Now for exercise #2.

In this exercise, I journey to find my inner "wise person". I modified the exercise a little to get a firmer feel for it.


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Meeting My Inner Wise Person

I imagine myself just inside my left ear. I climb into my ear canal and come out of my eustachian tube into my throat. I slide down my esophagus into my stomach. It glows red inside there as I wade through my stomach acid to a brown door in the wall of my stomach.

I go through the door and shut it. There, in a tunnel, are steps going down. As I walk down these steps with irregular rises, a glow comes from me, illuminating a six foot area in radius around me. I walk down these stairs for a long time until I come to a tablet, bathed in soft yellow light.

My personal commandments are on this tablet:
You must be nice.
You must help others.
You must be reasonable and considerate.
You must be thorough.

These are beliefs I have rarely challenged, though I have fought the last one on several occasions. I acknowledge these beliefs for a moment and gather my courage,

I walk into the dark tunnel behind the tablet. The glow is still with me. I walk onto some ledge looking over a green valley bathed in a faint blue light. This is the Valley of My Childhood. It is not painful for me to look upon it as it once was. I have most of the pain that occurred then. I feel very much at peace, as I survey what I survived.

I walk back towards the tunnel and take a path that goes off to the right of the ledge. It slopes gently downward into the valley. Walking further, I find a graveyard of simple tombstones. This is My Graveyard of Lost Illusions. Here lie the naieve beliefs I once held:
You can make things better for everybody, if you just try hard enough.
People will change their abusiveness if you give lots of love.
The people you love will treat you with the same amount of respect you treat them with.
You can make others see reason.
{The book adds the belief that life is fair, but I don't think I ever really had that belief.}

I acknowledge these lost beliefs and turn to walk further down the valley into another tunnel. I do not glow in this tunnel--there is no need for me to. The blue light from the valley is behind me and a white light shines from the opening before me.

I walk out of the tunnel into a large forest, where the leaves are high above me and light flows over them like water. It splashes and flows over me too, as I step into the forest. There are two trees bent into an archway before me, with a curtain of light flowing between them. I part the light with my hands and walk through.

There stands a beautiful woman waiting for me. There is joy in her sparkling grey eyes as she smiles at me. She is dressed completely in white and her hair is the color of a jar of clover honey when sunlight shines through it. I realize that she is the purified version of me--the me God knows and loves.

Beffore I can say a word, she runs upto me and hugs me tightly, as if she has no intention of letting me go. When she finally does pull back, there are tears in both of our eyes and she hugs me again. This time, she kisses my forehead and steps back.

I stutter a "thank you" and she squeezes my hand and kisses my cheek. Then she waits for me to ask my question.

"What belief do I have that is causing me the most harm right now?"

She tries to tell me, but for some reason I cannot hear the last word. She tries a few more times and I realize that I am blocking it out. Finally, she holds my chin and looks me in the eye.

"The belief that you are not worthy of protection."

I nod and reply, "But I'm not very good at protecting myself."

She smile brightly. "No one said you had to do it yourself. You can let others help."

I thank her and ask her what I needed to do to visit her again. Suddenly, I hear the soft chords of The Blue Danube Waltz.

"Hum this and imagine butterflies flying through the liquid light and I will be there."

I hug her and thank her again. She tells me, "We are one," and wishes me well.

I go back through the curtain of light and through the forest with its waterfalls of liquid light. I walk through the level tunnel and past the graveyard. I skirt the Valley of My Childhood and enter back into the main tunnel, where I begin to glow again. I pass my tablet of commandments and climb up the stairs. Finally, I reach the door and enter my stomach again. I jump up and pull myself back into my esophagus and continue until I climb out of my ear and onto my left shoulder.




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Close friends of mine may realize that my inner wise person bears a strong resemblance to a story character of mine. She is--and yet she isn't. In a real sense the character is only a pale reflection of my inner wise person, with many traits neither I nor my inner wise person posses.

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