I wrote Just Who Do You Think You Are? to help those who are ready to discover their true identity. For more than two decades, I have helped people balance their lives and move forward to greater success and inner fulfillment. The ideas and principles in this book come from that work. What my clients have taught me about their individual predicaments applies equally to us all. The universal is mirrored in the particular. We are all human and have the same basic set of needs. These needs were programmed into us as a species when we were conceived and have stayed with us as we have grown and evolved as a race. The deepest of these needs is our eternal search to find out who we are. That quest is why we are here. We are all in pursuit of transformation, whether we realize it or not. Life is a quest for truth, light, and identity. The answer to that quest does not lay outside us, but rather, hidden deep within us. No one can do the work of transformation for us. This work we must do for ourselves. Just Who Do You Think You Are? is about walking the path of Light as directly, deeply, and powerfully as possible.

The great mystic poet, Kabir, once wrote that the only truth he felt justified in teaching was the truth he had lived. It is in that spirit that I have written Just Who Do You Think You Are? In writing this book I have referred to the Divine in masculine terms, as a He rather than a She. I have done this, not because I feel that the Divine power has a gender, but because it is simpler and more economical to speak in terms of one gender than to speak in terms of two. Likewise, in places where I could have said his and hers, I chose to use the masculine pronoun to refer to both genders because that is how it has been handled historically. I have followed that literary convention in order to economize my use of words and to make those sentences in which I could have said his or her less awkward.

If you find value in Just Who Do You Think You Are? please consider reading my previous book, The T Zone: The Path to Inner Power. The T Zone will deepen your understanding of unconscious dynamics and amplify your appreciation of what may truly happen when you heal your life.

Throughout this book I have cited the experiences of several clients to better illustrate important dynamics in the psyche. I have changed the names of these clients to protect their identity and privacy.

Chapter 3

The Three Zones of Personal Evolution

To change, a person must face the dragon of his appetites with another dragon
, the life energy of the soul.
- Rumi

There’s no point to proving your superiority over another person/
but a lot to be gained by being superior to your former self.
- Old Indian Proverb

Life is suffering. The root of suffering is desire. To eliminate suffering
one must eliminate desire.
- The Buddha

There are three zones involved in the process of opening up our system to the soul. Taken together, these three zones comprise the path of personal evolution. If we fulfill the requirements of these three zones, we will realize our potential. In the first zone on the path of personal evolution, our primary work is to overcome past karma and clear unconscious emotional toxicity from our system. In the second zone, our main work is to stand up for ourselves, integrate our nature, and find our wholeness. In the third zone, our central task is to discover who we really are and fulfill our life purpose. The tasks we need to master in these three zones are sequential in nature, and if we are to succeed in this work, these steps must be taken in their correct order. To approach them out of sequence is to guarantee failure. The three zones of the path of personal evolution in their correct order of sequence are:

1. The Elimination Zone
2. The Integration Zone
3. The Elevation Zone

The Three Ego Levels
Each of these three zones also has a corresponding level of ego associated with it. In the Elimination Zone, we have to contend with the resistant and obstructive nature of the negative ego. The negative ego has no interest in moving forward because its sole interest is in maintaining its control over our entire system.

In the Integration Zone, the negative ego has been transformed and emerges as the healthy ego. The healthy ego seeks to move in harmony with the soul and spirit. Its primary values are growth and freedom rather than control and repression. It is committed to moving forward.

In the Elevation Zone, the healthy ego gives way to the surrendered ego. The surrendered ego has fused with the soul and spirit, becoming their ally and their door to the world. In the third stage of personal evolution, there is no more tension or conflict between the ego and the higher dimensions of our being. A deep peace and clarity settles over the entire nature. The differences in these ego states, as well as their potential transformations, will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters.

The Elimination Zone
The Elimination Zone is where we must start. The central focus of the Elimination Zone is clearing the toxic, incomplete emotional experiences that we have buried in our body and failed to face. Virtually everyone has this kind of toxicity imbedded in his body, but for the most part, we are unaware of the existence of much of this material.

Let’s consider the imaginary case of an adult male who grew up in a family with unstable, alcoholic parents. As a young child, our young man never felt safe enough to express his emotions or to ask for what he needed. He received little nurturing, approval, or love from his parents. When he got home from school he never knew what conditions awaited him. Would his mother scream at him? Would his father beat him? Would there be food for dinner?

His childhood was an ongoing nightmare. He was preoccupied with conditions that another child, growing up in a stable and loving home, would never have to face. He had nowhere to turn and no one to confide in. There was no safe harbor in his life, no way to reduce the pressures he had to confront everyday. He was alone in the horror of his childhood.

His solution for dealing with the exigencies of his life was to take the only path available to him, which I call the path of most resistance. As he trudged down this path he learned to shut off his feelings and numb his system to the constant assaults he faced from his parents. Not feeling was the only way he had to endure and survive.

Shutting Down and Surviving
When there is no one to protect a young child, the only way that child can protect himself from further psychological harm is to shut down emotionally. Shutting down is not really a conscious choice, but is rather an unconscious mechanism to stop the emotional bleeding. Turning off the ability to feel will shut off the pain and silence the inevitable rage, at least part of the time. Unfortunately, it also means that the person who shuts down his feelings has lost his ability to feel and, therefore, to connect with other people in any meaningful way. Instead of feeling connected to his world, he will feel empty, alone, alienated from those around him, and dead inside. In shutting down emotionally he also severs his connection to his soul.

While shutting down his ability to feel allows him to survive, that protection comes at a high cost. In addition to feeling empty, he has also made himself into a chronic victim, powerless, unbalanced, and angry. The chronic inner victim will not magically disappear when his childhood ends and he tries to make his way in the world. Instead, the inner victim will continue to undermine him and make his life a living hell. He will be his own worst enemy. This is the path of most resistance.

The strategy that enabled him to survive his childhood then may well poison his adulthood. By burying his pain instead of facing it, he increases the odds that he will duplicate his parent’s dysfunction and like them, become a tortured soul laden with toxic shame. If he becomes a parent one day, without first healing his childhood nightmare, it is highly likely that he will do to his own children what his parents did to him.

In essence, when a parental dysfunction penetrates the subconscious of a child, that dysfunction is passed on from the older generation to the younger one and will persist as a dominant family behavior until someone in the family decides to confront and eliminate it in himself. If the children do not eliminate it when they become adults, it will be passed on to their children. If that toxicity remains firmly entrenched in the subconscious of family members, it can persist for many generations. As it passes down through the generations, it may also become more virulent with each new replication.

When a child shuts down emotionally, there are serious repercussions in the rest of his life. What he shuts down will be difficult to open later. Whenever someone shuts himself down, he locks a strong sense of his worthlessness and shame deep within his core. He will feel that he can never redeem himself, no matter what he does. It’s not that he has made mistakes in his life that he can atone for, as much as it seems to him that his whole life has been a mistake. How does he atone for that? Since that shame is who he mistakenly thinks he is, he may resist facing it with great ferocity. After all, he feels unredeemable. Facing the pain at the core of his psyche is like facing his death.

As time passes, and he attempts to move forward, his imbedded shame will become the shame of which he is no longer even conscious. It will imprison him in the alienation and emptiness of the past and prevent him from finding wholeness and happiness in the present. If he marries and has children, his unconscious shame will be his legacy to the next generation.

The Cycle of Adult Shame
The adult cycle of our young man’s imbedded shame begins with his denial that he was invalidated and made to feel worthless as a child. That conscious denial strengthens his unconscious shame and guarantees that he will continue to endure a sense of worthlessness that will gnaw at him incessantly. He will bear a strong sense of inferiority that nothing he achieves can overcome for long.

The same shame that exists in our young man exists in many of us. Those feelings don’t go away with time or disappear with our denial. They don’t melt away because we wish them too. In fact, the more we ignore them and pretend they don’t exist, the louder and more powerful they become. The more they penetrate our subconscious, the more they control our life. The unconscious shame we try to deaden in our system then, is not really dead at all.

If buried and unacknowledged shame is present in our subconscious, it will determine much of what happens in our lives. Whatever that shame brings into our lives will be detrimental to our well-being. Our unacknowledged shame will deprive us of our true identity and fulfillment and prevent us from integrating the physical and non-physical elements of our system. It will keep us from being whole and balanced. This is the legacy of the path of most resistance.

Making matters worse, when toxic shame is present in our subconscious, our ego has a negative orientation. A major function of the negative ego is to keep us from finding and confronting that buried shame. Its job is to keep our shame unconscious. Its mission is to keep shame alive. The only real solution to dealing with unconscious shame is to make it conscious. However, when the ego is negative it will do everything it can to keep that shame buried and unconscious.

Surviving life with toxic shame embedded in our system is far from living life without it. We can survive, we can endure, but until we clear the toxic emotion buried in our bodies, we cannot go forward. We will not find our purpose, our happiness, our freedom, or ourselves. We will just survive and endure, feeling worthless and unredeemable, living life without being fully alive.

For our adult child of alcoholic parents to go forward, he will have to face, feel, and complete all the painful, incomplete, and toxic emotion stored in his body. He will have to confront his shame, his feelings of worthlessness, and his unending sense of emptiness. This, of course, takes courage. It will not be easy for him to be vulnerable to the parts of his nature that he thinks are unredeemable. That’s why he erected a negatively oriented ego in the first place. However, there is a way out. If he chooses to face and feel his toxic emotions he can complete them. When he finally completes those emotions they will be discharged from his system. He will then stand clear of his past, and be well on his way to wholeness and happiness. If, however, he chooses the path of most resistance and decides to avoid facing his toxicity, his situation will not improve.

Almost all of us have our own incomplete emotion and unconscious shame to deal with. We may not have had alcoholic parents like our imaginary young man did, but virtually all of us have some dysfunction or disturbance to clear from our system that keeps us from being whole and integrated, in touch with our true identity, and able to manifest our true purpose.

Elimination is an exacting, demanding, and often exhausting process. The more shame and emotional toxicity we carry in our system, the further away from ourselves we are. Hopefully, our young man will get so tired of the way he is living that he will be willing to face his toxicity at last. If he can turn away from the path of most resistance, where he is constantly running from himself, and enter the path of conscious evolution, where he chooses to face himself, he will be able to find his way home to who he really is.

The Seven Principles of Negative Force
There are seven principles of negative force that exert constant pressure on us. If we don’t eliminate the incomplete, toxic emotion from our system, these principles become the power in our lives. They limit our growth and keep us from finding happiness.

The refusal to face the past guarantees its continued presence in our lives. The failure to face what once happened assures that it will repeat itself many times, in many guises, until we finally choose to confront it.

Over five thousand years ago, Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, shared this insight about dealing with inner obstacles: “Because the sage confronts his difficulties, he never experiences them.” The wise man never postpones the moment of reckoning. When he confronts his difficulties as they arise, no toxic shadow remains from the past to follow him into the future. No ancient blight waits in hiding, only to arise as if from nowhere, to poison his life.

The seven principles of negative force that control our lives until we eliminate our toxicity are as follows:

If we don’t take action to defeat our toxicity, it will easily defeat us. It does not lose its power to affect us adversely until we clear it. Clearing our emotional toxicity is absolutely necessary if we are to stand in our power and discover whom we really are.

Death and Continuity
Death is no obstacle to the continuation of unresolved toxic content. If we fail to clear a toxic condition during the lifetime in which it occurred, that toxic event is stored as a packet of blocked and polluted energy in our soul. When we incarnate again in another life, the toxic conditions in our soul will return with us. In our next lifetime we may have a different personality, a new look, and a new focus, but we will have the same heavy burden to carry that we inherited from our last lifetime. While everything else may be different about us, our soul, and the karma it carries, will be the same.

The unhealed wounds from our past life will continue to live inside us, unknown and unheeded. The fact that they are now completely unknown makes them more difficult to overcome. When the unhealed wounds of the past travel with us to a new lifetime, they attain a quality of invisibility that compounds the problems we face in finding them. Their invisibility gives them a deep cover. While we can access our past experiences in this lifetime fairly easily, we don’t normally have access to our soul history from past incarnations.

Revelation and Redemption
It takes a very bright and powerful light to penetrate deeply enough into our system to reveal these lost, long forgotten, and troubled fragments of our experience. These pieces must be revealed before they can be redeemed. The revelation of our hidden toxicity requires the descent of a higher spiritual light into the depths of our unconscious. That light will reveal what has long been hidden.

The redemption of our hidden wounds requires the ascent of these toxic emotions into the light of consciousness, where they can be faced, felt, and cleared. Only then is the past redeemed and our system cleared of its encumbrances.

If we do not heal our wounds, they will continue bleeding, robbing us of our power to be whole. Our wounds block our evolution. They place shadows of fear across our minds. They are the unseen chains that bind us to old agonies and prevent us from moving forward into a better and more fulfilling life. The most powerful and direct way to access these wounds is to focus the higher light of the spirit on the unconscious with laser-like precision and drive these experiences from the darkness in which they reside.

The Power of Choice
Everything that we have not yet worked out of our system must be worked out eventually, either in this life or a future one. The longer we delay that task, the more we prolong our unhappiness. The only power we have over our buried toxicity is the power of choosing when to face it. The sooner we choose to face our unresolved trauma, the easier it is to resolve the emotional blocks that hold us back. When toxic energy is close to the surface, it is easy to find and bring to our conscious mind. But if we postpone our confrontation with the toxic events that are lodged in our system, we unwittingly provide those events with the opportunity to burrow even more deeply into our body. If we don’t seize the opportunity to clear toxic material from our system as soon as we can, that toxicity will seize its opportunity to run as far as it can from our conscious mind. Our toxicity seeks to conceal what we need to reveal in order to regain our balance and accelerate our evolution. By hiding what should be exposed the negative ego maintains its control over our system.

If our toxicity remains concealed, our personal power will remain bound up with what has wounded us, and will continue to wound us still. When our wounds control us, we have little power. We become more powerless and unhappy with each new wound. Because we lack access to our real power, the focus of our future won’t be found in fulfilling our destiny, but rather in repeating our drudgery. The legacy of failing to act is a lifetime of failure.

Donald
Every lifetime has its moment of truth. We can step into the great unknown and seize our destiny, or we can grasp our fear more tightly and sink deeper into our darkness. Donald is a musician from Oregon who heard me being interviewed on a nationally syndicated late night radio show. He had been drowning in his pain for many years. During those years, he had tried many different therapies and popular seminars without success. He was desperate to resolve his suffering, and what he heard me say that night gave him the courage to roll the dice one more time.

Donald decided to come to a three-day training I held in Los Angeles. During the first two days of the training he felt some anger and fear coming up when it was his time to be worked on, but it was nothing like what he had hoped would happen for him. On the third day of the training I made it to his table and worked with him for nearly an hour. When we started, I placed one of my hands under his tailbone and the other on top of his abdomen. As I put my hands on his body, I saw pictures in my mind of an American P.O.W. from World War Two being tortured by Japanese soldiers. I told Donald what I was seeing. My perceptions touched a deep nerve within him, and the hidden emotional toxicity that he had been trying to reach for years came surging to the surface. For the next hour Donald writhed, screamed, and twisted his body all over the table as he relived the trauma from that lifetime and cleared the toxicity from his system. When he finished clearing that layer of toxicity, he lay resting on the table, his body at peace, his eyes bright, and his face luminous. He laughed and joked and gave everyone in his group a big hug.

While I had only told Donald the barest outlines of what I had seen at the beginning of his session, it had been enough to trigger the release of toxic emotion that he had so desperately needed. Although he felt unfulfilled by the two previous days of work my words would have been useless without those two days of preparation. The healing energy in the seminar room worked on him from the first day to the time we ended on the third day. It never stopped working on him, even while he ate and slept. During those few days, the healing energy accomplished its mission. It mobilized his toxic material and brought it close to the surface where not only I could see it, but also where he could finally find it, face it, feel it, and clear it.

Some months later I received a letter from Donald. He wrote that, “I feel so different. I don’t hear that nagging voice I used to hear in my head. It’s just not there anymore. I feel so much peace within and it’s so much easier to look at other people. I just don’t feel that fear anymore. All things considered, I just feel so much better about everything.”

While we might be afraid to know and feel what lies beneath the surface of our conscious mind, the actual confrontation with that buried material is not nearly as painful or scary as it might seem. In fact, it is more of a relief than anything else. When it is over, we feel lighter in body, mind, and soul.

Karen
Some years before the Los Angeles training, I gave a seminar in Virginia. Among the people in attendance that afternoon was a woman sitting near the front of the room who seemed very uncomfortable in her own skin. As I looked more closely at her from a clairvoyant perspective, I saw that the traumatic events of her last lifetime were visible in her aura. She had died horribly in the Holocaust, burned to death in the furnaces of a concentration camp.

I began the seminar and talked for a while, but my attention kept being drawn to her. I could see that her unconscious toxicity was ready to “pop” and that her inner being had led her to this seminar so that she could clear those buried events from her system. I could further see that the manner of her death in her last lifetime had cast a long shadow of fear and terror over her present life and that she knew none of this consciously.

Finally, I couldn’t bear her pain anymore. I felt that part of my assignment that day was to free her from her unconscious toxicity. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I asked her if she would come up front and lie down on the healing table next to me so I could demonstrate how the healing process worked.

She looked all around her, terrified of being singled out and separated from her friends. “ Why me?” she asked.

“ Because you’re ready, and I think you’ll be a very good subject.”

“ I don’t feel ready.”

“ That’s to be expected. People who are ready are in touch with their fear. Your high level of anxiety just means you’re really ready.”

“ Well, I’m not so sure of that.”

“ I understand. Nobody is ever very sure of anything when they are really ready to let go. It sort of feels like the rug is being pulled out from under you and everything in your life is suddenly being turned upside down. But all we’re going to do here is find what you’re ready to let go of and then discharge it. So if you can be a bit brave and take a risk, everything will be fine.”

“ But…”

“ I’ll tell you what. If you feel very uncomfortable at any point in the process, we’ll stop.”

“ Really?”

“Really.”

Having a way out convinced her to give it a try. She came up and hesitantly got on the table. I put one hand under the base of her spine, and my other hand under the base of her skull. The energy immediately started flowing out of me into her central nervous system. As I watched the energy flow into her, it surrounded her body with bands of green, blue, gold, and white energy. I could see that the audience was feeling the energy as well. Their restlessness faded away. They became quiet, peaceful, and alert. Within two to three minutes I could tell that Karen was very relaxed. Her eyes closed; her breathing became slow and even. I now moved my hands to her abdomen and her left side where the toxic energy of that terrible death was stored. As I shifted my hands, the healing energy flowing from my hands also shifted. It was now a bright, fiery red. Within seconds of the energy shifting, Karen opened her eyes and stared at me in shock.

“It’s Okay,” I said softly, so only she could hear. “ Some old stuff from your last life is ready to pop. Just make a little sound and it will come pouring out of you.”

“ What stuff?” she asked, terrified.

I had no chance to respond. With those two words her repressed material came flooding out. She started to cry. Her body shook. She waved her arms and legs frantically, wailed and screamed. After twenty minutes of intense release, her physical movements stopped. Her body became quiet as her system filled with peace. As she shifted from one state of consciousness to another, from a state of cathartic healing to a state of deep peace, the energy going into her changed once more from bright red to pink, lavender, and gold.

I looked out at the audience. The faces in front of me registered fear and terror.

“ I bet you’re all afraid of getting on the table now.”

They all nodded nervously.

“ Looks pretty dangerous and painful, huh?”

They all nodded again. By this time Karen was back from her experience and had opened her eyes.

“ Karen, could you tell the people in the audience how you feel?”

“ I feel really great. I have never felt as light and peaceful as I feel now.”

“ Was it scary and painful to go through that release?”

“ Not at all. I thought it would be, but it wasn’t. Instead, all I could feel was a great sense of relief. I know it probably didn’t look like that, but that is how it felt. It was funny too because once it started happening, I didn’t have any control over it. It just sort of gushed out of me.”

“ Did you see any visions or have any insights during the experience?”

“ I just felt like I was being burned alive.”

“ Were you afraid?”

“ I experienced a brief moment of absolute terror in the beginning, just before that feeling surfaced, but once the feeling of being burned alive surfaced, the sense of terror faded away.”

“ Are you still afraid?”

“ No. That’s what’s amazing. The fear is completely gone. I feel much lighter than I ever have. What did you see that made you call me up here?”

“ I saw that you had been burned to death in your last lifetime, as you correctly felt you had. It was during the Holocaust, and you were incinerated in a concentration camp. That experience was very close to the surface of your being and was ready to be cleared. That’s why I wanted you up here. Frankly, it was driving me a bit crazy, and I knew I had to clear it for you before we could go on with the seminar. I believe you were here today to clear it. How do you react when you see World War Two movies or read about the Holocaust?”

“ I’ve never been able to watch anything to do with World War Two or even think about the Holocaust. The thought of it has always tied me up in fear and made me nauseous. Now I know why.”

“ It’s always helpful to connect the dots and know why. It’s even better to be free of what has held you back.”

Every time we clear a toxic event from our psyche, we wrest more control and territory away from the negative ego. Each time we clear a toxic event, we expand our light, deepen our inner peace, bring our soul and conscious mind closer to each other, and lead our whole system closer to integration. Facing what we fear and going through some discomfort is a small price to pay for the freedom to evolve without internal resistance and the joy of becoming the person we were always meant to be.

© 2005, Alan Mesher

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