Reconciliation of Inner Conflicts

Examples of Inner Conflicts

LOSE WEIGHT OR EAT WHAT AND AS MUCH AS I WANT?

Say one part of use wants to lose weight or create a healthier body and the other wants to eat whatever and whenever it likes.

Let us call part A, "health conscious" and part B, "pleasure seeking".

So we try to answer the above questions.

1. About what part ¨"A" – The Health Conscious one feels:

Some answers might be:

a. Shame or self-rejection because of extra weight.
b. Self-rejection because of lack of discipline.
c. Helplessness because cannot succeed.
d. Fear of illness.
e. Anger at those who remind him/her of his/her problem.
f. Anger at the part of ourselves that refuses to be disciplined.
g. Fear of what others think about us.
h. Jealous of others because they have better appearance or more discipline than we do.
i. Disillusioned or depression because we have tired so much without success.

2. Then we do the same for part "B", the Pleasure Seeker.

What feelings might it have when it does not get what it wants?

Some possibilities are:

a. Suppressed when it cannot eat as it likes.
b. Anxiety when it does not get its "dose".
c. Sadness because it does not have its source of happiness and comfort.
d. Anger at those who suppress him/her.
e. Self-destruction so that it can keep up eating.
f. Fear of being controlled.
g. Fear of not having pleasure – joy.
h. Jealous towards those who can eat whatever they like.
i. Depression because there is no joy without food.

A few more examples.

BE IN A CONSCIOUS LOVE RELATIONSHIP OR BE ALONE

1. The part, which wants to be in the relationship, may feel the following emotions when that need is not fulfilled.

a. Loneliness because there is no one to be intimate with.
b. Frustration because of lack of intimate physical contact.
c. Injustice because we are alone.
d. Unhappy without the pleasure of a love partner.
e. Alienated from the others, because they are together.
f. Jealous towards those who have happy relationships.

2. The part, which prefers not to be committed to a love relationship, may feel the following when that need is intimidated.

a. Fear of losing our freedom
b. Fear of being hurt.
c. Fear of being abandoned.
d. Fear that of the other knows us well, s/he will not want to be with us.
e. Fear of being vulnerable.

STAY IN MY PRESENT JOB OR CHANGE IT

1. The part which wants to stay in our present job might feel the following emotions when it thinks about leaving

a. Insecurity whether we will make it financially.
a. Fear that we will not find what we want.
b. Fear that we might regret doing this.
c. Fear of how others will perceive us if we do not succeed in our new effort.
d. Fear of making a mistake

2. The part which would like to move on to another job might feel some of the following emotions when it thinks about staying indefinitely at our present job.

a. Boredom and lack of interest
b. Suppression that we have to do something which does not fulfill us anymore.
c. Injustice that we cannot do what we really want to do with out lives.
d. Self-rejection because we do not have the "guts" to leave.
e. Jealousy towards those who have jobs which they love.
f. Anger with those who in some way are "preventing" us from leaving.

When we work with inner conflicts in this way, we free each part of ourselves from our conflicting emotions and natural healthy solutions will flow effortlessly to the surface.

The information below might be useful.

THE SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL EGO

These roles or personas, which develop subconsciously, create a variety of beliefs and subsequent needs and emotions. Most of our personas manage to cooperate enough so that we can function without serious inner turmoil, but there are times in our lives when we experience inner conflicts in which two or more parts of our being have conflicting needs.

Many of these conflicts have to do with the differing needs between our "spiritual" personas and our "material" personas. We place these words in quotation marks because all personas live in ignorance, and thus are all material. The so-called "spiritual" personas are trying to be spiritual, or in some cases, only to appear spiritual.

One part of ourselves wants to improve our character and lifestyle, and proceed spiritually, while the other might prefer to remain in the familiar, conditioned types of behavior and activities where it finds security, pleasure and affirmation. Let’s call the first part the spiritual ego and the second the material ego. We want these two to meet, to open up to each other and become one.

We do not intend to imply that the spiritual ego is higher or more spiritual than the material ego. In some cases, the opposite may be true, as the spiritual ego might be simply seeking security, pleasure and affirmation in other ways. The spiritual ego may occasionally be even more afraid or attached to persons and situations than the material ego; however, this is not always the case.

CONFLICTS BETWEEN THE SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL PERSONAS

The spiritual ego feels the conflict most intensely (if we didn’t desire spiritual growth or self-improvement we would not have a conflict), and usually creates feelings of self rejection, failure and guilt when we are unable to satisfy its need to feel that it is "spiritual" and "worthy."

Also, when we do not feel worthy, we do not feel safe. This occurs because many of us are programmed to believe whoever is not "good" or worthy in God’s eyes is not safe, as he does not "deserve" God’s love and protection. Making matters worse is the fact that we might also be programmed to feel we deserve punishment.

These are obviously not the highest reasons to want to improve ourselves. They are, in fact, rather selfish motives. If we want to change to ensure our safety, or so others will accept us, we are simply replacing the material ego with the spiritual ego. Nothing has really changed. In some cases, our need to fulfill these spiritual "requirements" for our self-acceptance has to do with our need to feel we are more spiritual than others. Thus, we simply replace the need for affirmation and superiority on a material level with the same need on the spiritual level.

It is important to realize that our self-worth is permanent and divine. We cannot be worth more or less in God’s eyes. We are divine consciousness itself in the process of evolving our ability to express our divinity on the material planes. Our inherent spiritual value is not changed by our actions or spiritual growth. What is changed is our ability to express those values mentally, emotionally and physically.
Trying to be a better person because we believe it will encourage God to love us more is also an insufficient motive for growth.

Desiring to become a clearer channel for divine energies of love, peace, harmony, justice and happiness is a much better motive. Seeking to purify ourselves so we can experience that Divine Consciousness in every being and event that we encounter, is a useful motive. Seeking to remove all mental, emotional and physical obstacles so that we can cultivate pure love, simplicity and selflessness is also useful.

Such motives are free from the game of who is spiritual and who is not, or who is more spiritual, or who is good and who is bad, and whom God loves and whom God does not love. They are based on the presumption that God is a much higher type of consciousness, and thus is incapable of not loving anyone no matter what that person might ever do. This seems only logical since the Divine Being has asked us, mere humans, to love even our enemies and those who ignore and harm us. Is it possible then that It is incapable of doing so?

This type of thinking also removes us from the game of spiritual pride in which we feel that we are higher, more important, or more favored by God than others. It also frees us from feeling we are lower, less important or less favored by God than others.

The material ego, on the other hand, tends to react in such situations to the rejection and pressure it receives from the spiritual ego by rebelling and sabotaging its various efforts toward discipline, self-control and self-improvement. Thus, the more we pressure ourselves, the more our material ego reacts and rebels. In such cases, we experience instability in our spiritual or self-improvement efforts. In these cases, we usually play the roles of parent and child with our own selves. The parent in us rejects the child in us for not being a "good child," and the child then reacts so as to undermine the parents’ effort toward control.

In order to move more effectively toward our goal of spiritual transformation, these inner conflicts must be dealt with in a more mature manner. Rather than communicating within ourselves as child and parent, it would be more useful to develop a mature adult to adult system of conversation or dialogue.

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