Exercise 4: Searching for the Origins of Images

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Images are formed in childhood. The immature child reacts to the painful circumstances and experiences adopting an inappropriate, defensive behavior, based on childish, immature and wrong generalizations and conclusions.

Over time, these radical conclusions are repressed into the unconscious and are replaced by similar versions, equally wrong, but with more credibility to the more developed mind of the growing child. These multiple layers of conclusions repressed into the unconscious continue to influence behavior in adulthood.

Review your notes and sharing made in the 1^st week, regarding your contact with the recurring feelings in your daily review. Select a relevant feeling you noticed to be recurrent.

Look for an episode of your childhood in which a similar feeling was experienced.

Make yourself comfortable, to facilitate your meditative state. Close your eyes and breathe generously.

♦ Visualize a scene from your childhood that relates to the identified recurring circumstance observed in your Daily Review.

♦ Make that scene as realistic and vivid as possible, by observing its details. You do not need to “remember” those details. Let your imagination wander, spontaneously creating the details of the scene.

♦ Try not to interfere with the unfolding scene. Watch the scene unfold passively, as if watching a movie. Do not criticize or censor anything that presents itself.

♦ Pay attention to the dialogues, if they occur, but above all, pay attention to the feelings of the child.

♦ When you feel ready, let go of your meditation and focus again your attention on the “here and now”, wherever you may be. Make notes on what has impacted during meditation.

Compare the situation experienced by the child at the scene of the meditation with the repetitive scenes of your adulthood, when similar feelings occur. What you see in common in these situations? What similarities or analogies exist?

Note that the situations may be quite different, but still keep a close analogy between them. For example, an infantile situation of dispute over a toy is different from the dispute of a professional adult for a promotion at work, but such situations are “analogous”, which can lead to the same feelings and reactions in the adult and in the child.

What did you observe comparing analogous situations from your life as an adult and as a child? Did this comparison help to bring more clarity about possible images (rooted beliefs buried in the unconscious) that may be influencing your behavior and feelings in adulthood?

You can repeat this exercise with different situations from your childhood that remind you of similar feelings in adulthood.

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