I got the impression that a friend of mine was struggling to understand why we embark on this courageous and sometimes arduous journey in the name of freedom.  The following was my response to him:

As you relax your ego (or identify less with your personality structure), you move closer to your Authentic Self or Pure Awareness.  This is Presence, Eckhart Tolle suggests, or God-consciousness.  In other words, the way I explain this to people is that your personality structure is like a musical instrument with Presence or Atem (in German: breath) moving through it to create a unique sound which is you as you commonly know yourself to be.
We can get seduced into believing that we are only the music (and many wars have been fought defending this illusion) when in reality we are much more:  at our deepest, we are the breath (consciousness) that moves through the instrument (our personality) to make music (the content of our lives).  As I understand, that’s what Tolle is trying to convey.  He urges us to cultivate a practice:  meditation, yoga, prayer, awareness, etc, that will help us know who we really are since he believes (and I agree) that so much of our suffering is created when we hang on to our egoic mind sets.

In my work with people I use the Enneagram (an ancient system) to help me identify nine distinct patterns of being or personality structures.  These structures are based on three existential fears: autonomy, security, and self-worth.  I find that each of us is fixated on one of these areas and by working through the current manifestation of our core fear to completion (a very GT notion), we become a little less identified with our personality and more with Presence and this can be very liberating….this is how the personal (psychotherapy) moves into the transpersonal (spiritual).

Copyright 2018 – by Claudia Dommaschk MFT – All Rights Reserved.