This is about being deliberate with our feelings. It’s about taking radical responsibility for how you create your life, and how you respond to the people and circumstances around you. It’s about choosing positivity when you could just as easily choose negativity.

Core desired feelings are generative feelings. They originate deep within us and make themselves known when we take the time to listen. They do not change with circumstances. Jungian analyst Marion Woodman calls them “the soul cry.” They are generative because they are the place from which our life becomes a creation, like an acorn on its way to becoming the oak. Grounded in our core desired feelings, we act from creative (rather than reactive) energy.

Think of all the freedom fighters and activists who decided that openly loving and respecting whom they wanted to made them feel good. That feeling of liberation was more important to them than social acceptance, and it was worth the risk to fight for equal rights.

Something phenomenal happens when you start to examine your desires. You get closer to your current reality—all that you can appreciate, and everything you want to change. And you also get closer to your potential. You see the dark side of your clinging, all those things that you’re hammering away at to get—the neediness and the impulse to make demands on the world. And, mercifully, you can see the purity of your longing—all that’s natural and good and divine about what you want out of life.

Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully. —

The art of it is to keep asking yourself quietly: Am I being pushy? Is my desire for freedom clean or is it tainted with all kinds of emotional overtones? In my desire to be free, am I harming myself or others around me? Am I making a weird trip out of life, or living life naturally and cleanly? In other words, how neurotic (frozen, harming, non-functional) are my actions, speech (all forms of communication), and thoughts around liberation or awakening?

Desire is at the root of our divine impulse to evolve.

Most life-planning tools focus on external attainment and results—on accomplishments. Which is incredibly valuable. Aiming for results is what moves your life forward. Except that most goal-setting systems fail to harness the most powerful driver behind any pursuit: your most desired feelings.

Empowered choices are “whole choices” that take your mind, body, and Soul into consideration.

Most psychologists assume that, no matter how many subpersonalities we find, ultimately all has to be reduced to one. This is the most general conception of mental health. But Watkins, and her mentor James Hillman asked the question ‘Why?’ Would it not make more sense to live with multiplicity, to recognize more than one centre within ourselves? Hillman suggests that this quarrel is rather like the quarrel between monotheism and polytheism. Psychology, he says, is secretly monotheistic and wants everything to be neatly hierarchical or bureaucratic. But could we not envisage a polytheistic psychology, which admitted that there could be many gods and goddesses, many egos, many identities, many selves?

The notion of oneself as a ‘community of selves’ can readily be elaborated further by some people to incorporate three, four or any other number of ‘selves’. Some of these selves will be found to persist and others may be more transitory, some will be ‘isolates’, and others will work in ‘teams’, some will ‘appear’ in many circumstances and others only on a few special kinds of occasions, some will be ‘more powerful’ and others will give way to them. Sometimes, people can defer and use quite elaborated accounts of their ‘community of selves’.

Perhaps it is easiest to introduce the idea of ‘self as a community of selves’ by referring to the smallest form of community, namely a community of two persons. Most of us have probably, at some time, found ourselves talking or acting as if we were two people rather than one. We talk sometimes of being in ‘two minds’ about something, part of you want to do one thing and part wanting to do something else. Quite often we hear people talk of having to ‘battle’ with themselves, as if one aspect of themselves was in conflict with another.

One observes that in a large number of people, placed in the most diverse conditions, the normal unity of consciousness is disintegrated. Several distinct consciousnesses arise, each of which may have perceptions, a memory, and even a moral character of its own. [...] Consequently, the limits of our personal and conscious memory are no more absolute limits than are those of our present consciousness. Beyond these lines there are memories, just as there are perceptions and reasoning processes, and what we know about ourselves is but a part, perhaps a very small part, of what we are.

The phenomenon of possession, so frequent for many centuries, could well be considered as one variety of multiple personalities. We have already mentioned, the two forms of possession: lucid possession (in which the subject feels within himself the two souls striving against each other), and somnambulistic possession (in which the subject loses consciousness of his own self while a mysterious intruder seems to take possession of his body and acts and speaks with an individuality of which the subject knows nothing when he returns to awareness). We may note the parallelism between these two forms of possession and the two main forms of multiple personality. Moreover, just as possession could be manifest or latent, multiple personalities can be manifest (that is, appear and develop spontaneously), or it may appear only under the influence of hypnotic maneuvers or automatic writing.

More dramatic, of course, is the idea of spirit possession. For centuries, this was the only way of explaining how someone could be taken over by another spirit, another personality. In possession, the appearance of the person could change, the voice could change, the whole emotional range of the person would extend. As Osterreich (1974) points out at length, possession in its fullest sense exists only in countries and at times when there is an implicit belief in the devil, or at least in demons.

[...] But perhaps it is best of all to say with Beahrs (1982) that dissociation is not an either/or phenomenon, but exists along a dissociative continuum.

My own working definition of a subpersonality is a semi-permanent and semi-autonomous region of the personality capable of acting as a person. This goes further than the definition offered by Brown (1979), who says that subpersonalities are ‘patterns of feelings, thoughts, behaviors, perceptions, postures and ways of moving which tend to coalesce in response to various recurring situations in life.’