Becoming An

Individual
The Journey to Self
By Peter Fritz Walter
 Contents
Prelude-Maternity 3
Becoming An Individual 16
Who is Who Guide 28
Creativity Central 46

—2—
 Prelude-Maternity
The quest for recovering and healing our inner
child is identical with our quest for more aliveness,
more joy of life and more creativity. This quest is a vital
issue and one of the foremost topics in modern ther-
apy, and yet it is a foolish thing to strive for elucidat-
ing what most people consider their childish and
immature side.
Behold, the highest treasures in life are often
hidden at places where we least expect them to be!
Unfortunately it is also true that the inner child
is the inner energy we are inclined to disregard most;
it is the inner voice that is most easily made down or
put to silence in our culture. Yet the denial of our in-
ner voices, and especially the voice of our dear inner
child has many undesired consequences. Be it a dull,

—3—
monotonous life with mediocre achievements, shal-
low relationships and a lack of depth in our insights
about life, be it extreme alienation from self, schizo-
phrenia, criminal behavior or alcoholism, where it all
begins is where our creative inner guide is put to si-
lence, sentenced to shut up, deprived of input on our
daily decisions.
The quest for the inner child is the quest for soul,
and for that matter not something actively supported
by our cultural values. It is a personal religious quest of
the purest vintage!
In the East, meditation serves the need for re-
connecting with our source, and in the West we rely
on similar techniques that are only different by their
names but that lead to the same goal: true religio. As
Jeremiah Abrams, one of the finest editors and au-

—4—
thors on the subject of inner child healing and voice
dialogue points it out, inner child recovery and
working on our inner shadow are the essentials of
true religion.
Our modern media culture rarely ever informs
about the healthy growth of our inner landscape. It
does not officially recognize the fact that creators are
multi-dimensional personalities, beholders of heaven
and hell, angels and devils, to express it metaphori-
cally. Worse, moralistic education and puritanical
conditioning attempt to define the human being in a
reductionist manner that labels negatively certain
emotions, fantasies, inner processes, desires or obses-
sions, thus telling people to repress the most pre-
cious portion of their energy resources.

—5—
 This careless attitude regarding our inner world
is perhaps a relict of our past, the rigid conditioning
of our previous generations toward religious dogma-
tism and the cultural blinding out of inner truth.
Real morality is not a cultural achievement but
innate in humans when we are connected to our in-
ner wisdom; while it can never be brought about by
coercion, religious indoctrination and intolerance be-
cause of the simple fact that we are the beholders of
our inner life!
The result of this denial is human potential wast-
ed in the millions, virtually every day, and this in the
name of culture, while, truly, this process is closer to
the dissolution of culture than to its progress! Cul-
ture is language and language begins where inner

—6—
and outer processes are acknowledged and verbal-
ized.
If you want to be yourself, you have to face your-
self, all of you, all the time. You have to be nonjudg-
mental for this purpose, immoral in the right sense,
and gentle, rather than persecutory and moralistic as
mainstream culture tries to dictate for smashing the
individual and promoting the false hero as the incar-
nation of structural violence and thus of resistance to
life. The authentic individual is critical, yet flexible, fo-
cused on self-actualization yet compassionate.
The true individual is the result of inner alche-
my; the rebirth of the individual requires the death of
the social mask and the integration of the shadow.
The true individual follows innate wisdom rather

—7—
than authorities. The true individual does not build
growth upon knowledge, but upon self-knowledge.
Voice dialogue and especially the involvement of
the inner child in our daily rational and emotional
decisions wards off dissolution of our soul in the
meltpot of postmodern consumerism. The awareness
that results from it helps you to act appropriately, not
by reject and elitist evasion, but by making the right
choices and staying attuned to true and constructive
relationships.
Truth is the key word to inner child recovery and
healing, and it is truth that the inner child is asking
for. To be truthful establishes the bond with our in-
ner source; to be aligned with our inner energies, we
have to put aside self-condemnation, moralism,
judgmentalism, and overadaptation.

—8—
 Most people are unaware of their inner trials,
blindly surfing on the hot waves of mass hysteria, the
past and the present ones, imitating the general
schizoid theme of splitting the world into black and
white, good and bad, heroes and offenders, thus pre-
paring the world for war and themselves for a
schizoid crack-up!
Inner child recovery and healing cannot be done
halfway through, or it will never be done; we cannot
fool the inner child for it is bright, smart, and supe-
rior an entity or energy, full of wisdom and generosi-
ty.
What we dissect from its life, we feed on our in-
ner critic. The world is a sad place because of all
those blown-up righteous fighters of eternal justice
and so-called ‘good causes’ of all sorts that destroy

—9—
true innocence, the innocence that is innate in life, in
love, and in pleasure.
Let me accompany you on a part of your way to
innocence! Let me be of help in opening the channel
that leads to freeing your inner child from the vicious
attacks of your inner critic or a hyper-rational inner
adult that tries to argue away all that is outside a
mechanistic universe that comes with the presump-
tuous label of a ‘scientific society.’
And let me help your inner child get out of the
hands of a hypocrite and hyper-tyrannical inner par-
ent who yells that it acts always for the child’s best
through all the inner and outer media of this world
while subduing the vital energies of children from
birth and manipulating them emotionally in a holy

—10—
war for the golden calf of consumerism and for up-
holding the age-old myth of children’s purity.
The inner child is powerful but its power is not
of this world. If you do not open your awareness to a
nonjudgmental worldview, you can hardly come to
grips with it and your quest will remain superficial.
Do not fool your inner child with sentimentality,
with all that lukewarm soup that you absorb every
day in the mass media! It is immune to this kind of
care. It is beyond the pettiness of those life haters
who recognize as children only obedient little tod-
dlers, but consider criminal or delinquent those truly
critical, disturbing, obnoxious and intelligent adoles-
cents who often are big souls and great persons.
Our best children, inner and outer, are perhaps
our most unwelcome ones?! Surely, you and me will

—11—
end up with different patterns and definitions of this
truth, and do not have to share a ready-for-all solu-
tion. I do not believe in quick fixes, and I do not of-
fer you one in this guide.
What I offer you is a part of my truth. I will
show you some of my way, to help you finding yours.
Whatever may stand in the way of you and me un-
derstanding each other is the difference of human
character; however, the true key to yourself is your
inner child!
 There is extensive literature on inner child heal-
ing and art work. There are excellent nonfiction
books, there is fiction, there is poetry, there are films.
A recent Google search under the key word ‘inner
child’ threw me out 350,000,000 results! Yet, I dare
to say that on our daily life agenda, the topic of the

—12—
inner child is still a marginal item. It is not a subject
cherished by the mass media. It does not really fit in
their black-and-white design of a world split in an-
gels and beasts. It is a subject that leads to meditating
about the unity of all life, about our humble con-
nectedness with nature rather than our arrogant fight
with it.
It is true when you say that you already practice
inner connectedness through caring for your pets,
through watering your flowers every day, through the
role you play in uplifting others around you, if you
do that not as a dry obligation but with the enthusi-
asm of innocence. It is true when you argue that, af-
ter all, you practice involving your inner child in the
world! What I can give you is not much more, if you
have this attitude, this talent to be natural and con-

—13—
nected. What I can give you is perhaps some kind of
check list to help you uncover the hidden parts of
your inner child, to help you detect where and when
you act for others not from a point of genuine care,
but from a guilt pattern or a nasty obsession of being
good at all times.
We are not supermen and superwomen and self-
development should never pretend to render us su-
per-human. Unfortunately, a large part of the modern
selfhelp literature has a strong imprint of that kind.
In my view, it has misled people more than it helped
them, for it has enlarged the split that divides people
in light and shadow, angel and devil, beauty and
beast, instead of contributing to close this split and
thus establish natural harmony that is based on ac-
cepting life as it is: an unending play of shades of

—14—
gray. This guide is based upon acceptance as the supe-
rior principle of wisdom, in accordance with one of
the oldest wisdom books, the Dao De Jing:

Embracing the Way,

You become embraced;
Breathing gently, you become newborn;
Clearing your mind, you become clear;
Nurturing your children, you become impartial;
Opening your heart, you become accepted;
Accepting the world, you embrace the Way.
Bearing and nurturing,
Creating but not owning,
Giving without demanding,
This is harmony.

What about being truly human? Is there not

beauty in that, is there not immense joy coming from
that, the joy namely to be free of any concept, of any
obligation to represent this-or-that in the eyes of an-

—15—
other. What about representing yourself in the eyes
of yourself?

Becoming An Individual
The Tree of Life is different from the Pedigree or
Genealogical Tree. To walk into your own life basically
implies to leave home, and to make the psychological
cut with the matrix. For this to happen, we have to
go through a process of identity building that com-
mences as early as in babyhood. Building identity is
coupled with building autonomy.
Liz Greene & Juliet Sharman-Burke write in their
enlightening study The Mythic Journey (2000):

There is a mysterious impulse in all of us to be-

come ourselves—unique and defined individuals
apart from the family bonds, partnerships and
community life which give us a feeling of identity.
But, as myth tells us, the process of becoming an

—16—
individual is a hard and sometimes painful one. It
involves not only a willingness to meet the inner
and outer challenges that test our strength, but
also a capacity to stand alone and endure the
envy or hostility of those who have not yet begun
this journey towards selfhood. Myth presents us
with stories about how hard it is to leave home
and what kind of dragons we must encounter
and fight in our struggle towards autonomy. Not
least, mythic tales also reveal the profound im-
portance of a sense of personal purpose and
meaning—perhaps the deepest mystery imbed-
ded in our efforts to become what we truly are.
We may not always recognize the degree to
which we have avoided the challenge of individ-
uality and the everyday ways in which we betray
our most heartfelt values in order to feel we be-
long. In these spheres, myths can offer not only
insight, but also the reassurance that self-devel-
opment is not necessarily the same thing as self-
ishness. We cannot really offer to others what we
have not yet developed within ourselves. (Id., 73)

—17—
 Our present social and educational system makes
us believe that there are standard truths for all of us,
standard values, standard forms of behavior and a
standardized morality framework for all of us. A nat-
ural science that was deeply alienated from spiritual
truth and whose main advocate was Charles Darwin
has led many to simply compare humans to the ani-
mal race and to deduct social, political and psycho-
logical conclusions from such a haphazard premise.
The fact that we all got two arms and two legs
does not mean that we can compare human beings
with each other on a soul level. If we could, it would
be easy and practical to work out standards for self-
improvement and promote them worldwide in
schools, universities and the media.

—18—
 The only wisdom you can learn is the one you
have got already, that is contained in your continu-
um, your own inner space, your timeless soul, your
potential. All wisdom, all knowledge that we can
find, we knew it already before, and if we wish, we
can find it again. I think we all have gone, as hu-
mans, through the loss of connectedness with our
true source. From this experience of loss we keep a
deep-down memory, somewhere in our collective
unconscious. From this memory and the depression
and loneliness that followed, we have developed a
feeling of anticipation, a deep anxiety regarding the
lost knowledge.
This is why many of us today still reject what
they call ‘esoteric knowledge’ or make it down as su-
perstition or imagination. Life is our creation at every

—19—
infinitesimal point of the lifeline. The lifeline itself
has no beginning and no end and therefore is more
appropriately described as the circle-of-life, or the spi-
ral-of-life.
There is no doubt about our impact upon the in-
visible threads out of which the web of life is woven.
However, the depressed and alienated masses tend to
believe that there is, if ever, hardly any individual
control over life and that life is per se destined to be
this or that way, according to some mysterious heav-
enly plan. In reality, there simply is no such plan.
It is interesting to see to what extent this wrong
presumption contributes to the dullness of the igno-
rant masses. Contemplating the power of nature, of
creation, how can one associate anything but freedom
with the fundamental force from which sprang all the

—20—
thousand things? This force has created unlimited
freedom and power. However, humans have limited
it to the tiny stupid thing that they have made out of
life and that they use to call their life. They talk of my
life and your life, as if we individually owned life, as
if life could be owned at all. Only things can be
owned but life is not a thing, but a dynamic, ener-
getic process—a cosmic dance.
Only utter ignorance about the very roots of life
could bring about the present state of affairs among
us humans, this desperate dependency and passivity
of humans worldwide. Of course, we are very busy
imitating others and in that many people find their
shallow satisfaction. It is a lack of energy, of com-
mitment to ourselves and our individual, very specif-

—21—
ic mission that makes us comply with the baseline of
living and transforms us into bad copies of ourselves.
Few people live original lives, first-hand lives.
Compared with the masses of imitators and robots
that run around on this globe, these people represent
a tiny minority. And if you look closely at them you
find out quickly that they are always the contradic-
tors, the ones who try to do things differently, the
ones who are not easily satisfied, not easily duped
into some petty mediocre thing, be it a job or a part-
ner or a million in the lottery. Their value system is
strangely different from the one most people have
blindly adopted. When they were children, they were
keen, curious, sometimes excessively inquisitive, yet
not out of low intention but from a deep thirst for
human experience and interest in the human soul. In

—22—
school, or more generally, in systems, educational,
military or otherwise, they are the big or small dis-
turbers, the ones who never fit in, the ones who
won’t comply with most of the rules, the ones also
who spontaneously create different rules that, typi-
cally, function better than the rules they broke.
I do not say that you have to become a rule-
breaker in order to get to know your original self,
while rule-breaking at times does trigger a personal
path of self-perfection. I do say, however, that in or-
der to get in touch with your own originality, you
have to become acutely aware of all the influences
you are exposed to at any moment of your life. Why?
Because there are influences that are beneficial for
your growth and there are others that are harmful for
it or that for the least are going to retard it. The art of

—23—
life is all about being able to distinguish the latter in-
fluences from the former. Some authors and gurus
require an inner purification before they admit that
our soul can grow and develop. However, this means
to put a time element in something that is beyond or
outside of time.
Matters concerning the soul or our higher self
are outside the space-time continuum. If we assume
that growth processes on this level can only take
place after going through a sort of soul graduation,
we assemble events on a timeline that have no place
there. It seems smarter to admit that the very process
of growing implies in itself a purification of old soul
content. There is probably, without our knowing of
it, a continuous process of renewal going on in the
soul. In addition, it seems more effective to think in

—24—
terms of evolution than in terms of purification. Pu-
rification focuses on the past, evolution on the fu-
ture. If I want to ride a bicycle or a car and watch the
road too closely, I am accident-prone. I ride safely if I
gaze within a farther distance.
The same is true for personal evolution. Direct-
ed, voluntary progress is possible only if there is vi-
sion, and a vision that heads farther into the future
than just tomorrow or next week. True vision is cre-
ated by your higher self, after deep relaxation, by
centering within and focusing upon your unique-
ness.
Many people, especially from the older genera-
tion, find it against the rules of good taste to focus
upon themselves, to do self-improvement or general-
ly to bestow attention on themselves. Many of them

—25—
carry along deep guilt feelings from childhood, often
having suffered mistreatment and neglect in their ear-
ly years. As a result, they tend to block off when they
are asked to take care of themselves. They may in-
dulge in a good deal of social help for others, assist in
welfare projects, or be otherwise useful to the com-
munity. More often than not, their self-neglect ends
with a cancer or some other violent disease that
crowns the big sacrifice they wanted to offer with
their life!
We cannot be ultimately useful if we regard our-
selves as useless. We cannot bestow loving attention
upon others if we do not give it to us first. True reli-
gion, in the sense of the word, begins with taking
care of self. This is not a religion of egotism as you
may haphazardly consider it, but the only true reli-

—26—
gion. We do never know others good enough to
judge their spiritual views, needs and belongings.
We are all on different levels of evolution and
different spheres of existence and belong to different
soul groups and energy fields; and we all have had
different former lives, incarnations and challenges,
and we all carry different visions about our individ-
ual evolution and the evolution of our clan or race. It
is this difference about our soul origins that makes us
so helpless when we talk about what we call spiritual
matters.
Have you ever observed that people talk on dif-
ferent levels of consciousness when they discuss
about what is called spirituality? The true lover of
truth does not make a distinction between spiritual
and non-spiritual matters since this distinction is ar-

—27—
tificial and without value. For the spiritually-minded
being, everything is spiritual. For the materialistical-
ly-minded individual, everything is material. Life is a
whole process and every attempt to divide it up, to
section it, to dissect it into various parts is detrimen-
tal to grasping its perfume.

Who is Who Guide

This is a guide for the Who is Who of Your Inner
Child. Who is this child? When you see the abun-
dance of literature on the subject and consider that
it’s already so many years that inner child healing is
known, well, you think everybody should know
about it. But reality is far from this; truly, it is still an
esoteric subject, even for physicians and, you may
not believe it, for many psychiatrists.

—28—
 In my experience, there is a deep gap between
therapists who work on the gestalt, the emotions, the
imaginal realm, and the sub-language level such as
hypnotherapists, and those who work with psycho-
analysis, let alone behavioral psychologists or most
personnel psychologists who are really on a different
track. The difference consists in the fact that the first
group tries to do away with conditioning while the
latter make their living with helping maintain and re-
inforce social conditioning.
Inner child healing or, generally, voice dialogue
is a technique pertaining to the first paradigm; it has
nothing to do with social conditioning, and even acts
pretty much counter to it. Inner child healing there-
fore truly is a step into personal freedom! It is impor-
tant to note that this energy is present even in cases

—29—
where the inner child is cataleptic and not respond-
ing in any way.
A mute inner child is not a child that has the
tongue cut out. A mute inner child can be gradually
led to communicate using language as a means of
communication, once the fear blockage is removed,
and sufficient trust was built for the inner child to get
out of the protective shell.
The next question that most people ask silently
or openly is to know if this inner child is the same in
all of us or if we have all got a different inner child?
The answer is that we all have got our unique and
individual inner child and that your inner child car-
ries by no means the same energy pattern as my in-
ner child. That is one of the reasons for the fact that
inner child recovery is such a unique and important

—30—
event in the life of a person. The inner child is differ-
ent in all of us and makes the process a different one.
There are persons whose inner child would stay
a considerable time in the wounded phase without
wanting to move on to complete healing. With oth-
ers, the inner child, once communication is desired
from the inner adult and the inner parent, quickly
takes its natural power, is healed, and becomes the
Little Professor in the sense Eric Berne used this ex-
pression.
This is actually not something surprising. We
have all got different characters and a quite unique
mental and emotional setup. Why then should the
inner child be the same in all of us? This idea does
not make sense to me. One of the greatest pleasures
in life comes from recognizing and enjoying life’s in-

—31—
credible variety. As there are no two roses that are ex-
actly the same, there are no two inner children who
have the same character and the same kind of reac-
tion. Your inner child will face life differently than
mine. This is even so if both your and my inner child
have been recovered with exactly the same method,
using the same therapy approach, the same kind of
voice dialogue, the same facilitator, and so on.
This insight should warn us to standardize the
work on our inner child and expect automatic and
uniform results. Such an attitude will not only render
the work ineffective: it can impede the recovered in-
ner child from expressing itself fully and joyously.
Besides that, great care and sensitivity is needed
to cope with the first responses of a formerly mute
inner child. A wrong answer, a slight lack of empa-

—32—
thy, a spur of arrogance can hurt and damage much,
especially when the inner child was wounded and
betrayed. But after all, drawbacks have to be accept-
ed as a normal and unavoidable fact of life.
Inner child recovery is no easy task; but that
should not shy us away from doing it. The energy in-
vested in it is never wasted. It will pay back tenfold!
It would be very unrealistic to say that because
of the mistakes one may commit when doing the re-
covery work alone, people should imperatively be
accompanied by a professional. Of course, such ad-
vise is no bad advise, but it is impractical advice be-
cause of the simple disproportion of masses of people
with unrecovered inner children and a tiny percent-
age of mental health professionals who are special-
ized in inner child recovery and healing, on the oth-

—33—
er. And there is an emotional factor as well. The in-
ner child may indeed defy any sophisticated tech-
nique or highly trained professional as the facilitator,
and remain totally closed up —just for showing that
it can’t and won’t be impressed by any worldly
knowledge or power. This is exactly what I mean
when I am talking about the power of the child.
The inner child is often moved by true empathy,
by true commitment, by soft and repeated demands,
or a repeated and sincere quest to get in touch. Such
a quest typically comes from the heart, and it is mo-
tivated by love; not the kind of love most of us en-
gage in every day, not passion or desire, but genuine
care and a certain prudence, a certain caution not to
hurt another who may be fragile in some way.

—34—
 Yet not pitiful love either. The inner child tends
to ward off against saviors and apostles with their
usually false way of dialoging with a child. It general-
ly is not responsive to ‘baby talk’ since it is watching
out for manipulation. A betrayed inner child who is
faced with a manipulative attitude during the recov-
ery process will never develop enough trust to open
up to real dialogue. Genuineness primes.
For those of you who write poetry or are other-
wise well connected to the non-rational side of life,
also for those of you who have defied social adapta-
tion, the inner child will probably play a consider-
able role in your lives, and you may have more ease
than others to recover and heal it.
An important point in this guide is to under-
stand that your inner child is not asking you for—

—35—
 • adapting well to your environment;

• listening to what your neighbors or friends say;

• doing things the way others do them or as ‘one should’ do them;

• being persistent and patient, well-mannered and nice;

• obeying to a strict system of values and principles;

• having a high standard of moral or ethical values.

If you want to sell any of these virtues to your

inner child you will get one of the following:
• A long silence followed by a funny remark;

• A chuckle and warning that you’re going to be a robot soon;

• A serious remark that you’re not connected to your creative potential;

• A hint that you’re a boring, annoying nerd;

• No answer at all.

The inner child is not the instance in you that

wants to avoid all, be at peace all the time, satisfy
everybody, or play the savior or a role model. In the
contrary, your inner child asks you to be daring and

—36—
bold! Your inner child seeks adventure and pushes
you to do unusual and often funny things; is not al-
ways rational, but that does not mean that it is per se
foolish. Your inner child is your voice of wisdom once
it is recovered and healed!
Your inner child asks you to be passionate and to
live your life to its fullest. It belittles you if you want
to hold back yourself from adventure. Your inner
child wants you to be open-minded and frank; it ab-
hors dishonesty and hypocrisy. Your inner child is
hurt by nothing more than your indifference. It can
take the worst of critique, the worst of admonish-
ments, the worst of blame. It may cry, but it will not
turn away. It will turn away only if you are indifferent
to its needs over an extended period of time. Then it
might become cataleptic.

—37—
 Your inner child is proud of you when you are
brilliant and bold with others; it respects you less if
you hide behind a social mask or run with the major-
ity. It is a minority lover and prefers intelligent mar-
ginality over stupid conformity. Your inner child is
strong and powerful through the fact that it appears
to be a nonsense to most people.
You can win many people playing out your inner
child in the social game, and this, if you do it the
right way, can give you many advantages in your in-
teractions with others, professional or private.
Let me focus for a moment on the last point, the
question of social power. I think it is a very impor-
tant point and one that is generally largely misunder-
stood. Social power has a lot to do with the tactics of
communication, the silent dialogue that we lead

—38—
when we interact with others. To be more precise,
there are basically two levels of communication, an
obvious, and a hidden level. When we communicate
we are constantly interacting on two levels. The ob-
vious level represents the matter we are actually talk-
ing about, while at the hidden level, we have an ex-
change of coded messages regarding things like:
✓ ‘Who are you?’
✓ ‘Are you nice and friendly, or ugly and criminal?’
✓ ‘What is your motivation for this exchange?’
✓ ‘What is your general attitude?’
✓ ‘Are you interested to build a relationship with me?’
Let me point this out more in detail, using an ex-
ample. When you present yourself to an employer
for a job interview, during that interview a lot of in-
teresting things are going to happen. Of course, on
an obvious level we are talking about such common

—39—
things as the number of work hours, salary, vacation,
your qualification for the work, your references, your
expertise, your work experience, etc. That is rather
boring compared to what happens on the hidden lev-
el, for on the hidden level, the things are exchanged
that later really count for your employer to hire you,
or not. Here the elements come in that are used to either
build trust, or to not building trust.
Your employer wants to see if you would be a
trustworthy person as an employee of his company,
and you want to know if this employer is somebody
you can trust and who will not cheat you on your
health insurance or vacation amounts. There are typ-
ically many imponderables that make this silent dia-
logue a very interesting thing to observe. For exam-
ple, the way you sit in the chair, the way your eye-

—40—
balls move, the way you talk about others, the way
you talk about yourself; how what you say relates to
what is written in your CV. There are many other
points.
An interesting thing is that the more you are
conscious of your inner entities such as your inner
child, your inner adult, and your inner parent, and the
more you experience having dialogue with them, the
more you control this hidden subconscious dialogue
with others. I even go as far as saying that the only
way we master dialogue with others is to train our
inner dialogue, or that our outer dialogue with others
actively mirrors the quality of our inner dialogue
with ourselves.
This is some stuff from my communication train-
ing, but it’s not just an idea or an opinion; it’s a fact

—41—
of life that I have myself found through trial and er-
ror. When you read through the above example, you
may find some of the points not at all applying to
you. This is natural since we are all different. Of
course, this example is tinted by my own unique ex-
perience of life and my way of being. I am perhaps
that kind of unsocial, high-strung, megalomaniac,
overly individual, pathologically ambitious and ob-
noxious person …
That’s how mainstream people tend to see me. I
have never been employed for any job; I simply see
no value in that, and in most group interactions nei-
ther. I enjoy my solitary life very much, and I do not
feel lonely at all. I love the company of myself, and
else of my cats, and my plants, and when I go out
into the street, I feel connected to all.

—42—
 But sometimes I can find people truly annoying,
and I feel I am wasting my time with them. And then
I prefer working and doing something more worth-
while, more productive, such as playing piano. The
problem was that I did not figure why I was con-
stantly rejected, why I had so many problems with
others? It was only through my therapy and my work
with voice dialogue that I became gradually aware of
all of this. It has taken many years and was a beauti-
ful thing to happen. I am very happy and love my
work. That’s my bliss.
You may not be as extreme as I am and perhaps
much more accommodating with others, with
groups, with social life. Your problems may be oth-
ers; the principle, however, is the same for all of us:
the principle of the hidden dialogue, the language that

—43—
is not verbal and that we constantly use to evaluate
another on a trust-building scale, while on a basic
level, when trust is not yet built, we consider each
other as rats!
Why do I mention all of this? Because all of this
was totally hidden to me and is hidden to most of us.
I did not know why I was constantly rejected, why I
felt so terribly lonely all through my school and uni-
versity years. I did not understand it, so much the
more as I appear to be a rather gentle person in social
exchange, that I try very hard to respect others and I
hide my true identity in order not to dominate the
dialogue with others.
But I could not control that pattern until I had
found voice dialogue as a means of knowing myself;
and doing that, I found that it was my inner child

—44—
that was that obnoxious part in me. I then became
aware that this inner child had indeed all reason to
be obnoxious; it was obnoxious because it was very
angry with me, very depressed and very upset be-
cause I had neglected it for about two decades of my
life.
After I was getting to know my inner child, sud-
denly all became clear like a mountain river, and the
fog lifted around all those mysterious events in my
life, all those missed opportunities that in hindsight
had been no opportunities at all, simply because my
way was not to be a conformist. And I would not
now be able to contribute in the way I contribute to
society with my productions, had I obeyed to social
standards rather than my inner voice.

—45—
 There is always a sense in all that happens; the
problem is that we often do not understand the
signs, the ominous events that happen, because we
do not understand ourselves and the guidance we
always receive. This is simply the problem of connect-
edness with all-that-is.

Creativity Central
To start with, you have to open a door to your
understanding of life. It’s not enough, to repeat it,
that you read this book. It is not enough that you
know exactly what has been written. What is impor-
tant is what is going to happen on your feeling level,
and regarding your set opinions.
As long as those set opinions are alien to the idea
that there are multiple universes and layers of con-
sciousness, you’ll have a hard time to get to grips with
—46—
the idea of the subtle realm of energy I am talking
about here.
In other words, sitting in a coffee shop and lis-
tening to rock music, you may get to understand
even a complex programming language or master
your latest computer application, but you won’t con-
nect to your inner child. For this to happen, you
have to move onto another plane.
Yes, it’s as esoteric as it sounds and I do not
make a fuss about it. If you believe you can do this in
a linear way, the way you learn math or job knowl-
edge, you are off-track and I cannot help you. Life is
not linear and dealing with your inner child is deal-
ing directly with life. Dealing with your inner child,
you have to prepare for the unknown to occur, and
you should rather implement the following:

—47—
 —Accept the irrational in you and others;

—Accept the idea that culture should foster nei-

ther rational thinking, nor irrational thinking—
but both;

—Accept the fact that male and female are rela-

tive expressions pointing to an energetic interplay
of yin and yang;

—Forget all what you learnt in school and un-

learn it as fast as possible so as to again become
truly natural and integral;

—Forget all moralistic concepts and black-and-

white theories.

If you agree to approach these ideas and to inte-

grate them in your existing worldview, you have a
good chance to succeed with enhancing your creativ-
ity level. But an action must follow, too. It’s not
enough to do this in theory but to remain passive in

—48—
practice. A fine practice that could accompany those
mental or emotional processes is the following:

—Prepare some paper and color crayons. Take

one crayon or several at a time and, after breath-
ing deeply three times, just express the first emo-
tion that moves through your heart. Try to jot
down this energy, as you feel it, onto that paper.
You can accomplish this through the strength and
spontaneity of the movement or through the col-
ors or through both.

—Do more and more spontaneous activities

every day.

—Make a little list where you drop ideas what in

your life could be done in a more spontaneous,
intuitive, more joyful and less brain-draining way.
This will activate your inner child and invite this
energy to participate in your daily activities.

Write About What You Like

Write about what you like, not what you dislike.
Once in a while, when you have a minute, sit down,

—49—
take your laptop or a notepad and write a few sen-
tences like:

—Since I was a child I liked to be around paint-

ings. And there was aunty Ida who had these
wonderful flower paintings in her house, and
every time I was there, I loved to be around her
cats and the oil color when she was painting. I
liked that smell of the paint. It was like the antic-
ipation of something joyful to happen. Since then
I love paintings. So often I had that idea to open
a café-gallery, a place where people enjoy art
while they sip a cup of coffee or a glass of wine…

—I once had the opportunity to drive a Rolls

Royce. It was a unique experience. I felt like the
world had changed, like I was seeing things from
another perspective that day. All was magic, not
real, not down-to-earth, but somehow trans-
formed. I thought there are things in life that are
not commonplace, but result from a challenge,
the challenge to be daring and bold. This car was
that, I thought— daring and bold. And beautiful.
And in that moment I saw why I always wanted

—50—
 to have that car and yet condemned the very
wish a moment later!

I just gave you two little ideas from my own life,

but you will of course jot down your own! Doing this
once in a while, without a feeling of obligation, helps
to give your inner child a signal to be loved and ac-
cepted, and that shall be an uplifting experience for
you.
You can’t recover an inner child that is not col-
laborating, that prefers to remain the rebel because
that child was always betrayed, hurt and neglected,
because it lost trust in adults.
Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that you have
to do this or that. No. Just when you feel like, when
you anyway daydream and indulge in those wonder-
ful thoughts, take a further step and write those

—51—
thoughts down. That little step makes a huge differ-
ence! You will see for yourself.

Express Your Feelings

Once in a while, follow your intuition to express
your feelings toward another person in a way that is
not calculated, but spontaneous and with the im-
pending risk that you may be rejected or regarded as
being off-track, such as—

—telling a woman or a man in the bus or train

that she or he has a nice haircut or a pretty face
or very beautiful hands; and see what happens;

—telling your employer or your employee that

you really like him or her as a person, not just as
a superior;

—telling your child that she or he is a unique

person and that you had never thought you’d get
such a gift from heaven when you once wished to
have that child;

—52—
 —telling your parent that despite of all the prob-
lems you had with her or him, you value the ex-
ceptional bond between the two of you and the
significance that this relationship has for all of
you in the family.

Jot Down Creative Ideas

Jot down your little creative thoughts, those that
come to you in moments you are not prepared to re-
ceive them. It is often while you are in the restroom,
under the shower, or doing household tasks. These
ideas are often as smart as they are soft-voiced; they
do not come up boldly, being more like inner whis-
pers. And they are easily forgotten if you are not at-
tentive enough, and this so much the more as they
appear in moments when you are not prepared to re-
ceive them. Often you don’t even have stationary
with you and thus must become creative in marking

—53—
your thoughts for later recovery. The best technique
for this is to summarize a thought or idea with a
keyword or a symbol. For example if you get a new
idea about how to market the soap you are selling
and it has to do with the Internet, key it something
like ‘soap online’ or ‘soap opera online.’ It should be
catchy or funny. Your inner child likes a funny and
unusual markup of things and ideas, and will help
you developing your creative intuition further.
Just rely on the wisdom that inspired you in the
first place! Rely on this superior intelligence, that
subtle guidance. This force is connected with all of our
inner entities, but primarily with your inner child,
because it’s primarily innocence that creates the
openness needed to receive: a beginner’s mind, as it
is called in Zen.

—54—
 By contrast, what most effectively blocks off this
superior guidance is pride, arrogance and the feeling
that one possesses special professional knowledge
that one regards as the ultimate truth.

—55—