I feel that in many ways life chose me not to have children more than I chose not to have them. I would have liked to have had children. All of my youth I imagined that I would have at least four of them. Unhappily though, after I married I discovered that my husband had no intention of having children. I went through several years of deep sorrow and depression as a result of his attitude. Eventually I chose to divorce.

While I was married in Zurich, I was very unhappy because the fairy tale that I had been living by had proved to be wrong. I cast around desperately for a new myth or teaching that could help me find my way. All the stories I knew ended with the words, "and they lived happily ever after." Well, it was a lie. I was definitely not living happily ever after.

It was at about that time that I came in touch with Carl Jung's work and with my own dreams as a source of wisdom, truth, and guidance. I was elated by my discovery of dreams as a source of truth. It was the first time in my life that I had come in touch with an authority that I could trust -and it was within me! The first profound dream that I recorded spoke to my need to give birth to a new Self, the need to become a parent to a new 'me,' a divine inner child whose essence is grace and joy.

I dreamed that I was in a beautiful castle-like building with hundreds of other women, all of whom were pregnant like myself. We were awaiting our delivery. There were no men there. All around us were rolling green hills. It was a very beautiful place. Soon I found myself in the delivery room. I lived through every detail of the birth of the child with which I was pregnant. As they delivered the baby they held her up to me. She was about two years old at birth, fully developed and extraordinarily beautiful. She had black curly hair and the deepest azure blue eyes you can imagine. She had dimples on her rosy cheeks, and she was pealing with laughter as they held her up to me. I was overcome with her beauty and her joy. They asked me what I would call her. As I took her in my hands I looked into her eyes, and said, "Carlene." Then they took her away from me and she turned into a little tiny baby boy, no more than an inch long. And I was still pregnant.

I know that I called the child Carlene because she would be the 'daughter of Jung's work' in me. Since that time I have truly been living through every detail of the birth of this feminine essence within me. It has been a task of personal metamorphosis. 'She' is not a theory, she is a different 'me.' Part of the task that I have needed to address in learning how to become this new 'me' is to define a new world-view, discern new tools for educating myself, design new ways of living and choose new living environments, new friends, new social contexts. All of this work on my own awareness is the tiny baby boy that replaced Carlene at the end of the dream. It is the work I have had to do on my consciousness that makes it possible to choose changestep by step, building a new 'me.'

After that first dream that came to me at the age of about 25 when I was still newly married and living in Zurich, Switzerland, I decided to undertake Jungian analysis. For three years I worked deeply on my dreams with the help of my analyst and then continued on my own, avidly reading everything Jung had written. I used to carry my journal around with me everywhere, immersing myself in the images as often as I had a spare moment. I could feel the power of the personal myth that was unfolding there. Images of woundedness were frequent in those early dreams.

Eventually my dreams led me to see clearly that my marriage was killing me. My soul was drowning in the rigidity and cold-heartedness of the relationship. I had a powerful dream that made up my mind to get a divorce.

I was standing in a great cathedral with a black marble floor, huge stained glass windows that came to the ground, and many beautiful green plants growing up around the windows. There was nothing in the cathedral but myself and a priest who stood on a raised box in front of me with his arms out, wearing the black and white vestments of an Anglican Priest. He said solemnly: "You will never have children." My heart sank. "But that does not matter, because you will die young." My heart sank further. "You will drown." I was in shock. His voice had the ring of prophecy.

My analyst's first comment was: "Drowning is a slow way to go"
Instantly I knew that I had to be free. My husband represented the whole patriarchal structure to me. His life was dull and grey, boxed in by prejudices, opinions and rules. He was judgemental and unyielding. He did not like children because he hated spontaneity, creativity, freedom and playfulness. In my life he was symbolic of all that the patriarchal structure had encouraged me to 'marry.' The fairy tale goes that a young woman will 'live happily ever after' as soon as she is united with her Prince. But this was not the Prince, this was the son of the Patriarch to whom I had given my life.

My condition was not unusual for a woman married in the sixties. Our patriarchical system was drowning all of life and preventing the child in all of us from being born and thriving through joyous play. My work since that time has led me to believe that the child inside the son of the Patriarch is essentially autistic, unable to be here and be related, even if seemingly gifted in some areas of intellectual endeavour. The boy child in all of us is terrible wounded and aggressive, while the girl child is shut away in a faraway castle under lock and key, often the subject of torture and physical or emotional abuse.

It took me several more years to free myself of the marriage and overcome the guilt that I felt at breaking my marriage vow. . .'to stay with this person in sickness and in health, for better for worse, till death do us part.' I knew only one thing: a way of life that felt like a living death could not be a sacred way of life. I knew I had to get out and find real life, whatever that might be. I also did not know then that hundreds, even thousands, of other women across the Western world were also moving out of their deadening relationships with men.

At the time of my divorce, I had no idea that the question of the wounded child would become central to my work with adults, nor did I know that I would receive a compelling call from the Great Mother through mysticism, a call to help heal the planet and to bring the mother and the daughter aspects of divinity back into the consciousness of humanity. I was still occupied with my personal grief over not having children of my own, and immersed in the question of who this little Divine Child, the Magical Child called Carlene, of whom I had dreamed, might be for me in my life.

Looking back over the years and seeing where I have arrived now in my life, I feel that the will of Mother Earth had intervened in my personal life at that time in a deeper way than I could have known. It would have seemed natural to have pursued the question of having children since I love children very deeply, and I always have. Rather than marrying again, however, I moved from Europe to America. Putting my 'family' dreams aside for a later time, I went to college. I studied psychology and social welfare hoping to get more insight into people. I wanted to become a Jungian analyst. Little did I know then that eventually my family of choice would be the global family and that I would come to love the child inside each of the adults with whom I would be working.

While I was at college, life took some interesting turns. In the course of my studies I became involved with learning disabled and emotionally disturbed children. I began to wonder what dreadful things had happened to their souls that they were responding with such alienating and alienated behaviour. I spent almost ten years deeply immersed in the question of what autism is in children. I formed a deep heart bond with some of these children and felt a terrible sadness inside myself for these lost lives.

I continued to be deeply involved in the study of my dreams, which were becoming more and more mystical and powerful as time went by. Night after night I used to dream of trying to reach the lost soul inside the autistic children with whom I worked. I felt that these children had never been able to truly choose to be born, but were living somewhere in limbo, waiting to see if it would ever be safe to come to Earth. Their beauty was elusive and yet somehow they seemed to hold a key to what was wrong in my own life and the lives of so many others that I saw around me. I would look with pained horror at the street people on Telegraph Avenue and wonder what awful fate had brought them to such despair and rejection of their own beauty. I could understand why they might feel reluctant to be here. I certainly did. With all my heart I wanted to invite them to come to the planet, just as I wanted to be able to be here myself in a much more authentic way.

It was through the psyche and thanks to Jung's pioneering work with dreams that I realized the nature of the work ahead of me. The revelatory (right) brain gives us gestalts, images of our own wholeness that the left brain can then translate into actions and choices for ways of being. From these images, we may receive visions and inspirations to guide us into our future and call us toward a work that is wider and deeper than we are as individuals. We may realize that everyone and every event in our lives is also a mirror of an aspect of our inner selves.

The 'daughter of Jung's work' of which I dreamed is the work of midwifing ourselves and each other, and then of providing new contexts within which we can learn to see ourselves and others in healing ways. We must give birth to new community forms at the same time that we give birth to a new self. Without loving mirrors of awareness and a new kind of teaching, the newly born sacred self cannot retain its truths. I see the work of the 'Age of the Daughter' as the work of establishing community and communion all over the planet. I was made pregnant with this task, and I know now that I am not the only one.

At the time of the dream I was completely unaware that there were women all over the planet who were beginning to feel the stirrings of the Goddess within themselves. . .the Goddess who shows herself to us as Gaia, Mother Earth, Nature in her many forms. Her call to women is to mother the Earth and all its people. Her call is to recognize ecology, peace and global community. Her call is to honour people of all colours, and to restore sacredness to all the kingdoms, to all the incarnated manifestations of her grace. She made me pregnant with a knowledge of her.

Sixteen years after that first dream she revealed herself to me in a much more powerful and compelling way. I had a visionary experience of her that lasted a whole weekend. It was accompanied by powerful physical and emotional experiences that changed my life. I have never been the same since. She gave me mystical joy and union at the time that she revealed herself to me. She infused my cells with radiant love and excitement. I knew that I was pregnant with her. She did not give me theory. She told me through the vision the there is nothing to do but "Be." However, what is important is that we "be" authentic. Be who we really are. She also told me that each being is unique and each being is equally and fully in the image of the Divine.

Without this visionary experience my work would never have come into being, yet the visionary call was only a blue-print of the work to come. Through it I realized several fundamentally important things. I saw a whole new paradigm for how humans can live. I was called to approach my life from a new point of view with completely different values and goals.

Having seen who I truly am through vision I have to work to express that truth in everything that I do, say, and manifest. In order for the world to be a different place each person must manifest a different self, a wise and loving self who is no longer threatened by others and who feels her or himself in relationship to all other beings. In order to re-parent the world I must first re-parent myself by learning the art of authentic self-manifestation.

A couple of years after the first vision, I had a second mystical encounter with the Mother. This time she called to be re-membered; to be put together again in the memories and in the lives of humanity. Her charge to me was to help with that work. Her call came to me through an epic poem that re-wrote the story of creation to include the elements of Mother and Daughter that are presently missing from the Judeo-Christian mythology. Her final words in that call were:

"Now manifest me, as I have manifested you, from the beginning"

These two visionary experiences changed my life completely. They answered my questions about who I am, and called me to work on behalf of a humanity that is missing the dimension of Mother in its life. Placing me in context in the evolution of humanity as a whole, they informed me that we are leaving 'The Age of the Son' which was the age of the 'enlightened spirit,' and entering 'The Age of the Daughter,' which will be the age of 'wise embodiment.' Where Jung had worked only with dreams, I would expand the symbolic dimension to all of life and work with people on every aspect of the lives as if it were a dream that they are manifesting. Where Jung worked with individuals in a closed room. . . a private space, I would work with groups of women (and eventually of women and men). We would relate to each other's life stories and dramas and help one another to honour the authentic self that is revealing itself through our 'soulwork' together. What Jung saw as a private matter between 'patient and therapist,' I see as a sacred journey unfolding. . .a quest for which we need support; ourselves the hero-heroines on a mysterious and challenging journey. We need supportive relationship from a group of co-journeyers as we face the dragons, enter the darkness, and celebrate the light along the way.

I see this healing work as the basis for peace on the planet. Working on polishing the one crystal that I am, I become a clear channel for the healing work of Gaia who is using me as an instrument of change. She is mothering the world through me and through every human cell as a vehicle for healing and peace.

My work in the world is with people's life storiesunderstanding one's personal story from the symbolic rather than the pragmatic point of view and learning to see the 'DNA' of one's story unfolding. The DNA of my own story reveals that the child within is a central focus both in my own journey and of my work with others.

Most of us have been so collectivised that we do not know ourselves. My experience is that there is a DNA force guiding the unfolding of the life story of each soul just as it guides the unfolding of the physical body. 'Soulwork,' as I call my therapy work, provides the tools for an individual to look at her or his life story from the symbolic rather than the pragmatic perspective. Every detail of a person's life story is as powerfully packed with wise information as are dreams. We have simply never learned to look at worldly events from the dream perspective. When we do, we find out what the DNA code for our personal mythology looks like. Once we see the pattern of our true life story that hides under the roles we have imposed over it, we can begin to choose the authentic path, and begin to birth the authentic self.

Each dimension of Soulwork begins with the personal self, the inner experience, which is then translated into an outer relationship with the world as the individual manifests the authentic self through articulation, action and relationship. Soulwork seeks to find and manifest authenticity on every level of personal being, to clean ourselves up and out so that the messages we channel on every level are pure healing messages. Buddhists would say: Right speech, right action, right livelihood. Soulwork techniques help us to fulfill the individual soul.

The principle is that we are in the process of being metamorphosized by changes in consciousness that create changes in the material reality that we're living in and in our bodies. We have to completely rework the physical, mental and emotional body in order to give birth to ourselves in a new way, so that in fact we are capable of being peaceable, so that we become people who can live with each other in a peaceful fashion, which I think at this stage is really impossible for most. These major shifts in consciousness have to occur with accompanying physical shifts. The body is a frightened thing. Autistic children and psychotic children represent the most frightened child self, but all children, the children in us, are essentially traumatized and negated and fearful and defensive. Even though we cover this up, it's true of most of us that we're spending most of our lives defending this negated child. We do it, some of us, more elegantly than others. But most of us are still doing it.

I'm feeling at the moment that the people on the planet are adolescents. It is a sign of great immaturity that people are not choosing to work together more in teams to take care of the Earth. We need to start looking at other people and what they need and we can only do that when we're grown up, when our own will becomes the higher will. We can only do that when we have a sense of fulfillment of our own needs.

We have to choose new ways to be with ourselves. We need new paradigms for life. The mothering space is a total environment that we have to create for ourselves and others. Re-parenting the world involves each of us re-creating our personal environment, re-connecting with Mother Earth both inside and outside ourselves and our homes. We're moving out of an era of parenting altogether. The issue is whether or not any of us will ever become adults. What we need to do is teach each other skills for going inside, finding our kid, working through its problems and coming out the other side able to parent ourselves. Then we, as a collec-tive party, will parent the planet. We will take care of her, steer her anyway, rather than parent. As a collective body of adults we need to take care of all the species that are children to us, all the species that don't have our capacity to create and change things and move around in their environment and who rely on us to care for them. It's not just that we should take care of each other, although we will take care of each other, but the evolutionary shift in consciousness is going beyond parenting to adulthood, to co-creating.

The age we're entering is one in which everyone has to give birth to themselves in a new way. There is a spiritual pregnancy we're all in, whether we're male or female. Giving birth to ourselves again, or giving birth to the divine child in ourselves, is a big issue for us now, especially in terms of peace-making on the planet. I think it's the wounded child in everyone that stands in the way of our cooperation with one another as adults.

There are no experts in this work really, for each one of us is unique unto ourselves and must discover for herself or himself who the authentic being truly is. We can share tools, but not answers. Mothering is a process of watching ourselves unfold. We play games and draw pictures, just like the first time around. We enact different roles for the fun of seeing how the costumes fit, and of learning what different aspects of being feel like. The difference needs to be that this time each of us is honoured for her or his authentic truth and not judged: "good, better, best; bad, worse, worst."

We are a kaleidoscope of Beings. There are no better or worse ones, just different ones. Jung's work assists people in finding a language that could reveal the truth of who the individual truly is. He showed us the language of our inner 'Sleeping Beauty' the language of the Soul. Having access to the language of the dreaming mind, we are better equipped to choose authenticity. We can overcome the fragmentation that has resulted from centuries of dogma, judgement, prejudice and oppression of authenticity.

Now that I have worked with so many women across the country, exploring our life stories and our secret dreams and sorrows, I know that deep inside ourselves many others besides myself, including autistic children and street people, feel fundamentally unwelcome on Earth. We are afraid to be who we are. And no wonder. Over and over again we have been told by those in authority that the way in which we are unfolding is incorrect or unacceptable. Even as adults we continue to receive society's evaluations of who we are and who we should become via the media, churches, corporate institutions, and the government. We have been told that we are too tall, too short, too fat, too dumb, the wrong color, the wrong class, the wrong nationality, the wrong age, or the wrong sex to be lovable, valuable, useful or holy. Having been told what is lacking in us, we have been sorted according to prevailing standards of usefulness and attractive-ness, and then supported financially, socially and emotionally only to the degree that we 'qualify' as valuable and desirable. Those that do not pass the test are, in varying degrees, "left out on the mountainside to die."

Whether it is the boy child or the girl child in us, the child in all of us is wounded and denied its right to unfold as it really is. Those wounded children within us are the cause of our deep inner desolation, and the fears and anxieties that we project on others. At the time that I was growing up, in the late forties and early fifties, boys were taught to grow up to fight and kill anyone they feel threatened by, while girls were taught to sink into depression and despair.

There is a desperate need for us now to work on making peace with ourselves. Unless a person is at peace with him or herself, he or she will see the world as a dangerous place and will fight the enemy that he or she perceives to be outside. The wounded child is a key in this process of inner peacemaking because it is the pre-verbal part of ourselves that naturally uses physical violence to solve problems, having no higher skills with which to do so.

I'd always worked with the child in myself and with disturbed, psychotic and autistic children in the outer world. And now, around full circle again, I'm back to healing the wounded child within myself, understanding the depths of the journey that we have to take for peace on the planet.

The whole system that we were brought up in was just built to pit people against each other and make some people better than others, some people more valuable than others, so it's hard to get rid of that programming. As I was working on my inner child, I had a graphic image so unmythical, so right where it's at for me, which was that I was a computer and I'd been given a software program when I was little that was just like my parents'. I had no hands, and I couldn't get it out of the machine, and the only way to stop the program from running was for somebody to unplug the whole computer from the wall, which meant no life juice. That's what I felt for a long time. I felt as though there was no life going through me, because I couldn't play the old program. I wasn't willing to play the old program, and I didn't know any way to get a new one. It was so graphic, so painful and impotent, and felt so trueIt's as if on a deep, pre-verbal level, before you ever became able to phrase yourself or define yourself, you were programmed with a basic, fundamental survival program.

We're choosing not to be in a survival mode, but that program is still in the computer. It's so close to the cells, it's so interwoven that it's almost like cancer, or a deep addiction to a way of thinking that the robot self runs and runs and runs. You can go over it, or ignore it, or meditate your way past it, or act as if it didn't exist, but when the baseline is still that software, you're in trouble. Because when it comes down to it, you're fragile and threatened.

It doesn't matter if you've seen God and been to heaven, if this kid is still injured, it's not going to help. It takes sheer willingness to dive into this place of absolute terror. I guess it's the hero's journey, fighting the dragons. I learned for the first time that you do have to fight and kill some dragons. I'd always thought from my feminine perspective that you really didn't have to do that...just try to understand what they were. But I saw this business of fighting dragons and killing them as an incredibly important part of getting free. The dragons are the programsthe scarcity program, the "you can't trust anybody" program, the "nobody loves you as you are" program, "you're not as good as other people" program. All of that. All of the ways that you subtly had to compromise your true being in order to survive physically as a wee little being, and the whole cultural programming that comes with it.

I'm a Scorpio, so in the planetary sense I am prone to descent. To looking into the darkness. One of the things my work is about is how to find what's down there that is a treasure and come up with it again. That's what I've been doing for the past five years, a part of which has been this wounded kid. "Except you become as a little child, you can't go to the kingdom of heaven." We hear that "except you become as a little child," and the image usually is pure, sweet innocence, but it has to include the terror of the little child.

The highest goal of all meditations is non-attachment, but you can't be non-attached when your basic programming is terror-ridden. I feel that many people do use meditation and other things to rise above it. But I don't believe that's an answer. I think it's a bandaid unless you've gone in and down and done that work and seen what those demons are that keep you so attached to your security and who loves you and what you need for money and what you need for food. The truly healed person has gone down there and had a good look at all that. The danger is that some people get stuck, wallowing in the mire. Every myth where you descend to the underworld has this admonition, "Don't eat down there. Don't stop down there. Don't help anyone down there." There are conditions for going into hell. "Don't look back when you're coming out." All these things that basically say, "Don't get fed in any way while you're down there, because if you start to get addicted to the miseries that are down there, you can stay there forever." There's a real trickiness about it. There's a way in which you have to go down and you have to find out what's going on, you have to make a decision to kill the dragon, seize the treasure, and get the heck out of there without looking back. It's tricky.

My experience of the light and the vision gave me the perspective to be able to do the lower journey. I know I couldn't do it if I hadn't had that. There would be not enough hope. I think that hope is really important. Over and over I pondered the questions that stayed continually close to my heart: Who am I? What am I doing here? Where is the Divinewho and what is God?

I also think that refined skills for underworld journeying are very essential, that people who have gone that way and people who know how to get there and get back are really necessary at this time. A lot of midwives are needed for people giving birth to themselves. There are many different angles through which each person may have to meet this. According to our astrological signs and our family history and our cultural drama, there are different ways in which people have to do that journey, and we need as many maps as possible of the underworld. What it amounts to really, in my experience, is that you go and fight your own ultimate world war. You go in there and explode your own nuclear bomb and release the anger and the pain and the hatred and the fear. You have this war going on inside, and it's very threatening. It's so much easier to find someone outside to hate and fight them than it is to go inside and look at all of that stuff in yourself.

As a social worker and counselor, I saw that I would have parental power whether I was working with children or with adults. This fact has always made me uncomfortable. How can we parent the planet if we haven't learned to be our own parent? What qualifies me to act as a pseudo-parent to another? I never felt that it was enough for a therapist to simply avoid talking about his or her own life drama with clients in order to create a safe space for the client/patient. The child in us knows through universal consciousness all that is truly going on inside another. We cannot hide from one another. Good therapeutic skills do not necessarily make a healing space. A healed person emanates a healing space around them. I asked myself what it would take for me to become a healed person.

We need a space or a system or a temple where people can literally go back into a womb space and rework it all. There's a real need for nurturing care for people while they do that. The 50 minute therapeutic hour doesn't provide it. The nurturing space needs to include body work, the beautiful earth around you, peace and quiet, and components of real hard heroic work, fighting demons and confronting really frightened places. There's acting out that has to be done in the whole reworking of the basic programming of how you see life. I think that it's very courageous work, and the part of you that does it is the smallest, most tender part. Opening up that trust area for someone to guide you is very frightening in the first place. They may take advantage of you, or fail you in some radical way and leave you worse off than when you started. And yet it seems totally necessary. It's sort of like the tortoise needing to take off it's shell for a while to get from here to there, wherever that passage might be.

The journey is hard and so exhausting that we really need to be able to relax in other parts of our lives and not be stressed out trying to make a living and trying to be an authority. The descent makes you really question your authority at all, to be doing anything with anyone. So to provide spaces for people to do that as a rite of passage feels important to me, like the pregnancy space, because we need safe pregnancy spaces where it's OK and people are approving and accepting and encouraging.

I think women have the courage to do this more than men do. It may be that the mother-child archetype is so strong in the woman that we're just driven to do it by the ethos, by the zeitgeist. The spirit of the time is mother and child. The child in me wants to be born and the mother in me is driven to help her. We're also driven to help other people. The most important thing will be for us to facilitate other people facilitating themselves, giving them the tools instead of taking them there and having them project the power on us. We need to give them skills where they can be accompanied by somebody as a guide, but they do the work, they find the mother and the child inside. And then this fear and defensiveness that's at the bottom of all of the war and the pain and the crime and the alienation that so many people feel will dissolve, because we'll be able to stand up for ourselves. We won't feel threatened by other people's power.

Thank God we don't get all the instructions on the first day. Little by little we come to it. For me it was took five years of mystical bliss followed by five years of underworld journeying, getting deeper and darker. I'm coming out of it now. I finished the healing work on the child in so far as I've done the work on fighting and killing the dragons, and understanding the questions and the problems, and now the next task is to create a new world for the child. Part of why I'm moving is to give her a place where she wants to be. She's fed up with living where adults tell her she's got to live in order to be. She wants to live where she loves it. And she wants, right now, to do body work as part of her life, and that's sort of a no-no coming from my upper-middle class WASP intellectual background. You just don't really be a body worker. You be a Ph.D. any day of the week, and you especially don't get an M.A. and "go backwards." People need to choose that, to not be rich, and to refuse to continue climbing whatever kind of success ladder that they've been told they have to climb.

I am seeking to work with other teachers as companions on a team, allowing ourselves to be seen as we do that. We will give our own piece of the workshop as an expert, and then climb off that and get into the workshop ourselves as an ordinary person learning skills. We'll learn from each other, and we won't be out there as the big parent taking care of all these workshop people who are our children, who come to think we have the answer and they don't, that we can give it to them.

As we go into life in the future, the archetypes that are guiding us aren't going to be "Great Mother - Great Father." If you look just at the Christ model, he's not a father. He's a brother. I don't know from other mythologies what the latest, emerging archetypes are, but the other one I use for the feminine psyche is the corresponding figure for the feminine. She's not a mother, even though she's pregnant. She's pregnant with her own bliss, and pregnant with her own divine love, giving birth to her own divine child. So the archetypes that I'm looking for and being part of are not parental archetypes. They are adult clildren, if you like. Grown up. They're the divine human archetypes. And they're not archetypes anyway. They're human divinity models. It's time to stop thinking Daddy or Mummy in the sky, or any place, is going to take care of it for us and to become those who take care. It's time to marry heaven and earth.

Having been at least once around the spiral of my life journey, I have recently returned to the issue of the child in a new way. I have just spent over a year working intensely on finding and healing the child within myself who felt every bit as 'disturbed' as any I met out there in the world of my work! It has been the hardest thing that I have ever done to begin to love, to truly love the inner child. Much as we hate to admit it, most of us treat our inner child just the same way that our parents and our culture did. Most of the time that is a long way from unconditional love. Creating a positive parent within is enormously difficult work; not until we have each established this positive parent-child relationship within ourselves can we turn kindly to the world outside. It has taken me forty-three years to find this out, and I am only just beginning to know the positive parent within me.

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