In Love and Awakening, John Welwood uses the analogy of a castle to illustrate the world within us.  Imagine being a magnificent castle with long hallways and thousands of rooms.  Every room in the castle is perfect and possesses a special gift.  Each room represents a different aspect of yourself and is an integral part of the entire perfect castle.  As a child, you explored every inch of your castle without shame or judgment.  Fearlessly you searched every room for its jewels and its mystery.  Lovingly you embraced every room whether it was a closet, a bedroom, bathroom, or a cellar.  Each and every room was unique.  Your castle was full of light, love, and wonder. 

Then one day, someone came to your castle and told you that one of your rooms was imperfect, that surely it didn’t belong in your castle.  They suggested that if you wanted to have a perfect castle you should close and lock the door to this room.  Since you wanted love and acceptance, you quickly closed off that room.  As time went by, more and more people came to your castle.  They all gave you their opinions of the rooms, which ones they liked and which ones they didn’t.  And slowly you shut one door after another.  Your marvelous rooms were being closed off, taken out of the light, and put into the dark.  A cycle had begun.

From that time on, you closed more and more doors for all kinds of reasons.  You closed doors because you were afraid, or you thought the rooms were too bold.  You closed doors to rooms that were too conservative.  You closed doors because other castles you saw did not have a room like yours.  You closed doors because your religious leaders told you to stay away from certain rooms.  You closed any door that did not fit into society’s standards.

The days were gone when your castle seemed endless and your future seemed exciting and bright.  You no longer cared for every room with the same love and admiration.  Rooms you were once proud of, you now willed to disappear.  You tried to figure out ways to get rid of these rooms, but they were part of the structure of your castle.  Now that you had shut the door to whatever room you didn’t like, time went by until one day you just forgot that room altogether.  At first, you didn’t realize what you were doing.  It just became a habit.  With everyone giving you different messages about what a magnificent castle should look like, it became much easier to listen to them than to trust your inner voice; the one that loved your entire castle.  Shutting off those rooms actually started to make you feel safe.  Soon you found yourself living in just a few small rooms.  You had learned how to shut off life and became comfortable doing it.  Many of us also locked away so many rooms that we forgot we were ever a castle.  We began to believe we were just a small, two bedroom house in need of repairs. 

Now, imagine your castle as the place where you house all of who you are, the good and bad, and that every aspect that exists on the planet exist within you.  One of your rooms is love, one is courage, one is elegance and another is grace. There are endless numbers of rooms.  Creativity, femininity, honesty, integrity, health, assertiveness, sexiness, power, timidity, hatred, greed, frigidity, laziness, arrogance, sickness, and evil are rooms in your castle.  Each room is an essential part of the structure and each room has an opposite somewhere in your castle. 

Fortunately, we are never truly satisfied with being less than what we are capable of being.  Our discontent with ourselves motivates us in our search for all the lost rooms of our castle.  We can only find the key to our uniqueness by opening all the rooms in our castle. 

The castle is a metaphor to help you grasp the enormity of who you are.  We each possess this sacred place inside ourselves.  It is easily accessed if we are ready and wiling to see the totality of who we are.  Most of us are scared of what we will find behind the doors to these rooms.  So instead of setting out on an adventure to find our hidden selves, full of excitement and wonder, we keep pretending the rooms don’t exist.  The cycle continues.

But, if you truly desire to change the direction of your life you must go into your castle and slowly open each and every door.  You much explore your internal universe and take back all that you’ve disowned.  Only in the presence of your entire self can you appreciate your magnificence and enjoy the totality and uniqueness of your life.

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I spent so much of the first part of my life closing and locking those doors.  I have also spent many of my adults years discovering and opening doors and I find that I still have many more to unlock.  But, at least I am now unlocking them and I am slowly getting light into more parts of my castle.  And that is so much better than where I was before I began this journey.

Love, light, and laugher!

Starstuff