“Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me…”  To me, this has always been a sentimental church song sung by well-meaning people who gave little thought to the words they sang, and who could blame them?  In today’s world, peace on earth seems like an impossible dream and a cliché championed only by vacant-eyed beauty pageant contestants and the occasional old hippy.  Even those who consider themselves to be “peace activists” have been limited to passively lighting candles or attending war protests, which is, in itself, a form of warfare.

A few years ago, I was among those who opposed the war in Iraq, feverishly sending out emails and petitions to everyone on my mailing list in an attempt to “educate” them and do my part to nourish a fledgling anti-war movement.  But what I found was that, the more I educated myself about all the violence that was being perpetrated on the world by my own country, and on all of us by the pharmaceutical industry among others, I myself was feeling more and more violent with each passing day.  I simply could not contain my anger at all the injustice in the world, and most of all, at my own inability to do anything about it.  And I realized that, by disseminating the tales of all these atrocities, even though in a spirit of protest, I was also disseminating my own rage and adding to the negative energy in the world.

Not knowing what else to do, I stopped reading the news.  It was easy to do, because I lived outside the US, mostly in countries where I didn’t speak the language, so getting the news was an effort anyway.  And living this way, without hearing about all the horror stories of war, I eventually began to return to a peaceful center. But I couldn’t avoid the news entirely, and there remained a nagging feeling inside of me… something that told me I had turned my back on the suffering of the world and was, therefore, complicit in its propagation… a codependent enabler to a world addicted to war.

And that’s why I was so intrigued last spring, when I was planning a trip to the Tamera Community in southern Portugal to attend their Horse Course, and I read on their web page that they have a pro-active approach to attaining world peace that does not involve organizing or attending anti-war protests or finding other ways of asking political leaders to please stop fighting.  It’s time, they claimed, for a new paradigm.   These people were serious about taking peace into their own hands, and I couldn’t wait to find out how. 

How can I begin to describe Tamera’s approach to peace activism?  Let me start with a conversation I had with one of my classmates in the Horse Course.  Hannah had visited Tamera once before to attend their Introductory Week and get acquainted with their philosophy, and I was happy to pump her for details.  I was aware that Tamera advocated free love, but I was surprised when Hannah told me that they consider it to be a core issue.  A core issue?  How could free love be a core issue?  Weren’t there more important things to worry about, like sustainability, spirituality, peace activisim, work with animals?  I really couldn’t understand how sexuality could possibly enter into the equation.

Then, I read The Sacred Matrix, a book by Dieter Duhm, one of the co-founders of Tamera.  In it, he explains (and my summary here doesn’t do the idea justice) that we can not send peace workers out into the world if those people have not found peace within themselves.  And further, those people can not hope to bring peace to the nations of the world if they have not found peace within their own personal relationships, most particularly their love relationships, as well as peace with the planet and all of the creatures who share it with us.

“There will never be peace among nations as long as there is war in love,” declares Duhm.  He goes on to say that there is not a war in the world that cannot be traced back to repressed sexuality, and that one of the greatest ongoing conflicts in the world, that between Israel and the whole Arabic world, started with a love triangle (if you’re not following this line of logic, read in the Old Testament about Abraham, Sarah and Hagar and their sons, Isaac and Ishmael).

I can’t recommend Duhm’s book highly enough, but the topic of this post is how I began to work on creating peace within myself.  It’s a fairly common idea in modern psychology that we all have a number of different “inner personalities” that make up our overall identity.  In some people, these inner personalities cohabitate rather peacefully, but in all of us, there is some level of conflict.  If you’ve ever been faced with having to make an important decision and found yourself equally pulled in two or more different directions, those were the different personalities expressing conflicting interests.  In fact, how often have we said something like, “A part of me wants to do this, but there’s another part that thinks that?”

One of our primary tasks in life is to integrate these different parts and bring them into harmony with each other.  How easily we can do this depends on the degree of harmony or separation that we have when we begin the process.  Extreme cases of separation between the personalities are known as Multiple Personality Disorder.  In fact, we all have multiple personalities… the disorder just comes from a lack of communication between the parts.  So, we have to get to know those parts and encourage them to start talking with each other. 

How on earth do we do that?  Well, fortunately for me, just before going to Tamera, I had spent some time taking courses at Damanhur, an artistic and spiritual community in northern Italy.  One of the courses concerned just that… learning how to integrate our inner personalities, and I am going to share the first steps of my journey with you here.

After two days packed with activities to get to know some of our various inner personalities, we were given an assignment.  This assignment was to create a meeting place for our five main inner personalities to come together to discuss decisions that needed to be made.  Of course, we all have more than five inner personalities, but there are five main ones that are most active in conducting our affairs.  Briefly, these are the Dominant Personality, the Masculine Personality, the Feminine Personality, the Incomplete Personality, and the Personality in Formation.  As you may have guessed, the Dominant Personality is the one that’s in charge most of the time, and especially during the first 40 or 50 years of our life.  He or she is usually from our most recent past life but also incorporates all of the lives that that personality has had in the past.  The Incomplete Personality is from a past life… someone who has left something unfinished that they need to accomplish in this lifetime.  The Personality in Formation is You.  It’s the personality of the person that you are becoming in this lifetime, and the Masculine and Feminine aspects probably don’t need much explanation at this point.

The homework assignment was to last for 17 days.  During the first five days, we were to make appointments with our inner personalities… four times during each day and one time in the middle of each night.  These appointments were always to be at different times each day, and at irregular intervals… 6:57, 11:19, etc… times that we selected at random, but once the appointments were made, it was important to keep them.

During these meetings, we were instructed to ask, “Who’s here?” and have a conversation with that personality (to whom we had given a name in previous exercises).  During the conversation, we were to work with that personality to design a meeting place where all the personalities could come together to discuss issues on neutral territory.  It could be any kind of a place, anywhere, but it had to be a place that everyone agreed upon, and where everyone felt safe.  Little by little, each personality would contribute to the design until we had come up with a master plan.

During the next seven days, we would convene in this meeting place once a day, again at odd hours.  I would come to the meeting with a proposal for one change to make in our life.  It would be a small change, a little habit that we could either add to or remove from our life.  I chose to add the habit of starting each day by smiling in the mirror (while lying on my back to get the effects of a gravity facelift).  I would need to get the consensus of all the personalities and address any concerns that they had with the idea.  We would continue to meet for all seven days to congratulate ourselves for doing the smile each morning, or if it didn’t happen, to find out who was responsible and why.

During the final five days, I would again set random appointments, four each day, and one in the middle of each night, in order to continue to get acquainted with each of the personalities.

Designing the meeting place was a fun process.  I had no idea what to expect, and I learned that my inner personalities are all very creative and have very diverse tastes, but one thing they could all agree on was that the meeting place should be in nature, far away from other people and distractions.  They also agreed that the tone of the meeting place should be different depending on the weather and the time of day or night that we were meeting, so, although the original assignment was to come up with a single meeting place, we came up with several that all agreed to rotate depending on when the meeting was held.  Each meeting place, however, was designed with consideration for and a special touch for each of the personalities.

Most of the meeting places were integrated into a single building, a palace reminiscent of Cair Paravel from the Chronicles of Narnia.  This palace has a terrace overlooking the sea with a rooftop supported by white, twisting columns that look a bit like meringue.  The terrace is actually on top of the palace which is built on a hill on the side of a cliff.  We had to do some interesting landscape work so that the palace could have some windows other than just the ones on the sea side, but it was important for the terrace to have a view of the gardens and the forest as well as the sea.  On the terrace, each of us has a throne to sit on around a round, marble table (the round table being a unifying theme), and we all wear crowns as we gaze out on the sea, the gardens full of singing birds and small, woodland animals, and the friendly forest just beyond the gardens.  After each meeting, we always have cake with white, butter cream frosting.

On rainy days or at night, we meet inside, in the sunken parlor adjacent to the library.  We lounge on semicircular, velvet covered sofas or lush throw pillows around the low, round, wooden table.  Everyone gets a kitten to hold, and the treats have a middle eastern theme.  The base of the talking stick has “roots” in the shape of multiple dragon tails, and we can see the rain pouring down over the trees through the tall, leaded glass windows, while the fire in the fireplace keeps us warm and cozy.  Overhead is a dome that opens on starry nights to serve as an observatory.

On special, sunny spring or summer days, we go to the kitchen which is in the servants’ cottage in a clearing in the woods.  It’s a rustic, wooden cottage, and the kitchen is simple, with an old, painted woodburning stove and a round, wooden table.  Through the large, bay windows in front of the table, we can see a large, lone oak tree that has special significance for Ewald, my Incomplete Personality.  Everyone is especially fond of Ewald and takes care to include him and make him feel wanted, because he struggled with that so much in his previous incarnation.  Snacks here are simple, usually things that Ewald has gathered from the forest with the help of his animal friends.

I have sketches of each of these meeting places that I hope to turn into full color drawings or paintings some day. 

The second phase, agreeing on the daily smile, started out rather smoothly.  Some of the personalities had reservations, but all agreed that it would do us good.  We started doing it, and during the rest of the meetings during those seven days, I just checked in with everyone to see how they felt about it, and I recorded the conversations in writing as I had been doing with the individual meetings. 

It didn’t take long before a conflict arose.  Although we performed our smile every morning like clockwork, and felt good about doing it, it seems that Lydia, my Dominant Personality, had been feeling insecure.  Because I was making so much effort to bring out some of the other personalities that hadn’t had as many opportunities to “take the driver’s seat,” Lydia was afraid that we were trying to phase her out, and that she was going to cease to exist.  She also felt that she was taking the blame for all of the negative patterns that had evolved during our lifetime.  I assured her that I was not trying to phase her out, and that I was, in fact, thankful to her for having helped me to survive the early years so well and that although I was probably going to be taking the driver’s seat more often from now on, she was usually going to be riding shotgun.  And I thought she deserved to relax now and again, but I had no desire whatsoever for her to disappear.  I needed her. 

Then, I asked the others, Ewald, my Incomplete Personality, a young forest boy from medieval Bavaria; Evora, my Feminine Personality, and Dexter, my Masculine Personality, how they felt.  Evora compassionately assured Lydia that, although she might like to come out a bit more often, she was, for the most part, quite happy in her role as observer and consultant and had no desire whatsoever to do away with her.  Likewise, Ewald was happy with the status quo.  After all, he was getting to complete his mission (more on that in another post). 

Dexter, however, was less than sympathetic: “Hey, survival of the fittest, Babe!” was his response.  My efforts to get him to understand how she was feeling led to the revelation that Dexter had been harboring some resentment against Lydia.  Although he begrudgingly conceded that he didn’t really want to push her out, he admitted that he would like a little more airtime.  He wanted to have more fun. 

It turns out that Dexter is the personality that loves to dance and laugh and play, all things that Lydia fears and keeps a tight rein on.  It was amazing to watch how, once they started really listening to and communicating with each other, Dexter was able to convince Lydia to give him a chance to take over in situations that made Lydia feel uncomfortable (or even panicky) by giving her examples of when he’d done just that in the past.  He was actually able to come around and be quite supportive of her fears and assure her that he wasn’t going to let her humiliate herself or get hurt in any way.  I was really touched by this interaction.

The conflict between Dexter and Lydia wasn’t over, however.  The next day, when I was asking everyone how it went with the mirror in the morning, Dexter said,

“She’s a hot babe.  I’d do her… if she got rid of those liver spots.”

“I can’t help it.  I’ve been around a long time,” said Lydia.

In the ensuing discussion, Dexter accused Lydia of taking everything personally, but Lydia was able to get right to the heart of the issue with amazing clarity.  She recognized Dexter’s attack as his way of dealing with his own fear of death and growing old.  Quite a lengthy discussion ensued in which Dexter came to grips with this fear, helped by some words of wisdom from Ewald who had never had a chance to grow old. 

We made it through those seven days and ended up a lot closer than I could have imagined.  There’s still a lot of work to do, but we are on our way.  During the last five days of the assignment, I got to chat with them all some more, this time alone, and as a project one day, I asked for each of them to help me finish work on some poems that I wanted to get ready to submit to some poetry contests.  We finished in one day what I’d been putting off for a year.  It’s inspiring to see what can be accomplished when we respect and listen to each other and cooperate instead of struggle for power.  If each of us were able to accomplish this on a regular basis, with our own inner personalities, we wouldn’t even need to be “peace activists.”  The world would already be at peace.