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What would a society look
like, where its members
had undergone a profound
spiritual transformation?
Before a "new earth" can
possibly arise, there must
come "a new world view."
A change in the way we see
ourselves in relationship to
each other, the world
around us and the Divine.
This 238-page e-book
features fresh and inspiring
interviews with 27 paradigm
pioneers in the fields of
medicine, psychology,
economics, business,
religion, science, education
and human potential.
Featuring: Willis Harman,
Matthew Fox, Joan
Boysenko, George Leonard,
Gary Zukav, Robert Monroe,
Hazel Henderson, Fred Alan
Wolf, Peter Senge,
Jacquelyn Small, Elmer
Green, Larry Dossey,
Carolyn Myss, Stan Grof,
Rich Tarnas, Marilyn
Ferguson, Marsha Sinetar,
Dr. Raymond Moody,
Stephen Covey and Peter
Russell.
For Table of Contents,
Click Here
Russell E. DiCarlo is a
Spiritual Entrepreneur, Soul
Coach, Energy Therapist,
Author and Workshop
Leader who's focus is on
personal transformation,
consciousness research
and the fields of energy and
longevity medicine.
like, where its members
had undergone a profound
spiritual transformation?
Before a "new earth" can
possibly arise, there must
come "a new world view."
A change in the way we see
ourselves in relationship to
each other, the world
around us and the Divine.
This 238-page e-book
features fresh and inspiring
interviews with 27 paradigm
pioneers in the fields of
medicine, psychology,
economics, business,
religion, science, education
and human potential.
Featuring: Willis Harman,
Matthew Fox, Joan
Boysenko, George Leonard,
Gary Zukav, Robert Monroe,
Hazel Henderson, Fred Alan
Wolf, Peter Senge,
Jacquelyn Small, Elmer
Green, Larry Dossey,
Carolyn Myss, Stan Grof,
Rich Tarnas, Marilyn
Ferguson, Marsha Sinetar,
Dr. Raymond Moody,
Stephen Covey and Peter
Russell.
For Table of Contents,
Click Here
Russell E. DiCarlo is a
Spiritual Entrepreneur, Soul
Coach, Energy Therapist,
Author and Workshop
Leader who's focus is on
personal transformation,
consciousness research
and the fields of energy and
longevity medicine.
Dr. Joan Borysenko,Ph.D. is president of Mind/Body Health
Sciences in Boulder Colorado, and the author of several books
including the New York Times best-seller “Minding the Body,
Mending the Mind,” “Guilt is the Teacher, Love is the Lesson”
and “Fire In the Soul.”
Borysenko is generally regarded as being on the cutting-edge
in her knowledge of mind-body research, a principle
ambassador who brings the latest scientific findings to
mainstream doctors and the general public. She is one of the
principle architects of the field of psychoneuroimmunology.
Sciences in Boulder Colorado, and the author of several books
including the New York Times best-seller “Minding the Body,
Mending the Mind,” “Guilt is the Teacher, Love is the Lesson”
and “Fire In the Soul.”
Borysenko is generally regarded as being on the cutting-edge
in her knowledge of mind-body research, a principle
ambassador who brings the latest scientific findings to
mainstream doctors and the general public. She is one of the
principle architects of the field of psychoneuroimmunology.
Interview With Joan Borysenko- Excerpted from Towards A New
World View: Conversations At The Leading Edge
By Russell E. DiCarlo
World View: Conversations At The Leading Edge
By Russell E. DiCarlo
 | Available as e-Book | |
| Cost - $9.95 | |
| Click Below to Order | |
| Immediate Download | |
DiCarlo—Could you describe the experience of being connected to your core self?
Borysenko—Well, for me, when I am in that core or essential self, I feel spacious. I am not
prone at that point to judge anybody or anything. My heart and mind are both open, which
makes me a lot more perceptive as a scientist and psychologist. It makes me happy. My whole
body feels relaxed, at ease, at peace. I feel a sense of unity with something greater than
myself. A feeling of connectedness. For me, that experience always brings forth a tremendous
sense of gratitude. The recognition that life is a tremendous mystery and a tremendous gift
and that we are most fortunate to be living it.
I think everybody probably has that experience several times a day, but it might pass by very,
very quickly and we just don’t notice it. It happens every time you become present in the
moment. Maybe it happens when you are looking out your window at the rising sun and for a
moment you forget your fears and concerns and obligations, and are fully present to the
experience. Perhaps it happens when you are around small children. There are so many
moments when a child will just erupt with such laughter or such joy that you will just find
yourself pulled into the moment. That’s when you are in touch with that essential core.
The rest of the time we are in touch with the persona or the ego. That’s when we feel closed
down in some way. That’s when we are judging. That’s when we don’t feel spacious. That’s
when we feel worried by something or are fearful.
DiCarlo—Do you feel that at this time in our collective history, it’s important that we come into
a recognition of this aspect of ourselves?
Borysenko—Not only is it important, it is inevitable. This part of ourselves is being spoken of
in so many different ways. Take for example, the people who have near-death-experiences
and who talk about experiencing some purity within themselves, some wisdom within
themselves. They come back and others are interested in their story. What is this all about?
What is this light experience within us?
Also, if people are connected to that part of themselves, then that is one way that healing will
occur within our community and within our world. Our individual communities are going to have
violence to the extent that we fear one another, to the extent that we judge one another and to
the extent that we are unforgiving. There are going to be difficulties of every sort, from schools
that are not nurturing our children, to corporations which take advantage of the public, to the
war machine which is ever active. I think the hope of the world is truly in recognizing this
oldest, oldest spiritual principle that exists within each of us. Then, you end up with a whole
different paradigm and way of viewing the world. This world view is exemplified by the Dali
Lama and how he felt about the holocaust in Tibet. He wasn’t in the old paradigm of “an eye
for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” Instead, he practiced a form of loving kindness and
compassion towards the Chinese. Every time he thinks of them, he tries to think of their pain
and what he returns to them is his peace and blessing. We could stop war instantly—instantly—
if people could do that.
DiCarlo—In your work you talk about the three stages of courage: willful, psychological, and
spiritual. Could you explain their significance?
Borysenko—Sure. First of all, it’s very important to have some sense of courage if we are to
effectively deal with life. Without courage, when faced with difficulty we would just fold. But
there are three stages, three types of courage. In Fire in The Soul I talked about my mom who
had quite a bit of willful courage. That is, she could rise to any occasion, and do whatever
needed to be done next. She could just “keep on truck’n” and go through it without looking
forward, and without looking back, and without necessarily enquiring into the meaning of
anything. She just said, “This is where I am right now, this is what I am supposed to do, and I’ll
do it no matter what.” That will take you pretty far in life, but you can get a little bit further if
you enlarge the idea of courage beyond the plain old will to keep on going.
Psychological courage, the second type of courage, comes from self-awareness. For example,
there is a book out there that essentially says, “feel the fear but do it anyway.” Oftentimes,
that’s what we have to do in this life. You can do that through either through “willful courage”—
feel the fear and do it anyway—or through “psychological courage,” where you enquire into
the origins of that fear. You look and see what the fear has to teach you. Through that, you
become a lot wiser and your heart tends to open. You develop compassion. And so that’s a
broader form of courage.
The third type of courage, spiritual courage, comes from having a higher perspective on the
whole situation. From a psychological point of view, we can look at who copes well when under
duress and we say they are stress hardy. They are optimistic. They look at change as a
challenge. But when we look at it from an even a broader view of spirituality, that’s when we
reach a whole new level of transformation. I want to borrow a line from Ram Dass, who once
said, “We have a choice in either viewing ourselves as human beings who might have an
occasional spiritual experience or viewing ourselves as spiritual beings who happen to be
having a human experience.”
That is the viewpoint of spiritual courage. It reveals itself when you have contemplated the
meaning of life, and have come to the point where you recognize that no matter how difficult,
no matter how painful, no matter how nonsensical something may seem to be, that there is a
higher form of meaning involved. It is the faith that though our perceptions may be clouded,
on another level of experience, things make sense and that the universe is a friendly place.
DiCarlo—Abraham Maslow was an explorer of humanity’s higher possibilities and potential
who shunned the prevailing fixation of mainstream psychology upon emotional and mental
illness that you mentioned earlier. Those he studied were able to bring out and express, to
varying degrees, their latent potential and wholeness. He referred to these individuals as
being “self-actualizing.” Many understand a self-actualizer as being a better performing human
being, displaying a multitude of talents and abilities. Would you agree with that definition?
Borysenko—It’s interesting...I think we have to be very, very careful when we talk about self-
actualization because everybody has a slightly different idea about what a truly creative human
being is. For me, a truly creative human being is one who has gotten some sense of what their
unique gift is and is using that gift. The gifts vary. The gift of one self-actualizing person may
be that they are extremely nurturing and their gift is to mother. Sometimes in this particular
society we look at someone who has made the choice to mother and we say, “Oh my, poor
thing. She hasn’t actualized her potential—she’s just being a mother.” So I think one of the
first things we have to do is take the blinders off our eyes and let people be who they are and
to recognize that self-actualization has to do with being who you are. It’s not about being a
perfect person in some way. One self-actualized person may in fact be highly creative in one
area, and yet still have blindspots in another. They are not “perfect.” What they are able to do
is say, “I see I have this blindspot or that blindspot. I’ll try to deal with it as well as I can, but it is
part of who I am at this time.” So I would say that a self-actualized person has a degree of self-
awareness and has become spacious enough that they can accept the pairs of opposites that
they are. They can accept that they are great in some areas, but maybe not so great in others,
and that’s OK.
DiCarlo—So they would to some degree be in touch with their inner core?
Borysenko—Oh, yes. Without being in touch with your inner core at some level, you don’t
have enough of a feeling of spaciousness to become who you are.
DiCarlo—I suppose that the opposite of being whole and self-actualizing is to be fragmented...
When we say someone is fragmented, what do we mean?
Borysenko—When somebody is fragmented it means that they have become identified with
one aspect of themselves and have closed off other aspects. Much like an individual with
multiple personality disorder has different alters or personalities, we all have different
subpersonalities.
This is the theory called Psychosynthesis, created by the Italian psychiatrist Roberto
Assagioli. For example, many people have the subpersonality called the victim. They grew up
in an abusive home or an alcoholic home and they might have a variety of subpersonalities.
There might be the hero, or the mother or the teacher. All are different aspects of themselves,
and they go from subpersonality to subpersonality rather unthinkingly.
Somebody who is used to being in a victim subpersonality most of the time and doesn’t have
much conscious awareness of it, will tend to associate—because it is behaviorally familiar—
with other victims who then support one another in their sorrows. Or a person might associate
with the subpersonality of being an aggressor, because they are used to that. Or if they are
used to being victimized, they may associate with or marry people whom they can rescue
because that is their best way to get out of that victim sense of self.
When this happens, other aspects of a person are blocked from awareness because the
person has become so identified with one aspect, one fragment of themselves. So this is what
we would call being fragmented. A person who is aware of their different subpersonalities,
aware that “Yes, I have all of this within me” is more spacious. So when this comes up, instead
of necessarily feeling like a victim, they can see the old feelings and that part of themselves
might rise to the occasion but they can also make the choice to respond from a larger aspect
of self and not fall back into the same holes. So a person who is integrated has far more
choice. They are more flexible and they are more creative. To the extent that they have
become more whole, they will tend to respond to people and situations with more kindness and
love.
DiCarlo—Would this integrated person, this whole person, be balanced in mind, body and
spirit?
Borysenko—Well, in balance generally, but I think we can also go overboard with this
because there’s a sense that once you are “on the road to self-actualizing” you are going to
be an idealized human being who is not going to fall into periods of depression, jealousy,
anger or anything else. I think people need to give up these limiting ideas and realize that
these so-called negative states are all part and parcel of being human. But as you begin to
recognize these negative emotional states sooner, you begin to realize that you have some
choice. All emotions that come up in some way serve the realization of our wholeness. But you
must be willing to pay attention, accept the message and not get stuck there. So wholeness,
once again, is not about perfection. It’s about awareness and choice.
DiCarlo—You have stated that the number one affliction of Americans is a sense of
unworthiness, which perhaps causes us to disconnect with this inner core that you speak of.
Why is low self-esteem so prevalent?
Borysenko—To discover the reason for this prevailing sense of unworthiness, you need look
no further than the media. From the time we are children, we are sold a bill of goods about
what it is to be a worthy person in our society and it has everything to do with money and
looks. Most people don’t have that much money and they don’t look like models. You can see
this preoccupation begin to take root as little children, when for example, little girls, five and six
years old, begin to look in the mirror and say, “I’m too fat” or “My nose is too big.” What a sad
thing to measure our value and worth as human beings by. We have a very injurious society
that sets people up for a good deal of self-judgement. We have a very injurious society in
terms of defining the value of a life well lived.
If we could define the value of a life well lived in terms of a person who develops some
compassion, caring and a strong community—a community of people who help one another—
and if we determined that a truly fine human being is one who has let go of judgements, and
helps others, self-esteem would be a lot higher because these are qualities that a person can
choose to cultivate.
Our sense of low self-esteem and unworthiness can also be traced to some old, European
ideas about how children were supposed to be raised. Most of us in this country are still heir
to the old type of child-rearing that says, “A child should be seen and not heard” or “Adults
know best.” Every time a parent with an authoritarian point of view raises a child, self-esteem
will be low because the child never quite measures up. In some way you are being told what’s
wrong instead of what’s right. There has been a great deal written about changing modes of
child-rearing. That has everything to do with self-esteem. The more authoritarian the parent,
the lower the self-esteem of the child.
DiCarlo—Do the roots of our unworthiness also trace back to traumas that may have been
suffered during this lifetime or others?
Borysenko—Sure, it has to do with lots of different things. In Guilt is The Teacher, Love is
the Lesson which was my second book, I discussed child development, self-esteem and
experiences of shame—whether we were shamed by a parent or shamed by a teacher or
shamed by peers. It turns out that shame is the master emotion, and that as soon as you feel
shame, which is the feeling that you are so unworthy that you wish a hole would open up in the
ground and swallow you, it brings with it other negative emotions. Shame is the master
emotion.
Kids who have had very shameful experiences carry these wounds for the rest of their lives.
Oftentimes they are the consequence of school experiences, where an unthinking teacher
shamed a kid in front of their peers. Some people who have had parochial school education
may have had many positive experiences, but many people are beginning to step forward and
say, “Gee, I was beaten by the nuns.” One little girl I know peed on the floor in front of the
other students when she was shamed by a nun. She never got over the experience.
Throughout our lives we have these kind of experiences and we’ve got to know how to
integrate them.
And I don’t think the wholeness of who we are is limited to just this lifetime. Who knows? Every
parent will tell you that their child has a personality that they noticed from the time their child
was just a few months old. Beyond the nature-nurture controversy—“is it in our genetics or is
it in the way we were brought up?”—there are personal differences that go beyond that
explanation and which are most likely soul experiences, soul residue; old patterns that we bring
in. Whether these are from past lifetimes or parallel realities, who knows? That’s all within
what I would call the purview of the sacred mystery.
To read the entire interview with Joan Borysenko, plus those with other wisdom
teachers, click here.
Borysenko—Well, for me, when I am in that core or essential self, I feel spacious. I am not
prone at that point to judge anybody or anything. My heart and mind are both open, which
makes me a lot more perceptive as a scientist and psychologist. It makes me happy. My whole
body feels relaxed, at ease, at peace. I feel a sense of unity with something greater than
myself. A feeling of connectedness. For me, that experience always brings forth a tremendous
sense of gratitude. The recognition that life is a tremendous mystery and a tremendous gift
and that we are most fortunate to be living it.
I think everybody probably has that experience several times a day, but it might pass by very,
very quickly and we just don’t notice it. It happens every time you become present in the
moment. Maybe it happens when you are looking out your window at the rising sun and for a
moment you forget your fears and concerns and obligations, and are fully present to the
experience. Perhaps it happens when you are around small children. There are so many
moments when a child will just erupt with such laughter or such joy that you will just find
yourself pulled into the moment. That’s when you are in touch with that essential core.
The rest of the time we are in touch with the persona or the ego. That’s when we feel closed
down in some way. That’s when we are judging. That’s when we don’t feel spacious. That’s
when we feel worried by something or are fearful.
DiCarlo—Do you feel that at this time in our collective history, it’s important that we come into
a recognition of this aspect of ourselves?
Borysenko—Not only is it important, it is inevitable. This part of ourselves is being spoken of
in so many different ways. Take for example, the people who have near-death-experiences
and who talk about experiencing some purity within themselves, some wisdom within
themselves. They come back and others are interested in their story. What is this all about?
What is this light experience within us?
Also, if people are connected to that part of themselves, then that is one way that healing will
occur within our community and within our world. Our individual communities are going to have
violence to the extent that we fear one another, to the extent that we judge one another and to
the extent that we are unforgiving. There are going to be difficulties of every sort, from schools
that are not nurturing our children, to corporations which take advantage of the public, to the
war machine which is ever active. I think the hope of the world is truly in recognizing this
oldest, oldest spiritual principle that exists within each of us. Then, you end up with a whole
different paradigm and way of viewing the world. This world view is exemplified by the Dali
Lama and how he felt about the holocaust in Tibet. He wasn’t in the old paradigm of “an eye
for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” Instead, he practiced a form of loving kindness and
compassion towards the Chinese. Every time he thinks of them, he tries to think of their pain
and what he returns to them is his peace and blessing. We could stop war instantly—instantly—
if people could do that.
DiCarlo—In your work you talk about the three stages of courage: willful, psychological, and
spiritual. Could you explain their significance?
Borysenko—Sure. First of all, it’s very important to have some sense of courage if we are to
effectively deal with life. Without courage, when faced with difficulty we would just fold. But
there are three stages, three types of courage. In Fire in The Soul I talked about my mom who
had quite a bit of willful courage. That is, she could rise to any occasion, and do whatever
needed to be done next. She could just “keep on truck’n” and go through it without looking
forward, and without looking back, and without necessarily enquiring into the meaning of
anything. She just said, “This is where I am right now, this is what I am supposed to do, and I’ll
do it no matter what.” That will take you pretty far in life, but you can get a little bit further if
you enlarge the idea of courage beyond the plain old will to keep on going.
Psychological courage, the second type of courage, comes from self-awareness. For example,
there is a book out there that essentially says, “feel the fear but do it anyway.” Oftentimes,
that’s what we have to do in this life. You can do that through either through “willful courage”—
feel the fear and do it anyway—or through “psychological courage,” where you enquire into
the origins of that fear. You look and see what the fear has to teach you. Through that, you
become a lot wiser and your heart tends to open. You develop compassion. And so that’s a
broader form of courage.
The third type of courage, spiritual courage, comes from having a higher perspective on the
whole situation. From a psychological point of view, we can look at who copes well when under
duress and we say they are stress hardy. They are optimistic. They look at change as a
challenge. But when we look at it from an even a broader view of spirituality, that’s when we
reach a whole new level of transformation. I want to borrow a line from Ram Dass, who once
said, “We have a choice in either viewing ourselves as human beings who might have an
occasional spiritual experience or viewing ourselves as spiritual beings who happen to be
having a human experience.”
That is the viewpoint of spiritual courage. It reveals itself when you have contemplated the
meaning of life, and have come to the point where you recognize that no matter how difficult,
no matter how painful, no matter how nonsensical something may seem to be, that there is a
higher form of meaning involved. It is the faith that though our perceptions may be clouded,
on another level of experience, things make sense and that the universe is a friendly place.
DiCarlo—Abraham Maslow was an explorer of humanity’s higher possibilities and potential
who shunned the prevailing fixation of mainstream psychology upon emotional and mental
illness that you mentioned earlier. Those he studied were able to bring out and express, to
varying degrees, their latent potential and wholeness. He referred to these individuals as
being “self-actualizing.” Many understand a self-actualizer as being a better performing human
being, displaying a multitude of talents and abilities. Would you agree with that definition?
Borysenko—It’s interesting...I think we have to be very, very careful when we talk about self-
actualization because everybody has a slightly different idea about what a truly creative human
being is. For me, a truly creative human being is one who has gotten some sense of what their
unique gift is and is using that gift. The gifts vary. The gift of one self-actualizing person may
be that they are extremely nurturing and their gift is to mother. Sometimes in this particular
society we look at someone who has made the choice to mother and we say, “Oh my, poor
thing. She hasn’t actualized her potential—she’s just being a mother.” So I think one of the
first things we have to do is take the blinders off our eyes and let people be who they are and
to recognize that self-actualization has to do with being who you are. It’s not about being a
perfect person in some way. One self-actualized person may in fact be highly creative in one
area, and yet still have blindspots in another. They are not “perfect.” What they are able to do
is say, “I see I have this blindspot or that blindspot. I’ll try to deal with it as well as I can, but it is
part of who I am at this time.” So I would say that a self-actualized person has a degree of self-
awareness and has become spacious enough that they can accept the pairs of opposites that
they are. They can accept that they are great in some areas, but maybe not so great in others,
and that’s OK.
DiCarlo—So they would to some degree be in touch with their inner core?
Borysenko—Oh, yes. Without being in touch with your inner core at some level, you don’t
have enough of a feeling of spaciousness to become who you are.
DiCarlo—I suppose that the opposite of being whole and self-actualizing is to be fragmented...
When we say someone is fragmented, what do we mean?
Borysenko—When somebody is fragmented it means that they have become identified with
one aspect of themselves and have closed off other aspects. Much like an individual with
multiple personality disorder has different alters or personalities, we all have different
subpersonalities.
This is the theory called Psychosynthesis, created by the Italian psychiatrist Roberto
Assagioli. For example, many people have the subpersonality called the victim. They grew up
in an abusive home or an alcoholic home and they might have a variety of subpersonalities.
There might be the hero, or the mother or the teacher. All are different aspects of themselves,
and they go from subpersonality to subpersonality rather unthinkingly.
Somebody who is used to being in a victim subpersonality most of the time and doesn’t have
much conscious awareness of it, will tend to associate—because it is behaviorally familiar—
with other victims who then support one another in their sorrows. Or a person might associate
with the subpersonality of being an aggressor, because they are used to that. Or if they are
used to being victimized, they may associate with or marry people whom they can rescue
because that is their best way to get out of that victim sense of self.
When this happens, other aspects of a person are blocked from awareness because the
person has become so identified with one aspect, one fragment of themselves. So this is what
we would call being fragmented. A person who is aware of their different subpersonalities,
aware that “Yes, I have all of this within me” is more spacious. So when this comes up, instead
of necessarily feeling like a victim, they can see the old feelings and that part of themselves
might rise to the occasion but they can also make the choice to respond from a larger aspect
of self and not fall back into the same holes. So a person who is integrated has far more
choice. They are more flexible and they are more creative. To the extent that they have
become more whole, they will tend to respond to people and situations with more kindness and
love.
DiCarlo—Would this integrated person, this whole person, be balanced in mind, body and
spirit?
Borysenko—Well, in balance generally, but I think we can also go overboard with this
because there’s a sense that once you are “on the road to self-actualizing” you are going to
be an idealized human being who is not going to fall into periods of depression, jealousy,
anger or anything else. I think people need to give up these limiting ideas and realize that
these so-called negative states are all part and parcel of being human. But as you begin to
recognize these negative emotional states sooner, you begin to realize that you have some
choice. All emotions that come up in some way serve the realization of our wholeness. But you
must be willing to pay attention, accept the message and not get stuck there. So wholeness,
once again, is not about perfection. It’s about awareness and choice.
DiCarlo—You have stated that the number one affliction of Americans is a sense of
unworthiness, which perhaps causes us to disconnect with this inner core that you speak of.
Why is low self-esteem so prevalent?
Borysenko—To discover the reason for this prevailing sense of unworthiness, you need look
no further than the media. From the time we are children, we are sold a bill of goods about
what it is to be a worthy person in our society and it has everything to do with money and
looks. Most people don’t have that much money and they don’t look like models. You can see
this preoccupation begin to take root as little children, when for example, little girls, five and six
years old, begin to look in the mirror and say, “I’m too fat” or “My nose is too big.” What a sad
thing to measure our value and worth as human beings by. We have a very injurious society
that sets people up for a good deal of self-judgement. We have a very injurious society in
terms of defining the value of a life well lived.
If we could define the value of a life well lived in terms of a person who develops some
compassion, caring and a strong community—a community of people who help one another—
and if we determined that a truly fine human being is one who has let go of judgements, and
helps others, self-esteem would be a lot higher because these are qualities that a person can
choose to cultivate.
Our sense of low self-esteem and unworthiness can also be traced to some old, European
ideas about how children were supposed to be raised. Most of us in this country are still heir
to the old type of child-rearing that says, “A child should be seen and not heard” or “Adults
know best.” Every time a parent with an authoritarian point of view raises a child, self-esteem
will be low because the child never quite measures up. In some way you are being told what’s
wrong instead of what’s right. There has been a great deal written about changing modes of
child-rearing. That has everything to do with self-esteem. The more authoritarian the parent,
the lower the self-esteem of the child.
DiCarlo—Do the roots of our unworthiness also trace back to traumas that may have been
suffered during this lifetime or others?
Borysenko—Sure, it has to do with lots of different things. In Guilt is The Teacher, Love is
the Lesson which was my second book, I discussed child development, self-esteem and
experiences of shame—whether we were shamed by a parent or shamed by a teacher or
shamed by peers. It turns out that shame is the master emotion, and that as soon as you feel
shame, which is the feeling that you are so unworthy that you wish a hole would open up in the
ground and swallow you, it brings with it other negative emotions. Shame is the master
emotion.
Kids who have had very shameful experiences carry these wounds for the rest of their lives.
Oftentimes they are the consequence of school experiences, where an unthinking teacher
shamed a kid in front of their peers. Some people who have had parochial school education
may have had many positive experiences, but many people are beginning to step forward and
say, “Gee, I was beaten by the nuns.” One little girl I know peed on the floor in front of the
other students when she was shamed by a nun. She never got over the experience.
Throughout our lives we have these kind of experiences and we’ve got to know how to
integrate them.
And I don’t think the wholeness of who we are is limited to just this lifetime. Who knows? Every
parent will tell you that their child has a personality that they noticed from the time their child
was just a few months old. Beyond the nature-nurture controversy—“is it in our genetics or is
it in the way we were brought up?”—there are personal differences that go beyond that
explanation and which are most likely soul experiences, soul residue; old patterns that we bring
in. Whether these are from past lifetimes or parallel realities, who knows? That’s all within
what I would call the purview of the sacred mystery.
To read the entire interview with Joan Borysenko, plus those with other wisdom
teachers, click here.
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Magnetism Through Feeling
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Contains an energetically
encoded image that amplifies
feelings of excitement, making
you more magnetic towards
your goals and desires.