Close your eyes and take a few nice deep breaths,
Breathing in through your nose and out through your nose.
Feel the tension leaving your body.
Imagine you're in your seat of consciousness in your beautiful garden and you're feeling safe,
Loved,
And supported.
Begin to envision that you are 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 a very important part of the entire castle.
When you were young,
You explored every inch of your castle without shame or judgment.
Fearlessly,
You searched every room for its jewels and its mystery.
Lovingly,
You would embrace every room,
Whether it was a closet,
A bedroom,
A 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 not perfect and that surely it did not belong in your castle.
You should get rid of it,
Especially if you want to have a perfect castle.
You need to close that door and lock it.
Of course,
You wanted love and acceptance,
So you quickly closed off that room.
As time went by,
More and more people came to your castle and they gave you their opinions of other rooms,
Which ones they liked,
Which ones they didn't,
And slowly you shut one door after another.
Your beautiful castle and your rooms were being closed off,
Taken out of the light and put into the dark,
And this began a pattern.
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 that were too conservative or because other castles that you saw didn't have a room like yours.
You closed doors because religious leaders told you to stay away from certain rooms.
You closed any door that didn't fit into society's standards or ideals.
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 wished would just disappear.
You tried to figure out ways to get rid of these rooms,
But they were never supposed to be gone.
They were part of the structure of your castle.
Continue your breathing and keep your eyes closed.
Now that you have shut the door to all the rooms you didn't like,
Time goes by until one day you just forgot about those rooms 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 own inner voice,
The one that loved your entire castle.
Shutting off these rooms actually started to make you feel safe,
And soon you found yourself living in just a few small rooms.
You learned to shut off life,
And you became comfortable doing it,
And you made yourself feel comfortable and safe in only a little,
Small space.
Many of us also locked away so many rooms that we forget we were ever a castle.
We began to believe we were just a small two-bedroom house in need of repairs.
Now,
Begin to imagine your castle as the place where you can house all of who you are,
The good,
The bad,
And every aspect that exists on the planet.
And knowing that all of these aspects live within you and have a room within your castle.
You have rooms of love,
Courage,
Elegance,
Grace,
Creativity,
Femininity,
Honesty,
Integrity,
Health,
Assertiveness,
Sexiness,
Power,
Timidity,
Hatred,
Greed,
Frigidity,
Laziness,
Arrogance,
Sickness,
And evil.
These are all rooms in your castle,
And each room is an essential part of the structure,
And each room has an opposite somewhere in your castle.
Fortunately,
You are never satisfied by being less than what you are capable of being.
Our discontent with ourselves motivates our search for all the lost rooms in 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,
And it is easily accessed if we are ready and willing to see the totality of who we are.
Many of us are scared of what we might find behind the doors to these closed 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,
And the pattern 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 must explore your internal universe and take back all that you have disowned,
Only in the presence of your entire self can you appreciate your magnificence and enjoy the totality and uniqueness of your life.
This visualization is an excerpt from The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford.
I of course encourage you to read the entire book.
And now I'd like you to spend some time thinking about all the rooms that you have closed off and thinking about the opposite room within your castle.
For each room,
There is also an opposite room.
When was the last time you accessed these rooms?
And what are some of the memories you have surrounding them?
And how can you love and accept these aspects of yourself and make your castle beautiful and magnificent again?
Think about some of these doors that you have closed off,
In your seat of consciousness,
In your beautiful garden,
Loved and supported,
Of course.
So come back,
Go to your elevator,
Come back up the seven floors and begin to journal about these rooms that you are going to unlock.
