On this bus (that’s you) are a group of passengers who have been on trips like this with you many times before. They are your inner selves. Some have been with you since birth, most joined the bus in early childhood. A few more got on board later on in your life. When it comes to dealing with any one particular type of road condition or one part of the journey it just happens that one of the passengers is a specialist in that area. In the past, that particular passenger has proved its strength or its special skills or its wisdom and experience in helping you handle that particular problem. It’s almost as though these selves enjoy the chance to deal with difficult situations that arise as you are driving along ‘their’ part of the road.

Your passengers learned to help you in this way a long time ago and it is so important to honour their very real abilities in the ways they protect you. In many ways it would seem sensible whenever you have something difficult to do, to hand the wheel over to the inner self passenger best qualified for the job and let it drive.  However, the inner selves are still only like passengers, no particular one of them is ‘you’. So one problem is that if they are driving most of the time, you (and other people) may not be too clear about who is the real ‘you’.

Because each inner self is a specialist they also don’t coordinate well together as a team. Faced with an unpleasant task like writing a report, one inner self may start pushing you to get it finished as soon as possible, another self may want you to spend too much time on it to make it as close to perfect as possible, while a third self thinks you should take a break, relax and fit the task in later when you are in the right mood. Notice that each self wants to help you, but each one in a totally different way.  Things will get a bit uncomfortable on your bus, as the three of them push and pull each other around until finally one of them gets the steering wheel and takes control.

It helps to learn how to recognise when an inner self wants to drive or has grabbed the wheel and is already driving , why it has decided to help in its own way and what that way involves. Later you will see why we, as adults are better off when we ‘embrace’ all our inner selves rather than reject them or allow one self to judge or disown other selves in us and others.

Your aware adult side already knows much about your inner self ‘passenger-drivers’ and understands their skills, so when their help is needed the aware adult will happily let them sit next to the driver’s seat and give advice. The difference is that with the aware adult in charge, your one-above selves will no longer be able to take over the driving, get into fights about which one should get to drive next or try to control the bus by themselves.

This page and the book, Growing Awareness explains how to develop your grown up (aware adult side) which is already within you and how to help it take command of your bus and your life as soon as you are ready for that part of you to take over.

Copyright © John Nutting 1996- - 2004  and   ©   GROWING AWARENESS   All rights reserved World Wide   LAST UPDATE  Wednesday, 01 April 2009 11:52

Don't worry about these copyright notices at the foot of each page. It just means I want to hang on to legal ownership of what I write for use in future books.  Until that day, please feel free to copy and even adapt them for your own use and for friends as long as you acknowledge me as the author and owner of the copyright and you don't charge anyone for them. If you want to use them professionally or commercially (charge a fee for them) or for clients, each sheet you hand out must include full acknowledgment of copyright ownership as above and if  you are benefiting as a result, I would appreciate an appropriate sharing.

RETURN TO GROWING AWARENESS  HOME PAGE