11/17/11

Taming Your Inner Tyrant

Patty de Llosa

Show Description:

Do you, too, have an inner Tyrant, a hypercritical judge who monitors your every word and action, and tells you what’s wrong with you? I do. He ruled my inner world for many years. Sometimes he was just mean and bossy but most of his attacks were damaging, convincing me I was pretty stupid and my efforts worthless.

For a long time, I thought he was the voice of my conscience, my better self, so if I didn’t obey him, I’d be “in the wrong.” But when my marriage fell apart and I had to fend for myself and my three children, the physical and mental distress he inflicted on me were too much to bear. I sought help through a Jungian exercise called Active Imagination, a psychological experiment that attempts to bridge communication between our conscious selves and the unconscious world within. It offered me a path to a more positive relationship with him and with other inner personas I discovered along the way. In other words, with myself.

Taming Your Inner Tyrant describes my experiences with psychiatrist C. G. Jung's "active imagination" exercise, in which I dialogued with my intrusive inner critics over many years and gradually found relief from both physical and psychic pain. Now that Jung’s Red Book has been published, hailed by the New York Times as “the Holy Grail of the Unconscious,” there’s increasing excitement about this mysterious process. Yet a book about it written by a non-psychotherapist is very rare, if not unique. That’s why I offer my imaginal adventure, with an eye to helping others undertake a similar journey. Each chapter ends with experiments the reader can make, to learn more about his or her personal inner tyrants.

Taming Your Inner Tyrant is dedicated to G. I. Gurdjieff, who first called my attention to our Inner Tyrant and the many little ‘i’s, or personas, that move us, unaware; to Jeanne de Salzmann, who lit my path toward the development of consciousness; and to C. G. Jung and Marion Woodman, who helped me discover what I had long undervalued in myself. 

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Guest Bio:

Patty de Llosa is a Contributing Editor of Parabola Magazine and author of "The Practice of Presence: Five Paths for Daily Life" Morninglight Press 2006 (www.practiceofpresence.com). She has led group classes, daylong workshops and weeklong intensives in the Gurdjieff work, T’ai Chi and Taoist meditation and teaches the Alexander Technique both privately and in group classes. Among her recent public venues are Northern Pines Health Resort; the Peruvian Aikido Association; the Lake Conference Center, New York; Columbia University Graduate Theater Program and the Society for Experimental Studies, Toronto.

After graduating from Swarthmore College, Ms. de Llosa worked as a reporter for Time Magazine for six years. She married a Peruvian and raised three children in Lima. When her husband became governor of Loreto province, she served as president of The Green Cross, supplying treatment and medicines to the needy in the Amazon jungle, and coordinating with the Peace Corps a summer visit of American doctors and young people to help build roads and schools. Returning to Lima, she founded and ran the first foreign chapter of the United Nations’ pre-school, International Playgroup, for eight years.

De Llosa returned to New York in l979, where she worked for six years as managing editor of American Fabrics & Fashions Magazine, moving on to become associate editor of Time Inc. startup Leisure Magazine and then to Fortune Magazine, where she became deputy chief of reporters. She retired in l999 to take the three-year teacher-training program at the American Center for the Alexander Technique, while working halftime as communications director of internet startup e-academy, inc. and writing her first book.

Her recently published articles appear in the Fall 2004 Parabola (“Befriending the Body”), the Winter 2004 issue of the Taijiquan Journal (“Are You a Leader or a Follower?”) and the Spring 2006 Parabola (”Embracing the Irrational”), Winter 2009 (Healing from the Dark Emotions), Summer 2011 (The Neurobiology of WE).