Introducing “The Inner Map”

Last updated on: September 6, 2016 at 12:30 am by Julie Colwell

Introducing “The Inner Map” 2016-09-06T00:30:01-05:00 Julie Colwell

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I want to get the word out about a powerful tool I’ve been developing over the past few years. It’s easy to understand and has led to lots of folks having a better idea of what’s going on for them when they get emotionally stuck, and then what to do about it.

My “Inner Map” is based on David Hawkins‘ “Map of Consciousness.” Hawkins first published the MOC in his groundbreaking book, Power vs Force. I’ve taken his concepts and simplified them to something that I carry around in my head pretty much all the time. (Really!)

I’ve spent my life trying to figure out what the heck is going on in my internal landscape. Looking back, my young world seemed pretty stable, but once I hit adolescence, I’m sure my family would assigned me the moniker of “moody” (perhaps along with all other teens). Moodiness became “anxiety” and “depression” once I left home and started studying psychology, though these generic terms intensified into the more serious “labile” if I read too much research. These designations gave me a little port in the swirl of my inner confusion, but didn’t seem to help me feel better.

Graduate school in Clinical Psychology gave me even more ways to label people (and myself), as I honed my assessment and diagnosis abilities. The DSM (III, IV, IV-R, and V!) allowed me to do a better job of organizing how I understood people and their personalities, and were slightly useful in deciding how to actually try to help them change what was causing their personal suffering. I guess. Well, maybe not. I persisted, though, as these Official Classifications impressed me and gave me some way to sound authoritative. I had a vague sense of there being something missing in my quest to sort out the chaos of the inner world into something that made real sense to me.

Finding Hawkins’ work was my bridge into a whole new world of understanding. I read and re-read “Power vs Force,” synthesizing his concepts with my growing experience with clients’–and my own–difficulties and triumphs. Eventually, I created my own, easy-to-use “Inner Map.”

The next series of blog posts will give you an understanding of the Inner Map and how to apply it to your life. Start by downloading it here. You probably will want to print it out so you can see what I’m describing in those posts.

My favorite way to think of the Inner Map is that it’s like a mall map–it’s that arrow that says “you are here.” Because if you know where you are, you can start moving to get to where you want to be.

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