Exploring our inner geography – both the far horizon and the immediate scenery can sometimes be rather a challenging and humiliating experience. There are times when I think that the false self that predominates can also be quite unpleasant….in fact I know that is the case. As Baron Von Hugel said: ‘Another little humiliation thank you God’. So I guess it’s good to see it and through the knowing of our inner world comes the possibility of changing or at least evolving … it’s a deepening of the perception of who we are. Sometimes it feels as if the skin merely holds together an odd assortment of partially constructed and partly long established experiences. They seem to cohere into different formations at different times and things that I thought I had sorted re-emerge with an added intensity. it was Harry Guntrip who so memorably said that ‘water can always flow again in the dried up river bed’.

Whether through meditation or through analysis there can be an opening up  an easing of the taut and tense aspects of the personality, this can be space not for our own manoeuvrings or attempts at manipulation but for God’s transformational action. As Jeremy Taylor wrote in the 17th century: There should be in the soul halls of space, avenues of leisure, and high porticos of silence, where God walks’. What a wonderful space that would be….