Some 10 years ago I did a year long course, called Partnership Explorations. It was intense, incomprehensible, and difficult.

Yet, it had an aspect that caused me to have an insight that was directly responsible for the breakthrough that you live with me, now.

The course was some talk, and a lot of collages.

A collage is an artwork… normally. But in the Partnership Explorations course it was a tool to get a new insight about life, about ourselves.

In one collage I wanted to show that I was locked out. I was locked out of the kind of life I saw people enjoy: parties, kissing, love.

So I cut out pictures of magazines to show the life I was locked out of. Not many, maybe eight pictures. And then I cut thin black strips of paper and methodically started to glue it, representing bars, on the top of the hedonistic scenes of pleasure.

Then I caught myself. I was the one putting the bars there, they weren’t there to begin with.

That woke me up. That shook me to my core. I wasn’t locked out… I chose not to go there. Hm… very significant.

I, for the first time, had a chance to look at my life differently. I suddenly had access to ownership. Owning what belongs to me begins with seeing what belongs to me.

And I saw that most things that matter did belong to me. In many small ways I chose my life to be the way my life was.

And if I chose those ways, I can unchoose them, and choose something else.

I have chosen the most perfect environment, the most perfect lifestyle, for me, to grow in unexpected ways, so I can lead you to a total paradigm shift.

I choose to be poor. I do. I could make lots of money, but that would make a different life with a different focus. I choose this, paradigm shift, to be my focus for now.

I choose to keep my temperature in my house very low. I choose to have no friends. I choose to be unattractive. I choose to eat to live. I choose lots of inconveniences, some insane! because they open up avenues that are not visible when life is easy.

I used to have a car… and every time there was inner tension, I would hop in the car and escape.
I used to have friends, and every time I had something to say, I would pick up the phone… my thought lost forever.
I used to attend classes and effectively prevent myself from thinking my own thoughts.

There is more, but you get the gist of it… I’ve designed my life, piece by piece to be a “transformation machine…” lol.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in ~Virginia Woolf

By the way, ownership is a capacity. It is what is underneath responsibility: the access to power.

The two twin capacities, courage and ownership are the capacities that separate lower, unevolved, from higher: evolving humans.

PS: I have no idea where my collages are. So what you see here: they are not mine. Mine have done the work for me: unlock me from what I was locked into. Seriously, that is the job of a transformational collage.

Most people don’t get that, and they lock themselves even deeper in with their collages… less and less room to own, to choose, to live.

Read the original article: More on being locked out… I am handing you the key