We are constantly in motion even when we are standing still.

Our minds and hearts are their own travelers, unconstrained by physical limitations. The imagination is the vehicle of choice for these passengers.

They go where they want to go. This is both delightful and dangerous. The mind may become addicted to going to the same scene or thought pattern. The heart may long for what it cannot have or for what may be a poison to it. Longing, saudade, while beautiful in its own right, can target a poisonous object. The physical body too is susceptible to pursuits that put it in danger—addictions to substances, food, and sex can lead the body down a path of suffering.

Who then is there to guide these travelers if not the travelers themselves? We are more than our component parts—we are more than even the sum of our intellect, our emotional self/inner child, and our physical body. The Hoffman Process claims there is a fourth component to what they call the Quadrinity Model—beyond the aforementioned, there is the Spiritual Self, the one that is your truest you and your highest good. I've found another labeling similarly useful—we are our awareness of what we are. It is the observer, distinct from the thoughts of the mind, distinct from the emotions of the heart, distinct from the sensations of the body, who is the bearer of our true self. Awareness sits on the control seat of our life.

Our awareness may not always be able to override our system. The three components outside awareness are their own beasts and not always cooperative. It can take a lifetime of reconciliation work between these characters to help them come into harmony. Indeed, the body is not the only part that can contract an autoimmune disease—mental illnesses that afflict the mind and heart, while often the result of an external trauma, self-perpetuate in an auto-afflictive fashion. OCD illustrates this as the mind's recurring, unwanted execution of obsessions (repeated thoughts) and compulsions (repeated behaviors or mental acts). Schizophrenia and its sister schizoaffective disorder yield wild contortions of reality that funnel the afflicted into socially isolating behaviors and materially dangerous circumstances, whether spending all one's money on an investigator to out the people supposedly watching them or living so erratically that they cannot sustain a job to support their material needs.

I found one part of Hoffman's method to be a particularly poignant one—the explicit signing of a contract between the four parts, each agreeing to love and support one another, each acknowledging the others' intent to serve, each vowing to forgive the others and themselves. Hierarchy here is indeed important—the spiritual self who sits in the seat of awareness must be our internal guide, our leader. The other parts have an important seat at the table, their input is to be taken seriously, but they cannot be given full jurisdiction of one's life. That responsibility is for awareness and spirit alone.

I should note that some of the mental health conditions I mentioned above cannot be resolved through self-reflective work, the construction of mental models via parts work or IFS and IFS-adjacent systems, or therapy alone. Disorders in the schizophrenia family are chronic and indeed need serious medical attention. May those afflicted find peace and happiness.