Your Grail Journey
Charles Ridley © 2025 - Revised Edition

The Grail Journey is a path for navigating Core Erotic Wounds, but what is a Core Erotic Wound? In depth psychology, a Core Erotic Wound is what we suffer in our flesh and psyche after an extremely painful event separates us from our Eros, will, or shakti.

How do we navigate these wounds? We establish a daily Stillness Practice to strengthen our will and then our presence of stillness can bear the intensity of the self-revelations that arise during our Grail Journey. Otherwise, unconscious recoil patterns will hinder the integration of our shadows.

To Read More On How Navigate And Integrate Your Core Erotic Wounds, read Chapters 6 & 7 in Stillness Touch Union of Body & Love.

If you long for freedom from ego’s narcissistic control over your Eros, which is your will, I cannot overemphasize the importance of integrating your Core Erotic Wounds.

Knowing Yourself includes integrating your shadows. Each shadow you integrate increases the strength of will by which your presence of stillness can carry your consciousness across the threshold of the black abyss to a freedom from narcissism.

You Do Not Integrate Shadows By Working On Them

The work is to relax all effort, remain in an inward Sacred Repose, surrender control, and with your presence of stillness be with any shadow that arises.

Whether you ‘take up your bed and walk’ on your Grail Journey is a choice point of freedom that no one can decide for you.

Only You Can Integrate Your Shadow

How Do Recoils Prevent Me From Owning My Shadows?

Recoils are unconscious psychosomatic patterns that block the free-flow of Eros in the body, which separates the body from love. Recoils indicate that the ego and superego control your Eros. And remember, Eros is will, which is the power that moves you to action. The superego controls you by wielding a constant subconscious threat such as if you touch potency or love it will cause a repeat of the unbearable pain of the Core Wound.

Terror implants into the core depths of your Being the Psychotic Core. Steiner calls this complex Core Evil or AntiChrist, which creates the snake or the Apocalyptic Beast (We study the Psychotic Core in Master Class 3. In Stillness Touch Chapter 6 & 7 I use the term snake instead of the Beast).

If we chronically avoid our Core Erotic Wound, it condenses into a narcissistic complex that takes over our will and ‘behaves’ us: I call this complex the snake because it distorts the Sacred Serpent Power of Love or Kundalini.

Read Stillness Touch Chapter 6 to review behavior patterns that manifest when the snake is in charge of our will. Again, the snake is also known as the Beast, according to Rudolf Steiner. When the following three aspects are present, it indicates that the Beast has taken over our Soul Forces:

In the Head the Beast is Doubt                                                            
In the Heart the Beast is Hatred                                                                 
In the Pelvis the Beast is Terror

In his Esoteric First Class Lessons Steiner graphically characterizes the qualities of the three Beasts that imprison our Soul: Click Here

Perhaps this brief characterization of Knowing Thyself will inspire you to explore the Core Erotic Wound, Psychotic Core, Core Evil, the Beast, the snake and the narcissist, all of which you can integrate in your Grail Journey.

Know Thyself

In the Human Design system, the ego is called not-self, which I call the snake. When the snake co-opts our will, the not-self opposes the Self. That conflict creates an inner war which severs our connection to the Tao,which is the guiding principle of our destiny.

The Tao is the inner guidance that comes from our true nature.

A Human Design reading reveals whether your will is under the control of not-self or the Self. An insight into your operating system exposes hidden psychosomatic complexes that unconsciously drive you to actions that are self-destructive. Knowing Thyself, when combined with a daily Stillness Practice lightens the burden of your Grail Journey. For a Human Design reading (in English or Espanol), click on the link below:
Quietud Dinamica

Please print the following 4 Charts as a reference for engaging your Grail Wound Practices.

Chart 1

Navigating Your Core Wound

Core Wound → The Vow → Hypervigilance → Fundamental Misperception → Core Terror

Chart 2

Forms of Recoil Due to the Core Somatic Terror

Chart 3

Practitioner Recoils From Pure Breath of Love

Chart 4

Grail Journey Summary

Home Practices

Let’s begin our self-paced home practice.

• Read Chapters 6 - 7 in Stillness Touch Union of Body & Love until the Grail Journey forms a whole picture, a gestalt in your awareness, as depicted in Chart 4 above.
• Then read Stillness Touch (ST) pages 134-137 The Core Wound And Our Unconscious Somatic Recoils From Love.
• Next, read ST Chapter 3 Practitioner Recoils That Impede Pure Breath of Love.
• Review Charts 2 & 3 Forms of Recoil and Practitioner Recoils.
• Finally, review Chart 4 The Grail Journey.
  (For Neil Cohen’s Buddhist version of the Grail Journey: CLICK HERE)

Use your printed Charts 1-4 during your meditative journey of descent into your body while you stew in the recoils that arise from your biography.

Let’s review my homework as an example.

My Biography Work

Important Note: I began a daily Stillness Practice at age 16. Over time, meditation built my capacity to bear the inner depth of the Great Black Mother. Eventually, my regular daily Stillness Practice strengthened my presence of will to also bear the unbearably painful past events without being controlled by intense emotions or unconscious recoils.

Bodily Union With Love At Three (Chart 1)

Every morning, when I was around four years old, I’d sit inside the front screen door. I had a regular routine: first, I would focus my eyes in a certain way to magnify the little squares in the screen until I could see the tiny rainbows created by the morning sunlight. Have you ever done that?

I would then look out into the yard while my whole body opened to the splendor of nature. The flesh of my whole body was like a lung that breathed-in nature’s flesh.

I enjoyed a wordless conversation with Natura’s Holy Breath, absorbing her into my whole body. The expressions of nature’s Spell of the Sensuous engulfed me in the bliss: her blue sky, sunlight, warmth, the scent of the pine trees, roses, and grass, the sounds of the cicadas, crickets, and birds, and the sound of the wind passing through the trees and touched my skin and left tracks of erotic goosebumps. Each sensuous expression of holy breath enhanced my whole body felt-sense of union with love; enfleshment was my normal state.

When I was five years old ‘something’ happened that broke my constant bodily union with love. Depth psychology calls this event a Core Erotic Wound because it separated me from my Eros, which is my core life force. Eros is a creative elixir, and separation from it can either break us or send us on a lifelong Grail Journey. Fortunately, losing my bodily connection with love was the fire that drove me at 16 to begin a regular spiritual practice tht continues today (See Chart 4).

The First Core Wound I Remember

My first Core Wound occurred around age 5. But it is important to share that I had no idea this event happened until 23 years later after I received a memory regression at age 28. Prior to my memory regression, I had assumed that I was fundamentally broken at birth so I suffered an unconscious hatred of the feminine, which affected my intimate relationships even today. Keep in mind that my Core Wound is the first one that I recall.

Details Of My Core Erotic Wound

When I was 5 years old my dad took me for a drive in our VW Bug. I loved going on car rides with dad because he often took me with him to work where I enjoyed meeting his clients and eating yummy food. However, on this trip dad parks the car in front of a tall white brick building. We climb the steps and enter a hospital waiting room. After a few minutes, my mother enters the room from around the corner.

Her appearance is shocking: she has a blank expression, pale grey skin, no makeup, her hair is a mess, and she is wearing a disheveled bathrobe with house slippers in public. I reached up to get a hug from mom, but she backed away with a confused look and said Who are you? Do I know you? My consciousness snapped and I went numb. My ever-present sense of union with love was abruptly cut off. After that event, being alone in nature was the only way I could regain my prior sense of enfleshment. When I was in the house with mom I felt separate from love, as you will see.

The Aftermath Of My Core Wound
It turns out that mom had spent two months in the hospital getting shock treatments and Thorazine for a psychotic break. When mother came home, she was a different person, she was not the mom I had known. Her moods ranged between violent mania and a ‘nobody is home’ black depression. When depressed, even with the cup of coffee in her hand, mom would ask where did I put my coffee? During her manic states, mom viciously attacked, hit, and screamed at me.

Being around my mom was so unpleasant that I spent most of my time outdoors in the woods. Being in nature restored my union with love. Yet, as soon as I got home, my mom behaved like a demonic fiendess. Whenever my inner child radiance accidentally emerged, my mother attacked me to close down the radiance. Her attacks occurred so often that I saw my mother through the dark-colored lenses of doubt, hatred, and rage.

I could clearly see that mom was filled with Core Evil who hated the radiance of love. Mom’s behavior reflects the Beast, or the snake (Stillness Touch Ch 6-7).

My Psychotic Core

It is obvious that my encounters with my mom characterizes one of my Core Erotic Wounds. Mom not recognizing me in the hospital, combined with her attacks created a hatred for my mother. My merged association with mom created the false-self that implanted in my being a Psychotic Core that hated the feminine. Amid all that, I still enjoyed a child-like innocence, despite having to repeatedly endure mom’s attacks for seven years, until I turned 12.

That’s when at dinner, my younger brother knocked over a glass of milk and mom slapped me on the face. My Beast arose in the form of the cool, calm killer, and mom never attacked me again. That moment confirmed that the Psychotic Core had successfully implanted in the core of my being, because now I had access to the killer. This complex is the polar opposite shadow of our indestructible innocence; instead, it is an indestructible killer. Sadly, there are world leaders and many people who are in prison because they suffer either the fiendess or the killer, which got out of control. I will never forget my first college psychology teacher who on the first day of class asked ‘do you want to know the difference between a prisoner and you?’ We said ’yes!’ The teacher said ‘They got caught.’ 

Now I’ll put my biography on the Grail Wound Navigation Map (Chart 1)

The Core Erotic Wound and My Vow

Immediately after my Core Erotic Wound and mom’s subsequent attacks, I took an unconscious Vow:

I will never let my mom get close enough to hurt me again.

To uphold my vow, I developed Hypervigilance. My body felt-sensing became a highly refined precise radar system.

My body was so sensitive I could detect my mom’s intentions, and I knew her whereabouts in the house. If mom merely thought of approaching me physically or psychically, I’d sense it and was able to avoid her.

I regarded mom as a poisonous snake and a demonic fiendess, to avoid at all costs. After repeatedly attacking me, I stopped letting mom touch me. If by chance she did touch me, my whole body would go into convulsive recoils. As my wound descended deeper into my flesh, my revulsion to touch became so unconscious that whenever anyone touched me, it triggered similar recoils. It is interesting that my life’s work is dedicated to touch, perhaps as an attempt to navigate my Core Erotic Wound so I can integrate my shadows?

Look at Chart 1 While You Review My Core Erotic Wound In Slow Motion

My Core Wound: my mom did not recognize me in the hospital, which so shocked me I dissociated, and had a memory loss of the event for 23 years.

Each time mom attacked me, it separated me from love. So, I took a Vow:

VOW: I will never let mom get close enough to hurt me.

Yet, to uphold my Vow, I needed Hypervigilance to detect mom’s whereabouts.

Hypervigilance was triggered by a Fundamental Misperception:

When my mother attacks me, it severs me from love.

This misperception is my hurt boy’s truth, and it is crucial to honor it.

My Misperception led to the insight that my Vow and Hypervigilance arose due to my Core Terror:

When mother is near me, I get separated from love, which will destroy me.

Chart 1 depicts a linear map from Core Wound to Core Terror:

Vow - Hypervigilance - Fundamental Misperception - Core Terror.

However, bear in mind that all these components unfold simultaneously as a single gestalt in a random order so it is hard to catch them.

Please use my biography as a starting point for your inner Grail Journey to uncover the hidden details of your Core Erotic Wounds that, at a tender young age, severed you from your Eros, which cut you off from your bodily access to love.

Remember, it took me 23 years before I could access my Core Wound. Also, recall that I regularly meditated beginning at age 16. That means it took 12 years of daily meditation before the details of my Core Woundemerged into my consciousness at age 28.

Begin Your Journey

Once you remember an event that is your Core Wound, use Chart 1 to gain insight into how it operates as one unit:

Wound - Vow - Hypervigilance - Fundamental Misperception - Core Terror

Accessing the details of your biography reveal your Core Erotic Wound, its shadows, and associated psychological complexes that recoil you from love.

If you cannot remember your Core Wound, journaling, drawing, dancing, or painting can help you discover your shadows. Active Imagination and Dream Work are extremely potent practices that Carl Jung specifically devised to excavate the shadows that lurk in the depths of the unconscious. Also, if you contact your Inner Child you can connect to the potent life force elixirs of your Eros (See link to download the Inner Bonding Course at end of the workbook).

Your Homework: Recall the Grail Wound as a single motif from your reading of Chapters 6-7.

Review Charts 1-3

Using Chart 1, hold the gestalt of the Grail Wound Navigation in your awareness, then review the Forms of Recoil (Chart 2) and the Practitioner Recoils (Chart 3) that arise due to your Core Terror (See pages 137-138 Stillness Touch).

Here are questions to help get started:

• Can you remember any of your Core Erotic Wounds?
• Do you remember the specific event(s) that triggered your wound?
• Who delivered the wound?
• What patterns of recoil did your Core Wound create?
• What was your Vow, i.e., what will you never allow to happen again?
• What was your Hypervigilance, and what was it designed to detect?
• Do you know your Fundamental Misperception?
• What is your Core Terror?

Write your answers on the worksheet. Be thorough; it is better to overdo your journal work than shortchange it.  You can edit your notes later.

Print as many pages of this worksheet you need and use Chart 1 Navigating Your Core Wound
 Vow-Hypervigilance-Fundamental Misperception-Core Terror

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The Core Wound Arrests Our Development

The Core Erotic Wound severs us from our Eros, breaks our body-felt connection with love, and cuts off access to our will. The Core Wound recoils us from love, takes control of our will, and stops our development; we become stuck at the emotional age when the Core Wound occurred.

This insight is pivotal: it is our frozen emotional development that creates the Fundamental Misperception:

The Core Wound And Love Are The Same

Since the Core Wound separated us from love, our tender young child sees no difference between Love and the Core Wound. From then on, whenever love freely expresses in our body, it triggers a subtle core terror that the unbearable pain of our Core Erotic Wound will return.

Again, as adults we know that letting love freely flow in the body will not reactivate the pain of our Core Erotic Wound. However, what drives our recoiling behavior is an unconscious misperception:

If the Sacred Pulse of Love touches my heart, it will reactivate my Core Wound.

I suggest you breathe this into your awareness because this Fundamental Misperception is the fulcrum that triggers all the recoiling strategies of the snake. The Fundamental Misperception is unconscious, so no amount of self-talk or belief system modification can resolve it.

The Subtle Core Terror

The Fundamental Misperception evokes a Subtle Core Terror:

If I let love in, I will go crazy, be extinguished, or it will kill me.

Let’s review the motif in Chart 1: the moment the Core Erotic Wound occurs, it triggers a solemn Vow: "I will never repeat the wound."  However, I need Hypervigilance to detect situations that may trigger the wound, along with the Fundamental Misperception. When all three components combine with the Subtle Core Terror, it lands us in an impossible paradoxical dilemma:

To become whole, I have to let love in, which will kill me.

Ironically, reposing in this paradoxical dynamic tension of opposites - to become whole I have to die - resolves the dilemma.

This is a choice point of freedom that mirrors the Initiate’s decision to begin a descending journey into the black abyss and plumb the unconscious depths of shadow for redemption. The degree to which we navigate our shadows equals the degree that we restore our resurrection forces, renew our Eros, and reunite our body with the Sacred Pulse of Love.

Let’s review the Grail Journey as it is characterized in Stillness Touch.

The Ideal Journey When Eros Pulses Freely in the Body

When we meditate, offer and receive Stillness Touch, or make Conscious Love, the strength of the potency of Eros builds within the body. Eros wells from the pelvis, moves up the midline into the lower and upper belly, and then passes through the solar plexus to unite with the radiance of the heart to become a conscious emanation of love that suffuses the sacred pulse of love throughout the whole body.

This occurs if we have not experienced a Core Erotic Wound. However, if we suffered a Core Erotic Wound, here is our journey:

Recall that after our Core Erotic Wound, we Vowed to never repeat it, which requires Hypervigilance. The slightest build-up of Eros triggers Hypervigilance that activates unconscious recoils. Recoils can manifest as an inner war at each chakra level to stop love from rising in the midline to the heart radiance.

The forms of recoil include physical, psycho-emotional, and practitioner (Charts 2 & 3)

Physical Recoils

Cellular-level recoils occur when the liquid ground substance turns to a gel that conveys digital instead of fractal information.

There are defensive behavior patterns that are stored as armor in the body that hinders the flow of Eros.

Chakras recoil in the pelvis, lower and upper gut, the solar plexus, the front and back heart knots, the throat, third eye, and crown.

Psycho-Emotional Recoils

There may be an inner war at every chakra level that prevents love from reaching our heart radiance. However, three chakras - head, heart, pelvis - control the Soul forces of thinking, felt-sense, and will, whose shadow expressions are:

Doubt in the head center.
Hatred in the heart center.
Terror in the pelvic center.

Download Neil Cohen’s Chakra PDF as a guide to determine which chakra levels are involved in an inner war: CLICK HERE

Practitioner Recoils (Chart 3)

Whenever a practitioner engages efferent practices that impede Pure Breath of Love, it is a recoil.

All the above recoils combine into a single motif that provide the first line of defense to stop Eros from rising into the heart radiance and unite with the Sacred Pulse of Universal Love.

Remember during your navigation, that recoils are due to the fundamental misperception that the Core Erotic Wound will repeat if I let love rise from the pelvis into my heart radiance.

The Core Somatic Terror

If the physical, psychosomatic, and practitioner recoils fail to stop Eros from rising to the heart radiance, then the superego takes over and unleashes the deep, hidden, Core Somatic Terror that’s been stored in our flesh since the moment our Core Erotic Wound occurred.

Here are examples of the Subtle Core Terror (bodily feel into them): If I let love in, the Core Erotic Wound will reactivate and___________

I will not survive.
I'll be alone forever.
I will lose everything.
I will die.
I will lose myself for eternity in the infinite black abyss of nothing.
I will no longer know who I am.
It will destroy my life.
It will extinguish my consciousness and I will no longer be.
I will go insane.
I will become an enraged killer or an emotionally out of control fiendess.
Everything I built up will come crashing down.
Life as I know it will end.

Write down your Core Somatic Terrors on the worksheet below.

Print as many pages of this worksheet you need, and list all the dreaded things that could happen if you let love all the way in.

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There are many variations of the Core Terror that are not conscious, or verbal. Our somatic core terror is subtle and wordless because it lurks in the deep hidden subconscious layers of our flesh. The threat that our greatest terror will occur, as death or extinguishment, traps our consciousness in narcissism. The narcissists’ defensive personality traits and behavior patterns recoil us away from love and towards acts that are for selfish gain.

The Narcissist

The narcissist, which is another name for the snake or beast, displays a cold, calm, unfeeling, hatred that is drenched in selfishness. The narcissist controls our will by wielding the constant low-grade threat that our most dreaded Core Terror will become reality if we do not obey the narcissist.

Misused as a weapon against us, the snake uses terror as a threat that controls our attention to efferently drive our will from its reposed embodied presence, and then it misuses our libido to get from others. All this is to avoid contact with the Sacred Pulse of Love in our body in the name of I will never repeat the Core Erotic Wound (Vow).

Can you see that to cross the threshold to freedom from narcissism is not easy because it takes a great deal of unwavering presence and fierce-hearted courage to face yourself?

Crossing the Threshold of the Abyss from Narcissism to Freedom (Chart 4)

Dare to Feel Your Terror and Call the Bluff

The Grail Journey is like a High Stakes Poker game: one card player will bluff the others by implying that they have a sure-fire winning hand of cards in hopes that out of fear the other players will quit. Then the bluffer takes all the money. However, a Grail Wound bluff occurs between the superego and your embodied presence. When Eros rises to approach your heart radiance, the superego places a sure-fire bet so that you will not dare to call its bluff:

You will die if you feel love in your heart.

An example of calling the bluff occurred During a Prague Stillness Meditation Class when someone said:

You have to let love kill you.

Calling the bluff brings to full consciousness the entire charade of unconscious physical, psychosomatic, and practitioner recoils that stop the flow of Eros at each chakra level. We then see how the ego and superego misuses our Eros to stop love from reaching the heart radiance, all to avoid repeating the unbearable pain of the Core Erotic Wound.

When Eros lands in the heart radiance, the game is over for the ego and superego: they lose control over your will. Recoiling strategies become conscious, and you are no longer at their mercy. The subsequent integration leads to an irrevocable union of your consciousness with the Core Wound, which reveals the shocking realization:

Uniting with my Core Erotic Wound, I Realize Paradoxical Consciousness.

Integration occurs after you become conscious of your recoils to love due to the Core Erotic Wound.

Practically, that means you unite your presence with the wound, which paradoxically, makes you whole.

Note: Sharing this practice is irresponsible if I were speaking to the general public. But you are a dedicated professional practitioner who serves others, which requires that you have done your inner work, and you have cultivated the psychological stability to engage the practices.

The following supplementary practices can help you navigate your Grail Wound.

Supplementary Study And Practices

If you do not remember any of your Core Erotic Wounds, Carl Jung’s Active Imagination may help retrieve them. Read Robert Johnson’s book Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth.

I also recommend making contact with your Inner Child by downloading the Inner Bonding Course: Inner Bonding Course.