16/07/2026
In Love and Awakening, John Welwood uses the analogy of a castle to illustrate the world within us.
Imagine that you are a magnificent castle with long hallways and thousands of rooms. Every room in the castle is perfect and contains a unique quality. Each room represents a different aspect of yourself and is an integral part of the entire perfect castle.
As a child, you explored every inch of your castle without shame or judgment. Fearlessly, you searched every room for its treasures and secrets. Filled with love, you embraced every room, whether it was a closet, a bedroom, a bathroom, or a basement. Every room was unique. Your castle was filled with light, love, and miracles.
But one day, someone came to your castle and told you that one of your rooms was imperfect and certainly did not belong in the castle. They suggested that if you wanted to have a perfect castle, you should close and lock the door to that room.
Because you wanted their love and acceptance, you quickly shut that room away.
As time passed, more and more people came to your castle. Each of them had opinions about which rooms they liked and which they did not. Little by little, you closed one door after another. Your magnificent castle became sealed off.
A process had begun.
You closed more and more doors for all kinds of reasons. From that moment on, you shut doors because you were afraid or because you believed that certain rooms were somehow wrong. You closed the doors to rooms that were considered too confrontational. You closed doors because others told you there was something wrong with those rooms. You closed doors because your religious authorities told you to stay away from certain rooms. You closed rooms that resembled your own. You closed every door that did not fit society's idea of what was normal—or your own ideals.
The time when your castle felt endless and your future was filled with excitement and light had come to an end.
You no longer felt the same love and admiration for every room. Rooms you had once been proud of, you were now willing to let disappear. You tried to find ways to get rid of these rooms, but they were part of the very structure of your castle.
After you had closed the door to every room you disliked, time passed until one day you had forgotten all about the locked rooms. At first, you did not understand what you were doing. It simply became a habit.
As everyone kept giving you different messages about how your castle ought to look, it became easier to listen to them than to trust your own inner voice, the voice that loved your entire castle.
Closing off those rooms made you feel safe. Before long, you realized that you were living in only a few small rooms. You learned to shut life out and to feel comfortable doing so.
Many of us closed off so many rooms in our inner home that we forgot it had once been a castle. We began to believe that we were nothing more than a small, run-down house with only two rooms.
