This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
No Bad Parts – Rev. Linda Jackson
DESCRIPTION
Ernest Holmes writes that our word does not restore wholeness; it reveals it. And yet, many of us do not feel whole. We tend to reject or suppress the parts of ourselves we do not like. What would happen if instead of rejecting them, we honored them? What if we asked: What would my life look like if I honored and loved all of my parts, even those I do not like?
SUMMARY
This talk explores the theme “Whole No Matter What” and the idea that there are “no bad parts” within us, drawing from Science of Mind teachings, Internal Family Systems, hypnotherapy, spiritual psychology, and Prentis Hemphill’s work in What It Takes to Heal. Rev. Linda Jackson frames psychological and spiritual growth as parallel, mutually necessary paths, emphasizing that spiritual practice without psychological work becomes bypass, while psychological work without spirituality misses a deeper connection to the divine. Wholeness is presented not as something to earn or construct, but as an already-present truth that spiritual treatment and inner work reveal rather than restore.
Using the metaphor of “parts,” the talk normalizes inner voices and personas as coping strategies formed to protect safety, belonging, and dignity in response to trauma and life experience, insisting that none of these parts are inherently bad. Hemphill’s insight that trauma can “arrest a part of you” and leave regions of the body “living out of time” underscores how unprocessed experiences remain stored somatically, sometimes for decades, and continue to shape behavior even after circumstances have changed. Rather than attacking or suppressing these parts—which only entrenches them—the talk advocates befriending them, listening for the protective role they have played, and gently letting them know their job is complete.
Rev. Linda introduces practical tools for this inner work, including the “four A’s” (Acknowledge, Allow, Accept, Appreciate) from Conscious Leadership as a way to relate to inner parts and outer personas with curiosity instead of resistance. She pairs this with somatic practices that move stored energy through body awareness, movement, and nonverbal sound, illustrating with a personal story of releasing a deeply held memory and simultaneously healing a lifelong pattern of image management and the need to “do a good job.” This embodied work is framed as preparation for spiritual practice, enabling a shift from reactive states into “embodied presence” where one can better hear inner guidance and experience genuine freedom rather than spiritual bypass.
The talk also connects individual healing to collective transformation, describing those engaged in this work as “transitional characters” whose inner shifts contribute to broader social change, particularly in the context of racial and social justice movements. Drawing on Ernest Holmes, Rev. Linda stresses that conviction and subjective state, not words alone, shape manifestation, and that psychological integration and spiritual treatment must work together to make us clear channels for the divine. Throughout, she returns to affirmations of inherent wholeness—“I embrace and honor all of who I am” and “I am whole no matter what”—inviting listeners to practice the four A’s with their most challenging parts, trust that “wholeness is working itself out,” and live as authentic expressions of the divine in service to personal and collective freedom.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Linda Jackson:
Good morning. I’m Rev. Linda. I use she/her pronouns. Thank you so much, Paige and Andrew. Quick little mention, something I learned about that song. Linda Perry wrote and produced it and she wasn’t sure if Christina Aguilera would be a good person to sing it because she was so famous and so beautiful. How could she really relate to that feeling? And at the top of the recording, if you listen to the recording, you can hear Christina say, “Don’t look at me.” And the story goes, I watched a video with Linda Perry talking about it, that in the recording session, and I think it was like a first take, Christina had brought a friend and at the beginning she said to her friend, “Don’t look at me. ” And Linda Perry realized in that moment that in spite of her fame, in spite of her beauty, that she still had the same insecurities, the same not enough, those same fears.
And so she chose to leave that in the song. It’s at the top of the song. I love that. And we all have those parts of ourselves, right? That say, “I’m not enough,” or the parts that we reject or hide. So that song is for each of us and for all of us I am beautiful no matter what they say. And that’s so appropriate for this month as we are exploring the importance of recognizing and embracing all of our parts.
So I’m very glad to be here with you today. I’m so grateful for you all showing up on this holiday weekend. I just want to acknowledge this 4th of July as the 250th anniversary of a nation founded on a big idea that all are created equal. And now we know that even when those words were written, they excluded more people than they included, but they were aspirational. The words held a vision for something greater and in New Thought we would say freedom begins within. And yes, of course, political freedom matters enormously and true liberty also requires freedom from the beliefs that limit us, from the parts of ourselves that are still living in an old story. So change doesn’t begin out there. It begins right here within us. And Prentice Hemphill in our July book, What It Takes To Heal echoes this idea that it begins here within us.
And as you know, this is our July theme Whole No Matter What. And this is the CSL talk title, No Bad Parts. So the question we’re sitting with today is what would life look like if you honored and loved all of the parts of yourself, even the ones you don’t like?
And I want to preface this with acknowledging that this talk has a lot of psychological content and I fully believe that psychological growth and spiritual growth need to live side by side. If you try to grow spiritually without the psychological growth work, it’s a bypass. And if you try to grow psychologically without spiritual growth work, you still find yourself missing that place where the divine is wanting to be connected or to have you remember your connection with the divine. So the question today is what would it look like if you honored and loved all of your parts, even the ones you don’t like? And I always like to bring Science of Mind in since that is our foundational teaching and Ernest Holmes said, our word does not restore wholeness, it reveals it. So our word does not restore wholeness, it reveals it. So when we are praying and affirming, we’re not making it whole, it is already whole and we’re doing the treatment to our mind to remember the wholeness that’s already there.
And that’s the whole talk really. We don’t have to earn our wholeness or to create it. We’re here to uncover what was always there. So we sometimes move through life feeling like wholeness is something that we’re moving toward. Something we’ll have once we done enough work, fixed enough things, healed enough wounds as if our wholeness were out there somewhere not quite finished. And what if the parts of you that you’re trying to fix or heal are not obstacles to your wholeness but evidence of your wholeness? You’re hearing this another way. You’ve heard this, especially the last few months with Mark Nepo, what’s in the way is the way. And we hear everything is for your awakening Pema Chodrin and many teachers say similar things and it all comes down to love.
I think in last month’s talk or theme we had the love ethic that’s what one of the concepts was, having a love ethic, using love as a verb and an action, right?
So another thing as sort of a preface, I want to normalize the idea of having parts. It’s not a sign that there’s something wrong with you. It’s just the human condition. A simple example if you’re considering something new and one part of you is like, “Yeah, let’s do it. ” And the other part is like, “Oh no, slow down. You don’t know what you’re doing.” And then other part’s assessing the damages the last time you jumped into something, right? That’s what we’re talking about the parts of us, right? The voices is just being human. And I’m emphasizing the importance of recognizing these parts, honoring these parts so that we can be our most authentic expression.
That’s one of the statements in our mission statement, one of the sentences to be our authentic selves.
So that talk title, No Bad Parts, comes from Richard Schwartz’s book about the therapeutic model of internal family systems. I’m sure there’s a few of you in the room who are familiar with internal family systems or IFS. I had a few sessions in internal family systems myself and learned about the firefighter, the manager, the sort of categorical IFS names for parts. My personal understanding or relationship of working with parts comes through the lens of hypnotherapy, more general spiritual psychology and the inner child healing. Parts show up organically. Sometimes there’s just a part, five-year-old version of you who learned something on a particular day and never got the message that the danger had passed. But the core idea is the same. Every internal part and the outward personas developed for a reason and none of them are bad. Letting them run unchecked may contribute to our suffering, but they are not bad in and of themselves.
We’re talking about a sort of a phenomenon where something in us took shape a coping strategy was formed to handle a moment that we didn’t have other resources for and it’s still there, still doing what it learned to do often long after it needs to.
And we know some traumatic experiences are much more egregious than others, but it is important to understand that the impact of trauma isn’t about how bad it was, it’s about what we made it mean about ourselves and the world and about what resources we had to help us process it. Hemphill says, “Trauma can arrest a part of you. You can have a region of your body living out of time, out of step with the rest of you. ” So in other words, a part of you can get stuck in a moment from the past and never get the memo that things have changed. When we experience something overwhelming, the body activates to protect us, but sometimes that cycle doesn’t go to completion. So that part just keeps going, still doing its job, still protecting you from something that may no longer exist.
We can’t always think our way through it. It’s in the body. So yes, there may be a thought pattern to notice and correct and there’s often something the body is holding 10, 20, 60 years long after the mind has decided it understands or 70. So if every part and persona developed as a coping strategy essentially to protect us, then why is there an issue? We have an experience. We come to believe something to be true about ourselves or the world and we unconsciously develop this strategy. This part finds a way to navigate life based on those beliefs. But often in that process, the authentic parts of us, the parts they were trying to protect sort of get crossed out or overshadowed.
And we may have learned that some parts got rewarded and some not so much. The angry part gets sent to time out, needy part gets called dramatic and the scared part gets told to toughen up while the cool or aloof part might get some extra attention. And so we sometimes hide the parts that aren’t desirable and sometimes the authentic parts are just overshadowed by the strategic parts and we can get very good some of us expert level good at performing the parts that earned us love or acceptance and hiding the rest. Hemphill names three capacities that trauma can fracture, safety, belonging and dignity.
Hempel is saying our coping parts are trying to protect one of those three things. The part that needs to control everything, probably protecting safety, part that performs and people pleases, probably protecting belonging and the part that gets defensive at the smallest criticism, probably protecting dignity. These parts aren’t the enemy. They’re doing a job. An old job, maybe a job we don’t need anymore, but a job nonetheless. They just don’t know the job is done. Nobody has told them it’s safe now and Hemphill says the wound grows even as we use it, eating away at the person who holds it, acidifying all we do. And that’s the cost.
Fighting against the parts we don’t like doesn’t help. They won’t surrender and disappear. Parts don’t disappear under attack. They entrench, they get louder. The parts we’re most challenged with tend to be the ones that have been fighting hardest and longest. So what’s the alternative? Instead of rejecting the parts of ourselves we don’t like, we’re being invited to embrace them, to ask what have they been trying to do for us all along? Through decades of his work and clinical work, Richard Schwartz said he found that every single part is worthy of being heard. So this requires a shift from fighting to listening. This is one of my favorite areas of work with clients helping people befriend all the parts of themselves to hear the messages. Hemphill reminds us that the parts we haven’t honored in ourselves don’t stay contained inside us. They leak into our relationships, into our leadership and how we treat each other.
So this work matters beyond ourselves. In addition to being a therapist, Hemphill has spent years in racial and social justice movements and they would say healing the self and healing the world are not two separate tracks. You’ve heard it said before, the work of the individual impacts the collective. Hemphill calls the people doing this work transitional characters. We’re in the transition from what was to what is or what will be.
So we’re transitional characters, those who feel stirred by what’s going on in the world and want to make a difference and transitional characters understand that the change has to begin inside. That’s you. That’s us. We are transitional characters. So this isn’t just about healing individually. It’s about building something together, revealing wholeness together and that’s where this month is headed from this personal application into the collective and it always starts with ourselves. And there’s a simple practice. I’m sure many of you have heard it before. I know it as the four A’s. I learned this version in Conscious Leadership Group as a way to work with parts or with personas, parts being the different voices in your mind and personas being the outer mask. And the four A’s in the context of conscious leadership, I think they took a different model and modified it.
It’s a technique used to move through some of these emotions and feelings without trying to fight or suppress them. So it goes something like this. Acknowledge, you notice what’s here. In my case, that might be the part of me that needs approval. Allow, we open space for it. Let it be there. Don’t rush to fix it or change it. Accept. Can you accept that part showed up for a reason and appreciate? Get curious. It’s trying to teach you something to protect you. What’s the learning? What has the part been trying to do for you? And I learned this with an analogy of imagining your part in the context of being in a room. So the first step is I notice that it’s there so I notice that part of me that needs approval. Okay. I acknowledge it’s there.
And then allowing is to see if you can let the part be in the room with you. Either a yes or a no. Can I let the part be there? If I can, then can I invite it in? Can I let the part be up close? Can I be with it? Can I accept it? And then moving to appreciate even inviting it to sit next to you or if it needs to even sit on your lap asking the part what it needs. And this practice can help soften the inner struggle rather than avoiding or resisting because we know what we resist persists and this is the shift from get rid of it to get curious about it.
And this is why developing self-awareness is always the first step because you can’t shift that of which you’re not aware. If you don’t even notice this part of you is activated, you can’t go to the four A’s, right? But you can imagine that the acknowledging it and allowing it may be somewhat more doable and that accepting can get harder and appreciate can be kind of next level when you’re in the middle of an activated part, a part that still feels threatened because in a survival state we’re asking a primary question of like, “Am I safe?” And in that state we tend to defend and close off. It’s not a character flaw, it’s biology doing what it evolved to do. And you can’t always think your way into this. You can’t think your way into shifting into the part of the brain that’s capable of curiosity, of asking what I can learn from this.
Sometimes the body needs to move the energy before the mind can get there. And there’s a somatic practice that supports moving from activated response to embodied presence. There are many somatic practices. I’m just sharing one that I work with.
So you have the ability to notice when you’re activated or triggered and the work is to check in with yourself. When you feel this activation or this triggering, notice the emotion, notice the physical sensation, where is it in your body and then to express it so that it can move through body movement, through nonverbal sound like. I’ve shared many times about the part of me that needs to do a good job. I’ve been working with this for a long time. The part that learned sometime very early that being good and performing well, managing how I was seen was how love worked. If I did it right, I’d be loved. If I didn’t, maybe not.
And I had an experience during a training where I was one of the facilitators in a group practice. So I’m modeling this practice of moving emotion through nonverbal sound and body movement, which can feel a little awkward at first, especially in a room full of people and especially for someone prone to image management, but I let myself stay with it and at some point I dropped into something I was not expecting. I was on the ground with full primordial sounds coming out of my mouth something old, something stored was moving through my body out and there were two things happening at once. I was releasing this memory that had been living in my body for who knows how long and at the same time also healing the part of me that needs to manage how I’m seen.
The part of me that needs to do a good job. There is a real fear there for a moment that I’m one of the facilitators. I’m supposed to be leading this thing. How can I be leading and still have this kind of wound surfac? And it’s not in spite of the wound that I can hold this work. It’s because of it. That wound isn’t disqualifying. It’s often the thing that makes you trustworthy. It’s sometimes what makes you relatable as long as it’s not running you. When you get to know your parts, when you accept and appreciate them, they begin to relax a little, to trust that you can handle it now. And I hope there’s something in that for you. I’ve done so much work with this part over the years that I don’t experience it as a belief I’m holding anymore. I recognize it by what I feel in my body.
The gripping or tightening and there’s a swirling and an adrenaline surge that goes down my arms and I know it’s like an old alarm going off in my body.
This is the practice. When you’re activated or triggered, notice the emotion, notice the physical sensation, express it so it can move and it can move you from dissociation and reaction into embodied presence. And you don’t have to do this with an audience. You don’t have to do it perfectly, but I invite you to see this week if you’re willing to let your body speak and move and release what’s no longer needed. This and the four A’s, when you get to genuine appreciation of the part, appreciation for the buffering, the buffering you from the kind of pain that you didn’t have the resources to handle, it was doing its job. It still thinks that it’s a job.
It doesn’t need to be banished. It needs to be thanked and gently let off duty. And we heard in the reading this morning from Ernest Holmes, there is something in each one of us which is transcendent. As we learn to listen to this inner presence, we shall be strengthened in mind and body and move ever closer to the perfection of the divine pattern within us. So parts work isn’t a detour from our spiritual practice, it’s a preparation for it or at least a tandem work alongside it. Moving from that activated state of being in embodied presence is what it takes to be able to listen to the inner guidance. And when we honor and release what’s been frozen in us, we’re more available to transcendence, not by bypass, but genuine freedom.
Our authentic selves expressed and it happens from the inside out. A concept in science of mind is to take your mind off the problem, hold to the vision of the solution and that’s true but often misunderstood. It doesn’t mean avoid the problem. It doesn’t mean bypass what actually happening to you. And that matters because whatever energy and conviction we’re holding is what gets expressed or what becomes manifest. If there’s a part of us still living in fear, still bracing, still managing, and we just paper over it with affirmations, we’re not actually changing our demonstration. We’re holding two conflicting energies. We have the words of wholeness but the felt conviction of threat underneath it. We get a mixed demonstration. Holmes would say that that subjective state is what does the work. I was taught in some of my earliest class in this teaching that the conviction is the most powerful part of the prayer or the affirmation or the changing the thoughts.
The thoughts and feelings with the most conviction manifest most powerfully, not the words alone. So we need both psychological work and the spiritual work side by side together. You’ve heard this Quaker saying, treat and move your feet, pray and move your feet and part of moving your feet would include doing the inner work. So we’re honoring the parts, moving the stored energy, listening for the learning and doing the spiritual work of remembering the transcendent truth of who you already are. Ernest Holmes said, “In reality, we know God or truth only as we ourselves embody God or truth.” We’ve also heard God can only do for you what God can do through you.
This idea we have to make ourselves clear channels for the divine and it’s through remembering our truth that we embody truth and sometimes we have to get all that protective thinking, all the coping strategies out of the way to remember our wholeness. It’s not something out there, not something you have to go find. Wholeness is the truth of who you are. We only need to remember it to reveal it from within and we don’t get to wholeness by editing ourselves down to only the acceptable parts. We get there by embodying the whole of what we are and discovering what was sacred all along.
In a session with my mentor, Reverend Dr. Kathy Hearn, I was asking once, this was a while ago, how to be with what felt like injustice for someone I love. And she simply offered, “Trust that wholeness is working itself out through him or through this experience.” That helps me looking out at a world that seems chaotic, that seems to not make any sense. Trust that wholeness is working itself out through this experience and I think the same is true for our inner work. We have to trust the wholeness is already working itself out through me, through you, through us. So trust is the big practice really not to fix the parts until wholeness appears. It’s to recognize the wholeness was always there and the parts being honored and heard are actually part of how our wholeness reveals itself.
So we’re remembering that there are no bad parts and I have a couple of closing affirmations for us. I embrace and honor all of who I am, not the edited version, not the acceptable version, all of who I am and I am whole no matter what. So this time I’m going to say them again and I want you to repeat after me. I embrace and honor all of who I am. I embrace and honor all of who I am and I am whole no matter what. I am whole no matter what. So the invitation is as you go about your days this week, notice This is when a part of you shows up that you’d normally want to push away the critical part, the anxious part, the controlling part, the part that needs to do a good job. Instead of resisting it, try the four A’s, acknowledging it, allowing it, accepting it, appreciating it, getting curious about what it’s doing for you.
And if you’re too activated, you can let the body work it out. Moving through your body, expressing it through sound or even breathing it out and see what becomes possible. You can try your affirmations or play the song and remember I am beautiful no matter what those parts say. Wholeness is already the truth of who you are. You simply reveal it and we are the transitional characters. We are the people willing to do the inner work in service to the world. I thank you for being that with me.
I’m going to invite you to turn within as I begin to close. I acknowledge the on presence, the on power, this presence and power in which we live and move and have our being. This presence is never divided. It is whole. It is perfect. It is complete and we are expressions of it. We are whole, perfect and complete now. Not someday, not after we fix something. Right now it is the truth of our being. We are whole. I affirm that every part, all the parts, the parts we love and the parts we’ve hidden, each part is in that wholeness.
There are no bad parts. None of them are mistakes. I dissolve any belief in the need to banish or fix or change any parts. I trust wholeness is working itself out. I trust wholeness is working itself out. I trust wholeness is working itself out in as and through me in as and through each one. I claim safety. I claim belonging. I claim dignity. I claim freedom to be fully expressed, to be our authentic selves, to step fully into who we are, who we are here to be the unique individual expressions of the divine who can express it as only we can express it, that we are saying yes to our wholeness, yes to our freedom, yes to unlimited possibility, and yes to being fully expressed.
I call forth any support that might be needed in that any additional help or guidance is available and that people receive exactly what they need to say yes to their full expression, yes to their freedom. Yes, to the truth of who we are. I’m so grateful for the fulfillment of this prayer. I’m grateful for the wholeness. I’m grateful for the yes to being these transitional characters who are stepping into their own healing in support of the world healing. I am so grateful for the fulfillment of this prayer. I release it into the law that always says yes. And if this resonates with you in any way, please join me in affirming by saying, “And so it is. ” Thank you.