literally dissolves into a gooey ooze. Within the
ooze are imagnal cells which reconfigure and create the blueprint of butterfly. I think of humans as having cocoons also, but generally we carry ours around most of the time and we refer to the cocoon as 'me.' For most of us however, the true 'me' is hidden deeply within my life.
Pictured on the left are Russian nesting dolls which are generally composed of five (sometimes more) identical dolls each of which is slightly smaller and enclosed within a larger doll. Twist the first doll and the head pops off revealing a smaller doll within, keep repeating the action and eventually a tiny intact doll is revealed nestled deep within the dolls. The idea of my self being similar to nesting dolls popped into my head about a year ago when I was mulling on ideas of how to present in a workshop the concepts of persona, personality, defended ego, the true 'child' self and the authentic or essential self. Each of the components just listed are aspects of a self. When I had the idea of the nesting dolls, the concept I was attempting to explain was that although each doll is in fact 'real', the outermost dolls actually 'enclose' the true self and they may or may not honestly support the authentic self.
When our outer 'selves' do not honestly support our authentic self, we experience conflict in our inner life which may be experienced as generalized anxiety or simply feeling out-of-sorts much of the time or perhaps on a general happiness scale of 1 to 10 we would grade ourselves around 4 or 5 even though nothing appears 'wrong' with our life. If we are unable to 'change' our sense of dissatisfaction then we may discover we respond with irritation and defensiveness inappropriately or, and this is always the litmus test for my life, we want 'to run away from home': find a new job, a new state, a new partner - please, something 'new' that will make me feel good!
Sometimes our 'outer' self no longer supports our authentic self because we have outgrown the shell of the role. This outgrowing of our shell happens with 'life roles' such as parenting when the children become older and the definition of 'being a parent' changes and in marriages where both changing life circumstances and changes within the persons involved may no longer fit the old definition of the relationship. Sometimes the shell surrounding our job or career-persona no longer fits because we have outgrown the needs we once had in the definition of the job. All of these 'out growing' of shells are completely natural and terribly uncomfortable and often terrifying. Why would an experience described as 'natural' engender a word like 'terrifying.' The answer to that is very simple and the process of understanding the answer and responding to it is very, very complex.
The simple part of the answer is that although I compared the self to a nesting doll with five separate selves, we do not tend to think of ourselves in this way. We may think of our 'self' having five roles: job person, relationship person, parenting person, friend person, sibling person and then the private self, but those are more like rooms in a house that we wander in and out of. And in terms of the nesting doll concept, generally those roles would be the persona doll and the personality doll and if you are very lucky, you have a person or place where you share the 'child' self which is the one we tend to call our 'private' self but sadly, a great many adults never share from the 'child' self with anyone on a regular basis (although this is the reason that therapists generally have a never-ending supply of clients: therapists are paid to listen without judgement to the child-self)
The complex part of the answer lies in the fact that by mid-life, which I tend to think of as beginning at around age forty, most of us have lived so completely from our persona-selves that we think of our persona and it's roles as "me". Because many people are unaware that the self they think of as 'me' is actually mostly roles and 'persona', when a part of this persona experiences a major change as with either 'difficult' situations: death, divorce, being fired or laid off or even from 'pleasant' situations such as marriage later in life, all the children leaving home or grandchildren it may be experienced deep inside with a sensation akin to dying or in the caterpillar terminology, dissolving.
The problem inherent in accurately responding to the inner sensation of 'dying' is that in our contemporary culture, successful people are bright, shiny, all-knowing and tidy, and so we really don't talk about a personal sensation of 'dissolving.' For one thing, dissolving sounds really incompetent. Actually dissolving sounds incompetent and messy. Actually dissolving sounds incompetent, messy and possibly life-threatening. Very few people have someone they are able to be both intimate and honest enough with to admit to feeling like they are dissolving and therefore might at the moment be feeling a bit incompetent and messy. In this culture, we do not dissolve: we fix the problem: we buy a new house, we buy a new car, we buy a vacation house, we work for a promotion, we get promoted or we get an even better job: in this culture we prove that we are tough and stronger than any problem by accumulating more and better of what we have.
However, if the shell of your persona-self no longer fits you for whatever reason, then the little dolls on the inside are asking for less and not more. The little dolls desire for less and not more means that our cultural 'fix' for the problem: new, better or more, isn't going to work over the long term. When I say 'less' rather than more, what I am indicating is that your true self may feel as though it is dying because your life, your persona-roles, has gotten too far away from your true self and the little dolls on the inside would like you to have less persona and all of it's perks: success, material acquisitions, careers that take all your time and energy and more time and energy devoted to inquiring into truth.
Inquiring into truth sounds so philosophical, so other-worldly, so la-de-da, and who has time for la-de-da? Well, actually, if a person desires to be alive with a sense of purpose rather than to simply live, inquiring into truth is a requisite for such a life. But, I'll be honest with you, if you have not been engaging on a regular basis, the practices and actions that support an honest and searching inquiry about living, when you very first attempt the practices, your defended ego will react as though it is a pit bull assigned to guard your life.
Which is exactly what your defended ego is: a pit bull guard dog which firmly believes that growling, snarling and biting strangers who wander into it's territory is it's job. We all have one of these snarling guard dogs and truth be told, we're the person who trained the dog and gave it its orders. It is also true that most of us got this snarling dog when both it and the self were quite young. In fact, we were so young when it arrived that we've forgotten exactly what we trained it to do. And, it's been with us for so long and we are so used to it's behavior, we aren't particularly surprised when another 'new friend or idea' is run off: 'oh well,' we think, 'I don't need to be friends with anyone my dog doesn't like.' And with that decision made, often we simply return to life as it has been with maybe a new acquisition that is so similar to the old life and so tame, the guard dog paid no attention to its arrival. But despite that decision, the shell of persona-life is still too tight and the inner dolls are still clamoring and so, the cycle of relief and then uncomfortableness and then discontent will continue. How does one change this cycle?
First of all, it is easier to contemplate 'change' if the beginning place is a change of 'cycle' rather than a change of self. Your true and authentic self does not need to change. For most of us who at some point in life, found ourselves maybe drinking too much, or working way too much, or contemplating an affair too easily, or shopping too much or exercising too much or eating too much: and none of the 'too much' really added to life as pleasurable, the problem was that the true self was hidden. Hidden and rarely interacted with regularly and meaningfully.
It is impossible to truly be content and happy with life unless a person is regularly interacting with and from their authentic self. For most of us this is a confusing thought because having confused our persona-self: jobs, responsibilities, life-roles and the 'perks' of those things: social approval, money, material acquisitions and discretionary freedoms; shopping, vacations and extra houses, cars or whatevers) as "me", then, possibly I am unsure if I would even recognize my authentic self.! This is not only a confusing thought, it is a lonely thought and a very scary thought. Yet, as lonely and scary as the idea of having 'hidden away' the true self is for many of us, we can also recognize the truth of it because we are aware of some kind of yearning: a deep longing for something we can't quite name, that is with us if we allow our self to be still and unoccupied for any length of time . Truthfully, it is because of that deep yearning; a kind of undefined loneliness, that we generally learn to not allow ourselves to be still and unoccupied too often and certainly not regularly.
Learning to be 'still and unoccupied' is the first practice to be acquired if a person is willing to set out on the adventure of inquiring into truth and excavating some layers of shell in order to find the authentic self. The second practice is actually not so much a 'practice' as it is just acquiring knowledge and one important piece of knowledge is a thorough understanding of the pit bull called the defended ego. Knowledge about the defended ego is essential because in order to avoid being bitten: yes, your defended ego can even turn on you, you will need some practical information on how to approach the defended ego and then how to make friends with it so you may retrain the ego. Yes, retrain the ego. Ego's are required for living in the world but what is nice is an ego that is able to do the bidding of the adult rather than an ego that still lives out of survival defenses. You trained the one you have right now, you are perfectly capable of retraining it.
Why is learning to be still and unoccupied for a short period of time each day necessary in order to inquire into truth? Because truth is often quite shy and initially whispers very, very softly and so is rarely heard over the shouting of the world and our guard-dog ego. I know, this sounds boring: set your alarm for 20 minutes earlier than normal, get up, grab your coffee or tea or whatever and sit quietly for 15 minutes. That's all as a start: 15 minutes of quiet sitting; optimal if you are outdoors, the next best is being able to see the outdoors. If you are indoors and the 'quiet' makes you antsy find some instrumental, classical is best, music and put it on softly. Do not use ear-phones because putting in earphones is a 'message' that tells the self that the intent of the time is to listen to music and that is not the intention. The intention is to simply be present to 15 minutes of life without a plan. I'll be honest, this is one reason being outdoors is optimal: when you are out in nature all your senses are engaged: by the air, birds, trees, sky and whatever form of nature can be seen and so it is much easier to enjoy 'doing nothing' if you are not used to taking this kind of 'nothing' time.
That is the beginning step: making a commitment to doing this action a minimum of 4 times a week for one month. Oh, yes, the reason for doing this in the morning is twofold. One, the action of setting an alarm in order to take the time signals to you that you are making a specific intentional action on your own behalf: this kind of action is referred to as a practice. The second reason for doing this upon waking is that you will begin your quiet time with a fresh, unused mind and this is virtually impossible to achieve as the day goes on.
Next topic is the guard dog defended ego. I have a great image for the column and it's a fascinating topic.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Love to hear your thoughts ....