Tag: growth

Not taking ourselves too seriously

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I faciliated a Day Silent Retreat this weekend which was really a lovely gentle experience. It passed so quickly and all participants expressed a deep contentment with the day and the time they had spent silently sitting or walking. It really confirmed for me how finding some time for quiet in our lives is not a luxury but rather is essential for protecting our health.

Retreat days and reflection aims to develop our capacity to drop into our lives as they actually are. However, sometimes, they can feed into our ever-present need to change or fix ourselves. If this happens, our awareness of  self can become a full-time preoccupation and  take away some of the naturalness of life. It is good that we try to change in ways that allow us become more healthy and happy, but sometimes we can feel pressure to change because of an unconscious sense that we are not good enough or we are unacceptable as we are. Some of the self-help culture visible today feeds into this unhappiness with how we actually are, by continually encouraging us to take on one self-improvement after another. And even noble self-improvement projects, such as “I want to be more calm“, or “I want to be more happy“, can simply substitute one type of discontent with ourselves with another. The reason they do this is that they actually strengthen our premise that we are broken and need fixing.

Even sometimes the reason we come to meditation is precisely because we want to change something inside us. We wish to be calmer, better, more spiritual, more together, more integrated. And if we examine deep enough under that wish we will find that it arisies from a belief that there is something wrong with us as we are. We look to put order on the parts of ourselves that frighten us.

But real life is not necessarily ordered; it is immediate, messy, incomplete. We are in danger of taking things too seriously and not allowing enough room for our chaotic and playful side. Part of the joy and spice of life comes from seeing that our mistakes and wrong turns, our compulsions to do too much, or our tendency to veg out, all add up to our unique personality. The end goal of all our work is not to become some ideal version of ourselves, based on ideas passed on by others or in books. We are to become ourselves fully, with all our quirks and exaggerations. Our natural selves, unaffected; not the one where we pass the time continually checking in on how are doing.

The only way out of this struggle is to leave our mind alone, to fully accept the mind that we have, anger, dualisms and all. And when we no longer judge ourselves or try to emotionally neuter ourselves, the internal conflicts and tensions gradually begin to quiet down. We might say this is the most basic psychological insight: I cannot escape myself, so I have to come to terms with the mind that I have.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

Poppies

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The other day I drove past a beautiful field of poppies. At least it seemed so, but when I stopped to look at it,  it became clear that it was actually a field of wheat, with poppies growing up through it. It reminded me of the parable of the weeds among the wheat, in the gospel of St Matthew. In the story the servants notice that someone has planted weeds in among the wheat, weeds that are almost impossible to distinguish from the real crop. The Master’s instruction is to leave them grow together, until the harvest, when they will be easily divided.

Normally this parable is interpreted in a way that refers to the judgment at the end of time. However, it can also be a wisdom that applies to our life now. There are many areas of our life which we would like to change, which we feel do not contribute to our overall growth. We can be unhappy with aspects of our body,  of our job or our relationship – whichever “weed” we think is ruining our field. Our attention is often drawn to that aspect of our life, and it becomes the focus of our happiness or unhappines.

And we often notice that out desire or our instinct is to fix ourselves, rip up these “weeds”,  remove them immediately from our lives. We find ourselves believing that things would be better if this or that was changed. We notice that it is not easy to accept ourselves, that we almost always want to change ourselves.

However, the parable points us in another direction, and gives two insights. The first says let the weeds and the wheat grow together. This goes against our normal instinct which is to turn away from the things that disturb or scare us, and says let us start by tolerating or accepting them.  The second draws our attention to the fact that we are always imposing conditions: it must be this way or that way, or we can’t be happy. These conditions can lead us to look elsewhere for happiness, and not realize that the all we need is already in our lives right now. Even with the weeds.

When we start meditation, we often think that somehow we are going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are: its a bit like saying “If I jog, I’ll be a much better person”, “If I had a nicer house, I’d be a better person”. “If I could meditate and calm down, I’d be a better person”. Or we find fault with others. We might say “If it weren’t for my husband, I’d have a perfect marriage”…. But loving kindness towards ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything…Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.

Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertaintly

Spring: Undoing and letting go

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All though our lives, we experience loss, in little and big ways. Some we acknowledge explicitly and grieve for. Others we may not have had the time or space to grieve for and they can come up later on in life, and attach themselves onto some other loss. There can also be the gradual loss of our hopes and dreams, or the plans we have invested in our work, or the direction of our lives.

Robert Neimeyer, who has written extensively in this area, says that when we go through a significant loss we have an undoing of our individual and collective life histories. It affects our world, and changes our sense of self. If it is a significant loss, such as the death of one who meant much to us, or the loss of a partner or even a move from work or familiar suroundings, we can feel uprooted and homesick. He says that what is needed at such times is having people to turn to who care for us, as we “tell and retell our story”. We need someone who can listen.

Why is this? Because as humans we like to give our lives meaning by underpinning them with a coherent and consistent story. Thus when we experience these losses we need to reorganize our sense of sense and our sense of meaning in life. We reach a limit where we are invited to tell our story again, but in a new way. The losses of life can make us hard and fearful of life or can make us more open, more caring for others.

The Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa talks about a soft spot, a raw spot, a wounded spot on the body or in the heart. A spot that is painful and sore. A spot that may emerge in the face of a loss. We hate such spots so we try to prevent them. And if we can’t prevent them we try to cover them up, so we won’t absentmindedly rub them or pour hot or cold water on them. A sore spot is no fun. Yet it is valuable. Trungpa Rinpoche calls the sore spot embryonic compassion, potential compassion. Our loss, our wound, is precious to us because it can wake us up to love, and to loving action.

Norman Fischer, Love, Loss and Anxious Times

The unconscious must out

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The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict…

Carl Jung, “Christ, A Symbol of the Self”,

Sometimes we can see repeating patterns in our own lives or in the lives of others. We find ourselves in similar situations to before, or saying the same, self-defeating words, often based on deep-seated, limited, views of our own capacities. For example, some people say “I always end up in rotten relationships”, or even “life has it in for me”. Despite the painful nature of such experiences, these people do not gain the insight that would help them understand, for example, why they always end up in relationships that end badly. They continue to make choices based on patterns laid down in their own early relationships, which can end up running the show despite their best efforts. One way of dealing with this is to blame life or the other person and put the responsibility onto them.

However, the quote from Jung seems to suggest that the person needs to look inside themself for the real solution to this problem. He suggests that this can be due to unconscious parts of the self, the individual remaining unaware of his or her unconscious patterns and attitudes. He suggests that what we do not face inside ourselves will come into our lives from the outside, as “fate”. Unconsciously we will attract the parts of us that we deep down, unconsciously, know that we need. In other words, life will bring us into situations where we are asked to look at our unconscious or shadow side and bring it out into the open, in order to grow to our full potential.

He further seems to suggest that when we come to an important period in our life for growth, this new potential inside us does not always simply go from the unconscious to consciousness. Rather, it comes to full consciousness through outside circumstances or with the help of another person who comes into our life. This can then mean going in new directions in work or relationships, as we move from old patterns and things that once seemed important.

Thus, a person who spent a significant part of their life investing their energies into their work or their family may find that they neglected other aspects of themselves in the process. Jung suggests that they will be brought face to face with these unlived parts and given the possibilitiy of integrating them. He suggests that to be fully happy we need to bring to light those parts of ourselves that have been repressed or neglected.

On getting older

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A lovely poem on getting older:

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Donald Justice Men at Forty

At times it is necessary to let go of the past as one moves on in life. Doing so, the ground may not feel so solid; it moves, as the poet says, “like the deck of a ship”. However, that movement is gentle, partly because of the wisdom, experience and skills built up over the years. There is something beautiful about the use of the word “softly” at the end of the second line. Moving on can be done with full acceptance, with a face turned toward future adventures, with an understanding of the passing of time.