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Posts from the ‘Spirituality’ Category

Aug 5

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Opening to the Shadow Self

Call it suppression or repression or whatever… the point is that we have a tendency to avoid pain.  Not because we are wimpy – quite the opposite actually – much of the time we avoid pain as a way to “stay strong”.  We avoid pain because it feels overwhelmingly huge and there just doesn’t seem to be enough “space” to deal with it.  We think that we have to stay strong, for our partner, our kids, our job, or our quivering sanity.  After all, life just keeps moving, and for most of us, at a pretty quick pace.  So, what do we do?  We stuff it down… we tuck it and run.  We sequester the shadow parts of our self and we keep moving.  We survive.

Once the unwanted parts get tucked or stuffed, we don’t really want to dredge them up.  We convince ourselves that the unpleasantries of our past are better left in the dark recesses of our minds; “I mean, what good would it do to bring it all up now”, we might say to ourselves.  In fact, over time we may not consciously remember what we pushed into to the shadowy corners of our psyche.  We may develop nifty habits to keep the threatening information from bubbling to the surface, like addictive behaviors, unhealthy ways of thinking, or maladaptive emotional patterns.  These aversive measures do keep the blackness at bay, at least for awhile, but they don’t hold.

Life has a way of reminding us of those things we don’t want to think about: The weight of an old betrayal that we relegated to the attic of our mind threatens to break through the sagging ceiling and drop into the living room of life each time someone threatens to leave us; a shot of fear rips through our body when we pass by the craggy door of our psyche’s cellar where long-ago we banished our unwanted shame related to hurting a friend or family member; we pull the emotional curtains tight to shield us from seeing the characterological garbage we threw over the back fence of feeling.  It’s all tucked and stuffed… but not necessarily gone.

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Mar 21

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Befriending Our True Nature

You wouldn’t know it by looking at me now, but there was a time when I had luscious locks of hair – truly, it was a thing to behold!  I used to spend large chunks of my mornings carefully coaxing my hair into perfect shapes with the help of Aqua Net hairspray… (remember that stuff?)  My hair was a vital part of my identity – it was synonymous with what I knew of myself.  No doubt, I derived some of my personal worth and esteem from my hair.

Then in medical school, my hair began to “thin” (which is a euphemism for “fall out in droves”).  During that time, I would wake up in the morning with a sense of dread as I assessed the damage on my pillow.  Some mornings it looked like someone had snuck into my room in the middle of the night and rubbed their shedding cat all over my pillow.  Absolutely nightmarish.

As you might imagine, this unexpected change of events was troubling for me.  After all, I had great expectations for my hair and me – we were going places – we were going to live out our lives together in follicular bliss.  I went through the classic stages of grief: denial (for a long time), anger, bargaining, and depression.  The final stage, acceptance, eluded me for some time because it required that I look into the void – the hole in my self-worth (and on the top of my head) that was left by my over-identification with my hair.

While it is true that losing one’s hair can be difficult, many of us have lost much more.  The experience of change or of losing something dear to us is all the more difficult when it is connected with a sense of who we are… our very identity!  When we lose something that is tied to our inner worth, it can be excruciating – like a part of our very being goes away – leaving a terrible feeling of vacancy and emptiness.

Yet, the very nature of this life, this incarnated existence with our imperfect bodies and minds, is that we will experience change!  Really, the only thing we can surely count on is impermanence.  All of us have experienced change and loss… and we are bound to experience more of it.

So, this begs the question: In this sea of change – this constantly shifting landscape – how do we come to understand our true nature? Read more

Aug 6

Behind the Mask

Facing the Truth Behind the Mask

“Recovery is about living more in truth than in lies… it’s about facing reality and growing up.”

 –  Pia Mellody

 Over 2,500 years ago, in Athens Greece, playwrights like Sophocles introduced a form of theatrical art known as the tragedy.  Greek tragedies typically dealt with weighty themes such as betrayal, loss, pride, jealousy, rage, love, courage, honor, life and death.  Often these dance-dramas also explored man’s relationship with God and the existential challenges that are part the human condition.  Actors wore elaborate masks with exaggerated facial expressions so that their character’s role, emotional state, and intentions might be accessible to the audience.  Commonly, one actor played several characters during the course of the theatrical performance, changing masks for each character and sometimes for each scene.

Fast-forward to our lives today and the Greek tragedy might be used as a metaphor for some of the key aspects of recovery from trauma and addiction.  Like an actor in a play, often we are reacting to life’s existential challenges according to a script.  This script can influence how we move about on the stage of life; it can spell out our roles in relation to others, how we think and feel, and how we act in various situations.  From the first moments of conception and throughout development, by way of ongoing interactions between ourselves, others, and the environment, this narrative is written into our psychobiology – it becomes an implicit script in the mind-body system.

Moreover, similar to actors in Greek tragedies, our implicit scripts encourage the use of certain masks or personas.  In many ways, this is completely natural and necessary for a life in which we play many different roles.  For most of us, the scenes on life’s stage are constantly changing; we may transition from a family mask to a work mask, then to a friend mask, and back to a family mask, all within the course of one day.  However, unlike the actors in a Greek tragedy, for us these personas are not distinct, separate people – they are aspects of a single being, linked together by the person behind the masks.

For some of us, our own life resembles a Greek tragedy, with painful experiences of betrayal, loss, abandonment, and trauma.  These experiences are written into the mind-body script that tacitly flavors our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.  Some of these life events can be so traumatic that we don’t even want to look at the script – we would rather not face the reality of our situation, it’s just too painful.  Yet, our bodies and minds still play the part, even when we don’t pay attention to the script; something happens on the stage of life and we just react according to our past experiences, maybe without even being aware of the script. Read more