Beyond Broken

Self Exploration

Real But Not True

 

According to Tsoknyi Rinpoche,  a most beloved contemporary Tibetan Buddhist meditation masters, to have an open heart and open mind we must develop a deeper understanding of the patterns that drive our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.  Then we will not so easily surrender to the impulse to blindly follow them.

I happened to be reading his book, Open Heart, Open Mind: Awakening the Power of the Essence Love, as I was crossing the International Dateline around the Bering Straits on my way to Tokyo to teach a class on Images. (The Pathwork terms for false beliefs and conclusions formed in early childhood.)

Tsoknyi Rinpoche continues to say that patterns are hard to change, especially the ones that are embedded in our unconscious or even our pre-verbal nervous systems.   This reminds me of Pathwork Lecture #201, which I am preparing to teach. It talks about the negative force field that images create as they go unexamined. The lectures defines images as a “force field of distorted ideas”.  “… it is like a deeply imprinted motor mechanism set in motion with great energy.  Thus a stronger energy is required to deactivate this motor force and change the negative force field into a positive one.”

After going through the hard work of uncovering your patterns or images, Rinpoche suggests a mantra, which is a time honored method of talking to your thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes called prayer, it is a means of opening up a conversation between the heart and the mind.   His mantra is a simple four word phrase: Real, But Not True.

What I love about this prayer is that it acknowledges the young one in us who came up with this group of distorted ideas and conclusions.  To this young one our conclusion about ourselves, about life, about God are absolutely real.  But as we shine a light on them with our adult consciousness they are also absolutely not true.

To find images we have to look back on our lives, the ways we define ourselves, the pressures that were applied by the people around us and the culture in which we were raised.

In the process of teaching Images in Japan my husband and I find our intertwined images, which are always at work in relationships.  My image:  “If I am sick and suffering then I will get the attention I need.”  This comes from my young one who watched my mother, sick and suffering and sucking all the attention and energy out of our household, leaving none left for me.  It seems so clear to my little one if I can be sick like my mother then all that attention will be mine.  Of course the attention I want the most is from my husband.  His image: “My attention does not matter or will be used by others to manipulate me”  I try desperately to get his attention and he tries desperately to avoid being manipulated by me by withholding it.  And round and round the negative force field we go.

This is a spectacular example of the truism: we teach what we most need to learn!

Sometimes images or patterns help us avoid feelings like being alone and neglected in my case or being invaded and used in my husband’s.  But I also learned while teaching that sometimes images are put in place as a sacrifice to try and save our families.  One student took the blame for everything that ever happened in his family.  He sacrificed his need for fairness and justice.  This was a huge sacrifice. When he realized what he had done he wailed with grief.  We all know how important fairness is to children.

Tara Brach has more to say about Real, but not true. “What this means is that, while thoughts are really happening and there is a real biochemistry that accompanies them, they are only representations in our mind. They are not the experience of this living moment. We can begin to identify and challenge limiting beliefs by starting with the simple question: What am I believing right now? And then: Is this true? Is it possible that this is real but not true? Our beliefs fuel our sense of separateness. Uninvestigated, they are a veil between us and reality; they actually prevent us from seeing truth.”

 

 

 

 

AWAKE

 

“I just realized something important”

My husband and I recently taught a workshop in Vermont about the Spirituality of Relationships—the title of a Pathwork Lecture—but the workshop was really about love.

I was walking in the woods a few days later with nothing particular on my mind and started to think about a woman I know who wanted to become a mother about 10 years ago. She told me she was going to manifest this.  She was older at the time and I was cynical.  By that point I had had many failed attempts at having a child.

I will tell anyone who will listen that not having a child is my biggest disappointment or regret in my life.  As I walked through the woods I began to think about disappointment and regret and my story about it began to turn upside down. A new truth emerged.  My friend had  approached being a mother with a full open heart. My approach was different.  I had conditions.  I had wanted a baby of my own with my husband, Tom. I could feel the constraints I put on my heart.  And therefore I could  feel that I had created different results than my friend whose son is now nine years old.  There was no judgement about the different results I had created and I do not wish for my friend’s life, but my sad story seemed to vanish in the light of the truth of my own creation.

I felt incredibly empowered and knew that something really important had happened that was going to change the dynamics in my family.  I began to feel into the subtle tension I bring to our family gatherings—a vigilant, focused attention on “who is getting how much of what”.  I feel that I must get my share (especially of the grandchildren) given that I did not have children of my own.  The tension contained a demand.  By Friday of the same week our family was assembled for our last birthday party of the summer.

The change was amazing.  I was able able to relax and just be with everyone.  I noticed how much attention I did get, how much joy and love was present in our family without needing anything extra.

This made me think about what the Pathwork teaches us, that cause and effect only seem spread out over time because of our time/space relationship on this plane of existence, and that it is actually immediate in the reality of greater unitive conscious.  Cause and effect collapse into all cause.

In another example this week,  the woman of a couple I work with wanted to unpack what happened to her on a family trip.  One day she was letting in the love of her family, especially the love of her niece, and the next day it felt like she lost it.  Her niece let her in and then shut her out.  She went from blaming and shaming herself to blaming her niece (which is what we do—we go to the hard pain) when we do not want to feel the softer pain.  I asked her to track what she was feeling back to the softer feelings and she was feeling a broken heart.  This creates an apparent dilemma for her as she has a real need to love and it comes for her naturally.  In that moment the time/space continuum collapses again and I realize that needing to love and having our hearts broken are not separate.  They go together.  Her partner says, “we think we will love at one time and then sometime in the future we might get our hearts broken but actually it is all going on at the same time.” “Exactly,” I say, “it is all cause—the future effect is an illusion. She realizes how love and heart break are inseparable.  In this place there is no duality, there is no victim or perpetrator.  The world is truly benign, as the Pathwork Guide promises us, and we are truly mini gods creating all our experiences in every moment.

Stand Your Ground

This summer our 5 year old is venturing out into the ocean but he needs to hold hands for support when the big waves hit.  When the big wave approaches I say to him, “stand your ground, buddy” over and over again. My wish is that he remember this as metaphor for the rest of his life.  As I say it to him over and over again, I am learning to stand my ground.

Boundaries are something that did not exist in many chaotic households, or they were held inconsistently.  And I am finding that many of the people I work with have never experienced healthy, safe, flexible boundaries.  As one person put it recently, “I either shut down completely behind my wall or I am wide open with my heart fully exposed”.  The first approach is not a boundary but a defense and the second approach is a merging which is unhealthy and leads to co-dependency and loss of self.

Brene Brown has done the most beautiful work around boundaries that I have discovered.  It came out of extensive research that she did.  She wanted to know what qualities contributed to the most compassionate people.  She began by interview clergy and other known types of compassionate people.  Her hypothesis was that compassionate people were also spiritual people and that spirituality contributed to compassion.  What she found out was very shocking to her and it might be to you too.  She found that the most compassionate people are the people who have the best boundaries.

She uses the acronym BIG for her boundary discussion.  BIG becomes an amazing question.  Here is how it goes:

What Boundaries do I need so that I can be in my Integrity and be most Generous towards you?

As one friend pointed out, we often try and do GIB, and that doesn’t work.  We often think we should be generous.  Aren’t good people generous?  And then we find we have gotten out of alignment with our integrity and wonder what boundaries we might need or should have put in place and didn’t.

As I have worked with this notion of boundaries and generosity with myself and others I find this miraculous thing happens.  Let’s say there is a conflict with another person.  We are considering having it out with them.  Hashing out what is wrong, all our hurt feelings, etc.  And then we consider maybe a boundary would help.  When we energetically feel a boundary — like a transparent cloth over our hearts or a piece of lucite (letting light in and out but a boundary none the less) — everything changes.  We feel the boundary.  We are inside and the other is outside.  We have a parameter around us, there is a border between us and the other.  In this act of protection  and self designation, we instantly can feel more generous towards the other person.  The grievances or issues seem to vanish as we feel secure and unharmed inside ourselves.

I spoke to a friend about BIG yesterday and as she carefully took in what I was saying she said she felt I was talking about creating order.  Boundaries do create order where otherwise there is the potential for chaos.

Try standing your ground first with a simple boundary based on your own integrity and watch your generosity and true compassion grow.  It is straightforward and easy and works instantly.

 

 

 

“If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it” Richard Rohr

or, “The Doom Loop of Righteous Indignation”

I have been having a lot of encounters with people lately who have very strong opinions about our political and humanitarian situations and global issues threatening our planet.

The thing is, I usually agree with whatever they are saying, since we all typically surround ourselves with those who think like us and agree with our point of view.  But I hate the conversations.  The energy between us feels negative before I have said a word and I begin looking for distractions or ways to change the subject.

As the conversation progresses (mostly one sided) I get more and more desperate to escape. Then, if it is a good day,  I am able to find my curiosity and wonder what pain is driving this negativity.  I look into the eyes of the person talking and they look angry and somewhat vacant.  They are not really connecting with me, they are spewing rhetoric or perhaps well reasoned thoughts. But why the rant?

If I ask, (or they may tell me anyway), they say “We have to take a stand, we have to make a difference.”  And I wonder how more righteous indignation and pain will make a difference in our world.

I listened to an inspiring dialogue yesterday between Russell Brand and Brene Brown.  Their conversation spanned many topics, but inevitable led into politics and planetary concerns.  They discussed how politics can never be separated from spirituality (Brene defines spirituality as love, compassion, kindness and oneness.)  They conclude that since our politics are about humanity they must include these very human qualities.

The Pathwork teaches us about hard and soft pain.  First we feel soft pain, then we cut off from these tender, vulnerable feelings and split into hard pain, kind of a doom loop.  I see it as continuous loopy, angry, orange spirals.  The hard pain keeps us thinking dualistically, saying  “either there is something wrong with me or there is something wrong with you.”  And it is repetitive and can be both addictive and disheartening.

We split from the soft pain because we have trained ourselves not to feel it and it requires the ability to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole.  Splitting is a common defense mechanism.  Most of us split into black and white thinking or good and bad thinking.  But this is simply a strategy to avoid pain.

The way out of this doom loop is to notice when you are in it and trace your steps back to the soft pain.  The anger and indignation turns to sadness,  the grievances turn to grief.  The magic of this process is that when we feel the soft pain it moves through us and settles us.  We are now in our real selves, in our present moment.  It is a relief and it is both simple and takes a lot of effort to do this over and over again each time we find ourselves hard and unfeeling.

Brene Brown suggests that what we are seeing today in our world is the last stand of “white male power-over” dynamics. She points out that last stands are always ugly.

One of my dear friends has made many trips to Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of a massacre of around 300 men, women and children.  It is a pilgrimage for her.  She is quiet about it but just keeps going back to one of the places of pain strongly symbolizing the dominance of “white male power-over” in this country.  She seeks a deepening of her spirituality and she turns to a painful place for this.

What if we made pilgrimages to painful places instead of devotional shrines or aspirational holy ground?  What if the painful place is the holy ground of being human? What if it leads us to know our humanity and that of others, versus pretending that our humanity is uniquely ours but is not granted to others, especially those different from us?

Look at the image at the top of the page closely.  Under the self assured man and women with their fingers pointing are little struggling, suffering, sweaty beings.  When I find myself in the unpleasantly indignant conversations I try to tune into the suffering one under all the bravado and strong opinions. They are often obfuscated by all the noise but I feel them anyway.  It is painful.

 

 

 

“I know I am imperfect, but I make believe I am not”

A collaboration of various authors on the subject of the Idealized Self Image, the damage it does and the promise of recovery  – into our sacred humanness.  Our true nature.  Thank you to all you brave souls who contributed. 

Image Above – The Idealized Self Image as Constructed by Susan G. — variegated cardboard is material she visualized, flimsy and inadequate for supporting all the structures she puts on top.  She adorns it with various ornamentation – random, without coherence.  This is a beautiful portrayal of the idealized self.  Individually each piece representing a belief about life and ourselves, makes sense but the overall construction … well draw your own conclusions!

A Pathwork Lecture says, “As a child, regardless of what your particular circumstances were, you were indoctrinated with admonitions on the importance of being good, holy, perfect.  When you were not, you were often punished in one way or another.  Perhaps the worst punishment was that your parents withdrew their affection from you; they were angry, and you had the impression you were no longer loved.  No wonder “badness” associated itself with punishment and unhappiness, “goodness” with reward and happiness.  Hence to be “good” and “perfect” became an absolute must; it became a question of life or death for you.  Still you knew perfectly well that you were not as good and as perfect as the world seemed to expect you to be.  This truth had to be hidden; it became a guilty secret, and you started to build a false self.” PWL #83

I am working with several people who are doing the sacred work of deconstructing the mask of the Idealized Self that they have constructed over so many years.  The Idealized Self Image is what the Pathwork calls the perfectionist standards that we hold ourselves to and present to the world.  The ISI is made of many images  (beliefs about the world and ourselves that we formed during our sorting and categorizing stage of our brain development.  My four year old grandchild is doing this now.  “I have a penis, Daddy has a penis  – you and Mommy do not have penises”.  The conclusions he will draw about men and women will form a lasting image that will become unconscious because of his young age.  Many images also contain conclusions about cause and effect.  The young one trying to make order and sense out of the world.  If I do this _______ then that ________ will always happen.  We have a myth is our family – if you wear your pajamas inside out it will snow when you wake up the next morning.  Some of our unconscious images can be just as magical or erroneous as this one and make little sense in the light of day of our grown up psyches.

Here is one example.  It begins with her belief  that, “I am  special and therefore inoculated against anything bad happening to me.”  (We can smile at the magical thinking of her little one). “Next, something bad does happen.  Then I decides I better hide and make myself  small.” (This plays out in adulthood with eating disorders and other issues). ” But then I am hungry, and so lonely and so afraid.  If I keep making myself a better (special) person maybe that will help. But then I fail at my expectations and bad things keep happening and I hide and get small again.  The world feels like a very unsafe place.”  This is something that all Idealized Self Images have in common.  The world does not feel safe.

Someone else has a different cascade of images that leads him to loneliness and often severe depression.  Here is how his goes:

“I cannot feel support, If I were to feel support then it would not be enough.  If the support  is not enough then I am alone.  If I am all alone then I am not enough.  If I am not enough then life is hopeless (here is where the depression begins).  “If life is hopeless than I have to try harder.  If I try harder then it is never enough.  I give up any hope of relationship.  Then I am really alone.”  This one is a bit trickier.  His Idealized Self Image rests in not needing support, in being able to do it all by himself. and with an arrogance that he will do it better than anyone anyway.  But it does leave him frightened and alone.  Because deep down inside we do not believe the story of  our ISI’s.  We present it to the world but we know it are false.

In these two cases you can see two tendencies of the ISI  combined:  over-exacting moral standards – impossible to live up – and pride in being invulnerable, aloof, and superior.  The co-existence of these mutually exclusive strategies presents a particular hardship for the psyche.

Another person is very accomplished in her field.  Yet she cannot relax into all her accomplishments because, though they are true and well earned, she also has these over-exacting standards that she knows in her heart of hearts she cannot live up to.  This makes her constantly vigilant that she will be discovered as a fraud – exposed.

“A further and drastic result of this problem is the constantly increasing estrangement from the real self.  The idealized self is a falsity.  It is a rigid, artificially constructed imitation of a live human being.” PWL 83

 It can be hard work to excavate the real self amidst this life long construction project of the false self.   Another person  writes, “Yes, it (the ISI) needs to somehow, at some point, be replaced. Talk about being disoriented!!  Sometimes love just seems so much like the lack of it.  So imperfect.  And yet in its imperfection, stronger, more pure, more meaningful.  Sacredly human.  It feels so scary to trust this imperfection.”

Another person writes:

“My mask of love was so thick and layered with the mask of power and then surrender if all else failed.  I was aware of this for decades before I could find a way out.  These days I am risking it all to live authentically – with my flaws and the truth that I will always be in recovery and wishing to find underneath it all what of the joy, love, giving and effort I launched into life which is actually real. Today I pray – to be real, to feel and sense and speak truth – and to stay close to me.  A me I never sensed, while in the frenzy to flee and function.”

There is so much creativity. hard work and hope in these examples of deep excavation, art work and writing.  I hope you will feel the hope too and join us in embarking on trusting your imperfect, human self.  Staying close to yourself – who you really are – makes the world a much safer place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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