Doing taxes tonight, with support from a friend. Certain activities have an immediate depressive effect on me - I become very sluggish, sullen, unwilling to put up with anything. I need my house mortgage statement - dark forces well up inside as I reach for a pile of paper. Suppressed rage, feeling hopeless, controlled. The absurdity of the questions on TurboTax galls me.
The feelings are so out of proportion to the stimulus that if this were not a common occurrance, I would question my sanity. I feel like a small child, angry and humiliated, being forced to do something I hate, having no say and no power. Obvious regression here - scenes of my mother standing tall over me, glaring down to watch as I erase the pencil marks from the wall. The sense of powerlessness and hatred are strong.
Why this task, and not another? In the past four months I have let go of so much resentment and bitterness towards the world. Yet some triggers linger. It is so clear in others - I see a friend go into a rage at an innocent statement, and he sputters incoherently and leaves angry. Only several days' distance allows him to see the strangeness of his own actions.
Our brains regularly misfunction, causing untold pain and destruction, yet we are so used to it, we don't even notice it. "Oh, he's just having a bad day." "She was so furious she threw dishes at him." "Yeah, he drinks a lot ever since his mother died." Like the cell phone, we know to expect signal loss and static, and we think nothing of it, but if our land phone did that, we would be furious.
We turn the wheel in the car left, and the car goes left. If it went right, even one percent of the time, the car would be totally unacceptable to us. Yet our minds desire to diet, but we eat the cake. We intend to be loving to our children, and wind up yelling at them. We want peace, yet we go to war. Something is wrong. Our minds are broken. We don't act consistently according to our own intent.
Actually, given that our minds are the byproduct of an unintelligent process of survival of the species, it is astounding that we can think at all. Logic came to our minds because we survived better than creatures that could not use logic. It is like learning that two plus two equals four through trial and error instead of through logic. No wonder that millions of years of instinctual living regularly interfere with this quirky new capability of the mind we call reason.
We are largely unfit for a world that demands us to be reasonable.
Monday, March 31, 2003
Light and Shadow
Last night, in counseling a friend, she asked if she was guilty of making a bad situation happen because of some secret harbored resentment she might have. The inclination we have in counseling is to steer someone away from guilt, to assure them it is not their fault, to help them feel good about themselves. Instead, the influence of Pathwork caused me to tell her to honestly look to see if there was resentment there, and if it had influenced her in some way.
It is a delicate balance. Many of us, especially those of us who have been abused, have blamed ourselves and suffered under terrible guilt for years, and only by placing the blame where it belongs do we find liberation from the devistating self-abuse of shame. However, there is also a tremendous relief experienced when a person uncovers some negative motivation within them and can honestly admit to having it, acting upon it, and even enjoying it. It is the relief of no longer having to hide who we are.
The trick in acknowledging our negative qualities is this: we must understand that all humans have qualities of selfishness, ill intent, jealousy, fear, as well as qualities of compassion, altruism, delight in the good fortune of others. The negative qualities do not make us bad; they are not all we are. In fact, they are a very small portion of who we are.
When we do not acknowledge our faults, then we become victims of our own nature: "I couldn't help it" "Society/my parents/my gender made me this way." As a victim of a force we deem we can't control, we become exactly what we fear - a creature that is inherently flawed. By shunning responsibility for our actions, we cause the blame to fall on our nature instead. When we acknowledge and embrace the part we play in our own dysfunction, in the sabotage of our own lives, we both acknowledge that it was a choice, and therefore could be different, and acknowledge that we who dislike our own action are creatures who strive for something higher. Thus, fully acknowledging and embracing our shadows causes us to recognize that we are not what we are embracing. If we have a shadow, it is only because we are living in light.
It is a delicate balance. Many of us, especially those of us who have been abused, have blamed ourselves and suffered under terrible guilt for years, and only by placing the blame where it belongs do we find liberation from the devistating self-abuse of shame. However, there is also a tremendous relief experienced when a person uncovers some negative motivation within them and can honestly admit to having it, acting upon it, and even enjoying it. It is the relief of no longer having to hide who we are.
The trick in acknowledging our negative qualities is this: we must understand that all humans have qualities of selfishness, ill intent, jealousy, fear, as well as qualities of compassion, altruism, delight in the good fortune of others. The negative qualities do not make us bad; they are not all we are. In fact, they are a very small portion of who we are.
When we do not acknowledge our faults, then we become victims of our own nature: "I couldn't help it" "Society/my parents/my gender made me this way." As a victim of a force we deem we can't control, we become exactly what we fear - a creature that is inherently flawed. By shunning responsibility for our actions, we cause the blame to fall on our nature instead. When we acknowledge and embrace the part we play in our own dysfunction, in the sabotage of our own lives, we both acknowledge that it was a choice, and therefore could be different, and acknowledge that we who dislike our own action are creatures who strive for something higher. Thus, fully acknowledging and embracing our shadows causes us to recognize that we are not what we are embracing. If we have a shadow, it is only because we are living in light.
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What I hope to use this for is a journal of my thoughts as I work on personal transformation, working with clients on their personal transformation, and working with my community on creating something new, daring, different, difficult, but hopefully deeply rewarding. This format allows me to just drone on and on instead of carefully picking my words. And while that can be boring, I feel that something is lost to organization, and that the raw flow of thoughts contains more of the stuff of life than books and lectures. I have no idea how often I will post, but I hope to do so more or less daily, just for the discipline of expressing my thoughts on a regular basis.
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