Opening to self, instead of hiding from self

Hi Reader,

A reminder: my vision for the future is “a world no longer divided by religion.” This is the context for everything I’m writing now.

I find this hard to believe, but this is the first time in eight weeks that I’ve been able to sit down during my regularly-scheduled time to write to you. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to add some ironic quotation marks: “regularly-scheduled” writing time.)

Seriously, I feel like an acorn that has just fallen in fresh, rich soil. It’s ready to go, but there’s an ice age on. Just… bad timing.

Well. None of us get to pick the timing of our lives anyway. So, let’s go nevertheless.

I’ve had a couple breakthroughs this week. One is simply realizing the extent to which I’ve been dead to myself. Really, my habitual state of being is quite numb to my feelings, my emotions, my heart, my… whatever you want to call it: higher self, soul, true self. I thought I had worked through this, but I caught a couple glimpses this week of how far I have yet to go.

This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with me. I know I’m on exactly the journey I want to be on (and that’s a big change for me). I just have a very distorted view of who the person on this journey is. When I think about my self, I pretty much always default to thinking about my mind, or my ego (I use “ego” here in a more-than Freudian sense; for those of you who aren’t familiar with the kind of depth work I’m engaged in, I owe you another post sometime describing in more detail what I mean). But my mind/ego is only a part of me. And I’m beginning to see it’s not the most important part. Had I a more healthy internal balance, my mind/ego would be in the service of my heart, rather than running the show as it so often is now.

Opening myself to my self is the work. And ongoingly so. When I allow it to happen, it seems to be a continual unfolding. Which is just like a reflection of the universe as a whole (or Kosmos, a more-holistic term I got from Ken Wilber), isn’t it? The Kosmos never stops unfolding itself into the future. Like the eternally-opening lotus flower of some spiritual traditions.

Ok, even what I’ve written so far has been very much from my mind/ego, and not from my heart. I’m avoiding something, which is the second breakthrough I wanted to share with you. Even though I’m not really ready to share it and I’m going to partially chicken out.

In a previous post I mentioned the book The Way of Integrity, by Martha Beck. I’ve been working my way through the exercises in the book, and there’s one I want to share with you. It was the one where it got really challenging, really squirmy. Beck fully acknowledges this. She says:

Believe me, she is spot on. When I sat down to do this exercise, I literally closed the book at this point and put it back on my nightstand and played another game on my phone.

So squirmy. Sooooo squirmy.

The denial thing Beck mentions is precisely what I want to share with you. What this book, and integrity in general, is pointing to is the fact that, when we hide, repress, or deny parts of ourselves, we are no longer fully in control of ourselves. Instead, the need to continue to hide, repress, and deny is what drives us. All our behavior becomes about hiding, repressing, and denying the things that we cannot, must not, allow others to see. This is what separates us from ourselves, resulting in a total lack of integrity.

(There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. It’s impossible to be human without this kind of lack of integrity. I suspect the most spiritually healthy people would be quick to confess that there are parts of themselves they hide, repress, and deny.)

There are most definitely parts of myself that I want to hide from you. From my family and friends. Even from myself. Heck, maybe more from myself than anyone else!

Yet in the last few months and especially in the past couple weeks, I see more and more clearly that until I uncover those parts of myself and accept that they are the way that I am, I can never be free.

So the night after I put the book down and played on my phone, I picked it back up and answered the first question of the exercise.

And then I put the book back down again. One question was enough.

The next night I answered two more questions. And another the following night.

Am I free yet? Have I cleaned up my internal suffering?

Of course not. This is really just practice for an activity that will last as long as I live. Best to get comfortable with it. Someday I might even be good at it. But I have to keep practicing.

Eventually I’ll get to the point where I can share these things with my family and friends, and even with you here.

But for now? Time to chicken out.

Er, well, one more thing: I thought about stopping these emails this week. It occurred to me that I’m sort of sharing about the lesson before completing the lesson. And I wondered if I might be sabotaging my progress by doing so. Well, maybe I am. Who knows? For now, at least, I will keep going, if for no other reason than because I said I would.

So thank you for being here with me. I’m truly grateful.

If you want to follow along in the lesson without reading the book, this is the question I invite you to ask yourself:

What is something I don’t want anyone to know about me?

It doesn’t have to be dire. It can be a little thing. And, you don’t have to change it. The point, in fact, is not to change it at all, but instead to just look at it.

Once you have the answer, you can practice looking at it. Maybe once a day. It only takes a minute. Notice if you squirm. Notice if it gets easier the more you look at it. Just notice what you notice. There’s nothing that’s “supposed” to happen here. It’s just practice.

One last last thing. Here’s a poem I cried over this week: