under these safe circumstances, drop away in that game, and there’s a sense of wholeness, of coming home, which isn’t only a relief to the individual but also to everyone else around them. There’s something really uncomfortable, even claustrophobic, about being in the presence of someone else’s suppression.
We are each of us uniquely sculpted by our formative years, but the only one who can go in and harvest all that treasure we’ve buried is us.
The student says to the guru: ‘I want liberation.’
The guru replies: ‘Who is restraining you?’
The irony is that even though we live in terror of anyone seeing these shameful and unwelcome aspects of ourselves, all the treasure we want for our creativity and our relationships lies buried in the shadows. These parts of ourselves have gifts, they have life, they are full of dimension and intensity, but we’ve pushed them away for fear of rejection. What if we’re missing the real invitation and potential here? As Jung said, if we are willing to explore beyond the ‘persona’, the mask that we put on during the day, and accept all the defects and ugly bits we find in the shadows, it is then that we get to connect with the source, where our instincts become stronger, our emotions freer and our perceptions wider. My experience is that it is so much more efficient and inspiring to explore ways to play with those buried parts. Some of the greatest and most compelling characters in literature are the villains and the psychos, all born from the darker, less acceptable realms of the writer. It is when the hero goes into the darkest part of the forest that he discovers the gold or the secret of life. It is when the princess is willing to kiss the frog that she finds her prince. If you and I are to be free and play from a full deck then there’s nothing we can push away. All that sometimes uncomfortable energy we’ve been taught not to feel is the fodder for our growth and intimacy. The most touching, melancholy poems and music, the most thrilling sex games and the most genius, evil mischief all arise from the willingness to go beyond this safe and ‘appropriate’ version of ourselves.
When we allow in more and more of ourselves we become available for intimacy. When I am more visible in who I am, I become a walking permission slip for you to lighten up about your own edges. I invite you to be genuine and relaxed around me instead of manufacturing a ‘version’ of you which you’ve groomed to be ‘acceptable’. How exhausting! How much of your day is spent wearing masks for people who would only accept you when you wear that mask? Surely these are the very people you don’t want to hang out with! Why am I exhausting myself wearing masks for the very people I don’t want to hang out with? It has got to be a better idea to gently remove the masks, layer by layer, and see who stays. Those are the people who really love us. Those are the people I want to create with and live with.
By rooting our projects, our art and relationships in visibility we make contact with the authentic nature of whoever comes into contact with us, and that recognition is the intimacy we’re all looking for.
CHAPTER 2
Hiding Demons
Projection of our own shadow makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face.
Carl Jung
How many of us grew up in a family where our rage was supported? Anger is a natural and essential element of the spectrum of human emotion. We all have it, but if, while we were growing up, we were shut down or told off every time we got angry, we soon learned that expressing our rage was unacceptable and would result in a telling off or worse. ‘How dare you speak like that to your mother?!’ We learn to suppress, not express, our rage, and month after month, year after year, all that non-expression accumulates in us, creating a mini pressure cooker ready to react and explode.
What happens to all those parts of ourselves we attempt to edit away? These essential parts of ourselves are impossible to amputate. The best we can hope to do is suppress them, bury them in the basement somewhere out of sight, but because these aspects of us are alive, it is impossible to eradicate them completely. In fact, ironically, it seems that, like a beach ball pushed down under the water, the deeper we try and bury them the more violently they spring back up. There’s a reason they say ‘beware the anger of the quiet man’. The more we try to deny and keep a lid on these demons, the more likely they are to suddenly leak into our everyday lives in unexpected, self-sabotaging episodes.
If we are too successful in our suppression, and we bury something so deep that it never gets expressed, then in the dark it continues to grow, but without any outward expression it has to turn inward and become a disease. Life will find its way of expressing, and if we don’t participate and allow it to be expressed outwardly in a safe context, as energy can never be cancelled out or destroyed, it finds a way to feed itself in the dark.
REPAIR WITH GOLD
The human body is the most amazing self-mending machine we know of in the universe. We take it for granted of course, but isn’t it amazing that when we scratch our skin, it heals itself? If we break a bone, it knits itself back together. Deepak Chopra talks about the human body as being ‘an exquisite pharmacy’. While we go about our lives, our body is scanning for viruses and bacteria, it is making its own drugs! Secreting substances from glands and then administering them to us in the perfect quantities day and night while we work, play and sleep.
The body is hard-wired to mend itself, no matter what, but it is not just on the material plane that it is self-mending. It is also hard-wired to mend itself on the emotional and mental planes. Despite all these ways we’ve edited ourselves down, all the snips and cuts and clever ways we’ve found to edit away these essential parts of ourselves, the body and Life itself is working round the clock to un-edit us, to restore the unapologetic, complete version of ourselves that we began as. Life has no choice but to do this; we are hard-wired to constantly mend ourselves. So no matter how successful we think we are being at manicuring this appropriate person to please the world, Life has other plans. Have you noticed this?
Have you noticed how whatever you push away keeps coming back, knocking at the door? More than that, the deeper you have buried it, the more forcefully it needs to get your attention. The more you deny and disown something, the more Life has to almost break the door down to get to you. There seems to be no escaping yourself. It reminds me of something my folks would say to me when I was not co-operating at bedtime: ‘Do you want to go to bed the easy way or the hard way?’ As the Zen proverb says, ‘Let go or be dragged’, because Life will evolve you whether you come kicking and screaming or agree to participate and make it easier on yourself. ‘Bedtime’ comes for us all, whether we make it easy or hard on ourselves. I have discovered when I become a willing participant in this process my life treats me more gently, but it requires a total reframing of how I’ve been taught to experience my life.
Most of us have been uploaded with the basic human software, Victim 101, where we view the unexpected and challenging people and situations that cross our paths as problems, as things we have to suffer, as things that are ‘happening to us’. It takes a great leap of faith to imagine during these uncomfortable moments that there might be a deeper intelligence at work which is in constant connection to our state of being and doing its best to invite us back to our juicy, unedited selves.
Let’s upgrade our internal software from Victim 101 to Warrior 305.
Here’s an example: from the usual perspective, the people who irritate us are annoying things we have to put up with, but from the reframing stance of ‘Life is trying to show me something’ there’s a whole new level of data to explore. The person who annoys you might not bug me at all, and you might well be totally immune to the people who drive me crazy. It is almost as if the people who irritate us have been sent over specially by some sort of Central Casting agency to be just the kind of arsehole who pisses us off.
