me and grab the wheel! ‘Hey, Jamie, that guy on the internet called you a wanker!’ and my attention is momentarily diverted. It only takes a second for that character to leap into the driving seat and get control of the wheel, and God help me if he gets control of the mouth or the internet. Suddenly my inner vengeful murderer has control of my email . . . arrrgh! This is truly hazardous. This is one of the areas where our faster-is-better culture really does not serve us. In the days before the internet, if I was going to write something irretrievably rude or aggressive, by the time I’d hand-written the letter, folded it and slipped it into the envelope, there’s a good chance that while licking the gum I might come to my senses, crumple up the letter and write something less petulant and destructive. Email does not afford us this luxury. All too quickly I write my confrontational reply, probably totally over-reacting to whatever I have been sent as my I’m not being treated with the respect I deserve buttons have been pressed, I hit ‘send’ and it’s over, another bridge burnt.
The truth is that when we stop looking at these characters as enemies and consider that there may be some benefit to reframing our experience of them there’s an endless harvest of treasure available. That’s right, I’m saying that even these demonic voices have a function in Life’s genius. They have illuminations within, they can show us our limiting, wounded beliefs about ourselves, they can lead us into compassion for ourselves and others, and they each have skills and gifts which may presently be applied for dysfunctional ends, but with a new dialogue they can be transformed into allies, even employees. But first, we need to be willing to step into the shadows.
CHAPTER 3
Willing to Feel
Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.
Alan Alda
One of the limiting habits we have formed as a species is always to try to and move towards comfort and push away discomfort. We feel a pain and we take a pill to make it go away, but as long as we are always trying to escape the uncomfortable we are missing half of the treasure of life. It is when we are uncomfortable that we have to reach out to others; it cultivates intimacy and trust. When we are in pain our compassion for others who are experiencing pain, too, is deeply felt, unlike the rest of the time when we are buzzing around in self-involved busyness. The dark night of the soul is one of the most growing experiences many of us ever have.
In Eckhart Tolle’s classic self-help book The Power of Now he talks about a concept which he calls ‘the pain body’. The idea is that as we grow up, our rage and our pain and our grief are often unsupported and unwelcome in our homes and schools, and much of the time we have to suppress, not express, how we feel. When we do this, remnants of that unexpressed emotion get lodged in our bodies. Week after month after year of continually not expressing these painful cries and wounds results in an accumulation of unexpressed, over-reactive emotion in us, like a large constipated lump. This is what Tolle calls ‘the pain body’, and it causes us to over-react to the challenging people and experiences we encounter every day. When someone upsets us, our reaction often bears no proportional resemblance to the size of the infraction we’ve suffered. Why? Because we are not only feeling the pain caused in that one moment, we are experiencing the pain body rearing up with the lineage of all the times someone treated us like that, back to our early childhood. All the unexpressed times when we were hurt or unjustly treated wake up, and we howl with decades of accumulated pain. It is so overwhelmingly painful that our mind holds the person who triggered us responsible for how we are feeling, and we attack or control or condemn them, trying anything to avoid feeling the accumulated pain fully.
We each have in us a unique cocktail of accumulated, unexpressed pain influencing how we react, and we all react to different triggers. Someone who upsets you might be totally benign to me, and the guy who makes me want to explode might be just vaguely annoying to you. No matter who we are, if we grew up in a home where our natural, total expression of all our hurts was unwelcome, we will each carry our own uniquely sensitive lump of unexpressed, constipated emotional gunk, usually, in my experience, lodged down our fronts from our throat to our belly. When it is triggered the contraction that happens in our body is so excruciating that we will do anything not to feel it.
This brings us back to how our bodies are hard-wired to constantly mend themselves. Yes, when we scratch our skin it heals over, and when we break a bone it magically reknits itself, but the body is even more genius than that. It knows it has this yucky, constipated lump of over-reactive emotional ‘stuff’ lodged in its torso and so is understandably on a daily mission to flush that shit out.
It is almost as if each annoying experience is tailor-made to awaken a lump of that pain body so that it starts to feel itself intensely, and if we are skilful we can participate in the body/mind’s genius process of clearing out that day’s cupful of emotional gunk. If we resist and control and suppress that feeling, then it gets pushed back under, waiting for another day, another trigger, to give it a chance to release. But if we are willing to feel, we have a chance, day by day, cupful by cupful, to allow Life’s genius to move it all through. From this perspective, the challenging people and trigger situations of our lives are really walking laxatives sent to help us discharge all that emotional constipation.
ASTRAL ANUSES
In ancient China the dominant philosophical principle from around the fourth century BCE was the Tao, which roughly translates as the Way. They weren’t busy worshipping anything or anyone but they were scientifically, and meticulously, generation by generation, mapping the pathways that this life force (Chi) moves around our bodies. To give you an example of what we mean by Chi, think of an apple that’s just been picked from the tree. When you first hold it in your hand it is firm, full of juice, full of life, full of Chi, but if you leave it on the table for a couple of weeks you will see its skin begin to sag and its firmness soften as gradually all its Chi leaks out of it. The human body is the same. Early in life we are full of Chi, our skin is tight and supple, we have lots of energy, and we heal quickly, but later on as we reach old age we have far less Chi and our skin is beginning to wrinkle and sag, our self-healing capacity is drastically reduced, and our ability to leap around withers year by year.
The ancient Chinese developed systems to cultivate lots of life force and came up with methods to make sure you waste the minimum amount of it as you go through your life, so that you can meet old age with more ease and longevity. Practices they developed such as Tai Chi (literally meaning ‘Big Chi’) and Chi Kung are becoming more and more popular here in the West for facilitating health and wellbeing. It is not only keeping the body healthy that conserves and cultivates Chi; the way we think plays a significant role. If we are relaxed and calm we don’t waste so much Chi, but if we are hectic and constantly upsetting ourselves with inner and outer conflicts, we use up our reserves of Chi and end up exhausted and depressed.
The Taoists taught that the ability to be mindful of all this and to, above all, be aware and present with how we are breathing, is the key to conserving and cultivating our life force and living a healthier and more contented life. They have all kinds of practices where when you feel into yourself, you can sense that your stomach is feeling blocked or your throat is feeling tight and you can participate with the body’s genius in releasing any blockages so that the Chi can flow smoothly and unhindered around its pathways. All illnesses, the ancient Taoists believed, are the result of blockages in the complex Chi pathways of the body. Have you ever had acupuncture or seen the acupuncture map of all those pathways? Those are the major and minor Chi channels that the life force travels along, and Chinese medicine is all about helping it flow correctly to keep you well. Here is a big difference between Eastern and Western medicine. In Western medicine, we go and see a doctor only when something’s
