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Self Awareness

By

Table of con­tents for voice of the body

  1. Body Voices
  2. Lost in Thought
  3. Ground­ing Your Self
  4. Cen­ter­ing
  5. Pas­sion for Life
  6. Sacred Sex­u­al­ity
  7. Self Aware­ness
  8. Com­pas­sion
  9. Self-less Expres­sion
  10. The Zen of Insight
  11. Crown­ing Glory
A Word from Wayne

It’s been a while since I’ve writ­ten a per­sonal note, and I thought I might do this more often.

First of all, this BLOG is a con­tin­u­a­tion of our old e-zine “Into the Cen­tre,” and last month, we turned 9! There was a two year period when I wrote 2 times a month—otherwise, it’s been weekly. I haven’t done the math, but that’s a cou­ple of articles.

In keep­ing with that, I trust you enjoy this BLOG. If so, please rec­om­mend it to your friends, and encour­age them to sign up to receive it. That’s easy to do. Just send them to the online BLOG for any arti­cle, and they can sign up.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any­thing actively to solicit new read­ers and I’d really appre­ci­ate any help you could give me.

The other thing I’d like to ask is that you make a con­tri­bu­tion. I picked that word inten­tion­ally, because I have three things in mind.

1) Con­sider writ­ing an arti­cle, or leav­ing a com­ment.
You’re always wel­come to send me an arti­cle for con­sid­er­a­tion. If you want to leave a com­ment, all you have to do is click on the article’s title in the e-mail, which will take you to the online BLOG , and I just scroll down to the bot­tom of the arti­cle and leave a comment.

2) Make a sug­ges­tion.
There are four or so more arti­cles in this series, and after that I’m open to what­ever direc­tion you’d like to see, as far as top­ics go, for the BLOG. My intent is to be more Zen focused, but let me know if that works for you.

I just put together a sur­vey! (If the sur­vey doesn’t show up below, click the link!

3) Make a finan­cial con­tri­bu­tion. It goes with­out say­ing that this BLOG never has been, and never will be, a money-making propo­si­tion. My goal is always to pro­vide you with excel­lent con­tent on top­ics you want to read about. On the other hand, I think my con­tent is valu­able. It takes four to five hours per week to write, edit, do the HTML, and post these arti­cles.
Please, if what I’m doing is valu­able to you, con­sider a monthly or yearly dona­tion to the cause.

A New Series—The Body Speaks
voice of body

(In the first in this series of arti­cles, I pro­vided you with a handy lit­tle chart that pro­vides the loca­tion, descrip­tion, and char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Chakras. Use the link if you want to refer to it.)

Today, we’ll have a look at the 3rd Chakra

3rd chakra

The 3rd Chakra is located at the solar plexus. Its zone runs from the belly but­ton to the solar plexus, and on the back from an inch or so above the pelvis to the mid back.

The major organ con­tained in this zone is the stomach.

If you been fol­low­ing along, you might have noticed an add a cou­ple of weeks ago for our med­i­ta­tion work­shops. By the way, we still got a cou­ple of slots for the 24th of May, if you’re inter­ested. See the ad below.

Work­shops, Retreats!

A New Workshop!

A Seven Hour Work­shop
Peace, Pres­ence, Contentment—Mindfulness Train­ing

on May 24, 2008, 9–5

Dar­bella and I can help you to find a new, vibrant, rich path. We offer day-long and week­end events —just you and us—and we will work with you, to be the change you want to see.

Read about it here:

Day-long Inten­sives
Week­end Residentials

Any­way, Wednes­day nights are med­i­ta­tion teach­ing nights here at Casa MacAllen. A cou­ple of weeks ago, one of the par­tic­i­pants men­tioned that her mom was vis­it­ing, that this was stress­ful, and that her stom­ach hurt. As she was walk­ing out the door, I laughed and said, “Mom’s a bit hard to swal­low, eh?” I was jok­ing, and I wasn’t kidding.

In this zone, it’s the stom­ach that most often gives us trouble.

As an exam­ple, if you have to get up and make a speech, and you’re not com­fort­able doing that, all of a sud­den, you notice that your stom­ach is queasy. It’s not that you’re afraid of the audience—it’s not about some­thing exter­nal. What’s going on here is that we are not com­fort­able in our own skins. In this case, we think that the audi­ence is going to see right through us.

How­ever, as usual, it’s not about them, it’s about us.

In Car­olyn Myss’ “Anatomy of the Spirit,” Myss describes this zone as the zone of self-esteem.

I’ve been think­ing about that, and while I “get” the whole self esteem idea, this is one of those terms that can be badly mis­un­der­stood. Being the Zen guy that I am, I’d much rather head down the path of self accep­tance — that’s what this arti­cle is going to be about.

The prob­lem with self-esteem

North Amer­i­cans tend to equate self-esteem with pride, pos­i­tive think­ing, and elim­i­nat­ing every­thing that could be con­sid­ered “bad.”

It’s almost as if peo­ple think that the goal of life is to repress the “bad list” while mag­ni­fy­ing the “good list.” It’s like that song lyric,

“You’ve gotta accen­tu­ate the pos­i­tive, 
Elim­i­nate the neg­a­tive,

Latch on to the affir­ma­tive,
Don’t mess with Mis­ter In-Between.”

Prob­lem is, no one has ever pulled off this trick, and it’s a sure­fire recipe for mis­ery. You see,

Mr. In-Between is actu­ally right on track, at least from a Zen perspective.

The prob­lem with all this pos­i­tive think­ing non­sense is that it sim­ply doesn’t work. Here’s how it goes:

  • you might get a moment’s peace, and start to believe that all that strain­ing to be good is a great idea.
  • And then life hap­pens, and what­ever nor­mally goes on for you pops right back to the foreground.
  • Then you flip to con­demn­ing your­self, blam­ing your­self, mak­ing life hard to stomach.

Ben Wong and Jock McK­een have writ­ten that the ego has only two func­tions. The first is to say, “Try harder and you’ll be per­fect.” Then, when you fail, (because per­fec­tion is impos­si­ble,) the ego says, “You are such an idiot. But if only you’d try harder, you could be per­fect.” It’s an end­less loop, and a no-win situation.

Carl Jung was an amaz­ing psy­chother­a­pist, and was able to see the magic and mys­tery of life. He, I believe, was the first to coin the idea of The Shadow side of our­selves, which is like the “bag we drag.”

shadow

What’s hid­den in the “bag you drag???”

He said that, around the time we get to be six months old, we end up with this lit­tle, tiny bag — it’s sort of the bag that soci­ety pro­vides us with, so that we have a place to “stuff all the stuff” soci­ety tells us is unacceptable.

Par­ents are end­lessly mod­i­fy­ing the behav­ior of their children

—and do so ver­bally and non­ver­bally. The rea­son my Wednes­day night friend is hav­ing stom­ach prob­lems is that her mom con­tin­ues to be her mom. Her mom shows up, and my friend sets off in her­self the same reac­tion as when she was a child. She feels repressed and controlled—and she has a dim feel­ing of her Shadow Self.

In fact, she even said that she didn’t want her mother influ­enc­ing her chil­dren the way she’d influ­enced her.

When you’re a kid, you don’t have much choice here

— par­ents are big­ger and pretty much have their own way of mak­ing you behave. So, whole aspects of your per­son­al­ity, your skill set, and your emo­tional set gets stuffed into the bag.

sack

I got a sack on my back, and don’t even know it…ain’t life grand!!!

And the bag gets big­ger and big­ger. By the time we head off to work, or go to col­lege, the bag may be 20 or 30 feet long. We’re drag­ging it, and don’t even know it.

All we know is that some­thing doesn’t feel quite right, and it feels like the weight of the world is on our shoulders.

Thus, the 60s ques­tion, “What’s your bag, man?” Is actu­ally a pretty good question.

Self accep­tance, on the other hand, is all about the recog­ni­tion that we are whole.

In other words, the stuff in the bag is is much “us” as the stuff we show to the world.

Now, I’m not try­ing to argue that all the stuff in the bag is worth­while, as some of it really should not see the light of day. It’s just that the bag that holds our stuff is sort of like any bag full of stuff.

We don’t have x-ray vision, so the only way to know what’s in the bag is to empty it. Then, we can exam­ine the stuff that we’ve stuffed, and make intel­li­gent, adult deci­sions about what to keep and what to put back in the bag.

And here’s the kicker: the stuff we stuff back in the bag, hav­ing been eval­u­ated in the light of day and by an adult, is still us!

Self accep­tance means pre­cisely what it says. I don’t get to cherry pick who I am. If I run around, pre­tend­ing that life is sweet­ness and light, and that I’m the sug­arplum fairy, I am def­i­nitely going to trip over over the stuff I’ve stuffed, and fall flat on my face. It’s just the way it is, and we hate it, because our sen­si­tive lit­tle illu­sions are get­ting all bruised.

The stuff we stuff has a way of ooz­ing out.

We want to deny it, claim some­one made us do it, or oth­er­wise escape respon­si­bil­ity, but as I said, the kicker is that the ooze is us, and we just haven’t accepted it.

Self accep­tance matches the Buddha’s Mid­dle Path.

Really, one of the most impor­tant insights in Zen is that we have the choice to deal with our stuff, and with all of life, with­out judg­ment.

Now, this doesn’t mean excus­ing bad behav­ior. It means that, when we engage in some­thing that gets us lousy results, we see it, accept respon­si­bil­ity for doing it, fix what we can, and move on.

sailboat

It’s sort of like sail­ing a sail­boat into the wind. If you watch a sail­boat sail, you real­ize it doesn’t progress along a straight line. If tacks. Heads off in a direc­tion, makes a course cor­rec­tion, heads off in another direc­tion, makes a course cor­rec­tion… on and on, forever.

We don’t judge that the boat is bad because of the back-and-forthness of its path.

Self accep­tance works only when paired with a total self respon­si­bil­ity. This is a com­mon theme for this BLOG.

Back to the boat anal­ogy. It would be the height of dumb to blame the wind for knock­ing the boat off course. Sail­boats, like air­planes, are off course 95% of the time. Ulti­mately, minute course cor­rec­tions get them to safe har­bor (or the air­port…) So there’s no blame involved, there’s just a sim­ple accep­tance that the way it is, is the way it is.

Judg­ment is never nec­es­sary.
Course cor­rec­tion is always nec­es­sary.
What a per­fect def­i­n­i­tion of self respon­si­bil­ity
and self acceptance.

Here, in no par­tic­u­lar order, are 6 ideas for deep­en­ing your self acceptance.

1. Make a list
living life

Soon to be avail­able as a spi­ral bound book…

You might be inter­ested to know that my semi famous book “Liv­ing Life in Grow­ing Orbits” has been rewrit­ten, and is at the pub­lish­ers. The very first exer­cise in the book, which you can read about on the web­site, is to list what I call Rock Beliefs.

In other words, write down what you believe to be so about how the world works, and about who you are.

Most of our beliefs about the world and about our­selves are in the form of cou­plets. This is good, that is bad. Happy is good, angry is bad. Con­trolled is good, emo­tional is bad. We just nat­u­rally assume that the things we believe are accu­rate. Then, we get angry, and because we know anger is bad, we look around for some­one or some­thing to blame for our anger. As opposed to say­ing, “I am anger­ing myself right now.”

The rea­son this hap­pens is that we are con­scious of our good list, and only semi-conscious of our bad list. Here’s a hint. The stuff you’ve stuffed is the stuff that seems to just pop up, out of your con­trol, the stuff that you des­per­ately want to deny has any­thing to do with you.

Make a list of this stuff. In other words, visu­al­ize that bag, draped over your shoul­der, set it down, open it up, and start to fig­ure out what’s inside.

2. What do you want?

I have a really sweet, dear friend, who has an odd lit­tle quote on her Face­book page. It says,

“In order to know who you are,
you must know who you are not.”

I dis­agree. Mak­ing lists of what we do not want, or list­ing who we are not is a totally mean­ing­less and end­less task.

It’s like being asked, “What you want for Valentine’s Day?” and say­ing, “I don’t want choco­late.” (Man, what a bad exam­ple! Every­one wants chocolate!)

The prob­lem with this approach is the per­son ask­ing still has no clue what you do want.

In order to know who you are, you have to iden­tify your­self: this is who I am, and this is what I want.

Make another list. This list con­tains all the things you want, all of your desires, all of those hot and chargy things you’ve always wanted to do. As you list them, you may notice your judg­men­tal, egoic voice whis­per­ing or scream­ing, “Don’t go there!”

Have a breath, con­tinue to make your list, and then pri­or­i­tize the list. Then, and you knew this was com­ing, start doing things on the list.

3. Have your emo­tions

We talked end­lessly about emo­tions on this blog. Once again, what will likely pop into your head is the good list/bad list con­cept. Some emo­tions are good, many of them are bad and never to be expressed.

As usual, think anger. After a decade and a half of doing Body­work, if there is one com­mon denom­i­na­tor, it’s how many peo­ple are stuff­ing their anger. Peo­ple are sick, peo­ple are sore, peo­ple are sad, and much of it has to do with repressed anger.

I press, prod, and poke, all in an attempt to help clients to get emo­tions out.

List time again. Go ahead, just this once. Make two columns, and title I Good Emo­tions, and the other Bad Emo­tions.

Go for it. Make your lists. Now, put a cir­cle around the emo­tions you know you have, but sel­dom, or never express.

Con­struct a plan to begin hav­ing your emo­tions. While this might be dif­fi­cult, let me remind you that “have your emo­tions” does not mean judge, then sup­press your emo­tions. Have means have.

4. Belly rub time
belly rub

Life, and belly rubs, are a circle…

Here’s the Body­work part.

The belly area is full of trapped emo­tions. It’s also filled with your guts, iron­i­cally. You can’t be gutsy if you block yourself.

I find it inter­est­ing, how many peo­ple, dur­ing Body­work, request belly work. They have a deep need to be touched in this area.

Now, this is not par­tic­u­larly an easy area to work with, because you can’t just push on it. So, for now, con­sider get­ting some­one to sim­ply cir­cle your belly.

Have the per­son rub mas­sage oil on your belly from below your ribs down to your navel. Then, have the per­son press down­ward, com­fort­ably for you, and cir­cle your belly in a clock­wise direc­tion. When I do this mas­sage, I some­times pick a spot in the mid­dle of the upper belly, and then cir­cle out­ward in a spi­ral, in a clock­wise direc­tion, until I reach the cir­cle I defined above.

5. Push your lim­its
have a hug

Don’t ask, won’t get.
Every time.

Back to the list that you made in the sec­ond point. I sug­gested you start imple­ment­ing some things on that list. Now, let’s push it a bit.

Most peo­ple imag­ine dire things as a result of ask­ing for some­thing. In fact, most peo­ple refuse to ask for any­thing they really want, or if they do ask they do it indi­rectly. “Boy, it would be really nice to get a mas­sage some­day.” Indirect.

This indi­rec­tion, or not ask­ing hap­pens for two reasons.

1) Many peo­ple have hor­ri­ble, imag­i­nary out­comes trip­ping around in their heads — they ask, and are totally rejected. Or, and this is actu­ally the less com­mon problem,

2) they have asked in the past and were rejected.

Doesn’t mat­ter. The time has come to explore who you are, what you want, and how you are going to live out your life, moment by moment, from this moment on.

Self respon­si­bil­ity means ask­ing. If all you are hear­ing is “no,” you are def­i­nitely ask­ing the wrong peo­ple. Maybe it’s time to hang around with a whole new crowd. As I think about my rela­tion­ship with Dar­bella, I rec­og­nize that “yes” hap­pens about 95% of the time — per­haps higher. Why, oh why would I want to be in rela­tion­ship with some­one who only said “no?”

If this describes your rela­tion­ship to your near­est and dear­est, time to drop them off at the “Used Peo­ple Lot.”

Then, look around. Find some­one, or sev­eral some­ones, and ask for some­thing that you’ve always wanted but have been afraid to ask for. Make this a day by day project for the rest of your life.

6. Be hon­est
faces

I’m respon­si­ble for me!

How exciting!

Self accep­tance requires self respon­si­ble speech.

As we often say, the only authen­tic pro­noun is “I.” “I am mak­ing myself sad,” is true. The only one mak­ing you any­thing is you.

From this point on, own your emo­tions, your wants, your needs, your pas­sions. Use I lan­guage with every­one you speak to. No blam­ing, no accus­ing, no look­ing to make trouble.

Be hon­est about who you are, what turns your crank, and what’s going on for you.

Next week, on to the Heart Chakra, and lov­ing action.

Make Con­tact!

So, how does this week’s arti­cle sit with you? What ques­tions do you have? Click here to go to the online arti­cle, and leave a com­ment or question!

Pre­vi­ous in series Next in series

Related posts:

  1. Com­pas­sion
  2. The Zen of Insight
  3. 10 Things Your Mommy For­got to Tell You
  4. Have your feel­ings. Act respon­si­bly in spite of them.
  5. Cen­ter­ing

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1 Comment
  1. Holli (Reply) on Monday 19, 2008

    Ah Hah, I think this might be the first step in look­ing at the shad­ows alit­tle closer! Thanks Wayne!


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