A few years ago, I ran into a friend from that period, and we began reminiscing about our former boss. I told her that I still resented him. My friend asked me, "What could you have done at the time that would have made a difference?"
As I considered her question, a surprising recognition arose. I would have thought that my answer would have been, "Stand up for myself." But what came up instead was, "I could have laughed." If I'd been able to treat his tantrums lightly it would have defused the tension between us.
What stopped me? Partly the fact that I was holding a slew of unexamined tensions and fears about authority, not to mention feelings of unworthiness, all of them stewing around in my subconscious just waiting for some bully to come along and trigger them. But the deepest problem was that a part of me believed that if I became enough of a victim, then some higher authority—a grownup? God?—would come along and rescue me. On some level, I was waiting for the deus ex machina and not taking responsibility for creating change myself.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying the guy wasn't a bully. Nor am I saying that I deserved to have a bad time because I didn't have the awareness or strength to overcome my circumstances. What is true is that in the moment I truly recognized my own responsibility in the situation with my boss, I stopped being angry at him. Instead, I could see that the real issue was the inner patterning I carried, and its need to be brought out of its shadowy home in the depths of my subconscious, seen, and to use Jung's term, integrated.
One basic principle of consciousness is that your outer life reflects your inner life: every time you feel hurt by a careless lover or made angry by an aggressive driver you are being shown a part of your own shadow. It's not that you caused the lover to be careless or the driver aggressive. But, if you didn't have the tendency to feel hurt or angry in this situation, you wouldn't get hooked by it. Once you recognize that truth, you can stop blaming the people who seem to be making you unhappy—including yourself!—and start looking toward the actual source of the pain. It's that self-reflective gesture, the willingness to bring simple awareness to the hidden, scary areas of yourself, that allows these wounds to heal, and along the way, to stop tripping you up when we least expect it.
Feeling into Darkness
Though there are many useful practices for bringing consciousness to our shadow feelings, I've found that the most efficient way of working with really deep emotional tendencies is through inner feeling and sensation in the body. That's because the inner triggers that really get you reach far deeper than the discursive mind. They're layered into your energy body, lodged in your brain tissues and in your muscles. So bringing shadowy feelings to consciousness isn't just a question of understanding or insight. You begin to truly free yourself from these patterns only when you learn how to feel and release them in the body. And this is done with the tool of awareness, of consciousness itself—one of the true gifts of meditation.
For the last few months, I've been inspired by watching my friend Sharon working in this feeling-based fashion with one of her areas of darkness. Sharon is by any measure someone with a successful life. She's the center of a family, she works for worthwhile causes, and she's done years of yoga and meditation with powerful teachers. She also suffers from a recurrent belief that people don't like her. Yes, she knows it's just a story, and she's dropped the story many times. In fact, she's dropped it so many times that she was sure she had it handled.
But last year her young son, Todd, began wanting to spend holidays with his father, her first husband. Whenever Sharon arranged a family get-together her son would tell her that he preferred to be with his father. The whole thing came to a head at Christmas, when the extended family had gathered at Sharon's house, and Todd called to say he wouldn't be coming.
Sharon was blindsided by a wave of fury. She screamed at Todd, and ended by banging down the phone, going to her room, and crying for hours.
"I kept thinking, 'I know better than this; this is crazy' but it wouldn't go away." Obviously, the events were triggering something much more significant than the actual incident. And Sharon suddenly realized that she wasn't willing to live with those reactions for the rest of her life.
Such a "hot" moment can be the best possible time to transform a feeling. Sharon saw that if she could turn her full attention to the anger and grief, she might be able to discover its root and let it go. So she coached herself to step back from the immediate situation, and trace it back to other situations that had brought up the feelings. She saw a long string of moments when someone who was "supposed" to love her had let her down. She saw that each event had the same emotional resonance, the same emotions of hot, black anger, disappointment, and grief.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In