Connected and Committed

Busting Loose from the Belief Game

Creating beliefs, judging them, adding consequences, then applying tremendous power to make the now-enhanced pattern pop into your hologram and appear unquestionably real is the creative cycle that locks you into limitation and restriction in Phase 1 of the Human Game--and it applies to absolutely everything you see and experience in your business and throughout your hologram. The other interesting thing to note is that once an enhanced pattern is created in this way, and the experience recurs in your hologram, each successive time you look at it you say to yourself, "You see, that is how it works; it is real!" and the apparent evidence of its reality locks it even more deeply into your hologram.

Busting Loose from The Business Game - Robert Scheinfeld

~*~*~

Keep this is mind for the swing into a new year. Setting resolutions has very little staying power compared to the beliefs you have about those resolutions. Resistance Toys can help with that, and so can a Thought Chaperone.

May the bliss be with you, and it always is. All the best in TwentyTen!

more modern thingamajigs

As well as learning that natatorium means indoor swimming pool, I saw this set of swimming trunks with a life vest built into it. Amazing.

Natatorium

Looking for shadow-work partner in crime

Most people recognize three kinds of marriage: the legal marriage, which describes the partners' standing under the law; the social marriage, which describes their partnership in the context of family and community; and the nuptials, which describes their spiritual intent. But we propose a fourth: the shadow marriage, in which the partners vow to accept and honor the full entourage of the Beloved's shadow characters. And with this internal commitment, they acknowledge that they are engaged in uncovering their own shadows and taking responsibility for their own projections, judgments, fears.

Romancing the Shadow--Zweig and Wolf

~*~*~

I'm thinking about adding this excerpt to my dating profile. It's the ultimate extreme sport, really. Ready to meet yourself and love it into existence? Me too. Let's above all support each other's intent to remain conscious and humor-laden. There is nothing to defend, and everything to gain.

And bring dark chocolate.

Cuteness at Mac and Don's playscape

I recently spent some time at a Mac and Don's playscape with Little Man, something I begrudgingly agreed to do, but I'm glad I did because I had the best time watching the little ones and not having to be responsible for them. This little girl was fearless and exuberant and had the best outfit, a smudge on her cheek, and a smile a mile wide. Thank you for brightening my day, little girl.

Utopic Space has been waiting for humanity since the beginning of time

"Utopic Space, which is this new reality, has been waiting for humanity since the beginning of time. It is the source of all mystical traditions from the East to the West. Since Utopic Space is completely at one with itself, it can merge all theological positions that appear contradictory in traditional spaces such as: theism, atheism and agnosticism (both dogmatic and methodological). In Utopic Space, it is possible to have a real religious syncretism combined with a personal faith commitment...

"...The divergence of visions represents that bold striking out on your own onward and upward, climbing toward Utopic Space and the final realization that when the terminus is reached we will all experience the end of the future."

UTOPIC SPACE: A LECTURE ON THE FUTURE OF HUMANS AND TECHNOLOGY by artist Paul Laffoley

Lecture on the occasion of Man(Transforms) Sputnik Conference Copyright Paul Laffoley May, 2001

~*~*~

Pretty much explains 2012 for me.

SAME Cafe'

The price of admission is emotional vulnerability; the payoff is the wisdom that comes with it.

"We will examine romance, the divine madness of finding an erotic partner, which may be choreographed by the personal shadow in its quest to re-create the familiar feelings embedded in the way we were raised as children. For this reason, in adulthood, people abused as children often find abusive partners; children of alcoholics often are attracted to drinkers; children who suffered parental neglect may find themselves with neglectful lovers. When the shadow arranges a marriage, it puts us face-to-face with our unresolved childhood issues...We define this inner process of dating as the shadow's search for shelter in a projection that fits early childhood patterns. By re-creating the past, the shadow tries to help us feel safe, cared for, and loved. It attempts to achieve these ends by re-creating with a lover the primordial unity we felt in early life with a parent. Then we unconsciously transfer responsibility for our survival from our parents to our partners. And we imagine that our partners will love us the way our parents never did, nurturing our deepest needs and fulfilling our deepest desires.

"At the same time that the shadow is pulling us into the past, re-creating imaginary early bonds that we had with our parents, the force of the authentic Self is pushing us toward development, toward more consciousness and freedom. We propose that, with shadow-work, dating can become a conscious, meaningful process, rather than an unconscious, seemingly meaningless series of failures. Dating as shadow-work requires a willingness to look within and identify early childhood patterns and characters at the table, those sources of family shadow that influence our attractions and responses to potential partners. In addition, it requires a willingness to identify the wounds of previous relationships so that we don't unconsciously repeat the same patterns, becoming wounded again and again in the same ways.

"Instead of blaming others for not making the grade...or blaming ourselves for a fatal flaw...we can learn to identify when a particular character takes over and re-creates the same old patterns of pain. We can ...learn to honor the needs of the shadow without surrendering to them, and follow the call of the Self by risking greater authenticity. With this practice, we can become more authentic in a mutual exploration rather than showing a false front to achieve a preconceived outcome. As we become less defended and more vulnerable, we can learn at the same time to honor our own limits and protect our own boundaries. Finally, if we can trust the magic of the process, rather than strive with ego to make it happen in a particular way, it may rise to another octave--romance. And we may find a relationship that nurtures soul...

"For us, success at the dating stage is not primarily about whether a particular relationship will work out; if "work out" means marriage, it probably won't. Rather, it's about learning how to experience vulnerability and intimacy with another human being--and to gain awareness that comes with it. In our view, a relationship at an early stage is a process, not a product; it's a verb, not a noun. In these days of serial monogamy, the faces of people involved may change, but the process goes on...

"If one does not understand shadow-work and the notion of process, serial monogamy can seem meaningless and feel futile. But with the understanding that each of these seemingly unrelated relationships is part of an ongoing developmental process, providing grist for the mill in the next relationship, one can gain real meaning and value, as well as have more fun. The price of admission is emotional vulnerability; the payoff is the wisdom that comes with it. In this way, even a short relationship can enrich your life, in spite of not fulfilling your romantic dreams. And each experience can better prepare you for the next romance with the shadow."

~Romancing the Shadow - Zweig and Wolf

~*~*~

Doing shadow-work is all about embracing the freedom to be ourselves that was there all along, and that is a wonderful thing.

Let's take that to the next level however. I can envision a time when adults on their healing paths will be sharing this material with children on a global scale. We don't have to hand down that ancestral trunk of unprocessed gunk to the next generation, and require them to process it like we do (or don't). As we become comfortable with vulnerability (a word that carries a huge cultural shadow) and realize that's where our power lies, we are better able to teach through our example. Verbalizing choices and thought processes that awareness makes possible will help sever the ties that bind us to our legacies of pain.

I remember talking a class as a senior in high school that had "Marriage and" something in the title. I appreciate that there was even that surface level of awareness on the part of the school board for allowing a course like that to even be offered. But the content that would have better served those of us sitting at the round table could have arrived earlier, say in preschool, with appropriate developmental language and practice at every grade, if we can agree that organized schooling is in itself a good idea, but that's a whole nuther Pandora's Box.

Aussie Santa

Not sure why Santa has to have a drink in his hand, but that's what this particular artist envisioned. Courtesy of the Australia section in Bronner's CHRISTmas Wonderland in Frankenmuth, MI.

The Tiger Phenomenon--Chasing the Illusion--Dr. Elsbeth Meuth

"What can we learn about our cultural conditioning regarding marriage, love, intimacy, fulfillment, and happiness... that is not unique to Tiger and his relationships., but rather plays out as an archetypal structure of the human evolution?...

"Fulfillment in sex, intimacy, love, relationship or marriage is not available through another or a circumstance. Fulfillment resides within - and that's the re-discovery for us as human beings. This re-discovery of an original state of being will open the possibility for bliss. And this bliss can then be shared with another versus longed for to be sourced by another.

"The Tiger phenomenon is a reminder for where we are in our human evolution and a call to examine the illusions each of us might live in. We choose to what extent we are ready and willing to evolve. Frequently the reaching of a critical point of pain is the wake-up call overriding the long held need for secrecy or pretense."

The Tiger Phenomenon--Chasing the Illusion--Dr. Elsbeth Meuth

~*~*~

Personal shadow, family shadow, cultural shadow--many layers leading to a simple conclusion: fulfillment resides within.

unpacking that trunk of unprocessed ancestral gunk

Instead of blaming others, some single people may blame themselves for their fate, feeling inadequate, unlovable, even hopeless. In this case, they themselves are not enough--thin enough, successful enough, smart enough, sexy enough. For some, this shame leads to endless routines of diets, workouts, therapy, singles events, and self-help books. All of this compulsive activity may cover up a deeper self-loathing and a desire to fix some secret flaw, which feels as if it's been there forever. This feeling--it's been this way forever--signals the legacy of a family shadow, a self-hatred that is absorbed from one or both parents, whether spoken or unspoken, and passed down from generation to generation.

~Romancing the Shadow--Zweig and Wolf

~*~*~

Our parents, god bless 'em, were delivery pipelines of family shadow. I like to call it that trunk of unprocessed ancestral gunk that gets pass down from generation to generation, until someone down the familial line declares, "Hey--the gunk stops here. I am going to face this vague, gloomy monster that appears to be controlling the show, and set myself and my progeny free."

The self-loathing that sabotages so many good intentions, so many projects, so many relationships makes up a big part of that unpacked trunk. And it's so hard for us to see that quality in ourselves. Other people can spot it a mile away, which may be a projection of their own shadow, depending on how their own trunk is organized.

Somewhere back in great, great, great-grandparent land were people who knew their awesomeness but were persuaded otherwise. This inaccurate perception was reinforced and bequeathed to the collective unconscious of the lineage, manifesting in each generation's unique quirks and permutations.

I picture it as a sort of permeable sleeve that fits over our DNA helix, allowing us to breathe but taking in tainted air. We tag that air as feeling like "home", since it's the only air we've known. By then we've forgotten who we really are.  

But that's why we're all here--to help each other remember, to see, to heal. We're all one, individualized globs of awareness and preferences that make for a very interesting world. You dispel my shadow, I'll dispel yours, and let's have some fun with this, shall we?

Because underneath that self-loathing is a fabulous, amazing, magnificent being just waiting to shine, free from reactivity and injected meaning to rock on in their particular fashion.

Think about that unpacked trunk this holiday. See if you can spot some of its contents in your relatives, in yourself, and take comfort in the compassion that might follow that awareness.     

You dispel my shadow, I'll dispel yours.

the slow, daily tasks of shadow-work

I came upon this phrase several times while savoring Romancing the Shadow (which appears to have gone through a metamorphosis of its own since its original publication--isn't that fascinating?), only further cementing my respect for Zweig's and Wolf's work, and their writing style:

"Doing the slow, daily tasks of shadow-work."

Whatever form of personal transformation you are drawn to explore, the essence of your success ultimately rides on whether you allow for its slow, steady I.V. drip of change to seep into your soul, or not.

The thought patterns you have now were acquired at that same pace, over decades of moments strung together that is your life. Those patterns can only be replaced at the same rate of adoption, overachiever persona be damned.

What is so amusing is that we already own a set of these daily tasks; it's just that they've taken up residence in shadow land. The thoughts that begin to leap into our minds in the morning, the onslaught of which doesn't diminish until we give in to sleep in the evening, their positive dopplegangers happen to hang out in the light.

There are coffeeshops in each kind of neighborhood. Which one do you drive up to for your daily fix?

a richer ambivalence

Despite our assumptions that betrayal is evil, despite our deepest wish to live life without being wounded, betrayal has the hidden potential to open us to something larger. Thus it involves more than personal psychology: It's a gateway to an archetypal, perhaps fateful reality. In our betrayers we recognize our own capacity to betray. In this way, betrayer and betrayed are tied together in an alliance of opposites. The Other who carries the shadow then becomes a vehicle of the gods, requiring from us a richer ambivalence, a capacity to love and hate.

from Romancing the Shadow: Illuminating the Dark Side of the Soul by Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf

~*~*~

I've pondered this ability to achieve "richer ambivalence" since I watched a friend of mine react to being accused of things that clearly weren't true by an acquaintance whose emotional stability was in question from the beginning. Rather than standing back in his knowing that there was nothing that needed defending, he basted in some pretty awful feelings for awhile about himself and about the accuser, that pushing-against that keeps what we don't want firmly in place.

I came up with the term "dupability" that encapsulated the experience for me. When we believe that other people's words have power over us, even people we hardly know, we buy into the concept of being "duped" or taken advantage of in some way. The fear of being taken advantage of is most active in those who grew up believing there is something that needs to be defended. When we stop investing energy in that belief, we can relax in the knowing that even though others will do what they do, we aren't "dupable".

Of course getting to that place may require some major league suffering before we're willing to try believing something new. 

The Other brings that gift in relationship after relationship, until we are able to receive it that way and do the work on ourselves that unlocks that "dupable" dynamic. If what Zweig and Wolf say is true, it's not personal, it's collective unconscious processing through us, filling our shadow dance cards by our simply being human.

We've seen "the enemy", and they are us.

Which is good news, because we're all we have control over anyway.

the babies are coming.....

no longer at this address

An errant Christmas card was delivered to my mail box. The name doesn't ring a bell with my landlord, so there's nothing to be done except send it back to the originator. The researcher in me wants to find out where these people are and get records updated of the people trying to keep in touch and the post office who says they live here when they clearly haven't for a very long time.

So I'm sending a vibrational card to all parties involved. We're meeting at a Caribou Coffee to get it all straightened out and maybe even becoming Santa's elves for part of the epic evening.

Blissmonger of the highest order

It's interesting to read the comments on this video at YouTube. Such a fascinating microcosm of humanity's range of expectation, possibility, projection, shadow. I see amazing talent, poise, joy, discipline. Some see imperfection, lack, us vs. them, threat, shame, guilt.

If there ever were a perfect response to why I be this blissmongering thing, this would be it.

honoring negative emotion

Booth: I wish you would say more about how one can honor those negative emotions, including anger.

Bly: Three honorings come to mind...Secondly, Marie Louise suggests that we regard our anger as a person and talk to it. Rather than acting as a conduit for our own anger, and focusing it on another person, one turns one's face and body to the anger itself, and asks: "What do you want from me? What do you want of me?" That is honoring the anger, just as we honor everyone whom we turn to face.

...There is the question of the anger itself being angry at us. The anger is angry with us for not honoring it, for treating it shabbily, for getting out of it what we want without ever bringing it in and introducing it to our friends, saying, "This is my friend Anger here. He's a lowly-paid assistant of mine."

...Another quality that comes to mind in when a person absorbs his shadow is a certain kind of humor. Lincoln had it. Someone asked Lincoln if he would find him a good government job, and Lincoln said, "I have very little influence in this administration." When a woman he met on a train told him he was one of the ugliest men she'd seen in her entire life, he didn't become offended. "What should be done about that?" he asked the woman. "Well," she shad, "you could stay home." Lincoln told that story on himself--he liked her answer.

Robert Bly--A Little Book on the Human Shadow

~*~*~

I laughed out loud when I read that story about Lincoln and the woman on the train. What a delightfully aware man he was, to be able to reach inside and come up with that question for the woman, and to embrace her answer as the healing humor it was for him. If this shadow stuff works the way I think it does, this woman was projecting something of herself in her comments, and Lincoln's centeredness was having none of it. No Velcro loops to catch on her hooks. He healed a little bit of her shadow right then and there with embracing his own.

What people say to us has nothing to do with us. It's a comment on where they are in their process, and it's a comment on ours in how we choose to react. Our reaction has everything to do with us, a reflection of how we've trained others to treat us, based on how good we've gotten at giving our power away. Unlearning that skill, and detaching from the reactivity that comes with it, is the most important work we can do, for ourselves, for our children, for the world.

Abe, you rock.

the students know the teacher has his crow with him

Marie Louise von Franz says somewhere that a human being who has done work with the shadow or absorbed the shadow gives a sense of being condensed. Other people willingly give him or her some authority in moral matters. If a teacher has worked with his own shadow, she says that students, no matter how young they are, sense it, and discipline in that room will not be difficult, because the students know the teacher has his crow with him. Other teachers, she says, who have not worked on their shadow, can talk about discipline all day and never get it. I like the idea that the work a person does on his or her shadow results in a condensation, a thickening or a densening, of the psyche which is immediately apparent, and which results in a feeling of natural authority without the authority being demanded.

Robert Bly--A Little Book on the Human Shadow

~*~*~

I can feel into this cream of mushroom soup, this condensing, or the absence of it, in any classroom, any conference room, any tweet. People who have done the work and taken their shadow power back are palpably strong without needing to spit orders or throw things, steal words or art, passively live. They glow from the inside and are forever curious, vigilant even, about cooking up that shadow and eating it.

how to keep despots, dictators and other tyrants out of office

Using language consciously seems to be the most fruitful method of retrieving shadow substance scattered out on the world. Energy we have sent out is floating around beyond the psyche; and one way to pull it back into the psyche is by the rope of language. Certain kinds of language are nets, and we need to use the net actively, throwing it out. If we want our witch back we write about her; if we want our spiritual guide back we write about the spiritual guide rather than passively experience the guide in another person.

Language contains retrieved shadow substance of all our ancestors, as Isaac Bashevis Singer or Shakespeare makes clear. If language doesn't seem right at the moment, painting or sculpture may be right, or making images with watercolors. When we paint the witch with conscious intention, we soon find out whose house she's in. So the fifth stage involves activity, imagination, hunting, asking. "Always cry for what you want."

People who are passive toward their projected material contribute to the danger of nuclear war, because every bit of energy that we don't actively engage with language or art is floating somewhere in the air above the United States, and Reagan can use it. He has a big energy sweeper that pulls it in. N one should make you feel guilty for not keeping a journal, or creating art, but such activity helps the whole world. What did Blake say?--"No person who is not an artist can be a Christian." He means that a person who refuses to approach his own life actively, using language, music, sculpture, painting, or drawing is a caterpillar dressed in Christian clothes, not a human being. Blake himself engaged in his shadow substance with three disciplines: painting, music, and language. He illuminated his own poems, and set them to music. There was no energy around him that politicians could use to project onto another country. One of the things we need to do as Americans is to work hard individually at eating our shadows, and so make sure that we are not releasing energy which can then be picked up by the politicians, who can use it against Russia, China, or the South American countries.

Robert Bly--A Little Book on the Human Shadow

~*~*~

We elect officials with our psyches, not our spent chads.

to project, or not to project, that is the question

The issue is not so much that we do project but how long we keep the projections out there. Projection without personal contact is dangerous. Thousands, even millions of American men projected their internal feminine onto Marilyn Monroe. If a million men do that, and leave it there, it's likely she will die. She died. Projections without personal contact can damage the person receiving them.

We have to say also that Marilyn Monroe called for these projections as a part of her power longing, and her disturbance must have gone back to victimization in childhood. But the process of projection and recall, done so delicately in tribal culture, face to face, goes out of whack when the mass media arrives. In the economy of the psyche her death was inevitable and even right. No single human being can carry so many projections--that is, so much unconsciousness--and survive. So it's infinitely important that each person bring back his or her own.

Robert Bly - A Little Book on the Human Shadow

And then there are lies to the soul

Lie Number Seventeen:

We are helpless

There are lies that make news: lies told by public figures and celebrities. There are also simple everyday lies, lies told by everyday people to avoid embarrassment.

And then there are lies to the soul.

A lie to the soul runs deeper than any other kind of lie. It is like a river. Like a river designed to chill something deep down inside us.

It's a lie whose unconscious mission is to kill the spirit. To remove the passion, and to deny our uniquely human power.

The lie is created to convince us that we have no power. That we are helpless.

But it is not true that we have no power. The truth is, we have so much power, it sometimes scares us...

iMindShift blog - Steve Chandler

~*~*~

So true, so true.

Good thing our souls don't buy it.

We feel so awful in these moments because the part of us that knows better refuses to go there with us. The part of us that learned to tell these lies so well thinks it's a vindication of its inaccurate perceptions.

But it's not.

It's yet another opportunity to choose again.

And what do you choose?

that do-hickey in the shower

My hair is longer than it's been in a long time.

I noticed the water lapping ever higher around my feet in the shower from my now longer hair catching in the drain, so I looked around for a slotted drain cover to nip that situation in the bud.

It works, and works perfectly.

When I remember to use it.

Which can be an on-again, off-again thing, given that I clean it out every time and put it somewhere other than the drain to dry out.

It's oh-so-easy to forget to use it when I hop back in and fall back into habit, unless I consciously put it somewhere I will see it and practice using it again.

Ah ha! I thought this morning. Just like Resistance Toys.

Those reminders I created for myself to help me stop practicing the thoughts and behaviors I didn't want anymore, and install the ones I did.

One works for clogged rains, another works for clogged thinking.

Either way, I'm setting myself up for satisfaction.

Do you have a system like that in place? What does it look like?

And more importantly, what does it feel like?

One minute it's legal to project our least flattering human characteristics, and the next it's not

The 19th Amendment. The 15th Amendment. On the day each was enacted, these attempts to legislate human behavior were introduced to millions of people practicing thoughts/beliefs/perceptions along a spectrum book-ended by, say, "Discriminatory" and "Embracing".

One minute it's legal to project our least flattering human characteristics onto people of color and of the female persuasion, and the next it's not. Just because the law of the land made it so didn't mean squat to those who believed/believe that women and people of color weren't/aren't entitled to the same inalienable rights that white guys were/are.

Those who had demonstrated publicly for the attainment of those rights or had privately endorsed them had done so from a level of awareness of the human condition that the first group didn't/doesn't possess--an elementary degree of genuine living, meaning behavior based on an objective examination of whether our beliefs and perceptions serve us as a species, and consciously changing them if they do not.

Extrapolate to our individual psyches.  An equally complex, interlocking set of contributing factors informs the beliefs and perceptions we learn to practice and burn into our neuropathways from the time we are very small. A small portion supports genuine living, or embraces the sort of thought patterns that serve us, while much of it perpetuates those abhorrent projections mentioned above that rely on knee-jerk, fight-or-flight response thinking that we rarely question.

There's a reason the self-help industry has proliferated to the extent it has. There's a reason that statistics on domestic violence, incest, and emotional abuse are grossly under-reported. There's a reason that litigation is the contention tool of choice.

We learned centuries ago from religious dogma and other cultural institutions to loathe ourselves, deep down, and to project that loathing onto others.

Disingenuous living.

Genuine living includes doing the inner work to send those old, inaccurate perceptions of ourselves packing, with understanding of why we might have bought into them way back when to survive; learning to drop the meaning we inject to situations that just isn't true; learning to thrive on the positive energy of nonreactivity rather than the sugar high of reactivity.

a more genuine way of living

There’s no point in continuing to do battle with ourselves, because there’s no enemy within. Striving to perfect ourselves by making ourselves more moral, with all of the implied self-judgment, isn’t the issue. The motivation is not to change ourselves or others, but to aspire to a deepened awareness and a more genuine way of living. As long as we’re having a war between one part of ourselves and another, both parts lose.

~Ezra Bayda

only the shadow knows

This looks so like what hanging out with the shadow feels like.

It lives in a trunk that's accompanied my ancestry for centuries, and it's lodged right over there on that landing on the spiral staircase.

I opened the trunk this morning and this dark fleecey thing sat down next to me, like it needed a friend.

It isn't saying anything or demanding anything, it's just sitting there, waiting for a cue from me, I think. 

Questions float into my head, mostly around, "Why?" And the answers I keep getting are, "Because."

That's just how things work.

Perhaps we are unpacking the trunk together.

It definitely wants to play.

And so we shall.

Enlightened people are asleep part of the time

Enlightened people are asleep part of the time and unenlightened people are awake some of the time.  --  Alan Cohen

~*~*~

So true, so true.

Enlightenment is not a one shot deal for most of us mortals. Yeah, there are a few older brothers and sisters over the centuries who have attained a more stable state, but for most of us, it's a spiral staircase rather than a plateau experience.

It's a spiral because we dip back into old stuff from our new vantage points every now and then, ready to take on another layer or another chunk of our shadow sides or what we hold onto from the past like a security blanket--that's how intimate we've become with getting in our own way.

I'm in the midst of one of these special stretches of my spiral, and it's a fascinating ride. Part of me is awake and observing what's going on, and part of me is asleep and arguing for my limitations. The former is getting a kick out of the latter, because it knows how easy it would be to just let go and surrender. But it's patient and kind, and it can wait.

We've got eternity, so what's the rush?

Well, I've got things to express and create in this part of the journey, so I'm invested in this not taking so long. But all in good time.

I've proven to myself over and over again the advantages of a tortoise approach as opposed to what the hare thought was best. Slow and steady wins the race, in more ways than one.

So wherever you are on your spiral, don't bother looking down to see what's informed your past, don't look up to compare how far you have yet to go. Just keep an eye on the step in front of you, and breathe the rarefied air.

It only gets better from here.