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Post by wren on Dec 3, 2006 15:04:51 GMT -5
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The Laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
- T. S. Eliot, East Coker As a Wanderer, an apprentice to the unknown, you long to be initiated into the fully embodied life of your soul. You will have to wait a bit longer. The fallow time of the second cocoon, the time between death and rebirth, cannot be dodged. To catch up to your soul, you will have to learn, as T.S. Eliot did, to place your faith and love and hope in the waiting. But you will be anything but idle. Two essential tasks must be addressed: saying goodbye to the old self and making yourself ready for the new. More specifically, you must leave the home of your former identity and then prepare yourself for soul initiation. We are going now going to explore several soulcraft practices that support the first of these tasks… leaving home. As you leave your old way of belonging to the world, you enter a rich spiritual darkness that will serve, for the time being, as your ‘light’ as you move forward by way of descent. There are two underlying tasks involved in truly leaving home: honing your skills of self-reliance and relinquishing attachment to your former identity. As with the doorways of death and rebirth, you journey alone through the strange and unfamiliar realms on your way to a soulful or second adulthood. You must learn to conduct yourself boldly and to make difficult and critical choices without the comforting presence of a life partner, guide, or teacher at your side. You must sharpen your skills of physical, social, psychological and spiritual self-reliance. There are some skills you undoubtedly lack and that you’ll soon need if you are going to truly wander, skills that may never have been necessary if you had planned on ‘staying home’ your entire life. For example, if your wandering will take you into wilderness lands or foreign cultures, you will need certain practical skills. You will need the ability to get around safely and efficiently in exotic terrain and extreme weather, to locate yourself when you get lost (or learn to relax and enjoy being lost), to acquire the necessary goods and services, and to negotiate the language and customs of different peoples and cultures. But even more important are psychological and spiritual skills. You must be proficient at making friends and allies, defending yourself against enemies and resolving conflicts. You will need to know what to do when you lose heart, when you feel more deeply than you ever thought possible, when you want to run, when you need to let go of what is dear to you but holds you back, when you get stuck, when you suddenly break through. You must become conversant with the paradoxes and mysteries of your gender and sexuality. You might need to know who to pray and to whom or what to pray, how to obtain help from spiritual allies, and how to access strength and courage during times of danger or difficult or in the absence of faith. How will you acquire these skills? You will learn from mentors and peers, from books and courses, but mostly you will learn from experience, through trial and error. You will learn by courageously choosing new experiences with unfamiliar places, people, activities, and relationships. When you run into trouble, you will seek counsel and instruction from friends, teachers and your own inner guides and resources. Harley Swift Deer, a Native American teacher, says that each of us has a survival dance and a sacred dance, but the survival dance must come first. Our survival dance, a foundational component of self-reliance, is what we do for a living – our way of supporting ourselves physically and economically. For most people, this means a paid job. For members of a religious community like a monastery, it means social or spiritual labors that contribute to the community’s well being. For others, it means creating a home and raising children, finding a patron for one’s art, or living as a hunter or gatherer. Everybody has to have a survival dance. Finding or creating one is our first task upon leaving our parents’ or guardians’ home. Once you have your survival dance established, you can wander, inwardly and outwardly, searching for the clues to your sacred dance, the work you were born to do. This work may have no relation to your job. Your sacred dance sparks your greatest fulfillment and extends your truest service to others. You know you’ve found it when there’s little else you’d rather do. Getting paid for it is superfluous. You would gladly pay others if, necessary, for the opportunity. Hence, the importance of self-reliance, not merely the economic kind implied by a survival dance but also of the social, psychological and spiritual kinds. To find your sacred dance, after all, you will need to take significant risks. You might need to move against the grain of your family and friends. By honing psychological self-reliance, you will find it easier to keep focused on your goals in the face of resistance or incomprehension, initial failure or setbacks, or economic or organizational obstacles. And spiritual self-reliance will maintain your connection with deepest truths and what you’ve learned about how the world works. Swift Deer says that once you discover your sacred dance and learn effective ways of embodying it, the world will support you in doing just that. What your soul wants is what the world also wants (and needs). Your human community will say yes to your soul work and will, in effect, pay you to do it. Gradually, your sacred dance becomes what you do and your former survival dance is no longer needed. Now you have only one dance as the world supports you to do what is most fulfilling for you. How do you get there? The first step is creating a foundation for self-reliance: a survival dance of integrity that allows you to be in the world in a good way – a way that is psychologically sustaining, economically adequate, socially responsible, and environmentally sound. Cultivating right livelihood, as Buddhists call it, is essential training and foundation for your soul work; it’s not a step that can be skipped. What follows are examples of practices that support the Wanderer’s separation from the former self. Do not skip any of these, regardless of whether you think you need them or not. The truth is we all need to examine these areas within ourselves for answers. |
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Post by wren on Dec 3, 2006 15:05:12 GMT -5
Giving Up Addictions
Associated with remedial work are those inner places too painful to look into, the places you ‘successfully’ avoid: the losses, the shame, the fears, the guilt, the wounds. You didn’t merely overlook those places; the emotions and memories living there have been screaming loud enough. Perhaps you avoided those nightmare closets by numbing yourself through addictions.
In the worst cases, these addictions are chemical, creating a primary neurological impairment of your capacity to feel as well as a secondary behavioral impairment – by altering what you attend to (or ignore) and how you spend your time. But there are many other addictions.
In the second cocoon, as you prepare for the encounter with soul, you will have to leave behind any substances or activities employed to avoid the tender places inside. And you will have to replace them with positive habits of presence and self-encounter. This can be an arduous and formidable task. – addictions can be exceedingly difficult to overcome. People with substance addictions especially will need help – from friends and family, psychotherapy, twelve-step and other recovery programs, acupuncture, and/or other mainstream and alternative health care approaches.
Television ranks high among common addictions in our society, along with other ‘screen’ obsessions: the Internet, palm pilots, and videos. We’ve all read the statistics about how many hours per day the average American watches TV.
Giving up television is an excellent way to start moving beyond addictions (this does not apply to people with substance addictions, who must start there). To people who watch more than a few hours a week of television, it is recommended that you literally remove the box from your life. Short of that, shut it off. The people who say they’ll never go without television are the same ones who protest that there are simply not enough hours in the day to give serious attention to intimate relationships or spiritual practice or soul discovery. Remember the idea of meditating everyday? Where were you going to find the time? Take the time you would normally have spent watching television. Reclaim it back for your soul work. Kill the addiction and replace it with something worthwhile.
The fact that television, compulsive shopping, eating, sex or gambling can be so addictive suggests how profoundly difficult it can be to overcome the more destructive habits of drug and alcohol abuse. Before continuing any soulcraft program, it is recommended by Bill Plotkin that substance addicts be abstinent at least one month, along with counseling and support. It is simply not possible to open to the mysteries of the inner or outer worlds when you are numbed out and/or craving your next fix.
All other addictions in the West can be seen as components of a larger one...our addiction to the Western way of life. Technological progress, the need to consume and own and entitlement. If we are born to consume, then it is a dog-eat-dog world, there is no deeper meaning, no human soul and creation is just a huge, dumb joke. That’s a conclusion you wouldn’t want to live with every day; better to distract and deaden yourself with addictions.
How do you address so pervasive an addiction? Begin with Soulcraft practices. Relinquish attachment to the adolescent identity and overcome your dependence on the cultural worldview within which that identity is formed.
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Post by wren on Dec 3, 2006 15:05:31 GMT -5
The Loyal Soldier
Each of us has a Loyal Soldier sub-personality, as described by Bill Plotkin. This is a courageous, creative and stubborn entity formed when we needed somewhat drastic measures to survive the realities (sometimes dysfunctional) of childhood. This sub-personality’s primary task was to minimize the occurrence of further injury, whether emotional or physical. The Loyal Soldier’s approach to this was – and continues to be – to suppress much of our natural exuberance, emotions, desires and wildness so we might be sufficiently acceptable to our parents (and/or other guardians, siblings, teachers and authority figures). The Loyal Soldier learns to restrain another sub-personality we might call the Wild Child, our original sensual, magical untamed self that has an essential relationship to the soul and is not interested in limiting itself in any way.
Strategies to this end include self-criticism; placing our personal agenda last; codependent behavior; adopting an unpleasant or downtrodden appearance; restricting our range of feeling by encouraging us to always be in charge; busy; angry; ruthless; withdrawn; and/or numb; and suppressing our intelligence, talent, enthusiasm, sensuality, and wildness by locking up these qualities in an inaccessible corner of our psyches. In each case, these strategies keep us safe by splitting off or blocking much of our potential and our magnificence. The Loyal Soldier’s adamant and accurate understanding is this: it is better to be suppressed or inauthentic or small than socially isolated or emotionally crushed – or dead. The problem comes when the Loyal Soldier becomes convinced the war of childhood survival needs to continue. He may even intentionally provoke new battles just to prove his point.
This becomes evident when our childhood survival strategies prevent us from establishing more mature relationships, finding or expressing our wholeheartedness and limiting our untapped potentials. The Loyal Soldier’s atavistic methods form the core of our most neurotic patterns, those feeding our low self-esteem and our difficulties with intimacy. The strategies the Loyal Soldier uses to protect us from early childhood wounds become, however, more an obstacle to our growth than the original wounds themselves.
How do you overcome such devotion? Love your Loyal Soldier and welcome him home. Thank him a thousand times for all he’s done to protect you, deeply and sincerely, noting his loyalty, courage and service. Tell him gently but repeatedly that the war is over and, finally, help him find new societal roles for his considerable talents.
When you recognize an occurrence of any one of your old defensive patterns, first remember this is a method by which your esteemed Loyal Soldier successfully protected your Wounded Child when you were very young. Instead of scolding, lovingly thank him for the intention and skill and the fact that it worked for you in the past. Welcome him home as the hero he is. Then, gaze into yourself and tell him the war is over. Gently whisper it in his ear…again.
Be specific as to why you no longer need that behavior to protect yourself. Gently redirect his energies toward assisting you in love and for engendering love in your life. Do this each time he shows up to do battle. Help yourself to reassign him a role in your soul work and thereby preserving his skills in a healthy way, integrating those substantial abilities into your conscious life.
Imagine, even, redressing him for his new role. Picture him changing from the uniform of a soldier to one specifically designed for his new task. Remind him to set aside the old uniform any time he reaches for it. Help him, and yourself, set him to work for your new life.
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Post by wren on Dec 3, 2006 15:05:55 GMT -5
Healing Work with the Sacred Wound
When the Wanderer has eliminated all substance addictions and welcomed home her Loyal Soldier, she finds one inner place in particular that is immensely and uniquely painful. This place harbors an early psychological wound, a trauma so significant she formed her primary survival strategies of childhood in reaction to it, so hurtful that much of her personal style and sensitivities have their roots there. If she grew up in the worst sort of egocentric setting, she may have been emotionally abused or neglected in any number of ways.
She does not need to be from a dysfunctional family, however, to have such deep childhood wounds. Her wound my stem from a birth trauma or a birth defect, or the death of her mother when she was three, or a pattern of innocent but shattering betrayals at the hands of her older brother. Maybe it was her father’s absence due to illness or her guilt at surviving a car wreck that claimed her younger sister or her own childhood bout with a deadly fever. The wound does not necessarily stem from a single traumatic incident. Often, the wound consists of a patter of hurtful events or a disturbing dynamic or these in one or more important relationships.
Think of the birth of a pearl for a moment. The tiny grit of sand within the oyster creates an irritation the oyster seeks to eliminate by coating the grain with successive layers of lustrous deposits, ultimately producing the unique and beautiful jewel. This is a sacred wound and what it can become.
It may take an entire lifetime to complete the healing of such a wound, but the point is we must begin… and there is treasure inside. The stage of the second cocoon is a propitious time to uncover and recover that trove. The treasure created by the wound may be an extraordinary sensitivity to others’ emotions, like a sixth sense, or to the nuances of the natural world; it may manifest itself as exceptional compassion for others; it may be a phenomenal ability to react adaptively in the heat of a crisis, on one’s toes, leaping into skillful action; it may involve an artistic flare, a healing genius, a talent to inspire, or an uncanny knack to see the light side or to extract a shining jewel from the dark. In all cases, to release the full potential of the treasure, the wound must be uncovered, delved into, healed to some degree, as if coated with loving layers of lustrous deposits. Doing so renders that wound sacred.
Doing the healing work with your sacred wound can provoke an encounter with the soul itself. Your wound holds the key to your destiny in this life. As you struggle with the grief and horrors at the heart of the wound, no longer distancing yourself from what you uncover there, you may find yourself, one day, staring straight into the deepest truths of this lifetime.
The second cocoon is by no means the last time in life we will wrestle with a sacred wound. Nor do these wounds occur only in childhood. They can take the form of the loss of a primary relationship, the loss of a job or financial security, or the loss of sanity or self-esteem. The value of the wound is that it breaches the soul; the psyche is opened so that new questions begin to be asked about who we are in our depths. These fomenting questions facilitate the death of our old story and the birth of a larger story, a soul story, one revealed by the wounding itself.
By courageously diving into your wounds, patiently allowing the suffering to do its work, neither indulging nor repressing the pain, you reach for deeper levels of the psyche where you encounter your larger (soul) story. Wounding opens the doors of our sensibility to a larger reality, which is blocked by our habituated and conditioned point of view.
The risky task with your wounds is to open them so soul can come through. Allow yourself to be worked over until you awake to your greater potential. Avoid making sense of your pain too soon, finding relief too quickly, blaming someone for your anguish, or seeking revenge. Don’t cave in and seek refuge in self-blame, self-pity or playing the role of the victim or martyr; nor through denial, cynicism, abandoning your own dreams and values, or paranoid confidence in a never-ending series of further woundings. Allow the wound to do its work on you even should you descend into a pit of hopelessness. If you remain there long enough, you will be shorn of those personal patterns and attachments that must die so you may be reborn into a greater life. You will learn to forgive and to love again.
Opening your heart to your sacred wound allows you to genuinely fall in love with yourself. You come to see yourself so deeply you form an intimate relationship with the person you most truly are. What’s more, you recover a treasure to carry into life and thereby contribute to the redemption of the world – your family, community and species.
In the second cocoon, through the experience of heartrending grief, you discover the true nature of your deepest emotional wounds, both their pain and their promise. In this stage of the journey, you will probably find yourself entering at least one such wound.
In the contemporary West, the exploration of the sacred wound, when attempted at all, most commonly takes place in those rare psychotherapies that journey deep into the psyche to encounter the demons and monsters of our greatest fears. These wounds can also be approached through exceptional forms of bodywork or through ceremonies that expose our grief and allow its full experience. In a soul-centered setting, the elders, who know we all carry a sacred wound, offer rituals and nature-based practices that help us uncover and assimilate the lessons and opportunities, the treasures, hidden in our wounds. In whatever way we go about it, healing work with our sacred wound loosens our attachment to our former identity and is a vital component of the metamorphosis that occurs within the second cocoon.
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Post by wren on Dec 3, 2006 15:06:15 GMT -5
Choosing Authenticity
As a Wanderer, you must be true to yourself. You cannot follow the crowd. Authenticity is a decision and a skill. Learn to distinguish authenticity from deception and self-deception. You can act in accordance with your true understanding of yourself. Now, in the second cocoon, you must take up the practice of reversing the priority between acceptance and authenticity. Authenticity and integrity become your foundations for asking the deeper questions of soul.
Distinguishing authenticity from deception – at any stage of life – requires the ability to access and understand your emotions, desires and values. But the more advanced practice of choosing authenticity over social acceptance requires something more: you must tell yourself and your intimate others the truth, all of it, as deeply as you can, especially when it is difficult. What you express is from the heart and intended to serve both yourself and others. You must adopt the practice of making all your actions align with what you know to be emotionally and spiritually true.
A key authenticity practice is to stop pleasing others at the expense of your own integrity. If the important others in your life – at home, at work, at play, in spiritual community – need you to be someone you are not, you will have to surrender your impulse to keep living your life for them. You will have to relinquish your willingness to make major life decisions just to take care of them emotionally or to win their approval.
You will, in essence, have to learn the difference between shallow and deep loyalty – doing what another wants or asks versus doing what your heart tells you is best for all concerned, yourself and others. Shallow loyalty is ultimately selfish if your goal is to increase your acceptance or socioeconomic security through compliance. It is both selfish and destructive if your goal is to give others what they want despite knowing the ‘gift’ is harmful. Supporting a person’s weakness, psychopathology or addiction is always a case of shallow loyalty, otherwise known as enabling, caretaking or codependency.
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Post by wren on Dec 3, 2006 15:07:25 GMT -5
The Death Lodge A candidate for soul initiation knows what he has taken on. He is preparing to die in order to be reborn. He must abandon her old home to set out for a new home. He longs for the journey but is understandably terrified by the prospect. To help him approach the edge, the elders might suggest some time in the ‘death lodge’ once he has made progress with the preceding practices. The death lodge is a symbolic and/or literal place, separate from the ongoing life of the community, to which the Wanderer retires to say goodbye to what his life has been. He may dwell there a full month or more, or, during the course of the year, an hour or two every day, or several long weekends. Some of his death lodge work will take place n the cauldron of his imagination and emotions, while at other times it will occur face-to-face with friends, family and lovers. He will wrap up unfinished emotional and worldly business to help release himself from his past. In the death lodge, he will see that the life he is leaving has contained by joy and pain, success and failure, love and the absence of love. Some of the central people in his life have played the roles of villains or victims, others of heroes. No matter. Now all the paths of possibilities within his former life are going to converge at a single inevitable point up ahead: the ending of his world way of belonging to the world. In the death lodge he will say goodbye to his accustomed ways of loving and hating, to the places that have felt most like home, to the social roles that gave his pleasure and self-definition, to the organizations and institutions that both shaped and limited him growth, and also to his parents or caregivers who birthed and raised him and who will soon, in a way, be losing a son. It is in the death lodge that he might choose to end his involvement with some people, places and roles. In other cases, he might only need to shift his relationship to them. Although he must surrender his old way of belonging to the world, he need not violate sacred contracts. Some contracts might have to be renewed at a deeper level. It is essential she does not fool herself: embarking on the underworld journey is not a legitimate justification for abdicating preexisting agreements or responsibilities to others. Whether ending or shifting relationships, he will feel or express his gratitude, love, forgiveness, his good-byes. He will say the difficult and important things previously unsaid. He may or may not visit with each person in the flesh, but he will certainly have many poignant and emotional encounters. In his death lodge, the Wanderer also mourns. He grieves personal losses and the collective losses of war, race or gender oppression, environmental destruction, community and family disintegration, or spiritual emptiness. Not only does he cease to push the painful memories away but he invites them into his lodge and looks them in the eye. He allows his body to be seized by grief, surrendering to the gestures, postures and cries of sorrow. He grieves in order to let his heart open fully again. He knows at the bottom of those grief waters lies a treasure, the source of his greater life. Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief
turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breath
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else
~David White Each of us has been, at times the one who stood above a dark well and ‘wished for something else’ – namely, that we ourselves wouldn’t have to descend into the waters of grief, that our wishes would come true without our having to suffer in the process. In the second cocoon, we surrender our comfortable lives above the waters. We enter depths so dark we fear we will die and, in a way, we will. Most people come to their vision quests with the intention, or at least the need, to grieve significant losses. The death lodge is an essential preparatory practice to that end. Many people embark on their quests in part to say goodbye to an identity they’ve outgrown, in a sense to attend their own funeral. Some write a eulogy for themselves, a farewell to the old story. Although the new story stirs inside them, they know the old one must first be laid to rest. Others will finally grieve the loss of someone close to them, someone they have been unable to let go. In the death lodge, you loosen your grip on your former identity and world. You cut the cords, then gingerly step along the narrow ledge above the abyss, your back to the crag. At last, you turn and extend your arms against the half-truths of the old life, your fingers lightly pushing away. To relinquish your former self is to sacrifice the story you had been living, the one that defined you, empowered you socially – and limited you. This sacrifice captures the essence of leaving home. Toward the end of the second cocoon, you begin to live as if in a fugue state. Imagine: after developing an adequate and functional identity, you now have become as if amnesic, dissociated from your prior life. But, unlike the sufferer of amnesia, your goal is not to discover who you used to be but rather who you really are. Your time in the death lodge grants freedom. Untied from the past, you dwell more fully in the present, more able to savor the gifts of the world. You find yourself projecting less and seeing the world more clearly and passionately. You experience a deepened gratitude for the richness of life, for the many opportunities that await you. |
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Post by wren on Dec 3, 2006 15:07:48 GMT -5
Disidentification Through Meditation
Meditation practice develops the alertness of a centered mind, the ability to stay focused and calmly present. Meditation also guides you to disindentify from the small self that says ‘not me, I’m not going to die’. Through meditation practice, you learn to distinguish your personal consciousness – your beliefs about yourself, your ego – from the vast stillness of consciousness, the calm observing witness, at the center of the storm of your life.
During the second cocoon, it is essential to loosen your grip on the small self, the self that is going to die during soul encounters and soul initiation. A meditation discipline will help you open up to your larger self or your ‘wild mind’. As you experience wild mind more regularly, your attachment lessens to any particular way your ego might constellate itself. Your capacity for soulful shape-shifting increases correspondingly. Your ego becomes more fluid, more adaptable to the desires of soul, spirit and nature.
You might begin with daily mediation periods of twenty minutes, sitting with your spine erect and steadily attending to your breath, both the inspirations and expirations, perhaps counting ten breaths and then repeating. When you notice your attention has drifted away, gently return to your breath.
There are many variations on this theme. Different approaches to mediation employ different foci for attention, whether it be the breath or a candle, a photo of a spiritual teacher, a sound or a chant, or simply attending to whatever passes through consciousness without clinging to any momentary awareness. You might choose a mindfulness practice within an Eastern discipline or you may learn a modern Western approach such as the Relaxation Reponse but, in any case, your underworld journey will be greatly facilitated by practicing the art of centering and disidentifying.
These, then, are the practices of leaving home. None of them are common components of high school or college curricula in the contemporary Western world (as they ought to be), none of them high on the agendas of our youth themselves nor of most of their parents, none of them staple practices of our mainstream religious communities. We may long for what these practices would prepare us for (a soulful or second adulthood) but might have little idea how to get there. But it is possible to get there and with these seven practices for shedding your former identity, it may not be as difficult as you imagine.
By employing these practices, your attachment to your former identity will diminish. Then you must learn to be still and wait. Learn to put your faith and love and hope in the waiting. Do not cling to unripe answers to questions about destiny. You have now fully entered the cocoon, your previous form has dissolved, and your new form has not yet taken shape. The darkness shall be your light. Make peace with your lack of knowing and trust that place fiercely.
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