I Want to Know What I Want

I have a friend named Steve.  Steve lives in a world completely unbounded by shame.  He fascinates and irritates me at the same time.  He fascinates me because I have no personal frame of reference for his world view but I also am envious of the freedom in which he seems to live.  He irritates me because from my shame ego’s perspective his mere existence is a negative judgment on how I live my life.

I remember hiking with him many years ago.  We were walking along a mountain trail.  He suggested we go off the path.  The neo-hippie wannabe part of me readily agreed.  Yeah!  Stick it to the trail man who wants us to hike in specificly designated places!  Another part of me was annoyed.  We had a perfectly good trail to walk on, we were outside, getting exercise, being healthy and enjoying nature.  His suggestion implied that walking on the path was conformist and somehow an inauthentic experience of the natural world.

Recently I thought about this interaction when I was walking on a sidewalk.  Clearly the sidewalk was the designated place for me to walk.  I felt annoyed that the sidewalk builder was dictating where I should walk.  I considered walking off the sidewalk and cutting through a yard.  Then it felt like Steve was telling me where to walk and that felt annoying too.

In this scenario I do not really know what I want.  If I walk on the sidewalk I am conforming to society’s rule.  If I stray from the sidewalk I am conforming to Steve’s neo-hippie ethic.  If I ask myself what I truly want to do in this scenario my mind goes blank.  I have no real, whole-hearted desire.  Rather, I am trying to please two alien masters.  I am motivated by a desire to avoid the shame that goes along with making the wrong choice.

Even though I do not know what I want, I think the feeling of being annoyed is informative.  From the shame based perspective, feeling annoyed is wrong.  By being annoyed, on a passive aggressive level I am fighting the system and fighting the system is sinful.  Passive aggression is a primary tool in the shame-based tool box.  But the feeling of being annoyed is also a message from my true self.  There is something happening in the universe that I do not like.  That is the truth.  That is the key to finding out what I truly want.

Gestalt therapy taught me that my feelings are always right and never sinful.  That is, there is always a legitimate reason behind my feelings.  They do not arise because I am flawed.  I think my feeling of being annoyed comes from the no win situation my shame ego has constructed for me.  I can choose to walk on the sidewalk or cut across a yard.  Either way I am conforming and as such, unoriginal and inauthentic which is shame worthy.  It is the no win situation itself that irritates me.  I want to be unbound by shame and the no win situation.

I imagine Steve would not spend a second of his life considering any of this.  He would walk where he wanted to walk because he wanted to.  How utterly simple.  How utterly beautiful.  The no win situation is a construction of my shame ego as is not knowing what I want.

Labor Day – The Need to Do Something

Today was Labor Day.  I woke up feeling very anxious.  I felt like I should be doing something. No matter what I do sometimes I feel like I should be doing something else.  I had the day off from work and so did my kids but my wife was working.  I had to come up with something to do and if I did not come up with something the kids would end up watching TV all day.  I hate that because it makes me feel like I am failing as a parent.

We just moved from Connecticut to North Carolina.  The area is new to me and I am not entirely sure what there is to do around here.  There is this lake nearby where we can rent a kayak.  I did not really want to do that because we just moved and I have been hemorrhaging money.  It seemed like an unnecessary expense.  So I was torn.  I am a bad parent if I do not spend money and take my kids somewhere but I am irresponsible if I spend too much money.  I cannot win either way.  I recognize this dilemma because of my experience with Gestalt therapy.  No matter what I do I am wrong.

It is interesting to consider this feeling of needing to do something within the context of Labor Day.  This holiday celebrates labor, hard work.  I used to work for a national law firm and hated it because it felt like I was not doing work of any consequence even though I was working long hours.  I never felt like my work was important.  The dilemma repeats itself.  I work hard but my work is not important.  So I am not really working.  It does not count.  I cannot win.

But there is a small victory in recognizing the fact that I cannot win under any circumstances.  I recognize that there is this force that wants to fuck with me no matter what I do.  When I am not aware of this I think if I just get all my ducks in a row then I will not be fucked with.  This of course, is an illusion.  I am asleep when I think this way.  There is no way to get all my ducks in a row and even if I did I would be fucked with then for some other reason.  When I recognize this I am more awake (in the Buddhist sense of the term ‘awake’).

So where does this leave me?  When I wake up feeling anxious I am being fucked with.  There is an energy within me that is telling me I am doing something wrong.  To the extent I feel anxious I am believing the message of this energy.  To the extent I recognize this dynamic I gain separation from it.  This is a victory but each victory is small.  So on Labor Day my task is to do nothing and to try to be okay with it or at least recognize the energy trying to make me feel not okay with it.

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My Ego and My True Self *

Illustration by Warwick Goble to Beauty and the Beast: the heroine is the youngest daughter in her family. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My ego’s goal is to separate itself.  Separation is how my ego first came into being and maintained its existence.  Separation is also how it procreates.  The ego first came into being when I was told that I was not good enough and believed it.  To compensate for this belief I created a false self to present to the world.  This false self was constructed by my ego by splitting myself into two entities.  My ego is fundamentally dishonest in the sense that it was born from a lie I told myself, then tried to believe and largely succeeded.  Once my ego came into being it had a self-preservation instinct like all living entities.  To preserve itself it had to split and continue to split because it is always at odds with reality and the way it copes with being at odds with reality is to split itself.  Splitting itself gives my ego a place to run when it is confronted with a reality that conflicts with its point of view.  And on and on it continues to split itself spawning egos of egos of egos.

At the heart of my ego is shame, the fear that if the world saw my true self, I would be judged and abandoned.  In this way creating my ego was an act of self-preservation made by my true self.  I can see this clearly in my children.  My youngest daughter says she likes a singer, my older daughter says she does not like that singer but likes another one.  Then my youngest daughter drops her original preference in favor of my older daughter’s preference.

For the ego to thrive, the true self must be put to sleep.  In the beginning the true self does this willingly thinking that the creation of ego and splitting the self saves the self.  When the true self is put to sleep the ego adopts the persona of the true self.  Its judgement and jealousy of others becomes true.  Its vanity and its shame become true.  The true self is mostly just awareness itself so when it sleeps there is no awareness that the ego is running the show.  As such, awareness of the ego is a sign that the true self is awakening.

Over time my ego created such an elaborate maze of illusion that coping with reality became difficult.  When this began to happen my true self began to stir in its sleep.  I would feel anxious and not know why.  I experienced a tightening sensation in my throat.  I became depressed.  Feelings in the body are always true.  They cannot be dishonest and always exist for a true reason.  They are the way the true self communicates from its place of sleep while the ego is in charge.  It was this anxiety, physical discomfort and depression that set me on my journey to awaken my true self.

If my ego came into existence through separation and illusion then overcoming the ego and awakening the true self is achieved by unity (letting go of separation) and truth.  I did this a little bit at a time. After a while, my true self began to awaken and I saw the ego and its shame and judgment as entities separate from my self.  They are not who I really am.  They are not true.  Bringing awareness to the fact that shame is a feeling brought forth by a separate entity (my ego) gave me separation from the shame.  It was there, but rather than believe it I observe it.  Separation from separation is unity.

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