Hey all, I wanted to share about a book that was recommended to me by my therapist about healing developmental trauma, and how to heal and navigate the disturbances it can induce in one's thoughts, emotions, and well-being. The book is called The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You. It is written by Matt Licata, who has a PhD in psychotherapy and leans heavily on the the NARM (neuro-affective relational model) taught in HDT, polyvagal theory, and also wisdom from a number of spiritual traditions including esoteric western and eastern traditions (eg, alchemical metaphors, buddhism, tantra). The mysticism is there mostly for the power to poetically illustrate a given point. Metaphor is never shied away from in the book, and while sometimes I think it can be a bit heavy, I also understand the purpose behind it when it comes to really trying to get a concept or perspective through to someone who has experienced a lot of trauma. For those types of cases it's not a matter of reading one sentence and having the doors blown open (the best case scenario); sometimes a person needs to hear something in multiple ways (similar to the romance reading), with compassionate language, for it to sink in enough to hopefully sir something and initiate the process of integration. Similar to reading a lot of romance novels. :P
I read HDT a few years ago, and it was highly educational, but was of a mostly clinical description on how to apply it as a therapist to a patient. The style of TPIE is such that it's a guided journey the author is taking you on, inviting us to step into and and get in touch with the damaged parts of ourselves, and how to sustain and nourish that contact we make with our dissociated parts of ourselves without shutting down or retreating further. There are many books about healing from trauma that have been mentioned on this forum. This book itself is light on theory (much of which has been covered elsewhere), but I found it excels simply in the advice and emotional support given when it comes to engaging with a certain question or issue of relation, self-regulation, developmental wounding, how to hold oneself together in the middle ground between repressing or identifying with an emotion, and so on.
There is a lot of striving to validate where feelings come from, in the sense of appreciating their original and purely adaptive function of protecting you from further fragmentation due to an overwhelming stress. In spite of this though there are always qualifications for such an exploration to be grounded in morally correct behavior and acting, as the Buddhists say, "skillfully" (e.g. no venting to strangers in nontherapeutic contexts or acting without consideration of other people's needs).
One issue that is discussed in the book is how to avoid certain traps known as "spiritual bypass," where people shore up an identity of being spiritual as a way to avoid examining the discomforting feelings and emotions we can have brought up at irregular times, or to disparage ourselves for not "having everything together" or not being farther along in our path of genuine integration or spiritual growth than our story tells us we should be. This is seen as just another form of self-aggression and self-abandonment where an individual is again setting up a narrative to separate them from the raw deeper feelings by another degree. The protective function this has, to keep the process slow and steady, is another aspect to be honored and appreciated in and of itself, according to the author, which makes a lot of sense to me just in my own explorations of prevebal trauma and the like.
The title of the book is premised on the conviction that every encounter you have with negative emotions—heck, emotions of any kind—is an opportunity to become more deeply acquainted with yourself, in such a way that you can embrace and give space to it such that it will no longer overwhelm you or control your actions; these emotions can find their proper place within you when held properly. The subtitle of “Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You” refers to the life force and power we all have, and from which we can become estranged from due to splitting and dissociation. The book is an invitation to a journey into the self, the whole of our self—not just the known parts of us—and to become acquainted with and loving to the whole of us, that we can bring more of ourselves to bear in the service of others and creating a new world.
There are quite a few different topics and favorite quotes that I want to share.
Chapter 1, "Into the Holding Environment," is about holding space for either others or yourself, where you create a container for someone to open up more to the more traumatic or vulnerable feelings people commonly suppress due to being in an unsafe environment. Every therapist worth their salt should be able to provide a space of this nature. As the author points out, we also have to learn to create this holding space for ourselves also.
Chapter 2, "Crucible of the Broken," teaches about reconsidering how one reacts to the approach of disturbing emotions or feelings which may be unconscious or about to erupt into fuller awareness. The author challenges readers to try not to see the existence of negative emotions in themselves as inherently bad. They can instead become our teachers, and can instead be seen as signs or forerunners to increasing depths of awareness and emotional aliveness. In the section on sadness the author comments:
Similar sections exist for aloneness, melancholy, and also anxiety, shared in part below because you can replace anxiety with virtually any type of negative emotion linked with trauma:
What I also liked about this chapter was a section called "At the Edge of a Cliff," which talks about both the concerns people can have about opening the proverbial Pandora's Box of unmet and unprocessed feelings and trauma, and about an overzealous desire to dig through to the bottom of one's unconscious as fast as possible to get on with the personal project of spiritual evolution:
The chapter wraps up with some broader discussion of the notion of psychological death and rebirth; in learning to separate our narratives from our emotions we can see the validity in the emotion but falseness in the narrative (especially an outdated one), and in this space of "context collapse" the importance of experiencing the uncertainty there as not problematic inherently but rather something that over time will be reborn with greater understanding.
Licata has some comments about the word "integration," with respect to re-integrating fragmented parts of ourselves.
(The idea of "letting go" is covered a bit later on as well).
Chapter 4, "Wholeness and the Spiritual Journey," has several sections. The first talks about the phenomenon of spiritual bypass, which is a term coined by John Welwood several decades ago to describe the use of spiritual pursuit as a psychological defense mechanism:
As with any form of avoidance of negative emotion, what's advised is to approach it with openness and curiosity, and not with a sense of condemnation and urgency that works contrary to proper integration (as described earlier):
Another section called "A most sacred story" talks about narratives and how they shape in fundamental ways how we engage with our emotional and unconscious content. It also addresses how some new age or psychotherapeutic practices (especially those somatically centered) over-emphazie "letting go of your story," and how a more balanced approach is needed: "a light touch, resting in the unresolvable, rich middle territory between denial and fusion."
One of my favorite sections of the book, called "Love has no Opposite," challenges the (in my opinion pernicious) idea that fear is the opposite of love.
On the pressure to "let go," and the ways it can serve a maladaptive purpose that isn't attuned with our inner experience and the proper processing that needs to be done to truly let go of something:
A section called "closer to the wound" speaks more to the reasoning and wisdom of dissociating from the body in certain contexts in early development, and the types of dilemmas one can struggle with when they begin to see the first inklings of how one's wounds limit oneself and the possibility of overcoming or integrating those wounds.
Below is a later section in Chapter 4 I also loved, in the vein of "love has no opposite," which talks about how even the negative emotions we can have time to time are themselves are also just a means for love or the higher self (referred to throughout the book as The Beloved) to make itself known to you.
{continued below}
I read HDT a few years ago, and it was highly educational, but was of a mostly clinical description on how to apply it as a therapist to a patient. The style of TPIE is such that it's a guided journey the author is taking you on, inviting us to step into and and get in touch with the damaged parts of ourselves, and how to sustain and nourish that contact we make with our dissociated parts of ourselves without shutting down or retreating further. There are many books about healing from trauma that have been mentioned on this forum. This book itself is light on theory (much of which has been covered elsewhere), but I found it excels simply in the advice and emotional support given when it comes to engaging with a certain question or issue of relation, self-regulation, developmental wounding, how to hold oneself together in the middle ground between repressing or identifying with an emotion, and so on.
There is a lot of striving to validate where feelings come from, in the sense of appreciating their original and purely adaptive function of protecting you from further fragmentation due to an overwhelming stress. In spite of this though there are always qualifications for such an exploration to be grounded in morally correct behavior and acting, as the Buddhists say, "skillfully" (e.g. no venting to strangers in nontherapeutic contexts or acting without consideration of other people's needs).
One issue that is discussed in the book is how to avoid certain traps known as "spiritual bypass," where people shore up an identity of being spiritual as a way to avoid examining the discomforting feelings and emotions we can have brought up at irregular times, or to disparage ourselves for not "having everything together" or not being farther along in our path of genuine integration or spiritual growth than our story tells us we should be. This is seen as just another form of self-aggression and self-abandonment where an individual is again setting up a narrative to separate them from the raw deeper feelings by another degree. The protective function this has, to keep the process slow and steady, is another aspect to be honored and appreciated in and of itself, according to the author, which makes a lot of sense to me just in my own explorations of prevebal trauma and the like.
The title of the book is premised on the conviction that every encounter you have with negative emotions—heck, emotions of any kind—is an opportunity to become more deeply acquainted with yourself, in such a way that you can embrace and give space to it such that it will no longer overwhelm you or control your actions; these emotions can find their proper place within you when held properly. The subtitle of “Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You” refers to the life force and power we all have, and from which we can become estranged from due to splitting and dissociation. The book is an invitation to a journey into the self, the whole of our self—not just the known parts of us—and to become acquainted with and loving to the whole of us, that we can bring more of ourselves to bear in the service of others and creating a new world.
There are quite a few different topics and favorite quotes that I want to share.
Chapter 1, "Into the Holding Environment," is about holding space for either others or yourself, where you create a container for someone to open up more to the more traumatic or vulnerable feelings people commonly suppress due to being in an unsafe environment. Every therapist worth their salt should be able to provide a space of this nature. As the author points out, we also have to learn to create this holding space for ourselves also.
There is a primordial longing wired into us as infants to be seen: for our subjective experience to be held, mirrored, and validated by another. In an environment of empathic attunement, we are able to rest in the mystery of who and what we are. Grounded in this environment, it is safe to explore unstructured states of being and engage courageously and skillfully with the world around us. We can take risks in relationship, choose at times to lead with our vulnerability, and explore deeply in the realization that we are both separate and connected. We can flow with our separateness and then change course and fully embrace our nature as utterly interconnected. We can move between these realms seamlessly and with our hearts open. In this sense, love is an alive field of presence in which our subjectivity can unfold into more integrated levels of organization.
From this perspective, “I love you” equals “I allow you.” I allow you to have your own experience—to organize and make meaning in the way that you do—and I will offer you my presence and warmth even if I do not understand you or agree with your perception or conclusions. Even if your being yourself triggers within me surges of emotion, vulnerability, and unmetabolized feeling, my vow is to allow you to be what you are. While I will not allow you to abuse me or to act violently or break the agreements and boundaries we have established, I will allow your inner experience to be what it is. Even if I cannot allow your behavior, I will not demand that the flow of feeling or emotion within you be reorganized to fit my own preferences, hopes, or fears.
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Additionally, we can give ourselves these same qualities of good contact and attuned space. In many ways, this is one of the essences of true meditation: to meet our immediate experience exactly as it is, in a warm but provocative, curious, and intimate embrace, without any agenda that it be shifted, transformed, changed, or healed. As we deepen in our practice, we come to discover that what we already are—as warm, open awareness itself—is in fact the ultimate holding environment. We do not become our true nature in time, or produce it by way of process or struggle. Rather, we train ourselves to recognize, open into, and participate in it, in ever deepening and more creative ways. In this way, we discover that we are already held and do not need to seek this holding by way of any external form, or through any inner process in time. In other words, it has already happened.
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Turning... [to] the broken and the dark (within) may never feel safe, but we must discover if this is still a requirement as it was when we were young children. There is no right or wrong answer here and you cannot take anyone else’s word for it: you must see for yourself. Don’t assume you know what is most true as your conditioned history is sure to be there to greet you as you begin this inquiry. With curiosity, courage, patience, and compassion, you can slowly drop underneath your history and into the unprecedented aliveness of the here and now, into the body and the felt sense of the situation, where new information and new data may be found.
In this inquiry, you may discover that while safety is a perfectly valid experience and one that you naturally prefer, perhaps it isn’t safety that you are ultimately after. What if the demand to always feel safe was not actually in support of the deepest longing within you, and was instead an unconscious defense against the aliveness you were sent here to know and embody? What if the demand for safety is a remnant of the past and holding you back from the life of intimacy, connection, and gratitude that you so genuinely long for?
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When you are stripped of unexamined concepts of safety and the known—and of your demand that the movement of love conform to your hopes, fears, and the way you thought it would all turn out—you will be shown what you are....When the known crumbles away, all that remains is your burning heart. There is nothing more alive than that. There is nothing more sacred than that. There is nothing safer than that.
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When you are triggered and your emotional world is crashing down on you, experiment with shifting your awareness out of the interpretations of what is happening and into your body, into the life that is surging within you. Your interpretations, while also important to explore, arise from what you already know. They have a way of keeping you wedded to your conditioned history and out of the fresh, spontaneous wisdom of the here and now. You may find that your belly, your heart, and your throat are alive with important data, if you will explore them with warmth and awareness, opening the gates to previously hidden guidance that is attempting to reach you. While the narrative is vivid, colorful, and convincingly compelling, it is an act of self-love to slow down and return to immediacy. The storyline will be waiting for you at a later moment, when you have come back online and can engage it with grounded presence and fresh vision.
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Often we will say, “I’m fully in my body. I’m in pure, direct contact with the raw feelings and sensations of anger, sadness, hopelessness, and shame. Don’t tell me I’m not feeling all that! I’ve been sad for so long! The shame has been there my entire life.” But if you pause, slow way down, and get curious about the actuality of your experience in the present (rather than in your interpretations of it), you may discover that often what you are in touch with is a subtle narrative you have wrapped around your immediate experience that is now orbiting around the aliveness. There is nothing inherently wrong, problematic, or “unspiritual” about the narrative. It is just one degree removed from the transformative fires of the here and now, and usually an expression of our past, conditioned history.
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Emotional pain has been pathologized in our world, along with tenderness, heartbreak, grief, and any sort of state of feeling down. We doubt ourselves and question our very being, afraid to trust in the purity and integrity of our experience as it is.
But emotional pain is not pathological. Grief is not a condition to be diagnosed and treated. Feeling down and blue and a bit hopeless is not a disease that needs to be cured by consumption, whether that consumption is of material goods or new inner states. A broken heart is pure and complete on its own, filled with integrity, intelligence, and life. It need not be mended nor transformed into something else. It is the vehicle by which the poetry of your life will flow.
To stay embodied with waves of grief, confusion, rage, fear, exhaustion, hopelessness, and doubt … to provide sanctuary and safe passage for the pieces of a broken world … to dissolve once and for all the trance of self-abandonment … this invitation is one that is radical and nonconventional by its nature, appearing now for your consideration.
To infuse the entire spectrum with breath, life, awareness, and holding will liberate an eruption of skillful energy and help us to find meaning, to bear the unbearable, and to truly be there for others when they are suffering. (this resonated very deeply with me). And to be warriors in the world at those times when we are needed most.
Chapter 2, "Crucible of the Broken," teaches about reconsidering how one reacts to the approach of disturbing emotions or feelings which may be unconscious or about to erupt into fuller awareness. The author challenges readers to try not to see the existence of negative emotions in themselves as inherently bad. They can instead become our teachers, and can instead be seen as signs or forerunners to increasing depths of awareness and emotional aliveness. In the section on sadness the author comments:
The presence of sadness is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It does not mean anything about who you are or your inherent value as a person, or that you have “failed” or lost your way. It means you are alive.... Go ahead. Be sad. But be sad fully. Set aside the resistance to this movement within you and allow it to express itself, share its secrets, and bestow its gifts upon a world that has forgotten the purity of the broken. Love is full spectrum and will unleash all of its children here, including sadness, to awaken itself in form. It is an act of profound kindness to turn into the open, achy caverns of the heart and seed them with holding.
Dare to see that the presence of sadness is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It does not mean that you have done life and relationships wrong, or that you are lacking in faith, trust, or gratitude. It doesn’t mean you have forgotten a “secret,” need to meditate better, become more adept at staying in the present moment, or that you are unlovable or beyond redemption.... Sadness is not something you need to fix, cure, or transform. It need not be healed, but held. You need not shift sadness into some “higher” state or apply teachings so it will yield into something else, for it is complete and pure on its own. You need not pathologize your sadness or fall into the spell of a world that has abandoned the wisdom buried inside the broken pieces. Stay close to your sadness and surround it with curiosity, presence, and warmth. With the fire of awareness and with the ally of your breath, descend underneath the story of the sadness and into the crucible of the body where the sadness essence dwells and makes its luminous home. Go on a journey into the core of the feelings, sensations, and images and into the raw, shaky life that is longing to be held.
Similar sections exist for aloneness, melancholy, and also anxiety, shared in part below because you can replace anxiety with virtually any type of negative emotion linked with trauma:
From this non-shaming and compassionate holding space, you can inquire as to whether the disquiet, shakiness, and unsurety—though misunderstood and dismissed in our modern world—are in reality forerunners of breakthrough, special representatives of the sacred death-rebirth cycle. As part of your contemplation, you can explore whether the freedom and aliveness you are so genuinely longing for will ever be found in transforming, replacing, or even healing this tender vulnerability in the core of your being. Or whether your deepest yearnings will be met by way of entering into relationship with it. By opening your heart to it. By daring to practicing intimacy with it. By no longer apologizing for it.
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As you deepen in your inquiry and train yourself for short periods of time to stay with the feelings and sensations that are moving within you, you may discover that there is no ongoing, solid, continuous thing called “anxiety” that is happening to you from the outside... It is important to remember that the word “anxiety” is a concept, and as with all concepts is one step removed from the actuality of your lived, embodied experience. Underneath the very loaded word, in a given moment of here-and-now experience, the concept “anxiety” overlays a unique, alive, unprecedented arrangement of physical sensation, emotion/feeling tone, and conceptual narrative, at times accompanied and fueled by mental, visual imagery as well as an impulse to take action. Becoming aware of what is actually happening at each of these levels of experience, one at a time, can help you approach what is happening in a bite-sized way rather than feeling you need to confront the anxiety all at once, as if it were an enemy you are being called to go to war with.
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Once you connect in a very direct way with what is actually happening within you—instead of primarily with your interpretation of what is happening and the habitual conclusions you have come to about what it all means—you may sense that continuing to claim you are “suffering from anxiety” is a subtle form of self-abandonment, and even self-violence....Yes, the symptoms of anxiety can be disturbing and can be quite icky... The question is this: Are these feelings accurate representations of the deepest truth of your situation, in the here and now? This is not an inquiry to take lightly, but one to make slowly, over time, with curiosity and an open heart, so you can see for yourself what is most true—now. Not what was true when you were a young child.
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It is easy to dismiss waves of anxiety, angst, and apprehension, to conclude that their presence is clear evidence that something is wrong. While it is perfectly natural to want to take some sort of action to calm the storm, we don’t want to do so at the expense of our own growth and evolution. Before we rush to quell the symptoms, we can practice attuning to what is arising to be met. We can practice holding, containing, tolerating, and opening into it in a given moment of time. In this way we may come to discover that our freedom—even our “healing”—is not dependent upon making these symptoms go away, but upon befriending them, getting curious about them, and investigating our actual experience as it unfolds from moment to moment. The project of “fixing me” is birthed and the unending war of self-improvement waged from unexamined emotional conclusions about what intense and disturbing feelings mean about who you are as a person at the deepest levels. Many have discovered how exhausting the journey of self-improvement has become and are aching for deep rest, an ancient sort of relaxing into their lives as they are, which is not dependent upon first “fixing” our emotions or replacing one experience with another. The notion that you can be free within the experience of anxiety can be boggling to the mind, but the body and the heart know this truth, that your freedom is not dependent upon the appearance or disappearance of any particular psychological, emotional, and somatic phenomena.
What I also liked about this chapter was a section called "At the Edge of a Cliff," which talks about both the concerns people can have about opening the proverbial Pandora's Box of unmet and unprocessed feelings and trauma, and about an overzealous desire to dig through to the bottom of one's unconscious as fast as possible to get on with the personal project of spiritual evolution:
To set aside the ways you have come to defend yourself against the tenderness and depth of what you are would require that you first return your conscious awareness directly to those parts you have disowned at an earlier time. All of the feelings, emotions, images, fantasies, complexes, personas, and the entirety of the shadow in all its forms: the fears of intimacy, the anxiety around death, the panic of abandonment—all of it. Most have spent their lives organizing their experience around minimizing or altogether avoiding contact with this material, a strategy that makes sense from the perspective of maintaining a kind of homeostasis and status quo. The question, however, is whether the status quo is really going to cut it for you. Or whether you are called to something else.
It is important to see that these organizing principles are not the expression of some neurotic, intrapsychic conflict but are relational strategies rooted in regulating what would otherwise be an avalanche of overwhelming anxiety. While we all may have some hope that we are ready and willing to release these strategies all at once, it doesn’t really work like that. The wholesale dismantling of our defensive organization is not recommended. In fact, to do so is often more an expression of self-aggression and fear than it is of wisdom and kindness, as it is only the ego that feels the need to storm its own castle and tear itself down.
The chapter wraps up with some broader discussion of the notion of psychological death and rebirth; in learning to separate our narratives from our emotions we can see the validity in the emotion but falseness in the narrative (especially an outdated one), and in this space of "context collapse" the importance of experiencing the uncertainty there as not problematic inherently but rather something that over time will be reborn with greater understanding.
[W]hat if this lowliness were a legitimate experience, a messenger of some sort that is trying to break through an old dream, an outdated image, a worn-out narrative about yourself and something you thought was so important? What if in the totality of what you are, a wave of “unhappiness” is just as authentic and genuine as a wave of “happiness,” laying the ground for something new and unexpected to emerge? In a way that the mind might find crazy or even dangerous, what if we were to dare to see that even a moment of depression is valid and an attempt of psyche to communicate? Love not only takes form as flow, sweetness, and so-called “positive” feelings, but at times as the activity of death and deflation, reorienting old vision so rebirth can occur.
During these times of psychic transition and reorganization, what we conceive of as the purpose of our life begins to crumble and fall apart, and the rug is pulled away. What is the new reference point around which we’ll organize? Where are the identities we were once able to rest in and find meaning? As if this dissolution isn’t enough on its own, nothing has arrived to replace the old with something new. We are between worlds, without the past to lean into but also without any future that we can look to for solid ground and inspiration. We are in the realm of Hermes, guide of the liminal and the dead, and in the undefined space between it all. Yes, it can be disorienting and bewildering in this place, but has something gone wrong? Is death wrong? Must we scramble urgently to replace it with “life”? Does any of this make any sense on the path of the heart?
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It is difficult but possible to befriend waves of numbness and depression as carriers of a certain kind of life, though theirs is a signature that does not conform to conventional ideas about who you are and what you’re doing here. Depth, meaning, and information are often buried in these experiences, but you must open in new ways to receive this level of guidance. These visitors come not as obstacles but as invitations for you to slow down and provide safe passage to something that needs to die within you, so that you may lay the groundwork for new forms of love to emerge, be reborn, and flourish. It takes a tremendous amount of courage, curiosity, and self-care to go into this material and open to it, for it is not what is normally presented as what is required on the path of healing and inner work. But love is not only peaceful, calming, and creative. At times is wrathful, dark, and destructive. In fact, it is everything, and a partial love is never going to do. For you are wired for something immense.
Licata has some comments about the word "integration," with respect to re-integrating fragmented parts of ourselves.
Often what is meant by “integrating” or “healing” trauma (loosely defined here as any experience characterized by unbearable or overwhelming affect) is that one day we will “get over it,” “transcend” it, meditate or “manifest” it away, or otherwise purge it from what we are. In my clinical experience (in sitting in the fire alongside many courageous men and women with the most heartbreaking histories), this view of trauma is in large part inaccurate, aggressive, misguided, and at times even dangerous and violent. There are some things that happen to us that we will never “get over,” nor would this even be an appropriate goal or lens to use in approaching the sacredness of the human temple.
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But if what we mean by “integration” is discovering a place inside us where we can hold and contain our experience, make sense of what happened in new ways, and discover deeper meaning, then these concepts can come alive again. Slowly, over time, guided by new levels of kindness, clear-seeing, and multileveled awareness, we can begin to bear that which has been unbearable and provide sanctuary and safe passage for the shards of the broken world to reorganize. As we train ourselves to re-inhabit our bodies even in the face of profoundly disturbing cognitions, feelings, and sensations, we can begin to weave a more integrated narrative of our lives, reauthoring the sacred story of who we are, our purpose here, and what is most important to us. We can gather the pieces into a coherent whole and begin to trust in the validity of our experience again. The goal, then, is not some fixed state where we have successfully purged an aspect of our self-experience from what we are, as if it were some wretched foreign substance, but rather to find a larger home for it within us. Slowly, we can allow what has become frozen and solidified to thaw and become flexible. Ultimately, it is love, in the most resplendent sense of the word, that will soften the wounds of the body and the heart, for they will never unwind in an environment of self-aggression. It’s just not safe or majestic enough there.
(The idea of "letting go" is covered a bit later on as well).
Chapter 4, "Wholeness and the Spiritual Journey," has several sections. The first talks about the phenomenon of spiritual bypass, which is a term coined by John Welwood several decades ago to describe the use of spiritual pursuit as a psychological defense mechanism:
As with any significant activity that offers the promise of depth and meaning, engagement with spirituality can provide a very rich pathway into the unfolding of the sacred world and the endless dimensions of the human heart. It can also be used to avoid emotional pain, to protect us from the demands of intimacy, to provide a buffer against unresolved feelings, and to keep at bay the very alive, untamed landscape of our vulnerability in all its forms. This observation is not meant to suggest that we turn from our most sacred beliefs and practices, but rather that we engage them with eyes wide open. There are an infinite number of ways ego can co-opt even the most revered teachings to fortify itself in the attempt to remedy early developmental failure, unresolved attachment wounding, the pain of chronic misattunement, and unmetabolized trauma of all kinds. Believing we are becoming more intimate with our experience, we may be surprised to discover that we are in fact unconsciously distancing ourselves from the aliveness we so deeply long for....
As with any form of avoidance of negative emotion, what's advised is to approach it with openness and curiosity, and not with a sense of condemnation and urgency that works contrary to proper integration (as described earlier):
For many of us spiritual seekers, the ultimate letting go, what we really need to let go of, is the “ego” itself. The ego has become the bad girl and boy of spirituality, hiding inside the cracks and crevices, ready to surge at any time in a way that is very nonspiritual, mucking up everything with its selfish, ignorant, and pathological activity... Making use of spirituality to avoid certain aspects of ourselves is not “bad,” pathological, or inherently problematic. Nor do we need to diminish, critique, or practice aggression toward it, making use of our inquiry to reenact early dynamics of judging and shaming our organizational strategies.We do not engage in avoidant behavior because there is something wrong with us but because we are alive, sensitive, and doing our best to take care of ourselves using the tools we have at our disposal. Like any defensive behavior, the activity serves a function and can be respected as such. And then from a clear, spacious, non-shaming seeing, these subtleties can be explored with compassion, care, and open curiosity—fueled by the longing to know what is most true. As we inquire with our hearts open, we can see what feelings and aspects of ourselves our beliefs and practices may be inadvertently helping us avoid, and investigate whether we are ready to turn back toward them and provide a home for their metabolization and integration. No shame, no blame, no self-aggression. Just more awareness, presence, and kindness. No urgency to dismantle our defensive organization or “get enlightened” overnight or resolve it all on the heels of an insightful weekend retreat. Just grounded, open-hearted curiosity and inquiry, inspired by the love of truth.
Another section called "A most sacred story" talks about narratives and how they shape in fundamental ways how we engage with our emotional and unconscious content. It also addresses how some new age or psychotherapeutic practices (especially those somatically centered) over-emphazie "letting go of your story," and how a more balanced approach is needed: "a light touch, resting in the unresolvable, rich middle territory between denial and fusion."
The goal of this work is not to “get rid of your story” but to have a more flexible relationship with it. At times you can wear it as an ornament and at other times you can set it down for a while, allowing it to rest from a long journey, picking it up again only if it is helpful in connecting with others and in opening into the mystery.
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Allow yourself to come close to the narrative of your life. What story are you telling? It is both wise and kind to know the stories that are surging under the surface and discover whether they are yours or belong to another. Are you living your own life or someone else’s? Take a moment, and see. There’s no need to be afraid. You will not be tainted, or lose your way, or fall from grace, or lose your powerful “nondual” realization. The invitation is to move toward the story you have been telling, to get really clear on the lens through which you organize your experience, for it is only in the knowing the story you are telling that you will be able to make a conscious decision as to whether you would like to tell a different one.... Of course the greatest story of all is that you no longer have a story, that you have “transcended” all stories and that there is “no one here any longer” to tell a story. You are welcome to tell this story as well! But perhaps you will be willing to see that it too is only partial, like all stories. In this very moment, you can finally call off the war with your stories... It is all too common in contemporary spirituality to be anti-story, to devalue any sort of narrative about one’s experience, as if engaging at the level of story is something to apologize for, evidence that we’re missing the mark and getting caught up in “drama” and “the ego.” Often when I speak with people about what is going on for them, they will preface their report with something like, “Well, I mean, not to get into my story or anything, but …” As if it were something to be ashamed of to have a story, to have a way to organize and make meaning of their experience.
One of my favorite sections of the book, called "Love has no Opposite," challenges the (in my opinion pernicious) idea that fear is the opposite of love.
Fear is merely a temporary wave in the nervous system, longing to be met, integrated, and metabolized in the wholeness that you are, as are all forms that appear in the mystery of the inner landscape. It is not an enemy against whom you fight imaginary spiritual battles. You can call off the war and set aside the conditioning of a spirituality of aggression once you see how much unnecessary suffering such fictional wars generate. Apprehended with an open heart, fear is revealed to be a unique form of aliveness that seeks the light of your presence, which could never, ever be blemished by the temporary movement of fear. By abandoning fear and concluding that its presence is evidence that something has gone wrong and you have failed, you inadvertently keep alive the ancient pathways of self-abandonment and self-violence. Love is not opposed to fear but wishes to embrace it, enter into intimacy with it, and provide room for its essence to unfold and illuminate. There is no need for you to fear fear any longer. In this very moment, you can call off the war with your experience, holding whatever arises within your body and your heart as an invitation into wholeness. When fear is fully met and safe passage is provided, it reveals itself, like all form, as none other than love in disguise. You need no longer practice a spirituality of exclusion and aggression. Fear is not the opposite of love, for love has no opposite.
On the pressure to "let go," and the ways it can serve a maladaptive purpose that isn't attuned with our inner experience and the proper processing that needs to be done to truly let go of something:
We are often admonished (and admonish others) to “get over it,” as if our past traumas, surging emotions, addictive behaviors, and organizing narratives are something we can just “choose” to “get over” one sunny afternoon. If we will allow ourselves to get curious about this, we can explore whether this demand to “let go” is serving us, and if so, to what end. And as we look even deeper, we may see that in large part the demand to “let go” has its origin in early childhood, where this was often a subtle (or not so subtle) message from the attachment figures around us: “Just get over it.” “Stop crying.” “Stop being so sad. You should be grateful for all you’ve been given.” “Don’t you dare be angry with me.”
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It is important to note that I’m not talking about an external behavior that is abusive, harmful, or unskillful toward yourself or another. Yes, please let go of these. Rather, I’m speaking about the relationship with your inner world of beliefs, images, fantasies, meanings, hopes, fears, emotions, feelings, and bodily sensations—the entire landscape of your internal world and subjective experience. This is an interesting inquiry and one that you must enter into without any preconceived notions about what you might find. As with all of the inquiries and invitations in this book, it is important to approach these experiments with a fresh and spontaneous heart and mind. Not as the expert, but as the beginner. Dare to see as clearly as you can what is most true, even if it does not conform to what you’d like to be true, what you’ve been told is true, or what you should arrive at if you conduct the inquiry in the “right” way. From this open and inquisitive place you can then explore whether it is the wisest, most compassionate, or most skillful course of action to “let go,” your intention for doing so, the implications of taking such an action, and what that process might actually look like in real time.
What would it mean, for example, in your actual, present experience to “let go” of fear, a limiting narrative of abandonment, a wave of nauseous anxiety in the belly, a contraction or racing in the heart, constriction in the throat—or heartbreak, confusion, grief, or rage? Is this the deepest invitation you are receiving? To “let go”? Why? Do you believe that “letting go” of parts of yourself is going to make you happy? Fulfilled? At peace? Whole? Become passionately curious and interested in knowing your motivations for this, and what is truly driving the demand to “let go.” Is it coming from love? From fear? From wisdom? From avoidance? From unresolved feelings of unworthiness? From the fragmented self-narrative that something is wrong with you as you are? These are not questions to take lightly but to spend time and care with, discovering in the fire of our own direct experience what is most true. Does “letting go” truly get rid of something or does it bury it and keep it alive in more subtle forms, and in fact lead us to organize our experience around it? Is it “letting go” that is most helpful or is it something more whole, more integrative, less aggressive that we’re longing for? Is the offending material simply a cosmic error that must be eradicated through spiritual process, or is it an invitation, a form of intelligence and counsel, that carries with it hidden wisdom and guidance to be integrated? Please do not take my word for any of this. Make the embodied journey and see for yourself.
By way of this inquiry we may discover that we need not “let go” of any inner experience, but that it will “let go” of us when we meet it with loving presence and the energies of non-abandonment. It will release its hold on us when infused with breath, awareness, embodiment, and life. Further, it will “let go” of us when we have received its revelation and when we are no longer in need of the function it provides. In the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, it is the nature of all phenomena to “self-liberate” upon a meeting with naked awareness. When we are able to stay with what arises in the field of consciousness in an embodied way, wrapping it in a cloak of warmth and loving presence, we may become astonished to discover that it takes care of itself without any effort, striving, or struggle of our own. “Taking care of ” doesn’t mean that the experience we do not like will go away and be replaced by alternative experiences that we like better, or think we should be experiencing, or have been told by others are the “right” ones to be having. “Taking care of ” refers to the inherent great natural perfection of things as they are, and the reality that the forms arising in awareness are no different from the ground of awareness itself; that they are in fact made of the same luminous and alchemical substance. And even that unique configuration we call “ego” comprises these same strands of awareness, radiant and vast, and will reveal its nature when we meet it in direct embrace.
A section called "closer to the wound" speaks more to the reasoning and wisdom of dissociating from the body in certain contexts in early development, and the types of dilemmas one can struggle with when they begin to see the first inklings of how one's wounds limit oneself and the possibility of overcoming or integrating those wounds.
As young children, it was an act of intelligence and creativity to split off, dissociate, and disconnect from material we were not developmentally capable of digesting and metabolizing on our own, including the dysregulating and traumatic feelings and narratives that arose in the face of misattunement, neglect, and empathic failure of all kinds. As infants and young children, we were wired to do everything possible to maintain the ties to those critical figures around us, even if that connection was misattuned, less than healthy, or even dangerous. A shaky, tentative, and even potentially harmful connection is more regulating than none at all in the little nervous system of a helpless infant.
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As adults, we can see the remnants of this need to receive mirroring, empathy, and presence from others, even when a part of us knows that a particular relationship no longer truly serves our deepest longings. To allow ourselves to inquire into this, in a way that is non-pathologizing and non-shaming, can provide some very important data.
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As we engage over time in these strategies of denial and acting out—both pathways being oriented toward self-abandonment and turning away from our vulnerability and the emotional landscape altogether—we might find ourselves wondering why we are not feeling alive, why our experience is flat or numb, why we aren’t able to step in and take risks in our relationships or our vocation, and why things just aren’t flowing the way we’d like. There may not be any specific thing we can point to that is “wrong” in our lives, but we are still quite convinced that something is off, something is missing, something important is out of place. We sense that there is something deeper, something more meaningful, some more intimate way of being, but nevertheless it remains just out of reach. Though usually occurring underneath the radar of conscious awareness, the deeply embedded sense that we are not loved or lovable as we are infuses and colors our perception and interactions with others. This coagulation of energy has a way of perpetuating itself and eating at us from the inside, sure to emerge at some point (usually at the most inopportune times) in behavior that is passive-aggressive, avoidant, critical, or anxious. Even though all of this is seething underneath the status quo of everything being “okay,” a deeper part of us senses that only in intimate and direct contact with our vulnerability and unprocessed somatic feelings will we know this aliveness firsthand. And only then will we be able to take a risk, be spontaneous, and embody new levels of wisdom, compassion, and creativity in our lives, especially in our relationships with others.
Below is a later section in Chapter 4 I also loved, in the vein of "love has no opposite," which talks about how even the negative emotions we can have time to time are themselves are also just a means for love or the higher self (referred to throughout the book as The Beloved) to make itself known to you.
As you continue along the way, yes, sometimes your problems will be solved, sometimes the symptoms will go away, sometimes the feelings you like will replace the ones you’d prefer be banished into the dark wood. But your inquiry is no longer oriented around replacement. It is far too wild, unprecedented, and creative for all that. As a pure expression of your love of the truth, it is full spectrum. For your longing will never be satisfied by that which is partial.
Love has brought you to this very place that you are now, as it continues its journey to know itself, through you and as you—by way of your perception, emotions, feelings, and imagination; and by the signs and symbols that it places along your path. Not so that you can fix something that is broken, or even “heal” in any conventional sense, but so that you can connect more deeply with your longing, to more clearly hear the call of the beloved within you, and become more and more transparent the feast of the offering that has been laid out before you: To be fully alive to and to fully participate in the mystery as it makes its way into the world of time and space.
No longer oriented in how to get from “here to there,” but endlessly fascinated with how it is that love wishes to infuse “here” with its qualities. The path is endless. You are endless. Your heart is endless. And love will continue to reveal this endlessness to you, in ways that are at times peaceful, sweet, and soaked in pure joy. At other times, as wrathful, disturbing, and awash with the transmutation of the dark.
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