Category: Spiritual Essay

Pulled Backwards and Forwards

Ink wash and brush pen sketch on watercolor paper

All of us have good days–when we feel like we are talented, intelligent and lovable. And bad days–when we feel inadequate, and unwanted. Ok, nevermind… we all have moments where we feel these things. Our days our filled with a constant switching back and forth between our “best selves” and our “worst selves”.

The “worst self” is the one who doesn’t take risks. And our “best self” has the confidence to make large leaps in life, or more importantly, has the faith to believe these risks might just pay off. When we go through any big positive change in our lives, we tune out the “worst self” and focus on a hope that things will turn out well, that we ARE adequate, smart, talented, beautiful, and charismatic. And we do have the chance to succeed.

But maybe this is one reason change is so damn uncomfortable. Because we also have something called an “upper limit problem” (Written about by Gay Hendricks in his book The Big Leap). Hendricks theorized that we have an internal thermometer of happiness. When our happiness level gets above our goal, it suddenly becomes very uncomfortable. Imagine your thermometer is set to 80º (a lovely summer day). Right now that temperature is a really high goal because you are currently living in 28º winter. As soon as you move forward in your life, getting closer to the 80º goal, your happiness increases. But once you hit 80º, you’re not sure how to absorb more happiness. Suddenly having so much success feels like a burden, and the idea of more success feels like the very scary unknown.

It makes sense to me that the “upper limit problem” is really a point we don’t let our “best selves” think beyond. When you’ve hit the day of 80º summer, your confident “best self” has no room to breath. So instead you look back towards to that “worst self” and start saying things like, “I don’t deserve to be in such a good relationship.” “I’m not myself when I’m at work; this place is too good for me.” “I must’ve lied to achieve this goal. My whole life feels fake.” And on and on.

Comfort zones apply to both fear and happiness.

So what do you do? Wait it out. Do everything to stay in the present and remember how you got here. Eventually that “best self” will open up again and set a higher goal, and you’ll be back in your “happiness comfort zone”.

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Self-Portrait of Four

We’ve all seen cartoons with the familiar angel and demon sitting on opposite shoulders, fighting over who should advise the protagonist. They illustrate an internal dialogue of a character who is deciding between something right and wrong. It’s easy to empathize with the idea of two voices in our head fighting each other. But who said these voices are distinctly “good” or “evil”?

Every day, I am struggling with wanting to do too many things with my limited time. It feels like there are 3 or 4 voices in my head yelling out suggestions, and usually they all seem pretty good. But my automatic reaction is to pick one voice to tune in to and label all of the others “wrong”. Do you do this too?

When I was a teenager, I remember hearing my parents talk about my struggle to “find myself”. They imagined I was at a huge crossroads in my life, and I interpreted this as a place where I could customize my own personality, sort of like adding toppings at a giant ice-cream buffet! (If only it was that easy.) But after hearing that “find yourself” phrase over and over, I began thinking about myself as a flat paper doll personality, always predictable and unchanging, instead of the roly-poly ball of opposites that defined my childhood self.

Now, I feel like a traitor if I do something that “Emily would not do.” But blocking out those other voices in my head has never gotten easier, especially at times in my life with great change. It becomes incredibly difficult to make decisions because there are so many directions I want to go. My personality constantly tries to return to its multi-dimensional shape.

And perhaps returning to this way of seeing ourselves is the key to understanding and seeing others. The world is full of opposites pulling and fighting each other. But inside we are all just as restless.

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Metamorphosis

I love old adventure games because doing something as silly as picking up a few rocks from the ground can be absolutely crucial to winning the game. It’s easier to find solutions in these games versus life, because your perspective is not, “I am an adventurer trapped in a forest full of monsters with no money and nothing but the shirt on my back and a handful of rocks.” Instead, you think, “Wow, some rocks! I’m sure I can use these.” Because real life has way too many rocks in it for all of them to be useful (and plenty of other useless items and experiences), we tend to never look at these mundane, or negative things as anything useful.

Metamorphoses is about transformation. It’s not about throwing out all the rocks in your life and getting diamonds handed to you. It’s about using all the things we have in our “inventory” (experiences, friends, skills… rocks) to find our way to the place we want to be, and the person we want to become.

I recently watched a video by Marie Forleo featuring Dr. Cathy Collautt about how our subconscious minds can trip us up to getting where we want to be with our careers. Collautt explained how fighting your subconscious is a losing battle because this aspect of your brain runs far more of the time that your conscious mind. Instead, it’s important to transform the goals of your subconscious mind to match your conscious desires.

Teal Swan (a well-known contemporary spiritual teacher) talks about this principle in a slightly different light. She explains how improving yourself by denying aspects of yourself that you don’t like, has been a religious tradition for hundreds of years. Instead of working with everything we’ve been given as a person–fears, bad habits, negative emotions, selfishness, and everything else “wrong”–we remove these things from our personality and go on without them in a strange dysfunctional metal state. Actually, it’s not that strange, because I’m sure you do it all the time.

All this being said, I am not a proponent for sitting still and never improving yourself or your life. But we have to learn how to go about this change in the true form of metamorphosis. Very often, our unhealthy habits or lives have something very important to say about who we are and what we want in life. Don’t be that unconscious fool who can’t figure out why his friends won’t stay, his relationships won’t last, and his jobs self-destruct. Self-sabotage is a real thing, and it’s easiest to nip in the bud when you see it staring you in the face (when most of us habitually shove into the background). Metamorphosis is about staring right back at those unhealthy aspects of ourselves until we can truly see them for what they are.

Please share your thoughts and comment! This is my first blog post like this on my public art website, and I would love to know what you think.

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