Okay.
So,
Welcome again.
So,
Today's invitation is what I learned as to bring your whole self to the experience.
So,
Bringing your whole self to the experience.
Now in the five invitations,
That is listed as the third invitation,
I believe.
However,
The way that I learned these invitations were not invitations,
They were precepts.
And precepts are a little bit different.
Precepts are not quite vows,
Although in the Zen tradition they occur more as a vow or an intention.
So,
Bringing your whole self to the experience.
And when we say this,
It's like,
Oh yeah,
That seems like a good idea.
I can do that.
I mean,
When I show up,
It's my whole body,
Right?
It's very inspiring in some ways to say that I'm going to bring my whole self to this experience.
But when we look more closely,
We may notice that most of us are doing something quite different.
And this is what Frank says from the book that we're exploring,
The five invitations.
He says,
We all like to look good.
We want to be seen as capable,
Strong,
Intelligent,
Sensitive,
Or at least well-adjusted.
We project a positive self-image.
We don't particularly want to be known for our helplessness,
For fear and anger or ignorance.
We don't want others to know that sometimes we're a mess.
We tuck away these aspects of ourselves that we see as undesirable.
So,
Doesn't this ring true?
We bring the calm,
Enlightened,
Well-adjusted self to this room,
But not the frightened parts,
Not the angry parts or the weak parts.
We try to show up with all the wise parts,
But not the confused parts.
All of the compassion,
But not the resentment.
These are the parts,
The wisdom,
The peace,
The ease.
These are the parts that we pat ourselves on the back and approve of.
Yet,
The paradox is,
It is not our refinement and expertise,
But the wisdom gained from our own suffering and our own vulnerability that enables us to be real and to assist others in a real way.
In a subtle way,
What happens is that we divide ourselves in what is acceptable and what is not.
And this movement is often very,
Very unconscious.
And today,
Our practice is to bring it into awareness.
To be whole,
We need to include all aspects of ourselves.
That's what wholeness means.
Even those qualities that we're conflicted by.
Wholeness doesn't mean perfection.
It means no part left out.
Everything is included.
And it certainly doesn't mean that every part of us is wise.
We all have delusion.
Every person in this room.
Including myself.
Deluded.
Ignorant.
And ignorance in the Buddhist term is not stupid.
It's more like ignoring.
We're ignoring parts of ourselves.
We're ignoring parts of ourselves.
So,
Bringing our whole selves means that nothing is excluded.
Now,
The other book that I am using in this exploration of grief,
Loss,
Uncertainty,
Aging,
Sickness,
And death.
I'm calling them the big six.
I mean,
They're big.
They're big six.
The other book is called The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
And Amy held it up earlier.
This is by the psychologist Francis Weller.
And he speaks in very direct terms to this theme of wholeness in this book.
Weller writes that so much of our suffering comes from the way we banish parts of ourselves that feel unacceptable.
Or painful.
So,
His view,
His take on what we're studying,
Bringing our whole self,
Is to welcome all of those parts of ourselves that we've exiled back into the fold.
He writes,
It's important to look into the shadows of our lives.
Bringing these parts of soul back to the table is a central element to our work.
It means welcoming the full range of our being and restoring ourselves to wholeness.
For Weller,
He's talking a lot about how we've guarded these places that we don't feel are acceptable.
We guard them.
And keep them in exile.
Keep them pushed down.
And those places have not received love from us.
The wounds that we carry,
The emotions that we hide.
These are all guarded.
We've guarded them.
We've built walls around ourselves.
We don't want to see them.
When we talk about them,
We talk about them for an hour in therapy.
And then we put them back in the box.
And then we go about our day hiding them.
What Weller is saying,
What Frank is saying in both of these books is to welcome the grief,
The loss,
The sorrow,
The exiled parts of ourselves.
Returning those parts.
Allowing those parts.
What Weller says is the work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other.
And to be stretched by them both.
To be stretched.
Our wholeness doesn't come from eliminating sorrow.
Or pushing our way through it.
Or even for getting through it.
Getting,
Oh I'm going to get through this loss.
You don't have to get through any loss.
It's an integration.
Let the loss be your teacher.
Let yourself be held by the loss.
Opened by the loss.
In our Western culture,
We are sort of a grief phobic culture.
And a death denying culture.
Which really has led us as a humanity to suppress our sorrows and uncomfortable emotions.
Some of the things that we feel are like shame in our bodies.
And when these things aren't expressed.
When we haven't grieved these parts of ourselves.
And by grief I mean by loving them.
They become hidden in our psyche.
And what happens is they show up in other ways.
They show up as anxiety.
A constant thumbing of anxiety.
Depression.
Disassociation.
Numbing out.
And addiction.
So this is how they come out sideways when we don't work with them.
When we don't allow for our,
These parts of ourselves that we have exiled.
You know,
So much of our culture says the encouragement is to stay positive.
Just stay positive.
Look on the bright side.
Be composed.
Be grateful.
But what that does is it leaves us fragmented.
It doesn't allow for like,
Be a mess.
Be a mess.
Get on the floor and cry and scream and say how unfair this is.
Do that.
That's healing too.
But no,
No,
No,
No,
No says society and culture.
That's not the way.
Look on the bright side.
Positive,
Right?
So the heart of our practice,
Authentic spiritual practice.
It's not about transcending all of this and getting to higher states of consciousness.
People love to talk about higher states of consciousness.
And how they've transcended their body.
And how they've bypassed all of their relatives who are all fucked up.
And you're not.
And you know,
It's not that.
The goal,
The point of spiritual practice is way more grounded.
And way more real.
And way more alive.
And kind of messy.
To bring our whole self to practice is to,
Last week's teaching,
Welcome it.
Welcome it.
Love it.
All parts.
I have a wonderful therapist and she taught me this great technique.
Whenever those parts that I don't like show up,
I just say to them,
I see you stinker.
Here you are.
You little troublemaker.
You little troublemaker.
Like that.
Like that.
That's been really helpful.
Love those parts.
So when we bring attention and awareness to these places that kind of have hardened.
They've hardened over time.
We've,
You know,
These places that are now,
We have the habit of pushing away these parts of ourselves that we don't like.
You know,
And what we're doing here,
What we're doing later on in this practice,
Is we're going to bring them into awareness.
And when we do that,
When we bring these parts of ourselves that are broken into awareness,
That's how we heal.
That's how we grow.
And we will not stop growing until we stop breathing.
We will not stop growing until our very last breath.
And even then,
I don't know,
Maybe we continue.
I don't know what happens after we take that last breath.
We hope.
We hope we will not stop growing.
I think some people do.
We'll see.
I don't know though.
Things are dynamic.
Like the world is dynamic.
When we allow for the difficult,
The dark and the dense parts of ourselves.
When we allow for our pain to be just as it is,
Not trying to push it away,
Which we tend to try to push away the pain.
We begin the process of intimacy with ourselves when we allow.
The process of transforming what were once these exiled internal enemies into friends.
I see you little stinker,
Little troublemaker.
Like that.
There was a story that I heard years ago from the teacher Tara Brock,
Who talked about a man who went on retreat.
And when he got back from his retreat and was meeting with his teacher,
He said it was like a roller coaster ride.
It was kind of crazy.
Like everything happened to him.
Wonder and stillness,
Which is a beautiful state that we all want to experience.
And then this great heart opening.
And at other times he was completely isolated and hated everybody.
And felt flawed and damaged and disgusted with all the people around him and himself.
Had such aggression and hatred towards himself.
And then he said at the end of their practice discussion,
He said,
But you know,
There's a real joy in getting real.
And that's what we're doing here.
We're getting real.
That's what bringing your whole self is about.
This mindfulness practice,
This awareness practice is honesty practice.
And it doesn't,
You don't have to go and tell me your whole life story.
You just have to tell the truth to yourself,
To yourself.
That's who,
That's what matters.
All of the different dimensions of ourselves.
And there's freedom in that.
We're more able when,
When we tell the truth to ourselves,
We are so much more able to live in our wholeness.
And becoming whole can take the rest of our life.
Okay.
It's not like,
Oh,
I'm going to leave here today.
I'm going to live in my wholeness.
You might,
And then you'll notice how the walls start to come back up when you run into a neighbor and say,
I'm rude,
I'm distinctive.
And you're like,
What am I saying?
As you're saying it.
So bringing your whole self is cultivating the capacity to recognize what's going on inside of yourself without that judge.
Without interpreting your internal experience as bad and wrong and less than.
That's how we live in our wholeness.
There is a fantastic image.
And I wish I had a whiteboard for it,
But I'm just going to describe it to you.
And maybe if you have a piece of paper,
You can draw this for yourself.
So Joseph Campbell came up with this image.
He's a mythologist and also a wonderful teacher.
Draw a big circle on your page.
Just give you the whole page a circle.
And then draw a horizontal line through the middle of the circle.
Right down the middle.
And what Campbell says is that everything above the line is what we're conscious of.
What we're aware of.
And you don't have to write anything in the circle right now.
But you can.
And everything below the line is unconscious.
It's the parts of ourselves that we have banished into exile.
It's the parts of ourselves that we don't show the world.
Or that maybe we do when we're in our car and someone cuts us off.
It's the parts of ourselves that we have said are not acceptable.
The parts of ourselves that we have put in the closet and said,
Nope,
You're not going anywhere.
That's everything below the line.
And to the degree that we are not aware of our strong emotions,
Our strong beliefs.
Those are all below the line.
To the degree that we have not contacted them,
Even just by writing them down.
They rule us.
We live in them.
They affect how we make decisions.
They affect how we relate to others.
In the deepest way,
They create a separate self.
They create that division that is us and them.
And to the degree in which we bring that which is unconscious below the line.
Into consciousness.
Is the degree of our wholeness and freedom.
So our work here is to work within this circle of awareness.
To begin to shine the light of awareness on what's been below the line.
And you do not have to show anyone in this room what you write on that piece of paper.
But you have to be real with yourself.
Or not.
And to the degree that you don't want to look.
Do you want to keep suffering?
Because it will continue to show up.
It will continue to be the thing that plagues you.
So the more we recognize what's going on in ourselves.
The more we can be responsible in the world.
The more our actions will be aligned with how we are in the world.
And responsibility really means the ability to respond.
The ability to respond.
So when things are below the line.
When we're operating from below the line.
We are operating from an autopilot.
An automatic response.
And we're not very responsible.
Because we're being run by our emotional world.
That is unseen.
Most of the time.
And it's just coming from this unconscious habitual place.
Somebody makes a criticism of us.
And because we're not aware of how vulnerable we feel in that criticism.
Then we fall into a victim.
Nobody approves of me.
I'm unlovable.
I don't belong.
That story comes into being.
If we're not conscious.
This pattern.
Perpetuates.
And.
If we can just become aware.
Of what's below the line.
The wounded places inside of us.
Ourselves.
Start seeing how they are.
Running us to some degree.
That's how we stop.
The pattern.
It's just seeing.
That's why I said you don't have to share what's below the line.
Not one bit.
Only to yourself.
And as you do this.
So important.
As you start writing things down that are below the line.
That you don't show the world.
But that are true.
And you know it about yourself.
And you start adding judgment.
Oh boy.
Like somehow these things are evil.
That is so not freeing.
Don't do that.
Don't do that.
Remember what my friend and therapist said to me.
See you little stinker.
Little troublemaker.
You had a place at one point.
You had a place at one point.
At one point it was useful.
And now it's not.
And now it's not.
It's really important to understand that.
What's below the line.
Is not personal.
It's not personal.
It's just a survival mechanism that you adopted.
That we adopted.
So what transforms this practice and brings it above the line.
Is really understanding that it's not personal.
That it was a response to a situation.
And a survival skill.
There's an author who I have quoted before.
And I'm going to offer this quote again.
And her name is Elizabeth Lesser.
And she has in one of her books has written.
My prayer to God every day is remove the veil.
So I might see what's really happening here.
And not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears.
Remove the veil.
So I might see what's really happening here.
And not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears.
