While one may claim we’re stuck with ourselves and ask, how could we ever escape? I’ve suggested two methods by which we do escape to ourselves – blocking and masking. Blocking is the act of running from cognitive dissonance or otherwise avoiding any repulsive experience or memory. Masking occurs when we attempt to convince ourselves that something is not as we truly feel it is. Often, we will mask by seeking some similar but fresh or more positive experience and is similar to blocking.
A third and more preferable method for navigating personal challenges and emotional battles involves embracing, appreciating and otherwise opening up to ourselves and our natural response to a situation. Of course, there are times when this is inappropriate, perhaps during a catastrophe or immediately after an accident, but when the dust has settled and the tension of the situation has settled to a manageable degree, find and love yourself.
The three simple methods below are proposed as ways of opening up to yourself so as to better understanding yourself and an appropriate course of action or your place in the world. While simple, you may find that opening up to yourself is a bottomless adventure with many faces and adventures. Personally, I find these, among many other exercises, to yield long-term results more deeply satisfying than any fancy remedy, expensive pill or cookie-cutter exercise. These adventures are entirely yours to invent and reinvent each and every time you’re ready to know yourself more deeply and freely.
Listening
If you’re disappointed in this first suggestion, I’d like you to check your ego at the door and try again to listen to yourself. You may hear yourself for the first time ever. The easiest and most effective way of listening to yourself is to find a safe and quiet place. In this peace, get comfortable and allow your mind to wander. Do not focus on anything – not on meditation, not on breathing – let your mind wander. For some of you, this may be the first time you’ve ever let yourself free, though most of us daydreamed on a regular basis as children.
As you get better at unchaining your thought process during these listening sessions, feel free to begin targeted practice before which you can focus on something that has been concerning you. As you let your mind wander, you may find that it couldn’t care less and is far more interested in Pizza or Bora Bora. Or you may find your mind loops in an endless, unproductive cycle of conclusionless anxiety and mental noise.
Eventually, you will find that this practice actually results in peaceful reactions in startling or emotionally charged situations. You will find yourself resting back in your own mind, no longer reacting to heated arguments nor sweating when the pressure is on. This peaceful point of calm observation and assessment allows you to understand a situation, how you feel, what you want and how to obtain it before flailing with the perceptiveness of a barn animal.
Noise and Movement
With a smile on my face, I’ve been known to proclaim quite simply, “noise and movement” with the deepest sense of life-encompassing rightness my heart can feel. This unprompted declaration is shared fittingly at random and with anyone or no one to share in its, well, noise. If we speak, if we were not heard, if we were not understood, have we produced anything but noise? I suggest that we have not, but would like to take this two steps further.
If we we’re heard and understood, so what? Perhaps we received our water with no ice or helped our significant other feel how much we love them. These are both important, in many ways, but as we continue to listen to ourselves and step back, and step back, and step back and understand, we will find how truly small we are. We will find ourselves petty and our actions meaningless. We will find how all the world is noise and movement.
This understanding may be temporarily off-putting or depressing, and for many, it’s entirely unacceptable. In fact, for some, it’s so unacceptable they’re unable to approach the ideas as their animal’s reactions in ego-preservation and desiring sense of self-importance literally shuts down their perceptive faculties and thus they are free from clarity.
It is this clarity that I wish for us to exercise and this ego that I wish for us to explore. Begin first by listening to yourself in peace, as in the above section, then begin to explore outwardly sharing. If you are not ready to be judged, shunned, rejected, this will be impossible for you. But if you are willing to love yourself through the misunderstanding of onlookers, you will be able to grow the process of being misunderstood. You will be able to open up to yourself and know yourself as good in the freest displays of noise and movement.
Simply, begin with a simple listening exercise like above to center yourself – a few seconds will do. This first step is to avoid using noise and movement as a method of escape – blocking or masking. Then, as you feel called, embrace each and every desire to move or dance or whisper or yell. I believe that in deepest honesty you will find entirely incomprehensible displays. If your movement looks like dancing or animal impersonations, or if your noise is comprehensible or carrying a tune, keep searching for a deeper freedom.
Speaking
While many of our loved ones and doctors may recommend forms of intelligible communication for opening up to yourself, it is my understanding that this is unwittingly for their own benefit and dictated by their own fears of self. My suggestions above are more in line with primal scream therapy or acting class exercises in that they free you from the layers of fear and anxiety that may be so deep that you feel them as though they were in fact you. Beyond these layers of social and societal influence, emotional coloring and your own twisted web of interconnecting theories, you will find yourself, your child, your animal, your noise and your peace. It is only once you know yourself that you can speak in full confidence, knowing truly how you feel, how much of you feels it and how intensely in what situations and under what conditions.
The more deeply you know yourself and more extensively you have exercised outward honestly, the less your energy will be shared as mere reflections of the world colored only by the weak filters of your fearful understanding. As you come to know yourself, by listening, hearing, understanding, accepting, you will find yourself far more confident and stable. As you become confident in yourself and know what you want from yourself and the world, you will finally be able to speak clearly to the world, to a point, to a goal, with the whole of your heart and mind behind each and every word, each and every smile, each and every embrace. When you can approach your loved ones, your family and friends, your strangers and even your enemies with the same patience and understanding with which you have learned to address yourself, you will find you have a greater ability to connect, understand and influence than ever before.
Take time first to listen – seek first to understand. Try to understand why any given living thing says or does certain things and you will see, hear and know more than is ever made available by words or intentional expressions. Learn to hear what is not being said and in turn learn to speak this language. Learn that what you say and do unwittingly often speaks more loudly than what you intend – even if only to the subconscious of the untrained. Everything you say and doing, including that which you did not intend or do not mean, shapes and colors your relationships, with yourself, with others and the world. Take the time to get to know yourself, others and the world. Sit down with each of them and speak to them, calmly, intentionally, and leave self-consciousness at the door. It will be awkward and uncomfortable, it will be scary – you’re offering yourself instead of a masked version of yourself. Now, whatever is said or done feels like a reflection on you instead of the image that you’d painted by whatever situational agenda had control over you. I recommend you start first with your closest family and friends, your soul mate if you have one, and eventually consider to what extent you would like to be free and relieved of yourself.
Come to know and love yourself and you will find the world is yours and loves you as you are.
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