The Gaze of Prometheus: The Found Heart

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As I have said, in order to solve our life problems and find true fulfillment, we must find our hearts. What is the life we will have when we find our hearts?

Every human heart has the capacity to know the laws of nature, and by living in accord with them, we can achieve our life’s purpose.  We can know universal nature if we understand human nature. By understanding ourselves we can live in harmony with the laws of the universe.

When we embody our hearts, we live out our human nature. This means that we continuously  strive to develop our human potentials. Our potentials are for thinking, feeling, acting, imagining and connecting. Another way of saying this is that the blueprint for the mighty oak tree is written in the acorn. We, too, enter the world with a blueprint for what we are meant to become. If we grow toward realizing our virtues, –what Plato would call our arete and Confucius would call jen — we live out this plan, fulfill our human nature, and embody the heart. This process is the meaning of human nature, and this is what nature intends for us. To continuously grow toward becoming wise, which is the virtue of thinking; passionate, which is the virtue of feeling; strong, which is the virtue of action; creative, which is the virtue of imagination; and loving, which is the virtue of connection; is to have our heart.

The lodestar of existence comes from within, from the heart. By accessing our essential self, which is found in the heart, we can know and live the good in our lives. From this perspective, to have our heart means having a connection to our essential capacity and taste for goodness. Mencius said that just as the eye knows the beautiful and the tongue knows the delicious, the heart is the sense that knows the good. The good is beautiful to the heart. When we develop our capacity for thinking, this brings us in touch with our hearts and we find wisdom. As Paul Tillich put it, “wisdom . . . is the universal knowledge of the good.” When we live in accordance with this innate knowledge of ideal goodness, we are able to be truly fulfilled.

When we find our hearts through developing our capacity for feeling, we find the  seat of empathy. This capacity for compassion, for feeling what others are feeling, is what is most human in us. Since empathy is the essence of the heart, we do not have to rely on external authority for guidance of our behavior. The more we live from our hearts, the more we live in harmony with others. All morality extends from this ability to feel what others feel, and the greater we extend our compassion the greater the harmony in the universe. The Chinese Sages called this the central harmony.

Mencius believed that the general energetic principle of the universe, which he called ch’I, was something that “ran through” humans.  When we follow the path of human realization, which Mencius would call the tao, and extend our capacity for thinking and feeling, we have the greatest access to the primal energy of the universe. We then possess what Mencius called flood-like ch’I, which is the ultimate energetic capacity for enthusiasm and passion. When we develop our feelings optimally we have true vitality.

Most importantly, accessing this inexhaustible source of energy gives us imperturbability. Imperturbability is courage, the pure self-confidence that allows us to act from our central selves in the face of any danger. The work of finding the heart is to strengthen our vitality which gives us the courage to live from our authentic being. To have this imperturbability means that our lives are intentional. We live from choice, not from fear or conditionings. This is the achievement of our virtue of action, strength. Our vitality, courage and ability to live from choice are inextricably intertwined. Spirit is a matter of the heart, the personal center. Courage is derived from the French word for heart, “coeur.”

As Paul Tillich said, “courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim or entelechy. . .” Our nobility come from striving to actualize that which we are. It is in this quest that we realize the good and the beautiful. When we inhabit the heart, we may be hurt, humiliated, rejected or ignored. For some of the most enlightened, from Socrates to Martin Luther King, living from the truth put their very lives in peril. When, in the face of all the dangers of existence, we have Mencian imperturbability, or Tillichian courage, we embody our selves as we truly are. Fortitudio is the strength of the heart, its power to be what it essentially is. When we are in possession of flood-like ch’i, and we face the risks of living according to the inner light of the heart, we remain imperturbable; no danger sways us from bravely being what it is that we are uniquely meant to be.

The heart, the place of our spiritedness, strives toward the noble. When we develop our potential for imagination, we imagine the ideal. This part of us feels and knows justice in the core of our being, cheers when someone rises beyond limitation, longs for the good and wants to be the best. There is that within us that yearns for “somewhere over the rainbow.” To allow our imagination to flow, and to aim toward what we only know through faith, requires courage. The embodiment and realization of the heart is the striving itself that emerges from the root of our creative imagination, our heart.

The heart is the part of us that unifies. It integrates the disparate and sometimes conflicting aspects of our nature.  When what we should do and what we want to do are the same, we are living from our hearts. It also brings us into harmonious relationship with the world around us. When we are connected to our hearts, our needs and desires are in accord with what is best for us and for the cosmos as a whole.

Wisdom, our ability to know universal goodness, when combined with passion, our ability to feel our emotions culminating in empathy, the vitality of flood like ch’I, and the free engagment with our creative imagination leads us to choose and act toward love.

The chief virtue of the Confucians is benevolence. Benevolence means that we act with love foremost in our hearts. When we have a cultivated heart and are connected to our essential goodness, we embody this virtue. First and foremost, to live from the heart means that we love our selves. Benevolence toward others begins with self-love. To have found the heart means that we treat all beings — starting with ourself—with benevolence.

When we have access to our intrinsic goodness, when we have the free flow of our energy, or ch’i, when we are benevolent, empathetic, and courageous, when we are living in harmony with the laws of the universe, when we have realized our virtues of wisdom, passion, strength, creativity and love, it can be said that we have, and know, the heart.

To quote Sean Wilentz writing in Newsweek, “to find the lost heart means that it is not enough to be thoughtful or even popular; it requires becoming what Theodore Roosevelt called the man “in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and soot and blood,” who fights with the certainty that, even if he fails, “his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

The truth we must accept is that we will never fully reach the ultimate goal of in our lifetime, but the process of searching in the face of this certain failure is the life of the heart. It is the purpose that Prometheus made us for: to aim for the heavens.

“Prometheus took some of this earth, and kneading it up with water, made man in the image of the gods. He gave him an upright stature, so that while all other animals turn their faces downward, and look to the earth, he raises his to heaven, and gazes on the stars.”

We may never reach the ultimate, but in the searching we find joy. Again, as Tillich put it, “Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous Yes to one’s own true being.”

By embarking on the great journey of finding the lost heart, we join the noble human adventure of aspiring to fulfill our destiny: to be our authentic selves, to create a life of personal happiness and loving relationships, and a world returned to its place of harmony. The ancient Egyptians agreed with this view. They considered the heart to be the core of the soul. As it was said in the writings of Imhotep, the wise vizier who counseled the Pharaoh 5,000 years ago:

“Life, prosperity and health are a man’s heart.”

 

How to Find the Lost Heart: The Solution to Life’s Problems

We are all looking to end our emotional suffering and solve our life’s problems. We long to answer: How can I find love, stop being so anxious, lose weight, make money, have more energy, have a better marriage, be a better parent?

In this post I’m going to give you the answer to your difficulties and tell you how to achieve true fulfillment and happiness.

In order to do that, I will start with a short review of my basic philosophy of the heart.

As those of you who have followed my blog know, I am inspired by the great Chinese Sage of 2300 years ago, Mencius, who said,

“Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it, and lost his heart and does not go out and recover it.”

I believe that we have problems in our lives because we have lost our hearts. Since “essence,” — that which makes a thing what it is and no other — is known as “the heart of the matter,” our essential nature is what Mencius means by the term, “heart.” What this means then, is that we experience unnecessary suffering because we are, as theologian Paul Tillich stated it, estranged from our essential nature. This essential nature is what the Greek philosopher Aristotle called our entelechy, which is that which we are meant to be.

What is our essence? What are we meant to be? I believe that we are all meant to think, feel, act, imagine and connect in the best possible way. When those natural attributes are optimally developed we become wise, passionate, strong, creative and loving. This results in inner harmony, loving relationships, a productive social order and peaceful politics. This is an embodiment, and fulfillment, of the laws of human nature and universal nature. This is our evolutionary purpose and what is best both for the species and the universe as a whole.

A central way that we become distanced from that which we are meant to become is as a result of our relationships. When things go right in our earliest and most important relationships, we develop our potentials in the best possible way. As Mencius knew from observing nature, anything properly cultivated will grow. As we all live in a lost hearted world and each one of us is raised by flawed parents, we are all, more or less, and in different ways, emotionally wounded. When we do not receive the proper emotional sunlight, soil and water, we do not grow in the best possible way.

We become distanced from that which we are meant to be due to relationship failures in our upbringing. As a result of this, we are living in some way out of alignment with our own nature. When we are distanced from our nature, we live out of alignment with nature in general. We have, what Mencius would call, a lost heart. This results in our suffering and problems.

Science has now proved this to be true. When we get the proper love in early childhood our brain grows the way it is supposed to. When we do not get love in our early life, our brain does not develop to its full potential.

Though these early interactions leave very deep traces, we continue to grow and develop through life. Mencius said, “The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to find the lost heart.” This means that we can live out our entelechy, we can be what we are meant to be, we can realize our optimal potentials, we can end our unnecessary suffering and solve our problems, through working on ourselves.

The Answer to Our Problems is Finding the Lost Heart

The answer is that in order to solve our problems and get what we want in life, we need to find our lost hearts. And the way to do this is to live a life of self-cultivation. What does this mean, and how do we do it?

Throughout history, everyone has wanted an instant cure, a quick fix, a magic pill. Cardinal Richelieu, who lived in the 17th century, was prescribed a mixture of horse dung and white wine to cure his ills. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. He died. The instant cure doesn’t work. Whenever we try to take a shortcut, we never reach our destination. And even though I am a psychotherapist, psychotherapy alone is not enough to give us what we need.

The  wisdom of the ages tells us that to find the answer requires a quest. The method I propose may take more work then you’d like, but, unlike the Cardinal’s cure, it will work. It includes wisdom that has been proven by thousands of years of historical experience, and modern insights proven by cutting edge science.

The essence of finding one’s heart can be distilled into five basic steps.

1.    The Path of Devotion
2.    The Path of Wisdom
3.    The Path of Healing
4.    The Path of Vision
5.    The Path of Action

The Path of Devotion

Finding true fulfillment begins and ends with living a life of devotion to finding our lost heart. The devotion to a life of self-discovery and realization is a personal bhakti marga, which is a Sanskrit word for the path of devotion. This total intellectual, moral, and emotional commitment to daily practice is more important than the particular method itself. As Sri Ramakrishna said, “One can reach god if one follows any of the paths with whole hearted devotion.”

The most important aspect of this path is daily study. In the collected sayings of Confucius, called the Analects, the very first statement is, “Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?” But the purpose of this learning is not an accumulation of facts or information. Its point is the personal development of the individual.

The Path of Wisdom

One way to do this is to study the ancient wisdom texts from every culture, whether it is the Upanishads from India, the Four Books of the Chinese, the poems of Rumi, the Confessions of St. Augustine, or the Old Testament of the Hebrews. Confucius devoted his life to the study of ancient wisdom texts because he believed that the past is an inexhaustible source of content for self-discovery. He believed that in the sincere search of ancient texts one finds true knowledge. The classic texts are the best guide to understanding ourselves. This is the Hindu knowledge path of jnana-marga.

The study of the great wisdom of humankind is one important path to finding the lost heart because these texts are the evidence left behind by the great heroes of self-discovery who have travelled this road before us. These writers went into themselves, and the words they write tell us what they found there. Because we can never truly put what is deepest about being human into words, their utterances require contemplation to grasp. Their meanings are endless. The more we immerse ourselves in them, the more we find. These writings are symbolic in a particular way. I call them yantras, where a yantra is a complex symbol that is used as a revelatory conduit for cosmic truths.

Yantras are not only to be found in the writings of the wise but can come in many forms. They are in all the products of culture. They are in myths, rituals, fairy tales, mandalas, the results of scientific research, and art and literature. This path of devotion through contemplating the yantras of culture is known in German as bildung. Bildung is another essential way to develop our innate potentials. Bildung involves not simply an intellectual exercise but the participation of the complete person in the process of self development that leads to a realization of ultimate character. Whether you read The Frog Prince, Victor Hugo, or David Foster Wallace; listen to the music of Mozart, Ray Davies, or Taylor Swift; watch the movies, Citizen Kane, Groundhog Day or Ratatouille; you will find the answer wherever you look  if you immerse yourself in the work.

These practices give us a means of making a deep exploration of our selves. As inscribed at the temple to Apollo in Delphi, Greece, the answer to life is it “know thyself.” In order to find the lost heart we must embark on a journey of self-knowledge. The journey down the yellow brick road is a journey into the self. We must learn how to go within, as all the great heroes have before us, and discover the “jewel in the lotus.” In our deepest depths, we find what the Indians in the Upanishads would call Atman, the ultimate within the heart. Gestalt therapy is a good way to learn how to do this. This is a phenomenological method, which means that you learn how to go within and listen to the silent voice of the heart, your authentic self.

The Path of Healing

In the fairy tale, Cat Skin, as a result of the childhood emotional wound of incest, the princess hides her dress of diamonds in a walnut shell, covers herself in ash, lives under a staircase and does the work of the scullery maid. She has a lost heart. Because of her childhood wounds, she has hidden the best of herself, and lives a life of shame. The disguise becomes so convincing, she forgets that she is really a princess. This yantric fairy tale shows us in symbolic form the story that we all live. As a result of our childhood wounds, we hide our beauty. The low identity we create becomes so convincing we lose touch with the glorious beings we actually are. The next step in finding our hearts is to heal these wounds of the past so that we can bring our dress out of the walnut shell and reclaim our throne.

As a result of our wounds, we might live our lives believing that we are the problem, that we are broken or bad. We must uncover the true stories of our lives, and discover how we were taught these falsehoods about ourselves, how we learned that we are scullery maid instead of princess. New therapeutic techniques have been developed to help us  process those early stories so we can transcend them. In so doing, we can end the emotional suffering these wounds caused, and learn how to transform our shame into self-love, which is central to getting what we want in life. My favorite method for this is based on a method called EMDR.

Methods like the 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous also teach us the importance of taking responsibility for our own past and present behaviors. Part of the devotion to the recovery of our hearts is to  look closely at the hurts we have caused to ourselves and others and to do all we can to rectify those wounds.

The Path of Action

The next step in finding the heart is to take actions in the present. This corresponds to the path of karma-marga. The most important thing we can do in our lives right now to help us find the heart is to learn how to truly connect with others. If we were wounded by relationships in our lives, learning how to have relationships in the present provides us with a core means of self-realization. We need to learn the methods of authentic connection in order to become all we are meant to be. Harville Hendrix’s IMAGO technique provides one wonderful way of doing this. In this technique we learn how to speak from our hearts, and truly listen to another. We learn how to express our needs in healthy ways and meet the needs of others.

In order to find our hearts we also must care for the heart’s temple, our bodies. Good nutrition, exercise, rest and sex with an intimate partner are some of the primary ways of caring for our bodies. Health counselors trained at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition can provide terrific information on the best way to care for your body in order to optimize energy, mood, health and well-being.

Nature is the best yantra. It provides all the wisdom we need to embody and live from our hearts. Spending time in nature is essential to finding and living out our true nature.

Our own creativity is a central way of finding our hearts. When we go within in a process of self-exploration, we want to express and manifest what we find there. This is the source of creativity. It is the gift we bring back for others to share, to help them on their own paths of finding their hearts. By creating, we find out who we are. As William Faulkner said, “I never know what I think of something until I read what I’ve written on it.” Part of our essential purpose is to express ourselves. The quality of what we create is not our concern. Our job is, as the inventor of modern dance, Martha Graham, said to her student, Agnes De Mille, “to keep the channel open.”

Finally, we must learn to live from our integrity and do the right thing. When what we want to do and what we should do are in harmony, then we have inner peace. This right thing is not something imposed by external doctrine or held in the dogma of religion, though we might be able to learn a great deal about the good and true from such sources.

Ultimately, what we discover is that our source of compassion and empathy, the core of our ability for moral action, is the heart itself. Just like the tongue knows the delicious and the eye the beautiful, the heart is the part of us that has a taste for goodness. When we have access to our hearts, we know the good from the inside. Cultivating the self and finding the heart, are in the end, about developing our source of goodness, which we all share, and is within us. In this way we develop what Mencius called imperturbability. Tillich called this the ‘courage to be,’ the ability to act from our hearts in the face of any external threat or danger. Once we grow this ability, we have what Mencius called ‘flood-like ch’I,’ which is access to the endless stream of universal energy. No fear of rejection or failure can stop us. We can do anything.

The Path of Vision

Next on our path of finding the heart, we must envision that which we want to become. A unique capacity of the human heart is the ability to imagine. As the ancient Greek myth put it, Prometheus created us upright so that we could contemplate the stars. We are aspirational beings. If we can imagine, we can imagine a supreme, an ultimate. As a means of finding the lost heart, the Chinese philosophers spent much of their time visualizing the ultimate person, which they called, jen. The clearer the vision we have of what it is that we want to become, the more likely we are of becoming that thing. The quarterback needs to see the ball being caught in the endzone in order to make the touchdown. In order to develop this image we need to find symbolic heroes who hold the qualities we long to realize. By contemplating and communing with these ideal figures, we free these attributes within ourselves. Napoleon Hill, in his book, Think and Grow Rich has a wonderful exercise where he communes nightly with his board of ideal advisers in order to accomplish his goals.

Finding the Lost Heart

What does life become when we follow these paths and find our hearts? By following the path of finding the lost heart we live in accordance with what the ancients called “the Tao,” or The Way. We are in harmony with our own and cosmic nature. Our problems are symptoms that indicate we are living out of harmony with the Tao. When we find this central harmony, our problems dissolve. We receive the rewards for our efforts. We have great relationships and realize profound intimacy. We discover and live out our heart’s vocation and do work we love. We become prosperous. We feel great, and are healthy in mind, body and spirit. We look great and have our best body. We live a long and energetic life. We are great parents and raise happy children. We find true success, living out our meaning and purpose. We live lives of giving. We give and receive infinitely increasing love. We contribute to the healing of the planet. We find deep spirituality and a live a life of connectedness to the all.

As the fairy tales tell us, the path is long and filled with impossible tasks, but if we take the advice of magical helpers on the way, and follow their instructions, we end up with the kingdom.

 

The Heart of Transformation

How do we change?

Change takes one tiny step, but to take that one step can require a journey of a thousand miles.

So many of us can dream of the life we want to have and the person we want to be. It can be especially frustrating when we get to the stage in our adventure where we acknowledge our problems and have agreed to do the hard work of self-cultivation and still find change slow in coming. Despite our efforts, which may include years of therapy, we may still suffer from shame and self-denigration. Perhaps we still feel socially anxious, can’t find a lover, procrastinate or binge eat. For those of us who experience unremitting emotional suffering, being told to have patience provides small solace.

The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, which is so popular because it makes change sound easy and simple, tells us that if we just imagine something it will come to us. Unfortunately, what we discover when we try to implement this program is that though this is a necessary condition for change, it is not sufficient. We do need to imagine a better life, but sometimes we find it impossible to truly believe the vision. The Work of Byron Katie provides us with the wisdom that if we believe our thoughts we will suffer. Her solution, then, is to question, and modify, our thoughts. This too, is good and true, but all too often we find that our thoughts grip us with such a rigid tenacity that they won’t let us go.

The truth is, change is hard.

We find the archetypal story of the longing for transformation in St. Augustine’s Confessions. St. Augustine was a pagan who felt compelled to drink and screw around. He was exposed to Christianity, and understood the value of the virtuous life that Christ represented. But he also knew that if he took on the behaviors that he knew were good, he would be a hypocrite, because they were not congruent with where he was in his heart. He knew that if we was to change his behavior it had to come from the true center of his being. He would have to discover this good person within, so that he wouldn’t want to behave in the ways that he knew were wrong. If he stopped himself from those behaviors by forcing himself to, it wouldn’t be authentic, and it wouldn’t work. His book is his struggle to figure out how to truly transform.

At the key moment in this story,  St. Augustine’s struggles and suffering reach an unbearable point. He is overtaken with shame. He fights an inner battle between two aspects of himself. One part wants him to continue his self-destructive behaviors. These parts do not want to surrender their power over him. These parts  want him to stay as he is and do the things that, though they provide momentary relief, keep him miserable. On the other side he hears the voice that entreat him to a better way. These parts hold little sway. Unable to tolerate this struggle, and the pain of his existence, he finally  surrenders utterly. He throws himself under a fig tree and allows his tears to flow. He cries in a profoundly deep way. The measure of the length and depth of his struggle to change is felt when he asks God, “How long?” How many of us have asked this question about our own suffering?

At this moment Augustine hears a young boy chanting from a house near by, “Take up and read, take up and read.” He had never heard this particular chant. Believing that he is receiving the direction of an oracle, he determines to follow the direction of the boy. He opens the gospel to any random page and reads what he finds there. In the instant that he reads the passage, his suffering falls away. He is absolutely transformed.

What happened to Augustine in that instance and what can it tell us about the essence of transformation? Augustine’s story has many of the classic elements of the process that leads to transformation. These include a long period of struggle with no success, an inner battle that has no solution, total emotional surrender, a connection with a mythic symbol like the tree, the voice of an oracle that provides direction, a connection with a text of the heart, and total transformation in an instant.

But isn’t this just a 1500-year-old myth? How can this apply to our life today? Though aeons have passed since this moment, something similar happened to an acquaintance recently. He wrote me about the experience. Some details have been changed to protect anonymity.

“This spring, I had an experience which I would like to describe here, if you don’t mind. One day, I went to a museum. I went alone, and I was generally having a good time. At one point, however, I was overcome by some extremely strong (and possibly long-suppressed) feelings of anger. These feelings could have been directed at people who have harmed or betrayed me in the past, or at myself; I was not sure. In any case, my anger was not directed at anyone in the museum! Nonetheless, I had been feeling such upwells of anger quite regularly at that time. And the anger I felt in the museum that afternoon was potentially explosive, and I needed to confront it–although I did not want to act on it, and I certainly did not want to unload it onto anyone around me! So I stepped aside and let myself consciously experience these explosive feelings of anger. All of a sudden, the words “I hate you” entered my mind and–silently–passed my lips. These words, like the feelings, could have been directed either towards tormentors from my past, or towards myself; I did not know. As soon as I acknowledged those three words, a large amount of my anger quite literally melted away. I could actually, PHYSICALLY, feel much of my anger melting away. After that happened, I felt much more relaxed, peaceful and calm. I was astonished. It was an unbelieveable experience, quite visceral and soul-cleansing. Before that night, I had been feeling physically stiff and blocked in some parts of my body, especially around the middle region of my back–it was as if all the cells in that part of my body had been tightly crammed and jammed together; after experiencing, acknowledging and (silently) articulating my anger, I began to feel like many of those “crammed and jammed” cells were suddenly being set loose (although still connected to one another) and were allowed to breathe again. I suppose that this is one of the more physiological consequences of successfully confronting anger and other extreme emotions resulting from traumatic experiences. I still feel some blockages, but they are nowhere nearly as great or as powerful as they once were. Since then, I have been experiencing fewer upwells of anger, and these upwells are nowhere nearly as intense as they once were. Even so, I continue to confront them whenever necessary. In any case, this experience confirmed one thing which I already knew: There is a major difference between experiencing a feeling and acting on a feeling! I would very much like to know your thoughts on all that I have described here. I’d be grateful for anything you have to say on this matter.”

What had happened to this person in this situation that was so like what Augustine experienced? Very often, what causes us suffering is not our emotions themselves, but our struggle against our feelings. One way that so many of us have been chronically hurt as children is that we are taught that our emotions are unacceptable. We then experience our emotions as bad things, not to be felt. We learn how to get rid of our emotions when they come up, either by suppressing them or acting them out. These unlived emotions transmute into shame. Rather than feel our anger and sadness about what was done to us, we blame ourselves and see ourselves in a negative light.

We may not only learn that our negative feelings are bad. We may also learn that we shouldn’t have our excitement. Then, if we are excited around people, we feel shame. We want to hide this feeling. We experience the danger of the exposure of these feelings as anxiety. This anxiety is correlated with all kinds of distorted thinking. We assume we will be judged and hated for who we are and what we feel, as we project our self-loathing onto others. Wanting to avoid our emotions and listening to the voice of shame, we act out compulsively, with drugs, drink, food. Just like with St. Augustine, an inner battle goes on between parts of the self. One side shames us for our behaviors, the other side agrees, but says we’ll deal with it tomorrow. And so it goes on.  In this way our unfelt emotions lead to the symptoms of our life.  Often we are not aware of the deep suppression of feeling that is under our compulsive behaviors. We are just aware of the suffering the behaviors cause. If we simply did not avoid these feelings we wouldn’t need our destructive behaviors, and we wouldn’t have the problems that plague us.

We want the suffering to end, but we won’t do the thing that will bring us eventually to the place of transformation. We will not feel the core emotions that are underneath our anxious, depressed, misery. How do we do this? The first part of the journey is the realization that we must search for an answer. This may require a long period of being lost in the woods. During this time we come to an experienced realization of where we are in the moment. We need to journey within as St. Augustine and my friend did. There we discover our early wounds, our patterns in the present that hurt ourselves and others, our underlying shame, our physical and emotional restrictedness and the unresolvable inner arguments that go on within us.

As we come closer to our hearts, we then feel our longing for that which we never got. As the inventor of Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls, would say, we reach the “hurt child” layer of the personality. This is a time of protest and complaint where we feel our unmet needs acutely. This takes us one step closer to our authentic pain but it is still not enough for transformation.

Finally, when we have traveled along the yellow brick road long enough, we slay the witch. We can no longer hold ourselves together, and we feel all the feelings that we have contained for a lifetime. We experience our pure sadness or anger at having been hurt in the ways that we were. We may not be able to articulate it in that moment, but our longing for getting unconditional love in our childhood turns into grief. This comes with the recognition that we will never get that which we never got. We cannot go back in time, we can never relive our childhoods, we can never get our parents to treat us differently than they did because we will never be two-year-olds again. Once we surrender  this hope and fully grieve our loss, change happens automatically. Once we allow ourselves to feel the totality of our feelings and penetrate to our core of emptiness that which keeps us spellbound magically dissolves. The inner battle ceases to rage. What seemed impossible a moment before become inevitable. All Dorothy needs to do to get home in the Wizard of Oz is click her heels, but it takes her the whole movie to figure that out.

When we grow up being shamed for who we are, including our feelings, we store these wounds in the cells of our bodies. We learn chronic habits of muscular restriction in order not to feel. Our unfelt experience then lives outside of our awareness in our bodies. These traumatic experiences also live in our brains, unprocessed, alive like they are happening presently. Our natural ability to realize the fullness of our potentials remains restricted until we can free our bodies and our minds. When we face what we fear, and reown all of our feelings, we experience a tremendous release. We find access to the lifestream of energy, our ch’i. Just like in Einstein’s formula, E=mc2, there is almost an infinite amount of energy in every atom.  When we free this energy that is bound up in our muscles and psyche, we are wholly changed and we are motivated for a lifetime to accomplish all we want and to become all we want to be. We find an alignment with our own nature, and the nature of the universe.

As the great psychologist, William James discovered in his exploration of the change phenomenon, The Varieties of Religious Experience, an absolute recentering of personality is almost without fail preceded by a time of absolute emotional despair. But by the testimony of endless pilgrims who have made the journey of the heart before us, this suffering itself is reason to hope. If we let ourselves fully go into this feeling, without resistance, change will happen.

We discover in the end  that our very desire for wanting to change, for being something other than what we are, means that we are still stuck in the shame of negative self-judgment. When we free ourselves from the bonds of our emotional wounds we realize we do not need to change. Instead, we simply become what we have always meant to be. We become ourselves. We find the lost heart.

 

The Heart of Self-Confidence

In order to accomplish our life goals we need self-confidence. What is self-confidence, where does it come from, and how do we cultivate it?

Mencius, my favorite Chinese Sage, believed that confidence comes from “ch’i,” the universal source of energy. This power that moves through us has many names — eros, elan vital, libido, kundalini.

The brilliant philosopher, Paul Tillich, called self-confidence “the courage to be.” Possessing this courage means being your authentic self in the face of any danger.

Tillich believed that if we lack such confidence it means we are distanced from our essential nature. Mencius believed this, too. His name for our essential nature was heart. This definition of heart as our essential nature has been found around the world throughout history. In one example, St. Augustine said, “The heart is where I am whatever I am.” Mencius said, “pity the man who has lost his heart and does not go out and recover it.” He, too, believed our lack of strength came from being distanced from what we actually are.

Mencius said that when we are connected to our hearts, we have “free-flowing ch’i.” This means that when we are our true selves we have the ultimate connection to the endless and powerful supply of energy from the universe. It is when we are in touch with this source that we can do anything we set our minds to.

Having this power and confidence is another aspect of our entelechy, that which we are meant to be. We grow this power and self-confidence through being properly parented. When we get what we need from the world, our brain is pumped with chemicals like dopamine, which fills us with energy and confidence. When we are disappointed in life, our dopamine levels drop and we feel like the air has been taken out of our balloon. Getting sufficient positive reflection growing up is the real Popeye’s spinach. When we do not get enough positive support growing up, we chronically have low supplies of dopamine. This can lead us to feel enervated and insecure. We learn that being who we truly are is no good, and so we hide those essential aspects of ourselves. We come to believe that we are not the glorious beings that we are. We live in shame, which is the opposite of having “free-flowing ch’i,” or self-confidence.  Having problems with energy and confidence are sure signs that we have a lost heart.

With self-confidence, we believe in our value and capacities. We can face any obstacle. We can handle the risks of rejection, failure, and mistake. When we live in shame, we believe we are less than, and incapable.

How do we recover our hearts, develop the courage to be, reconnect with our essential being, and find access to our ch’i?

In the fairy tale, Maid Lena, nothing grows in the center of a farm. This is a symbol for a disconnection from heart and ch’i. When we are disconnected from this source of power, there is something in our center where nothing grows. The youngest son, Esben, lives a life mooning about. He is put down by his brothers. He lives in shame, and has no motivation or confidence. After his brothers fail at the task of figuring out why nothing will grow in the center of the farm, Esben determines that he will find out. When his father tries to dissuade him from going, he says, “I’m going, I’m going, I’m going!” When he gets there, he feels fear, but he keeps his feet on the ground, breathes, and determines to face whatever happens. A horrific storm begins. He sees three demons flying straight at him. He looks the demons right in the eye. As they get closer they turn into three swans. Then, just before they reach him, they transform into three beautiful princesses. One of the princesses promises to marry him if he spends the following year completing three impossible tasks. When he returns to the farm he looks completely different. He is filled with power and beauty. After fulfilling the princess’s wish, they marry and he becomes king.

What does this fairy tale have to tell us about recovering our hearts and finding our self-confidence? First, despite the lack of confidence shown in him by others and his own lack of energy,  he determines to find the source of his problems. No matter how frightened he is about facing his demons, he doesn’t run away. When he does, he discovers that what he had been avoiding actually becomes the source of his inspiration. By going to the empty place and staring down his fears, he becomes transformed. This doesn’t mean that his task is complete. In fact, it means that his work now begins. But he now has enough confidence and power to complete the impossible tasks he is given, and in the end he gets all that he desires.

To find our hearts and cultivate our self-confidence, we need to follow Esben’s path. We need to begin by devoting ourselves to a life-long process of growth. Just like Esben, we must say, “I’m going!” We need to go to the empty place within ourselves no matter how scary that seems. We need to learn how to go within, explore and come to understand ourselves. When we do, what we usually find is that we need to heal the wounds of our childhoods that have resulted in the formation of shame.

We must complete the impossible tasks. This means mastering our present. We need to commit ourselves to self-improvement, learning continuously, immersing ourselves in art, spending time in nature, caring for our bodies. We must practice the discipline to recognize and end our negative thinking.

Central to finding self-confidence is acting impeccably. As Mencius said, every time we do the right thing, we come into greater contact with our ch’i. We must take responsibility for our destructive behavior patterns and  surrender to getting help with our addictions and compulsions. We discover that when we do the right thing, we feel good about ourselves and this is the greatest fuel for the growth of our self-confidence.

In order to grow our confidence, we need to have reciprocal, authentic relationships. Like Esben, simply meeting the princess does not win her. He must work to gain her love. We must learn how to communicate and connect with others in true intimacy. This must include both giving and receiving positive validation. Start telling people you know and love that they are extraordinary and you’ll find your own confidence growing.

Another step in growing our confidence is envisioning a better future. By using the examples of the courageous who have gone before us, we call on them for inspiration and help. We must cultivate an image of ourselves as being that which we desire to be. We need to read stories of heroes like Esben, because when we do we realize that we are potentially kings. To fulfill our nature we simply have to follow the path of the heroes who have gone before.

This plan for self-cultivation which provides us access to the “free-flowing ch’i” which is the core of our self-confidence, is known in Asian philosophy as “the Way,” or the Dao. When we live in accordance with the way every day, we find our hearts. By living according to our core truths, we will grow in self-confidence until we can overcome any obstacle, face any fear, achieve any goal, and find true fulfillment and happiness. As Esben learned, that which we fear turns out to be the source of our power. When we follow the way, transformation is guaranteed.

 

The Heart of Love

Image via Wikipedia

Where does love come from?

Contemporary science tells us that love is built into us. As the great researcher, Allan Schore, proves, we enter the world pre-wired to love the first person who takes care of us. Once an infant is born it works like this. When an infant sees his mother gazing at him with love in her eyes, happy neuro-chemicals flood the infant’s brain. The child feels happy. He or she likes this feeling and wants more of it. This sets up an attachment to the source of this good feeling. Since the good feeling comes from mom, the kid starts to love mom. We are genetically set up so that when the brain gets a good dose of those happy-making chemicals, we grow neurons in our brain. These neurons form the basis of our feeling confident in the world. They enable us to create and sustain loving connections with other people.

As we grow into childhood, when we receive the proper emotional attunement from our loved ones, our brains continue to develop and we mature our natural propensity to love and be loved. It is when we get our emotional needs met that we grow the ability to love more and more people in deeper and deeper ways. John Bowlby makes a great case that this built in ability to love is evolutionarily adaptive. That is, it contributes to the survival of our species. Helpless infants and mothers need to be bonded because little babies can’t survive without that protection and care. Without love, we do not thrive. Those neurons that grow from love also contribute to the development of our ability to think, feel, create, imagine, act and care for ourselves in the best possible way. Our ability to love and connect is what is natural and adaptive. Our destructive aggressiveness happens when our natural emotional needs for a loving relationship get frustrated.

When we understand that our love is innate, we realize that children are not bad without a moral basis and need to be “trained” and restrained to be obedient. This view that children are evil and need to be broken has justified all kinds of abuse. We now know that this kind of child rearing leaves permanent scars. Instead, if our task as parents is to cultivate the love that already exists in our child by giving love, it makes our job clear.  Our children are precious with potentials that need to be nurtured, nourished and lovingly tended.

Our natural ability to love is our common human bond. Mencius, Confucius’s disciple, said that every human heart is alike. When we realize this, this becomes our basis for living.  Since we are all alike, we must live our lives according to the golden rule, which has been understood in every culture and religion, including the philosophy of Confucius. The Chinese character for this reciprocity, that is, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is shu, which is a combination of the characters for “heart” and “alike.” It’s common meaning is forgiveness.

Our central core of loving compassion is what Mencius called heart. This is what he believed defined what it meant to be truly human or humane. This natural empathy, or the ability to feel what others feel, is what Mencius used as the primary proof that man is essentially good. In order to be fully human, we need to cultivate and develop this heart of compassion.

If this is the case, then the best thing we can do for ourselves, the ones closest to us, and for the planet is to develop our ability to love. Certainly, as we understand the great chain of being, it is our love that helps grow love in our children. Though we understand this scientifically today, this wisdom was understood by Confucius and his follower, Mencius, 2500 years ago. Confucius’s main concern was human relationship. He understood that we were in alignment with our intrinsic purpose on this planet when we were able to have the best relationship with others.

The Confucians believed that our whole society needed to be built on this principle. Our leaders needed to run the state so that relationships would be in greatest harmony and there would be the ultimate conditions for the realization of love. This is a great model for our own leaders and one we need to encourage them to embrace.

As part of this societal imperative, learning about love needs to be central to our education. 70 years ago, Franklin Roosevelt, after seeing the catastrophe of a world war, said that schools needed to expand from the three R’s to four: reading, writing, arithmetic and relationships. He believed that the very survival of the world depended on us learning how better to love and connect through relationship and that it was the responsibility of society at large to provide this direction. In some ways we seem further from this educational goal almost a century later.

This common core of love also means that we do not need to look outside of ourselves for what we seek to become in life. Confucius also said, “the measure of man is man.” What this means is that we can all begin where we are, and by developing our best attributes, we can become wise, strong, passionate and optimally loving.

Confucius’s idea of this ideal person was captured by the Chinese character, Jen. This character is made up of the characters for “man” and “two,” signifying that the measure of an individual is his or her ability for good relationship. The ideal person is one who can connect with others, who can love.

Within each of us is such a fine person, because we can become one, given the proper cultivation. This begins with how we are raised. But once we become grown ups, we need to take over the task of cultivation. We must self-cultivate.

How do we develop our capacity for love and compassion? This is an especially important question because not one of us received the optimal nurturance growing up.

Confucius would say that this begins with tireless self-education. We must explore our great cultural heritage to understand what the pilgrims who have gone before us have learned about love and how to achieve it. We must imagine this ideal, and continue to develop this image so that we have a goal to aim for. We must immerse ourselves in the arts, because this is the food of love.

Finally, our heart of love and compassion is cultivated through our actions, what we do every day. Each day we must practice living up to our highest vision of love. We become more humane – we find our hearts – through giving. To be what we are meant to be, we need to open ourselves and passionately risk all for the sake of loving others.

Science has now joined philosophy and spirituality in understanding that love is our root, answer, and what we are made of.  Through a commitment and devotion to a lifetime of self exploration, you must travel within yourself to find the lost and hidden heart, because there you will discover that the source of love is within yourself. That’s where love comes from.

 

A Book Review: The Making of an Elder Culture by Theodore Roszak

One of the great thrills of existence  is that there is an endless amount to learn. I recently wrote a blog post predicting that as baby boomers entered the last third of their life there would be a resurgence of the 60’s values that many held in their youth. I was excited to discover that I was not alone in this hope. Dr. Theodore Roszak, famous for his culture-defining 1968 work, The Making of a Counterculture, and as a leading proponent of ecopsychology, has written a book on this very topic called The Making of an Elder Culture , published by New Society Publishers.

It has been a joy to read this book and become familiar with the work of Dr. Rosjak (who I am embarrassed to admit I was not familiar with — there’s that joy of new discovery!). This 76-year-old maintains and embodies the spirit that he writes about. He writes with a vigor and an idealism of a person one-third his age. In his latest book Rosjak makes a compelling case that as the baby boomers live for decades past 65, they will reengage with their original, countercultural values and take a leadership role in making the world a better, fairer place.

Roszak sees the baby boom generation as the leading edge of a profound change in demographics that will dominate world culture for the foreseeable future. The combination of lowering birth rates and longevity will make the world an older, and hopefully, wiser place. The 60’s were a time when we believed that if we raised individual consciousness we could change the world. Dr. Roszak agress with the Confucian concept that we cannot “pull the shoots.” That is, we must respect nature’s rate of growth and change. There is nothing, he asserts, that has the potential to raise consciousness like aging.  When vast numbers of people live into their 90’s and beyond, their values will shape our world. We will become a world that prioritizes wellness, sustainable living, and learning. The values of consumption and growth for growth’s sake will give way to a world where mutual care will be of utmost concern. He lays down a challenge for this aging generation. He says that, “Theirs must be a noble, far-sighted cause. They must be the spearhead of a compassionate economy that spreads its benefits to everyone.” He has the audacity to propose an optimistic world vision that results in a healthy relationship with the places we live and our broader environment, and leads to a spiritual realization.

Discovering the works of Roszak has particular meaning for me because I am a proud member of the Radical Passe. The values of the counterculture have stuck with me through the decades of narcissism, greed and fear. It isn’t just the ’60’s that have had a sustained appeal for me. I’m a fan of a whole world of thought that flowered with romanticism in 19th century Europe and passed on into a coma in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. This was a tradition of humanism. It included the belief that the unexamined life was not worth living. It questioned the alienating values of industrial capitalism. Its religion was love. This tradition included Carl Jung, John Lennon and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It brought us the art films from Jean Renoir to Vittorio De Sica. We believed in the experiential educational principles of John Dewey and the therapy of Fritz Perls. It was based on the belief that there was something better to life than the world we inherited: that money, stuff and fitting in were not life’s ultimate goals and something “more” was worth fighting for.

Unfortunately, since this scene is mostly passed and not comprehended by most, my heroes are mostly dead. Ashley Montagu, Erich Fromm, Confucius and Tolstoy are all gone. (There are a few exceptions, including Harville Hendrix and some of my personal teachers who are not so well known). So I sometimes feel a little lonely at this end of the philosophical spectrum. This has increased my joy at discovering Roszak. Here’s a guy who is alive and whose thought and life I can admire. Here’s an invite, Theodore. How would you like to take on another piece of your “eldering” role? I’d love to add you to my mentor list.

 

The Heart of Surviving and Thriving in This Struggling Economy

Statistics like 10% unemployment and reports of 50% pay cuts barely capture the pain and anxiety that so many of us are experiencing in today’s struggling economy. How can we  get through this rough period and also figure out how to succeed in such troubling times? How can we set the economic ship of the world on a course that minimizes this kind of distress in the future? In order to find the solution we need to understand how we got here and what is presently going on.

Much has been said about the technicalities of toxic assets, the lack of regulation on exotic investment instruments and other incomprehensible economic arcana. Some has been said about a culture of short-term gain and greed run amok. Even a free market devotee like Alan Greenspan has had to admit that the market did not do its magic of self-regulating to the best possible outcome.

How did this happen? How did we get to a place where very smart people acted against their own interests? Are people dumb or evil? 2300 years ago the people of China found themselves in a similar situation. The world’s greatest Sage, a man named Mencius (Men-shus), devoted his life to understanding how things could go so wrong in a society and what to do about it. Observing nature, he recognized that there were laws by which the universe operated. Following what he observed in agriculture, if you understood and followed these laws of cultivation, you could increase your yield dramatically. If you went against them, nothing would grow. He called these laws the heavenly mandate, and applied this principle to politics. If leaders followed the heavenly mandate, that is the laws of nature and human nature, people would have peace, happiness and abundance. If leaders lived against this law, there would be discord, economic distress, anxiety and depression.

If we believe what Mencius says, it means that we are in this economic pickle because those in control of the levers of the economy have been living against natural law, and against human nature. Mencius believed that just as our eyes know the beautiful, it is our heart that knows the good, and so it is the faculty of the heart that can judge whether we are living in harmony with the heavenly mandate. When we do not realize that we are living against these principles, it means that we have a lost heart. Another way of saying this is that we have lost touch with our common sense, which was also considered throughout history to reside in the heart. This is based on the humanist belief that we are not stupid or evil. Rather, we all have a basic sense of the good and the right, if we can only access it.  Our troubled bi-polar economy, manic one moment and depressed the next, is a measure of the extent to which we live in a lost-hearted culture.

How have we been living against those laws? As Mencius understood then, and as all ancient peoples understood, simply getting the greatest yield, or amassing the greatest amount of wealth, does not mean that you are following the laws of cultivation. These laws have an ecology, an interdependence between all things that require balance and harmony and a consideration of the long view above all else. Nature tells us that rather than an economy that is geared to making the most money for the smallest number, it needs to provide the maximum well being for the greatest numbers on a sustainable basis.

In order to achieve the kind of harmony that will lead to this favorable outcome, we must understand all the aspects of our being, not simply the material ones. This emphasis on the concrete and away from understanding in depth has obvious consequences. We see evidence of our imbalance all around. The sharp contrast between the financial CEO who makes hundreds of millions and the plight of the average unemployed worker is only one aspect of this. We have seen in our culture a progression towards the greatest value being put on the work place. If young professionals do not spend 12 or 14 hours in the office, they fear that they will not advance. Others are made to spend 60% of their time on the road. As a result, people do not have time to develop relationships or spend time with their families. This can have terrible consequences, as research indicates that at least for the first three years of life a child needs the active care of their mother for their optimal development. If mom is a young lawyer and spends 60 hours a week in the office, her children are not getting what they need. This culture-wide dehumanization and workaholism is a major contributor to problems like addiction and depression. By living in a world where all of our hours are spent at the work place, we have lost our moral footing, or sense of what is of essential value.

What did Mencius propose to cure this problem? He said that in order to find the central harmony, or to live according to the good sense within us which is the inward manifestation of the universal law, we need to find our lost heart. In order to find the heart, we need to live lives of self-cultivation. In the same way that our plants need the proper sunlight, soil and water to grow, we need to give ourselves what we need to grow a truly abundant, sustainable, socially responsible and meaning-filled economy. That means that we have to put the full force of our intellectual, emotional and moral force into developing ourselves. We need to live from a place of devotion to our own growth and the well being of the world. We need to work very hard, but only toward the end of true meaning and purpose.

We do this, first and foremost by making a commitment to our own development, and doing something toward this every day. This is especially important for those at the top, who have a broader impact on our financial wellbeing, but is important for all of us, whether we are some small part of this machine that regulates our capital, or we are simply running the family economy. This cultivation is an act of what the Germans would call “Bildung.”  Bildung means growth through an immersion in culture. We must devote ourselves to learning the inherited wisdom of all time, so that we can learn the eternal principles. We need to explore literature, art and music as much as we learn about economics and business. We need to balance our concrete ways of thinking by enriching our imaginations by spending time in  the world of symbol through myths and tales. We all must learn how to best take care of our bodies, other people and our world.

We need to learn about ourselves. Without a penetrating understanding of human nature,  which begins  with a process of self-exploration, as Alan Greenspan was to learn all too late in life, we can make gross errors of judgment about how people will act and behave.  We need, perhaps most of all, to learn how to have intimate relationships. The only way to grow is to truly open ourselves to other human beings.

This path of self-cultivation which has been known for centuries, is especially necessary for the world today. Everything in our world of work is changing. The world where people found security by working for one corporation for a lifetime is gone. Technology is changing so rapidly that by the time a new business model comes online it is already obsolete.   Those people who will be lifelong learners and are most comfortable with change are the ones who are going to find success in this new world. The only security we are going to create is the control we take of our own work lives. We will be able to do this through continuously developing our intellectual and skill capital. Those of us who depend on old models will find themselves left behind. The people with the greatest imaginations, those who can envision the possibilities available in this new world, will be the ones who blaze trails and come out on top.

Much of what prevents people from being able to change in these ways are old emotional injuries, starting at the earliest phase of life. We now have evidence that our earliest interactions have a profound influence on our capacity for learning, personal growth, change, imagination and the emotional self-regulation necessary to thrive in a world of continuous new demands. The only way to free our natural abilities for adaptation is to work on healing those wounds thorugh a process of self-discovery. In order for our children to thrive in this new world they are going to need optimal upbringing because the most rounded, emotionally healthy and creative people are the ones who are going to have the skills needed in this new world. In order to give our children this kind of upbringing, we need to heal ourselves. We need to widely disseminate the knowledge and skills for self-healing so the greatest number of people can benefit from this understanding.

What will our culture look like if we develop ourselves in a way that brings us into greater harmony with the heavenly mandate? Actually, our technology can be a help in this regard. One great secret of this world where we are married to our work is that most people spend all too many hours in the workplace, but they spend very few of those hours actually being productive. For many, more hours are spent on Facebook than doing work. People hate being trapped in their offices, resenting time away from the rest of their lives, and act out by screwing around. We now have the technology so most people can do a great deal of their work from home. We need to re-vision work. People can work  from home, creating their own flexible hours so they can have time to drop off the kids at school, help them with homework, and tuck them in at night. People will be more productive because they will be happier and their spouses and children will be happier, too. This can also be a significant aid in shrinking our carbon footprint and reducing global warming. How much fossil fuels will we save if every single person who commuted to work eliminated one or two days of driving their car?

As a society, we show what we value by how much we are willing to pay for it. Another change that we will see if we cultivate ourselves is that we will give less value to the work of Wall Street. For our culture to be the richest it can be, more than financiers and lawyers, we are going to need transformation leaders, teachers, therapists, coaches and health counselors. These are the people who are going to give us the tools necessary to be life-long growers. We will put more of our resources into these areas because we will see that social value is economic value. People on Wall Street and in law offices will be paid less, and change agents will be paid more.

These difficult times are the result of great changes in our society. If we are able to recognize our mistakes and correct them, and see the great potential in this time of transformation, there is great promise ahead for better lives for all of us. It is going to take courage, optimism, faith, perseverance and tremendous effort to come through this transition. These are the qualities that reside in the heart. The good news is that we all share those common attributes. All we need to do is find our hearts through a process of self-cultivation and we will have everything we need to not only find personal success and well-being, but to make the world a better place as well.

 

Why Parents Need to Read Fairy Tales (Part 5 in a series)

As we have learned in this series so far, fairy tales are ironic. They tell a truth so shocking that it can only be revealed in innocent children’s stories. 2500 years ago, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates said the truth exposed in these stories was so dangerous that they should not be allowed to be read by children at all!

Socrates spoke about one of the earliest Greek myths, the story of the origins of the universe. In this story, Uranus hated his children so much that he buried them in the darkest place. Then his son, Cronus, castrated him. Cronus received a prophecy that he would be dethroned by his children, so he ate them.

Socrates responded to these tales by saying,

“The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him. . .ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence. But if there is an absolute necessity for their mention, a chosen few might hear them in a mystery, and they should sacrifice not a common [Eleusinian] pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim; and then the number of the hearers will be very few indeed.”

What these tales tell us is that the wounded parent has been wounding the child since the beginning of things. Our pain is not the fault of our immediate forebears, our parents, and the wounds that we inflict as parents are the result of a multi-generational pattern that goes back to the earliest times.

As parents, with this knowledge, we have the opportunity to break this cycle and to do our part in healing a broken world. As Confucius said,

“To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; to cultivate our personal life we must first set our hearts right.”

The creators of fairy tales were in touch with their own child-like nature and so understood things from the child’s point of view. The intent of the inventors of these stories was less to entertain the child and more to return the parent to the child’s world.  Parents need to read fairy tales so they can understand how their children experience them. The harsh lesson of the stories is not one that a child can say directly to the parent and so the story does it for them.  If we can listen to the hidden message, then we can understand what we need to do to become better parents.

From ancient times,  the creators and tellers of the tales were old women. What were the lessons these elders were trying to teach? These women were actually engaging in a subversive act. These crones were able to reach across the generations and communicate on a subtle level the hidden truths about life. They were saying, “Watch out for your parents, and don’t worry, there is a way out.”

These tellers of tales validated the child’s emotional reactions to their world. Children respond to the stories because unconsciously they feel grateful that someone acknowledges their reality, albeit in disguised, symbolic, form.

When the child asks about the story, “Is it true?” they are secretly saying, “Mom, I want you to know that the story is true. You hurt me and make me feel bad about myself, but I can’t tell you.” When the grown up gives their ironic answer by saying “No, this is just a fairy tale,” the secret message to the child is “I understand now what it is that I do, and I’ll do whatever I need to so that I won’t do it anymore.”

Before saying that children should not be exposed to the shocking truth of the murderous rage of the father against the son, Socrates had a hard time accepting the truth of such stories. He said,

“First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies, in high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too, –I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him.”

Before accepting the truth of their own destructive impulses, parents sometimes denigrate fairy stories because they confirm their worst fears about themselves. Denying the reality that we harm our children in big or small ways makes a significant contribution to the problem in the first place. By evading our responsibility, the child ends up believing they are the problem, and this is how they develop shame, or the belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. The child comes to believe that if they are being treated poorly by their parents it must be their own fault.

The fairy tales are a way for the the true facts to be introduced to the parent without eliciting this denial and getting the child into trouble. Fairy stories try to make it easy on grown ups by critiquing them without the listener knowing what is going on. In this way, the parent can hear these important lessons about themselves.

For example, the modern story, The Emperor’s New Clothes says to the parents that they are self-absorbed hypocrites, and it is the “child” in the story who reveals this. The story itself symbolizes the process of confronting the parent with their character flaws. The child in the story is the only one who has the guile to reveal the naked truth about the king. Because the story is supposedly about someone fatuous and ridiculous, the parents are not offended. But if they are open to the message, they know the story is about them. Can we grown ups face the truth in these stories? This is the great task, because without it, we will repeat the crimes reported in the tales.

From the earliest times, these stories were told in groups, and adults listened and heard them as well as children. This is still the way it is today. Grown-ups bring their children to see plays like The Lion King, or movies like Coraline. The structure of these fairy tales are barely different than the stories told 5000 years ago. Parents may resonate with them more profoundly than the children, as we have a greater appreciation of the depth of their message. Parents were children once, too, and they had parents, as well. We know the ways we have been wounded by our predecessors and we intuit the ways that we harm our children despite our best intentions.

Here is the message we parents are offered when we enter the world of fairy tales. In a great chain from the beginning of time, you were hurt by your forebears and your society. This has resulted in your having a lost heart. This means that you have not fully realized your universe-given capacities for thinking, feeling, acting, imagining and loving. You are not fully being that which you are meant to be. The result is that you cannot give to your children all that they need to optimally realize these same potentials themselves. In some way, great or small, you are passing down the wounds to the next generation.

The stories then go on to tell us that this does not have to be. You can leave your old ways of being behind. You can liberate yourself from the constrictions imposed on you from without. You can free your capacity for growth become wise, passionate, strong, creative, and loving. You can heal. You can find your heart. The stories tell us that as parents, this is our charge and obligation. The stories demand this of us, because humanity is striving to end this cycle of wounding, shame and self-limitation. In order for the world to survive and thrive, we need to live a life of self-cultivation, where we heal our wounds, liberate our children, and fix a broken world.

The stories provide hope for all children and grown ups who are still spellbound by a giant ogre. The stories tell us that there is a force in the universe which will come to our aid if we show the pluck and courage to fight the demon within.  The stories are revolutionary in this way. The threatening giant may keep the land under a spell for a thousand years but eventually the child in each of us can grow up and save the kingdom. As parents, if  we can free ourselves, then we will not continue the cycle by becoming the tyrant, ourselves.

If parents take responsibility for their own imperfections by sharing the tales with their children, then there can be a relationship based on reality and acceptance. This can help move the child toward self-love and love of others. If parents can take the lessons of the tales to understand their own shortcomings, they can follow the heroic journey presented in the stories, and become King or Queen.  This means becoming a great parent.

When parents share fairy tales with their children, the parent conveys to the child that they accept what the happy ending of the story means. The parent’s main job is to surrender to the great chain of being, and enable their children to become King or Queen themselves. In the end, we need to accept our own death, and give the universe over to our children’s dominion.  Even though, this means, as sometimes happens in the stories, that the parents end up in a vat of boiling oil.

 

Why Grown Ups Need to Read Fairy Tales: Accessing the Inner Scheherazade (Part 4)

FAIRY TALES AND THE INNER MALEFICENT

In the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, at the party that celebrates the birth of the new princess, an evil witch named Maleficent shows up and ruins the whole event. She puts a curse on the infant that destines her to a painful existence. Who is this nefarious character that makes an appearance in many different guises in endless stories?

The truth is, there is a Maleficent who lives in each of us. All of the explorers of the human condition have recognized that we are not a unity. We are not simply the singular “I” that we imagine ourselves to be. We possess multiple sub-personalities. There have been countless names and descriptions for these inner part-selves and how they work. Freud divided us into three, id, ego and super-ego. John Bradshaw named the “inner-child.”  Jung named these parts complexes and archetypes. Fritz Perls described the relationship between the parts by calling it the topdog/underdog game. Eric Berne, in transactional analysis, named three interacting parts, the parent, the adult, and the child. The purveyors of the object-relations school split what they call internal representations into at least four parts, the good and bad self and the good and bad object. Watkins describes ego-states, a family of coherent sub-personalities that live and compete within us. Historically, it has been known as the cosmic battle between good and evil. In cartoons, we see an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Whatever name we give it, it is apparent that we are a multiplicity within a singularity, we are many within the one. Our search is for that oneness within our many-ness: like our money says, e pluribus unum, within the many, one.

Freud’s profoundly disturbing discovery is that we are not masters in our own house. Strange as it may seem, these part-selves, sub-personalities, or ego-states, though they exist generally outside of our awareness, have a tremendous influence over our thoughts, feelings, imaginings and behaviors. That person that we think of as “I,” who we believe is in control of our lives, is actually oftentimes not in command of what we do. Despite the fact that this has been well known for well over 2500 years, having been described by Plato, we still have a hard time grasping this fact and accepting it. But the truth is told by fairy tales. Maleficent, the troublemaking fairy, lives inside of us. We know this because we set an intention, but all too often don’t live it through. How many times my clients have said, “I know what I want to do and what I should do, why don’t I do it?”

Some fear when they hear that we have hidden personalities that this means we are crazy and have multiple personality disorder. What we now understand is that this syndrome is merely one extreme end of a long continuum. Only the most wounded of us risk such a complete shattering of personality.

The extreme can illuminate what most of us experience in a far more subtle and integrated way. A schizophrenic may hear disembodied voices that tell the person they are worthless and should die. This does not happen for most of us, but all too many of us, when we dig deep within, discover that there are parts of ourselves that undermine our good intentions by telling us we are worthless and that nothing will work out for us anyway.

These parts of ourselves that sometimes can act against our own apparent self-interest are not evil, or necessarily intend harm. Rather, they serve a protective function. The ways that they protect us may be far outdated and no longer help us, but those parts still think they are aiding us. In this sense, there are no irrational acts. If we can understand the motivation behind the act, we can see the rationality in it, even if they are operating out of wholly false premises. For example, whenever one particular client of mine makes any kind of mistake, he punches himself in the head. Now this is what his father did. His father believed that this was the best way to teach his son not to make mistakes. He did not recognize that what he was doing was completely harmful. He thought he was doing the right thing. Now this client does not want to do this to himself, but feels compelled to. This internalized father behaves autonomously, outside of my client’s control, and he continues to do what he believes is the right thing, even though one day it might kill him.

Very often these parts of ourselves are our own unrealized potentials. Hiding our potential selves is one way of describing what it means to have a lost heart. These unrealized potential aspects not only remain in an unmatured state within us, they corrupt, putrefy or distort through a long period of non-acknowledgment, lack of support and lack of conscious use. They become vitiated. They corrupt because they have gone so long uncultivated. That is what makes their influence negative. They may be enraged, and are protective in the sense that they are seeking revenge on our behalf for a lifetime of neglect and hurt.

The tales reveal this as well. In one fairy tale, a fisherman frees a genie from a lamp. The genie says to the fisherman that he will grant him one wish and that is to choose the method of his death. The fisherman says that is not the way the story is supposed to go. Genies are supposed to give those that free them three wishes of anything they would like. The genie says he would have done that had he not been trapped in the lamp for 10,000 years. After being in there so long, he was too enraged to do anything but destroy.

Oftentimes we battle against these inner demons with our conscious will, but we often lose the battle, because the part of us that we fight with is not invested with sufficient energy to win the battle. We identify with the part that fights, but that is not really our source of greatest strength. All too often, the ogre rules the kingdom.

Fairy tales speak to this outer battle which has become an inner battle. It speaks to those undeveloped parts within ourselves that are hurt and afraid. It speaks to all the lost children within us who feel so all alone. It speaks to those children within grown up bodies who don’t want to come out and grow up, because of the fear that the pain will be too overwhelming if they get abandoned again.

FAIRY TALES INTRODUCE US TO THE WISE ONE WITHIN

There are also parts of us that are wiser and stronger than we are aware of. In order to counter the power of Maleficent, we need to call on these good powers within us.

One of the most significant collections of tales is the ancient book, “The 1001 Nights.” In this cycle, the Sultan is so troubled by being betrayed by his wife that he plans to marry and then kill a new woman each day. Scheherazade comes up with a plan to save the women of this realm, but in order to do so she needs to put herself into the ultimate peril. She herself will marry the Sultan. She convinces him to let her live each day by telling him a different story for each of 1001 nights.  By telling him these tales, the Sultan becomes cured of his condition. He finds his heart, falls in love with Scheherazade, and eliminates his decree to marry and kill a woman a day. The cycle tells us that in this first recorded course of psychotherapy, the cure was fairy tales.

Scheherazade was an extraordinary woman. She had studied the wisdom of the ancients. She had followed the travels of past pilgrims of the heart. She was a fine poet. She had mastered science and philosophy. She was verse in stories and folk tales. In other words, she had lived the life of self-cultivation that is necessary for finding the lost heart. This gave her true courage in the sense that Paul Tillich described in The Courage to Be.  She did not avoid her destiny, even though she risked death. She was willing to risk all for authentic being.

Scheherazade is what Jung would call an anima figure. This is that great source of wisdom and power that lives deep within each of us. If we can get past the limitations imposed on us by our own woundedness, we will find her, and the great riches she offers. She is our Beatrice, our guide out of hell and into paradise. We need this wisdom figure if we are to counter Maleficent. In the tale “The Sparrow with the Slit Tongue,” after the man journeys in a dark forest, he comes upon a garden. In the garden is a beautiful house. In the house is a magical princess. This house in the garden in the center of the wood is our heart. This is the home of the divine within. As The Upanishads tells us, the heart is the home of Atman, the great source of all.

The stories tell us that if we are to overcome impossible obstacles we need supernatural help. In order to access our “inner Scheherazade,” we need to do what she did. We need to live a life of self-cultivation. We must study the world’s wisdom, be creative, become knowledgable, and immerse ourselves in tales. By taking this outer journey of studying the collective wisdom of human kind in its multifarious variations, we call on the power of the magical princess. With her aid we can overcome our shame, and render our demons powerless.

The life of self-cultivation described by the stories combines this outward journey with the inward one. We need to feed ourselves with everything we can from the outside to awaken our inner guide, and then we turn inward and hope for communication. The way to discover the answer to our problems is to enter ourselves the way we enter the story. We look inside, and with patience we wait. If we listen carefully, something eventually bubbles up to the surface. This is the way to find a pathway to our heart. The stories tell us that the inner guide will give us all we need, if we are willing to do the work of finding her. She is the guide to our innermost being, where the world and our nature are one.

To understand ourselves is to understand everything.

 

Why Grown Ups Need to Read Fairy Tales (Part 3)

WHAT THE TALES TELL US WE NEED TO DO

What do the tales tell us we need to do to find our hearts and become what we are meant to be? What Bruno Bettelheim says for children is equally true for adults.

“Fairy tales, unlike any other form of literature, direct the child to discover his identity and calling, and they also suggest what experiences are needed to develop his character further. Fairy tales intimate that a rewarding, good life is within one’s reach despite adversity — but only if one does not shy away from the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity. These stories promise that if a child dares to engage in this fearsome and taxing search, benevolent powers will come to his aid, and he will succeed. The stories also warn that those who are too timorous and narrow-minded to risk themselves in finding themselves must settle down to a humdrum existence — if an even worse fate does not befall them.” 24

THE TALES TELL US THAT DUMMLING IS A HERO

We internalize the wounds we suffer at the hands of our parents by becoming shame-bound. In order to counter this invention of a false identity as someone inferior, the stories provide us with the image of the hero. These characters often start out being called shaming names like “Dummling,” but by the end they win the princess and become king. The frog turns into a prince. This recognition of the hero within the shamed character awakens us to the truth that we are far greater than we realize.

The stories tell us that hidden within we are king or queen and our destiny is to rule over our own lives, take responsibility for others, and caretake our planet. As the legend of King Arthur tells us, the time comes when it is necessary for us to pull the sword out of the stone and claim our mature identity. With the finding of our heart, we emerge into adulthood. We are capable of fulfilling our responsibilities with all the difficulties that this entails, because we have uncovered the power to do so.

Adults need role models and heroes who provide us with a vision to follow in life. Though we often focus on getting money, sex or a thin body, our deepest need is to find a reliable and true way to significance and quality that we can follow with confidence. The heroes in fairy tales provide us with such a path.

FAIRY TALES AND THE PERILOUS JOURNEY TO THE TRUTH

At a certain point in many fairy tales, the child makes a huge decision. They leave the safety of home and enter the world in search of adventure. In order to end our needless suffering we must be willing to leave the safety of what we know, and enter worlds unknown.

It takes a great leap of courage to leave our childish fantasies behind and face the realities of life as they are revealed in fairy tales. To do this leads to a giant gain, but many who are most in need of this message stay at home and avoid, because they are too afraid. For those who shrink from this challenge, the stories fall flat.

When we leave the house, it means that we are moving to transcend the archetypal, multigenerational, historical wounds that we carry within us from our families. In order to succeed, the child in the story needs to battle their way out of the trapped predicament with their family. In the story “The Giant Who Had No Heart in his Body,” the youngest child, Boots, was forbidden from leaving home despite the fact that his brothers were turned to stone by a wicked giant and his father was frozen in grief. Finally, he forced his father to let him go and conquer the evil giant.

We must accept that we can never go back to our earliest childhood and get our unmet needs met by our parents. In one story, the girl lives in a far-away castle with the one she loves, but longs to return to her family. She is warned that if she does it will separate her and her lover forever. She doesn’t listen, returns home, and the prophecy comes true. She must then travel “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” to find her love again.

We need to recognize the ways that we  live out this unsatisfying early relationship in symbolic form, whether it is with the bottle, food or bad relationship choices. Hansel and Gretel are rejected by their parents, and end up in a house made of gingerbread. It looks sweet and appealing on the outside, but  the house is owned by a witch who intends to eat them. Like drugs, alcohol or bad boyfriends, what originally provides an easy release from our childhood pain ends up threatening our doom. Addictions are the ways that we think we are leaving, but actually end up staying in, the house of our families. It is only when we give up our compulsive habits and self-destructive patterns that we leave the house and enter the world on the adventure of finding our hearts.

In order to reclaim the parts of ourselves that we sacrificed in order to maintain our early relationships, we need to sacrifice our child-like relationships to our families. For Hansel and Gretel, in order to save themselves from being spellbound and eaten, they needed to put the witch in the oven.

What we find when we dare to leave and adventure is a grounded sense of identity rooted in purpose. This not only leads to the discovery of our personal destiny, which is our individual goal, but also to the realization of the entelechy of the universe as a whole. We leave the home to enter the heart of the world. We become participants in the world’s growth toward love. Love is what the universe is meant to be.

THE ANSWER WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR: IT WON’T BE EASY

The next painful truth revealed by the tales is that the only way out of our life’s dilemmas is to face our darkest fears. When the hero leaves home for adventure, the first thing that happens is he enters a dark forest and becomes lost. We long for the easy answer, but fairy tales are never so childish. They tell us that we can only get what we want by making our way through the treacherous thicket. This means we must recognize all that we don’t know about ourselves and how to live. We must admit our incompetence.

All too much, contemporary life is structured to avoid these difficult problems. We fear that we do not have the wherewithal to face the challenge. We are consumed with shame, believing that we cannot do anything about our problems because of some intrinsic flaw. We’d rather see things in this way than face the awesome responsibilities of existence, and we end up with relentless suffering as our prize. We feel all alone when we find ourselves in this trapped place, but the tales speak of whole kingdoms being turned to stone. This means that we live in a lost-hearted world, one that is out of touch with its essential nature. This leads to the terrible consequence of us being spellbound, unable to truly live.

FAIRY TALES TAKE US ON AN INWARD JOURNEY

What must we do to free ourselves of this curse? The hero meets a humble figure in the woods who gives him three impossible tasks to complete. And so in order to free ourselves, we must do the impossible.

What this means is that in order to discover the source both of our troubles and our salvation, we must take a trip within. In the stories this journey may be down into a place under the earth, or up to the top of the highest mountain. This journey in is like going into the basement or attic. It is the hidden place where much is stored. When we take the trip within, we come upon the past. We find the remains of our childhood and all the remnants from endless generations. When we travel within we also find depths of being of which we are unaware. We find ways of seeing things that we haven’t contemplated before. We unearth aspects of ourselves that have long gone misplaced. We find the parts of ourselves that have existed only in potential, those things, that with cultivation, we can be. In a sense, this process is like Plato’s anamnesis. In this theory, before birth we have all knowledge and life is a process of remembering all that we once knew.

By entering the world of tales, we reach that deep and hidden interior part of ourselves where we find our hearts. It is a pathway into a level of experience of unimaginable depths and richness. In the tales, when the hero completes the impossible tasks of going to the bottom of the sea, to the ends of the Earth, and to the top of the highest mountain, they find treasure and the water of life.

Thanks for reading. Part 4 is coming soon.