I’ve been reading the book The Trouble with Boys by Peg Tyre, published by Crown Publishing. This wonderful book, which is truly ‘fair and balanced,’ explores the question of why boys are falling behind girls in academic achievement. This book has led me to think about my own experience in school and beyond. I remember my first day of kindergarten. No kid wanted to go to school more than me. Unfortunately, by the time I left 4th grade I was turned off to school. I got by on talent and little work. I was so disenchanted by high school, where I majored in hitching to the ‘record store,’ that I could see no purpose for college. Today, 40 years later, I am writing at 6 AM on Sunday morning and I have my doctorate. What happened? Where did this discipline and passion come from?
Fortunately for me, instead of going to college fresh out of high school, I became an apprentice at one of the world’s premier recording studios, A and R Studios in New York.
This was a rough place to grow up. New York in the 1970’s was an edgy place and the culture of the studio followed that midtown style, where people went to the Carnegie Deli for a pastrami sandwich and paid extra to be abused by the waiters.
The guys at A and R played hard and loud. It wasn’t uncommon to find these grown men screaming and throwing things at one another. A and R’s leader was one of the era’s truly great engineer/producers, the legendary Phil Ramone. Ramone was notorious for being brutally rough on his apprentices, and as each apprentice became a master, they trained the next generation in the same fashion. If the new kid screwed up, and they always did, they would get yelled at, cursed, thrown around. Not many could take it, but if you did, you became a member of the club. I went through it, took it, and gave it back. When I walked in at 16 I was a mess of a kid. 4 years later I was a master engineer working with the most demanding clients in the world, artists like Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra.
I always wondered if the training had to be so rough. Couldn’t I have learned the same lessons in a gentler way? But now that I have read The Trouble with Boys, I’ve been thinking about what was right with the kind of apprenticeship I had at A and R.
The reason I gave up on school was because I was disillusioned. What I longed for was a noble ideal to aspire towards, a reason to work hard. School did not provide this, but Ramone and his minions did. We were there to do the best. We were creating great art. Though we didn’t have the best equipment, we provided the greatest service to the musical geniuses we worked with. Our goal was to provide the ultimate environment where they could create at their peak. And it worked. For example, Billy Joel, until that time a floundering artist with a minor hit, created “The Stranger” and then an endless list of hits in the A and R milieu. We had pride in what we did. We could be arrogant jerks, but we earned it.
In this very male environment, we were all bonded by this common mission and approach. It was no joke that everyone there did whatever was necessary to make a great record. When I started out working in the tape library and got a call on Saturday morning to come in and find a tape for Burt Bacharach, Milton Brooks, the studio manager, had already been there for an hour. We were all in it together. The mores and rules were passed down with each new generation and shared by everyone. And the first rule was you did whatever it took to get the job done right.
Though the training often hurt, there was an amazing amount of loyalty that we felt toward each other. It might be hard to imagine in today’s world where we all want to try out a new restaurant every time we go out, but at that time clients stuck with you through it all. Arnold Brown, a “Mad Men” era music producer for the advertising agency, Dancer, Fitzgerald and Sample, would run me around in circles just for the purpose of driving me nuts, but he was willing to make an investment in the new guy, because he wanted someone there who he knew would do it his way and give him the quality product he demanded. The amazing group of top engineers on staff, guys like Don Hahn, Dixon Van Winkle, and Steve Friedman, stuck by their assistants while kicking their ass because that was how they had gotten the gift of their careers from Ramone, and they wanted to give back. There was enough work for everyone, and when Elliot Scheiner started working with Steely Dan he might not have time to work on a jingle, so he’d throw that gig my way.
So why did that experience change me so fundamentally? These qualities of a tradition, ritual behavior, a willingness to suffer pain in order to achieve an ideal, group bondedness and loyalty are all characteristics of an experience of initiation. This was a group of men who ushered young men who were willing to pay the price into manhood. It was the army, but instead of killing, we made great recordings.
Maybe this tells us what boys need to thrive. If initiation rituals that have existed since the dawn of time have anything to tell us, boys need to suffer to become men. But they need to suffer for a good reason, do it with a group of men bonded by this common goal, who have been through it and are invested in them becoming good, strong men. And it certainly is possible to do this for a better reason than war.
Young men crave this experience and hold it with them as something sacred for their entire lives. A few years ago I went to a party for Blue Jay Recording Studio in Carlisle, Massachusetts that I had helped start in 1980. Several men came up to me to meet the ‘legendary’ Glenn Berger. They had been trained by people who had been trained by someone who had been trained by me. I had trained those first guys in the way that I had been trained, to the exacting standards of Phil and A and R. I passed the legacy on. I had no idea that I had influenced any of these guys, and I was stunned to see the impact that this had had on them. They all had that fire and pride, that passion and discipline that was the true gift that I had gotten from the men who had initiated me. That might be a big part of the answer of what our boys need and what we men need to give to our sons.
This week I was interviewed for the second time by Michael Carroll on his quirky, funny, and intelligent alternative radio show, The Mikie Show. Mikie constructs the whole show himself and it sounds wonderful. I think I get to say some good stuff, too. Give it a listen. I hope you enjoy. The Mikie Show Episode 20 featuring Glenn Berger
The next quality that is central to the Mencian conception of heart is ch’i. (For those of you who are just joining this conversation, Mencius was a great Chinese Sage who lived and wrote 2300 years ago. Central to his philosophy was the notion of “heart.” See other posts.) Ch’i is the prime energy of the universe. This can be correlated to “the sacred fire” of the Upanishads. The Indians, too, located this energetic source in the heart.
“I know . . . that sacred fire which leads to heaven. Listen. That fire which is the means of attaining the infinite worlds, and is also their foundation, is hidden in the sacred place of the heart.”
Buddhists located their equivalent, prana, a concept they borrowed from the Sanskrit, in the heart, and also saw the unity of heart, energy, and the cosmic reality. Ch’i has also been named tejas, mana, or by Jung, libido. It is found in Norse mythology as the mead from the world tree of Ygdrasil.
The Chinese posited two kinds of ch’i, the gross and the subtle. The body was the home of the grosser ch’i and the heart was the home of the subtle ch’i. To cultivate the heart means to cultivate our subtle ch’i. This would not only bear on our moral health, but our physical well being as well. Mencius unified his concepts in a moral vision, where right living, as determined by heart, resulted in maximum ch’i. Health, wellbeing and courage were related to living in harmony with the dictates of heart, which emerged from its connection to universal nature.
Mencius believed that this general energetic principle of the universe was something that “ran through” humans. When we achieve an optimal alignment with the Heavenly Mandate, or universal law, we have the greatest access to this primal energy of the universe. We then possess what Mencius called flood-like ch’i, which is the ultimate energetic capacity.
Mencius himself admitted that explaining flood-like ch’i was difficult. A disciple asked, “May I ask what this flood-like ch’i is?”And he replied,
“It is difficult to explain. This is a ch’i which is, in the highest degree vast and unyielding. Nourish it with integrity and place no obstacle in its path and it will fill the space between Heaven and Earth. It is a ch’i which unites rightness and the Way. Deprive it of these and it will starve. It is born of accumulated rightness and cannot be appropriated by anyone through a sporadic show of rightness. Whenever one acts in a way that falls below the standard set in one’s heart, it will starve.”
This means that our energy, mood and motivation, is dependent on our integrity, of acting from our highest moral understanding, which is in our hearts. This places us in alignment with universal forces, which gives us courage. Depression and failure can be likened to a lack of moral attunement. This does not only mean not doing the right thing toward others, but also toward the self. The condition of shame, or treating ourselves from self-hatred instead of self-love, will lead to a diminishment of ch’i.
Through the manifestation of flood-like ch’i we develop the virtue of imperturbability. This means being true to oneself even without external validation. As Mencius stated it, “Only a gentleman can have a constant heart in spite of a lack of constant means of support.”
When we have imperturbability, our motivation for action must be on rightness, and not dependent on outcome. (more…)
The heart, as the great Chinese Sage Mencius defines it, is the sense organ that knows the good just as the tongue knows the delicious and the eye the beautiful. The good is beautiful to the heart. Here’s what Mencius said:
” . . . all palates have the same preference in taste; all ears in sound; all eyes in beauty. Should hearts prove to be an exception by possessing nothing in common? What is it, then, that is common to all hearts? Reason and rightness. The sage is simply the man first to discover this common element in the heart. Thus reason and rightness please my heart in the same way as meat pleases my palate.”
What Mencius means is that the heart ‘knows’ what is reasonable and right, the way the eye knows what is physically beautiful. When we embody, or live out, what is reasonable and right, the heart is pleased. Through a devoted practice to being reasonable and right, we find the heart. When this inherent sense is optimally cultivated this ends in the ultimate moral development, which means becoming a Sage.
For Mencius, the heart is the seat of compassion. Mencius describes compassion as the “unbearability of suffering of any creature.” This natural reaction to the suffering of others is Mencius’s primary proof of the inherent goodness of people. The universality of this empathic faculty is captured in his statement, “No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others.” He uses as proof the argument that any sentient human would react with horror if they saw a child about to fall into a well. This feeling would occur spontaneously, and not for any extrinsic purpose. He suggests that this natural attribute is the most important aspect of humanness, and is what needs to be cultivated in order for one to achieve jen, or to be truly humane.
Recently Charles Blow of the New York Times cited some studies suggesting that people between the ages of 18 and 29 are “moving away from organized religion while simultaneously trying desperately to connect with their spirituality.” I believe this is true for vast numbers of people of all ages. We find ourselves in a time when untold numbers are searching for a deeper sense of fulfillment in their lives. People everywhere are looking for answers. From the spiritual cognoscenti, to those who regularly tune into Oprah and are committed to personal growth and change, to seekers looking for a way to solve a problem in their lives through the many forms of psychotherapy, to the many millions who fuel the self-help industry, lifelong learners everywhere are seeking something deeper and more fundamental than motivational tips and familiar nostrums.
Evidence that the quest for spiritual development outside of conventional religion has gone mainstream is all around us: in the upswing of interest in the healing arts such as yoga, meditation, and holistic health practices; in the fascination with forms of mysticism such as Kabbalah; in the study of the traditions of the East like Buddhism and Taoism; in the openness to the melding of the most advanced science and the most ancient wisdom traditions as illustrated by Deepak Chopra’s huge following; in the renewed sense of personal responsibility brought on by the changes in our political and economic landscape; and in the nostalgia for the less materialistic values of the ‘60s.
I call this vast group Seekers. These are people who in addition to personal healing are also concerned about the environment and the fate of the earth. They are parents who are feeding their children organic foods and working earnestly to give their kids the best start by applying attachment parenting techniques. They are couples who are devoted to having sacred marriages through using the dialogical techniques of teachers like Harville Hendrix. They are baby-boomers going back to school after the kids graduate college, and thirty-somethings who have gotten off the fast track to become social entrepreneurs, using their business savvy to make a better world. They are open-minded and tolerant. They are receptive to all traditions, philosophies, and wisdoms, whatever the source. They read Eckhart Tolle and admire the Dalai Lama. They are connecting with old friends through Facebook, following politics on the Huffington Post and are interested in all types of social networking. They follow the big thinkers on sites like TED.com. Every day they make an effort to become better people.
Where is this spiritual thirst coming from, and why are people looking in places other than organized religion? (more…)
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. (more…)
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been reading the book The Trouble with Boys by Peg Tyre, published by Crown Publishing. This wonderful book, which is truly ‘fair and balanced,’ explores the question of why boys are falling behind girls in academic achievement. This book has led me to think about my own experience in school and beyond. I remember my first day of kindergarten. No kid wanted to go to school more than me. Unfortunately, by the time I left 4th grade I was turned off to school. I got by on talent and little work. I was so disenchanted by high school, where I majored in hitching to the ‘record store,’ that I could see no purpose for college. Today, 40 years later, I am writing at 6 AM on Sunday morning and I have my doctorate. What happened? Where did this discipline and passion come from?
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Glenn Berger, Ph.D. 