Posts tagged Life

by jajacks62

With this inaugural blog I am mindful of running the risk of opening a cosmic can of spiritual worms. So, I will stubbornly stay above the fray and opt out on debating the righteousness of any one set of spiritual beliefs versus another. I write this article hopeful it may engage your curiosity about the essence of creativity and its relationship to the mystical realm no matter where you fall on the “faith continuum.” I have no doubt that my experiences inside of as well as outside of traditional and non traditional houses of worship have influenced my spiritual beliefs. Moreover, this blog in large measure represents the fruits of my evolving artistic sensibilities inside and outside the treatment room. It is an outgrowth of my own search for truths about human nature, the universe, and what it means to apply these truths in the service of living well.

My working hypothesis is that mystical transformational processes are at the heart of the value of “being” and indispensable to the regulation of self esteem in a world rife with injustice and loss. Furthermore, it’s my contention that our purpose for “being” in the present, which I will term the only possible moment of creative possibilities, is to become enlightened as to our reasons “for being” or to say it a different way, our purpose for living. Finally, I contend that this process of self discovery or self creation requires trust in one’s self to process wisdom the universe gifts us, and faith in forces that operate inside and outside of us to render the unintelligible, intelligible.

It is as obvious as the noses on our own faces absent some sort of reflecting pools that we need selves to have self esteem. In truth many of us may have never even considered that we exhibit many different self states on any given day. Furthermore, many of these self expressions were conditioned earlier in life and unaltered by time and circumstances. This is due to real and/or imagined recollections of the threats to our physical safety and emotional security posed by questioning the validity and reliability of how our caregivers saw us and wished us to seem them. So when I use the concept of self I am thinking about nurtured autonomous capacities of self observation and self reflection in the service of processing, integrating and using in a coordinated fashion, what our senses receive. Without space these developmental milestones will not take place.

Like a good wide receiver in football who must create space and separate himself from the defensive player covering him so he can catch a pass, we must develop separation and space from how our caregivers wished for us to experience them and how they wished for us to experience ourselves and the world in order to create new and more flexible mindsets. It is imperative that we do so because otherwise, we will suffer painful consequences by not respectfully and considerately relating and responding to those in our immediate presence by virtue of being wedded to expectations shaped by a world of blacks and whites with very few shades of gray. Such idealized and simplistic notions degrade our capacities to enrich each other’s lives as if our individual limitations and flaws were antithetical to the concept of having and regulating self esteem. Furthermore, if we have learned that the creation of and use of space to sense and evaluate the world beyond the limits of the wisdom imparted to us by our role models could result in a loss of their love, hurtful judgments, or physical and/or emotional abandonment, then this process of self creation may to varying degrees be stunted. This is not a knock on anyone’s parents. It’s the respectful acknowledgement that we are all human, imperfect, limited and flawed. Thus, no one should be revered in such a manner.

The bottom line is that we need the freedom and operating space

to practice being, trusting and valuing our selves. To use an analogy this might be equivalent to trying to make sense of the world with our eyes if our faces are pushed up to a pane of glass. This is a gross form of blindness or loss of perspective. Or imagine being packed into a subway car like sardines during rush hour. You would lack the operating space to protect and promote your self interest should there be a sudden jolt or a boundary violation of some kind.

For example, I imagine that very few of us who do not possess the mentalities of a stunt man or woman would attempt to learn to fly an airplane as an unseasoned student if we feared that such mistake-laden learning the ropes might result in our instructors getting angry, disgusted and perhaps, parachuting out of the plane leaving us all alone and terrified with the overwhelming responsibility to fly and land the aircraft. These analogies are meant to drive home the point that the development of selves and self esteem does not happen in a vacuum and must take place within the context of supportive and trusted relationships.

I often liken psychotherapy to be a holding environment or to use a construction metaphor; the scaffolding while the patient’s personality is renovated. No matter how painful, self defeating and even self destructive can be the ways we live our lives they are the weight supporting beams or infrastructures for our personalities. We will not risk deconstructing our ways of being so that we can reconstruct how we experience and use these experiences to guide our actions without the security of knowing that these structures will not collapse. The trusted and valued psychotherapist is that scaffolding or weight bearing beams while we renovate the way history has shaped the unfolding of our stories. If there is one truth I hold very dear to my heart as a result of working in the field of helping others develop selves is that anxieties over non existence or the collapse of ones’ personality will most often supersede fears of death due to illness, injury or other accident of fate.

As much as the development of trust in our selves is critical to the growth of self esteem, since how this comes about remains much a mystery, we are forced to venture into unchartered waters on faith. I think about the mystical forces of creation as functioning like coalescing glue. Imagine for a moment wind borne asymmetrical scraps of paper lifted out of unrelated containers of some distance from each other somehow coming together to form coherent and cohesive documents of exact rectangular dimensions. This metaphor captures my utter amazement at the incomprehensible intelligence of the universe as it works through normal folks like you and me.

I still scratch my head at a loss to explain the mechanisms by which I intuit ideas that seemingly rise to the level of thought out of thin air. I am a very, small fish in a very big pond of artists of one sort or another who have described the creative process as “taking on a life of its own.” As a sports fan I often hear world class athletes speak about “being in the zone.” They often describe having a sixth sense of the events to unfold as if some inexplicable force outside themselves guide the outcome of events. It is not an original idea by no means that imagination is the soil within which new realities germinate. When I begin to reflect on these mysteries I recognize how dynamic are the boundaries between my self and others, the past and the present and even between parts of my self. These boundaries can be fluid and permeable and so fuzzy at times so as to temporarily disappear.

My perspective is that one degree of separation between our observing and experiencing selves, and between our selves and others makes a world of difference. It’s the difference between overcoming our inner resistances to adapting constructively to an ever changing universe and unhealthily tying up our creative energies in the service of resistance to living life on life’s terms. As you will readily see as I develop my thesis, suffering and loss are constant and often unpredictable companions no matter how well you learn to play this game of life by its natural laws. Still, those of us who grow in self esteem over the course of our lives do not forsake rich and meaningful attachments out of fear and anxiety even though our losses are inevitable, often irreparable, and unavoidable signposts that no matter what roads we travel will lead us to the end of our lives as we know it.

The good news is that what doesn’t kill us literally or figuratively makes us stronger. We become more resilient in our transcendent natures or to be put another way our abilities to experience ourselves as much more than any ephemeral attachment no matter how much we cherish our attachments. Thus we can grow to fear less, potential threats to our identities and are better able to fully engage our loved ones, vocations and hobbies. This is because “I” increasingly becomes one with the light of re inventive consciousness and it is this light that unmasks our illusions that our weaknesses, vulnerabilities and flaws are anything more than artificial and transient constructs parading in and out of our fields of vision. They are only as powerful as our investments in them as obstructions to our paths toward enlightenment. No matter how senseless, cruel, inexplicable, unjust, unpredictable and earth shaking are our personal tragedies necessity being the mother of invention, we can find in trust and faith in our selves movement towards an expansive sense of ourselves; a oneness with the infinitely creative, uncontrollable, uncontainable, ineffable and indescribable universe. This process improves our abilities to take what feels like a fatal shot to the heart and live to see and enjoy another sunrise.

For example, between one and two years ago I ended a relationship with a woman I had been dating for 3 ½ years whom I planned to marry. For 4-5 straight weeks I channeled my anger