Aloha and Good Morning,

 

 I stepped into a big pile of self-realization: if I am heavily invested in your good opinion of me then any situation that carries the potential (even if only imagined) of conflict will be either avoided or reacted to defensively. The more invested I find myself in you, the more likely it becomes that my habituated, thoughtless reaction to any situation I find myself in with you will manifest as avoidance or defensiveness. Worse, each instance of either creates an energy of unfinished business that slowly strangles our clarity of connection, slowly builds up a wall between us and chokes off our ability to go deeper within each other. Our communication suffers as I become more reluctant, more reticent to share from the depths of my authenticity. I fear my shadow is a brute of such monstrous proportion that you are left to either flee or find a mob armed with torches and daggers to destroy the hideous beast that lies within me.

 

 

My fear of loss and loneliness, of rejection and destruction soon begins the subtle shaping of a persona based upon the lie that there is no such beast – or if there is, it doesn’t belong to me. It may be Frankenstein’s monster, but it certainly possesses nothing of my self sewn into its ghoulish collective of graveyard parts. I thrust all these undesirable traits into a cage and flee the premises. Alas, to deny the darkness never halts the setting sun. Night arrives quite without my permission. Nor does the cage prevent the beast from reaching out from between the bars and sabotaging my better intentions.

 

 I look into my life and trace the rampaging path of my own inner beast as it chases after me, wanting only to be reclaimed into its ancestral home of inner belongingness.

 

 Belongingness.

 

 I’ve longed for it, and fought against this desire most of my adolescent and adult life. I’ve acted out from fear of disappearing into commonality while yet yearning to feel as if I fit in. Each antithetical impulse arising from opposite boundary lines like brothers fighting on opposing side of a conflict that can only be won by erasing the boarder over which they battle: a boundary created by imprisoning the beast in a cage of self-denial. Regrettably, the original act of rejection was my own. Sure, it may have been catalyzed by some outward trauma that I internalized as meaning some part of myself wasn’t okay – that normal, sexual feelings are sinful and dirty, or that normal, healthy ego boundaries lack compassion and kindness, or that anger kills and therefore to be angry is to be a killer – but regardless of the source of the original mis-message, the result was rejection of some part of myself as if the unalterable wholeness of who I am could be so easily amputated.

The original rejection resulted in refusal to fully know some part of myself. Refusing to know myself makes it impossible to fully know any one else. To reject a part of my self creates the possibility that I may reject a part of you. If I reject myself, and if I reject you, surely you will reject me also. It’s only a matter of time and circumstance.

 

 These are insidious, interior, unconscious thought patterns; they lead to the assumption of rejection as an inevitable conclusion: if I cannot accept myself then you, who know me so much less than I presume to know myself, will never be able to respond differently or better. I begin to create unconscious situations where rejection is unavoidable, it’s build into the experience, it’s the only possible outcome I’ll recognize; then I’ll say to myself: ‘See, you don’t really love me.’ I begin to create tests you can’t possibly pass and then say:

‘See, you don’t really want me.’ All the while I cry out in pain and think you’re the cause of it; when really the pain flows from personal soul parts that I’ve thrust away and forced on the outside of my self/not self boundary.

 

This is really important. I deeply desire to “get” this, to have the concept move from an intellectual realization to a deep cellular/spiritual actualization. Think how the experience of my reality will change, how it will open up, authenticate, how my soul will realign with the wonderful, circular flow of the universe. Self-deception tears up my ticket to the merry-go-round. Until I redraw my self/not-self boundary to include all that I am, how I will ever know which emotions, feelings, impulses, desires and thoughts come from me, from my soul parts, and which do not. If I am uncertain of such basic facts, what’s mine and what’s not, how accurate can my perception of my experiences and my reality be?

 

 If I feel rejected by you – is it really you who is rejecting or is it some part of myself I’m not ready to own and therefore am rejecting of, some part of myself I’m still exiling to the land of “not me.”  Even if you are feeling less than fully accepting of me, is that real or are you being subtly, energetically and chemically manipulated to feel that way?  Until we become fully awake and completely aware the possibility of extremely subtle emotional manipulation is ever present. How would I know, how would you, if we don’t even own the gross duality of our being? If I can blame you, then I still don’t have to look into the darkness, into the abyss of my own soul.

This redefinition of my self/not-self boundary begins to immediately affect my choices and my perceptions. I begin to recreate my universe so that only certain colors of the spectrum of occurrence remain visible. If I close my eyes to everything blue or to everything red, than I am not confronted by my own inner blueness or my own inner red. Sadly, soon my world becomes strangely monochromatic and I wonder why I feel such a sense of lack and flatness.

 

 What if I reclaim all my redness, what if I embrace all my inner blue? Do I then have to be red and to be blue for the entire world to see?  If my shadow parts are the counter balancing duality of all manifest creation in every level of beingness save the pure, un-manifest, eternal potentiality of the non-dual, then does that dictate equal time for all parts?

 

 I’ve seen some people who’ve used variations upon this argument to justify spreading their personal poison – thinking that it’s okay to vent, to “speak their truth,” and thus feel better while others around them slowly sicken. If I own my anger, if I truly accept that it’s okay to feel angry, does that give me license to unconsciously express anger in a poisonous and hurtful fashion? If I own my hatred and acknowledge its normality and even occasional necessity, does that give me the right to act hatefully? Acceptance isn’t an excuse for entrenchment, nor a battle-station from which we fire our “Ultimatum Ray.” Acceptance isn’t an excuse to put our pinky beside our mouth and insist the world pay ransom for our negativity.

What then does it look like to find full self-acceptance? How would our lives be different if we revisited the cage and welcomed the beast back home, to hear not its roar but the sadness of its howling?

 

 I don’t have all the answers, but I feel a sense of burgeoning excitement as if the first mighty hammer blows have begun to fall upon the Berlin Wall of my soul. Sometimes in the sleepy process our soul’s awakening sudden insights sound with the clarity of Gideon’s horn and the walls come a tumbling down. Sometimes we even know it.

 

 That’s a horn solo not to be missed, Chewbacca.  

 

With love and aloha,  Holman

Contents © 2008 by  Holman R. Meyerhoffer, LMT—Project Transformation