May you to live an unguarded, undefended, genuine, gritty life! May your soul dance defenselessly, in all its vulnerability and glory for what is there to defend and who is there to defend against? Who is it, after all, that is reading this Morning Moment? Spirit upon Spirit upon Spirit upon Spirit evermore.

 

 

Aloha and Good Morning,

 

 Defensiveness is yesterday’s Betamax. It’s an emotional technology that worked in its time, but is no longer relevant. Nowadays, we plop our DVD’s into our Hi-Def TV. Defensiveness is equally old fashioned, out-dated and irrelevant; the cutting edge of consciousness has eclipsed it.

 

 However, for those of us still in the trenches, defensiveness is a reoccurring, habitual response pattern. It’s born of our story and armored in our images. It produces the lamentable cry: How could you, how dare you. How could you treat me like that or discount me, or hurt me, or misunderstand me or look at me that way. How dare you do this, or not do that; how could you say this or not say that and countless other emotionally charged variations.

 

It’s an inner feeling of prickly, self-righteous, rationalized, self-justified heaviness that if acted upon, even if merely acted upon energetically, serves only to escalate conflict and reflexively project blame outside ourselves and unto someone else.

 

Defensiveness simply doesn’t serve us; it doesn’t help. It guarantees withdrawal from the present and raises the hoary head of ego’s unrelenting, emotional entrenchment and self-contracted protectiveness: a kill or be killed preemptive strike.

 An undefended life is open, limitless, filled with deep inner peace and joy. It is a contemplative contentment with the present moment. It’s the heart basking like blossoms in the morning sun, opening its pedals of presence. A defended life is closed, shut and shuttered within its bomb shelter, huddling in the dark. Our lives are a mixture of these two opposite poles, and yet we determine the recipe!

 

 Vulnerability can be frightening and filled with what if  scenarios that fall out of the ego’s self-protective program of defensiveness. A person’s reaction to our undefended self indicates both where they are and inner aspects of me I’ve yet to fully embrace. My interior experience of their reaction is always an interpretation. Interior experiences can only be interpreted, that’s why it’s a story and often wildly inaccurate if my witness-self went to sleep early that day.

A person who is consistently reactive to our authenticity will often select themselves right out of our lives if we do not engage, do not attach, do not get hooked. If something further is needed, we can make an actionable assessment based upon what truly serves us, and them, best. The point is that we are not helpless victims to persons or circumstances. If we choose to stay where we are, then the blame can never again be put upon person or circumstance.

 

An undefended life doesn’t mean we suddenly become mousy, submissive or allow ourselves to be trodden upon. It means that we act with the balanced power and acceptance of Spirit dancing in delight. We have no need to be other than we are; no need to aggressively assert our ego’s desire for superiority or to be “right” at all costs. It means that we can hear the tender heart of humanity beating beneath strategies of ineffectual or lesser value. We are all doing our best. It is Ghandi, sitting before gunmen and refusing to be moved. It is Christ recognizing himself in his executioners and finding no fault there.

 

 Untenable situations need to be addressed, not defended against. Defensiveness is a process of entrenching, self-contraction, digging in. It closes us up, reinforces separation and ultimately fails as a strategy to create more love, more acceptance, more joy, more intimacy, more connectedness. The moment defensiveness arises, it grinds our growth to a halt. Defensiveness is also completely natural – if by natural we mean that it is the inevitable outcome of the cycle of human development.

Children start out at the bottom of the dynamic wave of spiraling growth from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. For the first six or seven years, a child is wholly narcissistic and egocentric, unable to take or understand perspectives other then their own. Perspective taking is one of the growth points in each, ever more inclusive level of emotional and cognitive reorganization. Perspective taking typically goes from self to family, to extended family, to groups. From groups it begins to include extended, related groups, then community, country, similar countries and finally the world. We can postulate that it then becomes inclusive of all worlds, both physical and subtle and finally all sentient forms and beings.

Perspective taking, the ability to compassionately understand another point-of-view links directly to increasing values, morality and care, all of which unfold in wave-like stages that are formed of both permanent and transitory structures. Permanent structures evolve into greater permanent structures in a process of differentiation, transformation, integration and consolidation. If growth remains uninterrupted, consolidated structures again being to differentiate, integrate and so on, endlessly, as each structure “transcends and includes” the primary building blocks that came before. Or it can be a process of impermanent, transitory structures that are replaced by higher, more effective but still transitory patterns.

 

 Language is an example of permanent structures that build upon one another just like words build sentences which build paragraphs which form the Morning Moment. Words are a permanent structure. Sentences and paragraphs will always include them, no matter how transcendent the ideas they express.

 

 

 On the other hand, moral development is an example of transitory structures. The narcissistic, egocentric perspective of small children is eventually replaced by greater levels of ethnocentric care, a burgeoning awareness of needs outside our own. As that growing concern for others consolidates it forms its own completely new structure, unrelated to the selfishness that it replaced. This ethnocentric value structure will itself be replaced by world-centric values, and so forth.

 

Our human-level ego first forms during this selfish, narcissistic stage. The infant has no ego – its brain has not yet formed the physical capacity to create an egoic structure, through which a sense of self may be expressed. The new-born has no sense of self. You could say the infant has only raw, undifferentiated “senses”, raw emotional and physical data, which over time are organized by a combination of external forces (parents and society) and internal forces (culture and the whispering, evolutionary impulse of Spirit) into a sense of self, an inner I Am that finds expression through the slowly strengthening structure of ego.

 

 During this period, it is imperative that this immerging ego differentiate itself, that it becomes strong enough to gain autonomy and inwardly consistency. If this process is aborted, instead of a healthy ego we get a pathological one – an unnecessary host of hindrances!

 

 So in these beginning stages, defensiveness helps keep our ego healthy and intact. Yet the process of defensiveness, the physiological components of which might include brain waves, neural pathways and hormonal fluctuations and its psychological states, the prison guards that keep negative thoughts and emotions caged up within our soul, linger long after their evolutionary or developmental usefulness has passed.

The time has arrived to integrate and consolidate a new way of relating to ourselves, circumstances and everyone around us. It’s time to turn the grumpy, old guard marching his beleaguering beat about the prison-house of homeostatic stuckness into the gentle and wise watcher, the witness-self, the Seer who sees the well-worn path give rise to self-contracted, negative, defensive thought patterns and the reactive emotions such thoughts evoke and lovingly, but firmly guides them to the possibility of a new conclusion, a new response, a new level of inner-acceptance and awareness.

 

 This can be a difficult leap – to transcend the garbage heap of our own ego driven behavior: It’s a well-trained athlete running a well-worn path through our inner junk yard of images, belief systems and idealized outer persona. It doesn’t help that our society has created comedy out of conflict, has elevated ineffectual behavioral strategies into entertainment and sold it to us in multi-million dollar packaging.

 

Nor does it help that all too often our only models of transpersonal, highly evolved behavior are distorted by dogma.

So unless we are fortunate enough to meet some of today’s awakened teachers and observe directly how they manage to live transcendent, undefended lives with less and less self-absorption and less and less self-identification, we are left to either awaken ourselves or to read their books and try to figure out on our own how to apply higher, undefended ideals to the reality of the rubber meeting the road.

 

Here is something I’ve noticed about defensiveness and how useless and ultimately hypocritical the behaviors that arise from it are.

 

 Say I’m feeling unaccepted and I say to you, “You don’t accept me as I am. You’re trying to change me to suit yourself.” What am I really saying? I’m saying that I don’t accept you as you are and that I want to change your behavior to suit me. I may say to you, “You’re being mean.” To accuse someone of meanness is, well, mean of me. If I say, “You’re not being very compassionate or caring,” how compassionate and caring is it of me to notice and take offense. Have I taken your perspective into account or only reacted to my images and emotional state? I’ve yet to find a single accusatory statement that doesn’t condemn me in the making. Personally, I don’t think this is very fair. How am I supposed to come out ahead, how is my ego supposed to exercise its will to win, to assert itself? Arguing has become silly and lost its appeal. Arguing is the great American pastime. What am I to do?

 

 Seriously, this one understanding, that if I “point the finger at you, three more are pointing back at me,” is in the process of completely reorganizing my experience of relationship. Am I really willing to see you as the mirror of my awakening? Am I willing to lower my defenses and communicate with unguarded openness? Am I willing to walk in vulnerability, to be genuinely present to both you and me? Am I willing to look at what arises from the well-worn path, witness and refine my thoughts and emotions until I see you as you are: Spirit playing the same beautiful game of hide and seek, hunting out the hidden parts of myself that you represent for we are one and eternal, whole and part of all that is.

 

 

 

Defensiveness creates a vicious circle of negativity creating negativity, self-reinforcing misery and separation that create our experiences in very literal ways. Defensiveness implies that there is someone that needs defending against. It puts that someone in the position of being the enemy and is that really the relationship we wish to create with our loved ones?

 

 An open, undefended life is only a moment of awareness away. Life is an unending unfolding of moments that arise and fall back into Spirit and in each of those eternal, priceless moments I have another opportunity to practice being aware, to notice my inner state, to step back and witness it without attachment and then to chose how I present myself in the world. Do I give in to the ego’s guarded impulses, to ego’s aggressive negativity or do I embrace the ever-available, if occasionally difficult, invitation of Spirit expressing simple acceptance, unconditional love and welcoming, warm joy?

In each moment I can watch for defensiveness arising, awaken to its images, embrace myself and choose. I may not always manage defenselessness and vulnerability, but the choice is always there, awaiting my timeless embrace. Each time I choose life and unguarded, genuine Self-expression my heart opens up that much more. It’s an affirmation of magnificence: I am, and because I am, I chose life. I claim love and openness. I attract unending goodness, abundance and joy into my experience for I am that already. So are you. I chose vulnerability. Every time I notice I am being guarded, I make a different choice; I claim my awareness and my right to act differently. I claim my ability to learn to do things differently and better. I make the choice of Spirit embracing Spirit embracing Spirit embracing Spirit evermore.   

 

With love and aloha,   Holman

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