The Alchemy of Identity or Who Are we when everything falls away
"The self that appeals to me is the self that has not been conditioned solely by culture, whether family, religion, education, or economics, but rather the one found under these systems of domestication --the wild self, the self at once sovereign and entwined with the living world. It is this self that can extend its reach into the surrounding rings of connection--with vacant lots, watersheds, returning salmon, with children and struggling communities--and sense its intimate bond with all of them. This self is co-mingled with all the others that share this shining planet. When we can step into this wider and wilder state of identity, our isolation falls away and we return to a state of participation and belonging."
A few weeks ago, I had the honor of co-leading a seven-day retreat for cancer patients at Commonweal with Michael Lerner. It was a powerful experience of focus and intensity we rarely encounter in our day-to-day lives. I witnessed a form of beauty that moved me deeply; a transparency of soul that was refreshing and enlivening. There was no one trying to hide during our gathering; no one wanted to. The conditions were created to call to the foreground everything that was present--fear, sadness, grief, love, longing, regrets, hopes, laughter, tears, panic--the entire range of experience concentrated like a tincture into a condensed essence. It was a sacred time.
What struck me over and over again, were comments people made about how their illness had undone their sense of self; that they no longer knew themselves as they once were. This sense of loss and confusion was not transitory, but lingered with them for a long period of time. I was reminded while sitting with them, what Jung said after his heart attack. He wrote that he felt as if he were in a "painful process of defoliation" in which "everything I aimed at or wished for or thought... fell away or was stripped from me."
This is what I was hearing from these people. They too, felt stripped bare, like Inanna in the Babylonian myth, and were left with little to cling to in terms of who they thought they were. This can be a frightening time when the familiar stars disappear, when the narrative we have clung to for a lifetime fades like a dream and we are left naked and unsettled. This is a time of letting go.
Marc Ian Barasch, author of The Healing Path, remarked in an interview, "Healing must answer the questions disease raises." Here was a group of people sitting with an essential question that their cancer was asking of them: Who are you now? Their illness brought them to an initiatory threshold, propelling them into a sacred crisis where they had to learn to let go and allow everything to fall like leaves in autumn, even the stories they had held onto about who they thought they were. In truth, what was thrust upon these individuals as a consequence of a life-threatening situation, is our fate as well. We will all be taken through a gateway where our personal sense of self will need to be released and allowed to compost into something more real and gritty.
The question that remains for me is this: If illness can so thoroughly undo our sense of identity, then out of what are we shaping our sense of self? More to the point: How is it that this sense of self can fade like a dream when the unexpected arises? It seems as if our experience of identity is not as fixed and settled as we are led to believe.
We need to revision our sense of self. Identity in our culture is often predicated on roles we play; familiar patterns of behavior that give a feeling of continuity to our being. These repetitions of gestures, thoughts and feelings, combined with a narrative of history slowly evolve into a convincing tale of identity: I am Francis, born in 1956 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, youngest of eight. I am a father, husband, friend, writer, therapist...all helping to convince me of being, well, me. Identity in this configuration becomes fixed and rigid, a static and lumbering thing pushing its way through life. But what if, just what if, we were more verb than noun, more a jumpy and erotic rhythm than a concrete fixture--a song, a pulse, a poetic string of imagination than a conditioned and flattened explanation that captures us like a photograph? Can you see how essential it is for us to question our ways of identifying ourselves? How we see ourselves, the very way we sense our being in the world, determines how we encounter life. The encapsulated self, the self of Western culture, is cut off from the living world and as such we often experience a level of isolation and anxiety that permeates much of our lives. We live uncertain of our belonging, our place and our relationship with the living presence that is this world.
In this state of fragmentation we become vulnerable to consumerism with its promise of filling up our experience of emptiness with things. We become obsessed with image, with specialness, with rank and power, with wealth and possessions. We find ourselves tenaciously holding onto ideologies in an attempt to offer a sense of solidity in an otherwise uncertain existence. We partition the world into who's in and who's out, forming pockets of inclusion such as gangs, cults and militia groups. When we are cut off from the tangible experience of relationship with the cosmos, we cling to whatever we can to keep ourselves from feeling the isolation inherent in our cultural fabrication of the self.
Fortunately, there are other ways of knowing the self. The self that appeals to me is the self that has not been conditioned solely by culture, whether family, religion, education, or economics, but rather the one found under these systems of domestication--the wild self, the self at once sovereign and entwined with the living world. It is this self that can extend its reach into the surrounding rings of connection--with vacant lots, watersheds, returning salmon, with children and struggling communities--and sense its intimate bond with all of them. This self is co-mingled with all the others that share this shining planet. When we step into this wider and wilder state of identity, our isolation falls away and we return to a state of participation and belonging; we return to the living fabric of which we have always been a part.
For us to express who we are in this life, to embody the unique thread of this lifetime, requires that we step into the living world and encounter the animate earth. Identity is a wild alchemy, a blending of inner and outer, the most recessed and the most extended. Our psychological and spiritual traditions place great value on the deep interior of our lives. This is important. It is necessary to know the landscape within us. A great deal of richness is found there in dreams, images, intuitions, memories, wounds, sensitivities, feelings, longings, an entire panoply of psychic material affecting our moment to moment experience. I am often amazed at the inner lives of those working with me in psychotherapy. They reveal a storehouse of wonder, beauty, magic and a bit of mayhem as well. This inner life, however, is not separate from what goes on out there, in the world of traffic and bills, of family and work life, nor is it separate from clouds and rain, moonlight and birdsong. They mirror one another, reflecting what it is we take in and to what we offer our attention. When we embody this more inclusive reality, self and world permeate one another, offering an ongoing exchange that keeps it all alive. Here are Rilke's thoughts on this overlap between inner and outer:
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
Living into this wider sense of identity is a work of art. We are asked to simultaneously engage the domains of sovereignty and intimacy, of autonomy and affiliation. Both areas of our lives must be developed leading to a resilience that affords us the strength to stand in solidarity with our own knowing and in allegiance with the greater community to which we belong. It is in this ongoing state of exchange between the inner and the outer, between what is alive within and without that we find the most vital self we can be.
What struck me over and over again, were comments people made about how their illness had undone their sense of self; that they no longer knew themselves as they once were. This sense of loss and confusion was not transitory, but lingered with them for a long period of time. I was reminded while sitting with them, what Jung said after his heart attack. He wrote that he felt as if he were in a "painful process of defoliation" in which "everything I aimed at or wished for or thought... fell away or was stripped from me."
This is what I was hearing from these people. They too, felt stripped bare, like Inanna in the Babylonian myth, and were left with little to cling to in terms of who they thought they were. This can be a frightening time when the familiar stars disappear, when the narrative we have clung to for a lifetime fades like a dream and we are left naked and unsettled. This is a time of letting go.
Marc Ian Barasch, author of The Healing Path, remarked in an interview, "Healing must answer the questions disease raises." Here was a group of people sitting with an essential question that their cancer was asking of them: Who are you now? Their illness brought them to an initiatory threshold, propelling them into a sacred crisis where they had to learn to let go and allow everything to fall like leaves in autumn, even the stories they had held onto about who they thought they were. In truth, what was thrust upon these individuals as a consequence of a life-threatening situation, is our fate as well. We will all be taken through a gateway where our personal sense of self will need to be released and allowed to compost into something more real and gritty.
The question that remains for me is this: If illness can so thoroughly undo our sense of identity, then out of what are we shaping our sense of self? More to the point: How is it that this sense of self can fade like a dream when the unexpected arises? It seems as if our experience of identity is not as fixed and settled as we are led to believe.
We need to revision our sense of self. Identity in our culture is often predicated on roles we play; familiar patterns of behavior that give a feeling of continuity to our being. These repetitions of gestures, thoughts and feelings, combined with a narrative of history slowly evolve into a convincing tale of identity: I am Francis, born in 1956 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, youngest of eight. I am a father, husband, friend, writer, therapist...all helping to convince me of being, well, me. Identity in this configuration becomes fixed and rigid, a static and lumbering thing pushing its way through life. But what if, just what if, we were more verb than noun, more a jumpy and erotic rhythm than a concrete fixture--a song, a pulse, a poetic string of imagination than a conditioned and flattened explanation that captures us like a photograph? Can you see how essential it is for us to question our ways of identifying ourselves? How we see ourselves, the very way we sense our being in the world, determines how we encounter life. The encapsulated self, the self of Western culture, is cut off from the living world and as such we often experience a level of isolation and anxiety that permeates much of our lives. We live uncertain of our belonging, our place and our relationship with the living presence that is this world.
In this state of fragmentation we become vulnerable to consumerism with its promise of filling up our experience of emptiness with things. We become obsessed with image, with specialness, with rank and power, with wealth and possessions. We find ourselves tenaciously holding onto ideologies in an attempt to offer a sense of solidity in an otherwise uncertain existence. We partition the world into who's in and who's out, forming pockets of inclusion such as gangs, cults and militia groups. When we are cut off from the tangible experience of relationship with the cosmos, we cling to whatever we can to keep ourselves from feeling the isolation inherent in our cultural fabrication of the self.
Fortunately, there are other ways of knowing the self. The self that appeals to me is the self that has not been conditioned solely by culture, whether family, religion, education, or economics, but rather the one found under these systems of domestication--the wild self, the self at once sovereign and entwined with the living world. It is this self that can extend its reach into the surrounding rings of connection--with vacant lots, watersheds, returning salmon, with children and struggling communities--and sense its intimate bond with all of them. This self is co-mingled with all the others that share this shining planet. When we step into this wider and wilder state of identity, our isolation falls away and we return to a state of participation and belonging; we return to the living fabric of which we have always been a part.
For us to express who we are in this life, to embody the unique thread of this lifetime, requires that we step into the living world and encounter the animate earth. Identity is a wild alchemy, a blending of inner and outer, the most recessed and the most extended. Our psychological and spiritual traditions place great value on the deep interior of our lives. This is important. It is necessary to know the landscape within us. A great deal of richness is found there in dreams, images, intuitions, memories, wounds, sensitivities, feelings, longings, an entire panoply of psychic material affecting our moment to moment experience. I am often amazed at the inner lives of those working with me in psychotherapy. They reveal a storehouse of wonder, beauty, magic and a bit of mayhem as well. This inner life, however, is not separate from what goes on out there, in the world of traffic and bills, of family and work life, nor is it separate from clouds and rain, moonlight and birdsong. They mirror one another, reflecting what it is we take in and to what we offer our attention. When we embody this more inclusive reality, self and world permeate one another, offering an ongoing exchange that keeps it all alive. Here are Rilke's thoughts on this overlap between inner and outer:
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
Living into this wider sense of identity is a work of art. We are asked to simultaneously engage the domains of sovereignty and intimacy, of autonomy and affiliation. Both areas of our lives must be developed leading to a resilience that affords us the strength to stand in solidarity with our own knowing and in allegiance with the greater community to which we belong. It is in this ongoing state of exchange between the inner and the outer, between what is alive within and without that we find the most vital self we can be.