by Matt Licata
But how do we find a way through these seemingly opposite energies in our lived experience? Although the meditatively oriented approaches ask us to accept things as they are, set aside the dream of a “future moment,” and return to immediacy, other forms of inquiry encourage us to work diligently and creatively to heal and transform ourselves, to actively participate in the process of transmutation as it occurs within the vessel of our lives. We can feel the wisdom from both sides, but how do we reconcile what appears to be two different worlds? How can we simultaneously honor the authentic longing to change our lives with the truth we’ve discovered when staying in the present and setting aside our need to improve our immediate experience? It’s almost as if we must become two different people (or three or four) to make any sense of all this and honor the entirety of what we are.
It’s not so much that we need to “become” multiple people but to recognize that multiple people already exist within us; in this sense psyche itself is multiple.2 There is no singular, permanent, solid, continuous, fixed “voice” within us that “is” the psyche or “the” personality. In postmodern analytic language, the self is a construction that arises intersubjectively and relationally, not one single entity that serves as command central for the personality, existing separately and apart from the context in which the sense of self arises. We find this relative nature of the self echoed as well in many of the contemplative traditions, for example in the various schools of Buddhism. Rather than pointing to some rigid metaphysical conclusion that there “is” no self, the Mahayana Buddhist teaching of “two truths” acknowledges the relative nature of the self, the reality that most of us experience a sense of self even while questioning its ultimate status. In a similar way, for Jung and the analytical psychologists, the goal isn’t to “get rid of” the ego but to relativize it—to allow it to take its place in psyche as one figure or image among many.
Parts of us yearn for rest, acceptance, and pure being, whereas others have little or no interest in those states and are called instead to engage in the organic process of becoming, over time, exploring and experimenting with transformation. How do we validate both? How do we listen to and honor each of the voices without going crazy? It’s an important question and a critical aspect of any full-spectrum inquiry. Somehow, we must cultivate the capacity to embrace these contradictions and flexibly engage both without any fantasy that we’re going to one day feel only one way about these matters or that one is “right” and the other “wrong” and so forth. Rather than getting into some emotional battle in which we feel like we need to take sides, we become more and more psychically supple and creative, privileging being at one moment only to shift to becoming in another, without any sense that we will conceptually come to terms with these two great energies and movements in consciousness. Over time, we begin to discover that the aliveness and creativity are within the core of the apparent contradictions themselves rather than in their resolution.
At times, rest and acceptance are the medicines most needed; at other times, something active and fierier. Neither are “true” or “better” or “more spiritual,” but each an expression of skillful means we can call forth in response to the various challenges in our lives. The most effective, wise, and compassionate approach is oriented in flexibility, in which we can go in either direction in any particular moment, fully commit to experimenting with it for a time and remain open to switching to the other for further investigation.
The bottom line is we are never going to resolve the ongoing dialectic between acceptance and change, but that is okay, for resolution is not required but only our creative and conscious participation in the mystery as it appears. We can engage in both pathways and mine the wisdom found in each without the pressure of some idea that we’re supposed to choose only one, that there is a “right” or “more spiritual” one, and that we must abandon the other. As alchemists of our own lives, we remain committed to the experiment itself and to feeling all the feelings that come as natural consequences to whatever action we take. If we lean too much in the direction of being, we will be asked to meet and tend to certain feelings and experiences; if we organize our lives in a way that privileges only becoming, we have another set of feelings and experiences to work with and integrate. As always, the invitation is not into certainty, resolution, or even simplicity but into the core of the contradictions, paradoxes, and complexities of the human soul.
An Experiment in Creative Self-Exploration
If in a moment I am feeling incredibly sad and caught in despair about my life, I could practice dropping this story line and coming back into the present moment. I could feel my feet on the ground, become aware of my breathing, shift my awareness out of the narrative of “me and my sad life” and into the immediacy of the body, cutting into the trance that something is wrong in this moment. Yes, it is true that a feeling of sadness has come, but this sadness is not who I am. It is only a wave in the ocean of the fullness of being—temporary, transparent, and workable. I do not equal sadness, but I am aware in this moment that sadness is present. “I” am not sad, but I am aware that the sensation of sadness has come, as a visitor of my psyche and nervous system, complete with its own core beliefs, emotional moods, and behavioral impulses. But “I” am that open field of energy in which this and all thoughts and feelings come and go.
From the perspective of acceptance and being, we (temporarily) see through and let go of the colorful and seductive narrative about why we’re sad or who did what to us or what it all means or how horrible our lives are—and come back here, now. We might even begin to discover how feeding this habituated, conditioned story line is aggressive toward ourselves, a defense against the underlying feelings that just want a moment of our presence and loving awareness. We come back to the sounds in the room, the tingling of the hands and feet, the breath rising and falling in the belly, and the vast space in which the entire display arises, dances for a short moment, and then dissolves. We meet this temporary wave of experience with present-centered, mindful, accepting awareness. We’re not fueling the story line about what happened, why it happened, how could they do that, no one will ever understand me, but infusing our experience with a compassionate presence. With the intention to care for ourselves deeply, we renew our vow to not abandon ourselves in those moments when we need ourselves more than ever.
This is a perfectly valid experiment, an activity of wisdom and skillful means, and can yield tremendous perspective, clear seeing, and relief. It can open us into a freedom always, already here no matter what particular thought or feeling happens to be passing through. We do not need to get rid of, transform, or “heal” our immediate experience but only to tend to it with mindful and kind attention. Doing so opens us to the possibility of seeing that our suffering and struggle arise not from the mere wave-like appearance of sadness but in our relationship with it. In other words, there is no suffering inherent in the temporary movement of sadness; rather, the anguish comes from resistance to what is here, from rejection of it, and from the long-standing emotional conclusions about what a wave of sadness means about us and our lives. Training in the art of compassionate presence is a real gift we can give to ourselves.
Alternatively, perhaps we don’t get far with it, it doesn’t really lead anywhere, the time is not right, we just can’t do it, we’re too activated, or we are drawn for some other reason to engage in a different way. After sitting, staying with, or meeting the sadness in a nonjudgmental, accepting state of presence, we are still struggling, we are called to an alternative exploration—not in rejection of the first experiment but as a partner to it. Somehow, resting in the nonconceptual awareness of the space in which the feeling emerges does not appear to be the most fruitful or skillful remedy in the moment, and we notice a longing to get closer, more involved, more intimate with what is happening. We sense there is something else calling to us, some other way to engage, navigate, explore, and learn from the uninvited visitor—some way in which returning to
the present alone is not allowing us to befriend, attend, and open to the material to encounter it in its depth.
From this latter perspective, we make a journey into and with the sadness, separate from it (remember the alchemical separatio), and enter relationship with the intention to explore its textures, qualities, fragrances, and essences. As I mentioned earlier, for some, turning the emotion into a figure (young child, wise old woman, apparition of light, grieving man, etc.) allows for a more embodied and heartfelt exploration because it is not always easy to enter relationship with an abstract emotion.3 Whether we personify the emotion, impulse, or image, we can use our conscious attention and awareness to unpack and unfold the content, becoming curious about it, dialoguing with it, listening, and asking questions: Why have you come, what do you want from me, what is your purpose, why are you emerging in this moment, what is your historical origin, what do you need to heal and transform, what have you come to show me about how I might be living my life and what I might have forgotten? To where are you pointing me? What message have you come to offer? Why do you keep coming back?
Through engaging directly, compassionately, and curiously with the content itself—not merely the background context in which it arises—we are able to practice a certain intimacy with the visitor as it moves within the layers of experience, discovering how and where it resides in our bodies, what core beliefs it holds about us and our relationships, what images and moods it is tied to, and what impulses or behaviors it “asks” us to engage with in response to its appearance in our lives. We’re not just disidentifying from or “staying with” the urge or feeling as a transitory, impermanent, vivid display of awareness and returning to the present moment, but we’re being called into something more dynamic. We become curious about the sadness, for example, or the rage or shame, and want to know it, explore it from lots of different angles, listen to it, touch it, be touched by it, and allow it to unfold and share its essence, messages, guidance, secrets, fears, longings, and information. In this pursuit, we discover it is not some enemy come to harm us, some error or mistake we must dispose of or convert into joy but a part of us that longs to return home. It carries its own integrity and value and is a potential source of meaning and new vision.
Most importantly, we do not have to take sides. Instead, we allow ourselves to meet our experience with newfound levels of openness and interest, encouraged by a love of the truth and approaching our sacred human experience by honoring multiple perspectives. We let go of the fantasy that with the right understanding, insight, or realization we will resolve the great archetypal opposites of being and becoming, or that we need to limit the ways in which we tend to the soul, especially in its more challenging or confusing expressions. The goal here with our inner work is to generate movement in the psyche, in the soul, to unfreeze what might have become frozen, unlock something that might have become locked, and liberate something that might have become stagnant. Both mindfulness-based meditative inquiry and imaginal, psychological approaches are capable of facilitating movement when we have become stuck and open the doors of perception so that we might see, feel, and sense in a new way. Through a variety of doorways, we make discoveries inside and around the challenging experience, at times attuning to the context or ground in which it arises and at other times allowing its qualities and fragrances to unfold in great detail as it reveals its innermost essences to us.
The Vast Territory of the Heart
Let’s explore this landscape a bit more together as it requires some repetition, engaging a variety of different images, metaphors, and language for us to begin to have a felt sense of the territory. It takes practice to rewrite old, out-of-date pathways, adjust the lenses of perception, and become artists of a new reality. At times, with mindful awareness, we observe the visitors and energies of the inner world as they emerge, color the landscape for a short while, and then dissolve, tending to this organic movement with compassion, acceptance, and kindness. We allow ourselves to just be, for this moment, to call off the search, and to let go of the exhaustion of a life oriented in unending becoming. We attune to the unfolding, embodied flow of thought, feeling, and sensation exactly as it is, without any agenda to manipulate, interpret, change, or even “heal” it, shifting awareness out of the stream of content itself and back into the field of open, spacious awareness in which all form comes and goes. We step off the battlefield for a few minutes or seconds and realize the great liberation in this, in the natural perfection of one complete moment.
At other times, the invitation is into the very core of the content itself, into its color and texture, into the uncertainty and aliveness of the relational world, more oriented in exploration than rest. It is a bit messier here, yes, but the call is into a different level of intimacy. Here we are less concerned with the background field or the context in which the material arises but with the content itself: how it emerges, takes expression in the world of time and space, and unfolds meaning, messages, guidance, and symbols relevant to our lives. We dive head- and heart-first into the content with curiosity and passion, drawn not to “just be” aware of it but to meet the visitor in a more energetic and even emotional way, interested and curious to become more and more intimate with it, to use our creative and imaginative faculties to mine the depths. We can use the mind as a vehicle of relationship, to think creatively and in new ways, to discover meaning and take new perspectives, and to more actively reorganize the characters, plots, story lines, and narratives; to play with the content and dance it into new form. There is such richness and aliveness in this.
Sometimes yin, sometimes yang. Sometimes being, sometimes becoming. Sometimes accepting, sometimes transforming. But never is the mystery resolved or do we come up with some ultimate answer because we don’t need to take sides or choose in a way that results in fragmentation or rejection of its opposite. Both primordial energies are a part of the human person, each holy and sacred in their own way, each valid and worthy of our interest and care. Yes, the journey will feel contradictory at times as we navigate this unknown middle ground, but that is not evidence of error or mistake but only of how vast the territory truly is, of how majestic the human heart really is.
Each of these orientations is valid and is a potential source of useful information for our unique journey. We need not abandon one for the other but engage both with curiosity and presence, as experiments in self-awareness. At times we will give everything we have to one side, only to let it go and fully embrace the other in a later moment. It is perfectly natural to want to improve our sense of self, relationships, emotional experience, work lives, financial situation, physical health, relationships, and so forth. We can honor this human desire and work diligently to achieve these things, while simultaneously exploring the reality that our lives are more than endless self-improvement projects. There is something here now, already whole and complete, shining out of the chaos and the mess of our lives exactly as they are. We can honor that even if none of these things was able to truly change, we still have a human heart and mind and what we need at the most basic level to feel alive and live in a way that embodies great meaning, dignity, and sacredness. We can accept that we want to change and, at the same time, fully engage with our lives even if that change for whatever reason proves not possible, and we do not fall into the conclusion that we’ve done something wrong or have failed if we can’t manifest all the changes we want. In the end, we might or might not be able to shift, transform, or even “heal” in all the ways we long for and desire, but even in this somehow we are able to know and live from that part of us that is changeless, not in need of transformation, and already healed. And we just bow to the mystery of that.
Story, Dream, and Awareness
I’ve been speaking about these two primary ways of working with our experience. The first is rooted in meditative awareness, in which we’re not oriented in exploring our interpretations or reflections about our experience but rather tending to its nature by way of direct perceptio
n. We are more curious about the context in which our thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise and dissolve and less with their specific content. Here, we’re training ourselves to return over and over into immediacy, openness, acceptance, and noninterpretive apprehension of raw, naked experience as it arises moment to moment.
The other way is a bit messier and more alchemical—more complex, darker, and nuanced, oriented in the depths of soul rather than the heights of spirit. It recognizes that we human beings are storytellers by nature and invites us to honor and illuminate the ways we are dreaming our lives, how we’re imagining things, how our entire psychic life is being organized under the surface. Here, we are interested in the content, its specific, particularized, concrete forms, qualities, signatures, and fragrances, not merely the context in which it arises. From this latter perspective, the invitation is to travel all the way into the core and the centerless center, opening with curiosity into the ways we have come to imagine reality, the mythical figures with whom we are traveling, and the archetypal images that underlie our experience. It requires a real care and love of the story itself, of the dream and the drama (yes, even the drama!), the imaginal characters and plots and subplots, the crescendos and resolutions.
Remember, this latter inquiry does not mean that we become fused or enmeshed in the content or identify with it as who we are in some absolute sense, but by way of the alchemical separatio we differentiate from it so that we can get to know it intimately while not drowning in or becoming flooded by it. This potential fusion/identification is one of the concerns of the meditative traditions regarding working directly with the content in the ways described here, which is reasonable and warranted. It can actually take quite a bit of practice, concentration, and awareness to engage in imaginal work without fusing with the images, which training in mindfulness and meditation can support.
