Solemate

by Lauren Mackler

  As we move through the process of mastering the art of aloneness, you’ll be using techniques such as visualization; you’ll be directing your thoughts toward your aspirations; and you’ll be fine-tuning your ability to think deliberately and harness your own positive energy.

  Honoring Your Intuition

  I had a woman call me several years ago seeking coaching services; she said her life was falling apart. She had just gotten out of a relationship and was terrified of being alone. She had broken up with her boyfriend because, she said, the relationship “just didn’t feel right”—although she couldn’t really put her finger on why. She came to me because she was terrified of ending up alone. After six months of intensive personal-development work, she decided to try to reconstruct that relationship. She felt that she was different and better prepared to be in the relationship. Because she had dropped him so abruptly six months before, the man insisted that they marry; he wanted to avoid another abrupt ending, another broken heart; and they did so, very quickly. But she had underestimated how much she’d changed; the old relationship dynamic just didn’t work anymore and they ended up dissolving the marriage. The lesson: her intuition was correct. It wasn’t the right relationship for her or for him. But she ignored those very clear signals and went through the painful experience of breaking up yet again. Several months after her divorce, she resumed her personal-development path. Within a year, she had achieved the ideal life she’d visualized at the beginning of her coaching work. Now she’s built the house of her dreams in Spain, where she’s taking Spanish and salsa lessons. She has an extensive network of supportive friends and is about to start taking painting classes. She’s happier alone than she ever could have been in the marriage she imagined would deliver her from her own fears and unhappiness.

  Usually, when I’m working with a group, I ask everyone if they’ve ever had a gut feeling about something—a sense of whether something’s right or wrong for them. Everybody knows that feeling. That gut feeling—your intuition—is a valuable tool. When you’re able to cut through the layers of the conditioned self, at your core you often have a sense of what’s right for you and what is not. As we go through the process of mastering the art of aloneness, you’ll begin to peel away those layers and recover what I call your authentic self. At that point, your actions will begin to align with your life vision. Your intuition—your instinctive knowing—will become a valuable tool for living in alignment with your purpose, what I call living on course.

  To develop your intuition, you have to start paying attention to it. It’s the final key step in living more deliberately. As situations arise in your life in which you have to make a decision, start asking yourself: How does this feel for me? Is this what I should be doing? How does this sit with me? Before making a decision, ask yourself: Is this an emotional reaction? Or is this something that’s going to stick? Ask for insight from your intuition.

  When you’re looking at a relationship, ask your intuition: How does this person sit with me? What’s my gut feeling? Use it in the work you do. Use it in your everyday life. Remember my car-keying incident? I “had a feeling” that this guy was going to do something to my car, but I completely ignored it. I didn’t trust my intuition. People tap into their intuition in a variety of ways. They ask themselves: Deep down, how do I feel about this? People who believe in a higher power often turn to prayer for answers. Others use meditation to invoke the intuitive part of themselves. Others just ask the universe for a sign. The key is to begin trusting that your intuition is trustworthy and able to guide you.

  Over time, the more you trust your intuition and allow it to set your direction—the more often you find it doesn’t let you down—the more you build that trust. The core issue, from a perspective of living deliberately and finding your life focus, is beginning to ask yourself the question: Does this feel right? If you stay connected to your intuition as you go through the process of mastering aloneness, it will become an important guide for retrieving your authentic self. And, ultimately, it will become your barometer for determining whether you’re on course or off course in your life.

  Exercise: Developing Your Intuition

  Part 1: Find an Example of a Negative Outcome

  In your journal, write down a real-life example of a time when you had a “gut feeling” about a person, situation, or action that you discounted or ignored, and, by ignoring your intuition, produced a negative outcome:

  • Describe the specific person, situation, or action about which you had a “gut feeling.”

  • Describe the “gut feeling” that you had at the time. For example, it may have been a physical sensation like butterflies in your stomach, breaking out in a sweat, or constriction in your chest; a feeling of dread, fear, or uncertainty; a sense of caution, reluctance, or resistance; or just a strong sense about something you should or shouldn’t do.

  • Describe the negative outcome(s) you experienced by not following your intuitive messages and signals.

  Part 2: Find an Example of a Positive Outcome

  Now, write down a real-life example of a time when you had a “gut feeling” about a person, situation, or action that you acted upon, and, by acting on your intuition, produced a positive outcome:

  • Describe the specific person, situation, or action about which you had a “gut feeling.”

  • Describe the “gut feeling” that you had at the time. For example, it may have been a physical sensation like butterflies in your stomach, breaking out in a sweat, or constriction in your chest; a feeling of dread, fear, or uncertainty; a sense of caution, reluctance, or resistance; or a just a strong sense of something you should or shouldn’t do.

  • Describe the positive outcome(s) you experienced by following your intuitive messages and signals.

  PART II

  LIBERATING YOUR

  AUTHENTIC SELF

  CHAPTER 6

  RECLAIMING YOUR

  INNATE WHOLENESS

  The movie Becoming Jane is a love story, a fictionalized account of a relationship between Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy. Lefroy is believed by some to be the inspiration for Mr. Darcy, a central character in Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen is played as a spirited, independent-minded young woman with a knack for irony, living in the British countryside with her loving family at the end of the 18th century. Encouraged by her family, she writes constantly; writing is, the audience begins to see, her life’s purpose. As the story unfolds, Jane falls in love with the charming and roguish Lefroy, and they plan to marry, but, naturally, 18th-century Britain being what it is, social conventions pose a problem. Lefroy’s rich uncle opposes the union. And, for reasons not at first clear, the young man is hesitant to defy his uncle. But ultimately his passion for Jane wins out and the two conspire to elope.

  Of course, the real Jane Austen never married, so, the audience wonders, how is this going to end? Here’s how: As the horse-drawn carriage departs, carrying them off into happily-ever-after, it gets stuck in the mud; as Lefroy struggles to free the wheels, Jane ends up holding his jacket. A letter falls out, revealing that his parents rely on him for support and that by defying his rich uncle, Lefroy will leave his entire family destitute. Jane Austen turns and walks away from the love of her life, and there’s not a dry eye in the house.

  It’s a wonderful romance. But, after the tears, you realize that the beauty of the story is this: This Jane, this character, is profoundly consistent. She knows her true self. With Lefroy, she’d explored the question of whether she’d be able to pursue her writing as a married woman, something she knew she wasn’t willing to sacrifice. She was also willing to buck the system and marry Lefroy in defiance of social mores. What she wasn’t willing to do was to watch their love destroy his family. She knew, we assume, in the instant she read that letter, that they couldn’t be happy at his family’s expense. She possessed the inner strength to trust her intuition, to honor her truth, and walk away. She was making the decision, not through the ha
ze of romance but from a position of the authentic self. It seems a fitting depiction, given that the real Jane Austen more than fulfilled her potential. She went on to become one of English literature’s most celebrated authors. She must surely have been living from her authentic self.

  In reality, most people are unable to gain access to or honor their true selves with the ease of the Jane character in this movie. In fact, I’d wager that very few people go through life living from their authentic selves. When I refer to the authentic self, I mean who you really are beneath all the layers of your conditioning. Remember those core limiting beliefs? When you’re living from your authentic self, you’ve moved beyond them. Trance states? You’re making a conscious effort to identify and override them. The more authentic you are, the more you’re connected to your innate nature, strengths, values, and needs and to your inherent ability to feel and express the full range of human emotions.

  No one is exempt from familial, societal, and cultural conditioning. It’s an inevitable part of being human. In earlier chapters, I’ve talked at length about core limiting beliefs. Our cumulative life experiences—the family, culture, circumstances, and environment in which we were raised—have a powerful influence on the way we think, behave, and live. The challenge is to emerge from the conditioning process with as much of our authentic self intact as possible. When clients first come to me for coaching, it’s usually because they are living out of alignment with their authentic selves. However, most are not aware that this is the root cause of their difficulty in creating the lives, careers, relationships, or success they want. They attribute their difficulty to the symptoms of living out of sync with their authentic selves, such as a dead-end or dissatisfying job, conflict-ridden relationships with others, or loneliness stemming from not having a partner or spouse. Retrieving the authentic self is a core component of all of my coaching programs and the point at which I begin with every client; it is the foundation for mastering the art of aloneness and for becoming the person you were born to be.

  Mastering the art of aloneness is about reclaiming your innate wholeness so you can live a full and happy life, whether you’re alone or in a relationship. So a crucial step involves identifying and retrieving the parts of you that were lost as a result of your own life conditioning process. That’s the work we’ll be doing in this chapter.

  The Components of the Authentic Self

  Carl Jung, a young colleague of Sigmund Freud and the founder of analytical psychology, first introduced the concept of psychological type in the 1920s with the idea that there are two basic attitude types—extroverts and introverts—and what he called the four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting. Jung was the first to fully develop the idea that different people have different ways of perceiving and approaching the world and that these differences are innate. For example, “one person may favor thought as a guide to judgment, another will follow feeling; and whereas one will tend to experience both the world and his friends through impressions made directly on his senses, another will be given, rather, to intuiting potentialities, hidden relationships, intentions, and possible sources.”1By identifying these psychological types, he laid the foundation for our modern-day understanding of personality.

  Like Jung, I believe that we all have innate personality traits and temperaments. Most parents will tell you that they can identify traits in their own children from birth—distinct temperaments and predispositions. Some toddlers, for example, are quiet and still, hanging back, observing everything around them. Others jump into the fray feet first, full of energy and enthusiasm. However, research on twins reared apart, conducted over the past 30 years at the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research (University of Minnesota) by professor Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., and his team, provides perhaps the most powerful evidence of innate personalities. In research originally published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1988 and discussed at length in a New Yorker piece published in 1995, the Minnesota team assessed twin pairs for personality characteristics such as a “sense of well-being, social dominance, alienation, aggression, and achievement . . . They concluded that identical twins reared apart were as much alike as identicals reared together.”2The Minnesota twin studies, combined with a slew of other studies conducted over the past two decades, provide ample evidence that we are born with certain personality characteristics.3

  Part of retrieving your authentic self involves identifying your innate personality traits, the characteristics you were born with that may have been suppressed through the conditioning process. For example, you may be more innately extroverted—more outwardly than inwardly directed. But say you grew up with a father who was an alcoholic and he’d fly into rages when he was drinking. Your coping mechanism may have involved staying below the radar screen and not making a peep. You withdrew from the world, a characteristic that’s in conflict with your true nature. In my work, as part of the process of identifying innate personality characteristics, I use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular personality test developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers in the 1940s based on Carl Jung’s theories. Since its inception, millions of people have taken the MBTI assessment, and it’s been updated and refined through ongoing research. The results are remarkably comprehensive and illuminating. At the end of this chapter, you’ll be given information about how to take the MBTI assessment. If you do, recognize that the MBTI tool is valuable for helping people understand their innate natures, but it is only one piece of the puzzle of discovering the authentic self.

  Retrieving your authentic self also involves identifying your true passions. As you work through this process, you’ll be identifying your innate strengths, as well as your interests and that which inspires you. What do you care about? What captures your interest? What motivates you? What do you like and dislike? At the close of this chapter, you’ll do a series of exercises designed to help you begin to uncover your authentic self. But the process of retrieving your authentic self also involves a good bit of detective work. Each of us is unique, and the formula for finding that uniqueness is as individual as we are.

  Ultimately, as you move toward wholeness, you’ll identify your life purpose. Like Carl Jung, I believe that we all have an inborn purpose, and fulfilling that purpose is critical to the quality of our lives and our sense of well-being. I also believe we all have a soul or spirit. It’s a nonphysical part of us, which explains why there is no scientific means for proving its existence. Merriam-Webster defines the soul as “the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life.” I think of the soul as some sort of energy that connects us to the nonphysical realm. I believe our soul carries the blueprint for our lives, and that’s where our purpose resides. Of course, just as a builder can either adhere to a construction blueprint or build some variation of the original design, you have the capacity to veer off course from your life purpose. That’s where your free will and your conditioning come in. Mastering aloneness means knowing and activating your innate personality, your true passions, and your life purpose—that which gives your life meaning. Achieving that understanding can be transformational. As D. H. Lawrence wrote, “You’ve got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself.” That’s what retrieving the authentic self is really about.

  The Benefits of Living from Authentic Self

  Every now and then, when we embark on the process of retrieving the authentic self, a client will ask, with a note of impatience, “How much energy does this whole thing take, anyway?” My answer is always the same. “Take?” I respond. “It doesn’t take energy. The more you immerse yourself in the process, the more energy you have.” Even though living from the conditioned self—from your default operating system—seems like the path of least resistance, it requires tremendous energy to live out of alignment with your authentic self. The greater the disparity between the way you’re living and your authentic self, the more conflict there
will be within you, in your relationships, and at work. Living by default creates resistance, dissent, problems, and barriers in our lives. Maybe you find your work draining and unsatisfying because it’s out of alignment with your innate strengths. Over time, this affects your level of motivation and, ultimately, your job performance. Or you consistently find yourself in relationships plagued by conflict because you’re replicating the dysfunctional dynamics of your family of origin. Maybe you’re not getting your emotional needs met because you can’t express them or you have a pattern of putting other people’s needs first. When the way you live conflicts with your innate nature, strengths, passions, and values, it’s as if you’re living in a continuous state of resistance. And that takes energy. As you move toward living in alignment with your authentic self, you’ll see a lot of changes in your life, including a greater sense of peace, energy, and overall well-being.

  Rana’s Story

  When Rana came to me in the spring of 2007, she was lethargic and depressed. Raised in a close-knit, traditional Middle Eastern family, she was a successful orthopedic surgeon, and, at 37, she’d been married for nine years. Her husband had just finished his law degree and was looking for a job with a big firm. The two of them were living with her parents in a Boston suburb, and every evening after work, Rana had gotten into the habit of withdrawing to the family’s finished basement where she’d watch television. She wasn’t taking phone calls from her friends, she wasn’t socializing, and she wasn’t going to the gym much after work, though that had always been important to her. “Something’s wrong,” her mother kept insisting. Everyone else in her family was worried about her as well. Growing up, Rana had been an outgoing teenager with lots of friends and energy. She didn’t seem like her old self, her family told her; she seemed angry and upset. In truth, she felt like no one understood her. Just recently, her father and brother had started talking about opening an office with her. She would be performing the surgery—what she refers to as “the manual work”—and they would be her business partners. She would, in effect, be supporting her entire family, although that wasn’t how she expressed it at the time. Spurred on by her family’s concern and her own lack of interest in starting up this new office, she came to see me. She wasn’t happy in her work, she said. She wanted to explore some other career options.