The Shadow of Consistency

I used to judge a person by their tendency to contradict themselves, the more they seemed so, the more I would challenge the validity of what they said. Then, quite recently, I noticed that the more authentic I allowed myself to be with people, the more I have the tendency to appear to contradict myself from one moment to the next. I noticed that in one moment I can be quiet and serious in a conversation and in the next, I become light-hearted and laughing in the exact same conversation. To some, I would appear cold and shallow if I were to behave that way, changing my demeanor from one moment to the next, and in some contexts, I might even be seen as psychotic or at least mildly schizophrenic.

So what I have now discovered that I have made up about consistency is that for me to remain in the eyes of another with the appearance of being consistent, I must appear to be true to my character, a man of integrity, as some would call it, and that means I must behave in accordance with the projected way of being that another will cast on me. I must appear to be consistent to a standard of behavior if I expect anyone to take me seriously.

So what has this cost me in terms of my aliveness, that is my wholeness and my integrity, by striving to be consistent with the way I show up for others?

The answer to that is simple. I have sold out everything that makes me an authentic, whole person with integrity just to appear consistent and, in some people's eyes, a person worthy of knowing. In doing so, I get the booby prize, I get to appear to be a man of integrity. The problem with appearing to be a man of integrity instead of simply being a man of integrity, is that to remain so in the eyes of another, I must appear to live up to their standards of what integrity means, and that means that I must surrender one more thing that makes me whole, my autonomy. And when I surrender that, I am no longer free to be who I am and who I am not, I am no longer free to be whole.

The Shadow Behind Cultural Insensitivity

If someone had called me a racist five years ago or maybe even less, I would have been the first to deny it. Today I have chosen to stand for my racism or cultural insensitivity because I have those insensitive thoughts all the time, judging people for the lamest of reasons, from having dimples or a melodious regional accent or preferring coffee over tea to the less sublime reasons such as skin color, ethnic background, education, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation. At the same time, with people I know I hope I have been able to look past some of those differences to see them more as they are rather than what I project on them, such as my distrust, fear, and even hatred.

Seeing this shadow in me and taking ownership for it has done more for me to begin to question all of the more subtle aspects of this shadow than any class on multicultural awareness and sensitivity even though I still can see the value of teaching about those kinds of issues as a way to bring about a more compassionate society. In owning this shadow I must continually engage in the practice of seeing where I still have a charge around someone and pinpoint where, in the great diversity of human beings as we are on this planet, I have taken a difference between us, large or small, and hard-wired it to something to distrust, fear or worse yet, as something to simply ignore. While engaging my shadow I must be careful not to perpetrate one more projection, shame, which I have countless times projected on others as I have also done to myself whenever I have found myself caught up in the effects of this shadow of insensitivity, for as I continue to blame myself for my insensitivity, I will also continue to project it others. For me, the responsibility starts and stops right here, with me, and all I can continue to do for the rest of humanity is to remain true to myself and not perpetrate the taking away from the aliveness of others, in the process.  I must forgive myself and embrace my shadow so that I can dance with my shadow in the light, for I am all there is between my shadow and the light.

Withholdings and Perpetrations

One of the insidious aspects of shadow is that it can and will color my reality, just like colored sunglasses, often to the point that when I interact with another person, whether a stranger or a significant relationship in my life, I will passively view that person through the filter of my shadow and not be able to see or really be with that person. On the other side of the passive shadow is the active side of perpetration, where I will actively engage in the process of causing damage to the character or sense of aliveness of an individual or group of individuals by gossip or its more passive counterpart, withholding, along with projections, judgments or anything else that allows me to avoid responsibility and accountability, at the cost of intimacy, authenticity, vitality, integrity, in short, the cost of my aliveness and the aliveness of the other person. On the other side of the cost is, of course, the payoffs, such as righteousness, being comfortable, saving face, and most importantly, not having to be responsible.

I have lived most of my life going for the payoff of righteousness, comfort, saving face and not being responsible. I have finally reached the point where the payoff is no longer important enough to cost me my aliveness or the aliveness of another. Not only is it not important to go for the payoff anymore, just seeing the payoff itself stacked up against the cost of my aliveness has tipped the scales for me to see that by giving up righteousness by seeing it as a cost rather than a payoff, has allowed me to see that aliveness, along with the intimacy, authenticity, vitality, and integrity that aliveness brings with it, is the real payoff.

I have realized that the power in discovering my own perpetrations with another is that it also provides the opportunity for me to clean up the perpetration by communicating to the person with whom I have the perpetration, but only if my communicating is equally compassionate to the other as to myself and that also allows the communication to contribute to the relationship and not cause further injury or damage. The chance of further injury should be the measure by which I decide whether to communicate my perpetration or wait until my motive is as clean as the communication. To do otherwise will do more to hold the perpetration in place rather than to further the aliveness of the other and with that, the my own aliveness, as well.

The Shadow in Not Telling the Truth

I have wondered what it was that made telling a lie to be regarded as tantamount to murder in some people’s lives. In my discovery of the power of standing for my shadows when they turn up in front of me in other people and things, I have come to realize that lying is tantamont to murder because it robs people of their aliveness. I believe that I have often justified a “white lie” because I believed that I was protecting that person from possible harm as long as that person would never discover the truth by other means. What I now believe I was doing instead was robbing them of the opportunity to experience “what's so”, and that “what's so” is the essential aspect of aliveness. That leads to only one conclusion, that lying to someone is, for all intents and purposes, robbing someone of their aliveness, their experience of being alive. Further I believe that there is nothing as indefensible as to achieve my desires at the cost of another person's aliveness.  That is, in the most simplest of terms, my purpose in being here and writing these posts.

In many ways, this discovery has become, for me, a form of liberation rather than more burden, for it has shifted the question of lying from a moral question to a question of workability, integrity and responsibility which are the fundamental qualities of wholeness and aliveness. I can still question the issue of lying as a moral question if I choose, and it will not alter the fact that lying takes away from me having to be responsible, and that as long as I am able to remember to step out of any judgment, feeling or shadow around not telling the truth, I can simply let myself see that lying does not contribute to creating a world of workability, integrity and responsibility, that it creates a world of unworkability and chaos.

The Shadow of "I Can’t Be Vulnerable"

At the age of six, I went into the first grade in a public school named after the little known US President, Millard Filmore. The most lasting impression I have of that school is the smell of the soap we used to wash our hands before lunch. Next to that smell, my greatest lesson of those years in public school was that it was not a good idea to show my vulnerability. What I see as a shadow in this is that the teachers were unable to show their vulnerability either and I believe those teachers exerted their authority over us in order to not expose their own vulnerabilities to their students. Seeing this shadow in myself has allowed me to look back at the whole experience of growing up as a series of events designed to program me and all the rest of my peers to learn the most important lesson to become a functional adult in American society which is that I must never be vulnerable, or at least I must do my upmost to hide it from others by learning to hide it from myself. The question arises that if I can now see my education for what it really was and the impact it had on me to this day, can I forgive them for what they did? The answer is moot if I look at the fact that I now see it for what it was, it no longer has to have the same power over me that it has, all this time. I get to simply experience the aliveness that comes from this shadow now exposed to the light of day.

The Shadow of “Why would anyone waste my time like that?”

I believe that shadow is like karma. What I do to another is bound to come back to me as an annoyance that I get to look at as shadow. Being at choice at this is certainly a very difficult position to put myself in as it involves what I do for part of my income stream, that is, delivering flowers. On one particular day recently, I was given an arrangenent to deliver to a customer that was sent by another person in the household. The mailing address given was correct, however, the actual physical address was accessible on another street entirely and I wasted about a half hour trying to find my way to the house to find no one home and had to redeliver the flowers later that afternoon. Since the information could have been provided when the order was made by the person who actually knew this very vital information from the start, I wondered what they were thinking when they didn’t provide the information in the first place and had nothing to say to me when I told them about it when I finally completed the delivery.


Now why would anyone take the time to make my life unworkable for even a little while by withholding specific knowledge that I judge was crucial to the success of the delivery and would have been so easy to provide? The next questions I must ask, in taking a stand for a likely shadow here are “Where have I been out of integrity with any withheld vital information from another in my life” and “Is there anyway I can clean up the mess I made by doing that?”

In answering that first question I realize that most of my life has been about saving face and being accepted, two shadows of mine that have led me to lie by omission or commission to protect me from damaging my reputation. Each time I have done that I have added another piece of baggage to carry with me which over a lifetime has shown up in my body and which almost made me an invalid seven months ago.

To answer the second question I must simply say that to make my life more whole and workable and to have greater aliveness as a result, I simply have to realize that in order to embrace this shadow all that I can really do now to clean things up is to notice when I am out of integrity and to perform little acts of service to people by letting my genius direct me. As an example, the other day, as I finished my deliveries for the day, I noticed a credit card lying on the ground. I quickly got the idea that information about the cardholder might be on file at the pharmacy next door to the florist shop so I took it there straight away and sure enough, the cardholder was a long time customer. The woman I spoke with at the pharmacy wanted to know who I was and I said “I’m David and I work next door.” The very next day I received a $20 tip from the cardholder. I guess I saved the cardholder a lot of time and worry by doing the perfect thing. It made my day, even if I hadn’t received a penny for my service. Still it’s nice to receive a gift of the heart like that.

The Shadow of “Being Stuck”

It’s been several weeks since I posted my last blog and I have been so stuck in being stuck that I finally realized perhaps I should write about this. I have been involved in other creative outlets such as putting in a new storm door and doing other winterization projects as well as rekindling my other passion, my art of collage and assemblage, and now I sit here writing with a light snowfall going on outside. While I am not a fan of getting out of bed to dress by the furnace on these cold mornings, there is a certain delight in sitting down to a hot cup of tea and putting out my current thoughts on the white computer screen.


So what does all of this have to do with the shadow of “being stuck?” What I have realized in describing the two sides of getting up on a cold morning is that in being stuck on the things I don’t relish , I have also kept myself from experiencing my aliveness and with it, the subtle joys of the way it is.

This is the essence of aliveness, this experience of being at choice with the way things are and the way things aren’t. With aliveness comes the natural state of being, which I believe is happiness, the happiness in just being alive.

The Shadow of “Thinking That I Know”

Have you ever known someone who you just want to avoid like the plague because they not only seem to know it all, they probably also believe that they do,and that seems to turn you off to them, in some way?  A recent encounter into this shadow happened with a customer to whom I was delivering flowers.  Shortly after I had left her house to return to the store I received a call from an associate telling me to go back to retreive the flowers because the customer said the flowers were wilted.  I returned to her house and in retreiving the flowers, which seemed fine to me, she told me that she had her own rose bushes and “she knew roses.”  I conceded and took the flowers back and when I was returning from her house, I was thinking about how there might be a shadow whenever I think that I know something that someone might not know and still make them wrong for it by making myself right. Once I realized the opportunity to be a witness to the this moment in the car, that is to take myself outside of any emotional, rational, or other such attachments to this situation, I got to see the woman as me.

So how does thinking that I know become shadow?  If I am wanting to be right about something, by my focus, I can no longer be in the present moment, to just be alive with the person with whom I am sharing the air, time and place. Instead I am stuck in my story about the other person thinking that he knows, and therefore I can’t experience any aliveness in the person or in myself, for that matter. In fact, all I have is story and as I have recounted before, story, like understanding, is the booby prize.

Noticing this once again, I can choose aliveness over righteousness, and with that choice, everyone gets to win. 

The Shadow of "Having Life Figured Out"

I was sitting in the laundromat waiting for my clothes to dry and I was thinking about a friend of mine who I had just been talking to on the phone about his current unworkable situation in his life where he seems only focused on his most significant relationship rather than how he feels about it's unworkability.  Soon after I hung-up and still waiting for the spin cycles to finish on my machines, suddenly, I was thinking that he had not been hearing me when I invited him to look at his pain instead of focusing on the current and apparent source of his pain, which is what I suspect he is carrying as shadow of having life “all figured out” from about the age of nine, and this current situation has nothing to do with what happened “back in the day.”

“So what does that have to do with me,” I asked myself?  “Now that I think about it, I still have my own life figured out, all the way back to the age of maybe, three.”  It shows up everytime I tell myself that what is happening, right this moment, doesn’t jive with what I had thought all those years ago and turned into this shadow of “having life figured out” which is surely a block to my aliveness, again, right this moment.

So, the gift in this particular manifestation of my shadow is that I don’t have to carry on this conversation with my friend in my head, until the old proverbial cows come home.  Instead, I have the opportunity to let it go for now and anticipate that it will come up again in yet another form, but not this time.  And as I have beening saying all along in this blog, aliveness doesn’t ever really happen in space-time or in space or in time, anyway.

The Shadow of “People will say bad things about me”

"You only get to keep what you give away."  -Sheldon Kopp (from If you Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him)

"Being right is the booby-prize!"   -Attributed to Werner Erhard
 

 I believe that this shadow is as fundamentally shared on one level or another as any that we experience as humans in the present age. After completing the est Training® in 1977, my experience of the Training, if it can truly be put into words, showed me that if I live my life afraid that people will say bad things about me having a life of commitment to greater aliveness, that I am really giving up my life for something that they will do anyway, regardless.  I believe that this is why I am here with you now, trying to explain something that is not explainable, to share something that is really not sharable.  To take a stand for this shadow in myself changes the whole nature of the conversation I’ve been having with myself and others, a conversation where something, somewhere else or some other time, past or future, is more important then right here and right now. When I do that, I trade a life of what really happened (aliveness) for a life of my stories of what I think I remembered as happening and hanging on to being right about what happened to justify my life as it has turned out, at least as to how it turned out so far.

So how has this shadow been showing up for me lately?  To be frank, this shadow shows up every time I sit down at my computer to write this blog, especially when I am coming to the point of actually publishing it. It shows up every time I decide to not stand up for a shadow that is in front of me that I see in someone else.  It shows up whenever I trade the aliveness of who I am and who I am not for what others may think of me. 

With this clarity, I have available to me at any moment to change the conversation from my stories to my truth, whenever I choose to do so, and it not only creates power for me, but as I share or attempt to share this aliveness with others, I have a tremendous opportunity to give away this aliveness to others, and we all know that you never really get to have something until you give it away.

The Shadow of “I would never throw away an opportunity like that!”

Let me make something clear about shadow. Shadow is not something dark or sinister, like the fictional character Lamont Cranston, as some people might feel. Shadow is simply caused by me standing in front of the light.  In standing in front of the light, I am affirming my aliveness but as with darkness comes the light, so I am affirming that with light comes the shadow. To illustrate how this showed up for me yesterday, I got miffed by a colleague when I asked him if he had an intention for an act of service he was doing this next weekend and he responded that there was nothing for him to set an intention for because there was nothing for him to learn by, as he put it, chopping water and carrying wood. What irked me most by his apparent unwavering attitude was that I felt like he was throwing away an opportunity to see a shadow in this and I got to be right about it until I asked him to mirror my upset by hearing my emotional charge.  As I was spewing out my judgments, then my feelings about what kind of person would do this kind of thing, that is to throw away any opportunity to see shadow, I began to see in my reflection a man who has thrown away untold numbers of opportunities in my own life in order to be righteous about the results I have gotten from doing that. After the judgments and feelings and the projection of my shadow on this man, I finally was able to catch myself in the act of seeing this shadow of  I would never throw away an opportunity like that. By taking ownership, or as I so often put it, by taking a stand for my shadow, I was able to also catch myself in the act of not throwing away an opportunity like that by the very act of seeing the shadow and taking a stand for it. It truly no longer mattered that my colleague got what I was projecting on him around missed opportunities because I got it.  That is one of the blessings when I welcome my shadow instead of trying to hide it behind me.  Instead of settling for being right, I get the real prize, which, of course, is my aliveness and I don't take away from my colleague's aliveness in the process, which I would have done had I simply held on to the charge.

The Shadow of “I don’t Belong Here”

This last week I have been attending a five-day Conference on Healing and Transformation in Santa Fe, NM where I live. From the moment I was considering attending the conference, the little voice of doubt in the back of my head kept asking “Why should I be doing this?”  I had read through the prospectus and as I am one to consider myself somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to the Age of Aquarius,  and also as I am not a professional counselor or therapist and I wasn’t taking the workshops for  Continuing Education Credits (CEC), I felt panicked by the idea that I may be wasting my time and money on this realm of woo-woo stuff.  When I finally signed up, I faxed my registration with my credit card information on a Friday evening and waited until Monday to call to confirm receipt of my fax.  The person who took my call told me that my fax was nowhere to be found and could I please fax it again and the little voice again was there “Maybe it’s not meant to be!”  I sent the fax again and I received a call later in the day to confirm my registration.  I told a few friends who I believed might be supportive and enthusiastic about my registering for the conference and they too asked why I was doing this and I found myself again with that little voice questioning my decision. I felt sad for the lack of enthusiasm I was feeling from my friends and asked myself “Am I nuts? I really shouldn’t be doing this!”

     When day one finally arrived, I got up a little earlier than I usually do, got dressed and had my usual cereal and banana with rice milk. My plan was to leave with plenty of time to arrive early enough to park and find out where my first workshop was and instead I got on my computer to check my email and do other things until it was almost past time to make it to the conference without breaking a few traffic laws. About two miles from home I couldn’t find my cell phone, so in a panic I raced back home to retrieve it and wondered again, “Why am I doing this?” I finally got to my first workshop and discovered that I was the only participant who was not receiving CEC’s for the workshop. In the next workshop that afternoon, I really felt like I signed up for the wrong workshop as I noticed that I was the only man in a room of about 25-30 women and on top of that, I judged that the chairs were really too close to each other.

     The point of this story is this. Throughout much of my process in attending this conference, I was vaguely aware of my shadow “I don’t belong here!” and I got to watch it show up day after day throughout the conference in a variety of different ways.  Had I not been writing these blogs about aliveness and shadow for the past few months, I would probably not even been awake to the announcement about this conference, nor would I have gone very far beyond the first time that my little voice said “I don’t belong!”  With my aliveness present throughout this conference, I have come away with a clearer sense of purpose in life, which is to heal myself so that I can heal others by sharing my shadows when they show up.  I am grateful to my alive self for giving me this wonderful gift and, in the process, allowing me to share this gift to all with whom I have the opportunity to be alive.