Insight & the Risk of Embodying Our True Selves

When I was 37 years-old, in my very first full-day silent Mindfulness Meditation retreat held at a converted Christian monastery, my eyes flew open in a panic about 25 minutes into an unguided sitting meditation with the terrifying thought:

"If you keeping going, you will lose everything."

And the thing was, even though the thought felt like it was partly from me and partly from somewhere else, I immediately knew exactly what this thought meant:

If you continue to practice Insight or Vipassana Meditation, you will become your True Self.  If you become your True Self, there will inevitably be losses (people, places & things) in your life.

Or if I were to have drawn a picture of it, it would have looked like this:

Of course there are dozens of men and women throughout the history of psychology, theology, philosophy, and literature who have commented on this idea of  True Self and False Self (also sometimes called Big Self and Small Self), but I've always resonated with the 20th century Trappist Monk Thomas Merton's description of True Self as he describes in this quotation about the False Self:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person of false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself with glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.

And by age 37, I had already learned the truth of this statement.

Early experiences as the black sheep in the family, the only introvert in a world of extroverts, and the feeling of harsh disdain when my opinions were in opposition to the mainstream or status quo, taught me about the reality of loneliness in this journey toward a True Self.

I first learned this lesson in a really big way in my mid-twenties when I was methodically untangling myself from the minefield that is Codependency.

It was from this work and understanding, that I found it can be very painful to: 

A.) Gain insight that the way you have been living is quite problematic even though you didn't realize it.  

B.) Not receive support from key stakeholders when you make the brave decision to begin to break these unhealthy patterns of behaviors in order to practice even mediocre self-care.  And, 

C.) To embark on a path toward a True Self in adulthood.

Nonetheless, despite this earlier knowledge I had already hard-won (or maybe because of), after that quite literal eye-opening experience at the converted monastery, I never told anyone about it after that day, and acted as if it never happened.

Fast forward three years.

I was a couple of days in to my second 5-day Silent Mindfulness Meditation retreat at a different converted Christian monastery, and my eyes suddenly flipped open again amidst a longer unguided sitting meditation because I had the frightening physical sensation and imagery while meditating of falling off of a cliff into nothing-ness.

Again, I tell no one, but still sense in my heart that this is another version of the same thought I had on my first one-day retreat that is now manifesting in my body possibly for my having ignored it in the first place.

Then, the next day of the same retreat, while deep into a longer period of meditation, I have a petrifying visualization of a huge vicious lion jumping out at me--as if to devour me alive--that startles me into the starkness of my reality.

Apparently for me, third times a charm, and this time I choose to confide in one of the retreat Teachers to seek some insight, guidance and support.

This was a good decision.

The teacher, Heather, talked to me about the role that visualizations and archetypes can play in the  evolution of consciousness and insight, and she validated (without any sugar-coating I might add) that there absolutely will be losses of particular people, places and things as I move along this journey- some of my own choosing, some not.

She also reminded me to be gentle with myself, and to take things slowly.

I left our meeting feeling much better; more at ease, even in my on-going sense of dis-ease.

Well, our meeting and spiritual reading like these two books among many others.

Fast forward to today.

I continue to use my practice as a means or method for gaining insight, and the big breakthroughs continue to have that element of risk attached to them as I feel myself inching closer to living and breathing as my Truest Self.

Most recently, I've been exploring the role of visualizations and archetypes again in the context of a feminine wholeness that has felt like an important and missing component of my True Self.

In a chapter called "Lilith" in a book called The Moonlit Path: Reflections on the Dark Feminine, the author, Jane Kamerling, frequently quotes the 20th century "guru" of archetypes, psychoanalyst C. G. Jung when discussing the cost-benefit of allowing our authentic selves (the good, the bad, and the ugly) to emerge.

Jung writes:

They [cultural symbols] are important constituents of our mental make-up and vital forces in the building up of human society, and they cannot be eradicated without serious loss.

When they are repressed or neglected, their specific energy disappears into the unconscious with unpredictable consequences. The energy that appears to have been lost revives and intensifies whatever is uppermost in the unconscious- tendencies, perhaps, that have hitherto had no chance to express themselves, or have not been allowed an uninhibited existence in our consciousness.

They form the ever-present destructive 'shadow.' 

Even tendencies that might be able to exert a beneficial influence turn into veritable demons when they are repressed.

I like this last sentence in particular: Even tendencies that might be able to exert a beneficial influence turn into veritable demons when they are repressed.

It reminds me of the often quoted statement attributed to Jesus Christ from The Gospel of Thomas:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

In both quotations you feel the sense of both risk and necessity associated with the path of insight. 

Perhaps that's why the spiritual journey, which requires buckets of courage, is also loaded up with 10,000 different versions of the hero-warrior archetype as well.

And why American writer E.E. Cummings said:

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

So here's to us! The courageous risk-takers who dare to move that much closer to the embodiment of our Truest Selves.

May it be so.