Letting go and loving our dark side

Isn't it weird that as soon as I'm without my community around me I begin to question my own way of being? I start thinking, 'Am I crazy? Shouldn't I be getting on with my career, having children, buying a house?' The sense of certainty I felt about the 'rightness' of my life path just a week ago has all but evaporated. I'm adrift in a sea of doubt. And my doubt makes me feel frustrated and ashamed.

Even this blog, which has been giving me so much creative satisfaction, has come under fire from my critical mind. Suddenly I feel it's too preachy, too idealistic. How can I write about something so lofty as spiritual non-attachment when I clearly just haven't 'got it' yet! And what about all those other darker aspects of self that don't seem to fit?

I've come across this before and those who know me best will attest to it. I find it difficult to accept that inside this basically good person are all kinds of dark inclinations and desires: self-loathing, masochism, fear, judgement and anger. Sheesh! Anger especially! 

Spiritual teachers tell us that we should integrate our dark side but I've always felt a bit at a loss as to how this can be done without turning a wonderfully diverse character into a bland grey persona. Because honestly I love my dark side, even though at times I feel uncomfortable with it. I like that I'm a wild cat when pissed off, and that I'm introspective enough to question my own opinions and occasionally notice that I'm being a complete dick and feel like crap about it.

However I want to be able to move between these emotions, these aspects of self, and not get lost in them. So that they become like films projected across my being and I can enjoy every single moment, even wallowing in self-pity or ranting at someone I love, because I can stand aside from it and not identify with any of it.

Because none of it is really who I am! In A New Earth - Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, Eckhart Tolle clarifies this when he writes, “You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.”

Observing our reactions and allowing ourselves to experience every aspect of life, both 'light' and 'dark,' is part of our awakening process. I think the trick is not to get caught up in it, but to allow it to move through us freely while we remain firmly rooted in the present moment. Or as someone I no longer remember once put it: 'Don't jump in the river!' Just enjoy watching it flow on by :)

Letting go of ideology

An ideology is a collection of beliefs about the world and how it works. Our ideologies often go unexamined because they were picked up when we were young, and now run like programs in the background of a computer, subconsciously guiding our decisions. When deconstructed the beliefs that make up out ideologies are often false.

For example I have the belief that it's 'bad' to put toxic chemicals on the earth or ourselves. But when I look closely at this belief I find that it’s actually not true. Sure, from the perspective of our human life it matters whether the soil and water is polluted, and it matters if we harm ourselves and the other creatures on our planet. But with a wider perspective on time and space we see that it doesn't matter at all. The universe is a kaleidoscope of different atoms connecting and then separating, creating all the various forms of matter around us. That shampoo running down into the soil will eventually split into its component parts at the molecular level, one joining a tree, the next becoming part of a complex soil colloid. It does not matter what I do in my short life, the process continues unimpeded.

Yet, although I know this, I’m still attached to the ideology of sustainability and its doctrines, so my thoughts and behaviour are inconsistent. To prove my loyalty to the ideology I still find myself participating in critical discussions about 'the things that are wrong with the world', even though I don't think there is anything ‘wrong’ with the world at all! On the other hand, I increasingly rebel against the constraints I've created for myself and act in ways that are out of alignment with the ideology. Then I feel like a hypocrite and am filled with guilt and self-recrimination.

And from here flows a positive torrent of judgemental thinking! Because I judge myself I project this out onto others and feel judged by them too! Seeing through the ideology I find myself judging others who adhere to it, yet also judge those who live free of the ideology because my mind is so thoroughly programmed by it. My judgement is also motivated by jealousy at the freedom others have chosen... I want this freedom for myself!

All this unnecessary anguish! Time to let it go...

This doesn’t mean I'll now fill my cupboards with toxic chemicals and start spraying the weeds in my garden. I'm a sensible human being. I can see this is not intelligent. But neither is spending valuable time worrying about it, or feeling guilty every time we eat meat or processed food, drive a car or buy a new kettle. So much energy wasted! Easier to let go and allow things to be as they are. Allow others to believe and live as they like. And most importantly, allow myself to live as I like. So that if I want to became an old lady with rainbow streaks in her hair I can :)

Letting go of youth

One of the little contradictions in my personality is that although I find the idea of using toxic chemicals on the earth or on my body irrational and self-destructive, I continue to dye my hair. I'm not ready to let go of the pretty brown hair of my youth. In the same way I mourn the desire to attend wild all night parties, even though I know I would no longer enjoy them.

Why is this so? It is because I've invested identity in these things; things that only last such a short time. My body is slowly becoming aged. My skin is no longer taut, my rhythms have become slower. My inner world develops differently, into greater clarity and consciousness, but my body decays.

How silly then to get so attached to the colour of my hair or how many admiring glances I get from those around me? Making these things important sets me up to struggle with myself. And this is a struggle I cannot win. Better to just let go and accept gracefully that impermanence is the nature of this life we are living.

It is helpful to realise that where ever you are attached you will feel a fixation. This is a very good indicator that we can look out for in our daily lives. You direct a lot of energy into thinking about and trying to procure that thing you want so much. Instead of doing something creative, all your energy is being used on something pointless. Meanwhile you feel more and more upset. How silly! 

When I hang onto my youth so desperately, I also fail to realise the wonderful gifts that growing old is bringing into my life...

You see I think when we're born it's like we're waking up from a sleep. We've transitioned from another state and so it takes a while to understand who and where we are, and how to use our faculties. So you stumble around awhile, in life, but after a while the horizon levels out and you can finally make out what is going on. We begin to become conscious.

But for me consciousness is like a radio station: it goes in and out of reception. When I am aware I see: “Ah yeah! This is how reality is. Completely simple and free!” And then I lose the station and all of a sudden I am worrying about money or whether the man who is beside me is the 'right one.' If I were conscious I would know the answer to those questions without any consideration.

As I've grown older I've found these periods of clarity becoming more frequent and of longer duration. I catch myself more quickly when I become attached to something. You know, those petty little attachments we pick up like ticks everyday, usually through interaction with other humans? I may carry these attachments around for a while but I'm getting better at noticing and letting go before they become too painful or burdensome.

That is the gift of maturity. It becomes easier and easier to let go!

Letting go of youth is something we all have to do eventually. Why not do it now?

Letting go of style as identity

I'm not a particularly artistic person, but I've always really relished the creativity of fashion. Although I buy all my clothes second-hand, over the years I've developed a style that is uniquely mine and most of my close friends can tell straight away when an outfit is 'me'.

But actually it's not me. The clothes I wear and the way I create myself with colour and pattern and style is nothing to do with who I am at all. So why do I find it so hard to let go of this style? Why do I feel less when the clothes I'm wearing are in my opinion too feminine, too butch or just too plain daggy? Why am I so attached to these pieces of fabric, these buttons, zips and elastic?

If I were naked and you did not know my name I would be just another human animal, and until we had been introduced there would be nothing to distinguish me apart from the slight peculiarities of my hair, my skin, my body shape. I am nothing special. I am nothing that you would write home about.

But with clothes I can pretend I am special, that I am different. I can look at others and sub-consciously make a judgement about how much more or less stylish I am than they are. I can present myself in such a way that I invite compassion or illicit lust. I can make people afraid of me, or I can put them at their ease. In other words, through my style I can manipulate others to see me the way I wish to be seen.

As I travel my small collection of clothes grows more and more faded, stretched and worn. I am bored by them and I crave the stimulation and excitement of something new, of seeing admiration in someone else's eyes. So I ask myself why my self-worth and identity is so tied up with style and I see that here is yet another burdensome attachment that does not serve me.

But as I let it go I remember something I once read somewhere: "Enjoy everything, need nothing." And when it comes to style I think this applies very well!

Letting go of your career

Simply because I do not like the word, letting go of my career was less challenging than you might imagine. All that 'careering' gave me a pretty serious case of burn-out and I was all too ready to let the whole sorry burden fall from my shoulders.

Of course it hasn't come without its anxieties, money of course being the biggest one. But the funny thing is, once I set myself afloat at the whim of universal benevolence somehow I've always had more than enough.

Traveling to South East Asia was a good example of this. Within an hour of arriving in the town where I was to stay for the coming month, I had seen a poster advertising for someone to work in a guesthouse for room and board. And after this situation became untenable I sowed the seed to do astrology and tarot readings and this became the seed of a new enterprise that is now bearing fruit.

I do not see this newest venture as a new career however. The difference is that it is done in a spirit of playfulness. I like to earn money from it, but I will not stress myself unduly or turn on the hard sell to do so. This is a world away from the ten page proposals I would routinely submit to potential clients and funding bodies. Phew! What a bore...

And then the stress! Deadlines, regulations, bureaucracy. All tethers I can well do without!

Debt can be an especially strong tie to your career and one I have determinedly refused to accept. It's funny how all these bonds are self chosen - we literally sign our life away with the simple everyday choices we make, from enrolling our child in school to signing that mortgage paper. Every day we enslave ourselves a little more!

Many people pursue a career thinking that it will increase their status and influence within a community or network. Well weirdly enough my networks has grown markedly since abandoning this silly illusion and I find myself continually meeting people with whom I can collaborate in exciting, effective ways.

Letting go of your career is especially challenging when you have come to identify it with who you are. To find out if this is true of you, ask yourself whether you think of yourself as your job title, for example as 'a teacher' or 'an artist'. In such cases you are pretty strongly attached to your career and letting it go might cause you some discomfort.

Note that I do not suggest that you stop doing what it is their vocation to do. A vocation is very different to a career. One's vocation is the gift they give to the world, their niche within the social ecology. But unlike a career it is not something one has to strive for. It just happens naturally as we move with purpose through the world.

Letting go of my career was one of the most freeing things I ever did. It's been over three years now and I've never once regretted it :)

Letting go of being in charge

Until recently I held a job where a lot of the time I got to be the boss. I led teams of people in the garden and although we worked collaboratively I had a lot of control over the process because I was the one with the knowledge and experience. In the end, if there was a decision to be made I generally got the final say.

Just after I left this job I worked in a little guest house called Shanti Shanti on the Cambodian coast. Set on the beach with the waves lapping gently up to the little cane deck chairs, it's a place that should have been very peaceful. But actually it was often anything but! This is because the manager, an eccentric French gentleman, was very stressed indeed! And because he was so stressed his most common mode of communication was growling.

'Spoon, spoon, spoon!' he would shout at me in the kitchen, and then when I handed him a desert spoon: 'No! Spoon spoon!' The interpretation of this for those who are wondering is 'No I want a tea spoon.'

Once day the two of us, the only English speaking staff in this very small establishment, set out to mend a banner who's eyelets had been torn off. My initial idea, which I respectfully proposed, was to make new holes by cutting a small strip from the side, sewing a strong patch onto the corner and then reinforcing a new hole as one would a button hole. This way it would last for a good few years even in strong winds.

But my plan was not acceptable at all! 'Don't complicate things,' was the reply, and I was told to attach the banner to crooked bamboo poles with sticky tape. Of course this did not work! The result looked terrible unprofessional and would have lasted a week at the most, so we scrapped that idea after half an hour of mucking around. A series of new and increasingly wacky ideas ensued til I had spent the best part of my two hour shift on the project, but eventually the banner was up and looking fine.

This was a difficult lesson for me to learn. Of course I thought my plan was best but I had no say in the matter. Instead I had to bite my tongue and do what I was told. I'm sure many similar experiences lie ahead for me and each time I will need to swallow my pride and accept that I am not in charge.

But there is a blessing in all this. For the first time in a long time I was not the one responsible. I could relax and allow someone else to lead. This gave me the space to cultivate a calm and quiet spirit, and encourage the yin qualities of receptivity, gentleness and nurturing. Very soon my boss was confiding in me his fears and frustrations, and in this mode of openness I was able to listen and provide support.

Eventually we got along just fine, he and I. And I learned very quickly how to let go of being in charge!

Letting go of identity

Recently, I’ve been reading this book called ‘Multiplicity: The new science of personality’ by Rita Carter, fascinating stuff for a psychology nerd like me! The premise of the book is that instead of having one steady personality most of us have several, developed in response to the dynamic and unstable contexts we encounter in modern life.

Consider how it must have been for people even just 300 years ago: with no means of getting anywhere other than by their own steam, or with the aid of an animal if they were lucky enough to have one, most people in the lower classes spent their entire lives in one locality with the same group of people, encountering the same situations day-after-day. They thus developed a very simple, stable personality that could be relied upon by the people around them.

Today things are different. We exist within multiple contexts simultaneous, with different groups of people and with complex social dynamics and expectations. Thus it is not surprising to find that most of us have a suite of personalities, just as we have a wardrobe of clothes for different occasions, one for work, one that comes out when we are at home with our family, and one that we share only with our lover.

How do these personalities arise? Just as personalities have always arisen: in response to the pressures of our environment and the needs of the people around us, and through the lens of our natural tendencies, we develop habitual behaviours that we then begin to associate with who we are.

For example a child grows up with a deaf mother and a violent alcoholic father. In her childhood she does her best to help her mother whom she loves but who also makes her feel guilty, not intentionally but in the subtle unintentional way of people who have learned to play the martyr. She also learns to fear male aggression and avoids openness with her father because it makes her physically and emotionally vulnerable.

Based on these early experiences, we could make a very simple prediction that this child is likely grow up to be a people-pleaser, working in one of the helping professions and never feeling she is good enough to be truly worthy of love, respect or status. In intimate relationships she may well struggle to be open and will likely take on either a submissive role or a strident nothing-can-hurt-me aggression that prevents her from really connecting with the other.

But because modern life is not simple, the development of personality is not simple either. Perhaps this child, so powerless in the home, learned to exert her power over children at school. Thus we may find that the woman who evolves is submissive and a pleaser at home, but an assertive, power-hungry bully in the workplace.

Carter defines personality as ‘a coherent and characteristic way of seeing, thinking, feeling, and behaving’ and this seems a good enough working definition to me. This clearly indicates that personality is not just a role we play, it’s something we identify with, we consider it to be who we are.

In my life I can clearly see three different personalities: there’s the studious responsible me who works in a leadership role within an organisation dedicated to personal and social change. Right now this is the me that’s writing this blog! Then there’s the rebellious, outrageous me, who does things my work colleagues would find very surprising indeed. And finally there’s the me that comes out when I’m with my lover and that is a very different person again.

There are also roles that I play but do not identify with: for example I used to work in a big corporation. I played the games and wore the uniform because I thought I could get things done that way, but it never suited me and I never felt comfortable in the role. So at some point in our lives we begin to identify with some of the roles we play but not others, and these became our personalities, our identities.

The trouble is that identifying too strongly with these roles can become very limiting, and in some cases can cause serious cognitive dissonance in our lives.

For example, because I’ve come to believe so fully in my most prominent personality, the responsible, good one, I sometimes feel that I need to hide the other two, both from others and from myself. In the past I even tried to deny that they existed: these weren’t really me, they were some kind of aberration, a dark-side that I needed to resolve or work to integrate or grow out of, or at the very least keep well and truly to myself. I worked to make the dominant ‘good’ aspects of myself stronger in an effort to assuage my guilty feelings about these other aspects of myself that did not fit into my self-defined identity.

It’s very freeing to recognise that none of these personalities are actually who we are at all. As all the mystic traditions teach us, these layers of identity are nothing more than self-constructed facades behind which the true self resides, the silent observer.

When you let go of identity, accepting that none of your personalities are really who you are, you bring a playfulness back into your life. You’re free to try on different roles, as you would try on different clothes, selecting the ones you enjoy wearing and discarding the ones that don’t serve you. Life becomes a big game of dress ups where anything is possible

So now I hear you say ‘that’s all very well but if I suddenly start cross-dressing or play the smart-arse with my boss it’s not going to go down very well,’ and you’re absolutely right. But that doesn’t make cross-dressing or sassing your boss the problem. If you’re a man and you really want to wear woman clothes and the people around you can’t handle that then you have to decide what is most important thing to you. Like anything this will depends entirely on the context.

The point is not to cling onto something new, that is the need to try out different roles, but to recognise how by identifying with the roles you do play you hold yourself back from experiencing life to its fullest.

Letting go of possessions

Very recently I was traveling overseas and had stored a lot of things in my brother's backyard shed. While I was away a great flood came through the area and a lot of my things were badly damaged. In particular, many of my favourite books were ruined.

Now for me a book holds something of a sacred virtue. I know this sounds nerdy but books have been the doorway to so much pleasure, learning and insight that I place them on a sort of pedestal! So of course I was upset. I grilled my brother over the phone. Exactly which books had been damaged? How badly had the water affected them? Were they still readable? I ruminated about the whole thing for hours wishing that I had made a different decision about where I stored my stuff, blaming myself for being so stupid, wondering if my brother could have done something more to have saved them.

Then it occurred to me that most of the books I own I haven't read for years and yet I dutifully haul them from house to house whenever I move. Moreover I have dusted and sorted them, and made room for them in my sometimes small living spaces. Really I was better off without these books!

The other thing I realised was that many of the books I own help me create an identity that I use to present myself to others. You know how we gravitate towards someone's bookshelf when we visit them for the first time? How we judge their character by the titles they own? Well I wanted other people to be impressed by the books in my shelf, to think of me as a certain type of person: a serious-minded, intelligent and spiritual person with a wide range of interesting hobbies. Many of the possessions we own are used for the same purpose: to impress those around us in some way, to present to the world a persona that we think of as an ideal. For example we may want others to think of us as wealthy, or stylish or unique; in all these cases possessions can provide a means of demonstrating this persona to others.

Image: Copyright Petr0.

So beneath our attachment to possessions often lies a deeper attachment: the need for others to approve of us, respect or like us. And this attachment ties us up in even more knots than the first! When we are attached to the good opinion of others we are forever afraid that our mask will slip, that we will ultimately reveal who we really are and that this 'real' person will not be good enough. Moreover by creating this identity with our possessions we cut ourselves off from others and this can lead to feelings of separation, loneliness and alienation.

Letting go of possessions can be liberating not just because we now have less things to clean around, dust, move, organise and tidy, but also because by letting go of these identity props both we and others will see us more clearly. This is not so scary as it might sound: in fact life becomes simpler, we become more genuine as human beings and we move closer to the truth of who we really are.