I’m the sort of person who, if told to go ‘this way’, will go ‘that way’.
For example, when my parents wanted to buy me a geared bike to ride to school and I, the ‘I’ll-do-it-my-way’ teenager, chose a manual bike. Probably because I liked the colour. (Bright green.)
‘SLooK4U blog’ image courtesy Neda Andel and Visual Hunt.
A popular idea is that ‘We shouldn’t ‘should’ on ourselves’. Our ‘shoulds’ make us feel bad and so we ‘should’ reject them.
There’s an element of truth in there but, if we are honest with ourselves, the ‘should’ often contains more than parental impositions; it contains a kernel of truth. When we think we shouldgo to bed earlier or eat less refined sugar or spend more time in nature or catch up with so-and-so or complete x task, often there is an element of truth in that thought.
We just have to learn how to manage the ‘should’ voice so it inspires us to take action rather than making us feel bad / inadequate / not good enough, etc.
When I teach my Creative Writing classes, I explain that the voice of the critic is actually very useful to us – we just need to encourage it to wait until we are ready for its input (i.e. not when we are in the full flush of creativity), and then to convey its feedback kindly. (When we work with ourselves as a team, we engender ‘self-as-team’.)
We know that our Shadow side contains all sorts of treasures, such as our denied positive qualities and much of our power, since our power gets locked or frozen in judgements. Even our rejected negative qualities can serve us. Likewise, our ‘shoulds’ harbour potential achievements.
There’s another word that gets a bad rap, and that is ‘ego’. You often hear talk of eliminating the ego, but it’s actually an important part of us, as Inna Segal pointed out last Friday when she spoke at My Place Jimboomba. It is the people with a strong ego who conquer serious illnesses. You have to really want to be well, and that requires a strong ‘I’, strong desire.
Everything in balance!
So here’s a little balancing point to finish this blog: what I said up there about going ‘that way’ when people want me to go ‘this way’? It’s true – partly. I definitely have a distrust of what the masses are doing, and I definitely like to honour my own sense of what I should do, but even when I was a rebellious teenager I was pretty compliant and obedient to the school rules – though just the ones that made sense to me. And I do like to know what others are doing as I navigate new territory (eg. gardening).
The beauty of this two-sidedness whereby we contain all opposites is what makes us such loveable well-rounded characters. My husband and I watched an old Clint Eastwood film the other night called Absolute Power. We have a soft spot for Clint but the characters were all so black-and-white: they were either good or evil, nothing in between. By comparison with two other movies we saw recently, Doubt, starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour-Hoffman, and Dead Man Walking, starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, where all main characters portray complex, believable, well-rounded characters. (Great movies!)
You can see my old friend Dr Demartini’s themes throughout this blog, and my new friend, Jason Breshears of www.Archaix.com, a phenomenal character himself, with a deep, impressive website about history and how we can create our reality. Right up my alley!
One of his key themes is that our goal is to be individuals (need a bit of ego for that!) rather than part of the collective. And the way to transform our lives is to be unpredictable – get out of the rut of everyday habits, choose the thing you want to create and then take action, take a step in that direction. Magic happens when we value our desires and act on them.
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