by David Kundtz
Pablo Neruda has a poem titled “Keeping Quiet.” In it he says that if we were really to be quiet we would all experience a “sudden strangeness.”
A sudden strangeness. We know that feeling, right? We experience it at various moments of life: in an elevator when all are quiet, doing nothing, and feeling self-conscious in the presence of others; in a subway or on a bus in the silence that follows an angry outburst from a deranged passenger; or in a conversation with friends when one of them suddenly speaks out in unexpected anger or truth. In these moments, we are often anxious to get out and move away to free ourselves of the discomfort and, generally, we do just that. But what if we had to stay and deal with the sudden strangeness? Simply stated: we would then begin to become a community.
Community is people living together and caring for each other. The care is expressed by a willingness to deal with everything that is important to at least one of the members. To do this, boundaries are urgently necessary; otherwise, a state of enmeshment results wherein no one knows who's who and what's whose. Working out how we are to establish and maintain our individual boundaries is how we become a group.
During Stopping, especially the remembering part, self-identity is strengthened and clarified. Remembering where you came from and who you are adds power to your borders so that you don't lose yourself in others and don't allow others to lose themselves in you. When we are together in this way, we can be effective.
Keep your face to the sunshineand you cannot see the shadow.
ATTRIBUTED TO HELEN KELLER
31
The Gift of Embracing Your Shadow
Shadow is a term that comes to us from the psychologist Carl Jung. He called it an archetype, or a pattern of perception, that we all hold in our consciousness. It refers to that secret and often fearful part of ourselves that we generally like to keep hidden and pretend doesn't exist. Jung's insight was to identify the shadow as a positive force and a means to self-understanding. A hidden shadow can cause problems; it's an enemy we don't know. But if we look at that hidden part of ourselves and learn to embrace it, we grow in self-understanding and transform an enemy into a wonderful gift.
The process of Stopping allows time to encounter and ultimately embrace the shadow. When Stopped, I see things in myself that I normally ignore. The self-conversations in my head might go like this: Yes, I see that my shadow is actually a jealous tyrant; I don't like that part of myself but I have to admit, in truth, that it's there; generally my feelings of envy are under control but sometimes they jump out and get me into trouble; or I do and say what I would rather, given my rational preference, not do or say. If I acknowledge that envious self, try to find out what he craves, wants, and needs to tell me, maybe I can turn that energy to good use.
Embracing the shadow is acknowledging that nothing is either black or white, but a portion of both. When we project our shadow out—that is, when I point to you as the one who is causing all the trouble—we deny it in ourselves. The truth is there is no “evil empire,” no group or groups, or individuals that are the cause of our suffering and the world's evil. We all are the causes. When we deny or avoid our shadow, it not only has its nasty way with us, it can actually cause great harm, even death, to others.
Facing our Shadow during Stopping can be scary. “When one first sees the shadow clearly,” says Jungian scholar John A. Sanford, “one is more or less aghast.” When I was a boy, my brother and I would listen to The Shadow on the radio. The part of the program that I remember vividly is the beginning with the scary music and a man's deep, sinister voice asking, “What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” The voice would trail off in menacing and foreboding laughter. It scared us. It still scares people. What indeed does my Shadow know? Do I also know it? Will it surprise and scare me? What if I can't handle it? That's where courage comes in.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian dissident and novelist, said, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” That includes mine and yours. If we could have the courage to embrace our scary shadows, we would thereby take a giant leap to heal our deep and lasting pain.
Stopping is a process whereby you can—especially if this is scary for you—gradually shake hands with your Shadow. By first specifically acknowledging only your desire at some time to embrace your Shadow, you can bring some safety and control to the process by taking it at your own pace.
M. Scott Peck, speaking of evil in The Road Less Traveled and Beyond, says, the “central defect of evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it.” The refusal to acknowledge our dark tendencies is the central defect, not the dark tendencies. As Solzhenitsyn said, those tendencies are always with us; both good and evil are in all our hearts. Only when I can acknowledge all parts of me, can I move from childhood to maturity, from isolation to community, and from running and covering to peace and equanimity.
Sometimes the fear of the Shadow takes the form of truly believing that you are so busy you can't stop. At a successful, midsized business with a staff of about sixteen people, the owner noticed one of her employees becoming more and more stressed but never taking time off, not even her earned vacation time, yet always saying how overworked she was. “I specifically tried to give her permission and enthusiastic encouragement to take time off. ‘Take the afternoon off, Faith,’ I would say to her, but always she answered, ‘I can't. I have too much to do.’ Even when I said, ‘It's okay if you don't get it all done, you need to relax and get away from here,’ it was the same response. ‘No, I can't.’” I see this as evidence that the hidden and unembraced Shadow has much power and many of us will do anything we can to avoid looking at it.
It is also a trickster. It can make a lie look like the truth, a fiction like a fact, and a doubt like a conviction. Because it's a trickster, it can take many forms, even the form of innocence.
The gift of acknowledging your shadow is the antidote to the often dangerous oversimplification of the innocent Pollyanna. During the time of training for my counseling degree, I had the opportunity to take a class from Daniel Berrigan, S.J., the renowned Jesuit peace activist, author, and teacher. He spoke to us eloquently about “terrible innocence.” Terrible innocence is an attitude which, while looking into the face of evil, it prompts us to deny it, avoid it, pretend not to notice it, or feign ignorance while, in our hearts, we really know what's going on. It brings the false innocence of sweetness and light to a moment of possibly serious harm. That indeed is terrible innocence; terrible because it allows me to stand idle in the presence of evil. That's also a well-hidden Shadow.
That's what Stopping can help us to uncover and heal.
A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittentlymissed . . . but eventually it will out.
JAMES HILLMAN
32
The Gift of Purpose
Purpose is the wonderful gift of Stopping that encourages us to go out from ourselves, to listen to what we might hear from the universe, and to discover our unique role in life. Purpose means that someone or something outside of you is looking at you and calling your name; you are being called to accomplish an objective, to be someone that only you can be, and to realize what is most essentially you. Another word to express the same idea is calling. The idea of vocation serves well. Stopping helps you to clarify or even discover your purpose, to hear your calling, and to realize your vocation.
Purpose is knowing that there is something far beyond us. And knowing that means that there are lots of events, moments, and realities of life that are not immediately identifiable and explainable by just the facts that we can see and prove. The sense of having a purpose gives balance to our human situation: not only do we meet the divine as we look within ourselves, as surely we do, but in the same moments of Stopping, we meet the divine in the call that reaches to us from beyond our
selves. This beyondness is the distinctive characteristic that underscores the importance of this gift of Stopping.
Having purpose acknowledges that you are named to be something that only you can be. Your challenge is to find it, discover it, wrestle with it, or do whatever is necessary to realize it.
James Hillman, an ever-insightful, if controversial, author, writes about this idea from a somewhat different perspective in his book, The Soul's Code. His theory, the acorn theory, briefly stated, is that we are born with a calling and the object of all of life is to discover and realize that calling. Hillman calls this growing down into the acorn. Instead of looking ahead to what we might become as we try to realize our inner potential, he suggests that we look back at the call we had been given at birth, even before birth, and try to allow its fulfillment. Realizing one's calling is to look out to the world for signs as well as back to the seed or gift with which we were born.
I believe he's on to something. If we miss this element of our Stopping experiences or if we only concentrate on validating our very personal desires and yearnings, we run a real risk of seeing the world purely subjectively and from a narrow point of view and, thus, of becoming selfish, overbearing, patronizing, and self-righteous. It can also make it easy to get stuck blaming someone else for our problems and to take ourselves way too seriously.
Trying to identify, to clarify, and to respond to our purpose, or trying to hear and realize our call, takes our gaze out to the world's horizons and up to God to see what in the world or what in the heavens is calling on us for service, for help, for joy, for entertainment, or for whatever it is that only we can give. And it also takes our gaze back into our personal histories to search for clues. It frees us from allowing introspection to become overly impressed with subjective intuitions and gives the objective intuitions a chance.
Purpose and calling have a power of their own; they always want to come out and have life. Having a sense of your calling is having a sense of the presence of something other than yourself. Perhaps when you were younger there was a moment when you came in touch with that something beyond. You knew that you wanted to do something and to be something. Perhaps it just struck you and you knew or maybe it was more subtle. As Hillman says, “The call may have been more like gentle pushings in the stream in which you drifted unknowingly to a particular spot on the bank.” As you look back, you have a sense that something beyond you was involved. It is also important to remember that it is never too late to hear your call; now is always the right time.
Hillman tells a story about world famous singer Ella Fitzgerald. As a young girl she was in an amateur night event. She was introduced: “Miss Fitzgerald here is gonna dance for us . . . Hold it, hold it. Now what's your problem, honey? . . . Correction, folks. Miss Fitzgerald has changed her mind. She's not gonna dance, she's gonna sing.” She won first prize. Though she had meant to dance, something told her to sing, and that was the start of a long, successful career. Hillman tells the story to demonstrate his acorn theory and that it often shows itself early and unexpectedly.
The gift of purpose is especially realized during the longer times of Stopovers and Grinding Halts, dealing as they do with the broad questions of calling and vocation.
It isn't only the famous of the world who have a purpose. We all do. And most often it does not make itself known as dramatically or as early as Ella Fitzgerald's. Stopping is very much about recognizing and realizing your calling and identifying and fulfilling your purpose. We have to be still, quiet, undistracted, and awake enough to hear it. For to miss it would be tragic.
IV
Exploring the Challenges of Stopping
There is more to life thanincreasing its speed.
MOHANDAS GANDHI
33
Moving Down to the Roots
We are at a critical point on our journey with Stopping because we now have enough information to see that Stopping asks us to do something radical. Stopping is not complicated, is not difficult to understand, and is not even difficult to do. But it is radical. Stopping is not slowing down. Stopping is stopping. The effect will be to slow us down, yes, but the primary act is doing nothing, ceasing activity, and being still.
“Radical?” you might think, “I don't do radical!” But radical can be very simple. Banish the common images associated with it—starvation fasts, street riots, or someone's liberation army— and simply move the energy down deep and into your roots.
That's what radical really means. Here's Webster's definition of radical: “from a root or relating to the origin: fundamental.” Stopping brings you to your origins and to what is fundamentally you. It brings you to your true home. It reaches deeply into your soul. And we don't go there often; we're not used to the territory because the problem of too much is keeping us distracted.
Take a moment and allow yourself to form a mental image of a tree. What you probably have in your mind's eye is really only part of a tree: the part you see. But the whole tree includes a root structure as broad and deep as the branches are high and wide. A whole tree is actually a trunk between two equal masses of branches and roots.
Stopping is an energy that is radical because it takes you down to the roots of the tree that is you, down to the sources of your life. Those roots, which are not so obvious but are essential, are the necessary balance to the more active, external, and obvious branches of life.
So if Stopping is so great and wonderful, is so easy to do, and gives so many benefits, why don't we all just do it? Because we have received powerful anti-Stopping messages from society telling us it is bad, and because most of us are afraid of what we'll discover down there in the roots of ourselves; we're unfamiliar with the territory and we want to avoid it, if possible.
The goal of this section is to help you feel competent and confident as you deal with the challenges you may encounter with Stopping. To that end, please keep these important facts in mind: the fears you might face as you are Stopped are almost always not as bad as you might think; there are ways to deal with them that are satisfying and effective; if you have some overwhelming fears, there are safe ways to get help; and to not face your fears is to leave unexplored way too much of a vibrant, gift-filled life.
Our first challenge is the intense and potent anti-Stopping messages our culture has been imparting to us since childhood.
We have lived not in proportion to thenumber of years we have spent on the earth,but in proportion as we have enjoyed.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
34
When Society Says “Don't”
We live in a world that is not very open or friendly to Stopping. Our society's voices often say, “Keep going, don't stop!” So in order to Stop, we need to release the hold that our culture's unspoken but powerful messages have on us. Here are some of the ideas behind the anti-Stopping voices:
Leisure is a luxury you can't afford.
Pleasure-seekers end up in hell.
To get ahead you must work more hours.
You have to keep up with the Joneses.
Doing nothing is slothful and lazy.
If it's faster, it's obviously better.
Growth is always good.
Money is always the bottom line.
More is always better than less.
Play is only for children.
The list of lies is endless, and it is often very difficult to resist believing them. They sound pretty good. We often hear them coming from our own lips.
When we stop to think about them, we know that these statements are not true. But only when we Stop to think about them. If we don't, the danger is that they will have their way with us. We get distracted, we forget, and it's easier to just go along with them. Notice that they all argue against Stopping and taking time out for yourself and for those around you.
There are also many voices saying that, in effect, life is a most serious business. But just what does serious mean? The dictionary indicates that its first and most important meaning is “tho
ughtful.” So in that case, yes, life must be serious and we must live it thoughtfully. But not grimly. The word serious with its meanings of “grim, heavy, no-fun-allowed, and painful,” I would suggest, is not applicable to Stopping.
Often, it seems, organized religions can give the idea that life is serious in the grim kind of way. One need only think of the imperiousness of Vatican pronouncements, of the Seven Deadly Sins, and of the rules, regulations, and prohibitions of many religions. The international memorial of the Protestant Reformation in Geneva, Switzerland, supports this as well. The memorial is a three-hundred-foot-long wall of granite with fifteen-foot statues of an unsmiling Calvin, Knox, and Cromwell who are protected by an equally long moat of water; it says serious with a capital S. And the depictions of Moses with the Ten Commandments? Nothing to be taken lightly for sure.
I want to be the first to support religions in their effort to make us more thoughtful about how we live our lives. I also want to be the first to speak against their unfortunate propensity to kill people's spirits by oppressive, grim, and meaningless injunctions and attitudes. Life is hard enough on its own. Let's not needlessly multiply sins. We have enough of those, too.
Robert Ornstein and David Sobel understand this idea and express it in their book, Healthy Pleasures. They say, “Combining an archaic religiosity with a sensory-deprived world is to place two prisons together. The result is a life lost not only to this world but to the next.” Archaic religiosity is a false or excessive religiousness. Combine that with our tendency to ignore the pleasures of the natural world and, say the authors, you are succeeding not only in missing life on earth, but are also trying to bully your way into a very restrictive heaven with a frowning and determined grimace on your face. Who would want to go to that kind of heaven?