Negative Belief #7: Natural urges are illicit or dangerous. Since there is no such thing as an artificial urge, all urges are natural. They arise from either a desire or a need. When the mind intervenes, however, any urge can become a danger. Eating a candy bar feels dangerous if you are obsessed with your weight. Loving somebody feels dangerous if you fear rejection. There is a tangled dance between what we feel and what we think we should feel, and everyone is caught up in the dance, which is why disputes over social values can lead to violence. People have a lot at stake in judging right from wrong, and invoking God or higher morality to justify their own sense of guilt and shame. The power of no insists that right and wrong are absolutes. Under its spell, you become afraid of what you actually feel. Unable to assess your feelings in a positive light, you allow them to become distorted. As a result, more and more energy is spent defending white against black, without regard for the fact that violence even in the defense of right is wrong.
From your soul’s perspective, all urges are based on legitimate needs. When the need is seen and fulfilled, the urge fades away, just as hunger fades once you eat. However, when a need is denied or judged against, it has no choice but to become more insistent. Urges build up, pushing against the resistance that is trying to hold them down. At a certain point this war between urge and resistance becomes so strident that you lose sight of the original need.
When someone is pulled toward illicit sexual urges, for example, it is all but certain that a simple need—for love, gratification, self-worth, or acceptance—has become deeply buried. All that’s visible is the illicit urge and the war it wages with shame and guilt. If the illicit urge is rage and hostility, the underlying need is almost always the need to be safe and unafraid. So the ultimate issue isn’t whether you can win the battle against our “bad” urges, but whether you can find the need that fuels them. When you can satisfy a basic need, impulse control is no longer a problem.
Stop seeing this as a matter of self-control. Every kind of urge comes and goes in everyone.
Be willing to stop judging against yourself. Bad urges don’t make you a bad person.
Know that neither side will ever win an internal war.
Don’t make this a test of willpower. Giving in to an urge isn’t proof that you need to discipline yourself even more.
Permissiveness isn’t a viable solution, any more than is its opposite, rigid self-discipline. Acting on your urges serves only as a temporary release of energy, like opening a steam gasket. There will always be more steam.
Your personal demons will get worse if you keep being ashamed of them.
Guilt is a perception, and all perceptions are open to change. You can’t instantly change guilt to approval, but you can see guilt as negotiable. When you remove the underlying energy that forces you to be guilty, a new perception can flower.
Realize that your soul never judges you. With that in mind, your aim is to live from the level of the soul. That is the final answer to the war between good and bad.
Breakthrough #2
Love Awakens the Soul
A breakthrough at the soul level expands love, but it also brings challenges. The soul takes God’s infinite love and steps it down to human scale. How much intensity of love you can receive depends on many things. Most people dream of more love in their lives, yet in reality the amount they have right now is what they have adapted to. There’s also the issue of how acceptable it is to show intense love. Not everyone would be comfortable if you suddenly confronted them with an onrush of unconditional love. They would wonder if this new kind of love could be trusted. In their heart of hearts they would worry that they didn’t deserve such open, complete love.
Many people have made momentary contact with the soul’s more intense, purer love. When they do, there’s a wonderful sense of awakening. Love awakens the soul. This happens because like is attracted to like. The soul isn’t passive. It vibrates in sympathy with you anytime you try to free yourself from limitations. There’s a similar sense of expansion and liberation when you experience beauty or truth. You are freeing up soul energy and letting it flow. The electricity in your house doesn’t provide light and heat until you flick a switch. Something very similar happens when you awaken the soul’s energy.
People experience a surge of the soul’s energy without knowing exactly how they did it. Without warning they glimpse unconditional love or feel God’s presence. There’s a sense of being blissful and unbounded. It suddenly feels real to go beyond all boundaries. Why, then, does everyday life draw them back down again? These privileged journeys into expanded awareness are almost always brief—a matter of moments, perhaps a few days, and rarely more than a few months.
Year after year the brain has adapted to a way of life in which it is normal to be much less than loving and joyful. Since you can’t force yourself to embrace something new, what will do it? The answer, I believe, is desire. The desire to love and be loved constantly urges each person forward. When that desire is most alive, we seek the most from life. When that desire flickers out, life becomes static.
Countless people prefer to exist without love because they are too afraid to risk whatever comfort they have; others have failed in love and feel wounded, or have grown bored with someone they once loved. For all these people, love has come to a stop, which means that an aspect of the soul is numb. To tell someone in that condition that love is infinite may be inspiring, but the inspiration is empty unless they can experience not infinite love, but the next step. And the next step is always the same: to awaken the soul. Because everyone is different, there’s no cut-and-dried method to achieve this. It may work to tell a lonely person to get out of the house and meet new people, go on a date, or join an Internet service that matches couples up. And it may not work at all.
The secret of desire
Why is love like water to one thirsty soul and yet rejected by another? I’m reminded of a poignant story told to me by a woman from the Southwest who retired from a lucrative media job to become a builder. She chose to buy land in the most dilapidated section of the barrio, where she intended to renovate a group of adobe houses. “It was a hard choice to be a builder in those surroundings,” she recalls. “I hired local workmen, but there was a lot of theft from the site. Many of the men were out of work and resented having a woman boss. Every day the kids on the block would gather at the curb to stare at me framing out a roof or plastering a wall. None of them had ever seen a new house being built, I imagine.
“Two kids caught my eye. Antonio was older than the others, maybe fifteen. He had a drug history and a string of arrests. But one day I came to the site and found a mural of the Virgin Mary painted on a wall. When I asked around, Antonio confessed that he had done it. So I made a secret pact with him. I bought him the materials that local painters used to make traditional retablos, holy pictures painted on tin. He eagerly went to work, and it wasn’t long before he had an active little business going. Nobody talked about what I’d done for him, but they knew.
“The other kid was a little girl, Carla, who was eight or nine, very bright and very curious. We got to be friends, and I met her mother. I was so touched by their sweetness, people who had almost nothing, that I went to the best private school in town and got the principal to agree to admit Carla on a full scholarship.
“I took time off and helped her mother send her off that first morning, and then I went back to work. Around one o’clock I looked over and saw Carla where she always was, standing with the other kids watching the workmen. She was no longer in her school dress. I felt very upset and ran down the street to the trailer where the family lived.
“I asked the mother what had gone wrong. Did Carla misbehave? Did the other kids pick on her? She looked away, not wanting to meet my eyes. ‘I went back at noon and took Carla home,’ she said. ‘You tried to do a nice thing, but she doesn’t belong there. She’d never fit in.’ I tried not to get angry. I coaxed and cajoled, but the mother was firm, and her little
girl never went back.”
The moral of this story is that love and desire must match. The spiritual path unfolds when you follow your heart’s desire. Inside everyone is a place that is intimate, alive, and full of yearning. It doesn’t focus on God, or salvation, or unconditional love. It focuses on the next thing it desires. If that next thing is fulfilled, there will be another next thing, and then another, and on and on. Religious traditions miss this very pragmatic point. They offer the final, glorious reward to people who can’t figure out how to get the next small reward. No religion can dictate from the outside. Only you are in touch with the living impulse of desire that wants to move ahead.
But what if the next thing you want to do is eat chocolate cake? What if your deepest hunger is for a second house or a third wife? The soul doesn’t judge your desires. It works with who you are and where you are now. The trick is to turn the path of desire, which for most people is focused on worldly things, and redirect it to a higher plane.
The problem of boundaries
As much as you may love chocolate cake or a second house, there’s a limit to the joy that material things bring. The great disadvantage to desire is that repetition kills joy. Couples face this problem in marriage, because daily life with another person, however much you love that person, involves a great deal of repetition. The standard advice is to add spice by doing something new. Surprise your husband with new lingerie. Surprise your wife with a vacation in Bermuda. This advice may work in the short run, but it’s only a temporary diversion. There’s a deeper answer based on the soul.
As your soul sees it, desire has no interest in repetition. It wants to go deeper. It wants more intensity, more meaning, more expansion. What keeps a marriage alive is that you see more to love in your partner; the possibilities grow over time. Intimacy with another person is an incredible discovery, for which there is no substitute. When you find such intimacy, you naturally want more—you want it to grow closer. On the other hand, desire that doesn’t go deeper, which circles around repeating the same pattern over and over, has somehow been diverted from its natural course.
If this description brings images to mind of a dog chasing its tail, or racing cars endlessly marking laps on the track, you have grasped the point perfectly. Desire that pursues its object while never gaining ground is stuck. A boundary acts like an invisible fence or a line that is not supposed to be crossed. Why do we put boundaries around our desires? First, to keep out uncomfortable experiences. Think of the times you’ve passed a panhandler or beggar on the street—or a Santa ringing a bell for charity at Christmas, for that matter. If you decide to freeze out their pleas, you put up an invisible barrier. Because it is psychological, a boundary can have emotional implications for the person who sets it in place. Imagine yourself as the panhandler instead. When you say “Spare change?” some people will simply ignore you; others will hurry their steps out of guilt; many more will be irritated or angry; a few might ironically toss you a penny or act deeply offended.
The second reason for putting up a boundary is to protect your comfort zone. Inside this zone you feel satisfied. You also feel safe and protected. There are many kinds of comfort zones. For every person who feels safe only when he or she is alone, there’s another who feels safe only when other people are around. But whatever kind of zone you have created, you are making it much harder to allow change into your life. When I was a medical intern rotating through various departments of the hospital, I learned some acute lessons about why people don’t change. One of my most vivid memories from a veterans hospital outside Boston was of leaning out the window of the cafeteria, watching patients down below.
Each patient was wheeled to the front door of the hospital, at which point he got up and walked away. A happy sight, you would think. But one day I saw a lung cancer patient under my care cross the street and enter a drugstore. Two minutes later he came out with a carton of cigarettes under his arm. He had already ripped open a pack and lit up the first smoke. When I pointed this out to a second-year oncology resident, he shrugged and told me that if he looked out the window, he’d see half of his patients doing the same thing. He had learned not to look.
This was thirty years ago, and fortunately the tide has turned against smoking. But the deeper point is that people will go a long way to protect their comfort zones and to fence out painful reality. Another memory from those days, this one from a time when I was on psychiatric rotation: a woman came in for evaluation, and as I was doing her workup, she revealed that she had four young children at home and a husband who had lost his job and started to drink. She was diabetic and many pounds overweight. I felt overwhelmed at what her life must be like, but when I asked her why she had come to the clinic, she said, “I have a feeling I’m depressed, but I can’t figure out why.”
Back then I assumed that offering kindness, sympathy, and caring would nourish everyone—I underestimated how protective boundaries really are, thinking they would be easy to tear down. Boundaries are made of frozen awareness, which is very elusive to understand. I had a very warm-hearted mentor on my psych rotation who was considered the most empathetic doctor in the hospital. He could get people to open up who seemed frozen and out of reach. He himself was a delightfully open, carefree person, and he used his natural charm to disarm frightened patients.
But he also had deep understanding of why these people were unreachable. It’s one thing to feel unloved, he said, but for some, “I am unlovable” is such a deeply ingrained belief that it feels like part of who they are. So when you expose them to love and caring, they flee. Why shouldn’t they? You are threatening to take away part of their identity, which would be threatening to anyone. Try going home next Christmas or Thanksgiving and being kind to the relative who bothers you the most. When you radiate love where once you radiated dislike, their response will probably be suspicion, and if you persist, they may become anxious or angry.
In short, our boundaries are part of our identities. The soul can change that identity, and the process begins by negotiating with your boundaries. You know, in your heart of hearts, that you aren’t truly safe, protected, or fulfilled. If you want those things to be real, several new assumptions come into play:
You are not so afraid of risk.
You don’t have to be right all the time.
You trust that love is meant for you.
You welcome the opportunity to expand.
You see abundance as natural to life.
You don’t expect anything.
These are powerful beliefs, and they all melt boundaries. Let’s take a closer look at how they work.
You are not so afraid of risk. Taking a risk is the same as stepping outside your boundary. We all want to be free, but anxiety holds us back. Every mother knows the look a toddler wears when it first tries to walk—it’s a mixture of curiosity, intention, anxiety, and open-eyed wonder. “What am I doing? I know I want to try this, but it feels wild.” That’s the look of a risk-taker. It expresses the mixed feelings that are inescapable when you abandon what you know for what you don’t. Boundaries try to convince us that risks are too dangerous. In truth, risk-taking is desire coaxing you to reach for something new.
People who avoid all risks are making a devil’s bargain. In exchange for limited fulfillment, they gain safety. But that safety is an illusion. The reality is that they are stuck, immobile. Think of an agoraphobe, someone who is afraid to go outdoors or into large open spaces. Staying at home feels safe at first, because the outside has been walled off. But as time passes, even the safety of being in the house starts to lose its effect. Now the agoraphobic sufferer finds himself feeling comfortable in only one room, and then a smaller room, until only the smallest room in the house brings any feeling of security. Why does the phobia progress this way? Because the desire to be outside can’t be stifled, and as it builds up, the phobia counters by creating tighter and tighter boundaries. Learning that risks are positive, that they allow you to grow, is an important step.
You don’t have to be right all the time. Being inside a limiting boundary is like being the ruler of a small island. You are in control, and the essence of control is always being right. I once met a strong-minded man, an executive in a large corporation, who had the annoying habit of contradicting everyone who tried to talk to him. His automatic reaction to any statement, no matter how obvious or innocuous, was “That’s not true” (or “There’s another way of looking at this,” “I’m not sure about that,” or “That’s a weak argument,” etc.). Apparently he was unaware that he did this. He had just gotten into the habit of making everyone else wrong so that he could always be right. An associate of his asked me to assess what was going on. I sat and listened while this man spent an hour contradicting each person he came into contact with. I decided to try the direct approach and pointed out that he had said “That’s not true” at least twice a minute all morning. Without the slightest hesitation he turned to me and said, “That’s not true.”
Notice how much is contained in those few words. “That’s not true” allows someone to shut out anyone who disagrees, and to put up a warning sign that reads, “Keep out. My mind is already closed.” Boundaries, it turns out, serve very complicated purposes; they can’t be defined purely as psychological defenses. In this case, learning that you don’t have to be right means learning to trust, because the basic need expressed is for control. The boundary is only strengthened if you challenge it; trying to prove to a control personality that he is wrong is futile. Instead, you must show, over and over, that your love can be trusted.
Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul Page 16