by Elle Luna
I was judgmental about selfish people. People who put themselves first, who are really vocal about their needs and cause conflicts to get what they want, grated on my nerves. Selfish was not OK in my book so I devised a way to ensure I was never called selfish. I would show everyone I met how cooperative and easygoing I could be. I would defend other people and causes and stand up for the rights of others, but I wouldn’t stand up for myself and tarnish my reputation as a giving and kind person.
This defense mechanism worked exquisitely until I needed something. I always felt wonderful when someone would say how easy it was to be around me, or how spiritual and unconditionally loving I was. It was a good gig. However, when I started to have health problems as a result of people smoking cigarettes around me, or when I found that eating certain foods caused stomachaches, I was challenged. It started to seem odd watching myself go through physical pain rather than make waves by saying, “Please don’t smoke around me,” or “I’m sorry, but I can’t eat that lovely dish you have prepared.”
It wasn’t until I was in a graduate program in psychology that I got a window view into the absurdity of this ego stance. I was in a role-play where each person had to vote on who would get kicked off a fictional lifeboat. There were nine people but only room for eight, so someone needed to be sacrificed for the others to survive. I figured the polite thing to do was to vote myself off. Well, I was surprised to find that everyone else had voted me off as well (because everyone else had children). I was shocked. No one, not even I, looked out for my own life.
If I was so selfless, how could I be kicked off? It would be like kicking a kitten out of the boat. I was sure people would opt to keep me because I was so easygoing and loving. Not only had my defense not worked, but my offer to sacrifice myself meant just that. I would die.
It was then that I started to remember myself as a child, terrified of admitting I had needs, especially if it was a need that I didn’t understand how to meet. I had somehow concluded that asking for help or insisting on having something I needed was contrary to my survival. I would put off doing things that were in my own best interest. As a nine-year-old, self-sacrifice was my go-to behavior, but it didn’t work. My self-sacrificing was not done out of love, but out of fear and a need to be loved. I was so cooperative that I assumed others would look out for my needs. I would let others make decisions for me rather than voice my needs and risk upsetting others.
I had to learn that not only was it OK to act in my own self-interest, but that I had to be the one to look out for my survival. My friends and lovers were interested in helping but not in being responsible for me. They weren’t interested in someone who did not state her preferences or stand up for herself. They were tired of the burden of guessing what I needed and trying to make sure I got it.
I have gradually learned to say what I think, take care of myself, and not sacrifice myself needlessly to the whims of others.
Your personal story
Focus you story
On note cards, write down short versions of eight to ten stories you tell yourself about yourself. Have these stories changed over time? For Susie, she learned that part of her personal story was:
I should always take care of everyone else before myself
Next, pin all of your cards up on a wall and look at them as a set.
As you look at the cards, start to look for patterns. Maybe part of your story is “I am good at accommodating difficult people (Personal Story) because I come from a family who is here to make positive change in the world (Family Story).” Or, “I’ve never been good at using my voice (Personal Story) because I learned from an early age not to rock the boat (Cultural Story).” Or, “I was loved as a girl (Family Story), but I have felt less loved as I have become an older woman (Cultural Story).”
Now, looking at your note-card wall and using the examples from Susie’s and Elle’s stories, what features of your survival strategies are no longer working in a positive way?
Do you see any parts that you would like to shift? Are there any aspects of your story that you want to come forward and play a larger role in your life? By using cards, you can see the significant beats of your life story—which otherwise would be sprawling and difficult to grasp—and study them.
For example, you may assess the difference between real fear and imagined fear. Or you may identify a behavior that has grown so strong that it has become fanatical and is actually causing the opposite of the intended effect. Susie experienced this when she realized her survival strategy was to be a Peacemaker, not making any waves and being invisible. Once she was able to see the effects of this story she had been telling herself about herself, she realized there was no way she could keep behaving that way, and she needed to change. She made it a goal to begin expressing her needs, in small ways at first, by saying, for example, where she wanted to go to dinner if she was in a group. As she got more comfortable, she focused on larger issues, such as telling her father how she wanted him to treat her.
Looking at your own cards, you can choose where you want your
story to go next.
Part Three
The Center of Your Story
“The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path . . . and where we had thought to slay another. We shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”—Joseph Campbell Mythologist
You have seen how stories have affected you; you may have gained insight into internal structures of your mind that you inherited from your family or community; you may have seen how your ego built ways to keep you safe; and now, you are seeing how those same structures, stories, and strategies might actually be obsolete. This path is the meandering, spiraling journey toward the center of the labyrinth.
This work and its rewards tend to evolve over time, but the first steps are here.
The journey to the center of your story is, in a sense, the journey to the present moment. It can be helpful to learn to quiet what Buddhists call the “monkey mind,” or “chattering mind.”
In this deep inner-silence, you might encounter a higher truth or profound voice from within.
“The labyrinth is a mirror of the soul.”—Kate Wolf-Pizor Psychotherapist
At Chartres Cathedral in France, there is a labyrinth at the center of the church. Its design is unique; it looks like a flower with six petals, and the stem is the walkway both in and out. We see this as a metaphor or a reminder that there is only one way into yourself and one way out because you are the container of yourself. You are the only entrance to you. And it is here that you can be alone with yourself and enjoy the emptiness of the space. If you see others at the center inside of you, they are merely aspects of your history and the culture that has shaped you. Only you can be at the center of you.
Once you have identified some of the influences and forces in your life that have led you to be who you are, you can imagine a way of looking at the world through fresh eyes. Because you are now at the center, awake to the influences of the aspects of your psyche. Maybe you discovered that there are aspects of yourself that you desire to bring forward.
Imagine Cinderella walking the labyrinth. She’s a woman who wants to change her life—in her situation, that means meeting a prince. Her stepmother’s and stepsisters’ complaints and directives are a metaphor for how the mind works. “You can’t have this, you can’t have that. . .
And if you do . . . Then you should . . . ” Imagine Cinderella finally getting to the center of the labyrinth, having let go of those voices, and exclaiming, “But I want to meet the prince!” And, as heroines do, even amidst her horrible situation, she uses the power of her imagination to visualize what she wants, and a plan emerges that will help her achieve her dream. In some versions of the story, Cinderella sits in her corner
of the kitchen imagining a better life.
It is then that her fairy god(dess)mother, the symbol of that part of us that can think in new ways, comes forth. She waves a wand, and Cinderella gets all she needs to meet the prince. It seems as if this is all done by “magic” and is a temporary illusion, but there is the slipper that somehow remains material. In a sense, the slipper becomes the bridge between imagining and manifesting.
This is our dream for you—that you have access to your imagination to help you achieve what you want from life. As you enter into the heart of your story, here are some tips and tricks to help the process of transformation.
“In my own little corner in my own little chair I can be whatever I want to be. Oh the wings of my fancy I can fly anywhere and the world will open its arms to me.”—Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella
You are in charge of you internal world
Call them your inner committee or your mind family—there are many voices that offer opinions or advice on your actions. In many spiritual traditions, becoming aware of these voices and then learning to separate from them is an important goal. When you recognize all of the different parts of yourself and hear each one, you begin to realize that you are separate from those voices. As you gradually become aware of all of your inner voices, the more you will be able to choose—in real time—how you want your story to unfold.
Honor the aspects of your personality that have helped you to survive so far.
It’s important to give credit where it’s due. We have all developed aspects of our internal world that have simply been trying to keep us safe and protect us. For instance, the part of you that says, “Don’t fall in love!” is a protective muscle. While we might want to relax these parts of ourselves, it’s important to honor and thank the parts of you that did the best they could to protect you.
A Japanese martial art called Aikido exemplifies this practice.
Aikido was developed to protect both the person being attacked and the attacker from injury. For example, if an attacker is running full speed at an Aikido practitioner, the person being attacked would try to both defend and redirect, or turn the energy back on the attacker and then quickly bring them to a place of rest so that no one gets hurt. You’ve probably seen an example of this if you’ve seen a martial arts scenario where the attacker appears to be effortlessly deflected and flipped into a prone position. Aikido emphasizes compassion for the well-being of the attacker. You can practice Aikido, in a way, by extending compassion to the parts of your internal world that have been “attacking” you.
This might be the most powerful practice that you can use in your internal world. It will reward you for life if you put the effort into it. As you gently bring self-awareness to your inner voices and fixations, you will gain the capacity to fire, hire, or retrain those voices and fixations.
Your fixations, having been developed early in life in order to keep you safe, are fierce. They have been in charge for a reason, and that is exactly what makes this work difficult. Retraining old inner voices, giving them new tasks, or asking them to stop doing old things and start doing new things might feel threatening. You might even feel like a part of you is dying. But this is what’s necessary for you to take control of your inner world and your story. You will see incredible change in your life if you stick with it.
When Susie began dealing with her inner misogynist, she would imagine that it was an inner voice sitting on her board of directors, and she would talk directly to it, as though it was real and present. First, she would give it credit, saying,
Thank you for helping me to survive so far.
Then, she would say specifically how she wanted to retrain it, adding,
I no longer want you to report to me in a critical way.
Finally, she would tell this very real part of her what would happen if it didn’t start to change its tune, saying,
If you keep talking to me critically, I will practice ignoring you.
As you dialogue with your own inner voices, you will be able to listen as they retire their defenses and get in line, doing what you want them to do and helping you write the story that you want to be living.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, or their background, or their religion. People must learn to hater, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”—Nelson Mandela Former President of South Africa
Assign new tasks
In your own inner world, every part of you wants to be a team player and stay on the field. This is important to remember: All the parts of yourself want to be a part of you; they just might need some training and counsel on how to do it.
I would speak with the different parts of myself in real time by bringing awareness to the internal dialogue in my head. One day, I was crossing the street in San Francisco when I saw another woman crossing the street toward me. In my head, I heard a voice—my inner misogynist—say something horrible about the woman based on her appearance. Right then and there, I remembered my practice of using the process of naming the voice and telling it to change its tune. I told my inner misogynist that it was not okay to talk that way, and that it needed to say something nice to the woman. At the moment that thought occurred, the woman sneezed, and I got to say, “Bless you.”
When you take one step toward the gods the gods take ten steps toward you.
Find a special object
From the Holy Grail to the Glass Slipper, special objects have symbolized important journeys. What is yours? This object might be something that caught your eye as a child or something that you have held close to your heart. Maybe it is an object that you wish you could have had, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, or maybe it is a recurring image that always feels particularly potent for you.
For Elle, she began to have a recurring dream about a white room. It had tall white walls, warehouse windows, and a cement floor. Eventually, she began to look for this dream in real life, and one day she found it: a warehouse for rent in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. On her first night in the white room she had visualized in her dreams, she began to panic because she didn’t understand why this dream had called to her. “Why am I here?” she asked, and the room replied, “It’s time to paint.” While she had painted all the time as a little girl and even into college, somewhere along the way she just got busy and forgot about it. Honoring this dream is what inspired Elle to return to her life-affirming practice of creating art.
Dreams, objects, and images have the power to transform your life. They bridge the world of imagination to the here and now, and they give us courage when we are trying something new and potentially uncomfortable. For Cinderella, she left her glass slipper at the ball, which did not disappear like the rest of her magical gear that her fairy god(dess)mother conjured for her. Then the prince showed up with it, still in material form. The slipper can be seen as the bridge between the imagined and real world.
When I was in Mexico in my twenties, I fell in love with the images of conch shells on the ancient pyramids there. I’ve visualized them many times over the years for their beauty and lasting power. Years after Mexico, I was at Mount Everest base camp and had a vision that I was meant to help lead women to find their power. The voice, which I call the internal misogynist, told me that the vision was vain and narcissistic. Who was I to suppose I could do such a thing? I tucked the vision away in the back of my mind, but never forgot it. Years later, I was given a fossil of a version of a conch shell. It was from the Mount Everest base camp! And it is the Tibetan symbol of awakening! Its symbolism includes focusing on your welfare and that of others. It was as if I were being knocked on the head with a sign that what I was longing for was also trying to find me so I could realize my vision. That was when I began to more consciously speak my mind. By doing that, I began to put myself in a position where people started
asking me my opinions and eventually to take on leadership positions.
As you continue gently bringing self-awareness to your inner world, you are already beginning to take the story back from the storytellers, both real and imagined. And you get to decide what happens next. When you feel you can help choose the direction of your story, or how you feel about your story, joy starts to seep in, allowing for optimism and mirth to become your travel partners as you venture forth.
“The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that in comedy the characters figure out reality in time to do something about it.”—Bennett W. Goodspeed Economic Advisor
Part Four
Why Feminine Power is the Best Way Forward
“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”—Anaïs Nin Author and Essayist
Have you ever had a moment when things seemed totally aligned and exactly as they should be? Artists and writers often call this an epiphany, saying that the lyrics to a song simply “arrived” without any effort, as though from a place beyond themselves. It has also been called a “runner’s high” or an endorphin rush, which is a fleeting surge of positive energy. Can you recall a time when you felt that everything was aligned and at peace in your life? Maybe it was a moment where you had utter certainty—even if it was about a difficult thing—or a feeling that everything was going to be okay, or maybe you felt at peace and confident in the future.