(This is Part 22 of a series. Go back to Part 21.)
When deep shadow and misfortune fall upon us, our first response is usually to feel as if we're lost at sea, as indeed we are. The familiar can seem strange, or it can feel as if we've somehow landed in unfamiliar territory. We're lost our way, our path; we no longer have our bearings.
This is how Dante describes himself in the first section of
The Divine Comedy. In the middle of his life he suddenly found himself lost in a dark forest, with all of his exits blocked. Significantly, he couldn't just ascend to heaven; he had to pass through hell first.
So it is with us. We can't just ignore the shadow in our lives; we must deal with it. In order to find heaven we must use the shadow as a means for growth—that is the shadow's enormous potential gift to us.
But how to do that? Is there a basic principle involved in this alchemy? Indeed there is:
The basic principle for transforming the shadow into light is to break the pattern.
Let's take an example: Let's say that we get irritated or angry a lot and that we often act this out in, say, sarcastic accusations, hostile confrontations or even violence. If we have some history of reacting in such ways we have a deep "groove" in the brain that predisposes us to react in those ways again and again.
The essential idea is to do something—almost anything—to break the pattern. Perhaps we simply walk away for a while when we feel the urge to be hostile or pugnacious
yet again. Or perhaps we sit down and do tonglen for awhile instead of immediately acting out the old ways; that is also a breaking of the pattern.
Or let's say we're about to have another confrontation with our significant other. Instead of another scenario of bitter accusation and argument we might try Ken Keyes' SOS technique (described elsewhere in these pages) where we each in turn listen deeply to what the other is saying and then reflect it back to them.
Another example is the time, described earlier, when I was driving home from a seminar—sunk deep in hopeless and suicidal thoughts and feelings—and suddenly was able to "jump out" of my own mind for the first time. It was the breaking of an old mental-emotional pattern.
Or let's say that we find ourselves often trying to control everyone and everything around us. I can remember being elected to a kind of student council in graduate school in the late 1960s and trying very hard to control the council. I was kicked out of it, and in looking back, rightly so. I was more interested in control, in the service of my ego, than I was in productive, harmonious council business.
Gradually, over many decades—why do you suppose I'm named "Mr. Slo-man"?—I began to see that it was more satisfying to flow with the river—not to mention a great deal more effective—than to try to control it.
This doesn't mean that we don't take action, including effective action. Rather, it just means that deep down
our actions feel somehow aligned and harmonious with the flow of life. And if they don't, if we often seem to be "battling upstream", perhaps it's time to look at where we're holding on. Where's our death-grip? What are the outcomes that we're saying we have to have to be happy?
All breaking of patterns, to some extent, requires a degree of self-observation. Otherwise we can go on for many years never noticing our own rigidity and automaticity in reacting to situations—a rigidity which often contributes mightily to bringing about the shadow in our lives and in the lives of others.
One of the most effective ways of breaking patterns is to consciously let go of the outcome. In the Hindu classic
The Bhagavad Gita, when Arjuna is facing a dilemma Krishna (God) says approximately this to him: "Play the role that you find yourself in to the best of your ability, but leave the outcome to me".
The precise way in which we break a pattern is far less important than the attempt to do so. And if we can't break the pattern yet, we can notice that. Even just the noticing that we have a pattern is already a partial breaking of it. It's already loosening the rigidity of it.
Once a pattern is broken, even if only temporarily, other possibilities open up to us. For one thing, we can more easily see how we're caught in the pattern. For another, we find it much easier to break the pattern the next time, and the next and the next.
However we break a pattern, we find that we have more freedom of action instead of slavishly following the old tendencies. Every time we do this we become a little less robotic, a little more free.
In fact, full awakening or liberation has sometimes been described—one dimension of it, anyway—as just being free of conditioning. This doesn't mean that conditioned thoughts and feelings can't surface into consciousness now and then; of course they can. But we don't buy into them any longer; that's the difference. That's the freedom.
(This is the end of Part 22. Go to Part 23.)
—jim sloman, 1.13.06
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