Lifeletter #119: What About The Small Self?

To be human is to engage in a constant process of development and evolution. We don’t stop developing just because we are adult. We don’t get to lean back, put our feet up on the sofa and say, “Great, I’m done now.” Too bad for us—life is a lot more demanding than that. Our human design is encoded with the evolutionary impulse, which is not the same as the impulse to fix, to correct or to ‘be a better person.’ Evolution and transformation are forces that expand our identity, and allow us to embrace a lot more of life, of reality, of our own experience. We don’t become ‘better,’ we become more and more whole.

And we can easily get stuck along the way. I certainly have been. It’s easy to have a glimpse of an expanded state of being, like unconditional love, or universal consciousness, and try to go directly there. If my life was a board game, I was always looking for the ‘get out of jail free’ card in the Monopoly world, or the ladder in the Snakes and Ladders game that would take me straight to the top. I wanted to zip right up that golden ladder, without having to deal with any more snakes pulling me back down. Unfortunately, there are snakes all over the place in the game of life. We can spiral back down into regressive behaviours and old patterns in the blink of an eye, if the right trigger comes along.

This tendency to go up and down, or forward and back, is exacerbated when we do not understand the process of adult development. We can contact our essential nature, we can glimpse what it is to be egoless, because that is who we are, at the core. What I am talking about is our capacity to live from this place. For many years, I didn’t understand that there are very specific stages we need to go through; and that it doesn’t work to try and skip over some of the steps. I’ve been very close to a lot of the suffering that happens in the field of communication and connection, when we try to skip these basic and essential steps.

There is a very evolved place I can reach, where I am able to communicate clearly and with freedom, from a space that is not limited by the conditions of my small, egoic self. To hear someone speak from this place is a very powerful experience. It brings healing and liberation to the whole field in which it happens. What we don’t always understand is that this vaster perspective actually unfolded by including everything within it. And that includes the small self, the one that calls itself ‘I.’

It’s becoming very obvious, at this point on planet earth, that the small self is creating a lot of destruction and chaos, due to its extremely limited perspective. Our chances of surviving our current global crisis are not looking at all good, if we stick with this confined and narrow identity. We are being called to open to something radically different. Sometimes it’s referred to as the ‘we space.’ More and more people are talking about this right now. We need to move from the ‘I’ to the ‘We.’

But here’s the place where we can get derailed. You can’t just jump into the we space and throw your small ‘I’ out the window. You evolve and expand into the we space, into the larger field, as your small self gets stronger and more healthy. And the small self grows as it learns to be more and more inclusive. This happens as you learn to express yourself, to find your true voice, and to receive other experiences and points of view. This speaking and listening, this offering out and taking in, is how your small self expands.

We can’t avoid this process, if we want to keep developing. And yet we do avoid it, because it’s a challenging and messy experience. Our whole culture avoids it. Learning to speak for ourselves, to express clearly and directly, from our own living experience, is not part of what we learn as we grow up. Nor do we learn how to really listen, to deeply attune ourselves to someone else, just as they are.

It’s very disconcerting to realize how much this essential aspect of becoming fully human has been overlooked. Our parents, our schools, our higher learning, our spiritual traditions, do not guide us through a basic process of discovering how to freely express our own experience and point of view, and listen to the experiences and view points of others. I work every day with highly educated people who have not been able to find their own true voice. They don’t know how to ask for what they want—they don’t even know what they want. They don’t know how to say ‘No.’ And they don’t know what to do when they are listening to a perspective that is radically different from their own.

And I am one of these people. I am still learning all of this, even after years of practice. To find your own voice, to really be true to that, and to slow down and become receptive enough to really hear the people around you—this is not a small thing, not an easy thing to undertake.

I think we have profoundly underestimated how crucial it is that each one of us develops this capacity: to respect and honour our real voice, without hiding and pretending to be different than we are. It’s like standing naked, a lot of the time. And how do we listen to the people in our lives, when what they are saying may disturb us deeply? The lack of this capacity is creating a great deal of isolation, disconnection and violence in our world. It’s making it very difficult to discover what intimacy really is.

In fact our whole relationship with this small and very fragile self is not very healthy at all. We spend our time berating this self, denying it and disowning it, or inflating it and defending it. To simply commit to learning how to express myself, just as I am, and to listening to you, taking you in, just as you are—this is where I have to start. It’s not very glamorous; it’s quite demanding and humbling. And it feels to me like the very beginning of love.

I have called even my voice in close to whisper with it:
Every secret is as near as your fingers.
If your heart stutters with pain and hope,
Bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.

                                                                                                           ~ David Wagoner ~

with love

Shayla