The E in EXPAND.

 

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go. Theodore Roethke. The Waking

Slow down. Begin with settling on an experience to explore and consider what you hope to come away with. Make sure that the outcome you seek from this practice is something that is feasible. We can sabotage ourselves by framing questions in certain ways. For instance, “How do I get this person in my life to change?” I doubt you have the power to do that, but you could ask, “What do I need to comprehend about this relationship–something that I might be missing?”

Invite willingness, an inherent quality of an inquiry. Be willing to reflect on what comes up. To go where your Heart needs to. As a therapist I don’t presume to know what I will discover as I enter a session with a client, but I do want to understand the outcome they seek. Similarly, as I start my contemplative Work, I don’t know what I will find as it progresses, though I start with an intention, a willingness and trust that what is important eventually reveals itself. This is the Artist’s process, always a meeting of the known and the unknown. Whether you consider yourself creative or not, give yourself over to being influenced by whatever arises. It is helpful to believe, “I’m not creating this alone.”

From the beginning Warmup you have been widening your awareness, shifting states, and inviting more Inspired modes of attention so that everything and anything can be explored. Enlarging maintains this attitude but now focuses on what we have before us. As we reflect, we want to get deeper than our first thought.

As we remove the screens, the coverings, and look deeply, one way to tap creative juices is to “double.” This entails speaking for the card or the imagery in a collage, or a colored scarf or for the people or being(s) that you feel must be on your imaginative stage. This is a powerful strategy in psychodrama. It encourages what has not been spoken yet to be heard. In a Heart-drama, I would encourage that you take the time to “double” for whatever shows up. Of course, you don’t know what needs to be verbalized until it finds a way to language. Sometimes you will recognize some intelligence, even a brilliance, that is not yours but is speaking Truth, if not necessarily fact.

It is a psychic fact that this fantasy is happening, and it is as real as you—as a psychic entity—are real.

Carl Jung, CW, paragraph 753

Use a pad of paper and write down what occurs to you in this moment, however crazy it sounds. When possible, reduce it to a short statement. If that feels right, then go with that. If it doesn’t feel quite right, then take a breath and write down a different statement. It could even be a gesture or a sound that captures the attitude and stance. Ahhh! Ow! Shit or damn. This can take some time.

When we Enlarge, we gain:

• Awareness of different internal voices

• A “felt sense” of different states and energy forms.

• Awareness of the social systems that provide different attitudes and perspectives.

• Resources that have been elusive, both internal and external.

• We begin to differentiate from (rather than project on) others, and/or separate our own subjective ego-states, one from another.

I will list below some common directions a drama might take. But be aware, these are only where a drama could start or they are some of the landscapes you might traverse, terrain that opens up. It is not an exhaustive list, and frequently the inquiry will pivot to something different all together or you will traverse many places. Enlarging can take the most time within any given drama. Resist jumping to “the problem” so the ego can rush to “the solution.” Slow down. The reason we can feel disempowered in our attempt to heal and grow is that we don’t fully appreciate the territory, and we forget that challenges in life are not things to be solved.

1. Broken at Heart

Drama of Differentiation

“Neuroscience, social psychology, and artificial intelligence all agree that each of us consists of a multiplicity of identities that account for the richness and complexity of the human experience. In other words, no one is a “unitary” self.”

Daniel Siegel and Richard Schwartz

The Myth of Unitary Self: A Dialogue on the Multiplicity of Mind

 

In this drama, the focus is on internal differentiation. This is an important psychological property to explore, especially when you are conflicted, overwhelmed by competing pushes and pulls. Parts of the psyche can seem glommed together, with different revolving voices and urges. In such a noisy state, often we feel paralyzed, or we swing from position to position, not making any traction nor clarifying what we want or need.

Here it is necessary to deconstruct the notion of one mind. If I’m one mind, I can be diagnosed as a narcissist. If one mind, I can be judged as needy. Or I am the person who screws up relationships. If one mind, I’m the addict or the people-pleaser, the rage-aholic. I am the problem. These are the typical storyteller narratives (fallacies) that are coherent and thus so seductive. But what can I do if my one broken mind is the problem? If I am a singular unhealthy psychological identity, what is there to do except become a patient? Or become an inmate needing to be monitored or jailed?

Finding other energies in us, recognizing and separating out the conflicting and polarizing voices in us, identifying and naming whatever turns up, moves us beyond the common delusion that we’re one damaged thing. Such differentiation is what, I believe, IFS means by unblending. There’s tremendous power for healing in this. There’s also a clarity, and relief that comes from encountering and getting to know the true madness that has controlled, distracted, and impeded our psyche’s maturation. Coming to discern the neuro-gravitational pulls and inner personalities in conflict, the fragmentation that developed from mental injuries, we see the inner characters (and the dramas between characters) that have prompted so much of the repetitive life “problems.”

As we begin to make distinctions among these impulses and energies, as a variety of characters begin to people the stage in our imagination, we can experiment by bringing some closer, propelling others farther away. As we make these decisions, deliberately choreographing our inner realm, we begin to wonder, “Who is able to orchestrate in this way, to be this director?” Of course, I am arguing that the only capable director is Inspiration or the Inspired Self, sometimes called our True Self. It is remarkably liberating to channel the power to do this, freeing us from learned helplessness, disempowering diagnoses, and discouraging symptom-stories. Even if nothing more occurs in your Work, this can kick free enough debris so that the river of spontaneity and creativity begins to flow again. When that happens, healing continues long after you are consciously aware of it.

Differentiation is liberation.

Playing to Invite Discernment

Good conversation has an edge; it opens your eyes to something, quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates.          Hillman, The Soul’s Code.

To start, you might identify some aspect or inner voice, and then take an object or a scarf or something with color or designate a chair where this identified part of you—a voice, a feeling, a belief or injunction— can sit. If there is a conflict between parts, then designate two chairs or objects, etcetera, and stand outside the immediate drama to invite more insight. From this new vantage point, you may be able to speak soliloquies about their immediate thoughts and feelings; take turns sitting in their places, notice the sensation in their bodies, then step away again. This promotes dual awareness. How old are they? How do they feel about the other? Discern how their reality differs from your own time and place.

As you get to understand these energies, then they may be more willing and able to speak at length. They may be able to explain what they have long believed. To share their fears. To tell you what has driven them. This becomes an opening to share what you—as Inspired—know now, what they did not grasp then: an interpretation perhaps or understanding that is closer to the Truth.

Such a simple Enlarging strategy can lead to a new perspective. Or a softening of the inner conflict.

Challenging the Unitary Self

 

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

                                         Carl Jung, Mysterium Conjunctions 14, paragraph 147

 

Stuck in the House, we can spend time lingering on the different characters, the unexpected bear climbing out from under the crib, the bear-child clearly wanting to escape but stuck straddling the bars, half in-half out. The girl in the cellar, the dominant distressed bear on the stairs, the frightening Monster peering in. We can experiment, bringing some characters closer and inviting them to tell their compelling tales, propelling others farther away so we can better focus and return a sense of order. As we make these decisions, deliberately choreographing this inner realm, we are accessing Inspiration. This is remarkably liberating, especially if we have solely identified with just one of these personalities or if we have been stuck in the overwhelm and learned helplessness.

No longer simply painted, we are the viewer of the painting and better able to decide if we have outlived the disempowering diagnoses and discouraging stories.

Why this painting?

In the energies of Enlarging, we can see without just projecting our fears (bringing less projective identification to these energy forms in our psyche). We might identify with the bear on the stairs who seems stuck, at her wits end, unable to view what is True. But we see the whole—more of the house—so we are less confined in an ego story where life is predetermined. “Our painting has been painted! Life has been written! And we are flawed. irrevocably damaged, unlovable, incapable, bad or shameful.”

Inside Out:

The painting encourages us to step back and witness conflicts and paralysis and dissociative responses. If we are to be the Director (Artist) of your own drama, we must remain sufficiently in the Inspiration to stay separate enough from the characters and the action and to take different points of view. We must become a visitor to our own paintings, those individual representations that do not tell the whole story, conscious of the larger gallery, remaining curious, freed of the fear that we—one psychic entity—are fundamentally flawed, at core pathological.

Off course, early on in our Work, we may be flying blind, not fully seeing what is in front of us. This takes effort and time, however long it takes, before we can shift into a witnessing position.  What we find (because so many of us have been traumatized), the internal dialogues and the repetitive cycles can be rather predictable (common and, as patterns, often not very complex). We notice triggered states, activating sequences of the sympathetic nervous system. We fight, flee, submit, or collapse.

Upside down:

Paradoxically, recognizing that there is a complex inner world does not make us more fragmented but less. Differentiation prompts awareness, more connectivity and flexibility while stabilizing our sense of self. As we achieve increasing authentic integration, we are better able to push against the pressures to be absorbed into the hive-mind, to refuse the well-advertised narrative we are one person, capable of being diagnosed and treatment planned or punished. I will warn you; this Work makes it difficult to remain a content creative, especially if you are regurgitating the usual content from the culture and not creating art. Or if you are filling out applications requesting funding from the military industrial complex or from the pharmaceutical industrial complex or any other industrial complex. You could find it hard to even construct an elevator pitch to sell a product to the masses, or to design an enemies list.

And begin to see that whatever Influencers peddle to fix the apparent problem miss a fundamental multifaceted reality.

2. Heart Stopping

Drama of Internal Resistance

“It’s the part of our brain that worries about safety and dishes out anger. Being laughed at is the lizard brain’s worst nightmare. And so it shuts down our art.” Seth Godin ^]

When the drama of internal resistance takes shape, we explore what is keeping us from our objectives. Eventually, inevitably, we must meet the saboteur. Self-sabotage, of course, is not a new concept. We have all experienced a force that “shuts down our art.” Indeed, many writers have described internal resistance as a devilish creature living in our mind, an entity responsible for writer’s block, seeking to squash our best plans. It keeps us from evolving. It sets out to close the eyes of the Awakened Child, to denigrate the creations of the Artist, to ravage relationships or diminish our spiritual awareness and gratitude.

What animates the usual oppositional character is the fear that we (they) will fail, become overwhelmed, feel weak or powerless, or will be made fun of, “the lizard’s worst nightmare.” The usual calculus is that underneath you will find a wounded soul.

In the language of Internal Family Systems, resistance is an uncooperative Manager, a type of Protector. That seems closer to the reality of what we find, since the administrator refuses to cooperate, is filled with self-importance, resentment, and a commitment to easy dishonesty. It may have tapped a lot of our psychic energy over time, and, so, we can’t just get rid of it. In IFS, we must work to help re-channel its power. The objective is to eventually integrate all parts, align them to Beauty and Truth.

Perhaps that goal sounds bizarre? Even for a traditionally trained therapist, it can be revolutionary to see that the best way forward is to engage rather than to fight resistance. However, on the other hand, I don’t believe we want simply to accommodate, sympathize, or let sabotaging parts off the hook. The more we do this Work, the more we fully recognize and appreciate that some inner recalcitrant energies are poisonous and can stop our Heart in the very act of creation. Softness or compassion, even logic, gives some parts a license to retaliate or, at least, to dig in its heels harder. Their methods to resist us are numerous, but often take the form of distraction, condescension, invalidation, escalation, preoccupation with narrow concerns, spreading lies and contaminating others to create an echo-chamber. We may hear simple resistance internally nagging at us or it may show up around us, in the scorn of friends, coworkers, family, in the media, etc.

What to do? At the start, I encourage you to name these oppositional subpersonalities, depict them, sketch pictures of them, explore their stakes. What are the payoffs they seek? We do this examination not just for our own clarity but because some entities are prone to interpret silence or ambiguousness or confusion as capitulation. Which means they will get more persistent and confident and ugly. So, render them clearly until you recognize them when they come forward. Call them out. Spotlight them. I provide some names you can consider. But be creative. The more exotic designation and portrayal is the better. Perhaps the title: Monster, Abuser, Heart Invalidator, Soul-Erasure.

A Negative Aim

“Resistance cannot be sensed, touched, heard or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.” Steven Pressfield The War of Art

Engaging in combat is the opposite of capitulation. Like Steven Pressfield describing his constant battle with Resistance, Wayne Dyer suggested we need to clash against such pressures. His words were “scorch the ego,” recommending we make it submit—Excuses Be Gone. The danger is that an internal fracas tends to feed on itself. Resistance may get larger, more energized and become more of a looming presence in the psyche. People who are struggling with addictions typically want to rid themselves of this Self-deceptive energy, but it often has great power and cannot simply be cut off. If it is disowned, then it will go undercover—don an invisibility cloak—and pull at us without our knowledge. The method it employs here is a kind of trance induction, where you suddenly wake up and find yourself somewhere way off course.

There is a way forward that’s neither people-pleasing in the face of internal bullies and oppositional sadists nor is it fighting an exhausting war against our defenses. I have mentioned this and will again. In all dramas, the technique of role-reversing allows us to encounter and differentiate. We take the role of one energy and then another. You may use scarves or colors or objects or drawings or even detailed paintings to facilitate getting to know resistance, to step in and out of unyielding characters. In every dramatic focus, it always pays off when we courageously encounter what opposes us, though it requires a lot of effort and courage to press forward and not simply retreat.

The Enemy

The restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling. Blake, Heaven and Hell.

In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz describes a destructive force that the Toltec call “Domestication.” Similarly, Don Juan Matus in the Carlos Castanada stories names “the Enemy,” an entity that opposes our quest for knowledge and personal freedom. Carl Jung described the archetype that animated Hitler as Wotan—a powerful psychic “restless wanderer” that seizes us or captures a whole society collectively, unleashing irrational passions and savagery, leading to apocalyptic events.

These writers all describe extremely energetic forces of greater magnitude than our personal resistances. But they all share a similar refusal to get to know or understand what it does not want to know. Central is the effort to grind Inspired life to a halt, ceasing our heartfelt explorations, leaving a dark emptiness in the chest and dismissive eyes and a sneer (sometimes half disguised until it feels safe enough to be exposed).  This level of antagonist—Domestication, the Enemy, Wotan—of course seeks to erect barriers that hinder our personal growth and spiritual development, but it also is an immense malignancy, permeating through a culture and multiple generations, transcending our little individual struggles. It moves relentlessly and pervasively and can and has changed the course of human history, taking large swaths of people into unlivable disasters and violence.

Face-to-face with such ancient energy larger than us, even extensive role-play (with its potential for deep understanding) does not quiet the turmoil of the social world around us. It would take a great dose of magical thinking to imagine that we can Love such powers into accommodation.

What exactly is this force of nature (or against Nature)? How to we best denote it? Again, in our Work, we don’t assume to know it. We need to name it, discern what stands before us, move it from an abstraction to a character with some specificity so we can recognize it. Maybe we call it unfettered capitalism or misogyny or racism, or a culture of violence, slavery, authoritarianism, evil, or nationalism or hyper-religiosity. Whatever name you choose, when you encounter a person, or a family group, a collective, a nation-state that is enveloped by this dark cloak of potentially murderous opposition, expect that they will declare that you are the dangerous one, “You don’t know what you are talking about.” But they won’t debate or suffer questions. “Get over it. You just sound like a mad man. It is not that bad!” What you see in their eyes is blindness driven by a drive to repress what the Heart knows.

Any form of Resistance can contaminate, but these archetypal forces are especially contagious. They metastasize in the body politic and lead to pandemics of lost Heart and abandoned hope and insanity and raging fevers of hatred. When resentment fires up into mass psychosis, it prepares the ground for tyrants planning retribution.

I do believe all of us will face moments when we must refuse to capitulate. However dangerous a stance, the Heart will eventually call us to be like Gandalf who refused to allow passage to the demon from the underworld. We need to announce, Thou Shall Not Pass!

To bottom-line this, there are variations in appearance and different measures of magnitude in the opponents we meet when we select a drama of resistance. We do not know what we will meet at the start, not with assurance. A small egoic push back may abruptly perform a transmutation into a cultural monstrosity that haunts us (haunts us all). Sometimes what seemed humungous and unassailable will dissolve like the Cowardly Lion. What is the takeaway? Always attend carefully to what is on the stage—because fundamentally different forces can wear similar costumes and have multiple layers of meaning. I suggest we need to be flexible and to learn a variety of strategies. If something we try to settle the resistance doesn’t work, then try something else; expect different results from the same approach day to day.

Consider developing a morning practice that starts with honest reflection on how much influence self-sabotaging, self-deceptive, Heart-dissolving forces are exerting in your inner and outer life. To raise awareness, you might fill up a bag with rocks to represent the load you are carrying at the start of the day, take a moment to reflect on those ignoble powers that could have been stirred up in your dreams. Some days you may have a light burden; other days the entire social cosmos will seem contaminated by what can only be called evil. Seek to be aware of one or many vicious voices that prime you to be triggered, especially the ones that repeat. They are bombs waiting to detonate the bridge you need to cross to reach your potential. Prepare yourself for high-risk days or months or years.