Category: Personal Development

A Richer Life Through Symbols

Our world is soaked with symbols. Everywhere we look, we encounter familiar, stylized emblems that carry meaning in our culture, such as hearts, four-leafed clovers, rainbows, wings, shields, stars, and mythical creatures. 

Symbols are deliberately used by nations, businesses, and sports teams because of the impact they tend to have on the psyche. 

If we pay attention, we’ll see that symbols are not only man-made but also inherent to our natural environment. From the perspective of psychology, everything in our awareness is symbolic in one way or another. 

If we long to live by the sea, that has a symbolic as well as a literal meaning. If we want to plant strawberries in our front yard, or we would prefer to happen upon wild strawberries as a surprise in the forest, each of these has slightly different symbolic meanings. 

When I say something is symbolic, I mean that there are layers to what it can mean, beyond the literal. Planting is symbolic. Strawberries are symbolic. Front is symbolic. Yard is symbolic. Finding is symbolic. Wild as well.

Life can feel richer, more meaningful, creative and important through realizing the power of personal symbols.

Psyche’s Native Language is Symbols

Psyche, which is that aspect of us that lends the juice to life, the feeling of something being worthwhile, important, and satisfying, speaks in the native tongue of symbols.

Psyche communicates with other psyches all the time, whether we are conscious of what we are communicating and receiving, or not.

Psyche speaks poetically. Our own personal psyche, as well as the shared collective psyche of the oneness we are all inside of, uses metaphors, similes, analogies, and imagery. 

Imagery is always Multi-Sensory

Imagery means not just visuals, but also body and movement sensations, sounds and musical phrases, scents and aromas. 

Images appear in all of the body’s sensory channels at once. For example, the image “I’m swimming upstream” has:

visual dimensions (blue-green-gold of a stream, moving water, blurry because your eyes are underwater, etc)
felt-sense  dimensions (how it feels to be immersed, to get your hair wet, to exert physical effort against a stronger flow, etc)
auditory (how it sounds in a rushing river, how acoustics are muffled and changed once our ears are underwater, the sounds of breath, clanging rocks, etc)
olfactory (something brackish, or fresh, or pristine or green-smelling) 

In addition to appearing in our sense channels, images are also always symbols, carrying layer upon layer of poetic and dream meaning too. A beach is a beach, but it is also a symbol for, among other things, dreams, emotions, time, and a transitional space between worlds.

Any image is a point of entry to all of the other layers and can be mined or unpacked extensively for personal resonance. So whichever facet of an image comes to us first, we can find many other sides to the same symbol. 

Invitation to Explore Symbolic Resonance in Your Life

Choose one image, object, or symbol that’s in your life right now, that you find interesting for any reason. It can be something in your visual field right now. 

Start unpacking all the possible other meanings and resonances, through free-associating. Free-associating means writing down anything at all that this object or personal symbol makes you think of, in any order. 

For example, on my desk right now is a small beeswax candle. Starting with the beeswax candle, I am led to the following:

• light
• flickering
• melting
• seals
• warmth
• warm light
• long nights
• praying
• quiet time
• scent of honey
• scent of flowers
• scents of springtime
• sage flowers
• lupines
• pollen 
• pollinating
• collecting
• honey
• honeybees
• honeycomb
• hexagons
• soft structure
• wax 

Now choose a word from your list that you want to play with further.

Write about this word and what it means to you. Ask yourself, what might this image have to show you, teach you, or bring you this particular day? How can your life be enriched through this personal symbol?

I choose the word honey. 

I like honey because it’s sweet, it’s natural and wild, very precious. A special gift, you could find it quite by accident, in wilderness, in a rock or the heart of a tree. It’s secret. Gold. Ambrosia, nourishing, personal and intense. It might be a symbol of essence, spirit, of creativity, of how what really matters in life is intimate, protected, out of sight. 

This exploration helps me remember that what matters most to me might be small, hidden, wild, and private. 

What do your personal symbols show you?

How do you feel about your own personality? Do you like you? Could You Be Loved?

I’m not talking about the totality of you, just your personality. The one you seem to be to others. Who others take you to be at any given moment. Do you like her?

If you’re like me, you may feel ambivalent, even embarrassed, about your personality. You may have some “notes” for her. 

Your list of improvements might be quite long. Ways she could be better, things you think she could or should be doing differently. To draw less attention to herself, or perhaps more. Whatever it is, you’re not fully satisfied. 

Not Allowed to Like Ourselves

Many of us don’t allow ourselves to like who we are. I would venture to say that as women (and this is frequently true of other marginalized points of view), liking our own personality is a bit of a no-no. We’re supposed to always see and quickly point out before anyone else has to say it, where we need to get better.

It’s not very common that someone says, Gosh, you know what, I sure do like me, just as I am.

It’s ok that we practice humility. We do need to keep an eye on negative ego and shadows. We’re not crazy for being aware that anyone, at any time, can do things that aren’t good for life, that we would rather not do. It’s ok to remember we have to stay conscious, in a world that constantly begs us to go unconscious.

The difference between Ego and Personality

But the personality is not the same thing as the negative ego, painbody, or shadow. The personality is something much more organic, inherent, natural, and wonderful. 

It’s the positive version of our “small self”. Our little, down-here-on-the-surface-of-the-earth, boots-on-the-ground identity.

Our personalities showed the moment we first took breath. It’s who we were naturally, as children. Back then our true natures burned bright, could not be hidden or withheld.

It’s that personality, not our false self, that I’m asking you about. Do you like her?

Secret Love

Perhaps when I remind you of your most original self, you can admit that in a secret, private way, you love your little self. 

This is true of me, though it feels forbidden to say so out loud in most company. When I catch a glimpse of her, when I remember her, when I stop the learned practice of constant self-criticism, then what pops through is a strong, small flare of self-love. 

This is the love that Source has for each of us, as imperfect as we are. It sometimes shows up in our experience. It is natural and good, even if it is a secret love. 

One Precious You

We each are fully original, unrepeatable, never before seen and never to be seen again once we drop the body. We are precious. There is only ever going to be this one of us, in this form. Even if you believe in multiple incarnations, you will not be the same identity again. 

Why do we have to resist her, push her around? Why not support her? What would happen? 

The personality shouldn’t and can’t take over the entirety of our lifestream, but if we suppress it, do violence to it, it will suffer and ultimately, represent a source of problems for us.

When on the other hand, we really support our personality to be her full self, enjoying and celebrating her as the divine daughter of life that she actually is, that is when the personality will be able to really harmonize into the higher harmonics of our greater spirit. 

A Journal Invitation to You: Could You Be Loved?

Do you find your own true personality hard to love and accept? If so, why do you think that is? What is it that makes you want to reject or hide away this part of you, suppress or minimize her? 

Could you imagine an opposite approach, of truly supporting this part of you to be big and strong in the world? What would that look like? If fear comes up, what precisely do you fear would happen, if you let yourself grow this side of you?

What would change in your life, if you loved you, the human, heartbreaking, flawed, interesting, adorable, problematic, difficult, beautiful, extraordinary you?

Bob Marley sings, “Could you be loved?” Well, what do you say? Could you? 

Don’t let them fool you, or even try to school you

Love would never leave us alone. 

Authors with Authority

There is a connection between the word author and authority. When we are restored to the role of author of our own life stories, we also retrieve our authority. 

There is a form of therapy that especially embraces this truth, called Narrative Therapy. Narrative Therapy was developed in the 1980s in New Zealand by Michael White and David Epston. The two therapists developed the impactful techniques of Narrative Therapy specifically to help us restore agency, expertise, and power. 

By lending conscious attention to the way we tell stories about ourselves, others, and our world, we can take authorship back into our own hands. 

Narrative Therapy works because of a natural truth of the psyche, which is that we are made to be the protagonists of our own lives. We see life from our own point of view, as the heroes and heroines of our own story.

More clinically said, one of the core mechanisms of human psychology is to make sense of our experiences in the human body by telling a story about it. We forge a narrative that makes sense to us, to give order to an otherwise chaotic set of sense impressions. 

These narratives we make up live internally in our own heads, but are also very often shared with the world, out loud. What comes out of our mouths does so because of our core narratives.

What we say aloud is allowed. So let’s start looking at the stories we tell, and whether or not we want them to continue to be allowed. 

Writing Exercise for Rethinking Your Core Narrative

Step One: The Current Story

Start this writing exercise by setting a timer for 20 minutes. Write the entirety of your life story from birth until now. You may want to start with Once upon a time…

If you get caught up to today in sooner than 20 minutes, go back in and add details, flesh out details. 

If you didn’t get to your current day in the 20 minutes, give yourself a short extension of 5 minutes and complete your narrative. 

Step Two: Externalize Your Current Story

Now it’s time to take a look at your story by externalizing it. 

Externalizing your story means getting it out of you, getting some distance from it so you can see it with more objectivity, or simply from a new point of view. 

If you have a safe person who can hear your story, this is a good way to do it – read your story out loud to them. 

If you do not have such a person on hand, or would rather not share your story, record your own voice as you read your story. 

Listen back to yourself reading your story, and take notes of anything that seems relevant, including how you tell the story, the quality of your voice tone, and breath, any curiosities of wording, and anything that grabs your attention. 

Step Three: Deconstruction

Now it’s time to think about taking this story apart a little bit. 

Perhaps you may like to think of yourself as Agatha Christie’s famous fictional detective, Hercule Poirot, or Sherlock Holmes, poking holes in a story and seeing where the narrator might not be so completely reliable. 

Look out for anything that doesn’t actually make sense, or places where it seems that someone or something else has “told you to say that.” 

You can also put on your English teacher hat and see if you can break your story down into some core esthetic and creative themes.

If your life story were a bestselling book or a film, what would you say this story is about? What genre is it? What images, ideas, and metaphors seem to underpin the work?

Step Four: Rewrite Your Narrative

Now it’s time to make some amendments. You are the author of your life story and you are allowed to make changes during this writing exercise, to alter what you emphasize, what quality of light you want to shine on the events of your life. 

Maybe you want to add more humor, more compassion, more joy, more celebration, more self-recognition. Maybe you want to bring greater emphasis to your innocence, your valiance, or the role of your spirit, which has been with you all along, throughout your ups and downs. 

Setting a timer for 20 minutes, start from the beginning again, and re-tell it in a way that emphasizes things that make you feel better about who you are, and more optimistic. Lighten the tone, if you want to. Richen the details that you want to richen. Have fun with it. 

It’s your story to tell, after all. 

Human beings are precious. Every single one of us matters in life. We have the misfortune of not being able to understand that about ourselves and, often, other people.

And while we are resilient and able to endure and recover from the most mind-boggling array of assaults on human consciousness, we are not immune to the ravages and damages of long-term maltreatment in the form of self-neglect.

Even though we cannot always recognize and validate that we treat ourselves relatively poorly, because to us it’s just how it’s always been (water to the fish), the atrophy to our health is real when we withhold love from ourselves. 

Many of us treat ourselves with shocking contempt and utter ignorance of true human needs, essentially carrying on the abuse we grew up with.

Those of us with a tendency towards addiction are guilty of deep self-rejection of our real self and what it needs to thrive. Not only have we abused our physical bodies through repeated destructive behavior, but we have also deprived and mistreated our emotions and denied the soul’s needs. 

Many people end up with addiction problems because they don’t know how to care for themselves, treat themselves with love, respect, tenderness, self-support, and so on. Many of us are essentially feral before we learn otherwise, like animals that grew up on the streets and have no idea what it would be like to be genuinely wanted, cherished, and valued. 

We replaced actual care of ourselves with addiction, relying on substances to manage our symptoms of emotional pain, our varying states and moods, to get the many jobs of life done. 

When we get into recovery many of us learn how to care for human life for the first time, perhaps by watching those around us who have more sobriety under their belt. Healthy meals, sleep, exercise, mutual love, and friendship are new, learned behaviors for us. We gradually realize that much of what we lived without for so long, in terms of emotional support and self-care, is necessary to live soberly.

Here are three self-care and addiction recovery tips to help you along your journey.

1. Accept your Needs

Practice the point of view that human needs are neither good nor bad, they just are. Plants need sunlight, soil, water, and that is not a moral issue, it is simply what it takes for plants to thrive. 

We human beings need a lot of forms of nourishment – nutrients for every layer of our being. Since we are not only physical beings, but also emotional, mental, and spiritual ones, we have many different kinds of needs. And that’s ok. 

Rather than drawing up a balance sheet in your mind of which of your needs you do or do not deserve to have met, consider that all needs can be accepted, just as they are, whether or not they’re being met at the moment. Declare full amnesty for all sides of your humanity.   

2. Get to Know Your Needs

With the understanding that needs are neither good nor bad, just a fact of life, write out all the things you need, whether or not you are able to have them in your life at this time. 

Don’t be conservative, but rather generous with this list. Try not to worry about how you might meet those needs, focusing instead on merely naming what they are. For example, I need affection, attention, support, people to listen to me, people to have fun with, creative outlets. And more.   

For inspiration, you can look at the following list of universal human needs: https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs-inventory. Perhaps there’s something on this list you didn’t know you were allowed to want. You are!

3. Put Your Needs on the Schedule

Using your generous list of needs, make a sample self-care schedule, starting with all the needs of the body (healthy food, exercise, sleep, physical affection, etc), and gradually adding needs of the other layers of your being. What emotional needs do you also need to regularly meet? What mental, spiritual, sexual, relationship, friendship, or creative needs do you have? 

It can be helpful when doing the exercise to do two versions of the schedule: one is a realistic, grounded schedule based on your life as it is right now, in which you envision how you might meet your needs given your current circumstances. The second exercise is to allow your imagination to run wild with picturing all the beautiful ways these needs could get met, in an alternate reality free of restrictions. Using your creative imagination to fantasize about meeting your needs will help you experience these needs being met in the real world.  

Good luck!

The Saboteur Inside You

If you’re like me, there’s a side of you that’s problematic, a bit troublesome. Someone tucked away within who does not fully serve your highest wishes and intentions. 

This is the Inner Saboteur. 

We all have different sides to us, facets that seem more socially acceptable, wholesome and life-affirming, and others that are more violent, dark-hearted, and mysterious. It is the nature of humans to be somewhat shadow-bound, our souls dappled with places that have not touched the light in a long time. 

These areas, as frightening or repellent as they may be to us (and others), have a lot of power over our lives. Typically much more than we realize. Saboteur comes from these realms. 

Signs of Self-Sabotage

We can detect a Saboteur at work when we behave in ways that contradict our stated goals. 

For an easy example – we think we want to be happy, but we behave in ways that make happiness inaccessible to us. A great example of this is when we have addictions and can’t seem to shake them. At the conscious personality level we want to be free and happy, but apparently another portion of us wants us to stay ill and bound.

Saboteur wants destruction, death, to feed rather than quash our misery. This shadow version of us can create a lot of trouble for us, wrecking our well-laid plans, giving off energies that propel away the cooperation of others, hijacking and spoiling our intentions for higher good. 

Having an inner Saboteur inside is much more common than we may realize, and is a reason for deep self-compassion. Good news is that it’s not a death sentence, rather just one of those cryptic soul signals calling us to a deeper, wider life than we have yet lived. 

The Silver Lining

Like all of the “bad things in life”, the Saboteur, brutal as she can be for us, is actually a doorway into a greater experience of aliveness than we could have imagined for ourselves had she not torn the walls down for us. 

All of that said, it’s important to get to know the Saboteur within us or we can be worn down by the struggle against her. 

So, why do we self-sabotage?

Here are some tips for understanding why we self-sabotage and how to stop the cycle of self-sabotage.

Step 1: Acknowledge your Saboteur

The pathway out of self-sabotage starts, like most things, with first acknowledging the truth of the problem. Part of us does not want to be happy and free, and this part is working against us to destroy our progress towards health and wellbeing. OK. This is our Saboteur.

Step 2: Befriend your Saboteur

Having accepted that we have a side of us that destroys us in lesser or greater ways on the regular, we’re off to a great start. Once we accept that this is so, we can get to know this inner character and befriend her. 

It might seem frightening at first, but this person is only a version of us, and we need not be afraid of our own selves. When we remember that we get to be in charge of our own selves, that we ultimately have the power to retrieve our own life energies out of shadow-bindings, we can have the courage to make friends. 

Make friends as you would with anyone else: be nice, ask questions, approach gently and with curiosity and kindness.  

Step 3: Understand Your Saboteur’s Motivation

Once we’ve established a basic friendship with our Saboteur, by acknowledging her presence without aggression, she can tell us what’s really been going on for her there, deep in the shadows of our being. What emerges will be meaningful: there is always a reason that we self-sabotage which makes sense within the dream-like logic of the psyche. 

If you’re puzzled, look for some way in which self-sabotage has actually served your physiological survival. Perhaps sabotaging yourself fulfilled a need for self-punishment, for example, which was necessary to keep the love of a caregiver or to protect someone else within the family system from taking responsibility for themselves and their own pain. Look for child-logic and magical thinking. At some point you’ll have an a-ha moment about why the behavior of self-destruction makes sense in its own way.  

Step 4: Ask for Your Saboteur’s Cooperation

When you’ve spent a good amount of time understanding, accepting and recognizing your Saboteur for the ways she is actually trying to keep you safe and alive, you might get to the point where you can tell her that you would like to try to be happy now, and see if there’s anything you could do to gain her support. 

Many times the Saboteur is willing to stop hijacking your journey if she feels like she had a chance to air her concerns about the direction you are heading (or more likely, where you’ve been in the past, that she’s afraid you’ll return to). She will also feel much more at peace when she feels you safely in charge of the kingdom of your psyche, and will be more cooperative than you might expect.

With the power of the Saboteur working on your side, you will have new reserves of energy to help you move towards life in ways you could not have imagined previously.