Episode 31: Awareness Talking Points

Talking truth about "self-improvement" as it relates to health, overall wellness, and expressing the truest version of you. This is Marta Mrotek with Something Honest…..

Sometimes it feels like I spent my whole life looking for a hero. I got lost in other people and their problems and their feelings when I was still just a little girl … and some of that was self-protection, and honestly, maybe some of it was to be expected considering the circumstances. I felt like I lost my champion and my defender when my mom got sick, and I didn’t know how to be that for me in a healthy way. That’s one of the things that’s especially difficult for those of us who struggle with codependency, especially when that struggle starts at a very young age. You can start losing your sense of self and start defining Self-awareness as something that feels more like self-censorship, self-judgment, or self-control. But that’s not what it is, and it's definitely not what we’re talking about here...

Today we’re gonna start talking about the principle of awareness. Specifically, self-awareness, but if you’re a religious person, and certainly if you’re a spiritual person, the idea of spiritual awareness can definitely come into play as we start exploring the part of you that is able to view everything about you and your true purpose from a far higher point of view. We’ll talk about the difference between perception and reality, and we’ll talk about how that relates to shadow work and the ways that we tend to bury different parts of ourselves over time. And then we’ll talk a little bit about the different parts of the psyche and how you can dig deeper to find the information that actually brings you closer to the real you.

All of the talking points relate in some way to remembering who you really are and who you were really meant to be… but so many of us are caught in this surface level of awareness that applies almost entirely to our own perceptions, and that’s where we’re gonna start, with talking point number one perception….

TALKING POINT 1: PERCEPTION

There is a very common saying that your perception is your reality, and we’re starting here because I do think that’s usually true. If you take a look around at the world, there is so much division, and honestly, outright hate between people right now, mostly because they have differing opinions. People can see things so differently, even though we’re all looking at the same thing. And I think it’s really worth it to take a long, hard look at what you don’t like in the world around you and why. And unfortunately, it’s usually easiest to start by looking at all the people and situations that you don’t like, and especially the things that you feel really strongly about. And maybe you have some really great reasons for feeling the way you do. That’s how most disagreements start. And if you know me at all, I absolutely refuse to talk about politics. But it is probably the best example of this, so I will say that anything political is almost immediately divisive. And I will say that’s even difficult for people like me who don’t wanna talk about it because everybody wants you to pick a side. And all I really have to say about that is that we’re all just people who have our own past experiences and teachers and personal beliefs that shape our view of the world, and later on, we’re gonna talk more about the ego, but we all have that part of us that wants to label and judge everything around us. And in order for us to be right, somebody else usually has to be wrong.

And that can greatly skew anyone’s perception of any situation or controversy. And I’m not going to talk about current events because this is usually true for anyone on any side of any argument, at least to some extent. It’s pretty easy to start demonizing or in some way degrading other people when we don’t agree with their point of view, and that brings us back to perspective in our personal lives and the question, why is it that two people can look at exactly the same thing and see two totally different things? Why do people remember conversations differently? That’s always so crazy to me. It happens all the time. I mean, at some points in my life, I’ve wished I had a recording of everything that was ever said just to be sure I wasn’t losing my mind.

Personal onions shape all of our perceptions and they make people remember experiences differently, we just do, and I believe that’s because we actually do experience them differently. A lot of that has to do with what you already believe and all the thoughts that are going through your head while that experience is happening, and it’s intensified by all of the emotions that come up while you’re in the middle of that experience. And then when it’s time to file it all away in your head, you end up remembering it the way that it felt for you. And just because the other person saw it differently or felt differently, doesn’t necessarily make them wrong, but it definitely does make it difficult to come to an agreement about what really happened, and it can greatly affect your feelings about someone else’s view of reality.

Sometimes it’s really hard to know what’s true because we all struggle to get a clear picture of objective reality, and that’s Talking Point Number Two, Reality.

TALKING POINT 2: REALITY

And I just said it would be really hard for us to nail down objective reality unless we had every minute of every day recorded, but I actually believe that even if we did, we still might see things differently. And that’s a really deep topic and actually a pretty hot topic right now for a lot of spiritual teachers. What if we actually are experiencing things differently? What if there are multiple realities happening at the same time? I personally don’t totally love the thought of that. It actually scares me sometimes a little bit, and maybe that means I’m not totally evolved, but I’ve only just very recently been able to come to terms with the fact that the people in my most intimate relationships might actually be wrong. Even if I really thought I was right. And that’s weird because I don’t have that problem in my professional relationships and relationships with acquaintances or friends that are kind of on, you know, the outer circle of everyday life. I mean, I still don’t wanna fight, but I don’t have any anxiety that comes up, and I don’t feel like I’m losing my mind because I know what I know is true for me, even if I don’t feel like I have to be loud about defending it.  But when it comes to the people that I’m closest to, I’ve almost always been the one who is sitting there a little confused, nodding my head in agreement, just assuming that I’m probably remembering it wrong because the other person felt so strongly and that they were fighting so hard to prove their point because they were probably right. And even if it didn’t feel right on the inside, it was just so much easier to agree. And the really dangerous thing about that is that if you’re agreeing to something that you don’t actually believe, and you stick with that story for long enough, you do start to believe it. And you actually start rewriting your own history. And I cannot tell you how many times I’ve let someone else rewrite my story just because I didn’t have the energy for the fight. I mean, this is part of why gaslighting works. Usually, you’ve got a very empathic or codependent person, catering to the needs and wants and viewpoints of someone who just doesn’t want to be wrong and knows how to use that power dynamic as a form of control. And I have some experience with being passive to the point of my own detriment, and I can tell you that it’s not good for either party because then nobody actually knows what you think and what’s important to you, including you. And of course, the opposite side of that coin is deciding to challenge everyone on everything because you don’t mind fighting and being right, or having things your way, is so important that you can’t let anything slide.

So it's safe to assume that we are probably looking for something that’s somewhere in the middle. We’re looking for common ground, and when it comes to relationships, that’s definitely a place where you need to be willing to at least try to see things from someone else’s perspective. And you’ll hear Yoga teachers, including me, talking all the time about the witness perspective or the perspective of the observer because that is such an incredibly useful tool for settling your emotions and quieting your mind down so that you can kind of step up and away to observe whatever’s happening from a more objective viewpoint. And sometimes you get a great big wake-up call and find out that objective reality has some important information for you about you and you’re behavior, and we’ve already agreed that living in denial is not something that we wanna do anymore and that we are actively seeking the truth.. And for me, being able to see the whole truth from an objective viewpoint and admit my part, while at the same time holding my ground and not just automatically accepting what the other person says took a kind of work that I had never really explored done before.. and that’s shadow work, the real kind that you do in a clinical setting, not the pop culture kind. And that’s talking point number three.

TALKING POINT 3: SHADOW WORK

 Shadow work is really having its moment right now, and I’m actually a fan of it when it’s done the right way. And before we start talking about my experience, I just wanna briefly address. What the right way is… and I’m not bashing anyone out there who is creating this kind of content because I’m a content creator too, and I create content about shadow work, and I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience, but I do know that there’s a whole lot of stuff out there about dancing with your dark side and sometimes really intense aspects of shadow work that really should be done with a mental healthcare professional. But there are some people out there, like me, who offer it as a tool for getting to know yourself better, and depending on how you’re doing that work and as long as you’re doing it safely, it can be really helpful. But it really isn’t just about the dark side. The shadow isn’t the dark side of your personality. It’s just the unknown. It's the unconscious, and according to Carl Young himself, the whole point is to make the unconscious conscious. To reveal anything that’s been hidden and understand why it was buried in the first place. It’s a method for integration and bringing all of the different parts of yourself together, and I can tell you from my personal experience in a clinical setting, that it is some very powerful work. I actually remembered things that made all the puzzle pieces of my whole life fit together. Things that I literally did not know. Memories of mine that were actually fractured and reorganized in my head as a child in a way that my mind could handle, and live with, and use as a coping mechanism, so that I wouldn’t have to face it. And the most intense memories were from more than 50 years ago, but the very second that I remembered them in therapy, I knew for sure that they were absolutely true, and everything about the rest of the story suddenly made sense, and that created an incredibly dramatic shift in awareness for me. But it wasn’t some fun weekend workshop that I went to, and it wasn’t a book that I read. That kind of therapy is the kind that I really think you do need to do with a professional. But there are aspects of that work that you can do safely on your ow,n and that leads to talking point number four. 

TALKING POINT 4: THE PSYCHE, THE EGO & THE HERO

Carl Jung’s model of the human psyche is built on three aspects of consciousness that play primary roles in shaping your inner world. And it’s worth studying them, if you’re interested in any kind of shadow work, because they each have their own part to play in working with this principle of awareness effectively. The conscious mind, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious work together to make us who we are, with the conscious mind representing your sense of self and outer awareness, the personal unconscious storing all your old or forgotten memories, and the collective unconscious operating seemingly “alone” but actually working with everything in the universal realm. That’s the part that’s so counterintuitive, and it really does apply to what we’re talking about here. Sometimes it feels like that part of you that is connected to everything is inaccessible to you. It seems like it’s working alone out there somewhere as a separate entity, but it's really all working there inside you. And that leads to the study of the archetypes.

Now the archetypes that we've been studying here are loosely based on Yogic traditions, some that very specifically correlate with traditional Jungian archetypes and some that don’t, but they all apply to this work because Carl Jung himself said the number of possible archetypes is actually endless. They’re all created through the interaction of different aspects of the psyche as they play out different roles to help us figure out the world around us and how it relates to what’s happening on the inside. And the general idea is that they are all in there somewhere, interacting with each other behind the scenes of everything that we know and believe about ourselves and everyone else.

And the ego plays a huge part in that. The ego is the director of the executive function. It’s running the mental show most of the time, and we’ve talked about it before; it’s not necessarily a negative thing. It’s just a thing that is happening for all of us. The ego is there working at the center of the conscious mind, acting kind of like a bridge or a gatekeeper between the inner and outer worlds. And its role is essentially to protect your sense of identity from everything on the outside and whatever you’ve got hidden on the inside. And none of it is inherently good or bad, but if we do want to become more aware and achieve some level of wholeness, we have to study all of those different parts of ourselves and learn to work with them. Because most of our disagreements with other people are really just playing out this big internal drama as the different parts of ourselves interact and often argue inside our heads. And if you really learn to listen for all of those different voices, this whole thing starts to make a lot of sense. And if you don’t think that you have voices in your head, just stop for a second and listen, you can actually hear your brain working in words, that strangely, you can definitely hear somehow. And you might think that’s all just one voice, but they all have a slightly different tone. Especially when you’re angry or conflicted or confused or resentful or defensive. And different voices, different archetypes, stand out more strongly at different times.

And the one that comes out most strongly in this practice is the hero. And it’s not just a yogic archetype that is actually a traditional archetype in most forms of shadow work. And the reason why the hero applies so strongly here is because that’s the part of you that defends the inner realm. That’s the part of me that was pretty broken. I had a little girl inside me that needed a defender, and she just didn’t get one. And she sat there alone in a pretty dark place for a really long time, and it was the hero in me that finally stepped up and helped me access those stories that she had been keeping. That’s the part of me that had the courage and the foresight to get there and the part of me that could look at my life from the finish line and comfort me and tell me that what happened in the past doesn’t have to hurt me anymore, and let me know that it was all gonna be OK. Because the hero knows it’s the hero, and it knows you’ll be okay because it can only be the hero after the battle is won. It’s the part of you that drives the process of individuation and raising awareness; it’s willing to go off on any quest, even if it has to go into some scary places. It’s willing to go there because it’s always working for the common good, and it knows that integration is the only way to find the answers that you’re looking for, and it knows that you’re probably gonna have to dig deeper to find them.

There are other archetypes that we won’t explore in this season that also apply very clearly to attaining wisdom and gathering information, including the child, which we are gonna talk about when we get to the episodes on service. But if you wanna know more about this, I’ll put the link to my little book of messages about shadow and light in the description that more fully explains the map of the psyche, the primary archetypes, and how to study a big, long list of common sub-archetypes. And they are all worth studying because they all have such a big impact on our opinions, on our values, and what we believe and how we identify ourselves in relation to everything. And that brings us back to the original point about perception. Your perception isn’t just shaped by your experiences, or by your teachers, or your parents, or anybody else in your life. They all definitely have an influence on your thinking.. But your perception is yours, and it’s shaped by your values and core beliefs that are formed by the interaction of these different parts of yourself. And the one that we’re talking about digging into right now is the shadow. That’s the unconscious aspect that holds all of the information that has been hidden, and that includes studying fears and desires and instincts, whether they’ve been repressed or denied, or acting out in your life without your conscious consent in ways that you might not fully understand.

TALKING POINT 5: DIGGING DEEP

If you’ve been out there, listening from the beginning, I have to believe that your life looks at least a little bit different. Maybe the things that you want are different now, and maybe all of the work that you’ve been doing has been paying off. I really do believe that just your interest in listening to this sends out a pretty powerful energetic signal of your intent to know the real you. Self-study is the path to self-awareness, and self-awareness is the path to self-realization. And at least me, self-realization and self-awareness are almost synonymous, and sometimes it’s really hard to know which comes first. Because digging deeper always leads to leveling up. It’ like you’re standing in here and now with everything just the way it is in the center of two staircases, one that goes up and one that goes down, and might feel like you’re taking a step down to dig a little deeper into the truth, but what you find there is a step up in awareness. And if you’ve been digging along with me this whole time, you’ve probably learned something about yourself. All of the work that we’ve done together has been a really gentle approach to digging down into the subconscious. It’s not shadow work exactly, but we have been digging around in some of those hidden places to find the whole truth about the real you and working our way up into higher levels of awareness. And I’m not gonna try to speak for you, but that can be really emotionally challenging work to do… And even though I’ve been doing this for such a long time, I know that I still have more work to do. I don’t know if we’re ever really done, but I do know that any amount of work that you do counts when it comes to raising your awareness in really practical ways.… and that brings us to talking point number six, leveling up.

TALKING POINT 6: LEVELING UP

At the highest levels of awareness, the big picture is clear, and the awakening comes. I believe that. I believe that we can make a connection with a higher version of ourselves and get some understanding of a higher power because I believe that we all have a little spark of divinity in us… and this is where any religious or at least somewhat spiritual beliefs have an impact on the way you make those connections. For some people meditation is the listening part of praying… for some people free writing is a form of channeling a version of themselves that can see the bigger picture… but for all of us, no matter what you believe, the work that you do to level up your awareness is about getting connected with the part of you that can see your true purpose and the whole truth about you from a higher perspective.  And that’s the part of you that knows that we’re all connected… and I do believe that we’re connected, and that when we’re working together at those higher levels of awareness, we don’t have to judge each other or pick sides or fight about anything. And I’m not saying that you have to be there right now. I’m not saying that I’m always there either. I’m just saying that you’re already making those connections and serving your purpose because you’re doing the work. I honestly think that’s why we’re here. I don’t think it’s supposed to be easy and I don’t think we’re supposed to agree on everything because I think that’s all part of the process, we’ve talked about this before, I really think that we’re here to learn and grow and I don’t think there’s really any way to do it without some really striking contrast in your life. And if you can keep looking at it like that, as a learning experience that requires contrast for you to get something meaningful from each experience, you’re leveling up. With everything you learn about yourself and every new habit that you create, you're leveling up. Every bit of digging that you do, every intention that that serves the common good, every bit of information that you uncover, every inch closer to common ground, every shift in your perception raises your awareness, so that you can really be there for yourself, and be your own hero so that you can go on that internal quest without fear, and protect and defend your truth without losing yourself or giving yourself away. And nobody can do that for you. Nobody can be that for you. And when you have that, you find a new kind of strength that comes from knowing that everything’s gonna be OK. And you don’t have to fight about anything anymore because you know you’re the hero, and the hero is only the hero when the battle is won. And all of that digging is worth it when you finally realize that the real battle has always been happening on the inside. It’s always been a fight between you and some other part of you. And the hero can help you bring all of those parts together and make peace.

And that always brings us back to being who you really are, and studying all the different parts of yourself so that you can deepen and sustain that connection with who you really are and fully express who you’re really meant to be..

So, let’s take a look at the talking points one more time:

·     We started with perception and exploring some reasons why different people see things differently.

·     We talked about objective reality and how raising awareness can help us see things more clearly.

·     We explored what shadow work really is and the idea that it can be approached safely if we understand its purpose.

·     And then we went a little deeper into the map of the psyche and the roles that the ego and the archetypes play.

·     And how the hero can give us the courage and the perspective to dig a little deeper.

·     And how digging deeper leads to higher levels of awareness.

CHALLENGE QUESTION

The question for Awareness is, “What do I need to see?” And asking that question with a real desire to see everything you need to see about you, so that you can see things from other people’s point of view, so that you can find common ground and work together for the common good. Next time we’re gonna talk a little bit about growing your intuition and knowing your true purpose with the study journal, but I think it’s really important to emphasize that your true purpose is always gonna be to be the real you and to do it without having to fight for or against anything.. All of the work can be done without the fighting, and realizing the real you is always the purpose… and the integration of any lost or hidden parts is the path to fulfilling that purpose, and that always starts inside you.

Episodes for the rest of this season will be dropping early on Tuesday mornings, so stay tuned. Check the description for the link to the Shadow and Light book and go to wellnessmeetings.com for more related content….. Something Honest is a Wellness Meetings production with original music composed and produced by James Mrotek at Mrotek Media.

This is Marta Mrotek sending out all the love and working on being well.