Embrace All Parts of the Self


The greatest danger for meditators is deleting parts of the self. The parts of yourself that you snub and do not invite to the party cannot give you their gifts. This is a danger in the sense that in so doing you limit your vitality and limit your range of expression. In the long run, this will mean that you either go through life as an overly peaceful meditator or you quit meditating because you have made it a kind of prison.

Think of meditation as a party you are giving for every aspect of your humanity, every aspect of the soul. Invite even the street people, the homeless, the witchy bitch, the cranky skeptic, though they seem incongruous. Maybe they stink and don’t know how to use the silverware, but feed them. When any quality is integrated, when it gets to rub shoulders with all the other parts of the self, it changes and is socialized. Each has a gift to give you.

Everyone has parts of themselves they have lost. A feeling tone you had when you were in college, maybe you were athletic or you sang in the shower a lot. Maybe you were a passionate movie lover, rejoicing in Italian cinema. Consider this, something a wise old man said to me one day at Esalen: The purpose of life is to get survival taken care of so you can get on with being as individualistic as you can get away with. Many men lose the lover in them when they hunker down to work long hours. Women lose their free spirit in the midst of marriage – or imagine that they have. In the process of gearing up to be successful, many people find that they lost the person inside who was capable of enjoying the success.

If you continue meditating, you can be sure that the lost parts of you will come knocking at the door to be let in. They may appear as moods, images, memories or sensations in your body. Welcome them, even though you will most likely not know what they are at first.

In fairy tales, it is the unpleasant aunt that is not invited to the wedding who shifts into a malevolent witch and curses the marriage. When people go into meditation with a spiritual approach, you can almost hear the ripping sound as they split off parts of themselves to fit their picture of what a proper meditator is. It is some kind of Peter Pan syndrome, in which the Shadow is split off and then becomes Other.

In meditation, you have a few months to get used to the range of your inner experience and train yourself to accept it all or not. The problem is the habits you develop will tend to be permanent. This is what I see in my friends and in the people who come to me for coaching. The attitude they went into meditation with has become cast in concrete. At some point a necessary crisis was missed.

In everyday life, we have to edit our responses to match what is appropriate in the environment. This is healthy. Everyone has their set of emotions they allow and those they disallow, and this is called a personality. When you begin meditation you have a fresh start on life, on how you slice up the pie of your inner qualities. If you just carry over your outer-world adaptation to the inner world, you miss much of the opportunity meditation offers. You do the equivalent of taking your elementary school personality over into high school.

Anger, greed, sexuality, revenge, ambition, wild passionate adoration of anything, the desire to be drunk or Dionysian, fear, laziness — which of these do you have trouble with? Which of these do you think are not a proper part of meditation?

It sounds obvious when you put it this way — whatever you leave out can not get integrated. Sure, why not? Remember that in meditation, all your thoughts and feelings are whizzing through your body and nerves at high speed and it will take you quite a while to learn what they are. The acceptance of all parts of yourself has to translate to the level of reflex. This only comes from gradually developing trust. Trust of the space of meditation, trust of your body, trust of what the nervous system is, trust of what your brain is, trust in life itself.

Your task is to take the embracing attitude from the level of theory to the level of your bodily responses. During meditation things happen too fast for theory. You operate out of reflex. That is why I say meditation is more of a physical sport than a mental game. Or you could say it is more like a relationship with all your parts. If a child playing in the backyard turns from her little world and comes running to you with total excitement to share about a caterpillar she has been watching, you have less than a second to decide to accept her embrace even though she is muddy and you are wearing nice clothes. If you stop to think, "Hmm .... ok, this is my daughter or my niece, and she is in an explosion of enthusiasm for life and discovery that I can not ever hope to return to. Every moment of her three-year old life is a major moment. Do I let her get my clothes dirty or do I try to hold her at arms length?" She will see your hesitation or disgust or preoccupation and that is what she will get. You will miss the magic of the moment. Or you could embrace her with open arms, share in her joy, and she would run back to her play fulfilled. What moves you toward this kind of emotional suppleness with yourself and others? Is it music, theater, movies, friends, conversations? Find out and cultivate it. Go on in and make friends. Get muddy.

-- selection from Meditation Made Easy