Rules of the Road in Doing Inner Space Travel by Michael Naylor, IEA Professional with Distinction
The Search for Internal Unidentified Flying Objects-Learning to See Your Artificial Identity or False Self-…And So On and So Forth
Or as Kurt Vonnegut would say, and so it goes. Meaning…well…just that. You’re focked in advance because your patterns have their own identity and they aren’t letting it go anytime soon. And unless you find the secret code…
Or as Almass might say in fierce fashion…You’re patterns are immortal. There’s no getting rid of them. So give that project up right now. You won’t eliminate your anger pattern but you can develop eyes to see it so that it doesn’t run you like a windup toy 99% of the time as in…whenever it wants to. And since its attached to your Pain Body (read Eckhart Tolle for this one), the pattern most likely inherited from your ancestral line (the bastards), its looking for expression because it’s hungry. (Really, you ask? Yes, because nearly everything ET says about the inner world tends to be close to 110% accurate.) All your unbecoming patterns have a systematic wave of hunger that requires them to seek and hunt an object to draw psychological blood, food, wine from it. Once satisfied it retreats into its hidden chamber and you think, oh my Lord, it’s gone. No, not really. Likely it’s out in the parking lot of your soul doing pushups and learning new skills to bypass your wish for change. It’s a hard worker.
Okay, brace yourself for a few high and inside fastballs, because let’s face it, you’re crowding the plate again from this standpoint: your hope is that with insider tips you can go fast up the food chain, or as we say in the Enneagram World, the Levels of Health. So, for you Type Threes who like to get everywhere as fast as possible, or the Type Eights that think they can muscle their way through anything, or the Type Seven who figures he can outsmart you with his/her very fast moves and beautiful sense of humor, get ready for the psychological belly punch of which, when you first hear about these particular belly punches, you’ll say out loud, proud as a peacock, “That rule of life and change is for newcomers. And for me, it’s just bullshit.”
How to Heal a Pattern
Evidently, you can’t change yourself by willful direct effort. This is so counter-intuitive that even the angels laugh gleefully when you scoff at this idea. Why? Well it’s because most of us have been taught that if we apply ourselves we can make shit happen. This can be true in the world of objects and material things. I apply my will to building a house and there I go, swinging that hammer like a home run stick and pounding nails and next thing I know my efforts have created four walls. I did it. But it’s a little different with the inner objects we want to remove because inner objects, let’s say our type’s tendency to experience envy over any wisp of wind that hits it sideways (Fours, listen up). For this, space traveler, my first try as stopping or ridding myself of the pernicious habit of Envy, that is, imagining others have a better life, or got a better deal, was to try an kill the envy. As though I could pin it down and chop off it’s head. Problem is, inner patterns rely on a different life source. You try to man-handle an inner pattern, that is, if you try to kill your envy, what happens. It slips right out of your hands and then laughs at you saying, nice try Mr. nobody, I’m alive and well, and I’ve got Jedi skills. You try to kill me by hating on yourself, as in, Michael, you are a stupid fool for believing this envy, and then you apply 25 psychological kicks to your belly in service of rooting out the Envy, and fast as you can say Sponge Bob, envy moves like a quark from one spot in the jungle of your psyche to another, from point A to point B like a ghost, able to travel without being seen or heard or felt. It’s not linear, and it’s proud of it. Also, your attempt to track and kill your envy has provided it more food to torment you. You’ve fed it with your unskillful efforts.
Here’s where it gets complicated. Employing your Inner Critic, it says, Michael, you are stupid for feeling this Envy. It shows you’re a wimp. Man the F up. Stop feeling this way, Shut it down big boy. In which by powers yet to be understood by me, the Envy takes this self hatred as food for it’s existence, eats it, gets bigger, and then takes bigger bites out of you. I know what you’re thinking…that’s just wrong. No shit. It is wrong, and vile, and most especially unfair. Here I am with a sincere wish to rid myself of this nagging Type Four emotional pattern and I make a sincere effort to extricate the vampire, and it gets stronger, quicker, faster. As if you’ve given it amphetamines and now it’s blazing fast and you can’t touch it.
So how do you stop/change/affect a difficult emotional pattern like Envy. Jedi skills. That’s it. So what are those Jedi skills. Okay, what follows are ideas, not grooved-in-the-heart-of-God facts. Ideas. Take what you need, leave the rest. Or be stupid and simply believe without doing the hard work of researching what happens when you try this or that. Or…drink. Smoke Pot. Try for a spiritual bypass through the now famous and ever more expensive plant medicine movement. The Question: how do I get off the wheel of automaticity that I acquired when I three years old and trying to survive a broken heart. Meaning: I did not choose this pattern. It was woven in to me by life and my protective enneagram tool box that I inherited from god knows where. So, practically, there’s no need to blame myself for the pattern because it wasn’t chosen yet what’s the favorite tool grabbed for. Self-blame and self-hatred, as if you decided to have this pattern of Envy when you were 4 years old so it could rob you of joy and happiness when you became an adult.
First suggestion: learn, slowly but surely, to observe your envy. You start from scratch which is like this: you notice the envy after the envy episode has occurred and the pattern has thrown you to the wayside, kicked your psychological ass because when it entered the stream of your consciousness, started playing in the theator of your mind, you bought the story of “He has a better life because he’s succeeded at something I wish to succeed at, and he’s way younger than me.” So, fast as quicksand, the movie plays in your emotional/mind stream and because it’s clever and fast, you experience it as real, as the truth, as if everything in the fantasy is real, and gulp, you are swallowed in the quicksand of the illusion. When you come to, an hour, a day, a week later you realize I got eaten by my envy. Good for you. This is part one: noticing you’ve been eaten and not killing yourself with self-hatred. Self-hatred makes the envy pattern ever more unconscious!
Now, on your own, is this idea: You try to relieve the experience in your imagination, remembering how it felt in your body, heart, head, noticing the thoughts (the lures) that began to play quietly in the background setting you up for being hooked like a blind fish, and you try, best as you can, to revisualize step by step how the pattern sucked you into the movie…without judging yourself, shaming yourself, or piling self blame on yourself, as in Why did you let that happen? You didn’t allow it. It just ran. It just happened. Without your volition. So no blame, zero, zilch, nada, none. And humbly admit: this pattern is powerful.
So in this visualization you are doing your best to reexperience in your body, mind and heart, how the pattern felt. You work to get as visceral as you can. The deeper you feel it, the more that you set an alarm clock in yourself that will alert you when the Envy arrives. You’ll sense it sooner. Then, after walking through the past event via your head center and the imagined story, and heart center and how the envy felt there, and body center and whether the body disappeared, that is, you lost contact with it, or it numbed down or got tight…your just collecting an impression and setting the table for the next step,
Which is Step two: Now imagine how you want it to go…the envy starts to creep in, you feel it’s entrance, the tug on your soul, you notice the movie beginning to roll the imagination story of ‘they have it, I don’t’…but you catch it and you bring attention into your heart, you relax your body, you experience the hurt underneath the envy, and you then experience the rise of equanimity into your solar plexus/heart center as part of your attention is anchored in your body sensations. In this visualization you feel compassion for yourself and your suffering and then see yourself returning to a state of calm. This whole scene takes about one minute. You could do it three times during the day. Again, you are training a healthy response inside you. Building a new neural pathway.
So, prepared as you are the pattern is wily and quick. So it beats you from time to time and you fall into the movie of envy like Tobie McGuire fell into the TV he was watching, joining it (this is in the movie Pleasantville). As you find yourself on the ground of your soul once again beaten, feeling the hangover of envy, what to do next. Journal. Sit down and write out the bloody experience in detail. Collect it on the page. This will help create a self-observation skill inside you, an impression that has lasting effects.
If you’re really beaten down and have no energy to write then head for the gym. Workout. Sweat. Get in your body in whatever way you can. Break the damn trance. This forces you out the imagination-dream story, and the aftereffect of the emotional hangover from the envy, and puts you into your body. Do this. Do this regularly. Other options: yoga, walking, running, dancing, weight lifting, biking.
Talk to a mentor. Tell him the story of your envy. Openness to sharing it out loud with an ally once again dissipates the power of the trance. Naming it out loud, letting yourself feel the shame of the experience in front of another, creates an emotional openness that is filled with more compassion for self.
Develop the capacity to experience quiet mind.
Well, this is a project of a lifetime. Start simple. Sit down and get comfortable but alert in a chair (not sleepy comfortable that triggers your sleep response, but alert comfortable). Feet on the floor. Now, your task is to follow your breath in and out of your body, sensing the rise and fall of your diaphragm and stomach. Your attention begins away from the head center where the torrent of thoughts is ready to launch a full scale attack on your attention. So, beginning with placing your attention on breath and body in short time you notice you’re attention has been taken by your thought wave. Noticing is the first step. Opps, there goes my attention.
Then gently and kindly you label the thought or whatever internal force took your attention, like a feeling wave, and say to yourself gently and without judgment…thinking about the Boston Red Sox…or…thinking about my exercise program…or…thinking about my angry conversation with my girlfriend. You just label/name the thoughts and return your attention to your breath and belly. Easy peasy. In ten minutes you might do this ten, twenty, a hundred, two hundred times, and the key to it is to do this back and forth motion with no judgement. You have not failed in meditation. You can’t make your mind get silent, but you can notice it with an easy going attitude, returning over and over again to your breath and belly and body, like taking a nice lap around the pool.
You are training yourself to be more mindful of your thought-train and how to return to center. In time, your mind will settle and you will experience quiet mind. Not because you tried to impose it on yourself, but from this counter-intuitive exercise of labeling thoughts. Maybe you just tire the thoughts out, who knows. But when quiet mind finally arrives, what will you do? You’ll start thinking ‘I’m experiencing quiet mind…opps…my thoughts just knocked it out.’ Not to worry. It takes time to trust a quiet mind and initially can make you feel unsafe and vulnerable to…what? The quietness! It feels alien in the beginning and over time you will relax into it.
Then your capacity to observe your thoughts, sense your feelings, inhabit your body will arise. You’ll develop new inner eyesight!