In my note on anxiety and its deeper causes, I described it as being driven by a kind of inner conflict, where a part of your inner self is relentlessly and viciously negative towards the rest of you. This will then lead to anxiety and stress. But as the inner conflict rages on over a lifetime, it can also give rise to problems with anger, feelings of low self-worth and even depression. And ultimately cloud your sense of life direction, meaning and purpose.
So then a natural next question is: Why on earth does this inner conflict happen in the first place? Aren’t we wired to seek survival and happiness? Why would one’s “self” ever hurt itself in such an awful manner?
In my work with meditation students, here is what I’ve learned. This kind of self-punishing behavior is almost always the result of a kind of accident in one’s early life, an unwitting mistake through which a part of you was deeply wounded, cut off and exiled from the rest of you.
The wound comes in many forms, but always results in some part of you, some deep and authentic part of you, being suppressed, betrayed and pushed away.
It might have been an early passion you had for the arts, which you were pressured to push down for being too impractical or embarrassing. Or a cherished belief that was not accepted by your family and friends. Or even a part of your innate personality that was ridiculed, and driven into hiding.
This kind of thing happens all the time — in childhood homes, in the schoolyard — and it’s a typical part of “growing up” for most people. But when the thing being suppressed is truly a part of your core, it will never actually go away. It will just go into hiding within you, and over time, it will tend to get very, very angry — at the rest of you, and at everyone around you.
Most of the time, it’s buried so deeply, you don’t even know it’s there. It’s all but invisible because you cut it away so long ago.
But you most definitely feel the impact of its anger. And the pain of its suffering.
How does the cutting off happen?
When I say a part of you is “cut off” as unacceptable for some reason, the way it happens is through an inner act of self-negativity. You literally become negative toward this part of you, within yourself — the passion for the arts, the cherished belief, the part of your personality — and it can actually take years of sustained “practice” and brutal self-training to get this self-negativity fully installed against your inner nature — to really convince yourself that this forceful self-denial is actually the “right way” and “all for the best”.
The good news is that the cutting off can be healed and restored.
The first step is to realize that something has indeed been cut off and is missing from your inner world, which will then trigger your desire to find it.
Then the next step is to find it. For reasons I’ll explain in a separate note, I call this process “finding your frog”.
The amazing thing is that the “cut off” part of you is often hiding in plain view — it is simply the part of you that all your self-negativity is trying to smash down!
It’s very hard to see though, because many of us will do anything — anything — to avoid sitting down quietly with the self-negative voice within us. We are terrified of it — we will suppress it, drink and drug it away, sex it away, and even overwork it away with an endless stream of “urgent projects”.
But the truth is that the self-negative voice is not trying to hurt you, it’s actually trying to help you—just in a clumsy and misdirected way. You can teach it to help you better, but you first you have to stop running and talk to it.
I will cover that in a separate note.
Right now, I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. You can comment and reply here, or email me privately at artie@presidemeditation.com.
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