I don’t know if this makes sense to anyone.
I was watching this video yesterday…
I know, a guy who look likes “Gandalf the grey” dressed in traditional Indian clothing preaching about meditation is never that marketable. Yet, this guy changed the way I looked at emotions, creativity and our inherent attachment to shame.
I probably lost you there.
As Brene Brown once said in her TED talk few years ago, as soon as you mention the word ‘shame’ to people, they immediately start thinking “Why me?”. Shame is one of those words isn't it. Like love, it is one those emotions that everyone experiences yet no one wants to talk about deeply. Now, the reason I want to talk about shame is because I think it holds the key to creativity. You might wonder how that is but I think it has something to do with how shame limits our imagination. More on that later, but going back to shame, I think it is an epidemic — a global one. Our culture and society is to blame for this however, our salvation as I said earlier lies with tapping into shame.
Shame
We live in a world where we have no idea who we really are and what our identity truly is. If we deeply look at what we identify ourselves with, whether that’s to do with our race, occupation, country, type of lover we are, type of morals we believe, whatever that may be, this identity is not really our own. We take on the standards and the cultural norms of any identity from the world around us. For example, I fight in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and being part of this community, this sport and even my club has a huge impact on what kind of person I am. My perception of the world and my identity, about who I am and who I should be, stem from what “BJJ” wants me to be. This is also true also across other parts of my life, for example I am university student and a small-business owner, both of which come with their own societal norms and standards that are imposed on my identity. Now, this is neither good or bad. The process of accumulating positive and negative experience is what makes life beautiful and that can only really occur if we fully allow our self to become one with the experience. The problem occurs however when we do not live up to these standards and cultural norms.
I remember when I started my first personal training business and how proud I was of becoming a business owner at a young age. That happiness and pride disappeared quickly, however, when I started reading stories about these college drop outs who have created multi-million dollar enterprises at the age of 21. Being a business owner, I felt that I should be performing to that level and upon realising that my business was no where close to that standard (the standard that I have placed upon myself because of this identity I inherited of a “business owner”), I felt ashamed. I wanted to quit my business immediately because I felt it was too risky and that suddenly, I was too old. I also felt that I wasn’t qualified enough to run a business. When the feeling of giving up disappeared, I told myself that “it’s ok to be mediocre” because my parents didn’t give me the best education or my high school wasn’t the best. I too could be a multi-millionaire if I had the right upbringing and was born in San Francisco. Rather than developing my business further, I fell into the trap of believing that “this is all that’s possible for me”. All of this happened because of the standards and the identity I placed upon myself. I stopped being the creative, problem-solving, intuitive and out-of-box thinker I am, all because of a set of norms that kept reminding me that I should be someone else that I wasn't.
Your imagination is limited by your identity.
I know, from as far back as I can remember, I have longed to belong and identify with something bigger than myself. Whether that’s a rugby team or a larger community that call themselves “business owners”. The feeling of purpose and belonging we get when we inherit an identity and it’s inherent standards, values and beliefs, is awesome. It makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves but, nevertheless, the reason we do it is because not having an identity makes us feel purposeless which is often too daunting and leaves us feeling quite vulnerable. Now that may be true but I think the limits of our imagination is embedded in our ability to embrace that vulnerability. Our attachment to our identity limits our experience of this world and narrows our perception.
You will often hear 21st century scientific commentators saying that no new idea is ever really created anymore and everything new is really just an evolution of what we have seen, heard or experienced. Essentially what they are saying is that the limits of our imagination are the outer walls of our perception of ourselves and the world. That may be a bleak view but if true, wouldn’t you want to see, hear, experience and be as many different types of things. Our salvation lies in not identifying and becoming nothing; in becoming colorless and transparent. As we are then able to see, hear, experience and become anything or anyone whilst being no one.
Originally published at theubermensch.org.
