Pathwork & Daily Review practice
By the point I arrived at Pathwork, a year or so past the Kundalini awakening, I’d already had years of ‘on the job’ experience seeing the various ways I got hooked into misunderstanding and suffering. I could ‘if/then’ like a total pro. And despite my recognition of all the ways my mind and parts were likely to go into misunderstandings and misperceptions, it certainly didn’t mean I didn’t go into them. Just ask my partner, my best friends, my clients–they would be happy to give you billions of examples of the ways I got activated, defensive, reactive, pushy, judgy, clingy, and various other not very skillful ‘dreaming’ actions, words, and enactments–each and every day, a thousand times a day. Remembering back to ACT and Vipassana, it makes me think of the way teachers used to talk about falling into holes. ACT used the metaphor, ‘if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging’. My Vipassana teachers, taking the metaphor in a different direction, said that life involved lots of potholes, and in the beginning of our processes, when we hadn’t cultivated concentration and went through life distracted, we’d inevitably fall right into the holes. Their point was that awareness, and paying attention, help us develop the capacity not to fall in so quickly and completely each time (and perhaps initially, notice sooner that we’re falling in, so we can hang on to the side, and pull ourselves out faster, until we eventually notice the hole and don’t even fall in the first place).
But in my process, I found myself fatigued–both from constantly falling into these holes, and from the labor of pulling myself back out. I wanted to create a pothole-less path. But trying to orchestrate situations, life-hacking, micromanaging—these didn’t seem to be the way to go. Around this time I became obsessed with a chapter of Almaas’s Diamond Heart: Elements of the Real in Man, on, you guessed it: “The Theory of Holes”. Almaas uses this metaphor to lay out a brilliant and simple argument: we go through life full of holes, which we (understandably but ineffectively) try to fill from the outside. In this conceptualization, the holes come from traumatic experiences that cause parts of essence to splinter off, which we lose consciousness of. If this sounds familiar, (which hopefully it does!) I would say it dovetails perfectly with IFS’s frame of exiled parts, created through traumatic moments (when our nervous systems got overwhelmed, and felt alone in the overwhelm). Almaas’s point is that we can spend years-or even
(by which I mean, both on the job of living my human life, and in my profession, working with clients)
This video basically walks you through the teaching
lifetimes, trying to find hole-fillers–some of which do seem to fill some holes somewhat, for some amount of time.
Although absolutely no one in my life, to whom I talked incessantly about this chapter, seemed even remotely interested, I got a bit zealous, going through a strange proselytizing phase where I recommended it, wove it into every conversation, and generally sounded like I’d stepped out of an infomercial for it. It’s odd–usually you’re trying to convince someone of something. “Oh yeah, that tub shroom thing from Amazon really does work!” “Using baking soda and white vinegar and a little bit of salt on your enamel dutch oven: non-toxic and so effective!” “Try a Costco baking soda and Himalayan sea salt bath! They’re so thrifty but luxurious!” But instead of a practical product or tip, I was completely smitten with the opposite–a chapter about how we all try to fill our holes, and it never works, and instead what we’re looking for is actually in the hole. Unsurprisingly, few people wanted to be sold on something not for sale.
But to me, what I was starting to see was that instead of ‘trying to practice acceptance’ (which most of the time meant I was just in a state of resistance, but scolding myself for being in the state of resistance), it actually was most fruitful to go into the places of contraction, dissatisfaction, and suffering. Going back to Pathwork, in which Thesenga recommends doing a ‘daily review’ practice, where you simply make a note of anything that gives you a “disharmonious feeling or reaction” (p. 57), I started see how it was possible to connect the dots of daily review, polyvagal & IFS by seeing what my conscious mind had experienced as aversive, and then using the bodily reactions and somatic communications to reveal which part or parts had gotten touched and awakened in me.
Explaining the rationale for the daily review practice, Thesenga writes: “every negative experience is an invitation to look deeper into ourselves…we learn to become aware of how we really react, so these thoughts/feelings don’t have a chance to accumulate in the unconscious. Daily review prevents self-deception, pretense, and repression–all the ingredients of mental disturbance and confusion.” (p. 57) She cites Pierrakos:
If you follow this through for some time, you will see after a while a clear pattern coming out of it. At first these incidents will appear entirely unconnected and isolated [but after awhile] you will discover that certain kinds of incidents are repeated. Then a pattern will evolve from which you will have clues to your own inner makeup. If something recurs constantly, it is an important clue to your own soul.
I love this idea of our daily rants and dissatisfactions transforming into “ important clue[s] to our own soul[s]”. In a similar move, Rupert Spira reframes suffering as “a call from the depths of our being.” Poetically, he expresses:
[Suffering] is in fact a call from happiness itself: “Come back to me, you are looking for me in the wrong place. Cease rising in the form of attention, wandering in the realm of objects, looking for peace in situations, happiness in objects, love in relationships. Look for me where I really am. Look for me in the heart, look for me at the source of attention, not its destiny.”
Urged on by Almaas, and his reframing of the initial piece of ‘the work’ involving trying to find more skillful ways of filling our holes, I decided to use the daily review practice (conscious mind noticing aversion), and the somatic communications (bodily doorway to unconscious content) to get to the parts (who would point me to the traumatic moments from the past) to jump into the holes.
Meanwhile, I tried to give myself grace while doing this process, as Almaas had so clearly expressed (and my Rebel Ears had perked up when I read his words) that:
Allowing ourselves to tolerate the holes and go through them to the other side is more difficult now because everything in society is against this. Society is against essence. Everybody around you, wherever you go, is trying to fill holes, and people feel very threatened if you don’t try to fill yours the same way. When a person is not trying to fill his holes, it tends to make other people feel their own holes. So, it’s becoming more and more difficult to do the Work. And the Work is becoming more and more needed…it is very difficult, almost impossible, for one person alone to do this, because everything in his environment is against it.” (p. 23)
I read this section of Almaas’s writing as validating, countercultural music to my ears (despite the archaic-feeling way he genders the ubiquitous seeker as consistently masculine). It helped me understand why I so often felt lonely in my process. What I was noticing with myself (a pattern that became ever more glaring as I looked at what kept ending up in my journal from ‘daily review’ practice), was that the vast majority of my daily dissatisfactions had to do with three areas that turned out to be related. The first had to do with a disguised, super tricky shapeshifting-through-merging that involved blurred boundaries. The second had to do with yearning for ‘perfect’ connection from within human relationships. Although this longing for perfect connection seemed doomed, in one way, the gerbil-spinning-wheel reports from my journal showed me that I kept chasing it, and kept feeling let down and lonely when I couldn’t find the perfect love I sought. The third had to do with a confusion about responsibility. In all of my clinical consultations, the theme that came up over and over was me taking too much responsibility for clients, continuously getting stuck replaying patterns from my childhood with my narcissistic mother.
Because what we’re talking about all relates back to deconditioning, and I framed the three ‘blindfolds’ as initial barriers to clear seeing, I’m going to lay out what for me became the next three ‘advanced level’ blocks to clear seeing in the area of deconditioning, using examples from my own process. Instead of blindfolds, which are opaque and unchanging, we could think of these three areas of challenge as coming from both internal, changeable distortions, AND external fluctuations, like ever-shifting light and weather on the outside. As the light and weather conditions change, objects appear to move in and out of focus.