What are you? What would it take to be yourself? What reveals who you really are? Is it your favorite flavor of ice cream? Your preferred TV series? The way you dress? Your hairstyle? Your hobbies? The triggers that ignite your emotional reactivity?
Are you yourself? Or are you what other people want you to be? What mannerisms do you attribute to your true self? In what situations are you most fully expressed?
Can you be yourself in private? If you think you are yourself in private, at your own apartment, doing your art or your music alone in your studio, then who really cares what you are? To whom does it truly matter that you live? Who really knows you?
What are you up to when no one is watching? Do you have a life? Or does your Gremlin have a life? Who are you when there is no one there to stop you? Is that really you?
When are you most you? Is it when you are operated by your Box habits and comforts? Is this you? Or is this only your neurotic childhood survival strategy?
Have you ever taken the risk to stand up, to speak out, to make a difference for another person? Have you ever held space for an Emotional Healing Process (EHP) for someone else? Someone you did not know? What comes through you when you are fully there for someone else? What shows up when you want someone else to succeed in their own terms? To experience their aliveness? What appears when you do everything you can for another person to fly, to play full out, to create amazing possibilities for themselves and others? How is this for you? Why do you ever stop?
Consider the idea that you might be most powerfully yourself when ‘you’ are not there. You might be most you when you are a space through which your resources create clarity and possibility for someone else, or for a team. How does this make sense? We return to the first question: What are you? If you are a guardian, then you need the context of a group of people to guard. If you are a village weaver, then you need people to weave into their village. If you are an evolutionary, then you need people who need evolving to be yourself in action. If you are a gameworld builder, then you need people who are stuck until they explore and inhabit the gameworlds you build.
It comes down to this: You are yourself most when you are being the space through which your skills and archetypal resources actively serve other people. You cannot be yourself when your resources have nowhere to go. You are empty if you are not generously creating with others. If this is so, how do you treat the people around you? Do you fear them? Try to control them to make it ‘safe’ for your Box? Try to hide out and be invisible as a ‘good’ person, a ‘nice’ girl, until you are by yourself again?
Here are some ideas for experimenting your way to a new life.
NOTICE WHEN YOUR BOX AND GREMLIN DESIRE TO BE ALONE. Title a new page in your Beep! Book: MY URGES TO BE ALONE. Use Self-Observation to detect urges to hide, to go away, or to be stingy. Each time, look around in your vicinity to see what you are angry or afraid about. Document your feelings. Then take a breath, shift orientation, and document if there is an opportunity for you to deliver your services. By looking with ‘nonlinear glasses’, perhaps you will see it. For example, the baby next door may be crying. Your urge might be to put in earplugs or go for a walk. The opportunity might be for you to knock on the door and offer to take the baby for a stroll, or to do the dishes so the mother can have some space to nap with her baby. Or you may wish to learn about navigating transformational spaces, but no one offers a WorkTalk about this, so you step forward and deliver one yourself. Start noticing which approach to life you prefer: Going away? Or, generously creating?
TRACK THE DETAILS AND PURPOSES OF YOUR SECRET LIVES. When you arrange it so no one else is around you, what comes out? What is the purpose behind each of your unwitnessed actions? Why do you do it? For the next 4 weeks, document the Gremlin foods you consume. Notice where you put your unused attention, and what you feed yourself with. Porn? Gambling? Gossiping? Candy? Alcohol? Binging TV series? YouTube? Low Drama? Speeding around on your motorcycle? Who in you is wanting that? Map yourself. What are your secret lives? And what are they for? Revenge? Superiority? Keep writing down the purposes behind being alone in your secret lives. Try not to lie to yourself about this. Make no conclusions. Simply become more and more acutely aware of what is going on in you.
CREATE A WEEKLY SPACE DEDICATED TO SERVING YOURSELF THROUGH SERVING OTHER PEOPLE IN WAYS THAT TURN YOU ON. For example, holding space for a weekly S.P.A.R.K. Experiment Team creates necessity for your resources to flow through you and be put to high-quality use for others. Make notes after each meeting in your Beep! Book to answer the questions: Who did I get to be for people this week? A Speaker For The Dead? A Sorceress? A Memetic Engineer? An Archetypal Lineage Whisperer? What came through me for the others? Capture your discoveries until you have so many treasures you must start writing articles and delivering WorkTalks and workshops to give them away.
TRAIN OTHERS TO HAVE A LIFE AS GOOD AS YOURS BY BEING A SPACE THROUGH WHICH THEIR ARCHETYPAL RESOURCES CAN BRING THEM TO LIFE. It turns out that since people are not initiated adults, so many obstacles and inner confusions prevail in their lives. They relate out of despair rather than love and creation. They demand security which avoids the ecstasy of experimentation and discovery. Their childhood survival strategy masquerades as a belligerent tyrant trying to defend an enhanced but artificial personality attempting to achieve success in the standards of a dead culture. It is a mess in there. Every bit of inner structure you can help them build makes a difference. Every healing and skill building you can do makes a difference. Start delivering a one-day workshop for removing obstacles to aliveness. Radically rely on your resources to respond to questions, not your mind.
PRACTICE ACCEPTING OTHER PEOPLE’S GENEROSITY SO THEY CAN BE THEMSELVES. You were probably taught that independence is a virtue. But think about it. If you behave as if you are self-sufficient, how can anyone give you anything? How can they be generous with their resources towards you? They cannot. By now you know that if you cannot be generous to other people with your resources, you cannot be yourself. The opposite is also true. This Experiment is to generously accept other people’s generosity, so they get to be themselves around you. This may be harder than you think. Enduring kindness can be intense. Write gloriously about the generosities you can accept. E.g. Can you accept 100 million dollars?