SGM Sept. 2013 Weekly Message Two: “Who or What Will Rescue You?”
Press the play button or click here (right click + save target as) to download the audio file
Welcome back to the September 2013 Edition of Spiritual Growth Monthly. I’m Kevin Schoeninger. It’s great to have you with us here at SGM. This week, we continue our exploration of “The 12 Stages of Healing,” by Dr. Donald Epstein.
Do you find yourself on the lookout for that special insight, technique, or person who will help you feel better, get to that next level, and be more successful?
Once you’ve allowed yourself to experience Suffering (Stage One in the 12 Stages of Healing), it’s natural to look for something or someone who will help you through that. This is your natural entry into Stage Two of the healing process.
As we discussed last week, in Stage One, suffering must be acknowledged instead of repressed or avoided. In Stage Two, you take the next step of objectifying and identifying with your suffering as a “thing” to be fixed. In other words, you describe your suffering in objective personal terms such as “my bad back” or “my dysfunctional relationship” or “my lousy job” and you’re looking for how to fix that negative part of your life. This is your next step forward. You take the position of a conscious agent who is dealing with some bad part of your life and you are seeking someone or something that can fix that for you.
So, in Stage Two, you become aware of different parts of yourself—or at least one other part of yourself that’s gone bad or is broken and the rest of you that is seeking a solution. You become aware of polarities within you, different parts of you that seem to have a life of their own. This could be a part of your body or a part of your life that is in pain.
In Stage Two, it feels like you are fighting a battle with that part of you that is broken and you look to authority figures such as doctors, teachers, or religious figures, medicines or therapeutic elixirs, or special techniques or procedures to fix, correct, save, or cure the part that has gone bad.
Dr. Epstein says, “In the early part of Stage Two, we are often tempted to seek a magical genie—a person, procedure, or thing—that will save us from feeling “bad” and will help us feel “good.” (p.26, 12 SOH)
Basically, we are looking to be rescued from our suffering by some outside force.
When we find something or someone that seems to work, that helps us feel better, we will tend to idolize that person, cure, or procedure and put them or it on a pedestal. We make them or it our savior—at least temporarily.
What will generally happen, however, is that, after a period of time, we find ourselves suffering—again. The technique doesn’t seem to work as well as it did at first, we see flaws in the person who saved us, and the new job or new relationship cycles around to where it feels just like the last one we gave up on. We may now blame the doctor for our renewed pain, or blame our new job, or blame the new partner or the magical method that we had just so recently idolized and praised. The former savior is now a villain.
In “The 12 Stages of Healing,” Dr. Epstein says, “I have found that most people fluctuate between stages One and Two for most of their lives. Rather than participate in a larger and more fluid rhythm that encompasses all the healing stages, they remain stuck in a vicious cycle of suffering and magical solutions.” (p.32, 12SOH)
In fact, this might be the state of our global culture as a whole—we are stuck in cultural cycles of suffering and failed saviors and external cures. Whether it’s our ailing economy, or tensions in the Middle East, we tend to see our suffering as something “bad” “out there” that needs to be fixed by authorities or special procedures. We look to saviors to cure our suffering and villains as the cause of it.
A rather mundane and seemingly innocent example of this “saviors and villains” cycle happens in the world of sports and entertainment. I was listening to sportstalk radio after reading this chapter this past week, and I noticed how the callers were either extolling the virtues of the sports heroes that made them feel good or ranting about and blaming those who had screwed up and were now making them angry.
Our culture tends to do this with all kinds of celebrities and public figures. Either they are larger than life saviors who take us to magical places that make us feel good or they are villains who have fallen from grace and whom we blame for all that is bad in the world—and our lives. And, it’s not hard for someone to move from one side of that spectrum to the other in the public eye.
This whole tendency to objectify our suffering and project it onto others who are either helping or adding to our suffering is characteristic of Stage Two. It is a symptom of a deeper event in our consciousness which Dr. Epstein describes like this:
“Any part of us that is ignored, denied, or alienated builds pressure or tension. As this polarized consciousness, region, energy pattern, or disassociated rhythm screams for its existence, it gains an unconscious control of more and more of our reality. It is often resentful, injured, distrustful, and foreign to our nature. Therefore, it is seen as ‘evil’ or ‘wrong.’” (p.35, 12SOH)
Racism, dogmatism, fear of evil, the fight against cancer, the war on drugs, and pretty much all of the world’s “big problems” are projections of these injured and alienated parts of ourselves. These projections make up the majority of our news and form the currency of most public discussion. They are dramatized and sensationalized to entertain us and keep us stuck.
Here’s the key to move forward:
We move through Stage Two, as we realize that there might be a pattern in our suffering and that pattern is not “out there” but “within us.”
We begin to notice a connection between our symptoms and ailments and the events in our lives. We start to notice patterns repeating themselves over and over again. We find ourselves in the same “bad jobs,” the same “dysfunctional relationships,” and dealing with the same pains and poor financial situations, again and again.
Then, we start to wonder if maybe it’s not some outside force that’s going to rescue us, but maybe it’s more about healing ourselves on the inside. When we open to the idea that what’s wrong is a pattern of suffering within us, and realize that we participate in that pattern through our thoughts, feelings, and actions, we complete Stage Two.
At this stage, we don’t have to know exactly what this pattern is or exactly what our role is in it. We simply need to acknowledge the basic idea of “having different internal patterns” and “our personal involvement in these patterns.”
Dr. Epstein offers another simple breathing exercise to connect us with a felt sense of having different patterns or what he calls “rhythms” going on inside us.
(to experience the different rhythms in your body):
Sit or lie down in a comfortable position in a quiet, private environment.
The basic idea of this exercise is to place your hands on different part of your body, so you can feel differences in what is happening in each of those different areas.
Throughout this exercise, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.
Begin by placing one hand on your upper chest and the other hand on your navel. Breathe and feel your breath connected to the top hand on your upper chest. Then breathe and feel your breath connected to the bottom hand on your navel. Notice any differences in feeling between these two areas.
Move your hands, so your top hand is at the bottom of your sternum and your bottom hand is on your lower abdomen. Again, feel your breathing in your top hand, then, feel your breathing in your bottom hand. Notice any differences in feeling between these two areas.
Finally, place one hand on the center of your chest and the other on the center of your abdomen. Breathe and feel your breath through the space between your two hands. Notice any differences in feeling at one end of this space and the other.
— — —
The purpose of this exercise is to help you notice differences in how your breathing feels in different areas of your body. This gives you a visceral sensation that you have different rhythms or polarities operating within you.
You might expand this exercise to notice how you have different parts of yourself that have different needs and desires—some of which may conflict or compete with each other.
For example, there might be a part of you that wants to get in shape and a part of you that wants to veg in front of the TV; a part of you that wants to get up early and meditate and a part of you that wants ten more minutes in bed; a part of you that loves and adores your spouse and a part of you that nitpicks every little flaw; a part of you that wants to grow your own business and a part of you that wants the security of the current job you hate; a part of you that wants to eat broccoli and a part of you that wants chocolate cake. . . You get the idea.
I’d love to hear about any personal polarities that you discover, and would like to work with, in the Discussion below.
In next week’s message, we’ll explore Stage Three in which we see how our current perspective is creating the experiences in our lives.
Until next time,
See if you can notice different parts of you that have different rhythms and different agendas,
Kevin