Difficulty in your team? In your family?
You could turn away, into your stories, into your certainty that they are at fault.Or you could turn towards, and begin a new kind of conversation - most likely one you've never had before.It may be that what you really want is to preserve your sense of your own rightness, and hold onto the powerful feelings of self-esteem which resentment and resignation can build.But if you don't want this, if you do want an outcome which builds trust and the possibility of ongoing relationship which path, do you think, is most likely to bring about the outcome you desire?The path of turning away, or the path of turning towards?
Photo by David Hawgood at Wikimedia Commons
I write here often about the inner critic because it has been the cause of so much struggle and difficulty since I was very small. In writing I discover new angles and new waysof responding. I hope it will be of help also to some of you who are reading.For years I did not want to hear anything that others had to say about me, whether praise or criticism, loving or ill-intended. It was all pretty much the same to me - a wounding reminder of my own constant self-judgement. Such harshness in my inner world led me to take on inner self-numbing as a serious project. The comments of others, however offered, simply reconnected me with what I was working so strenuously to avoid.I extended this project into the outer world too, of course, trying not to draw too much attention to myself. I'd stay out of the limelight when I could. And I developed a reputation for shyness and quietness, for not being too much trouble to anyone, for looking ok, for being humble and self-effacing: all powerful supports for the inner numbing to which I was so committed.At the time, I doubt I would have understood any of this as something I was actively doing. But such is the power of the critic, it can shape a life from the inside out, and for that reason I think it's a topic of enormous importance.It was only in my mid-thirties, when a teacher of mine was generous enough to tell me how self-critical he found me, that I began to see that I had a critic at all. Until then I'd thought it self-evident that the world was made up of exactingly high standards that I could never reach and populated by others who knew my many failings even before I discovered them myself. It had never occurred to me that my hyper-vigilance for criticism, inside and outside, was just one possible way to live an adult life.The foundational, liberating move was to identify the critic as an entity in its own right - a part of me - and to see that the harshness it generated was not life itself. In this way the critic became something I have rather than something that invisibly has me. And having it opened up the possibility of cultivating a new relationship with it.I learned how to see the critic as an attacking force and, gradually, how necessary it is to defend against its attack. Reasoning with it (a familiar habit for me) or otherwise engaging with it does not help, because the critic is insatiable. It has higher standards in all domains of life than I can ever reach. Whatever I do it's on the immediate lookout for what else is undone or not perfect. It cannot be placated by persuasion, by argument or by giving in, and it is not at all interested in the evidence of my eyes and ears and heart. Living with the critic is like living with a rabid dog.Defending requires meeting the critic with equal and opposite energy to its attacks, pushing them away with considerable force. Expletives help - the more evocative the better. What does not help is passivity: quietly waiting, staying small, until it goes away. This strategy, familiar to me from my childhood, just invites the critic to keep going.When I remember to defend myself adequately I gain a measure of freedom, some space, into which the longings of my heart and conscience can step forward. It turns out that the critic - though it will defend itself by telling me it is my conscience - is interested neither in what I long for nor in what is right. It cares only about maintaining a vanishingly small world in which nobody can ever be disappointed and no shame can occur. And it's willing to use the very disappointment and shame it so fears from others in order to keep me in line.And so I have to remember to defend, every day. As time goes on the attacks become more disguised, more wily. It's a lifetime's work. And necessary, if I am to live fully, and if I am to take up the freedom and capacity to contribute that is my - and everyone's - birthright.
It’s common to think that insight is required before you can make a change to your life, to your work, or to your relationships. From this perspective you'll put off changing until you've "got it", until you've understood what's called for.But it’s equally true to say that insight is what happens as a result of the changes you make.Being different, or understanding more deeply, often requires first standing in a different place to the one you’re standing in now - giving up your certainty, taking up new practices and behaviour and a fresh, perhaps temporary, story about who you are and what's possible for you. You have to step purposefully and with some courage into the unfamiliar territory of not knowing before you have much chance of understanding from a new perspective.If you’re waiting for insight to strike you first, you might have it exactly the wrong way around.
Perhaps today is the day to start allowing yourself to feel the impact of the life you're living.What joy, sorrow, tenderness, anticipation, love, fury, despair, disappointment, acceptance, hope is being brought about by your life?What does it feel like to be you, really?It will probably take some softening, some slowing down, and some opening on your part, so that you can feel beyond the numbing and automatic habits we're all prone to fall into.Once you start to tune in to what life is actually like for you, you open the possibility of a new and fresh response arising - one that honours your life and that of those around you.And what better project could there be to take up at the dawn of a new year?
I'm learning how easy it can be to experience life as an affront.When life shows up this way my attention is drawn to everything that is absent. I see how much I long for that cannot be, and the many reasons why that is the case - the limits of my resources and power, the particular place and time in history into which I was born but which I did not choose, the people I have met and not met along the way, the many choices made and the many chances missed. How nothing is ever complete. And how nothing is ever perfect.Life as an affront is nothing but a series of unrealised and unrealisable expectations which somehow I'm expected to take care of.It's not hard to amplify the feelings of shame and resentment and despair that arise from this. I can easily dwell on all the ways I imagine I am to blame for it all. Or, in a more grandiose sense, I can get to feel entitled to a life that spares me from the ever messy, partial, uncontrollable situation in which we all find ourselves, and resentful and fearful at its impossibility.Sometimes I catch myself in the act of choosing this interpretation of life, for a choice it is, and see that it's a habit - a way of thinking and feeling in a predictable and familiar way, over and over. A way of sameing myself.I'm reminded that choosing differently will be difficult and unlikely to become a new kind of habit without my dedication, commitment and constant practice.So I'm hoping over the coming months to learn from traditions that have chosen a different and more joyful interpretation of life. I want to follow in the footsteps of those who have been attuned to the very real difficulties and suffering we experience and who have nevertheless deeply cultivated their capacity to look upon life with both wonder and joy.The Sufi tradition in Islam, Hasidism in Judaism, the Jesuit order in Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism all have a strong streak of joyfulness and laughter woven through their stories and practices. They are able to laugh at and laugh from within life, and take joy in the sacred messy incompleteness of everything.I'm seeing what it could be like to whirl and be whirled by life, to consciously practice finding joy at what is, to love and be loved by life rather than habitually being affronted by it.Already I'm seeing so much in ordinary life that normally passes me by.I'll let you know how I get on.
I think there's much to be said for 
Inspired by the author David Grossman whose eloquent and beautiful work takes on many important topics - most recently grief in his book '
Two kinds of conversations you can have when you're in difficulty with others:The first is an inner conversation.
What a miracle our consciousness is.That an assemblage of matter, atoms and molecules, earth and stardust, coheres into cells - entities with processes and membranes and the capacity to produce themselves, and cells into organs...... and that those cohere into a living, breathing, thinking being that can experience itself as alive, and think about itself, and take conscious deliberate action...... that we can have other people and what happens matter to us...... that we experience joy and love and grief and disappointment...... that we can choose and speak, move ourselves and others to action, create and build and make and destroy, teach and play and invent and compose and undo ourselves...... that we form relationships, communities, organisations...... that we make worlds.Maybe it's only when we come into first-hand contact with death that we appreciate all at once what a miracle any of this is. And most of us do not come often into such contact directly. We are hardly in touch with the inevitability of our own end. Death is a rumour, a whisper, a great silence of which we are reminded only occasionally. It is, mostly, what happens to others.I am coming to see that when I forget death I also forget how improbable any of this is. I forget that my body lives and that I live because of it.It feels safer that way.In my forgetfulness I am quickly distanced from the realness of things. I try fit in, to be liked, to avoid judgement, to stay within familiar horizons. I hold back. I retreat into the security of my own mind, where my suppositions and judgements of people can not so easily be tested. I become concerned with looking good. I get distracted, reaching repeatedly and automatically for what feels recognisable, for what will soothe me. But in order to shield myself from death something has to die and freeze and become very small within me.I'm gradually finding out that the miracle of my own consciousness and the consciousness of others comes with a compelling responsibility to take care of life - to turn away from automatic pilot, and towards creativity, compassion, fierceness, love. Away from distraction and towards being present. Away from disconnection and towards listening deeply and speaking out. Away from denial and towards what's true.Towards life itself.Because in my forgetfulness I also forget - and oh so quickly I forget - just how soon this miracle will be over for me, and for you, and for everyone we know.
