Three Selves That Emerged For Me In a Moment of Insight
One of the most annoying things, for me, in growing and developing, is realising that something that people had talked about to me for years... is true.
I had a moment like that in my office (our spare room) in our flat in London several years ago.
I've never created a meditation practice in the way I thought they were supposed to be created. I spoke about this on the 12-Minute Method podcast. In fact, the idea of how meditation should be - a cushion, cross-legged, an hour at a time, a bell, some beads or something - had stopped me meditating.
One of the great lessons I took from creating the 12-Minute Method Podcast, and working on the books, is that done and average is much better than not done and brilliant.
Meditation emerged for me as a part of my coaching practice. My coach early in my business, Joel Monk, challenged me to create a practice to help me do my best coaching. I did it. In essence, this was a meditation. Just not cross-legged, and no beads.
I coupled it with another exercise from Joel - a centring exercise designed to tune in my senses and awareness. Again, a meditation, just without the cushion or bell.
And then we come to that thing that people had said that I found to be true: that insight arises from meditation.
I suppose on some level I had often thought 'I thought meditation was about not thinking, not about having insight.'
And then one day, while focusing my attention on my breath, or the sensation of being in deep connection with people, or my senses, I had an insight.
In some ways it had happened many times - many of these articles came into my thoughts while focusing, and were quickly scribbled down as titles.
But this one felt different. It was a clarity of thought about something I'd been wrestling with. A clear sight of what I was trying to write about in a book I was working on (you can read the preview of it here).
The insight was this (it's been fine-tuned in my thinking a little since then).
It can be powerful to think of ourselves as three selves, which we might call:
The Higher Self
I was already working with the Higher Self. When Steven Pressfield wrote about it in The War of Art, it really stuck with me. I had an intuitive grasp of what he was talking about when he said that if we get past Resistance, we can do the work of the Higher Self.
How I think about this is: the Higher Self is me on my best days. It is me at my most skilful, nimble and noble. My wisest self. I feel clear, open, present, creative, powerful. In some ways, this is what my meditations were trying to invite in my coaching.
If possible, I want to be my Higher Self more - and my personal development work has mostly been aimed at that.
The Deeper Self
In some ways this was the distinction that came clear to me in the moment of insight during the meditation. That we might think, also, of all of our self that is under the surface and subconscious as the Deeper Self.
Deep currents of an underground river, moving us. Deep tidal currents pulling us one way or another, without us really realising. Unless we are really aware.
In the Deeper Self can be the values and ideals that pull us forward - it can bare fruit to bring them to the surface. But although they can be unconscious, mostly they feel like a part of the Higher Self: what we live on our best days.
For the Deeper Self to serve us, we need to understand and love it. And mostly, it is the wrapped up patterns and pains that have developed in us over many years. It is the stories we still tell ourselves from our childood - it's not about the suits, remember, it's about the last 30 years.
And more than that, it's about the many ways evolution has formed our psychology: to keep us safe in simpler times, to keep us alive when life or death was acceptance, and more.
We can be subject to these parts: they can rule us, they often do. They may always do so, to some extent.
But if we can see them... If we can use curiosity as the antidote to contraction, then they are simply objects we see. They may still have power, but we have more power, when we can see them: the power to choose. Choose our response in the face of our patterns: the underlying, deep tidal currents of our Deeper Self.
The Everyday Self
Remaining, of course, but not particularly contained in that moment of insight, is the normal self. The everyday self. The one thinking about all these things today. Not at its most dynamic and high version. Neither completely ruled by the patterns of youth or evolution.
Writing this today, Resistance tells me: you're probably just regurgitating Freud, and the only reason you don't know that is that you're too lazy to have read him. This isn't original.
But, that's just Resistance.
Something higher is writing this through me today, and my Higher Self knows that all we need is one person to experience life differently because of this article, and God's work is done for now.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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