Step 9 - Undoing The Stories That Bind You

I’ve spent the last year crying most weeks, often every morning. It has been a powerful, healing process that I don’t fully understand. What I do understand is that first person I need to love is me. When I have no love for my Self, it is not possible to love anyone or anything else. Self-hate, in my growing knowledge and experience, is the only problem that we have.

 

 

However, self-hate often won’t appear as self-hate. Instead, it comes with an effort to improve my Self (because I am not good the way I am) or the indignation of not being seen as you imagine (how dare you treat me that way) or the longing for love (when will I know that I am worthy of you). We rarely consider these emotions originating from self-hate, and we often blame others for how we feel.

 

 

Victims are violent people - violent against their own Self. The pain and suffering a victim feels is not inflicted from without, it is inflicted from within: when you rage against what others say, you become the person afflicting your Self. It is never another person who causes you pain, it is only ever your Self that would not love you enough to know that those other people are wrong about you. Poor them - how sad that they fail to know the real person you know and love. Compassion for others is born from the love of your Self.

 

 

Over these last years I have been disparaged, misunderstood and criticized by more people than I can possibly know. It’s part of public life, part of what it means to take a stand and commit to something. When I used to care about other peoples’ opinion more than my own, I ached so much I resorted to alcohol to anesthetize my longing. Now there is only one opinion I value above all the others: my opinion of me.

 

 

When I hate me, I suffer and end up hating you too. When I love me, I love you. This is all too simple for some people, but the essence of truth is simple. My precious teacher Marjorie Barstow, in describing Alexander's discoveries, once remarked: “This is so simple, it is shocking.”

 

 

I feel the same way. It all came to me for the first time when I was 18 years old - and this insight keeps returning as I grow older - that downward pressure is the result of self-hate, it is the result of failing to forgive your Self for being who you are in the moment. You are that, nothing else. If you say “I wish I did not do that, say that, think that…” what is left but to hate your Self?

 

 

Hate fills the space when love absents itself.

 

 

Love is what is there, hate is what we add. Our heads do not need to be poised on our spine because that is what happens organically when we are present, loving and being who we are. Heads start pressing down on spines when we are not present, when we imagine ourselves as wrong, as lacking, as victimized, as some kind of mistaken person that needs fixing.

 

 

You do not need fixing. Alexander's discoveries are not a fixing phenomena. Alexander's discoveries reaffirm what already is, and present us with concrete, scientific proof that when we hallucinate and believe a story that would argue with how things exist, we can see it’s harmful presence almost immediately by observing the relationship of the head to the spine and whole self.

 

 

Yet this pain we feel is also part of our perfection - it is what is right about us, not what is wrong about us. When we do the things we do, if we create such volumes of self-hate in our internal dialogue, pain and suffering is the natural sign that lets us know we are out of harmony with the truth of who we are.

 

 

What stories do you carry around that cause you to feel pain? These are stories that actually bind you to the world that you do not want be in! You are not in that world when you cease imagining it. It doesn’t matter if your story is a happy one, but when it causes you pain, why keep it? There is only one world, the one that is here right now, not the one in your imaginations. While you live in a painful story of what is wrong with you, with her, with them, with him, with the world - you miss the moment that is all you have.

 

 

This is the work that rests at the heart of what I do. Everything else is there to support it.

 

 

This is the work.