Accepting All of Who You Are: Talk with Rick Hanson October 14, 2020

we've been exploring the broad theme of refuge which is particularly important during a time that's challenging such as with the plagues of covid and other things that are really turbulent these days so how do we find refuge in different areas and one of the key refuges is ourselves if we don't feel comfortable in our own skin if we don't have a sense of acceptance and allowing and even appreciation for who we are uh it's hard to take refuge in ourselves and so last week i explored um the refuge of accepting your experience all of your experience including all of your feelings and helping yourself as i had to gradually learn to help myself when i finally went off to college to wake down not just wake up as samuel bonder puts it and to really include my softer feelings my vulnerable feelings all of what i was feeling rather than merely my intellectual thoughts from the neck up and so last week was about accepting all of our experiences now to be clear and to make a point that we'll keep recurring as we talk about accepting parts of ourself tonight and the next week i'll talk about accepting other people oh working our way at the challenge level and then ultimately the week after that accepting all the conditions in the world and in reality altogether to be very clear acceptance is distinct from discernment we can discern things and we can discern what's problematic about them bringing to bear second our values of various kinds we can engage these qualities of discernment and valuing while also not resisting the reality of what we are trying to change and this may sound initially kind of theoretical and abstract but it gets clearer and clearer when you bring it down to experience when you bring it down to practical actual situations like for example you walk into the kitchen or wherever and you see that there's somebody hasn't done their dishes and their dishes in the sink or think of some other example they've left the cap off the toothpaste or they haven't flushed the toilet or whoever knows whatever and there's the reality that it is what it is and notice that if there's this quality in your own mind of resisting the reality of it of aversion to the reality of it that creates needless suffering that's a kind of inner collateral damage that can often create a lot of friction with other people and on the other hand we can discern that you know the cap was not on the toothpaste tube or the toilet was not flushed and we can also have a value that says hey you know it's better to put the cap back on or flush the toilet let's say we can have all that happening and then we can take skillful action as well without adding anger or resistance or tension to the fact of what reality is it is reality right dare i use the troubled phrase these days it is what it is i mean it is what it is while we can try to help it be better so it's the combination of those two summarized in the serenity prayer summarized in lots of wisdom teachings in which discernment and valuing that is your own your own can exist alongside and accepting of the way it is okay so i want to apply this to accepting all the parts of ourselves who is very often the one being among all others that we are most judgmental about and most scornful of and most exiling of various parts of ourselves out into the nether regions or down into the basement behind a locked door and this is territory that's well trod in psychotherapy and in psychology in general and i'll draw on some of those themes and also i want to explore three fundamental ways that might be perhaps a little novel to you in terms of accepting all of yourself and remember as suzuki roshi put it you are perfect as you are and you could use a little improvement so that's the paradox both are true and we can keep it all in mind here all right okay so um let's see okay so um the first thing i'd like to say in terms of accepting ourselves is to expand the way in which you regard yourself for example the classic model in psychoanalysis from freud you're probably familiar with it is this division of the psyche into these three major elements the ego which is sort of the you know core executive process inside us and it's the part of ourselves we tend to most identify with with off to the side the id the bubbling source of primordial passions of various kinds remembering that freud grew up in the victorian age uh and uh he you know clearly was you know dealing with that acculturation so we have the id and then we have the superego the kind of voice of civilization the voice of you know society saying you know what your standard should be and then we have this ego kind of beleaguered in the middle trying to negotiate between the primordial sexual aggressive id and you know the standards of civilization that say thou shalt not that's a kind of structure we have the structure of ex and the notions that were more expansive let's say coming in from jung and then neo jungians like hillman and others who talked about it's as if we have all kinds of sub personalities that could be to some extent identified with archetypal figures like the various gods in ancient greece or ancient rome you know the part of the person that is you know diana the hunter or the part of the person that is like jupiter you know the father figure throwing thunderbolts or the part of the person that is like you know a trickster part of oneself these are the ideas that we have these different parts so these are familiar notions and um one way to [Music] regard ourselves is that it's as if we are this little beleaguered ego process surrounded by these other parts of ourselves that we're kind of alienated from and we're trying to keep at bay and they're so unruly and why won't they settle down and how come they keep getting me in trouble and ah you know it feels a little bit to me metaphorically like feeling as if we were endowed at birth as young children who are wide open you know they are all of who they are right joyful one moment sorrowful the next moment hijacked by a part of them that wants the red truck and another part of them wants to bonk their kid brother with the red truck and then another part that's mortified when the parent catches them bonking their kid brother with the red truck right so we start out in this very expansive and inclusive way and then if i could i want to show you the blob theory of the blob model of psychological development okay so this is how we start this is a visual aid can you see the circle there okay circle visual aid and then life happens and i'll use myself as an example so let's say life happens and then you skip a grade and you have a late birthday and you're really in going through school and also you're a little late to puberty and so you start to feel like there's this part of yourself that's young and squirrely and picked last for sports teams and so embarrassing and it feels so unmanly if i dare use that word so you carve that part out nope not me gonna exclude that part gonna leave that part out gonna shove that part down whoa and then maybe there's another part that you encounter especially as you get a little older and it's a part that can be very righteous and certain about how things ought to be and how people ought to be and angry and this part gets you in trouble too oh no better leave that part out also so now we have another part that's being left out it's pushed down disowned shoved to the side and then maybe there's another part of you growing up in a home that really valued rationality and control of yourself and was not very imaginative was not very intuitive was very sort of logical and linear and that's how you know this kid me learned to be but these other parts that were more intuitive imaginative and i'm going to use a word that could be problematic i mean it in a certain way parts that were a little witchy a little out there a little uh oh those parts too no no no no carve them out as well right so then and i could have kept going you find yourself just being conscious of the parts that remain with all these other parts carved out and they're not carved out in a in a sense like you can actually prune a bush and that branch is no longer part of it they don't go anywhere they just go underground they're still there you know the parts of ourselves that we carve out and push aside right and then eventually we start feeling like in effect if we were born with this vast estate it's as if we gradually withdraw into the gatehouse or the capital and look out on the swamps and forests and and provinces these different parts of ourselves as if they're alien to us living smaller and tighter and more beleaguered than we really need to be that's a very common experience for understandable reasons right and then you feel as people are commenting here very pinched inside here as i very much felt when i finally you know i remember driving away from my home i had wonderful parents but for all kinds of reasons i became very contracted in that environment and i remember driving off to ucla with all my stuff in my car i was 16 and you know and i literally heard the song in my mind freedom free and i knew i knew i had to find myself in a different setting to gradually engage a process that could be safe enough to reclaim my own interior right to find all of that again and i bet a lot of us can relate to this right i'm seeing comments that coming in yeah people can relate so my first of three major suggestions tonight related to growing in self-acceptance is to regard yourself as the entirety of who you are and to have a growing sense even without working on all these warded off carved away suppressed parts of oneself just even before getting to that which is will be my second suggestion some good ways to do that it's a general sense of of as walt whitman put it i am multitudes just accepting the fact that we are all multitudes with many parts many sub-personalities many voices it's as if there are many metaphors for this you know we are a vast land with many provinces yes there is a place for developing a core executive process of discernment and values and will there's a place for that and if a person feels very fragmented and completely blown apart and scattered as if truly they have multiple core personalities that's problematic and and difficult right so as uh you know um i forget his name it'll come to me in a moment said a psychoanalyst and an or a psychologist and a buddhist practitioner you have to be somebody before you can be everybody or nobody right so it's important to be able to have a kind of core process but as you get comfortable in being this core process of discernment valuing and willfulness and you know motivated action then increasingly you can regard yourself much more loosely much more as the whole symphony the whole village the whole land provinces included the whole committee even while recognizing there needs to be a place for the chair of the committee along the way then in fact paradoxically taking refuge in and trusting in the functionality of the core process makes it more comfortable and safer to include all the voices in the room just like in in human meetings and if there's a skillful chair of a committee they can include all the voices and manage the fact that some of them need to you know finish now and hand the microphone off to somebody else but they can make a spaciousness for everyone because they're a skillful chair so you might want to ask yourself how do you experience yourself you know and to what extent is there a suppressing of all of who you are as people have written me in the chat maybe because we're worried that if we reveal our true selves others won't like it and because they don't like it we push it down and we treat ourselves as as if we don't like that now to be very clear again i believe that there are parts of ourselves and in the biological evolution of the brain in which we all have an inner lizard mouse and monkey metaphorically speaking but somewhat related to the evolution of the brain we we do have these parts of ourselves we can be very savage we could be very hateful we can be very addictive we can be very possessive we can do shitty things to use a technical term i hope you'll forgive it we can do these things yeah we need to regulate parts of ourselves but we can regulate parts of ourselves while including and accepting parts of ourselves and as i'll get to in a moment respecting and listening to the wisdom they can offer and understanding the deeper wants in them and even forgiving them while feeling more and more that we are ourselves as a whole meditative practice like the one i did tonight and i'll talk more about this in my third suggestion can really help and there's good research that shows that as people deepening their mindfulness practice and they develop trait mindfulness they become more able to be aware of all the parts of themselves without being overwhelmed or hijacked by any single part very important point so particularly if like me you grew up in a way in which you ended you suppressed repressed pushed away disowned were ashamed of felt bad about revealing different parts of yourself if you've grown up uh socialized in cultures that want to suppress certain aspects of yourself like there's a lot of research that shows that that women tend to be socialized to the extent that category means something in terms of socialization socialize to repress anger you know men tend to be socialized to repress fear and the revealing of fear as if it's shameful shameful to reveal that you're anxious about something and so as the saying has it you know we end up with you know men who are afraid of women and women who are angry at men don't take that saying too far uh so can we regard ourselves as a as the whole being that's my first suggestion can there be a sense of appreciating yourself as the whole estate the whole village the whole committee the whole symphony with all the instruments included you know and with that can there be some awareness some mindfulness maybe with wistfulness and mourning for what you may have carved out and exiled in yourself okay second suggestion in the context of this there are many powerful skillful psychological methods for including and integrating parts of ourselves and related feelings and desires and beliefs and history sometimes of interactions and even traumatic history with other people there's a lot of psychology about this and obviously my talk tonight is no substitute for professional treatment for any significant mental health issues um and for as an illustration of that there's the gestalt of therapy approaches that talk about different parts their voice dialogue from house and sidra stone approaches that let different that encourage different parts to have conversation with each other in a very accepting way richard schwartz uh with internal family systems has done wonderful groundbreaking work and a number of people are increasingly trained in that approach that integrate different parts of ourselves that have been maybe warded off or mistreated or not really understood they they haven't been allowed to give voice many different approaches i'm going to summarize two things in particular or really three things in particular with regard to parts of yourself and again i'll i'll use myself as a as a bit of an example here so if if our aim is to be more inclusive and more integrated while also being regulated because very often what happens is that these parts get suppressed and pushed away they sneak back out and suddenly you know you find yourself talking to your family or your kids and the voice of your father angrily like i have found myself to my horror suddenly finding myself doing or maybe you relax your control a little bit maybe you have a couple glasses of wine and then suddenly a part of you is just coming out and it's kind of problematic right it's not well regulated just because we've shoved them down in the basement you know sometimes they sneak out and then things happen so this doesn't mean that we ought to lock him up more in the basement because that's a short-term solution if if at all but we can be more regulated we can regulate while integrating ourselves so three key aspects of that and you might want to think about a particular part of yourself that perhaps you've been ashamed of or you feel is bad maybe other people told you it was bad maybe a part of you that really just wants to play and goof off and not do school not get the job done or maybe there's a part of you that is really pissed off really pissed off like sometimes you can open these doors inside yourself and what comes out is a hot blast of rage that's kind of non-specific or maybe even it's targeting a particular class of people like men maybe who've mistreated you or whatever you know okay imagine a part of yourself and obviously as you do this here remember this is not psychotherapy take good care of yourself here so i'll use these two parts of myself you know one being this kind of shy kid um who didn't wasn't athletic as a kid later in life i learned i'm moderately athletic but definitely not a great athlete but moderately so didn't know that when i was little so i just felt humiliated a lot so that's a part of me so here are three things one deep down inside what is that part of you wanting and can you allow and accept and include and listen to what that part of you wanted you know i wanted that part of me to be seen as capable and competent including frankly in ways that were kind of standard more for boys because that's how i grew up to be a boy and a you know a certain kind of a boy what did he want he wanted to be seen he wanted to be befriended it didn't want to be feel so embarrassed at pe when teams were picked for baseball and i was usually picked last or next to last you know inside you what does this part want maybe it wants a just world maybe it wants to be loved maybe it wants to be unshackled and just have room to be big and loud and what does it want and can you include the want of it deep down all wants are positive the deepest layer of all wanting is linked to our biological nature and it's it's pro-life in some way even if it's expressed problematically there's something there's a kind there is there are healthy wants somewhere at the root of even problematic ones so they may need to be regulated in their expression they need to be inappropriate at particular times and places to be fulfilled but in themselves the wants are okay can you honor the wants of these parts of yourself that have may have been disowned suppressed exiled and so on recognize the wanting in these parts and can you accept it second every one of these parts in their own way is trying to help you survive they're trying to help you get through one way or another to the next day even if they are very unskillful about it and in fact um misguided and creating the opposite result but deep down they're trying to help you every single voice in the committee of your mind no matter how annoying is trying to help you one way or another okay how are they trying to help you what's the teaching what's the helping right and um you know what i recognize in that little part of myself for example fourth grade third grade you know i was six years old when i started third grade uh you know is a part that that's that was trying to help me be part of the group to be included and was trying to help me um in my kind of sweet way to be okay and to engage life and you know this part of me would lead me to move into wilderness and the orange groves around her home to explore because that was where it could be expressed so it was trying to help me express healthy aspects of myself as an exploratory kind of person and someone who naturally has a deep affinity for nature and is really interested in the world as a whole this part of me as i'm realizing even as i talk about it was real was very is very curious and was trying to help me follow the thread of my curiosity out into the world it was helping so this part of you does it have a a lesson for you a teaching for you what's its function that it's trying to serve to support you in some way and can you respect that can you appreciate that the waze is trying to help you that's a second point here about these parts of yourself in the second part of my talk here third can you forgive this part of yourself not just accept it which has a kind of some you know kind of i think manly as soft receptive quality forgiveness is more active it's it's a kind of blessing and and if you can't forgive it you can't forgive it forgiveness must be authentic if it's to occur at all but can you forgive this part of yourself or can you forgive aspects of that can you communicate an understanding of it is for why it did what it did why it is the way it is can you give it the gift of forgiveness this part of yourself for myself i can forgive the part of me that was shy and humiliated and embarrassed and felt weak and small and you know uncool and okay i can forgive that part okay i can forgive the part of me that uh second part i referred to here that could get very righteously angry and critical and identified with that stream of criticism i i regulate that part and gradually it's dissipated and been uprooted in my mind although it can still arise occasionally but i can't forgive it yeah i know you i know where you're coming from i know why you're doing what you're doing yeah didn't work no please don't do that again and yeah i forgive you can you bring that quality of forgiveness to to the parts of yourself that have been pushed away okay and then as i move to the third part of my talk and then i'll open it up for discussion i see lots of things that have come in here in the chat related to that pond meditation which may have seemed kind of abstract at first but with practice you can start to be mindful of the ripples of experiencing and then second you can start to get a sense of being the streaming of consciousness as a whole the mind process as a whole yourself as a whole second and then as you gradually stabilize in that you can even get it start to get a sense of a kind of ground underlying your beingness as a whole the mind as a whole you know rested in life rested in reality maybe perhaps rested in something that is unconditioned so that's a a powerful meditation one that i encourage exploring in terms of acceptance you may have noticed that when you go out to yourself as a whole there's this very wide sense of yourself as a whole which neurologically can be supported by being aware of your body as a whole or a room as a whole or lifting your gaze to the horizon line if you want to open your eyes or just imagine it with your eyes closed there's a sense of awareness consciousness as a whole i use suggestions which you may not relate to that they work for me though of kind of like widening or opening in all directions somehow you know you go out to the hole when you go out to the hole you notice that whatever is present in that whole is okay i mean it is what it is it may need to be regulated it may need to be managed in some ways but it's not a problem because you are identified with the whole of who you are you are abiding as the whole of who you are this may be hard to understand conceptually but it becomes very clear experientially when you start to explore it and um you realize that you are just what you are as a whole you're fine as a whole mind as a whole is never a problem there may be aspects of mind that are problematic and need management and regulation and you know releasing or encouraging etc but the mind process as a whole is always okay as it is because it is simply what it is and this is something you might want to explore okay so i have covered a lot of ground here i'm looking now at the chat and seeing what kind of questions or comments may have come in all kinds of great comments and questions have come in i'm not going to be able possibly to encompass all of it what i would really just summarize and suggest to you is to to just kind of be honest with yourself about what you may tend to push out push out of sight perhaps because you've internalized social prohibitions about being that or having that as a part of yourself and seeing if at least inside the privacy of your own mind you can be more allowing and more including you could even do little exercises with yourself where you imagine your mind is like a big house with different rooms some of which are open and others that are kind of maybe the door's ajar and others that are boarded up and locked away as if there be dragons inside and then just in your own mind imagine what would it be like room by room door by door to be more inclusive of all of who you are right and with maybe some parts in particular that you've pushed away um can you recognize you know what they want and maybe even give it to them in some way so you get a sense of giving them what they long for you know and let and kind of help them receive it into themselves second can you appreciate their function can you appreciate them what they're trying to do for you in a genuine way not playing any tricks here and can you forgive them can you bring forgiveness to them and a blessing to them much as you would to an understanding to them much as you would to someone else and then last can you explore you know opening your mind wide in my book neuroderma this is the fourth practice of wholeness being whole being your mind as a whole being yourself as a whole right as a whole allowing your mind process your stream of consciousness to unfold as a whole and seeing what that's like to be whole undivided okay all right so questions comments you okay so far accepting yourself yeah and okay good all right let's see how do you get in touch with those parts of you if these parts have been suppressed for a long time um start easy just think about you know simple parts what about a part of yourself that wants to be loved and it just feels uncool to acknowledge that you really do want to be loved right or maybe there's a part of you that wants to be special and i remember acknowledging this in a graduate seminar and asked you know in 1975 i want to feel special and the workshop leader was very skillful and said okay stand on your chair rick and we are all going to clap for the next 10 seconds about how special you are and i want you to really take it in it was like oh my god but okay i went for it and then you know there you are so maybe there's a part of you that wants to feel special what is it maybe there's a part of you that's just angry about certain things and there aren't good reasons why you're angry about those things you know just start with something that seems pretty apparent and then gradually as you become more integrated and this core executive process that you know um is stable and viable and functional you become more able to just include it all you know it's okay it naturally comes forward for you okay well a case then christopher at the very end can you speak to acceptance in the context of feeling stuck in constructing environments very important point where you feel the music inside cannot fully come out where your sense of global meaning is stressed because of it yes if certainly to be clear if we're in environments where it's not safe this is really important point to reveal all of ourselves you can't do it safety first and foremost and that's the truth of it sometimes we live in under occupation in a sense with the people we you know go to work with or go to bed with and we have to be careful maybe and i want to be really clear about that or maybe just because of racial injustice or all kinds of things we can't it's not safe actually to be all of who we are you know like people who have more privilege can be all of who they are so it's very important to be of course attentive to environments and to think about environments as best we can that are more like fertile ground for us the people who actually want to hear us sing they want to hear the music inside us they're truly okay with that and sometimes when you start exploring this you realize there are certain people that will always disappoint they really can't tolerate all of who you are they don't want all who you are they really want to put the genie back in the bottle you know and then then there's some poignance there there's faithful choices there can be a grieving and a mourning as we face that well meanwhile looking for um you know increasingly people who really support you so i want to be clear you know my little talk here about be all who you are yes while dealing with environmental forces that constrain and constrict us as best you can minimally i find that it's helpful to as best you can carve out an inner freedom where you can really be yourself distinct from what other people are saying as best you can if only inside your own mind or the privacy of your own journal you know or with your therapist or that one person your rabbi your priest or maybe someone who's an imaginary not necessarily imaginary like an angel or a figure uh you know archetype of a wise being if you had a chance to talk with gandalf what would you say collateral man i'd really love to hang out with galadriel in the lord of the rings mythology uh you know imagining that if you really bared your soul revealed your heart sang your songs with with beings who would welcome that what would that be like you know if only inside your own imagination okay um okay bonnie rose i grew up in a whole family of people who wanted to put the genie back in the bottle what is the want behind their behavior that's a very interesting question and it'll be a good segue into next week well it's this is a helpful way to understand other people even people who are behaving terribly under underneath their terrible behavior what is the wholesome want it doesn't mean that in recognizing that we countenance their behavior it can often give us a deeper understanding of what's really going on and sometimes can give us ways to manage them more effectively or to understand actually what they really want and reveal more clearly what their true agenda is in in recognizing how deeply problematic it is the truth is maybe they really do want to rule everyone maybe they really do want to ward off any possible feeling of feeling of being small and bad by dominating everybody maybe that's really what they want and deep underneath that is the healthy want of safety and comfort and ease but it's expressed terribly badly so sometimes understanding and discerning the deep wants and others can be really helpful to us other times we realize that you know like people who suppressed us really growing up you know like my own parents they grew up in certain cultures around the depression in which children would be seen and not heard how was their culture that was what they thought being a good parent was about and you know that was their want to have a nice family and to look good in the eyes of the world when they took the kids out to a restaurant for dinner and we were very proper and well behaved that was what they wanted and in understanding that you know uh understanding my my mom's depressive mood sometimes understanding my dad's desire to you know have the home life kind of work out so we could just sort of focus on being a grad student and finally getting a phd in a job you know understanding that we can forgive them more sometimes so you know we can understand these deeper ones than other people and that can help us come to peace it doesn't mean again turning a blind eye doesn't mean letting them push us around because deep down their wants are are wholesome but it can mean a deeper more peaceful more accepting way of being in reality as a whole in the service of our own well-being and in the service of developing our capacities to truly make the world a better place without getting caught up so much in being at war in our own minds with the minds of other people okay um let's see here uh lots of great stuff got a couple minutes here dreams dreams are fantastic in discovering hidden parts you know young had a lot of great ideas including the notion of the shadow and very often you may have the sense in your dreams that there's some force that's trying to get you it never quite gets you but you can't escape from it like your shadow and it can be helpful to kind of imagine these aspects of oneself which can show up in the dream as sort of creepy or disfigured in some way like flawed or stained you know these are the parts of ourselves sometimes that we want to keep out and so in dreams as my dream therapist said to me once you know when the unconscious knows that you're listening it will start communicating more with you so dreams can be a wonderful way to have parts of ourselves come forward intense non-ordinary experiences can be a way for this sort of thing to come forward you know visions vision questing journeying of various kinds can be a way for these parts to come forward art drawing on the you know the other side of the brain as the book has it can be helpful in really exploring who you are all of who we are that's lovely that's lovely okay um yeah what do you think accepting yourself all of yourself you might even think about doing a little committee drawing all the all the voices all the sub personalities or some of the major ones you know this classic and think about just different aspects the wise child so i'm going to name some maybe as as i finish here see what if anything resonates so one drawing on young to the extent this is meaningful to a person the anima so the more feminine aspects of someone who identifies more as uh as male or animus the masculine quote unquote and obviously this can be controversial aspects within someone who identifies as female classically different archetypes like the inner child the wise child the angry child the misbehaving child the selfish child who wants my cookie oh yeah you know the voice of wisdom many of our parts are actually really wonderful they're quite profound the voice of spirituality the the you know the buddha within if you relate to it christ consciousness you know what whatever is speaks to you um you know the tree of wisdom the great mother just these archetypal figures these parts of yourselves the critic the pusher protector parts right i like this have a tea party invite all those parts for tea welcome them instead of locking the door on them and give give voice to them see what that's like right you know in transactional analysis the the psyche is divided into the inner child the critical parent and the nurturing parent yeah um okay well this was a lot right so how about we just kind of sit here with all of ourselves all of ourselves all of it allowed all of it included all of these parts of ourselves are actually processes they are verbs not nouns the wise child process the critic process the protector process the great mother process all of these processes like currents deep currents in the total pond of who you are letting this land as we finish up here [Music] thank you for your practice thank you for being here for everyone here and thank you for being here for me

Channel: Rick Hanson

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Id: ZHsYMzvBijE

Length: 47min 8sec (2828 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020