I liked this article from Integral Recovery - on Surfaces and Depths - quite a bit. This is a useful reminder and a useful practice for all of us. More below.
Surfaces and Depths
One of the main insights of the great mystics, and one of the essential truths of Integral Recovery is that all suffering comes from identification with surfaces. This is not a dogma that one has to believe or buy, based on what I or anyone else is saying, this is an experiential given that one will discover as one practices and plunges again and again into the depths of one’s own being in daily contemplative and meditative practice. And yes, again, daily contemplative interior practice is an essential part of Integral Recovery practice. Someone recently defined practice as “cultivation through repetition.” This is the best short definition I think I’ve heard. What are we cultivating? Through exercise and nutrition: strength, health and vitality; through our cognitive work: new perspectives, knowledge and wisdom; through our emotional and shadow work: freedom from the dysfunctional aspects of our past programming, and the freedom not to get lost in our current drama; through our spiritual practice: the ability to live our lives from our core, which means our best and truest self. This means going beyond the apparent to the essential. We cultivate all of these qualities by the constant repetitive exercise of these four essential aspects of our selves: body, mind, heart, and soul.
As Marco Morelli once told me, daily practice is equivalent to keeping the fire going under the pot. To keep the fire of transformation and growth going, one has to keep the heat up. If one approaches the project of transformation and transmutation piecemeal, or sporadically, the desired changes simply will not happen. Again, the call and challenge of Integral Recovery is daily Integral Practice.
One of the main problems that I have seen for people on this path is the fear that arises often when one is doing the work. The problem is not that “oh, this doesn’t work,” but “this is too much!” When the darkness and the pain and the chaos and the dark nights emerge, the natural tendency is to run as quickly as possible from the darkness, and even the light. It was this same attempt to avoid unpleasant and unwanted states that lead to using drugs and subsequent dependency in the first place. As Bill Harris has said for those using Holosync and facing the chaos that necessarily comes up, “you should high five your partner,” because chaos is the mother of evolution and when chaos kicks in, you are getting ready for what Prigogyne called the “escape into higher order.” If one does not short circuit the process and stays with it, one will transform and grow. How do we do this? By continuing to expand, invite, and allow the process of going from chaos into higher order to continue. We can’t control the chaos, but we can invite it: from caterpillar, to chrysalis, to butterfly. Not just once, but over and over again: the constant process of recreation (death and rebirth), expansion, evolution and growth.
Read the whole article.
For me, this is the key passage that resonated from this article:
To be changed, transformed, to move to the next level or stage we must “let the darkness come upon us,” and let ourselves move through the darkness of the birth canal in which our old ideas, beliefs, and identities die and are reborn again and again. How do we do this? By continuing to expand and become identified with the context, the Witness, and not the objects that arise.When we are caught up in the nigredo, to use an alchemical term, it's easy to become identified with the contents of the shadow that are now so clear to us. These disowned or exiled parts - freed from the personal unconscious often for the first time - want to take over the system (the self) and have their time in the sun.
Like the above quote suggests, we need to stay centered in the Witness, the observing self, or our Buddhanature, whichever term you want to use. When we identify with the "objects" - those exiled or disowned parts - we can get derailed from the growth project not just in the short term, but for days or weeks at a time.
I'll close this post with another quote from the article, one that reiterates something I wrote about the other day - crisis is the greatest possible teacher.
We must be willing to cross the threshold from the known into the unknown. We must enter the dragon’s lair, the dark cavern and face our own demons to find the treasures that lie beyond our darkness and fears. By our willingness to take this journey we find our medicine, and power: that is our gift to the world, our payback to life. This is a journey that we must be willing to take again and again, through fear, darkness, and chaos, into wisdom, strength and compassion. Over and over again. Not just once (that would be nice!), stress, chaos, crisis, the mother of evolution.
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