Sculptors of our own selves

Editor’s note: Jan is a longtime Planet Waves reader and psychologist who is offering this feature to answer one reader letter per week. If you have a question you would like answered and explored in this forum, please email her at Drjanseward [at] gmail.com. Please note, depending on volume of emails, not all letters may be featured. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We’re really excited to see what our readers come up with! — amanda

Dear Dr. Seward,

Something came to me soon enough after your kind first post, now I’ll attempt to take my notes and turn them into a coherent question.

Where Am I? Who am I? What Am I? While these questions have longitude and latitude of human consciousness, they mean something different to me today that “just” The Hero’s Journey.

What are the new questions we need to ask of ourselves? How do we begin to understand who we are, where we are, what we are? What tools are available? Where is the language to speak of what we are becoming?

How do I define myself in a world where I have shed the old skin but the new one isn’t the same? Is it even there? How do I recognize it? I am not my mother’s daughter. I am not “one” with my family of origin. What I did for a living does not define Who I Am. A position with which I could earn my economic place in society no longer holds water as a way to define (a farmer, an IT tech).

Handling other issues/subjects such as “shame” is difficult when there is no framework beneath, defining “self.” Although I often latch on to these discussions (they are often all I have around me that feels “real”) doing so feels much like making the icing/decorations before the cake is baked.

In therapy for awhile contemplating “abuse” and recovering from it, I often spoke about my tool box – how I knew I had one, and it probably even contained “tools” but that I couldn’t see them (and certainly not feel them) and until I could identify them, they could be of no use. (Sadly therapy did not help me discover my “tools.”)

A few minutes ago, contemplating this letter, I happened upon a crow’s feather in the grass of a park as I walked through. Long enough for a quill pen, beautiful yet imperfect – I understood that I will place this quill in my “toolbox.” Perhaps its meaning, the meaning of its discovery, will come with contemplation.

My question is: How do we discover who we are/what we are with no model? Or how do we learn to see where the model is? Or at least the clay and the sculpting tools?

Thanks with Love,
Linda

Dear Linda,

Thank you for your beautiful question, and for allowing an opportunity to gaze at the universe through the lens of your musings! Let’s jump in. You ask: “Where am I? Who am I? What am I?” and “ What tools are available to help us to understand what we are becoming?” I believe that we are all indeed waking up to a new sense of ourselves and of our potential, a sense that exceeds any previously held notion or model of how we should define ourselves. And we are indeed in an “in-between” place, where old models no longer define us yet we haven’t yet discovered the new definition of whom we have become. I see this every day in my practice, and I am experiencing it myself. It is a new reality, and can be a profoundly disorienting psychological space in which to dwell.

Part of our challenge is that psychology itself has grappled with the idea of what the “self” is — or if it even exists at all! There is not agreement about how a self develops, or which part of our “felt experience” the concept captures. Are we who we feel we are, or how others see us? Can we exist if we are not reflected through the eyes of others? And what about the role of the transpersonal, the world of Spirit, infusing our ideas and experiences of our core reality? Are we human, or are we Divine? Making matters more complicated, we are also awakening to the idea that we no longer have to be either/or, but “both” — we are awakening to non-dual experiences of our “self.”

One thing this new psychological reality is offering to us is the opportunity to discard some old conceptions of what we previously thought the self to be. For instance, we’ve moved beyond the dogma that development is driven by conflict, or that in order to be self-actualized you have to have arrived at the top of the heap. We know that we’re wired to be happy, and that giving service and being in healing relationships create the highest amount of life satisfaction and positive health outcomes. We have more permission than ever before to move beyond concepts of shame, self-blame, and unproductive guilt. And we are learning that we can literally change our experiences of the past by creating new narratives with healthier outcomes.

Most profoundly, I believe we are moving beyond the model of the “expert,” of looking outside of ourselves for the answers to the deeply felt questions you so beautifully expressed — of who, where, what, and even why we are. I believe that we are now the sculptors of our own selves; the clay is our lived and felt experience combined with our inner and outer resources (like our astrology and our community), our tools are the individual and collective accumulated knowledge and wisdom that we have inside or can borrow from others. Our inspiration comes from the divine spark that brought us all here and continues to prompt us to ask the questions and search for the answers. And we are not “fixed in stone” — we can re-sculpt and re-mold the clay in response to the discoveries we make about ourselves along the way.

Finally, I believe we are always being helped to discover ourselves by nature and the animals around us. You were offered “crow magic” along your path of self-discovery, a quill to write your beautiful, perfectly imperfect story. As Ted Andrews, author of Animal Speak tells us, the crow was “a common symbol in medieval alchemy. It represented “nigredo,” the initial state of substance — unformed but full of potential.” Get ready for some magic, Linda, as your new creation unfolds.

Many blessings!
Jan