{"id":41987,"date":"2011-07-21T19:00:26","date_gmt":"2011-07-21T23:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=41987"},"modified":"2011-07-28T13:31:42","modified_gmt":"2011-07-28T17:31:42","slug":"sculptors-of-our-own-selves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/psychology\/sculptors-of-our-own-selves\/","title":{"rendered":"Sculptors of our own selves"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note<\/strong>: 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<\/strong>. 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 <\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Dr. Seward,<\/p>\n

Something came to me soon enough after your kind first post, now I\u2019ll attempt to take my notes and turn them into a coherent question. <\/p>\n

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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 \u201cjust\u201d The Hero\u2019s Journey.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> are available? Where is the language to speak of what we are becoming?<\/p>\n

How do I define myself in a world where I have shed the old skin but the new one isn\u2019t the same? Is it even there? How do I recognize it? I am not my mother\u2019s daughter. I am not \u201cone\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

Handling other issues\/subjects such as \u201cshame\u201d is difficult when there is no framework beneath, defining \u201cself.\u201d Although I often latch on to these discussions (they are often all I have around me that feels \u201creal\u201d) doing so feels much like making the icing\/decorations before the cake is baked.<\/p>\n

In therapy for awhile contemplating \u201cabuse\u201d and recovering from it, I often spoke about my tool box \u2013 how I knew I had one, and it probably even contained \u201ctools\u201d but that I couldn\u2019t see<\/em> 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 \u201ctools.\u201d)<\/p>\n

A few minutes ago, contemplating this letter, I happened upon a crow\u2019s feather in the grass of a park as I walked through. Long enough for a quill pen, beautiful yet imperfect \u2013 I understood that I will place this quill in my \u201ctoolbox.\u201d Perhaps its meaning, the meaning of its discovery, will come with contemplation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Thanks with Love,
\nLinda<\/p>\n

Dear Linda,<\/p>\n

Thank you for your beautiful question, and for allowing an opportunity to gaze at the universe through the lens of your musings! Let\u2019s jump in. You ask: \u201cWhere am I? Who am I? What am I?\u201d and \u201c What tools are available to help us to understand what we are becoming?\u201d 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 \u201cin-between\u201d place, where old models no longer define us yet we haven\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

Part of our challenge is that psychology itself has grappled with the idea of what the \u201cself\u201d is — or if it even exists at all! There is not agreement about how a self develops, or which part of our \u201cfelt experience\u201d 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 \u201cboth\u201d — we are awakening to non-dual experiences of our \u201cself.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

Most profoundly, I believe we are moving beyond the model of the \u201cexpert,\u201d 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 \u201cfixed in stone\u201d — we can re-sculpt and re-mold the clay in response to the discoveries we make about ourselves along the way.<\/p>\n

Finally, I believe we are always being helped to discover ourselves by nature and the animals around us. You were offered \u201ccrow magic\u201d along your path of self-discovery, a quill to write your beautiful, perfectly imperfect story. As Ted Andrews, author of Animal Speak<\/em> tells us, the crow was \u201ca common symbol in medieval alchemy. It represented \u201cnigredo,\u201d the initial state of substance — unformed but full of potential.\u201d Get ready for some magic, Linda, as your new creation unfolds.<\/p>\n

Many blessings!
\nJan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1738],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41987"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/191"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}