If you are beset by a negative self-image, especially one that is self-fulfilling and reflected back to you by others whose reactions may feed it even further, release can seem very far off. We wear our past selves like scarlet letters, eternally branded, and knowing how we have been labeled funnels us into emotions and behaviors that may make it true.
After a long struggle with an image of myself as overly emotional, neurotic, and “mental,” I’ve learned to open fully to my own apparent brokenness, and when I do, wholeness reasserts itself naturally. My resistance to that stereotype is precisely what has made me so anxious and sad, which meant that only a drop in resistance and an embrace of my nature could unlock the door and free my persona.
Recently, a series of events culminated in an intensely visceral experience of rebirth. It was just another night on the town, dancing by myself on Valentine’s eve. I am surprised at how much I enjoy being single, attached to no one, unvexed by infatuation. Still missing my cruises on the sweet French Riviera, but ah, the monastic life.
From a dry shrub watered the day before, a flower grew.
The Looking Glass Self
On Friday morning, I had tea with the director of the zen center. He shared his experience with new recruits and expressed how deeply we all just want to be known. Not to be known for anything or as anything. Just known.
I told him about a concept in psychology known as “the looking glass self.” The idea is that our self-image is constructed in large part by how we believe others see us. Others act as a mirror (i.e., looking glass).
Even if people see us inaccurately, it makes sense for us to adopt these images, even temporarily, because our actions will be interpreted within their bounds. For all intents and purposes, how we are seen is how we are. The mirrors whose image we tend to strongly adopt, regardless of accuracy, are those friends and loved one’s whose opinion matters most, those with whom we desire intimacy.
The looking-glass self is not always apparent, but when combined with the fundamental attribution error, it can be very damaging. According to the fundamental attribution error, when we evaluate ourselves, we take into account situational factors and context, but when we evaluate others, we tend to ascribe their behaviors to long-term personality characteristics. In other words, we reflect to others an image that attributes what we see in the moment to their lasting nature. When we are unkind, we see how we were provoked. When someone else is unkind, however, we tend to see them as just a mean person.
One lesson you can take from all this is that you should never look at yourself through the eyes of someone who does not see you clearly. More importantly, we rarely see ourselves clearly through the imagined eyes of others. How do we really know what others think of us?
Finally, if others see you in a very negative way, it can be very crushing and difficult to break out of. Even worse, if their negative image evokes an emotional response that confirms their image, you enter a downward spiral in which the image feeds the response which feeds the image which feeds the response. Pretty soon, you are hopelessly mired in it.
The Chöd Practice
The Tibetans have an interesting way of dealing with the self.
My strange-reality co-pilot returned from his pilgrimage in India, and we had dinner on Friday night to share stories before parting ways and breaking off contact more fully. He talked about true surrender, the sort of surrender that happens when you cannot even choose how you will cope with a situation. You cannot even say, “I will go with the flow. I will flow with the chaos.” Simply, some situation brings you to your knees, and you have no choice but to give in, and that is when the real surrender happens and the real magic begins. It was a beautiful story.
Later, he read an excerpt from a book on the practice of Chöd (Machik Labdron’s Complete Explanation: Clarifying the Meaning of Chod). For about a year, we practiced Chöd with a Tibetan Buddhist sangha in town. It involves a somewhat elaborate mixture of visual imagery, chanting, and meditation centered on sacrifice of the self. You imagine every part of your body being offered to dark, suffering beings in order to pull them out of their hell and heal them. You let them stomp on you, pull you to pieces, and have you for dinner like vultures picking apart carion.
According to the Dharma Fellowship of His Holiness the Gyalwa Karmapa:
The practice of Chöd means that the yogini or yogi meditates in such a way as to become, stage by ever deepening stage, absorbed into the whole process of surrendering and offering one’s body and self. This selfless offering only really occurs when the practitioner is finally absorbed into trance (samadhi) through the use of the ritual, aided in particular by the steady beat of the drum and bell. The adept of Chöd, uttering a secret mantra, then leaves his body, mounting the sky in the aspect of the Secret Gnostic Dakini, and there, in the mind-made-body (manomayadeha) of the Dakini, Who is black as night itself, she severs the metaphysical mind-body complex so as to offer it to the communing spirits (lha-dre), good and bad. What is really given to the spirits to feast on, is the energy used to bind the Ego in the mind-body form. In devouring this, they become liberated, as does the Siddha herself.
You Dropped a Bomb on Me
Before the night ended, my friend hit two very tender nerves. My negative self-image was reflected back to me by someone whose opinion mattered. That image has been dissolving during these past two months. Wholeness is intrinsic even in our apparent imperfections. Pema Chodron wrote, “No matter how committed we are to unkindness, selfishness or greed, the genuine heart of bodhicitta cannot be lost. It is here in all that lives, never marred and completely whole.” But the pain of feeling like a “mental patient” was refreshed by seeing its reflection in the mirror of my friend.
The next night, I went dancing and gave myself to the music. The music moved the energy in my body until I was humming like a tuning fork. I let my refreshed pain buzz and ring in the soothing river of vibrations and danced for Ganesh, the obstacle remover, praying for my transformation to deepen.
Feeling a renewed sense of loss as I tried to ward off colorful, intrusive mental images of my friend and his new paramour, and seeing my broken self reflected back at me again, I sunk. I stood against the wall, the urge to dance draining from me. My heart was sorely aching for an accepting embrace. I let the painful yearning rise up from me like incense and fill the senses of the Divine Beloved.
Then the DJ played a song by the Gap Band, “You Dropped a Bomb on Me.” Suddenly, I remembered how extensively I had used that metaphor in recent months (see Five Phases of Transformation). I often say I was “nuked back to the stoneage.” Ah yes, I thought, the universe dropped a bomb on me. I thought the bombing was over, but that was another one. A little one. That is all. Just another bomb.
And I remembered the promise of holy fallout that came to me when I was in the hospital (see Holy Fallout). I looked out across the dancefloor and imagined a barren landscape covered in white ash. Okay! I have been nuked, and I am going to dance in it!
Dancing in the Fallout
I envisioned myself swirling and stomping in the ash, like a tribal grief dance. The pain left me.
As I was dancing, it occurred to me that it was not just my landscape that had been bombed. Not just my life and all of my relationships. I myself had been bombed, my self-image, my identity, who I am in relation to others. None of these things formed some survivor rising up from the ash. They were burned to dust. I was not changing from one form into another. The old form was gone gone.
I imagined that not only was I stomping and dancing on the ashes of my former life, I was stomping and dancing on the corpse of my former self, grinding her bones into the earth.
What was left? This body, right here and now! I felt my body, felt the touch of silk on my skin, the billows of air enveloping me as I moved. I felt the ground under my feet, the boots around my toes, the stockings criss-crossing against my thighs. The vibrations of music in the center of my body, the lights scattering color across my eyes. The glowing energy congealing in the space around me. My breath. There was nothing else. No old self ever exists. I am nothing. I am not anything at all.
I felt brand new. Brand spankin’ new! My newness was not an intellectual conclusion or a verbal thought. It was my reality. It is our reality.
“Chöd!” I thought. “This is Chöd!” Like I had never practiced it before. The looking glass shatters and disappears.
Perhaps this is the real meaning of the Chöd practice. Again, I was overcome with wordless bliss, the fundamental ground of inexplicable, consuming joy so often obscured by attachment and thinking. When you look at this, this right in front of you, and drop everything else you think is there, really drop it not just with your mind but with your body, everything opens up and out into a ground of blissful silence and pure being. It is always there.
My dancing became ecstatic, flooded with energy freed from the coils of rumination. I stomped and jumped and twirled like I was tripping on peyote or something. I laughed and shook the bliss out of my muscles in a seizure of love for this being. I could have run ten miles down the dark, frozen roads by the lake. I just kept looking around the room and feeling my body and thinking, or rather, wordlessly seeing, “I am brand new! All of this is brand new!”
I felt enormous gratitude for everything my reality co-pilot said and did Friday night, the unconscious insensitivity. He gave me my self back. No small task. Nothing broken there. “Perfection!” I said to myself.
Nothing is Ever Lost
My friend pointed out that I had lost much during the past several months. Another former love had also felt the need to point out that my losses were real. I imagine these were just ways of expressing their disappointment in me. Actually, I have not lost a single thing. Whoever it was that had anything is also gone! Who is there remaining to miss what came before? Impermanence is not something that happens around us. Impermance includes us, so who is there to grieve or be grieved?
When I first read the poem by Hafiz, “There Could Be Holy Fallout,” in the hospital in December, I thought it meant that after loss, something new would come in to fill the space and bring joy again. No, the fallout itself is the source of joy. The fallout itself is holy!
Realizing your newness is not a coping strategy for pacifying a negative self-image. That image could be accurate, but it still refers to something fundamentally empty, something that is already gone before the image even reaches your eyes.
You are brand new, continuously reborn in every moment. Not reborn over and over again but residing eternally in a state of rebirth. I don’t just mean “hey, this is a new day, start over and rebuild.” I mean your self-image is never anything but a ghost! Right now, right here, where is that self? It is nowhere! Don’t think metaphorically or poetically. Take it very literally. Breath. That is real. Touch. Look. Taste. Those things are real. They are real on their own, without being evaluated or narrated as real or not-real. Enter that! But there is no substance and no reality to that for which you wear the scarlet letter, so rip it off and recognize that in this very moment, you are brand new.
And when people point at you and say you are like this and you are like that, respond with love and without judgment to what they are really saying, that they needed something different of you. If you can, meet the need. Do it directly, right then and there, and without needless self-reflection. Never try to be who someone else wants you to be, because you would only be changing their image of you. Rather, just meet the need. Be there. Then, when they point at you again and say, now you are like this, just tilt your head back and laugh. They are pointing at nothing. Blissful nothing.
