11:11 Awakening to Your Real Self
"Rewilding" Your Life
Long before you awakened to being a distinct self at around five years of age, the inevitable stress of being a tiny human had already made an indelible mark on you. Any perceived threat to your survival may have activated an opposing force within you that determined which aspects of your personality could express themselves in their “wild” form and which parts got domesticated, altered or banished to the shadows.
Though born with pure, constructive drives meant to lead you to a good life through the expression of your natural talents, adverse events suffered in childhood can arrest your organic development and activate dysfunctional compensatory drives.
Wounds to the psyche’s integrity suffered in childhood can shape you in their image. As a child, whenever you felt helpless and small, you automatically created a compensatory “work around” that helped you cope. Over time, these childish modifications got grafted onto your personality and became normalized until you accepted them as fundamentally how you are and who you are.
Unfortunately, these now-unconscious modifications are obsolete—you’ve survived childhood—and holding on to them can prevent you from maturing into a fully functional adult, capable of cooperating with others and living your best life.
Your Real Self is sentient, sensitive, open-hearted and open-minded at birth. As an infant, you were like a tiny video camera, recording experiences in their raw state without relevant context. Given the lack of resources, personal agency and practical life experience of the child, you were forced to react to the events initiated by those around you by exerting the only power you had—the power to modify your Real Self to help you adapt to your surroundings.
Those modifications allowed you to survive childhood, but they may also have disabled your capacity to live out your destiny and thrive as an adult.
Your Real Self comes equipped with numerous talents and a constructive drive that guides you to use those talents to make your life and the world around you a better place. However, whenever you felt alone, unsafe or helpless to improve your situation as a child, your nervous system reacted to the primal fear of abandonment and death.
Although basic existential anxiety is intrinsic to the human psycho-social-spiritual makeup which we all share, a variety of complex factors determines the degree to which our Real Self becomes disfigured by adverse childhood experiences. Whether the impacting incidents appear horrific or mild, frequent or rare, the radical adaptation demanded of you in childhood pre-conditioned you to bury the “unacceptable-to-others” or wild aspects of your authentic self and amplify a more tame and socially acceptable version of you.
The fact that we experience anxiety and annoyance is the certain sign that, in the unconscious, there is an emotional program for happiness that has just been frustrated.
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation
Under pressure to adapt to your childhood environment, feeling tiny, helpless and all alone in a hostile world, you learned to grasp for proof that you were sheltered, cared for and belonged to a stable community. If such proof was not forthcoming in real life, your psyche would have had to invent it. If your primal needs for control, security and esteem were consistently unmet, you would have defaulted to the only useful tool available to a small child: Imagination.
To soothe basic anxiety, the psyche creates an idealized version of itself . Using the vehicle of your (imaginary) Idealized Self, you started to amplify some attitudes and suppress others, crafting an ego that was more acceptable than the Real Self.
Now instead of relying on the instincts of the Real Self, which easily makes spontaneous moves towards, against and away from people, places and things in accordance with its authentic wishes, we calculate our moves based on how we can extract our needs from the scant resources we perceive in the environment. The ego irrationally blames and hates the Real Self for its desires which have seemingly caused deprivation. Tragically, this scarcity mindset and misplaced blame causes us to declare war on the the Real Self and imprison the Idealized Self in the shadowy realms of the psyche.
Ego is an artificial pride in an artificial self.
The tragedy of the human condition is that many of us destroy ourselves by wasting the potentialities we actually possess in hopeless pursuit of characteristics we think we should have. Constructive, creative strivings can get wrecked by the obstructive or destructive forces inherent in the Idealized Self.
But the saving grace is that life and our Real Self are the best teachers if we are willing students, open to “knowing thyself.” Working on yourself is an integral process of living, maturing and finding your place in the world. Learning to live without the illusion created by your Idealized Self dissolves inner conflicts, making you more wholehearted in all that you do. It lessens outer conflicts because you’re less conflicted.
Learning to listen to the guidance contained in the true wishes of your Real Self can strengthen your faith in yourself, allowing you to tap into the constructive drives that will empower you to reach your God-given potential.Your constructive, guiding impulses can be unmistakably felt when you cultivate stillness and listen with the heart. Awakening to your Real Self starts to awaken the heart and activate the soul. The demanding ego dissolves of its own accord over time.
Spiritual Practice: Rewild your life. Set your Real Self free!
Moves initiated by the Idealized Self are pretentious, conflicted and compulsive while spontaneous moves toward fulfilling your God-given potential are coherent, realistic and effortlessly compatible with our situation in life. Notice when the actions you initiate feel graceful and when they feel forced. This helps you differentiate the impulses between the Idealized Self and the ego. Be kind when you recognize the ego at work. Befriend it, but listen for the guidance of your Real Self.