Category Archives: Insights

These are insights into life, gained from my inner processing, that might be useful for other people.

My Interview with Worry

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Worry, one of the Malcontents

Yes, starting this, I am worried if I’ll say this right. Ah well, I’ll just write it.

Today I learned some more about another one of the Malcontents, “Worry”. This guy is always worrying about everything. Right now he’s worrying if that last sentence was phrased correctly. Or if this writing style I’m writing in right now will be good enough to present to people, or if it will be rejected.

The most important thing I found out about him was that he disliked uncertainty. Actually, I’m worried that my discoveries about him wouldn’t be as well received in this form, so let me do a numbered list (of the things I learned about worry):

  1. He dislikes uncertainty. He knows what it’s like to feel certain about something only to have it instantly crumble to bits. He’s worried about that kind of stuff.
  2. His role in the Malcontents is to alert the others to things they need to pay attention to. If Worry is getting so worked up about something, there might be something to it. Suspicion takes a keen interest in Worry’s worries.
  3. He wants to make sure others within me don’t get too certain about stuff ever, because then they might not pay attention to something that might fall apart at any moment. So he invites the very thing he doesn’t like.

I have begun to see a pattern. All of the malcontents seem to dislike something that’s a part of life, and through their dislike seek to avoid it. Stubborn Pride dislikes tragedy; Paranoia, death; Suspicion, immorality. Haven’t talked to Depression yet, but I have my suspicions on what I’ll find.

What makes me sad about this is that even though it’s obvious that the way these parts of myself work can be destructive, negative, over the top and fearful, I can’t help but agree with them – I don’t want tragedy, death, immorality, or uncertainty (at least not constant uncertainty) either. I feel as though I could try to give this side of me hell, to fight them with all of my being, but… it would just sneak back into me. After all, if I fight them fearing what they will do, that’s also a dislike for something. So, the “Inner explorer” in me, which is what I’m writing from now, will do nothing but gather more information, for now.

Is this the right thing? Will I look bad for posting such a conclusion? Perhaps. (There’s the worry talking.) But I feel like for now I will balance out that fearful side of myself with all of the strong, adventurous, fun-loving, courageous sides of me. And if any side of me harms any other side, I can respond, and if I can see it, I always will. That much I can do.

But, sorry, I’m talking too much about my own thoughts and conclusions. What’s something practical in this experience? I don’t know. I would recommend everyone get a sense of how this side of themselves operates. Why does your “worry” does what it does? What about the other malcontent, dissatisfied parts of you? Get a sense of what they’re doing too, so that when they do something damaging, you can stop them, question them, and force them back. Fear and practicality is not all there is to life, after all, no matter how good those ideas are at getting things done. Maybe some things aren’t worth being done.

The Irresponsible Self

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The part of myself who coaxed me to procrastinate. He carries around a lot of pain.

Ever been trying to get things done, and, whenever you think of an item on the list, you say to yourself, “eh I’ll just do that later.”? I bet you have. Procrastination runs rampant in the world and this little voice seems to be the one responsible for putting things off. Today I decided to see where the thought was coming from, and I found something intriguing.

On the surface, this irresponsible guy just says things to get you to put off doing what you really want to get done. He comes up with all kinds of excuses as to why you don’t really need to be doing what you wanted to get done. But the real question is, why is he saying these things to begin with? Why make excuses?

After talking with this part of myself for a little while, I could tell that he was carrying around a lot of pain. He got defensive, bitter, resentful, and told me straight out that he didn’t want to do some of the things I wanted to get done because they would be “too painful”. Now sure, any given task has its challenges, but this part of yourself uses the pain it’s already carrying around as an excuse for avoiding more pain, even if it’s relatively small.

I had to be very patient with this part of myself to avoid an all out fight. Understand that it can get so bad for this side of yourself that it would rather bury the pain deep within the subconscious than even talk about it. However, doing this reduces the chance of healing that pain by A LOT, because you have to go dig around inside with the express purpose of finding the pain. And who really enjoys doing that?

However, what my encounter today showed me is that it is an absolute priority, if we want to live without carrying around a burden of intense emotional pain, that we must find a way to get to the pain and let it out despite what this irresponsible side of ourselves says.

Now, that being said, it’s not easy to find that pain right off the bat, and that part of you may not even remember where the pain is stored anymore. So instead of stigmatizing this part of yourself, it’s OK to let it continue doing things that it enjoys doing to avoid the pain, as long as another part of you searches for it. However, this pain-ridden, irresponsible self might resort to harmful activities, in which case, it needs to be confronted.

So what’s the take away? If you want to live more freely, seek out your pain to let it out. Otherwise you’ll get caught in a routine of life that doesn’t satisfy your true needs, and doesn’t bring you fulfillment.

False Modes of Being

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The Six False Modes of Being I’ve Identified so far: The Heart of Negativity, Emotional Vampire, Dull Giant, Philosophy Knight, Demanding Critter, and Emotional Cynicism

Today my Self-Doubt was fed up with always having to struggle to get things done. You know the feeling: When you try to do something, but then all these other thoughts come in that make you want to just forget about what you wanted to do, and engage instead, perhaps, in some pleasant distraction.

Well, my Self-Doubt (with the help of my Critic), decided it would be a good idea to try and come to a compromise with these parts of myself who were always getting in his way. Rather than fight with them, he thought he could get them to all come to an agreement about what to do.

As soon as he had decided on this task, a number of forces became evident to me. I began to visualize them, and six made themselves apparent at that time:

  1. One appeared like a hawk, hovering over the rest of the forces. An ominous feeling came from it, and it had blood-stained wings. It was extremely negative, so negative, in fact, that I call it “The Heart of Negativity”, thought I don’t know if that’s accurate. This part of you shuts you down with hopelessness, a lack of faith, joylessness, and negativity.
  2. The next (going off the picture above), was one I’d run into before. This was the “Emotional Vampire” – this guy likes intimidating people, finding pointless but pleasing things to do, and doesn’t care how he accomplishes what he wants to. He puts thoughts in your head that get you to start doubting or defending yourself.
  3. This guy, the “Dull Giant”, appeared first. He is concerned with physical needs, and will easily abandon things that you think are important in favor of things like eating, sleeping, exercising.
  4. The “Philosophy Knight” is always checking his beliefs against what is going on. He seems almost mechanical, just thinking about whatever is true or false without much emotion. This side of you decides on a course of action and just keeps going even when it doesn’t make sense.
  5. The “Demanding Critter” gets impatient, angry, uptight, and creates a huge fuss whenever it’s not doing something it wants to do. And when it is doing something, it often does it for reasons such as: proving a point, winning, getting some cheap feeling of superiority or excitement.
  6. “Emotional Cynicism” is the part of you that frowns at “Free Hugs” videos. He doesn’t give a crap about all that touchy-feely emotional stuff, in fact, he’s downright suspicious of it. Your idealism, your upbeat attitude, all of them just seem misguided to him.

As my self-doubt soon found out, not only do these guys tend to not agree on anything, but when questioned they get very explosive, giving you those kinds of feelings that, when you want to get things done, make you want to give up. After going through this encounter, my self-doubt decided that it wanted to become more powerful, so it didn’t have to just bend to the demands of these guys anymore, but could stand up to them. Let’s see how that goes.

P.S. I call these guys “False Modes of Being” because the way they go about things seems backwards, wrong, and petty. But then again, these sides of me don’t think so. They’re quite pleased with their mode of being.

Relieve or Resolve Tension

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The part of myself who was pushing himself and feeling the tension.

When you get tense, it’s probably because a part of you is pushing themselves. Maybe they’re saying things like, “Just need to keep calm, keep calm, keep calm…” “Just keep calm… maybe look at some websites, maybe do something to distract me, that’ll fix it…” “I don’t need help, or advice, or consideration or sympathy, I just need to do something…” “I need to do something… something important… crap… why isn’t it working?”

You get the idea. This side of you can get pretty worked up.

But if you question its assumptions – that it needs to do something, that the situation is a desperate one – then it can finally relax and become renewed. When you feel terrible, and tense, trying to keep pushing yourself is like running up a slippery slope while you’re emaciated.

The problems with tension always seem to come up when you seek to relieve it, rather than resolve it. Then you might lean on that harmful habit of yours, run to an unfulfilling relationship, or constantly fight against the tension. But to resolve the tension, it’s important to question it.

For me, the other day, this conversation between a tense part of myself and a nurturing part resolved the tension. Now, keep in mind that for a long time I had put off actually doing Cartoon Processing during a tense moment, but this time I did. Here was the key part of the conversation:

Nurturer: “I know you think you don’t need help, but maybe I have a perspective, that, through no fault of your own, you haven’t thought of yet.”
Tense Guy: “You don’t understand. My life is only about doing things that are important. If I ever don’t do things, try to – no no no taking breaks is fine. To play games, and such. Gets me back on track. But just doing nothing for too long is unacceptable.”
Nurturer: “Is that so…?”

Shortly after that question, the tension went away, and the tense side of me felt better. Ungrateful for the help, but better.

This situation showed me that sometimes certain assumptions about life, assumptions one makes inside their head, actually cause tension and need to be questioned, even assumptions that seem reasonable. Looking at the effect of those assumptions will tell you what you need to know.

I have the feeling I haven’t seen the end of this guy, or gotten to the root of tension yet, so stay tuned.

The Destructiveness of Moral Righteousness

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Yes, that is an impressive unibrow.

Moral Righteousness, examining his own fury

There is a part of you, who, when it sees a part of yourself it sees as a “demon”, it wants to utterly destroy that part of you. Right now I’m calling this guy “Moral Righteousness”, as he wants to decisively “purify” any “evil” he sees with his fiery powers. But unfortunately for him, I’m wise to his game. Yes, something in me might cause problems for me in life, might bring me down or keep me from some goal of mine. Fine. But if you try to come at things from a perspective of moral purity, then you never get to the root cause of what made a part of you “demonic” in the first place, and thus, never heal it. Now if a part of yourself is actively hurting another part, that’s different. Then you just need to stop the self-abuse. But to actively seek to destroy something inside of you? That’s extreme abuse.

And not only that, but it’s denying that the “demon” is a part of you in the first place! Maybe you’re uncomfortable relating to that twisted up part of yourself, or with even having the patience to work with it. But ultimately you’re not working with a “demon” or something outside of yourself. It’s a part of you, and for some reason, a reason that’s important to get to the root of, it’s behaving as it is.

Not only that, but the mindset of “Moral Righteousness” has been part of the reason for many of the genocides in the past century. The impulse to label a certain group of people as a problem, then seek to destroy them in the name of “purity” is something we’ve all seen before. It’s similar on an internal level, with that group of people being called things like “demons” or “evil”, and ruthlessly pursued so it can be purged out of you. And yet, as much as we try to deny it, they are us! We have something in common with everyone,  especially our “demons”.

So then, if we each learn about healing, if we understand what causes “demonic” behavior in the first place, and can work with those parts of ourselves, maybe we’ll see less genocide in the world as well. Sounds good to me!

And btw – what do I mean by “demon”? Well, one internal character I talked about a while back, The Deceiver, I could definitely call a demon. Perhaps anything in you that causes havoc or harm you could call a “demon”.

Mind Chatter

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So today I had allergies, and, funny as this might sound I thought there might be something in me, that I wasn’t aware of, that was causing it. And while there is strong evidence for the connection between the emotional and physical (See this Google search on “emotional connection physical ailments”), I unfortunately was left to have a dribbling nose the rest of the day. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t find something interesting, however.

To find it, I did a meditation to go to my shadow. The “shadow” is just a metaphorical construct that you can go visit in your imagination that houses all the feelings you deny as being a part of yourself. That’s why I went there (in my mind) today – I can find the root causes of various feelings, things I never even thought were the cause. You can buy the meditation I used to first visit my shadow by clicking here. It is one of the best ways I’ve found to have an instant, enriching, informative inner adventure. The meditation itself is by Mark Ivar Myhre. He’s got lots of great tools for healing yourself emotionally. Check his website out at: http://www.emotional-times.com/

Today, I found what I interpret to be a metaphor for mind chatter:

The Mind Chatterers and their attacking snakes (and my Explorer going “oh no go away snakes!”)

My Shadow showed me to a room where I had a vague sense of what was there. The only thing I could clearly distinguish to visualize was a purple ball of energy in the middle of the room. So I was like, “well, I’ll just take this and see what happens.” Immediately after I did, I started visualizing what you see above. A number of stoic, thinking parts of myself were standing in a large circle around me, talking incessantly about if it was right of me to have taken the ball of energy. As they were lost in this talk, a hoard of snakes kept advancing on me from all sides. I noticed also that the talk of the thinkers and the snakes were connected.

This led me to the conclusion that when you start thinking incessantly, and get lost in thoughts, it can be like a hoard of snakes is also advancing on the acting part of you – the one who actually gets things done and moves around and explores the shadow. And I’m not talking about daydream thoughts – but rather the kind of torrent of thoughts you get when worried. “Well what if this, what if that, or maybe this, no this…” and on and on without end.

So if you’re wondering about practical application, I’d say this: Thinking about things is great and all, but just be careful about the effect it’s having on you. What’s it doing to you? Is it shutting down your ability to act, attacking you? If so, it might be helpful to stand up to those thoughts, find some way to get them to stand down. Or just act regardless of what they have to say.

P.S. I concluded in my Shadow by leading the mind chatterers out of their room. At first I was going to keep the snakes sealed away, but they complained saying that the snakes were their friends. So I let them keep them on the condition that if they tried to attack me or anyone else inside me, I would burn them up with fire. They agreed and so we all left the shadow, and then I exited the meditation. Fun times!

Giving in the Inner World

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So, I ran into a giving, nurturing part of me today, and the part of me who wants to understand things asked the guy to explain how giving works on an inner level. I thought I’d share what I learned for anyone who wants to explore their own inner world.

As I understand it, it works like this:
Any “item” that’s visualized can be imbued with certain feelings – love, courage, even stuff like negativity. The item, imbued with these feelings, can be given to other parts of you. Once received, the given part of yourself can “use” the item, and in doing so, gain access to the feeling it was imbued with.

I’ll give a couple of examples. Say that you imagine that a nurturing part of yourself makes a dish of food for another part of yourself, and this was done with a feeling of love. That other part of you receives that feeling from the food.

Or, the item could be a sword. A sword can represent confidence in something. So if something in you has a close connection to the feeling of justice, they can probably “make” a sword of justice, which can be used by inner warriors to fight for just causes.

It works in the same fashion as a metaphor. In fact, you could say items ARE metaphors. The food is a metaphor for the love a part of yourself wants to share. The sword is a metaphor for a sense of confidence that you utilize when fighting for something. Any imagined item can be imbued with meaning.

And remember that inside of you, metaphors are dynamic. They can change as your feelings change. And as your inner world changes.

The same is true for any aspect of the inner world. A landscape can represent an emotional state. A character can represent a certain part of yourself, perspective, or way of approaching the world. And substances, like water, or items, like swords, can represent a certain feeling.

We experience this day-to-day as well. It’s sort of like how you can see a word, like “love”, and it can evoke a little bit of the feeling of love in you, just reading the word. Or see a painting and get a feeling from it. Or see a present and think of the person who gave it to you.

The idea is that what you visualize as your inner world becomes more clear when you let the things you see represent the feelings that are there inside of you NOW. Knowing a little bit about how this works will let you better navigate that inner world, and test how those dynamics work. I find that as one develops one’s own system that makes sense to them, it begins to seem more and more familiar to the system of meaning we already use, constantly.

Anyway, to those who use this info to explore themselves, enjoy the adventure!