The Way of Effortless Mindfulness, page 14
When you check to see where Self is, who is looking? Only the interconnected Self all around and within all parts can know itself. Self is not a state that appears to you. This is because Self is you! As a way of unblending your Self from Self-like parts, you can ask, Is this part aware of me? which will shift you to locate your Self beyond the part, creating an amazing opportunity to know Self directly from the Self.
The Three Facets of Self
Just as it is possible to distinguish and know our parts as managers, exiles, and firefighters, we can learn to know three aspects of Self. Richard Schwartz divides Self into “Self-energy” and “Self-leadership,” to which I’ve added “Self-essence.” These can be described briefly as follows:
•Self-essence is the way we experience Self with awake awareness—pure Self, the authentic fundamental nature of who we are: invisible, intelligent awake awareness.
•Self-energy is our Self knowing parts and other people and experiencing from awareness-energy through being relational and connected.
•Self-leadership is grounded in Self-essence and Self-energy becoming full embodiment of open-hearted awareness, where we can live our daily life from.
Notice that each aspect of Self has a quality we have covered through the lens of awareness. Now we’re looking at how we can experience our felt sense of identity, who we are, in congruence with these types of awareness.
FACET ONESELF-ESSENCE
As we’ve explored in these pages, awake awareness is intelligence prior to thought that is invisible yet palpable. Self-essence is not found as either inside versus outside but is both spacious and pervasive, transcendent and immanent—everywhere, nowhere in particular, and very much here. Because it is wordless, and not a thing or an object, we might overlook it. Self-essence—invisible intelligent awareness—is our boundless ground.
In my process of understanding and teaching Self-essence, I’ve come up with eleven Is to illustrate it:
Invisible
Intelligent
Innate
Is
Indestructible
Infinite
Immediate
Illumined
Inherent
Inspired
Ineffable
Self-essence does not change or grow, it just is. Self-essence cannot be hurt or destroyed. Self-essence is often difficult to see because we see from Self-essence. From Self-essence there is seeing the whole without the feeling of a particular location of a seer. Self-essence is the foundation of all expressions of Self, although its subtlety is often not felt directly because it is so close, so invisible, and is not a state.
Self-essence is not known as an object but knows itself first as awake awareness. It is unconditioned and is inherent within our conditioning and precedes energy: it is that from which energy arises. We can learn to let parts know that they are safe to give us more space or to step back to discover Self-essence. Self-essence is the transcendent clear light of awareness.
FACET TWOSELF-ENERGY
Self-essence arises or comes into existence as energy. It is like the quantum field: Self-essence is an invisible source, prior to energy. In turn, Self-energy is both wave—flowing boundless dynamism with relational qualities—and particle—active, compassionate, embodied, and full of vitality. The waves and particles are made of the invisible potential of the quantum field of Self-essence.
Self-energy is connected through the type of awake awareness we know as awareness-energy. It is how we feel the sense of interconnected relationship from Self to parts within us and with other people and all things around us. It is from Self-essence that Self-energy’s natural qualities arise as creative energetic expressions. Self-energy is the healing light of liberation, as there is the capacity for movement, expression, and transformation.
The qualities of Self-energy, or eight Cs,1 created by Schwartz are:
Calm
Curiosity
Compassion
Confidence
Courage
Clarity
Connectedness
Creativity
FACET THREESELF-LEADERSHIP
Self is grounded in Self-essence, interconnected and related through Self-energy, and acts from Self-leadership. Self-leadership is the ability to create and relate from open-hearted awareness and heart-mind. With Self-leadership, we unblend and shift the location of our identity from parts to Self. In Self-leadership, we can feel the spacious awareness of Self-essence and Self-energy’s dynamic aliveness, full embodiment, and the compassionate relationship to all parts and people. From Self-leadership, you can make choices while being free of the agendas of parts. Being in Self-leadership does not get rid of parts or reduce parts to a smoothie, but, as Dan Siegel says, it is more like a colorful fruit salad of parts.2
Schwartz’s nine Ps of Self-leadership3 are:
Patience
Persistence
Perspective
Presence
Pure Perception
Peace
Precision
Purpose
Playfulness
In Self-leadership, we speak for parts rather than from parts. Self knows that all is well while also having the motivation to actively be part of the solutions in the world. Self-leadership operates from our compassionate, wise heart-mind connected to Self-essence, as if using Wi-Fi to bring personal information and memory files down from the office of our head to our new home in our heart-mind. Self-leadership feels grounded in Self-essence, feels itself within our body, and feels the parts with Self-energy as it looks out from the eyes of the heart to people and to the world with new motivation and vision for action. Self-leadership is simultaneously aware of all the dimensions of Self, our parts, and other people and the world. Self-leadership has the light of compassionate wisdom in action.
Your Self-Driving Vehicle
What I’ve done above is look at awake awareness, awareness-energy, and open-hearted awareness through the lens of Self. This is who we are and how we are being when we are experiencing different levels of awareness. Note that language becomes tricky here: Self and awake awareness are two views of the same thing. We are that awake awareness, and we call it by the name of whatever “Self” term correlates with it. The difference is in the nuance: when we talk about awake awareness, we talk about perception, how we are perceiving; when we talk about Self, we talk about identity and who we perceive ourselves to be.
It is important to note that overly emphasizing one dimension of Self without staying connected to all dimensions of Self can lead to an imbalance—bypassing, underpassing, or overpassing. If we are overly focused on Self-essence, we can become spaced out, transcendent, and impersonally detached. Imbalanced Self-energy can lead to taking on other people’s emotional energy or continually moving parts around on the chessboard of the psyche. It can also lead to being a “bliss ninny,” “hippy-happy,” or an unmotivated couch potato.
Being too imbalanced in trying to be in Self-leadership from a part can lead to becoming an outwardly focused helper or an activist who burns out by feeling disconnected and not resourcing with the Source of Self. Notice, though, that Self-leadership, as open-hearted awareness, is indeed how I’m defining our interconnected whole, true Self. So when I point out this imbalance related to Self-leadership, it is not that Self-leadership itself is imbalanced, but instead, what will tie us in knots is an attempt to be in Self-leadership when we are in a part that is thinking that it is true Self when it is not. What’s necessary is acquiring the discernment to tell the difference—as sometimes we can have blind spots! This is when it is helpful to be reflected by friends, a healing practitioner, or even paying attention to cause and effect from our actions and choices.
It is from the heart-mind, the all-embracing, compassionate, open-hearted awareness of Self-leadership, that we are able to meet and embrace our parts. When we do, we recognize them and bring them back to Self so that we can have integration and wholeness. A good way to do this is with some mindful glimpses.
GLIMPSEKnow Your Self
Recognizing Self leads us to a new kind of Self-compassion practice. In the usual self-compassion practices, who is compassionate to whom? What self is compassionate to what self? This usually means that a part is trying to have compassion for another part. In the following approach, we realize that who we are is not a small self but many parts. Then, rather than a part having compassion for different parts of “yourself,” there is a discovery of Self, which has natural compassion for the whole. This mindful glimpse can also be done with another person.
1.Can you feel an emotional or energetic pattern you’re aware of in or around your body? What is the shape, size, location, and feeling of this part?
2.Can you thank this part and ask it to unblend and open some space?
3.From this space, rest as the awareness that is aware. How do you feel toward this part, not from your head but from your heart? Is this part aware that you are here with it? Is this part aware of your feelings toward it?
4.Is there anything this part wants to let you know?
5.When this part turns to be aware of You, what does it experience as the size, location, and feeling of You?
6.How does it feel to be aware from your heart toward this pattern within your body?
7.How is it being open-hearted Self with your body and these parts?
Accessing Our True Self
Now that we’ve reviewed three types of Self that correlate with the three types of awareness we’ve covered previously, we can notice and practice how infinite, dynamic, loving, and capable of meeting life our true Self is in all of its aspects. We can realize that we are this infinite, loving Self, and whenever we feel disconnected and contracted, we’re probably in a part of us—a part that somehow got cut off from the whole and has forgotten “home.” When we’re fully identified with that part, thinking that that is “me,” we end up living life through its lens and act through its beliefs and agendas, which might create havoc! Instead, when we take a step back to unblend from whatever part we are blended with, we can remember how to unhook awareness to return to our Self-essence. Then, from Self-energy, we can see the part we were blended with and begin to listen to its story. Then, from Self-leadership, we can finally embrace our parts and welcome them back home to our Self. Each time we get to know the exiled parts in this way, we become increasingly aware of our wholeness. From here, we’re ready to move on to sustained awakening—training to remain awake from Self-leadership.
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How to Remain Awake
The most fundamental aspect of awakening is the shift in our understanding of who we are. Our culture, upbringing, and mind have all created a sense of “me” that is based on a thinking self: “I think, therefore I am.” Even when experiencing awake awareness, awareness-energy, or open-hearted awareness, we have missed the point if we think that these experiences are “cool meditation states” and then return to our regular lives. These types of awareness are not states of mind; these are dimensions of our interconnected, whole Self. Shifting into Self is not just an exercise of imagination or a psychological practice that our thinking parts do when we are in crisis or feel a need to care for our hurt child parts. Experiencing life through the eyes of our true Self is our natural human potential.
We take the first step on the path to awakening when we realize that we are a different Self than we originally understood. When we taste this shift in identity, it is an “aha!” moment. We feel like we have seen behind the veil of separation and understood something so crucial that we never forget it. We realize that we are so much more capable of love and more whole than we ever imagined.
This initial shift can often be experienced as deep relief, letting go, or a sense of homecoming. From our shift of Self, we are able to see how we are compassionate creators in the world, how we are lovable no matter what, and how our problems are held within something much larger. We are happier and more fulfilled than we could have imagined because there is no conditionality to our well-being; we intimately feel how we are innately perfect and well. Once we directly experience this reality, even if just for a moment, we may feel changed at our core (although we have not changed into something new but rather come into our true Self that has been there the whole time).
Once we experience a shift into Self, something funny happens: often, even if we think our realization will last forever, eventually we find ourselves back in a more contracted, habitual experience of small self. While we may have thought that living from our awareness of our true Self would easily continue, we come to realize that we need to go through an unfolding process for our awakening to abide as Self-leadership. By “abide,” I mean a background-to-foreground shift, where open-hearted awareness remains primary and becomes where we are viewing and living from. Abiding is a dynamic moment-to-moment unfolding within the ground of awake awareness that does not come and go.
From the ultimate level of reality, we could say there is no process of abiding, no journey, and no path. The essential awake awareness is always present and does not change or develop. Awake awareness is already abiding, even when our human experiences are changing and passing away. The small self does not awaken, and the true Self is not a stable entity or person. Awakening is simply a shift of view to look at the interconnected whole from open-hearted awareness. We have explored how there is no-self, and yet this does not lead to us being robots or puppets of awake awareness. There is a play of yin/yang, Shakti/Shiva, divine/human, transcendent/immanent, which is a dance of formless awake awareness and our human form.
I have met people who have had an initial waking up from small self who get stuck in this first stage in the unfolding of full awakening. This is because initial waking up is not enough, and there is no one so evolved that they do not have to go through an unfolding process to live from an embodied open-hearted awareness. As we awaken, we do not become perfect by any means, but we do have a wholly different way of knowing, being, and experiencing life than we did when we were identified with a smaller ego-self. We can delve even deeper by examining what goes on during this stage of awakening into Self-leadership.
Why It Is Hard to Remain in Self-Leadership
The first hint about why it is hard to remain in Self-leadership is that the “you” that wants to remain awake is not you! The entire abiding experience will feel paradoxical to the thinking manager “you,” which will likely think that nothing on this path of awakening makes any sense! Indeed, the reason many people haven’t yet awakened is because the small self is being run by their survival operating system and the expectations of our culture.
Here is where a transitionally helpful spiritual ego, meditator, manager, or Self-like part can be a trap if not recognized. This is where a wise teacher, like a good car mechanic, who has been through the transitions from small self to Self-leadership can give pointers for maintenance of your Self-driving vehicle and a tune-up to get you back on the road.
At first, we may think that Self is a part of us or a state, such as silence or stillness, but in order for Self to remain primary—the place we view from rather than what we view—Self must get to know itself. We must avoid being pulled into the mind by the old egoic structure and its defenses, which, for their own survival, are wanting to convince you that Self is just a “meditation state” so that they can remain in the driver’s seat—a Self-like part playing the role of Self.
How do we get to know Self? First, we learn how to let go of the small self that is currently leading. We first need to get it out of the driver’s seat so greater Self can sit in it (even though it has been waiting in the background the whole time). The key in this effortless mindfulness approach is to shift immediately into the new operating system of awake awareness rather than just deconstructing the small self. Awakening and stabilizing our awakening is as much a process of unlearning as learning. It is going to take effortless mindfulness to change the old habit of remaining in our small self and to learn to let go into open-hearted awareness, which sustains itself naturally.
One student expressed this stage of moving from effort to effortlessness by saying, “Not knowing has been such a gift because it means that I can give up all the trying. I can give up wanting things to be a certain way, and I can just let go. I can’t express how free I feel in letting go of that striving. It is then that I notice a new knowing that is alert, safe, and wise. I don’t have to go back to my thinking mind to try to confirm anything, and there is so much peace and freedom in that.”
This transition into “don’t know mind” can feel like the moment we released our parent’s hand when we were a kid on the first day of kindergarten. But here, as we move toward the unknown, toward the greater Self, we are letting go of the ego identity’s hand. We must learn to bear the arising of unpleasant messages from our ego managers that are yelling “Danger!” from the repressed contents of our psyche and from our protective parts and inner children calling out to be seen and processed. The danger signal at this stage is like a car alarm going off with no threat to the vehicle. Can we sit in the fire of these transitional moments?
The key experience of this stage is a shift through the unknown into the new knowing of awake awareness. We can think about it like swinging on a rope that’s hanging from a tree branch that reaches from the shore out over a lake. Letting go of the rope to jump into the water can be frightening because we relinquish control of our grip on safety. The water isn’t like the land we left behind, but when we are in it, we’ll find that it is a place that brings joy, refreshment, and a new kind of support. This is how it feels to transition from small separate self to interconnected whole Self.
