Your subconscious has its own Work to do.
Call your subconscious “shadow” if you wish.
Look to the elders of the scientific communities of neuroscience and psychology and those in the spiritual communities concerned with our “dark sides.”
You will find common ground for primary agreement, with room to debate details. To complete this Work, your subconscious will draw you like a dark magnet into relating with others who will activate this work. They will bring hot light and a scrub brush to old wounds and demolition tools to the unsound structures you built as a child, those little forts that provided what shelter you could create, as a young and then limited being, to protect yourself.
It matters not at all that these structures are irrelevant to your present context. Indeed, they are fully alien to it.
They will manifest anyway, in small ways as subtle fakeness or petty barbs, sneakiness or mis-directions you don’t notice and don’t remember because ‘you’ were not present and noticing what ‘you’ were doing. They’ll manifest in major ways as sabotage to relationships, to employment, to projects, to another’s wellbeing.
Expect to show up for other people with strange, limiting, perhaps even destructive or dangerous behaviors as you hide, dodge, manipulate, grossly misinterpret, throw tantrums, panic, sustain personal self-inflicted insult and offense wounds of magical intensity and depth, and otherwise contort or maneuver. You’ll dance away with conscious excuses and defensive stories while dancing toward with a primal inertia nearly impossible to deny.
Your subconscious has its own Work to do. Partner with it consciously to do the work that needs doing or go involuntarily on whatever ride it takes you. Your choice, your costs. But keep in mind that the second choice may have cost to those you care for, far beyond the burdens of the first choice, because subconsciously driven psychodrama is viral and infects others, including your own beloved children if you are a parent.
And since I am talking about your subconscious, I regret to inform you that you that The Moment the ride starts will arrive without warning, because you won’t be able to see it coming.
Sound scary? Hmmm, maybe. But missing the growth that you get from doing The Work? Even scarier.
How to do this task? This conscious partnering, this whole-making of self? How to go about making art or shelter or at least a fine bonfire of the debris left at your feet by the storms and tides of your own past selves and their experience?
Some ways and means I like and you might also:
Own your Dark Magnet and The Work. Say “this is mine” first to yourself then out loud. Or say, “this is not about you” to whomever you trigger, are triggered by, or are triggering with. Even
as you fall over the edge of the abyss, look back and tell the person you’re with, “I know you didn’t push me in to hurt me,” and, “I chose this.”
This acknowledgment of ownership is the first tiny step in getting your subconscious to begin trusting your conscious mind. Your subconscious doesn’t trust your conscious mind because (a) it hardly existed when you were young and were challenged beyond your means, so your subconscious had to take up all the slack, and (b) your conscious mind has been socialized to play nice, please others, and otherwise GOOF OFF instead getting down to business and getting things done. You will need to develop this trust between the subconscious and the conscious mind. You need to prepare for The Moment and The Work.
To prepare myself, I strive to be genuine and clear in showing up for everyone, always. I note my primal yes and no signals. I go with them, with self-honesty about my motives, the things I judge as shameful or unacceptable, be they small or large. I reveal my motives to the people that matter.
I suggest you do too, if you dare, and please dare. Revealing is good for you, and for them, and THAT truth will never stop surprising you, or them, as long as you know completely that they owe you nothing, and they know you know it too. I ask myself frequently, “What do I need right now?” And I WANT the real answer even when prospects for meeting that need are slim to none.
I navigate with what I find out, like the captain of a ship on the sea of daily experience, and I see who stays with me on the voyage, who helps trim the sails, share the views, and bail water when needed. My challenge to myself: can I willingly do the same for them in my time with them, without a sense of duty other than to my core values and love itself? Can I join and part with a companion or lover cleanly, without expectation, and ultimately without burdening myself with a sense of loss uselessly carried forward?
Here is what I see as the good news in all of this: what I have just described as my ways and means for the work of rebuilding that trust between subconscious and conscious, and my process of preparing for The Moment when the going gets rough, when The Work must be done, is the same as my process for living a more and more joyful and free life.
How about you?
Twisted flow under Ground,
water births forth into Lifegiving springs,
drink!
PS. To connect, experience, and embody this kind of work check out the member’s area at Evolved Life!
