Looking Under the Hood — Getting to Know Yourself

"When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.

The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

Joseph Campbell, well-known author, teacher, and scholar of mythology taught us about "The Hero's Journey." If you are reading this book, something inside you has prompted you to search for something better, something more wonderful, to experience a life greater than the life you are currently living. You, my friend, have heard "the hero's call to adventure."

Your hero's journey begins now. Throughout the journey you will meet not only dragons and evil wizards with whom you wage battle (your fears, limiting habits and false beliefs), you also will be given the guidance, the light sabers, the magical amulets and the armor (knowledge, love, and positive beliefs) you need to face these obstacles in order to change. Your soul will remain intact; you will fight your battles with integrity, honesty, and honor. You will journey inward to yourself to win the battle, to be your best self, to find your best life. The destination is your inner place of peace, calm, focused attention, and power. Refusing the call leads to its own set of problems: frustration, unsatisfying and painful relationships, sadness, and a lack of motivation, passion, love, and joy. You must take this journey yourself, no one can take this journey for you, but paradoxically, we all take this journey together. You are never alone. Others have faced loss, gain, temptation, salvation, death, resurrections and created happy and fulfilling lives. Though you are an individual, relationships with others are a critical factor of human life. What you are affects the whole, and the other individuals that are in your life affect you.

The thoughts, feelings, and memories that you are aware of are part of your conscious mind. It is impossible for your conscious mind to hold all of your memories, thoughts and experiences in the present moment. Your subconscious becomes the repository of the myriad thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and memories of significant and seemingly insignificant experiences that you have had since infancy. The memories of smells, colors, words, sounds, places, and textures are stored with an emotional charge. The smell of baking cookies may be a pleasant comforting reminder of a safe time for one person while it may bring up a memory of grief for a mother lost too soon for another.

As a child you did not always get to choose your experiences or the people that populated your life. You may not have had a safe adult in your life to help you process and make sense of the situations and relationships you were experiencing. The unprocessed, not understood experiences get stored in the subconscious in a raw state. Even some of your processed experiences may have been processed with the assistance of someone that may not have been a wise emotional guide, such as a parent that was an alcoholic or a parent that was still affected by their own unprocessed emotional disturbances. The contents of your subconscious affects your perspective of the events in your life, your behaviors, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs. Through this process, this journey, you will bring parts of your subconscious into your consciousness, to process, to heal and to change where necessary to improve the quality of your life, removing blocks and harmful, limiting subconscious information and beliefs.

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis, reminds us that throughout history philosophers and scholars have used analogies to understand the human mind. Plato used the symbol of a charioteer driving two horses. One horse is passion, the second horse is reason. One horse is white; the other chestnut. They are both horses, but they look very different.

Passion and reason do not always cooperate with each other nor do they always understand each other. When we think of passion we often think of romance and creativity. Passion lives under other names such as anxiety, fear, addiction, compulsiveness, and anger which describe some of our emotions that compete with reason.

The goal is to live a rich life, not afraid of your emotions, but having the courage to feel the full range of human emotion: love, grief, loss, compassion, joy, and longing for creative expression, but not to be controlled by emotion. To be a successful charioteer, you must keep both horses under control and going in the same direction, to set a goal you are passionate about and to use your intellect to accomplish the goal.

The first basic truth of Plato's metaphor for yourself is that you have two parts - a thinking and a feeling part. At times you may be in your thinking mind and you see an image or hear a sound and all of a sudden you feel a wave of emotion flow through your body that can change your posture and mood, or you feel the scalding wetness of a tear in the corner of your eye, or the tightening of your fist before you strike out in anger. In some instances, the emotion is so strong that you blurt out words and you have no idea of their origin. You may jump up and grab someone or hit someone without consulting your thinking mind. This emotional impulse may be essential for survival when you grab a child before he runs into the street or when you jump out of the way of an oncoming danger.

The sudden emotion may be sexual arousal or attraction. This may be an ancient biological impulse to insure the survival of the species, an emotional need for bonding or a modern day addiction to pleasure seeking. The emotions of shame, guilt, embarrassment, disgust, self-doubt, and insecurity are psycho-social -- meaning they have their roots in your relationships and community.

It has been many decades since Sigmund Freud began his practice and much has been learned about the human psyche. Freud suggested that the human subconscious plays a major role in the development of your personality and the creation of your life. He suggested that our conscious mind is only the tip of the iceberg.

Freud described the mind as the Id (the animal, impulsive, needs meeting part of the mind), the Ego (the I/me, personal identity center of the mind), and the Super-conscious (the part of the mind that tells you when you are doing something wrong, but can also encourage and support you).

Using a driver and carriage to illustrate this concept, the Id, the wild part of the mind that needs to be tamed in order to be useful is the horse. The Ego, controlling the horse and deciding the course of the carriage, is the driver. The Super-conscious is your father or mother in the back seat telling the driver - you - what you are doing wrong. We all have these and many other aspects of ourselves that have developed over our lifetimes.

What are the different aspects of yourself that you have developed...