Tony Baggot SJ describes the contours of that exploration of the self which we need to undertake in order to have compassion on ourselves so that we can grow spiritually.
We live our lives within the life of our times. One of its characteristics is a thirst for a deeper and more spiritual religion. There is, too, in many hearts a longing to combine the creative development of the whole human person with the quest for ultimate truth, life and love. We are trying to put together the search for self with the search for God. Our response to the mystery we call God is through our human experiences since our closest awareness of divine mystery is to be found in the mystery of ourselves. As Christians, rising from within our precious selves is the prayer to ‘be kept safe and blameless, spirit, soul and body for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (I Thess. 5:23). Paul is stating here the understanding of human nature which runs right through the Bible. It is a longing for wholeness, for the flowing together of these three levels of life which interact with each other so that body and soul through the spirit, open to the divine Spirit. The human person is a living theology, working out the mystery of life within the enfolding mystery we call God. From time immemorial, the word God has been used for the secret depths of our own being. ‘God in the depths of us receives God who comes to us,’ the mystic John Ruysbroeck has told us. Journey into self is journey into God.
There are two kinds of journeys. The outward journey we make through involvement in the world around us, finding a place there, participating with our personal role and contribution in the continuing process of creation. But special attention must also be paid to entering the world of oneself. This is the journey inward.
Choices
The urge and the longing to be our true selves is hampered and limited by our compulsions and impulses, our unruly attachments (often called in religious terms, disorderly affections) and the internal tug of war of contradictory energy forces. The ensuing confusion and conflict diminishes our inner freedom to make proper choices which is an essential feature of human growth. Like trees, we as living organisms grow from inside out and are not a collection of separate parts put together from without. But unlike trees, which in their growth simply follow a natural instinct, we collaborate in our development by conscious choices. Having been born from our mother’s womb we then start learning how to give birth to ourselves. The spirituality of being human takes in the whole person. The many levels on which we are affected by all that happens in our lives, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, require direct care and attention. The heavy energy of the burden of sadness and worry can so weigh down the shoulders as to take away all zest for life itself, let alone religious and spiritual life. Blocked energy of fear in the heart – ‘My heart is frozen with fear,’ people will say – prevents us from opening out to and trusting others, causing us to hold back and hide inside ourselves. Religious exercises of themselves are not sufficient to alter fixations, faulty mental attitudes or destructive emotions in our pursuit of spiritual values.
We need to live through our unresolved experiences and release their painful, pent-up energy to gain freedom to be more ourselves. Past painful events recorded within, exert a powerful influence. ‘I don’t know what made me say that’ or ‘I can’t understand why I behaved so badly’ we often say about ourselves. When highly charged emotional contents are given expression, they lose their grip. By entering into and working through them we can restore at least some measure of inner order and create more space to listen to all that is going on inside. An even more subtle and fascinating transformation begins to take place. Instead of just weighing up matters in our head to make decisions, we will notice choices flowing from inside ourselves in such ways as: ‘I found myself writing a letter I ought to have written six months ago’; ‘Yesterday at work I did not give in to others as I usually do. I took a stand for myself This just happened. I did not plan to do it and I was amazed at myself’. It is like being carried along by the flow of one’s own life with a new-found sureness and conviction. This is a change of heart rather then a change of mind.
Salvation of the soul
We seek spiritual wisdom to lead us to fullness of life – what traditionally we have called salvation of the soul. This unhappily often came across as a means of controlling people’s lives and as a matter of stern obligation associated with threat, fear and guilt. The human heart however is to be drawn not driven. Properly understood, the Christian message of salvation is a guide towards meeting human needs. Salvation of the soul does not refer to the soul as if it were separate from the body. We do not have a body or a soul or a spirit. We live through them looking for some degree at least of completeness in all three aspects of human living.
Salvation of the soul means having life, being alive right down to the deepest level of ourselves, in touch with the spirit, the point at which we open to the divine Spirit. Francis de Sales speaks of the spirit as the fine point of the soul. Teresa of Avila’s profound mystical journeyings were related to the triple structure of body, soul and spirit. But to explain the special mystical experience of God dwelling in her she had to say, ‘Of course the soul is one but the centre of the soul is so different that we have to call it spirit because this is the place where God who is Spirit dwells.’ The soul is not a thing; it is a quality of living. A country or a person without a soul lacks depth, values and a sense of the mystery of life.
Prayer and counselling
We need to clarify the respective and complementary places of meditation and therapy. Each in its own field is directed to a different level while contributing to the harmony of the whole person. Meditation will not mend a shattered leg after a car accident: the physical level. Neither will it mend broken emotions: the psychological level. It may bring surface calm and be of use in alleviating and controlling mental and emotional distress. Of its nature, however, meditation is not, as is counselling, an uncovering method which reveals the roots of problems. So a person may find that ‘When I meditate things come up from inside and I don’t know what to do with them. At the end I just shove them down and get on with my life. Now at last I’m coming to see that it’s through my body that further healing will come, not by trying to work out in my head the reasons for the desperate loneliness which at times swamps my whole being and leaves me worn out at the very centre of myself’.
Such prayerful reflection can be carried a step further by entering into the pain and tension of unresolved experiences still carried around in the body. As this is done, the spiritual and the psychological as well, indeed, as the physical levels of life will converge and flow together. So it will be found, too, that as the blocked energies of hurt and anger are released, the spirit of forgiveness will flow more fully and freely.
We can have a blending of prayer and counselling. Without prayer, either in its formal sense or in its more generalised sense of prayerfulness, counselling may have no soul. That may explain why a client can be dissatisfied and unfulfilled finding that beyond relief from physical and emotional strain and pain there is still a thirst for something more, a spiritual quality that is missing. Yet a spirituality of turning to God with the mind only, while disconnected from feelings and sensations, does not take account of all the workings of our human nature as embodied persons. Many discover that from being tired in body and drained emotionally they become dried up spiritually. With care and rest, energy will begin to flow back again thus reviving the life of the spirit.
Breathing
An integral part of the journey inward is proper breathing, establishing the natural rhythm of the breath of life flowing in and flowing out. As we breathe, so do we live. Through learning how to breathe deeply and fully, we can get down into the inmost reaches of our bodily being. To some degree most, if not all of us hold our breath in to keep down experiences which we have cut off because they are too threatening and frightening to go through.
Even in the ordinary stress and strain of daily living we get out of touch with ourselves and, when really upset, annoyed or unsure, lose the head, as we say, instead of keeping the head. The most effective way of getting in touch with ourselves again is not by thinking more thoughts up in the brain. If however, we let out the breath and reconnect with its natural flow by breathing down into hips and abdomen, we can then draw on the power of the body to steady and strengthen us once more. Someone who, after falling apart inside from the pressure of overwork, excessive responsibility and misunderstanding, went on the journey of self-exploration put words on the transformation that took place: ‘Now when life’s activities take me away from my deeper self, I recognise my need to recollect myself, get myself together again. Once I have re-established the rhythm of the breath in my body, I am ready to pray. I am in touch once more with my own self and so with the Great Self which is God.’ In our deepest human self, there is the healing life-giving action of divine life. Jesus of Nazareth, our spiritual teacher, in going off to pray was returning to his source of life which flowed from God.
Sacred self
‘The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth as it makes its way into the mind quietly and with power’ – The Declaration on Religious Liberty, Vatican 11. The wisdom of these words – that religious teaching is to be proposed rather than imposed – is worth recalling now, some thirty years on, in the developing story of human history. In our more secular age, the reawakening of the sacred must spring from the depths of ourselves yet not just from ourselves alone. The full recovery of a feeling for the sacred has to include the sense of the sacredness of the whole universe. God’s creation, the universe, is the prime sacred reality of which we form part and in which we have our place and role. From the dawn of consciousness in the evolutionary process, religion is a continuing exploration of the mystery of existence. Only slowly do we grow into a fuller, deeper faith, passing from notional assent of the head to religious statements, to real acceptance in the heart as teaching finds an echo there. Karl Rahner’s words come to mind: that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or not a Christian at all. Mysticism here means the experience of infinite Mystery emerging out of the very heart of human existence, the sacred dimension of everyday life. This obviously has to be through oneself I experience God through my own experiences. We enter the sacred, secret centre of our inmost selves through our human lives as embodied persons. The deeper the exploration of self, the more profound will be the discovery of the many mysterious layers that make up my own unique sacred identity.
Experiential journey
Human living encompasses the full range of experiences – sensations, feelings, ideas, images, intuitions. As embodied persons we operate through the body which registers and remembers everything. In its cellular memories, our life history is stored. Belief in the Incarnation, the self-revelation of God in the person Christ Jesus, of the divine in the human, of spirit in matter, tells us to grant the body its essential place in the integration and healing of the whole human person. An increasing number of those on the journey inward feel impelled to take what will usually be the scary step of venturing beyond thinking, talking and reading about unresolved inner difficulties to exploring and expressing them, thus combining experiential with cognitive therapy.
By experiential is meant giving outer verbal, emotional and bodily expression to painful traumatic happenings whether past or present, living through them and working their harmful effects out of the system. This relieves tension and allows the life energy to flow. A personal story might take this form: ‘I understood in my head why I was sad but that did not take away the tightness and pressure in my body. I then saw that I had to learn how to let the well of unexpressed hopeless grief overflow. As a child I was told that I had nothing to cry about and should not be upsetting others. So all my life I’ve kept everything in. Now I know that I can’t live this way any longer’.
A journey of this kind will not be completed in one session by a good cry even though this will bring some immediate relief The blocked energy of grief along with the force of other accumulated feelings of hurt, anger, rejection and loneliness which will slowly surface have been built into the body. When we have grown into a certain style of living over the years, we must patiently allow ourselves time to grow out of it. We are not machines to be switched off and on in an instant. For some, the early stage of entry into the dark and hidden areas of self may seem interminable, but gradually the dawning of the day will appear as light breaks through. This we can in gospel terms call conversion, a change or turning around of an inner disorderly life style.
Path of growth
Delving beneath the surface of our outer functioning selves, we come face to face with our damaged human nature and the struggle to progress from the false to the true self. Through our darkness and vulnerability, we come closer to the mystery of self This entails going into unwelcome painful aspects that knowingly or unknowingly we have partially or completely shut out. .A strange law of living says that it is through our wounds we grow as persons or, to put this more accurately, that we can grow. Those who on their journey begin to emerge from the lonely path of depression, inner torment and pain begin, after a while, to acknowledge with humble gratitude the wisdom and the new lease of life they would otherwise never have attained. In the profound levels of self lie hurt, confusion, ugliness, loss of faith in self, others and God. Yet there are, too, the bright areas of peace, joy, compassion, courage, freedom of spirit. In opening to the whole of ourselves we open to our light as well as to our darkness. Peculiarly enough, in the journey to find self we may run up against our own resistance. Somehow, we often do not want to believe that we are lovable and good, that we are liked, that others actually do care for us. The old negative energy patterns are very powerful, so much so that even when we are making progress we are pulled back towards the familiar way of behaving. We feel we are on safer ground there since, at least, we know where we stand, whereas letting go to sadness or anger or their threatening feelings is a plunge into the unknown in which we lose control of ourselves.
As essential part of our journey inward is learning to have compassion for ourselves. Otherwise, we undermine our best intentions by blame, condemnation and self-dislike. True human growth includes spiritual growth. As we explore our deepest experiences we will be able to distinguish what is constructive or destructive, what gives us life or what takes it away. The journey inward will strengthen us for the journey outward. The two will come closer together.
This article first appeared in Spirituality (March/April 1996), a publication of the Irish Dominicans.
