On Self-Sabotage, Shadow Work, Dream Yoga, and the Tibetan Four Natal Forces...

Finding the Fine Line Between Humility and Self-Suppression

SHE WHO WALKS IN TWO WORLDS by Margaret Trost

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Please note that I narrated this post into a highly flawed dictation program. My left hand is immobilized in a cast and I cannot type with one hand. (I am early Gen-X and we learned to type with two hands.)

I've been thinking a lot about self-sabotage lately, and I've been thinking about what they call the shadow--both the dark shadow and the golden shadow. And I've been thinking about my father, who died two-and-a-half years ago, but who remains in my consciousness very strongly. Not so much as a spirit guide but as more of an inhabitant. I'm not sure if this will make any sense, but it feels as though the traits that I inherited from my father feel more activated than ever since he passed and I know it is my job—let’s say my “duty,” because I dislike the word job and its connections to capitalism... it is my duty to help transmute these traits, these shadows, into strengths, into allies, into wisdom qualities.

I remember learning, shortly after my beloved father had passed, that in his lifetime he had a near- genius level IQ. I think his score was 130 and that genius score starts at 132. This revelation really struck me. Not because I ever doubted his supreme intelligence: he was a very brainy and articulate man who worked as an electrical engineer, and he was renowned for his intelligence and for the unique and remarkable way his brain worked. No, I was struck because he kept this fact to himself. He never lauded it over us. I realized he had never used his intelligence against us. Again, I'm not sure if that will make sense to everybody (intelligence as a weapon?), but I know it will make sense to some. Even though I knew I was not as intelligent as my father or as other members of my family, I was never made to “feel stupid” by him. (Others took on that role)

When I first discovered my father's IQ after his death, I theorized that he had kept his mental supremacy to himself so it has not to appear as a threat to others. I'm not sure why I am using the word threat (so soon after using the word weapon?) so I'll rephrase this. I theorized that he kept his genius to himself as a form of noble humility. A sort of Buddhist honoring of a precept to not elevate oneself but to remain humble. (Please note that while my father was not a Buddhist, but to me his moral code pretty much mirrored the Five Precepts and the Noble Eightfold Path. Or maybe I'm just projecting onto him because I am the Buddhist in the family. He was the Catholic. Emphasis on the past tense of Catholic. By the end of his days, my father had questioned many of the Church’s tenets but remained true to the original teachings of the Christ. And dare I say the Magdalene?) So all this is to say: I found myself admiring my father’s “humility.” (Which is a very old-school Catholic perspective, by the way. Very don’t-get-too-big-for-your-britches self-shamey. But More on that later...)

Back to self-sabotage: I practice dream yoga and lucid dreaming and I work with these practices to continue to try to understand my own myriad baffling behaviors. Self-sabotage and self-denial have been long time destructive patterns in this lifetime. Starting with anorexia as a young teenager and morphing into other more cleverly disguised life-denying behaviors through the years. In the mid-Aughts, I unconsciously sabotaged my own book publication, letting my memoir fade into obscurity lest someone actually read it, and failing to complete a contracted novel after it got orphaned at the great Random House. Any time I started to excel in any one field of creativity or academia, I would abandon it. Sometimes I've defined this as a fear of being seen (because being seen translated to my child-mind as being threatened), or of having a very overly protective protector-part, but no matter what’s going on, it feels suppressive. It feels oppressive. And it takes a lot of energy to unplug oneself from the creative life-force.

Currently I am trying to understand and release my tendency to make myself energetically very smallwhenever I am singing on a stage. And here I should clarify the sort of music I sing is not performative. I sing sacred chants and when singing devotional music, I take steps to dissolve the self and serve as a vessel for the deity or for the energy of the mantra being transmitted. The “I” disappears and a “we” emerges. So there is that—the dissolution of self--and this is different from the energetic smallness of self-sabotage. And exactly how these energies are different is what I am trying to figure out right now in my dream yoga practices.

The dissolution of self--in a Vajrayana context--is expansive. The destruction of self in self- sabotaging behavior is contractive.

When I am singing at an event, the singing part is quite easy because I feel like I'm not even the one singing... something else is singing through me. I am an Aquarius and have an air element typology, so floating around up in the cosmos is par for the course in my realm. But all of the practical details that are involved in putting on an event, and guiding other musicians, and interacting with sound crew... All of this requires a different sort of energy and presence. From a Tibetan perspective perhaps we could say it requires a lot of wang t’hang energy--magnetism. And it seems to me that the pattern self-sabotage actually cuts off the flow of wang t’hang. This is still a theory at this point for me, so don't quote me on it. All I can say is that I feel an energetic shrinking at the beginning of many of my events, like something is shutting down. So I just keep asking my dream body: What is the source of this pattern, and how can I best release it to be of better benefit to others?

And has been what has been arising as an answer is to think of my father. To contemplate his life. To recognize all of the ways in which he was forced to self sabotage and suppress his own glory. From what I understand and from what I sense, he was raised in a very old school, Old-World, suppressive Catholic environment--an environment in which children were not coddled or praised; in which lack of affection was encouraged--lest a child becomes “spoiled” or “full of himself;” a world in which guilt and shame were used as teaching tools and methods of control; a world in which obedience was demanded and corporal punishment was a part of daily life (and done for the child's “own good.”). To me, this sounds like a reign of terror, and I don't understand how any parent could have truly believed in the efficacy of such systems. But I do understand how said systems can force us to shut down essential parts of our selves, our souls. And once we start to shut off connection to our souls, we can “do as we are told.” And cause a lot of harm. It breaks my heart to know and feel how how much harm the Catholic Church has caused.

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