Self-policing
I have had a revelation thanks to one of my friends, around this self-policing which we all seem really good at. You know, the one where we give ourselves a hard time because we don’t live up to our idea of right or wrong, good or bad, perfect or imperfect, and how we can even take this into the spiritual realm. The trouble is when we judge ourselves, our heart and spirit flags. And the more we judge ourselves, the more we are likely to be judging others too, so we end up in a vicious cycle of negativity and stuck in this ‘judgement’ conditioning.
It was explained to me that if Hinduism had been the triumphant religion in this part of the world and all our law, religion, ethics, literature, medicine, art etc. had been based upon it, then our ideas of good verses bad would have been different to the ones we have, in this Christian dominated part of the world.
Now don’t think I’m about to lash out at Christianity or indeed Hinduism, or any other religion for that matter; I’m not. I have no preference, I’m not pro or anti any of it. I have just become increasingly aware that whether we wanted it or not, religion has seeped into our cells, our minds and our ways of thinking, and sometimes to our detriment – at least in terms of our relationship with our Self.
You see when Christianity came along, it behaved very much like a terrorist group, at least to the Pagans, who were living life deeply connected to the Earth and the Goddess too. People were beaten and bullied, temples and statues were smashed or buried (think of our glorious Goddess statue at St Martin’s church which was broken in half, and the one at Castel church which was buried to rid the church of links to Pagan beliefs), then when more established/popular, the church just started burning anyone who disagreed - those of you reading this would probably have been burned, I definitely would have been!
So our modern society’s adoption of Christian morality to determine good/bad, right/wrong, perfect/imperfect is basically to agree or disagree. This showed up marvellously during the pandemic and was a divider. In fact those of us who chose not to take the vaccine, were in many respects persecuted by our modern form of religion, namely science, just like the witches back in the day, although fortunately we weren’t burned at the stake albeit it did get rather ‘hot’ at times.
Anyway the point is, to question in this geographical reason is tricky, because there is only more Christianity to measure it against - there are no alternative reference points unless one has a spiritual practice.
And even then we’re up against it, because while spiritual practice helps to release us from the conditioning of our mind, we live within a conditioned society so we’ve always got that ongoing external conditioned influence – and it also depends on the nature of our spiritual practice, because even that doesn’t necessarily lead us to freedom depending on whether it actually has any roots to it.
Not to say, it isn’t possible to release ourselves from the conditioning, but it does demand more courage to increasingly live differently, namely outside of the box and the mainstream programmed way of believing how life should be lived.
But the bit that really concerns me, is this self-policing as a way of gaining control of the populace and how this control keeps us, well, controlling ourselves.
Because that’s the thing with Christianity, it wasn’t enough to control us on the outside, it also sought to control us on the inside, inside our own minds. It was very clever really.
And whether Christian or not, this continues on today, and the scary thing is, we don’t even realise it. It has become so normalised that we don’t question that our minds could be shaped differently. That is, until we wake up and realise that we have been brain washed, programmed then, to behave and consider our life a certain way.
It’s pretty scary - like a form of amnesia.
And when we wake up and realise this, it raises all sorts of questions – how might we relate to ourselves and live our lives differently if we let go of this internal control based on our brain washing?
It is my hope that we might start loving ourselves more as a starting point. Because if there’s one commonality amongst most clients and students is this lack of love for self, which manifests in all sorts of unhealthy and unhappy ways, and I know only too well the damage that is done, when we are at war within ourselves.
In fact it was this war that brought me to this path. I really didn’t like myself back then, over 20 years ago now, I didn’t consider myself good enough, worthy enough, enough of anything really, and I was constantly giving myself a very hard time as I judged myself against these crazy ideas of right/wrong, good/bad based on what society had taught me let alone school, family members, friends and peers. This led to years of self-harm, some techniques more obvious than others.
New age spiritualism didn’t help with its focus on love and light and its rejection and suppression of so called ‘negative’ emotions. It took me a long time to free myself of that conditioning too, the one that told me that to be a sincere spiritual seeker I needed to behave a certain way, feel a certain way, eat a certain way, present myself a certain way, look a certain way and use certain vocabulary. Not true incidentally. Spiritual practice encourages us to be us, your true Self, without aligning to any notion of right/wrong, good/bad, perfect/imperfect etc.
Slowly, slowly, I have tried to let all this go but it isn’t easy, it requires work and awareness. Needless to say, the conditioning pops up from time to time, usually some guilt around doing something which brings me joy, at least if it is criticised or judged by others. Because for some strange reason, not everyone likes us following our joy. We’re named selfish or self-centred. In fact we’ve been conditioned to associate self-love with selfishness and self-depreciation with virtue.
This of course makes it really bloody hard work to actually love ourselves and put our needs first without feeling selfish, self-centred or indeed – as I was saying - guilty. But this is just a conditioning. And if more of us can free ourselves from it, then it gives others permission to do similarly.
I have been leading a series on Self-Love and yesterday I asked the ladies what brings them joy. It was interesting to hear what they had to say and to notice commonalities in that often their greatest joy occurs when they are participating in activates on their own and generally in nature too. This quite in contrast to society’s externalisation of joy, as being something that we find outside of ourselves, that we have to buy – we have commercialism and capitalism to thank for that, yet more conditioning!
Sex is another factor that sometimes brings up this conditioning. Following a Tantric path, there have been moments where I have stumbled up across old feelings of shame, because to be sexually liberated was once hugely frowned upon and we would have been shamed and labelled a whore.
This programming (and indeed fear of caring too much what others think, because we might have been killed for that at some point in history) runs deep and having attended various Tantra courses, I am conscious that many women suffer from this, unable to experience sexual pleasure, whether from themselves or another or even touch their body gently, let alone their yoni.
It is a real shame as there is a huge amount of power residing in these lower chakras, in yoni especially, but this is the point – the powers that be back in the day were fearful of women’s potent sexual and creative energy, and so in came the virgin ideal, so that we women then feared our own power and being killed for it and therefore learned to supressed our true nature.
If you look back pre-Christian, to the Neolithic times it was fairly much all about sex, in terms of creative energy and the consciousness that results when we tap into it. Menhirs are penises essentially, piercing the land, dolmens and cairns are like yonis entering to the womb, the space which creates new life. This is the reason so many are aligned to a rising or setting sun, the sun is the masculine principle so it comes into meet with the feminine. Stone circles, with all their various menhirs are aligned to capture the energy of the moon and further sex the land.
We once celebrated this sacred union, think of the maypoles at Beltane, May Day, and how they represent the masculine penetrating the female land. A mortar and pestle used by Witches to mix magical herbs is worked on the same principle.
Nowadays we have totally lost our way. The sacred has been stripped from sex and a whole industry now exists in its place. Sadly the younger generation are growing up thinking that sex is all about strangling each other, which is such a shame because they miss out on the potential intimacy, tenderness, heart-felt, blissful and all body connection that sex can create.
I digress. But let me just say that this is for me one of the greatest woundings of this self-policing brainwashing, is the way the body and mind have been separated and the body’s intelligence and indeed power has been supressed. This still plays out in allopathic health care – the body is treated in one building and the mind in another and there is a lack of cohesion between the two, or indeed respect for the wisdom and intelligence of the body.
Even new age spiritualism leans heavily into this paradigm of head being best, with its emphasis on the upper chakras, over the lower chakras. Yet the real juice - or so it feels to me - is found in the lower chakras and our connection to the earth, but this is tricky, because we hold a lot of crap down there (quite literally sometimes!), far easier to hang out in the upper chakras, where we don’t need to look at our stuff, or be in the body for that matter.
I stumbled across this blog post written by Sharon Salzberg which highlighted this lack of self-love in our Western world
“At one point during the event, I had an opportunity to ask the Dalai Lama a question, so I ventured, “Your Holiness, what do you think about self-hatred?”. He looked at me seeming somewhat confused and asked in response: “What’s that?”
It powerfully sums up a fundamental difference between our Western, ambition-focused value system and the Buddhist moral compass. While I came to meditation at 18 as a result of dealing with feelings of inadequacy and self-judgment for my entire young adult life, the Dalai Lama didn’t even know what the meaning of self-hatred was. When I explained to him what I meant by the term — talking about the cycle of self-judgment, guilt, unproductive thought patterns — he asked me, “How could you think of yourself that way?” and explained that we all have “Buddha nature”.
In other words, he simply didn’t get the fact that many of us are often overcome with fundamental feelings of negativity and inadequacy. I revisit this story repeatedly because there was, and still is, something so freeing about the fact that the Dalai Lama was so surprised about this negative way of relating to ourselves, an attitude that seems so common in today’s day and age.
I don’t want to deify Asian culture, or Tibetan people, or Buddhist thought. There are problems in every society, group, and philosophical school. But, I think it is powerful to reflect on what we think we will find within if we look underneath our habits and our desires and our fears. Is it a capacity for love and awareness? Or is it pretty much nothing, or nothing good?
In particular, I’ve thought about this in the process of writing my upcoming book this past few months. I’ve found that many, if not most, of the people with whom I’ve spoken, feel the greatest sense of struggle around the question of cultivating love for oneself. We are conditioned to associate self-love with selfishness, and self-deprecation with virtue. It often seems easier to access feelings of judgment and anger about ourselves than towards those around us.”
At some point we have to let off our self-policing and our inner control, which judges and harms us. We have to let go of the idea of right/wrong, good/bad, perfect/imperfect based on something external to us - some imaginary rule book.
We also have to find the courage and strength to set ourselves free, because let’s remember, no one else can do it for us. This is sometimes our biggest obstacle because we still live within an allopathic care model, which causes people to give their power away to others, hoping to be fixed. More often than not they simply find symptomatic relief, without getting to the root cause of their loss of wellbeing.
We have to take responsibility.
But how?
By noticing our thoughts. Watching them. Remembering that we are not our thoughts any more than we are out emotions. They simply come and go, like clouds in the sky. The trouble comes when we hold onto them and identify with them as if they are concrete – like making the sky permanently grey, rather than letting the clouds come and go and allowing the weather to change.
This is not easy. But there are various tools available to us on this spiritual path which can help. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras offers us the 8-limbs of which yoga asana is a part. But there are other activities such as those which feed our joy, which take us deeper into that quieter space within ourselves where we become less beholden to our thoughts and feelings and orientate increasingly to the moment and to our heart, gut and soul.
And this demands honesty. Because like I wrote earlier, doing what we want, that which makes our heart glow, that fills us with joy will often be judged by others as being selfish. Yet if we give of ourself, like some perpetual charity worker, being both the people pleaser and the good girl, then we never please ourself and are constantly up against our perfectionist tendencies and loaded sense of good/bad and right/wrong. And then we wonder why we feel so frustrated, angry and overwhelmed.
Instead we might watch our thoughts and notice when we have fallen into the trap of self-policing or judging others, and take a step back, detach, change the pattern, be mindful and cultivate greater love and compassion for Self and others in the process. In this way we gradually – very gradually - let go of the negative conditioning imposed on us over the centuries and set ourselves increasingly free.
