Personal development

I’ve been wondering why the story I quoted in my previous post about inner and outer predators had so much resonance for me.

For me it’s about some damaging principles that are often misleadingly promoted as “personal development”. Like the idea that complete self-sufficiency is desirable. That being upset means you’re giving in to your fears. That painful emotions are to be avoided.

Of course dependence, fear and painful emotions are good to avoid when you can. But some forms of personal development just have the effect of making you feel worse when they turn up! It is dangerous to be told that it is possible to get through life without pain if you follow the simple principles of the religion/program. Dangerous, because then when life does throw a painful situation at you, the pain is made worse by the fact that you judge yourself for not living up to these “principles”. And it’s even worse when someone else tries to apply these principles to you and rejects you for failing to live up to these ideals.

For my version of this story is also about two very different men who pushed me to apply those principles to myself to a negative extreme. With good intentions, but nevertheless harmful effects. But it’s also about the part of me that willingly took on board those principles and scoured my soul with them.

I’ve tried several different sorts of personal development so far, and I have come to the conclusion that the only way to develop sustainably and authentically is just through living life!

Religions and personal development courses offer “short-cuts”, through prayer, meditation or various new-age attunements and so on. And for someone who’s impatient with their own imperfections, it’s so tempting! But my experience now seems to confirm what my instincts have been trying to tell me all along – short cuts just end up messing you up faster. You end up trying to integrate the perceptions of others into your world view, and they may be the wisest words ever, but they can’t be a substitute for developing your own wisdom.

Sitting on your own doing exercises or meditations on your “issues” around intimacy, needs, giving or fears may help in one way or another. But it seems simpler and better just to engage, openly and honestly, with whatever issues the people and events in your life are bringing you right now.

The “personal development” I’ve been through just seems to have cluttered up my mind with other people’s thoughts, which often turn into judgements. The learning that helps me seems to have come almost entirely from just getting on with living my life.

Maybe not all personal development is like that… but there’s enough bad stuff out there that I have resolved to be very, very careful when deciding what I allow into my mind in future.

Inner and outer predators

I’ve just started reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women who run with the wolves. Some passages speak to me very profoundly… like the following one:

“This fact is one of the central truths… that all women must acknowledge – that both within and without, there is a force which will act in opposition to the natural self, and that that malignant force is what it is. Though we might have mercy on it, our first actions must be to recognise it, to protect ourselves from its devastations, and ultimately to deprive it of its murderous energy.

“All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own forest without being devoured. To understand the predator is to become a mature animal who is not vulnerable out of naivete, inexperience or foolishness.

“The youngest sister represents a creative potential within the psyche. A something that is going toward exuberant and fissioning life. But there is a detour as she agrees to become the prize of a vicious man because her instincts to notice and do otherwise are not intact…. She is not only naive about her own mental processes , and totally ignorant about the murdering aspect of her own psyche, but is also able to be lured by pleasures of the ego…. It is to be hoped that she will finally open the door to the room where the destruction of her life lies. While it may be the woman’s actual mate who denigrates and dismantles her life, the innate predator within her own psyche concurs.

“In the tale, the sisters slam shut the door to the killing chamber. The young wife stares at the blood on the key…. now the naive self has knowledge about a killing force loose within the psyche. In this state the woman loses her energy to create, whether it be solutions to mundane matters in her life, or her concerns with compelling issues in the larger world, or with issues of spirit, her personal development, her art. This is not a mere procrastination, for it continues over weeks and months of time. She seems flattened out, filled with ideas perhaps, but deeply anaemic and more and more unable to act on them….

“We can say what we like, present the most smiling facade, but once we have seen the shocking truth of the killing room, we can no longer pretend it does not exist. And seeing the truth causes us to bleed energy even more…. A starved soul can become so filled with pain, a woman can no longer bear it. Because women have a soul-need to express themselves in their own soulful ways, they must develop and blossom in ways that are sensible to them and without molestation from others.

“Ironically, both aspects of the psyche, the predator and the young potential, reach their boiling point. When a woman understands that she has been prey, both in the outer and inner worlds, she can hardly bear it. It strikes at the root of who she is at centre, and she plans, as she must, to kill the predatory force. Meanwhile her predatory complex is enraged that she has opened the hidden door….

“When opposing elements of a woman’s psyche both reach their flashpoints, a woman may feel incredibly tired, for her libido is being drawn away in two different directions. But even if a woman is fatigued unto death with her miserable struggles, no matter what they might be, even though she be starved of soul, she must yet plan her escape; a woman must force herself forward anyway.

“This is the more profound initiation, a woman’s initiation into her proper instinctive senses wherein the predator is identified and banished. This is the moment in which the captured woman moves from victim status into shrewd-minded, wily-eyed, sharp-eared status instead.

“When women surface from their naivete, they draw with them and to themselves something unexplored… In the end several things occur. One is that the vast and disabling ability of the predator is disabled in a woman’s psyche. And second, the blueberry-eyed maiden is replaced by one with eyes awake, and third, a warrior to each side of her if she calls for them.”

The emotional power of singing

For years singing has been my main form of creative expression, a companion in times of anger and grief and ecstasy. I have songs that have comforted me in loneliness, songs that have expressed my grief or anger or determination… an expression for the most personal emotions.

But now that seems to have changed. Today I played the accompaniment to one of my arias, but, not for the first time, before I had sung the first phrase I was sobbing. Not surprising; the music is a beautiful evocation of profound loss, in phrases that seems to stretch out eternally – just as grieving often feels it will last forever.

Here is one of my favourite recordings, and here are the words:

Ah! non credea mirarti _________Ah, I can’t believe I see you
Sì presto estinto, o fiore; ____ ___So quickly wilted, flower
Passasti al par d’amore, ________You have faded with the love
Che un giorno sol durò. _____ ___That lasted only a day

Potria novel vigore ___________Maybe my tears
Il pianto mio recarti… _________Could bring the flower to life again
Ma ravvivar l’amore _______ __But reawakening love
Il pianto mio non può. _________Is not something tears can do.

Music, especially vocal music, has amazing power to draw out emotions…. But at the same time, so many of the sentiments expressed are so unhelpful – they give such a limited picture of what it was to be in love.

Operatic love is generally a highly clingy, intense, demanding and jealous emotion that mostly ends badly – the only prospect of a happy resolution is for the heroine to get the hero back at the end, rather than ever being able to recover and be strong and independent on her own!

I felt that singing these arias was encouraging thoughts that were increasing rather than relieving my pain. Perhaps for some there is a cathartic effect that comes from acknowledging the power of these feelings, but it felt more like a very powerful way to drive deeper into my psyche the feeling of being lost without him. And that seemed such a misdirection of the emotional power of singing – to exaggerate pain rather than to heal.

So I have been wondering if I can use my singing in some way that is more healing. I think one of my gifts as a singer is to communicate emotion in a way that touches people – can I find a way to use that power to help people rather than to seek the limelight?