A Mason's Work

[00:00] All week, we've been working towards this single moment.
[00:07] You've identified your shadow and the disproportionate reactions, the patterns that repeat, the wishes that were pushed out to the margins.
[00:17] You understand sort of where it came from.
[00:21] You've learned to understand that you have created it.
[00:25] And today, we get to the heart of the beast and put the kind of final death blow together.
[00:37] Not to kill it forever, because again, you can't kill your shadow, but we can take all of its capacity away, at least in its current iteration.
[00:50] So, how do we do that?
[00:53] We give it a name.
[00:57] And not like Bill.
[00:59] Like, oh, this is my fear.
[01:00] His name is Bill.
[01:01] We're going to talk to what the cause of these things are.
[01:08] Right?
[01:08] So, when you have this experience that, again, from yesterday, we talked about, we oftentimes will project the things we are most concerned about in ourselves onto other people.
[01:25] He did this to me.
[01:28] She made that happen.
[01:29] The world is causing this or that or the other thing.
[01:34] When we change the pronouns to I, we get to a certain level of understanding.
[01:43] So, I caused this.
[01:44] I did this.
[01:45] And now, from that I perspective, we can start to answer the more meaningful question underneath that lets you develop the name of your situation.
[01:57] Is why?
[01:58] I did this to myself because I'm afraid of X.
[02:08] I did this to myself because I don't want to deal with the reality of Y.
[02:16] Okay.
[02:18] Let's talk about that in less mathematical terms.
[02:22] So, when we're afraid of a thing, we're either afraid of it's positive or negative.
[02:31] Right?
[02:32] So, either I'm afraid of the consequences of the behavior or I'm afraid of what it means if I am this person or if I think in this manner.
[02:43] Or I'm afraid that the way that this expresses itself will hurt me in some other way.
[02:54] This fear, this named fear, begins to lose its capacity to drive you when you have an understanding of what it is and where it comes from.
[03:09] So, I'll give you an example.
[03:11] When we have disagreements with each other as people, oftentimes you'll find that someone does not know how to do that.
[03:21] They will immediately flee or immediately refuse to have a conversation because of the emotional content.
[03:34] They might avoid a conversation or an argument.
[03:39] And then their shadow turns into, well, you made me do that.
[03:43] You made me run away.
[03:44] You made me avoid this.
[03:46] We'll get into that maybe in another episode.
[03:48] But on the internal experience of this, your reason for not doing a thing, for avoiding or for walking away or in some other way, aggressively intimidating people to get out of your way.
[04:07] All of that is, again, it's a result of an unexpressed and oftentimes invisible fear.
[04:17] When you are able to name this fear, you are beginning to lessen its control over you.
[04:27] When you look at your behavior and have accepted the consequences and sort of mechanics of how that has happened, you'll find that the fears that you have were, again, the fears of a person who at the time couldn't handle the situation.
[04:49] But now you can.
[04:56] Now you can respond to all of the things in turn that caused you to create this invisible shadow.
[05:12] This is a very challenging thing to do.
[05:16] And by taking on this work, by committing to improving yourself in this way, you are doing one of the most difficult things it's possible to do.
[05:29] And the only person who can do it is you.
[05:33] But when you find a moment, when you've identified this shadow and you have this fear and you have named it.
[05:46] Say it out loud.
[05:50] Take a moment now.
[05:52] Take a moment after this episode.
[05:54] Say it out loud.
[05:56] By virtue of saying it out loud even once, you gain the ability to start to notice it.
[06:06] It stops being a shadow and starts being a reality that you can begin to assert control over.
[06:18] It is step one in acquiring the courage to face your fear.
[06:26] Step one is to name them.
[06:28] And that's today's work.