A Mason's Work

[00:00] Yesterday, we talked about the psychological shadow and sort of how to locate it, find
[00:06] it in the little recesses of your experience.
[00:10] It's that disproportionate reaction or the unfulfilled wishes and desires kind of pushed
[00:15] to the edges or the patterns that keep repeating themselves across years and time and context
[00:20] and stuff like that.
[00:21] Finding those is the beginning of the work.
[00:25] But before I go any further, I want to make sure you kind of know what we're working
[00:29] towards here.
[00:30] And we talked about a little bit a couple episodes ago, but this work is, it sounds heavy.
[00:36] It sounds onerous because we're getting into some kind of rich emotional territory.
[00:41] It's going to feel a little bit strenuous.
[00:46] And I want you to know what you're sort of working towards here and why is the view that
[00:53] we're going for worth the climb, if you will.
[00:55] And what's on offer here is the difference between essentially freedom and slavery.
[01:04] It's whether or not the things in your life, in your everyday experience control you, or
[01:10] you are the master of your own sort of destiny.
[01:15] You're the master of your own ship.
[01:16] And so when we start digging into this work, you are not here to essentially become above
[01:28] the work.
[01:29] You're here to live through it.
[01:32] And in the process of living through this work, you gain agency over it.
[01:38] So, uh, when I'd spend a moment talking about where the shadow came from and why is it kind
[01:44] of something you can't see in the first place because the mechanics of this are kind of important.
[01:50] So when you were younger, uh, whenever that was, uh, maybe you were a child, maybe it was
[01:58] yesterday.
[01:59] Who knows?
[02:00] There was a version of you that was confronted by something that they didn't understand.
[02:09] They maybe had, uh, an experience that felt threatening.
[02:15] Uh, maybe they took on an emotional reaction from someone else that wasn't, wasn't their own.
[02:22] Maybe they felt embarrassed or ashamed.
[02:26] That version of you couldn't deal with it.
[02:32] And we're not trying to, in this conversation, deconstruct that significant, right?
[02:40] We don't need to go into the mechanics of all of why that person didn't feel safe.
[02:45] It doesn't matter.
[02:46] What does matter is that that person you were responded in the moment in a way that anything,
[02:55] any rational person, any reasonable organism would respond.
[03:00] They avoided discomfort and pain, uh, or they sought pleasure as part of a medicative process
[03:09] that, that mechanism that avoided, uh, this discomfort.
[03:15] It pushed all of the stuff that came with it into the background and I swept it under the
[03:22] rug where it couldn't cause issues where you didn't have to deal with it.
[03:28] And for most folks, that's the right move at the time.
[03:34] Like you couldn't deal with it then.
[03:36] And you kind of just talked, tucked it away.
[03:38] We don't take the time in the moment to, again, build that capacity to respond.
[03:45] You only kind of can work on these things after they've happened.
[03:50] Again, just like in the first episode this week, you don't go put yourself in a crisis
[03:55] to, to figure out like, how can you better adapt to crises?
[03:59] You actually build crisis capacity during your sort of everyday Tuesday or whatever.
[04:04] So when, when all of that happened in your past, in your previous versions of yourself,
[04:11] that was a rational response, but where you're at now, the person you are in this very moment
[04:19] that is pursuing that shadow, that's looking for it.
[04:24] That's trying to find that rough edge is, is genuinely capable of dealing with the crisis
[04:34] that created that problem.
[04:36] The person that is seeking this, the person who put you on this path yesterday, this morning,
[04:45] 30 seconds ago is able to handle this stuff.
[04:49] You know this because you start to lean in, you start looking for that uncomfortable material.
[04:58] That, that ability to look for it is in and of itself the capacity to deal with it.
[05:07] Now it's uncomfortable, but you can handle it because you start looking.
[05:15] The moment you start looking, you know, you're already on the right path.
[05:19] So today as part of maybe the homework from this episode, or as you're kind of going through
[05:26] your everyday life, look for a recent moment where you had an overreaction.
[05:31] You don't have to solve it.
[05:33] There's nothing to do right now, except find that moment and think about it.
[05:42] Think about what happened.
[05:43] What was the thing you were avoiding?
[05:47] What was the, the thing that you were able to not deal with as a result of the reaction
[05:54] you had?
[05:56] As you go through this process, you'll be able to, again, cultivate a much stronger experience.
[06:01] We'll talk a little bit more about how to deal with some of the more difficult parts, the
[06:07] folks that, uh, the little shadow shadowy guys hanging out in your, the back of your mind
[06:13] that are really being, uh, kind of dodgy.
[06:16] Uh, and then we will, uh, work through those a little bit more in tomorrow's episode.
[06:21] Thank you.