Insanely Gifted. Jamie Catto
I’ll focus and listen. I can do this!’ Yet pretty soon I’d be daydreaming again and spacing out, unable to take in what they were teaching, and inevitably would get in trouble for my laziness. Still I soldiered on with my well-intentioned version of studiousness – to no avail, sadly. The naive child in me can’t understand why the world is so corrupt and unpredictable, and he often feels painfully powerless in the face of the current state of the planet. We want to live in a world where we can expect people to be fair and kind, and none of us want to live life looking through a cynical lens, expecting the worst, but inevitably certain people and situations are going to disappoint us. This little guy, like a faithful puppy, comes back again and again for more and often forgets to make the necessary boundaries I need to protect myself from the unpredictability of life’s relationships and challenges.
8)The Needy One
Some people have done a great job of shutting this character down, especially as it is one of the more shameful ones. The needy one in me thinks that he depends on other people’s actions and decisions to feel OK. I live in a very volatile and tenuous realm when this character is in the driving seat. The beliefs that this character lives by are totally self-sabotaging because none of us can depend on everyone else acting as we would prefer. People are undependable. Everyone has their own lives and changing priorities, and while I am only OK when they choose what I want them to choose I am guaranteed to live like a hungry ghost, never fully satisfied and never feeling fully safe. The beliefs this character lives by are rooted in childhood and can be hard to shift. To cultivate the healthy path of self-care, not dependent on others, is a wonderful yet challenging undertaking. I’m not sure the path ever ends but until I take a more self-caring attitude I can live a totally disempowered existence, as if I’m a regressed child waiting for Mother’s milk. This character also brings a lot of shame with it, as our culture looks down on neediness. As Woody Allen said, ‘If only neediness and begging were attractive qualities.’
9)The Flaming Sex Maniac
Anyone not have this one? Some days nearly any stimulus can trigger sexual thoughts and sometimes in the most inappropriate of situations. This character only sees life from one single perspective. When he’s walking down the street all he sees are fuckable, competitor and irrelevant. This is one of the characters who we tend to try and keep the most hidden, as not everyone would appreciate the nuances of our dark appetites. Our culture is very hung up around sex. As Gabrielle Roth says, ‘We make it both too important and not important enough’, and it is no radical news to suggest that religion has been largely responsible for brainwashing generations of hell-fearers away from their natural, horny impulses. Sexuality can be one of the most powerful portals to experiencing one’s spirituality, to making a direct connection with whatever your idea of the Divine is. Priests don’t want to give up their jobs of being the middle-men, so over the years they’ve rebranded sex as a sinful thing and, as we said earlier, the further you push a beach ball down under the surface of the swimming pool the more violently it springs back up. Suppression magnifies intensity and it tends to leak out in all sorts of directions. We probably wouldn’t have the endless menu of sexual flavours and depravities available to us had religion not been so busy trying to ban it. That’s my kind of karma!
DEMON GROUP THERAPY
When you use the Way to conquer the world,
Your demons will lose their power to harm.
It is not that they lose their power as such,
But that they will not harm others;
Because they will not harm others,
You will not harm others:
When neither you nor your demons can do harm,
You will be at peace with them.
Tao de Ching
These living characters have needs and fears and compulsions. When we are in constant shame and suppression of these essential parts of ourselves, our demons find their own ways to get their needs met, and often in unexpectedly dramatic and self-sabotaging ways. These characters never die (until we do) and they need expression, so if we don’t feed meat to the demons we are setting ourselves up for endless unexpected dramas. We need to enter into a new relationship with these guys and stop trying unsuccessfully to hide them in the basement. They start banging on the trap door and as Tom Robbins says, ‘In the darkness they grow fangs and at unexpected moments leap out and bite you’. We almost need to start our day with a little group therapy session with the characters in our heads.
Ah, good morning, murderer, who’s on the list today? Oh, everyone? OK . . . and, sex maniac, what is it today? Oh, donkeys and baked beans, nice.
Once their desires are given a little oxygen they no longer need to force their way to the surface, breaking down the doors to get their needs met. I think of my demons as a school bus full of unruly freaks. If I don’t let them express themselves they find a way to distract me and grab the wheel! ‘Hey, Jamie, that guy on the internet called you a wanker!’ and my attention is momentarily diverted. It only takes a second for that character to leap into the driving seat and get control of the wheel, and God help me if he gets control of the mouth or the internet. Suddenly my inner vengeful murderer has control of my email . . . arrrgh! This is truly hazardous. This is one of the areas where our faster-is-better culture really does not serve us. In the days before the internet, if I was going to write something irretrievably rude or aggressive, by the time I’d hand-written the letter, folded it and slipped it into the envelope, there’s a good chance that while licking the gum I might come to my senses, crumple up the letter and write something less petulant and destructive. Email does not afford us this luxury. All too quickly I write my confrontational reply, probably totally over-reacting to whatever I have been sent as my I’m not being treated with the respect I deserve buttons have been pressed, I hit ‘send’ and it’s over, another bridge burnt.
The truth is that when we stop looking at these characters as enemies and consider that there may be some benefit to reframing our experience of them there’s an endless harvest of treasure available. That’s right, I’m saying that even these demonic voices have a function in Life’s genius. They have illuminations within, they can show us our limiting, wounded beliefs about ourselves, they can lead us into compassion for ourselves and others, and they each have skills and gifts which may presently be applied for dysfunctional ends, but with a new dialogue they can be transformed into allies, even employees. But first, we need to be willing to step into the shadows.
CHAPTER 3
Willing to Feel
Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.
Alan Alda
One of the limiting habits we have formed as a species is always to try to and move towards comfort and push away discomfort. We feel a pain and we take a pill to make it go away, but as long as we are always trying to escape the uncomfortable we are missing half of the treasure of life. It is when we are uncomfortable that we have to reach out to others; it cultivates intimacy and trust. When we are in pain our compassion for others who are experiencing pain, too, is deeply felt, unlike the rest of the time when we are buzzing around in self-involved busyness. The dark night of the soul is one of the most growing experiences many of us ever have.
In Eckhart Tolle’s classic self-help book The Power of Now he talks about a concept which he calls ‘the pain body’. The idea is that as we grow up, our rage and our pain and our grief are often unsupported and unwelcome in our homes and schools, and much of the time we have to suppress, not express, how we feel. When we do this, remnants of that unexpressed emotion get lodged in our bodies. Week after month after year of continually not expressing these painful cries and wounds results in an accumulation of unexpressed, over-reactive emotion in us, like a large constipated lump. This is what Tolle calls ‘the pain body’,