I am working with six people at the moment where, directly or in some other way, all are telling me; ‘I’m not sure how much of myself is real anymore’. It takes a lot of humility for that statement to be made. But in prisons up and down the land, custody suites and courts, it is something I have often heard. It is perhaps among the most useful realisations anyone can ever have. The tragedy is that it often takes an experience of prison, or some other ‘full stop’ in life, to cause the issue of the false self to be recognised and spoken of.
To just be ourselves is not easy anymore. All forms of media tell us where to go, what to do, to buy, to own and how to look. The process of getting, hoarding things and hiding things in order to meet these demands and create a public image smothers life even before it starts. When enough is never enough, happiness is always just out of reach and unrest is pervasive.
It is often the search to get enough that ends up for many in prison and if not the brick and mortar kind then one of our own making. As Sr Joan Chittister reminds us; The truth is that too much of anything erodes its essential power. Too much partying leads to a loss of concentration. Too much travel leads to exhaustion. Too much make-up distances us from the glow of the natural. Too much self-talk identifies us as narcissists. Too much posturing, too much affect, too much drama leaves us clown like and alone on the stage of life. There’s no one to talk to because few are really sure enough who this person is to risk interaction.
Indeed, too much of anything robs us of the rest of ourselves. It cuts us off and separates us from others. But of greater concern and pain it also separates us from ourselves.
So, when someone at the start of their work with me is able to state they no longer know who they are, it heralds the start of a challenging process in which pretence in its many layers starts to fall away and a more real authentic person emerges.
The falling away process nearly always involves the letting go of complexity. The letting go of everything that we have invested in to meet the need of ‘enough’. Only to find that, as we shed it layer by layer, it has only covered up everything that we always ever had. So, although at the start the falling away is feared and experienced as loss, it really is a process of much gain.
Being simple in our place in the world and by not playing at being anything we are not, we start to be all that we have always been. If we are content with less than the latest of everything, we cannot be frustrated by the fact that others have newer, better versions of anything. If what we have does everything we need to have it to do, why bother to want it to be bigger and better?
Importantly, if we are content with who we are, we can’t be insulted by anybody. Nor then we will doubt or despise ourselves. We will know who we are and what we are and what we are not. Being content with our reality frees us from self-aggrandisement and from our false selves.
Living a more authentic self enables us to take life more as it comes. It relieves us of the burden of the superfluous, the inauthentic, the masquerade and brings us closer to the best we have to give to the world.
Enabling ourselves and others to become free of the many prisons of the false self takes courage and more. It requires commitment, determination, a letting go and a saying ‘goodbye’ to all and sometimes ‘goodbye’ to those that played a part in enabling a covering up of authenticity. We tend not to like the ‘full stops’ of life because we fear the losses of ending. But ‘full stops’ are also often the very point where new things begin.
Br. Stephen Morris fcc
