AW4: Recovering a Sense of Integrity
AW4: Recovering a Sense of Integrity
Meeting your Self at the blank canvas of your next life
Once, in a therapy session, my Morla asked me what I thought ‘respect’ meant. I asked her to repeat herself. She did. I tried to focus on the word, but every time it came into focus in my brain, a fuzzy white noise filled the space. I asked her to repeat herself and explain what she meant by respect. She spoke some words but she might as well’ve been speaking gibberish; my brain just couldn’t compute the meaning. It happened with the word ‘trust’ as well. And later, ‘kindness’.
In this week’s reading of ‘Recovering a Sense of Integrity’, I had a similar experience. I couldn’t make sense of ‘integrity’ in this context; the whole chapter felt almost meaningless and so I had to read it a few times to give the words time to find purchase in my mind.
When you’ve stripped away all the old stories, thrown turps all over your canvas to peel away the paint thrown carelessly onto it by other people, and stare at that blank, white space – what do you do? How do you make sense of the opportunity?
At least I’m familiar with this. Therapy taught me that a good process is one that sets you on a path to discovering your Self as you identify and discard all the assumptions, inherited beliefs, traumas and defences that crowd it out.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been truly gobsmacked at how well this process is working to bring me back to my creator Self. It’s not that I haven’t tried before; but I guess I just wasn’t in the right space. ‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears’ and all that.
I had to look up the word ‘integrity’. Oh, sure, I know what it means, but what does it mean. Google gave me some definitions:
the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles
the state of being whole and undivided
The first three chapters of AW seemed to be about identifying and discarding all the assumptions, inherited beliefs, traumas and defences that crowd out your own creativity.
The fourth, this one, is about getting honest, about building that integrity of your own Self – ‘To thine own self be true’, Cameron quotes Shakespeare (or Crowley, depending on where you stand). When you look at that blank canvas, it asks, what’re you going to put on it? Who are you?
And there is some fuzziness and white noise in that for me. I don’t know yet. But I know I’ll figure it out. I always do.
In this chapter especially, Cameron talks a lot about the value of the morning pages for this. And I know it works. I wrote a column about journalling that sums up many of my feelings around the value in finding your true self on the page. The honesty that you can practice, the meeting of authentic feeling, building trust in intuition, impulse, subtle shifts of the inner voice directing …
As Cameron says, “The morning pages signal our willingness to speak to and hear God.” And I love this, it works in whichever way you view god.
So I’ll just keep journalling/morning pages-ing until I figure it out. Oh! And join a 6-week art class with Gail Schoeman. That’ll be a good step in the right direction of filling that canvas with something meaningful to me, right?
It’s scary, fun, rollercoaster-fucking-crazy-wild-mad stuff and I’m here for it.
If you're doing AW and you're at week four, you'll know about the 'reading deprivation' task. I'm still reading from the 1990s version of this book and I wonder if it's been updated for newer audiences, since a more relevant take on this today is probably 'social media deprivation' which is how I'll be doing that this coming week.
Since I'm completing each chapter over two weeks instead of one, I decided to use the second week to try this out. I know at least one of you is at the end of your 'deprivation' week and I'm looking forward to hearing about how it's going.
It's interesting that at about this time of pulling back attention from the noise, I've settled on a new book called Deep Work, by Cal Newport. All about focus I'm told. I'll how it goes. I'm curious at how the further I get into this exploration of my creative landscape, the louder the question gets: who am I? Creatively, in the world, who am I? Maybe this week, away from the social media shoutscape of who everyone else is, I might figure it out.
And another thing!
Neil Gaiman, he of sexy voice and literary enchantment said this in a podcast interview with Tim Ferris and I thought of it a lot this week:
“I would go down to my lovely little gazebo, sit down, and I’m absolutely allowed not to do anything. I’m allowed to sit at my desk, I’m allowed to stare out at the world, I’m allowed to do anything I like. As long as it isn’t anything.
I’m not allowed to do a crossword, read a book, phone a friend…all I’m allowed to do is absolutely nothing, or write.
But writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after a while. You’ve been staring out the window now for about 5 minutes, and it kind of loses its charm. And you’re going ‘Well actually, might as well write something.’
That was always — and still is…my biggest rule.”