Heroes in Business - Healing Split Between Ego or Personality and Soul

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Top way to heal split between our Ego or Personality, and Soul and Spirit. Personality is a choice to identify with an obscuring, limiting protector. Choose to release and become our essential Self with Dr. Andy Hahn of Guided Self Healing Fearless Living.  

Hi, this is Dr. Andrew Han, and once again, I am speaking to you from my library in Waltham, Massachusetts. And today is Friday, May 21st, 2021. And this is the 13th episode of Guided Self-Healing, Fearless Living. And today, what I want to talk to you about, we're going to call this episode, this 13th episode, healing the split between ego and soul. And the reason I want to talk with you about that today is that one of our listeners had been listening to the last couple of episodes, and she asked a very interesting question, which is, she said, you were talking about front back splits, and up down splits and left-right splits, but what about up-down splits that aren't between the head and the body, but between the ego or the personality and the

soul? And how does that fit in with talking about these different kinds of people that you've talked about in the past few episodes and our identification with our personalities. And so I wanted to speak to that sort of because it's here right now. And in order to speak to that, we have to talk about a whole different kind of practice than the ones we had talked about a few weeks ago, when, if you recall, we talked about emotional freedom technique and tapas acupressure technique and EMDR and frontal occipital holding or FOH. And because this is sort of like give unto Caesars what Caesars and give unto God what's God's. And what we're trying to do right now is find a way to bridge

the worlds between the worlds of matter and the worlds of soul and spirit. And so she said, how do you put that together with this idea that we have this compulsion that is called our personality, that we sort of believe we are our personality, I am my personality, just like I am my body, or I am my thoughts, or I am whatever. Well, how do you handle a split that plays out in this compulsion called I am my body or I am my thoughts or I am whatever. Well, how do you handle a split that plays out in this compulsion called I am my personality? And interestingly, of course, these two concepts go together if we can get enough perspective. It's sort of like there's an umbrella that could hold both of them, that how we could understand that our personality is a compulsion and it isn't who

we are. It's just an experience we're having that we, you could say, we filter life through. It's just a limited lens, you could say, our personality. And our personality does speak to our identification with duality, which means that, of course, if I believe I am my personality, then, of course, when it disappears, you could say I disappear. And that's, of course, for those of us who don't like disappearing at all, and like we never existed, that's kind of anxiety provoking. So let's now look at that. So let's start with the personality and say, why is the personality a compulsion? Very interesting question. And in order to understand this,

let's just take a little journey together, like a mythic journey, and say, who are we fundamentally, in essence, before duality? And you could say that who we are is everything, and everything is who we are. We've already had that conversation. It's like we fundamentally are is unity. It's boundaryless, dimensionless, infinitely expanding spaciousness that includes, it's called the fullness of the emptiness. It includes all space and all matter because it's all one. Now let's talk about what happens when we become embodied,

which on one level means whenever we experience ourselves splitting off from this oneness, which we've talked about some, so that we are now, there's two problems that happen when you split off from oneness. One is separation, which we're not going to talk about today. The other is limitation and limitations, a problem, right? Because we're, you know, we once had the experience of being truly unlimited. And when you become something in particular, on one level, it's an opportunity. But on the other level, you could say it's a trauma, because it's sort of like going from being everything to something. It's like, you know, being total spaciousness and then collapsing into something. And one aspect of us experiences that as a trauma. Just like any other trauma, like being yelled at or being hit or being anything. You could say it's a soul level trauma that when we go from being everything to being something.

We're going to talk about that at greater length when we talk about this at greater length. But let's just take that as a possibility for now. We'll suspend disbelief, so to speak. Okay. So once we experience that, then there's a problem like there is with every other trauma, which is that if we became who we truly were, which was unitive, then we would have the problem of disappearing. You could say dissolving is something separate and something limited, which is really what the point here is. And so we identify with the limitation because we believe that if we became who we truly were, we believe that if we became who we truly were, we would, of course, as a separate being, cease to exist. That's all clear. But like with everything else, right, like with everything else, when there's a trauma, there are these beliefs that we know on a deeper level aren't true. And the first belief is that I'm an I, as opposed to I'm an everything, that I am something in particular.

Now, what we're going to notice is that that protects us and limits us. It protects us from disappearing entirely, and it limits us because now I'm a limited something, and with all of the consequences of that. And not only am I an I, but if we go to the personality, I'm a negative I in my way of understanding things. And we've already talked a little about the Enneagram. And I think that there are three kinds of people and three variations of three kinds of people. And we had started to talk about the heart people lost time. And we're going to say that every personality is based on a fundamental, you could say, reversal. What we might call, if we were being like, you know, philosophical and ontological mistake, in that we put something, right, we say that I am something, and that's more fundamental than being everything.

And we do that because it keeps us existing. So let's suppose I am, we're going to talk about the heart points again. I'm a giver. Well, we know about givers, right? We've already talked about them in our last episode. A giver is someone who says, I'm pleasing, therefore I am. And pleasing means that I take care of you to such a degree, and I know your needs to such a degree, like I know them better than you know them,

so that you will need me. Of course, the thing that I don't want to have to admit is that I need you to need me. And so my whole sense of worthiness compulsively comes from my taking care of you and you needing me, and now I'm worthy of existing. Well, all right, so let's look at this. What we're going to then say is this sense of worthiness is a compulsion. We can't stop ourselves. We have to keep taking care of people's needs. If we're a giver, we have to be pleasing. Why? Because on the one hand, of course, it's wheat and chaff. We want to take care of people's needs. Altruistically, we want to do that. But there is a whole other way that we're doing this, which we could call in this case, the chaff, so to speak, which is we're not taking care of their needs to take care of their need. We're taking care of their needs to take care of our own need of our fear of unworthiness and our fear of unworthiness in the eyes of others, almost to the extent to say

that I'm not worthy of living unless I'm taking care of your needs. So I then compulsively take care of your needs and I'm compulsively pleasing and I never truly get to experience being someone who cares for you fully because in part I'm doing it not to experience something else, which is I am unworthy. All right. So you could say that I am unworthy is a black hole in the center of our personality that if I'm a giver, I'm going to spend an awful lot of energy trying to avoid whatever it takes. And the simplest first way to do it is to keep proving to myself that I'm worthy and by using you, you could say, by using you so that I will have an inner sense of worthiness because I've taken care of you and therefore now I feel worthy, right? So let's look at this. I am worthy, which is the foundation of my personality, right? Is a compulsion to protect myself from a fear, which is I am unworthy. But now we have funny thing to say, which is I am unworthy while being a black hole in the

center of my personality and something that I would, as a giver, I could almost say I'd rather be dead than have to experience I am unworthy because I will do everything I can to never experience it on a whole other level is a protection from non-existence. So look at this, it's a two-part process, right? I start off being everything, right? I become a something with a negativity in it and a black hole in the center of it called I. And in this case, if I'm a giver, we go one more step, I am unworthy. So we go from a big black hole to a little black hole that protects us from the big black hole. But it's like out of the frying pan into the fire of I am unworthy. And then we have to compulsively do things that make us feel worthy in order not to experience the unworthiness that

was protecting us from non-existence. Now, if you followed that, good for you. And if I followed it, good for me too. So now we can talk about how these episodes go together because if we want to heal the split between our egos or slash our personalities and our soul and ultimately our spirit right the way to do it is to do something totally counterintuitive which is to instead of using all this energy to pull you away from the black hole, to stop and to face the thing that we're most afraid to experience about ourselves, to face the thing that we're most afraid to experience about ourselves, which in this case, if I'm a giver, would be I am unworthy. So what would happen,

and this is my invitation to you, if you found the thing that you were most afraid to experience about yourself, which has to be an inner process, right? It has to be something internal to you. It wouldn't be that I'm going to be rejected because then someone else is doing the rejecting. So you'd say, well, what is it about me that would make it so that somebody would reject me, which of course I don't want to experience any rejection. And if I'm a giver at some point or other, I'll come to, of course, they're going to reject me because I am unworthy, right? So of course they're going to do that to me.

So what would happen if I take this black hole, which is just emptiness, which I've called by the wrong name, in this case, I'm unworthy. And I say, instead of using all of my energy, try not to get sucked into that blood call, which doesn't work because it's gravitational pull because it loves me so much, is be stronger than my running away from it. Because even though I hate, it loves me and it keeps inviting me back. So what would happen if I accepted the invitation

and instead of trying to pull away from it, I turned to it, and said, I'm going to become you. I'm going to let you pull me towards you and into you, this black hole that I've called up unworthy. And that is the start of freedom. That is the start of grace. Because if I could just say, okay, I will become this thing that I'm most afraid to experience about myself that I have misnamed because all it is is a full emptiness. It's like a black hole. There's a whole universe there. So if I let myself go into it, maybe worlds will open up to me. Now, how do I do that? Well, we've talked about this before. If you let yourself for acceptance to, for a second to accept this experience that you've

been trying your whole life to avoid, I am unworthy if I'm a giver, right? If you do that, you will find a body sensation. And I want to invite all of you today, if you want to, to just do what I'm going to invite you to do if you were a giver or a performer or romantic today, because that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about the heart points, if you listen to our last podcast. You know, the three heart points. So you're going to go into this thing that you're afraid to experience about yourself. I am unworthy. How do you do it? When you allow it, like I said, there will be a discomfort. There'll be

empty feeling, like a hole in the center of your being, or there'll be a nauseous feeling that may accompany the hole in the center of your being, or there may be extreme pain or heaviness or tightness or whatever it is, that will be the equivalent, the exact equivalent of I'm unworthy. So the invitation then is to scan your body, which is like a archive of everything that you could experience. So we're going to find the thing that you're most afraid to experience, this limitation called I'm unworthy, and you're going to feel it in the body. And then you're going to choose to bring all your attention to it to such degree that you're going to become it. it in the body. And then you're going to choose to bring all your attention to it to such degree that you're going to become it. And once again, then, just like in every other situation,

while you're having the experience, I'm unworthy, while you're having the experience of choosing to become I'm unworthy, as opposed to unconsciously identifying with it and then running away from it. As soon as you choose to become it, you then identify with the one who's choosing, doing the choosing, who is the one who is holding and witnessing and being with or hosting, you could say, because it's kind of a sacred process, is hosting I'm unworthy. While you choose to be, I am unworthy. But then, of course, it's just an experience you're having. But it's the experience, interestingly enough, from the

point of view of your personality, that you have most tried not to have. So paradoxically, it's like running away from God and denying God and like everything. This is the doorway. Why? Well, let's look at it on a soul level. Let's suppose I could experience I'm unworthy. Then two things happen. The first is that I don't have to be prideful and say, you can't live without me. So my arrogant pride can transmute alchemically into a kind of humility, right? I could take care of you and care for you, but without thinking that you need me in a prideful stance, right? Instead of being a slave to this, I am now, I experience freedom, right? So I will get to experience something that as a giver, I never experienced, which is humility and freedom, as opposed to this prideful stance which really has me stuck, you could say.

So that's the soul. That's a soul evolution. If I could do that all the time, I would just become naturally humble, which just means I care for you and you could live without me, right? It's not that you need me, so I can give to you with no strings attached, and now I'm free. And that is the doorway for any giver to move into something even richer than identifying with the freedom that comes with humility and freedom, right? Because eventually then you could go into a place where you're not even the higher element of a giver, you become open to being everything again. So it's like this doorway in, if you keep doing that practice, which is like, as my partner in all this, Joni says, it's like climbing a mountain, you know, it's like, you have to, it's not like you do it once unless, you know, some people say that they get revelation, you know, and suddenly they're

free entirely. That has not been my experience. My experience is I keep working on my, the thing that I'm most afraid to experience about myself, this limitation. And it's like, I get, you know, to experience about myself, this limitation. And it's like, I get, you know, freer, so to speak, but it's a climb. It's not one of those things you do at once. So that's the bad and good news. But, you know, it's like, you know, there's the, you know, you can get to the mountaintop someday, even though it gets steeper and you get more tired and the air gets thinner and you look up and you can't see the top of the mountain. The only way you'd ever know you've gotten any places, if you look back to where you were and say, well, at least I'm freer than I was before, you know, so I must be heading

in a good direction, but you know, your times really, it would be much nicer to do whatever you'd want to do to escape this and so to speak, take a vacation. But of course, you always have to come back. So that's the practice. The practice is to find the thing that you're most afraid to admit about yourself. And when you do that, you won't believe that you are your personality. You will realize that your personality comes out of one core experience. If I'm a giver, the core experience meaning compulsively I have to feel worthy in the particular other's eyes. And then you can know anything you want to about a giver because you'll know what's motivating them, right? Compulsively motivating them. So you say, well, what would that person be like if they had to do that?

Well, they'd have to be upbeat. They'd have to be pleasing. They'd have to be kind of comic so to speak extroverted they would certainly know how to take care of everybody's needs they would certainly want appreciation for it if they didn't get it they get angry i mean you could begin to extrapolate the whole thing right you know and say oh that's my personality yeah that's your personality because say you thank you to your personality it's just a protector that's keeping you stuck, so to speak, because you call it in and say, like, you know, can you please protect me from being who I really

am? Because if I do that, I'm going to be scared to death that I'll stop existing. So let's identify with something limited and negative, all that. So this is how we put together those two ideas of healing splits between these different energies of ego and personality to soul, which is the higher aspect, the highest aspect of our limitation, right? To be unlimited. So it's a two-part doorway that we go through until eventually we can get to not just our fear of our personality, I'm unworthy, but our deeper fear that there's no I, that there is only non-existence and existential non-existence. But of course, that's not non-existence either. That's true existence. Except this time we do it with awareness as opposed to doing it just without awareness. That's the only difference. Now, let's go on for a second

and say, all right, so that's what I would do if I were a giver. Well, what about, we talked about last time, a performer. What would we do if we were a performer, right? A performer is someone who says, I perform, therefore I am, right? Being an actor on a stage and someone who does, who takes action and then wants some recognition for it, right? So I identify with my personality, which is I succeed. Failure is not an option, right? Or I do. I'm a human doing. Or I create. I'm a human creator. I have to keep compulsively doing and creating and succeeding and getting recognized.

And that's my personality, right? Why? Because I'm afraid of something. This thing that I'm afraid to experience about myself that knocks on the door late at night and says, well, you think you're successful? Uh-uh. Look at somebody next door. You know, you're not as rich as they are or your husband isn't as gorgeous or whatever it is so you have to keep going it's a compulsion you know keep doing doing doing eventually you'll get there of course you'll never get there because if nothing else you'll get older and slow down and then you get a big problem and then you'll have a late midlife crisis which a lot of performers do okay so what's the way out you have to go into the fire you could say of who do i really believe i am that i've not wanted that i've been afraid to admit about myself i do nothing i create nothing i am failure so again you would say

all right for one second what would happen if instead of running as far and as fast away from that as I could, I just turned and faced it and said, okay, I'm going to choose to be you because you're just part of life, you know? And of course, ironically, which is true of everything, if you really want to succeed in life, you have to be able to be comfortable with failure. Otherwise you'll never really succeed anyway and even if you look like you succeeded you wouldn't have succeeded so in order to really succeed you have to know that success and failure in a sacred marriage and it's like you have to be non-attached to either one well how do you become non-attached to failure if you're a performer you have to fully over and over and over again meditate on i'm failure right so i'm asking you to do a kind of mindfulness meditation

but not just on your breath on the sensation that arises when you fully experience i am a failure or i do nothing or i create nothing and then you'll get free and you'll have hope right that someone actually that you're you're lovable and could be loved if you were truly who you were as opposed to this image that you created you know you know what the world would look to you being if you were going to be a success you know it's called vanity i am my image right whether it's on my image of my home or my image as a woman or a man or my image of what i would be you know if my ambitions were realized you know it's all an image it's all a delusion that i have to put out to the world and then i have to deceive myself that i'm deluding the world what happens if i just said i'm going to tell you

who i am that i'm scared that you know small that I really feel sometimes I can do nothing and that I'm a failure and what freedom comes with that what courage that takes actually takes incredible courage you know so do a meditation on that and if you kept

focusing and allowing I'm a failure I do nothing I create nothing you would get to be free again, you would get to be free again and you would have hope and you could say I'm going to just be who I am, warts and all, and show it to the world. You'd find something amazing which is they would actually love you as opposed to admire or not admire this image that you put out right or what happens of course if i'm a romantic and then of course we still want approval but we're going to go inside now for the approval so i have to find my authentic image so to speak because i know it's a funny concept why authentic image because i want to show the world something that's still ideal

so it's a it's a image of authenticity that could have all kinds of things show the world something that's still ideal. So it's an image of authenticity that could have all kinds of things going on with it that's melancholic and everything. But I don't want to show you what I'm most ashamed of to admit about myself because then, of course, you wouldn't love me because I wouldn't be special. I'd be ordinary and I'd be defective. I don't want the world to know that. So I have to present this idealized image to cover over this sense of lack, this denigration of there's something wrong with me, which is that I'm ordinary, which is really, if you really look at it in your romantic, you know, I'd rather be dead than be ordinary. And

I always feel like I'm defective. So when there's something wrong with me, and then I'm going to spend my whole life trying not to do that. But of course, since it's the internalization of despair, it's closer to the surface right because we know all excuse me we know all heart points are in a special relationship with despair three different kinds right if i can i'm a giver and you love me whoever the particular brother is then i won't feel the despair right and uh if i'm a performer and failure is not an option and i can just keep identifying with my image i'll never feel the despair for the romantic since the internalization i look for my authentic image inside i get closer to despair so despair is closer for me so you know when we're romantic

i have to really run from it but it's really closer to the surface anyway and keeps like failing you know idealized no let's talk about the denigration of who you really closer to the surface anyway and keeps like really you know idealized no let's talk about the denigration of who you really are and the shame you feel about it all right so if i could really let myself feel this i'm ordinary and i'm defective and there's something wrong with me then i wouldn't have to prove how special i was how ideal i was whatever it was right because i wouldn't be afraid. I wouldn't have to prove anything to anybody, most especially myself.

So again, the invitation today, if you want to heal the splits between the worlds of matter and the worlds of soul and the worlds of spirit, which is what we talked about, healing splits a few times ago. And if we want to be free from the compulsion of our personality, which is what we started to talk about in the last two sessions, the thing to do is to find what you're most afraid to admit about yourself. And we've

already begun to talk about that. If I'm a giver, it will be some profound sense of unworthiness of even being on the planet if I'm not taking care of your needs. If I'm a performer, it would be like the sense of I'm a failure, I do nothing, I create nothing. If I'm a romantic, it would be something to the effect of I'm ordinary and therefore defective and therefore something's wrong with me, all of which are one big thing. And I would just say I'm going to let myself fully experience it by finding the body sensations and bringing my awareness to them so much that I become them and then just letting that be and that's the starting place because now instead of identifying with them you'll just say it's just

one more experience and now I can open to all experience and I could start to become who I truly am which is all experience because I wouldn't be afraid of any particular experience. So that's the invitation for all of us to do as an ongoing practice. And having said that, next week we will go on to the head voice and which we had started to talk about, you know, the heart points last time, but we're taking a little bit of a detour because of this comment that was made by one of our listeners so um i wish you well with this practice it's really it's as freeing a practice as i know it's not you know dramatic sometimes but it's it's worth it it's like if you were going to do one practice to find the thing that you're most afraid to experience about yourself

and then choose to experience the body sensation that you associate with it and just say, I'm here with you, it's slow, but it's true gold. It's not for this gold. It's the real path in my experience, which I'm just, what do I know? I can only tell you. It's the one thing I know that ultimately works for me. So if it's useful to you, great. So having said that again,

you're always welcome to reach out to us if you want to know more about us, lifecenteredtherapy.com. And if you want to reach me, A-H-A-H-N, like Andy Hahn, A-H-A-H-N at lifecenteredtherapy.com. And until we talk again, thank you so much for listening.

And I'll look forward to next time where who knows what we'll be doing because life kind of teaches us sometimes someone will say something and it leads us in a different direction. But if life doesn't teach us anything, we'll probably go back to the headpoints and the three variations thereof. Be well, my friends. Bye.