Tag: denial

Love and Shadow Work

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

– James Baldwin

If I love you, I don’t want you to be stuck, I want you to grow. If I love you, I don’t want to get stuck, I want to grow with you, for you, for all of us. To me the very purpose of being in a relationship is to grow with someone. I have no interest in tranquility if it is housed on a gurgling cesspool of unconscious dysfunctional behavioral patterns. Such tranquility is a farce, it is not real, it is not peaceful. Peace can only ever arise from making conscious that which hides in the shadows of our being. Carl G. Jung referred to this as shadow work. And it is precisely in (conscious, self-reflective) partnership with another person that such work is particularly feasible. Why? Because when I see you – truly see you – day in day out, and if I am the slightest bit aware, those shadows of yours are going to announce themselves to me sooner or later. We all have them. In this inevitable process I will feel those shadows hurled at me with sharp clarity, at which point I can say: “Hey, you! Look at this. Here’s something to dig into because it hurts me and others”. And you, dear one, can do the same for me: “Your behavior is painful to me, let’s address what is happening here”.

And guess what happens through this type of relational labor? Peace happens. Peace happens within the awareness of the chaos. Peace happens within the acknowledgment of the pain. The moment we are conscious of our destructive and dysfunctional behavior, is the moment we can heal it, is the moment we can breathe a sigh of relief. That is what it means to me to be in a loving relationship; to trust someone to respectfully call out my bullshit because that person cares about me enough to see me do better. If we can lovingly do that for each other, Love will continue to grow, intimacy will continue to deepen, life will expand in richness and in meaning. To Love you is to see you and to support you in becoming the best possible version of yourself, which in turn helps me become the best possible version of myself. Such Love is evolutionarily, reciprocal, and regenerative.

Unfortunately, we are collectively pretty terrified of being uncomfortable. And if one thing can be said about shadow work: It is ridiculously uncomfortable. However, dismissing discomfort is much like closing the curtains to life. We have been duped by the sugary platitude of “Happily Ever After” to buy into the false idea that relationships are there to make us happy. As if it’s even possible to affix a transitory emotional state to a lifetime of perpetual changes. Philosophically we can likely agree that it is questionable whether it’s even possible to gain happiness through external acquisition. There is surely a correlation between wellbeing and having our basic human needs met, but there is a limit to how much joy can be derived from external goods and services. If happiness is an inside job, it should come to no surprise your new fling isn’t gonna give it to you. Yet in the realm of relationship we seem so addicted to this infantile storyline: “Godspeed ye innocent lovebirds carried into the distance on a sparkling carriage just smiling happily and chugging along ad infinitum towards an elusive horizon! Your coupling grants you entrance to the ranks of well-adjusted extras in a lifelong Colgate commercial!” Not only does it sound boring AF, it’s delusional as all hell. This is not fucking Pleasant Ville, you’ve got a life to live, buddy.

We are humans, we die, we lose loved ones, we meet sickness, misfortune, we grieve, we fail, we fall apart, we are wrong sometimes. Sometimes we are wrong a lot. Try to smile through that. Happy yet? What’s that? You are telling me you can’t sustain that radiant smile of yours for all of eternity? Is the denial starting to hurt? Is it beginning to feel weird? You see, I am not in this life to witness a staged performance of perpetual happiness. To be clear, I have nothing against ‘happy’ as an experience. Bless ‘happy’. I just believe we have been misguided to measure our success in life, as well as our sense of worth, on how long we can sustain a state of happiness. But happiness is not an achievement you lock into for life, it is a gift, and it arrives on our doorstep naturally when we align with our essence and learn against all odds to love ourselves fiercely and deeply. The only way we can love ourselves deeply is through a systematic dismantling of all of the places where we are in denial and full of shit. And yes, indeed, we can lovingly see each other through such a process*.

So, in lieu of a feigned smile, please give me your pain, your struggles, and your mistakes. Let’s work through the reality, the grit, the rawness, the really disturbing shadow of it all. Allow me to love you entirely and let’s be real about all the places where we have more work to do. Let’s dance through the truth of our humanness together. Let’s marvel at the messes we’ve made. Let’s shake our heads really hard. Let’s sit for a moment in how much it hurts. Breathe through it. That’s where freedom and laughter simply come to greet us on their own accord. It is such a glorious relief to surrender to the realness of it all. I am in this life for the remarkable joy of “Evolving Ever After,” instead.

* For the record, I am speaking from a perspective of personal relationships here, but this very same process holds true for our collective struggles as well. From the micro to the macro – everything is connected. James Baldwin has written extensively on the role of truth-telling in relation to racism and other injustices in our societies. True patriotism – the love for a country – thus resides in the people who dare to shine light on the horrible shadows of our nations, because only through such labor can we even start to imagine peace. Healing can only begin when we uncover the festering wounds of our collective past and present and start scooping the puss out. No, it isn’t pretty, but it is what Love does when it cares about something.

How I Became A Vegetarian But More Importantly How We Change Our Hearts And Save The Planet

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

For 8 years I was in a relationship with a hardcore vegetarian. During most of this time I did not identify as a vegetarian myself, but I cooked mostly vegetarian food in our house, and I respected and understood my partner’s vegetarianism completely. When he decided to also quit eating eggs, I admit I did some huffing and puffing because that seriously challenged my baking and cooking habits, as well as our sweet ritual of sharing meals in restaurants. But then when it came down to it, I couldn’t bear ever baking cookies that he couldn’t also enjoy, so I always ended up using egg-replacer anyway. See, I understood vegetarianism intellectually. It made a lot of sense to me. But I continued eating a hamburger every now and then when I was out.

Until one Summer when I was biting in a hamburger at a local diner, and all of a sudden it tasted disgusting to me. I was chewing on this meat and something about it just felt wrong. This glob of animal parts was (or plural, were…) raised under horrible circumstances and was (were) killed to become this mediocre dish on my plate. I suddenly felt shame and a disturbing sense of decadence. I was chewing on suffering. I was chewing on pain. And I was allowing that degradation into my body. How is that nourishing? It was in this moment that a shift occurred from understanding vegetarianism intellectually, to feeling it emotionally and spiritually. That’s when I stopped eating meat. I have had a couple of meat dishes since in other people’s homes as a gesture of gratitude for their hospitality, but when I get to choose, I always choose meatless options. When asked, I now identify as vegetarian.

It’s an interesting feeling, because once that shift has occurred – once that light switch flips over – you can’t really go back. You can go from unawareness to awareness, but you can’t go from awareness into unawareness again. That doesn’t work. You could go into denial. And there are a lot of ways in which I am in denial when it comes to the choices I make as a consumer in a capitalist society. Our societies are actually based on systems of complete denial, so it’s particularly easy to go along with that current. In fact, we are constantly stimulated to participate in this system of denial with every step we take in this world. Our supermarkets are neatly presented aisles of denial. Our traveling methods are meticulously streamlined networks of denial. Our wardrobes are eclectic messes of denial. Our electronics are such amazingly convenient apparatuses of denial. We are in the thick of it.

Now, I am not writing this because I am preaching vegetarianism to you. If you caught my drift, the idea is that such preaching is fruitless. My point is that knowing something intellectually will never be enough to generate change. This goes for everything in life. We have reached the absolute end-station of the intellect-train. To prevent this train from driving us all straight off the cliff of existence, we need to hop onto the train of emotional awareness. That means we have to personally and collectively look deep into the abyss of planetary suffering, and begin FEELING our actions on an emotional and energetic level. This is scary work. We have made a real mess of things, and it’s extremely painful to bear witness to that reality. But I believe that we can talk about climate change, and sustainability, and ethics, and racism, and sexism, and everything that’s wrong with our world until the end of time (literally…), yet nothing will ever change until we really FEEL it. That means we have to begin uncovering all the barriers in our lives that prevent us from feeling pain, discomfort, grief, sadness, and sorrow. And from that place, we must connect the dots between our personal and our collective suffering.

Changing behavior on the basis of intellect alone is never going to be enough. Emotionally disconnected action, even towards a righteous goal, will not prevail. We need an uprising of emotional intelligence, of open hearts and spirits feeling passionately into the reality that our intellect presents to us. Don’t get me wrong, the intellect is a neat tool. But like any tool, it has no ethical compass. A hammer can be used to build a home and to smash someone’s skull in. Our intellect can be used to build networks of connection and to methodically orchestrate genocide. If anything is going to change our world for the better, it’s going to be that emotional heart of yours, it’s going to be your capacity to really feel pain, to cry, to love. Cultivating, harnessing, and revering emotional intelligence is going to be the next crucial leap in our evolution. And since we are dangling on the precipice of planetary destruction, I’d say it’s about time.