LYNDA’S STORY: INTEGRATING THE PERSONAL AND THE UNIVERSAL SELF

"My inheritance was particular, specifically limited and limiting, my birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever. But one cannot claim the birthright without accepting the inheritance."
-James Baldwin, Preface to Notes of a Native Son

BEGINNINGS

Today, looking back at my life, it is clear to me that something wasn’t right, from the beginning. For as far back as I can remember, even before I learned to speak, I felt lonely and hungry. Whether joy or sorrow or anything in between, I could not feel as much as I knew I felt somewhere deep inside. In any given situation, I lived with a brutally negative inner-judge that constantly put me down, against which I had no protection.

To any outside observer, I would have appeared to be a vibrant, happy, blossoming child on her . way into life. I came from what anyone would consider a good, loving, middle-class, Jewish family in Brooklyn. No apparent trauma had occurred. Mostly, I lead what resembled the normal life of a child at that time: I went to concerts and plays, I vacationed with my family, and I played with friends. But all the while, I sensed a pervasive longing for something I couldn’t name.

Although my mother was a smart, forward-thinking woman, she couldn’t reconcile her deeply ingrained, old-world beliefs with the modern intellectual values she claimed to uphold. She always professed that she wanted me to be my own unique, unconventional self, but then pressured me into adopting traditional roles, such as becoming a public school teacher so that I could be home for my children by three, make dinner for my husband and family, and have the summers off. This contradiction in her being lead her to build emotional walls that prevented her closeness with me. Because of this avoidance, she was unable to be fully present with me in the moment. Focused on herself at the expense of the children, she felt hungry for attention and rarely asked me the simplest of parental questions: “How was your day at school?” She was truly caring on an intellectual level and loved me, but was unable to make me feel safe or help me find my deepest self.

My father was born in Russia. He came to the United States when he was five years old. Because his family lacked a steady income, he had to find work and could only complete the fourth grade. Early in his life, he found himself cast in the role of nurturer for his mother and father. Consequently, he never received the nurturing and support he needed to develop into his own dynamic adult self. He wound up too frightened to follow his deepest passions. He certainly wasn’t the ideal model of a father who could teach me how to deal effectively in the world and find success. As a result of his background, he was so intent on creating his family as a peaceful and loving one that he denied both himself and the rest of us any feelings to the contrary. I knew he loved me, but, ironically, his insistence that no negative emotions be expressed in the home caused me to suppress my true feelings. Although he possessed a big heart, I never knew if he loved me for who I was, or out of his need to be loved back.

To varying degrees, all children undergo the process of absorbing their parents’ feelings and beliefs. On some unconscious level, I couldn’t help but swallow whole my parents’ dependencies, powerlessness, fears, and self-judgments. I discovered that the best way to survive in my family was to ‘shut up.’ Forced to be deaf, dumb, and mute, rather than the vital, active, and intelligent little girl I was, I felt nothing but rage, powerlessness, sadness, and the overwhelming belief that something was wrong with me. Although someone else might have responded to these circumstances differently, due to my own inherent nature I reacted to my family situation in this particular way. As bitterly as I fought against these limits, I could not free myself.

When we receive sufficient early nurturing and support, this creates a solid foundation for developing into the whole individual we were meant to be. In this way, our unique talents and gifts are honored and given space to flourish. We emerge from childhood having developed a positive personal self, the “conditioned” place in us, which also contains our subjective emotions and beliefs ingrained by our parents and society.

In the well-integrated person, the personal self is rooted in a healthy relationship with what can be called the universal self. This refers to the place in us that directly accesses a loving wisdom beyond convention. It has also been the “unconditioned self”, “Being”, “essence”, and more. This intuitive “gut” self knows our own intrinsic goodness and self-love and also recognizes it in others. If we remain sufficiently connected to the universal self, the issues that arise within the personal self will not control us because we have a larger perspective with which to view it.

Ideally, the personal self and the universal self work together as partners and co-creators. When we fail to develop a healthy personal self, the entire system becomes misaligned. This was my particular plight. Having lost my connection to my universal self and having never developed a healthy personal self, I could find no solid ground on which to stand. I lived without hope, faith or dreams. With no conception of a larger self to provide perspective, I lived in a world of unchecked emotional extremes. Circumstances such as these necessitate a survival mode of living, whereby we resort to our most primitive instincts to survive. In this mode, therefore, we cannot safely feel our own vulnerability, and must remain constantly on guard and vigilant in order to feel protected.

Given the underlying agony that persisted regardless of my life’s external circumstances, it should come as no surprise that I felt a nameless longing for a different way of living, even if I had no clue what shape that might take.

WAKING UP AND THE WORK

By my twenties, I had all the trappings of what anyone would consider conventional success: I was married, I had earned my Ph.D, I was financially comfortable and traveled often. But even then, deep within I felt the same gnawing sense of incompletion that haunted me in childhood.

One cold Saturday in February, I attended a Leadership Training program where I shared my deep sense of suffering and longing. After I spoke, a member of the group suddenly turned to me and asked permission to do an exercise with me. He told me to sit before him while he repeated over and over, “Lynda, you are a beautiful person.”

I couldn’t let in his words. Each time he repeated the phrase, I found a way to discount it. Finally, he said, “If you have to, put your hands over your mouth and be quiet.” Literally, I had to place my hand over my mouth, forcing myself to sit and just listen.

Suddenly, I was truly able to hear him. His words entered my heart. I remember thinking, “ I feel like an empty well and this is my first drop of water.”

In that moment, I realized that the walls I had unknowingly created my entire life to keep out the bad were also keeping out the good. In an instant, although I didn’t’ realize it then, my universal self kicked in with a powerful realization: if I had built these walls, I could also take them down. An extraordinary energy flowed from my heart throughout my entire body; I felt love consciously for the first time. Later that day, still under the influence of this shift in consciousness, I experienced what I could only then call “clear vision.” It felt as if veils were literary lifting from my eyes, so that when I turned to look at everyone else in the room, my mind didn’t interfere with my perceptions as it would have before. Earlier, I would have read rejection in their faces as I saw them distractedly looking away, whereas now I observed that half of the room seemed involved in my experience while half of the room seemed uninvolved. Rather than take this personally, I could simply accept the objective reality for what it was.

At the end of this day, after having experienced a number of extraordinary transformations of consciousness, I finally found what I had unknowingly been searching for my entire life. These experiences were nothing of short of life-changing. I now had a vision for what would be possible in my life. From this place of awakening, my new life’s work lay before me and my journey began.

To integrate and embody an experience as profound as this, shifting our identification from the personal self and increasingly aligning with the universal self, takes a considerable amount of time for most of us. Rather, it is a process that gradually unfolds as we begin to enter our new of living. Over time, I worked to resolve my personal issues, learning to honor and love them, while also slowly orienting myself in a new life grounded in the compassion, wisdom, freedom and peace of the universal self. The longing that had begun in my childhood was now moving toward completion. Having lived in a world driven by fear, I was now discovering the joy of being the real me. I resolved to study as many different modalities as possible to help facilitate this process of growth, from psychology to spirituality to body therapies and coaching. Not only was I grateful and proud of my life-altering transformation, but I knew that my future gifts as a professional were clearer than ever.

NEW LIFE, NEW WORLD

Whether or not the specifics of my story mirror yours, what’s important is how the larger meaning of my experience resonates in your own life.

Everyone has a story. Many of us come from families that are trapped in historical cycles of conditioning. Until each of us works to free ourselves from these cycles, however, we will unconsciously impart them to our progeny. This conditioning continues to persist over generations until we choose to face it. Avoidance works to a degree, yet awareness is the only response that opens the door to possibility. The crucial step is to move inward toward awareness. Only then can we fully experience the true nature of who we are.

Whether we are in pain or suffering or perfectly content, or somewhere in between, we first need to recognize that we have a personal self and a universal self. The most important consideration is not to get stuck in either the personal or the universal. Rather, we must integrate them both into a larger perspective that takes into account our particular conditioned beliefs and our vast unconditioned awareness. This synthesis represents who we truly are.

As we move into awareness, we will hear another voice growing and becoming. This can be anyone’s voice. It is all of our voices. When we learn to let go and open to the place within that is born out of this quiet, we increasingly come to experience our true nature in all its freedom. Aligned with this greater perspective, we have a second-chance to overcome the limitations of our upbringings. There emerges a space for our true selves to flourish, manifesting our deepest inspiration, creativity and wisdom.

Ultimately, this movement toward awareness is simultaneously a movement back outward toward the collective. In turn, this leads us into a new world rooted in compassion, forgiveness, imagination, and connection.