One of the essential ingredients of inner growth and transformation is developing a curious and open-minded attitude toward how life, others, our body, and life events are reflecting feedback to us.
Sometimes this feedback is positive and the feedback we receive is encouraging and helps us to stay motivated and energetic in our creative pursuits, in our relationships, in how we are relating to our body and life energy, and in our general life direction.
Other times, the feedback we receive can be discouraging and painful where in spite of our efforts to progress on a creative path or create or sustain a nourishing relationship, experience is not giving us what we would like. Or life brings very painful events such as a painful loss or an illness that may not make any sense while they are happening. Sometimes the reflection is that people are not prioritizing spending time with us or may be irritated or angry with us.
We call life’s feedback, “the mirror.” This is whatever is happening.
Our attitude toward looking into the mirror will profoundly affect how we learn from, relate to and deal with the feedback we are getting.
It’s easy when the reclection is positive and aligned with what we consciously want, but not so easy when it isn’t.
It’s very natural and automatic to close and harden or to give up, when life brings painful and difficult experiences.
Quite often, the way that we look into the mirror is profoundly affected by the lens through which we are looking.
Sometimes, that lens is a parent’s negativity, anger, or depression. Sometimes, our lens is deeply mistrustful based on painful, unloving, and unsupportive experiences we had in our past especially in our childhood. And sometimes, the lens is affected by our toxic shame that expects and believes that negative feedback is all we will ever get.
It’s not always easy to recognize that we are looking through a particular lens based on past experiences or still being influenced by how a parent looked at life and particularly life challenges.
When we are not receiving the kind of encouragement and results we would like or when we experience a painful loss, it is easy to blame people, situations or even life for being unkind and unsupportive. Or we may give up and blame ourselves.
When we feel unloved, unsafe and unsupported today, it naturally combines with painful experiences we had as a child and fortify our mistrust, causing us to feel angry or give up and collapse.
It can be very difficult to get some perspective and recognize that perhaps what is happening is exactly what we need in order to mature and deepen. And that what is happening is teaching us something.
Let’s explore some examples of different ways the mirror of life can reflect back to us.
Susan has survived childhood abuse and many dysfunctional relationships in which she attracted men who mistreated her. Ten years ago, she dove into doing inner work and devoted all her energy, and what little financial resources she had, to doing individual sessions and seminars with impressive commitment and totality. She was working as a manager of a health resort which provided her an income, but her real passion was to work with people.
She started slowly in her free time to offer sessions. At first, she had a hard time attracting people and still needed her other job to pay the bills. She kept persisting, working long hours, and at the same time she kept working on herself to go deeper.
Lately it is all coming together for her, and she can now live from her work with people. It took some time but her loving nature and her sincerity in inner growth have helped her create a nourishing life for herself.
However, many people that we have taught to do this work have had disappointing results even though they have done a lot of inner work and learned the tools we are teaching. When they attempted to attract clients and make a living from the work, it is not producing encouraging results.
For instance, Diana has been blocked by her insecurities and shame of even believing that she has something to offer people in terms of guiding and supporting them. Our impression of her is that she is highly qualified, has done a great deal of dedicated work and could easily create trust with people because she is so sensitive and empathetic. However, her shame is still holding her back.
The mirror is reflecting her shame not her potential and essence. We are guiding her to see that it is a shame mirror and focus on her gifts and passion instead and find the courage to begin making herself available to work with people.
Leonard, another long-time student of ours, has a dream of leading workshops. He would like to do this with someone, and has tried to invite people to co-lead with him, but they have told him they are either not available or too busy.
The danger of not looking into the mirror in a curious and open-minded way is that we can fall into the space of a victim where we feel that life is unjust and unloving. Then we are not looking deeply at ourselves to see why this reflection is happening. And we may feel unsupported or find excuses for why things are not working the way we would like.
We can interpret the reflection to show us that this is not the right direction for us, or another way of looking at it could be that life is testing us to seehow much we want to do this or how easy we give up.
Perhaps with the rejections it is helping to strengthen our resolve or to help us become more resilient.
In this case, it could be that the mirror is saying to Leonard that he has either not taken the risk and put enough energy into creating evening events to introduce the work and attract people in this way. Or perhaps it is saying that he has not gone deep enough in his own process to create trust in others for this kind of deep inner work.
Sometimes when the mirror is feeding back disappointment, we compare ourselves with others whom we feel are much less qualified and ready and yet seem to be more successful. It is easy to compare ourselves and feel that life is unjust. But comparison is a dead-end. We need to go deeper to recognize and feel what is under the comparison. Perhaps it is deep insecurity, perhaps it is fear of taking a risk and exposing ourselves to failure. Perhaps there is more inner work to do or perhaps the avenue we have taken is not right for us.
Life moves in a way that supports our growth and our deepening.
It usually supports us when we take a step out of our comfort zone and into more aliveness and vulnerability. However, there are no guarantees, which makes it very scary. We need to move in that direction for the journey itself and the reward is the deepening vulnerability, not the result on the outside.
It takes a lot of courage and deep insight to begin to see life’s reflections as positive and supportive even if it doesn’t feel like it at the moment it is happening.
In the area of relationships, this process can be equally painful and discouraging unless we change our attitude and sincerely start looking at ourselves.
Alicia comes to our work because she is continually attracting men who are not available for the kind of deep committed relationship she would like. She angrily insists this is happening because men are afraid of intimacy and only want sex. It is difficult for her to look into the mirror because she is still blaming. She has a lot of anger at men that she is carrying from the past.
We created a situation in a seminar where we invited her to pick a man to get a reflection. She was told that he feels that she is not available, and he is frightened by her expectations. Fortunately, she was able to take this feedback and go deeper inside to explore the unconscious message she is sending out and begin to take responsibility for the pain and anger she still carries about her father.
Adriana recently began a new relationship with a man and for some months, they had a wonderful time together. She idealized him because he was wealthy and self-confident, and she felt insecure and inferior in relation to him. Problems began when the way he wanted to have sex felt too aggressive and disconnected for her. She has been used to giving into what men want and believing that it was her job to satisfy them. When she expressed that she would like slower and more connected lovemaking, he got angry and accused her of being afraid of energy and wanting to castrate him. Rather than standing up for her own needs, she went along with what he wanted.
But she became resentful and began to make excuses to not make love. This infuriated him and he told her that if she couldn’t “be in her energy in sex,” he would move on. His anger terrified her. It reminded her of her abusive and violent father. She gave in to making love his way even though she was no longer present and began to have vaginal infections.
In this case the mirror was inviting her to stand up for her needs and to love herself enough not to abandon her boundaries, in spite of her fear of his anger or the fear of being left. We suggested that she try kick boxing classes to connect with her anger of giving her power away as a way of empowering herself until she felt ready to face her fears of confronting him and being firm with her boundaries in spite of his anger and threats.
Unless she deeply connects to the rage from past abuses and the pain of betraying her body over and over again, no deep intimate connection is possible with anyone. This situation is happening for her to connect to this hidden anger which will bring her true empowerment.
In another example; Maria suffers because she longs for a relationship and is convinced that she will never find anyone to love her. She sees all her friends being happily together with someone, creating families and feels like an outsider. She uses her negative past relationship experiences to support this belief. In addition, she is convinced that now she is getting too old to attract a man because men only want younger women, preferably in their twenties and she is almost forty.
In our experience, this is a common and very unhelpful way of looking in the mirror. The mirror is only reflecting that she is not with someone at this time. All her thoughts about that are affected by her past, her fear of the future, her parent’s horrible relationship, and her shame and insecurities which tell her that she is not pretty or sensitive enough to be loved. In our work together, we are helping her to see that she is a wonderful person and would be a gift to any man. The deeper reflection she is getting is perhaps a deep fear of intimacy, lack of profound self-love and not yet having enough confidence in her boundaries.
There are some situation that we confront in the work where the mirror is very clearly saying what a person needs to see but confronts a blindness to get the message.
For instance, Nathan contacted Krish for a session and when Krish asked him what he would like to talk about, he said, “I am not getting enough sex from my partner.”
To which Krish responded, “that can really be a source of concern and there can be many reasons. I am wondering, Nathan, if your wife has told her why she is not so interested in lovemaking?”
“Yes, sure she does. She tells me that she doesn’t feel safe with me.”
“Has she told you why.”
“Yes, she has. She says in sex I am not sensitive to her and outside the bedroom, I often am impatient and yell at her for different reasons.”
“Do you think she is right.”
“No, I think she is making a big deal out nothing. Sure I yell sometimes but what’s wrong with that? As for sex, I have lots of energy in sex. She just doesn’t know who to handle energy – afraid of it, I think.”
Unfortunately, Nathan didn’t want to look at himself and take responsibility for what the mirror was clearly showing him so the therapy could not progress. He just wanted to be right which never bodes will for inner work.
Here’s a more fortunate example.
18-year-old Alex suffers because he feels he is not cool enough. He compares himself to a classmate, William, who is “really cool and gets all the cool girls.” He is devastated because a recent girlfriend left him and wants to hang out with William’s group of friends. She even started dating his close friend just to be accepted in that circle. When I (Krish) asks him if perhaps he is too sensitive and deep for that crowd, he says that his sensitivity is a sign of weakness.
It is hard for Alex to see that the mirror is reflecting a part of his true self – a deeply sensitive person. He just doesn’t value these qualities yet. It’s hard for him to see that the mirror is reflecting rejection because he is rejecting his own depth and sensitivity. Once he begins to understand that, he might not even want to be part of that particular group of friends or be interested in that girlfriend who left him.
“What qualities would you like to find in a girlfriend?” I ask.
“Well, last summer when I was in Los Angeles, I met a girl that I really liked. Nothing happened but we continue communicating online. She is really cool – not that kind of cool like this in-crowd, but really deep and sensitive and we have amazing talks.”
“Do you think she would fit into William’s crowd?”
“Oh no, not at all. She hates those kinds of people. Says they are just superficial.”
“Hum, interesting.” I say.
Another way that the mirror is sending us messages as feedback is through the body. James, a highly sensitive IT professional, gets regular asthma attacks whenever he feels stressed or in any kind of threat. He was physically abused by his father and has suffered from asthma all his life. But he never connected his asthma to the trauma from his father.
He just thought it was a physical illness that he had to learn to live with. Seeing the connection to the trauma with his father is helping him to validate and connect with his sensitivity, feel the deeper fear and to learn to anticipate when he feels his shortness of breath coming on. This illness is helping him to connect deeper with his vulnerability and to open his heart to what he went through as a child.
Sometimes our shame, self-judgments, and insecurities prevent us from listening to, learning, and maturing from the reflection in the mirror.
Because of our negative conditioning, we may have become used to expecting negative feedback and accepting it as something we deserve and will always receive.
Shame can say to us that no matter what we do, it is never enough or that no matter what we do, we will never make it. When this is the case, we can sink into a collapsed state that doesn’t give us the strength and motivation to learn and grow. Or we respond to the mirror’s message by pushing and trying harder, only to collapse, burn out, or have healthy issues later.
It can be very hard to penetrate the deeper layers of mistrust that are coloring the lens with which we look at life’s reflection.
When we have become used to receiving and expecting negative feedback, we mostly likely need help to begin to recognize the lens we see ourselves and the world through.
We need help to begin to see ourselves in a different light.
When shame ane mistrust is guiding our perceptions and interpretions, as a first step, it can be helpful to look into a different mirror – one that can reflect our preciousness, beauty, natural qualities, and potential.
If the people we are surrounding ourselves with are not reflecting this, then we need to question our choices of people we spend time with.
Then perhaps the mirror is encouraging us to find the courage to love ourselves enough to rather face our aloness than being with people who continue to shame and disrespect us.
Learning to recognize and listen to the mirror can have a profound impact on our life.
Rather than falling into victim consciousness and strengthening our mistrust, we can begin to see that life is not against us even if the feedback we are getting does not feel supportive.
And when we are struggling emotionally, we may need some help from a trusted source to help us interpret what the mirror is showing us because we may be blind to its message.
Rather than just believing in the mistrust or the shame blindly, what is needed is an attitude shift.
We could ask: “How can I look at this in a new way? What are some other possibilities? What is life trying to teach me? What can I learn and how can I grow from this feedback. What is my lesson here?”
With love, Krish and Amana