Thriving is Perfecting Our Wholeness
"We were perfect when we started. I've been wondering where we've gone." -- Counting Crows
For a good many of us, life has put the beatdown on realizing our "perfection." Given that we are living organisms that naturally gravitate toward survival, as a means of survival, we develop the skills that support our survival needs and ignore the ones that don't.
Children raised in post-industrial Western nations are told that the most valued skills needed for survival are: formal education, the ability to comply, acquisition of empirical evidence/material assets, and logical deduction. (Empirical evidence is anything that can be observed and verified by someone other than you.) Western religious education does little to invalidate or expand upon these basic culturally valued survival skills. Western religion simply asks that you ignore empirical evidence and logical deduction in deference to its teachings because the text in which they are found is considered sacred.
The result of Western society's common survival programming is profound. At the individual and collective level, our conscious and unconscious reverberates "anything external to me that can be validated by someone else has value for my survival." This programming creates fissures in our ability to perfect our wholeness. In the game of life, wholeness is our psychospiritual wholeness. Psychospiritual wholeness is not just the skills we need for survival, but the skills we need for thriving and flourishing in a life that has meaning and purpose; the skills needed to create a life that feels magical.
Beatdowns Create Weaknesses (and Strengths)
Imagine a beautiful car that has a powerful engine but only one tire fully inflated. How functional is that car? The ability of that car to get where you want to go can only be unleashed to its greatest capacity when all four tires are full of air.
Similarly, human beings require fluency in all of our unique abilities in order to unleash our own greatest potential to get where we want to go. But for most of us, we do not receive the external validation we need to fully develop those abilities.
Consider how many of our core psychological functions are consistently and positively validated by our external environment: sensation (somatic knowing); emotion/feeling; desire; imagination; intuition; and thought. Let's start with the obvious and work our way to the least validated.
Image: Dr StClaire
Thoughts. The entire human race can engage, in one way or another, with our thoughts. Whether positive or negative, we receive immediate feedback and validation of their importance for our survival from the time we are capable of language. Therefore, the thinking psychological function is usually the most cultivated. For most of us, it becomes our primary way of survivie.
Emotions and Feelings. A smaller subset of humanity is truly capable of conversing with our emotions and feelings. Depending on our culture and family dynamics, we may have been encouraged or outright told to keep our emotional dialogue to ourself. In other words, ignore how we feel and do what we are told. This is not always intentional malfeasance on the part of our caregivers and teachers. In fact, they were subjected to cultural and familial programming too. Regardless, what many of us learn from a young age is the skill of discounting our feelings (in order to please others) to survive.
Sensations. Fewer humans still are able to relate to our sensations. With the exception of athletes, dancers and those who do body work, most of us are disconnected from our bodies. Unless we are intentional in our pursuit of somatic knowledge, we receive no instruction or validation on interpreting our physical sensations. Since we are told by our culture that sensation is not a skill required for our survival, it is little used and barely registers for many, until we are in significant discomfort due to injury, atrophy, or psychosomatic illness. Consider the epidemic of anxiety and depression in Western society, both of which have inextricable somatic components.
Desire, Imagination and Intuition. People who are fluent in the language of desires, imagination, and intuition -- and who actively engage to cultivate these skills -- are outliers in Western society. For sure, desire, imagination and intuition do not check the scientific method box, which means Western society does not value or validate these skills. In addition, similar to feelings, these psychological functions are often problematic for or irrelevant to others and, therefore, the external feedback we receive tells us these skills are actually impediments to our survival. While creativity, which is the physical product of imagination, can be positively validated in the right circumstances, our personal imagination is a method of dialogue very few people perceive has value. How many times have we been admonished for daydreaming when we should be working? How many of us equate daydreaming with procrastination, goofing off, and escapism? Likewise, most of us perceive desires and intuition as utterly useless fantasies.
Use It or Lose It
As a car needs four inflated tires to operate effectively, humans need all six of our psychological functions operating in order to move from survival/functional to thriving. Instead, due to our cultural programming, most of us are operating using only one or two psychological functions as our primary means of navigating our lives. We were told in many ways and on many occasions those were the only ones that mattered!
At best, surviving feels like functional. At worst, it feels like struggle. Either way, surviving is not thriving or flourishing. Yet, we expect that we will be able to get where we want to go -- thriving and flourishing -- using our survival skills, just one or two of our psychological functions. It doesn't compute that what always worked for us before will not work again. And when it doesn't, we feel frustrated and often at a loss to figure out what's missing and how to fix or change it to get ourselves moving toward our targeted destination.
Because we lose what we do not use, it does not even occur to us that we have other valid psychological functions to tap into and one of these may be the magical key to unlocking the full power of our Self. For some of us, these little-used functions are so vital to our well-being that we begin to feel broken and maybe even depressed or anxiety-ridden. We may go to therapy or counseling for help, only to be disappointed when we are not "fixed."
Therapy and counseling are modalities to help people in crisis get to "coping" and "functional." People looking to go from functional to flourishing are simply not going to get the results they desire from modalities designed to help people recover from trauma and manage crisis. Personally, I have found therapy and counseling to be of little to no help when dealing with existential matters concerning the need for self-actualization.
Lost But Not Gone: Perfecting our Wholeness
Refreshing the car analogy used earlier, when we want to learn to drive a car, we must practice driving in a car. We must give ourself permission to feel reckless and uneasy and then dedicate time to the task of learning to drive.
The same is true for the psychological functions we have turned off and/or tuned out. It is possible to revive them, but only with intentional effort and consistent practice. This may feel very uncomfortable, reckless and even frivolous at first. And just like we need a driving instructor to help us learn to drive efficiently and effectively, we need a coach to help us relearn how to connect with our most mysterious and magical psychological functions.
When we cultivate and use all of our psychological functions, all of our wheels become free to spin so we are able to more easily move toward creating deeper, richer lives. Sensation, desire, imagination and intuition help us go from living a two-dimensional life to a multi-dimensional life. This is where the magic happens.
You were perfect when you started. If you've been wondering where you've gone, it's time to ask your Self using your desire, sensation, intuition and imagination.
About me:
I help people create magical lives so they feel more authentic, joyful, and fulfilled. Psychosynthesis is my coaching specialty and I am an expert in helping people connect with their dormant psychological functions. If you desire to be brilliantly resilient and gracefully use your unique powers to transform challenges into opportunities for thriving, I can help you get there.