PART THREE
CHAPTER 11
Meditating in Joy
Message from July 15, 2007
What is meditation? All the great masters of wisdom say that meditating involves successfully quieting one’s mind to be fully in the now and to enjoy the inner plenitude or fusion with the divine within. Is it necessary to remove oneself from the world, cease all activities, and withdraw in order to meditate? Quite the contrary: you meditate each time a rush of happiness, love, or peace overcomes you.
Whether at work, at home, while driving or washing the dishes, when you are truly focused on what you are doing and when you feel good inside, you are in a state of meditation. There is no need to adopt a certain posture, recite a mantra or prayer, or even to try your best to chase away the thoughts that plague you. You can simply take three deep breaths while focusing your attention on what is happening in and around you here and now, and there you are.
Meditation is opening to the light energy present everywhere in and around you. Often the continuous presence of that light within you seems abstract because you are exclusively preoccupied by what happens outside of you, to the point that you sometimes forget who you are. Taking a break and gaining some distance then will help you return to yourself and contributes to getting the energy to flow within you once again.
There are countless ways of replenishing the light energy within you. When you enjoy yourself by going out with friends, laughing at a good joke, having a nice hot bath, or going for a walk in the woods—basically while doing anything that gives you joy and encourages you to find, if only temporarily, some inner peace—all those acts are a form of meditation.
You may also look deeply into the eyes of the person you love, play ball with your son, listen to your niece talk about her first flirt, or lovingly prepare a family meal. All the experiences lived in the now are beneficial, and the possibilities are infinite. It is up to you to choose the best way. Should you prefer to retreat for a few moments to be on your own, if that makes you feel good inside, that’s fine too.
The wonderful thing about enjoying deep happiness and the plenitude of being for a few minutes is that no matter what the context is, it amplifies our energy. In an ideal world we would have been taught from childhood how to maintain our energy level by not being affected by the illusions of the pseudoreality surrounding us. But because that is not the case, we have to find the right practices, those that suit us personally, to recreate peace within us each day.
Once you have found the way that best helps you reconnect to the wonderful and luminous being that you truly are, it’s up to you to give yourself the time and the room to recreate this state of grace within yourself. Whether on your own or with others, the better you feel, the more you elevate your vibrations, and the less outside disturbances can affect you. Even better, the more you radiate happiness and joy, the more your energy spreads to everything that surrounds you, raising the energy of everyone who crosses your path.
This is the very foundation of quantum physics: your states of mind directly impact your energy and influence everything around you. In other words, “thoughts create,” or “the outside is the reflection of the inside.” It is up to you, then, to choose to keep the flame of your inner plenitude burning so that the outside world may be a reflection of your pure well-being.
Indeed, only two possible choices are offered to you on a daily basis to find happiness and live in joy. The first, which society encourages, is have-do-be: “When I have the ideal context, I will do what is best for me, and then I will be happy.” The other choice is a change of attitude to create your own happiness from the inside out, or be-do-have: “I choose to be happy even though I don’t know what to do to get there, so much so that I attract the best ways to have a fulfilling life no matter what the reality is that surrounds me.”
Meditating, therefore, is integrating in daily life the certainty that you can just be—be well, be happy, be in love—for you life to transform and become the reflection of what you are.
The same goes for all that lives around you, for the whole of humanity, and for the planet itself: every cell will benefit from this light energy that inhabits you. The more you amplify your own light, the more it influences your surroundings. Similarly, when you feed worried, fearful, or have doubting thoughts regarding the people you love, you amplify that energy around them. The more you let their suffering, pain, or misfortune affect you, the more those issues will take root in their reality.
Have you heard of the principle of watering the flowers rather than the weeds? The more you spread thoughts of trust, support, and love around you, the more your loved ones will feel filled with these positive feelings toward them and easily find the solutions they aspire to. You can give your attention to a positive thought, and it will take to the ground and bear fruit. It is as simple as that.
The same goes for Gaia, our Mother Earth. If you picture her as suffering and sick and you send her energy to heal herself, the negative part of your thoughts will cancel out the positive virtues of your action. But if you visualize her as purified, balanced, and harmonized, vibrating in light just like you, you inspire the energy of transformation that will allow her to pursue her path toward full realization, hand in hand with you and all that lives here.
Every time you send someone energy, isn’t it the part of you that lacks light that spurs you to want to make up for what is lacking in them? If so, why not start by finding the way to fill this void in you to set a good example around you and encourage those close to you to do the same for themselves and for our beautiful planet?
You can only give what you really own; thus you can only transmit the energy that is truly at your disposal. Everything is therefore a matter of purity of intention. It is not the means, the gestures, or the words that count, but rather the state of mind and spirit in which you enter meditation, for you as for the entire planet.
May you find what makes you most happy and choose to vibrate in bliss in every moment of your life. Isn’t that the most beautiful of gifts that you could spread around you?
May joy illuminate your meditation, every day of your life.
—Bianca Gaia
Letting Joy Fly Away
Since meditation is the luminous attention to the now, if we are constantly in joy and inner peace, all our defense mechanisms disappear completely. Wouldn’t that be excellent? By acquiring the energy we need to rebalance ourselves from the divine energy present everywhere in the universe, it would no longer be necessary to obtain it from those around us.
Better still, since meditation elevates our vibrations, it contributes to bringing us closer to inner plenitude, the state of grace also called “illumination” to which the saints and mystics have aspired for millennia. This is why the great spiritual masters encourage us to take a few moments every day to recenter ourselves through meditation, prayer, or various exercises.
Evidently, meditation would then be the key to a perfect happiness in daily life. In reality, we know from experience that events happen regularly in our lives that bring with them disturbances, chaos, and confusion, on the outside as well as inside. When health, finances, loving relationships, or any other important area of life is affected, it becomes hard to recenter or find the inner peace that allows access to the state of serenity indispensable to meditating.
When the now in itself is a cause of suffering, it is difficult to find the joy and lightness needed to recenter ourselves in a permanent manner. Even if taking three deep breaths helps us to blow off some steam, at times the outer or inner pressure becomes too great, and we become unsettled.
This is when the best letting go consists of going with the flow: fully welcoming and living the emotions that overwhelm us. There are some moments in life when we have no other choice but to engage in the process, whether we want to or not.
Imagine that one of your parents passes away, that your older child leaves home for good, that you reach the age of retirement. These are difficult moments to go through, yet they are impossible to avoid. There is no point in trying to see these chaotic states of mind in abstract terms. The more we allow ourselves to fully surrender to them, the less they endure.
The day I became aware of this intrinsic reality, my life changed completely. The crucial moment when it all clicked for me, where I managed to integrate everything I had read and learned on a spiritual level, is when I finally managed to make peace with my personality by allowing myself to live fully each of the steps needed to accept what I couldn’t change despite all my good will.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s Steps of Mourning
Have you heard of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross? She was a Swiss psychiatrist who worked with people who were dying. In her book On Death and Dying she was the first to describe the natural journey taken by all human beings at the end of our lives. People who learn they are about to die go through similar stages of grieving before their soul is able to depart in peace. These steps may not necessarily be experienced in the same order, but they are always the same: shock/denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance.
Does this remind you of anything? It is our primary mechanisms in full action. Even at the time of death, every individual continues to seek and obtain energy to cling to life and living at any cost. If this is true for a terminally ill patient, wouldn’t this process apply to everyone in daily life? We experience the steps of mourning regularly in various contexts, whether it’s because we lose a job, our partner leaves us, or we fall in love. Every time our brain is confronted with something new and out of the ordinary, as seen in Chapter 7, it has to rework the same process and go through the same steps.
However, Kübler-Ross allows us to see the stages that lead to acceptance with other eyes.
The Five Steps to Acceptance
(From Elisabeth Kübler-Ross)
1. State of Shock/Denial
Kübler-Ross, as well as good psychiatrists after her, affirm that when we learn of our impending death, our first spontaneous reaction to manifest is a state of shock and denial: “It can’t be. I can’t believe I’m actually going to die. I don’t feel that sick.”
The same thing occurs when you lose someone dear to you: “This is impossible. I don’t believe it. You’re kidding me. I saw her only yesterday, and she was doing so well.” The tragedies that can send you into a state of shock are countless: losing a friend, getting mugged in the street, having a car accident, witnessing a plane crash. No matter what the event is, if the shock is too great, your instinctive reflex is to refuse to admit the reality.
Even though the circumstances may have seemed positive at first glance, the fact that you didn’t see it coming may still results in denial. Imagine that you just won a lottery jackpot. Your first reaction will probably be, “That can’t be. I can’t believe it.” Although it is good news, the information is too large, too important to be admitted all at once. Your brain can’t assimilate it fully.
Not everyone would react like that, but generally speaking this way of blocking information or taking a hit is our innate defense mechanism and protective reflex so that our neurons don’t disconnect. Bit by bit our mind becomes used to the idea that a change has happened outside of us, and it becomes ready to move to the next step.
2. Anger
In the mourning process, after learning the news of their imminent death, terminally ill patients tend to rebel against the injustice of such a situation. Anger then takes over. They resent the whole world, want to break things around them, and strike out at God: “I don’t deserve this. This isn’t fair. I’m still young; I have too much life in me. This can’t happen to me.”
The same reaction also applies in other situations: a bad driver cuts you off, you are made to wait for hours at a hospital emergency room, or your wallet is stolen on the subway. “How nasty people are. The world is full of idiots. I don’t deserve to be treated this way.”
The feelings of irritation, rancor, fury, and even aggression all find their root in the same emotion: anger. It is as if all the pressure exerted on the brain at the time of the initial shock evacuates all at once. This can have the feeling of a volcanic eruption, in which you explode with rage and discontent.
Even in a positive situation, such as a lottery win, you may feel some dissatisfaction and resentment. A part of you says, “This is too good to be true. I can’t believe it.” You may be confronted with some disappointing reactions: “I am your wife; I am allowed to treat myself to this fur coat.” “I am your father; you owe me part of this money because I brought you up.” “We’ve worked together for years, and you know my financial situation, so you can certainly help me out a little.” Not only is it annoying to be assailed by requests like this, it can make you regret the good old days when everything was “normal.”
Indeed, any period of change carries with it its share of uncertainties and difficulties with adaptation. There is no point in repressing these frustrations, however, as that would only cause them to be exacerbated and to boil inside you even more. It is better to swiftly evacuate the anger before it turns into hate, to be able to get to the following step more freely.
3. Bargaining/Guilt
It is impossible to experience an emotion as intense as anger for long. It takes so much energy from the body that you tire rapidly. There comes a time when the rational Cartesian dimensions take over again.
In the case of a life-threatening illness, the patient will then look for all the solutions imaginable: trying to find a new experimental treatment, meeting with an internationally renowned surgeon, experimenting with various alternative remedies, and so on.
Ultimately he is trying to gain time, to bargain the time he has left to live. He is ready to spend huge amounts of money or go to the ends of the earth. If he is a believer, the individual will invoke God’s clemency. “If you let me live, I promise to dedicate my life to others, to stop smoking, to give my money to charity.”
In the case of an unhappy event of more manageable proportions, bargaining can take other forms: suing someone who caused a car crash, negotiating a pay cut so as not to lose your job, proposing marriage counseling because your relationship is on the rocks, allowing your youngest to repaint her room so that she will live at home longer; the examples are limitless.
Even in the case of a happy event, such as a move or a promotion, most people have a tendency to report the unavoidable later in order to remain on familiar ground for as long as possible.
For the brain, the period of bargaining permits continued juggling with the information to be integrated without going through too many strong emotions. This allows it to imagine that it still has some time left. It convinces itself that it still has the situation under control, or that there is the hope of finding a way to around the unimaginable.
After numerous attempts, however, of the individual still not succeeding in resolving the outer issue, she starts to harbor some guilt toward herself: “I should have been more careful about what I ate.” “If I’d known I was going to die so young, I would have enjoyed life more.” “I should have known I was going to have my wallet stolen, and carried less money on me.” “My wife tells me to drive slower and more carefully on the road every time.” “If I had been less hard on my children, they wouldn’t have left home so soon.”
Sooner or later, however, bargaining and guilt lead to a dead end, a deep feeling of powerlessness, and then a breakdown.
4. Sadness
Depression happens in terminally ill patients when all hope of survival has been lost. The feeling of discouragement that strikes the person becomes overwhelming, and tears then appear to be the only recourse.
At some time or another, sadness ends up affecting all the victims of problematic or conflicting events. No matter what the circumstances are, it is nevertheless very hard to evaluate whether it is the external cause that is generating so much pain, or whether it is self-pity. It is said that the first thirty seconds of sobbing are caused by the actual current situation, but sobbing for longer than a minute is the personality taking over to dwell on all the old wounds accumulated through the years.
This explains why, in a domestic confrontation, for instance, all the errors of one or the other partner end up being mentioned: all the absences, hurtful words, or unhappy actions resurface, and the soul wallows in pain and suffering to better empty the heart.
The problem is that by constantly crying about the self, you end up sinking into despair. A sad or unfortunate event can come to seem dramatic or even totally insurmountable. Melancholy then gives way to demoralization, weariness to affliction, emotional debilitation to despair. While this is understandable for a dying person, the same happens in everyday life: a breakup, a loss, or a major accident can cause just as much damage, leaving the person in a state of incomparable inner ruin.
In such a situation, if he or she remains withdrawn in herself for too long, constantly mulling over her misfortune, she may need some outside help because she is in danger of entertaining suicidal thoughts. Usually, however, the person ends up giving up, surrendering, and leaving it to a higher power to then move to the next step.
5. Acceptance
For a patient at the end of life, acceptance represents the outcome of the mourning process, for it allows him or her to welcome death no longer as a punishment or a failure but rather as deliverance. When fear fades away, when sadness and anger have been cleared out and all the possibilities for healing exhausted, inner peace can at last settle in.
All resistance vanishes, and blockages are undone. This is why some people experience a period of remission even though they are in the terminal phase: the brain stops juggling conflicting data and ends up admitting the inevitable aspects of the situation. The body can then rest for a while.
The same goes for all other situations or problems present in your life: once you have been through all the steps of mourning, you understand that there is nothing else to do or that can be gained from this experience, and you are finally ready to let go and to accept what is. This opening of consciousness is often a sign that you have acquired a new inner maturity, and some wisdom has settled in for good. You may not yet be ready to draw the lessons of this apprenticeship, but at least you have managed to calm your mind and appease your emotional body.
You have definitely managed to come full circle. No matter which step you started with and which was the last one you went through, it is only possible to reach acceptance once all the steps, these stages that are bereavement, have been covered.
If the exercises in this book haven’t allowed you to recenter yourself, it is good to know that time always ends up sorting things out, and no matter what is happening at this time in your life, it won’t last forever.
The understanding of this primordial notion allows the integration of the universal principal of impermanence: everything is evolving, everything changes, everything gets transformed. Nothing around us is frozen or definitive. We can choose to get involved in the process, and it will unfold in a much easier way and be completed much more quickly than anticipated.
Speeding Up the Process
Remarkably, once we apply this knowledge to our daily lives, we end up understanding that each emotion or bout of uneasiness is never a means to an end: as soon as we notice that the grieving process has started, we know that what will follow is only another step on the road to our full, tangible, and clear liberation.
When an unfortunate incident happens in everyday life, even if you need to go through all the steps of grieving to get to acceptance, you now know that it isn’t necessary to die from it. To the contrary, it is in your interest to take part in the process actively by allowing yourself to play the game of your personality in order to concretely contribute to its resolution.
The proof is that if you fully live out your anger, go to the end of it without hesitation, and exaggerate it if need be, you know that at some point in time you won’t have any other option but to go to the next step. Once you have experienced it fully and have looked at all the aspects of the problem, there won’t be any sparks of annoyance left to rekindle your anger.
The same goes for all the other steps of the grieving process, which can be considered rungs to climb, deserts to cross, necessary evils to allow the brain to do its work properly as an information processor to integrate the new data somewhere on its hard drive.
The order that you go through the steps is usually dictated by the least dominant aspects of your personality. For instance, if you are the quick-tempered type, you will probably first react with anger; if you are of a pessimistic nature, you will tend to sink into sadness. Hyperactive people tend to go into action and look for solutions outside themselves so as not to feel their unease, while the usually apathetic type will first deny reality. The important part remains that no matter the order in which they unfold, these stages allow you to reach closure in your grieving process.
It can happen that we remain stuck in a particular stage, that our fears and resistance freeze us in repetitive patterns. These end up degenerating into defense mechanisms that stop us from completing the loop and turning the page.
A Mourning That Drags On
Some people remain in a state of shock for a very long time. An example is a sixty-year-old woman who lost her husband more than fifteen years ago. In appearance, Ginette didn’t seem too affected by the loss of her husband: she carried on working, had her children over on Sunday, and went away on vacation every summer. In her home, however, the presence of her deceased husband still pervaded every room. His pipe still lay in an ashtray in the living room, his clothes still filled their shared closet, and even his work desk remained untouched, his day planner open to the date of his death.
In reality, Ginette stopped living when her partner passed away. She made do with living like a robot and surviving rather than living. She went through life like a zombie, without soul or color. It is not surprising, then, that this woman has much trouble walking. She now has to sleep in a reclining armchair with her feet elevated because her legs can no longer carry her. In fact, because her husband died in their bed during his sleep, she hasn’t managed to admit it openly, but she feels unable to sleep on the mattress she used to share with him.
Having remained in denial for all this time, her life has remained on hold, and the mourning process has never been completed. She has become indifferent to what surrounds her.
The same thing can happen if, for instance, you are in conflict with somebody and don’t talk to them for a very long time. One day you will find out that person has died without you having had the opportunity to make peace with him. An important piece of your puzzle is now missing, which will prevent you from completing it.
Dying Slowly
This is the reason that some people suffer the absence of a departed one for decades. Jean, Christian’s best friend, died while Christian was away on a trip with his new lover, Jean’s ex-partner. Christian felt guilty for years because he had not taken the time to tell Jean that he was courting the woman his childhood friend had been with for nearly three years. Even worse, knowing that Jean still loved her very much, Christian felt even guiltier knowing that his friend died in a motorcycle accident just after finding out from someone else that the lovers had gone on holiday together.
For months Christian tortured himself, imagining that his friend had voluntarily caused the accident that ended his life. Even after finding out that the fatal skid had happened on a slippery road during a torrential rain, doubt continued to consume him. Night and day he would mull over his feeling of responsibility for the death of his best friend. “Had I known, I would never have gone away like that on an impulse. Had I remained near him, I could have saved him. I should have confessed everything to him from the start. If only I had waited a few months longer before going out with Cynthia.”
Of course, his relationship with Cynthia did not survive all the guilt and the deep existential questioning. Christian ended up sinking into a deep depression that lasted nearly five years, and to this day he remains single, afraid of a new commitment, feeling that he does not deserve to be happy now that his friend is dead.
The problem here is not going through the steps to acceptance but remaining stuck in one stage or another along the way, forever repeating the same obsessions without changing or succeeding in moving to the next stage.
Getting Rid of Fear
In your life, every time you have had to go through mourning, or a painful experience has presented itself to you, if you haven’t gone through all the steps, lived all the aspects of this experience, it is impossible that you have managed to free yourself from it completely. In my view, this is the biggest secret of healing. It is fundamental to become aware of this unavoidable reality, because if you miss a step, it is clear that eventually you will have to go back to it: it is your only chance to liberate yourself from the ongoing process.
Allow me to give an example from my own life experience. Over the years I had to explore various aspects of my tumultuous relationship with my father. In therapy as much as on my spiritual path I took the time to work on myself. I thought that I had completed the loop and that I had succeeded in overcoming the violence I had been subject to, that I had forgiven him his clumsy ways of acquiring the energy he was lacking through me.
At the time, I didn’t make the connection, but I very often dreamed that some invisible person would enter my room and wanted to attack me. I didn’t imagine that this anonymous adversary could have been my father. Inside myself I had healed the sadness, the powerlessness, my victim side. I had become responsible for myself and had started fresh doing everything to become the creator of my own life. There was therefore no reason to feed any ill will toward him. But I had forgotten to consider one aspect of the situation that had never affected me before: the fear that lived with me since then.
A few months after giving birth to my son Émile, I again dreamed that an invisible man was chasing me through the house. Holding my newborn in my arms, I was rushing toward his room to shelter him. Something unexpected happened there: my son, who was looking over my shoulder, seemed to see something humorous behind me and started laughing.
Panicked, I couldn’t understand why he was reacting like this. Then, still within the dream, I understood that the person who was following us had to be someone he knew; otherwise he would not have smiled that way. I turned around and then realized that it was my father.
As a consequence, I understood that during all these years that I had been consumed with fear, it was my father that I was scared of. For a whole decade I had feared the hereafter, the invisible world, and I had closed the door to my extrasensory perceptions, believing that negative energy surrounded me. That morning when I awoke, I started to cry. I had just become aware of the story I had been telling myself for so long, and also of the stage of my grieving process that had not been completed.
I had been communicating more healthily with my father for a long time, though. Our relationship seemed healed, but I had neither identified, nor recognized, nor accepted my childhood fear. As long as I hadn’t identified the source of this fear, I was continually living it without being able to point to its origin or overcome it.
The stages of the grieving process are like a spiral, or an endless loop: as long as we haven’t completed the process, we keep going back to the same state of mind, until we accept it and become free of it once and for all.
The same applies in your life. When you have had unfortunate, painful, or traumatic experiences, as long as some aspects remain unintegrated within you, like the hamster on its wheel you continue to go around in circles without ever getting anywhere.
It is a bit like a game of musical chairs. As you can see in the following illustration, as long as you haven’t sat in each of the chairs in the circle (the stages of mourning), you cannot take the central seat, acceptance.
The Typical Patterns of Conflicts:
Musical Chairs
Surely you have already made the connection between the stage of acceptance and the defense mechanisms that we talked about in chapters 9 and 10: the state of shock and denial are the favorite withdrawal positions of the Indifferent; sadness is the emotion usually favored by the Victim; anger remains the Perpetrator’s domain; and bargaining and guilt take all the attention of the Savior. Finally, it is only possible to occupy the Witness place by developing an exceptional ability to recenter oneself daily through detachment and unconditional acceptance of all that is.
Musical Chairs
Our problem of imbalance does not come from the mechanisms we commonly use to maintain our energy but rather from the life positions we refuse and which represent the step of acceptance that we avoid. It is thus the chair on which we are most afraid to sit that is the most important, rather than the one we constantly use.
If you refer to the results of your Egogram as calculated in Chapter 9, the relevant column is the one in which you obtained the lowest number of “somewhat true” responses. If your score was generally balanced in every field, it means that you manage to go through the steps of mourning without getting caught up in one of the conflicting patterns presented above.
But if you avoid one of the primary reactions at any cost, life will surely repeatedly present you with the same opportunities to relive the stage of mourning that you have put aside. To omit one step toward acceptance is like leaning on a table that is missing one of its legs: it is impossible to remain balanced for very long. It’s also like driving a car with a flat tire: you can’t go very far or reach your destination on time.
Concretely, the mourning process is complete only when all the steps have been covered, after you have experimented with and integrated each of the defense mechanisms, and you have sat in all the available chairs in the big game of life.
If you are afraid to express your anger, you will have a tendency to feel denial, sadness, and guilt rather than having the courage to express your frustrations and discontent. Similarly, if you don’t allow yourself some distance and some indifference toward a problematic situation, you will constantly be overwhelmed by emotions of anger, sadness, and guilt that will drain your vital energy.
Round and Round and Off They Go
For me, the part of myself I was refusing to integrate was the Indifferent. To make a connection with the fear I mentioned earlier, I will explain its origin by relating an incident that deeply marked me as a child. When I was about twelve years old, like most kids my age, I had a bicycle that I used every day. Every evening my father would say, “Don’t forget to put away your bicycle, or you’ll be sorry.”
Like all twelve-year-olds, I was forgetful and often forgot to put away my bike. I then had to go out again in my pajamas to put it away. One evening while my father was out, I went to bed without thinking of my bicycle, which was still outside. When my father came back and saw my bike blocking the alleyway, he got angry. He picked up one of my brother’s toys, a plastic baseball bat—which was not that hard, but still—and woke me up by hitting me on the head with it.
To be hit while sleeping was one of the most traumatizing experiences of my young life. During the days following this incident, I slept with the door to my room closed, a chair jammed under the door knob, thinking that at least if my father came in again, I would wake up before he could hit me when the chair fell on the floor. Later, for many years, I could only sleep lightly. I told myself, “I will never be caught off-guard again. From now on I will always be prepared for the worst.” What my body registered was, “One cannot be indifferent; it’s dangerous. Always be on guard.”
The part of us that constantly remains on guard is the Savior, always looking for solutions and answers to provide. In my case, this defense mechanism had taken over, while the other, the Indifferent, was nearly totally obscured along with the fear I felt at that time.
From then on, when an unpredictable event arose, my first reaction would be immediately to look for what I could do to improve the situation. Twenty-five years later, at the time of my mother’s death, I immediately got involved in organizing the funeral, the buffet, the memorial, and so on. In other words, I looked for solutions. By doing so I overlooked the stage of shock and denial.
Generally speaking, I would spend most of my time in the bargaining phase. Fortunately, having understood this mechanism for the past few years, I have transformed my way of reacting. I was continually on guard, remaining active and making myself indispensable. Because I was not allowing myself some distance, I wandered from one chair to the other, juggling with sadness, anger, and guilt without ever succeeding to complete the grieving process.
Two Can Play That Game
In 1987, when I started seeing my partner, I thought to myself, He’s so adorable. Serge had an artistic temperament and was nonchalant and relaxed, his head always in the clouds. At the time I thought to myself, This is exactly what I need the most in my life—to be Zen, as I am always on guard.
I didn’t know it yet, but I had attracted this exceptional being into my life in order to become aware of my need to create distance and to allow myself sometimes to be indifferent to what surrounded me—which I never did. Unconsciously, I accepted sharing my life with someone who completed me. Together we maintained a good balance.
Unfortunately, after only a few months, Serge’s carefree nature started to irritate me. Conflicts arose between us. I found him absent-minded, while he considered me fussy and demanding.
Returning to the analogy of musical chairs, in a couple, when the grieving process starts, each of the players goes from one chair to the other, moving through successive states of mind, often in opposition to the position that the other chooses to adopt. Because it is not possible for two people to occupy the same chair at the same time, some chairs are never used by the other person, and the cycle never ends. Anyone in a relationship will probably recognize themselves in this situation.
At home, because I was of a Savior temper and my partner was an Indifferent, our fights would nearly always start in the same way: I would attempt to make him responsible for my inner emptiness. I would say something like, “We never do anything together.” Hating conflict, Serge would avoid responding, and not getting any reaction from him would only increase my dissatisfaction, feeding the fire of my anger, and I would immediately start to lecture him like a true Perpetrator. My partner, unable to understand where so much hate was coming from, as according to him he had not done anything wrong, would experience sadness, suddenly feeling blame for everything that was wrong. He would then automatically take refuge in the Victim position.
Seeing him in that state, the Savior reflex would automatically click on within me, given that it had never been my intention to hurt him. Serge’s reaction wouldn’t take long in coming: he would take the chair of the Perpetrator, attacking me to make me feel guilty for having attacked him.
The Savior/Indifferent Dance
This awful dance could last for several hours or even days, because if no outer event interrupted the process, we would both unavoidably fall back into the same chairs (there are only four of them) without ever succeeding in closing the loop.
The most frustrating thing for me was to notice, several hours or days later, that nothing had been resolved and that “we still never do anything together.”
The important thing to note in this example is that there was a chair on which I never dared sit, and the same went for Serge. Indeed, as the youngest in a big family, from a very young age, my husband felt, rightly or wrongly, that no one valued his opinion and that he therefore didn’t have a place as a Savior. He preferred to remain at distance (the Indifferent) to avoid getting hurt.
As a consequence, because the Indifferent chair was his chair, I would never sit in it. Similarly, because the Savior chair was my chair, he never dared settle into it. However, if we observe the situation a bit more closely and with more objectivity, we realize that these are respectively the two chairs that would have allowed us to quickly undo the dead end we were forcing ourselves into.
Had I managed to take on the Indifferent role, I could have stopped the process on my own, for I would have found my own solution within: not to care about it whatsoever. Similarly, had he had the courage to become a Savior, Serge would have been busy answering my needs, and I would have felt at last that I mattered to him, thus canceling out the very source of the conflict that put us in opposition.
All this to explain that suffering settles in when we find ourselves stuck in one or the other steps of grieving, this stage of the grieving process then becoming our primary defense mechanism simply because we don’t have the courage to change our attitude or life position. We haven’t learned to let go.
The Perpetrator/Victim Dance
Deep down, everyone who suffers is someone who has let themselves be caught up by one or another of the control dramas, and they have remained stuck in a particular stage of the grieving process. As discussed in Chapter 10, some individuals can remain in anger their entire lives because they don’t allow themselves to connect with the sensitivity or vulnerability within them. They are dominated by their survival instinct: the aggressiveness and control they exert on others.
Victims will be content with feeling sorry for themselves and having people pity them rather than believe in their inner potential and affirming their own power of manifestation to create their lives. In the game of musical chairs, those two complimentary personalities will tend to attract each other to rebalance the forces of nature that seem to have been unfairly distributed.
Hence the expression “opposites attract.” We could say rather that one person’s deficiencies are automatically filled by someone else.
When we have to deal with a conflicting situation in which we play different roles, we need to understand that we won’t get anywhere by continually switching chairs. Others will always act by reacting to the position we occupy, whatever it may be.
Once we have allowed ourselves to sit in all of the chairs, to give way to all of the primary dimensions in ourselves, it is no longer necessary to oppose the other person in order to finalize the grieving process. It becomes possible again to center oneself and become an impartial Witness.
When we recognize in the other person the aspect of our personality that we need to integrate in ourselves, we no longer need to confront him or her to acquire his energy. We manage to find balance by ourselves, through opening up to the liberating energy present throughout the universe.
It then becomes possible to recognize the strength of the other person and to ask for his or her collaboration in order to develop a winning attitude in all spheres of experimentation in the relationship. Things become very different: We no longer try to control, paralyze, accuse, or crush the other person. On the contrary, we open ourselves to her luminous addition and value her talents and life experiences, for we now know that she is here to help us find balance and make peace with all the parts of ourselves.
This way of proceeding connects spirituality with psychology. When we remain centered, we help the other person because we don’t exclude him into his favorite defense mechanism, and he doesn’t have to use it because he doesn’t feel threatened anymore. When we value another person by making him aware of his own potential, we command to the universe to place his strengths at our service. This works for the best in each of us.
Watching Others Dance Alone
The first time I explained to my daughter how the steps of grieving operate, she had just applied to represent the students of her class on the student council of the new school she was attending. Marlène and another young girl, let’s call her Geneviève, were jointly selected for the position.
Loving to bring people together, Marlène aspired to sharing chores and democratic representation, while her friend was instead looking for the power and popularity derived from it. After a while, my daughter noticed that her teammate was not there to help her but rather to govern without her. Because this did not fit with her values at all, she first tried to reason with her, without any luck. Later on she decided to withdraw from the student council because she couldn’t manage to get along with Geneviève in any way.
Because the young woman in question had a rather domineering temper, she immediately reacted by calling Marlène a “deserter,” which seriously unnerved Marlène. That is when I shared with her the five steps of acceptance and told her, “If you succeed in keeping your distance, in not giving in to the emotional blackmail that Geneviève will attempt to expose you to, in less than a week she will have gone around all the chairs and will end up leaving you alone. But if you get into her game, she will always have some power over you and will constantly try to unsettle you and rob you of your energy. She will always attack you or attempt to manipulate you in the same way, and that may last a very long time.”
My daughter went back to school the next day on her guard and well prepared. During the day, Geneviève acted totally indifferent to Marlène’s decision: “It’s your problem; you wanted to desert; it doesn’t matter because I will find someone much better than you. Too bad for you; I don’t care.” My daughter came back from school saying, “You were right: she’s in denial. I saw it, and I didn’t fall into her game.”
The second day, Geneviève stubbornly dogged her: “You let me down. I have to do everything by myself now, and I can’t. It’s all your fault.” My daughter cried a bit, and the young woman encouraged it, until she remembered that I had warned her of what would happen if she let herself be unsettled by her former friend. She got hold of herself and told herself, She is angry. She has a right to be, but it’s not my problem. She centered herself. When she got back home, she told me, “You were right, Mom: today was the anger phase.” I answered, “It is very rare for someone to go through two emotional phases in quick succession, as it’s very demanding for the physical body. So tomorrow you can expect it to be bargaining.”
Indeed, the next day the young girl tried to make Marlène reverse her decision: “I will be nice to you. I promise I will let you take more initiative. You can come back. I swear I’ve changed.” This time my daughter had to laugh (to herself, of course).
Then, as predicted, over the weekend Geneviève called, crying on the phone, “You can’t do this to me. I’ll never manage on my own; it’s too difficult.” My daughter replied, “That’s good. You’ve done a full tour of your mourning. On Monday, everything should be back in order for you, because you will have finally accepted my choice.” The next week, the young woman stopped going over what had become ancient history to her and ended up leaving Marlène alone. Time passed, and because Geneviève turned out not to be well-suited for the position, the principal ended up dismissing her and offered my daughter to return as head of the student council, telling her, “We have realized that the problem did not originate with you, but with Geneviève. So if you’d like your position back, you’re welcome to it.”
The great thing is that, having been advised about the process, Marlène didn’t play the other person’s game. The stages of the grieving process were therefore quickly completed for both of them.
Going to Sit in the Middle of the Circle
The purpose of the musical chairs exercise remains to get to the center of the circle, to reach the state of detachment and acceptance that allows for balance to be found within oneself without having to rob or depend on the energy of others. Here lies the key of the mystery of spiritual evolution: everyone aspires to reach illumination, to ascend, to live in a perpetual state of grace, but sooner or later we end up falling back into our defense mechanisms.
Why? Even if our ambition is to follow the middle road, in reality, as long as a part of us has not been integrated to the remaining dimensions of ourselves, it will do all it can to be heard, recognized, and accepted unconditionally. This aspect of ourselves that has been neglected until now is then going to shout, scream, and attract to us all the necessary experiences in order to make us take it into consideration and return it to its rightful place within ourselves. Deep down, it is inviting us to unify all of our parts and merge with them in divine nourishing, reinvigorating, and unlimited energy.
Integration: The Call of the Wolf
Here is a therapeutic allegory aimed at allowing you to integrate the notions explained above with the help of your right brain, your creative and intuitive lobe, operating in a non-Cartesian way:
In a remote land, during a particularly harsh and icy winter, some villagers went to their king to complain about a very serious problem: a pack of ferocious wolves was attacking their cattle and devouring their poultry. The king immediately called the best archers from his garrison and gave them the task of ridding the country of those bloodthirsty beasts.
“The most deserving among you,” the king added, “will be invited to my table with his entire family and will share my meals until the return of spring.”
All the soldiers hurried out to go hunting, courageously braving the snow and the cold. They went alone, each in their own direction, all aspiring to become the king’s favorite. For days on end they tracked the wolves in every corner of the forest, stopping only to eat and sleep.
Finally, the first hunter came back and went before the king. He was covered in wounds, one arm in a bandage, and was kneeling on crutches, one of his legs having been cut off at the knee.
“I am surely the most deserving, your majesty,” said the soldier in a distressed tone. “I fought with my bare hands against the wolves, and even though I haven’t managed to exterminate them, I have managed to wound at least one. See, I even lost my right leg,” he said, almost tearfully.
The king was filled with compassion for the wounded man, but before he could open his mouth another soldier stood before him, carrying the remains of a wolf on his shoulder.
“My king, I bring to thee the skin of the leader of the pack. I shot down this wolf with one arrow, and all the others ran away without asking for more.”
“Very well, valiant soldier,” said the king. I congratulate you on your bravery.”
The sovereign was again interrupted by the remarkable entrance of another soldier, escorted by a young wolf peacefully walking at his side. “What is this?” the king asked the newcomer.
“Your majesty,” the archer answered, “while my colleagues were chasing the wolves to kill them, I thought that, as long as one remained alive, it would come back to attack the neighboring farms. I therefore took the time to observe them at a distance, and I noticed that they were neither violent, nor cruel, but rather terribly hungry, just like we are during this harsh winter. For them, as for all of us, prey is getting scarce, game is hibernating, and the good weather is late in its return. These wolves roam your lands savaging farm animals because they have nothing else to eat.
“So I had an idea. I brought them a bit of food every day, attempting to lead them further and further away from the kingdom. I guided them to the valley, where the weather is milder and the buds are starting to bloom. The ice by the shore of the river had melted, allowed the pack to quench its thirst and even to catch a few fish. I don’t think they will be back this way any time soon.”
“What about this one?” the King inquired, pointing at the wolf obediently lying at the soldier’s feet.
“He saved my life,” the young man answered without hesitation. “At the top of the mountain, I accidentally awoke a bear by entering his cave, and without the intervention of this precious beast, the ferocious animal would have eaten me alive.”
The king recognized that this brave soldier was the most deserving of all, and so invited him to sit at his table for the evening feast. But the archer refused: “Thank you, but I have already received my reward, my king.” Under the incredulous and even outraged gaze of the onlookers, he continued, “This wolf and I have become friends. We tamed each other, and from now on he is no longer my enemy. I now know that if I am mindful of the needs of others rather than to trying to fight or impose myself on them by force, they will respect me and help me in return. Thus we both come out winners.”
An old man, famous for his great wisdom, approached the young man. Laying a hand on his shoulder, he cleared his throat and announced, loud enough for all to hear, “Today this pure-hearted man has integrated one of the fundamental laws of the universe. All outer threats are illusory: they are nothing but the echo of your own fears and the reflection of the shadows hidden within you.
“Why want to kill this untamable beast inside you, called the ego, when you can decide to listen to it and tame it for it to become your ally? The mastery of your lower instincts will happen easily once you stop wanting to control them at any cost and instead simply welcome them unconditionally, and direct them toward more luminous choices on roads leading to serenity and plenitude within yourself.”
And you, how do you answer the call of your inner wolf? What type of warrior are you? How do you succeed in making peace and unifying all the parts in yourself?