Tugging at the threads – Recovering Potential
I was doing my morning stretches today and somewhere between an upward reach and a downward dog, a thought popped into my mind. Nothing unusual there, “Did I set the car charger last night?’, “What time was it that Brendan said he would call?” But this was different. It was one of those thoughts that had a deeper emotion, a sense of deeper connection, a light bulb switching on, a waking up, quality to it.
Because these kinds of thoughts happen in a milli second, they come and they go. It is easy to treat them as disinterestedly as every other kind of mundane thought. But they aren’t. They are threads. Threads that left ungrasped go nowhere, but if honoured, held tightly, unpicked, taken seriously and begin to be tugged at, lead us to our deeper selves.
“Deeper selves” can sound a bit pop-psychology if that is not your language, but it isn’t. It is descriptive of what we know about our humanity. We mostly know about our smaller selves, our ego selves. The self we created early on in our life to adapt to the child’s challenge of how to be here, survive, look after ourselves, stay safe, in this new and unsafe experience we call ‘being born’ and ‘being alive’ in the world. That smaller, ego self, is important and does a pretty good job for most of us in getting us out of bed and launched into the first half of life.
But there is a deeper self. An original self. A truer self. The essence, the core of who we are. It is sometimes called soul, daemon, genius, element, sage, or wisdom-self. Whereas the smaller ego self is largely an adapted version of ourselves, this deeper self is the real and true self. Ancient wisdom would have it that our soul, before it was born, has a unique idea of who it wants to be and how it wants to contribute to the world and why it sees that now is the right time in history to do this. Ancient wisdom also goes on to say that while we have this memory stored inside of us like an acorn knowing its destiny is to become an oak tree, in the process of birth we forget who we actually are. But it, we, that acorn seed, doesn’t go away. All the while that we are getting on with the first half of our life with the help of our smaller, ego self, there is our deeper self waiting and wanting to be recovered, so that we can fulfil our destiny in the world.
It is often in the second half of our lives that the deeper-self shouts louder to be heard. So how do we discover and recover our deeper, truer self? Through the threads. Those moments of insight, awakening, clarity, connection, longing, intuition imaginings, that we touch in a millisecond.
Catching a thread and tugging on it very gently but firmly leads us down, or in, to the core of where the thread originated. Your deeper you. The thread is a clue to you; your truer, deeper, more original, most-necessary-to-the-world-self. The other day I had a skipped heartbeat. “Interesting” I thought. “What’s that about?” As I gently tugged at the thread, I remembered experiencing the same thing years ago when I was really angry with someone I was working with. “Is there someone I’m angry with right now?” I followed that thread over a few days and finally allowed myself to see that yes, there was someone I was very angry with and I had spent much of the past year putting it out of sight. The opportunity to now forgive and move on was gratefully taken. The thread led me back to a deeper, more honest version of myself.
Some of this comes down to understanding the brain. Between the two hemispheres of our brains we have four ways of knowing truth about anything, from the world we live in, to ourselves(1). They are science (let’s look at the facts and details please); logic (one of the marks of real intelligence is our ability to think things through); intuition (knowledge and insight that arises from a different place inside us); and imagination (our ability to imagine and reimagine a different future than the one we are walking towards in all aspects of life, large or small). The first two are usually associated with the left hemisphere of our brains and the other two, the right. Our culture has, for a few centuries, increasingly favoured the science and logic and downgraded, or even scorned, intuition and imagination as serious brain functions at an equal level. While this doesn’t tell us the whole story, it accounts quite a lot for how we have become dismissive of the ‘threads’ when they appear. We rationalise them away.
A different response is curiosity, honouring, listening, respecting, tugging at the threads and following where they lead us to a deeper conversation with ourselves, with others, and with the wider world. For example, I was reading a book by Michael Meade the other day. I had been reading for about twenty minutes when the sentence I was currently reading made my something in my body skip and jump. It was a feeling. It was a resonance in my body. It was a little charge of energy. I had no idea why. But I grabbed hold of the thread by writing out the whole sentence from the book into my journal and then just sat with it, not just for that moment, but each day over the following weeks. I got curious. I tugged at the thread of the feelings it had engendered and sought to get closer to what was going on, because whatever had been going on in that moment was going on inside of me, at depth. There was a deeper me that was recognising something and it offered me the opportunity to know myself at a more significant level. Eventually I had a conversation with a very experienced and trusted friend and discovered a whole part of myself that I had bracketed off when I was a child because it had felt too dangerous then. But not now. The thread had led me home.
The whole notion of human potential is that there is more of me, always more, to be discovered and recovered. And the threads are a great place to start that voyage. Personally, that’s why I love journaling. It’s a place to capture the thread so that I don’t lose it and then in the following days, weeks and months to continue curiously to tug at those threads to recover more of a deeper, truer version of myself to hopefully, offer, contribute, more to the world
(1) The Matter With Things - Our brains, our delusions and the unmasking of the world 2 Vols Perspective Press 2021