Along with posting a new page on this site, A Place to Reflect, I want to share a few thoughts about inner work. By inner work, I mean any self-inquiry in which your aim is to tap wisdom from a personal, intuitive source. This may be about the largest questions that face us, such as “who am I?” or may be about incidents, reactions, relationships, patterns in behavior or circumstances that create important questions for you. Sometimes called soul searching, inner work is about finding insight based on exploration of our inner, subjective world, including feelings, thoughts, motives, impressions, dreams, images, fantasies, intuitions and sense of spiritual connection. In practical terms, self-reflection can be deeply satisfying or deeply disturbing. On any particular day, it can yield much or little in terms of understanding, a glimpse of eternity or simply an escape from the harsh realities of the world. Self-reflection is both the “hard look in the mirror” that reveals uncomfortable facets of personality and the discovery of vast reaches of beauty, awareness, and mystery that we hold within us.
We are all endowed with the capability to reflect, but we cannot do so without interrupting the flow of daily activities and discourses and make a turn inward. Our conditioning deeply colors whether and how that inward turn is made. I recall a woman asking me a question during a presentation at a university. She said, “I think I understand what you mean, but whenever I look inside the truth is I don’t find anything there! What am I supposed to do?” I suggested to her that perhaps what was there had been “numbed out” by her own conditioning. If you were raised to believe that the inner world has nothing to offer, that because it is not “verifiable,” or that it is “just feelings” or that it is only “navel-gazing,” then, sure, why would you find anything when you looked? I sense that many people have a skepticism about the existence or value of their inner worlds. But, of course, that very reaction comes from where? An inner world.
The art of self-reflection is simply about being open internally, allowing messages to come forward. A message could be a phrase, a feeling, an image — or an event that is unexpected and meaningful, such as a chance encounter. Here’s an example. I was sitting on a hill one day thinking about the nature of my work in the world. Suddenly, I seemed to fall backwards deep into the earth itself and when I “returned,” I felt a strong sense of kinship with the large rocks, the waving grasses, the blue sky and clouds that surrounded me. As I continued to gaze down the hill, I imagined a figure, a medicine man of some kind. He held two feathers. I closed my eyes again and asked what the two feathers symbolized. Right away an impression came to me. One was called, “inner strength;” the other, “psychic understanding of the world.” Those terms surprised me. I hadn’t been thinking about either inner strength or psychic understanding, and yet they felt vital to the questions I was holding about my work.
Okay, so what? Well, these two “feathers” continued to have a great attraction for me. Not long after my hill experience, I went to a local store and found two beautiful turkey feathers with leather loops attached to them. They have hung for many years on a wall in my apartment, along with a small medicine bag that was given to me by a colleague. These artifacts are a source of solace to me. They remind me that not all things come logically or even consciously. They lead me to argue less and accept more, traits that benefit me in my work and in my life. I suppose I could be judged by people who believe this is all poppycock, but I choose to believe I received a boon that day on the hill.
The art is in allowing meaningful messages to come, which is often a form of imaginative listening and seeing (and maybe tapping other imaginative senses, as well). Sitting by the ocean, words or music may form in the sound of the waves, or perhaps I see a shape on the stony beach that interrupts my other thinking. Is that seaweed or some strange sign? I could say, skeptically, “well, it’s all nonsense” or I could say with more openness, “how interesting, I wonder what that means?” I often think this is a matter of practice — a practice of illogical association that upon reflection has a deeper logic to it, if only I will give it a chance to emerge.
