Lick It. Bite It. Suck it. (part 3)

        Paul Simon wrote in his song Slip Slidin’ Away; “A good day aint got no rain. A bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been.” Simple words that ring true.
        There’s a stark beauty in simplicity, especially when it reflects such powerful truth. But I’ve always found immense pleasure in taking that simplicity and, once I’ve absorbed it, deconstructing it and examining the complexity that lies within. Like a perfectly executed, successful scoring play in football, when experienced in the moment, the result is a touchdown. If you walk away from it with just that, it’s simple. Victorious. Six points. And there’s a joy in that that’s unique.
        But after reveling in that excitement, I find a whole new experience in breaking down the play, analyzing it, and understanding how and why it happened the way it did. It doesn’t diminish the original elegant simplicity in the least; that stands on it’s own. But it adds another layer to the experience, making it richer, fuller, more complex. It works for me that way in football. And it works for me that way in a lot of other things too, one of them being my own process of growth, change, and experience of life.
        Although I admit, sometimes I can get too caught up in the dissection and analysis at the expense of pure enjoyment. It’s not so much a balance as an integration. Having the simplicity and the complexity co-exist, side by side, each standing on their own and yet also somehow contributing to the overall complete experience that is both simple and complicated. I guess that’s the zen of it.
        Either that or I’m just missing the whole fucking point completely.
        I’ve written about being more in touch with this little boy inside of me and the parts that my psycho-emotional self has developed to protect him. There’s a simplicity in that that automatically resonates very deeply within me, and there’s a complexity to it that I want to better understand.
        The naked truth is that the more in touch I am with this kid, the more other parts of me are going to try and protect him from getting hurt. Because that’s their job, and they’ve been doing it my whole life. I’ve been aware for years that this kid and these protective defense mechanisms have been inside of me. But I’ve done a lot of inner work with this over the last few years, and I’m close to another breakthrough now. I’m close to helping this little boy let go of more of the pain he’s still holding onto. That freaks my defense systems out, because with no more wounded boy to protect, they’re out of a job. A job they’ve had for a long time, that they’re very good at, and in fact don’t know how to do anything else. Who the hell would want to give up a gig like that?
        One of these defense mechanisms is Self Conscious Guy. He’s hyper...self conscious. Very critical of me. Very scared that I don’t look right or act right. Very concerned with how I appear and of what other people think of me. At The Gypsy Bar last Thursday night, he was in overdrive.
        His job is to protect me from getting hurt, or more precisely, to protect that little boy in me from getting hurt. So how he does that is to scare me out of taking risks by coming up with all these doom and gloom consequences that could happen if I put myself out there and really show up. He automatically thinks “rejection”, a real buzz word for most of us, and plays out all of these painful scenarios that should befall me if I get rejected. That’s how he sees the world. As a potential stage for rejection, humiliation, pain, and suffering. To avoid that, he wants me to stay inside myself and hide. That way, I can’t get hurt.
        Polarized from Self Conscious Guy is Dancin’ Boy. He’s a psychological construct in direct opposition to the dire consequences of rejection. He sees life as a party: damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead, take no prisoners, let’s jam. He’s the person I show most of the world a lot of the time. He’s closer to the real me than Self Conscious Guy, but he’s still an extremist. He’s an extremist because if I don’t squeeze the maximum amount of fun and mayhem out of every single moment, he’s not happy and he gets on me for not seizing the moment. He’s just as brutal as Self Conscious Guy, but in the other direction.
        He’s trying to protect this little boy inside of me as well, but he’s doing it by trying to kill the pain with fun. With attention. With “Look at how great I am!” He’s not self conscious at all. He wants the attention. In fact, he wants all of it. Every minute. If he’s not getting it, he feels less than, in the same way Self Conscious Guy feels less than by rejection.
        These two extremes are built around trying to protect this kid inside of me. The closer I get to him, the more these parts wig out, because they’re afraid that once I really connect to this kid and release his suffering, they won’t be needed.
        What I’m developing is a new paradigm where these parts aren’t in conflict but in harmony. Integration, not separation. Zen, not....something un-zen.

Please join me again for part four.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a Self Conscious amount of Dancin’ Wrongs) Reserved.