Going Inward

The Human Fire 3.3 - December 15, 2024

Inhabiting an interior castle.

If we take our cues from the natural world, winter is the perfect time to go inward. The critters are preparing to hibernate, stockpiling their stores and burrowing deeper into the earth. The trees are conserving energy. The birds have escaped to warmer shores. I'm by the fire with a book.

Don't get me wrong: I love a good holiday party. But "good" doesn't mean, to me at least, the kind of party that might provide the basis of a new Christopher Guest movie.

Give me some people who have done their work, who know themselves, who have interests, who participate in something beyond the daily grind of our culture. That kind of community would provide sufficient reason to brave the cold for the warmth of their company.

Until then, you can find me at the fire. With a book, and an open invitation for you to grab a seat and talk about our lives.

Oxygen

“It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.”

~ Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

Once, there was a wall around my heart. To keep my heart safe, invulnerable. In fact, to not feel.

I suspect many of us, when we suffer in this life, erect similar monuments of internal protection. But we cannot grow without dying to that fortress, dismantling the walls of stone that shield us from feeling what we must.

If you can build a wall, I've learned, you can also tear it down. And when you do, you can use that stone to build other things: a path, a gate, an opening to that treasured, vulnerable part of yourself.

Fuel

To move inside yourself requires practicing awareness. If that sounds daunting or scary, then psychologist Dan Siegel has a tool for you: the Wheel of Awareness.

We often find ourselves to be a mystery, but that is usually because we fail to turn our attention to what's really going on inside us. The Wheel provides a useful way to cultivate and integrate three things: focused attention, open awareness, and kind intention. Attention is the connector between what we know, and the range of possible things to know.

But the kind intention, in my view, is the real key to the practice. If our internal voice is that of a harsh judge, it skews where we focus our attention. If, on the other hand, we treat ourselves kindly, our attention can focus on truths about ourselves that may be uncomfortable but necessary to know, and do so without judgement.

As Siegel notes, the result of such a practice is "allowing things to be different or distinct from each other on the one hand, and then connecting them to each other on the other. When we differentiate and link, we integrate. We become balanced and coordinated in life when we create integration."

There's an old debate among practitioners of the spiritual life as to the proper focus of that life: is it an active life, immersed in the world of doing, or is it a contemplative life, going inward to seek the mystery of being?

The way these debates arise in history often depends on happenstance, on which approach dominated at a particular time, and on how it was blind to certain realities. The other approach then comes about as a corrective, until it in turn requires a reining in from excess. The history of Christian monasticism, for example, is a history of "reform," a movement in and out of the world, from the cloister, to the parish, to the desert, to the city school. A swing of the proverbial pendulum, perhaps, though more of an ebb and flow between two legitimate and necessary human orientations.

As such, I've always found this debate between the active and the contemplative a bit sterile. Activists burn out quickly with no internal resources to sustain them. Contemplatives whither away in silence when they fail to share the insights of their interior journeys. Rather, those who have a positive impact, whether spiritually or professionally speaking, find a way to integrate these two emphases in the particulars of an individual life.

The interior life needs both active and contemplative dimensions, and one may take more prominence depending on the needs of the day. That's why for me, for now, the contemplative side is receiving my focus. I believe we all need a deeper interior wisdom to fare well in the world as it currently is, and is becoming. The time will come for action, but only those with sufficient interior resources will be prepared.

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Heat

The sixteenth-century French reformer John Calvin's famous Institutes of the Christian Religion opens with an intriguing suggestion that our knowledge of God is inextricably linked with the knowledge of ourselves. That's not exactly how most people think of Calvin. But he is one of the most sensitive spiritual writers, in my view, of how our own false reasonings about ourselves - our harsh internal judgments - keep us from apprehending the transcendent beyond ourselves. What are the voices inside you that keep you from knowing yourself, and from knowing the divine?

Far from being a one-way street to neurosis and idiosyncrasy, the interior life has as its end, an abundance of joy and meaning. How would your life be different with a self-renewing, inexhaustible source of internal energy and joy? What would you give, what would you do to have that?

May your journey inward be filled with awareness and joy.

Until next week, I'll see you down the path. (Or by the fire...)

Chad

HumanWealth Partners

P.O. Box 1486, Newburyport MA 01950
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