Halloween: A Chance to Dance with your Shadow

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”
— C.G. Jung

It was a sunny day yesterday and I took a short walk. At one point as I was looking down because the sun was so bright I saw the perfect shadow of a butterfly. The shadow was huge and flapping and caught me by surprise because you don’t expect to see a butterfly when you look down.

The shadow was this sign that there was something else, something beautiful if I could find it. I looked up and the sun was bright and at first I couldn’t see the actual butterfly, just the shadow, the sunlight obscured the butterfly as a silhouette. I stood patiently, and had to look away from the sun for a moment—and then I saw it. Bright orange and brown. Flapping toward the autumn trees, practically blending in.

I need to see my shadow, befriend it, and by doing so, find my own beauty.

Everyone has a shadow side, the side we don’t want to show the world. The things we don’t like about ourselves or others. Our shadow isn’t always bad, but it’s the part of us we don’t know, don’t want to know, are afraid to know, or don’t know how to handle.

And that brings me to this holiday: Halloween. It is the holiday of shadows—of bringing what most frightens us, what is hidden from us, what is unpracticed in us—out in the open. It is the opportunity to ‘come as you aren’t’—which children know instinctively. They dress as the most powerful beings they can: superheroes, princesses, ninja warriors—they dress in costumes that makes them feel all the power that they usually can’t as children and they revel in it. The bigger the cape, the longer the dress, the more weapons they carry—the better.

Halloween allows you to literally live and play inside your shadow—dress as your darker side, your lighter side, you more feminine side, your more powerful side. See if you notice an ability to do or say things that you can’t normally do. Ruth Reichl, in her book Garlic & Sapphires, talks about her experience as a NY Times food critic. She would dress in disguise as a variety of characters so that restaurants wouldn’t recognize her and she found that in certain disguises she had the power to do things she couldn’t as her ‘regular self.’ For example, in one disguise, she could assertively send food back to the kitchen –something she normally couldn’t do.

So let this Halloween be a beginning.: A new year’s celebration of your shadows. A chance to bring one of your shadow selves out for a dance—out in to the light for chance to see it’s beauty, it’s usefulness, it’s strength. You could bring it out playfully in costume, or simply in spirit.

And tomorrow when the holiday is over—you can still find ways to make friends with your shadows. Whatever you are working with right now. My experience is that something happens, some small piece of growth happens, some new view of the world occurs and something cracks. Something cracks enough for light to shine in on the hidden things and you can get a glimpse of the shadow. These cracks are permanent. And once light gets in, the shadow is seen, it’s attached, it’s connected to who you are.

Our shadows, the things we don’t like, can’t do, do too much of, can’t feel, feel too much, feel shame about, can’t tolerate—all these things over the years are hidden—they are our shadows. But they are also what makes us whole. Hidden in our shadows are also our butterfly wings, our superhero capes, and our dancing shoes. Take them out, get to know them, and twirl around. 

© 2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Bringing Awe to Autumn

“Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.”
— Wendell Berry, Sabbaths, Given

Fall is amazing. Awe-inspiring. I turn the corner while driving and can’t stop saying, “Wow!” On my walks in the morning I catch sight of each tree and it reminds me of the finale of the Fourth of July Fireworks where the colors just get brighter and more exciting. It’s as if the Boston Pops are playing in the background.

It was my first car (a mint green Buick that required a quart of oil at every fill up) that put me on a path of true autumn appreciation. Before that, I had taken the bus to work, which took a route on a main road without much nature of any kind. But once I had Bessie (that was her name) I could take the back way—all tree-lined roads in the Boston suburbs. And it was during that fall of ’88 I began the ‘Best Fall Tree of the Day’ Award. It’s a life changing game. It’s your own private Reality TV show. You drive (or walk) and look at all the trees and then suddenly one will appear in all its glory. And you will just know that on this particular day—that tree wins. In fact as soon as you give the award you may notice that the tree shines even brighter from the recognition. Sometimes I announce it out loud to myself in the car “Well done! Bravo! You win!” And sometimes it’s just a quiet nod of recognition. Either way, the tree seems to know and puff up its leaves a little bigger. And every day is different—even on the same commute—the way the light hits it, where the tree is in its progression of color, how it sits in relation to the other trees.

I was working with teenagers at the time, and I rallied them to be on the judges’ panel when we took trips as a group—getting them, uncharacteristically, to look for beauty in the world. And then when I worked for a few years as a rowing coach I would encourage my athletes to do the same—to look when they were running, or had taken a break from rowing for the most beautiful tree --to add a bit of appreciation of the natural world into a morning of exhaustion from exercise.

Most people are now familiar with the practice of gratitude—the idea of writing down at the end of each day, something you are grateful for—as a way to build muscles for seeing what you do have in your life, rather than what is missing. And to that practice I would recommend the simple game of “Best Fall Tree of the Day” as a way to build the practice of “Awe” because it turns out that our capacity for awe has some pretty “awesome” properties.

Awe is one of the positive emotions with an interesting effect: it makes us feel smaller and yet connected to a larger whole. And the research on awe shows that even brief experiences of awe make us more generous, more helpful—generally more pro-social, and better community members. According to the research, it didn’t seem to matter what it was that inspired awe: beautiful nature, frightening nature, in reality—or memory—all of it shifted the behavior of the research participants to be less self-interested and more interested in the lives and problems of others. It turns our, we may become our biggest and best selves, when we can feel our ‘small self.’ And awe is our pathway to finding our small, but generous self. 

Our best stewards of awe may be our poets and our artists. Read any poem by Wendell Berry, Rilke or Mary Oliver and come away stunned by the awe they capture in language and image. Look at Georgia Okeefe’s flowers or Monet’s Water Lilies. As human beings we are all capable of awe, but artists teach us how to keep it, they give us language for it, they provide the possibility that we could share it with others.  

Over the years I have expanded the Reality show to match the season: Best Holiday Lights Display, and Best Flowering Garden to keep up my practice of looking for beauty, for looking for awe once the leaves had fallen. So I challenge you to have an awe-some day—find your moment of awe—let it fill you—and share it with others if you can.

© 2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

You can read the original research article on awe by Piff et al here. Or a New York Times summary of the research on awe here. 

Given: Poems
By Wendell Berry
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Have an Awkward Day!

“Have a great day.” “Have a good day.” There’s just too much pressure on good and great. I’m all for results and achievement but I have watched the whole ‘good’ and ‘great’ thing kill any possibility of learning and growth. Why? Because learning is messy, learning can be ugly, learning is downright awkward.

I’ll put it simply. Without letting yourself be awkward you won’t learn anything worth learning. When babies learn to walk they totter and wobble and fall and get up and for some reason we don’t call this awkward—we call it adorable. But this is the blueprint for learning everything. We totter and wobble and fall down and get up. And we need to see it as just as adore-able. We need to adore that awkward part of ourselves. We need to adore it more, or adore it at all. Awkwardness is the sign that you are actually doing something different. If everything is going smoothly, it’s a good bet that you aren’t changing anything or learning anything new.

This is true for new skills, but especially new behaviors—and adults hate being awkward in front of others. And this dislike of awkwardness is especially difficult when the very thing you need to learn has to do with interacting with others differently. You can’t learn to have a different way of talking to others without doing it in front of other people. Bummer, huh?

If you want to learn to be more honest, or to ask for help, or to assert yourself more you have to really, really, get in to the whole awkward thing. I mean you have to jump in with both feet and wiggle around in it. You have to love awkward.

The good news about human interactions is that perfection isn’t actually the pinnacle. Repair is. In studies of securely versus insecurely attached infants the differences in caretaking wasn’t that the caretakers of securely attached infants were doing a perfect job connecting with their infants: they made as many mistakes or misses as the caretakers of insecurely attached infants. The difference was that the caretakers of securely attached infants went in for repair after the miss. They sought to reconnect—to soothe—to figure out what went amiss. The caretakers of insecurely attached infants did not. Being in connection with others isn’t about saying it right all the time. It is about miss and repair. Miss and repair. Miss and repair.

But tolerating miss and repair is about tolerating awkwardness and staying in the moment long enough to say it again, to ask a question, to admit your confusion. To stumble in another’s presence and survive it. Give yourself permission today to stretch and do something new. You have to tolerate the miss and repair with others--and you have to do it with yourself too. Let yourself off the hook--be kinder to yourself when you get frustrated. Totter and wobble and fall down and get up. Remember that you are adorable. Have an awkward day!

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2016

 

This Change Thing Sure is Wobbly

“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

For someone who teaches about change for a living, I certainly can get wobbly during big transitions. Change is all well and good when it is happening to other people, but hey, when it’s mine, I just want to slow it down or stop it altogether.

It doesn’t matter whether it is change that I have worked hard for or sought out—at the moment of shifting plate tectonics I look around for the nearest thing to grab on to—the oldest habit, the most familiar protection, the fastest way back.  I want solid ground—even if it is exactly the solid ground that I have been diligently working to move away from. Why does the new place always seem like it’s less solid than the old place?

Part of it is just the way the brain works—the familiar is easier because it requires less attention from us. Even ‘bad’ familiar. We know it, we can use autopilot and we don’t have to pay attention or use extra energy.

And if you add trauma to the mix: the new is the unknown and if there is anything a trauma survivor is more against, it is this: being caught off guard. And the unknown is entirely a world where you can get caught off guard. So once we are on the road to the ‘new’ we begin looking for the exit.

The problem is that the anticipation of change is never actually the same as the actual change. The anticipation of it is usually way worse—the anticipation is what has you turning around mentally in your mind the way I did on the high dive when I was five. You imagine the change, the long trip, the new job, the loss of the relationship, and you panic that there is no solid ground, and you believe that you are up in the air with no where to go.

But actual change is different. If being caught off guard is the kryptonite for trauma survivors, the feeling of surprise and new beginning that can come with change are actually one of the strongest medicines for healing. Those moments that you can’t predict, where you get to experience a new part of yourself, often an untraumatized, unpracticed part of yourself—these are transformational. They shift parts of your being. They help you knit back together, and become sturdy in ways you can’t imagine.

These moments of new beginning can only happen when you let go of an old way, an old habit, and old belief. You have to let go, and trust the fall. You have to let go and feel wobbly. You have to let go and not know for a while. Oh, I wish I could tell you this were easy—but I can’t. The letting go is quick—the wobbly-ness—well, that can last a while.

But the truth is almost all of us have witnessed these moments in others and cheered: the moments of first steps—whether children or foals, the moments of taking the training wheels off of the bicycle and watching them go, the moments of your teenagers confident grin as they head in to a big event. All of those are wobbly moments, but they are also beautiful moments, strength gaining moments.

The problem with the metaphor of the caterpillar is that in the metaphor, it happens all at once—you go from caterpillar to butterfly and the change is complete. And I think secretly, we all believe that if we were doing this change thing right, that this is exactly how it would go. I’d go from flawed and awkward to a beautiful creature with wings.

But really, we are all made up of hundreds of these metaphorical creatures who are all at different stages of change. Some parts of us do have wings, which we often forget. Some parts of us are wrapped up tight, transforming on our own time. And some parts of us are still poking around looking for the right twig to attach ourselves to. We are all of it, and it’s so hard to love all of it. To hold that if we want to feel our wings, we are going to have to let go of the old branch.

© 2016 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD