Supercoach - Michael Neill [15]
The creatures of creation were stumped, but then an old blind mole spoke up. “Why don’t you put it inside them—that’s the very last place they’ll look.”
The Creator said, “It is done.”
The Essence of Essence
Recently, a woman whose thoughts were in a terrible spin called in to my radio show. She was worried about everything and trying to solve all her problems at once. I interrupted her litany of woes and asked her what I’m sure she thought was a complete non sequitur.
“If you had a bowl of murky water and you wanted to make that water clear,” I said, “what would you do?”
She thought for a moment and then suggested boiling it.
I laughed because I recognized that this was exactly what she was doing with her own thoughts. She was attempting to gain clarity by trying harder than ever to figure everything out. As a strategy, this is like increasing traffic to reduce pollution, turning up the volume to drown out the noise, or attempting to bomb your way to a peaceful resolution. It’s not that these strategies have never been attempted; it’s just that they hardly ever work.
If you want to make murky water clear, you have to leave it alone long enough for the murk to settle. The reason this works is because the nature of water is clear. The nature of the mind is clear, too, and the nature of a human being is well.
When I studied a few years back with supercoaches Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, they shared a distinction with me they called “essence” and “persona.”
At the level of essence, there are no boundaries—we are all one. Deep inside, we all want the same things: to love and be loved, to care and be cared for, and to live as happily as we can in whatever world we’ve been born into. In times of crisis, this common humanity tends to come to the fore, which is why we’ll often come across acts of incredible kindness, understanding, and compassion in the face of great tragedy.
One Minute for Yourself
The next time you’re speaking or working with someone and the person seems stuck, suggest that you both take exactly one minute to do whatever you can do and/or need to do to become fully present to the moment.
You’ll both be amazed by how much your energy shifts!
Exploring essence is a lifetime pursuit and is the endgame of a number of spiritual traditions and practices. But most of us get so caught up in the game of persona that we miss out on the joy and wisdom that are an everdeepening presence at the level of our essential selves.
The Birth of Persona
I recently watched the somewhat laughable 1950s romantic drama Scaramouche starring Stewart Granger and Janet Leigh. In the movie, a hideously scarred actor has been making his living playing a masked romantic clown by the name of Scaramouche. At some point, unbeknownst to the local police, his mask is taken over by a handsome political radical played by Granger.
Granger is able to function right under the noses of the local police because they believe they know all about the hideous creature that lives beneath the mask. In the same way, most of us have spent so long pretending to be whatever it is we’re pretending to be that any pretense of living from our true selves is long gone. We begin to make up a new story, one based on our underlying awareness that we’re not who we appear to be—that at any moment, we’ll be unmasked and found out as the phonies and frauds that we are. The more energy we put into developing our mask, the more convinced we become that we really need one.
Unlike essence, which is something we’re all born with, our personas are created and maintained throughout our lives. At first, they develop as a kind of unconscious reaction to what is going on in the world around us.
To better understand this, imagine yourself inside a “motel womb.” You’ve been there for around nine months, so you’re feeling completely at home, although lately things have been a bit cramped. You’re relaxing on your heated waterbed, snacking on placenta-flavored potato chips, minding your own business, when all of a sudden—boom!