Getting to Know Ourselves Better
How well do we really know ourselves? How can we know ourselves better? Psychology is an imperfect science—science continuously researches how to delve deeper into the psyche and develop continually improving treatment techniques. It is an ongoing process. We can now assess which mental activities emanate from certain parts of the brain, even which part may trigger emotions and certain physical actions, but we don’t yet know what prompts us to initiate thinking, creating, or believing in things. So, there are lots of things we humans are constantly finding out about ourselves, ‘dots’ we are connecting. Our current world encourages us to ‘look good,’ exercise more, and stay fit–but seldom encourages us to look more at what is inside us, not just into how we feel, but at ‘what makes us tick.’ We Can Self-Help and Self-Excavate When I refer to self-help, there are so many many books and articles available to delve more into how we can help ourselves in a number of ways many are quite good, so I won’t belabor going into that category. Instead, I’m going to be suggesting some less-discussed topics that we can explore to start to ‘excavate’ a little more that is hidden in ourselves. Let’s start, as an example, with a fun topic. Signs. What is your sign? No, no, not your astrological sign, your ‘sign’ … what is it you scribble, that little ‘doodle’ you draw on your notepad or i-Pad while you are waiting, or bored? Take a look at what your scribble or draw; does it look like little squares, circles, stars? Or are they squiggles, swirly lines? If you’ve ever taken a personality test, there are a few signs ascribed to each that identify characteristics, such as, a circle representing wholeness, unity; a square representing stability, organization; a triangle, action – up = positive, down = negative, fears or anxiety. Stars generally depict optimism and hope (a six-star representing a solid structure). Squggles or swirly lines could show more rambling thoughts, indecision, or just desires to ‘escape.’ If you don’t ‘doodle’, no big deal, you may daydream. Pay attention sometimes to the things that you notice or distract you, or you may yourself glancing around at the room décor or the clock and it gets you thinking … of your early life, or of family memories, or legends. Doodles can mean more than they seem; they could be pointing to your subconscious thoughts and emotions—of aspirations, hope, or escape, frustration. They may simply depict a desire for change or completion. The unconscious selection and depiction of certain symbols, although seemingly random, may be something inside you ‘talking to you’ from your inner self. It might be fun to start noting what you scribble or doodle more to see if you tend to repeat them, and if so, what you may have been thinking at those moments. Again, if you do start paying a bit more attention to your thoughts and observations, you are continuing to add to the story of your own inner self. Often people do not realize that they can merely go about their lives in their familiar habits, not paying attention to what goes on around them and living in their routines. Few seldom stop to think about it. As you begin to observe more about yourself and your choices, it will be interesting to acknowledge honestly what you find you actually think about—and what you take for granted. Did you really think all those things occupying your mind by yourself or do you realize it is something you are supposed to think, or was taught to think as a child, thoughts embedded by family or by ‘media’? Now, let’s do a fun experiment: hopefully you have some object that someone left you that you still have—or, if you don’t, maybe you’ve watched ‘Antiques Road Show’ on TV and know the show is about experts who look at antiques brought to them for appraisal. The experts tell the antique owner about what it is and the history of the item and approximate its worth. Often the item’s value surprises the owner who knew little about it. Like the owners seeking value estimates, we inherit items we know little about, and often we know just as little about the relative who left the item to us. What we may never know is why, somehow, we were meant to have it. While we may have wondered what we would do with the item, now we can start to look at it again in a different way. We can think about what it may have meant to our relative or benefactor who owned it…do we know if they bought it, or was it a gift? It must have meant something to them. Was there an emotional attachment to it? We may never know for sure, unless a living relative remembers something about it and can tell us, otherwise we can only think about why they held on to it. But it gives us a little insight into the benefactor, her/his choices, and another piece of something about ourselves. It might be we find ourselves thinking more about who they were and what they were like. It might even get us to wondering if shards of them are still in us too. Too often we move through our lives in a daze of routine, paying peripheral attention to anything outside our routine and we numb ourselves with social media. We seldom even know when we get mad about something until it mushrooms inside us, and then we mostly control it, or occasionally don’t. Still, we continue to rush to meetings, worry about anticipated challenges, and repeatedly try to make sure we work hard to ‘get things right.’ Instead, we can commit to try to take a few minutes every morning and tell ourselves to Wake Up! Pay a little attention to what is around us and give ourselves permission to be alive and acknowledge it is a new
What Can Cave Walls Teach Us?
Each blog I write looks at aspects of our lives that affect us, perhaps even what we do every day. I don’t know about you, but I’m barraged with social media all around me, it cuts into my day and my personal life. Every day I seldom stop ‘till I get home from work. If a workday is eight hours (and that’s an optimistic number), then there may be another hour or more commute time, time to cook and eat, leaving the time left, and we’re lucky if we can get eight hours sleep. I’m sure that the kind of crazy schedule applies to the majority of us. So, I seldom think about my time limitations, let alone compare them to what it was like in the past for me or my parents. Courtesy Microsoft Clip Art ®2010 Sometimes I look around me and think of my family home and lifestyles back then. I think my life is different now because of technology, different location, newer habits, etc., but, if I stop and really think about it, I realize I still do many of the same things my parents did. I may fix different things for breakfast and other meals, go to work, and try to get together with friends and family when I can. Is my life so different from what it was in growing up? For most of us, it is. But if we stop and think about it for a few minutes, we may find we still have a few things around us that are reminders from the past. We may have an old cookie mold, or a cream pitcher of our mothers. We may have even kept a painting from our old house. if we look at those objects, what do they remind us of? Those keepsakes can make us reflect a little, just like the ads we see that try to get our attention. We humans have used these creations to ‘speak’ for them to us for eons. They send us messages, the same way we humans have tried to communicate for thousands of years. Today, we go to museums, travel to archeological sites, look at how our ancestors lived and what they left for us. We see paintings on cave walls from many thousands of years ago that were primitive messages and wonder what they wanted to convey. Could their representations have any relevance to modern humans? What could those signs and symbols tell us, and could there be lessons from them we can use in our lives today? If we think they have nothing to do with us, then maybe we might want to think again. Twenty-First Century humans have all kinds of innovations, our language has evolved all over the world, and surely, we’ve progressed beyond daily routines and diets of earliest humans. But we still have the same body functions, still want to worship something or someone, and when we explore their age-old ruins, we still recognize many signs and gestures humans used for millennia. If we spend even five minutes looking at these things, we can quickly discover that they were trying to communicate with future generations so long ago. We’ve evolved in so many ways, but human instincts remain. We still work to civilize our lives using signs every day—in words and sentences, pictures and stories, even in technology. So, drawings on the cave walls of our forbearers gave us graphic examples of how to survive and progress into who we are today. Yes, they were much more primitive, but those tools continue in new communication forms, and we use them to teach our progeny about the past, present, and future. So, we’ve talked about a few things that have contributed to who we are as a species, a little about our families, and how these have formed the foundations of who we are. I’m not a psychologist, but I know that echoes of it all affect us daily in different ways. What affected us 200 years ago caused our predecessors to migrate here and other parts of the world, and factors, like faith and fear emboldened them and still reappear in our hopes, fears, and aspirations. That’s why, when we get uncomfortable in certain environments, or when we find ourselves suddenly feeling afraid, we may just be repeating a familiar inherited pattern. Or, conversely, if we feel something is comfortably familiar or makes us feel good, it may fit a recognized pattern from long ago. We don’t necessarily need to go on a quest to analyze every single thought or feeling we have, but just to stop every now and then to ‘get outside’ of our routine. I’ll be your big advocate for permitting you to let go of your feelings of ‘I gotta…’have to’…’must do immediately’, at least for a few minutes…Take a deep breath and feel alive. It won’t hurt you and it might just open you up to be in the moment and to enjoy it!
Storytales from Childhood: How Archetypes Shape Who We Become
First, I have to share that none of the blogs I write and publish were created or edited by Chat GPT. I have nothing against those who use it, it’s just that I want to write about my own research and thoughts, not something created by AI. I don’t like to take shortcuts. That said, in this session’s blog I want to write about an important facet of our human history, what I call psychological alchemy—storytelling. Our lessons from earliest childhood often come from storytellers, though we seldom realize it. We are told fairytales as children, then read storybooks, see stories on TV and movies, and even in social media. We do not pay much attention to them, but they resonate in us on subconscious levels. We may ignore them, thinking they have no effect on us, but we are wrong. We humans have been hearing and telling stories long before we could convey them in writing; we carved pictorial stories on cave walls 25,000 years ago. Through time, as generations grew and migrated to other areas throughout the world, we used symbols to communicate and evolved languages and stories to communicate. All over the world we humans shared stories and, despite separation by huge distances and oceans, were strikingly similar. Legends evolved from those stories, recurrent themes throughout, such as, a hero who goes through struggles and prevails, of a princess rescued by the good knight, of an evil king destroyed by a hero. They became representative of what became characterized as “archetypes,” recurrent symbols or motifs in literature, art, or mythology (Wikipedia, 2015). So, what about archetypes and why should we pay attention to them? It’s pretty interesting that there seems to be so much similarity in the symbols and stories found over vast stretches of time and locale. Psychologists, like Carl Jung, began aggregating similar storylines and repetitive patterns, pointing out recurrent themes. A few are recognizable, such as Joseph Campbell’s archetype of ‘the Hero’s Journey,’ it was the story of the wanderer who becomes a warrior fighting battles for right and coming home’ from the ‘battles’ as ‘the hero.’ Other archetypes that have been identified were: -The child archetype who loses innocence and gains maturity, like –Alice in Wonderland, or has gone from rags to riches, or Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. -The Orphan, the child orphan who shows her/his survival skills and perseverance in difficult situations, such as Cinderella. -The Mentor, the ancient one wo offers wisdom to the novice through trials. They can be family elders, wizards, or spirits who leave after their advice is given, like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings or Yoda in Star Wars. -The Savior, a derivation of the Hero, the person who sacrifices him- or her- self for the benefit of others.(This archetype has often been viewed as a version of the Hero, where the Savior goes on journeys, fights for believers, sacrifices his life for them , then rises to reign in peace). We view and experience these archetypes daily, in our movies and TV shows, commercials, even in our sports! We root for the heroes and heroines, perhaps subconsciously hoping to emulate them, or at least, have similar happy outcomes. Start taking more notice of what gets your attention. Why did you stop to notice that? No reason? Maybe. But if you notice it more than once, start paying a bit more attention to why it got noticed. It might be a commercial on TV or social media that stands out. Yes, maybe it’s just something on sale, but what if it just noted something that you’d noticed before? A good example might be a commercial for the University where a person sees a sign that says ‘11th Street’, then she sees a post offering $11.00 specials, later turns on TV to see a commercial offering $11,000.00 Master’s Degrees–and she has the ‘AHA’ moment of getting the degree! Perhaps, you’ve thought of taking a trip someday, you overhear someone talking about their trip to that place, or you go to a restaurant that reminds you of it too, then get a mail flyer offering discounts to that place. You might want to begin thinking about making some real plans to go to that place, even if it seems impossible right now. Yes, it might just be a ‘bucket list’ wish…but what if some part of you is seeking something, some missing piece, in you seems to resonate with that place? While it may not seem to be worth notice to you, subconsciously you relate to similar type of archetypal story—and chances are you often approach life that way too. Psychologists would ascribe a certain personality type to you based on that observation, perhaps a personality test designation of a Type A, dominant, ‘get from point A to point B, leader, an ‘Analytical’, or an ‘Amiable’, it may well also describe how you approach life. Many of you have taken those kinds of tests for job interviews or other reasons, and the choices you make could often align with those designations. If tasked with choosing a favorite archetype story? Would it be the Hero? The Orphan, the Mentor, the Savior? Another story? And, looking at your choice, does it align with your personality and decision-making style? Or do you want it to? Could that archetypal choice tell you more about who you are right now or the future already there inside you revealing the ‘who you can become’? If you pursue that curiosity you may find it leads to a dead end…but that’s the worst case. The better or best case is that you discover some things about yourself that surprise you! It may also point to some things you recognize as being important to you, little things, habits perhaps, that are part of who you are, like your love of gardening, of flowers, your appreciation of beauty, love of food or travel. These observations may not change your life, but they may reinforce your belief in who you are and your connections to even deeper essences of yourself, past and future. In truth, the desire to know about our ancestry ties directly back to the desire to know more about both the past and the future because it also tells us more about ourselves, and what makes us who we are today. In the future we may talk a little more about tracing family ties (with or without companies, like Ancestry). What’s key here is why so many people want to trace their ancestral lines. The popular responses would be ‘to find famous ancestors,’ trace back countries of origin,’ maybe ‘track back long-lost relatives.’ But in the end, the signs’ point to it being all about the future—and you.
Time As A Circle: Why History And Ancestry Keep Echoing In Our Lives
Introduction In the last blog post, I mentioned we would begin to excavate more about what our ancestry and origins reveal and how it may have an effect on us in the present. I’ll begin by sharing a little history and a little physics, starting with time. Time is often discussed as a circle. In fact, over perhaps thousands of years ancient people drew pictures of time as the sun, as a circle, coming up, going down, and coming around again. The reasoning seemed to be that time is controlled by an inner, linear, sense of time, which enforces the sense of ‘past, present, and future’. As such, they exist as separate positions in a straight line. Our human ancestry progresses in time along that straight line, echoing our identity, behavior, and collective memory. Cyclical Time Yet time recurs, as in a circle. How can that be? Cyclic time has been used by Indigenous cosmologies, philosophies of the East, and in ancient mythology through millennia. Hinduism includes the wheel of time (kalachakra), and the Mayan civilization fashioned calendar cycles that extended through time over many life cycles. They all believed that time seemed to bend, going around in an ongoing circle. But today the way we view time is linear, with everything viewed as past, present, or future. It controls the schedules and economies of the world, the rise and fall of empires, and the repetition of natural seasons. But the past does not disappear completely, and it resonates through the present and continues into the future. Each generation does not merely supersede the previous one but also inherits it in its ceremonies, traditions, and genetic characteristics that come back to life in each generation. Genetic Echoes Genetics shows how the codes of ancestral DNA resonates; DNA is transmitted through centuries, and what we have today in our DNA is the expression of those codes. We see remnants of those codes in archetypes, symbols, and patterns, what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, which exists across time and cultures. We see it too in how we think, how we process and teach. Daily we use stories and metaphors reminiscent of fairytales and mythological stories that are remnants in today’s TV shows, ads, and our social media. Recurrence in History We are now recognizing the impact of culture, and we see cultural psychology emerging as a thermometer of today’s world of humans. Culture permeates so many aspects of our lives, it controls historical, family, and societal rituals, as well as news, and daily routines. Ongoing life events, like birthdays, weddings, funerals, and town festivals are all symbolic and cultural; they are recursive events that propagate coded values through generations. Time is circular in all of these instances. What our grandparents and their grandparents passed down to us is a kind of blueprint bequeathed to us. As we learn more about man’s history, we see it has been this way for thousands of years. While civilizations have changed and progressed in many ways, we still carry the blueprints and continue in our habits and choices. History also repeats itself on a macro level. Historians, such as Arnold Toynbee, Timothy Snyder, and Karl Polanyi all noted that civilizations go through a rise, a peak, and a decline. If we go further back in world history, we see that there seem to be repetitive structural patterns and cycles that have occurred from the evidence of early humans. Interestingly, the advent of technological over the last century’s innovation has not invalidated these cycles and may even have speeded them up. Events of the present often resemble those of the past, and so ‘the wheel’ of history and time moves predictably through our lives and world. We humans persist through time and are both resilient and fragile. Genealogical research and genetic ancestry testing are becoming increasingly popular because, on some subconscious level, people have a gut feeling that they need to get back in touch with their long-lost histories. They sense a few of the artifacts of their histories may still be present, that their lives somehow could be covering the same ground as their predecessors. Their quest is to unearth more of what these were and assess how they may relate to their lives now. Perhaps even more important, though, is how they may relate to the future.
The Archaeology of the Soul: Finding Meaning in Everyday Signs
Life doesn’t stop sending signs just when we’re lost, it whispers directions to us softly with a feather, a clock that stops, or a number you see again and again. Signs don’t speak in words, they speak through time and symbols. As we uncover these remnants, we are reminded of how we can glimpse traces of our ancestors and piece together what may have been trying to get our attention through signals already around us. So, now that we’re thinking about it a little, how can we start honing in on these ‘markers’? Let’s make it a treasure hunt and begin to dig up the clues from what’s around us. This is what archeologists do, just on a more rigorous basis. They select a site, select a location to excavate, prepare for going about the ‘dig,’ and then go to the site and begin, making notes of each remnant uncovered. You can go about your ’dig’ similarly too. Pick a time to start, relax and allow your mind to wander a bit, and then slowly ‘see’ what starts coming into your mind. If nothing comes at first, that’s okay, still sit a bit longer because if you start clearing a space, in time your mind will become more relaxed and open. If you find yourself distracted or sidelined suddenly by something you see or something floating through your mind, try to remember it, then when you end the relaxation time, write down what you saw, what you imagined, what you felt. Throughout the day observe if you note any similar signs or things that seem familiar or feel kind of’ like what you felt or saw while relaxed. Write that down too. Then the next day, do it again. You don’t need to take a long time each time you do it, just make sure you write down anything that you remember each time. It is key to write everything down because there may be items or thoughts that have recurred on other occasions that are now surfacing so that you can notice them. After a week, take a look at what you wrote down. You may or may not see anything that stands out to you just yet, keep doing this for a few weeks and review your findings. Like an archeologist, you’ve begun your dig! As you collect your findings you can then decide if any of what you’ve read is starting to resonate a bit with your dreams, your hobbies, or habits ? Did anything you wrote down remind you of something you dream of or of some era in history? I’m personally not a big believer in reincarnation, mainly because I surely don’t know if it could really happen, but I do believe that aspects of history and our cultural heritage still resonate in our genes. We may simply find ourselves gravitating to certain times in history attractive to us, or maybe daydream of places we have always wanted to travel to…and it is possible, if we get our ancestry records, we may find we actually had some ancestors that lived in those areas. Even if you don’t find any documentation, that doesn’t mean they weren’t real, only that there is no evidence of them at this point—and you may never have hard evidence, but, like discoveries archeologists make all the time, you can continue digging and as science keeps making inroads, so can you. As you start looking at things from a slightly different perspective, you will start noticing more signs, emblems, symbols. You’ll start listening to stories and begin hearing them from new perspectives, so stay receptive, curious, and open! In time you may realize that certain things have always been unnoticed consciously by you, but were just under your radar. In fact, you may have had favorite things for years and seldom thought about why, like a lucky number, a charm, a lucky shirt. As you collect the notes you made, you may start to see recurring symbols, dream sequences, or even recurring thoughts of things that happened long ago. There may not be specific things that initially come to mind, but persist in making your notes, then reviewing them. Single out what seems to regularly occur.
Dr. Ruth Gannon Cook
Hi, this week I’m debuting my Blog for Your Life in Time, Signs, and Alchemy. So much to talk about! Since it’s a dizzying array of topics, what I’m going to do is to parse the topics, one by one, each week, reassembling the shards of time, our lives in it, and the artifacts we keep stored inside each of us. As we dig and excavate them, we begin gathering them into a collection, and we will begin to see familiar patterns and symbols recur—that’s when the fun begins! I was always curious…wondering and asking how things worked, why people did the things they did, and asking if we humans always do those things. As I got older, I started reading about all the things that intrigued me, taking hours at the library pouring over history, archeology, and mythological legends. Through the years I began to see patterns emerge in all of those areas and I wondered why we humans seemed to repeat those patterns through millennia. Worse, why do we persist in repeating them? I wish I could explain exactly why we don’t seem to learn from our errors, but we often don’t even think about them, about things we do, the choices we make. There are many factors influencing us every day that we aren’t even conscious of, but if we are a little curious about what some of these things are, then now is a good time to start looking at them. So, what are they? Well, they are things we do every day, choices we make, every day, even habits we have, all of these are routines and practices we seldom stop to question. But it may be time to start. Each of us comes from a specific place, from different circumstances economically and culturally that we are born into—no baby is born as a ‘blank slate.’ As we grow, we pick up lessons and habits our parents pass on to us, and at some point, psychologists generally, (Piaget1, 1969) pose that, in our teens, we begin to actively make our own decisions. But chances are we make those decisions based on most of the things we learned from our parents and culture more than what we may have learned from school or even the media. We already have so much of our identity from our heritage—at least from our parents and environment. But subconsciously we know that somehow, we seem to ‘feel’ or ‘know’ things we were never exposed to before—we seem to be attracted to certain aspects of history, we even dream to venture to those places—even if they are out of time. Now, let’s take a look at, perhaps, why we get these feelings and how we can pursue finding out more about them. So, let’s begin. If we’ve ever signed up to Ancestry.com we know they take a sample of our saliva to discern our DNA. Then they research the origins of where that DNA comes from, compare the DNA of people with similar DNA, and then piece together a broad picture of where our ancestors came from and DNA related kinsfolk along the way. The result is a report of the DNA family tree and their general origins. Most readers these days have subscribed to Ancestry.com. It’s a great way to pursue the process of finding out about your family’s origins. While you may find out a lot more than whatever was known previously about your family, the records help pinpoint the tracks of the family and the records from their respective countries. So, the next steps are to review those records, see if anyone else in the family also did an Ancestry.com search, and see if they have any additional data to what you have. Feel free to share what you know with other family members—after all, it’s all ‘in the family’. After accumulating the combined data, ask relatives if they may have heard some stories, or some ‘legends’ attributed to the ancestors. Often a family member will say, “oh yea, I kind of remember my grandma talking about how her family was from Ireland and left ‘cause there was a famine”, or “It’s interesting that our great-great grandfather claimed his family came from a count in the Russian court”. If no one recalls anything specific that’s okay—you’re just starting your archeological search. Next week we will begin to excavate more about what your ancestry and origins reveal and how it may have an effect on you in the present. After all, this is a journey that is a return to the self that is your destiny—the destiny our ancestors would hope and want for you.