When interacting with people in the Felt Connection community, you might occasionally hear us mention "the new paradigm." The new paradigm is a way of seeing human beings that's been (very) slowly growing within humankind's collective awareness for over a century, although it's not yet the dominant paradigm in the field of human development.
The new paradigm can be stated in a simple sentence: Every part of you is valuable, important and essential to the whole of your consciousness.
An unseen paradigm silently shapes our self-image
For over two thousand years, Western culture has unwittingly broadcast the "old paradigm". This paradigm teaches us to hate certain parts of ourselves and love others by labeling some parts of our inner self as good and others as bad.
We would never label our kidneys as good and our liver as bad, and yet Western culture has influenced us to see our inner self in this "good guy vs. bad guy" kind of way by dividing people into:
A spiritual vs. egotistical self
A selfless vs. a selfish self
A higher vs. a lower self
A true self vs a false or inauthentic self
A dysfunctional and wounded self vs. a healthy, functional self
A real self vs. an illusory self
A mentally ill self vs. a (hopefully future) non-mentally ill self
There's truth in each of these ways of seeing the inner self; none of them are "wrong" and all of them are based in part on direct experiences of the inner self. That said, years of dialogues with different parts of ourselves coupled with a few compelling outer influences (including the writings of Carl Jung and Jane Roberts) have moved our Felt Connection community to take a less divisive and more affirming view of the inner self.
Surprising elements of the new paradigm
We didn't set out to find the new paradigm. Through years of dialogues with different parts of ourselves, it slowly found us, and it continues to challenge our old paradigm views of things in surprising and challenging ways. Here are some of the ways our Felt Connection community currently sees the self (and the energies flowing through it) that seemed foreign and unthinkable to us just a decade (or less!) earlier:
We see emotions, needs and desires as creative, life-forward energies. Intense emotions, needs and desires aren't the problem. The problem is that very few people in the world have received sufficient education in how to work with emotions, needs, desires and other inner energies in creative, enlivening and life-forward ways.
We see different energies within the self as playing unique and complementary functions. Just as the kidneys, lungs, arms, and legs play unique functions in the body, specialized self-energies within us play different functions in our daily lives Our calm, detached, mindful "spirit energy" plays one role; our intense, attached, narrowly-focused emotional-charged "feeling energy" plays a different, essential and equally creative a role, as do our physical (somatic) energy and our heart energy. Modern-day psychology is slowly starting to acknowledge these different types of inner energy and awareness, but there's still a lot we need to learn about them.
We see inner tension and conflict as dynamic, creative forces. Inner conflicts and tension aren't something we need to numb out; they're forces we can learn to creatively support that are designed to help us stay in balance and carry forward our unique potential.
Our evil inner self isn't the problem
The new paradigm is central to our work and informs every single practice we teach.There's a lot I could say about it, but I'll close with just a few final thoughts:
Although we acknowledge that shadow parts of ourselves can do truly self-defeating and evil things, we don't believe that mankind's problems mankind are due to negative, evil or self-sabotaging parts of the self. We believe that the bulk of mankind's challenges result from our lack of education about how to skillfully relate with different parts of the self and the emotionally-charged energies that flow through them.
Breaking free from Western culture's self-defeating view of the self is a whole lot harder than you might imagine. It's "baked into the cake" of our way of thinking about human beings. It's the Koolaid we've been given, the all-pervasive trance we've been led to believe.
Above all, breaking into the new matrix will require spiritual psychological "experts" willing to deeply explore their own psyche in a humble and ongoing way. Until that day comes, you can gather your own expertise as a citizen scientist willing to explore your own inner self.
One way out of the matrix
In my experience, one reliable way out of the matrix of self-hatred that Western civilization is steeped in is getting to know parts of ourselves that we've learned to hate through direct inner dialogue. To paraphrase an old love song and apply it to unknown parts of yourself "To know, know, know them, is to love, love love them."
The psychologist Jung first started engaging in inner dialogues with different parts of himself over a hundred years ago, a practice that he eventually called "Active Imagination" and recommended to many of his clients. At the time, this self-awareness practice was so revolutionary that Jung chose not to publish documents documents relating to it. (See Active Imagination, Barbara Hannah, p. 1. ) Today, over a century later, we believe that it's time to drag some of these life-changing practices out of the closet and weave them into the warp and woof of our daily lives.
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