I woke up with a sty in my eye. I notice there is a shame –based story that pops up with it. Your dirty old make-up caused it, I hear a punishing voice say. Whether or not this is true is not what interests me, as this voice is not seeking to help me by understanding causation - it is the accusation and vehement disgust that I am noticing, curious, and somewhat surprised by. There is a tone of bleeding in its voice. When I feel into it, I sense the reverberation through time of how this habit of mind – an internalized voice of contempt - captures my attention and instead of wondering why it has hijacked my peace of mind, I have allowed it to torture me instead. Head bowed, brows furrowed, eyes lowered, vision narrowed. And for what exactly? But this is how it happens.
This voice arises from the mass hypnosis of the collective culture and manifests as a punitive authoritarian who seems always to be laying in wait, ready to take another swipe at the emotional and creaturely aspects of my being. I am no longer its naive victim-host, but throughout my life, this phantom has crept in and repeatedly accused certain features of my humanity as stained and unacceptable.
When the brute is allowed to roam unchecked, it gains power and momentum both by its constant negative commentary as well as by my acquiescence to the fear of its reach. There have been times in my life when I have felt completely dominated by it – in fact, I thought the voice was me, even though there was always another part that was desperate to escape. Still, it was convincing. My body and my feelings were rampant with problems. Either I would “solve” them somehow or I would fail.
When I am passive to the derogation, it feels almost impossible to question its motives, let alone understand that I have a choice regarding its beatings and demands. That it is possible to refuse to yield to its savage opinions and recognize its precedent is a lie. But how does a person do that?
First another way to try and manage: avoidance strategies. There are so many paths that this can take, but ultimately, each one is a temporary reprieve. For some people, the onslaught is so continuous, it is impossible to avoid this voice for long.
I may even find myself colluding with it, by believing it’s complaints against me and therefore employing some kind of self- improvement agenda to try and do its bidding – to “fix” or hide. Anyone who has ever been caught in this dynamic will recognize that there is no end to this approach, as it seems to demand ever more impossible standards be achieved, all the while creating an imperative doomed for more excoriation.
I do not know the origin of “the voice that despises” but as far as I can tell, it began when we started to accuse ourselves of things that were never a problem to begin with, yet we must overcome, transcend, even punish the animal nature of our human experience and depend instead, on the idea of a contentious God who secretly despises his own creation. Or variously, a kind of scientism of dissected logic. That is, intellect in its most desiccated form.
Emotion rises from the body and is therefore suspect, irrational, something that must be controlled and frequently, something to be ashamed of. Shame - it starts with the sound of quiet, but it is the kind of secret that will kill you. If I respond to it with an attempt to ignore, fix, or get rid of painful physical, emotional or mental experience, I am compliant with the systems that seek to pry me away from embodiment and loving acceptance of my whole self. How many of us feel that our whole selves are “allowed” to exist? What ideas have we swallowed and incorporated that habitually remind us to ignore, hide, punish, or use spiritual by-passing as a means to vanquish parts of ourselves that we have been taught to view as “unacceptable?”