“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” ― Pema Chödrön
Last year, after having lived many years abroad, I started a long-distance course at a German university. Whilst other students are based in Germany, I am doing the course from Nairobi. As I navigated my way through the Germany university system (and German culture:)), I started to develop a sensation of non-belonging and isolation. It became a strong feeling in the background as I went about my assignments, and surged at particular moments when I was interacting with the administration, solving issues such as delays in receiving postal correspondence. I told myself that university staff wasn’t sensitive to my location, though they were doing pretty well in supporting me! Then, in an online seminar students had to pair up for an assignment. Most found someone in the same city or region so that I was left without a partner. At that point my story of non-belonging was ripening fast. The data in front of me, so I concluded, proved that the other students excluded me and even discriminated against me in my far away location. I became overwhelmed with my own imaginary narrative.
In the end I realised I had created a story. I had to untangle myself from it and make a firm decision that it was up to me to make myself feel included. It did not depend on anyone else and besides I didn’t even have any data about what other students were thinking, nor did it matter. I posted a message on the site explaining that I was perfectly able to virtually communicate from Nairobi and that I needed a partner. Another student who had also not found anyone contacted me.
We tend to project our own stuff onto other people, assuming they are doing something to us which in reality is going on inside ourselves. We search for something external so that we can blame it and have an explanation for why we feel the way we feel. Blame feels better than guilt! Since we do not have control over what other people do, we simply perpetuate our own feeling of dissatisfaction, whether it is anger, resentment, frustration, sadness, rejection, fear, laziness, stress or criticism.
The narrowed down version of ourselves which denies our own tendencies and feelings is called persona. It only includes what we accept. It excludes everything we disown: things we do not like about ourselves and resist. We construct our identity based on this narrow image of ourselves. Whatever we exclude is our shadow projection. When we feel the feeling or the impulse, we deny that it comes from inside ourselves and hook it onto something external.
“An impulse (such as drive, anger, or desire) which arises in you and is naturally aimed at the environment, when projected, appears as an impulse originating in the environment and aimed at you. (…) No longer do you push for action, you feel pushed into action.” (Wilber 2001: 83)
We selectively pick up data from the environment to support our emotion and create a story out of it. The story we tell ourselves makes our projection justifiable to ourselves. We feel that people do things that make us angry or frustrated, that they prevent us from doing certain things, that we are under pressure from people to do certain things, that circumstances are making us sad (or joyful), that we are not being appreciated.
I denied the non-belonging I had generated inside myself and projected it onto others as exclusion. By blaming them I was able to perpetuate my persona. Each time I detected a hook externally, I kept on spinning my story. Only when I stepped back and observed my own process, I was able to undo the boundary I had created between myself and the non-belonging. Whether I belong or not – that is something I define. It’s my own construct. When I included the non-belonging within my own self, thus enlarging the boundary, I was able to change it. As long as it belonged to others, I could not control it. But I could change what I recognised as belonging to me.
A good way to dismantle the boundaries around our persona is to carefully observe when we repeatedly blame someone or something for the way we feel or for something we have to do or cannot do. We may for example blame other colleagues or teams in the organisation for certain things and justify our anger. In such situations it is very likely that we project a disowned trait or desire of our shadow self onto them/it. Feeling strongly affected by something is a sign we are projecting. Once we are aware, we can deconstruct it. It gives us options to release what we previously thought to be unchangeably bound to hostility or lack of cooperation in the external world. It gives us options to create what we want for ourselves. As leaders, it frees us up a great deal to create and work with positive energy.
Ken Wilber discusses the persona-shadow phenomena as the first level of limiting boundaries human beings construct around themselves. Thus, this is just the first one to be aware of! One day we discover that we are the sky for all there is and that it’s up to us to let the sun through.
Reference: Wilber, Ken (2001), No Boundaries. Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth, Boston (MA): Shambhala