Dear Ones,
Last night I watched the Catskill Mountain Shakespeare Company perform Julius Caesar. Under an open air tent, I studied the characters as they plotted the death of their leader in his gold lame and glitzy shoes, in his striding and strutting, in his popularity and ambition. As the sky turned to night around me, I witnessed the characters struggle to define their loyalties and how to show them, to figure out who they were for and who they were against, to justify the rightness of their actions as they ricocheted from one extreme belief and feeling to another. As the half-moon rose and the crickets sounded, I saw the characters die one by one while the personified black shadow of their motivations and fears, their obsessions and wounds, oozed across the stage like the darkness that fell just outside the lights of the stage. Felt but not recognized. Sensed but never acknowledged. Central to everything but never honored.
What lurks under the performance of self? muses the director Michael Alvarez in the program. What happens when we refuse to see what motivates our thoughts, words and actions?
A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way, writes Karl Jung and quoted by the director, and in addition he is fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbor.
When we are not awake to what lies within us, we will act from those dark, unacknowledged motivations. These desires and beliefs that drive us - ambition and pain, hurt and hope, humiliation and fear, surprising and inconvenient longings that threaten our acceptable persona - will then appear as outer realities in others. Out there, in the world, these illusions, as Jung calls them, rise up to and fill us with anger, frustration, and fear. If we remain asleep to our shadow we will be tricked to believe that what is out there - inciting a feeling of incredible threat - has nothing to do with what is within us but something else. Something other. Something we must fix, control, appease, dominate, reject, or even kill. All the while we will not know that it is our own eye - and the narrative lens that covers it - that is creating this drama, this movie, this play, this character, the very texture of the story of our lives. And, in the end, we cannot kill and reject the other without also killing and rejecting ourselves.
We create the story of our lives - and the determining action within it - by how we decide to see. With what energy. This was true in 44 BC where the action is set and in 1599 when the play was written and in 2024 as it is being staged. Politics change, as the director remarks, but people do not.
Are we actively, consciously waking up to the truth of what is within us or are we choosing to remain asleep? Do we look with an eye that is open to a bigger context than the tiny stage that we can see right in front of us? Or do we get lost in the drama - the gun shots and gold lame, the big feelings and mental shoulds - tuning out the rising moon, the broad night sky, the crickets in the distance, the sky behind the stars? Do we look with an eye that is aware of our own role in a larger, unfolding story? Or do we explain and justify our actions and reactions by assigning praise and blame to outer circumstances alone, forgetting that we are here as observer as well as participant, the embodiment of a familial and cultural history and belief system that plays itself out in every moment of our lives, in our flesh and bones and thoughts and actions?
To create the more beautiful world we know is possible, we must take the time to practice seeing what is within us - as individuals and as a larger collective - with connection and love as the energy that drives us. We must become brave enough to meet the black shape of our shadow and invite it into the light. We must become curious about our own automatic responses and let them wake us up to curiosity and compassion. Every shadowy thought. Every bewildering desire. Every gaping wound. Every bodily communication. Oozing like a black shadow throughout our experience, the shadow is hard to see - slippery, scary, and unsavory - but with time and training and support from those we trust we can honor it and draw it into the light of our awareness.
Training in equanimity, writes Pema Chodron, is learning to open the door to all, welcoming all beings, inviting life to come visit.
Without exception. A banquet to which everyone is invited.
At first, we might open the door just a tiny crack and then shut it as necessary. That’s okay. We are in training. We are strengthening the muscle of wakeful loving awareness. The point is to consciously practice opening into loving clarity, courageous and compassionate seeing, and warm witnessing. Over time, our hearts will grow and our minds will become bigger and bigger, able to take in every guest and hold the whole scene of our lives and then some. Our lens will become wide enough to notice the tent in which the play is taking place , the village of Hunter, NY, the mountains and valleys, the whole country, the universe, the infinite span of time. The intensity of our feelings will remain - there’s no getting around this experience of being in a human body! - but they will not blindly determine the color and shape of the story. Instead all of our experience will be held in a wakeful vastness which is far beyond ourselves, far deeper and wider than masks of our personas.
The shadow is a main character in the story of each of our lives. Lets get to know how entangled with it we are. Lets get to know what lurks beneath our constructed personas. For the sake of our own lives and the lives of all others.
And if you can do that difficult and necessary work while remaining aware of the beautiful night and the glorious, rising moon and the unconcerned choir of swamp toads and the dear, dear smart friend who sits beside you… occasionally giggling and gasping along with you while also giving you much-needed instruction about Rome and who the heck is Octavius … well, it will make this whole process a whole lot lighter and way more fun.
I am yours in love and in getting to know the shadowy drama of my own inner and outer life and how I feed it, create it, react to it, love it, am hooked by it and am increasingly curious and compassionate towards it,
Sara
P.S. If you’re in the Catskills, go to the play!!! It is spectacular!
above, behind and outside the drama of our experience lies a sky that can hold all that is here
I will be in the Catskills for one more week! Teaching Tuesday, July 16th and Saturday, July 20th. If I don’t see you in person (just a couple of spots left on the 20th), there are online ways to connect with me. For yoga practice, meditation mentorship, breathwork, and spiritual embodiment/life coaching. Reach out to learn more!