Foggy Brain

I am part way into a three-and-a-half day seminar called Inside Passage. Its purpose is to "decide and declare, discover and create the best of who you are."

We are addressing our personal vision and our relationships. We are working on acquiring compassion and forgiveness, both towards ourselves and towards another person with whom we have an unresolved issue.

At the beginning of the seminar, our facilitator asked each of us to stand up and state our name, what we wanted to get out of the seminar and what we thought our greatest barrier was to getting what we wanted.

I said my name was Judy, I didn't know what I wanted to get out of the seminar, and my greatest barrier was that I didn't know what I wanted.

When I was working in a small group of four people today, one of the members of that group shared what felt to me like a very important fact after we'd already worked together for three hours. She mentioned this central fact of her life in passing, almost as if it was a throw-away line.

When she did that, I felt angry towards her. The reason for my anger was that I had poured my heart and soul into assisting her during the preceding three hours. I had grappled with what seemed like a complex issue, and had racked my brain to help her in finding more clarity.

The salient fact that she then mentioned as if by accident was so huge that it just blew me away. If only she had shared that at the outset of our work together, it would have made all the difference.

Her "forgetting" to tell us this highly relevant piece of information might have been understandable if we'd been a bunch of newbies. But, in order to register for Inside Passage, all of us had to be graduates of the Pursuit of Excellence and The Wall. In exchanging pleasantries with this woman at the beginning of the seminar, I knew that she also was a graduate of the Advancement of Excellence. So we're talking about a person who has done a considerable amount of self development work. It just did not feel plausible to me that such a person could have "forgotten" to mention what seemed to me to be the single most important piece of information about her life.

I also could have understood her withholding the information from us if the environment had been unsafe. But really conscious people participate in the workshops that Excellence Seminars International puts on. By the time we make it to Inside Passage, we can be confident that our fellow participants have integrity. So I expect everyone in the room to participate to the maximum extent possible. To me that includes full disclosure in small group activities.

A few minutes after I'd felt anger towards this woman welling up inside of me, I realized that her withholding critical information had pushed one of my hot buttons. I recalled the elephant in my family of origin's living room. That had been my father's dyslexia, which I mentioned in my blog post entitled My Incomparable Dad. It seemed to me that, even after I thought I'd come to terms with it, I still must have been feeling hurt by my parents' secrecy. That probably explained why my reaction to my team member's apparent secrecy was disproportionate to the seriousness of her "transgression." I might add that it was a slip up that did not bother our other two team members in the slightest.

While I was driving home from the seminar venue tonight, I reviewed that whole thing about my father. I recalled how it had felt safer for me when I had suppressed how smart and capable I actually was. Then a light bulb went off for me. I realized that that also explained why I often felt confused about what I wanted. Confusion was safe, because nothing could be pinned on me, and I couldn't be blamed for it. The picture that came to me was of a dog fight in the First World War. I visualized a pilot ducking into a bank of clouds to escape the crossfire.

The thing you need to understand if you want to know what it has felt like to be Judy for most of the last 57 years is that Judy did not know that she was smart while she chose to present a dumbed down version of herself to the rest of the world. Rather, to feel safe, Judy hid even from herself the fact that she was smart.

Actually that is a good illustration of what all of us do to pull off what Robert Scheinfeld calls the Phase 1 Miracle. All of us players in the Earth Amusement Park hide from ourselves our true power. The special effects that are required to convince an infinite being that he or she is limited are very sophisticated indeed.

As soon as I became aware that my confusion was an artificial device, a whole bunch of things became clear to me. I knew at once what I wanted to get out of the seminar. I instantly knew answers that had eluded me during today's exercises as well as the answer to the most important question in tonight's homework assignment.

My recognition of my own mental fog also gave me compassion for my team member in the small group exercise. I could see how a vitally important fact about her life could have escaped her attention during our work together.

Postscript. It occurs to me that this blog post contains a lot of Phase 1 language and assumptions. If you've come here expecting to find insights into Phase 2, it seems to me that this post may confuse you. I apologize for that.