This year has been a really good/terrible year for
authority. Banks and bankers have had a rough time, politicians have not
covered themselves in glory, the church continues to stumble on and now the BBC
is in the middle of a deep scandal.
These events seem to hit people quite hard, they shake our
sense of trust in a stable and predictable world and leave people with a
feeling not dissimilar from a lover disclosing an infidelity.
I’m interested in where this need for external figures to
trust comes from. We need people to do things for us, we need news stories to
be true, we need our bins emptying and someone needs to look after our money (I
suppose). But it’s the deep feeling of disappointment which suggests to me that
there is more investment than just the practical need for the above.
I have a sneaking feeling that the possible root of this
need for external belief in others partly comes from our separation in our
belief in ourselves. We learn from a very early age that we are not to be
trusted, we are not to trust our thoughts, we are not to trust or emotions and
we most certainly should not trust our bodies. They (we) are seen as
unreliable, wrong, dirty, deviant. By the time we are adults, we have learned
to ignore the clear messages we are giving ourselves so well that it’s almost
impossible to tune into them.
“Mr Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners
So with this intuitive method of knowing what is correct,
who can be trusted, really how the world sits, being dulled or silenced we look
to external figures to fill the void and get into lots of trouble.
I have been on a long
journey to reconnect to my innate internal messages, it’s not been simple, but
it has been fascinating. My training in Shiatsu has been a huge help and whilst
I’m not 100% there I have made huge strides.
For me it’s about listening with a quiet intensity to my
body as I take in external stimulus, this gives me greater understanding through
my emotions, which leads to greater intellectual understanding which then leads
to more feelings, emotions, thoughts and on I go until I am able to form a
fully rounded feeling/understanding of where I am on a particular thing.
I am not saying that with a better sense of self authority
one is not disappointed when one is let down, just that the emotional impact is
much less, it’s much more like you have been told the train is delayed rather
than you have been cheated on. It affects me but does not shock me in the same
way, as my central core is still in place.
There is also an argument that if we lived in a society
where each member had their own sense of authority we would be much less likely
to place people in such important positions of authority, they would then be
unable to abuse them. Of course we are taught that feelings (emotional and
physical) are soft, maybe feminine and not to be trusted, that hard, rational
thoughts are the only safe method, ideas and intellect are seen as the only
valid way of coming to understand the world. I feel that this way of thinking
is so wrong and so outdated and has led to so many issues, from relationship
problems, addictions, to war and global issues.
Embrace your feelings, your emotions, your gut sense,
combine them with your mind and intellect and you have a fantastic method of
negotiating the world.
