Monday, 12 November 2012

Authority and where do we get it from!



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.