I have been contemplating the real meaning of humility.
I see such a lack of genuine humility in the wellness/personal development spaces.
As a provider in this space, especially on social media, there is an omnipresent drive to position yourself as the one who ‘knows.’
You need to have a hook— a way to grab peoples’ attention in the first few seconds as someone scrolls on by.
A society of people who are searching for saving and sound-bite-solutions, produces a an assortment of vendors playing the role of savior and giving oversimplified answers.
Where is the humility on either side of this equation?
What is True Humility?
I have come to believe that true humility has nothing to do with shirking praise. It is not feigning meekness or modesty at your achievements. It is not believing yourself too weak or incapable of impact.
Humility is not saying “Oh jeez! Please, stop! You don’t have to do that!” (All the while loving every second of acclaim and compliments.) It is not pretending that you don’t need or like recognition or validation.
Humility is as much not an inferiority complex as it is not a superiority complex.
One of the spiritual texts I come back to again and again is the The Way of Mastery.
Concerning humility it says:
“Genuine humility flows from the deep-seated recognition that you cannot save yourself, that you are created and not Creator, that you are effect and not cause (in an absolute sense), that something called Life is not yours, that there is something beyond your capacity of containment and intellectual understanding. And if that something ever decided to give up loving you, you would cease to exist.”
In other words, real, true humility is an in-the-body recognition that without Source Energy, God, Universal Intelligence, The Great Mystery you would do and be nothing.
Really sit with this a moment. Let it wash over you and in you. No matter where you are or what you are doing, really allow this fact into your body: the thing responsible for your very existence is unfathomable to your mind. You cannot know it.
How does that make you feel?
When I feel into it, I feel a lot of things.
I feel a deep relief and a great fear.
I feel simultaneously like weeping with grief and cackling with ecstasy.
I feel terrified and completely electrified, at the same time.
I feel a deep, resonant, quaking Truth in my bones and through my center.
This is true humility.
The Power of Dreamwork
I have been working intentionally with my dreams in the style of Marion Woodman and Carl Jung for about a year.
Dreamwork has been an unending source of humility for me. I feel inexperienced with the language, while at the same time feeling highly attracted and resonant with it. I feel like a total rookie, but also clear that it is for me.
As someone who has identified as an ‘experienced practitioner’, who has genuinely built my life and career around my own interests and spiritual seeking (hello 1/3 profile in Human Design), I may have gotten a bit stuck in a rut of feeling like I knew what I was doing and had done it all.
I have done a lot. I have had more experiences in my 37 years than many people have had in lifetimes.
And yet, as the saying goes, the more you know, the more you know you do not know.
Stepping earnestly into the world of Jungian dream analysis has given me humbling experience after humbling experience with just how much I do not know.
It has shown me how little attention I have give my Dream Maker, my Soul, the subconscious part of me. The part that is actually most connected to the Great Mystery.
Every single night our dreams are filled with symbols, images, stories… subconscious material that we can choose to work with or not.
I used to think dreams were just psychological castoffs; unimportant details being sifted and reorganized from our days. This is, on a small level, true. Our dreams can largely be our psyches trying to synthesize and rebalance all the information and experiences we’ve taken in throughout our waking life.
Our dreams are not junk, however. They are not lifeless jibber jabber. They may be full of content we do not understand, but they are alive with metaphor; the language of the Soul.
When we write our dreams off as nonsensical or just weird interpretations of what happened to us in our waking life, we lose out on the Wisdom staring back at us.
One of my most spiritually fulfilling practices is to look out onto the natural world and feel how it is looking back at me.
This is what I am doing with my dreamwork, acknowledging that there is some part of me, I like calling it my Dream Maker or my Soul, attempting to communicate with me.
I am looking at my dreams and seeing and feeling them look back at me.
Dreamwork is quiet work. It’s not work done out in the world. It’s done at home, in my journal, in silence, and within my very own psyche. There is zero flashiness to it. And it’s some of the most deeply rewarding work I’ve done with myself and ultimately it is for no one else, but me.
Shamanism and Dreamwork
When you choose to practice ‘dream weaving’ you start to see and feel patterns, insights, realizations, and assimilations within yourself. It’s like your own personal shamanic journey created by your own personal Shaman (your Soul) each and every night.
As Marion Woodman said, “The more you work with your dreams and your unconscious, and honor it, the more you understand it and it understands you.”
Shamanic journeys are simply connecting you to this dream world and dream state in a more conscious way. This is what we do by working with our dreams. We bring consciousness to the unconscious, within us. We see that there are different forms of consciousness all around us. We are expanding our consciousness.
So much of shamanic journey work is simply allowing our imaginations to run and move without the narrowing influence of the programmed egoic mind. Imagination is how you access the shamanic realms (without drugs). Dreams are as well.
Dreamwork has shown me a new level and depth of unconsciousness within myself. As I build a relationship with my own Dream Maker I cultivate a relationship with the magical, feeling, intuitive, mysterious aspects of myself through the guidance of the bigger, wider part of Myself that lives unconfined by our consensus reality. My mind doesn’t really get it. And that’s precisely how I know it’s the place I need to be in and explore.
We ‘experienced practitioners’ think we are out here ‘working with our shadows,’ ‘figuring out our patterns,’ and making some headway on comprehending our deeper selves while filtering it all through our conscious understanding.
We think we are moderately far up the mountain peak of enlightenment, that we have made some noticeable dent in the meal that is a Soul’s journey to consciousness, but what weaving with my dreams has shown me is that the sheer amount of unconscious material I have to work with is endless.
It’s like an iceberg. What we are conciously aware of is the part of the iceberg on the surface of the water. The unconscious is not only the lower, massive, under water part of the iceberg, but the dark oceanic waters as well. Its vastness cannot be overstated.
We could never fully understand our motives.
We are never going to totally comprehend our unique path.
We will never know all the pieces and parts that are driving our own becoming.
We cannot see all the lenses we perceive reality through.
We aren’t meant to. It’s not how human life works. It’s not the experience we came here to have.
Maybe when our spirits leave our bodies we will be able to access a higher vantage point, but until then, here we are.
While here in these human forms, the idea that we could somehow comprehensively figure ourselves out, with our small intellects, lacks genuine humility.
Humility When Giving and Receiving Medicine
The amount of information available to us nowadays is shock-inducing. We can find the answers to literally any query we may have in a matter of seconds.
We can ask Chat to summarize the entire internet for us on any subject we find ourselves wondering about. It can be so hard to imagine how little we know, especially when we can know so much, so quickly.
We are also inundated by all sorts of advertising, algorithms, sales tactics, and general lack of authenticity every minute we choose to engage with any source of media. This can leave us feeling inferior, superior, angry, confused, and just plain overwhelmed.
All of these things play in to our subconscious states. Everything we engage with takes up psychic space.
We are so wildly impressionable.
This is another humbling realization, just how little awareness and control we have around what is influencing us at any moment.
It can feel so good to feel like we have got it figured out. It can feel like the safety we have always longed for.
On one level, isn’t that what we are hungrily searching for? The answers? The secrets? The keys to life? The ways we’ll be safe and protected and stable forever?
What is that thing you find yourself endlessly pining for?
Money? A partner? A career? Fame? Power? A home? To be truly seen or loved?
We all have some weak spot, or many weak spots. We all have some tender, raw, trembling desire (probably coming from a wound) that we might do things we are not proud of to acquire.
Humility is recognizing this about ourselves. It is understanding that we do not know all we think we know, that we could never know. Again, recognizing that we only exist because of a The Great Mystery.
Even though we think we know what reality is, we could easily be tricked or persuaded or enchanted at the prospect of getting something our unintegrated wounded parts secretly yearn for or believe they need.
Humility is to know and honor that these desperate parts exist within us and understand that we may not see them until they’ve already been driving our behavior or choices.
I remember when I was 8 years into running a business only to discover that my inner teenager was the one who was running my finances. You ever been there? Humbling.
Humility is also to know and honor that these desperate parts exist in others, too.
Our unawareness of our desperate parts and not acknowledging sometimes others also have desperate parts driving their actions is a lack of genuine humility.
A genuinely humble teacher, guide, practitioner, coach, service provider understands that they are not the source of transformation or healing.
The Way of Mastery says: “A master accepts the love and the gratitude offered by those whom his or her teachings have touched and gives it all to God, recognizing that of themselves these things could not have been done.”
To hook into someone’s desperation for healing or power or love or money would be to assume you could play the role only Source can play for them.
There are a lot of inner young ones out there running practices and businesses for validation, a sense of power, accolades, belonging, and self importance. This is OK, I don’t believe in perfection other than perfection as wholeness. However, having a sense of genuine humility and a sense of our own limitations is wise. It keeps us from believing that the work we do in the world is due to something special about us.
True Power is Like Sand Through the Hands
Each and every one of us is wildly special and unique. We each have our own quintessential vibration. We all need to offer the world the song only we can sing.
And, we are completely and totally insignificant, at the same time. This is the great paradox in the middle of the Truth.
The more we can release our sense of self importance, the more we can actually be of service.
True power is like sand through the hands. It is something we cannot hold onto for ourselves. It may only come through us, if we are willing not to grip too tightly, while being very clear about what is us and what is not us.
I pray everyday to remember: “I am not the doer and the maker” and to recognize “that Only Love can fulfill my Soul.” (Way of Mastery)
This is humbling work.
May you receive true humility for the terrible and wonderful gift it is, within you and without you.
Only Love,
Clara
