Learning From Your Three Selves
Mental Health is More than Mental – Part Three
NOTE* – I capitalize several words that have other cultural, spiritual, and contextual meanings).
In Part One, the conversation began with some age-old questions, ‘What is Mental Health?’, ‘What is a Self?’, and ‘What is a Mind? ‘
If we can appreciate those objectively, then Mental Health can also be seen objectively. READ PART ONE HERE
In Part Two, the conversation explores Self-Awareness, subjective experience, the impact of the environment, and how biochemistry can change everything. READ PART TWO HERE
What if your story is a defense mechanism?
Your subconscious self will decide when it is time to grow more than protect itself. Instincts often happen before the Mind. When it is time, your instincts and Unconscious Self will take a step back and allow your more conscious Selves to find new ways of adapting and growing. (Yes, I said Selves)
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and other comprehensive systems of thought and healing are very effective at helping people become whole and individuated as human beings. The common sense of eating real food, staying fit and taking care of all external aspects of your health, even your relationships is also good advice. Having the adaptability and the inner resources to embrace an inner, personal, subjective, and often challenging existential journey, are essential. A social support system is too. Find a group or a therapist of some kind.
If you are going to begin making friends with your Self and your Mind, you will benefit from some support.
TCM has a very pliable and subjective range of practices that are meant to help any individual assess and understand how and why any of us respond to our outer lives and inner lives in the ways that we do.
Try this…
Here are a few examples of ways that TCM helps us guide ourselves through the subjective experience of our Minds, to make friends there, and become curious about the possibilities.
Please remember, with all things TCM, the context is the most important part.
Your three Selves
One way to explore your experience, and the behavior of others is through your Three Selves. (get ready to laugh, especially at yourself). This practice invites you to be playful, and consciously respond to something in three ways.
Imagine you are walking around a corner and you suddenly run into someone that shocks you back into the moment.
Something could go wrong!
A part of you is instinctual – you respond from there, from your guts. What large terrifying animal or small and tricky animal do you need to be in this moment?
A part of you experiences life socially and relationally, bonding and control of distance can determine your survival. Who is the last person you want to bump into right now?
In the moment you imagine bumping into them, drop into your hips and legs. Find your pelvis and the root of your breath. Soften there. Wait until you are ready, in a consciously embodied way, before engaging in the encounter.
What would that feel like right now?
As a social Being, in this moment, what is the most authentic way to respond skillfully to the benefits, risks, and rewards, of that relationship.
Just in case you needed to hear this. Being a crutch is not healthy for either of you.
Bring your attention to your Heart and breathing. Feel into how you communicate.
As a social being, what is the most authentic and skillful way to respond. To communicate with your heart. Even if it will be challenging.
Can you feel that shift of state now?
As an existential being, what truth actually matters right now?
In this moment, do you feel connected and clear with how you can feel both autonomy and discernment with every moment, and with every word.
Each of your three selves is a Mind. A Way of being a Being in the world. A way of adapting to the three most influential environments in your life.
The practice is to stay curious about which of your minds is evaluating each of your Minds…, and why getting clear on the most potent influences in your life will always be the first step to making completely other choices.
Which are completely up to who?
Have fun learning how to learn how to find out.
Some Other Paradigms of Self
It is worth noting that, in Chinese thought, these Minds, and Selves are not thought of as literal substrates of Being. Each aspect of cognition, each unique emotion, each innate drive within your character, your conflict style, your ancestral homework and treasure chest you receive from your Ancestors. Even your Acupuncture Meridians can be understood to be adaptive components of a whole Self, and a pliable Mind.
Just like with the Three Selves exercise and practice above, here are several other models to learn from and practice. Now, instead of imagining bumping into someone on the street, let’s consider these as tools to navigate the rest of your life.
The following examples will be discussed in detail in future articles, or taught in depth in a course called Embodied Psychotherapy, Spiritual Recapitulation, and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Cognition has four or five major functional components and steps, depending if you are using Western Neurology, or TCM Psychology (Qing Zhi Bing). Any time you are stuck looping, or have writers block, you can observe how you are processing your thoughts, and then choose the most effective aspect of cognition for what you are engaged in.
The Classic Seven Emotions of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) are a template for exploring the spectrum of all possible emotion. Instead of trying to discover which emotion is the worst, or most damaging, you are invited to look into all of your emotions about the most impactful experiences of your life. You are also invited to feel how each of the classic emotions is involved in your Mood and Disposition. And finally, how to listen into each of your tissues, organs, and internal systems for latent emotional ‘stowaways’ that might be whispering in your dreams.
Every Mind is made of many Minds. Every Mind is also made of a series of moving forces, motivations, volitians, and tendencies that work in the background to direct your Mind and Self throughout the journey of your life. TCM encourages a conscious relationship with your Five Wills, so that you can learn to steer and then rely on each of them when needed. The Five Wills are your Spirit (Shen), Capacity to Interact (Yi), Ethereal Soul (Hun), Corporeal Soul (P’o), and Willingness (Zhi). If you can train them, then you can rely on them when they are the most needed.
If you feel a need to resolve Ancestral Trauma, receive Ancestral Gifts, sort ot your dreams, explore parts of your personality, your type of intelligence, emotional sensitivity or bluntedness, and sense of fate and destiny, you can connect with your Hun or Ethereal Soul. Your Hun exist ‘behind your Mind, Heart, and dreams.
Just like a Mind can hold a Self, your Hun holds your Spirit, which holds your Mind, which holds your Self, which holds and experiences pain.
Your Hun, or Three Hun, if you are using this relationship therapeutically, can offer a subjective exercise to explore other Minds that maintain your Mental Health. By paying attention to how you manifest certain attributes, you can call on deeper aspects of your Mind and Self to help build aspects of your character and relationality that may have been suppressed or ignored earlier in life.
Your Hun brings into being the structure of your Character, your emotional range and sensitivity. If those aspects of you were blunted or contorted in your childhood, it is now you choice or opportunity to use Hun as another kind of parent or Elder to guide you in another way. A more open way, a more fulfilling way, and a more completing way. Perhaps even a more authentic way.
There are several more models of exploration and healing, such as your P’o or Corporeal Souls and Ancestral Grudges, and the Meridian system, which is really three distinct systems. There is your 6 layers of Boundary Meridians, your 12 Embodiment and Relational Medians, and your 8 Extraordinary Meridians, which mediate ancestral imprinting and cultural conditioning.
From a TCM perspective, all of these influences are like voices in a choir. Stress, sugar, insomnia, Selves, Cognitive bias, emotional load and sensitivity, inner forces of Will, Souls, Spirits, and maybe even some Ghosts all mix together and sing their many songs. This song is always in the background, filling the space of Mind, defining the Self, somewhere beneath the ‘status’ of anyone’s Mental Health.
If you are interested in becoming the guiding conductor of all of the voices in your choir, or in your head, I am teaching a course next Spring. It is called Embodied Psychotherapy, Spiritual Recapitulation, and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
This course is usually taught to third year students of Traditional Chinese medicine. It is not very complex and is accessible to people with no clinical of TCM experience.