Name
Your Demons
“When
the demons become unmasked, you may feel you are going mad or doing something
wrong, but in fact you have finally begun to face the forces that keep you from
living in a loving and fully conscious way. We face these forces over and over.
We will probably work with anger a thousand times in practice before we come to
a balanced, mindful way of living. This is natural.”
Jack
Kornfield (A Path with Heart, p.91; Bantam Books, 1993)
Kornfield’s
classic book on meditation practice is subtitled, A Guide Through the
Promises and Perils of Spiritual Life. In it, he teaches the impediments to
spiritual practice and how to work with them. Chapter 7 is titled, Naming the
Demons and step by step, he does just that: Grasping and Wanting, Fear, Boredom,
Judgment, Sleepiness, Restlessness, Doubt. Each one covers a lot of ground,
especially fear which can manifest as almost everything from rage to obsequiousness.
Most of us, especially we co-dependent worriers, have a favorite way to
manifest fear. Mine happens to be judging, since I grew up in a family who
taught me the ins and outs of that particular mindset. I’m a master judger.
Kornfield
says that in original cultures, shamans taught people to name their demons as the
first step toward having a modicum of power over them. Most spiritual
practices, including meditation and some forms of depth psychology, are all
about naming, understanding, and incorporating our demons. (I prefer to call
them dragons since mine breath fire. Perhaps yours do, too.) For one thing,
until you recognize them as belonging to you, you will only see them in other people.
Projection is like whacking a tennis ball hard against a brick wall—it always comes
back to smack you in the mouth. But if you can summon up the courage to allow
your demons/dragons to rise into consciousness, then you have a pretty good
chance of figuring out who they are, where they came from, and what they have
to teach you. Because their purpose is to teach you, believe it or not.
It’s not to scare you to death.
I’m
bringing this up now because this is a time of year when our demons are particularly
restless. When the traffic is horrible, half of what’s on your shopping list is
not in stock, and two thirds of your fellow shoppers are not wearing masks, the
demons WILL come out to play. And then there are the snarls at the airports and
the flight delays and by the time you get where you’re going, you’re exhausted
and more than a little withered and grumpy. Oh, yeah, demons—it’s a given. And don’t
even get me started on all the cooking and cleaning up and….breathe, just breathe.
William
Blake said, “Those who enter the gates of heaven are not beings who have no
passions or who have curbed the passions, but those who have cultivated an
understanding of them.” (A Path with Heart,
p. 86) That should provide a little comfort for those of us hoping to make
it to the pearly gates. Purity is not a requirement for entering.
So, if
we want to name and claim our demons, and to begin the hard work of
incorporating them, we must be patient with ourselves. There is no such thing
as perfection; we take three steps forward and two back, and we’re grateful for
that one step we didn’t lose. It’s Christmas time—hone your skills, children!
Name those dragons!
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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