STEALING SOFT TOWELS from a fancy hotel presents an ethical dilemma, but we all know the feeling of wanting to take something special from a place we may never return to again. I know better now but I still cherish the glass taken on my behalf from the old-school supper club. When I was younger, my little heart beat extra fast when stealing candy and gum from the 7-11.
I vowed never again to break the law at 13, when my friend and I got accused of stealing embroidered wallets from a folk arts fair in Evanston. We were somewhat guilty—but only somewhat—as we had not successfully completed the act and ran like hell to catch the 250 Dempster bus back to safety in Skokie. Stealing was never about lack but more so about an inner dare, to cross a line and see what might happen on the other side of it. To risk reality itself. I’m glad I learned to reprimand the inner voice that dared me to take risks that weren’t worth the consequence.
What is this inner voice that instructs and commands? On “Pulling the Thread,” Elise Loehnen talks with her guest, psychotherapist Satya Doyle Byock, about the daemon, that inner genius or “spark” that comes through a person as a felt “calling.” In the conversation, Byock references Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series, in which a daemon takes the form of an animal that talks and acts as the person’s companion—a man and his tiger, a woman and her snake, a child and their butterfly—as the external manifestation of a person’s inner self. Essentially, the soul made visible, a constant, co-existing self.
It makes me wonder what my inner life might look like as a physical form that could walk beside me. Perhaps a fox or a bird, or shifting between the two? How might I give voice to this being and relate? What messages does this creature have for me? There’s something powerful about externalizing an inner self and giving it shape in order to engage with yourself. I guess that’s similar to what IFS tries to do—put us in touch with “parts” of ourselves in conflict with each other.
(Mind trick: When I don’t want to vacuum my room, I like to pretend I’m someone else offering this gesture as an act of kindness for me. I say to myself, “Amanda will so appreciate this when it’s all done.” And I do. It works!)
The point I guess is to pay attention to these small and subtle messages that may even seem illogical in the moment and yet steer us toward the most generous path or help us light that spark and keep it lit. A conversation between self and self seems key. Is something telling you to learn how to embroider? Go do it. Write daily for a month? Go do it. Drop the facade. Go do it. Take a long road trip? Go do it. God-o-it.
I have always been sound-forward but haven’t figure out (yet) how to channel that enough to share it with the world. In my voice notes, I keep recordings of the sound of coins clapping in a vendor’s hands, the high cry of the call to prayer, cicadas screeching in the summer time, electrical towers in the fields buzzing, rain crashing into the grassy earth, the sound of a woman screeching alone in the early morning fog; the sound of my father playing jazz piano on the electric organ.
Why did I record these sounds? My daemon told me to and I obliged. What’s next is not for me alone to decide.
I vowed never again to break the law at 13, when my friend and I got accused of stealing embroidered wallets from a folk arts fair in Evanston. We were somewhat guilty—but only somewhat—as we had not successfully completed the act and ran like hell to catch the 250 Dempster bus back to safety in Skokie. Stealing was never about lack but more so about an inner dare, to cross a line and see what might happen on the other side of it. To risk reality itself. I’m glad I learned to reprimand the inner voice that dared me to take risks that weren’t worth the consequence.
What is this inner voice that instructs and commands? On “Pulling the Thread,” Elise Loehnen talks with her guest, psychotherapist Satya Doyle Byock, about the daemon, that inner genius or “spark” that comes through a person as a felt “calling.” In the conversation, Byock references Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series, in which a daemon takes the form of an animal that talks and acts as the person’s companion—a man and his tiger, a woman and her snake, a child and their butterfly—as the external manifestation of a person’s inner self. Essentially, the soul made visible, a constant, co-existing self.
It makes me wonder what my inner life might look like as a physical form that could walk beside me. Perhaps a fox or a bird, or shifting between the two? How might I give voice to this being and relate? What messages does this creature have for me? There’s something powerful about externalizing an inner self and giving it shape in order to engage with yourself. I guess that’s similar to what IFS tries to do—put us in touch with “parts” of ourselves in conflict with each other.
(Mind trick: When I don’t want to vacuum my room, I like to pretend I’m someone else offering this gesture as an act of kindness for me. I say to myself, “Amanda will so appreciate this when it’s all done.” And I do. It works!)
The point I guess is to pay attention to these small and subtle messages that may even seem illogical in the moment and yet steer us toward the most generous path or help us light that spark and keep it lit. A conversation between self and self seems key. Is something telling you to learn how to embroider? Go do it. Write daily for a month? Go do it. Drop the facade. Go do it. Take a long road trip? Go do it. God-o-it.
I have always been sound-forward but haven’t figure out (yet) how to channel that enough to share it with the world. In my voice notes, I keep recordings of the sound of coins clapping in a vendor’s hands, the high cry of the call to prayer, cicadas screeching in the summer time, electrical towers in the fields buzzing, rain crashing into the grassy earth, the sound of a woman screeching alone in the early morning fog; the sound of my father playing jazz piano on the electric organ.
Why did I record these sounds? My daemon told me to and I obliged. What’s next is not for me alone to decide.
