Hello and welcome! This is the first of a series of blog posts focusing on inner work: why one would do it; ways to do it including using somatic practices, energetics, and using personal symbolism as a gateway to wisdom; and its impact on the flow of vitality and creativity. These posts are scheduled to come out on the 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month with accompanying presence practices dropping every Monday.
Let’s dig in.
Why would we want to engage in inner work? In short, to feel, be, and express our fullest selves and bring that fullness to bear in our relationships, work, and life through choice and intention.
In my experience, we are like the color globe in the photo. We possess the full range of colors and their values manifesting as personality traits, emotions, thoughts, and desires. Through various experiences—some so subtle they may not even register in our awareness, others clearly traumatic, and many in between—our working palettes begin to change to reflect our environment and circumstances, our beliefs about them, and, in particular, how we have come to maintain a sense of safety within them. If we associate being red with a certain quality of pain, we will likely stop painting with red. We may add in white to tone it down or black to make it stand out less or put it away altogether. If painting with blue feels threatening to our sense of self and safety we might never paint a landscape with skies.
The people who see our paintings affirm repeatedly, “Oh, yes, red is awful.” or “I much prefer paintings with no blue.” This feedback reinforces how we relate to ourselves and the world. Palettes without red or blue become part of our identity and we adapt our painting focus and style to accommodate this. We move about without really noticing that we’ve made colors good or bad when, in truth, they’re simply colors.
Until it becomes more painful to avoid those colors than to paint with them. Perhaps without knowing it the tube of red gets mixed up with the rest of our colors and we mistakenly squeeze out a big blob of it on our nice, grounding fields of green, or blurt something out we normally would never say. Maybe we paint our umpteenth canvas with bright and cheery oranges and yellows and can’t put our finger on why they seem flat, or why we feel a nagging emptiness because by this point we don’t even know that we don’t see blue anymore.
Here we have a choice, avoid what’s happening and attempt to go back to what felt normal or begin to relate differently to the colors we’ve had difficult relationships with. For a while, it might be possible to see omissions of self as refinement but there is often a tipping point where it becomes clear we’ve neglected, denied, erased, and buried parts of ourselves to get by in a life that grows ever smaller. The cost of maintaining this arrangement has been avoiding colors that can help us create paintings that feel deeply resonant and personally satisfying.
Inner work begins with noticing our relationship with our inner colors, which ones we prefer and which have us want to lean back, cause us to shudder, or even make us want to vomit. Often we come to inner work because our paintings don’t feel alive or we find we’re painting the same scene over and over again or we’ve lost our sense of purpose and have stopped painting at all. This choice to turn inward can feel enlivening and also terrifying, becoming aware of the red or blue relegated to the bucket in the back of the closet doesn’t mean we feel safe opening the tube.
When we put a color away for so long we don’t always know how to work with it once it’s on the palette again, how it might change what we paint, ourselves, our lives, and relationships. Another part of inner work is developing the skills that help us bring these colors into harmony with the rest of our palette in a way and at a pace that we can integrate and that allows us to feel wholly seen by ourselves and safe in our growing capacity.
Inner work can feel daunting, especially if we’ve resisted it for any length of time, but ultimately it’s an invitation to greater range, depth, and meaning. It can have a profound impact on our acceptance of and relationship with ourselves as well as the sense of safety that comes from bringing these colors back into our expression and welcoming these parts of ourselves back home. Along the way, we find ourselves with a paintbox full of colors and the inner and outer resources to paint a masterpiece.
What, with this paintbox full of every color, will you choose to paint?
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