There are certain voices that we have all disowned. The clue to discovering that a voice is disowned is when we can’t get in touch with it. We just have a difficult time. For example for me it was the voice of the Judge. I discovered that I had disowned this voice back in 1983-84, when I was practicing Voice Dialogue with Hal Stone and a facilitator asked to speak to the Judge in me.
My reply was, “The Judge? It doesn’t exist. I never judge. I haven’t judged since I awakened in 1971. I don’t judge people. I never judge anyone. Now, my wife on the other hand, judges everybody.”
On that same day when I was asked to speak as the Judge, the person who was facilitating me, (who later become a Zen Roshi) flew backwards in her chair when I finally spoke as the Judge. The energy was so strong, that it knocked her over. The whole chair just fell over backwards because there was such force behind that repressed Judge in me. A week later, my wife said to me, “Have you noticed, I haven’t been judging as much?”
What I found was that by my owning the voice of the Judge that it allowed my wife to be less attached to judgment, to her judgments. This we will find in relationships very often, that one partner will actually carry a certain element for the partnership. So one might be more judgmental and the other less, one might be more frightened the other one less, one might be more jealous the other one less, because one will hold it to compensate for the other one that has disowned it. So if let’s say you’re in a relationship where your partner has a lot of fear, maybe your voice of fear is disowned, and maybe you need to own more of your fear so your partner doesn’t have to hold an unfair amount of the fear in the relationship. And it goes on and on and on.
It can seem overwhelming how much there is to accomplish, because our practice is endless and continuous. The beautiful part about this is that the more we begin to own these disowned voices, the more complete we feel, the more complete we are, the more whole our experience is. So I think this is a really beautiful way to discover our self.
In Buddhism, the great Zen Master Dogen Zenji, who lived from 1200 to 1253, said “To study the Buddha way is to study the self.” And that’s what we’re doing here; we’re studying the self.
By studying one’s self what happens is we’re able to then relinquish the self, forget the self, drop the self. This is what allows us to be free, to be enlightened, to be enlightened by what we call the ten thousand phenomena’s. We become the ten thousand phenomena and then we manifest that in our life.
Genpo Roshi founded the Kanzeon Sangha, an international Zen community in 1984, with groups and centers throughout Europe and the U.S., and is abbot of Big Mind Western Zen Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, which he founded in 1993, where he leads ongoing Zen Meditation Retreats. He discovered the Big Mind process in 1999. His newest book is Big Mind Big Heart: Finding Your Way.
Visit his website at: www.bigmind.org
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