One of the themes explored during my recent Diamond Approach retreat was “the road less travelled.” Within the Christian tradition, this term points to the teaching of Jesus found in the gospel of Matthew. Here Jesus teaches his listeners to “enter <the reign of God> by the narrow gate. The gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. However, the gate that leads to life is narrow and the way is hard, and those who find it are few” (Matt. 7: 13-14). Being raised in the church and also a pastor for 30 years, I have wrestled many times with what this teaching means. During my retreat, my Diamond Approach teacher, Dr. Thomas Weinberg, brought a new perspective that helped me, as a Christian, see how this Jesus teaching gets at the essence of what is the spiritual path of transformation and enlightenment. In this blog, I plan to explore this fresh interpretation of the road less travelled. Within the Christian Church, the road less travelled has been understood in different ways. Within conservative Christianity, the road less travelled is the conservative approach to being a Christian with its emphasis on the Bible, the cores doctrine of the Christian Church, and its suspicion of change and progress. Liberal Christianity sees the road less travelled as being about “bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, recovering sight to the blind, and letting the oppressed go free” (Luke 4: 18). This road less travelled involves taking care of the poor and working for justice. As a member of the Mennonite or Anabaptist faith tradition, the road less travelled involved me following the way of Jesus both in how he lived a counter-cultural life but also in how he centred himself in his relationship with God’s Spirit so that he could live this counter-cultural life. The temptation in all of these Christian approaches to understanding the road less travelled is to see ourselves, and those like us, as those on the narrow way. We tend to become identified as the people of the road less travelled, that is, God’s holy people. The road less travelled often becomes part of our Christian identity. All others, including people of other religions, even members of other Christian denominations who we see impure compared to us, we see as potentially travelling the wide road that leads to destruction. These interpretations of the road less travel don’t work for me for I see many Christians following what appears to me to be the wide road away from life. At the same time, I also notice many people who don’t identify as Christian seemingly walking on the narrow road that leads to life. There has to be another understanding of the road less travelled that transcends this issue of religious identity. It is here that I have found the Diamond Approach’s understanding of the road less travelled quite helpful. Building on the insights of different psychological models (attachment theory, object-relations theory, self psychology human development theory, etc.), the Diamond Approaches teaches that how our soul and personality developed during our childhood years determines to a great extent what road we travel on as adults. Object relations theory teaches that a child’s mind naturally creates a representation of its life experience through object relational structures. There is a mother-me object relation, a father-me object relation, a friend-me object relation, a stranger-me object relationship, a teacher-me object relationship, a world-me object relationship, and a reality/God-me object relationship, and many more. What is significant is that since the mother-me, father-me, and the reality/God-me object relationships form first in our soul as a child, they become the template for all our other object relationships. Self psychology stresses the importance of parents and caregivers meeting the mirroring, validating, and twinning needs of their children. When this does not happen well enough, these primary object relationships carry all our unresolved painful experiences along with our child-created beliefs and interpretations from these painful experiences. Furthermore, psychologists have learned that a child’s soul is far more sensitive than an adult's soul. Therefore, what our parents may judged as reasonable behaviour (eg. acts of discipline) was sometimes experienced by us, as children, as traumatic. All of these painful traumatic experiences, big and small, are stored in in these object relationships within our soul. What is important to understand is how these object relations work within our soul. When we encounter an interaction with someone that resembles one of our painful object relations, that object relation is triggered. All that stored pain and associated interpretation flow into the present moment and we find ourselves reliving that past experience with the current person we are interacting with. When this happens, we naturally begin to resort to one of many pain coping strategies that we learned as a child like numbing, soothing (eating, drinking, shopping, medicating, merging, etc.), distraction, isolation, avoidance, attacking with anger, pleasing, performing, agreeing, etc. And we also adopt many survival strategies or compulsions to keep us from triggering these painful times in the future. By the time we entered our adult years, our soul is filled with many object relations, coping/survival strategies, fixed narratives about others, self, and reality/God, etc. As a result, it is really hard for us to experience the present moment freely, the place where we can just be ourselves and experience reality as it really is, including all the dynamics of God spirit. As a reader, you are probably wondering what all of this psychological talk has to do with the wide road and the road less travelled. The wide road, based on the Diamond Approach, is the road we tend to automatically travel due to our historical conditioning from our past. When we walk on the wide road, we are following all our narratives, coping strategies, object relations, self images, and identities that we have developed from our upbringing. Most of the time, we are unconscious to the fact that we are walking on this wide road for it is our normal way of operating until something happens that wakes us up and we have an experience of the present moment. During these present moment times, we feel more alive and we experience life, others, and ourselves as more real, more authentic and more true. As Christians, we describe these moments as "God-" or holy moments, times when we might sense Christ or Jesus interacting with us, times when we sense God’s spirit moving in our lives. If this is the first time you have recognized such a moment, like I did in September, 1983, you might see this as a conversion moment, as the moment you first realized God was real, that God was more than a belief. Now knowing God was real, I now had a deep longing to experience more of this God reality and discover for myself how to walk this road less travelled, and help others do it too. But there are good reasons why this road is less travelled. As Jesus says in the Bible, this is not an easy road to travel. Let me share some factors that make this road hard to follow and thus less travelled. Some are probably evident to you by now. The first set of factors are tied to the fact that we naturally want to walk the wide road. It is the road we travel without thinking about it based on all our conditionings from our past. There are very good reasons why we are loyal to these past conditionings. First, our coping patterns were needed for us to survive and thrive as much as we did as children. In fact, these coping patterns were the best ones available at that time when they formed in our childhood; that is why our child’s soul pursued them. And so, our soul is loyal to these coping patterns, even though now, there are times when these strategies don’t work well. In fact, they now may cause us much discomfort. Take for example the coping strategy of numbing. Every time, you start to feel any negative emotion, you quickly numb yourselves through physically contracting where you are feeling that emotion in your body. This strategy worked well for us as a child when it was unsafe to feel and show our feelings with our caregivers or others around us. But as an adult, this compulsive coping strategy of numbing keeps us from feeling our emotions. We lose the ability to feel deeply the dynamic emotions of the heart like love, compassion, sadness, joy, anger/strength, anxiety, fear, hatred/power, etc., the dynamics that make us feel alive in the present moment. Instead, through numbing we bury the energy of these emotions in our physical body causing us to feel physically tired more often, or have physical symptoms like severe head aches, high blood pressure, nervous stomach, agitated bowels, or unexplained painful conditions like fibromyalgia. Every time you are following a coping strategy, like numbing, you are on the wide road. You are no longer connected to the present moment which is what the narrow road is all about. Second, we are often very attached to our belief systems and narratives that are connected to these coping strategies. When we found ourselves in painful chaotic places as a child, our mind looked for ways to organized it and make sense of it. We formed beliefs about ourselves, beliefs about others, and beliefs about how God and reality works. The more chaotic our childhood was, the more black-and-white and emotional our belief systems became. When elements of our belief system become fixed, we, as adults, lose our ability to be open, curious, and thus question our beliefs. We lose our ability to discern in the present moment what God’s spirit may be teaching us through our experience. Instead, our beliefs function as facts to us. As a result, we tend to bend our experiences of the present moment so they fit our rigid belief systems rather than be open to adjust our beliefs so they align with the truth of the reality we are experiencing. This bending of reality to fit our belief systems is the way of the wide road. People, in general, are very attached to the interpretative frameworks of their past. People prefer to interpret reality so it fits their beliefs. Few people are curious about what God’s spirit may be revealing when the truths of reality don’t fit their beliefs. Much of the conflict we see in the world is due to this disconnect between the truths of reality and the beliefs people hold whether it be the Israel-Palestine conflict or the Trump-Anti-Trump conflict in the United States or the conflicts we are facing now around the world with COVID. People are quite attached to their beliefs and positions and not very curious to what the actual truths may be that need to be honoured and followed. The conflicts within our families often have a similar flavor. We often experience people through our judgements and beliefs about them. That is way of the wide road. To journey on the road less travelled means to actually experience in the present moment our family member as they really are with a curious mind and open heart. Third, the fact that people often trigger us tells us that our historical conditioning is very active in our current life. I suspect all of us have experienced being triggered by others. Depending on the situation, we may become super anxious by someone’s presence or behavior, or become filled with unexplained anger by how someone is treating us. What is common in both of these situations is that our intense feelings do not fit the current circumstances. The reason this triggering happens is because something in the present situation resembles closely an unresolved memory stored in the object relation structures found in our soul. This is an obvious case of our past conditioning shaping our present experience, but the reality is that all of the object relations in our soul are shaping our current experiences in some way, sometimes in helpful ways but many times in unhelpful ways. When our internal object relations keep us from experiencing in authentic ways our relationships in the present moment, we are unconsciously living on the wide road. We have focused so far on the internal factors that make travelling the road less travelled hard. But the reality is that we find ourselves living in a Western culture that is shaped by the dynamics of the wide road. We are constantly bombarded with marketing strategies that are geared toward the vulnerabilities based on our past conditioning. I think of all the products that are designed to soothe our negative feelings whether it be through eating, smoking, drinking, medication, shopping, etc. Consider all the products and experiences that are designed to distract us from the pains of life whether it be shopping, entertainment, sports, travelling, etc. Every time we purchase a product or experience to avoid feeling the struggles of life, we are walking on the wide road.
Hopefully by now you are realizing that all of us spend a lot of time walking on the wide road. All of us. There is no truth to the belief that one religion has a special passport to the road less travelled and the rest are travelling on the wide road. Rather, the truth we need to be curious about is this: how does one spend more and more time living on the road less travelled that leads to a more abundant experience of life and less time on the wide road that leads to more conflict, pain and suffering in life? I see this as the role of a religious or spiritual community when it is functioning at its best. It helps people work intentionally at transforming their soul so that they spend more time living on the road less traveled. Questions to Ponder: 1. When have you found yourselves living life on the less travelled road of life? What was it like? How was it different from experiencing life on the wide road of life? 2. Explore the different aspects of your personality that keep you living on the wide road. a. What coping patterns and pain avoidance strategies (numbing, avoidance, pleasing, soothing, thinking over feeling, medicating, merging, arguing, shopping, pleasing, performing, agreeing, watching TV/videos, etc.) do you often use? b. Explore your beliefs, images of self and others, and narratives you tend to follow without questioning them. What aspects about yourself, others, life, and God are not captured well by your beliefs and the narratives you tell yourself? When do you bend your experiences to fit your beliefs? When do you allow your beliefs to change as you realize the truths behind your experiences? c. Review the people who emotionally trigger you and cause you to walk on the wide road. What aspects of them remind you of past painful moments from your past? 3. How does our western culture make it hard for you to follow the road less travelled? What people (friends, authors, bloggers, people you respect, religious/spiritual people, etc.) have you found supportive in helping you walk more often on the road less travelled?
1 Comment
|