Anatomy of a Lay Off, Part 2: In The Abyss There Rests A Light

This article is a follow up to Part 1, where, gentle reader, we stare into the abyss, pause for a breath, look again, and see in its depths a curious light. Let us continue this fresh journey.

When I was in college I worked as a community service officer, a civilian job with the campus police department. I walked around campus in a powder blue jacket, a radio and a flashlight, keeping the peace and amusing myself with an imagined sense of authority. I was an idiot, however useful.

The urban campus was broken into patrol beats, which were assigned at the beginning of a shift. Beat 2 included the old library; within the depths of the library were The Stacks, a dimly lit labyrinth of tall metal shelves filled with aging tomes and magazines. Among the shelves were scattered study desks, actually populated by living students who were given beepers at the front desk so they could call for help should something untoward happen. I'm not making this up.

When I had beat 2, I made a point of frequenting the stacks. In the mirror of my mind I was a protector of those hapless, focused students; I really don't like bullies and those who prey on the weak. (Little did I know at the time that I was that very thing. Story for a different time.) At the back of the stacks there was a stairway going up into an unlit landing. You could not see the landing from the bottom of the stairs. And from the top of the stairs a loud pulsing thrum emanated, all of the time. I would stand at the bottom of the stairs and look up, drawn to the darkness and the strange hum. Terrified. Really. I could not explain at the time what turned my bowels to ice about the top of those stairs, but boy howdy, when I finally chose to walk up those stairs I was carrying 200 lbs (~90 kg) of fear. Each step was a labor. But ascend I did.

At the top of the stairs were three doors, one straight ahead and one at each side. Being the faithful patroller, I check the doors to confirm they were locked, as they should be. Grasp the handle to the right, give it a shake. Yep, locked. Do the same for the door straight ahead, and same, locked. The loud thrumming unmistakably was behind the door to the left. Fun. Pause. Breathe. Reach out and grab the door handle, give it a twist. Unlocked. Paralysis set in. I could not open that door. Could. Not. Do. It. I turned and walked down the stairs, breathing both relief and a sense of What The Heck Is Going On Here? Since when did I walk away from anything?

I got to the bottom of the stairs, walked five steps and stopped. Nope. Worse than whatever is behind that door is letting it be bigger than me. No matter what it cost me, I was going to open that door. Isn't this the part in the movie when we yell at the fool who enters the basement door armed with nothing more than a weak flashlight and an unjustifiable sense of confidence? Idjit! All of the bad stuff is in the basement, and your innocence is not going to save you. Ah well, scratch one good guy.

Again, the heavy weight of fear joined me on every step. It was hot at the top of those stairs, so the sweat on my brow was honest stuff, so I told myself. I reached out to the door on the left, held the handle for maybe 20 seconds, and with an incredible war of terror and will in my body and brain, slowly opened that door, letting out the yawning madness of dark and vibration. Louder and louder as the gap widened, not a bit of light from within. I could feel the sound in my chest. Facing into the doorway, the light from my flashlight was sucked into the room, barely illuminating the structures within. I fumbled at the door's edge for a light switch (there has to be one, right?), found it and snapped light into the darkness.

Around the perimeter of the room were a handful of large motors, spinning cable with the noise and heat of a hundred giants laboring in the sun. It was the elevator motor room. Machines lifting and lowering students and staff, doing a humble machine's duty, serving the school in a lonely forgotten space. I breathed a couple of breaths, looked around once more, turned off the light and closed the door. And locked it.

A few decades distance has given me a pretty clear understanding of those few minutes on the stairs and the horror waiting above. What could be so paralyzing about a staircase, some doors in the dark, and an unknown machine noise? And what does this have to do with understanding and moving through our internal chaos and paralysis when we are laid off? Let's ascend these stairs together. I am with you, every step.

In the previous article, I spoke of a primal wound, a withdrawal of love from trusted caregivers, at a very early age, that results in a loss of self, a hole where a place of light and love should be. This wound is not trivial, and it's not really a single wound. You might think of it as a wound cluster, and it's different in scope for everyone. Around this wound grows a system, as we grow. This system is all about protecting us from further wounding. The system itself is a community of fragmented selves, or parts, each with its own narrative and voice, or some other means of expressing themselves; each of these wound selves is acquainted with its community to varying degrees. Some of these parts know one another; others believe they live in isolation. And get this: when these parts have captured our awareness, when we are identified with one of these parts, we behave in ways that perpetuate our wounds. The very system we naturally develop to protect our primal wounds only knows the wounding, and our various selves or parts don't know the way to be healed; they only know the way of the wound. We are meant to be healed, however, and that path is within us, as well. A Buddhist saying describes this pretty well: The mind knows no answers; the heart knows no questions. I know this is a model, and can't be proven empirically; yet it comes pretty close to providing an adequate container for our reality, which is of course, uncontainable.

So what is this path of healing, and what does it look like as we navigate the sometimes overwhelming seas of a layoff, or other existential threat? Bear with me for this next few paragraphs. They lay a foundation that will help make sense as we come back around to practical ways of working through the fear and frustration of a layoff.

One way of understanding ourselves, a further development of this model of being human, is to think of ourselves as being a mind, a body, a heart, and a spirit. Please keep in mind this is only a model that provides a convenient vocabulary and a scaffold on which we can build an understanding. Our reality is much closer to being an uncontainable whole. We are beings created in love, by love, and for love. We are connected to one another and the entire cosmos in a way that is so much bigger than our fears and wounding. The path of healing moves our awareness out of a cramped place of fear into an expansive and infinite space of beauty and freedom where we belong. We belong in paradise. Our wound parts cannot accept this, yet our hearts know it to be true. It has occurred to me more than once as I stumble on this path, that our minds simply cannot frame where our hearts always live. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Okay. Briefly, here's a description of, what, our anatomy of being, in terms of this model I keep going on about. First our mind: our mind is great at problem solving. It allows us to follow a recipe; read a map (paper contraptions of a previous era that involved much confusion around folding); learn to write software; make quick and accurate judgements about what to do when a toilet overflows; you get the idea. Our primal wounds and the development of our wound protectors find their home in the mind. Our mind naturally wants to make sense of our world, and because the pain of our wounding is so significant, our mind takes up the task of trying to figure out what happened, and what to do about it. The problem is that the mind alone does not have the resources to open our wounds to healing. Instead, our mind defaults to exerting control, and attempts to contain the problem. The wound protection community that develops around the primal wounds takes some familiar forms and voices. One of the biggest is: who is to blame for this pain, this overwhelming loss of self? Our mind tends to create two answers to this, and two parts or selves grow to take up the burden of answering this question. One part says: I'm sure not to blame. The problem is outside of me, and it's that person, or that group of people who is responsible. We usually don't realize just how pervasive this response is, yet think about it for a moment. Our primal wounding is so painful, and we are so committed to making sure it never happens again, that we are willing to do a lot of damage in the interest of self-protection. If we can point the finger at anyone other than ourselves as the source of our pain, we think we have avoided further wounding. It's the source of prejudice, of a narrow tribalism that isolates us and blinds us to our actual connections. And it perpetuates our wounding by keeping us from the source of healing. The other answer our mind creates to the question of Who Is To Blame points the finger directly at ourselves. Surely I am the wretched person who deserves this pain. The only way to make sense of all this pain is to believe that I have brought this on myself. These two parts might not be aware of each other, but they work together in a dance. When one of these parts has captured our awareness, the other part is projected onto something or someone outside of ourselves to complete the narrative. For example, if I believe that I have deserved the wounding that has caused my pain, I will find someone or something onto which I will project the blamer, the one who says: it ain't me, it's you! We do this all the time in relationships. We project an accuser on someone who fits the role of a bad parent in the moment: our partner, our boss, a cop, some other authority figure. We don't actually see that other person, we see the self that we project onto them. Likewise, when the part of us that knows we are not to blame has captured our awareness, we project onto a person or a group of people the self that accepts the blame. We lose our ability to see another person or group for who they really are. Instead, we are invested in maintaining the narrative of our wound protection system, all because we are deeply driven to make sure that we never feel that pain again. Except, of course, this very approach, which is entirely normal, keeps our wounding fresh and alive. The mind churns on with a myriad of voices, of selves that form a community around our wounds. Fortunately, we have much bigger and more gracious parts in our internal anatomy, and they are forever gently tapping on the door of the mind, playing a music of freedom that we are meant to hear and follow.

Onto these other parts of this anatomy. Our bodies are these lovely means of moving through the three or four dimensions in which we have evolved. We swim, walk, breathe in the scents of spring, brace ourselves against the cold of winter, hold one another in welcome embrace. We enjoy oatmeal in the morning, deal with the pain of a headache or a deteriorating knee, sing in shower, step outside and catch a surprise salmon sunset. And we feel in our bodies. Our emotions flow through our bodies, and are meant to keep flowing until the energy is spent. All too often, however, a hard feeling gets associated with an event in the mind, and we get stuck. Healthy sadness or grief gets stuck into despair; anger at injustice gets stuck into self-righteousness and blame. Our bodies are meant to feel everything and turn those feelings loose back into the world.

Our spirit is typically what we think of as ourselves. This is the part of us that can get captured by the voice of a wound protector. You can think of our spirits as having their own set of senses, their own eyes, ears, sense of taste and smell, their own skin that feels. Our spirit is meant to be free, to rest in a place of love and joy. Our wound selves are rather sophisticated; they are not blunt caricatures. They can be compelling, and from an early age our spirit gets accustomed to being captured by the voice or other expression of these selves. Thus, our awareness is lost in a wound narrative, whether that's accepting blame; assigning blame; living in paralyzing fear of more wounding; or sabotaging our own efforts in the interest of perpetuating the wound system. This variety of expression here can be impressive. But our spirit was never meant to have its home in our mind, among the wound community. It is meant to breathe free air, to live in joy, in silence, to be a gentle guide for our minds to the place of healing, to open the eyes of our mind to the light that always surrounds us. As bizarre as it might sound, we are surrounded by paradise, right here, right now, in the midst of terrific human suffering. We must keep the eyes of our spirit fully open to see both the light and the suffering. This journey requires the discipline of contemplation, the growth and development of a contemplative practice. More on this in a bit.

Finally, our hearts. Stick with me on this, because we are now at the anchor of our humanity and its very real connection with the entirety of the cosmos, our connection with one another and with all that is. An understanding of our heart, or soul, reveals the inadequacy of seeing ourselves and all that is in merely three or four dimensions. Strap in, the ride gets a little wild.

The very spark of creation, the source of all that is, the Love that is at the heart of the universe, dwells in each of us in a way that is entirely incorruptible. Our heart is the home of the Infinite. We, every last one of us, are most deeply defined by this inexpressible burning Love. This is the truth of who we are. The infinite dwells within us, and we dwell in the infinite. Our minds can't frame this, can't frame where our hearts always live. And yet, here we are. The work of this life, and all of our subsequent lives, I suspect, is learning to shift the seat of our perception from our mind, with its all-too-small frame of reference defined by wounding and fear and a limiting dualism, to our heart, in all of its wildness and limitless joy and freedom. This is the work of contemplative practice, of gently and daily unclenching the fist that captures our spirit, so that we can make our home in our heart. When our spirit rests in our heart, when it learns to be at home where it was always meant to be, it can bathe our minds with the healing balm of love. Our wound selves long for this, to stop all of this exhausting and wearying work of protection. They long to be transformed by love. And as they unclench their fists that hold the fear, the primal wounds themselves begin to be healed, breathe free air, and emerge into a place of unwavering peace and beauty.

Let's come back, then, to working through the nuts and bolts of being laid off. The jolt of anxiety that sometimes visits us after we have been laid off does not come because our circumstances have changed. It comes because our change in circumstances reveals what has always been there. Most of us have an addiction to security. When that security is threatened, especially by what can be an existential event like a layoff, our freakout is one or more wound selves jumping into an urgent response because they don't know that the layoff is not the same thing as the events that led to our primal wounding. They are sure that more wounding is coming, and they must protect us. When our spirit does what it does, and allows that compelling voice to capture its awareness, we experience the cortisol dump and the need for control. Our sympathetic nervous system kicks in, and we are in Oh Shit mode. This response varies with each person. Some folks take it all in stride, and are confident that everything is going to work out. Others of us lie awake at night, wondering how in the world it's all going to work out, eyes open in the darkness, maybe not realizing that our illusion of control just gets in the way of finding real peace in the midst of our panic. And of course the feeling come and go. Sometimes we are sane and while frustrated at times, we know in the end things will be fine. And sometimes all that trust is elusive, and we slip into believing that somehow we can and should control everything, and make ourselves crazy in the process.

The path forward has two parts. One you know well: the concrete steps around the job search that mostly involve networking, applying, and the general slog of putting it out there. The second part is the internal journey, greatly aided by beginning a contemplative practice. A daily contemplative practice is not a cultural norm, yet it brings us into a place where we can see our wound selves and hear them without responding to them. It brings us to a place where we can gently let go of those compelling voices, and bring them to a place where love begins to fundamentally heal them and set them free. At first, contemplative practice grows a place inside of us that we go to, a path for our spirit to rest in our heart. In time, we find that rather than a place we go to, our hearts become the place we come from. We shift the seat of our perception from our minds to our hearts. There is some rather interesting results to this practice that is seen in a functional MRI. When exposed to startling stimulus, something that would typically generate panic or alarm, people who have been in contemplative practice for some time bypass their amygdala as a part of their response, and instead respond from the pre-frontal cortex. They don't panic; they calmly regard the event without forcing anything, without an initial need for control. Isn't that interesting?

Imagine living mostly in peace, aware of the voice of anxiety speaking when some triggering event pokes that wound self, and not having to be it, or control it. We are meant to be gentle with these wound selves, and to help them transform into something quite different. Being human is meant to mean being free; free to see one another, to serve one another without a need for validation or recognition; free to enter into a Oneness with all that is. Really really.