Dancing between Self-Love and Self-Awareness

Cycles goin' in Spirals

In the last post I wrote that “real love can only begin with self-love.” Indeed, we can only pour our love out for others if we have a full cup — if we first love ourselves. Yet, if growing means becoming aware of the superficiality of the self, then what is it we’re learning to love?

We learn to love whatever layer of ego is visible to us, predominant in our current perception of self. In January 2022 (and January 2021, and February 2020) I found a self-love that felt complete and final, only to then gain enough self-awareness to hate myself again. The self-love I found required some level of obliviousness to deeper layers of my being, to morally dubious ancestors’ energy living on in DNA, to the fundamental selfishness and disconnection that make me who I am. Obliviousness fostered a layer of self-love, and that self-love created the space and courage to drop the obliviousness and work another layer deeper. I’ve been passing through these layers rapidly since getting serious about practices like meditation and plant medicine work, but I was on this journey even as a teenager, when I concocted a persona to get cast on Survivor. I’d always felt deep self-hatred and shame, and so to pump myself up and succeed, I inverted those true feelings into a nearly-baseless arrogance, and let myself be a shameless walking id.

I haven’t talked much about Survivor casting; I never saw much use in telling casting associates that I recorded all our conversations and studied them to gauge reactions and “game” the process; I never saw much use in telling Jeff Probst that the guy he met for ten minutes in a hotel and then five minutes at CBS was more-or-less a theatrical performance. Now that the reality TV universe has largely forgotten me and I’m writing this blog to a mere one thousand people, though, it seems safe to discuss my twisted foray into shadow work. I call it shadow work because rather than simply “acting,” my approach to casting was more like drawing on whatever parts of me were authentically polarizing, and then blowing those qualities wildly out of proportion. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was my way of embodying my shadows rather than stuffing them under the rug (as people normally do), and by embodying my shadows I discovered a revolutionary freedom. I remember yelling at my casting guy, insulting him in a tirade that I never would have gone on in any context other than reality TV casting, and feeling truly good doing so. We were a pinnacle of inauthenticity — me saying what I thought would sound like good television, him eager to advocate for a polarizing character who offended him personally (so as to demonstrate that he’s objective, and good at his job) — and yet in that situation of pure artifice, I was allowed to fully embody the anger, conceit and contempt living inside me, and to express those layers of self authentically. It felt awesome. It was fun. And, it opened the door to actually being myself. It provided the excuse I needed to bring the shadows of myself to the surface, and after the massive ego-trip of actually being on the show, I could start loving my shadows and integrating them more skillfully. Peeling back layer after layer of self, I began a dance that has continued unfolding with each layer:

Love it, integrate it, then become aware of the next “it” — a journey of deepening self-love intertwined with a journey of deepening self-understanding.

Maybe hundreds of thousands of tweets commenting on my personality were more humbling and introspective than necessary, but for better or worse, I was on my way after doing Survivor. I learned to love myself, pick myself apart, look at my ugliness, repeat. I’ve repeated the process with increasing frequency and intensity, from the Survivor rollercoaster to deep vipassanā meditation retreats to working with plant medicine in the Amazon jungle. Much more has transpired in the past decade than just those broad strokes, but the dance between loving myself and seeing myself clearly has been a consistent thread through all the practices, adventures, dreams, challenges and revelations. I’ve most recently found myself in a phase of disenchantment with Reiman, working on cultivating a layer of self-love I didn’t realize I needed. Buddhists talk about alternating phases of “purification” (difficult periods of purifying defilements in the mind) and “purity” (pleasant periods thereafter), and “purification” is definitely where I find myself now.

Today’s my second day cannabis-free and my first day tobacco-free, coming after three weeks of abusing both, and abusing myself in the process. I’m not thinking especially straight, and feelings of shame are at the fore as I reflect on the blog post from October 8, in which I felt like I’d found balance in my relationships with these plants. I stand by what I wrote then — that labeling substances “good” or “bad” solves nothing, and that I must instead shift from bad relationships to good relationships, healing the relationships with the plants rather than ending them. Yet, to never draw a hard line and end a relationship is itself to draw a hard line (against ending relationships), and after seeing myself repeatedly return to a bad relationship with cannabis and tobacco, it seems that I do need some sort of hard line. With humility I have to admit that I’m simply not capable of smoking cannabis once per week right now, and that I have yet to overcome my achilles’ heel of an addictive personality. The best relationship with cannabis and tobacco that’s realistic for me right now is no relationship — stone-cold sobriety.

After some months clean, I can always return to a relationship and try to do better. I’ll certainly use tobacco again ceremonially in the future, but never again can I justify the way I used it this March to October. It seems highly unlikely that I’ll never again imbibe cannabis; I can imagine smoking socially in 2023, or making edibles or oils with cannabis that I grow on my land. Then again, I’ve had dreams essentially advocating zero cannabis as optimal. No más.

So, my current phase of “purification” is less meditative, less esoteric and more plain: Get off the ganja and tobacco. I’m embarrassed to publish this post because I’m embarrassed that this is where I’m at after so much inner work, but there it is. It is what it is, and whatever other platitudes my semblance of a mind can’t think of currently. My work now is to meet the darkness I’m seeing in myself with love, and accept these aspects of self that have been so desperate to feel alright. Letting those hedonistic aspects steer the ship has been a setback, but I still need to meet my titanic-crashing sub-selves with love and compassion. And with true compassion, I resolve to actually support myself feeling better in the long term and the big picture. I know what that means more particularly, because I know what’s bad and good for me. I’ll know I’ve found the next tier of self-love when choosing what’s good for me is natural.

Thank you for bearing with me as I write this post that may or may not be of any use to you. I’ve yet to do anything close to my best work, but the best work I can do now is to at least be transparent as I go. If the transparency reflects something insightful back to you, cool. If not, stay tuned. Whatever writing and other creative work that’s inspired, yet sitting uncooked within me, will come.