The Land of Projections

note: today’s writing includes a few points that didn’t make it into the video.

This morning, a beautiful question arrived in my inbox from someone who has been attending my groups and workshops.

“How do you re-own projected shadow material—disowned qualities—without taking them on to reinforce your ego?”

Here’s a simple example: I see someone and think they're really smart, while not feeling smart myself. The projection places this quality outside me, and inside of someone else. Re-owning leads to experiencing yourself as smart. The important distinction is between genuinely knowing your intelligence versus maintaining a rigid self-concept that becomes threatened when challenged.

You can experience your intelligence without it being vulnerable to external invalidation. This doesn't mean holding it so tightly no one can break it, but knowing it through the evidence of your life rather than clinging to an abstract self-concept.

This journey is a process. One of my favorite practices involves noticing people I'm jealous of. I might feel jealous of something as simple as a woman's cool nails in yoga class. My practice: do my nails in a way I think is cool, and deeply experience how it feels to have cool nails.

The key is basking in the experience. What does having cool nails mean about me? What emotions course through my body? What sensations arise? What thoughts emerge? Through this process, I begin to re-own the experience.

There’s one more step here, that didn’t make it into the video. Ultimately, the experience is not about the nails. It’s about YOU. The next step of the process is to make the experience you’re having about YOU, instead of about the nails. To feel the experience and the meaning-making as something that arises inside of you, and is not inherently tied to the nails. Ultimately, you can begin to practice touching that experience, whether or not you have cool nails, just by allowing the feeling to be in your body and accepting the feeling completely.

For more complex example, like intelligence, it helps to examine your life honestly. Where do you demonstrate intelligence? People express intelligence in numerous ways—social perception, writing ability, mathematical skill, the list is endless. Look through your life neither self-deprecatingly nor in a grandiose way, but truthfully. What are you good at? How do you see things differently or process information uniquely? You can also ask other people about the strengths they see in you.

These approaches use life experience to build a bottom-up understanding of your capacities. Ideally, this understanding should be grounded in direct experience—those moments when you realize, "I'm good at this" or "I'm really smart." Return to these moments or create new ones by engaging with areas of competence. Let the experience expand within you until it becomes internally accessible, rather than based on your performance in an external arena.

It’s almost a mind trick: making the experience about YOU, inherently, rather than about the thing you’ve demonstrated or accomplished in the external world.

The tricky part is that if we take on these beliefs in a rigid way, we will always feel, at some level, like we may be “found out”, and others will discover that we are not actually cool, smart, good, worthy, or deserving of love. We will always be hiding. This is where examining identification comes in.

When qualities we identify with are questioned or threatened, strong emotions arise. This is one indicator of ego identification. These emotions maintain the identification. To disidentify, when triggered or activated, simply breathe. Notice the reaction—physiological, emotional, mental—and recognize that something you identify with is being touched. Bring awareness to what you believe about yourself and what seems at risk.

The goal isn't avoiding identification entirely, but developing flexibility—being able to put on and take off identifications like clothing. I occupy different modes in my life; cooking activates a completely different experience in my body and spatial awareness than coaching or leading a group. One day I may feel smart, the next day I may feel incredibly unintelligent.

Can I allow those experiences and feelings to arise, without making them mutual exclusive, or more true than any other experience? Can I begin to rest in the background of my experience, such that all sorts of thoughts and feelings can arise, and they are just flavors in my day?

One thing that can help is to practice enjoying the full range of emotions and experience. Emotions have so many different flavors, colors, and textures, and we can become like scientists of our own experience. Wow, check out all this variety! That’s crazy! That’s incredible! I didn’t know THAT was what shame felt like! Mind blowing!

We can learn to move fluidly between different identifications rather than remaining locked into rigid positions: "I must be smart" or "I must hide my intelligence"; "I must appear powerful" or "I must seem meek." By bringing gentle awareness to these default patterns, we discover more fluidity in our experience—and that is something truly wonderful.

Re-integration is a beautiful process. It’s like painting with beautiful colors on our own canvas, which we thought was blank, or covered in things we didn’t like. To me, it’s like treating the world as a candy shop: what delightful things out there do I want to “shop for” and integrate into my own being? Knowing that it’s possible is the first step. The second is doing the practice of feeling into new qualities of being, for yourself.

Here’s something to try on: the next time you notice yourself admiring someone, try experiencing yourself in that way, too.

I’d love for you to support my writing and vlogging by becoming a paid subscriber and sharing this work with others who you think would benefit. If you’re interested in experientially exploring these topics, join me for spicy relational practice weekly online or explore a 1:1 coaching series with me. Let’s connect—you can book a free 30-minute call to explore together!