So, if you’ve figured out how to have discipline in your life and how to look forward to your practice, you’re ready for this. What do you practice to gain the ability to function in the world of closed-mindedness? Differentiation is a fundamental currency to have in your personal “wallet.”
What is “differentiation”? Again, it is not easy to fully explain on one page, because there is so much to it. But, on a simplistic level, it is where you can fully know that you are your own individual self who is different from any other person. It is where you feel wholly as yourself, not requiring anyone else or anyone else's opinion of you to feel complete.
There are four basic elements of differentiation.
First one is the ability to maintain the sense of separateness in close proximity to another. This means that even as you are fully connected to another person, you feel that you are separate and different. Non-differentiated people cannot maintain the sense of themselves and get lost in others. Two non-differentiated people may both lose the sense of themselves and become some “third” blended entity with unclear borders. If one person is more differentiated than the other, the less differentiated person may become lost while the more differentiated person will have the controlling advantage.
The second element is the non-reactivity to other people’s reactivity. If it’s a case of another person’s reaction to you, it is sort of like playing a bad game of ping-pong. You serve, the person on the other side returns it, and you let the ball drop. If it’s a case of another person’s reaction to someone or something else, you would simply observe his reaction without reacting to it yourself. Again, if you get caught in the reaction-to-reaction endless loop, you will lose yourself and be drained of your energy.
Third comes the ability to self-regulate your emotionality so that you can use your mental processes of judgment and reason. To clarify, “emotionality” isn’t the same as “emotions.” Simplistically, emotions are what you feel. In a more complex way, emotion is a feeling state that is created without conscious effort; it happens without your control. Emotionality is how you experience your emotions, which, in turn, determines your behavior in response to those emotions.
Unregulated emotionality kills judgment and reason. It is impossible to see clearly when the emotionality is "running the show." Emotionality will use fear and imagination to create pictures of the future in a person’s mind. At that moment, the sense of self disappears.
To self-regulate your emotionality you have to observe and feel your emotions and then make conscious decisions about how you want to experience them by using your mental awareness. This allows you to see “what is” and to maintain your sense of separateness.
The fourth and last thing is the ability to tolerate pain in order to achieve growth. It doesn’t require much explanation. However, there is an interesting twist to pain. Our minds don’t allow exact recollection of past pain. What we do recall is only a general mental description of that pain, primarily that is was something to avoid in the future. Regardless of any positive outcomes of past pain, we tend to want to avoid more pain. The lesson here is to remind yourself to accept that growth requires pain.
Well-differentiated people can participate in any system, no matter how rigid, without being captured by it. They maintain their individual emotional, mental and spiritual freedoms and are never controlled by the external pressures.
Well-differentiated people can tolerate and enjoy both intimacy and aloneness. Intimacy isn’t possible without the ability to self-disclose. Differentiation makes that possible. Loneliness anxiety results from a fundamental breach between what one is and what one pretends to be. Differentiation allows a person to know and feel exactly what he/she is and makes pretending unnecessary. (In this case, when I say "pretending" it means "unconscious pretending." Pretending consciously would be called "acting" or "camouflaging.")
Have fun with this one!
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