970x125
This post is part one of a two-part series.
At 86, Pali Summerlin is an author and wisdom teacher known for her deep insights into emotional wounding and the liberation of limiting self-concepts. She uses a radical method of self-inquiry known as the Six Steps to Freedom (originated by Diederik Wolsak), helping others to find their way through the maze of psychological distortion that underlies our suffering. A native of Alabama and the grandmother of six, Summerlin, lives on the Hawaiian island of Maui, where we caught up recently to talk about her pioneering healing work.
Mark Matousek: You’ve said that when it comes to our own wounding, there’s a common inversion of cause and effect. What do you mean by that?
Pali Summerlin: I’m talking about shifting to a radical understanding of yourself as cause in the matter of whatever shows up in your world. The way that we see reality creates our experience of reality. How we see is determined by our early wounding; the lens through which we see is distorted by our early pain. In other words, as Anais Nin said, “We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.”
MM: So our suffering isn’t being caused by what’s happening outside of us.
PS: No. I use a technology with clients called the Six Steps to Freedom process, which correlates to your early wounding and the distortion lens through which you perceive reality. It’s very deep and close and personal work. We’ve bandied around the concept that we create our own reality for a very long time in spiritual circles. Referring to our ego, the me-self, we might ask, “Oh my god, how did I create this mess?” But the reality is that we can’t determine what our reality will be from the ego’s perspective. Early on, the I’m not good enough or the I don’t matter tape gets installed, and then we’re seeing everything through that prism.
MM: If I’m feeling insufficient, or experiencing low self-esteem, and believe it’s because of something happening outside of me, what’s the first step I can take to undo that myth?
PS: The first step in the Six Steps to Freedom process is to acknowledge that you’re triggered. You’re upset. The second step is turn the pointer toward oneself and realize it’s about you. Once you’ve done that, you’re invited to experience, as fully as you can, the feelings that have come up in that triggered experience. After that, you use those feelings to evoke the earliest memory that occurs to you, when you felt the same way. Typically, that will bring back some memory of an interaction with a caretaker or a parent, or a sibling. It will typically take you back into an early experience of when those same feelings were triggered in you. Then we use those feelings to move into the experience of that early memory to inquire, “When that happened, what did I conclude that it meant about me?” With that information, with that revelation, we see what created the distortion lens in the first place.
I sometimes use the innocuous example of your mom being late, picking you up from kindergarten. All of a sudden, you felt abandoned. You felt alone. As you begin to get in touch with that, you see how you jumped to a false premise or conclusion. How you’re interpreting what someone is saying or doing through the distortion lens of “I don’t matter.”
The final step in this process is shining the power of the light of awareness on this early conclusion and seeing that while it was unavoidable, it was never true. I call it the process of forgiveness, the revelation of what’s actually happening. With this forgiveness, the light of awareness, I’m able to forgive myself for ever having believed I don’t matter. It’s like a homecoming; we’re coming back to ourselves. From that place, we’re present in our world in a different way than when everything looked like it was against us.
MM: Can you say more about this process of forgiveness? That’s a word lots of folks have trouble with.
PS: (laughs) Because all of this is our creation, the one we’re forgiving is ourselves. We’re forgiving ourselves for the misperception, which was unavoidable but never true. When you get to the sixth step, and you’re shining the bright light of awareness, it’s like training a beam of sunlight on mold. It has an energetic power to dispel false perceptions. We’re looking to dispel, disintegrate, and dissolve the attachment and identification with “I’m not good enough, I don’t matter.” That’s what creates a “me” that needs to get something, or avoid something, in order to be okay.
MM: So our triggers are always with us but our relationship to them shifts?
PS: Yes. I’ve learned this in my own life. In 2010, I had a powerful experience that showed me the error of my own beliefs, which enables me to do the work I do. I woke up from what I call the error of codependency, the belief that somebody else’s well-being depends on me. I had had a lifetime of that! I was 70 at that point, and had put all of my attention on two close family members. I had done the Work with Byron Katie years before that, and could hear Katie’s voice in my mind saying, “If you’re suffering, you’re believing something that’s not true.” With that, something shifted. The “me” fell away, actually. I came to sense myself as one with all of reality as well as other people. Since all judgment is self-judgment, that fell away. Often what happens with major wake-up calls is that things have to get close to catastrophic before they get our attention. We have to go all the way through our disturbing material to come out the other side.
Stay tuned for Part Two of this conversation.
