Taking Back Our Projections, Episode 324
When we freeze in public - giving a speech, or making a presentation - it's valuable to consider the possibility that all the unwelcome attention that seems to be coming our way might actually be our own attention, projected out onto others.
In other words, feeling everyone's intense interest in us might show us something about how interested we are. The same goes for the feeling of pressure to do things - which might be a projected-out version of our own wish to contribute.
Seeing this way starts to give us some routes to notice how we're participating in life, and to receive our own lives rather than push them away. And when we can see the ways in which 'what is happening' is at least in part 'what I am doing', we have the opportunity to turn our many gifts in productive directions that free us rather than constrain us.
This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife
Here’s our source for this week:
Taking Back Our Projections
Perhaps nothing is more painful than the feeling of acute self-consciousness, the feeling that everybody is staring at us. Maybe we have to give a speech, or act in a play, or receive an award, and we freeze because we feel that everybody is looking at us. But many people don't freeze in public. So the problem must lie not in the situation itself but in something we are doing in the situation.
And what we are doing [is] projecting our own interest in people, so that everybody seems interested in us. Instead of actively looking, we feel looked at. We give our eyes to the audience, so that their natural interest in us seems blown out of proportion into a massive amount of interest zeroed-in on us personally, watching every move, every detail, every action. And so naturally we freeze. And we will stay frozen until we dare to take back the projection – to look, instead of feeling looked at, to give attention instead of being clobbered by it.
Ken Wilber, from 'No Boundary'
Photo by Rainier Ridao on Unsplash