Illuminate the Committee in Your Head – Day 0
Illuminate the Committee in Your Head
By Stephanie Foley
Here’s a challenge: Find the “I” in team! The benefit of working in committees is the increased diversity of input, yet the drawback is frustrated members when there is too much discussion and too little action. Does it ever feel like that in your head? While resources abound to help the external world to improve performance and create high functioning teams, who is guiding the committee in your head? Who is “self” regulating and directing the various elements of your personality a.k.a. the members of the committee in your head? Which personality tendency — thoughts, feelings, desires, intuition, sensation, your imagination or your will – knows what it best for “you” and what if they all disagree?
To illuminate this committee is to bring a collection of disordered tendencies into a meaningful synthesis of self. A multidisciplinary approach to this work includes transpersonal psychology, shamanism, and spiritual practices such as Buddhism. What the transpersonal psychologist calls a sub-personality, the shaman calls a soul part. Astrologers interpret how these personality elements play out through the cycling of the planets, and quantum physics is mapping out the energy field where the paradox of individuality and transpersonal identity connect.
In the great quest of figuring out who we are, how life works, and finding meaning, both ancient wisdom and modern science keep telling us the same things in different ways. Ancient wisdom tells us there are four elements – earth, water, fire, and air. Psychologist Roberto Assagioli parallels Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs with four major levels of identity – subpersonalities, ego, self, and transpersonal self. Medical anthropologist Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. wrote about four levels of perception and four domains of vibration shared by medicine people of the Andes called “Laika” in his book, The Four Insights.
