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The Insight Trap
Conventional wisdom says that personal understanding requires insight.
You may be undertaking your personal work on your own through journaling, meditation, and/or any of the various books and workbooks that are available. Or you may be working with a coach, counselor, or guide. In any case, you seek out and welcome those flashes of insight that take you deeper into understanding yourself.
However, this often leads to insight just for the sake of insight. And insight for the sake of insight leads to constant analysis, relentless processing of experience, digging into memories and emotions, an endless seeking for more and more understanding — more and more insight.
When seeking insight becomes its own end and its own reward, you’ve fallen into what I call the “insight trap.” It’s easy and kind of fun to be there. Greater understanding of yourself feels quite rewarding. You’re mining for treasures, uncovering gems of revelation about yourself — “Oh, yeah, now I get why I do this, feel that, can’t sleep, hate blueberries...”
It’s a trap because it’s a dead end. When you form a habit of insight-hunting, you’re always looking for the next one, the one that will take you deeper, further, the one that will explain everything, the one that will help you feel better once and for all.
I don’t mean to be harsh, but that won’t ever happen. There is no “once and for all” insight. As long as you’re caught in the insight trap, you’ll always be looking for the better, deeper, next one. And you’ll always be stuck processing, analyzing, trying to understand.
In short, you’ll be stuck in an artificial focus on what’s happened to you and why — an endless loop through attempts to interpret your memories.
Insights are great signposts, but they’re not the end of the journey. There’s a time to cultivate insight, and there’s a time to look deeper and wonder — what if your insights were, as I suggest, signposts to true deeper understanding? Where might that lead you, and where might you already be?
Resistance
Resistance points to what you most need to turn towards and see, no matter how much you may resist doing so. When you gently, persistently consider what you’re avoiding, your insights will gradually shine a light deeper into it.
Insights into resistance can feel overwhelming. Rest assured that awareness allows a pace you can handle. Your fear of (resistance to) what’s been buried for so long will yield to the simplicity of seeing with the eyes of compassion.
Approach
I often use metaphors to help my clients open to new ways of being, new places within themselves. For instance, as I’ve said before, you can’t control your thoughts, but you can see the constant chatter of thought as background noise, nothing you need to react to — nothing more important than the clacking of wind-up mechanical teeth chattering across your desk.
What metaphors and approaches work for you as you turn towards your true Self? Your insights may surprise you. Let them lead you to where you respond instinctively.
One client wanted to deepen her meditation practice, but wasn’t having much success — until she took up an old handwoven afghan and began patiently unpicking the tangles that time had created in the fringe. At the end of an hour, she felt that she’d untangled knots deep inside her. What insight led her to that afghan? Follow yours and see where it takes you.
Commitment
Your commitment to coming home to your Self, to opening the door of the Remembering Room and stepping inside, is what calls most deeply to you. As you cross the threshold, as you continue to reaffirm your commitment over and over and over again, you’ll find insights leading you deeper into what commitment truly means.
Sometimes these insights will point out personal values you might not have acknowledged. Or they may reveal what work wants to express itself through you — whether it’s your career, volunteer work, or simply the quiet “work” of being what you truly are.
And one more thought...
Who and what is it that’s having these insights? What if you left behind the quest for insight, and instead looked for what it is that’s aware of insight? When you take insight personally, you start to grasp and seek, which closes down your opportunity to go deeper. Pause to notice the silence and where you always and already are. Allow your insights to move through you, without hanging onto them; experience them in the moment and in your whole being.
“Man is the only kind of varmint who sets his own trap, baits it, then steps on it.” John Steinbeck, American author, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1902-1968
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