Why We Need to Radically Reinvent Ourselves: A Conversation with Philip Shepherd, Author of “New Self, New World” by Sydney L. Murray
“We cannot liberate ourselves from a dead-end story that we cannot question. That’s what ‘New Self, New World’ does: it brings fresh questions to bear on our culture’s story, exposing the collateral damage that comes with living in our heads and yielding a new model of human consciousness that brings mind and body into balance.” —Philip Shepherd
Shepherd’s new book “New Self, New World,” is full of intellectual debate, thought, and musings along with very practical exercises at the end of each chapter to integrate the body and mind. Shepherd describes them as a “full body exercise that guides the reader into an understanding of what it means to be whole.” According to Shepherd, freedom, creativity, and presence are integral in a well-lived life. Recently I had the opportunity to speak with him.
Vision Magazine: What does the term ‘daily living’ mean to you?
Philip Shepherd: It means two things to me. It carries a danger and it carries a very luminous possibility. The danger for me is the staleness factor, because we fall into patterns that deaden us day after day to the world. That is just something that happens in our minds. The reality is the world is nothing but newness. Then the question becomes how to live from day to day with sensitivity and an appreciation to that newness.
The staleness is never a characteristic of the world; it is always a characteristic of the body. We tend to retreat from the sensitivity of the body into our heads to the point where we feel and attend to our own thinking and our own ideas more than we feel the present. I know people can get into a state where 80 to 90 percent of the time what they are really paying attention to is their idea of the world rather than the world itself. An idea is a static, bundle of energy. It is trapped and can only eventually fill us until it yields a new idea. The body is an infinite reservoir that is tapped into all the currents of life that swim around us.
VM: In your book you talk about the disconnect between the mind and body, as well as the female and male mind. Can you please elaborate?
PS: One of the most striking images I found in my research was the ancient Mayan concept of what it meant to be human. For them, humans are created with two skulls. There is the skull that contains the brain and then there is the pelvic bowl. There was a time when the goddess fell and the gods took over, between the early Neolithic and the Greek transition. That transition was not one of idea; it’s one that actually carried us from an experiential center in the belly. Up to the time of the ancient Greeks it was in the chest. The Greeks had a word [Freon] that means “mind,” but it also means “diaphragm,” where they experience their thinking.
Finally, by the time of Plato, we were in our heads. That transition to the belly centered intelligence up to the head. Centered consciousness is a transition from the female to the male aspect of our consciousness. I differentiate between them by saying the intelligence in the belly is where we can consciously be, and the brain and the head is where we can consciously think. What happened is that we have detached our thinking, not just from our body, but because our body is our bridge to the world, we have detached it from the world. That is why we walk around in our daily lives paying attention to our ideas of the world and neglecting the world itself.
VM: What would be the new model of living that is offered in your new book, “New Self, New World”?
PS: I would say the whole aspect of it begins with recognition that we are not unipolar thinkers. Because we believe our intelligence is trapped, we constrain our experience to conform to that idea. Each of us is born with two brains (there is a second brain in the belly). Our consciousness as humans is designed as an exchange between these two aspects of our consciousness. So, the core message of the book, in terms of how to reinvent ourselves, is one that overcomes the paradigm we are stuck on that our consciousness is locked in the brain. Instead of a unipolar consciousness, it is the consciousness that courses between these two aspects of our body consciousness.
VM: What do you think has gone wrong in our society?
PS: I hesitate to call it wrong, because I think it is a necessary part of our evolution. In the Paleolithic and the early Neolithic [periods] we were entirely matrifocal. We were centered on the mother, on the female aspect of our consciousness. What happened over the past 10,000 years is that we have moved up through the body into the head and devoted ourselves to male values, male agendas, and male ways of perceiving the world. If we continue along that path it will doom us all, it will doom us as individuals, and it will stunt what we are capable of.
We cannot act in the world around us, even in our day to day living, in a way that brings balance and harmony without first finding that within ourselves. So that is why my book is called “New Self, New World”—it begins with an opening of the self. When I say an opening of the self, I mean it begins with the kind of work that allows you to overcome the divisions in the self that have basically been imposed by our Western culture by this male outlook, value, and perspective.
VM: So, how do our two brains affect our lives?
PS: If you are stuck in the head you will not be able to resolve what you experience into a whole. The male aspect of our consciousness looks at the bits and pieces of the world—it analyzes. It systemizes and finds relationships, but it cannot integrate. So, that loop of chatter you sometimes find yourself listening to in your own head—because it is dissociated from the ordinary world around us—has only itself to move through, so it will never come to rest because you are not at rest in the world. [In] contrast, the brain in the belly, that whole region, is one where we can consciously be, and being itself is something that accommodates the entire world around us. That is where integration happens. I talk about this is in my book that we have lost the ability to feel the self as a whole, let alone the world around us, so people can feel parts of themselves, they can feel their body, they can feel their thoughts, they can feel their skin, their emotional life. But to come to rest in the whirl of all that and feel the whole of who you are now in this moment, in this place—it is just something our culture systematically undermines. It basically communicates that there is no place for that because the head rules everything.
VM: How would we uncover our true nature that you speak of?
PS: It begins with the body. Once you recognize that our evolution has carried the center of our consciousness from the pelvic bowl up into the head, and once you see the consequences of that, then you can start to heal. In my book there is an exercise called the Elevator Shaft. It is just a matter of feeling the center of your consciousness in the head and allowing it to tangibly drop down through the body to come to rest on the pelvic floor. By doing that you are reversing this 10,000 year trend that our culture has gone through, and as you drop that center, you may feel it get stuck, unable to go further down in places. When that happens, you have found a gold mine because you have come face to face with a division within yourself, something that is keeping you from your full experience of being. If you pay attention to that and allow it to soften and melt, you will find that your consciousness can continue its journey down. Once you are able to allow your consciousness to rest on the pelvic floor, you will have entered a completely different way of being in the world. It’s a way of being that is calm, sensitized, clear, and is able to integrate whatever your day to day living may bring to your doorstep.
VM: Why do you think our culture is so addicted to doing?
PS: We believe there is redemption to be found in idea[s] and solutions. It’s an expression of a male aspect of our consciousness that has cut itself off from the female aspect. So, we think that life is a problem that we have to solve, and if we can get enough information and accumulate enough stuff, we can win at this thing called life. It is a really gross misunderstanding because despite the claims of science that everything can be explained, it’s simply not true. Even quantum physics has hit a point where the world lies so far beyond explanation that they [scientists] pretty much leave it alone. There’s an aspect that they have run up against which is called quantum vacuum, and matter arises spontaneously into being from the quantum vacuum and then disappears back into it. There is a deep mystery to life that doesn’t mystify; it reassures. That seems paradoxical, but the more you hang onto a solution, the less adequate it seems, in terms of solving your problems. The more you open to the mystery of the moment, the more you come into relationship with the whole world around you.
VM: If there were one thing that people could do each day to change their life, what would it be?
PS: I would say pause. What I mean is unexpectedly, for no reason at all and even when it seems most inopportune, just come to rest in the moment. If you can learn to do that, you will free yourself from the driving agenda that tends to capture our life. It is an opportunity to rest, and the deeper the stillness you can allow yourself to dive into, the more subtly you tune [into] the world around you. Just as a pond, when it is still, a tiny insect can land on it and the ripples tell you what is happening. If there were a breeze, you would never see it. That insect landing on the pond is something in our daily life that happens over and over, and it is the nourishment of life itself if only we were able to notice. That is where the stillness of our being resides.
VM: How do people get beyond the attachments to their status in their lives?
PS: We are all, to some extent, attached with an idea of ourselves. In my book, I call it the Known Self—it’s who you know yourself [as]. Once you recognize the consequences of that, you want something better for yourself. You have a choice at any moment: you can either be who you know yourself to be or you can be present. Once you find what it is to drop into the pelvic bowl, then [you find] the richness that waits for you there—the ease and the connection— [and] anything else seems impoverished by comparison.
The other thing that happens is once you do drop into the pelvic bowl and connect with the world in that way, the world guides you. It asks something of you and it calls to you because you cannot drop into your wholeness as an individual without feeling the whole of the world that basically calls you into being. When that happens, there is an exchange that happens between you and the world [which] is what calls you to life and to engage and make a difference.
VM: Is that the same thing that would reduce stress?
PS: When you are doing something in a state of wholeness, there is an effortless quality to it and it is free of anxiety. By contrast, if you are doing things in a divided state, you are fighting yourself in at least one way and probably in many ways. It is exhausting, anxiety-inducing, and it clouds the mind. When you live from the whole of yourself, you are living with the pure signal of your own being.
VM: Do you believe that people in our society can change, understand this, and move toward this type of living?
PS: Yes I do, because I have been changed. I think we all long to experience life. Joseph Campbell said one thing that really had an effect on me seven years ago. He said, “We all think we are searching for the meaning of life.” I don’t really think that we are. I think what we yearn for is the experience [of] being alive. I studied as an actor for many years and when I started, my voice teacher was telling me I should breathe with my sacrum. (The sacrum is that triangular bone at the base of the spine.) I can’t even feel the sacrum, [so] it was really hard to work through that. What happened was that ultimately it felt so much better to allow the breath to drop all the way down to the sacrum and release out from there that I started to begrudge when it wasn’t happening. Now it is my natural way of being, because if I start to feel uncomfortable or edgy I know right away the breath hasn’t dropped into the body. I think that same principle applies with the dropping of the center of our consciousness down to make amends with the female aspect of our consciousness—the aspect of being.
VM: Do you have hope for our society/world?
PS: There are signs all around that people are recognizing the crisis into which we are marching. On the other side there are signs all around that people are stubbornly resisting. What is apparent to everyone else? I have to have hope because I love life and I have children and I know what this world could be if we stopped demeaning the female, shutting it out of our own bodies and perusing only ideas and solutions as an imposition of our will on the world around us. I do have hope. I just fear that the evolution of our consciousness won’t come early enough and there will be some very dark times ahead. If those dark times come then they will just accelerate our recognition of what we need to do next.
VM: What would the female mind look like for everyone, both male and female?
PS: Right now our culture teaches us to live in isolation, so we are alienated from our bodies and each other. We notice nature through our windshields, our double-pained windows, or the illuminated screens that surround us, but we don’t recognize nature as our most intimate teacher. That isolation is a very male thing. The male strength requires a sort of isolation because [it] is really typified by the astronaut who leaves the planet, Mother Earth, [and] goes into space and looks back and sees what is left in a totally new way. Then the astronaut comes back to Earth with that new perspective.
What happened to us is that we have lost the ability to come home, to return to the pelvic bowl. We have lost the ability to come back to the present. We keep ourselves in orbit, accumulating more and more perspective in this isolation, whether it is the hermetically sealed walls of our house or our car, or just a psychological space. That, I think, is the problem with our disassociation with the female and it is what will ruin us because isolation is a fantasy, and as long as you are chasing a fantasy, you are out of balance with the reality around you.
It is a matter of recognizing that what our culture presents as normal is just a story that has been develop[ing] for 10,000 years. It is a story that is taking a terrible toll on us. We have surrounded ourselves with imagery in our architecture, in our automobiles, [and in] our cultural icons. When you go into a public washroom and there is the sign on the door that says this is a woman’s washroom—and the head is a little ball that is separated from the body below—we look at that and we recognize ourselves. The layers and layers in our culture communicate the story to us that the head should be separated from the body and the self is an isolated entity that exists independent from the world, [but] it doesn’t; it’s a complete fantasy. This is the story our culture has told us. We look at a skyscraper, and what that communicates ultimately is that nature is irrelevant. It is this modelistic huge thing. It stands there unchanged and that is how we come to identify the self. Why doesn’t a skyscraper gather the rain and let it run down one side and celebrate it in a waterfall? It doesn’t because nature has no place in our idealized image of ourselves.
So once you recognize the story, then you can come back to the ordinary splendor or the world itself. We seek what is extraordinary in our lives, but in reality is pretty much a fantasy. It’s what money can buy. We have all these different images, [but] the only truly extraordinary times in my life have been gained through what is most ordinary. Anything that is truly ordinary is visibly born of the entire cosmos. You look at a twig, and the material from which the twig was made was birthed in stars, just as the material from our bodies was. The twig itself, the shape of it, tells of the rains, the suns, and the seasons it has gone through. You go back further into its story and it tells about the ancestors of the tree that breathed oxygen into the world and sustained your ancestors. It’s through the ordinary that we experience the extraordinary. That is why daily living is such a gift and that staleness is a choice.
Philip Shepherd is a writer, actor, and corporate coach who lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. For more information on Shepherd, please visit his Web site, www.philipshepherd.com. Contact him at philip@philipshepherd.com. Shepherd’s new book, New Self, New World can be purchased for $19.95 from North Atlantic Books at www.northatlanticbooks.com.