All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
MAY SARTON
IN THAT FIRST SESSION with Nancy Napier, I had bypassed the hardest years and found a Wild Child from an earlier, happier time. It was as if my subconscious had given me an immediate reward as a way of encouraging me to continue returning. But meditating by myself, I still found that my mind glanced off the years that came later, when my mother and I were living on our own, as if they were behind an invisible shield. I feared that, if I allowed myself to feel the emotions this little girl had worked so hard to suppress—the heart-piercing sadness of watching my mother as she tried so desperately each day, like a bird with a broken wing, and the panic of trying to be her caretaker when I was too young to care for myself—I would fall into an old and familiar well of invisibility and aloneness.
For the first time, I would have to admit just how much I had missed having a mother.
It was a fear I first had noticed in my relationship with an older woman whom I trusted, loved, and depended upon in a way unique for me, and for that very reason I couldn’t hug her in the easy way I could hug my other women friends. She played a “mother” role toward me, and I wanted that so much I feared I would dissolve. This fear was, I realized, why I had chosen to play a sister role with all the women in my life. I didn’t know how to be a daughter and accept help and nurturance—though I wanted them desperately. And to become a mother would have meant getting lost in caretaking again, and perhaps becoming as broken-spirited as my mother.
When I explained this to Nancy, she suggested that I introduce a new image into meditation. After the usual induction, she asked that I see myself walking on a path through a natural scene that I found beautiful and safe: a forest or meadow, the seashore or the mountains—anything that rose up from the back of my mind. She encouraged me to make this scene real by asking questions: What were its sounds and fragrances? Was there sunlight or shade? How did the path feel beneath my feet? I realized she was calling up all five senses in order to find the strongest bridges to the unconscious, but even this outside observation didn’t keep her questions from working.
I began to see a forest of pine trees with a path that seemed to parallel an ocean, yet also drew closer so that, in the distance through the trees, the ocean itself was visible. As usual, my visual sense was strongest, but I had intimations of the crunch of pine needles beneath my feet, the tang of salt and pine in the air, and the feel of dappled sunlight under trees. Those faint perceptions added to a sense of being present in the scene.
This path was a part of my life’s journey, Nancy explained. My conscious self was an observer, a passenger, and my deeper self was the voyager. Ahead of me on the path was someone walking where I had yet to travel. It was my future self, the person I wanted to become, an optimal self who was leading me. She suggested that I look more closely at this distant woman: What did I notice about this future self? How was she different from my present-day self? When I looked at her, how did I feel?
Though all I could see was a shadowy figure, I was surprised to feel a kind of strength and clarity emanating from it. As Nancy’s questions progressed, I could see that this future self was wearing some sort of long, dark cape that flowed down from hair pulled back in a bun or braid. Looking at her made me feel inspired, yet uncomfortable, as if she were desirable but cool and unfamiliar at the same time, but there was also an implicit inner yes, as if I had accidentally stumbled on the right answer. Only one detail was clear and it made me smile: She didn’t have on shoes like those I was then wearing, with low heels but heels nonetheless. Her feet were planted firmly and felt the ground.
As if reading my mind, Nancy asked me to imagine myself inside this future self and to note the differences between her body-feelings and mine. I felt the sure-footedness again, and also a spareness and simplicity, as if this future self had been reduced to essentials by the elements. In her body, I seemed to be standing straighter, to be both myself and androgynous in a way that made gender seem irrelevant. “Your body,” Nancy explained, “is learning something important about how to recreate this future self in your daily life. It will remember.” Again, I recognized this as a posthypnotic suggestion; yet I could feel my body remembering.
Then she focused my attention on other questions: If you were able to look through the eyes of your future self, how would the world look different from the one you experience now? … Look back at your present self—what do you see? … Inside this wiser and more mature part of you, what emotions do you feel toward your present-day self? …
Though I hadn’t been able to imagine the face of my future self, I could look though her eyes—and suddenly the trees looked more sharp and green, and I could glimpse the brightness of the ocean in the distance. When I looked back at my present-day self, she seemed lost in the shade of confusion and encumbered with unimportant things. I felt a heart-turning-over compassion for that figure behind me, much more than I thought I could feel for myself.
From now on, Nancy explained, I would be able to call on this future and optimal self in daily life. If I called her up through my body’s memory of how her body felt, she would be there to lead me. With that inner “click” of something fitting into place, I knew this was true. She was a real and unreal image at the same time; a magnet that seemed to collect inner and unknown strengths around it; a far-off view that gave perspective to the present.
One more thing, Nancy explained: “If your present self is too afraid to go back and comfort your inner child, send this stronger, wiser self back to the child. She will go where you cannot.”
I sensed that this was right: until those childhood emotions had been lived through, my future, stronger self could go where I was still afraid to travel. She was ahead of me on the path.
As I left Nancy’s office this time, I thought: Perhaps that little girl has found a mother after all—the only mother who knows her.
Since that day, I’ve revisited my inner child—though still as my future self. Occasionally, I’ve painted or drawn what I saw; for instance, the basement room where a scared eleven-year-old lies on the top of a bunk bed while her mother sleeps beneath. Though stick figures are all I can manage, I find it’s the colors that count. Gray is for the ceiling that the little girl stares at to pretend nothing else exists, dark brown is for the horizontal figures of her and her mother lying on their narrow beds—and purple is for the healing witness of my future self who is entering the doorway.
I’ve also tried to use those future and different body-feelings in times of crisis or confusion. It doesn’t always work, of course, but I find that imagining a greater groundedness beneath my feet, a body that feels more spare and erect, does call up some deeper well of strength and focus—a sense of knowing what is important and what is not.
And sometimes when I feel a current blow hitting a childhood bruise, I do send that future self backward in time as a grown-up witness who knows what happened, but who is less afraid that it will happen all over again.
Since these voyages began, I’ve also talked to diverse people who use this “future self” in their daily lives. One young woman imagined her future self meeting the man she was about to marry—and realized he could not know or love the woman she wanted to become. It helped her understand that she had been pretending to be the person he wanted, not who she really was.
I know an older woman who placed photos of herself at each of several difficult stages of her life on the bedside table. By looking at them every morning with the more compassionate eyes of her future self, she dissolved her guilt at having “deserved” such hard times, and also retrieved strengths she had forgotten.
A middle-aged man with a badly damaged little boy inside himself—and a young son he was damaging in turn—imagined in meditation a laserlike beam of light emanating from the heart of his future self, passing through his present self, and illuminating the little boy on the path behind him. He realized that by focusing all his childrearing efforts on undoing the damage his father had done to him, he had been trying to father himself.
Because this process goes deeper than intellect, it often brings surprises. Some years ago while using this imagery, Nancy Napier had seen her future self in city clothes, lecturing in a conference room. Since public speaking terrified her at the time and she was working at an experimental psychology center in rural New England, this seemed unlikely; yet what she experienced when she envisioned that future self was an inner power and ease she hadn’t known existed. “I spent the next months imagining ‘her’ every morning,” she wrote in Recreating Your Self, “either visualizing the image or experiencing the feeling of being her.” After the center closed, she moved to New York and began consulting. One morning as she was standing in a conference room, talking to a large group of executives, and “doing it comfortably,” Nancy realized that she had indeed become her future self.
I’ve heard many other such stories:
• The mechanic and carpenter in Northern California who was an unhappy, paper-pushing Los Angeles executive until he realized that his future self had dirt under his nails, tools in his hands, and a smile on his face. In real life, this transformation took seven years, but it brought the satisfaction of working for himself. It also brought new self-esteem to his blue-collar father who had thought his son disdained working with his hands.
• The teacher in Montreal who consciously set out to approach his future and most authentic self by reentering his own childhood—at each developmental stage. With the knowledge he had gained from his years of teaching children, he supported that inner infant, toddler, child, and adolescent, until he had succeeded in literally reparenting himself. It also made him a better teacher, he said, one who could better empathize with his students.
• The teenager from Boston whose present self could not confront her sexually abusing father, even though she knew that her younger sister was being abused, too. Only after her future self had taken her terrified child-of-the-past to a safe place, where the father could never hurt her again, could she start the present-day procedures that saved her sister—and started her own healing.
• The documentary filmmaker in Rome who invoked a future self, and then made in her mind her own autobiographical film, thus viewing her life with form and perspective.
• The homemaker in Tokyo who saw a future self leading other women—and who began a newsletter for other homemakers struggling to educate their children in a competitive system and to break time-consuming traditions of homemaking at the same time.
• The union organizer from Detroit who kept seeing a future self surrounded by kids—even though his own grown-up children had been estranged from him for years—and so became a foster parent of five “hard to place” kids. The last time I saw him, his own children still had not forgiven him for giving strangers a father they had missed, but he felt happier than he’d ever been.
Not everyone used meditation to reach a future self. For some it made a spontaneous, one-time, life-changing appearance. For others, it had always been an organic part of daily life, something they never had to be taught. But given the external focus of modern life, most of us probably have to make a conscious effort to search for it, allotting a set period of time each day for writing, dream-capturing, meditation, or whatever else works. Many therapists, shamans, and other wise women and men recommend checking in with that future self often, perhaps each morning as part of a daily meditation. Nancy suggests adding the inner child to that routine, so there is contact with both the creativity that our child-self represents and the strength and wisdom of our future self.
Integrating a future self into the present is very different from the time-wasting, life-wasting habit of thinking about the future instead of the present; of indulging in magical thinking about what could happen; of living a deferred life. By definition, one can only live in the present—and time is all there is.
But each of us is a hologram. That means we can only perceive, understand, and value ourselves by looking from all sides; from a continuum of past, present, and future. They are all within us right now.
[[Footnotes]]
*The Gnostic Gospels—written about two centuries after the death of Jesus, rediscovered only in 1945, and not fully translated until the 1970s—are the record of a Jesus who presented himself as a teacher, not the son of God, and taught that God is within each of us. For background and major quotations, see Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, New York: Random House, 1979; Vintage, 1981. For a complete text, see James M. Robinson, editor, The Nag Hammadi Library, New York: Harper & Row; Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1977.
*For a discussion of addiction adapted to women, see Women, Sex, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power by Charlotte Kasl, New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989.