Name It, Tame It
There’s an old story about a creature who strikes a bargain: he will spin gold for the miller’s daughter, but the price is her firstborn child. Unless, he adds, she can guess his name.
She learns it. Speaks it aloud. And his grip is gone.
Not his power; Rumpelstiltskin could still spin gold. But his hold on her, the leverage that trapped her, dissolved the moment he was seen. Being named was enough to break it.
We carry a version of this inside us.
Modern psychology calls it affect labeling. When we name what we’re feeling - “this is anxiety,” “this is grief” - the nervous system softens. The flood recedes a little. Naming creates distance, and distance creates space to breathe. Something that was us becomes something we can observe. We are still affected, but we are no longer identical to the affect.
This is useful. Genuinely useful. But we might consider pushing a little further.
Notice what’s doing the naming. There is a “me” here who steps back, surveys the feeling, applies the label. That namer feels solid. Reliable. Present. And for most of us it goes unexamined because examining the examiner seems like it might unsettle everything.
What if we looked anyway?
A Course in Miracles suggests that the ego, that constructed sense of a separate, threatened self, survives entirely by staying invisible. Not hiding, exactly. More like blending. We don’t look at the ego because we are so busy being it. We experience its fears as real danger, its grievances as justified, its voice as our own deepest truth. The Course’s word for the remedy is simple: look.
“The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about yourself,” the Course tells us. Its power is entirely borrowed from our unawareness. To name it, to recognize the thought-pattern as a thought-pattern rather than the truth of who we are, is not to destroy it. It’s to stop feeding it with our identification.
Gently. Without drama. We look.
Join me in Thursday’s class where we’ll explore the practice of naming what runs us, and discover the quiet freedom that comes from being the one who looks. I look forward to seeing you then.