Upstairs Downstairs
This is Episode 13 of Awareness at Play podcast on Apple Podcasts.
In this episode of Awareness at Play we’ll look at a way to approach our problems with acceptance and allowing. Being OK with our dark side isn’t easy, and we’re going to use an analogy and its practice to help.
Uncovering self-images and core beliefs that have caused our suffering is a good step toward freedom from them, but often, even after we’ve discovered a lot, we are far from free of them. There is a tendency to want to rid ourselves of our blindspots, and plenty of directives point toward ideas of detaching or distancing from them. Kinder words for making them go away are dissolve, digest, or melt. It’s understandable that we’d want freedom from our attachments. Isn’t that why we started the path of recovery or awakening in the first place?
Here’s the analogy that conveys the approach we want to take toward our blindspots.
There are British TV shows like Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey that are set in Britain in the days when aristocratic families ran great estates.
These TV programs show the aristocratic family living on the main floor, enjoying a luxurious life, wearing fine clothes and surrounded by priceless belongings. Their domestic servants are stationed on the lower floor, working hard from early morning to night keeping every aspect of the household clean and running smoothly.
Our mind is like one of the great estates. We house a well-curated upper facade while we hide our less becoming attributes out of sight.
It may seem like a weak analogy. Unlike the hard-working servants of the great estate, our blindspots don’t seem like qualities that support and serve us. Don’t they thwart our efforts to live peacefully?
We presume that our upstairs personas are the right ones while the downstairs ones should stay hidden and never bother us. We think that we call Me is the fancy face we show and what we call our dark side is just stuff we need to get rid of so our fancy face can be happy.
Yet the hidden stuff below runs the show. It is full of energy, potencies, and capabilities. It’s just been put to use toward misguided motives, and then ignored and disrespected so long it’s in a lot of pain.
The fancy exterior seems nice, but wouldn’t happen at all without the dynamism of the unseen operatives.
The problem is the upstairs downstairs idea in the first place. Our only chance of peace is recognizing that hiding anything promotes an attachment to a propped up outer image and an unacknowledged inner strength. It’s a vicious cycle of unawareness.
Here’s the practice with this analogy that starts us on the path of integration. We’re going to pretend we’re characters in the house.
Since we seem to think we are the upstairs people, we begin by playing the role of the grand matron of the estate. At Downton Abbey, the title role is Lady Grantham. Pretend you are she, the Dowager Countess, proud of your vast wealth, fastidious about the running of the house, snooty about who comes to call, and beholden to all kinds of rules about manners and etiquette.
You are going to invite the low-bred chimney sweep, the dirtiest of the servants to come upstairs and sit on your expensive, imported velvet couch. You are going to serve him tea and treat him like he is your equal.
The practice is to learn about him. Ask him questions about his life. Find out as much as you can about him, with curiosity and sincerity.
In real life, we are about as keen to treat our blindspots this way as Lady Grantham would be in this scenario. Yet if we are to become free of the suffering of our “household” we can be open to seeing what’s been running the show, what’s been neglected, what needs our attention.
The more we invite our blindspots to tell us about themselves while we listen with patience, kindness, and genuine interest, the more the we find they were always benevolent hidden energies. Unfortunately they had been put in service of well-intended but ill-directed tasks. And then, because of the pain they caused, they were shunted to the shadows long ago.
The integration of both our supposed upstairs and downstairs personas happens naturally as we gain acceptance for all the splintered parts of our psyche.
One might ask, who is the one seeing all these parts? There is no one to find there, just awareness itself. As these parts of ourselves integrate we find no need for the safety of a self-image. The one we imagined and thought was the most acceptable (in this analogy the upstairs self) has to maintain a long list of obligations and has to keep the downstairs images tucked away. Without obligations and hidden motives, we live in the present, responding to life as it happens.
If you’d like to try this Upstairs Downstairs practice, determine a part of yourself—a habit, a perspective, a trait—that you aren’t pleased with.
Imagine how difficult it would be for the Grand Lady of a great manor to ask the chimney sweep to come upstairs and sit on her fine couch, and see if you have some of the same disdain or disgust as you bring your blindspot, in all it’s displeasing aspects, to come into the light.
This disgust is actually fear in disguise. Who knows what this character will reveal?
Ask the blindspot about its life. Be respectful. Show interest and courtesy, as a great lady would treat her fancy friends.
Ask it where it lives. What it does with its free time. Does it have a family? How it likes its work. The same kind of questions you’d ask someone you don’t know at all. Someone who’d been silenced their whole life.
When you write down its responses, you can go in any direction. You can let it be psychologically insightful, revealing the inner motives of a long-held pattern. Or it can be a fictional character with answers out of a fantasy. You can draw it and it’s life.
The point is to give it attention. The analogy helps you see the way we’ve treated parts of ourselves as upright and other parts as ugly. This practice humbles our self-righteousness and gives more acceptance to our frailties.
The outcome, meaning the writing or the drawings we do, could be shared with someone who understands what you’re up to. This is an extra boost of self-awareness. It adds another perspective, and it might cushion the sting a bit more (if there is a sting.) Most importantly it perpetuates more acceptance.
We like to do this practice in a group setting. It magnifies the impact of it, and tends to be more fun and often more deep. It’s one of those practices that embodies the title of our podcast, Awareness at Play.
