Katheryn Kiker

Intimacy is a word that people associate with couples- and it belongs in that realm of course- but the use of the word can be applied to any type of relationship. For example, I imagine someone who’s been taking the same hike for the last 10 years has an intimacy with that specific trail, watching it change, knowing where all the twists and turns will be. Or a mother with her children, a farmer with their land, a surfer with the ocean, a chef with their knife. So self-intimacy is where you meet a kind of internal part of yourself, especially with ongoing familiarity.

Self intimacy requires a kind attention, acceptance, and vulnerability. And it takes work.

Why is it important to understand your own inner workings, be intimate with them? 

How you are with yourself extends outward to every area of your life. Your relationship with others. How you behave. How you accomplish your goals. Neglecting that you have an inner experience often results in your underlying emotions taking control of situations and behaving in ways you do not mean to.

Ram Dass, the author and meditation teacher, quoted in his book Be Here Now, “I can do nothing for you but work on myself… You can do nothing for me but work on yourself.”

At first when I read that quote I didn’t exactly like it. But the more I think about it the more I recognize the truth in it. Humans have a natural tendency to protect themselves from the people they’re closest to. It doesn’t start out this way, of course, but overtime there are little hurts that happen which we can interpret as a lack of caring.

Without having intimacy with ourselves and tending to our own pain, yes you can be giving to others in action, but the more you do so will result in harbored resentment. And we can start to feel our hearts aren’t open when we’re giving and we don’t know why- we know we love them and we want to give them things but it’s a real strain.

When we work on ourselves we also grow the capacity for what we’re able to accept from other people – we get better at accepting others are human and may hurt us in ways that are disappointing, and we also get better at letting ourselves receive love from them. So truly, whether we are giving or receiving, working on ourselves is the only way we’ll be able to understand how to do it in a loving way.

How do we become less confused about our own internal experience and experience more self-intimacy?

I can understand that sometimes there’s so much going on inside us that it feels like if we start listening it’s just going to be very anxiety inducing. I can also understand the feeling of being so numb that nothing comes up. In both of these situations, our minds have taken control. We feel like we need to run everything we experience through a string of logical tests to make sure that it’s valid enough and honestly, it’s hard to acknowledge anything we’ve gone through as real as long as that part of us is running the show. So mad respect to our minds, they do so much for us, but they’re also going to find a fault in anything and what we experience and it is not really up for judgment. It also creates a lot of static that makes it hard for us to listen in- so the antidote to either business or numbness is to pay attention more closely and just be curious about what comes up.

One of the reasons I think we start to judge ourselves instead of be curious about our internal experience is the idea that we think other people have it so much worse and we shouldn’t complain. I have heard so many people say this, I almost think it’s a part of our culture. And I agree if we are talking about the median income of Americans and taking care of our physical needs, yes. To some extent the comparison is correct. However, what’s interesting to me is that it comes up when we’re talking about emotional suffering. And suffering is one of the realities of being human, you can’t decide to focus on someone else’s suffering and yours goes away. This philosophy of others have it worse doesn’t actually help us to focus on others in a real way, it just keeps us looking away from our own pain. And if we bring in the quote from earlier … you can do nothing for anyone but work on yourself.

There is suffering all over the world and just thinking about it can be paralyzing. But just think, if we can’t address our own suffering, how are we going to address it when we see it in others? Shifting our focus to ourselves isn’t selfish- it’s just that we can’t take care of the whole world when we aren’t taking care of ourselves, our families, our neighbors. So when we work on our own experiences we become more open to seeing the pain of others, are more able to operate from a place of caring, which can motivate us to do what we can in our daily lives to make the world a better place.