December 24, 2023

324: Taking Back Our Projections

34 minutes

When we freeze in public - giving a speech, or making a presentation - it's valuable to consider the possibility that all the unwelcome attention that seems to be coming our way might actually be our own attention, projected out onto others. In other words, feeling everyone's intense interest in us might show us something about how interested we are. The same goes for the feeling of pressure to do things - which might be a projected-out version of our own wish to contribute. Seeing this way starts to give us some routes to notice how we're participating in life, and to receive our own lives rather than push them away. And when we can see the ways in which 'what is happening' is at least in part 'what I am doing', we have the opportunity to turn our many gifts in productive directions that free us rather than constrain us.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.

Here’s our source for this week:

Taking Back Our Projections

Perhaps nothing is more painful than the feeling of acute self-consciousness, the feeling that everybody is staring at us. Maybe we have to give a speech, or act in a play, or receive an award, and we freeze because we feel that everybody is looking at us. But many people don't freeze in public. So the problem must lie not in the situation itself but in something we are doing in the situation.

And what we are doing [is] projecting our own interest in people, so that everybody seems interested in us. Instead of actively looking, we feel looked at. We give our eyes to the audience, so that their natural interest in us seems blown out of proportion into a massive amount of interest zeroed-in on us personally, watching every move, every detail, every action. And so naturally we freeze. And we will stay frozen until we dare to take back the projection – to look, instead of feeling looked at, to give attention instead of being clobbered by it.

Ken Wilber, from 'No Boundary'

Photo by Rainier Ridao on Unsplash

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