My Previous 57 Lives I Was A Bear

When you close your eyes and picture yourself, what do you see?

Can you remember your face, the shape of your body? What are you doing in the vision? What emotion, if any, do you see? Are you alone? Where are you in the world, if anywhere?

For some, they will see themselves as a child or adolescent. Others will see themselves in aspirational terms, as the person they hope to become. Still others will see themselves in a role or relationship to others.

I have learned to see a bear when I picture myself, and it has deeply changed my sense of self, sense of direction, and sense of relationship.

A number of years ago I was sitting with a group of community workers at the start of a week-long practitioners gathering. We were introducing ourselves and as I listened I felt more and more certain that if I was to have an honest, deep encounter with this group from all over the world, I would need to practice vulnerability with regards to my struggles with depression and anxiety.

The problem was that in the past, disclosing such information about myself seemed like an invitation to all the “helpers” in the room - the good people who would take it upon themselves to offer me the key insight, process, or method to rid myself of depression once and for all. I knew from countless previous experiences that my practice of vulnerability ran the risk of inviting strangers to try and analyze and treat me.

So as I sat there waiting for my turn and trying to listen, my mind bounced back and forth between “I shouldn’t bring it up” and “but it’s the only way to know me”.

When it came to be my turn, I said something that I didn’t know was in me. And it was and is transformational for me.

After the usual script of sharing name and home, I heard myself say, “and I live with bears.”

I continued, “I live out on the edge of society, where wilderness overtakes the town and country. And if you visit me you will see the bears with which I live. Their names are Depression and Anxiety. And I’m nervous to tell you this because even when I tell you that I am okay living with these bears, I know that some of you will feel a deep need to run them off. You will come and explain to me how much better my life would be without these bears. And seeing me wrestling with these bears, you will try to convince me to scare them away once and for all - or simply kill them. But I am asking you not to do that. I just live with bears. You should know that, but I am not asking for your help or advice on that fact.” People were nodding.

“And I know that someone in here will hear me saying this and not believe me. And you will come to me anyway sometime this week to “help” me with my bear problems. But I do not want you to help me,” I said to laughter.

As the week continued, the image of myself as living on the border of wilderness and society, with bears, became more and more vivid. And as I predicted, someone did in fact try a few times to rid me of my bears. That only confirmed the truth of the metaphor for me.

After the gathering, I began to see that the image of “living with and wrestling with bears” was a wonderful explainer of my personal relationship to depression and anxiety, as well as the relationship I had other people, society, and so on. It was a metaphor that gave great meaning to my experience.

“Previous 57 Lives” imagines a reincarnated bear coming back to life as a person.

Ever since then, I’ve been working with metaphors as windows into individual and collective meaning. I understand metaphors this way: a vehicle for moving meaning around in our minds. By seeing myself as “living with bears”, I no longer imagined myself as a “sick patient” in need of a cure, nor as a “chained prisoner” in need of escape.

The patient and prisoner metaphors led me to search for responses to depression and anxiety that would cure illness or secure escape - outcomes I had chased for decades without catching them. But was does one do when one “lives with bears”? They learn to live in relationship to bears in ways that preserve one’s safety and health, but that also allow the perceived threat to exist.

As time has gone on, I’ve learned more about the power of this metaphor. I call it an organizing metaphor because I use it to make sense of and order my life and relationships. I have even come to understand that when I said I lived with bears, I did so without yet understanding that I am, myself, a bear. That image now is expressed in my writing, poems, and community leadership practice. The poem “Previous 57 Lives” plays with these ideas by imagining that I am a bear born for the first time ever as a person and how terrified I am to see myself this way. It explores the feeling I sometimes have of longing to return to my more native way of being in the world as represented by being a bear.

These images and stories have further allowed me to imagine myself in ways that my depression, anxiety, and self-loathing would not usually tolerate. When I used to imagine myself as only the human I see in a mirror, I could easily criticize and despise the parts of me I did not like. But when I imagine myself as a bear, the things that once gave me shame often simply melt into my overall shape. No longer, when I move, does an overweight, hairy, cantankerous philosopher move. Now when I move, a great bear rises, and looks and acts as a great bear does.

It is not a denial of what I do not want to be, but an acceptance of the whole.

Loving “Bjørn the bear,” I have found, is much easier that loving “Bjørn the person.” And not only that, since they are the same being, loving “Bjørn the bear” is loving “Bjørn the person.” It has changed how I think of my mind, my body, my heart, my vocation, my introversion, my power, my place - everything.

So what do you see when you picture yourself? If you were not a person, but any other thing, what would you be? With that in mind, how might you make sense of your life in different ways?