In short we are like icebergs. It is an applicable and useful analogy for self understanding.
This analogy is brilliant. I first came across it at an in-service training by someone else where I worked in community mental health. I don’t remember who that was any more. I don’t know where the analogy came from, but I have elaborated on it over the years. I have overlayed it with other systems of thought I find useful for describing and understanding how you operate in the world.
I found pretty pictures of icebergs and used them as teaching tools. It is a short course but enough to be useful. With it, navigation and evolution of your personal growth, self understanding and wellbeing is possible.
Behavior
We begin above the waterline. What is behavior, really? It is what we can observe about our own actions and what we can see in others. Behavior is accessible to the senses. That is all that is above the waterline of our individual icebergs.
We can see gestures, posture, gait, hear vocabulary, voice tone, feel skin, hugs, stiffness, ease. Smell perfume, taste kisses. All of that is behavior. You can understand what you see and respond to it. What it means is up to interpretation. That comes from below the water line. There is so much more going on underneath.
Thoughts and Feelings
A little bit below the water line are thoughts and feelings. We can deduce these to a certain extent. We know our own. The meanings of facial expressions are global. While body language is also somewhat global, culture also plays a part.
People from out own culture are easy to read. People from different cultures can pose a challenge. But someone can speak a sentence and mean none of it. Someone can wear a mask and their emotions are inscrutable. Still, they are closer to the surface.
Attitudes Values and Beliefs
Next up and deeper into the iceberg are attitudes, values and beliefs.
Each of these three are less mutable within a person although they can be emphasized or muted or changed with effort. They are deeper in the iceberg, not easily unfrozen.
Attitudes.
People have a dominant attitude. Some are idealistic. This is a tough attitude to have in this world. To want the shining city of idealism would create and to have those ideals dashed is not my idea of fun.
To have a spiritualist attitude, to ever be considering what could be, is the way of the optimist. There are realists, who examine what is, stoics who seek to handle or endure what is, skeptics who investigate what is, cynics who challenge what is, suspecting fraud, and pragmatists such as myself who are about figuring out what works and going with that.
(This particular set of core attitudes comes from the Michael Teachings which a philosophic framework that describes human personality and evolution. I have been a not particularly serious student of this framework for many years but serious enough to integrate it into my own wok where it fits well)
Values
Values are those qualities we find intrinsically important to us. These are things like family, honesty, excitement, fun, financial success, loyalty, friends.
It is a great idea to look into lists of values and consider which are the most important for you and whether you are living in alignment with them. People can feel good about their lives even in the midst of great difficulty if they are living in alignment with their values.
Beliefs
The majority of our beliefs are not even truly our own but were given to us by parents teachers, neighbors, clergy, others who were an influence early in life. They became the framework for “the rules” of survival after leaving that blissful infant period where there was nothing we need do but exist to be worthy.
If you snooze, you lose. The early bird gets the worm. It is a sin to be angry. Loyalty above all. Santa’s elves are watching you. If it doesn’t apply, let it fly. Some, people outgrow. Others are ours for life. Some are useful. Some hold us back from our best life.
The Challenge of Change
As such they are entrenched. When we look to change thinking or beliefs, it works for a while until survival brain kicks in to stop us. “this is what got you here”. This is what kept you alive” it is dangerous to change this!
And so we go back to what our nervous system finds familiar and comfortable instead of the better future we really do want. We get up and eat that snack at midnight for emotional comfort , or doom-scroll to reinforce our belief that the world is going to hell and we are right or other behaviors that make us miserable but it feels safer somehow.
The Deepest Layer Hides the Answer
Ahh and then there is the deepest layer, The part of us that is consistent throughout our lives, changeless. It is always there, but so covered with the rest of it, it is not surprising to be out of touch with it except rarely.
It is what it feels like when you breathe in. Notice how this feels the same, that it has felt the same forever.
I thought, “I will feel different when I am sixteen”, or twenty-one or thirty. But I didn’t it was the same as the day before and the day before that. And it has remained the same the entirely of my life. Examine, is this is not also true for you when you choose to pay attention? This is the Observer. Consciousness. It is who you really are.
Consciousness
All the rest of the levels are overlay. Consciousness is calm. Even. Peaceful. And it is possible to access it through simply noticing your breath and only noticing your breath for a few minutes.
Another way is to notice only sound or to expand your vision as wide and high as it will go and let go of all the words. The rest of our being is mutable. From this deeper place, the power, not to change, but to become who you really are, exists.
