The hard way

“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”

Adrienne Rich

Sure enough, I agree. What is “that hard way”? Whatever I might have imagined to be smooth enthusiasm and enduring love the other idea, is now a bundle of nerves rushing through my stomach, filling my mind’s space, pressing me to make a big decision where no such drama is necessary.

I know this place.

A relationship is blooming into a new phase. Conflicts are inevitably part of it, the only way out is through. The depth of the appreciation, the rightfulness of the relational compositions, the co-occurring complexity, some felt clinging and avoiding on both ends, turn it into an intimidating process. I feel a deep inner urge to disclose my truths, to confess, with a somewhat desperate longing to co-create a blank piece of paper, an emotional tabula rasa, on which I imagine a redrawing of the relational conditions, cleansing all the projections, all the childlike reaching out and the hardened self-protection.

Probability is, things will get messier, feel a bit more chaotic, and, as such, demand more trust and surrendering, more communicative clarity and experimental progress. I can’t do right what has been wronged in the farther-reaching past. I will do wrong, and I will only learn about what is right by allowing a mutual wrongdoing to inform our relational evolution.

It is in the eyes of this dearest friend that I self-recognize a continuous refinement of truths. It is not an inner pressing, overarching set of standards, it is an embodied alchemy of values expressing themselves through ongoing, fragile openness, renewed humbleness, and full-fledged appreciation of differences leading to an unknown dance of two bodies trying to break-down vulnerability into controllable motions and characters. Can we stretch wide enough to accommodate each other’s emotional reach?

Reality is teaching me to surrender beyond a highly educated role, beyond the position best suited for a convincing transcendence of old pains, even paid for. Reality is asking me to deeply look into the pain, and acknowledge how the other, just by being who they are, is inviting me to embrace it unconditionally, to open towards the evenly justifiable experience of deep pleasure, the beauty of a unique connection amid frightening uncertainties and a deep-rooted need for security. Will the other go the hard way with me?

Do we ever have another question in mind?

How grateful to be dancing with lightening, to be inspired - and contained - by the complexity and intensity of everyone of my friends, of every one of the relationships born out of striking love.

To feel - a lot

The pressing question was running circles, shaping a lower quality of mind: what can I possibly dó with this potential to feel – a lot?

As I approached puberty, my inner doubts about sensitivity's outer manifestation also grew. Looking back, I know the intensification of inner doubts is rooted in personal, social, phsyical and cultural conditionings that surpass the power of a child to feel worthy as such and at the same time convincingly competent in the external world, in the frightening, powerful and conditioned eyes of others.

The picture is nuanced, besides feeling worried and confused about my role in society – something that I, fueled by intensity, claimed must be a calling – I also noticed some of the clear qualities that came with that same potential to feel a lot. Leadership talent, a source of bursting creativity, deep connections, a strong intuition, to name a phew. But identifying these potentialities as an answer to my question – what can I do? – demanded that I synchronized the complete answer with clearcut intrinsic motivation. That same feeling-potential would not accept any other motivational quality. I must forge my own path, like Katja writes (in the attached blogpost). But to do so, I must trust. And trusting myself and others has been quite challenging at times.

Luckily, I did experience the opportunities, momentum, and spirit to go through a process of meaningful societal contribution and accompanying acknowledgement. A sense of belonging and creative expression of deep value to the wellbeing of others have nourished self-esteem. In this process, I did trust the unknown, something that was easier 'to do' back then.

These months, I am settling into a more instrinsically felt and resilient appreciation of feeling-me. A quality of experience that goes beyond the question of 'doing' and feels intimately and socially trustworthy.

Thanks to a great mentor, many mirroring friends, and thanks to caring and appreciative colleagues in the gifted field, I rest my case:

What can I possibly dó with this intensified and sensitive potential to FEEL? Well, a lot! Just being(-with-it) is sourcing new creative output.

Embodied in amazing senses, aware of an intriguing openness ‘underneath’ conditioning, breathing life into the connection that I am, trusting how the environment receptively flows through me, mirroring its subtle qualities and letting go, wherever possible, of self-preserving projections.

The theory of positively disintegrating is becoming more heartfelt, rooted in my stomach area with my body as the carrier of delicate dynamisms, broadening the scope, healing and artistic impact of sensitivity. It's a darkish night of the soul for sure, and I, once I feel into it, would not want it otherwise.

Deep inner sea

Some years ago, I had a coaching session after an assessment. The coach emphasized the importance of learning how to sink into the emotional depth of my experience. We spoke about a deep inner sea. A longing bubbled up. Surely a transgenerational longing, I did not know where it stemmed from, how to root it, or follow its seamlessly endless grasping.

The longing appeared to be a nameless and faceless deep-sea creature, scaring the one in my mind always trying to oversee the depth.

I have always been drawn to the sea. Swimming is, next to dancing, my favorite sports. Funny enough, as a young girl, I was very hesitant to learn how to swim. I refused to go into the water, but when I finally did go, and I was about six years old, the flattering story goes that I learned swimming strikingly fast. I can’t remember the details; I do know that water has felt like a second skin.

So, during that coaching session, I imagined what it would be like to learn how to be as fluid as I can be, in a continuous dance with my environment, sensing its shapes, motions, and sensations in the most inner parts of my body, and offering nourishment by mirroring graciously, falling into an intuitive life. It felt appealing, a potential I wanted to explore, a beingness I wanted to celebrate before the disintegration of this marvelous life form.

Now, some years later, I give into what is needed to do so. To be as feelingly fluid as my body – and thus mind – can be. Throughout the years, and with everything that has happened and has shaped my emotional and relational tendencies, I know that fluidness has partially been formed for surviving instead of thriving. Internalized violence has come with a long battle with myself, and not seldom also with my most intimate social environment. Since softness and clear mental discernment are dominant qualities of my social surrounding these days, I can dive a little deeper into conditionings withholding me from solidifying that characterizable fluidness.

This process brings me in contact with that undirected longing. I now see that what I thought was a monster, is a deep-sea creature with fascinating and fine-tuned senses to swim (us) through the darkness.

And I found a bedrock for that deep inner sea. Earth firmly holding the sea to its chest, drawing it inwards with the help of gravity, knowing how the water is ultimately formed out of the most inner earthly gasses. Here, my attention draws equally to the meteoritic forces that play a vital role in the creation of the most fluid elements of all. Violence hasn’t created a wall out of water, it has roared it into being, onto the surface.

Not having any color, water reflects what-is. Moreso, it is part of a vital cycle, a life-giving potential that has the superpower to reshape and reshape, never in need of claiming a particular place or space for as long as Earth embeds.

Yesterday, after an intense session of emotional healing, I rested my hands and feet on the mud surrounding an elegant tree. As if I could draw in what was underneath the earth. And I could, by trusting the presence of the bedrock.

Explosively me

Hello, who’s there, inside? I am a bit afraid of my own voice, or force. Or core. Is it explosive? Well, yes, a big bang of one human life waiting to happen wholly and intensely. Parts of conditioned-me prefer to be implosive – some might call that introvert, which sounds much better and feels comfortably safe. I am sure some of the associated behavioral tendencies qualify as self-sabotage, even if circumstances are genuinly testing. But, wat is testing, actually? Rusty projections are since identifying with them imprisons my thinking, feeling, and actions. A learned sense of safety may well turn out to be a bundle of constructions.

This period, I feel like the best way to break through, or soften, let go and discharge these self-denying habits, is to name them directly within a context of attuned witnesses. With the gentle yet forceful awareness of somebody that ‘has seen it all’, my mind’s eye may see through the layers of hardened skin and reach my heart’s wisdom, communicating authenticity by allowing my motions to align with a felt sense of life. Something I could not do without the nourishing support of mentors disguised as friends , and everyone else cocreating what I, somewhat hesistant, call 'my path'.

Choosing words is, logically, a bit hard these days. However fluid and playful interpretation can be, unfiltered honesty is more important than creativity these months. This is challenging, my ego comes with an identification with the one thing I always knew I ‘had’ within arm’s reach: creativity. And hey, if the things I say must reflect the ‘real me’….well, this comes with quite a lot of pressure, of course.

Out of the emptiness that will lay bare after this emphasis on transparent self-recognition, new artistic forms will arise, I am sure, trusting laws that surpass my decision making. Because surely, creativity and honesty do not have to be opposites. Once the creational source called sensitivity is unmasked, creative energies otherwise involved in veiling depth of being are unleashed.

Ironically, a pressing emphasis on ‘self’ will dissolve simultaneously.

Whoever I interpreted to be may turn out to be much more unknown than I dare to intuit! This dance between playfulness and seriousness, or truthfulness, is stretching the emotional reach of every learned conviction. Embodiment is the stage of this dance.

Want to dive deeper into the question what authenticity really – REALLY – is? Settle yourself in a comfortable position and experience how this podcast about 'authentic presence' may or may not resonate with you.

*And see the following page for the next edition of our training in authentic presence which starts in March, will be held in Brussels, in English (the precise information about dates, location, and accomodation will soon be published).

Let her lead

What a breath smoothing interaction it was. The streaming sensitive responses of a good friend invited me to graciously offer tender embraces to respond to his evenly distributed need for care, however invisible at times.

A while ago, his attuned responses showed me that it is really possible for every – every- of my physical boundaries to be acknowledged. During a kind conversation about intimacy, he determinedly stated my autonomy and freedom to always say no and to be taken 100 percent seriously. There was a perfect harmony between his softly yet resolutely spoken words and the gentle humming I sensed from his upper body slowly swaying from left to right while addressing his values. This is how protection without any pressure or demand feels like, my inner child learned eagerly. Finally, those parts of me that still and shameful believed it was necessary to hold on to (the also internalized) distrust and the nonverbal, pressive memories of an assault, could loosen.

Maybe even for the first time in my life, my bodily integrity felt like an undeniable central reference point for every form of intimacy. The context of deep connection outside of any predetermined exchange or role made it all the more meaningful. His words were expressed in such a harmonious, direct, autonomous, and principled way, that I gave up the struggle to be alert, to notice any sign potentially saying I should be on the lookout for transgression of physical boundaries. This is what it feels like to be aware, not alert. My ‘no’ felt honored through his words, my skin felt mine, and my heartbeat not a threat but my body’s pounding bond with me. Also, as it turned out, this was the moment in which I was also ready to receive such a humane gift of tender love and acknowledgement of my integrity. An emotional – not per se intellectual - awakening to the truth of my openness, and how it has been damaged in the past, and how it is still, without a doubt, the heart of my heart.

Compassionately, I look back on learned behavior and the fear that accompanied physical closeness. I was shaken, not broken. In need for help and subtly yet ongoingly lost in the continuation of traumas we get caught in, generation after generation. Luckily, this can change.

Some weeks later, I felt totally safe to trust the openness of my body in interaction with this same friend.

While sharing reflections on emotional needs, I simply uttered the words – motions - my body was communicating. There was no script going on, thoughts ran slow, and mental images weren’t influenced by damaging situations from the past. Emotional, sensual, and psychomotor excitability could coordinate a dance of touchable closeness, fully and finely attuned to what his evenly vulnerable body needed. Just a hug. No strings attached.

Again, trusting the feedback of my body was such a strengthening experience, precisely because the setting was intimate. I deeply appreciate the power of words, and now the process is to integrate the full potential of emotional depth in those words by letting my body do as much nonverbal talking. It hasn’t been an easy journey, violence left its traces in tendencies that I know how to hide, but it’s out in the open now. I feel my body’s integrity much more vividly thanks to these kinds of interactions with loving friends, however supportive therapy has been in the past.

The bodily wisdom can be recognized, amongst others, in how touch can be a surrendering, tendering invitation to embrace every single sensation of being alive. To celebrate pure signs of life's energy. And our human form on this planet, a complex and embodied dynamic of different needs and the central role connection plays in all of this.

My body’s openness has been abused, I did not wholly learn to honor her presence, but her tender wisdom is on the rise. The word grateful doesn’t match the deep tissue relaxation this brings. It’s love. A love for my own integrity, for sentient life, and my power to stand for this truth. A testimony to the power of community.

A long, soft talk after a long, cold walk

A swift breath denotates the rhythm of my feet. Steadfast and even joyful do I bounce over these streets. Winters cold does not seduce me inside a warm home. Instead, I feel the rush of a refreshing wind and the luck this brings after moments of demanding despair. Just yesterday I was unconscious of anything stroking my skin so precisely and awakening, ever.

Life is teaching me a thing or two here. How much space I need, I am accustomed to, to attune autonomously. In the middle of family life, the pull towards energetic out-thereness is enormous. For now, I rest my case and walk alone, absorbing the flip side of complexly attuned sensitivity. It is okay to surrender to all the psychological limitations, this pause of participation in social life will me bring me back to a home much broader than my conditioned eye tends to disentangle from the primordial sea. The embracement of the natural beauty surrounding me, and the recognition of the loudest silence possible to affirm the transcendent source of it all. It’s just 50 meters away from home, every day. Or is it?

A couple of days ago I noticed myself thinking, at the end of an angered state of mind, "How nice would that be, having myself as a coach". Of course, this made me giggle internally. Was this self-aggrandizement, or a truthful invitation my mind and heart might want to listen to? Can I transform this potentially unilevel approach to frustration into a multilevel understanding of what is unfolding this inner winter? Dear mind, you are in need for your own attunement, do you know?

With concentrated effort, rooted in the practice of coaching, journaling and introspecting, I imagine myself sitting at the other side of the couch, attuning to myself, and creating a holding space as I do in my work as an emotional guide.

This feels nice. I tend to type ‘actually’ at the end of the previous sentence, but I find it important to leave that vague nuance out of the sensorial picture.

At some point in the connection, apparently perfectly adjusted to what my body and mind need, I pose the first question, listen to my own response and yet again finetune mutual understanding by reflecting authentic experience and embodied associations. Clearly, my self is receptive towards this kind of internal reciprocity. "Aaaah", I concluded with the release of someone finally entering the front door of their home after a long, almost freezing walk in rather steep mountains, "…how nice". A deep “nice”, not some “nice” to appeal to another’s approvement, but an embodied “nice”, stemming from every bone, muscle and longed for and relaxing end-of-the-searching. “Here we are now.”

I now see our couch as a vivid invitation to tune into myself.

And I imagine this to be part of “autopsychotherapy”, a dynamism of personality growth Dabrowski referred to:

“Autopsychotherapy: Psychotherapy, preventive measures, or changes in living conditions applied to oneself in order to control possible mental disequilibrium. Autopsychotherapy is the process of education-of-oneself under conditions of increased stress, as in developmental crises, in critical moments of life, in neuroses and psychoneuroses. […] Conscious selfhealing is an example of this process at work; it is, however, more crucial in the mental and emotional than in the physical realm. Solitude and concentration play a very important role in this process.”

‘Multilevelness of emotional and instinctive functions’, p. 40, Dabrowski.

The cold, hardened spots inside of me are in need for unrelentless care. Softening coaching with an equally sharp mind and testable practices. So that during and after all that has been disintegrating, I find truth in processes yet unsaid, in between the lines or in need for fierce perception and differentiation, continuously moving and often times, without solitude (and a couch in the middle of my emotional living space), in the periphery of my awareness.

A strong personal pull towards humbleness is often counterbalanced with proud and persona’s, due to the bitter self-rejection that got me stuck in loops of denial. In my self-on-self coaching session, we encounter a gentler version. I appreciate humbleness, there is no survival need for self-rejection anymore, and who knows how being humble may be the right guide to appreciate what is truly of value but often dismissed as such. The vulnerable, the suppressed, the in-between the power structures. The emotional gift.

An unrealized potential is guiding the way. Let my own feet carry me forward by doing what is needed right now to heal humbly, and to heal humbleness. Slowing down my pace, I turn inwards and find a wonderful coach to team up with.

Self-to-self

“To accept that there can be no happiness without despair is to recognize that, rather than a malady of the spirit, despair is the rudder course-correcting the ship of the self, steering it from the actual to the ideal.”

Maria Popova

And so, I lean into this experience of despair. After a period of intensified hope, or at least bubbling imaginations and recognition of longings, this is the moment to surrender to its counterpart. I am not particularly fond of this phase of emotional waves, to be or not be anchored in some sort of development. My body aches and is tired, my mind is heavy and angered, loss is in every limb. At the same time, the heaviness is bringing me back to my body. It’s demanding my total attention, and even though this is what is challenging amidst everyday duties, it is not to be denied. It can’t, reality wanting to birth itself will break my resistance by any emotional means, I know. I know birth, and I know birthing.

Kierkegaard writes:

“The self is a relation which relates to itself… A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity… A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self.

[…]

Despair is the imbalance in a relation of synthesis, in a relation which relates to itself.”

As I grew up learning to suppress certain powers, and my voice, not seldom a strong one, got partially dimmed, some vital aspects of my relationship to my-self sunk into the unknown, the unreachable. Or did not yet develop into what they could, or even should (do I dare?), be. The last few years, the external circumstances of my life have changed quite intensely. There is nowhere to hide anymore; without those vital aspects, my-self mourns enormously. In the at times suffocating but also determined walls of a home that I finally call my home, my-self demands a relationship. With me. Here and now, utterly intimate, with no other intention than to be who I am at this moment.

Kierkegaard again:

“This then is the formula which describes the state of the self when despair is completely eradicated: in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it.”

Life's energy roaring through my veins fuels a new kind of discernment. A blooming ‘third factor’ Dabrowski might have called it. While so many old conditionings pop up in my doings as a friend, mother, partner, entrepreneur and creator, something must give. And this something is what is left of me when I leave aside all hasty motions and quickened thought patterns once needed to assure attachment. It must give into authenticity, but not without seeing the tough structure of egoic and learned tendencies. Or the uncontrolled emotional peaks challenging loved ones to be ever more present.

Once I do give into authenticity an undemanding hope is everywhere, convincingly pointing the way, stating that I should repeatedly breathe life into what is worth despairing for - determined without hesitancy or anxious haste.

I like to lay down on the floor, imagining and feeling the earth responding with strength and presence, particularly when grieving. What a mentor. Although, mind us, so much more than that.

Roar like a beast

Pressure cookers everywhere. As if every cell, nerve, of my body is yet another reminder of who I am – not. Wrestling with every choice, step, thought, feeling. Wrestling with everyone, wrestling with the notion of ‘someone’, wrestling with assumptions, impossibilities, a projected lack of imagination. Wrestling with anything that does not stream consciousness as such, wrestling with the irony of my own struggle as the same source of suffering.

Attachment intensifies. I see how every regurgitated hurt is of the past - and yet has to be processed, including damned anger.

Every cell of my body is by now surrounded by acceptance, love, endurance, care, and sensitivity. What is left is to sense here, a blooming bounded by boundaries deeply yearning for connection.

My inner child screams, and so do I, wholly and out loud. Streams of tears and emotional break throughs testify to the storm. Every thought gets swept away by the force which awareness is in the form of anger. No word can hold position in sentences disrupted by sensuous inhibition while my body speaks of the greatest melodies and choreographies never told.

No feeling is eternal, no meaning in and of itself holds truth above or beyond the realm of free-flowing consciousness. Every force I have ever used to suppress is now in service of the, first and foremost, disintegrative power we call authenticity. Attachment needs cannot be a source of self-denying conflict anymore. However hard I try to push myself away from what is here, I am surrounded by a social holding space for everything, literally and figuratively, that is me.

‘I’ would like to flee, but I am not in control anymore. These are my life’s yesses to every ever-unuttered NO. Can’t no-one, I can’t even hold me down as the earth carries what is and has always been rooted. Let me reflect what is meant to flow through me, bloom into being, surrender as such. And roar like a beast.

Synchronizing feelings and thoughts

“Creativity is distinguished by moral religious, existential, and transcendental elements. In consequence it deals with the problem of lasting, unchangeable, and unique emotions essential to deep relationships of love and friendship.”

My eyes rest for a while on these sentences. Please, can you guide me a bit here? As if I am looking for a mentoring session with the author of the paper in which these reflections can be found (“Multilevelness of emotional and instinctive functions”).

How do heartfelt relationships play a role in or inspire your artistic or otherwise creative endeavours?

I sense there is a deep, thirsty need for honesty, trust and openness in those relationships informing my love for life, amongst others manifested in creative works. For clarity of judgement and attunement of the heart, for a real, shared research into the question 'how to live together?'. But as a lot of inner conditionings are crumbling away and emotional dams break, allowing some floods to fill the emptiness in which I learn to rest in between the upheavals, I feel intensely touchable. Images and writings illustrating human and animal suffering around the world come in unfiltered. There is a deepening sensitivity towards moments of conflict with loved ones. At times, I tend to feel hurt so intensely – maybe I should say ‘precisely’ or ‘intensely subtle’ - that panic might break through. It doesn’t though, at least it remains a purely physiological event with - almost - no stories attached. I frequently and happily 'fall back into' awareness and notice that at times, my ability to cognitively share what I find to be true is awkwardly sharp. And then, suddenly, or so it appears, I feel myself shaking again, losing words and direction.

As if there is somewhere to go. There is not. That's the feedback. Sensitivity of feelings is synchronizing with my thought patterns.

Every time my attachment to my close social circle deepens, I allow myself to feel deeper into the sensitivity and suffering of those measurably, socially and 'biologically' far away. I know this may sound unbelievable. Empathy is nowadays often understood as an emotional and cognitive process that comes with a previously unmentioned and conflictuous side note. Our empathy comes with a tendency to identify with an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ and to act upon these identifications with potential violence, or at least ignorance. Here, I appreciate Dabrowski’s writings again, highlighting how multilevel emotional development comes with a deepening of empathy towards the other and a stronger identification with the ‘I’. A new ‘I’, in the process of development. An ‘I’ that, ideally, takes on more depth, breadth, and height of felt through, thought upon and experimented with ‘otherness’, the way I come to understand it. Would this lead to a different kind of empathy? One that does not per se discriminate automatically (but it does in an embodied and reflected sense) between what is ‘mine’ and what is ‘foreign’?

Maybe the felt safety and richness of my direct social environment free up emotional and intellectual space to experiment with new stretches of empathy.

But I am sure it is important to stay cautious here. On paper this may sound good, but in practice it is at times frightening difficult. When it comes to those most close to us, including any particular, symbolized ‘I’ we entertain mentally and socially, to anything we emotionally identify with within a split second, our empathy is intensely conditioned. Only practice can reflect what our deepest, or, if you will, highest motivations are; those that perhaps also require disidentification (Dabrowski might say inhibition or a strong “third factor” as a dynamism involved in rejecting lower-level behavioral tendencies).

Real-life situations show us what the process we call life has taught us so far, consciously, and unconsciously. In my own process, a critical reflection rises. There is a lot that I can still become aware of when it comes to the suffering of sentient beings quite near to me, but still foreign to the maps of the world ‘I’ believe to live in. Critically reflecting on this blogpost, I could say that it appears easier to empathize with those far away towards who’s destiny I feel essentially quite powerless, than to act upon empathy for those (who are not in my direct social circle, yet) whose everyday lot could actually be changed quite directly through my actions.

Hmm, there is a lot to say here, because complexity does not guarantee any simple and linear answers; it appears to me that every object here in my living room reflects some kind of power struggle, some kind of unwanted impact and ecological disharmony. How challenging can decision making become? I am going to chew on this a little bit more, invite my judgment abilities to stretch as far as my current ‘tenderized’ emotions allow me to, and vice versa.

Enabling constraints

Ever since I was young, I noticed that it was quite hard for me to follow a structure provided by a teacher, curriculum or area of discipline. I found myself questioning why we were supposed to learn something, how everything was delicately interconnected but approached as grossly independent, whether the underlying motivations and questions were being covered by the proposed structure, what (kind of world view) was beneath the overlaying structure we needed to adhere to, whether learning this or that was actually what I or the world needed, why a teacher was not always, or even often, an embodiment of what he or she was teaching, …

Recently, I am going through a couple of challenges resonating with these experiences, even though I am not a young child anymore and the current contexts do not fully reflect those I experienced back then. Allowing myself to learn in a student-teacher relationship, and diving into the challenge of collaboration, I find myself in situations where it appears that I have a hard time adjusting to some structure or format. It is confronting, because the structure I find myself in is really speaking to my heart, it resonates with my passions and interests, with the structure of my ‘self’! A deep longing to connect with others and share intimate emotional and intellectual processes is projected upon my participation in the proposed structures.

But, again and again, something inside seems to resist certain structures, because it feels inauthentic to push my own processes into a particular form. As if we are not doing what we claim to be doing. And this is usually the moment where I started to doubt myself up to the point of total self-rejection or questioned authority, and then - without any other learned or provided option as an adolescent - my ego found it appealing to flee into a superiority complex. I don’t feel this is the right way to go now, particularly so because this time around, I feel a space of possibilities inside of myself, I trust the teachers and I am an adult who is threatened by a situation in which I do not seem to have my own authority to leave. But, at the same time, I don’t want to harm myself, like I did in the past, by pressing myself back into the structure, depending on intensive control over my impulses and thought patterns.

Maybe I haven’t learned yet fully how to ‘positively maladjust’ in these situations, to include someone’s else’s structure and at the same time be in sink with my own processes and findings. Maybe this isn’t possible in specific contexts, but I am sure it is possible this time and within the places I find myself in right now.

It is not by coincidence that I have my own company and have been working alone a lot for over 13 years now. Then again, I really want to learn to collaborate intensely this time; in the deepest sense I am convinced that we will reach further when we stand together and put both of our shoulders to the wheel to realize a shared vision and mission. To work together, my participation in the trainings offers a solid ground to stand on and to root the collaboration.

Looking honestly at the situation is difficult – some part inside of myself is up and ready to defend ‘freedom’ and the way I was conditioned to believe what this freedom is. If I want to adhere to a structure, that part feels like I must slow down A LOT (and you can see why this leads to identification patterns ). This slowing down demands a lot of my attention and focus, or: inhibition, and somehow that seems to be difficult for me, I associate it with a form of violence. Here, I have a couple of justifications ready to avoid adjusting to the structure. Such as: one question raises 100 other questions and I can’t possibly stop my thinking here, there is a deep seeking towards the depth ‘of the cause’ which is not allowed within the format, I do not have any time to sit and work this out precisely the way I want…. All these thoughts are untrue. I know that once I look honestly at them, then I see that I am fighting reality here and it is a battle I cannot (and essentially do not want to) win, however vivid my imagination may be. They are conditioned thoughts, and they imprison my own possibilities for learning. Here, an identification with giftedness, even though these dynamics can clearly be related to literature and anecdotes about gifted people, at times justifies myself not taking responsibility to face reality and see how reality and I can work together, can expand together within boundaries intrinsically and fluidly part of reality.

Working together and participating in a training also implies a form of alignment. So, really wanting to collaborate means I must find a third way, some way other than over-controlling myself or rejecting the structure all together.

What is it that the other might need to understand what I am sharing in the training in a way that is also understandable, enriching and nourishing for me? How can there be a dialogue?

I have been working with these questions so much, that in a certain way, my whole working life (and many private interactions) have been focused on this. My professional focus on emotional development and creativity is also because these are the areas where I seem to easily connect with others. This is where I can ‘handle’ my thinking in such a way, that it seems to create felt connections and adjustment, where I feel that I can be loving, feel free and speak truth at the same time. Furthermore, what I offer in this realm can be an intense form of inspiration. Ever since I was a young child, I was the first to raise my hand when we were asked to do a public speech. I loved to gather all the information and create an inspirational structure out of it, even if eclectic, passionate, offbeat complex and what more. I have also been a teacher that seems to ‘demand’ students to try to understand me (sometimes leading to slight forms of maladjustment from my part towards the student), even if I am eager also to mirror students emotionally. As a teacher, I feel that I am also a student. But that does not imply I shouldn’t try to understand what my role as a teacher may imply, what kind of structures come along with this role.

My thinking patterns feel very fluid to me, there are many associations, I can’t control them easily. I can do it with my body, by focusing on the emotional patterns since I sense that emotions are the connections between the associations; this way I can orchestrate an intellectual concert out of the associations. I can do it while writing, because then I manipulate linearity out of the free associations, and gratefully, I have had the possibility to study literature and practice writing a lot. I can do it while speaking in front of an audience, because then I have both a well-prepared story in mind, and the freedom to tell it in the immediacy of the moment however I want it, without clearly checking whether everybody has “understood” it – understanding isn’t even my intention, I guess, however uncomfortable this may feel for me to say out loud. Now that I really would like to work together, the challenge of reciprocity is rising. The structure that is proposed in the trainings that I am following feels very familiar to me. It feels logical, emotionally relevant, and artistically free. Perfect! I would say. And in this open space, two things happen: within the openness, conflicts (conditionings) arise. I want to flee because I can’t stand over-controlling myself anymore. But then again, I do not want to flee because I feel at home, and there does not seem to be any invitation to overcontrol myself other than coming from the inside, from some old story inside of myself. At this point, my mind starts to feel enlivened, free and ….. very silent. As if there is nothing left to say about myself – an invitation that is there though, warm heartedly. As if there is no self left if everything feels interconnected and flowy, and I feel at home. But then, there is no reference point, and it is hard to connect with the others, or to conceptualize my process and adhere to the provided structure, leading to the possibility of a deeper learning process. How can I go beyond what I need (freedom and trust) and work together?

Now is the time to feel into the freedom and flowyness, and from that place, trust that if I adjust to the structure, this won’t mean I am being violent towards myself, and anything I identify with (and even this, whatever I name "violent" may turn out to be a fruitful use of distinctions and constraints, leading to new degrees of freedom). Now is the time to trust the teachers, and surrender to their guidance, to decondition the experience of being ‘too much’ (the number one feedback I got as a young child, was that I talked too much), the experience of being threatening (whenever I felt and at times communicated that a teacher wasn’t trustful to me in his or her demeanor), the experience of being impossible to understand (whenever I would connect many different dots around a topic and others, like was written in one of my school reports, ‘did not understand anything Lotte was talking about’).

Now is the time to be softly bold, sit with the complexity, and search spaciously for the forms that suit both me and the format of the training. It is a tough path of deconditioning, but I know it will bring me closer towards a shared vision while at the same time emphasizing that I am okay just the way certain parts of "me" are, free-spirited and in love with connections, both human and otherwise. This time around, teacher-me is also learning how to modestly embody what I am talking and preaching about. And this is made possible also because the teachers in the trainings are more like mentors and are willing both to understand what is happening when I run into one of those old conditionings, and to be in dialogue about this, to co-create reciprocity while remaining intellectually sharp and engaging. I feel very grateful and wish for every young child - also within every still eagerly learning adult - to experience such an enlivening encounter on their path of development.

Really - or wanting?

Love is a shared, active process of truth finding that calls upon freedom.

I asked him whether, if possible, he could choose one of the following words as reflecting what is most important to him: love, truth, or freedom.

“Well,”, he said, “this is impossible, at some point they all merge. Do you really want me to differentiate?”

“Let’s see what the experiment brings.”

We had an engaging conversation, resulting in the definition mentioned above.

The conversation grew also out of an introspective process. I was thinking about how I felt trapped in some way, in the last couple of years. How I felt less free and was seeking to understand what this was all about. Of course, when one seeks, it helps to ask questions that might get to the bottom of things, of conditionings. What do I really want? What am I looking for? Am I looking for something? Am I looking, really?

It took more than a rejection of old answers to know what the unrest was all about.

I had all these stories going on about how my life – now conditioned by motherhood, more dependent on support from others, impacted by a new kind of relationship with my partner in which we needed to work with the parent/partner balance, more online (and less offline, intimate) meetings during and after the corona pandemic, a sense and intuition that my work should take a new existential turn, the continuous devastating consequences of day-to-day and political decisions on each other and our ecosystem - wasn’t structured in a way that fitted what I wanted. My changed life, a growing awareness and old coping mechanisms did not work anymore to convince myself that I was….. free, loved and loving, and doing what was truthful…? Is this life really what I want? something inside of me asked.

It took some time to realize I was questioning myself whether I really, just really, really, really wanted to be free, love(d) and truthful. It took some challenging situations, a dive into my learned relational and emotional skills, sitting with the existential unrest of our lives, and still, to this day; the time to sit with the process and keep on doing self-inquiry. The situations, and the effort to dig deep into what was happening, taught and teach me how wanting something is not the same as loving something, how wanting is not per se the same as setting it free and seeing the truth of it. How 'really' and 'wanting' were two different perspectives intertwined in one question.

I do not demand the world into existence. This was confrontational, little toddler-me was at the heart of the matter. Beautifully, the new encounter with little toddler-me taught I yearned for something. That I yearn – and mourn. Painfully, it reflected how this yearning had been conditioned to look for it in ways that even disregard the primal yearning, the primal tears kissing the yearning into a truth in and of itself.

It took the disintegration of certain conditionings around love, freedom, and truth to see that I am yearning for these to guide me, but I cannot, on the long run, silence my seeking for them by putting a veil on them as to shape them into a form feeling less vulnerable, more approachable, less painful, or more controllable. I can not want the truth and thereby bring it into life, as if truth reflects what I want. I can not want love and thereby create it as such, as if this is something that I hold in my owns hands only. I can not want freedom, and then suppose it is here because I demand so. They are all here, and if I really want them to be here, it is the wanting, the projecting, that covers up my potential recognition of their existentiality, and even of the yearning spurring me towards a humbling hello to the grandiosity and vulnerability of life – the truth, love, and freedom of the matter, ultimately.

Kneeling before the wisdom of touch

“Those whose aliveness has been trampled will desperately use others in order to enliven themselves.”

Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology

Yes. I have noticed my attempts at restoring my life’s aliveness by grasping for another’s vivacity. Please, dear beloved, burst emotional flames right through my constricted abdominal muscles, direct my trembling hands with your nod of approval, make them create a shared life out of beautified clay or erosion resilient words or uncovered facial expressions conveying a swift tempering of prejudices. Embrace this longing for your closeness, silence my isolating doubts, those doubts freezing the stream of consciousness life is.

A deep longing to merge with the other’s vibrance, an erotic attempt, not only physically, also intellectually, and much more. How intimate is a shared laughter? Behind so much of what I share, utter in words, put forth through movement or exhale automatically, is this yearning to be enlivened, and to enliven. This is not solely a romantic kind of way of looking at things, processes, life. It is a matter of fact, a matter of desire as a fact of life; why art, philosophy and science are unmistakably born out of the same source. Consciousness burns, everything is delicately interconnected, relating is what makes life worth living.

And somehow, this yearning can fall back unto itself, loosening the grasp(ing), making my skin more porous, thought more tender and permeable, transformable, transmutable; the body more receptive and the act of living a succumbing to its grandiosity on the tiniest scale, encompassing the whole in the immediacy of the moment while acknowledging our always failed attempt to oversee the whole of the matter(ing). As if by cooling consciousness we get the chance to sense the enlivening impact of something subtly heating our bodies, minds and disintegrating lives from so, so nearby. There is no end to depth.

As we try to stand in the middle of a context that is endlessly moving, a fruitless attempt to confirm order and hierarchy, to decentre complexity, we notice there is nothing that stands still; our experience of desire offers a deep insight into this fact of life. The matter of fact of my desirous a-live-ness can gracefully be an invitation for another breath to come to life in apparently random acts of humaneness, and other life forms. Here, it is not about using the other to enliven myself, it is about an intimate, endless dance of elements, to put it bold: a daily practice of both connection and dying, defying our ideas of individuality and strict borders. Sadly though, so much of what we put out there in this world feels and is so much more gross than the subtleties of experience that convey our solidarities and merging with everything in and around us. All the heavy suffering wants to make one flee from the experiential knowledge of being ever so deeply interconnected, ever so fragile. That is why grief is so potent; it teaches us how desire runs through our veins.

My hitherto privilege to occupy this reflective space can make me feel humbler, since the distance between my own safety and another’s full-blown pain demands more opening, more travelling away from all those experiences I deem to possess, fragments of my life’s story I hold on to since they seem to suggest I am immune to the potential painful touch of the other, a thousand reasons legitimizing why interconnection is nothing but destruction. But the ongoing other-ing that a reflective holding space allows me to process almost feels like a moral duty. But, wait a minute, chances remain high that my superego is intervening and boasting “shoulds and shouldn’ts” to cover up some conditionality I hold on to as preferably and particularly my own. As if I have the power ‘to should or shouldn’t’ the world. Writings and self-reflections can contain bold statements, generalizations that may sound loving, but also lay a veil over the absolute locality and temporality of my supposed wisdom. It is in the continuous interaction with my loved ones, the daily motions and choices, that I find how my a-live-ness is humbling dependent upon a world that can suddenly feel a-life-threatening, upon a bundle of differences I eagerly try to recognize – or even overpower - as familiar and predictable.

Here, for now, there is no direct threat, it is often a condensed consciousness of psychological vulnerability that is overtaking my awareness, overshadowing my surrender to my body's tenderness. If only I listen, and slow down, it is consciousness reflecting that unconsciousness is evenly one with its deemed opposite, however intense the resistance is a well-equipped mind may rightfully interject. Everything is interconnected, this life is a never-ending story of connection.

Enlivening ourselves is the practice of kneeling before the wisdom of touch. Nothing remains untouched, there is no life without the melting of the apparently minor with the apparently superior, without the interconnection between the nearby and the far away – and this is what is so beautiful and painful.

Tenderness

“We need a politics of tenderness more than ever.”

Báyò Akómoláfé

Oh, how I want to believe! How thought can come in the way, build a protective wall around my porous experience of being a-live, together and in continuous transformation. How my mind occupies perspectives born out of pain, rocky reference points in the soup our universe is, mummified thought patterns, solidifying my skin, making me defy touch, vulnerability and, ultimately, grace. Well, this is not even about believing, this is about fully taking in, not-doing anything with or against, the ongoing motions, transmutations, processes that we are (part of). This is the practice. The eruption of ways of understanding that might allow us to see “surprising solidarities with a world that is open-ended in its emergence” (Akómoláfé). As we notice when we zoom in on our personal experiences and processes, politicized terms and frameworks always reduce complexity, place us out of our context and out of our relationships with so much more than what we in a split second atomize to be ‘this or that human’, 'this or that right way to go'. A total embrace of tenderness beyond the humanized (or de-humanized), sensitivity as a force of nature in forms my mind has no truer knowledge of other than its intricate sensorial in-hereness, allows me to perceive, again, that the existential pressure cooker my body is right now, is the hardening of that same sensitivity, my resistance to ongoing change. Can time truly be a reflection of expanding spaciousness?

Otherness is also a continuous mirror

In the morning, I woke up from an intense dream. I wouldn’t call it a nightmare; it was anxiety and not so much fear expressing itself. Nonetheless, the type of anxiety that could undoubtedly be formed into a state of panic. The director of this dream was a small, abandoned girl, asking for help, asking for a pause, if only I listened. A lucid kind of awareness was weaved throughout the dream. I saw myself, a particular and familiar psychic structure, reacting to a relational situation that felt very threatening. A sense of empathy towards my response arose amid that lucid state, some inner space to ponder whether the triggered reaction was necessary afforded a disidentification from the flight and fight reaction that nonetheless was also displayed in my Shakespearian motions and words. A monologue stemming from my pain body showed that I wanted to fight for my interpretation of what was happening (my ego’s attempt at controlling reality) and flee the situation (that level of intimacy) in which I felt betrayed, and at the same time I was not fully one with the person that clearly felt her tribe had betrayed her. And, more painfully, had the conviction there was nowhere to go but to the haven of loneliness.

This dream came after a new level of trust had awaken in connection with dear friends, in real life. I had communicated certain needs – and they not only welcomed the sharing of these needs, but also actively chose a practical option that felt altogether inclusive towards my being in this togetherness. As my body has also been conditioned in situations of chaos and neglect, parts of my psyche were surprised and needed a good night sleep – an awakening dream … - to let this new reality sink in. The dream was communicating my psyche’s resistance towards this new level of trust.

At the end of dream, approaching awakening, I tried to do research into a dream opening. What other options were there, in my response to the situations I was in, in the dream? Open heartedness, direct communication, slowing down in a heated situation, looking honestly at my own convictions, and accepting the intensity of human differences and processes. Reorienting and seeing that everyone can be included in the conversation and connection around a dynamic that may feel quite threatening to something that feels precious – integrity. Whether physical, emotional, or relational. Can we sit down and look at this situation from a welcoming and open perspective, providing everybody with the necessary space to speak their minds and bodies, and show their experience of reality? Can I allow everybody’s dreams to be part of this grander scheme of reality?

As the dream opened, a new dimension of collective truth seeking became part of that otherwise very much individually oriented dream. How can we come back to a shared and inclusive dialogue in situations that are unimaginably threatening…?

This, at the end, is a dream worth pursuing in reality, a place where otherness is also a continuous mirror of those realities I do not dare to dream as if they were also intimately mine.

The Winter of Listening

“All those years

forgetting

how easily

you can belong

to everything

simply by listening

And the slow

difficulty

of remembering

how everything

is born from

an opposite

and miraculous

otherness

Silence and winter

has lead me to that otherness

So let this winter

of listening

be enough

for the new life

I must call my own.”

David Whyte

I am preparing a home retreat for this upcoming winter and spring. The home retreat is going against my need for conditioned security and constructed independence (what will be left of what I have build the last years when I loosen my grip?), and external validation (who knows what will be created and however this will or will not be welcomed). It is also going against some of our collective rhythms, namely to be busy, busy, busy, and to avoid deeper awareness of ourselves and our (interconnectedness with the) environment.

My creative heart yearns spaciousness, and for now I am still dependent upon external conditions to practice this art of being. I know there is a deep seeded tendency to think there is always something to be done, fixed, and focused on. And even though the appearance and materialization of this conviction can be quite subtle, and even though I can facilitate a space for others to expand emotionally and exhale their processes beyond the confinement of daily and old demanding conditionings, there is still this subtle yet fierce grasp for control over subtle sensitivities of my emotional world. And, ironically, it is from that same place of sensitivity that a deep seeded longing for liberation, a desire for unconditional love, emerges. It is an existential quest fully embodied and empowered by emotional sensitivity, an organic consequence of being in this body, of being of these wires, if you will, and of being lived by the totality of experiential processes that life affords me.

To feel freely and fully is at the core of what I call my own calling, and even if I would let go of such deft names such as calling, I would still be carried towards surrender to the calling’s power over my experience of reality. That is why, this winter, without knowing what and where this will bring me, it will be a winter of listening. A rocky and delicate research into the lived space I might start to call home someday.

Howl, a Lot

Sometimes, it is hard to get to the outer, inner edges of an emotional response, to decondition the repeated, generalized narrative, to search for the margins of our thinking, feeling, speaking and relating habits. Even more so when an emotional response seems to be connected to an apparently not individual experience, something that may easily be regarded as going beyond the outer edges of our responsivity.

A strange mixture of nausea, distance terror and fervent sadness kept resonating in my bodily cells last week, orchestrating my perception and response to little and bigger daily events. Just going about doing my business, I couldn’t put into words what the unrest was all about. Then, suddenly, after a disagreement with my partner, I burst into tears, and I hear myself shout out: “I can’t stop the battle, I just can’t!!” Surely, these intense emotions were also related to the quarrels with my partner, but the intensity made me aware that 'there' was more to recognize 'here'. What was this all about?

Afterwards, I kept thinking about war, mental imagery demanded attention, narratives of particular people in specific, horrifying situations wanted to be seen and heard in my consciousness. In the meantime, some part of me, some line of thought, kept saying I should not introduce these preoccupations in any conversation, because it might upset people - and what good could it bring? These conditionings felt untrue, of course there can be a time and place to share our worries and grief. And still, often, I couldn’t. As if there were a grief that I couldn’t reach, that I could not trust in its place in shaping who I am, who we are as human beings, also – and that is actually the point.

It was only after really sitting with the emotions, after the co-creation of an open and attentive conversation with my partner, after having experienced a sense of unconditional love towards the vulnerability of being in an intimate relationship, that I recognized how, on a subtle yet steering psychic level, some part of me was seeking the power to have impact and alter situations that I really can’t. Not to say that I just should give into damaging behavior or bluntly accept violence and sink into indifference. This was a deeper acceptance of very unsettling experiences in my personal past, chaotic situations that left me feeling entirely powerless, and thus created a psychological counter-reaction in a (for the time being successful) attempt to survive. However thoughtful I had already looked at these situations, there was still this subtle but demanding feeling of hopelessness prompting resistance to what is, configurating an emotional stance characterized by closed heartedness as an escape out of reality. Embedded in caring connection, the intricate and subtle levels of defense that I recognized in myself gave way to surrender, again. The deep truth is extreme grief, my body’s need to howl, my mind’s need to overcome representation and to give into possibilities emerging from beyond the shaping of reality into one particular path of supposed eternal survival. Howl, Lot, a lot.

Allow yourself a story that holds your complexity

“Whenever you are telling a story, that story is completely trans contextual. That story is holding all these contexts that we live within, that story holds the complexity and the complexity you live within.”

Nora Bateson

I remember one of the first times I went to a psychologist to talk about my eating disorders. I remember feeling numb when, afterwards, I was processing the fact that she never asked me one question about the family situation I was growing up in. It felt like I was plucked, once more, out of my living context. An experience painfully like some of the processes leading to self-destructive behavior. I felt lonely, disillusioned, and even more convinced I should search for perspective and belonging in a world far away from the one inhabited by the cultural norms.

A lot has changed over the years, our cultural default to place things, ideas and even people(‘s experience) out of context has been intensely criticized since, and we have found many different ways of understanding ourselves and the world we inhabit and co-create in a more systemic, fluid, interconnected, complex way. Nonetheless, separating ourselves from lived experience is a challenge we will continue struggling with for a while; not in the least place because it remains a trauma response and because it has a huge and devastating impact on the planet's ecosystem. Reductionism, it is a tendency I struggle with myself to this day, at times hardly going beyond the internalization of ‘there must be something wrong with me’ (or the system, for that matter).

You see, it is only half the story, it comes with an interpretative neglect reflecting the emotional neglect many grew up in.

How grateful I feel to have studied literature and to get more insight into the art of context. How grateful I feel to accompany others ‘journeys into their lived contexts, both past and present. How my work as, amongst others, a writing coach comes with the most enlivening travels into the minds and textual landscapes of writers; doorways into authentic complexities. How grateful I feel to recognize that this is also my path, that we are sharing contexts here, that we are not confined by our roles (writes versus reader or writing coach) but connected through a deep seeded need for our stories to reflect the complexity we live within, which we are. How grateful I feel to sense a direction in a radical acceptance of complexity. Something my mind can only begin to understand when it surrenders to a sparky aliveness and allows the transcontextual dance to unfold bodily and associatively, to withold any emotional neglect characterized by misplaced reductionism.

Writers of deeply personal stories reflect interconnection with such evocative evidence that we might start to question how we ever got lost in the social dream of disconnection. Allow yourself a story that holds the, your, complexity. Really, it is how love is structured.

A fragile knowing

“Gentleness is not the absence of violence; gentleness is the mastery over violence.”

Abhijit Naskar

Today, I am just going to sit it out. The rush, the presumed need to accomplish, the pressure cooker I know as misleading tiny grains of anxiety swirling through my veins. I am going to sit, watch our walls if needed, hours on end. Today I am going to choose and write those kind words that softly stroke and relax misleading tiny facial muscles silently carrying me through stressors I hardly recognize as damaging.

Today, I am going to sit with the news and inhale the pressure on my chest, the heavyness of reality, the potential undermining of any existential courage.

Today I am going to love what is here, inhale into my imagination and exhale its overwork to keep me from falling, to keep me from surrendering to what is here. Today, I do not ask anything from myself. Today is a day of practice, a day of practicing the type of gentleness that comes from mastering self - or other directed anger. Today, I am going to fiercely love an outdated attempt to control pain in situations that left or leave me feeling powerless and disconnected from a place of shared compassion.

Today, I am the embrace I need and always very much needed, an embrace everyone, I believe, needs. Is. A deep, deep softening, a sense of wholeness offered by one's own breath, a rejoicing in a transpersonal resilience beyond imagination.

Today, I am going to radically be with what is, even if feeling down because of the world's alienating madness.

Slowing down my movements, I am inviting my mind’s eye to see eye to eye with myself, allowing myself to be more than a list of chores, tasks, roles, opinions or certificates, allowing myself to be everything all at once, to expand into the actual longing behind an internalized emphasis on growth or rightfulness. Today, I am going to unlock becoming by being unlocked, out in the open of a cared for heart, leaning into the void as if it were a cradle.

Today, I am not nice to ‘be nice’, I am assertively nice because it is the only right response to everyone's rightful, even if often painfully crafted call for attention. Reveiling what is there, a bundle of energy waiting to be endorsed as part of a communal effort to live together.

Today, I rest, again, in the fragile knowing that we all live together.

Study hard from the heart, Lot!

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

Richard Feynmann

So, I long for those days. All closed in by a wall of books; an assemblage of beautiful minds that captured the sensorial input of their wondering bodies on an always curious paper, now readily available for my cognitive, intensely engaged exploration, a deep dive that altered the current of my own oceanic depths. Learning with a splendid ferocity was just an outcome of ‘normal’ passion coinciding with values, and external pressures that felt like momentum. Yet, existential unrest tinted the last couple of years, some of the eager passion became tougher along the years due to internalized power structures with respect to individualistically running a company, security took over ‘openness to experience’ as a guiding value, and I did not listen to the intuition telling me to look somewhere else, to create with, instead of against uncertainty. Motherhood was born and many desires of those directly surrounding me organized my everyday life. I flirted with some secondary interests but already knew this was not my energy, not my flow, I did not fully embrace my values, legitimizing the truthfulness of my fears by referring to the needs of my environment. I problematized a lot of my own tendencies, sorted out whatever seemed indeed baggage, did emotional work to overcome challenges rooted in childhood struggles. And still, here I find myself having the same intuitions.

Something feels liberated now. An amount of energy otherwise invested in another’s approval, another’s path that is, if I am radically honest, too small to process the expansion of my own journey, has been liberated and is finding its way back to the intuition nested in my stomach. Thanks to the embodied experience of motherhood, my pelvis offers two imagined, generous hands to rest this intuition upon. A dear colleague reminds me not to be afraid of criticism, which to me also means not seeking asylum on another’s path. She is right, I must take a step forwards, process the possible stings of rejection on the level of agency, slowing down my emotional pace as I speed up my intellectual study, and reach out creatively in a potentially stinging social field.

This time, the calling is not grandiose, it is a fortifying whisper freeing me from the chains of projections, if only I direct my listening to her breeding place, a place so well-known by our beloved daughter.

The days I long for are, thanks to that same last couple of years, enriched by beautiful collaborations, unpresented, embodied mirroring on an emotional and intellectual level, an ongoing practice of deepening relationships that is quite scary at times, the biggest joy of life greeting us every morning, a deeper appreciation of and immersion in community life, more frustration tolerance due to a thousand little familial challenges, and wonderful teachings in existential skills. Logically, this is the moment to open the inner door to those patiently waiting intuitions. Study hard from the heart, Lot! Never to forget to look up and allow the sky to guide you to a space unknown.

To coordinate a dance that emerges out of self-organizing cooperation

“The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Oh, how I notice myself trying to control situations and processes. Here I mean the attempt to overcome doubt, as Joyce Oates mentions. I find myself in, invite myself to situations that indeed are complex; there are many, very different persons involved, there are many different relationships between them, and everyday social norms seem outdated to regulate the associated intra – and interpersonal dynamics. Also, a lot of different ‘sides’ of my personality are involved in the process of trying to navigate this social landscape. I notice my minds tendency to want to identify with particular sides, a tendency that of course triggers resistance from the other parts, they tend to feel unseen and unacknowledged after a period of identification with their supposed opposites, grasping for attention and space, experiencing the joy of release from what does not feel anymore as enabling constraints. I laugh at the image that the complexity of the social landscape is also a mirror of the complexity of (my) personality. A memory pops up and I hear my father’s words: ‘joe laughs, joe cries.’ A little sting of worry pops up, that little girl thinks there is something wrong with the change of emotional tone and intensity.

It feels sad, at times, that I allow myself to be mentally emerged in stories that suppress complexity. There is this nagging voice telling me ‘I should be such and such.’ Out of fear that allowing the complexity to be as it would mean chaos, I create narratives that suggest a controllable complicatedness. Expand, Lot. Endorse the shape shifting. Do I need one big, overarching narrative to include all the complexity that everyday life and the grander stream of motions and choices mirror back? How to enjoy and find meaning in storytelling without being enslaved by the structure seeking mind? Before I know it, I am convinced that I need a solution when it is actually gentleness that is more than enough.

While writing I feel this tender energy rising in my body. An expansion of my chest finds its way through my fingers, its promising affirmation of presence swirling on the computer scheme in wordy bits of stroked life, a transformation breathed out in between words. Now I feel like dancing as if I am a person who never stands still, fully overcome by bodily intensity, out of sight of a contemplative life. It’s the contrast that makes up a good story, right ? What I deem to be opposites, is sheer movement, dynamism.

We humans are trying to coordinate a dance that emerges out of self-organizing cooperation, we are surfing the waves of emotions in a deep ocean of feelingfull life.