I’m at a party. I just arrived 10 minutes ago with my partner and a few other people. And I already feel like leaving. I feel disconnected. I don’t know anyone. I feel contracted and I struggle to be there. People seem disinterested and distant from me. I am inside myself.
A few hours later I am sitting in a soft corner chatting away with a couple I just met. I feel soft and open and the many strangers around me seem friendly and kind.
What happened? Well, something seemed to shift when I let go of having to figure it out myself and just spent a bit of time with my partner. When I accepted the very real need for closeness and safety I had in this new context, let go of my “I can take care of myself” pose and said yes to a few invitations from the outside – my mood changed significantly.
For many this might seem like a small thing, but for me it’s pretty fucking challenging to let go of my “I’m taking care of myself here” pose and allow myself to be part of a group experience that I am not in control of (as in: it is unknown). And it feels big to bring that resistance down a bit. Not having to solve something myself, not looking for the big thing that is going to change my experience, but rather just allowing myself to say yes to the small invitations.
I want to live the rest of my time well
At a weekend workshop I led recently I got in touch with how often I get in the way of really living the way I want. Here I don’t mean that I would like to live in a big house by the ocean with a library and a lovely garden and have 2 brilliant and beautiful children with my perfect partner in 10 years time (although I would be good with that). What I am pointing to is rather how I continuously show up for myself and others in my everyday life.
The way it came to me in this workshop was: “I want to live the rest of my time well.”
The words came with a mix of grief and joy. Grief for all the missed opportunities in my past. Seeing all the ways in which I have not lived in the way that I would really want to, and joy in the sense of empowerment that comes from knowing that I (and largely only I) can actually make that happen.
It’s the edge of the unknown.
I am not (and I have yet to meet a person who is) able to show up continuously with effortless openness and presence. I certainly have my ups and downs during a day. I contract and then expand again. I get afraid that what I am experiencing might be wrong somehow and stop myself from sharing it with the people around me. Or I simply try to resist having the experience by distracting myself in whatever way is available.
It takes courage to live.
Living my time well is about noticing all the ways in which I am leaving myself in everyday life, without shaming myself for it. Noticing is a gateway to continuously come back into relationship with the world. It means taking it seriously when I see myself shut down rather than engage with the people in my life – and find ways to come back to connection. It is apologizing and repairing when I don’t show up in the way I want to. It is daring to bring fierce love and passion to the relationships that matter for me. It is taking the invitation to step into life every day, every hour, every minute – whenever it is available.
I experience it as a quality of devotion.
Not knowing is the invitation into life
Most of the time, most of us are relying on knowing. We do what we know works based on experience. This is all very good for getting stuff done without having to consider how to do every little thing or marveling over the fantastic colors and textures all around us. We need to have a certain level of knowing of the world to be able to exist in it.
It is also quite easy to get stuck in the knowing. I am quite identified with competence and it can be quite scary for me to be in a room where I am not seen as “someone”. I really don’t like feeling small or ordinary. Which means that something I have done to myself repeatedly has been making my reality smaller, so I didn’t have to feel small and insignificant.
Circling and surrendered leadership has helped me to include more of my incompetence, vulnerability and not knowing but it seems to me that I am now just relating to these things as a new form of competence (I am the most competent at being incompetent) and that the core pattern is still the same.
However, it is clear for me that the experience of being alive is not found in the known, but in the unknown. At the edge of the comfort zone. We experience this when we are on vacation, when we go to a play or a concert, when we practice some kind of extreme sport or when we fall in love. Something new is happening and it is simultaneously scary and invigorating.
What I really want for myself, and what I mean when I say that I want to live the rest of my time well, is living more in the mundane. My interest is in practicing not-knowing in the small things of everyday life. Most importantly maybe, not falling into the belief that I know my partner, the people close to me or myself. It is about not creating a fixed reality around me where everything is defined, but rather seeing reality as something to be continuously explored.
The concept of Shoshin or “beginner’s mind” is useful here. It implies approaching everyday life with openness and without too many preconceptions as these will limit the possible space of movement. To be in beginners mind we need to let go of some of the safety (or perceived safety at least) that comes from knowing and stepping into a sense of trust and surrender to life. It is coming into (entering again and again into) relationship with the world.
Getting over myself, letting go of myself and beginning to listen to what is there in front of (together with) me. Not contracting too much. And not letting the contraction lead to more contraction, but letting the awareness of contraction be a gateway back to life.
These days I often feel quite triggered in inadequacy. I feel a mix of potential/excitement and fear in this stepping into something new, taking on “beginners mind” and taking seriously that I can live my life the way I deeply want to.
Wild man, sweet heart
For some reason I get quite touched when I write those words: “wild man, sweet heart”. Maybe it is because I have been in a world where they were in opposition to each other and now so clearly see that they go together for me.
I have never felt very called to Men’s work. Coming from a firm position of advocating feminism I feel quite sceptical about any kind of essentialistic framing of what it means to be a man or a woman. And while I am aware that not all schools of Men’s work have this approach (I have participated in men’s groups that have simply been about talking about our lived experiences of being men in the modern world and the challenges that poses for us), I find that there is often some kind of essentialist, anti-femist agenda more or less overtly snuck into the work.
What I have found for myself however is that the way I relate to my gender and my sexuality is very connected to the idea of wanting to live well. Embracing polarity is at the core of what I want to live my life from. I want to be able to embody the raw, sexual, animalistic part of me and the soft and gentle part of me. The challenge is to be open and sensitive in order to respond appropriately to the context that I am in. Peter Ralston, a brilliant martial artist and zen teacher, says it well with his soup analogy:
If you were one ingredient in the making of a dish, say the salt in a soup, then you must apply yourself to the soup (the condition arising) wholly and in the right proportion. To not apply yourself would be to not surrender to the making of the dish. To over-apply yourself would be to destroy the dish to further the exclusive demands of the self…Whether you are demanded of more or less is not seen as a rating of your value. As salt, your value lies in the whole condition arising, the soup.
Peter Ralston
The metaphor of the soup points to the challenge of surrender. It emphasizes how we are always parts of a larger emergent field and how we can apply ourselves more or less skilfully in relation to that. We need to bring the right amount of salt to the soup. If we add too much it would destroy the dish but adding too little would make for a bland and uninteresting dining experience.
In other words. Sometimes we are called to bring ourselves in to challenge, change, set boundaries or bring clarity and in other situations we are needed to sit back, listen, or give space. Sometimes the appropriate way of showing up is to be a sexual beast, sometimes it’s not. One is not better than the other, but discernment is important. The right course of action is dependent on the context (the soup) and not on our identities or dogma about right and wrong.
We have, if not a responsibility, then a potential to show up and take active part in co-creating our realities in a more attuned way – by being present with what is happening in the moment. This is what we are looking for when we practice relating arts. We practice how to surrender and show up in our vulnerable truth and in that way co-create unexpected, beautiful and transformative moments.
A vision for living my time well
In game theory the term “magic circle” is used to describe how the rules of engagement are different when you are playing a game than when you are not. When you step into the boxing ring, you score points by punching someone in the face, outside of the ring it would be considered violence.
I find the concept of magic circles deeply fascinating. We can change reality itself by changing the “rules” of the spaces we inhabit.
What I really want to do with my life is to create spaces infused with love and life. These days they are mostly temporary in the form of workshops and retreats, but I feel increasingly inspired to create physical spaces that allow for more beauty and interconnectivity. Places that invite people to experience that there is more to life than what they thought possible and that they are welcome exactly as they are.
I read this question somewhere recently:
What is something you didn’t realize was optional in life until you saw someone simply not doing it.
I want to create spaces where people can realize that they don’t actually have to put in so much effort to be with others. Spaces that make it possible to rest in presence together and to trust that we are welcome in this world with all our imperfections.
