Reactive or responsive? A pre/trans fallacy

– Don’t call me. Do not call me.

I’m in a hotel room in the paradisiac town of Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, shouting at my lover (it’s complicated) on the phone. My own voice startles me, and in some secret corner of my being I’m impressed. Watching myself act this way is strangely enlivening – a personality bound by conflict averse enneagram 9 sensibility. Bows to my mirror, I am now free to include ill-tempered hound dog in my bio. The furious Buddha has been revealed!

As a practitioner of Integral Zen and of the relational practice Circling I’m interested in the action that precedes our sense of self (often disastrously limited in its perceptions). Attuned to the entirety of this moment – inside and outside of individual and collective realities – my actions are spontaneous, appropriate and life-giving. Effortless creativity is available. In Buddhism, this way of being is described within the Noble Eightfold Path, under the guideline of right intention. Manifesting this precept involves continually asking oneself: “What is my function in this moment?”, and aligning with what is mine to do.

A clue that this is happening is that there’s ease, a deep relaxation stemming from your knowing that you are connected to the whole – as opposed to the anxiety of a separate sense of “me” urging reality to conform to it. We find a dance that’s less volitional and more an expression of our true selves, of the cluster of relationships that we are moment to moment. When my heartmind is open to experience what is – not clutching personal preferences but actively surrendered – my response is trustable. It’s not about ridding oneself of the brilliant thinking mind, but cognition is integrated, rather than primary.

– I feel bored when you speak.

A woman says, standing on the opposite end of the room where 30 people are sitting – and she’s addressing me. She turns and walks out the door, and as it slams shut behind her I start crying. This is not an uncommon scenario in the context of Circling and surrendered leadership. In this practice participants are invited to discover that many of the limitations we perceive in relationship are in fact self imposed. New to the practice we sit properly in a circle, listening kindly to each other until ears fall off – until we start to see that we can lie down, crawl, disagree, walk away. We discover that intimacy flowers as we reveal what is truly here for us, more so than it does seducing others to come closer.

There are few if any rules in Circling, but there is the implicit invitation to show up and to pay close attention to the feedback. It is a form of interpersonal playspace where we may be faced with the impact we have on each other. In its deeper layers, the practice seems to me to be pointing to the same place as Zen and the core teachings of all the major traditions, it seems to reveal that this sense of “me” at the center of my experience is so thoroughly co-created by the countless seen and unseen forces involved in the dynamic meshwork of this living breathing moment – that my efforts to tailor a fixed persona to present to the world is at best endearing. Hence the ego is not the place to build our temples. Taking a backward step we may watch how we shapeshift from victim to villain, top dog then loser, as the only constant in the world of form is change. And nothing is independent, everything is influencing everything else. I am one body with a thousand faces, I am relationships upon relationships – eternally free, dynamic and fundamentally empty.

Our inherent wildness

For many of us it also becomes clear that our premeditated, preformulated ways of expressing bores people. It lacks the lifeblood of our inherent wildness, the full spectrum of being available to us. We form habits and in our loyalty to these habits we miss opportunities for engaging the moment as fully and as skillfully as we are able to. Now, facing our longing for aliveness, for more oomph in our interactions, we can move in two directions (and more): eros, or agape. We can move up the spiral to embody the awakened mind – to move and speak from wholeness – or down to engage the juice and the limitations of the imperial (red) structure of being. Two valid options, both useful in different moments. This post is to suggest we note when we mix them up. Spontaneous actions that are differently sourced, differently experienced and that may produce quite different outcomes. Mixing them up would also be participating in a pre/trans fallacy – where egoic impulse may be heightened to divine principle, or deeply attuned awakened activity may not be seen to be anything much at all.

Close to “respond” lies the word “react”, movements that share a handful of similar characteristics. Reactive impulse and wakeful response tend both to exhibit life force, and to seemingly precede cognition. Though where action sourced from the Self is naturally compassionate and comprehensive, reactivity tends to be habitual and self-serving. If responsiveness is karma yoga, reactivity is one of the driving forces of a bodymind that we preferably grow into, transcend and include in childhood, somewhere between ages three to eight.

We want to include it because it’s the seat of raw power (I’d argue it could be your greatest investment in cultivating sex-appeal and charm, this is your inner rockstar, belly first – I’m working on it). Also though, we want to transcend it because it’s a world space dominated by immediate impulse. Walking through the world unable to pause and consider alternative perspectives (or inhabit them at all) is to walk through the world making quite the grand mess. And when threatened – like I felt in that hotel room, spiraling into an alternate reality where I had been left to bleed on the roadside with no one to hold me ever again – we often regress to this place. Our instinct becomes to hunker down, close in, push away and in other ways participate in constructing further pain for ourselves and others. My expression erupts as freely as a geyser – similar to the spontaneity of the Self, only they are worlds apart. One difference is the relationship to my sense of “me”. Where reactivity is driven by a strong self-sense – a drive to protect, promote and cherish the self – wakeful response is marked by its absence.

I cried, and continued

In the absence of self sense enter flow states. I learned of this caring for my mother (who is since up and running) when she was sick with cancer. Attending to her I did not stop to consider how I felt about the situation. That isn’t to say I didn’t cry, I cried – and continued. At the time there was no question around what was mine to do. The simplicity of the engagement was somehow exquisite, no effort. No suffering. I cry. And I respond.

It’s so habituated we often don’t notice the trade-off we make, grasping and identifying with our sense of “me”. And let’s be clear, there’s not only one me, but countless senses of me that arise throughout a day. A me who is tense, a me who is exhausted, a me who is concluding she didn’t fulfill her life or do the thing she wanted to do. Our attention is drawn to the particulars, while an open field of awareness is also always here.

In each moment we may opt to surrender our sense of separateness, which is effortful. I am effortfully moving away from the resources within me – failing to see that I am naturally connected to the movements of my life, to earth, water, fire, air. Placing my attention on the open field of awareness I make myself available to recognize stillness, silence and spaciousness, which we often overlook because it may not feel like anything. I can bring some real good quality attention and meet my sense of me softly, yet not empower it by becoming it. Anything that arises will exhaust itself naturally unless I participate in it. My pain will naturally reveal its own impermanence. I can release the effort I am unconsciously making and allow my sense of me to rest, as I open to inhabit a larger body – large enough to breathe through the sensations in my local body. Awareness comes first – we then contract and fixate on this contraction. As I open into my larger body, what I seek is abundantly available.

Seeing this I have set myself out to learn to trust. Dedicated myself to allow words to fall out of my mouth and listen as they put themselves in relevant order. As my words find coherence of their own accord. (An ongoing commitment which requires a whole lot of softness toward the controller, stubbornly attempting to do its job like it is used to.) My commitment deepened in a retreat some years ago, when I’d just read the book Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin – telling me that people who listen from their heart will hear if your expression is intuitive or rehearsed and stillborn. Throughout the retreat I was resolute not to plan a word and watched myself continuously engage and bring people to tears (and I had often lost my train of thought completely holding the attention of a group).

To impress him

More recently, dating a man who listens to the field I’m speaking from moreso than to my words, this commitment has been strengthened – seeing which of my communications turn him on. I can put great effort into a sweet and insightful story, trying to impress him. His response:

–It’s painful to hear you. You seem scared.

Well, fuck.

Next time I just growl into the phone and find him tearful at the truth being embodied. It’s one of the paradoxes of practice: The more I try – the less I impress him. When I want to be other than who I am, better than who I am, I hold back from being who I really am in this moment. Clinging to an outcome, I transmit pain.

Clinging to a preference often comes at the expense of embodying the upsides of whatever we have deemed less-than. I like to identify with space and maintain some sense of egoic homeostasis through expressing weightlessly, an air of kindness and equanimity – ill-tempered hound-dog is not my vibe. And the integration between our crown and the base of our spine, spirit and our humanness, sky and earth, the awakened and the primal – living in the pulse between the two, craniosacral rhythm – being available to grab and be grabbed by whatever paint brush gives life in the moment, having the full palette of colors at my sleeve, that’d be the the juiciest juice engaging the relationships that I am.

Therefore encountering estranged corners of my psyche, expanding what I’m able to hold as I, experiencing my current sense of me cracking loose to embrace new territories is thrilling – almost regardless of the texture of what’s being embraced. This is a practice in its own right. But I’d be quite far out in the meaning making of a developmental optimist if I were to tell you that shouting at my phone that day was a spontaneous action of the natural Self. I yelled at him and all beings were simultaneously awakened? Doubt it. Both intention and result tells a different tale. In this case, in terms of intention, I’m pretty sure my aim was to protect myself, if not also to hurt him. And in terms of result, I mostly just got myself into a pickle.