This summer I had a participant leave a retreat I was leading. Part of the reason was that he felt that the interactions he had with me were disorienting. He also shared several times that he would rather not interact with me. I respected his boundary and kept at a distance while doing my best to be open and available, sharing my own experience while not inquiring into his. When I finally moved with what my body had been telling me the whole time, to get closer and engage with him physically, it was like the relationship changed. Suddenly we could play and be in contact in a way that felt free and open.

I get quite impacted by dissonance between what is said and what I experience (the embodied expression of the other). This is even more present in the relationships I deeply care about. The deep dilemma is that I really want to trust my experience with my partner and let that guide me, while I also want to respect their autonomy and take seriously what they are saying. There is quite a lot of anxiety connected to trusting my experience, when it doesn’t match what I hear from the other. There is a risk of overstepping and a whole world of fear of breaking consent that gets in the way of following what feels true for me.

However, when investigating this, it seems to me that my reluctance to move with my truth (and potentially overstepping) does not come so much from care for the other, but rather from fear of being wrong or being blamed for doing something wrong.

It is not love, it is fear.

We are all saying no to love. When we dont trust our embodied knowing of others and make ourselves more separate than we are. When we go too far that way we go into projection from resentment or from our own wounding. But it is possible to speak from our true knowing of others.

If I trust my experience and take the risk of potentially fucking up, it makes love and compassion more available.

A way this often shows up in Circling & Surrendered Leadership is as “(someone in) the group can’t handle my experience”. The belief that telling the truth will be dysregulating or too challenging for someone in the group. I find that these kinds of statements (often spoken in private without the people who might not be able to handle whatever it is) are very rarely true. Most often it comes from a lack of trust in others’ capacity to handle themselves and connects to a one-up mentality – believing that you are better than them.

Liberation for me comes from trusting and owning my experience more and daring to bring my experience into connection – as it is.

Levels of surrender and owning experience

In Circling, Surrendered Leadership and related practices we often talk about “owning experience” as a principle. I find it more constructive to talk about it as an attainment we can continuously strive towards, but will rarely manage to embody fully. At least I have found myself moving through many different understandings of owning experience as I have practiced more and gotten more experience.

The way I understand the following “levels” is that they “transcend and include” the previous ones. The learnings from the previous level is still part of the embodiment as you move into a more complete ownership of your experience.

When we are challenged we will likely move down the ladder. I was at a festival not too long ago where I found myself silently judging quite a lot of the time as I didn’t feel safe enough to bring my experience more truthfully. It took me days before I got myself out of the contraction and finally shared with the team how much anger and disgust I was feeling, moving myself out of the contraction and into some kind of embodiment of my experience.

Charge/contraction/acting out

Acting out is what we do when we are dysregulated and captured by our emotions. We believe that what we are experiencing is what is happening and often blame or shame either ourselves or others. Perspective taking is not available and emotions are often explosive and come with a lot of projection. Someone else is wrong and they need to be told that they are.

Charge is per definition disconnected. You are other than me and there is no opportunity for connection.

Even if I don’t bring my experience, I can be in the contraction of “something is wrong”, and just hold it internally.

Expressions:
– “You don’t understand me”
– Silently judging

Am I coming from love?
A powerful heuristic for me at this level is connected to noticing if I am coming from love when I am speaking. And if not, letting go of the impulse to ask questions (and definitely refraining from telling the other something about them) and rather going into self-reveal, speaking to my own experience.

This also applies to my life outside of practice spaces. Do I feel compassion and experience how others are suffering? Otherwise I am likely in my own drama/narcissism.

A particular aspect of this is forgetting that other people also want presence and love. I often find myself shutting down my longing for more presence and connection out of some kind of misguided belief that it is only me who wants that and that it would bother others if I bring myself with more truth.

Witnessing

Moving from charge/acting out into becoming better at witnessing was a major step for me.
Witnessing means noticing the emotions as they are arising and naming them (this can be done internally as we do in meditation or externally as we do in relating practices such as Circling & Surrendered Leadership). It creates distance between the emotion and the observer and allows us to see clearly that we are not just the emotion, but also the awareness that notices the emotion.

The challenge of being in the witnessing quality is that we can get in our own way and end up sanitising our experience. We take away the energy and the directness of the experience and it can often feel quite disconnected when someone says that “they are noticing anger arising” in them.

Expressions:
– “I notice anger in me”.
– “I notice that I am contracted”.
– “That’s ok, it’s just your experience”.

Can you dial it up a bit?
A challenge at this level can be that we start believing that our experiences really don’t have anything to do with each other. That we are living in completely separate worlds of our own and that we don’t impact each other’s realities.

Witnessing can get a bit flat when we get stuck on the idea that we should bring our experience in a way that is uncontroversial and “just our own” – this tends to take us away from connection.

This often manifests as the expression “that’s just your experience” which often comes up in relating arts practices. It seems to be a belief that my experience and your experience are completely separate and that what we say, when we speak about what we see in each other is only projection. This does not seem true for me. I trust that we are deeply seeing each other all the time and that we can access this seeing if we let go of our ideas of who the other are and allow ourselves to experience them at an embodied level. Trusting the interconnectivity.

A couple of years ago, while leading a training I had this “madness” come over me. I felt an impulse to play the role of the Instructor and direct (and replay) scenes in the room. Like “could we do this scene again, but with a bit more grief over there and a bit more shock over here”. I mostly found it amusing at the time, but as the years have passed it has dawned on me how useful it can be to work with dialing up (or down) what is happening in me.

Working with dials is not meant to make a large problem out of something small, but rather a way to help the other see the thing that is being communicated more clearly. Getting more of the emotional content into the transmission. Speaking to dials can also be a way of encouraging someone to own more of their expression with you, if you feel you can’t really hear it. As in: “It’s like you are speaking from 2/10. It would be helpful for me if you could dial it up to 6/10”.

Directness

When I was mostly learning about witnessing I understood “owning experience” as revealing as much as I could about myself. However, after some time I started noticing that the things I was revealing were rarely the things that felt really challenging – I was avoiding saying the important things, by revealing a lot of other stuff that was going on. I was hiding behind “I feel shy”, “I notice that I am tensing up” rather than bringing the need or setting the boundary.

Expressions:
– “I feel attracted to you.”
– “I feel contracted, because I don’t trust that you will like me if I tell you how you impact me.”

Emotions are not rational
I sometimes seem to think that my emotions need to be reasonable before it’s ok to share them. But the job of emotions is not to be reasonable, it is to point to what is being experienced. If I try to rationalize my emotions before sharing them I get in the way of connection and often end up stuck with a lot of emotional processing on my own.

My heuristic here is to trust that the emotion wants to be expressed and experienced. And that my only job is to do just that. And to stay with the impact afterwards.

Telling the truth, by bringing the emotion, can be understood as a subject/object move. Bringing it out makes it possible to see it less as “me” and more as “a thing that I have”.

Embodiment

Embodiment is a bit tricky as it in many ways looks like acting out. However my experience of embodying my emotions is very different than acting out of trigger. The difference is awareness. When I am embodying an emotion I am consciously welcoming it and I am willing to express it, while not being consumed by it. I don’t believe that I am the emotion although I recognize that something important is going on in me, that I would like to be met in.

Expressions:
It’s tricky to write down examples of what embodiment looks like as it is often, well, embodied. It is about actually letting the experience fill you and move you in service of connection.
– “I feel rage when I hear that.”
– “I feel so much love when I look at you.”

Can I be continuously available?
A risk of working more with directness is that you can start “throwing truth” at others without staying in connection. For me it has been important to really allow myself to be direct and truthful, while also staying with the impact on the other, being willing to hear their truth about the situation.

Boundaries became more important for me in this phase. Not boundaries simply as in saying no to things I don’t want, but rather boundaries understood as “showing up” – being willing to show myself clearly with my needs and wants.

The quality at this level is being at my boundary and making myself visible and available for others to come and meet me. Not hiding and then coming out once in a while (as I would at the directness level), but continuously bringing myself forth and showing where I am. In other articles I have described it as an “emptying out” process, where I am constantly doing my best to show up with what is true for me. If something feels important I say it out loud.

Moving with attunement

“Truth insists that we not only be truthful, but that we act truthfully. It is not enough to just know the truth. You have to be it — to act it, and to do it.”
Adyashanti

When I think about what I would call “moving with attunement” it is a move from staying in my own space and being available – waiting for the other to come out and meet me – to embodying by speaking, moving, touching or in other ways really following my impulse for what is right in the moment.

It means risking overstepping a boundary by trusting my embodied experience deeply and moving with it. Not requiring the other to bring themself in order for me to really be with them.

A picture I get of moving at this level of surrender is being with a child that is screaming “go away” and kicking, but not leaving. Rather staying with them and holding them (maybe physically) and giving them the love they need, rather than what they are asking for.

This is risky business, as it can feel like a potential catastrophe if I am wrong, and I rarely dare to do it. But I do find that not doing it can also lead to disconnection.

Expressions:
I find that the expressions at this level are rarely (only) verbal, but rather embodied invitations, but the transmission of the expression can look something like this:
– “I am here with you”.
– “I am not going to leave”.
– “I love you.”

Life in High Resolution
Something that has become apparent for me over years of practice is how impact and emotions that I would previously have disregarded (or simply not been aware of) have suddenly become available and relevant. I trust the small hurt I feel when someone does me an injustice. I want to express my anger, even if I could manage it myself.

I like the analogy of resolution on screens for how I see capacity grow in myself. The ability to notice what is going on in higher detail and pick up on the small things that are moving in myself and others. It seems to me that the most beautiful experiences I have come from bringing forth things that seem quite small and insignificant, but when met in connection turn out to be quite important indeed.

This move has been significant in my life. I have often found myself trapped in some kind of completion project where I need to fix myself in order to get to the state of openness and happiness that I long for. When I am in that loop I keep looking for “the big thing” that will finally fix me and I become blind to all the small openings that are continuously offered by my surroundings.

Looking at people as trees

“When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”
― Ram Dass

Years ago I was inspired by a wonderful quote by Ram Dass about “seeing people as trees”. The quote pointed to how we don’t tend to judge a tree if we see it being bent in a particular way, but rather just notice that it has likely gotten a lot of wind in a particular direction. And that we tend to judge people in a different way.

I find this helpful for being with people in a more effortless way. Simply seeing how they are and acting accordingly. Not blaming them for how they are, but also not making it into a problem for myself that they are as they are by shutting down my own experience and becoming a helper.