On Expansive Growth and Boundaries

 

Dear Beloved,

I’m learning something that has to do with Expansive Growth and Boundaries:

My boundaries are an old story, a wubby-wide-growth-arc. I was reading a blog post from my college days about spending a weekend cramming on a term paper while my friends all went on a road trip. That weekend, I remember thinking I “lacked discipline” around writing my paper over the whole term, and if I had been more disciplined, I could have gone on that road trip with my friends.

Nearly 10 years later, I can't help but see my “lack of discipline” as a lack of boundaries, and how that shows up in my relationships today. My early boundaries were founded on the swampy ground of a lack of conviction, a lack of belief, a lack of vision, (fear of conflict and fear of being intolerant) all while walking around with a heavy pack laden with a need to be accepted by adults and peers.

Other adults who never knew how to create space for me to cultivate my own vision in the way I now know I need. Other adults who were carrying the visions of their own grandparents without realizing it.

How can I have discipline without conviction and ownership? I’m responsible for choosing what environments I put myself in and when. What I will and will not allow into my awareness. Attention. Intention. Knowing my Needs. Holding my Boundaries to support those needs getting met in easeful, joyful ways.

And that’s just really new for me.

—---

Expansive growth is in contrast to Adaptive growth.

Adaptive growth is a tree growing around a barbed-wire fence.

Expansive growth is a tree rooting deep into the ground and wide up to the sky. 

It had been two weeks since I arrived in Guatemala when I had these thoughts around intention, discipline, and boundaries as they relate to progress, growth, and mastery:

I’ve been waking up each day and my mind is aware of one big task at a time. Today I’m writing a blog (why? to let people know I've landed and am enriched by this land), the other day I spent a couple hours figuring out how to post my tickets for sale to a concert I can’t make it to back in the states.

Tying up loose ends from a time before this life in Guatemala.

Sleeping a lot, too. Is my sleep a need being met or softness and complacency eroding my disciplined self? Regulating the overwhelm by numbing with my nintendo game Animal Crossing. I can’t help but wonder how I’m doing with my intentions. What are they? Am I following my intentions? Do my intentions have to be conscious to "count"?

Am I holding my boundaries to support my intentions to get my needs met, so I can set new intentions from a really richly-resourced place within myself?

What are my intentions? Where do those intentions come from? Why did I choose to be here? What can I do here that I can’t do anywhere else?

We grow in the direction of the questions we ask. 

What about my current beliefs distract me from realizing I am loved and that my full self is needed in the world?

When I'm feeling formless and lost, I read my gratitudes and intentions from my journal I wrote in Seattle, breathing into some structure, routine, discipline. That became “too rigid” and I relaxed into more nintendo. If I am too disciplined, am I just perpetuating the wounding that I'm trying to distance myself from? 

I decided I wasn't disciplined enough and so I pressed myself into more “desk work”. Produce, without any specific outcome, let producing be its own joy. Share whatever comes.

There’s something comfortable about my nose against a screen, with a couple tasks to put off while I dawdle and muse on a keyboard until I have enough fear to return to action. This is a familiar cycle, I’ve been told it’s a common strategy to get by.

Progress?

—--------------

Progress. Growth. Change. Mastery. Awareness. Transformation. Intention. 

Catching myself looking for something to drive my day around. Noticing I pull away from activities like feeding myself or getting what I need to feed myself. The state I’m in when I’m doing my work is important to me.

Round and round and round.

Leaving my corporate job and venturing out, I feel the expansive sea of things around me. I cling to my raft of Google Docs and joy of sifting and sorting through words and documents to digest, process, distill my stream-of-consciousness to a whiskey-dense syrup of wisdom.

It’s been five months and I’m just coming back to really dedicating myself to this publishing-work. I've been writing in my journal, doodling, now it's time to look back and distill, and share with you my treasured sap!

I feel a need to have enough time to really understand how I operate within a business, AS WELL AS have enough time to do the work based on that understanding. There’s the organism itself and the awareness of what surrounds the organism.

Just following my whimsy today, doing both of those at once. 

Remembering my intentions. 

What are my business intentions? Creation of Connections, Generation of Gratitude, Protection and Reclamation of The Commons.

What is my personal intention? To more skillfully live into the fullness of my relationship with myself and others at once. 

In typing all this, am I just stroking my own whimsical musing without a focal point? Is this getting me closer to where I want to be? Farther from where I was? Or perhaps I’m descending deeper into the formless wilderness.

Noticing also I’m following my old way of working by setting a deadline and letting that bring focus. Focus on ineffable and formless fullness, keep writing, revise, publish what gets written.

What is my ideal outcome? What happens right before that? Is there some kind of milestone that gently emerges into my ideal outcome? 

Focus on fullness and keep writing, let whatever comes be enough. Listen to whatever comes. Set boundaries to maintain a curious, compassionate, slow-and-steady state of being and keep writing. Let a publishing schedule bring your focus to a point. Keep writing, keep revising. 

Next I want a study buddy, a practice ground, a playspace to fuss with all the big pieces and notice emergent patterns together and play with those.

It’s been five months.

I’m learning something.

And it has to do with boundaries.

It has to do with how I get triggered and what to do relationally to navigate that trigger while I stay in connection.

(I seem to want to avoid being triggered to focus on keeping the connection with others, at the cost of my connection with myself. Why am I triggered? Thank you for triggering me.)

Avoiding getting triggered seems to keep happening and I get silently triggered in less conscious ways, looking for ways to

To this point in my life I’ve relied on using shame to change somebody else’s behavior or inhibit my own behavior.

Shame is a clumsy tool. Skillful use of boundaries are the next cool thing. Holding my boundaries so I only get just triggered enough to keep growing. Skillful use of boundaries keeps me in the sweet spot. 

Balance. 

Now I’m asking questions like, what if I’m triggered because I’m choosing to step into situations to break down my rigid edges and re-cast them in the heat. 

Gentleness.

I’m responsible for choosing what environments I put myself in and when and to what end, and something about Boundaries seems to be the solution.

And that’s just really new for me.

On Unfolding in the SunLight

I yearn to be known. 

My writing is confessional and carefully textured to both share myself and to hide in plain sight. You cannot see me in this writing, even though I am showing myself! I am here and I am not here, these are only the ashes and the wake of myself.

Below is a wandering thought I wrote in April of 2020. My mother was not yet sick. The world was still in shock to the COVID-19 pandemic. I had just read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", thinking about society, conditioning of rationalism, and the imperceptible truth of ineffable inner-wisdom. I was a year into really dedicated healing work, reckoning with who I am and who I want to be as a person in the world, and who the real me is in relationship. Therapy, journaling, integration, challenging my family norms and discovering the medicine of myself. 

I wrote this from a place of transition, a place of lockdown, and I enjoy reading it as it is today, feeling for the little cracks and crevices of change since that time.

April 19, 2020

I value experiencing a sense of Awe
and so Gratitude in my life
And so I devote myself to nurturing and fostering Awe and Gratitude
In this pursuit, so I unpack and repack my beliefs to more easily recognize the bliss of Reverence.
I call awareness of reverence in each of my steps.
To more deeply know the Gift of Being.

This I pray in the name of The God of All Things, Yahweh, The Breath of All, The Great I Am.
Amen

---

I'm reading this book. "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". It has provoked the following process out of me. My experience of it has been an exploration of "Rationalism".

I'm going to pause here and say my understanding of Rationalism tells me it is an even deeper bucket than I can begin to convey, the meaning for me for the purposes of this article reside in popular science, logic, in the institution of publicly funded education, their influence on me and my field of paid work, the principles by which I live my social/professional/bills-paying/secular life.

This year I have been finding my "light" and becoming aware of all the ways I hide my "light" to sustain relationships I depend on, whether or not those relationships celebrate my light. The idea that work and rest in balance is a more "worthy" life than the noble suffering of "hard work" rooted in "effort" has been unsettling the whole structure on which my life is built.

In this time of quieted schedule of COVID-19 and permission to be quiet, I am continuing to lovingly observe the unfolding of a relationship between my light and the means by which I receive or am given access to warmth and nourishment. The paycheck as the gateway to food, shelter, water, survival. Any threat to my paycheck being equated with my SURVIVAL. And so inspiring SURVIVAL instincts to defend the structures I have INHERITED.

I feel I have built none of this. I have kept my feet on the path greater traveled. There is a part of me who resists "society" and romanticizes "wilderness", the scary truths of "authenticity".

What are my values? I know what I WANT them to be, but I notice my life is not aligned to my ideals. Here is an exploration:

I value liberty, autonomy, comfort, ability to both SUPPORT others and not be a BURDEN. I value access to enough resources to not draw unwanted attention (to be in a space without experiencing micro-aggression suggesting I need to change or I am wrong). I value the space in my life and the time in my day to rest. I value being seen as someone who would do the right thing. I value putting in the least effort for the greatest benefit. I value the self-respect that comes with actually doing the right thing.

I fear the discomfort of doing the right thing. The risks and pain of doing something that I feel called to do by my spirit or moral compass, or social conditioning. I fear the shame of going against social conditioning, I am afraid to be the only one who sees, I am afraid of the responsibility to speak up when my perspective is called on.

I am afraid of carrying a regret which tells me I "wasted time" or an led an "inertial life". I keep an "open tab" which considers and evaluates my life decision so I do not go so far in one direction just because it is of least resistance.

I fear the scarcity of time. Imagining something ending affects my enjoyment. "Killing time" until the "next thing" dulls my enjoyment of the opportunity for whimsy in this schedule-desert.

I am naming values because my values to this point have been formed around the shape of institutions which have in part failed. I want to clarify my values based on Spirit (which dwells within the 'irrational' and unknowable, often defined entirely by faith) and within the unspeakable reaches of Myself.

I am afraid to pursue this questioning because I feel safer within rationalism, with the inertia of my everyday, it feels more defensible, easier to hide behind, and is so feels more forgivable than the irrational.

Except! To say I feel better behaved within the scope of the rational suggests that I cannot also hide lies within rationalism. Perhaps I hide behind rationalism because I know I can get away with my shortcomings there.

"There's liars, damn liars, and statisticians!"

I fear the irrational as a guiding light/value/principle because I believe I could either misinterpret or lie to myself easier "in the name of God" and so more easily fall off the wagon. The "system" as I know it, bases punishment on the "fairness" justifiable by rational thought. Rational thought which is believed to detect lies more reasonably than the mystical.

So defending the crooked lawyers. Corrupt politicians which operate within a framework of the rational, the logical, the procedural steps of rules.

I no longer have to associate social standing (shame is the way I orient myself to my social standing) with the energy of food and warmth.

Noticing the use of shame as related to the pursuit of comfort. If I am ashamed, I am uncomfortable. I want to be comfortable and so I avoid shame. I can be influenced by others.

Describing how schools and universities reward students realizing, too, I have been treating my job the same way.

There's an urge to tune my "light" into the systems where I can receive energy. To get a paycheck cut from client bills. But that's the root of it! I tell myself the honest pursuit of truth is willing to cast away security because there is Truth in the desert. If I am unwilling to go into the desert, I am unfit to know truth. I am a sap, a fool, a hypocrite who is afraid.

To really do it is to really do it and I feel like I SHOULD be doing it.

I SHOULD be in the desert. Even though I have not been CALLED to the desert.

To say I'm doing my best is to fall short of who I think I am. Who I aspire to be.

I just observe the holy men and see they are in the desert and my ego desires to be holy because to be holy is to be pleasing to the judge. And to be always pleasing of the judge is to know nothing of grace. When the judge disregards holiness, so do I. This is the difference between the rock of me and the tide.

BUT WHY do I choose holiness? If it is not from a place of honest reverence for the holy, it is a manipulation, a mining, a commoditization of the general regard we public have towards holiness. To believe in something is to see differently to the judge, is to open myself to be judged.

Then Paul, in Romans, tells me to submit to authority. Can I bow to God in my bowing to the authority of an institution of law or commerce? If my real pursuit is to know Love, to manifest Love within the realms of humanity, then I can always be given any circumstance as a human and always be in connection to love, guided by love of God and Neighbor as Self.

I ask, with the help of God, to set down my desire to be holy, to be known as righteous. Fear of being inconvenienced, shamed, or judged by my convictions.

I lay down my ambition with confession to my weaknesses I know within me. I offer grace to the pieces within me which struggle to return to God. I offer them the same love afforded to me. So in welcoming them, so I struggle to connect with God, and so God can begin to really do work with me. I can allow Her to fix my eyes to her and through her eyes know Me.