Dear Johan,
This cool thing happened at the Oakland immersion.
My co-facilitator Joanna taught me how to unexplode.
Earlier in the day, before everybody arrived, we were meeting outside. She had done the handoff with the kids to her husband and she asked me,
“What you said about tiredness, that’s it’s trustable if you’re enjoying it…do you have a similar blurb about overwhelm?”
And I told her that every time we arrive at a new level of complexity, we’re the expert of the past level, arriving into a space of being a novice at the current level. There’s more complexity than our old ways of orienting can include.
The ways of being of an expert are often not the right pace or expectations for a novice-state.
So the first thing we must do when we feel overwhelmed is trust that fidelity took us to the next frontier, and here, we are more like a baby than an athlete.
Baby’s deserve a limitless patience. They grow up faster if they lack urgency whereas experts can sometimes get more done if they hurry. The last grenade our expert can fall on is to urgently drop into patience, acceptance, and wonder. It can often feel like burning our toolkits in the moment or trashing our accolades.
Be the baby: awkward, confused, innocent. And be the baby’s parent: patient, awe-filled, innocent.
And that foundation allows for more integrated learning.
And so later during the immersion I was triggered and overwhelmed and it was ok.
My intelligence gets so limited that I start grasping to understand my capabilities. One lever I can always find looks like, “suppress” or “act out”. The confusion continued. I was just about to pull the “act out” lever when Joanna paraphrased everything I told her.
And I could hear her handing myself back to me.
But there was a tone. And a look in her eye. It felt like a human gift she was giving me with that tone.
It wasn’t a trick. It was her, in some way, assuring me of who I was…
…and I noticed that I had already shifted to “act out” the energy of the overwhelm…and then I just stopped and put it away.
Or let it go.
It just kinda disappeared.
And I only could have learned that from another human. I couldn’t learn it through a philosophy. I can now. Somehow her connection gave me presence to realize choice on a much finer level. Instead of seeing myself as a cause and effect robot, I caught a glimpse of how much power we have to choose to feel.
I felt relief about it.
I can “unexplode” now. That’s a gift I didn’t even know I could hope for.
I’m so excited to grow up again.
Night,
Mike
