Invocation
Knowing the world (and its problems/situations) intimately
is one crucial way of loving the world.
To witness more of your and each others' experiences
is to love the world, and to know the world.
And the more I know of the world, the more adaptive I become.
With my one precious life, I can send the truth and the message of our blissful interbeing/interconnectedness through EVERY action. A devoted life.
It begins by developing a discipline of witness.
To adapt to truth, you must first uncover/reveal it. For truth lives latent in unprocessed experiences/memories stored in our body-minds. Witness invites it to reveal itself.
The capacity to remain with and bear witness to even really hard experiences—this is world-shifting praxis. Developing the capacity stay with yields revelatory insights about the nature of the world.
What is your capacity to experience the full spectrum of sensations and emotions, between mind-altering bliss and the most wrenchingly wretched despair?
Information that we encounter, we never truly lose. We just reorganize our relationship to it.
Let's unearth truths through collective, loving-kind witness.
Let us learn our way to greater wholeness.
In any transformational learning process, witness is the first step.
The Gift of Depth
I have come to learn that there is a unique need I meet among my community. It is the capacity to go deep.
Deep into witness. Deep into truth. Deep into our dreams. Deep into love. Deep into understanding born of empathy. Deep into a communion that transcends our little body-minds. So deep that we end up encountering astonishing insights.
I’m learning to accept and embrace that I have a unique capacity for depth. Born of my relentless appetite for inquiry into the "what is?"-ness of the universe, that I've deliberately dedicated my life to for more than 20 years.
This embodied difference was often shamed by society, causing me to fear and shame my natural orientation.
Yet now, as I begin to respect this unique capacity for depth/intensity as my gift, I am noticing I tend to attract people to me who are really craving opportunities for depth, intimacy, and transformation through relationship.
For the longest time, I rejected superficiality in relationships as something that universally "didn't serve." Now, I respect that a spectrum of witness/depth is what's authentically available across the variety of beings in this life full of pain and alienation. And even superficial interactions can serve, if that is what the people have capacity for.
I experience more freedom to relate with people across a spectrum of intimacy now. I credit my long-time love Naveed for helping cultivate these capacities in me, directly and indirectly.
Now that I feel less attached to what kind of relating "serves," I make my embodied presence a subtle invitation, while also showing up fully to even superficial interactions, trusting that they always have a chance to go deeper into shared knowing. More often than not, people are refreshed by this invitation, and they pursue me for more of that kind of vibe/conversation.
It is a healthy reversal to not hold my wound over others' heads, but to invite them instead into the gifts my wound has generated. It is so healthy when folks "follow their aliveness" into further pursuit toward my gifts, rather me trying to aggressively pursue "their" liberation.
Now, this doesn't mean I must force myself to enjoy superficial interactions if that is not authentic to where I'm at at the moment. However, I can tolerate them much better (and understand them as a natural part of the spectrum of human connection) when I embody my own authentic invitation: that, with me, there is always an opportunity to go into it more.
When I frame my gifts as an invitation, holding them lightly, people tend to respond more abundantly, themselves.
The Embodiers Circle is designed on the basis of these gifts along with my deep yearning for all of us to experience greater witness, and to train ourselves with these capacities, for the betterment and benefit of all beings—particularly those in our direct communities.
My Prayer
I want us all to experience greater witness in this life.
From ourselves most of all.
Let's sit with the medicine of witness.
To witness something is to devote your life-energy to not just superficially recognizing it in your environment, but to understand it as best you can, to relate with it, and to be subject to transformation through that inter-relating.
When we offer someone our witness, we offer the capacity for transformational relationship. A community's capacity to meaningfully and beautifully transform, therefore, is related to its capacity to self-witness.
This is true for a community 🏘️... It is also true at the scale of a person🙋🏽♀️ or at the scale of a society.
When we offer ourselves our witness, and when we train to witness ourselves: we become powerful enough to survive and thrive through even the most epic tribulations and fluctuations imaginable, as we undergo this no-guarantees ride on this great living planet through the cosmos. 🌎
Self-witness is one of the most liberating capacities I have ever developed in my life, with enormous effects. It is the essence of foundational Buddhist practices such as sitting meditation, and also yoga. If done well, it enhances your capacities to witness yourself and others with compassion, wisdom, and an earnest motivation to adjust maladaptive patterns for the benefit of all beings.
Witness is the seed of liberation, and should be cultivated.
Embodiers Circle - Final Invitation
I'll be spending the next week in even deeper rest and creation-mode to properly gestate the Embodiers Circle, so I won't be sending another newsletter out until after the Embodiers Circle kicks off on March 27.
That's why you should...
❤️🔥Sign up here❤️🔥
What is the Embodiers Circle? It is a space to train. (A dojo, in a sense).
It is a space for training to develop capacities for witness, emergence, and meta-learning. It is a space for study and practices related to transforming our paradigms. ("Paradigm transformation" is the top most influential place to intervene in a system, according to systems thinker Donella Meadows.)
What of Fractal Praxis will be brought into the Embodiers Circle? Y'all... I have SO MUCH I'm on the chaotic brink of bringing to you and bringing to fruition. I have a spreadsheet of, no lie, 40+ teachings, tools, and practices I would like to test-drive in Embodiers Circle. If we met as a group monthly, getting through all of that material would take 3.3 years!
Yet, how & what will be offered is entirely emergent. Because—surprise! Surprise and revelation is fun. It stimulates the mind, and makes learning stickier.
Whatever "bubbles up" 🥘 and gets digested in each session of Embodiers Circle will emerge from the ✨✨unpredictable* magical dialogue✨✨ to transpire between the circle's sacred participants. *IT'S ALIVE!!!
This is the kind of revolution that will not be televised📺—but it will be synchronized between our bodies, and the scale of a circle of peers.
This is the kind of revelation that—
... oh, you just had to be there, friend. 😉
Who is Embodiers Circle for? It is for fans, followers, friends, and aspiring practitioners of Fractal Praxis, who are prepared to go deeper in their inquiry and practices in a circle of their peers; who can offer a commitment to self development, loving-kind witness to their peers; and who possess a willingness to try on new perspectives and techniques vital to expand their consciousness.
Is your curiosity not slaked? Learn more about Embodiers Circle here.
Registration closes on March 26th for the first Embodiers Circle group. So don't miss out, fellow freaky fractal friend.
Sign up today as an Embodier Member!
Your witnessing friend,
C.