This week's video explores the notion of "meta-adaptivity"—or, adaptivity that transcends scale.
In previous weeks, I've written about my sometimes-troubled relationship with emergence—being so in the flow that I would lose track of my human-beingness, and my own basic needs. This was subtly an effect of my trauma, not an overcoming of it.
Yet I keep returning to the value of letting our worldviews be shaped even more richly by real information, by experiential encounter with "edge." In the previous week's video (🔥 make sure to watch this one!) I discuss evolution at the scale of a human organism's worldview using an allegory about urgent survival pressures.
Yes, your worldview can and does evolve. The disruptions to your mindset's habitual "order" can feel internally like dissolution and rebirth events, or what I like to call Breakdowns-Breakthroughs. These are necessary to make US more adaptive in the world—to get us more "fit" for thriving amidst the world's truths.
I'll say more in future pieces about the living tissue of stories that we build up around us in the process of meaning-making, and their sacred fractal role in living systems, as well as their persistent dangers.
For now, I simply want to share a glimpse and glimmer into my latest personal collapse and reorganization event. Those who follow my newsletters may recognize this theme is recurring from previous posts this summer. This appears true. It is clear to me from how my life played out since writing that that I did not quite integrate it then. So, necessarily, the pattern reemerges to my life and consciousness. It returns in salience with even more intensity. So it can achieve the integration needed for my holistic growth.
This weekend I went to new edges and exposed my body-mind to new experiences by participating in a queer DIY kink conference called Unabashed. It was a wonderful experience I wouldn't dare fully unpack here. Most of all I got to witness kink, consent, and queer love being practiced dynamically all around me, for hours and hours, and it opened up new horizons in my own body-mind.
That night I had a dream that helped me symbolically recognize and reckon with my engrained reluctance to make asks. The metaphor was literally stopping the flow of traffic at an intersection. My hesitation and shamefulness around making asks of someone, someone who had already professed explicitly they wanted to give to me, was stopping up the flow of organic reciprocity in my life. The presence of the stoplight seemed to reference the consent stoplight concept (with "yellow" and "red" being common shorthand for urgently expressing boundaries in kink realms), and further revealed my reluctance to communicate when something within emotional-social spheres feels "yellow" or "red" to me.
The pressure building in the traffic jam metaphor suggested that whenever it's my turn to receive or ask, there's some kind of psychic stoppage that occurs. To remove this block would be to allow greater flow in my life.
In waking life, that morning I experienced a big breakdown of a very familiar condition. The same archaic stories were telling themselves through me of "how the world is" and how unfair / unkind / uncaring it has treated me.
The stories that served me to survive a difficult childhood were no longer mapping, but I was still blocked from seeing the reality.
Thanks to the loving-kind therapeutic patience and attention from my beloved Naveed, I got to experience love first-hand that helped melt my rigid, defensive, convulsing stories.
It started to dawn on me, first in the subtle body, then emotionally, then consciously, that the blockage in my receiving love might be coming from inside the house, so to speak. Was this persistent, patterned frustration really "out there"? Or was it a contour of my projections—an edge of my internal mappings, my story about my experience?
Why am I so resistant to asking for my needs or desires? Why do I believe I must silently tolerate situations that feel unsafe to me? Why am I so reluctant to trust anyone to help meet my needs?
I got to see that so much of my struggling and striving lately was tied to a deep-seated belief that I will not receive naturally from the universe. My needs will not be met—so why ask. Asking is only further shameful.
To free myself from this internalized "architecture" was to empower me to make asks of my relationships and of the universe. To make asks that are perfectly in alignment with my sacred visions and purposes in my life. To make asks and watch the flow of care, resources, receiving come to me. To make asks because my Givingness has become excessive and it's time for me to Receive. And this isn't others' fault—it's mine. It's a result of a mis-mapping between my internalized architecture and the world as it is.
The trauma was swirling and surging, generating friction, but still seemingly intact. That is, until it cracked open like a geode. As though all the accumulating stories that didn't match my mapping finally had the power to split the whole things wide open. And its demons escaped like noxious gas from the crust of the earth into the open air, dispelled and decayed.
It was time for me to be open and raw again, in flow again... time for me to be reorganized by reality.
On the same day I was working through this, unbeknownst to me, I was literally receiving unsolicited messages of support from several people in my life, professionally and personally, through various channels. By intentionally tapping into and sustaining this flow state since then, I have received even further affirmation that I am seen, I am valued, I make a difference, and people want to make sure I'm cared for.
We are patterned. And quite often, maybe more than we are comfortable with, we are called to be re-patterned.
Let's talk subtle indications: When things are rigid within you or seemingly around you, that could indicate a no-longer-adaptive story or matrix of stories is being activated in your body-mind, to the friction and dissonance of the reality. In contrast, when things feel melty and fluid, soft and gently energized, this could indicate that you are adaptively flowing in rhythm with universal forces and conditions, giving and receiving in balance.
I wish this for you! May you shine brighter as you polish off the grime accumulated by mis-mappings in this life. You have the power to grow evermore Lifeward. Blessed be.
C.
