Branching, Breakdowns and Breakthroughs

Summer Solstice

Our plans for summer solstice were grand and lush. They were crafted with outrageous spirit and care. They were collaborative and celebratory.

And, they all fell apart at the last minute.

Three days before it was to unfold, it all folded, with no warning. Abruptly broke from expectations and diverged from where energy had been passionately poured over weeks and months prior.

This divergence is a branching, a forking of realities, featuring closed possibilities and new openings. The result is a deep reckoning and reflection on how energy was used.

We must always remain open, rigorously open, to feedback from the world received through experience.

My beloveds and I are resilient. From the ashes of curated plans was born an enlivening ritual space I could have never expected, yet filled my cup so very much.

Summer solstice was celebrated. Our devotional practice of tethering to divine cyclical time proved strong enough to hold something together. Through moving humbling in the wake of expectations, my experience transformed into an intimate, co-created ritual space, from sunset into night, set in the absorptive silence of the great outdoors beside campfire blazing, with generous vulnerable creative expression and sharing from Drew, Naveed, Karyn and myself. We played, sang, spoke, cried, showed and knowed together. I remain honored and grateful for it all.

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The Breakdown and Breakthrough Cycle: Wisdom Gleaned from the Gap

New knowledge is born by being lashed against the edges of what one previously took to be true.

In my dark hour of grief and struggle, in my blindsided reckoning with what had collapsed while stumbling forward into what had been set in motion… I reconnected with the parts of me that guide me. They thrive in the shadows, knowing breakdowns like the back of their hands. They are ready to be called upon. I found their dark wisdom rising and revealing, enhanced by other violent lessons I didn’t want to learn but was in fact learning in those ensuing days. I humbled myself to be sculpted and remade by the gaps I had made and had met, proofed by my grief.

I believe I must practice self-guidance to be ready to guide others. I truly am Fractal Praxis’ first student, as well as its first teacher. Since solstice, I recommit to this as an active practice ahead.

I will share a glimpse into my guidance with you here, in the prayer that it shall be amplified through our witnessing.

I notice there is a kind of matching, or affinity, between my inner subtle experience and this pivotal moment in the earth calendar’s year. I feel parts of myself becoming empowered by the dawning of the dark half of the year, when the sun descends into the underworld and knows death.

Since the beginning of this year and embarking on Fractal Praxis' formation, I have embodied a phase of giving and shining generously. One expression of this is holding free and public ritual spaces on every Celtic Wheel of the Year holiday, in collaboration with community. I have joyfully sacrificed my money, time and energy on the altar of our collective wellbeing.

This phase belonged. To be in a mode of constantly giving and showing up has helped my community see me and my offerings better. I have loved serving this role in my community.

However, now dawns an opposite phase shift. It is time to practice withdrawing my energy back into myself, and asking for what I need before doing any giving. I will be turning my best energy toward myself first, constraining how it is to be expended. From this I foresee a period of prolific writing, disciplined building, and an active practice: that I receive appropriately and first from every relationship or project that benefits from my life-energy.

I choose to turn toward the shadow of my strong tendency to give.

I will face my conditioned inner resistance to being supported. To having enough money. To having enough care and attention from my community. To letting myself be the first to receive my best energy.

Giving as a habitual and not-always-fitting pattern hints that there is a shadow behind it.

To give too much is to become burned. To believe oneself worthy of being disappointed, burned, depleted, distressed. Is to enact imbalance in a world where right relationship looks like reciprocity.

I don’t need to live by the protective myth that “I’m good because I’m giving” anymore.

What if learning how to take and ask was actually good for me now?

What if I could become more whole by doing the opposite.

It is time for me to face, and integrate, this next edge.

Breaking... or Branching?

It’s just a branching. A creation of new potentials through repatterned action and belief pathways. A new form of me, pushing what the form of “me” can contain.

I’ll be with this edge for the next while. I'll work on it and let it work on me. Because that's how I'm being guided right now.

Here is my Ask:

You can support me by exploring my guidance modality for yourself, or inviting others to.

I am open for guidance now. Please check out my coaching offerings on my brand new website! ✨✨✨✨✨

I welcome any questions if you’re curious about receiving one-on-one guidance—just ask.

And here is my Gift:

What follows is a channeled teaching, recorded live while hiking the day after summer solstice, and inspired by the twig shown in this image.

Branching. It’s as simple as the twig depicts: one direction is cut off, by choice or by force, and, life doesn’t simply accept this, but continues on in a different direction, confidently, albeit at a radical new angle.

Branching is as simple as people, human agents, taking their attention and redirecting it toward different ends and means—reinforced by the feeling of what gives them aliveness.

Like this tiny fractal illustrates (and which is truly ubiquitous in a forest setting, above and below ground)—a choice to go this way instead of that is widely, and continuously, available to us. It is evolution.

Now consider branching on the scale of society. Shall we choose to move in the direction of a viable, restorative future—or one filled with hate, ignorance, and demise? And how do we make that choice, in little, medium, and big ways, in individuals, families, groups and communities, every moment and every day?

Every choice causes the universe to branch more strongly in that direction. To prune back unwanted or nonviable pathways is as simple as withdrawing energetic resources like our attention and consent, allowing the unwanted to fade and die off while the wanted ways get reinforced, thicker, and stronger. That’s it. The forest can attest: it is a simple mechanism. It happens all around us, and in us, constantly.

Mycelium, which match the shape of our neural nets, are resilient because if any one branch is cut off or destroyed, new connections are easily formed across nodes. And it is this networked-intelligence shape that appears to be the definitive shape of a viable future, in my contemplation. If we are indeed like a collective mind, waking up to collective-scale survival threats, connecting, linking up our intuitions, synching up our visions and knowledges—if there is such a thing going on, the pattern-analogy of a neural net and its pathways are wonderfully sufficient to guide the reality of what we must do now.

So let us go forth making mind-full (and not thought-less) decisions of where to put ourselves and our energy in the world. The basic mechanism for starting that process is intention.

Intention. In-tension: That bridge between soul and reality, between embraced and possible. Intention is something that testifies to our truth, even if the action taken in its name doesn’t translate into reality perfectly. Intention is a carving or sculpting tool for creating the shape of your life in the future through deliberate and deliberated choices.

When I hold this branching twig and I touch the arm that has thrived, pointing 90-degrees to the side, I feel the viability of a living future represented: I feel a kind of radiant, vibratory resonance as though the diverse living beings of that branch, that future, can transmit their rambling sounds to my senses like a radio receiver. That future IS real; it is already viable now if it is viable then.

I feel how viable it is and how simple, how natural, it would be to choose that. A simple choice at scale of a human being has the potential to ripple into a complex shape like a honeycomb created by bees. It IS a simple choice. And to practice it becomes a habit. And to strengthen that habit is to strengthen that muscle, the physical electrical form of body and mind, the training that will keep us agile and effective no matter what.

I feel the vibrancy of that future. I see the appropriateness of cutting off the path we are on now, violently or by the withdrawal of consent, letting it die in favor of differently-directed potentials. And I could only possibly be here right now, strolling through this cool forest in silence, in solitude, on this day in my once-future, now-present, if I myself had diligently and passionately practiced the branching arts and sciences. If I had learned how to choose something more meaningful than what was at hand for me, over and over and over again.

Studying to be a filmmaker gave me some awareness of just how malleable the world is. I redeem that consciousness now for the sake of the real world, in devotion. I am prepared to guide, but I don’t want to tell you which path to choose. That is a knowledge and wisdom that only your life and spirit may claim. Rather, I really want to encourage you, implore you, invoke you, to start intentionally choosing. Mindfully branching.

Make a choice now that your body or your heart has been waiting to make.

It could be little, medium or big.

Affirm your aliveness. Affirm your livingness. Affirm your capacity to endeavor.

To make mistakes. To grow.

Affirm it now by making an intention.

Affirm it now by making a choice.

In closing

Any breakdown can become a breakthrough. All breakdowns contain that potential. To experience a breakthrough from a breakdown is to choose to learn from the information encountered in that vivid confrontation with reality.

How do you cultivate the potential for breakdowns to become breakthroughs? How shall you harvest breakthrough wisdom from breakdown suffering? Is a breakdown ever just a breakdown?

All branchings contain choices. They do not just happen, but rather, are responses to conditions. Your capacity for choice is one condition and constraint in reality.

Which forking paths in your life are showing up now, and which are you ready to choose? And what branchings are happening to you that you don’t want or feel ready for? What can you choose within the current conditions—and can you discern which conditions are real and which are mind-made and mind-imposed?