Range

My capacity varies wildly. And widely.

There is such an immense gulf between my capacities when I'm regulated, and my capacities when I'm dysregulated.

Yesterday I was trapped in an emotional flashback the entire day. I could scarcely function. My body ached all over from subconscious bracing. My emotions were hair trigger volatile, sad, angry, lonely, loathsome. (I've learned to give what's happening for my body grace and permission, not adding to the resistance.)

Today I feel so healthy, hale, bright and sprightly, full of energy and inspiration for the day.

Yesterday, I had little capacity to handle things. Today, I have what feels like unbounding capacity.

If I were to share with you what my week has looked like, you'd see a head-spinning span from ecstatic breakthroughs in love and dreams, and, gutting falls into the rock bottom trenches of despair.

Yeah... sometimes I think you'd have to be crazy to survive, much less make sense of, a life like mine.

Perhaps this touches into the theme of "range" that I wrote about in last week's newsletter.

Right now, I'm focused on spending more of my minutes, hours, and days more regulated, in the name of integration. Noticing: the more time I spend regulated, the more my capacity for love expands. This has meant—for now—releasing, letting rest, and abstaining from experiences of romantic love. I poignantly report that romantic love has, as of yet, proven too much for me to handle.

I am working on my capacity to love to the degree that I want and envision in my life. I've discovered that love itself is dysregulating in my system. Following a first half of my life in which I was never sure if I was feeling love in my body, love's palpable presence in my life and body now is going to throw me "off," to say the least. Something about it feels fundamentally unsafe to my miswired nervous system.

This in-buried bias causes me to be separated from love—not outside of myself, inside of myself! Which is a very sad state of affairs. Love is a basic human experience: a birthright of any free person. It's unfortunate the work I must put into reclaim it. Although I know my story is not at all unusual, and many reading this may share a similar experience.

And, as in the case of yesterday's meltdown, I am not adding resistance to this. I am practicing patience and paying attention. Right now, choosing other forms of love—like self-love, and brotherly/friend love, and God-love (agape)—all of which is feeling super nourishing and accessible to me.

The more often—literally, the more minutes and hours of each day, the more days of each year—I remain regulated and supported, the more capacity I gain. However, this does NOT mean staying forever within the narrow band of tolerances my harried nervous system requires. It means taking excursions out to the extreme edges—to integrate them. I accept that romantic love is out of my body-mind's grasp for the time-being—something I had to go to my own edges in order to learn.

Encountering one's own dysregulation contains extraordinary amounts of teachings. Oh yes, indeed it does.

Resilience

Disruption and disregulation are essential to the world's gaining of resilience. May we thus consider ourselves fortunate to live, and endure, in an era of profound and compounding catastrophes. 🌀🌪️🌀

Each breach of the possible—each threat, each threshhold crossed—expands the being's awareness of what is possible.

If the being integrates the impact effectively—they live on, even thriving, for the knowledge.

If they do not, it becomes trauma... or fully, the cause of death.

The truth is: We cannot HEAL without rites of passage.

We cannot become capable of integrating More until we face what we haven’t been willing to face before.

We must expand our consciousnesses to cross the threshhold, to stretch and bend what we can perceive and know, and integrate what has gone before. Not partition ourselves with evermore energy-intensive compartmentalization.

All the parts we've come to encounter, and know... give us RANGE.

I want so badly for you to nurture your suffering until it converts spontaneously into the lotus blossom of spiritual transformation.

To take a learning orientation to even our darkest nights of the soul, is to love that the world gives us feedback enough to awaken us, to make us greater Knowers, capable of knowing ourselves and one another, and knowing the world. And thus being more perfectly fit with all of life's requirements and magic.

This is what the Resilience Mass is all about.

In Holisma masses, we practice attuning—mind, body, and spirit—to a beneficial pattern from nature. Please join for next Sunday's Holisma mass, Resilience. RSVP HERE.

Love and Range: What's To Be Integrated?

Despite the profound teachings contained in going to the edges, I am choosing to experience more regulation, more of the time, to grow my capacity for love.

Because I need to focus my daily energy less on KNOWING the world — which has been my obsession and my path for my entire adult life, of which Fractal Praxis is a product! And more on LOVING the world.

Knowing and loving the world are similar. And one is a potential path to the other. But there is a subtle difference. One I'll avoid articulating (after all, let's take a breather from all this knowing and knowability business!😉)

I'm choosing to amplify the LOVING variation.

Thus, I am undergoing a major shift and initiation myself. By abandoning the well-worn path of knowing and taking the much greater vulnerability-in-my-body of loving.

Thus I'm looking to expand my range with regard to experiences of love. Grow my body-mind's zone of tolerance for experiencing plenty, security, and bliss. So I can help remind myself — and thus the world — of what a world made of love looks like. This is like an activation of a sci-fi imagination: reimagining the world in love's image is only possible if you have had a personal direct experience of love in your body so powerful that it drew you forward toward it and into the rest of your life, like a spark lighting an undying flame within.

As highly intelligent competent beings: our capacity to integrate information is, in theory, unlimited.

Compelled integration events—when an unwanted truth suddenly confronts our consciousness, and we must go through an inner (and sometimes outer) ordeal to make it make sense—are crucial for growing our range of what we dare to include in our maps of the world. And thus: what we are able to love about the world.

These ordeals grow our capacities, and grow our resilience and adaptability. Even if we don't know what's about to confront us, or how to manage it—we get familiar with the nature of the challenge. We trust ourselves and the universe in the midst of crisis and unknowing; an embodied trust of, we've been through this before.

Resilience is a measure of how much not-life one can integrate. Not-life is by definition, anything at the edges of life's continuance. Anything potentially or actually threatening life. Put fractally (at the pattern level): the more entropy negentropy feeds upon, the stronger and more expansive it gets.

Resilient beings are strong and flexible, agile and enduring—just like Truth.

And just like the network/web shapes 🕸️🧠🌐 we explored thematically the first Holisma mass on April 9: Interconnectedness. Want to watch the Holisma masses video recordings? Join as a paid subscriber at any level of Fractal Praxis today, and you'll get access to all the private archives including Holisma videos!

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Thanks for reading, wishing you gentle integration this week if the winds are whipping your sails 🌊⛵... or, if you're feeling a little too stagnant, may you successfully call in an encounter of the next great shock of truth that's lingering around your perceptual corner. May the shock be like a spark, setting aflame a transformation ready to happen, burning away whatever is ready to be cleared out.

Love (as wide as I'm able),

C.