In order to claim we know something, we must accept we are also creating and reinforcing its shadow. 🌓
What we know is what the mind is holding in regard, what it is retaining and focusing on. What we don't know is everything else.
In Fractal Praxis, there's a general premise of pursuit of knowledge, radical embodied knowledge, through intensive process-generated insights that enable old ideas to dissipate and be replaced by more elegant, adaptive worldviews (aka mental models, or cognitive structures). The theory states that pursuing integration of new horizons is the praxis of Life itself. (Negentropy, or, to convert more available energy into higher-order, intelligent, structures.)
Yet, we must not write off negentropy's counterpart—entropy. We must not write off death in how we choose to live.
We must not write off what we do not know, or even cannot see, because of what we are choosing to regard as truth in this moment.
Let us call this as-yet-unintegratable shadow the Grand Horizon. We always don't know what we don't know, and we especially may miss how what we choose to perceive or consciously know actually creates shadows, making it harder to see other truths.
This week, I discuss one method for expanding beyond one's ordinary invisible horizons. Your horizons this week may be big or they may be small. It may be about learning to trust, learning to let go, learning to step up—or learning why you feel unconsciously averse and inhibited toward what needs to happen.
It may be met as a literal horizon—like the upper crest of the Great Sand Dunes looming in epic glory against the deep dark sky, signifying an impending initiation. For most of us, it is less obvious. For most of us, it may be incredibly subtle.
I credit my beloved Naveed Heydari for teaching me to see the queerness of truths, the many complex parts that are ever-present, even if one strong experience is receiving the entirety of one's focus. This perspective of "how is this queer / look for the queerness" has truly reshaped my inner landscape over the past couple years, for the better.
May this method help you uncover new dimensions of yourself that are non-exclusive to the others. May this help you expand and include even more truths, without conflict. I dedicate this message to Naveed, and to the merits resulting from training for a spacious heart and an open mind. 💗💗💗
Breaking In, Breaking Out
I experienced a major emotional disruption earlier this week. A trauma activation pertaining to my difficulties in early childhood—a wicked reckoning with improperly encoded, dysfunctional beliefs that became a fundamental part of my worldview between the ages of 4 and 6. Yet that are no longer working for the environments and personhood I'm in now.
My instinctual response to this situation was to let the depth of suffering go even deeper—in the "Breakdowns to Breakthroughs" method, a common one in Fractal Praxis. I was assuming that breaking down utterly would yield valuable insights by surfacing the otherwise unconscious architecture operational in my day to day life. And, true to form, it worked. In just one (albeit anguishing) day, I came out of it with an honest and detailed accounting of the wrong "mappings" I had made while surviving hardships affecting my social and emotional development in early childhood. By the end, completely spent and aching and feeling like a shell of a person, I looked at my exquisite, accurate list of my sources of struggle and suffering, and I thought to myself "...Now what?"
Through this most recent ordeal, I gained new respect for the reasons why not to simply "go into" and stay with one's trauma activation. Although it had brought me insights into what was happening for me, there was no way I could DO anything with those insights. I couldn't effectively integrate them on my own. Being alone, I had the freedom to go deep into my shit and hold myself in that. But I was also alone, and stuck as to what to do next. I needed other resources.
This inspired me on a path to gain more knowledge about self-administered "skillful means" for coping with trauma when it is arising. Such as EFT, EMDR, yoga, and methods from Holistic Life Navigation. I am feeling more inspired than ever to add these methods to my wheelhouse, so I can be more accountable to the distortions and harm cycles I can create when I'm in trauma activated states.
It is a tender thing to take responsibility for how trauma plays out in your life, when you were the not cause of the original sources of trauma you endured. It feels good to hate myself for being traumatized, to blame others for having easier/better lives than me... it feels good on some level because all of that feels familiar. Self-loathing comprises the deepest neural "ruts" in my body, having been established so young, and so there's a twisted kind of relief to indulge in a worldview that makes me and my trauma "the problem."
But when I eventually shift out of that focus, I recognize the opportunity to expand my horizons, experiment and poke and dance beyond the so-called "known" and discover that my mappings, my sensemakings that I clung to so avidly for a time for my survival might not in fact be serving me that well.
Here is the beauty, the discipline and the salvation of a life systems based praxis. If it is not serving you, no matter how much you might covet it or the reasons you created that mapping in the first place, you must let it go. You must adapt.
Do the Opposite: a Fractal Praxis technique
"Do the opposite" is another method in the Fractal Praxis toolbox—one I often forget about, yet had great benefit to me when I first developed in my mid 20's. In essence, it looks like this: once you recognize you are harboring a belief that is not serving you, experiment with adopting the opposite belief or behavior and seeing what kind of feedback you receive.
It is important that the first recognition—that you are harboring an unfit yet entrenched belief or behavior—be held with compassion for how that wrong mapping came to be. If you are feeling aggressive or judgmental toward yourself about the belief, work with those emotions first, through compassion for the imperfect ways we make sense always, and the imperfect ways we are supported by others, etc. Once you can feel emotionally regulated or ambivalent about the fact that you're holding this unfit belief, you can get curious about: What might be beyond it? How might it be adjusted? What is true beyond it? You can start getting excited, like you might feel for an upcoming vacation, about how this archaic belief might be ready to change in your life, and about the wondrous truth-edges out there that you may have been missing out on all along.
To illustrate with an example: I have a habitual story (tethered to my childhood hardships) that I am bad at socializing, and socializing is not my medicine/it feels like labor. So, the opposite would be: socializing is my medicine, and I'm good at it. (After all, that second story IS a part of my experience, it just the one that gets deemphasized when the trauma is prominent.)
I then seek out experiences that try that truth on for size, to dip my toes into the water beyond my norm. I may deliberately opt into low-pressure, low-stakes social environments. Like a cookout and song share evening at a friend's house, or going out to see a show with friends, or intentionally sitting down to tea and vulnerable conversation with my roommates. I can notice what these experiences feel like and what feedback they give in my body, when I am not operating with the story "I am bad at socializing; socializing is not my medicine/is labor."
What I'm noticing I love about this method is it allows for indirect breakthroughs—gentle, nonlinear encounters with experiences that fall outside the normative frame by which you unconsciously navigate your life. Where Breakdowns as Breakthroughs can summon intense, accelerated intelligence (sometimes at the cost of emotions and wellbeing), Do the Opposite is playful, curious, adventurous—it resembles a child playing on a playground or in the woods, embodying an attitude of "what's out there?" Do the Opposite generates contrasting experiences that illuminate the biases of your stagnant mind, and offer a more expansive experience of your own life.
In between the shift in methods from Breakdown-as-Breakthrough to Do-the-Opposite this week, I also used Catharsis, another method I'm gaining increased appreciation for. In a ceremonial context, I focused on channeling the old architectures that were very present in my body from trauma activation, and yet I had decided I wanted to be purged from my body. In a concentrated manner, I energetically expelled energy: beating a stick, shouting, pounding a cushion with my fists. This helped me to give physical expression that matched my inner distress—to dedicate the expending of such explosive bursts of energy to the passion with which I committed to expelling these harmful yet engrained ideas from my body. It almost felt like an exorcism, purging demons: letting these old beliefs know they are not welcome here anymore, even if they once were formed benevolently: to help me survive.
***
Which of these methods is feeling most alive for you right now? What is being called for in your life? Are you craving Catharsis? Are you craving the gentle disruption of norms through Doing the Opposite? Or are you on the brink of a radical breakthrough that will reshape you in waves of intensity?
Mabon: Fall Equinox Community Ritual Space, September 22!
What will this year's Mabon hold? It is a mystery even to me! 🍂🍂🍂
As the leaves are turning, as our full fleshy gardens are preparing to dessicate and decease, as the sun king wanes his way into the underworld—what a wonderful natural time of year to explore the natural letting go process in a gentle way, a way that lets us taste the sweetness of life even as we grieve what could never or no longer be.
What I can say about this year's Fall Equinox ritual space is it will take place at Shared Ground (formerly called 29th Project), a community hub for holistic resilience. (This is the church reclamation project I alluded to in previous newsletters!)
And, it will be co-hosted by at least one, if not more, wondrous women priestess/healers yet to be announced. ✨✨✨✨✨
RSVP here, and reach out if you want to lend a hand in pulling this event together!
These community ritual spaces are offered as a gift. We gratefully accept donations in support of them. Or subscribe as a Sustainer member for $8/month to help ensure these spaces continue receiving vital support. Thank you for supporting community ritual spaces which are so important for helping us to consciously rebraid to place, time, spirit, and each other. 🍀🌞🍁🌙🧑🤝🧑
Moon Dunes Loons radio: the last episode comes out today!
If you are already subscribing to the Moon Dunes Loons audio series, just letting you know the final episode in the series, entitled "Seeing in the Dark," is coming out very soon.
"Seeing in the Dark" leverages many of themes here in this newsletter about the way shadows are created by what we think we know (that is, what we are holding in the "light" of awareness). What are the mystic's or the artist's techniques of relating to what is there in the shadows—even without necessarily bringing it to the light.
After all, when you are peering into pure darkness... are you afraid of something lurking there in the shadows? Or are you more afraid that there is nothing there at all?
Want to catch up on the audio series? Make a one-time donation or become a subscriber and you'll gain access!
🌕Moon Dunes Loons🌕—the epic "initiation into intuition" at the Great Sand Dunes under the full moon—is taking place one week from today!
If you're coming, get ready for a big opening. 🌌
Love and solidarity,
C.
