Intentional Society: Edge-finding and the messy kitchen
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The first step of the Edge Case practice sequence is the "case giving": the giver shares the definition and context of their developmental edge/challenge, while having their words periodically reflected back to them. This has worked pretty well in our experience so far, but some of us have also felt the impulse to ask questions during that time -- and case givers have been a bit unsure of where they're going and when they've "arrived."
So this last Sunday, we isolated and experimented with defining and finding our growth edges. What the "edge" metaphor means to us, sharing some definitions and examples, and mainly practicing the process of edge exploration with a 'round-the-circle question loop.
Exploring from where to where? From a reaction to a system-level awareness, I would say. From the signal of a feeling to the understanding of what and why that feeling is telling you. I use the phrase "navigate via tension" (which I associate with Sociocracy, polarity management, and the revealing and owning of one's experience in Authentic Relating) to describe this.
Our body-mind system brings us a "charge" of energy when we hit a trigger or stored pattern - a message that's informational, emotional, and hormonal trying to initiate a reaction that is associated with keeping us safe or meeting our needs. Our system is doing the best it knows -- yet the fact that we have some sort of tension about executing this reactive script shows why that's not the full story. Our self-awareness knows when there's conflict between the way we're behaving and the way that we want to be. That's our opportunity to change, to grow. Not by fighting those older patterns, boxing them into submission with punishments -- but by bringing them, with their message and needs, fully into our awareness.
I could say a lot more about the modeling and theorizing of how this works best, but I'll reign this back in to sharing about what we learned last Sunday. One thing we felt strongly was the messy overlap between inquiring to clarify, and inquiring as part of a solving effort. Indeed, it's not clear that the "finding" of a growth edge is clearly seperable from the actual "growing," as seeing is a big part of them both.
You don't know if you're seeing the system well until enough pieces are out on the table. But you don't know if you have all the needed pieces until you see the organization of the working system. There's a loopy "know it when you see it" nature there. When you hit that "got it!" click of really seeing where and why that feeling energy/message is there -- it's a sensation you can feel in your body. It's the completion of seeing and understanding a tension, which is also the moment where you can then flow towards dissolving and integrating it.
Gosh, if you can't tell already, I'll note that my excessive wordage this week reflects my own attempts at system awareness as it relates to practice design. Knowing why and how these practices are working is not strictly necessary to do and benefit from them, but the hill-climbing can go much faster if we have a useful map to orient us on our path. Map-making is a messy business, though. All modeling is lossy (in the information-encoding sense), and the domain itself is complex (requiring probes, not just expertise) at every scale (fractal).
What I particularly enjoyed about this last Sunday was the sense of having many chefs involved in the recipe creation experiments. People all around were seeing the ingredients (in addition to the taste) and were designing with awareness of their own experience, the practice itself, the domain, and how these things relate!
This is quite satisfying to me, that we're on our way to identifying and furnishing (at this scale, at least) the ingredients and utensils and know-how to replicate a kitchen of growth-supportive practices -- not just how to spoon-feed one particular meal. Mmm. I'll leave you, and myself too, to sit with that chef metaphor until next week.
Cheers,
James