IS: Acceptance as freedom
Upcoming open events:
(In two days!) Saturday August 17 - Practice Dojo Connection Lab #2
Saturday September 7 - Practice Dojo Connection Lab #3
Calls start at 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). Core Community Season 15 calls run Sundays through Sept 22.
Information up front:
Our second "Connection Lab" themed call is coming two days from now - and if it's not on your calendar already, remember to click that registration link! (Because for these calls I set them up in the simplest possible way: single-session registrations handled automatically by Zoom.) Last time we experimented with reflecting-and-revealing for "feeling heard", and this session is set up to test our desire-and-detachment w/r/t making good/flowy/clean-feeling requests in relationship!
Story time:
Monday morning, I watched the red line appear before the liquid had even finished wicking the whole paper strip of my COVID test.
About 45 minutes later, after I had immediately sequestered myself and done a whole bunch of communication tasks and schedule changes, I took a breather and realized... Oh, that sure was an acid test of my acceptance stance.
What was I glad to notice about the way that I'd reacted? It was the way that I hadn't wasted any time being jammed up by emotionally fighting the new reality which that little red line had presented me. And it wasn't because I had done a "shove my feelings down in order to leap into action, stew about it later" thing, either. I had just... Accepted it, without resistance or judgement of the way that things already were in that present moment.
Conventional past-me would really have been struggling with resistance: fear of suffering in sickness, stages of grief for the impact on my week, anger towards blaming whomever exposed me, etc. Plus probably a second layer of self-judgment about how I wasn't in "control" of my emotions.
This isn't very new for me - I first noticed this four years ago in my feelings about the dishwasher breaking. Re-reading that realization, I was using the therapy language of "cognitive defusion" at the time and that's cool but, it's fun to see the IS frame capture (what feels to me now like) more of the experiential sensation. Acceptance is the middle word in our IS developmental mantra of "awareness, acceptance, integrity" and I'm still loving how it points at the okayness aspect without a connotation of disconnecting or turning off our feelings.
Did I still have feelings Monday morning? Absolutely. I was in touch with my cares for myself, for my wife, for my kids, for the neighbor kid that might have been exposed. Feelings, when they flow, they flow through pretty quickly! Regret, fear, pride, shame, relief, sadness... I think they all made their appearances - and were welcomed and accepted, delivered their message, and then each was complete in their own moment.
That's the immense freedom that I've been reveling in for the past four years. Emotions as-object, freedom of (not from) feeling, spaciousness for integrous action. These are "post-conventional" developmental capacities that IS cultivates through relational experiential practice and culture.
Cheers,
James
P.S. My experience of the last four days has been low in physical suffering as well - thank you for all the well-wishes and I am counting my blessings with gratitude.