IS: Energy is relational
Upcoming public events:
- Friday January 31 - Connection Call
IS calls typically start at 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC). Community Hub calls for Season 17 run every Sunday through March 23.
It's probably "today, the 31st" by the time you're reading this so, swing by today's Connection Call if you want to chat about towardness, energy, or the upcoming Limicon 2025 and what IS will be bringing into that energizing space!
My energy (just in the generic, conventional sense of "energy to do stuff") varies. I'm sure yours does too. But notice... I just said "my energy" as if it were a resource inside me — as if I generated it inside of me (maybe with sleep and food) and then spent it like money until I ran out. Sleep and food are important but, I noticed (again) today how false that model is!
Remember how I was saying last week that everything is a relationship? Well, today I was noticing in a couple different contexts how my energy "level" is soooo wildly different based on how I'm in relationship to the situation/thing/people I'm in relationship with. No it's not really surprising, but it surprised me that it surprised me. 😝
If there's no obvious relational place that energy is flowing to, then I don't have as much in the first place. But when everything is in alignment and flow? Bam, the spigot turns on and I can hop in the zone for 6 hours and get dozens of different things done, bang bang bang. (Today I upgraded many pieces of the Limicon infrastructural puzzle and hooked things together in preparation for turning on registration tomorrow.)
Caring is an energy generator. So is purpose. Opportunity. The possibility of being awesome, satisfying our values, feeding our desires. These motivators are desires, and desire is always relational. Any kind of desire — for something to change, to happen, to be different — is a relationship between us and it, I and thou, present and future.
Desire brings me back around to culture: When can we feel safe to trust our desires and act on them? I claim it's being in a space where we can trust that other people are connected to their desires too, and where expression is not fixated on obtaining, and thus any expression (all feelings are data) is welcome. Those are norms that we can agree on with each other!
It's not how conventional society operates. People aren't grounded in their own integrity and haven't taken object-perspective on their own emotions, so desires, and expressing them and acting on them, are dangerous! So it takes intentional ways of being, in order to become rooted in wisdom, big enough to hold space for our emotions, and secure enough to express them without attachment or grasping.
But that's the society/community/tribe/congregation/crews I want to live in. Because- well, many reasons, but today, because I like flow states and channeling energy through me! The me in power and effectiveness in service to the world, that's a me that is in harmonious attunement in my relationships all around me, a me who is flowing with energy and meaning and satisfaction of enacting the good, true, and beautiful.
Enlivening, agentic, empowering, loving - how about we become that culture for each other?
Ciao,
James