IS: Turning up the heat vs. traction
Upcoming events:
- May 17 or May 18: Beyond Goals Intensive
- Sunday May 18: Community Hub 18.7
- Tuesday May 20: The Oasis
Last week's newsletter was "Love that frees" and last Sunday's Community Hub call was "It's all loveable".
We know that it's possible to "get too comfortable" in the sense of avoiding challenge and doing what's easy/pleasurable/default instead of what our best self really would want to have done. We also know that "acceptance" unlocks real personal change in a way that pushing/striving/efforting does not. Thirdly, we know that learning and skill acquisition happen best in a "zone of proximal development" in-between boredom and overwhelm.
So does that mean: just balance challenge and comfort so that our stress is somewhere in the middle? I'm going to make the NO case (I think) while crisping this up. The muddle I'm seeing is that there are two partially-correlated dimensions in play here:
- feelings (comfort, discomfort)
- traction (learning, stuckness)
The connection is obvious: I think we can easily see how the former evolved to optimize the latter! Our emotional valence (nervous) system steers us away from not-successful activities toward evolutionarily-useful activities, and learning is highly useful for succeeding in all domains of life! It is broadly and conventionally true to say "we get frustrated when we get too stuck and we're not learning" and "we get bored when things are too easy and we're not learning"... EXCEPT!
Our nervous system is a mesa-optimizer and "feeling good" is not tightly coupled to actual outcomes. Our emotional reactivity kept us alive in the ancestral environment I'm sure, and still does today, but then and now it also misfires and screws up our lives in many ways both obvious and subtle.
The not-the-same-thing-ness of this became visible to me when (long story short and oversimplified) I became able to take an outside perspective on my feelings — when instead of being reactive and hard-wired by my reactions, I became "bigger" and found another layer of equanimity and okayness. This unwiring process also raised my baseline feelings-state by a lot, mainly by unwiring a lot of protective negative feelings that weren't very useful.
So if someone has found equanimity and made object their feelings, how do they keep themselves learning and growing? If being "on one's edge" is the heuristic... well, there's a hedonic treadmill option of attempting to "crank up the heat" and doing more intense activities. I think that's one way to end up in Fight Club territory (while feeling good about it the whole time, not just hurting yourself in order to feel something while depressed). Intense practices, psychedelics, conflict/"boot camp"-flavored dojo/gym spaces, they all turn up the heat on the general theory that more challenge equals more change, heating and annealing producing more strength. This can be useful but I think rather predictably leads to a dead-end at some point when shadow work bottoms out and the "healing arc" starts to complete.
If one's heuristic is a positive-fuel "following the aliveness" more than "following the edginess of my fear", I think a well-integrated body-mind system can keep trusting itself by understanding and connecting consciousness with adaptiveness and deeply aligning towards outcomes. This can bridge the gap from steering-by-reactive-feelings to steering-by-traction, and beyond that to steering-by-omni-loving-outcome (it feels hard to pick a word there).
In my current stage/path of reintegrating "lots of inner development" with/to "being of service to all life", I find myself now reaching back and/or looking around for embodied wisdom that can help me navigate the arena of traction and outcomes by finding steering mechanisms to navigate the zone of traction/seeing/focus/outcomes with holistic tools.
I'm not saying "what logic can I use to steer instead of emotion" by any means — no, we are embodied and shall be evermore. But to what else shall our instruments of sensing be connected? Aha, aha, this points to the synthesis of this whole letter: reaching for the challenge that is not threat, the traction that is not avoidance, the attunement to greatness that is not egoic... When I've found it, I have found it in wise relationship. Developmental friendship. No surprise in retrospect, to have arrived here after several hundred words.
Radical Candor, Team of Rivals, Project Aristotle, Authentic Relating, great writers' rooms — all these things illustrate high-(psychological-)safety high-performance cultures that find traction by wiring-up/attuning their steering to learning and outcomes rather than (conventional) feelings.
Out in the wild, I have this sense that there are very few people that it's safe to be fully honest with in this way. It's not the norm, so it has to be carefully constructed. What if we could live more of our lives in spaces where this was a reliable cultural fabric? What an enlivening intentional society that would be — I bet we could do some amazing things.
Cheers,
James