Puzzle MeAprilWhere do I end? Where does the “outside of me” begin? These…Archaeology of Self

Every experience I have is a new lesson in life, a new addition to things that I’ve already learned. This process of learning happens whether I am aware of it or not. With every lesson, I also learn how to learn. That is, I continuously increase my capacity to learn.

Embrace the suck2022Picture a simple framework. There are three attributes that can have positive…Depending on the depth of my capacity to learn, the nature of the lesson shifts. When I was a child, my learning capacity was still nascent, and the lessons I learned were simple. Things were high-contrast: bad or good, sad or happy, dangerous or safe.

A Classroom for Humanity2019To gain more insights around these questions, I’ve been looking into the…Change2022If you’ve read my stories before, you may recognize the familiar stair-step…As I grew up, my capacity to learn deepened. I started seeing a more subtle and complex world and that this growing complexity is not the change in the world itself, but rather a change in how I make meaning of it. As my capacity to learn deepened, new dimensions of complexity opened up, with new opportunities to learn.

The Relationship Polarity2021I’ve been feeling a little stuck in my progress with the Four…Thus far, the learning happened in the context of my previous learning. What I learned in the past shaped how I would learn in the future. The stark nature of the early childhood lessons created sharp edges in the foundation of my continuous construction of meaning.

Practices to break out of the cycle of not-learning2022The Fallout station will feel like ruin, and most of the pain…Limits of attachment and capacity are interlinked2021It felt both liberating and somehow odd to make a distinction between…I am now recognizing that these sharp edges limit the extent of my capacity to learn. They are these unseen forces that collapse my choices, blind me to alternatives, especially in challenging situations. David Burns called them “cognitive distortions”. James Hollis gave them a more dramatic name of “woundings”. Brené Brown talks of armor. All these are different takes on the same thing: the natural outcome of learning when my learning capacity is a work-in-progress itself.

On the Riverbank21 days afterI am on the riverbank. In front of me, a river of…My Self-work Routinelinks here, 2019This leads to the second part, the archaeology of self. Here, I…The System of Selflinks here, 2019Here’s a checkpoint for Archeology of Self, a marker of where I’ve…The Upper Limit Of Understandinglinks here, 2019In this arrangement, the Context Model also necessarily includes the Model of…Somatic Signals: How I use the Four Needs Frameworklinks here, 2020In parallel, I’ve made some progress on developing the Four Needs Framework.…Thus, the deepening of my capacity to learn now includes re-examining the lessons from the past. Through careful archaeology of Self, I am challenged to understand the nature of my assumptions and beliefs, the context of meaning-making in which I learned those lessons, and learning different lessons with my current understanding of the world.