Month: August 2019

I started intentionally working on myself a year ago today, writing my first journal entry. Since then, I’ve iterated  to the point where I am settling down into a bit of a routine.

When I began,  I made the commitment to invest at least 30 minutes on self-work every day. The way it looks today is a nightly four-part exercise, taking about that much time. In addition to this practice, I read and talk to wise people. I’ve learned that many, many people have traveled along this path. I use their insights as path markers, holding them lightly. It was their path. I have my own to find.

I usually begin with journaling what I am currently feeling, listening to my body, looking for signs of somatic responses to stress. At first, this was a dubious activity (“uhm… feeling… fine?”), but I soon recognized that I have a few consistent somatic patterns, whether it’s a tension in shoulders or a knot in my stomach. I then trace these back to the emotions that caused them.

This leads to the second part, the archaeology of self. Here, I focus on understanding why I am experiencing these emotions. My goal is to surface the underlying wrinkle, the “thing that creates the suffering”. I’d found that looking for cognitive distortion patterns helps me as a good first pass. Sometimes it takes a few days (or weeks), but I usually arrive at some key assumption that was hiding in plain sight. I’ve grown to rely on David Burns’ vertical development and on Kegan/Lahey’s immunity to change techniques. This is also where I document what I learned in my experiments and design new safe-to-fail experiments to try.

Next, I move to the third part, letting my Purpose find me. I shift my focus from where I’ve been to where I am going. In the beginning, I struggled quite a bit with even discerning the pull of the Purpose. I was really trapped in “duty”, “supposed to”, and “have to”. Seeking clarity, I ask myself what I actually want out of life and whether my actions lead to that. I study how I instinctively frame my actions and whether the framing or the actions themselves need to change. Through this process, I keep sketching and refining the bigger resonant whole, the thing that moves my spirit, the larger Purpose.

I conclude my day with the riverbank. Early this year, I was introduced to meditation and it has been a gift. Thank you, Search Inside Yourself and folks who taught it as a class. Meditation serves as my closure for the day, putting back all the pieces that I may have dislodged, making me whole. It’s a blissful touch of serenity, a glimpse of what’s possible, however brief.

I am not sharing my routine because I believe that you should follow it or that it is somehow a solution that works for everyone. I can’t even guarantee that it works for me. YMMV.

I am sharing it here because if you feel overwhelmed, lonely, and lost, I hope to spur your curiosity to give intentional self-work at try and maybe come up with the routine of your own. I am but a data point, a tiny bit of evidence of making tiny steps toward inner peace and seeing my own Self more fully and embracing its beauty.

In my own clock, I spoke metaphorically about learning to listen to my own Self, learning to discern what I want from what I believe I am supposed to want. As this process continues, I am becoming more aware of the distinction between the two. In exploring this distinction, an interesting question arises: what is it that I actually want?

I am realizing that my desire to answer to this question is animated by a force that is much like gravity: subtle, yet unyielding. Like gravity, it manifests whether I want it or not. Like gravity, I can only pretend to ignore it. I’ve come to see it as the fundamental need for Fulfillment, the need to do something more than just surviving and living out my life.

I’ve also begun recognizing that this need for Fulfillment, this force is directed. There’s a definite sense of “more-of-that” and “less-of-that” when I make my own choices. And when there’s a direction, there’s a destination. There is a Purpose, my own sense of meaning that is clearly there, present within me.

I am neither used to looking for it, nor it is easy to see. With other forces pulling in their own directions, it’s easy for me to get distracted and disoriented. Did I act in a certain way because I was stumbling toward my Purpose, or was because I was trying to protect myself in some way?

I’d found that the direction is most easily seen when I sit down at the end of the day and spend a few minutes reflecting on what is happening within me, and how the day felt as a whole. This does not need to take a long time: I usually just set my fingertips to the keyboard and let them go. More often than not, exhaustion and angst of the day gives way to curiosity and wonder. That’s when I start seeing a bit more. I start tracing outlines of what is meaningful to me, what’s important, what’s purposeful.

It’s almost like my Purpose is always there. I am just blocking with the whirlwind of the mundane. In the moments when I can stop and let go, I am able to let it find me.

Why is it that some people are unable to see a different perspective? Why is it that when I try to introduce them to that perspective, I get an angry, hateful response, and often, trigger them holding more firmly onto their current perspective? What is happening here?

To gain more insights around these questions, I’ve been looking into the constructive-developmental theories, and they open some very intriguing possibilities.

They posit that we all have a meaning-making device, something that helps us take external inputs from the world and turn it into meaning, constructing a coherent reality in our minds. Through grounded theory methodology, they’ve found that our meaning-making devices are in the process of continuous evolution, rapidly and massively transformative in the young age, eventually slowing down, becoming more rare and far in-between for adults. Unlike children, who upgrade their meaning-making device every few years, we grown-ups are typically stuck with the one we acquired as young adults.

They also identified distinct stages of these transformations, the plateaus where people situate. According to the research, the current center of gravity for adults in our world seems to be in the Socialized Mind stage. (As an aside, different theories assign different names for the stages and I will use the ones from Kegan’s work.) When my meaning-making device is at the Socialized Mind plateau, my sense of rightness and wrongness is defined by those around me. I seek the principles and values from my leaders, and good and bad is what everyone in my “tribe” says it is. I tend to strongly identify with my tribe, and thus experience severe injured identity pain when I perceive that this identity is threatened. When I encounter ideas or perspectives that aren’t aligned with those of my tribe, I unconsciously feel the fear of the abyss and also react to it as a threat.

It is not a huge leap from here to see that the frictionless global interconnectedness of the modern world would leave a Socialized Mind reeling, feeling as if it’s under constant attack from the overwhelming, unbearable threat of the entire meaning to come undone, made incoherent. If I am constructing my reality using a Socialized Mind, I see it as the world coming apart, with The End fast-approaching. I am not having a good time, prone to polarization, further entrenchment in the ideology of my tribe, and blame, pointing fingers at others. And in doing so, along with others in the same state, I am acting out the fulfillment of my own prophecy. Trapped in this vicious cycle, we appear to be doomed.

The constructive-developmentalists suggest that there is another perspective. They reframe the bleak picture as a developmental environment, a classroom of sorts. This struggle of the Socialized Mind is actually a challenge, a tough assignment that is presented to the humanity in that classroom. And the goal of this assignment is transformational learning, the evolution of our meaning-making devices to the next plateau, the Self-authoring Mind. This next plateau offers me the capacity to hold my own perspective, seeing it as one of many, no longer viewing others’ differences as threats to core identity. Thus, the graduation looks like shifting humanity’s center of gravity toward to the Self-authoring Mind.

This learning continues. A graduation is just a milestone in this classroom of humanity. The next plateau over, the Self-transforming Mind is even more equipped to thrive in the modern world: with this meaning-making device, I learn to appreciate and cherish the multitude of perspectives, holding mine lightly.

Just like in any effective classroom, the challenge in itself is not sufficient to foster transformational learning. The support, the sense of safety and grounding is a fundamental part of the process. My best teachers weren’t those who took it easy on me. They were those who, while presenting a seemingly impossible challenge, made it clear that they were with me, empathetic and steady, supporting me as I flailed and struggled. They weren’t paternalistic or over-protective, but they coached me, and guided me back to the path when I was going in circles. They created an environment where I learned to thrive.

This framing creates a fairly clear–and frankly, more positive–way to view humanity’s current predicament. Shifting away from apocalyptic lamentations, I can now focus on exploring this question: what would it take to create an effective developmental learning environment for humanity?

I’ve been thinking about how I experience the fear of the unknown in the context of constructive-developmental theory, this fear of what’s beyond the edge of my current capacity to make meaning, the fear of the abyss.

This fear pops up when I am experiencing something that is incongruent with the reality I construct, something that I can’t reconcile and make coherent according to my current understanding of the world. I may experience it as something that is grabbing at me, trying to “get me”, something to be feared.

The subject-object shift in constructive-developmental theory refers to a developmental transformation of how I make meaning, where invisible is made visible. I see this shift as me improving my capacity to make meaning, to see an ever-increasing context. With each jump to a larger context, I start seeing things that were driving me, invisibly influencing me, being part of me, or part of the unknown become things that I see and have the capacity to hold apart, things about which I can reason. 

For example, let’s suppose that I am subject to some principle and value-making device. That is, I accept my principles and values as “things that are”, rather than something I can author. When I see that someone else has different principles and values, I experience the fear of the abyss: how can it be that someone else has different “things that are?”. In that moment, I may also be subject to the fear itself, and thus be subject to cognitive distortions (I am guessing those are an outcome of being subject to fear),  experiencing anxiety, shame, depression, anger, etc.

Once my meaning-making capacity grows to see a principle and value-authoring device in myself, I am no longer seeing principles and values as “things that are”, but rather things that people have. I can see how they can be different across people and the fear of the abyss no longer overcomes me when I encounter someone with a different set of principles and values. With the subject-object shift, the fear of the abyss has moved on to the next frontier of my meaning-making.