Thread by @VividVoid_

Hey, it's 2022.

Today, I'm thinking about change, about resolutions, about desire, about the reinvention of self, about integrity, shame and faith.

I wrote this thread about it, and I'd be honored if you'd read it. 🙏

After 8 years of mindfulness practice, I am still struck by how little I am capable of consciously controlling.

My mind has a small influence over my body, my body has a small influence over my environment.

My conditioning, intrinsic and extrinsic, rules my behavior.

As I go about the tasks of life, each moment pulls hidden dreams, desires and scars from my situation and my unconscious, up into swells of ego that rise, crest and fall again into negation.

I am just surfing, self after momentary self, with whatever grace & skill I can muster

Because we must all live together, we tell a story that we are individual entities capable of constant self-control. This is why ppl are so obsessed with shame/punishment, and why they have such savage inner critics. They can't trust themselves and they know it.

So they continue to use negative conditioning, wielding shame and pain and guilt, trapped in cycles of boom and bust behavior, because they and most of the planet erroneously believe that if we stop using these tools, the whole human enterprise will come crashing down around us.

There is a piece of the truth in there, which is that we can't stop conditioning ourselves and one another. We are inescapably contingent beings.

But how we condition, and for what, and the dynamics of the egos we hope to shape: these are questions of extraordinary importance.

To the extent that we can learn to live without letting pain and fear compel us, we can live authentically.

I personally believe silent, unconscious aversion inescapably lives in all of our schemas, deep down, and can only be witnessed and integrated, not removed

There are wonderful spiritual practices that help undo old conditioning that isn't working, and develop the self-mastery you need to live in truth and dwell in mystery

Any spiritual tradition worth its salt is concerned with this to some degree.

Many mountains, one sky.

As the year begins and winter comes upon us, the season of secret work, dreaming, darkness, gestation:

My wish for you is that you find yourself full of courage. Not the absence of fear, but the ability to accept and bear your anxieties, without distraction, defense or delusion.

To be human is to be ambiguous, to be anxious. If you can inhabit and integrate this fact of existence, you can begin to see for yourself that something compels you despite it. Something drives you, innately, to be what you are, despite your inability to ever know what you are

That is what the lived, embodied experience of faith feels like. I can't go on. I'll go on.

It's a holy tension, a fascia woven across your bodymind, connecting land, bones and spirit, orienting each uncountable self after self after self toward the possible.

Happy New Year, everyone. May you trust in what you are becoming 🫀