The basic idea

Paul Ricoeur was a French philosopher who noticed that human consciousness tends to move through three distinct stages in its relationship to meaning. He wasn’t prescribing a path — he was describing one that seems to happen naturally, especially for people who take their inner lives seriously.

The three stages: First Naiveté → Critical Stage → Second Naiveté

Stage One: First Naiveté

The inherited world

• You live inside a meaning-system without having chosen it — a religion, a worldview, a cultural story about what life is for

• Meaning feels given, not constructed

• Symbols feel alive. Rituals carry weight. The story feels true.

• You belong to something larger than yourself without having to decide whether you believe it

The gift: wholeness, wonder, a sense of being held by something larger

The crack that ends it: a loss the framework can’t explain, a contradiction that won’t resolve, an encounter with a different worldview that seems equally valid — something that makes the water visible

Stage Two: The Critical Stage

The examined world

• You step outside the inherited framework and begin to see it as constructed

• Deconstruction begins: theology, ideology, inherited identity, cultural conditioning

• Feels like liberation at first — clarity, agency, intellectual honesty, freedom from being fooled

• The critical mind becomes the primary instrument of navigation

The gift: intellectual honesty, autonomy, the refusal to live on borrowed meaning

The shadow (what happens if you go all the way through):

• The critical mind has no floor — it can deconstruct anything, including itself

• Desires become suspect. Motivations become questionable. Every framework becomes arbitrary

• Meaning stops feeling given and starts feeling impossible

• Small decisions carry existential weight

• Life becomes something you observe and analyze rather than inhabit

• The endpoint, if you’re honest: nihilism, groundlessness, profound loneliness

The wall: the moment you realize the critical mind can take everything apart but cannot put anything back together.

The gap/wall between Stage Two and Stage Three

This is where many thoughtful people get stuck. It’s worth naming what this place feels like:

• You can’t go back to the first naiveté — you’ve seen too much

• You can’t stay in the critical stage — there’s no ground there

• Every framework you might reach for can be immediately deconstructed

• Commitment feels like choosing delusion

• Staying small feels safer than risking another betrayal

• The critical mind mistakes this paralysis for wisdom

What’s actually needed here is not more analysis. It’s a different kind of move altogether….

Stage Three: The Second Naiveté

The chosen world

• Not a return to innocence — you can’t unknow what you know

• The conscious choice to inhabit a framework, knowing it is constructed, choosing it anyway

• You choose the myth that makes you more alive

• You choose practices that embody your stance toward reality

• You enter commitments — relational, creative, vocational — knowing they will end, deciding they are worth it

What makes it different from Stage One:

• Stage One: meaning is received

• Stage Three: meaning is chosen. (The critical mind is still present — it’s just no longer the only voice.)

What Ricoeur noticed about symbols at this stage:

• A symbol gives more than analysis can exhaust

• You can explain a symbol completely and it still resonates, still points somewhere

• The second naiveté lets you follow that resonance rather than only explain it

• Participation becomes possible again

The gift: agency, depth, and wholeness held together simultaneously — the rarest combination

Three fears that block the move into Stage Three

1. “If I know it’s constructed, am I just pretending?” Conscious choice is not performance. It is the most authentic act available to someone who has seen clearly.

2. “I stepped into something before and it betrayed me. Won’t this be the same?” There’s a difference between a framework that chose you and one you choose yourself, with eyes open, that you’re willing to revise as you grow.

3. “Committing to something larger means surrendering the autonomy I worked so hard to win.” Choosing a framework is not the same as being chosen by one. The authority remains yours. You are wielding yourself toward something, not disappearing into it.

A few things to hold onto

• These aren’t stages you climb once and leave behind — you can cycle through them in different domains at different depths. Ex: You can be in Stage Three regarding vocation and still in Stage Two regarding theology.

• The darkness at the end of Stage Two is not a sign something has gone wrong — it may mean you’ve gone all the way through, and the next move is available.

• The goal isn’t certainty on the other side of doubt — it’s a life large enough to hold the doubt while still committing to something.

One sentence for each stage

Stage One: Meaning is the (nearly invisible) water I swim in.
Stage Two: I can see the water — and now I’m not sure it’s real.
Stage Three: I know it’s water I’m choosing to swim in, and I’m choosing it anyway.

Spiritual Deconstruction

Religious deconstruction is one of the most common — and most disorienting — ways people move through Ricoeur’s arc.

• Stage One is the inherited faith: the tradition you were born into or adopted, received as true, lived from the inside without critical distance

  • The crack usually comes through: a theological contradiction, a church hurt, exposure to other traditions, or simply the collision of the faith with real suffering it can’t explain

• Stage Two begins as relief — finally being honest, finally allowed to doubt, finally seeing the machinery behind the beliefs

  • For many people, deconstruction communities and progressive theology function as a halfway house in Stage Two: supportive, validating, necessary

  • But if the deconstruction is thorough, Stage Two eventually consumes even those frameworks — progressive theology, therapeutic spirituality, secular humanism all become equally deconstructable

  • The endpoint: not just “I left my tradition” but “I have no framework for meaning at all” — which is a very different and much lonelier place

What Stage Three looks like after deconstruction:

• Consciously choosing a cosmology, a set of practices, a community — knowing they are human constructions, choosing them because they are alive and generative for you

• Letting symbol and myth function again — not as literal truth claims but as genuine orientations toward depth

• The difference between Stage One faith and Stage Three faith: one was handed to you, one costs you something to choose

The hardest part: Stage Three after deconstruction requires grieving the loss of innocent belief — the wish that there might have been somewhere truly solid, truly given, truly beyond question. That grief is real and deserves its full weight. But on the other side of it is a faith that is genuinely yours — tested, chosen, alive.

Therapeutic Work

Therapy — particularly psychoanalytic and depth psychological approaches — is one of the most powerful tools available for navigating Stage Two. It is less well-equipped for the move into Stage Three, and understanding why matters.

Where therapy excels:

• Helping you see the constructed nature of your inherited self — the parts, the defenses, the family patterns

• Revealing the unconscious drivers beneath conscious beliefs and desires

• Building the capacity to observe yourself without being consumed by what you observe

• Naming and metabolizing the wounds that made the Stage One framework feel necessary

Where therapy reaches its limit:

• Most therapeutic frameworks operate within what philosopher Charles Taylor called the “immanent frame” — the assumption that all meaning is generated from within human subjectivity

• Therapy can show you why you reached for meaning — the developmental need, the attachment wound, the defensive function of belief

• It cannot tell you that meaning is worth reaching for anyway

• It deconstructs the reach without being able to rehabilitate it

• The analytic stance — observe, interpret, reflect — trains you in exactly the second-stage posture: distance, scrutiny, self-examination

• This is valuable, but it can inadvertently make the Stage Three move harder, not easier

What Stage Three work actually requires:

• A guide or community that has themselves crossed the threshold — someone who models holding both critical awareness and genuine commitment simultaneously

• A tradition of some kind — chosen, not inherited — that provides practices and symbols tested by time and capable of carrying weight

• Permission to treat resonance as evidence — to follow what comes alive rather than only analyzing why it does

• The willingness to act before certainty arrives — to step into commitment as a practice, not as a conclusion

The core distinction: therapy tends to ask why does this matter to you? — which is a second-stage question. Stage Three asks what is this pointing toward? — which is a different orientation entirely. Both questions are necessary. A life of only the first question tends to produce insight without traction. The second question is what turns insight into a lived direction.

But what does that actually mean?

I think the answer depends entirely on the story you are living inside.

If we are living in the modern, enlightenment story of the sovereign self that lives in a silent universe - becoming yourself means maximizing your potential. Developing your capacities, achieving your goals, becoming the fullest version of the self you were always capable of being. You try to grow towards your ideal self - the one that is more productive or more healed or more autonomous or more free. The measure of becoming yourself is largely external (and therefore also comparative). Are you becoming more than you were? Are you closing the gap between who you are and who you could be?

This version of “become yourself” is so embedded in our culture that most of us have never questioned it. It feels like common sense. It feels like what the phrase obviously means.

But I want to contrast this story with a new and ancient story about Reality - a more participatory cosmology, where you are not an isolated self in a silent universe, striving to maximize your potential against a neutral backdrop. Instead, you are a specific, unrepeatble form of the cosmo’s own interiority - the particular shape that the universe’s self-knowing is taking in you and no one else. Your becoming is not separate from the cosmo’s becoming. It is a node within it.

Which means “become yourself” is not a self-improvement project. It is a cosmological one.

And it has four dimensions that the modern enlightenment story cannot see.

Dimension 1: Shadow Work - face what you have not faced

Every person, by virtue of having been raised in a particular family and culture, has developed certain capacities and buried others. The buried material does not disappear. It goes underground — into what Jung called the shadow — and runs from there, often with far more force than anything we are consciously directing.

The shadow is not only darkness - what we suppressed includes our genuine gifts as much as our genuine wounds. The person who was taught that anger was unacceptable suppressed not just the destructive rage but the healthy self-assertion, the capacity to hold a boundary, the force that says this matters and I will defend it. The person who was taught that vulnerability was weakness suppressed not just the grief but the depth of connection that grief alone makes possible. The gold is in the shadow as much as the poison.

Becoming yourself begins here - not building toward an ideal, but with descending toward what has been avoided. This is not therapeutic in the managed, clinical sense of identifying a dysfunction and correcting it. It is the willingness to let what seemed like your foundation turn out to be a defense.

You cannot be whole without what you have split off. The split-off parts are still you - perhaps the most you. The first dimension of genuine becoming is the willingness to go toward what you have been going away from.

Dimension 2: True Self - relaxing the performed self

Beneath the shadow work, something even more fundamental waits.

Over the course of your life, you have developed a way of being in the world - a presented self, a performance of personhood - that was shaped by what was rewarded, what was punished, and what was required to survive and belong in the particular world you were born into. This performed self is not a lie. It was the self that had to be. It got you here.

But it is not the whole self. And it has, in many cases, almost no relationship to what you actually want, what you actually care about, what actually moves you when nothing is watching.

Donald Winnicott, the psychoanalyst, called this the distinction between the True Self and the False Self. Richard Schwartz’s IFS maps it precisely: the managers — the parts of you that run the performance, that keep you productive and presentable and safe — are doing their job brilliantly. But their job was designed for a crisis that may have passed decades ago. And the cost of their vigilance is that the more genuine, more vulnerable, more actually-alive parts of you never quite make it to the surface.

The second dimension of becoming yourself is the gradual, often disorienting emergence of this more genuine self. Not by destroying the performed self, but by finding a different relationship to it. When the performing parts begin to relax, what they were protecting surfaces. Genuine desires you had written off, or genuine aversions you had overridden with obligation. A genuine sense of what matters to you.

This is why genuine self-becoming often looks, from the outside, like crisis. The successful person who realizes they have been performing success for twenty years and have no idea what they actually want. The faithful person who realizes they have been believing what they were supposed to believe rather than what they actually, in their depths, find to be real. These are not breakdowns - they might be the real self beginning to surface.

In the participatory story, this emergence is not just personal. It is cosmological. The universe is trying to know itself through you - specifically, irreplaceably through you. Every year you spend performing a self that is not yours is a year the universe’s self-knowing in your particular form goes unrealized. The stakes of genuine self-emergence are not only personal. They are, in the fullest sense, cosmic. (Not to add any pressure… :)

Dimension 3: Calling - discern your vocation

Every life has a specific form - a particular gift, a particular way of participating in the larger unfolding that belongs to this life and not any other. I don’t mean a predetermined destiny imposed from outside. Something more like what the Quakers mean by “way opening” - the gradual emergence, through paying attention, of what this life is most genuinely oriented toward at its deepest level.

The philosopher James Hillman called it the daimon — the particular image or form that each soul carries, the thing that has been trying to express itself through you your whole life, often in spite of you. Your unique acorn that is wanting to become an oak tree. Bill Plotkin calls it the soul’s code - the mythic, poetic sense of what your specific life is for. It cannot be discovered by strategic planning - only by a quality of patient, receptive attention to what keeps showing up, what you cannot help caring about, what breaks your heart in a way that feels like recognition rather than wound.

Vocation in this sense is not a job. It is the particular form of participation that only you can make. There is no universal metric. There is only the question: what is this life for, specifically?

And the participatory claim is that this is not a merely private question. Your vocation is the cosmos’s way of doing something through you that it cannot do any other way. Which means discerning it is not self-indulgence. It is your responsibility to the whole.

Dimension 4: Love - becoming capable of real encounter

All of this - shadow integration, the emergence of the True Self, the discernment of vocation - is in service of something that makes it worthwhile. Not happiness. Not even wholeness, exactly. But the capacity for genuine encounter with another person, another creature, or even the living world.

Martin Buber called the difference I-It vs. I-Thou. I-It is the encounter that is mediated by my own unprocessed need - in which I am not actually seeing the person in front of me but a screen onto which I am projecting my own unfinished interior business. I-Thou is genuine encounter: the other met as a subject, real, not assimilated to my own story about who they are or what I need them to be.

The person who has not done the work of the first three dimensions cannot fully access I-Thou. Because the unintegrated shadow colonizes perception, the performed self cannot risk genuine exposure, and the undiscerned vocation leaves the person always slightly elsewhere - reaching for something they cannot quite name. What looks like love is often a complex negotiation between two sets of unmet needs.

The movement through the four dimensions - which is never linear, never complete, always a direction rather than a destination - is simultaneously a movement toward the capacity to actually see and be seen. The self that has found its own ground can finally stop defending it. It can afford genuine presence. It can love without needing the love to fix something that only inner work can fix.

This is why, in the participatory story, the development of the individual and the quality of community are not separate projects. They are the same project, seen from different angles. The more fully each person becomes themselves, the more genuinely they can be present to others. And the community that holds people well in their becoming is itself transformed by the quality of presence that becomes possible within it.

Becoming yourself, in the participatory story, is not self-improvement.

It is the willingness to face what you have buried, to let the performed self finally rest, to discern the specific form your participation in this cosmos is meant to take, and to become - through all of that - genuinely capable of love.

This is the work the participation story calls us to.

And it is not yours alone. The cosmos is doing something through you that it cannot do any other way.

Counterproducivity is the idea that institutions, pas a certain threshold of scale or complexity, begin to actively undermine the very purpose they were created to serve. He called it a “counterprodutive” threshold.

To say it another way: growing organizations cross a threshold where they actively product the OPPOSITE of what they exist to create.

Examples:
Schools that systematically prevent genuine learning.
Hospitals that produce more illness than they cure.
Transportation systems that (when you account for all the time spent earning money to afford a car) actually move people slower than walking.

The institution doesn’t just fail - it inverts.

Once an institution grows large enough, it must begin serving its own survival - its budgets, its brand, its internal hierarchies, its need to justify its existence. At that point, the people it was meant to serve become, functionally, the resource it consumes to keep running.

Illich called the end state a “radical monopoly.” Not just market dominance, but something more insidious: the colonization of imagination. The institution grows until people can no longer coneive of the need being met any other way. You stop asking “how do humans learn?” and only ask “how do we improve the school?” The category swallows the question.

It makes me think about economics - when do economic institutions begin to create economic inequality and collapse instead of prosperity?
Or politics - when does the political system pass a threshold where it begins to invert and creates the very polarization and dysfunction it exists to resolve?
Or media — when does the institution built to inform a democracy begin to manufacture confusion and outrage instead?

No wonder there is so much distrust of institutions in our time.

I think we are living in a time where the older generations remember when institutions were generally good and healthy for our society - a time of Walter Cronkite media and George Bailey banking and relatively helpful school systems. A time when institutions were, by and large, doing what they said they were doing. And so the older generation’s instinct is to defend them - to see the problem as one of attitude, or effort, or a generation that doesn’t want to do the hard work of participation.

But the younger generation isn’t disillusioned because they’re lazy. They’re disillusioned because they’re paying attention. They grew up inside institutions that had already crossed the threshold - and they felt it, even when they couldn’t name it. Both generations are right about different moments in time. One remembers before. The other has only known after.

How might this idea apply to the church?
The Christian tradition, at its core, exists to form people - to midwife a particular kind of inner transformation, a dying and rising, a reorientation of the whole self toward love.

How well does formation scale? Can it scale?

When do religious institutions - the ones with budgets to maintain and attendance figures to defend and brands to protect - quietly, often unconsciously, swap out formation for something that does scale: inspiration. Content. A weekly experience that feels meaningful, produces enough emotional resonance to bring people back, and asks nothing too costly of anyone.

I believe most of the people running these institutions are sincere. But sincerity doesn’t exempt anyone from structural logic. Once a church depends on hundreds or thousands of weekly attenders to function, it cannot afford to take formation as seriously - because real formation would thin the crows. It would surface conflict. It would ask people to sit with discomfort long enough that something actually changed. It would require the kind of intimate, mutual accountability that simply doesn’t work at scale.

And so the institution, past the threshold, begins to produce the opposite of its stated purpose. It generates spiritual consumers instead of disciples. It creates people who know the vocabulary of transformation without having undergone any. It mistakes regularity for formation, attendance for belonging, emotional experience for encounter with the living God.

Worse — and this is Illich’s radical monopoly point — it monopolizes the imagination. People who have been inside large religious institutions for years often cannot imagine what genuine spiritual community might look like. They know the product so well that the original need has become invisible. They don’t ask “how do humans grow toward God?” They only ask “how do we find a better church?”

The answer, I think, is not to abandon institutions wholesale — Illich wasn’t quite an anarchist, and neither am I. But it is to become ruthlessly clear about what scale actually permits. Large gatherings can inspire, resource, and connect. They cannot form. Formation happens in small, slow, accountable containers — where people know each other well enough to tell the truth, and stay together long enough for it to matter.

Illich believed this isn’t fixable through better management. Its structural. The container becomes the obstacle to the purpose.

It makes me rethink the value and importance of the small, local church. Maybe that is the size of community that is most leveraged (from a structural, design perspective) for real formation. Large enough to create diverse community and teach a path. Small and intimate enough to create real transformative relationships.

Sometimes it frustrates me that signposts on my path keep pointing me to the local church… :)

Control vs Capacity

My default mode - it happens without me even realizing it - is to try and engineer a life that doesn’t include the hard parts.

If I optimize enough…
If I earn enough…
If I heal enough…
If I design my life carefully enough…
Then maybe I can create a version of life that only includes the pleasant parts!

It’s not a bad thing. It’s human. Of course we don’t willingly want to feel all that hard shit!

But underneath that impulse are two very different approaches to life:

• Control says: “If I manage this well enough, I won’t have to feel this.”

• Capacity says: “I can feel this. I can be with this.”

Control tries to eliminate discomfort. Capacity learns how to hold it.
Control shrinks your world. Capacity expands it.

The irony: If you can’t be with something, you are actually controlled by it.

What the Trees Taught Us

In the 1980s, scientists built a massive enclosed ecosystem in Arizona called Biosphere 2. It was designed to test what would be required to sustain life in a perfectly controlled environment - like a future colony on Mars.

Inside the dome, everything was carefully regulated.
The trees grew quickly and beautifully.

And then…they collapsed.

They didn’t know why at first. Why are trees falling over in our perfect environment?
And then they figured it out: There was no wind!

Without wind, the trees never developed deep roots or strong fibers. They grew fast, but fragile. When they reached a certain height, they couldn’t support their own weight.

A life without friction creates fragility. When we try to eliminate discomfort entirely, we don’t become peaceful. We become brittle.

A marriage that can only tolerate harmony becomes fragile.
A parent who eliminates all disappointment produces fragile kids.
A business owner who avoids uncertainty builds a fragile company.

Resilience doesn’t come from control. It comes from exposure.

The Package Deal

When you try to experience only the pleasant half of life, you end up living a half-life.

If you cut off grief, you cut off love.
If you cut off failure, you cut off growth.
If you cut off dependence, you cut off intimacy.

Life is a package deal.

When you try to eliminate vulnerability to gain security, you don’t get security. You get fragility.
When you try to avoid pain to preserve aliveness, you don’t get aliveness. You get numbness.

Fullness is not the absence of pain. It’s the presence of enough inner space to hold pain and joy at the same time.

The Actual Goal

Spiritual maturity isn’t about gaining more control over life. It’s about increasing your capacity to be with life.

Capacity to sit with disappointment…to hold boundaries…to feel uncertainty… to stay present when things get messy.

The size of your life is determined by what you are willing to feel.

If you build your life around avoidance, your world gets smaller and smaller. If you practice capacity, your world expands. Not because life gets easier - but because you become larger than the discomfort inside it.

Life to the fullest doesn’t come from eliminating the hard parts.
It comes from becoming someone who can be with all of it.

What area of your life are you stuck? And what would become possible if you could be with the discomfort?

Here’s a video about about my own (lack of) capacity to let my kids have sugar meltdowns.

(That’s my current elevator pitch - what do you think? I’m working on it…)

And as I work on it, here’s a little map I’ve created about the stages of moving from our Survival Self to our True Self. Of course, it’s nice and neat in this 7 stage map, but in reality it’s a whole lot of 2 steps forward, 1 step back. Sometimes in the shape of a tangled slinky someone dropped down the stairs.

The 7 Stages of the Survival Self → True Self Journey

Stage 1 - Survival Mode

Life feels overwhelming and reactive

Internal experience

• Constant pressure

• Anxiety about the future

• Feeling behind

• Trying to control everything

• Overthinking

• Exhaustion

Identity

“I have to figure everything out.”

Survival patterns

• overworking

• procrastination

• people pleasing

• perfectionism

• control

Business expression

• scattered focus

• unclear strategy

• inconsistent income

• working too many hours

Core illusion

If I just try harder and control things better, life will work.

Stage 2 - Pattern Awareness

The person realizes something deeper is happening

This is where coaching usually begins.

They start noticing:

• patterns

• emotional triggers

• inner conflict

They begin asking:

• Why do I keep doing this?

• Why do I sabotage things?

• Why do I feel so overwhelmed?

Identity shift

“Maybe the problem isn’t just external.”

Key realization

The problem isn’t the situation.

The problem is how my nervous system and identity are relating to the situation.

Stage 3 - Parts Recognition

They discover their inner system

Clients begin to see that they are not one unified self.
They are a system of parts:

• the achiever

• the critic

• the avoider

• the pleaser

• the scared child

Instead of saying:

“I am procrastinating”

They start saying:

“A part of me is avoiding this.”

This stage creates massive relief.

They stop attacking themselves.

Identity shift

“There are parts of me trying to protect me.”

Stage 4 - Presence & Capacity

They stop trying to fix emotions and learn to feel them

This stage is huge.

Before this point, their strategy was:

• avoid feelings

• fix feelings

• control feelings

Now they learn:

feelings can be experienced safely.

They develop:

• emotional capacity

• nervous system regulation

• presence

Identity shift

“I can handle whatever arises.”

Stage 5 - Self Leadership

The True Self begins leading the internal system

The person now experiences moments where they are:

• calm

• clear

• compassionate

• courageous

• curious

Instead of being run by patterns, they begin consciously leading their parts and patterns.

They can say:

“Thank you for trying to protect me, but we’re going to try something different.”

Identity shift

“I am not this emotion or pattern. I can lead my system.”

Stage 6 - Alignment & Expression

Life begins reorganizing around the True Self

This is where external life changes start happening naturally.

They begin:

• setting boundaries

• making clear decisions

• choosing aligned work

• expressing what they really want

• trusting their intuition

Business improves.

Relationships deepen.

Energy increases.

Because they are no longer leaking energy into survival patterns.

Identity shift

“I trust myself to lead my life.”

Stage 7 - True Self Living

Life becomes participation rather than control

This stage is not perfection.

It is a fundamentally different relationship with life.

Characteristics:

• openness to experience

• capacity for uncertainty

• deep self trust

• emotional resilience

• creativity

• presence

They still feel fear, doubt, sadness.

But those emotions no longer run their life.

They experience life as:

• meaningful

• alive

• participatory

Identity

“I can meet reality as it is.”

Coaching the Transitions

My coaching is essentially helping people move through three big transitions.

Transition 1

Survival Mode → Awareness

They realize the problem is internal patterns.

Transition 2

Parts Awareness → Self Leadership

They learn how to work with their internal system.

Transition 3

Self Leadership → True Self Living

Life becomes aligned and creative.

My coaching teaches people: how to lead their life from their True Self instead of their Survival Self.

That shift changes:

• business

• relationships

• creativity

• emotional wellbeing

And it’s hella fun :)

For example:

• A person cannot explore purpose if their nervous system feels unsafe.

• They cannot integrate parts if they do not feel worthy of existing.

• They cannot live from their true self if they cannot trust their own agency.

So the journeys often unfold in a developmental arc.

Below is a map that integrates:

• the 12 healing journeys

• Jungian individuation

• trauma psychology

• spiritual development (False Self → True Self)

The Stages of the Human Healing Journey

A developmental stages of how people often move from survival to wholeness:

SURVIVAL → BELONGING → SELF → MEANING → CONTRIBUTION

Stage 1 - Safety

(The Nervous System Stage)

Core question: Am I safe in this world?

Journeys here: Safety, Capacity, Grief

What is happening: The nervous system learns that life is survivable.

If unresolved: chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, emotional overwhelm, shutdown or dissociation.

Healing experiences: regulation, co-regulation, emotional tolerance, grieving losses

Transformation: Survival → Stability
The body learns: “I can exist without constant danger.”

Stage 2 - Belonging

(The Relationship Stage)

Core question: Am I allowed to exist with others?

Journeys here: Belonging, Permission, Worth

What is happening: The person learns whether connection is safe.

If unresolved: people pleasing, shame, emotional suppression, fear of abandonment

Healing experiences:

• being emotionally honest without losing connection

• being seen without rejection

• feeling emotions in relationship

Transformation: Conditional Love → Secure Belonging
The nervous system learns: “I can be myself and still be loved.”

Stage 3 - Self

(The Identity Stage)

Core question: Who am I really?

Journeys here: Wholeness, Freedom, Agency

What is happening: The person separates from inherited identities and discovers their authentic self.

Healing experiences:

• integrating parts

• dropping false roles

• trusting inner authority

Transformation: False Self → Authentic Self
The person becomes internally organized.

Stage 4 - Meaning

(The Worldview Stage)

Core question: What does life mean?

Journeys here: Meaning, Integration

What is happening: The person’s worldview evolves.

Healing experiences:

• integrating paradox

• reconstructing worldview

• aligning spirituality and psychology

Transformation: Confusion → Coherence
The person understands their place in reality.

Stage 5 - Contribution

(The Purpose Stage)

Core question: What is my life for?

Journey here: Purpose

What is happening: The person begins expressing their unique contribution.

Healing experiences:

• discovering personal genius

• contributing to others

• aligning life with values

Transformation: Self-realization → Self-expression
Life becomes generative.

Maybe More like a Spiral

People cycle through these stages multiple times.

For example:

A purpose-driven person may later face grief, which temporarily returns them to Stage 1 work.

Growth is spiral-shaped, not linear.

This aligns with:

• Spiral Dynamics

• Fowler’s stages of faith

• Jung’s individuation

It can be helpful to think of these Stages in relationship with the specific Archetypal Healing Journey that someone may be on. When mapped together, you see the specific journey they are on AND the stage they are at.

One way to map them is to think of them as 12 archetypal movements of the human soul. Each one with:

• a core wound or stuck pattern

• a developmental movement required

• a healing experience needed

I’m pulling here from different frameworks that have influenced me like Jungian Archetypes, IFS, attachment theory, trauma work, Spiral Dynamics and the Enneagram. But this map is specifically for TRANSFORMATION itself, not the personality type.

(And then we can also look at how these journeys map onto the larger stages of Becoming.)

The 12 Archetypal Healing Journeys

1. The Belonging Journey

(Attachment Repair)

Core wound: Connection broke when emotions appeared.

Belief: “If I show my true feelings, I will lose love.”

Transformation: From conditional belonging → secure connection.

Healing experience: Being fully emotional while remaining in relationship.

Presence here is relational safety. The therapist or coach remains connected while the emotion appears so the client can experience: “I can feel this and still be in relationship.”

2. The Permission Journey

(Emotional Liberation)

Core wound: Certain emotions were forbidden. (Anger was punished, sadness dismissed, fear mocked…)

Belief: “My emotions are dangerous or wrong.”

Transformation: From emotional suppression → emotional permission.

Healing experience: Learning the body can survive strong feelings.

Presence here is permission. Simply allowing the emotion to exist. “This feeling is allowed to exist.”

3. The Safety Journey

(Nervous System Healing)

Core wound: The nervous system learned the world is dangerous. (Hypervigilance panic, chronic anxiety, dissociation…)

Belief: "The world is dangerous."

Transformation: From survival mode → felt safety.

Healing experience: The body learning safety again through regulation. (Somatic experiencing, EMDR, trauma therapy)

Presence here is regulation training. Learning to stay present with activation without fleeing or dissociating. “This sensation does not mean danger.”

4. The Wholeness Journey

(Parts Integration)

Core wound: Internal fragmentation / different parts competing. (Ex: one part wants intimacy, another part fears it, another part numbs it…)

Transformation: From inner conflict → inner leadership.

Healing experience: A stable “Self” (in them) holding all parts. All my parts are trying to help me. (IFS helpful)

Presence here is Self Leadership. The person learns to turn toward each part with curiosity. “Every emotion belongs to a part that is trying to help.

5. The Worth Journey

(Shame Healing)

Core wound: Deep shame.

Belief: “I am fundamentally flawed.”

Transformation: From shame → inherent worth.

Healing experience: Being fully seen without rejection.

Presence here is compassionate witnessing. The person experiences their vulnerable feelings being witnessed without rejection. “Even this part of me is acceptable.”

6. The Freedom Journey

(Identity Liberation)

Core wound: The person built a False Self to survive. (The achiever, the caretaker, the perfectionist…)

Belief: “I must be someone specific in order to be loved, safe, or worthy.”

Transformation: From performing identity → authentic identity.

Healing experience: The person experiences acceptance without performing the role.

Presence here is truth recovery. Turning toward the feelings that were exiled in order to maintain the role. “These feelings are signals of my authentic self.”

7. The Agency Journey

(Personal Authority)

Core wound: Life controlled by others’ expectations. (Authoritarian parenting, religious control, abusive relationships…)

Belief: “I cannot trust myself.”

Transformation: From external authority → inner authority.

Healing experience: The person makes choices from their own center and survives the outcome.

Presence here is reclaiming inner authority. Learning to listen to internal signals without immediately deferring to others. “My inner experience contains guidance.”

8. The Capacity Journey

(Emotional Expansion)

Core wound: The nervous system cannot hold the full intensity of life, or their goals. (Fear of success, fear of grief, fear of risk, fear of conflict…)

Belief: "I cannot handle this."

Transformation: From avoidance → capacity.

Healing experience: Learning to hold more of reality without collapsing or escaping.

Presence here is capacity building. Gradually staying with intense emotions. “I can handle more than I thought.”

9. The Meaning Journey

(Existential Reconstruction)

Core wound: The person’s worldview collapsed. (religious deconstruction, divorce, loss, burnout…)

Belief: “Nothing makes sense anymore.”

Transformation: From meaning collapse → meaning reconstruction.

Presence here is fertile not-knowing. Allowing existential emotions to be felt instead of prematurely solving them.

10. The Integration Journey

(Spiritual and Psychological Union)

Core wound: Split between spirituality and psychological reality. (or some other area of life…)

Belief: "My inner world and outer world don't fit together."

Transformation: From fragmentation → integration.

Healing experience: The person experiences multiple truths coexisting without conflict.

Presence here is paradox tolerance. Holding conflicting emotions simultaneously. “These opposites can coexist.”

11. The Grief Journey

(Loss and Letting Go)

Core wound: Unprocessed grief. (loss of people, identity, dreams, belief systems…)

Transformation: From frozen grief → sacred mourning.

Healing experience: Grief becoming a doorway to love.

Presence here is mourning. Allowing grief to move through the body. “Grief is love continuing to move.”

12. The Purpose Journey

(Calling and Contribution)

Core wound: Disconnection from one’s deeper purpose. (existential boredom, success without fulfillment, midlife crisis…)

Belief: "My life is supposed to mean something, but I don't know what."

Transformation: From drifting → aligned contribution.

Healing experience: The person experiences alignment between who they are and what they contribute. The person experiences their uniqueness being needed.

Presence here is attunement to aliveness. Listening deeply to desire and aliveness. “My longing points towards my calling.”

4 Domains of Healing

These 12 journeys cluster into four deeper domains of healing.

Relationship Healing

Belonging
Permission
Worth

Nervous System Healing

Safety
Capacity
Grief

Identity Healing

Wholeness
Freedom
Agency

Meaning Healing

Meaning
Integration
Purpose

Transformation Journey Diagnostic

How can we identify which of the 12 archetypal healing journeys the we/ our client is currently navigating?

Here’s some diagnostic “signals,” questions to ask, signs to look for:

Step 1 - Start With the Disturbance

Ask: “What in your life currently feels most stuck, painful, or confusing?”

Then explore three areas:

• emotions

• relationships

• identity

Listening for patterns, not just events.

Step 2 - Identify the Core Pattern

1. Belonging Journey (Attachment Repair)

Signals

• fear of abandonment

• people pleasing

• anxiety in relationships

• fear of conflict

Diagnostic questions

• When you show strong emotions, what do you expect others will do?

• Do you fear losing connection when you express yourself?

• Do you feel responsible for other people’s emotions?

Core healing work

Learning emotions do not break connection.

2. Permission Journey (Emotional Liberation)

Signals

• suppressed anger

• numbness

• difficulty feeling

Diagnostic questions

• Are there emotions you feel you are not allowed to feel?

• Were emotions welcomed in your childhood home?

• Do you judge yourself for certain feelings?

Core healing work

Emotional permission and emotional literacy.

3. Safety Journey (Nervous System Healing)

Signals

• chronic anxiety

• hypervigilance

• panic

• dissociation

Diagnostic questions

• Does your body often feel unsafe even when nothing is wrong?

• Do you feel constantly on edge?

• Do you struggle to relax?

Core healing work

Regulation and nervous system safety.

4. Wholeness Journey (Parts Integration)

Signals

• inner conflict

• self-sabotage

• contradictory desires

Diagnostic questions

• Do different parts of you want different things?

• Do you feel internally divided?

• Do you feel like multiple selves are competing?

Core healing work

IFS / inner leadership.

5. Worth Journey (Shame Healing)

Signals

• chronic self-criticism

• perfectionism

• fear of being seen

Diagnostic questions

• Do you secretly believe something is wrong with you?

• Do you hide parts of yourself?

• Do you feel fundamentally flawed?

Core healing work

Shame healing through safe witnessing.

6. Freedom Journey (Identity Liberation)

Signals

• burnout

• loss of identity

• living according to expectations

Diagnostic questions

• Are you living a life that others expected of you?

• Do you feel like you are playing a role?

• Do you know what you want independent of expectations?

Core healing work

Separating identity from roles.

7. Agency Journey (Personal Authority)

Signals

• indecision

• reliance on others’ approval

• fear of making wrong choices

Diagnostic questions

• Do you trust your own decisions?

• Do you often look to others to tell you what is right?

• Were you encouraged to think for yourself growing up?

Core healing work

Reclaiming internal authority.

8. Capacity Journey (Emotional Expansion)

Signals

• avoidance of discomfort

• fear of grief, risk, or success

Diagnostic questions

• Are there parts of life you avoid because they feel too intense?

• Do you hold yourself back from things you want?

• What emotions feel overwhelming?

Core healing work

Expanding capacity for reality.

9. Meaning Journey (Existential Reconstruction)

Signals

• loss of purpose

• existential confusion

• faith deconstruction

Diagnostic questions

• Does life feel like it has lost its meaning?

• Have your previous beliefs stopped working?

• Are you searching for a new framework to understand life?

Core healing work

Meaning reconstruction.

10. Integration Journey (Spiritual Integration)

Signals

• split between psychology and spirituality

• spiritual bypassing

• spiritual confusion

Diagnostic questions

• Do your spiritual beliefs conflict with your lived experience?

• Have you struggled to integrate spirituality and psychology?

Core healing work

Integrating inner and spiritual life.

11. Grief Journey (Loss Integration)

Signals

• sadness that feels stuck

• inability to move forward after loss

Diagnostic questions

• What losses have shaped your life?

• Have you fully mourned them?

Core healing work

Grief processing.

12. Purpose Journey (Calling and Contribution)

Signals

• success without fulfillment

• midlife crisis

• longing for impact

Diagnostic questions

• Do you feel called to something but unsure what?

• Does your work feel misaligned with your deeper self?

Core healing work

Clarifying calling.

Step 3 - Identify the Primary Journey

Most of us have a couple dominant journeys and a couple secondary ones.

Step 4 - Match Intervention to Journey

Find a helpful intervention/practice for the specific journey. Some examples may include:

Belonging → relational therapy
Permission → emotion work
Safety → somatic regulation
Wholeness → IFS
Worth → shame healing
Freedom → identity work
Agency → empowerment coaching
Capacity → exposure and emotional expansion
Meaning → narrative work
Integration → DBT
Grief → grief rituals
Purpose → vision work

These are just some examples, but each journey can have a wide range of helpful approaches.

Finding What they Really Need

What makes this powerful is that most coaching models assume the client just needs clarity or goals.

But many clients actually need:

• attachment repair

• trauma integration

• identity healing

• meaning reconstruction

Different journeys require different containers. Identifying the journey of the person is so helpful in matching it to the actual approach that is going to help them experience the healing and breakthrough they want and need.

And now we can look at how these journeys map onto the larger stages of Becoming.

If you ask me if I have a tattoo, I’ll tell you I don’t.

But that’s not really true.

I’ve never been to a tattoo parlor. (I’m not even sure if they’re called parlors.) But I have had a needle and ink poked into my ankle 16 years ago. (Actually it was a guitar string, not a needle.)

Ash and I had been friends for several years and I wanted to ask her to be my girlfriend.

The tattoo was my plan.

We had talked about doing stick and poke tattoos. We were broke college kids who couldn’t afford real tattoos and I heard that you could do stick and poke tattoos for the cost of a bottle of India ink from Hobby Lobby. And I had a guitar string that I figured could do as well as a needle.

I took her to the capital lawn. We laid out a blanket. Put the guitar string over a lighter flame to feel like we’re doing this legit.

And then I tell her, “I don’t want to get a tattoo from just a friend.” She’s confused.

“I only want a tattoo if it’s from my girlfriend.”

She takes a few seconds to realize I’m clumsily, awkwardly asking her to be my girlfriend. Then she squeals and hugs me.

Then at some point we get back to the matter of the tattoos. We had already talked about where we wanted them: on our ankles. Somewhere discreet enough incase they were a (permanently) bad idea.

But we hadn’t talked about what.

So she asks me, “What do you want your tattoo to be?”

And this is the reason why when people ask me if I have a tattoo I say, No: because 16 years ago, when I could have gotten anything tattooed on my body, what I chose was the word: PURE

There’s an ancient creation poem about the Divine creating the world. Today we usually call it the first chapters of the book of Genesis.

It was quite a revolutionary creation story for the time. One of the other main creation stories at that time/place was from the Enuma Elish, where warring gods fight, one of them wins and then creates the world and humans out of the carcass of the other god.

Creation stories weren’t meant to be literal, they were meant to say something about the nature of reality and ourselves. So that story from the Enuma Elish said violence and destruction is the fundamental nature of life. (And some days I feel like that is true.)

So then this group comes along and tells this other creation story, with a new kind of imagination about what is true about reality.

This story said that before the world was created, it was formless.
The divine hovers over this formlessness. Then begins to create.
And how does creation happen? Through separation.
The divine separates light from darkness.
Separates the earth from the sky.
Separates land from sea.
Then animals and plants… all the way up to humans.

So in this story, all things come out of the same underlying oneness.
That formless oneness is separated into different shapes and forms.

And at the end of it all, the Divine calls it all, “Good.”

In this story, the fundamental nature of reality is not violence. It’s not even separation.
The fundamental nature of creation, of ourselves, is oneness and goodness.

So when you’re going through heartbreak…
When you’re feeling restless for something new…
When you’re tired and need rest…
When you’re confused and disoriented…
When you’re experiencing loss and grief…
And wondering, does THIS belong?
This story says, Yes. Even this belongs and is Good.

The Jews are the ones who gave us this story about a Good creation. Where everything belongs.

Later, the Greeks would come up with this idea of the Perfect. (And it was in Greek culture that the New Testament gets written and much of early Christian theology gets started.)

Perfect is static.
Perfect is fragile.
Perfect is easily ruined.
Perfect is this ideal we’re not currently experiencing. We’re falling short of.
Perfect means hardly anything belongs.

But the Jews did not tell a story of a Perfect creation. They told the story of a Good creation.
Good is dynamic.
Good is vibrant, pulses with life.
Good is fertile, it is pregnant with possibilities.
Good is evolving and becoming.
Good is unfolding.
Good is a world in process.

Good says yes to light, AND to darkness.
Yes to solid, predictable land AND the chaos of the sea.
Yes to joy AND to sadness, grief, loss, heartbreak.

Of course… how else would there be any creation without all of it? It all has to belong.

Perfect is a museum - don’t touch, preserve it at all costs.
Good is more like a garden - things grow, decay, get pruned, are alive.

If we are supposed to be living in a Perfect world, then the question we live with is: Should this be here?

If we are living in a Good world, then the question we live with is: How does this belong?
Because of course it belongs - everything belongs. It all comes from the same source.

We can move towards whatever is happening, whatever we’re experiencing… because it is part of creation. And creation is good. It all belongs.

In a Perfect creation, forgiveness is needed for things being imperfect.

In a Good creation, forgiveness functions totally differently. The fault is not failure to be perfect - it’s failure to include. Not seeing that everything belongs. Forgiveness is about releasing our resistance to include.

Which brings me to my tattoo.

My earliest memory of feeling something in me didn’t belong was flipping through a magazine in our “toilet time” reading basket. I was 8 or 9 years old. It was a football magazine, and up until that point in my life I had only been interested in the pictures of the macho football players. But one day a different page caught my eye. The full 2 page spread introducing the new Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders squad. Why had I never noticed this page before? All of a sudden, this was the most interesting picture in the magazine. In any magazine. I snuck the magazine into my room where I could flip open to that page of a couple dozen women wearing white shorts and small blue shirts with a front knot. I felt like this desire in me was something wrong. Something that didn’t belong.

Then I learned that the Titanic movie had a full on naked lady in it. And we owned the VHS! It was actually a 2 part VHS, because it was so long… So I figured out which tape had the scene. I would watch it, and then rewind the tape back to the beginning so no one would find out. I had this sense that this part of me was something I needed to hide.

Or maybe this part of me wasn’t imperfect - but maybe my inability to say no to it was.

When I was setting up my first laptop in high school, I had to set the password for it. I knew that having a laptop meant access to everything on the internet. And I knew the drives in me.

So I made my password the word ‘pure.’ But not in English. I looked up the Japanese word for ‘pure’ - partly because the English word was too short for a password. But also because I was worried of what someone might assume if they found out my password was the word ‘pure.’ Why is Brandon’s password ‘pure?’ Uh oh.

I felt like these parts of me were wrong. I wasn’t safe to be honest about what was real inside of me. I had to play whack a mole with my thoughts, my feelings, my actions.

I couldn’t rest in belonging. I needed to live in the pressure of evaluation. What was allowed and what was not. What was imperfect and how could I be pure.

Perfection, I’ve found, doesn’t create purity. It creates hiding.
When belonging is conditional, the self fragments.

So I lived in chronic self-monitoring. But I’d “fail,” which led to chronic shame.

So when my new girlfriend and I are sitting on the capital lawn, sterilizing our makeshift needle, and she asks me what I want my tattoo to be, I tell her the thing I most long for. The thing I most want to be true.

I want to be pure.

Then I can rest. Then I can be okay. Then I will belong.

There was this study done of two pottery classes.

The first class was told their only objective for the semester was to make the most perfect pot they could. That was it.

The second class was told they simply had to make as many pots as they could. No particular objective of the quality of the pots. Just make a lot.

At the end of the semester, it was the quantity class that ended up making the best pots. Focusing on allowing all of the messy process created better results than aiming for perfection.

Goodness actually happens when we release Perfection.
When we allow “failure” to be instructive.
When we can trust that growth emerges through the messiness of living.
When we let our imperfect pots belong to the process.
When we forgive ourselves for saying, “That doesn’t belong” and come back into the wholeness and oneness of reality.

Goodness says that all of it belongs.
And belonging is the soil of transformation.

A business owner I was talking with came to me because his work had piled up and felt insurmountable. He had gotten so far behind in his work that he felt buried in his business and didn’t know how to climb out of the workload. He was exhausted and there was no relief in sight.

As we talked, we noticed he had this lens of Perfection. He felt he had to do everything perfect, or his business would crumble.

As we looked at what the perfectionism was protecting him from, we found that he was trying to avoid conflict with his clients. He didn’t want to disappoint them. He didn’t want to feel the sting of criticism or the shift in someone’s tone that might signal disapproval. Somewhere along the way, his nervous system had decided that criticism meant danger. So perfection became his shield. If everything was flawless, no one could question him. If no one questioned him, he would be safe.

But of course, that safety came at a cost. When perfection is the requirement, nothing is ever ready. Every task carries the weight of your worth. Work stops being creative and starts being defensive.

This kind of stuff isn’t always conscious. Sometimes it lives deep in us and we need help becoming aware of it.

We began to explore how the things he wanted to avoid - feedback, criticism, conflict - might actually be things that are Good. Things that can be included.

He began to see (not just in his mind but in his body) that he can welcome other people’s opinions and perspectives. Even if that means some disagreement or healthy conflict is needed.

Now he wasn’t aiming for perfect anymore - his aim was for Goodness. Serving others in a way that is Good and can include all of the process.

He and his business transformed. Now he wasn’t trying to avoid anything, but could welcome it all - he had new ideas, created new systems, worked with less pressure and more lightness.

Nothing changed about his clients. What changed was what he allowed to belong.

The exclusion of what belongs is the root of violence, of evil.

Evil is the name we have for what grows out of exclusion. When something is not allowed to belong, then nasty things start to grow in those shadows.

The mind thinks, “Surely we can’t include everything! What about violence? What about evil? We have to exclude those things!”

Violence is rarely the first thing that goes wrong. It’s usually the last. Like a pressure cooker with no release valve, what explodes is not the heat itself - but the refusal to let heat move.

Pain that can be named, held, and responded to rarely turns violent.
Violence is often what pain becomes when it has nowhere to go.

When we welcome back what we excluded, it is allowed to return to it’s natural state. Which is Goodness. Not evil or brokenness.

We aren’t attracted to things that are perfect.

Have you ever wanted to watch a movie where things start out perfect… And then in the middle, they stay perfect…. Then at the end, it all ends still perfect?

Of course not! We wouldn’t even call that a story! There’s no plot. There’s no life. It’s uninteresting. It’s not moving. It’s not a story.

We don’t long for Perfection.
We long for belonging - of all of our experience.

To allow all the beauty, and grief and heartbreak and joy and terror.
To allow it all to be here in this dynamic, unfolding creation.

For years, my ankle tattoo of the word ‘pure’ was a badge of what I wanted (and was falling short of).

Until that whole worldview couldn’t hold my life anymore. It was bound to break. Like a pressure cooker with no release valve. I had to find a way to include what was real.

But then the tattoo became a symbol of shame. A relic of this old life that I was trying to distance myself from. Which was another version of exclusion - trying to exclude my old worldview of exclusion.

But slowly, through years of learning to include all myself… even my past selves… naming it all as Good…
I began to wear socks that didn’t hide my tattoo.

I practiced letting it belong.
And forgiving the ways I tried to exclude it.
That only created inner violence and harm.

Recently, I was at a coffee shop meeting up with a new friend. A friend who has a lot of tattoos. I started asking him about what they meant, when he got them, if they hurt.

Then he asks me, “Do you have any tattoos?”

There was my usual answer. My answer that didn’t want to include that part of my story. My answer that didn’t see that part as Good.

But I’ve been practicing including all of my life.

So, I tell him. “Yes, I do. It’s actually a great story.”

Shame - which is connected to what we think we can/not identify with - creates a kind of outline of our identity, ego.

Guilt is: “I did something bad.”
Shame is: “I am bad.”
It’s not behavior - it’s about identity.

Shame is the emotional contraction that forms when belonging feels threatened.

Shame is the nervous system’s response to potential exclusion, rejection, loss of love.

When a caregiver reacts negatively to a child (their emotions, behavior, etc) the child doesn’t think: “My caregiver can’t handle this emotion.”
The child concludes: “Something is wrong with me.” (That’s shame.)

Anger moves outward. Shame moves inward.
Anger expands - Shame implodes.

It often feels like:

• collapse in the chest

• sinking in the gut

• wanting to disappear

• shrinking

• heaviness

• heat in the face

• downward gaze

When emotions are unsafe, shame says “become someone acceptable.”
So shame is a kind of emotional blocker of all the other emotions.

The personality becomes a defense against shame exposure. “If they see the real me, I will be rejected.”
Shame doesn’t just affect behavior - it constructs the ego structure.
Who do I need to be to be okay, loved, belong?

The two distorted forms of shame if repressed or unmanged:

• Collapse: low self-worth, social withdrawal, avoidance, perfectionism, anxiety.

• Compensation: arrogance, narcissism, overachievement, hyper-competence, domination.

Both are attempts to not feel shame directly.

There is a wisdom (even a love) in shame.
It originally came online to protect connection and belonging. It is there to help you stay in relationship.
But once internalized, it becomes outdated.
It’s wisdom is: “Connection matters.”
But it’s distortion is: “You must change who you are to deserve connection.”

Going into shame feels like annihilation. It can feel like: “I shouldn’t exist.”
We will often do anything than sit in that feeling.
But when fully felt, it begins to reveal that there is no defective core.
There is no bad self.

When shame moves through fully, identity softens and vulnerability increases. Authenticity rises.
You stop trying to be someone. You start being someone :)

Shame says: “If they see this, I will be rejected!”
But the moment you allow it and share vulnerably, connection increases.

Shame dissolves through:

• embodied feeling of it (all the way through)

• safe witnessing

• non-fixing presence

I’ve found such healing for myself in being able to name to another person the thing I’m most ashamed of… and watching them not flinch. Or even soften and say “I love you. I love THAT in you.”

Some signs that shame is becoming integrated:

• You speak more honestly.

• You recover from embarrassment faster.

• You take more risks socially.

• You stop over-explaining.

• You stop defending constantly.

• You feel more relaxed in your body.

• Eye contact becomes easier.

And most importantly: You feel more belonging — without performing.

When shame becomes fluid, it stops being identity.
It becomes simply vulnerability moving through the system.
No contraction. Just the experience of vulnerability in an inherently uncertain, uncontrollable world of relationships.

Anger is integral to boundaries, care, power, clarity, love.

Anger is not aggression.
It is energy that arises when something you care about is violated.
It is care in motion.
It is boundary energy.
It is life force pushing outward.

If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t get angry. (Apathy has no anger.) Anger tells you that something matters. Something is misaligned. Something is crossing a boundary. Something needs to change.

It is fundamentally protective and organizing.

Most children are not allowed to express anger safely.
When they get angry, they are often punished, shamed, abandoned, told they’re bad or dramatic or disrespectful.
So the nervous system learns “anger is dangerous.” And it can become repressed.

Repressed anger becomes contraction/tightness, passive aggression, depression, chronic tension, self-criticism, resentment.

When anger is not fluid, it shows up in two unhealthy ways:

• Explosive Anger: blame, yelling, power-ver, punishment. This is anger mixed with story and identity. It’s reactive and usually years of repressing bursting out.

• Collapsed Anger: no boundaries, people pleasing, chronic resentment, depression, self-attack. This is anger turned inwards. Depression is often anger without a voice.

Healthy anger feels clean, direct, moves quickly, doesn’t linger, doesn’t blame.
It can feel like heat, power, clarity, forward motion.
It says: “No.” “That doesn’t work.” “This matters.” “I won’t allow that.”
It’s not about domination. It’s about alignment.

Anger teaches you:

• Where your boundaries are.

• What you deeply care about

• Where you are abandoning yourself

• Where energy wants to move

But we often fear anger because we think: If I feel this anger, I’ll destroy everything. I’ll lose control. I’ll hurt someone.

It’s not anger that destroys. It’s unowned anger that does.

Anger is connected to power.
If you were powerless as a child, anger felt useless or dangerous.
So many high performers disconnect from anger, over-intellectualize, stay “above it.”
But underneath, there’s unclaimed power.
When anger is integrated, leadership becomes cleaner. Speech becomes cleaner. Decisions become sharper. Self-trust increases.
BECAUSE YOU’RE NO LONGER AFRAID OF YOUR OWN FORCE.

When anger becomes fully fluid, it dissolves the self. It stops being personal, or “me vs you.”
It becomes simply energy moving through consciousness.
Then boundaries become clearer AND ego becomes softer.
You don’t use anger to defend identity - it’s just energy that is serving truth.

Often, after anger is allowed, what emerges beneath it is grief, fear, hurt, or shame.
Anger is often a first gatekeeper. If you allow anger, it softens and underneath is vulnerability.
That’s WHY many people stop at anger. Because what’s beneath is more tender.

We don’t release anger to get rid of anger. Or fix ourselves. Or beocme peaceful.
That’s MANAGEMENT.
Anger work is WELCOMING it.
It’s not a problem to solve.

When you welcome anger it moves faster, hurts less and teaches quickly.

Some signs that anger is becoming integrated:

• you say “no” faster

• You recover from conflict quicker

• You stop replaying arguments

• You feel less resentment

• You feel more aliveness

• You feel more clarity in decisions

• Your body feels less braced

And you feel more LOVING. Because resentment and bracing is gone.

At the highest level, anger becomes Love protecting something, setting a boundary, insisting on truth.
It’s clear, powerful, non-dramatic.

Eventually, it’s just indistinguishable from life force.

I pride myself on being a dad who’s nearly always home in the evenings. Dinner with the fam, some time to wrestle or play with the doll house before we all do bed time routine together.

But this particular Tuesday night, I have a photography job that’s late in the evening. I won’t be home for dinner or bedtime.

Apparently, Ash has told my son this. Because as I’m packing up for work I see he’s trying to keep his bottom lip from quivering. Eyes are red.

A rush of emotions go through me.
My heart breaks to see him sad I’ll be gone.
Am I wrong for breaking my own rules about working late?
Should I try to cheer him up? Tell him about something special we can do tomorrow?
I want to get past this part so I can get to the photoshoot and enjoy myself…

Lots of feelings. All at once.

I’m really value peace.
Especially my own inner-peace.

I don’t naturally like big feelings, stimulating environments, intense situations.
I want peace. Inner-peace.

Life, though, is messy.

So I’m often trying to iron out life, so it’s neat and clear and flat. Because I think that if I can make it all neat and orderly, I will find peace.

If I’m having big feelings, I want to figure out which one is the real thing I’m feeling.
If me and Ash are having an argument, I want to figure out what the core of the argument is.
If I have conflicting goals - wanting to grow my business and spend more time with my kids - I want to figure out which is the top priority.

I want to clean up the mess and make it neat. Because if I can turn the mess and into simplicity, then (as my thinking goes) things will be clean, manageable… and I can relax and be at peace.

Of course, this doesn’t actually create peace in me. It creates the opposite!
I’m trying to control and manage life. Which is a great recipe for no peace. Anxiety, exhaustion, confusion.

The mind seeks peace through control and singularity.
The heart finds peace through opening up to what is real.
Which is always complexity. Multiplicity. Paradox.

I want this. And I want that.
I’m feeling this. And I’m feeling that.
I want to be closer to you. And I want my autonomy and space.
I want to rest. And I want to go full out.

The mind can’t hold these paradoxes. It thinks, “If I can just feel one thing, be one thing, pick one thing… then I’ll be okay.”

So I might try positive thinking: Be positive! Be grateful! Move one!
Or productivity culture says: Focus, decide, eliminate the rest.
Or spiritual culture: choose the right beliefs, transcend the messiness.

Whatever it is, I try take the mess and simplify it. Which always means eliminating part of it. Eliminating something that is real.

I live with this underlying fear: If I let myself feel it all, I’ll fall apart.

The surprising truth of living in a paradox reality is that our suffering actually comes from insisting life be singular. Clean. Tidy.
Peace doesn’t come from resolving paradox, but learning how to hold it.

That is what it means to come into alignment with life - welcoming in the paradoxes.

When we try to smooth over the complexity, we end up numbing parts of ourselves.
Or we pressure our kids to “be okay.”
Or we mistake our big feelings for weakness.
Or we confuse maturity with emotional neatness.

When we allow the paradoxes that swirl inside us, then we become safer people to be around. Our children learn they don’t have to edit themselves. Our emotions no longer need to compete - they can coexist inside of us.

This is how we find a kind of peace that transceds understanding.
The mind can’t understand this, but our hearts can totally hold grief alongside joy.
Ambition alongside our gratitude.
Desire for intimacy and autonomy.

Our hearts say, Yeah.. of course. Reality is paradoxical. So of course we feel all of this.

My son was born in the middle of winter.
On his due date, it was raining and sleeting. We thought we might have to deliver at a different hospital if we couldn’t make the longer drive on the icy roads to our planned hospital. We made it. (In time for 36 hours of labor.)

When he was two days old, I sat holding him in the hospital watching the Super Bowl, waiting for the nurse to come dispatch us to take him home.

Little did I know, he would grow up to love football. And icy weather.

Last week we were watching a football game and the commentators said that the weather was blustery. There was fog, rain and ice, creating a wintery mix.

I repeated it to my son to make sure he heard: “There’s fog and rain and ice, buddy! All mixed up!”

He lit up. Fog. And Rain. And Ice. All mixed up. “Wow.”

He didn’t know weather - or football - could be this awesome.

Now, it’s Tuesday and I’m trying to leave for my long night of work. And he’s holding in his lip and tears.

“Did Mommy tell you I’m going to be working late tonight?” He nods his head.

“How do you feel?” He doesn’t answer. Just looks at the ground.

“Are you feeling sad?”

“Yes…” He squeaks. A couple tears start to come out.

I hold him, unsure of what to do. I want him to feel better. Or really, I want to feel better. I don’t like these competing feelings in me. This ache watching my son feel sad, this longing to get to work.

I take a couple breaths. I’m holding him, but also trying to hold myself, my feelings.

“You know, bud…” I start, not quite sure where I’m going. “When I’m at work, I feel happy. Because I get to take pictures of people. And that makes me feel happy.”

He just quietly listens without looking at me.

“And, at the same time, sometimes I feel sad. Sad because I’m not with you, and Sister and Mommy.”

He keeps looking at the ground.

“So… Inside of me, I have happiness. And I have sadness. Together.”

His eyes shoot up at me. They don’t look sad anymore. They’re wide and excited.

“Like fog and rain and ice!?” He says with anticipation. Now, I’m the one who’s quiet.

“It’s all mixed up?!” He asks.

Now I get it. “Yes - just like fog and rain and ice! It’s all mixed up in me too.”

With that, he jumps out of my arms. He heads to the backyard to kick the football around by himself.

I yell, “Love you!” at him. He yells it back to me.

I leave for work with so much swirling inside of me. Love. Heart ache. Joy. Melancholy. All mixed up.

Whether or not you believe in a literal heaven, we all have some idea of heaven. Or idea of how things ought to be.

Our idea of heaven is what shapes how we treat life. It functions as our north star.

If we think that peace will finally come when we escape all of this messiness, all of this heartache and grief… then we will spend our lives practicing escape instead of learning how to be present.

If we think that peace will finally come when the sadness goes away, when the questions are answered, when the tension resolves… then we will treat large parts of our own lives as obstacles to peace rather than the place where peace is meant to be found.

A neat-and-tidy heaven trains us to abandon parts of ourselves, parts of life.

But there is another vision of heaven, a much more radical idea: that heaven is here, in our midst, inside of you, among us. It’s this idea that heaven, or true peace and fullness of life, shows up wherever Life is welcomed rather than resisted.

It’s this idea that heaven is always already here, but it requires a turning toward what is real rather than a reaching for what is ideal.

Not the elimination of parts of life, but the fully inclusion of all of life.

Heaven is not a place or time when there’s no longer any weather. Or where it’s always sunny with a high of 75…
It’s not some weatherless perfection. It’s when we learn to love all the weather of life. All the diversity and experiences and paradoxes.

Many people deconstruct from religion because it tried to force life into one tidy answer. That can be really appealing to our minds, but our hearts know that life doesn’t work that way.

If religion or spirituality is going to be helpful at all, it has to start from being honest about what is real. Which is always mess, complexity, paradox.

And that’s not an unfortunate thing - it’s good news! We don’t live in a static, dead universe - we live in a dynamic, alive world! And nothing has to be excluded for life to be sacred.
Peace isn’t waiting on the other side of this mess - it’s found when we step fully into it.

Kids are so much better about holding multiple, contradictory things at once.
You can watch how a young kid can be sad and silly.
Or I’ll watch my daughter feel angry at her brother and still want to play with him.

Experiences move through them fluidly, like weather. No grasping for the sun or resisting the clouds.
They don’t narrative identity to block that up yet… or moral interpretation… or self-judgement.
They just feel.

But at some point, usually early in childhood, we learn that some experiences break connection. Certain feelings cause a parent to withdraw. Or we notice we are praised for being “good” (which really meant “easy”). Or we are in spiritual environments that reward certainty and simplicity.

And our system learns to avoid the complexity. Avoid what will rock the boat. Avoid what might break connection If I simplify myself, I’ll stay connected.

So we might learn to choose cheerfulness over sadness…
or easy-going over honesty…
certainty over curiosity…

This is how our systems adapt so we can be connected, safe and accepted.

It protects us early in life, but later on it can begin to show up in ways that aren’t helpful.

Life is contradictory. It is multiplicity. It is all of it!

So if our systems are still be playing that old game of “which part of myself do I need to hide to stay safe?” then we end up trying to avoid parts of Life. What once helped us stay connected is now creating anxiety, numbness, repression. It takes us out of peace.

When something contradictory arises, the body might react with tightness, or urgency or anxiety. It might try to avoid part of what’s coming up in us. It remembers what we used to need to do.

And this happens more in the body than our conscious minds. Which is why just knowing this doesn’t change it. Our nervous system doesn’t change by understanding something with our head - it needs a new experience of safety to begin to soften and open up.

Healing can begin to happen when our inner contradictions are met with attunement… when our complexity is held without withdrawing… when we can be present and it doesn’t cost us connection.

In developmental psychology, this is called integration. In spirituality, we might call it union. Returning to union with all of life, all the things we feel. Not exiling any of it.

The mind is not great at doing this. The mind is a great tool for categorizing and separating things. It’s not great with contradictions and paradoxes and two things being true at once.

But the heart has no problem with paradox. It can hold sadness and joy together. It can hold contentment and ambition right alongside each other, no problem.

This is why spiritual traditions have said the heart is much more the seat of who we really are, not the mind.

It can be pretty incredibly what can start to shift in our systems (and lives) when we allow ourselves to welcome in and feel what we used to avoid.
For just 5 minutes. Maybe 10.

There was a business owner I was coaching with who came to me because she was feeling stuck in her business.
She wanted to grow her business AND she wanted more time away from it with her growing family.
She was feeling resentful towards the business for causing marriage issues AND she was feeling excited about what the business could grow into next.

She was feeling lots of things, and not feeling lots of things.

Her mind was spinning on what to do… what would create the peace she was longing for?

We started by slowing down the mind and dropping into what was being felt.
Anxiety.
Excitement.
Gratitude.
Frustration.
Trapped.
Possibility.

We started with just feeling these things. For 5 minutes. Maybe 10.
All of these things she was trying to use her mind to solve.
At first, it felt a bit scary and overwhelming and wrong.
But as the feelings felt more welcome... and moved through her… there began to be some peace. And inspiration. And lightness.
She came into alignment with what was real, and things began to flow again.

We practice this kind of presence a little bit at a time. Our capacity grows through safe practice.
We don’t need to throw ourselves into feeling it all, all the time. That can shut our systems down.
So we create times where we can safely open up and begin to welcome what we’ve avoided. For 5 minutes. Maybe 10 minutes.

Let your body lead. Whatever it feels it can practice without overwhelm or dissociation. Respect the body, don’t invade it. We are learning to step into the rain and fog and ice and sun and clouds inside us… but we don’t have to live there. We step into the rain, and then come back inside and dry off when needed.

This is the spiritual journey - the work of becoming safe enough to feel freely again, without losing ourselves. To welcome it all back in, all the contradictions and paradoxes. Allowing the weather to move through us again - without running for shelter. Learning to dance in the sun or rain or sleet… even when it’s all mixed up.

Now it’s Sunday. We’re having our annual winter ice storm here in Austin. Harris is pumped for the wintery mix. I’m wearing my coziest socks.

I’m telling him about our plans for this ice day. We’re going to make a fire. We’re going to make a new logo for his football helmet (the Cardinals). We’re going to play guitar with sister. We’re going to watch a movie.

“And we can play football in the rain and ice - just like the football players?!” He asks, with excitement.

“I don’t want to be outside today, bud.” I say, knowing it’s going to let him down. And sure enough, his face immediately falls.

“Please, dad? Just for a bit?”

Ughhhh here we go again. So many feelings rush up that I want to avoid. Guilt. Sadness. Fear of discomfort. Exhaustion.

And right behind them rush in all my logical justifications for them. It’s totally justified to not go outside today. It may be unhealthy to play in this sleet. He won’t even really like it once he gets wet and cold. I’m protecting him. I’m protecting me. He has to listen to me. I know better. Let me distract him.

I do my best to just breathe into the feelings. To let them be here. To not rush into an answer.

“We could watch some of a football game later today… would you like that, bud?” I hope this distracts and appeases him.

“Okay…” He sighs. “Maybe we could also play SOME football outside in the rain and ice?”

I really don’t want to. I’m in my coziest socks.

Everything in me is wanting to close off to the things I don’t want to feel. And I have all the reasons why I can and should.

But I wonder… Can I welcome these feelings? For 5 minutes?

“Okay.” I tell him. He lights up. “How about we play outside for just 5 minutes. Maybe 10.”

I realized that this was becoming my framing.
Which was subtly leading to a new achievement framing. Another ideal self.
And a new gap. Between where I am (not total capcity) and where I want to be (total capacity).
It’s a new reason to feel behind or less than.

This becomes perfectionism with more spiritual language :)

But I think this is not the right way to frame it.

Capacity is not something you achieve once and for all.
It’s more relational.
It grows and contracts.
It depends on context and season.

You may have capacity for grief today. But not tomorrow.
Or capacity for anger during your coaching call. But not at dinner.
You may have desire in your body. But not in your imagination.
That’s not failure. That’s called being human.

The contemplative traditions don’t emphasize infinite tolerance.
They are focused on non-exclusion.

Non-exclusion = nothing is fundamentally off-limits.
Infinite tolerance = “everything must be felt fully right now!”

Wisdom traditions always assume rhythm and rest and limits.
Jesus withdraws regularly. Buddhist monks follow regulated schedules. Mystics speak of dark nights and dryness.

So maybe we could say that the goal of the spiritual path is not maximum capacity - it’s increasing trust in our capacity.

Oooof… even as I write that, something is shifting in me. I’m noticing myself relax.

Presence is not about being able to stay with anything.
It’s about noticing when something is here, and responding wisely.

Sometimes the wise response is staying and feeling.
Sometimes the wise response is pausing, getting support, or eating ice cream.

Presence is about discernment - not endurance.

In this frame, the spiritual path leads us to a place where we know when we can stay, when we need support, and when we need rest - all without shame.

It’s less flashy than my previous ideas of “enlightenment.” But it feels sooooo good.

I often tell my coaching clients: We don’t live at the gym.
Which means: create containers for doing this work, don’t try to do it all the time.

I like that metaphor for another reason: at the gym, the goal isn’t to life the heaviest weight possible at all times.
The goal is becoming more resilient, more healthy, more adaptable, and knowing your limits.
(I mean, unless you’re a gym bro. In which case, go for it, bro. I’ll be here when you need a shoulder to lean on. Literally. Because you hurt your hamstring.)

It’s human to have limits.
And incarnation says it’s good to be human.
This life is not about transcending our limits.
It’s about growing the capacity to stay present inside our limits.
Our limits are the very place where love can become real, incarnated.

Yes, our capacity can and does grow when we do this work.
But limits always remain.
Grace lives in the rhythm between them.

Or as my new favorite artist Angie McMahon sings:
Failure is on every map, just like north is
Failure is in every year, just like August
Balancing tiger with rhythm of tortoise, here in your chest

You can’t argue someone into safety. You can’t convince a body to trust.

So evangelism stops being about transferring correct beliefs (or winning a metaphysical debate) and becomes about creating experiences where trust in Reality becomes possible.

In this frame, evangelism is not “Believe this about God” but “Come see what happens when you live inside this way of relating to Life.”

(This brings to mind Jesus’ words: “Come and see.”)

Evangelism, in this sense, is a modeling of a regulated nervous system. Embodied peace. Communities where rupture and repair are practiced. People whose lives feel more inhabitable.

The gospel of a trustworthy Reality that we can open up and relate to… spreads because it’s livable (not because it’s “true” in the abstract).

I grew up wanting to make sure I believed in the “correct” view of Reality. The “right” truths. The objectively true worldview.
Now I care more about what RELATIONSHIP with reality helps me become more whole, loving, courageous and alive.

Which isn’t about morally judging one worldview or truth claims over another. Instead, the judgement / discernment I’m trying to tune into is: “Is this relationship with Reality still helping me grow - or is it helping me stay defended?”

The “growth” I’m most interested in is learning to fully inhabit my life. To be present to all of it. To trust my self and life enough that I can relax and open up to experience all of it more fully. That is my understanding of becoming more “fully alive.” Life to the full.

And my “evangelism” is about offering environment where trust can grow. Naming what I’ve found life giving. Inviting others to come and see. And protecting people from coercive formation systems.

It’s not an evangelism that says: “You should believe this.”
It’s more like: “I’ve found a way of relating to reality that has made me more alive, more present, more trusting of Life. And you’re welcome here if you want to explore that.”

That’s not fundamentalism. And it’s not relativism.
It’s respect for developmental timing.

In this framing, I guess I could say I DO WANT TO CONVERT OTHERS. Haha!
I want to offer relationship and story and practices that allow their nervous systems to be converted to live more in coherence, peace, trust.

I’ll call this FORMATION EVANGELISM. And contrast it to Belief Evangelism.

This kind of evangelism requires totally different approach:

• Belief Evangelism sees the human as a rational agent.
  Formation Evangelism sees the human as a regulating system.

• Belief evangelism uses authority, urgency and argument to persuade.

  Formation Evangelism uses authority to create safety. Slowness is respected.

• Belief Evangelism sees resistance as rebellion or blindness.

  Formation Evangelism sees resistance as information about their nervous systems capacity or original formation.

• Belief Evangelism is going for raised hands in the pews, prayers prayed, numbers counted.

  Formation Evangelism is tracking increased capacity to feel, more presence under pressure, greater love, truthfulness and courage.

• Belief Evangelism needs salespeople, explainers, defenders.

  Formation Evangelism needs hosts, witnesses, companions.

• Belief Evangelism comes with pressure, anxiety, fear of being wrong, fear of being out.

  Formation Evangelism comes with curiosity, spaciousness, welcome, patience.

• Belief Evangelism says “Let me explain reality to you.”

  Formation Evangelism says ““Let me introduce you to a way of living that has changed how reality feels.”

• Belief Evangelism tries to get people into heaven.

  Formation Evangelism helps people live fully here on earth.

• Belief Evangelism sees that people need convincing, information, appologetics.

  Formation Evangelism sees that people need safe places to practice trust.

• Belief Evangelism is focused on getting people to name Reality in the same way.

  Formation Evangelism is focused on helping people find the language that help their systems open and trust Reality more fully.

• Belief Evangelism is focused on getting people to use the same stories and practices to relate to Reality.

  Formation Evangelism is tracking what stories and practices would be most helpful for this person to open and trust Reality more.

This kind of evangelism needs churches that act more like formation ecologies (not belief factories). Communities that are practicing technologies of retraining how humans trust reality.

Communities that are not spreading beliefs about God. But offering ways of inhabiting Reality that make trust possible.

Evangelism, in this view, becomes creating spaces where a more loving universe becomes believable - because it’s felt and trained through story, practice and relationship.

What kinds of practices trains us to FEEL Reality a certain way?
How can I train my nervous system to “believe” or “trust” a certain kind of Reality?

Humans are not primarily thinking beings. We are feeling, desiring, habituated beings. We live from what we have been trained to long for.

We don’t change our worldview by argument - it happens by re-patterning desire and trust.

Your relationship with reality is not a belief system. It’s a trained posture.
It’s a felt sense of whether life is trustworthy.
It’s a bodily intuition about whether openness is safe.
It’s a reflexive answer to “What happens if I let go?”

And that posture is shaped by stories, practices, and relationships.

Through story, practice and community… we re-train our systems into a new worldview. (Not reason our way into new beliefs.)

Here’s how I see this working:

1. Story / Myth that Re-frame Suffering

   Story answers a question the nervous system is always asking: “What is this pain for?” Different myths train different answers:

   • Consumer myth: pain = obstacle to avoid

   • Productivity myth: pain = inefficiency

   • Moralistic myth: pain = punishment

   • Contemplative myth: pain = initiation

   When someone inhabits a story where suffering is witnessed, loss leads to transformation, death precedes resurrection… the body slowly learns that pain isn’t random, I don’t need to panic. This might be a part of something larger!

2. Community that Re-trains Safety and Belonging

   No one learns to trust Reality alone. Community works because it provides co-regulation, normalizes emotion, models alternative ways of being human. A healthy community teaches that you don’t disappear when you struggle, conflict can be repaired, you are held even when uncertain. This is why beliefs often change AFTER people experience being seen without being managed, being corrected without being shamed, being welcomed without performing. That lived experience reshapes metaphysics more than sermons ever will.

3. Practices and Rituals that Re-Train the Nervous System

   Practices work because they put the body in new relationship with sensation, emotion and uncertainty.

   Contemplative prayer, silence, breathwork, somatic presence, confession, sabbath… they neurologically expand our window of tolerance, reduce threat activity, increase our capacity to stay present without control.

   This slowly teaches the body that it can feel this and survive. It can soften without collapsing. This is not theology - it is re-training trust. And once trust increases, a friendly or conscious universe becomes emotionally plausible.

We retrain our relationship with reality by repeatedly placing our bodies into experiences where openness is safe, meaning arrives, and presence is enough.

Story trains hope.
Community trains trust.
Practice trains our capacity.

THEN beliefs follow. The head then creates the STORY that is coherent with what the body and emotions have experienced.

In this sense, evangelism totally changes. It becomes about helping other people experience safety, trust, unconditional belonging. (The opposite of what most evangelism actually does.)

For people who have deconstructed an old worldview/theology, they have usually done the INTELLECTUAL work, but what is lacking is a new formation system. A new set of habits for the heart, body. A new embodied story.
So they say things like “I don’t know what I believe anymore.” They’re not missing new doctrine as much as a new formation system.

We don’t change our worldview by choosing new beliefs. We change it by practicing a different relationship with Reality - until our body believes it’s safe.

So… maybe I do want to evangelize others to this way of relating to Reality :)

When emotional centers of the brain are damaged, people can take an hour to pick the color socks they want to wear.
Because we don’t make decisions rationally.
We make them emotionally, then use logic to work out the details.

So, this had made me want to explore: “How do emotions shape our spiritual / religious worldview?”

Why do people land in such radically different views of God and Reality? I think the most honest answer is: People don’t reason their way into metaphysics. They regulate their way into metaphysics.

Metaphysical beliefs are not primarily truth claims - they are nervous system strategies.

They answer questions like: is it safe to open? Is it safer to trust or control? Is relationship dangerous or nourishing? Does meaning come toward me or must I manufacture it?

Then the mind comes in afterward and builds a STORY that makes those emotional conclusions feel coherent, respectable and “true.”

Before someone thinks, “I believe the universe is mechanical, impersonal, indifferent.” their body has already learned that nothing reliably came when I reached out… or depending on something external was dangerous…. or no one was really listening to me…

A mechanical universe is not just an idea - it’s a story about Reality that regulates that experience. (Predictable, impersonal, non-demanding, safe from disappointment.)

So we can look at these worldview / metaphysics divides through an emotion-first lens:

1. Is Reality Conscious or Mechanical:

   If the person experienced care that was responsive, their emotions were met more than dismissed, and their expressions didn’t usually lead to shame or danger… their body may have learned that “something answers when I reach.” So a conscious universe feels plausible, maybe obvious.

   Or if their system formed in an environment where care was incosistent, reaching out led to overwhelm or rejection, and emotion felt unsafe to express… their body may have learned “Don’t expect response.” A mechanical universe then may be a strategy to protect against hope and disappointment.

2. Is the Universe Personal or Impersonal?

   If someone grew up where authority figures were predictable, relationship felt structured but real, love was present but came with rules, the body may have said, “relationship is safe if I do it right.”

   Or if the experience was that relationship felt intrusive, engulfing or unreliable… emotional closeness led to loss of self… or distance equaled safety… the body may have learned: “Nothing personal is safer.” An impersonal univesre can feel merciful - no disappointment, no demand, no abandonment.

3. Is the Universe Going Somewhere?

   If someone experienced that pain eventually led to growth, suffering had witnesses, hard things made sense later… their body may have learned: “This is not wasted. Things move towards an end, a particular direction.”

   Or if they experienced pain that felt random, trauma that lacked meaning or repair… their body may have learned: “Don’t tell me this is all for something. This is meaningless.” This view protects against meaning-making that feels like gaslighting.

4. Is Reality Friendly or Hostile?

   Before even developing verbal skills, did the body learn that when it relaxes, it gets hurt or is held?

   If they experienced that repair happens after rupture, pain was held by something larger, failure didn’t equal abandonment… their body may have learned: “I can soften and survive. The universe is ultimately friendly.”

   Or if they found that mistakes led to withdrawal or punishment, love felt conditional, hyper-vigilance was adaptive… the body learns: “Stay alert. Stay good. Stay small.”

5. Is Separation Real or Illusory?

   Those who feel that separation is ultimately true may have been formed in a setting where boundaries were necessary for survival, autonomy = safety, fusion or chaos was the threat… the body learned: “I must stay separate to survive.”

   Someone who believes union is ultimate, it may be because they experienced secure attachment. OR it could be because they spiritualized collapse, bypassing unresolved fragmentation, separation was unbearable (they haven’t individuated fully). Nondual language can be a sign of maturity… or dissociation.

Most people believe what they believe about God and Reality because their nervous system needed the universe to be that way. Not because they’re stupid or enlightened. But because it helped them survive.

This reframed spiritual disagreement from “Who’s right / wrong?” to “What did your system need to believe to stay regulated?”

It also explains why debates don’t work. Evidence doesn’t convert. Theology changes after healing (not before).

As people experience safety in relationship, capacity to feel without overwhelm and repair after rupture… their metaphysics soften on their own. People don’t argue their way into a friendly universe - they experience their way into it.

We don’t believe what’s true - we believe what matches the experience of our nervous system. Truth becomes believable when the body feels safe enough to receive it.

So may you hold your beliefs with gentleness.
May you meet others beliefs with compassion.
It’s not a debate about universal truth claims as much as it is a sharing of what our systems have experienced so far.

Now we can look at how we can train our body into a new relationship with Reality.

When I used God-language with a friend last week, he said, “Yeah, I’m just not sure I believe there is a God.”

I said, “For sure. I don’t either, if we’re talking about a theistic God.”

He said: “I don’t know if I even believe in an a-theistic God either!”

We laughed. Because figuring out how to relate to life is fun when you have friends that can laugh about it with you.

But it got me thinking: what are deeper things we are claiming / naming when we use God language? What are the fundamental questions or stances we are talking about?

Here’s my stab at this:

When we talk about God, we are fundamentally asking…

1. Is Reality Conscious or Mechanical?

   For some, Life is fundamentally conscious and intelligent. Consciousness is not a byproduct of materiality - it is primary. Mind, awareness, intelligence precedes matter.

   This includes camps like: Theism, Panentheism, Pansychism, Mysical Christianity, Vedanta, Taoism (though in a non-personal sense).

   For others, Reality is fundamentally unconsicous and mechanical. Consciousness comes out of matter. The universe is indifferent.

   This includes camps like: Materialism, Hard Science / Scientism, some forms of Secular Humanism.

2. Is the Ground of Being Personal, Impersonal or Transpersonal?

   So, even if you answer 1 by saying “Yes, reality is conscious!” do you believe it is personal?

   The personal camp might say that God has will, intention, dires. God can relate and respond and judge and love.

   This camp includes: Classical Theism, Evangelical Christianity, Islam, Judaism.

   The Impersonal camp might say that yes reality is conscious, but it has no preferences. It is order, law, flow, emptiness.

   This includes: Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism (often), certain forms of nonduality.

   Then there is Transpersonal (both and): Reality includes personality but exceeds it. God is personal AND more than personal. Relattional without anthropomorphism.

   This would be: Christian mysticism, neoplatonism, panentheism, Teilhard de Chardin.

3. Is the Universe Going Somewhere?

   Some would say yes, the universe has directionality. It is TELEOLOGICAL. Maybe it’s headed towards consciousness, or unity. Evolution is not random but has an inherent motivation or direction. And spirituality is about participation in becoming.

   This camp would include: Teilhard, Hegel, Integral Theory / Spiral Dynamic, Process theology.

   Other say no, change does happen, but without aim. Evolution has no real goal. History is motion without meaning.

   I think a big difference between these two camps is how it changes our relationship with suffering. Growth pain vs meaningless pain. Is suffering initiating us into something? or simply accidental?

4. Is Reality fundamentally friendly, neutral or hostile?

   Einstein said this is the main question. I tend to agree.

   Some say Reality is friendly - you belong here! Existence is trustworhty at its depth. Love is the final word.

   This can help produce a more relaxed nervous system, courage, risk-taking.

   Others say: Reality doesn’t care. It’s not necessarily a threat, you just have to make your own way.

   This is more Stoic. Self-reliance. Emotional restraint.

   Then there’s the hostile camp. Reality is judgemental. You must earn belonging. Your wrongness precedes your goodness. Danger is primary.

   This can produce control, perfectionism, fear-based religion, trauma-shaped spirituality.

5. Is Separation Real or Illusory?

   Separation might be seen as real - the self is discrete, God is “out there,” and salvation is a movement across a gap.

   This can produce transactional religion, moral accounting, heaven/hell frameworks.

   Or separation might be seen as illusory - self is relational and participatory, God is within, among and as. Salvation is awakening, not relocation.

   This can produce union, presence-based practice, nondual ethics.

And, to show my hand, as one who resonates with contemplative and mystic traditions, I view Reality as conscious, transpersonal, teleological, friends and separation is real at one level but ultimately nondual.

That’s what I’ve got for now.

I’m trying to get at what we’re talking about when we talk about God (to quote Rob Bell’s book title).

Often, when we stay at the surface level of language, we are disagreeing and arguing… and we aren’t even clear on what we’re arguing about.

So maybe this can create some distinctions for more fruitful and fun conversations about our views of God and Reality.

Another thing that might be fun to explore is the EMOTIONAL reasons we come to our different views of Reality (not logical or rational reason). Because we are not as rational as we often think :)

We wanted to know what words and frameworks would help our children feel that life is meaningful, relational and mysterious, and worthy of reverence - without lying to them or ourselves.

So naturally, I needed to flesh out this idea to see how I feel about this word God.
Primarily, because I want to know how I’d like to use this word with my kids.
But as I sit with it, it’s also about how I want to use it for myself.

In many ways, I miss using the word “God.” I miss having a pronoun for Reality. I miss dialoging relationally with the Mystery. I miss personifying Reality.

Is this a longing for innocence? Maybe. But I think it can also be a step of maturity - learning to return to simple language without returning to simplistic beliefs.

I think about people like Paul Tillich saying, the “God beyond God” or Meister Ekhart’s prayer, “God rid me of God.”

Even for those of us who have moved beyond a literal/theistic meaning of the “God” word, it may still be helpful to explore how that word can still be a skillful symbol - one that doesn’t try to pin the mystery down, but helps us relate to it.

I think “God” is a great proxy for something deeper: How do we name what is ultimately unnameable? (Without becoming dishonest, rigid or naive.)

The word “God” isn’t just theological. It’s a relational technology. A container for awe, fear, trust, surrender and love.

So here what I’d like to do is capture some ideas that are not meant to DEFEND the God word or DISCARD it. But some ways we might use it more consciously, lightly and skillfully.

As the Taoist say, words are fingers pointing to the moon. They can never be the moon itself.

I like to think about words as doorways. It matters less what the door is made of than whether it opens and takes us somewhere meaningful.

Here are some ways we might use “God” for our kids - but also ourselves - that is not about BELIEVING IN God and more about RELATING TO Reality.

1. “God” as Developmental Scaffolding. Words function differently at different stages of human development. Kids learn to think relationally and literally/concretely before abstractly.

   For a child, “God” can mean safety, care, belonging and moral orientation. For an adult, it can become metaphysical, symbolic, problematic.

   So here, we might think more about when a word is helpful scaffolding - and then when to take that scaffolding down. Noticing when it becomes a crutch and released (not rejected).

   A word can be true at one stage and limiting at another.

2. “God” as a Relational Placeholder. The word can allow us to practice relationship with life itself. Not because life IS a person - but because humans are relational creatures. Abstractions doesn’t form the heart - especially for kids.

   Love, trust, grief and gratitude don’t form well in abstraction. We need a way to experience life as responsive, not mechanical.

   So using “God” this way doesn’t claim that reality is a person - it allows us to practice relationship with reality. So we might say - it’s not an ontological usage, but a formational usage.

   So we may ask: Is this word helping my child learn trust, gratitude, humility, and care - or fear, control and shame?

3. “God” as Depth of Reality. The word can point to the intuition that Reality is more than what is visible, material. There’s a transcendent depth to what is going on.

   In this usage, “God” is not a being WITHIN the universe, but a word that points towards the DEPTH of the universe itself. It keeps people from collapsing the world into productivity, utility, consumption, mere survival.

   I think this usage will be incredibly important over the next decade as AI will force ethical questions about what Life is: can we upload a person’s consciousness to the singularity? Or is there a transcendent depth to Life that bits and bytes of information cannot capture? Does life and consciosness emerge from material, or is consciousness/Spirit fundamental to Life?

4. “God” as Values Orientation. This one has to be used carefully. “God” can orient values WITHOUT reducing them to rules. Not “do this because God says.” But more: “This is aligned with Love, the grain of Life, with God.”

   Here, we are using “God” to point to the direction that Life is trying to move. Do we believe Life is indifferent to values? Or is there fundamental values baked into Life - things like Love, Justice, Compassion, Unity? If so, then “God” can be a signifier of values that we believe are fundamental.

5. “God” as Cultural and Ancestral Bridge. For better or worse, “God” is a deeply inherited word. But if we use it consciously, it can connect children to ancestors and deep stories. It can allow dialogue with grandparents and tradition. It can provide continuity without demanding literal agreement. It can allow cross-cultural conversation about big ideas. I think this can allow for a greater sense of belonging - not just in Life/Realty, but in our place historically, ancestrally.

That’s what I’ve got for now.

I’m enjoying exploring how we can use “God” less about a claim about what exists and more about how humans have learned to relate to existence.

Here, the question is less whether the word is true, and more whether it is helping us live truthfully.

We could also look at what the fundamental disagreements about God / Reality we are really discussing when we argue about theology / metaphysics.

Why!? Why do we resist the very healing we say we want?

Without understanding of why we resist, we can end up moralizing ourselves.
Why am I still stuck? Why won’t I just let go? What’s wrong with me?

Here’s the reframe of our resistance: Resistance is not opposition to truth. Resistance is loyalty to our survival patterns.

People don’t resist letting go of their False Self because they’re weak or stubborn or cynical… They resist because, at some point, their nervous system learned that openness once cost them something.

Maybe it cost them safety or belonging or dignity or love.
Their body adapted to avoid overwhelm.

So..we don’t confront resistance as our enemy. It is information! Super valuable information:
Resistance tells us where/how trust was broken.

When we see this, we can reframe moralizing our stuckness (”I should be past this”) or spiritualizing avoidance (”I just need more faith”) and stop pushing through resistance.

These strategies helped us for a while. But the very things that once kept us safe eventually become the things that keep us from healing.

Here are 6 resistance strategies I’ve noticed, how to spot them and work with them:

1. CONTROL

Core Fear: Powerlessness, chaos, being at the mercy of life
How it shows up: Over-planning, strong opinions, micromanaging, tight boundaries
Avoided Feelings: Fear, vulnerability, grief, dependence
Inner Story: “If I stay in charge, I’ll be okay.”
Shadow: Exhaustion, rigidity, difficulty receiving support
Healing Move: Build capacity to stay present with uncertainty without intervening
Common Signs: Jaw tension, mental looping, “I just need to figure this out”
Key Question: What would happen if I didn’t manage this?
Reframe: Control is borrowed safety. Capacity is real safety.

2. AVOIDANCE

Core Fear: Emotional overwhelm, flooding, collapse
How it shows up: Procrastination, distraction, busyness, spiritual bypassing
Avoided Feelings: Sadness, grief, fear, longing
Inner Story: “If I go there, I won’t survive it.”
Shadow: Stagnation, muted aliveness, quiet despair
Healing Move: Slow contact. Regulation before exploration
Common Signs: “I’m fine” energy, numbness, staying busy
Key Question: What feeling feels too big to touch right now?
Reframe: You don’t avoid feelings because you’re weak - you avoid them because you were once alone with them.

3. PERFECTION / PERFORMANCE

Core Fear: Shame, rejection, being seen as defective
How it shows up: Self-improvement obsession, harsh inner critic, over-efforting
Avoided Feelings: Inadequacy, exposure, worthlessness
Inner Story: “If I do this right, I’ll be loved.”
Shadow: Burnout, chronic self-abandonment
Healing Move: Separate worth from performance; practice presence without productivity
Common Signs: Guilt when resting, “I should be further along”
Key Question: What do I believe would make me unacceptable if seen?
Reframe: Perfection is an attempt to secure love without risking vulnerability.

4. MERGING / PEOPLE-PLEASING

Core Fear: Abandonment, rupture, loss of belonging
How it shows up: Over-attunement, difficulty saying no, boundary guilt
Avoided Feelings: Anger, desire, autonomy
Inner Story: “Belonging requires self-erasure.”
Shadow: Resentment, loss of identity, quiet rage
Healing Move: Differentiate without disconnecting; normalize anger as boundary information
Common Signs: Confusion about wants, fear of rocking the boat
Key Question: What do I not allow myself to want or say?
Reframe: Fusion feels like love - until it costs you yourself.

5. WITHDRAWAL / SELF-SUFFICIENCY

Core Fear: Disappointment, intrusion, dependence
How it shows up: Emotional distance, intellectualizing, minimal needs
Avoided Feelings: Longing, vulnerability, desire
Inner Story: “Needing others is dangerous.”
Shadow: Loneliness, disembodiment, thin aliveness
Healing Move: Gently reconnect to desire; risk safe relational need
Common Signs: “I’m good on my own,” staying in the head
Key Question: What might I want if it felt safe to need?
Reframe: Independence can be a shield against heartbreak.

6. MEANING-MAKING / SPIRITUALIZING

Core Fear: Chaos, meaninglessness, raw sensation
How it shows up: Over-intellectualizing pain, premature forgiveness
Avoided Feelings: Grief, rage, fear, desire
Inner Story: “If I understand this, I won’t fall apart.”
Shadow: Emotional bypass, disconnection from the body
Healing Move: Sensation before story; meaning after feeling
Common Signs: Staying “above” emotion, difficulty naming sensations
Key Question: What am I explaining instead of feeling?
Reframe: Wisdom that bypasses the body becomes ideology.

Resistance shows us where trust once broke - and so also where healing is possible.

So we don’t push through it - we listen to it. We learn to stay present to it.

Because what protected you once doesn’t need to be destroyed - it needs to be thanked, updated and gently shown that it can release.

Meet your resistance with curiosity instead of force. Meet it with gratitude for what it has done. And show it that you can be present now to what you couldn’t be present to before.

See if it softens on its own then.

To begin living more from our True Self requires healing the False Self. And there are two main things that help with this healing:

• Consciousness (seeing clearly): we bring awareness to the stories we are living inside, the beliefs driving our decisions, the parts organizing our behavior, the assumptions about life, self and safety.

• Completion (feeling fully): unfelt emotions keeps patterns alive. Healing requires contacting bodily sensation, allowing emotion to move through the system, letting incomplete survival responses complete, staying present without fixing or escaping.

Many of my coaching clients, have begun doing the work of becoming conscious of their False Self patterns and parts. They can name the beliefs driving their decisions and the parts organizing their behaviors. This matters. Awareness names the patterns.

But insight alone doesn’t heal it.

You can understand why you wear the armor and still feel exhausted by it. You can name your coping strategies and still be run by them. This is where so many people get stuck - especially thoughtful, spiritually curious people. We mistake clarity for completion.

Insight shows the wound. But it’s presence that heals it.

What keeps old patterns alive isn’t a lack of understanding - it’s unfelt emotion. Incomplete survival responses. Sensations that were never allowed to move through because, at the time, it wasn’t safe to feel them.

What you resist doesn’t go away. What you can feel begins to soften.

This is where the shift happens - from control as safety to presence as safety.

Presence is the capacity to stay with what’s here without fixing it, explaining it, or escaping it. It’s the part of you that can feel without being overwhelmed. The awareness that can hold all the parts - fear, grief, anger, longing - without pushing any of them away.

Presence is about staying. And in that staying, something completes.

This is the difference between spiritual bypass and spiritual embodiment. Bypass tries to rise above the pain. Embodiment allows the pain to be met, felt, and integrated. One keeps the armor intact - the other lets it soften.

The True Self isn’t achieved. It’s revealed when defense relaxes.
Healing isn’t becoming someone new - it’s becoming safer to be who you already are when you’re not bracing, defending, avoiding, resisting.

The True Self is the capacity to meet reality without bracing against it.

From the True Self you can be present, more alive. Life doesn’t stop being hard, but you stop needing to leave yourself to manage it.

Life becomes something you can meet, undefended. Something you can even trust and be in relationship with.

Because now you are able to welcome it all, feel it all, be with it all.

But in the contemplative tradition, the aim is much simpler - and much harder:
It’s to learn how to trust life.
And to trust yourself inside it.

That is what salvation actually is: conscious union with life as it is.

The reason we need a spiritual journey at all is NOT because we are sinful, broken, or deficient. It’s because we don't currently trust life. And we don’t yet trust ourselves inside life.

That mistrust isn’t a moral failure - it’s developmental.

The way we develop into conscious union happens through stages.

1. Unconscious union. We all start here as infants. There is no separation for the infant between self and world, no subject/object split. Just openness, depedence and belonging.

   The Genesis story names this in the garden - where humans are naked, unashamed, at one with God and self and all of life. There is union here, but no consciousness. No reflective self. No meaning-making.

   Life, however, isn’t content with unconscious union. What life seems to want is conscious union - chosen presence, not naive openness.
   And to get there, we must pass through separation.

2. Unconscious Separation. As life inevitably overwhelms our nervous system - through pain, fear, confusion or unmet needs - the body learns that not everything is safe. Unconsciously, we begin to divide reality into what we allow and what we avoid.

   In the Genesis story, this is when people eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We begin to separate what appears good and bad. Safe and unsafe. Acceptable and unacceptable. The system contracts - not because it’s sinful, but because it’s trying to survive and belong. We are kicked out of the garden of union not because of something we did wrong, but because we must begin the journey of becoming conscious.

   Many of us grow into adulthood still living from these early unconscious strategies - controlling, people-pleasing, numbing, striving, fixing - without realizing they were never conscious choices.

   But if we continue on the journey, we then move to…

3. Conscious Separation. This is where we begin to observe ourselves. We bring awareness to our patterns and strategies and parts. “Why am I like this?” We shine light on the unconscious patterns that have shaped us.

   
   In the biblical narrative, this is confession and repentance. We bring awareness to our patterns, our “flesh,” our “sins,” the things that cause us to separate from self, others and Life. And we confess them. We name them.

   This stage is usually when people go to therapy, coaching, or doing spiritual work.

   But it’s not the destination. If we stay here, we simply learn to manage life better - but without fully trusting it. Awareness without embodiment becomes another form of control.

   The journey continues towards conscious union…

4. Conscious Union. This is not a return to infancy - it’s a new kind of openness - chosen, grounded and resilient. Here, trust becomes possible because the nevous system is updated through experience. What was once avoided is now felt. What was once divided is now integrated.

   We don’t’ heal separation through insight alone. Because separation was somatic and relational, it’s healed somatically and relationally - by slowly learning life can be felt without falling apart.

   
   In the biblical narrative, this is living in the kingdom of God, heaven on earth. Not a return to the garden of unconscious union, but the city on a hill - built on real experience.

This is not about belief.
It’s relational capacity. Our ability to relate to and trust Life.
Beliefs live in the mind - ideas, frameworks, theology.
Capacity lives in the body - what you can actually stay present with, feel and allow without needing to control, avoid or contract.

You can believe that life is good and still live braced against it. You can believe God is loving and still feel unsafe relaxing.

Trust isn’t something you decide - it’s something that grows through relational experience. We do this in “prayer” or practicing presence, relationships where we can be seen without performing, community where our defenses can rest, and practices that teach the body that life can be met.

This is what it means to become the kind of human who can rest inside life as it is. To trust it. To live in relationship with is. To live with presence.

Not because everything is now easy. But because you can now feel and welcome everything. You can be present to all of it.

This is salvation.