Not just tactical changes, like a new website or pricing. The changes I wanted to make were going to require something much more difficult: I needed to become a different kind of person. Someone who could tolerate more uncertainty. Make decisions before I had perfect clarity. Stay consistent when motivation disappeared. Let go of old ideas that no longer fit where I was headed.

I could have tried to do all that on my own. I usually do.

But I’ve known myself long enough to know how that usually goes…

So instead of buying another course or reading another business book, I built a container.

I invited half a dozen business owners who were wrestling with similar questions into a four-month experiment. We’ve been meeting regularly. We have a text thread that never really stops. Some grab coffee between calls. We’ve gone to each other’s events. We know what each person is building, what they’re afraid of, what they’re avoiding and what they’re hoping for.

My business has been changing dramatically because of it. But even more exciting: I’ve been transforming.

This group has become more than accountability. It is a container that is holding me while I grow. It’s people who can see me when I can’t see myself. It’s given me practices that keep me moving when I want to retreat. It gives me the stability to experiment, fail, learn and keep going.

It’s been such a good reminder that I don’t grow through information. I grow inside the right containers.

I grew up in church. My dad has been a pastor my whole life. Outside of my family, church was the most formative container of my childhood. It shaped me in thousands of ways I still carry today. It gave me a story larger than myself, adults who cared about me, rituals that anchored my weeks, opportunities to serve and develop skills, friendships that are still blowing up my phone with notifications to this day.

I’m deeply grateful for it.

Eventually I left my dad’s church to plant a new church in South Austin. Years later, I left the institutional church altogether. For a time, I described that season as leaving organized religion.

Now I would describe it differently. I wasn’t rejecting the need for a container, like religion. I had simply outgrown that particular one.

The pot that had helped me grow had become too small. I needed a container spacious enough to hold the questions I was asking and the person I was becoming. I didn’t need less formation - I needed a new container for the next stage of my growth.

I can now see that leaving an unhealthy container doesn’t mean I’ve outgrown my need for containers altogether. In fact, I think one of the tragedies of modern life is that we’ve become very good at dismantling containers and much less skilled at building new ones.

For most of human history, our lives were held inside a web of overlapping communities and shared rhythms. Families lived near one another. People belonged to churches, synagogues, temples, unions, bowling leagues, civic clubs, neighborhood institutions, and workplaces where they might spend decades. They weren’t perfect. Some were rigid. Some were exclusionary. Some desperately needed reform.

But they held people.

Today, much of that has disappeared.

We piece together careers through freelance work and entrepreneurship. We move away from our families. We switch cities, churches, and jobs every few years. We consume endless content but know very few neighbors.

We have more freedom than any generation before us. But that freedom has come at the cost of being unmoored.

Everyone seems to have an explanation for why anxiety, loneliness, and disorientation feel so widespread today. Some blame social media. Others blame politics, capitalism, the economy, or the decline of religion.

I suspect there are many causes. But I wonder if one of them is this: We’ve lost many of the containers that once held us.

The word “container” might sound abstract, but I haven’t yet found a better one :) What I mean by “container” is something that offers four things:

• It gives you a story. A way of understanding the world and your place within it.

• It gives you a purpose. A reason to show up and contribute.

• It gives you a community. People who know your name, remind you who you’re becoming, and carry some of the weight when life becomes heavy.

• It gives you practices. Rhythms that shape you slowly through repetition and embodiment.

Whether you’re talking about a family, a recovery group, a company, or a church, a Harry Potter fan-fic group, or a Crossfit gym, these four ingredients are what are present. These are the macro-nutrients of a meaningful container and they nourish a meaningful life.

And when we are starved of those nutrients, we will look for substitutes. We will binge on the empty calories of politics becoming our tribe, productivity becoming our identity, online algorithms becoming our teachers, sports becomes our liturgy. None of thse are inherently bad. They were just never designed to carry the weight of being our primary source of meaning, identity and belonging.

We don’t stop being formed. We just swap out what is forming us.

Growth and freedom do not come from escaping unhealthy containers. Because we never graduate from being formed.

The question has never been whether something is shaping us. The question is what.

The old containers were obvious. You knew when you walked into a church. You knew when you joined a bowling league. You knew when you started a career at the local company. They made no secret of the fact that they were trying to shape you.

Today’s containers are harder to see precisely because they feel like freedom. They feel like anti-containers.

We find ourselves inside containers shaped by personalized feeds. Consumer culture. Political tribes. Personal brands. The assumption that you should build your own identity, create your own meaning, curate your own beliefs, and optimize every area of your life.

These containers don’t ask for membership cards or weekly attendance. They simply shape your attention, your desires, your fears, and your imagination in a thousand nearly invisible ways.

Even the stories our culture tells about success, happiness, and what makes a life worthwhile become containers. They answer the questions human beings are inherently asking: Who am I? What matters? What should I want? Who are my people?

The most powerful containers are often the ones we don’t recognize as containers. They’re nearly invisible - which is what makes them so powerful.

Modern life didn’t eliminate containers - it individualized them.

That’s why simply throwing off old structures doesn’t necessarily make us healthier. It often just makes us more available to new ones.

We don’t escape formation. We simply trade visible forms of formation for invisible ones, shared rituals for personalized algorithms, intentional communities for unconscious culture. We don’t stop being discipled - we just become less aware of who our teachers are.

The goal isn’t to become container-less. It is to become conscious.

To ask, What story is shaping me? What community is forming me? What practices are quietly becoming my liturgy?

If we don’t intentionally chose what we want to form us, there are powerful forces already shaping us into a particular kind of person.

This is both the risk and the opportunity of the time we find ourselves in.

While this is an age of disappearing containers, maybe it can also be an age of becoming architects.

Unlike previous generations, many of us aren’t limited to the handful of set communities in our neighborhood. We can intentionally build the kinds of spaces we wish existed.

That may be the invitation of adulthood in our time. Children inherit containers, adults build them.

Parents create family rituals that didn’t exist when they were growing up. Friends start dinner clubs. Neighbors organize community gardens. Entrepreneurs create mastermind groups. Recovery meetings begin in borrowed basements. Book clubs form around kitchen tables.

Someone decides that our formation will not be left to the forces of individualism, capitalism, consumerism, tribalism.

They build a container.

Without an intentional container, growing into the kind of people we want to be can feel like swimming upstream. We feel burned out from leaning on willpower, trying to manufacture change through sheer discipline. Like a plant trying to grow in a dark closet, beating itself up for shriveling - when all it needs is to be planted in some soil, water and sunlight. What seems impossible in one container becomes natural in another.

I’ve become convinced that transformation rarely happens by trying harder, setting goals, buying a new habits journal. It happens when we intentionally place ourselves inside environments that shape who we’re becoming.

Our formation was never meant to be a solo project. The right container surrounds us with people who remind us who we’re becoming, practices that gently pull us forward, and rhythms that make the next faithful step feel natural, even fun.

We don’t grow by simply escaping old containers. We grow by intentionally placing ourselves inside better ones.

BENEDICTION: May we become more aware of the invisible containers already shaping our lives. May we have the courage to leave the containers no longer lead us toward who we want to be, and the imagination to build new ones that nourish who we are becoming. And may we find ourselves held by stories worth living, people worth walking alongside, and rhythms that make us more fully alive.

“He makes everyone feel comfortable to open up - even in areas that you or your team may not feel confident in. There’s no judgement. He makes it easy to get to the core issues. Lean in and trust him fully.”

Kate Davis, Founder

He’s brilliant. Companies hire him to help lead their teams. He has ideas he genuinely believes in. He knows the direction he wants to move his work.

But he isn’t moving.

He spends his days thinking instead of deciding. Researching instead of building. Feeling inspired one week and uncertain the next. Every burst of motivation seems to dissolve back into hesitation.

“What would being obsessed do for you?” I ask.

“Then I’d wake up motivated every day. I’d take bigger action. I’d be consistent. Imagine where I’d be if I’d been obsessed for the last year...”

I know that feeling. For me, it usually sounds a little different.
If I could just find my purpose...
If I just knew the right decision...
If I just felt motivated...

I often think what I lack is clarity, the right decision. But what I’m really searching for is relief from having to lead myself.

I want something outside of me to do the driving.
Obsession. Or motivation. Or certainty.

Whatever I call it, the fantasy is the same: “If I could just find the right thing, I won’t have to wrestle with myself anymore. Then I won’t have to decide every day. I won’t have to tolerate ambiguity. I won’t have to face resistance…”

Then the obsession would do the driving. And I wouldn’t have to.

In so many of the people I get to coach, I’ve noticed this desire. And often the reason they are hoping for something to drive them, is because they’ve experienced that before. Sometimes they were obsessed with proving themselves. Or driven to building a business to feel financially secure. Or motivated by winning the approval of people who looked remarkably like their father :)

For a while, it worked! Those drives got them through school. They helped them build careers. They protected them. They helped them survive and have some identity.

But being driven eventually reaches the edge of what it can carry.

The achievement stops satisfying. The approval wears thin. The mountain we’ve been climbing suddenly feels strangely empty.

So we assume we need a new obsession.
A new business…
A new purpose….
A new dream…
A new spouse…

But the problem isn’t that they’ve lost their obsession. They’ve just outgrown the need to be possessed by one.

Eventually, we’re asked to develop something deeper than external motivation. We’re asked to develop self-leadership. To become the kind of person who can remember what matters, make a decision, and gently lead ourselves toward it, even when no emotion is pulling us there.

That doesn’t sound as exciting as obsession. But it’s far more freeing.

Obsession is being possessed by a desire. Leadership is learning to possess your desires.

One is being unconsciously carried. The other is learning to walk.

Your old survival patterns may have helped you build a life. But they were never meant to lead you forever.

Real consistency doesn’t come from finding the thing that finally keeps you motivated. It comes from becoming the kind of person who can choose what matters again and again.

We are learning to live from a deeper, truer part of us that can lead all our feelings, patterns, reactions, fears. It’s a different kind of motivation - not born of seeking something outside ourselves, but from seeking alignment within ourselves.

The deepest freedom isn’t finding something that makes your decisions for you.
It’s becoming someone who can make decisions in alignment with what matters.
Again… and again… and again.

“Brandon has a real gift of guiding and not leading so that you can explore and discover what is truly best for you. He puts himself in his clients shoes, gets in the trenches with them, makes them feel seen, worthy and truly supported on the entrepreneurial journey.”

~ Darcie Huff, Go Rings

“Well… My day got hijacked by my A/C unit.” He says, sounding defeated.

He had planned to spend the day working on his highest priorities. But when he walked into his office that morning, he noticed water dripping from the A/C. Hours later, he was still researching mold and planning how to replace sheet rock. The work he had intended to do never happened.

He sighed. “I’m not mad about trying to fix the A/C. It needed attention eventually. What bothers me is that it completely took over my day. It felt automatic. Like I didn’t consciously choose to do it.”

I nodded. I’m all to familiar. This morning, I checked my email while going to the bathroom. One message created a spike of anxiety in my body. Then I spent the morning trying to solve that problem while making oatmeal for my kids. Usually I sit with them while they eat breakfast, but today I spent the morning on my computer, shouting at my kids in the other room to get dressed and finish eating.

The sneaky thing is that we rarely notice being hijacked when it’s happening. We just call it productivity. Or responsibility. Or being proactive.

But it’s not really a choice - it’s a reaction.

He said it perfectly. “It felt like I was a slave to my reaction.”

What creates that feeling of being a “slave” or being hijacked is not the thing itself - the client email, the A/C dripping, the kid’s tantrum in the back of the car. The real problem is that we cannot tolerate the feelings those things create inside us.

We tend to think we’re reacting to events. Most of the time, we’re reacting to our feelings.

The leaking A/C created anxiety → the anxiety created urgency → the urgency created action.
And that action hijacked the day.

He said he noticed the same pattern in other areas of his life.
When a client emailed him with a problem, he immediately dropped everything to solve it.
When his wife brought him a struggle she was facing, he jumped straight into fixing mode.
When something created anxiety in him, he rushed toward to solve it. To get rid of the feeling.

The feelings that are running us are also running our businesses, our marriages, our parenting.

As we slowed the moment down, I asked him to remember the instant he saw the drip. “What happened inside you?”

He closed his eyes. “There was anxiety.”

“What is the anxiety trying to do for you?”

His answer came quickly. “It’s trying to keep me safe. It’s trying to make sure a small problem doesn’t become a big one. I grew up in a house with mold that created lots of health problems.”

The anxiety wasn’t the enemy. It was trying to help. The problem wasn’t that anxiety showed up. The problem was that it completely took over.

There’s a difference between listening to anxiety and obeying it. One creates wisdom. The other creates reactivity.

I asked: “What do you want to say to that anxiety?”

He paused. Then said, “I’ll take care of this. Probably on Friday afternoon.”

And there it was. The shift from unconscious slave to conscious leadership. The anxiety still existed, but now he was leading.

The moment he could be with the feeling of anxiety, he was no longer controlled by it.

What we can be with no longer controls us. The feeling we’re trying to get rid of is the doorway to freedom.

The next time you feel a signal in your body / mind / emotions - notice it. When you notice something, you immediately create a little space between you and the feeling. That space creates some freedom.

Then connect with it: What is this feeling trying to do for me? Genuinely listen. And then decide what actually needs your attention.

Not every feeling deserves obedience. But every feeling can be met with connection.

The goal is not to eliminate our feelings - actually the opposite! The goal is to become someone who can be with all the feelings in us, without becoming them. The relationship with those feelings is what creates freedom, clarity and wise decision making.

Because aligned leadership - in business, marriage, parenting, for yourself - begins there.

Benediction: May we have the awareness to notice what is arising within us. May we have the capacity to be with it. And may we discover the freedom and alignment that comes from that connection.

“Brandon has an amazing talent and skill of listening, not only to what someone is saying, but what they are feeling and what they mean, who they are through it all.”

Elizabeth Hyman

Tonight, I’m going to try to pray with my kids.

I’ve been telling Ash for months that I want to try to pray with them at bedtime. But I haven’t pulled the trigger. Partly because I’m a bit unsure if this is a practice I want them to grow up with. Partly because it feels out of integrity to teach them to pray when I don’t really pray myself. At least not to a Sky-Daddy (as my friend, Taylor calls him).

And partly because I’m worried about how Harris, who is 4 years old, will respond. We haven’t really talked about “God” before. And now all of a sudden, I’m going to tell him that there’s an invisible presence in the room with him that he can talk to? Did we miss his window? Is 4 too old to casually introduce the idea of a cosmic being who is always watching you? That feels like the kind of thing you either start when they’re 2 or you spend the next twenty minutes sounding like you’ve joined a very enthusiastic cult.

He’s going to have nightmares, for sure.

But I just have to try. I want my kids to have some practices in their life that teach them they are a part of something bigger. That Reality is not indifferent to them. That they are not separate selves, alone in a big world. That even when mommy and daddy are not holding them, they are held by a universe that is alive, relational, and cares for them.

I just hope I can imprint that on them without also imprinting the fear, shame, and certainty that make me so cautious to use the word “God.”

Before going into their room for our bedtime routine, I give Ash and I a little pep talk. “Tonight’s the night. It’s gonna be awkward. Let’s just try it.”

We brush teeth, go potty, get into jammies, and read three books.

I close the last book. This is usually the part where we say, “Alright, into bed!” But I take a deep breath and tell them: “Tonight, I want to pray with y’all.”

Harris is confused. “Like when we hold hands before dinner?” At the dinner table we usually hold hands and say one we’re grateful for from the day. But there’s no deity involved in that ritual.

“No, this is something I did when I was your age. Let me show you.”

I didn’t plan this part, but for some reason I decided I needed to get on my knees beside the bed and clasp my hands together. The way a cartoon child prays. I don’t know…it’s just kind of happening.

“God is the one who created everything. All the trees and sky and animals and people. And God is with us all the time. We can talk to God anytime we want tell God anything we feel or think.”

Ooooh yes, it’s awkward…

“Like this…” I close my eyes and bow my head - because if we’re gonna do it, we’re doing it all the way.

“God…” I know they’re eyes are open just watching me. “God… thank you for today. I really liked playing basketball with Harris. And making dinner with Denny. I feel happy tonight. Please help me sleep well. Amen.”

I feel like a child. I hope Ash still finds me attractive after witnessing this. Thankfully she jumps in right after me. She thanks God for a thing or two and says Amen.

Then, Denny quickly jumps in. She is eager to take a stab at this. “GOD! Thank you for my new Anna and Elsa blanket! Aaaaaaaaannnnnddddd…. my polar bear!” I’m pretty sure she is just scanning her bed right now. “Aaaaaaaannnnnndddddd…. Bubba pushed me today and I cried and cried and cried. Amen!!”

She is loving this. I knew she would. Damnit, I think. We should have started when Harris was 2.

I peek up to to see if Harris is going to take his shot. He’s watching all of us, partially hiding his face under one of his stuffed animals.

He’s unsure, self-conscious. Me too, bud.

“Do you want to pray?” I ask.

“Uhhhhh…”

“You don’t have to. Only if you want to.” I definitely don’t want him to feel any obligation. I’m fine to push him to learn how to swim, but I don’t want him to ever feel coerced into this. Relationships have to be entered freely.

“I want to…” he says, using the baby voice he uses when he’s embarrassed.

“Just tell God anything you’re thinking or feeling.”

“God…” He says, looking directly at me with a self-conscious smile. “Thank you for basketball. I won 2 games and Daddy won 2 games. And I want to play more in the morning. Amen.”

Amen. It’s finished. We prayed. As a family. Whew.

It lasted about 3 minutes but contained 30 years of baggage and nostalgia for me. They have no idea. Hopefully for them it was something… meaningful. Even if a bit confusing. Hopefully Harris will be open to doing it again tomorrow night.

My hope is that this simple bedtime practice of prayer lands on them in the way I want. That prayer helps them relate to Life in a healthy, open way. That it helps them trust more and feel anxious less. I hope they learn that the fundamental nature of the universe is love, and it’s for them. That the very consciousness they are a part of is intelligent and they can tap into that source whenever they need.

Sure, tonight we just closed our eyes and said thank you for our Elsa and Anna blanket. But a dad can hope.

I feel a disconnect in myself between what I’m doing - praying - and what I’m feeling - anxious and unsettled.

I’m realizing I can teach my kids practices. But I can’t teach them a nervous system that I don’t have.

I’m not actually worried about whether Harris learns how to pray. I’m worried about whether I can teach something I’m still learning myself.

I thought tonight was going to be about starting a new practice for them, but it’s showing me that I need this more than they do.

If I want my children to feel held… I probably have to learn what it feels like to be held.
If I want them to trust Life… they’re mostly going to learn that by watching whether I trust Life.

Not by listening to my beliefs, but listening to my tone and seeing my reactions and attuning to my energy.

I cannot lead my kids somewhere I’m unwilling to go myself.

I wish parenting was like shaping playdough. Give me the right books, right habits, right bedtime routines, right school, right words. Then surely they’ll be sculpted into the adults I want them to be.

But they don’t respond to my attempts to shape them like playdough. They respond more like sponges. So my job isn’t sculpting them. It’s becoming someone worth absorbing.

Every day I’m preaching a sermon with my nervous system. If I spend my life anxious, controlling, hurried… they’ll learn that the universe is anxious. If I practice being someone grounded and surrendered, maybe they’ll begin to feel the universe is trustworthy.

There are a thousand beautiful family practices - prayer, walks after dinner, gratitude, meditation, lighting candles, reading poems before bed…. The practice isn’t magic. It’s an invitation. To become the kind of person whose inner-life is becoming more aligned with this practice.

That’s really why I’m on my knees. Much of me doesn’t want to do this awkward thing with my kids, my wife… But I want to have the courage to keep practicing the things I hope become true of me. And I want to be someone who can live held by something larger.

I don’t know how our nightly prayer practice might evolve. I don’t know if my kids will become adults who pray to a God. I don’t know what name they might resonate with for God/the universe/the Ground of Being… But I do know that I want them to be people who feel deeply at home in this world, in their bodies, in their feelings. People who feel that this universe wants them and knows them and cares about all of them, exactly as they are.

That is my prayer for them.

That is the prayer that I want to practice living myself.

Amen.

He continues. “The things I really want to do - with my business, my writing, my work - I feel like I’d have to be all in. Completely committed. But that’s always been my pattern. I get extreme. I know I need to be more balanced.”

I stop him. “How does balance feel to you?”

He thinks for a moment. “It doesn’t feel alive. It feels like settling. Like soggy rice.”

“You’re at war with yourself because you feel like you should be something that doesn’t feel alive to you. You don’t really want balance.”

For a lot of us, balance is one of those words that sounds good until you try to live it. Like drinking kale smoothies every morning for breakfast. Great on paper - actually makes life miserable.

Balance and alignment are not the same thing.
And confusing them creates some unnecessary suffering.

I knew this guy admired Michael Jordan the same way I did. Two boys who grew up in the 90s.

“Was Michael Jordan balanced?” I asked.

He laughed. “Not even a little.”

“Do you wish he had been?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he wouldn’t have become Michael Jordan.”

Exactly. Nobody would describe Michael Jordan as balanced. But everybody would say he was extremely aligned. His life was organized around a clear aim. His schedule, habits, attention, energy, sacrifices - they all pointed in the same direction.

Balance is trying to give everything an equal vote. Alignment is deciding what matters most and organizing your life around it.

Balance is an abstract concept. Alignment is an alive conversation with Reality.

Sometimes alignment looks “balanced.”
Sometimes it looks radical.
Sometimes it looks like saying no to things everyone else says yes to.
Sometimes it looks like saying yes to things everyone else avoids.

The question isn’t whether your life looks balanced. The question is whether it’s aligned.

As we kept talking, it became clear - he wasn’t actually suffering because he lacked balance. He was suffering because he wasn’t aligned.

He wanted to grow his business. He wanted to write. He wanted to create. He wanted to be a present husband and father.

But when we looked at his actual life, those weren’t the things driving his decisions.

Other things were: His fear of not being respected. His discomfort with uncertainty. His tendency to avoid naming what he really wanted because then he might have to risk pursuing it.

Those were the forces shaping his calendar, his thoughts, his mood.

That’s why he kept filling his days with random coffee meetings that felt productive but accomplished very little. That’s why he spent hours thinking, researching, outlining, and writing in private - but hesitated to actually publish his work.

He was aligned with avoiding rejection and uncertainty.

His behaviors and feelings made perfect sense once we saw what he was truly organized around.

Most of us are not aligned with our stated goals. We’re aligned with our fears. We’re aligned with avoiding discomfort. We’re aligned with maintaining a particular image of ourselves. Then we wonder why our lives feel fragmented.

When I look at my time, money, thoughts - I discover that I’m aligned with my fear of what other people will think of me… I’m shaped by my avoidance of ambiguity… I’m focused on endlessly planning instead of taking vulnerable action. I’m always aligned with something - but rarely is it what I actually want.

The breakthrough came when he stopped asking, “How do I create more balance?” And started asking, “What do I actually want?”

From there, the work became surprisingly practical and straight forward.

And, to his surprise, this didn’t mean sacrificing the husband/father he also wanted to be. In fact, alignment made him a better husband - because he was no longer carrying around the constant frustration of living half-committed to everything. It made him a better father - because he was more joyful, more at peace in his spirit every day.

When it was time to work, he worked. When it was time to be with his family, he was actually with them - not feeling a low grade frustration and anxiety from being out of integrity.

Clarify what you’re organizing your life around. Name the handful of things that matter most in this season.

Then look honestly at your calendar, your habits, your spending, your attention, and your energy. They are already aligned with something. The question is whether they’re aligned with what you actually want.

Because nobody wakes up hoping for a balanced life. What we really want is a life that feels alive because it’s in integrity with what we want. A life where our actions, values, desires, and commitments point in the same direction.

We don’t want balance.

We want alignment.

BENEDICTION: May we have the courage to name what we actually want. May we notice the fears, habits, and distractions that have quietly claimed our allegiance. And may we bring our time, attention, and lives into alignment with what is most true.

That’s a win.

I texted back, “Amazing! Now today, see if you can also notice any moments where you feel more alive with him.”

Because learning to calm yourself down is a wonderful skill. It’s just not the ultimate goal.

Learning to regulate your emotions matters. But the point isn’t to become less emotional - the point is to become capable of feeling more.

None of us wants to be ruled by every impulse. But neither do we want to become people who only know how to dampen the very signals that make us fully alive.

I often forget that this is the whole purpose of learning to regulate. Learning to calm myself, ground, manage my nervous system - those are beautiful tools. But I can become so good at regulating myself that I accidentally begin regulating my life. My inner life becomes something to manage instead of my deepest source of wisdom and energy.

What we’re learning is to become aware of the signals our body/heart/mind are constantly sending us. We’re learning to connect with them. To listen. To discover that our emotions are not enemies to conquer but invitations into a deeper relationship with ourselves and our lives.

My son is one of my greatest (read: most frustrating) teachers here.

When my daughter is melting down, I’m surprisingly steady. I can redirect her, hold boundaries, give consequences, and stay connected. For whatever reason, I have space inside myself when she is hitting Ringwraith-level decibels.

Then my son does something... and I can go from believing in gentle parenting to wanting to resurrect spanking in about three seconds.

Right now, I still need regulation. I need to step away. I need to “defuse,” as that dad’s text said.

But my hope isn’t to spend the next twenty years getting really good at walking away. My hope is to someday meet those feelings with enough presence that I don’t have to escape them in the first place. I want to relate to them the same way I can already relate to my daughter’s meltdowns - with clarity, compassion, sturdiness.

Not just regulated, but integrated.

I’m talking to another father right now who told me he feels disconnected from his kids. He struggles to simply be with them. To play. To delight in them.

He’s also a business leader. There too, he says he often feels overwhelmed by everyone’s needs. Every conversation feels like another problem to solve. Every interaction carries the pressure to perform. He can’t simply be with his team any more than he can simply be with his children.

The pattern isn’t in parenting. It isn’t in his company leadership either.

The pattern, he’s learning, is in his disconnection with his own inner life.

Now he’s begun doing the hard work of reconnecting with the emotions he has spent decades disconnecting from.

In my coaching, I’m often working with high-achievers - business owners, pastors, leaders. And they are more than willing to dive into the “hard” emotions when they see this pattern in their life. They want to face the grief, the shame, the fear, the trauma. That’s good work.

But I increasingly think it’s just as powerful (and maybe a better place to start) to reconnect with our expansive feelings too.

And for many of us, feelings like joy or play feel just as dangerous to our system as the “hard” feelings. For example: joy asks you to stop managing your life and just open up and receive it. To be in joy is to stop managing the moment and trust it enough to be present.

Which sounds beautiful. But goddamn if my system doesn’t freak out when I try to do that. I’d rather feel safe and protected than open up to my life - that feels vulnerable. Who’s gonna be in control!?

That’s the invitation. Not simply to become better at regulating difficult emotions, but to become more in touch with all of life.

This week, notice any feelings of expansion. Notice any little signal delight, playfulness, tenderness, gratitude. Instead of disconnecting or defusing, try to allow them. Connect with them. Enjoy becoming more open and alive to the signals from your inner life.

You may also notice another part of you wanting to disconnect or shut those sensations down. Notice that part too. Thank it. It learned that contraction was the safest way to live. You don’t have to fight it. Just remind it that this moment is safe enough to receive.

That is self-leadership.

That is what our clients and teams desires from us. A leader who is tuned into all the signals from his inner world is one that can be tuned into all the signals of the organization.

Our spouse wants a partner who can be with their own emotions, because that is a partner who can be with their emotions too.

Our kids do not long for perfectly calm, defused parents. They want a parent who can stay present to his own inner life. Because that’s a parent who can be present with them too.

BENEDICTION: May we become people who no longer fear the signals within us. May we learn to stay present long enough to discover that what once felt overwhelming may become wisdom, clarity, courage, and love. And may we become so fully alive to our own inner world that everyone entrusted to our care feels just a little more alive in our presence.

For months, I’ve been telling myself I’m ready to grow my coaching business. I’ve been coaching now for almost 4 years. I love it. My clients love it. I want to do more of it!

I’m clear on what I want.

But I just keep thinking about it. Lots of thinking. Very little else.

This week, I decide it’s finally time to move from thinking into action toward my goal. I know what I need to do: I need to sit down regularly and connect with people in my network. That’s how I grew my coaching business in the first place. That’s what I need to do again if I want to grow it to the next level.

So I schedule two hours on Monday titled “Connection Time.” 12pm - 2pm.

Now it’s 11:59am on Monday. I just finished a coaching call I did while walking around in a park in our neighborhood. The call went a bit long, so I had to nearly run to Starbucks if I wanted to keep my word with myself and actually sit down by 12pm to begin my “Connection Time.”

I made it. I kept my word. I’m following through.

Except, two hours later, at the end of my Connection Time block, I look back at what I had accomplished… Zero connecting. I took lots of notes. I made lots of plans. I thought of great systems for connecting with people. I wrote down people’s names that I want to connect with.

But no actual connecting.

I found a dozen ways to feel like I was connecting, but that actually avoided doing the thing I came to do.

I scrolled back up to the top of my notes for the day and titled the day “Mostly Thought and Made Lists.”

It hurt. To be honest about how much resistance I have to what I want to do.

Better Juju

Now it’s the next day, Tuesday. And I’ve scheduled another two-hour time block for myself. “Connection Time.” I know what will happen if I leave myself to my usual devices. My usual vices. Avoiding with planning, preparing.

This time I’m going to a different coffee shop. Maybe it will have better juju. But as I walk there, I pull out my phone and press record on a voice memo. I start talking to myself. I remind myself why I’m doing this. I ask myself: why is this hard?

Some of the voice memo is just silence as I feel into my resistance. I name how the idea of connecting with people — telling them I’m looking to do more coaching — makes part of me feel scared. It feels vulnerable. Will it push people away? Will I be misunderstood? Will they judge me?

I spend a few minutes just feeling that. And then talking to that part of me. It feels tender. But also really good to look directly at this part that is often unconsciously controlling my actions. Leading me to avoid what I say I want to do. Just to see it. Understand it. Acknowledge it.

Then I begin to show that part of me how we can do this in a way that actually feels good. Or at least less dangerous to that part. We’re going to try connecting with people in a way that doesn’t push them away. That minimizes how much they might judge us. I remind myself how many wonderful friends I have who are actually encouraging me to do this. This won’t leave me the laughing stock of Austin.

I feel a bit silly talking to myself in a voice memo. And it’s also making me want to tear up and hug a tree. As I stop the recording, I feel energized, like I could run a marathon. Or at least half a mile.

I walk into the coffee shop and sit down for two hours. And this time I don’t just “Mostly Think and Make Lists.” This time, I text and call and email people. Friends I’m close to. Colleagues I haven’t talked to in a year. And sometimes I text because I want to avoid calling.

It still brings up feelings of fear. Feelings of cringe. Feelings of danger. Sometimes I drift off to avoid for 15 minutes. But then I get back to it.

I can be with these feelings. I can be with this part of me that feels this is too vulnerable, too dangerous, going to lead to me being alone and judged. I can be with that part, that feeling, that story. And I can guide it. It’s here — but not running the show anymore. I am.

Connection Time

Now, here I am the next Monday, writing this essay. I’m wondering if even writing this is a clever way of avoiding Connection Time. Maybe it is. Who knows the mysteries of our internal world. But I’m telling myself that my email list is a great way to connect with my network too. So here I am, leaning into the vulnerability, the fear… and trying to lead myself through my resistance, to align myself with who I want to be and where I want to go. By writing an email.

(Is this too meta? No, it’s perfectly meta. Because life isn’t life always meta?)

I’m learning that leading a business is really about leading ourselves. Through the resistance, through the clever ways we avoid what we know we need to do or who we want to be. And the best way to lead ourselves is through connection — connection with ourselves, our parts, our fears and stories and patterns. Trying to willpower or manually override our inner parts never works for me. At least not for more than 48 hours. But connection — understanding and caring for my parts and their fears and feelings, and leading them through that, helping them align with where we need to go — that actually creates movement. Not because the fear disappears, but because I’m no longer waiting for it to disappear before I act.

So now the question for my week: Based on my goals, what do I need to do this week? What in me is resisting this? How can I connect and lead that part of me?

If you're sitting with your own version of Connection Time this week — and want a thinking partner as you work through it — that's the kind of coaching I do with business owners and leaders. Schedule a coaching call here.

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.