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… :)

(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.

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

This becomes perfectionism with more spiritual language :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presence is about discernment - not endurance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This kind of evangelism requires totally different approach:

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

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

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

• Belief Evangelism sees resistance as rebellion or blindness.

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

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

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

• Belief Evangelism needs salespeople, explainers, defenders.

  Formation Evangelism needs hosts, witnesses, companions.

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

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

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

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

• Belief Evangelism tries to get people into heaven.

  Formation Evangelism helps people live fully here on earth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how I see this working:

1. Story / Myth that Re-frame Suffering

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

   • Consumer myth: pain = obstacle to avoid

   • Productivity myth: pain = inefficiency

   • Moralistic myth: pain = punishment

   • Contemplative myth: pain = initiation

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

2. Community that Re-trains Safety and Belonging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Is Reality Conscious or Mechanical:

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

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

2. Is the Universe Personal or Impersonal?

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

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

3. Is the Universe Going Somewhere?

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

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

4. Is Reality Friendly or Hostile?

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

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

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

5. Is Separation Real or Illusory?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s my stab at this:

When we talk about God, we are fundamentally asking…

1. Is Reality Conscious or Mechanical?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Is the Universe Going Somewhere?

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

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

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

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

4. Is Reality fundamentally friendly, neutral or hostile?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Is Separation Real or Illusory?

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what I’ve got for now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what I’ve got for now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. CONTROL

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

2. AVOIDANCE

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

3. PERFECTION / PERFORMANCE

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

4. MERGING / PEOPLE-PLEASING

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

5. WITHDRAWAL / SELF-SUFFICIENCY

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

6. MEANING-MAKING / SPIRITUALIZING

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

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

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

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

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

See if it softens on its own then.

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

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

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

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

But insight alone doesn’t heal it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way we develop into conscious union happens through stages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   The journey continues towards conscious union…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is salvation.

Yes, on the other side of feeling emotions I find clarity. I find freedom. I expand. I find alignment.

But goddamn. Why can’t I just have that freedom and clarity WITHOUT feeling the emotion?

Wouldn’t that be so much better than having to lay on my couch for 15 minutes and shaking and crying and moaning???
Can’t we just skip this whole feeling my feelings part?

I think this so often that I want to creates some re-frames for myself:

• Emotions are not a pre-stage to presence. They ARE the expression of presence. Emotions are how presence moves through a nervous system. They only feel like obstacles when they’re unfinished, or fused with story, or resisted or rushed.

• They are not noise in the system - they are the system regulating itself. You’re not trying to clear them OUT of your system. You are letting them organize and communicate in your system. Fear is presence contracting to protect life. Anger is presence mobilizing energy for protection or truth. Sadness is presence releasing what can’t be held anymore. Joy is presence expanding into connection. You’re not getting the emotions OUT - you’re letting them organize!

• Emotions are not in the way of clarity. They are the process of clarity. That would be like thinking that listening to someone speaking is IN THE WAY OF understanding them! Emotions are Life/Truth/Spirit/Consciousness speaking - and feeling is the listening.

• Emotions aren’t something we have to “get through.” They are the very stuff of Life. They are Life moving in and through us. We don’t get through it. That would be like wanting to “get through” sex to get to an orgasm. When we rush the process, we miss the point - and often don’t get what we were aiming for anyway. The more we chase the outcome, the more disconnected we become from the experience that makes the outcome possible.

• Emotions aren’t uncomfortable. It’s the resistance to them that is uncomfortable. Going to the bathroom isn’t uncomfortable - holding it is. A wave isn’t uncomfrtable - fighting the wave is. Emotions actually become really pleasant and enjoyable when allowed to freely move through.

• Presence isn’t on the OTHER SIDE of emotions - Presence IS feeling the emotion.

• We also don’t WALLOW in emotion - thinking that is being present. Being with an emotion is not getting lost in the emotion. We don’t need to manufacture intensity - we embrace what already is. Presence has movement - wallowing tends to loop, repetition. Presence lets the river flow through us - wallowing damns it up. The emotion wants to move through, to complete, to transform, to evolve, to conclude.

• Emotions are not in the way of life - they ARE life happening! Feeling fully is living fully.

If you find yourself thinking of emotions as these pesky, unfortunate parts of being human… I hope some of these re-frames are helpful :)

• Old Patterned Responses from our Past: These are the emotions that were formed early on - often in response to situations that felt overwhelming or too much for us to process at the time. We might have developed this emotional pattern as a way of coping - like learning to push down sadness to keep the peace or turning fear into anger because it felt more acceptable. Over time, these patterns become almost automatic. When we face a situation that vaguely reminds us of that old context, the same emotions kicks in, even if it’s not fully relevant to the present.

• Relevant Information for the Present: On the other hand, emotions can also arise as fresh, relevant signals about what’s happening right now. The emotion is a kind of real-time feedback from your body-mind about the current situation. It’s letting you know that something matters here, there’s something to pay attention to.

The Old Pattern Emotions are here for one reason.
The Present Information emotions are here for another.
Some emotions are echoes.
Some emotions are signals.
Some are about then.
Some are about now.

This helps me understand why things can feel blurry, fuzzy, unclear about how to relate to my emotions. I’m often feeling a lot, but unsure of what to do with all the feeling.
Is it an old emotional response that I am mistaking for a present truth?
Or is it a present need I’m ignoring because it resembles a past wound?
Am I emotionally dismissing??
Am I emotionally reacting?
Ahhh!!!???

But here’s what I’m learning about this distinction:
The distinction reveals itself once the emotion is felt fully.

Trying to cognitively sort emotions into “old” vs “present” too early gets in the way.

This is not about correctly interpreting our emotions. It’s about becoming present, feeling them fully.
Not asking: “What does this emotion mean?” Instead asking: “Can I be with this without becoming it?”

The moment I’m trying to figure out whether an emotion is old or present, my mind has already taken over - and the survival pattern just got promoted to project manager. Now I’m monitoring myself, evaluating my progressing, trying to “do it right,” second guessing myself, slightly braced and contracted.
That’s the opposite of what allows emotional patterns to resolve.

The paradox is that this distinction is not something to DO. It’s something that REVEALS ITSELF once the emotions is fully felt.

After an emotion has been felt productively does it become clear:
“Oh…. that was old.”
Or “Oh that wasn’t actually about them.”
Or “There’s nothing to act on here.”
Or “This is still alive.”
Or “Something here needs to be said.”

The body knows before the mind does - but only if the mind gets out of the way.

After staying with the emotion in awareness:
If urgency drops → it was likely old
If clarity sharpens → it’s likely present
If options increase → you’re in the present
If compulsion increases → the pattern is still running

So the guidance becomes simple and embodied:

“Let the emotion move.
Then notice what remains.”

What remains is often clarity, truth.

You don’t have to know where the emotion comes from. You only have to be willing to feel it without becoming it.

The goal isn’t to classify emotions, but to complete them.
On the other side is clarity.

We make decisions from an EMOTIONAL place.

Research shows: When the emotional centers of the brain are damaged, people don’t become hyper-logical. They become paralyzed. Unable to decide even simple things - like which color pen to use. Choosing what socks to wear can literally take an hour.

Emotion is the engine of our decisions. Only after emotion, does logic step in to then help us guess at what path will help us AVOID what we don’t want to FEEL. (We often prioritize avoiding feelings we don’t want to feel over moving towards what we do want to feel.)

What clouds decision making is not confusion - it’s emotional avoidance.

When we are unwilling to feel certain emotions, we cloud our decision making.
Unconsciously, we block of all kinds of options, ideas, paths… because we don’t want to feel where they might lead.

Example: Someone stays in a job they quietly hate, not because it’s the best option, but because leaving might bring disappointment, financial anxiety, or the feeling of having “wasted” years. So opportunities that require risk don’t even register as real options.

Example: A person tells themselves they’re “content” in a relationship, when in reality they’re avoiding the grief that would come from admitting they want something more. The desire isn’t wrong - but feeling the sadness that follows it feels too costly.

The mind’s favorite job is protecting us from feelings we don’t want. We are not rational beings as much as emotional beings, rationally justifying our unconscious emotional decisions/avoidance.

But when we are trying to make a decision, we think we need more information. More thinking. More analyzing.

What’s really going on is that we’re trying to find a way to avoid what we don’t want to feel. But unfelt emotion doesn’t disappear - it becomes our unconscious strategy.

Clarity doesn’t come from thinking harder. It comes from being willing to feel more.

Your decision-making system already works. Your emotional avoidance is what’s distorting it.

When we don’t see this, we stay stuck in careers for years that you’ve outgrown. Or marriage stagnates because honest convos feel too threatening. Or “discernment” becomes spiritualized avoidance.

When we turn towards what we are afraid to feel and actually welcome it, then decisions get simpler (not easier, but clearer). Integrity replaces anxiety. We stop waiting for certainty and start moving with honesty. Life opens up instead of narrows.

If you’re stuck, it’s NOT because you don’t know what to do. It’s because you’re unwilling to feel what doing it would bring.

So, what do we do? We turn towards what we have been unwilling to feel. We open up to feel whatever we might need to feel.

This feels scary at first, because our nervous system still remembers when we were younger and had less capacity to feel the big feelings. But now - if we are stable and safe - we can turn towards them. We can take up our cross for the “joy set before us.” We find that, surprisingly, stepping into the very thing that seemed it would kill us becomes the doorway to our freedom and joy.

On the other side of feeling, our mind can stop spinning. When it relaxes, it can do what it’s actually good at: clarifying values, seeing tradeoffs honestly, sequencing next steps, discerning timing. The mind then is a servant to truth, not a guardian against pain.

Instead of, “How can I avoid those feelings?” It gets to ask, “Given that I can feel whatever comes, what is the most honest next step?”

We’re able to move from the fears and avoidance of the Survival Self to the spacious clarity of the True Self.

The True Self doesn’t make decisions reactive to emotions, because it is totally fine to welcome all the emotional experience. Instead, we can decide from something beneath emotion and thought. Something like alignment. Alignment with values, integrity, love, truth.

When feelings are allowed, they become information instead of unconscious commands.

What emerges underneath them is what many traditions point to: conscience, wisdom, the “still, small voice,” Spirit, Soul.

Not a voice that is seeking comfort, but one that feels courageous and calm and creative. Even in the face of what might be costly or uncertain.

From here, we’re not choosing the option that avoids pain. We’re choosing what is true and aligned.

So if you’re stuck right now, try this question—not in your head, but in your body:
What feeling am I unwilling to feel?
That answer won’t judge you. It won’t rush you.
But it will quietly point you toward clarity.
Not the kind that guarantees safety - but the kind that leads to truth, freedom and joy.