communications

AMA with Hannah Aline Taylor. Wednesday 2/4 at 4:00 PM CT

love, boundaries, and mistakes in relating, community, and peopling together (+ thank god love doesn’t look like you expect it to)

Do what Olympians Do. As an Olympian I know that mindset is key to which awesome athlete wins. Im concerned that most people are stuck in fear and anxiety about our collective future. We need to know and address the challenges, but keep focused on our collective desire for peace. What systems to change and who is doing what in the system you care most about? 

Seeing ourselves and our culture in Charlie Kirk. When I first heard about the murder I didn't know how big of a lightning rod it was going to be. Then my friend Kageni challenged me to write about the Charlie Kirk event “from an integral perspective,”* and I’ve learned to listen to her challenges, even when I'm feeling scared or inadequate (like this one). (For those who don't have the context, I apologize).

Also, in writing about this human being as an object of our cultural fascination, I've necessarily moved past the well of human grief and empathy. Forgive my insensitivities, oversimplifications (mapping rather than territory-ing), many omissions, forgive if I strayed from my lane, and may we continuously reclaim our shadows to create a more loving world.

I. We are projecting so much onto Charlie Kirk that says more about us than the real tragedies. This is normal—to quote Valerie Daniel “You can't breathe without getting projected on.” But it keeps us from confronting the raw realities of grief, powerlessness, the horror and unpredictability of life, the darkness and violence in humanity. And the irony—cruel or helpful, depending on your view—is that whatever we’re unwilling to face in ourselves is destined to repeat itself.

So let’s reclaim these projections, for our personal peace, and to prevent future tragedies. All the negative and positive stuff we project onto Kirk, onto culture, onto whoever we deem the other. Eg: If I can’t stand the celebrations, I’m probably hiding from my own schadenfreude, likely hiding how deeply I’m ashamed of my desire for power and holding others accountable. Or I’m unwilling to be tender with myself when I think I'm a victim, leading to over-responsibility: exhausting for me and enabling to others.

Loving like this is fierce. I call it forgiveness. It demands the courage to challenge deep rooted beliefs we use to orient to the world, and stay present in the resistance.

II. There are at least three distinct conversations happening at once:

1. Murder is always a tragedy, including Kirk’s.

2. Kirk's complicated character. His views are taken out of context but even so were offensive and scary to many people.
   
   How do we stay present with that fear and offense? But also the way he inspired so many good things in people, including the kind of integrity and service in young men this his murderer lacked? How do we wrestle with views that appear to span the gamut from traditional christian conservative (amber) to modern defenses of free speech (orange) to post-conventional institutional critiques (green)?

3. Celebrations of his murder are vastly overrepresented online, but are part of a feedback loop that leads to more fracturing, which leads to individuals like Kirk’s killer making specific horrific unethical choices, which keeps the loop going.
   
   (Eg: his success was somewhat a reaction to the increasing cultural power of the radical left (operating from amber/ethnocentric structure despite progressive (Green) language), which is now getting amplified, which will amplify another conservative voice, which will lead to more assassinations).
   
   How can we re-align the system if we don't see we are it? Reclaiming our projections is a necessary first step if we’re highly triggered, because (a) systematically reconstructing our intersubjective meaning-making capacity demands intertribal coordination, and (b) it shows us where our actual power lies.

III. Reclaiming our projections through collective dream analysis (sociosomnia).

What if we see America’s reaction to him like a dream that we can interpret? Here’s one view: our culture is in a tizzy around free speech. We seem to both love it and be so terrified of it that we want to cancel and “kill” it. We’re trying to find orientation and values in the chaos of a post-truth world but we don’t yet know how to say “yes, all these points of view are valid (green) but some are more valuable, relevant, and true in this context than others (teal)."

#TTT
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*The spirit of "from an integral perspective" in this context is making sense of competing claims to truth without demonizing anyone, but being willing to take a stand for goodness and values. To paraphrase integral grandpappa Ken Wilber, if we assume no one is smart enough to be 100% wrong, then how to we stitch together a coherent sense of what’s happening from all the partial truths and fragmented perspectives? In this particular post I’m relying a lot on adult developmental psychology, but the overall theory has a variety of other helpful meta-frames for understanding how seemingly totally different values relate.

What are your secret internal moves, your cues? I'm eternally curious about how we navigate our worlds, and the tricks, jumps, hops, and skips we use.

Sports coaches have cues for all kinds of things. "Follow through" in golf, tennis, and throwing generally. "Chest up, hips back, knees out" for a back squat. "Light feet" or "quick feet" for agility training. 

These cues aren't attempting to be accurate descriptions of the world from a physics point of view. They're an attitude/orientation that helps a human do a thing a little better.

My contention: we each are an entire compendium of little skill orientations that we use all the time. But because they're second nature and interior, they're funcionally invisible and don't often get shared or talked about.

Wouldn't it be neat if we talked about them?

Some examples from me:

• "Can I do this with less effort?" Physically, this applies to anything. Sitting, pooping, walking, standing, reading. It's an immediate invitation into my body and more relaxation. There is often habitual extraneous muscular/mental/emotional tension in the system.
• If I'm feeling small, stuck, contracted, tense – it can often help to "get as big as the room". It's not something to really think about or analyze too much. Just… become as big as the room. When I do so, there's often more space for the knotted stuff to just be and/or move. This also works great even when things are good.
• I don't have a convenient handle for this one, but it's something like: "fall into wonder as you observe (from within) your body just doing simple things". Doing the dishes or making coffee could be a chore – or I can switch into looking through this lens and just be astonished at how intricate and skillful the dance of it all is. There's no way I could thinkmanage it all, and yet somehow it all happens anyway.

So what are your cues? Nothing is too simple, silly, or obvious.

On Aspiration. In a recent Relateful Flow session, I said that I was aspiring toward something and that, to me, aspiration is an active principle.  My comment was met with strong disagreement from a person who said that aspiration is passive and only concrete action of a physical kind, actually "doing" something, is active.  I was a bit shocked and then realized that I might be in the minority on this subject.  To me, "aspiring" is actively signaling Life/God that I am now ready and willing to receive the thing I have been saying I wanted.  It is an energetic "yes"!  Other more physically tangible actions may follow, but aspiration is first , especially in things which have always seemed to be beyond my grasp. 

However, I understand what the person was pointing to.  There is a world where action is physical; aspiring may be useful in some way, but it is a passive practice.  

Would love others' thoughts and experience with this.

IP is a boomer concept in the age of abundance. This is a hot take that really has me thinking. 

I generally feel negatively toward Kyle for a myriad of reasons, but this is a really interesting proposal. 

I’m still noodling on it. Thought I’d share so others can join me in the noodling. 

Relateful Camp Announcements. This is where we'll post all Announcements, and it's a great place to ask questions that aren't covered in other threads.

Here's a checklist to prep for Relateful Camp:

• Fill out your survey (at this point, primarily helpful for Anja Sophie to do cabin assignments, and essential if you're flying in so that Philip can get you connected with your shuttle.)
• If you're flying into IAH: you've bought your shuttle ticket and filled out your flight info on the survey. Contact Philip with any questions.
• If you're going to camp from Austin: Self-organize rideshares between Austin and Camp Olympia in this Google Sheet.
• If you'd like to offer an Emergent Session, you can add it by filling out this Questionnaire.
• If there's someone you know who is still considering coming, please let them know they need to buy their ticket by March 19th at this link.
• If you'd like to peruse the sessions and activities to get a sense of which ones you'll want to be sure to attend, you can see all of the offerings here.
• If you'd like to go ahead and get the energy flowing, Add to one of the threads here in our UpTrust Group, engage in the Connecting thread, or start your own thread here in our UpTrust Group!

Oppress me. Is it possible? Can you oppress me right now?

Context:
The guy I’m dating (Ken) had said he was frustrated with the Austin School District teachers that he’s teaching Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to because they were all giving wrong answers to the question, Who is the oppressor in your classroom? According to Ken, and apparently according to the book the teachers had been assigned to read, the oppressor in a classroom is the teacher.

Last night I was telling my friend Arun about it and he said Oppress me! Right now!

All of this post is rooted in my discomfort with the premise that all teachers are oppressors in their classrooms. I can see the roots of truth of it, but making that its own conclusion point looks wildly flawed to me.