interpersonal relationships

AMA with Liv Boeree on incentive traps, game theory, and win-wins. AMA with Liv Boeree -poker champion with a background in astrophysics here to slay Molog- & Jordan Myska Allen on incentive traps, game theory, and win-wins | UpTrust launch event | #heywait, can we do better?

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

AMA with Jeffrey Ladish. Wednesday 2/4 at 2:00 PM CT

Executive director of Palisade Research; studying AI loss of control risks.

What is the 'Metacrisis' and How Do We Solve It? (AMA). Rewatch the live AMA conversation with Layman Pascal 

Relatefulness vs Circling. I've been discovering distinctions and felt-senses of Relatefulness that seem to differ from how I know Circling. My short catch phrase is: "If meditation is the art of being, and Circling is the art of being-with, then Relatefulness is the art of being-human-with."

I like this, it's short and sweet. I can't tell what Relatefulness really is vs what I'm making it and, given that I'm a founding member, it doesn't matter. I'm gonna bully these points.

Jane Goodall is in more Flows than she is in Surrendered Leadership. Helping behavior, care, needs, art, and the building of infracstructure are welcomed in Relatefulness. One thing I notice about Circling, if person A offers person B something, person A is (at least culturally) more likely to ask, "What's underneath it for you?", as if they're asking, "What's this cocaine cut with?" It's rarely believed in Circling if the underneath isn't negative. If the offering Circler says, "Care", then most Circlers assume a spiritual bypass and probably imagine being less sexually attractive (sarcasm). In Relatefulness I'm creating that, Person A offers Person B something, Person B, taking notes from Hannah Taylor, feels whether accepting feels like comfort and then accepts or declines accordingly. 

In Relatefulness we let the responsibility for shadow-hunting be with the one offering. It's a huge leap to believe that accepting something is bad because the offer had some shadow somewhere inside of it. It's actually a ridiculous leap. It's stupid. The shadow could just as easily be ameliorated by seeing its energy flow generatively or made worse by non-rational repetitive rejection.

Boom. Suck it. (I don't know who I'm angry at....myself.)

Last night as I was leading lab it felt amazing. I was watching them float in and out of chit chat. The thing that wasn't in and out was everything they were talking about was meaningful. There wasn't anyone there, besides a voice in my mind, that was tracking whether they were using speech patterns of immediacy, "Being here now, I feel like my balls haven't descended." They were just talking. I did not police it because it felt so fucking good. We're monkeys and we feel good. What I did do was use immediacy leaning language and speak it between people. I let people see the effect and never brought up them following. If it's good and it works then they'll follow at their aligned speed.

I stayed in slight vigilance as the thing in my brain that polices immediacy, or is on the lookout from being policed, slowly calmed down. It was beautiful.

In short, Relatefulness is more about being monkeys than monks, healthy than right, in alignment than understood.

Pass the bananas!

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.

Ordinary Love. An invitation to true wellness culture

Postmodernity is too egocentric. This includes current “spiritual” trends.

Here’s what an alternative can look like: Yesterday Dara asked Jason to install a window A/C unit in Val’s room; he came over and did it. Last night a participant shared struggling with a contract at work, and a lawyer in the session volunteered to help her redline it. My sister watches the kids while I help my brother-in-law move their furniture to make room for the new baby. If this doesn’t sound special, that’s the point. You’re already doing this, that’s also the point.

I’m not writing to admonish us to “get rid” of the “ego”—a particular self-identity*. I think it’s too hard for modern Americans, steeped in a culture of individualism. I love life, people, experience, and I think a good life includes a sense of “me.” Instead, I want to expand the sense of self to go much beyond the concept of “my body, my history” to see the larger whole these are part of. One upshot of this is gratitude, even for what I usually think of as “Jordan’s”—like these thoughts thunk in English. I needed English to think ‘em, so how much are they ‘mine’? 

Automated & consensual narrative lock-in

We know that social media exacerbated this. Many studies show narcissism and loneliness increasing faster with mass adoption of social media, especially after 2012. Young kids don’t want to serve as a fireman or doctor anymore, they want to be adored as an influencer (We’re working on this social media problem by launching UpTrust). 

Now I worry that AI is exponentiating this self-reification trend to unprecedented levels.

Last week I met four people who were convinced that their personal ChatGPT interface, molding its “personality” to respond based on their unique interactions, was a sentient being. If you think our filter bubbles are bad now, imagine what it’s like when we have 8 billion of them? Each individual’s personal collection of bots reinforcing whatever identity feels special, safe, and comfortable, no matter how limited and delusional?

There’s nothing wrong with specialness, safety, and comfort, but neither is there anything wrong with ordinariness, risk, and discomfort. Transformation, life, intimacy, and play all demand both. Are we bleaching the color of life in pursuit of maintaining a self? What are we so afraid of that we hide from becoming? Life is transformation. Relating requires and changes our uniqueness. Other people providing friction and challenge—that’s a service, freely given to all at birth.

Perhaps the trap isn’t narcissism. It’s any reification of identity via any narrative frame, especially spiritual ones, designed to parade as if they’re narrative-free. And the cost is ordinary love.

Transcend and exclude often means we fall back into less maturity

I’m still trying to get my mind and language around this, so I’m going to highlight the contrast to see the phenomena more clearly. Does your coach / (AI) therapist / culture / practice help you:

• Express more gratitude? Become more forgiving? Be more accepting of others’ flaws? “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court”?
  Or say you should be treated a very particular way (reifying a victim identity?)

• Build infrastructure that’s super helpful but unsexy? Do things that are good for others without recognition? Feed those who are hungry? Do mundane things for the local whole like pick up trash that’s not yours?
  Or build a marketing funnel that will help you promote yourself and perpetuate the ‘me’ ‘me’ ‘me’ cycle? 

• Love your friends and family better? Accept being misunderstood? Show up to their events and support their successes? Take care of them when they’re sick? Be more generous? Patient, humble, respectful, loyal, temperate? Maintain commitments regardless of feelings?
  Or emphasize your in-the-moment desire above all else, calling impulsivity and self-centeredness ‘surrender’?

• Develop boundaries as expressions of love and connection? Face challenges with grace and acceptance? Take responsibility for your pain, flaws, mistakes, shadows, and limitations?
  Or use "boundaries" to control others and force them to change according to your preferences?

• Admit ignorance, learn from criticism, hold your beliefs lightly, speak simply about profound experiences, work steadily without needing dramatic breakthroughs, notice your defensive patterns without performatively announcing them, contribute to social understanding, love others as they are?
  Or position yourself as having rare insights to help others transcend their limitations through your techniques and advice?

This list can go on; I wish I could speak to the connection and community side more but I’m stuck in my own bias. 

I’m not saying it’s easy, we of course need guides, mentors, feedback–it’s so complicated! Nor am I saying its special—all of this has been said for thousands of years! I’m trying to highlight a healthy version of one pole and unhealthy versions of another on purpose to get more clarity on where we are deeply unbalanced today. This is especially true of ‘spiritual’ hotbeds like San Francisco, Boulder, Ubud, Amsterdam. Austin is somewhat counterbalanced by its Texas-ness—cowboy culture still emphasizes family, duty and sacrifice to a greater good beyond ‘you’. Plus our immigrants are a little more integrated.

What’s up with me?

Anyway, I ask myself: Why do I care?

Sure, practices purported to transcend ego instead teach self-absorption. But it’s in the name— "personal growth" and “self-help.” What’s got me?

Because I’m guilty of all of this. 

Sometimes despite my best efforts, I’ve taught people to ignore their minds in order to stay with the sensations of their bodies (rather than integrating them); to ‘surrender’ to their feelings-in-the-moment and ignore larger consequences or agreements and the greater wholes that hold them. I’ve corrected a lot of these mistakes, made amends, even evolved the practice and training. Yet I still can’t quite escape the selfishness of ‘wellness’ culture. Prime example: a couple years ago we hosted a “Give Fest” at the Relateful Studio in Austin with a reverse silent auction, where people bid on what they wanted to give to a local nonprofit. Even my wife and I didn’t follow through on what we ‘won.’

Let us redefine wellness and self-development. Let us change the metrics to gratitude, forgiveness, acceptance of our and others' flaws, showing up for family, friendship, and our greater communities. Let us celebrate unglamorous, unwitnessed interdependence.

Three alternatives: what is it all for?

Burning Man is actually a great example of a positive alternative. The economy is about gifting—and after your first year, it’s well known that to get the most out of the experience, you need to give. People camp in communities, build massive art projects and cars together, and give them freely without credit, burning them at the end. It’s all about creating for the whole, being present with each other in non-transactional relating. All of this disrupts the self-reification loops in such a way that people are consistently shaken from long held encumbrances, and come out of the desert transformed. I say this as an admirer but not a fanatic—I went to Black Rock City in 2012 and 2014, and then didn’t go again.

Relatefulness

Relatefulness, especially in Level Up ⬆’s Leadership Program and the The Relateful Coaching Training, does not fall into these problem nearly as badly as almost every other community I’ve seen. We claim our directionality of truth + love. This means the personal can’t be number one—individual expression and growth is always in service of something greater. Of course we make mistakes. (For example, the Level Up structure highlighted individualism. We’ll be returning to a cohort-only model this Fall—more on that in a future email). But we’ve done a really good job focusing on being with what is, especially relationally and communally. 

We don’t abandon compassion and honesty in service of making sure people feel seen, heard, cultivating a ‘safe space,’ or maintaining instagram-defined-trauma-therapy-norms. This is hard, because I not only want people to feel seen, heard, safe, and heal, I think it’s crucial for a healthy community and for the true pursuit of truth and love. It just needs to be in service of love/truth, rather than an end unto itself. It needs to come authentically from the moment, not as a script or status signal or performance. We run into generative friction embracing the seeming paradox of this polarity all the time, and it is incredibly demanding of our facilitators to walk this tight rope. It demands that we are always changing, individually as leaders, as a community, and even the practice itself. Even our coaching teaches revealing identity commitments, inherently making the self an object in a larger self that can choose “yes” or “no” to, versus reinforcing a self and an existing worldview.

And even as we teach people how to meta-narrate as a way to witness and disembed themselves from unconscious habits that have been running them, we recognize that the compulsion to name and categorize experiences—spiritual or otherwise—often becomes a form of conceptual possession, serving self preservation rather than self-transformation.

(continued in comment)

(this will be sent out to my #TTT email in a couple of days, but UpTrust gets the early exclusive ;) )

Boycotting Explanation. I've been experimenting lately with refusing to explain in relationship.

I was raised by a lawyer and legal assistant and in the context of my upbringing being able to explain myself and my experience/emotions/etc (and implicitly justify myself) was my ticket to my experiences/emotions/etc being received as valid, worthy of care and attention, and so on. 

I have a hunch that this taught me to collude to manipulate/be manipulated by the habit/expectation of explanation - the implicit currency of justification seems possibly insidious and so far, since I've experimented with abstaining from it, otherwise unnecessary. 

#quicktakes

Community living. I'm in the process of building a neighborhood community in Asheville. It will be the first time I've lived with so many people - likely 20-30 - and had some choice over the members. Something I'm contemplating is: what sort of personality traits and communication skills should I sort for? I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts. What traits make someone good to live with in community?

Here are some my group has come up with thus far:

• Respectful / considerate
  - of others’ space
• Thoughtful and flexible
  - Take in other views, consider others’ ideas, negotiate
• Self-aware 
  - Admit when you’re wrong
• Chill 
  / Resilient
  - Take things in stride, sense of humor, patient
• Brave
  - Lean into honesty and difficult conversations
• Contributory
  - Show up with time, money, and attention

Hell is Praying and Heaven is Bullshitting. Every now and then, one finds oneself in a cosmic struggle between two truths that have a hard time being seen at once.  I've been in one of those for a few years, and thought I would try to describe what I see from my current position.

A story to help illustrate it: I was talking with a good friend of mine a few years ago, and he described a feeling that he was stuck in a pit, trying to get out, and asking others for help, and kept getting back this message to the effect of "you're doing this to yourself.  we can't help you until you decide to stop doing it to yourself." There was a sense that he was unworthy of even being considered for help without somehow changing first.

And I said: yeah.  I see you in the pit.  And on behalf of the universe, *we are doing what we can* to help you out of the pit, without you needing to fix yourself first. You are not unworthy.  And also, our capacity is very limited right now—including that some people themselves are still confused about all this.  And so to the extent that you CAN help yourself out of your pits, even a little, that helps bridge the gap and helps us help you.  But if we knew how, we would meet you fully, exactly where you are, without demanding anything.

This view of mine was hard-won, having spent years struggling with a similar issue only to suddenly have this insight where I GOT that the kosmos contained a force that fully wanted to meet me where I was at, and I could tell that it did because *I was a participant in that force*—I could feel its will flow through me, in my desire to meet others where they were at. (And sometimes parts of me are others to other parts of me.). 

And yet, over the years, both before and after this insight, I have tasted the other side of it.  I've gotten glimmers of the truth in C.S. Lewis's “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” I've felt strain and struggle suddenly shift into eternal boundless perfection—perfection that, when I look in the rearview mirror, was there the whole time, through the struggle. I've lost count of how many times I've arrived in such a place.  And there was truth to “nobody else could do it for me”, truth that it involved letting go of my grievances without trying to sort them all out first, and truth that that loving presence was always there holding me and supporting me and rooting for me.

There's truth to this, but when we go back and connect it to my friends’ story: what the fuck?  Something has gotten confused.  You can *obviously* be helped, in many ways, some of which have never been conceived of by anybody ever. Even if you only think that conveying the message of the need for someone to choose their way out can help, and nothing material can...  if the message is not getting through clearly, there are literally infinite possible ways to rephrase it or to convey it through not just word but example or gesture. I have definitely been helped, and I have no reason to think that the amount that I've been helped is somehow the perfect maximum theoretically possible (even if it was as much as was possible at the time).

A stance that says "there is nothing I can do to help you with your suffering", no matter how noble and righteous and  it presents itself, is its own hell.  It’s a stance of victimhood.  And it’s bullshit.  It’s failing to own your own limitations: *I* have run out of ideas, or patience to keep talking with you.  *I* cannot maintain my own groundedness while meeting you in your pit.  *I* do not have a rope long enough to reach you, but I would if I could.  And I can’t promise I’ll be back with a longer rope, but I sure hope someone can.

And I feel like many times I have been offered the choice to step out of the hell of overt grievance and into this other more subtle hell, that leaves me feeling forever alienated in relation to people I see as choosing to recreate their grievance hells.  Hell, sometimes I’ve even tried to take the option, but it didn’t stick for me.

Hell’s Prayer—“help me, show me I am worthy without me having to change”—kept coming back and demanding an answer.  “It always does, and is never satisfied,” Heaven’s Bullshit will warn you. And there’s wisdom there. And yet.  There’s also a skill issue.  I can tell that there is a more satisfying answer to Hell’s Prayer than that, and I am not giving up on finding it.  One that still doesn't require letting Hell hold you hostage.  There is a better Heaven, without this bullshit.  

As you can see: I have found my way to a stance that can at least hold that there is wisdom in both of these views, even if I can’t integrate them.  The tension exists internally to me.  As you can also see: I tend to find myself playing out the pole of Hell’s Prayer, in thinking about the topic or in relating to others.

This sucks!  It sucks to find myself bound to taking a stand for “no, I will not let go of this, I will simply complain until the day I die or the day someone says ‘yes, your complaint is valid’ and manages to say it so clearly and fully and honestly and tangibly... that I can put that complaint to rest.”  But the only other option I see from here is to adopt Heaven’s Bullshit, and…  well, for me that isn’t even really an option at this point.

It would be nice to integrate this tension internally, to sort it all out in myself and be able to meet the Bright People of Heaven and rather than complain and demand they change in order to drag me out of my pit, to calmly and patiently offer “it seems like you’re confused here, and you’re suffering unnecessarily because of it”.  But I fear that if I did, they would say “see, you sorted this out yourself, as I always told you you had to” and would only get the message to persist in their confusion.

And yet.  Their pits may be comfier than mine, but I will not give up in my search for suitable ladders.  I will rest though, on the path.

#DeepTake #DeepTakes

Deep take/ Hot take- Hating and complaining is healthy for authenticity and intimacy. In the new age era, there is so much emphasis on positivity and light. I sense a superficial texture at times, where it's challenging for me to feel the depths of the person before me. I noticed a pattern, that when I opened the doorway to begin complaining and hating things playfully yet honestly, gushing renewed life force showered the conversation.

followed by much laughter and beauty.

yes, some people need to learn how to use words in ways other than complaining and hating....

and some, need that permission slip to be a wild animal in their expression so their soul doesn't suffocate in an in an invisible box of superficial superior spirituality #deeptakes, #hottakes