personal communication

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)

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 ;) )

The best compliiment from a 3 year old. I was searching my FB profile feed for something and came across a post (from 2023) about the best compliment I received from my 3-year-old grandson.

"Nat, you're really good at being silly!" 

I am the luckiest (but mostly the best). Today is the 9th anniversary of my first date with Jeff and, at 31 years old, I am struck by how incredibly blessed I am to have been with a partner for almost a decade and to truly feel that over 3,285 days of knowing with him I really have grown to love him more every day. 

As I sit reflecting on this happy milestone, I notice something thematic for me lately is touched again. I hold up together the blessings only the Universe (and the-Universe-as-Jeff, or the "Other" in this case) could offer me and the sense of accomplishment I have for the way I (and Jeff-as-the-other-half-of-Us, which I really relate to as a part of "I") chose to show up for this connection. There feels to me like a fractaling infinitude of truth on either of these hands, but I'm pretty metaphorically right-handed in that I watch myself have a strong aesthetic preference for my sense of accomplishment.

I know this incredible love I have with Jeff can't be taken for granted and that it is far from an accident. I know I can read my statement of this belief as testimony to the synchronicity of life, the mystery of life as a karmic being, etc. but I tend to relate to it more readily as saying something like the Universe may have brought Us together but the life we built together is a living monument to the power and wisdom and devotion we have chosen in connection with one another. "We are really doing something right here."

Sharing this, I hold myself with a sort of humility. Laying out the duality, the non-duality seems obvious and beautiful and my little quirk of preference seems a little strange. I'm curious why I so often take such a stand for our agency and impactfulness and feel missed when those with the complementary aesthetic preference move to emphasize how much our love has relied on blessings beyond ourselves. Neither preference really calls for justification; neither are more or less "Right" than the other - no matter how fiercely I've held mine. 

And then I rest in my clown, happy to embrace and even exaggerate the funny little quirk of my character and belly laugh with you about it. 

Sure, I met the love of my life at 22!!! I was a baby!!!!! I could maybe live long enough to get to know him for SEVEN decades!!! Maybe more!!!!! This sort of good fortune is wildly beyond anything anyone could ever earn, deserve, accomplish.

I am the luckiest. 

But I have also never met anyone who was so brave in seeking love, so fierce in her determination to grow to be a better partner, so devoted to the study of loving deeper, so thoughtful in weaving the way she was born together with the way she wants to be. I am so happy and in love and so incredibly shamelessly proud of myself. 

I am the luckiest, but I'm mostly the best. 

We have the option to see everything in your life as collaborative; we are scared to say this because we don't want to victim-blame but we're also scared of the possibilities and transcendence that opens up.  

OK I’ve tried talking about this before and it always feels impossible, but it also feels super important, so here goes, relatively uncensored (meaning super philosophical, my apologies and hope some of you enjoy!):

“We have the option to see everything in your life as collaborative”

1. The nature of the universe is co-constructed / nondual: I think “experience” and “reality” are fundamentally intertwined; you can’t talk about a world out-there without a subjectivity talking about it (experiencing) and you can’t have an experiencing without a world out there (reality). In other words, subject and object (consciousness and matter) are one interpenetrated thingy. When I say “reality” I really mean “reality-experience” and when I say “experience” I really mean  “experience-reality.” Sometimes I just say “Life.”
   
   I mean this in a very extreme way.
   
   Not collapsing to the outer (materialism): This is not “there’s a pre-existing world out there, and many different pre-existing subjective views on it” which is the common way of understanding pluralism. That framing still fundamentally separates the outer world from the inner, and presumes a kind of self-existence of the outer without consciousness, which I think is basically epistemologically untenable. We simply can’t know if that’s possible, ever, because every thought- or real- experiment we do will always be known, by us, inside of a conscious experience.
   
   Not collapsing to the inner (idealism): This is also not “there’s no world out there, just constructs,” which I see as incoherently self-defeating: where do the constructs exist? We’re just hiding the fact that we presume constructs are objectively existing prior to that statement, and then declaring nothing inherently exists. It also doesn’t jive with out lived experience that there seem to be “things” like the laws of physics that are outside of our ability to simply construct a new meaning around. Perhaps the laws of physics are mutable, but we’d still be left with a meta-physics claim, like the one I’m making:
   
   The inner and outer, the consciousness and matter, fundamentally coexist as one occurrence. This is what I’m referring to as “life” in the title of this post.
   
   

1. From this claim I think another follows that there’s a (possibly) inviolable metaphysics of correspondence between the interpretation and world-out-there, a “mirror” to the (obvious to almost all adults) correspondence between the world-out-there and interpretation: eg I can reinterpret the experience of stubbing my toe, but I can’t reinterpret the existence of the table leg I stubbed it on. The most obvious inverse correspondence is that I can use my reinterpretation to change the outer world: let’s say I consider stubbing my toe a lesson, and what I learn from that lesson is that I want to move the location of my table. Now I move my table.
   
   You can probably see where I’m going with this.
   
   If I don’t have access to the interpretation that toe-stubbing is a lesson-opportunity, maybe I’m less likely to move the table, or change my walking patterns, or whatever. (Yes there’s another failure mode in thinking the lessons are always only internal lessons, but that’s recapping the “collapsing to the inner” mentioned above, so already covered I think). Having the lesson-frame changes the way we encounter and react to adversity, even as small as toe-stubbing. Any given frame changes the way we encounter and react to all that we experience, because they’re interpenetratingly one thing.
   
   

2. “Everything in my life is collaborative” is one of the interpretation-choices we all have; and it is causative in the same way “stubbing my toe is a lesson” is causative. I think this is a pragmatic statement of fact; here’s the value-laden one:
   
   Seeing everything that happens as collaborative is very good way to live, and results in greater well-being.
   
   It puts us in flow with what’s happening rather than resistance; it has us take self-responsibility for “what now” and keeps us close to where our actual power is (meaning making, as Frank said yesterday); all of this leads to a better experience regardless of your values and regardless of your life circumstances.
   

“we are scared to say this because we don't want to victim-blame”

This feels very un-politically-correct to talk about because people immediately try to apply it to others. They misinterpret it to mean, “If someone has a shitty experience it’s their fault.” 

This is a mistake!

(1) I’m not using it to talk about others.
(2) The capacity to do something now doesn’t imply the capacity to have done something in the past.
(3) I’m definitely not saying it’s fair.

The statement is about everything in your life, not everyone’s life. The mistake at a philosophical level is trying to make it an “out there” proposition, instead of remembering the entanglement of inner-and-outer.

This clarification is super important because to the extent what I’m saying is true, it’s a huge, underutilized technology in well-being improvement available to you in your life, but it remains unavailable to you if you think that using it means you have to blame other people for their circumstances. Don’t do that! Not necessary! For personal use only! (Even when I apply these ideas in coaching sessions, and we teach them in The Relateful Coaching School, it’s always first from a place of asking questions, finding attunement.)

“but we're also scared of the possibilities and transcendence that opens up”

The other most common block to trying on this perspective is that we’re terrified of being this powerful: 

• What if we don’t use it responsibly? (Then you’d have the chance to see that as collaborative, taking the results as feedback)

• What if we can’t use it well? (There’s no standard—that’s an unnecessary imposition we make up in our heads; and I don’t know if there’s an end either, so we’re always growing in capacity, if we want to) 

• Does this mean it’s our fault if we don’t have a good experience? (no, remember that would be collapsing the outer to the inner)

And we’re terrified at facing the reality of how deeply interconnected we are. 

This means the “I” that I think I am really is indistinguishable from the entire world, which calls into the question the nature of that I. This is a scary thing to face, in my experience. Luckily, as far as I can tell the nature of reality-experience is holonic—transcendence always comes with including. So yes, I am much much bigger than whatever concept I make of myself, but that bigness doesn’t erase the concept or the me, it simply contextualizes it in something much grander. Which ironically, gives us a lot more room for self-expression, play, and surrendering into embracing the whole human experience with all of it’s complexity, suffering, and joy.

#DeepTakes 

Our Experience of Gender is Caught in a Drama Triangle. My contribution to the #DeepTakes event is an experience I find really alienating and lonely on a personal level and I see it playing out culturally in a way that seems to impact everyone I know (and obviously huge swaths of people I don't).To express what I am seeing in this context I first have to explain a little bit about what I mean when I invoke the concept of a Drama Triangle.

The Drama Triangle is a social model of human interaction proposed by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman. It suggests that in circumstances where conflict arises and individuals are reactive to rather than present with that conflict there is a tendency to assign three roles: victim, hero, and villain.The victim role is characterized by fear and helplessness, the hero role is characterized by righteousness and some attempt to act as a saviour for the victim, and the villain role is characterized by blame (of self or others).

What is most important to me about this model is not how it points out that this dynamic often emerges in the context of conflict, but how it reveals that the dynamic is unconscious, volatile, and misleading. When the dynamic arises, it is typically through some invisible collusion that the roles are assigned and they remain implicit rather than being consciously claimed by the individuals involved. As a result of the unconscious nature of the dynamic, the roles are unstable - individuals often end up switching between these three roles as implicitly and unconsciously as the same roles initially emerged. Regardless of how the roles are assigned at any given moment, they obscure something true about each individual involved - victims are actually agentic and accountable for their own experiences, heroes are not moral authorities nor are they responsible for victims' experiences, and villains are not sole causes of the conflicts arising between them and their hero/victim counterparts.

I've explained this concept in the context of a conflict arising between individuals but, when it comes to gender, I am seeing the same dynamic play out in broader cultural conflicts between and within gendered groups. Probably the clearest example I can provide is how conflict between capital W-Women and capital M-Men has given rise to a drama triangle. For longer than I've been around there has been a broad, complex cultural claim that society is structured in such a way that Women are inherently victims and Men are inherently Villains. The specter of a Hero arises from this dynamic in many forms; activist groups are perhaps the clearest examples but it is also interesting to see how women/men may belong to the group role of victim/villain yet act in the role of the hero on an individual level if they can be seen as acting out any sort of protection, vengeance, etc. in reaction to to the Story of Women's Victimhood.

In my own experience relating to men, the cultural phenomenon of this Drama Triangle has been profoundly unhelpful! The dynamic sets a cultural precedent that looms over any conflict that arises between me and a man in my life - as tension emerges in our connection our difference in gender pulls this cultural lens into place such that there is a shared apprehension that I will be assigned the victim role and he will be assigned the villain role. What a mess! As if staying present with tension and orienting toward love and truth isn't enough of a task already! From here there are plenty of ways we squirm together - maybe we both preemptively try to promise we are not the victim/the villain, maybe I'll try to put him in the victim role or he'll try to put me in the villain role, maybe one of us will scramble to be the hero. All unconscious, unhelpful strategies to navigate an unconscious, unhelpful cultural script. I am getting a headache just writing about it.

Trust me, I wish this dynamic only loomed over my connections with men in my life. On the contrary, the way this Drama Triangle twists up my relationships with other women may actually be even more damaging - it's a tough race to call. In my connections with women the cultural precedent of the Drama Triangle still creates a shared apprehension but in this context the apprehension is that we are both victims and that we agree that men are villainous. Now I could gesture at the various ways in which this has been awkward and disconnecting in my relationships with other women but frankly, there is one stand out context which I see as the likely root of my deep resentment motivating this deep take.

I have had difficult situations with bad outcomes (ranging from deep emotional wounds to physical/sexual assaults) arise in my connections with men in my life. From the very earliest of these challenging experiences, it has been very important to me to integrate these experiences in ways that protect and strengthen my capacity to have healthy, loving relationships with men. I faced profound difficulty finding women who were able to support me in integrating my experiences this way rather than imposing the Drama Triangle on my situation, villainizing the men involved, and seeking to either play out the Hero role by saving me or pressuring me to join them in the victim role as a fellow woman. I have severed friendships, fired therapists, and generally opted out of "women's spaces" to protect myself from this because to the extent that I have ever seen myself as the victim of difficult situations with men it has been intolerable! My experience of the victim role was catastrophic for my self esteem, ruinous for my romantic relationships, and completely spiritually backward. I really really hate it.

Obviously I can't say as much about how this dynamic impacts men's relationships with one another but I do see men face pressure from women to take on the hero role by confronting other men as villains in their community. I've also had multiple men open up to me about the way that they've internalized the cultural role of Men as Villains and alienated them from their own sexualities, ambitions, boundaries etc. through a narrative that they are inherently creepy, greedy, controlling, etc. Although I don't seem to attract men who respond by trying to claim the victim role for themselves in my personal life, I am certainly aware of the "Manosphere" where the subcultural norm is to invert the cultural script and see men as the victim of women who perpetuate the myth of their own victimhood as a power grab and manipulation at mens' expense.

Now more than ever before it seems especially clear that gender non-conforming individuals are also deeply impacted by the way the binary gendered experience is captured by the Drama Triangle. While this impact is complex and multi-faceted, I'll offer an over-simplification here which I see as gesturing to a very prominent thread of impact for these communities. Non-binary and Trans people often seem to me to be implicitly collapsed into the same group role as Women or Men so that the existing cultural script can fit them into the Drama Triangle without much modification.

My social circles and information channels tend toward treating gender non-conforming groups as analogous to Women and implicitly assumes that they too are inherently victims of Men and assenting to this categorization puts "Us" (whoever we may be) in the hero role. Given my own impact of internalizing the message that I am a victim of Men, I have a strong projection that gender nonconforming people are actually greatly disadvantaged by the imposition of this lens and in my own relationships with gender non-conforming people in my life, the apprehension that they are victims and I ought to be heroic about it makes me act kinda weird. I feel an inflated sense of responsibility for their feelings and end up walking on egg shells around them in a way that doesn't feel true to me at all. This is something I really wanna work on in these relationships but, just like in my relationships with men and women, I deeply resent the added weight of the Drama Triangle as it shows up for me here.

Similar to the Manosphere example, I don't have much first hand experience of the corresponding culture which collapses gender non-conforming people in with Men but it is on my radar that there are people who see Women as victims of Non-binary and Trans People. This dynamic tends to rigidly impose the existing gender binary against the autonomy of gender non-conforming people and conclude that AMAB gender non-conforming people are trying to cheat their way into Women's Sacred Victimhood and AAFB gender non-conforming people are abandoning their sisters to escape Women's Sacred Victimhood and that whole narrative is unspeakably yucky to me in so so many ways.

There exist at least a couple of "answers" to the Drama Triangle that offer possible healthy responses to this unhealthy dynamic. Choy's "Winner's Triangle" suggests softening the helplessness, righteousness, and blame of the victim, hero, and villain into vulnerability, care, and assertiveness, respectively. Emerald's "Empowerment Dynamic" suggests swapping the victim role for the creator, characterized by a reclaiming of personal power, swapping the hero for the coach, characterized by the facilitation of the creator's self-empowerment, and swapping the villain for the challenger, characterized by the capacity to call others to action.

Imagine me shouting to the sky and shaking my fists when I write how strongly I would prefer a cultural norm that experimented with these approaches (or invented new ones) in context where conflict arises and gendered experiences are implicated. I've been taking my own baby steps in my relationships with men, women, and gender non-conforming folks, but I come to you all hoping for help to foster awareness and openness to new norms in our community. I deeply believe if we could make our great escape from the Drama Triangle and reclaim our experience of life in a world with genders it would be miraculously transformative for our relationships with ourselves, our intimate partners, our friends and family, and the world at large. 

My therapist says... if you have a disorder (I’d call this an undesired response + occurring regularly), don’t apply any strategies, any self-regulating methods to meet the stimulus. Don’t try to lower the fear. Any safety strategies will likely keep it in place.

When you do any kind of method you tell your nervous system this is truly dangerous. You need to show your primitive brain that this isn’t dangerous: I don’t have to do anything.

…

This feels so right in me. What a relief actually!

It feels related to what Jordan said earlier, that naming safety creates feelings of unsafety, making us more aware of what could go wrong.

Similarly, naming trauma encourages people to feel into their traumas, leading to distress…creating the opposite of what is intended.

Showing up to a disorder with a strategy is like an invitation to experience more of it.

What do you guys think?