Lifeletter 96: Hitting The Wall

 

“With friends you grow wings.
Alone,
you are a single feather in disgrace.
With them you master the wind,
but alone,
you’re blown in all directions.”
— Rumi

 

In my work, in my life, in my community, and everywhere I go, I hear more and more people speaking about their longing for connection and community. About how tired they are of struggling with the experience of isolation, overwhelm, and lack of support. People started speaking about this to me eight years ago. Not softly and gently, but loudly and with deep feeling. And now this desire for real connection and support is escalating.

 

So what is going on here? Why is this longing so rampant in our culture and what is holding us back? Most of the people who speak with me about this have friends. What they want is something else. Sometimes they don’t even know how to describe it. I think it’s because we are all glimpsing a new possibility, a new way of living. And this new possibility is just emerging in our collective consciousness, as our old structures and old ways of being hit the wall.

 

Hitting the wall is a difficult experience. We feel, very vividly these days, how unsustainable our old way of life is. And yet we still haven’t found a way to move through this wall. We haven’t let go yet, of our old operating system, even though we are paying a very high price for holding onto it. We have not yet been able to create the communities we want. We are still sitting around talking about it, most of us, not really doing what it takes. We are still living inside an old paradigm, an operating system that is thousands of years old.

 

The old operating system is based on separation and the survival brain. In order to help us survive, this part of us has certain agendas. If I am not conscious of what my survival brain thinks it needs, then these agendas will become mine: the desire to be right, to look good, to control, to win approval, to not be vulnerable.

 

Most of the time, we are operating with our survival brain running the show. This leaves very little room for the more expanded parts of our being to participate.

 

It is our survival brain and its world view that has dominated our collective consciousness for thousands of years:

I am separate and alone, and unsupported by life itself. I have to struggle and harden myself in order to survive.

 

This is the belief system, the perception of life that encourages us to ‘keep soldiering on’ by ourselves, no matter how difficult it is. The funny thing is, our survival brain is wrong. That’s why we have hit the wall. Isolation and doing it by ourselves and being a hero and trying to be strong and independent don’t actually help us survive at all. These strategies exhaust us. Some people say they are killing us. We just don’t have access to the resources we need when we are on our own. Together, we tap into a much more creative intelligence, a deeper love, a greater courage. A coach of mine, Mark Silver, told me that his New Year’s resolution for 2014 was ‘never brainstorm alone again.’ So why do we hold on so hard to these old, outdated ways of being?

 

The structures of our mind and nervous systems resist change. It’s as simple as that. Any structure resists change, by its very nature. It wants to survive too! So if we want to discover a new way of living and being with each other, we will need a lot of support. We’ll need to join with people who have a similar intention, longing and commitment. That’s what will make the difference. We will not be able to do this on our own.

 

It’s only with each other that we will discover how we can move forward, bit by bit, into the truth of another reality:

We are all interconnected in each moment, this is how it is.

 

Life Changing Conversations

A real living conversation is the medicine we need in this situation. If we know how to lay the ground, we can create a container for an entirely new kind of conversation, one that opens our hearts, awakens our real voice, and calls forth our deeper intelligence.

 

Most of us don’t yet realize that this kind of conversation is even possible. I’m here to tell you that it is, and that it can change our lives. We can help each other evolve, transform and awaken! This is very good news. And it asks something of us. This is not the kind of conversation we are familiar with. It takes us into new territory, into a space where we make deep contact with each other and with ourselves. In the depths of this connection is where we move through the wall, where our life starts to open and flow.

 

In the beginning, what we really need is just the willingness to open our hearts and mind to this possibility. Issue an invitation to the universe. Let it know that you are ready for something new. And see what happens.

 

with love

Shayla

 

A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

– Denise Levertov