Category: Vertical Development

No more working out loud…to get validation and permission from others.

Time for creating silently…to fully trust the experience happening through me.

There’s a space of groundlessness in front of me. In fact, I can see myself standing within it.

Yet I don’t know how to get from here to there. I don’t know how to step into something seemingly right in front of me that I already seem to be within.

Perhaps it’s because I’m already within this space and it’s not a question of how do I step forwards into it but about how do I stop stepping away from it.

The Ground is Always Shifting – Pema Chodron – The Dewdrop

When things fall apart, when the ground is pulled out from under us, it is not a cause for panic, but rather a cause for celebration.

https://thedewdrop.org/2020/06/08/the-ground-is-always-shifting-pema-chodron/

In Buddhism we call the notion of a fixed identity “ego clinging.” It’s how we try to put solid ground under our feet in an ever-shifting world. Meditation practice starts to erode that fixed identity. As you sit, you begin to see yourself with more clarity, and you notice how attached you are to your opinions about yourself. Often the first blow to the fixed identity is precipitated by a crisis. When things start to fall apart in your life, as they did in mine when I came to Gampo Abbey, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.

If there is no such map, then what is wayfinding? Instead of what he calls a “complex-structure metaphor” (the mental map), Ingold proposes a “complex-process metaphor” which he calls wayfinding. On page 220, he writes: “With a complex-process metaphor, little or no pre-structured content is imputed to the mind. Instead, wayfinding is understood as a skilled performance in which travelers, whose powers of perception and action have been fine-tuned through previous experience, ‘feel their way’ towards their goal, continually adjusting their movements in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of their surroundings.”

In this model, “we know as we go, from place to place” (229). “People’s knowledge of the environment undergoes continuous formation in the very course of their moving about in it” (230). This is not knowledge stored and then applied—it’s knowledge emerging through practice, through movement, through ongoing engagement with dynamic environments. This extends the dwelling perspective: we don’t design then act, we act and knowledge emerges from that immersion.

Wayfinding is more like storytelling, artistic performance, or musical improvisation. Just as a musical score isn’t the music itself—the music only exists in the actual performance—a map isn’t the same as the journey. The doing is what matters. And just as you can’t understand music by analyzing the score alone, you can’t understand wayfinding by studying mental representations. There is no such map to study because the process itself is what generates knowing.

Every living being, accordingly, grows and reaches out into the environment along the sum of its paths. To find one’s way is to advance along a line of growth, in a world which is never quite the same from one moment to the next, and whose future configuration can never be fully known. Ways of life are not therefore determined in advance, as routes to be followed, but have continually to be worked out anew. And these ways, far from being inscribed upon the surface of an inanimate world, are the very threads from which the living world is woven.

Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment

But the other thing is that nature has been left out and nothing shows how fundamentally difficult it is than Mark Carney’s book that he wrote before he became a politician.

The first chapter he points out Jeff Bezos Amazon is valued by the economy in the tens of billions of dollars. Brazil’s Amazon, the rainforest, the greatest ecosystem on the planet, has no economic value until it is logged, mined, damned, or grows soybeans, cattle, or houses. 

That shows right there what the problem is. That we feel that we’re supreme and everything in the service of us like Bezos’s Amazon is worthwhile but nature, that is keeping the planet habitable for us, has zero economic value.

So then you say okay but let’s work within the system but the system is all designed and based on the fact that nature has no value…

What you’ve been told about pain is wrong

A pain scientist breaks down the surprising brain‑body science that explains why so many of us hurt more than we have to

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-truth-about-pain-that-your-doctor-might-not-tell-you/

Yeah, so simply put, pain is our body’s warning system. It’s our danger-detection system. And it’s adaptive and evolutionary, right? Like, pain helps us survive. It tells us, “Pay attention. You may need to change your behavior. Something dangerous and bad might be happening.”

The Myth of Finding Your True Self

Still trying to “find your true self”? You may be asking the wrong question. New research shows identity isn’t something hidden waiting to be discovered. It’s something you build.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unconscious-branding/202603/the-myth-of-finding-your-true-self

Identity is much less likely to be the result of a single breakthrough “aha!” moment and more of a continuous cycle of exploration, commitment, and reevaluation. Even the foundational work on identity formation by Erik Erikson suggested that the final product is never fully realized. Subsequent research shows that who you become is an open-ended, multidimensional process that is actively shaped through personal, social, and environmental contexts. And psychological flexibility has been linked to mental health, well-being, and school engagement.

The key question to ask is not whether these different selves are the same, but whether they are integrated. Psychological flexibility makes integration possible by anchoring these distinct context-dependent “selves” to an evolving set of values and goals. A fixed “take it or leave it” identity may seem authentic, but it can also narrow down the necessary exploration needed to create a well-developed identity.

That shift matters in the pursuit of identity. When we tell young people that there is a single “true self” and that it is their job to find it, uncertainty and confusion can feel like failure. When we realize that identity is something we can create and refine over time, exploration becomes healthy and necessary.

Don’t try to change what has already been done.

Just change going forwards.