My Survival Dance
a follow-up to "What Do You Want To Be Known For?"
I wrote earlier about this question, what do I want to be known for? One thing that became clear while mulling over that question is that I don't have a deep desire to be known for my current survival dance — a term I got from Bill Plotkin, which roughly points at the ways that we cover our survival needs while continuing spiritual practice and undergoing personal transformation.
For me, the survival dance involves MY GLORIOUS RANGE OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES!! PRODUCTS AND SERVICES LIKE:
Sorry for yelling. I get excited. I just love products and services so much.
What was I saying?
Oh right, yeah. My survival dance feels outdated and ill-fitting, and I'm not totally sure how to change it — though I'm pretty sure it's gotta change.
I'm not quite sure where to start exploring this. I suppose two things come up that are worth examining:
This survival dance is about survival.
I have to follow life force on this.
To that first point, I have got to stop giving away so much time and energy for free in this sector of my life. I love to help people, but let's be real — I've been living in developing countries the past several years, in part because those are the only places I can reliably afford to live. If I'm doing my survival dance in a way that doesn't really give me good survival, then I'm... not doing it great.
To the second point: there is still some aspect of my life and soul and interests involved here, because whenever I try to do something that's against what my life force wants to do, it crashes and burns. This has always been true for me in my life, but as I've gotten deeper and deeper on the path, the fuse seems to have shortened a lot. My life force and my reality reeeeaaaally don't put up with me trying to do things that are against the grain of my Being anymore. They're very willing to fuck me up a bit when I try.
So whatever I do next has got to feel like my life force wants it, and has got to fit into the world's needs in a way that lets me survive more adeptly than I have been. My current bar is something like "could I live comfortably in Berlin if I wanted to?" Which feels like a modest bar, honestly. I should probably aim higher, but we’ll start there.
Out of what I'm already doing, my Deep Aliveness work and my Waytending work feel the most aligned with life force. Deep Aliveness is basically my way of teaching the stance that allows people to open up to expansive transformation. Waytending is my way of helping people transform from that open stance, allowing the change to sink into whatever layers are open, reprogramming the unconscious through ritual, image, action, repetition, and symbol.
Those feel clean, and I enjoy doing them. That said, I wouldn't say life force is so much driving that work as it is supporting it. Which is fine, I don't want to get too caught up on only doing THE MOST DIVINELY CRYSTALLINE RESONANT WORK THAT EXISTS, that's kinda how I got into this mess in the first place.
But I am interested in finding work where life force is the driving force, and seeing if there are ways for that to help my survival.
In this case, I'm not sure. I think there's a path to it, but the current version is unlikely to contribute much to my survival.
The project that feels driven by life force is a 2-week pop-up mystery school I'm running in Barcelona later this year. It's kind of a test run, to see what's possible with that format. And the possibilities of that format feel incredibly alive to me.
The working title of the event is MYSTERIUM. One of the core impulses behind it is to defamiliarize spiritual practice so we can experience it afresh. I don't want one more retreat where sitting silently in a room until the timer ends is the norm. And I don't want one more relational container where sitting in a circle and half-whispering things like "I notice that I'm aware that I'm feeling a narrative that you're noticing that you're aware of being angry at me" is the norm.
I'd like to make a space that can support exploration in the same areas those retreats do, but in ways that approach sideways, upside down, cattywampus. I want to drop askew into the sacred. I wanna get a lil animistic and surreal with it. I want to gather together people who can go deep, and who can take each other deeper than they could go on their own. I want to give them the time and the space and the practice stances to go places they've never been before, and bring something back.
This autumn is just a test run, an attempt to see what's possible. But if I could purely follow life force, I'd want to do more of them. I want to mine this direction and find the gold there. I can smell the gold there.
I want to create events, groups, environments where people can live differently for a time, can experience reality differently, can train themselves in ways of being and ways of relating that help to shake off their old habits and notice the deeper currents that want to be embodied. This definitely involves some amount of teaching the methods and techniques and stances that I'm teaching already — but doing so in a relationship-first way, an environment-first way, a lived-experience-first way. Not doing it via calls and recordings and check-ins and scheduled meetings, but via conversation, co-living, co-regulation, and serendipity.
My experiences with containers like this in the past have shown me that magic emerges over and over again from getting people together like this. Places that no individual participant could have gone on their own suddenly get unlocked in combination with the others, in combination with the group field. There's a mystery there, some kind of grace that brings in exactly the right people, and exactly the right wrong people to make the alchemy work. To unlock what needed to be unlocked. To learn things from a person's physical and energetic presence that you could have only glimpsed from their head and shoulders on a zoom call.
Looking at the current set-up, I'd be surprised if I make enough off of MYSTERIUM to do more than cover a month or so of my own living expenses afterwards, while I figure out what's next. But I think a future is bubbling up where events like this could be a part of my survival dance. Where things like deep transformation and relational co-transmutation become desirable and worth investing in, not just with money but with the time and effort it takes to make something like this magical.
That's about all I'm feeling at the moment. I think for now, I probably need to keep honing the parts of my survival dance that are feeling supported and supportive. And I can keep one eye on where life force seems to want to drive me, and keep taking the next step that makes sense towards making that a reality.
But for now, if you're interested in my work, now and in the future, the best starting point is Deep Aliveness. The most personalized way to move into Deep Aliveness and to use it for transformation is with the three Waytending options I keep open. That's mostly where you'll be finding me, dancing survivily.
I love this. It feels Divinely aligned and expansive, like an offering of living flame. I resonate with the field you want to create and want to support you/participate in exploring these emerging edges of collective growth and awakening.
"It isn’t that the bull’s-eye, the destination, heaven, home, doesn’t exist. It is only that it doesn’t exist in linear time. It is like a crystal hanging above our entire timeline, refracting partial images of itself onto our world that we recognize as home. That is why the mystics tell us it is always there, closer than close. Nonetheless, our journeys away from home have their purpose. A will stronger than our own sends us on these journeys. If we do not someday leave home, then home will leave us."
Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home