Boundary Discussion Group
I wanna give you all a little peek into what's happening on the Masterclasses I’m running each month.
We are on month four, and members are getting comfier and sweeter and closer with one another. The zoom chat is popping off, I can't always keep up as I steward the calls.
As our community gathers steam, I find it doesn't matter that I can't keep up. Per usual, my weirdass stories about my hardly-precedented way of living have gathered a rugged and soft crew of what I recently called "black belts in relationship." They are perfectly capable of holding and teaching one another exquisitely, if I can manage to shut up for a minute.
In The Boundary Discussion group, someone said "I've been rehearsing a conversation in my head for two weeks."
I grinned, excited "Will you perform it for us?!"
Smiles all around, we've all been in this position, rehearsing a conversation again and again in our heads. What a treat to hear it torturing someone else! What a relief to know I'm not the only one!
She gave it to us and I took careful notes.
I began by reflecting on the humanity and relational warmth of what she offered exactly as it is—"if you brought this to a relationship with a human who cares about you, you'd have a beautiful conversation."
"If you're up for it, we are going to go through this line by line only for your own refinement, not because these are wrong words to say to someone. We are going to investigate what you believe and what you're really asking for here."
We went through it line by line and identified the nature of the conversation, elements of practical personal responsibility, and existential grief that was not relational business at all. I reflected the ways in which she was already supporting herself and could trust herself. She understood what she was reporting and the purpose of making the report, and soothed her "am I asking too much?" with the fact that she was not requesting anything at all. She understood the nourishment required for her to shift her attention.
Everyone got so much out of going in on just this one conversation she'd been rehearsing for weeks. It was maybe ten lines long.
It often happens this way, though everyone is wary to "take up too much space." What's alive for one of us is or has been alive for all of us. That alone makes it comforting and generative to witness.
As we come together to seek out the nature of communication, the intent, the purpose, we develop an internal skill with identifying these things that comes online gradually and applies to our own thoughts automatically. This skill is far superior to the application of any "method" or form of communication.
When we gather on the Ground of Wellbeing, knowing that nothing is or can be wrong, knowing that I'm simply selecting and encountering experiences and some are more preferable to others, there is no getting it right. There is only the latent law of integrity, ready to inform every step, ready to topple any block tower that cannot stand, while never taking a single action.
I often emphasize the ease-aspect of this work on the calls I hold, that effort is a red flag something might not be true for you, or not true for you yet. I emphasize that you are the only authority, that you do not need to write this down or try to remember it, that whatever of it is true for you is awakened in your cells by your own recognition and it will not go back to sleep.
Love recognizes love. Given enough attention, love easily and effortlessly takes over the whole operation, and the hardest part is letting it happen, letting it be so easy. The hardest part is abandoning all the urgent things you learned were so important which have only ever made you miserable enough to strive.
We get together so that we can laugh about how we struggle to let it be so easy, to let me be so empowered, to let me act as if I am completely safe and sovereign in every given moment, to walk as though there is no such thing as a misstep, to wait as though it's all already arrived, to love as though what the other is offering me can only be their love, to grieve in lieu of going to war. We marvel at how it all feels different within, even as nothing has changed in our circumstance.
Devotion can run your whole life, but only if you surrender to the abundance of now. It's soooo hard to let it be this easy. Come home to your community and we'll lament it together.
