Door Closed
I was alone in my apartment in North Vegas, 11pm. Suddenly there's a loud pounding on the door.
My heart is racing, my deadbolt is holding. I look through the peephole and it's a man wearing over-ear headphones with a catatonically drugged out look on his face.
I yell "you are at the wrong place, go away!"
He seems not to hear me, he stands there. He keeps pounding on my door. I yell some more.
When he pounds on the door I hit it back, my call with 911 is ringing and ringing for literal minutes. I think he can't hear me because of his music, and eventually he seems to realize he's at the wrong house.
He walks away as if we've had a polite interaction. I think he gave the "little wave."
Regardless, the fear is clattering in my body, and I call and awaken my former partner, a man in law enforcement who I dated while I was in the correctional field. He is the greatest listener I know, and my body came down.
I want to highlight something.
Here's what I didn't do—
here's what NOTHING could have compelled me to do:
open that fucking door.
I know there is a significant chunk of the population who would open that door. It would seem to be the only option, to truly meet what is coming so insistently. They'd do it without even thinking. They'd do it righteously, defending and protecting themselves by in fact abandoning their greatest defense (the door).
I know this because I had this instinct trained out of my system in order to be effective at my correctional job.
All throughout childhood, we have been faced with the idea that we must meet what is coming for us, handle it in some way. We have not been in the position of power in our own lives, nor had the experience that we can "get away." There's even weakness associated with "avoidance" and "escape" and I'm like... who said I have to meet and resolve the garbage someone else tries to bring me?
This is a pattern of control/oppositionality, where we have been trained to experience our "free will" primarily in a practice of saying "NOT THAT" to what comes in, attempting to control what is controlling us.
It eclipses all other possibilities and offerings.
We are trained to see two options: compliance or rebellion, and then attempt to really OWN whichever choice we pick.
But agency is agility.
Agency knows the world is offering me LITERALLY EVERYTHING.
When something comes into my field, especially if it comes in and hijacks my nervous system, it makes perfect sense in that moment to center on that event.
You'll notice I do not describe myself peacefully ignoring this person pounding at my door. Perhaps some decades in the temple could cure this reactivity, but these are all waves I can surf, so why sit so long?
Responding as I did, yelling, pounding on the door, these are expressions which vented the fear coursing through my body. These are outlets of tension. I wield them with GREAT care, precision, and intention.
Something standing in the way for would-be claimers of their own nervous system is the idea that we must meet what is coming for us in the ways we know how.
In truth, our brain is a trained algorithm, trained by our past experiences to recognize what we have seen before, to repeat the patterns by knocking the response pattern to the call pattern.
We literally need to learn the purpose of each layer of what is entrained in our system, and the alternative skills and practices of serving what arises, and serving ourselves intentionally OF what arises. We need practice enacting new patterns.
The truth is that we are responsible for the reality of our systems and the reality of our actions in every single moment, and these moments add up to the only thing we can truly HAVE: a sacred human experience.
Honoring the body, I express the somatic truth.
Honoring the story, I discipline my actions to integrity.