Intimate Inquiries #2 — Embracing Mystery, a Year of Play, and Foundations of Transformation
I’m experimenting with a new short-form format called Intimate Inquiries.
For every issue of Intimate Inquiries, I’ll share three questions that I’m sitting with and exploring right now.
The primary desire of this experiment is to explore:
how to use short-form writing to increase frequency of writing in a way that feels sustainable and enlivening.
share more vulnerably what’s alive in my life right now.
inspire more inquiry and curiosity in your own life.
I welcome comments and feedback about anything I share.
1. How can I be with uncertainty and mystery without needing to manage the experience?
In a couple weeks, we’ll need to move out of our beloved home in Boulder, as our landlord will be moving back into the house.
For the past month, my wife Candace and I have taken the move as an opportunity to explore a big dream: to find and buy a house that we both love. I’d never wanted to buy a home before, but something about raising a family opened up that desire. The experience has been quite a spiritual journey on how to navigate uncertainty and mystery in my life.
The uncertainty of not yet having our next home lined up.
The uncertainty of whether we’d be able to find a home we love within the next month or so, so that we can all moved in by the time our baby arrives.
The uncertainty of whether to buy a home or take the more easeful route of renting another home.
I feel the desire of the provider in me to make sure that we have a wonderful home to raise our coming baby — to create certainty rather than to just be with the uncertainty. There was a point two weeks ago where I had a headache two days in a row. I was packing my schedule talking to real estate agents, lenders, and my financial advisor and checking Zillow in the middle of the night for listings. And I knew the headache stemmed from the stress and toll of treading the waters of uncertainty and trying to manage it.
And then during a tea ceremony a week ago, I experienced a powerful moment. I realized that I’d already perused most of the relevant home purchase listings on Zillow. If a home were to show up that we loved, it was not likely to be one that was currently listed publicly. There was nothing more that I could do to create more certainty for myself.
The moment created the opportunity and the challenge for me to let go of managing or trying to control the process, which only created fixation and stress. And instead, it invited me to trust and open up to the possibility of the universe delivering the perfect home our way. I felt my body relax into trust. And as I write this, we’ve just signed an offer yesterday afternoon on our dream home!
I’m celebrating how far I’ve come in navigating the uncertainty needed to get to this point, with ease and grace. I feel pride and self-love for having direct and loving conversations with Candace, working through any desires and fears around buying a home. I feel delighted in receiving an easy referral for a real estate agent whom we love working with. And I feel supported in getting pre-approved for a mortgage, having it fall through, and then receiving a backup plan with relative ease.
I’m aware that with a baby coming, this journey is part of my spiritual training, to up-level my capacity to be with uncertainty and ready me for the next phase of my journey.
And so I’m really sitting with the questions:
How can I expand my capacity with uncertainty with ease and grace? How can I be intimate with the sensations of uncertainty in my body without fixating on or needing to manage them?
2. What would permissioning myself to have a Year of Play open up?
The other day, as I was discussing strategies with Katara around how to sell our upcoming Mastering Desire course, I cried as I touched on a tender place.
Creating the course had come from a place of expansiveness and desire. And yet, in strategizing on selling the course, I could feel how I was partly relating to the sales process from a place of responsibility and obligation.
With Candace being 26 weeks pregnant, I’d authentically told her a week ago how much I wanted her to take as much time as she wanted to stay home with the baby and to go back to work from a place of desire. In my head, I was also holding that someone needed to take on financial responsibility for the family for her to have that freedom. And that person would need to be me.
In my call with Katara, I realized something: for as long as I can remember, I’ve never given myself full permission to just play. Even in the year and a half of nomadic travel, I certainly had an amazing adventure, but I never gave myself full permission to 100% just enjoy the travel. Some part of my subconscious was soldiering tirelessly to figure out my future offerings and my business. I cried a deep sob on the call as I realized that, as I made contact with a deep yearning to rest and to let go of the responsibility I’d been carrying.
The experience left me with the question: What would emerge if I gave myself permission for a Year of Play? What would open up if I let go of my fixation and need to generate income and create financial security for a year? What more beautiful and soul-aligned creation would come out on the other side?
Over a men’s tea ceremony this weekend, I could feel a young part wanting to discard all responsibility and play recklessly. And simultaneously, I knew that the healing around permissioning myself to play wasn’t going to come from recklessness. It would come from the adult part of me holding the young part as he’s playing, letting him know that it’s okay to live life from a place of play, while also acknowledging the responsibilities I have as a father and husband.
A beautiful insight hit me in that same tea ceremony: Play is the contact point with mystery. If I approach work and life purpose from the orientation of play — rather than from a place of trying to figure out how to make money in the future — it’s where I’m living life from enjoyment and wonder. It’s where I’m fully in the experience of the present moment, where I’m letting myself trust that things will work out, and allowing the universe to show up in a way that I cannot yet see or predict.
When I tune into those two ways of living, living from play feels more expansive. It feels more rooted and grounded. It feels more connected with a deeper desire and a sense of purpose.
And I’m stoked for what will open up from it.
3. What happens if I embrace the engineer in me who wants to create an effective map for rapid personal transformation?
Yesterday morning, as I sat in tea ceremony — if you can’t tell, tea has become a big part of my daily meditation practice — I realized that a bigger dream lay under the desire to design and run courses and in-person experiences for personal transformation. I want to be designing the foundational frameworks and maps for awakening consciousness and emotional healing.
The realization simultaneously felt so obvious, and I could also understand why it felt so elusive. It’s obvious because I’m an engineer who excels at the design of systems and abstractions. And so it makes total sense that after devoting way more than my ten thousand hours in the past seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal transformation, that I would have identified core tenets and abstractions that underly transformation across different modalities. Not all modalities are equally effective, and I have lived experiences and truths that point to why.
I could also feel compassion for why this realization felt so elusive. The part of me that’s been so focused on creating short-term and medium-term financial success would contract my awareness and make the loftier, more playful dream — with its associated mystery and uncertainty — seem risky and irresponsible. And yet, it’s clearly the direction to go if I want to unlock more creative energy and power. That additional energy, ironically, is also what might create the impact I’m wanting.
I can connect the dots and see how the journey of dreaming big to buy a home while letting the process feel easeful and graceful has increased my capacity for uncertainty and how it’s connected me with a new way of relating with my life’s work. And I’m grateful for all the puzzle pieces fit together.
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Mastering Desire
August 13th - September 10th, 2024
https://masteringdesire.co
In this 4-week transformative journey, we’ll guide you to discover and connect with your soul’s deepest desires — the ones that feel most scary and vulnerable to own, and yet, would significantly impact your life.
We’ll learn tested frameworks and somatic practices for tapping into the intelligence of those desires and navigating the fear that comes up when we let ourselves pursue what’s truly meaningful to us. And with support from a loving community, we’ll take bold and radical steps toward making those desires your new reality.