On Being Ready

One of my first teachings I share with new apprentices is that in general, the discipline you commit yourself to should make you READY.
I am often asked “Ready for what?”, or “How can you be Ready for everything?”

The nature of early childhood events that cause trauma, in my view, is the presence of triangulating factors: An overwhelm of the nervous system, a lack of an aware adult witness to assist in integration of the process, and a lack of preparedness. Childhood, for all of us, is a time where ideally an adult or adults are aware enough to cushion the impact of the world on us so that we can witness it without it wiping us out, learn, and calibrate ourselves to prepare for a similar event. Ideally, we are protected from the full impact of consequence by someone who loves us. This is a graduated time of learning, when it progresses naturally. However, it isn’t a possibility that anyone can save us from every fireball. We all carry scars of the times in life when someone didn’t show up when or how we needed them to show up. We have all been overwhelmed, unwitnessed, and unprepared at many times in our early life.

The gift of adulthood is that we are able to invest in healing and repatterning our overwhelmed nervous systems, witness our own patterns and habits as access points to compassion and, if possible, forgiveness, and to prepare ourselves for the inevitability of being exposed to the pressures of life’s creative tension.

Discipline is a vital preparation. I practice meditation, prayer, Kundalini and Hatha Yoga, trance-state journeying, sweats, ocean bathing (in the North Pacific ! ), toning, pranayama, singing mantras, plant medicines, jungle immersions, ecstatic dance, and mindfulness, with intention to prepare myself for the inevitable exposure of the creative tension of life. Though much of my practice is enjoyable, pleasureable, it often doesn’t start out that way. Most of the time, I impose purposeful stress into my sensory experience so that I can learn to configure it, to design my life to optimizing resilience. What I have learned is that it takes consistency, patience, determination, and willingness to proceed into the places that challenge my sense of being safe as a regular inoculation.

This is very different to being reckless, and I have had times of my life of recklessness. Being intention filled around challenging safety prepares and calibrates the instinctual body to adjust without moving into an overly adrenalized reaction of flight, fight or freeze.

I believe in Being Ready.