🔥Welcome to Volume #00094!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
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✊What Happens When We Do the Work and Ignore the Resistance?✊
Why can't you do it?
Why is it impossible?
How true is that?
Those questions keep coming up in conversations with coaching clients, friends, and mentees. Those questions keep coming up for me too.
How often do we start with the premise that something isn't possible and immediately shut down any potential progress?
How often do we question our capabilities and abilities by unfairly comparing ourselves to someone else?
I did it yesterday, working on a longer piece where I started feeling the resistance.
You can't do this well started percolating in my ear. You aren't good at this. Go and do something else.
The voices crowded out my writing. The voices stopped my thoughts cold. The resistance pushed me to take a break and leave my piece unfinished.
I immediately asked the questions from above.
I reminded myself that everything is like learning how to ride a bike. When we start, we feel wobbly and uncertain. If we get off the bike, we never learn to ride; we give in to the resistance. If we keep trying until we find that sweet spot where we smoothly ride the bike, we defeat the resistance.
We learned how to do it.
Anything we do is like learning to ride a bike; we need to keep wobbling until its smooth. The moment the wobbling ends feels like magic.
It got me thinking and marinating on these additional questions:
Why do we limit what we think we can do?
Why do we listen to the resistance and fulfill its prophecy?
Why do we think we aren't as good or capable as other people when the only difference is they push through and do the work?
How often do we limit ourselves with a lack of confidence and a lack of belief that stops us from doing the repetitions needed to improve?
We can amaze ourselves and the people around us when we show up day in and day out and keep going.
The Resistance
The resistance is when we think small. The resistance is when we build a wall around our capabilities and put ourselves in an effort jail. The resistance is when we tell ourselves we can't do it and never stop questioning that belief.
We break the spell of the resistance by continuing to press on. We get there by doing the damn thing over and over again until it becomes smooth.
When we keep going, we amaze ourselves and others.
Venkatesh Rao on the Tellability of a Story
What stories are worth telling?
A story gets told if it is worth telling to the would-be teller, and is tellable. Just as an essay gets written if it is essayworthy to the would-be essayist, and essayable. It’s like whether a flight plan gets flown. The flight plan has to be tripworthy it for the pilot to do the actual flying, and the plane has to be flyable. Skill matters only after these two conditions are met, and the second one is the more basic one. Even a skilled pilot can’t make a bus fly. Not even if you put a gun to his head to make it worthwhile.
Tellability is not about whether the story is good or bad. It is about whether the storyteller can literally sit down and (almost unconsciously) work out how to tell it at all. In whatever medium — screen/stage, comicbook, live oral performance, or prose. Skill is usually medium-specific, but tellability is a property of the story idea
🎧Things to Listen, See, and Watch 🎧
Dr. Garbor Mate breaks down trauma and the myth of normal on the Tim Ferriss podcast
My favorite quotes Dr. Gabor Mate
“Then was the experience and we all had to utter some words before the ceremony about what our intentions were. And I uttered two words, “Love and presence.” Then I experienced them both. I experienced love for myself in a deep way, which was new for me, actually. I can’t put it into words because it’s not a concept. It’s not a intellectual exercise. It was actually an experience, a full-body experience is what it was. And yeah, I experienced presence and you’ve had these experiences. They’re ineffable. You would take a poet, somebody with a much more poetic imagination than I have, to actually somewhat depict it in words.”
“Now, my experience with ceremonies is that everybody else has deep ceremonies and I don’t because I have this very thick skull and just nothing gets through. That’s my little self-myth”
“So the belief that I’m impenetrable and everybody else can heal, but I can lead other people to healing but I can’t get there myself. That itself is an imprint of trauma because an infant or a small child being traumatized, they think it’s going to go on forever. And then that experience of being in the moment and not seeing an end of it, then becomes a belief.”
“By the end of it, I come out a different person. Now, when I say I come out a different person, believe me. I travel home. And all of a sudden, that different person becomes a memory. I have to struggle again with a lot of the same old stuff, but I’m struggling with them from a much more informed perspective. And I know it’s no longer my absolute reality, which is a huge difference. It’s not that different. It’s not that hard to understand, really. Because we know that the brain can develop new circuits and new ways of understanding in response to new experiences.”
“I do meditation practice. Actually, when I learned from one of my colleagues, Dr. Daniel Siegel, who’s got this Wheel of Awareness that I’m practicing. I have a yoga practice that I do pretty much every day now. Every day I go swimming, I swim 2k every day or do some other kind of workout. And I pay a lot more attention to my own needs than I used to.”
“And then one day it just woke up and said, “Okay, I’m here. You’ve got to do it.” And that’s when the new title came to me. And that’s when I started working on it again. And so here it is. So it’s been a calling. It’s really been calling me. I can’t put in any other way. Nothing else has been calling me. This has been calling me.”
Norah Bateson is one of my favorite thinkers, and talks with semantic reactions.
The map is not the territory and a map to fix climate doesn’t work
How do we spend our days? What are you doing that makes you want to use a car so much? editor - as someone that bikes everywhere this idea resonates strongly
Freedom is a tricky word.
How do you hold a conversation that you need to have and not get stuck in a polatiry?
People better understand how interconnected things are
Top down models don’t work and making them are failures and scary
Leaders coming from an ecological improvisation… steeping up and steeping back when the time is yours to do it
How do we reach younger people, invite them to the conversation and let them participate? Her dad (Gregory Bateson) wanted to understand how anyone say the world differently from the existing matrix and then learn form them
Casual linear world destroys the imagination]
How do we see the world from different scripts and away from the dominate scripts?
We need warm data, information that is alive. How do we deal with alive data and work with it? Systems are all alive and now are dead, so you need to work with the data as alive not dead
The menu is not the meal
Chasing after the desired action can make you miss the learning
Systems thinking and complexity is looking for models to control for it, which is not what her dad meant and he would be rolling in his grave
His dad and Bucky Fuller were Stewart Brand’s mentors
People curious about life are curious about the children. Good people are nice to the children when other people aren’t watching. A tangible spirit that these people have and they don’t care about the current mainstream.
She learned form Essilen that we want to keep looking and staying curious. It was 90% nonsense and 10% brilliance and maybe you need those too. The weirdness was high and you need that weirdness.
Luckily to be around travelers like Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts when young.
How do we live without the controlling systems. How do we live more like a meadow where organisms live together with out trying to control. We need to meadow more.
Everyone is complex, we need to know ourselves better to know others better
If you are looking for a great intro to meditation or another form of meditation to add to your tool box, their classes are great. A reader recommended it and it is a great 10 week class. - hat tip to Klaus for introducing me to the offering.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
"It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager." - Susan Sontag
"To our brains, status is a resource as real as oxygen or water. When we lose it, we break." (Will Storr, The Status Game)
You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give. - (The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran)
"The researchers wrote, ‘most people strongly believe they are just, virtuous, and moral, yet regard the average person as distinctly less so’. Moral superiority, they concluded, is a ‘uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion’." (Will Storr, The Status Game
"Resiliency, I stressed, is an antecedent to equanimity." (Jerry Colonna, Reboot)
"As modern society reduced the role of community, it simultaneously elevated the role of authority." (Sebastian Junger, Tribe)
"Catching greenlights is about skill: intent, context, consideration, endurance, anticipation, resilience, speed, and discipline. We can catch more greenlights by simply identifying where the red lights are in our life, and then change course to hit fewer of them." -M McConaughey
"Here it is worth repeating Carl Rogers’s dictum: It is a curious paradox that when I accept myself as I am, then I can change. We can add as a corollary: It is a curious paradox that when I accept things just as they are, then I can find ways to innovate and make things better." - - Your Body Knows the Answer by David Rome
"Sights do not possess that deep symbolic power which creates a community. Sights are places one passes by. They do not permit any lingering or staying." (Byung-Chul Han and Daniel Steuer, The Disappearance of Rituals)
"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)
"Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one." (Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way)
🙏Thanks for Reading🙏
What resistance do you need to say no to and push through?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Another belt ceremony… this one for Axe Capoeira where three of us got belts
✊What Happens When We Do the Work and Ignore the Resistance?✊