Connecting to the unstructured wildness within you
Connecting to the unstructured wildness within you
Summer Camp starts in less than a week
Hello + happy Tuesday!
🌀 Group Call #1: (Tuesday, 7/9/24 @ 6pm PST // 9pm EST): Register here. Tuesday group call is CANCELED as I am still hanging with my family and we’re going to the BEACH tonight.
🌀 Group Call #2:** (Wednesday, 7/10/24 @ 9am PST // 12pm EST): Register here.
**This call features structured breakout groups of 3-4 people.
Today’s inspiration:
“To take care of your life is to burn the flame of your life force in everything you do.”
- Dainin Katagiri
Thank you to everyone who has signed up for Self Made’s inaugural SUMMER CAMP, a five week (we start 7/15) hybrid summer course that combines asynchronous lessons and community, 1:1 coaching, and a choose your own adventure experiment.
This gently structured program will support you in slowing down, connecting inward, and being more intentional with your energy, attention, and focus so you can head into fall feeling grounded and fortified.
$222~!
We start July 15th—just shy of one week!
Click the button for additional details and don’t hesitate to reply to this email if you have any questions.
Greetings from my usual midsummer chaos. This year I’m spending two weeks with my family in Orange County, which is the most consecutive time I’ve spent here since college. I have a pretty quiet, routine-rich life most of the time, so it’s always interesting to drop into the lives of my family and observe myself doing my best to relax into the rhythm of their routines. And then there’s the bizarre phenomenon of hanging out with people who both know me better and more deeply than anyone else on the planet, and in some ways also feel like total strangers.
A strange thing about my life is that I haven’t yet experienced a lot of the milestones that people typically use as markers for different periods in life—I’m not married, don’t own my own home, am childfree, etc. Though I certainly have many different eras in adulthood related to jobs, relationships, and locations, it has felt at times like I was living the same way I have since graduating from college. And while I love the life I’ve created, admittedly there’s an inner confrontation that occurs when I come home and can’t help but reflect on how different my life is than how I thought it would be.
So far I’m mostly loving this visit because it’s good to catch up and just be together, and to not feel the pressure of a two or three day visit where there’s considerable pressure to make every interaction meaningful. My mom keeps a garden and it’s been fun to go pluck fresh green beans and tomatoes and lettuce and bell peppers and one solitary Chinese eggplant and then to come up with a fun dinner; my sister is a horse trainer so I get to go hang out at a barn and walk and groom extraordinary beasts; my dad is an almost 79 year-old retired Italian man who can’t bear for anyone to be at his table and not be eating, so I get to relax and be fed, and overall it’s nice to have a few less responsibilities for a minute. It’s also warm and sunny and I’m grateful for any break I get from the summer fog in San Francisco.
There are also moments I’m close to hitting the eject button entirely. Yesterday was the 4th of July, and I spent a very long day together-ing, and by 8pm there I was, near catatonic, crawling into bed without even attempting to watch the fireworks, extraordinary comedy special pumping through the iPhone screen, cuddled up with the little dog.
Ah.
I’ve said it many times this year in these essays to you, but it’s been a weird one. A lot of change, a lot of loss, a lot of becoming. I’ve heard it said that there are some years that ask questions and some years that answer, and this one feels like the latter. In some ways, in fact, I feel like this year told me clearly to stop fucking around and get to work, and I don’t know if that’s because I turned 40 and it’s glaringly obvious that I don’t have forever or what, but all signs are pointing to me taking more decisive action towards things that I want.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this is also the year that I haven’t missed one day of seated meditation. I’m just like you—I’ve known it was something I should do, and I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades starting and stopping a practice. But after last year’s break up, and feeling my spark return in January, something has just stuck.
Self Made Summer Camp begins on July 15th, and one of the Choose Your Own Adventure options is to choose a daily mindfulness practice to commit to for five weeks. Up until this year, this was the type of practice that most quickly flew out the window when there was even the slightest edge of stress in my life. When the outer world got noisy, the inner world would follow suit, and the last thing I would want to do was sit quietly with my inner experience.
And yet! I continued to knock on the door, because the time I did spend in quiet with myself gave me just enough evidence that what I was seeking might be on the other side.
How many of you have a relationship with silence?
The way I see it:
You don’t need to sit on a cushion facing the wall for hours like in the Zen tradition, although that’s wonderful if you can do that, or if you happen to have a structure that has taught you how to do that. You can also have a marvelous relationship with silence by just going for a walk with yourself, or with your dog, and leaving your phone behind. A practice of silence can look like sitting with a cup of coffee without reading anything, without having to look up something.
It’s easy to spend all your time taking in information about the world. When you have a practice of silence, you practice letting the world come and find you. As you begin to develop a relationship with silence—as you create conditions in which the world can offer itself up to you—you begin to interact with the world as it is, in all its messiness and disappointment, all its surprise, all its wonder and awe. It is in silence that your projections of what you think life is supposed to be have the space to fall away. Because when you’re practicing being silent with yourself, you’re not predicting the future, or asserting power, or striving to figure out the right answer for everything. It’s a place where you get to actually be here, free from projection, or agenda. In silence, you’re actually listening.
In the linked poem, David Whyte says that everything is waiting for you. And this everything is not only that which is external to you—in the birdsong, and the color blue, and the shades of gray in the sky, and the greens that you’ve coevolved with for hundreds of millions of years. It’s also the inner horizon, the inner landscape, that is also speaking to you and inviting you.
Everyone reading this knows the experience of falling in love in the outer world—with a person; with a landscape; with a city; with a work of art; with an animal. But our greater spiritual traditions have understood that there’s an equal kind of falling that needs to happen for you to fall in love with yourself. And it is literally like dropping, dropping down into the body and undoing your logical faculties so you can be caught by other powers in the world. And you, me, all of us get to live out this astonishing conversation between the inner and outer horizons, all the beautiful landscapes that are pilgrim landscapes inviting us to the place where the world comes and announces its name to us.
But none of this can occur without establishing a space of silence in your own being.
This all sounds so lofty and aspirational. But it all starts with practice. A Summer Camp mindfulness practice is an invitation for you to go on holiday, on pilgrimage, inside you own body, your own sense of self. What inner landscape of understanding might you discover?
When you pick up the guitar for the first time, every bone in your wrist and hands and shoulder aches, and it takes everything for you to get a single unbuzzing note from a string with your finger against the fret. Then, slowly, as you practice more and more, you get clear notes, and the notes begin to work together in conversation. And then you start to express your own unique way of being through the way you play. The song may have been played by others hundreds of thousands of times but no one has actually played it the way you are playing it. You start to drop into the spaces between the notes and then suddenly, when you reach a certain place of mastery, you’re not playing a guitar anymore, you’re somewhere in the conversational frontier between yourself and your own listening ear, and other people’s listening ears, too. It’s transcendant, and it’s transcendant because there’s so much space, so much openness between the notes.
Sitting in silence is a way you can learn to be played by what yearns to be expressed through you, in a way that can only be expressed through you.
The way that you practice will be different than anyone else. There’s no competition, no pressure to arrive somewhere or achieve something because in this space of silence, there is no comparison. There’s only competition if you retreat from practice back into your strategic, rational mind that has already defined everything and determined where you stand next to others. One of the radical delights of silence is that it allows you to contact a certain unstructured wildness within you, which does not follow rules. And in that unstructured wildness you are completely and utterly in the present, back to the place you were made. You can listen with your whole body for what is finding you and what you’ve found in this moment.
A practice of silence is also practice of listening. David Whyte describes a practice of silence as a powerful counteraction, so as to “…not be dominated by one’s entrancement with unleavened power in the world.”
What say you? Will you join us this summer? A good group is forming.
Let’s knock on some doors together.
If you will be choosing mindfulness as your adventure, here are a few simple suggestions:
Choose a daily practice to commit to for five weeks. This could be traditional meditation; daily journaling; daily walks in nature; any sort of quiet, contemplative time
This is a great option if you’ve always wanted to establish consistency with a practice, but find that it tends to fall off after a few days/weeks
There will be a dedicated Slack channel where you can hold yourself accountable, give and receive support, and share resources/ideas/suggestions/pitfalls/progress
SELF MADE is a rebellious community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and boldly step into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, Integral coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA.
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