Field notes from The Funk
Becoming a shepherd through storms large and small
This week’s inspiration:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” ~Viktor Frankl
“You can do it like it’s a great weight on you. Or you can do it like it’s part of the dance.” ~Ram Dass
1.
In February I found myself in a funk, or, The Funk, as I referred to it in break-of-dawn morning pages. I’d wake up with a sense of dread in my gut. The sweet mundanity of my days, normally suffused with a decent amount of rosy satisfaction, took on a darker, more angsty hue. And, most frustratingly, shitty old stories I thought were decidedly in the rearview came out of retirement for another haunt.
Like clockwork, all the familiar signals showed up: I felt ungrounded, and out of control. I worried that this is where I live now. A wave of urgency took over, everything in me demanding that I pull the fire alarm and redirect all my focus to figuring The Funk out. My body scrambled to discern whether I should fight, flee, or freeze.
I’m 42 years old which means this was not my first (or even four-hundredth) rodeo. Because I (luckily?) have had so much experience with and am at this point a bit of an expert in navigating funky frames of mind, I was able to catch myself before becoming completely absorbed. I had just enough wherewithal to both be in the activated, habitual response, and to be able to observe the drama unfolding.
Going against those aforementioned signals felt like going against reason, sense, safety, and nature itself. But experience has taught me that right when I want to speed up is the precise moment when what would actually help is to slow down; to reconnect to feet on floor, breath in lungs; to probably drink some goddamn water; and, after I was more settled, to assess from as objective a vantage as I could muster.
Sometimes (often), it was only the thinnest of threads that kept me tethered to the more helpful perspective of observer. And that thread was just enough of a reminder that in almost every moment, I had a choice: I could approach my experience with curiosity and care versus self-abandonment. In practice, this looked like: attending to the needs of my creature body; like taking the intentional seat of observer and simply watching the shitty thoughts passing through like a bummer weather system instead of becoming absorbed by them; and most definitely, like offering myself a stream of soothing reminders every time my mind would start wilding out that I could indeed trust that life would eventually deliver me back to a more buoyant place like it had all 399+ times before.
One (hard-won) life lesson is that my only job when the bummer weather systems are passing through is to be a shepherd. For whatever reason (I have my hypotheses which I’ll share below), seasons of funk roll through. While I am in one, my job is not to force the funk, to figure out the funk, to finesse some fabulous fable of What I Learned from the Funk. I am instead meant to be a shepherd for the part of me that is caught in a storm. I guide and steer and attend. I observe with kind, present attention. I offer care, shelter, gentle encouragement, and whatever the metaphorical equivalent of an umbrella would be. I allow The Funk to run its course, and of course the course always lasts longer than my mind is comfortable, but I keep going, because that thread is just enough of a reminder that there is always, always, another side. And it is only after the storm passes and I am lying under calmer, friendlier skies that I can review my field notes and start to spin some sense from the experience.
The thing that fascinated me this go around on the funk carousel was how nothing had changed in my circumstances that I could point to and say, this is why I’m here. During my season in The Pit (which, less impressively, had nothing to do with the hit HBO series), the reasons for my suffering were clear: I was under great financial stress. An unhealthy relationship had just come to an end. And, not inconsequentially, I turned 40, which turned up the existential dial to eleven.
But in February, there was no clear reason for my foray into funkdom. I could speculate (and you can bet I have spent so much time speculating) about the perhaps more subterranean causes for it: a slight uptick in stress due to some big client deadlines; the subsequent dearth of enough do nothing, stare-at-the-wall, creative time; the background frequency of the chaotic breakdown of the global world order. These reasons make sense! And I’m sure contributed to the malaise. This time, however, something in me pushed back: while I knew The Funk was real, because I was experiencing it, I’d been in similar places so many times before that this time, I could question its veracity.
What emerged was a question: What if I could just orient to The Funk as some bizarro function of my mind, versus something external that I needed to fix? What if I could just…snap myself out of it, instead of perseverating, ruminating, rubbing my face in The Funk? What if this was just a maladaptive thought pattern, and not actually something that needed spelunking and excavating?
It has taken me a long time to develop my awareness enough that I can discern when I am responding from my default, autopilot, conditioned programming, and when the response is actually in alignment with who I am underneath all the noise. This is a pretty way to say: I’m increasingly able to call myself out on my own bullshit. In this case, I put my situation under the light of my awareness and saw that I was the one keeping myself stewing in it. In other words: my suffering was optional.
Once I saw that, The Funk dissipated like the fog out of a machine in a grungy club.
2.
I am someone who learned from a young age that the way to tolerate my inner experience was to numb it.
Blessedly, (blessedly!) I have come a long way. And though I have devoted my life to waking up, I would be a liar if I did not admit that I still have to be vigilant against creeping backslides into dissociative, anesthetizing behaviors if I am not careful. Currently, these behaviors include: falling into scroll-holes (at times, for entire evenings or afternoons); eating past comfort (I can always trace this back to something I don’t want to feel); getting lost in the fantasy of early romance (I love men, but these days the vibe is far more “guilty until proven innocent” than “benefit of the doubt”). These behaviors are far less harmful than the substances I used to depend on to cope. And while I do not judge myself for these behaviors (sometimes a dissociation session is harm reduction), ultimately, they are out of integrity for who I say I am and who I desire to become. As someone who wants to be awake for life—even the hard parts—and not some fragmented shuffler along-er, crossing her fingers that she can fly under karma’s radar, I know that it is my responsibility to play the hand I was dealt.
For me, this means learning to be—and stay—present. And the way I have learned (the way I am learning) to do this is to intentionally strengthen my relationship to the part of me that observes.
Interestingly and unexpectedly, what this has required is a full-sail disidentification with my intellect. Turns out, when it comes to becoming a person who wants to like–dare I say, love—herself; to be liberated from the past instead of perpetually reenacting it; and to decondition from funked-up programming and outdated scripts, I actually have to develop agency over my mind so that it becomes a helpful accomplice versus a critical, undermining, judgemental asshole.
A result of being socialized and enculturated in the West is that I pedestalized the intellect over other forms of intelligence. I know now that this is profoundly limiting. When the mind is the dominant filter for my experience, so much of what brings texture to life is left out: I stay cut off from a heart spacious enough to feel it all without folding in on itself. I let my brain talk me out of the wisdom of my animal body even though the body does not lie—something I could never say of my mind. I am disconnected from spirit, which is to say, from the greater web of life, from all beings, from a deeper knowing that guides me in discerning what is mine to do with my precious time on the planet and that has nothing to do with capitalism or productivity or earning a living.
The human brain is extraordinary, obviously. But left to its own devices, it can be a total tyrant.
Left unexamined, I know exactly how seasons of funk are going to go—all those “familiar signals” I named in Part 1. And even though my mind will try so hard to come up with a fresh thought that saves the day, in actuality it just zips me right back into the loop of old patterns, the playbooks of which I know like the back of my hand. But if I can watch my experience instead of being swallowed by it, then experience becomes something I can learn from rather than just suffer through. If I can relinquish my fight for control, possibility has space to pool in, and it is from this pool that I can consider fresh choices.
Sense making is important. Part of reviewing my field notes is to learn from the experience, not so that I never go there again—because I will of course go there again—but so that the next time I find myself lost in a haze, my navigation skills are more finely tuned.
Ram Dass talked about life as curriculum, a concept I have been experimenting with for the past two years. When I can view whatever I am dealing with as something happening for me, versus something happening to me, I am no longer a victim of my circumstances. I will still give myself the grace to not worry about mining the lessons until I’m on the other side, but I no longer insist that whatever is happening in my life should not be happening, because it is what is happening. I work with what is in front of me instead of rejecting it.
This applies to everything from the frustration of having to wait in an unexpected line, to maneuvering through challenging life seasons, to the bigger, more impactful life events, like illness, death, and dying.
This is not easy, in case that needs to be said. It is not easy to be trundling along, just moving through my days, only to find myself in murky territory. It is frustrating to make progress, to pile up evidence of progress, to begin reaping the benefits of progress, only to backslide, slip, regress. But if I apply “life as curriculum,” to The Funk, a slide back into the scroll-hole is not a failure of the project of waking up; it is part of the syllabus.
With the connection to the part of me that observes stronger than that which would criticize, I can remind myself that no system in nature—if it is to sustain itself—is in constant expansion. I can reframe backslides as requisite points of integration, places ripe for sense-making and learning, versus opportunities to shame or blame. The shepherd shows up; the judge is quiet.
Training my mind is not exactly fun. I have a long way to go to be able to welcome seasons of being tossed into pits and funks, loops and spirals. But what keeps me nosing my way forward through the difficulty is not only the relief of reaching the other side: it is that every time, I come out a little more free. More myself, more at peace with who and how I am. More open. More able to move and bend with life, instead of running from it or raging at it or gripping tighter on some illusion of control. Less and less at the mercy of old scripts, I become the opposite of numb: alert, clear, connected. Present in my own life.
3.
It is one thing to shepherd myself through a season of funk. It is quite another to shepherd myself through the collapse of an empire.
Living through collapse is not a story that I can just reframe, like I might the stories I harbor that would insist upon my unloveability, fucked-uppedness, brokenness. The reality of these times has real consequences, consequences that have pierced even the most seemingly solid of privilege bubbles, from which I, a self-employed-unpartnered-child free-woman supporting herself in a very expensive state and city, have benefited.
So let me be explicit: I don’t think developing a different relationship with my mind is all I have to do to girl-boss my way through the apocalypse.
Self Made is about taking responsibility for my experience and recognizing that no external force is coming to rescue me. As someone who spent most of her life operating under the delusion that someone/something—whether that be a man, a boss, a job, a mentor, a therapist, a witch—would eventually come and save her ass from every bad decision, from every learned helplessness, from all the nonstop inner chaos and drama, I still need daily reminders that while outside support is helpful and necessary, ultimately, so much of what it is to become a mature and increasingly whole, balanced, healthy person is an inside job.
That being said: there is a fine line between taking care of myself and falling into the trap of self-optimization, because the latter gives me only an illusory sense of control. As the news of the world spins faster and faster and every day some structure I was trained to believe formed the bedrock of society is carelessly dismantled, counting minutes in meditation and tracking workouts at the gym and doubling down on rigid routines can make me feel like I am staying one step ahead of things. And who would blame me? Like you, I am human, with a human nervous system, which is to say, a biological drive that prioritizes safety and security as paramount to my literal survival.
I cannot pretend that an undercurrent of fear is not permeating my days. What I do not know is precisely how it is affecting me. In dreams? In my subconscious? If I get to be 80 years old, what will I know about the impact of these times that I cannot currently see because I am too close to it?
My worries belie a legitimate vulnerability: yes, knowing that no one is coming to save me and that it is up to me to be responsible for my actions and behaviors does give me agency. What it does not offer, however, is omnipotence. I do not know, I cannot know, what the world will be on the other side of collapse.
Maybe I am only speaking for myself, but it is excruciating to not know.
Uncertainty is a universal human fear. Fear is an uncomfortable emotion. It is understandable that I would do what I can to either reestablish some sense of control, or, to turn away completely (cue all my go-to anesthetizers).
And so I ask myself—what are some other options? How do I apply whatever wisdom I have to this moment, not so I can life-hack my way through, or distract my way through, but so that I can adapt? How do I accept a curriculum of learning to work with fear, lest I be dragged along by it? What does it actually look like to surrender to reality, and to cease any insistence that it should be some other way?
I know that strengthening the part of me that observes is a path of adaptation, because it is not only how I interrogate the stories and scripts that I never had a say in writing, but it also lights the way for what is mine to do. It is not a superfluous undertaking to cultivate agency of body, mind, heart, and spirit, not only so that I may be guided in the right direction, but so that I can hear what the guidance is saying in the first place.
And though my commitments place me mostly in the realm of individual transformation, I also know that every transformed individual translates to a transformed collective. When I extrapolate the self-interested aspect of Self Made—individuals taking responsibility for their experiences and recognizing that no external force is coming to rescue them—and place that lens on the collective body, a path forward starts to reveal itself. Something fresh becomes available when we accept reality, when we release the promises of society and culture, when we turn to each other instead of some mythical figurehead. We become a body that adapts its relationship to uncertainty enough that we can continue to be effective and engaged, instead of only ever reacting to what is being served up by the media and the people in power who are wildly overplaying their hand.
What my February funk taught me is that my worldview doesn’t fly out the window when things get hard. Indeed, hard times are intrinsic to the curriculum. And next up on the syllabus is learning to stay with the discomfort of both not knowing what is on the other side of this moment in time, while at the same time trusting that adaptation is possible, even if certainty is not.
Along the way, I will lean into what makes me human: Fortifying the web of connection to the people in my life and orbit (I am currently working on getting to know my neighbors in a more genuine way). Whenever possible (would that it were more possible!), prioritizing leisure over productivity. Saying yes to invitations and showing up, body-mind-heart, for the people that I love. Getting on the floor and rolling around with the 13-year-old dog. Staying true to my daily meditation practice even though I spend most of the 30 minutes longing for the bell to ring. Remembering that the algorithm is not reality; adjusting my work life so that I am increasingly face-to-face and away from a screen. Reminding myself that anytime I feel helpless, or hopeless, the right next action is to connect.
Perhaps adaptation as nothing to do with certainty, or control, or chasing some perfected ability to remain calm while the world rearranges itself. Maybe it looks more like creating the conditions to stay in relationship—to my body, to other people, to reality as it is.
I do not know what comes next. But lately when I lose the thread, I remind myself that order and disorder are not in opposition. They too are in relationship; one always precedes the other. As institutions wobble and old certainties dissolve, the part of me that observes knows that the game is to stay equally awake for both what is collapsing, and what is being revealed.
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SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.
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Thank you.
A beautifully honest piece Dani. I see your funk and I want you to know I was recently in that place too. I love your writing and I just wanted to say I see you, and I thank you.
Another very well-written piece. I loved the reflection on "human brain is extraordinary, obviously. But left to its own devices, it can be a total tyrant." and navigating my own funk.