The Present Moment Is A Lounge Chair
Cede control of your life, so that you might receive it instead.
Hi everyone. Happy Tuesday.
You’re invited to tonight’s bi-monthly Self Made community call. These calls are a great way to ground the skills and teachings I share in the monthly Life Design Skills Sessions, and to get to know me and the community. Tonight, a discussion on La-Z-Boying our way through the moving too fast current state of affairs.
What to expect: A brief grounding exercise; a journal prompt; a discussion. An hour spent with fellow comrades on the path. An opportunity to remember how much bright goodness still exists.
✨Tonight (2/18) from 6-7pm PST. All are welcome.
✨ Join me March 12th for Self Made’s next monthly Life Design Skill Session (free! ):
March’s topic: Balancing the 3 Centers of Intelligence
→ As a certified Integral Coach, I view human beings through the Three Centers of Intelligence. This model provides a framework for developing self-trust that is both elegant in its simplicity, and highly effective in illuminating an individual’s unique path forward—truly—in any given moment.
→Connecting to the Three Centers helps reduce the dominance of the mind, which is one of the most, if not the most, fundamental starting places if there’s any chance for your self-development efforts to be lasting and sustainable.
→ When the mind is in balance, the filter through which you take in information expands. You can process information with more skill and nuance, because you’re running it through not just the wisdom of the brain, but also, the wisdom of the heart and the body.
→ This tool will help you learn to listen for what would *actually* be supportive, instead of holding yourself to a standard of perfection you will never meet…and then dropping into the failure/self-flagellation loop that ultimately is the antithesis of what we seek with self care/daily practice.
→If you’re already familiar with this tool, this is a great opportunity to learn from others, offer your experience, and go a little deeper. One of the best parts of these workshops is the resource shares and suggestions that open up between us.
→ There will be a recording - so please sign up even if you can’t make it live.
→ All are welcome.
Today’s inspiration:
Optimism
Rust morning. Again,
the incompetent heart speaks
the language of stones.
I tell you, in the voice
of the old poet: move it
into the sun. It will warm.
Like the fields and their seeds,
the clay and beams.
Happiness is a riot of endless
limbs. You say, Hope
is the light at the end–
I say, It is what keeps us
drenched and dredging
through the darkness
for one day more.E.C. Belli
Last week, I had an appointment with my energy healer/practitioner.
Towards the end of the session—after she peeled me down from the rafters and landed me back in my body—she checked in.
“What’s coming up for you?”
Sometimes, I know how to answer this question when she asks—there’s an image swirling behind my eyes, or a word, or some message that has come through. Last week I sort of mumbled something, I don’t remember what, and as I was speaking she interrupted me.
“Dani,” she said, “you don’t need to figure out. You’re exactly where you’re meant to be.”
With this validation and acknowledgement, my nervous system downshifted a few more notches: ahhh, first gear.
And then came the zinger:
“Remember,” she said, “the present moment is a lounge chair.”
And with that, I landed on an image that’s been dancing in my brain ever since: there I am, careening through space, relaxed yet alert, cross-legged in a lounge-chair, cool as hell as life swirls around, even as it continues to be life-y, even as life continues to do its life-thing.
For so long, I tried to micromanage my life. I believed that this approach would keep me safe.
What actually happened was that that by pouring my energy into managing my life, I started to miss my actual life. My vision narrowed, my body was perpetually clenched, and anything outside of The Plan™ activated my whole nervous system. I missed out on signs, symbols, signals, serendipity, spontaneity. I gathered endless evidence to reinforce everything I already knew. My beliefs calcified and what was available was the opposite of possibility.
I receded further and further into my brain. I replayed past mistakes, obsessing over specific do-over scenarios that if granted (if only!), might finally redeem me. I obsessed over all the things I was missing—people, jobs, ideas, careers, clothes, account balances, accolades—all the things that, if only I had them, THEN I would be happier. I grinded over every possible outcome of every possible scenario, behaving as if future tripping would protect me from the discomfort of the present moment.
One morning in the shower I was scrubbing my face a little too vigorously and a lightbulb went off in my brain, illuminating everything:
⚡️What was the point of all this “self-work” if I my EXPERIENCE OF LIFE still felt more or less the same as before?
Which is to say:
What was the point of all *this* if I still felt pretty shitty most of the time?
Then came the weird part: The part where I had to figure out how to change my brain. The part where I had to figure out how to cede control of my life, so that I might receive it instead.
I have been in this conversation with myself for some years now. I knew for a long time that the way I was operating was not working, and that not only was it not working, but it was actively contributing to the despondent sense of “Is this it? Is *this* as good as my life will be/feel?” I was swimming in. I worked with coaches and therapists and I luckily had some decent support systems in place. And ultimately, I had to own that it was up to me to fundamentally change the way I thought if I wanted to change how I fundamentally experienced my day-to-day life. I had to believe—I had to practice believing—that I was worthy of having a life that felt good more often than it felt bad.
I knew I had to learn to relate to life in an entirely new way. But how would I actually *do* that?
At the time, I wouldn’t have described that shower illumination (it’s always in the car or the shower when the best downloads come, isn’t it?) the way I’m about to, from the vantage point of retrospect. In that lightbulb moment, what I recognized was that my efforts, however well intended, were keeping me on the same hamster wheel I was desperately trying to escape. What I know now and what I caught a glimpse of then was that I was actually being lead astray by seeking answers externally.
And so began the (slow, painstaking, often boring, definitely devoid of all excitement or fanfare) excursion into my inner landscape.
And just to get this truth out of the way up front: turning inward and creating a new relationship with your inner world is an uncomfortable, tedious undertaking that takes years. I share this not to scare you off, but to normalize that your timeline is going to take longer than you want/or wish/or would like, and the sooner you can embrace that, the sooner you can begin to enjoy the journey instead of rushing to the next goalpost (there aren’t any goalposts but that’s another, um, post).
Unbeknownst to me at the time, my response to the lightbulb moment was to accept an invitation into an experiment. I began learning to cease looking externally for answers to my Big Life Questions, so I could discover meaning from within instead. I began to build my inner authority, which started with creating a relationship with that often buried, or numbed out, voice within me that had finally gotten unignorable enough that I had no choice but to seek a new way.
Slowly, slowly over time, the results of this experiment has lead to a fundamental shift in how I experience and interact with and receive my life.
Today I extend an invitation to all of you: your journey into the present moment as a lounge chair is a journey out of your head and into your heart and your body.
Here are some suggestions for first next steps. Choose one or two and experiment. Remember, the whole point of this is for you to build your own inner authority, not to listen to some lady telling you what to do. If something I suggest doesn’t feel right or work for you, leave it behind. I’ll be here throwing out suggestions, resources, and recommendations, but ultimately this journey is one of discovering what is right for you, which nobody can know but you.
One: Contemplation
Activities that fall into the contemplation bucket:
Meditation
Journaling
Time in nature with no tech (walks, forest bathing, anytime spent in nature)
Listening to beautiful music without multitasking
Simply sitting quietly: with a morning cup of tea or coffee, cooking without, say, listening to music/podcast (even if you start with 10 minutes), driving in quiet, showering or taking a bath in quiet with no distractions.
Reading fiction
And?
The point of finding daily time to be in contemplation is for you to have space to explore your inner landscape. It is here you can catch yourself in autopilot tendencies, your knee-jerk responses, the looping thoughts, the constant to-do list humming in the background. It’s also a time you can begin to listen. The greatest aim of this is for you to spend time every day listening for the voice of your “higher self” (if this phrase skeeves you out you can trade it out for teacher within, intuition, gut feeling, inner compass, etc etc. What you call it is less important than the felt-sense experience).
Over time, this voice becomes stronger, and your relationship to this part of you that has your best, most aligned interests at heart becomes louder than the one that would constantly remind you of your “shortcomings” (in quotes because I don’t believe in “shortcomings” anymore).
And, most deliciously—I have chills just thinking about it—once you establish a relationship to this “higher self,” you can turn to it when faced with a question, or you have to make a decision, or when someone in your life is being an asshole and you want to respond in a new way that is not perpetuating old patterns, or when something just feels off and you need some clarity, and more and more of this so on into infinity (for real, infinity, the lessons and aha’s and illuminations don’t stop).
Two: Crafting a consistent practice
I shared this on Instagram a while back, but: the aim of consistent practice is not necessarily to feel better, though that might be an outcome. The aim is for you to have somewhere to go, something to do, in difficult moments. This is harm reduction. Every time you turn to your practice over an old behavior that you know isn’t helpful, you are showing yourself that you matter. You are creating new neural pathways. You are living, quite literally, into a new life.
Because, ayyyy. You probably already know this, but a MAJOR part of change is learning to be uncomfortable. To let the discomfort burn through, to sit and squirm until it passes. Practice can help it pass.
Three: Incorporate self-compassion
For this, I will share a resource: Our Lady of Self-Compassion herself, Dr. Kristin Neff.
She describes the three elements of self-compassion as follows:
Self-kindness vs. self-judgement
Common humanity vs. isolation (I consider this element the sweetest, most accessible entry point), and
Mindfulness vs. over-identification
Without even reading the explanations of these, you can imagine how helpful it would be to develop these capacities.
Four: Consider the Three Centers of Intelligence
In Integral Coaching, one of the fundamental models for human experience is the 3 Centers of Intelligence: head, heart, body. By and large, we are all extraordinarily head dominant. As you bring these intelligences into balance, you can refer to different aspects of yourself for guidance and wisdom. The brain becomes a servant more than a master (incidentally! diving into the Three Centers is part of what we’ll be playing around with in my upcoming Life Design Skill Session: Balancing the 3 Centers of Intelligence).
OK back to the lounge chair:
Here’s the bridge I’m inviting you to cross with me: developing my inner authority is how we return ourselves to the lounge chair of the present moment. It’s how I’m able to partner with life, to be with tumult and disarray, to be in relationship with the unexpected, without assigning unhelpful meaning to it. It is how I receive the way my life is being revealed to me, rather than fighting against its unfolding.
I can’t spend my whole life in the lounge chair. That would be a ridiculous aspiration. I exist in a capitalistic society in collapse that requires a certain amount of effort for me to sustain myself and stay engaged in participating in change. There are demands on me, people and projects I am accountable to. Also, I’m a human, which means that every day I navigate things/thoughts/fears/stresses that seek to lure me away from the lounge chair.
What I can do is notice when I’m spiraling or squirreling, and then do my best to return.
This is not a bypassing. In my lounge chair, I am awake, receptive. I am not blind to the awfulness in the world. Indeed, spending time in the lounge chair is what makes it possible for me to stay engaged.
I just reread this, and I’m laughing! I’m laughing at the absurdity of being human, I’m laughing at our holy insignificance. I’m imagining all of us, a whole fleet, feet up, the chillest army in the galaxy.
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At SELF MADE, the game is to uncover your essential self so you can design a rebellious, bold, on-purpose life that is an expression of who you really are and what you really want. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA.
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