*If you didn’t have a chance to register and the terms of the coaching project speak to you, reach out and I’ll get you on the calendar*
This week’s inspiration:
“Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure… and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”
How many of you can relate: you’re going through a period of transition—say,
a career change, or a big move, becoming a parent; maybe you’re dealing with the aftermath of a breakup, midlife! or you got fired from your job in the middle of a recession, or you’ve just lost someone or some creature you love; perhaps you’re simply doing your best to exist amidst a greater backdrop of global and political insecurity, the noise and thrum from which increasingly colors every realm of your life.
The in-between space of transition is in and of itself complicated enough, but there’s your brain, ever eager to demand the most impossible thing: certainty.
You can’t help yourself: you go into project manager mode. Your vision narrows. Instead of being curious and open to the vast array of possibilities available at any given moment, you lose perspective.
In these moments, the last thing on your mind is how you might partner with the forces of change. You act quite the opposite; in order to be OK, you need to manage change and keep it under control every anxiety-ridden step of the way.
When chaos darkens your doorway and is sucking all the air out of the room, the idea of willfully softening and opening yourself up to it feels like going against basic human instinct. Anytime you experience chaos, your programming urges you to pull the fire alarm—to reassert control and prevent any additional breakdowns. Think about it: one of the most intense things a person can say to another is “you’re out of control.” But by relaxing control in the exact moment it seems most necessary, and seeing what might be possible beyond what you expect, or are most afraid will happen if you soften, you learn to trust the unfolding of your life. You can receive your life as it is, instead of wasting time trying to predict the future.
As you get more practiced at trusting the ebb and flow of chaos and order, you can pay more attention to developing strength of direction and purpose. This vision keeps you on track, no matter what swirls about you. You learn to move and bend with the forces of change, instead of getting stuck in the illusion that if only you maintained total control, bad things would never happen.
Rather than being hooked in a cycle of unrealistic expectations of perfect outcomes and subsequent disappointment when you are in transition, stress, or upset, you are far better served by imagining and creating multiple paths forward. You can free yourself from the restraints of past events, experiences, and behaviors, and embrace hope and possibility.
You can widen the aperture of your potential.
Befriending chaos is a way of interacting with life as a collaborative partner.
This partner “insists that you put yourself in motion, that you learn to live with instability, chaos, change, and surprise…to move in harmony with life rather than to resist it.”(Margaret Wheatley).
It reminds you that chaos and order are not opposites; indeed, they are intrinsic to each other.
At tomorrow’s workshop, I’ll teach how the principles of chaos theory provides a model for change and transition. Specifically, you’ll learn SEVEN principles you can start experimenting with and that will hopefully start to shape your current experience in fresher, more generative directions. (in case it’s not obvious: these are not “one-and-done” type activities but rather skills and practices and we cultivate over an entire lifetime).
🌀 Details below. Mark your calendars, register, and see you soon 🌀
WHAT: Learn about Chaos Theory and its practical application for building personal and collective resilience through uncertainty.
You will consider how disorder, unpredictability, and lack of control are natural parts of change and growth, and discover a model through which you can reconstruct the default narratives you have about yourself and the world.
You'll leave the workshop with a concrete framework you can apply toward imagining, creating, and living a new future beyond the limitations in possibility insisted upon by the culture-writ-large.
COST: FREE
The workshop is 75 minutes plus a Q+A/conversation that will go fifteen minutes or as long as there are questions/comments.
*There will be a recording so please register even if you can't make it live <3
SELF MADEisa call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor.Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.
Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session.
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