Your own personal wilderness survival map
Developing your inner authority, part one of seven
Hello + happy Tuesday!
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**This call features structured breakout groups of 3-4 people.
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Here are a couple of testimonials:
“The Self Made community has allowed me to examine and share pieces of myself I’d rejected. The love and compassion I’m met with each time helps me show that same warmth back to myself, and allows me to belong a bit more to myself each time.”
Kieran O.
“I joined Self Made shortly after I got sober. I knew from the first meeting that this space is where I belonged. It was open and authentic, free of dogma and ego-bashing. The level of safety I feel at Self Made is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.”
Holly S.
If you’re curious about participating, but feel shy, or nervous, please know that you are welcome to come hang and listen—camera off. You are never obligated to share if you aren’t ready (or ever, tbh).
Hope to see you.
For the next four weeks, I’ll be sharing what I consider to be the basics of developing your inner authority.
Here we go:
“What do I do when I don't know what to do next?
A Wilderness Survival Manual a century ago said ‘When (not if) you get lost: Stop. Have a cup of Tea. Climb a tree. Look at where you’ve been. Then, and only then, take a bead on where you want to head next. Go until you’re lost again, or arrive.’
We’re often desperate for the Solution, but if we start anxiously with only that we’re like a Squirrel on the Highway. Solution is the third step. The second step is Fairy Godmother territory: what are you really wishing for here? The first step is acknowledging what exactly has been going on in my experience? How did I get here? What are the chances I’ll just recreate history and wind up in the same place?
The goal of the process is coming to a felt sense of Safety and Certainty.”
Paul Gessford, MFT - Jacksonhole + Alpine Junction Counseling
Today, I’m going to share how to create your own “wilderness survival manual.”
Some context:
When I first started to turn away from problematic behaviors (for me, the first and most important was my alcohol (<mis>use), and began to turn and face my life, I came into a practice with a laundry list of things I wanted to shift and change and develop and learn and leave behind.
One of the first tools I learned to help me navigate the messiness was crafting my own, individualized Recovery Map, or what’s known as a “Four Quadrant Map” as developed by philosopher Ken Wilber.
For some background, the Four Quadrant Map:
“…is the basic framework of integral theory. It models human knowledge and experience with a four-quadrant grid, along the axes of "interior-exterior" and "individual-collective". According to Wilber, it is a comprehensive approach to reality, a metatheory that attempts to explain how academic disciplines and every form of knowledge and experience fit together coherently.”
Here’s another way of conceptualizing it with lots of clever lines that just seem a bit superfluous to me:
Here is a photo I snapped from Integral Recovery by John Dupuy:
I’m lingering here and yes to offer context, but also to be specific about what I mean when I say that I take a holistic approach to recovery.
From Integral Recovery:
In Integral Recovery, with the comprehensive outlook provided by the…map’s four quadrants, we are able to address our physical health; our inner emotional, spiritual, and intellectual life; our relational life, which includes our relationships to other beings, both human and nonhuman; and our relations with our exterior world, financial, professional, environmental, and technological among others. A simple way to express the four quadrants…is my body, my self, my people, my world. The quadrants allow us to clearly discern the causes and effects of stress in any or all of the quadrants as well as to follow the positive effects of he healing work and practices that we do.
Incidentally, I am an Integral Coach, so whether you’re here for recovery, or for another facet of self-development, this is a tool I share with all my clients.
The usefulness of a map—a tool that helps you organize and categorize both where you are, and where you would like to go, and that also reminds you of your vulnerabilities so you might stay alert as necessary—seems obvious early on.
Then what?
If you create a map of a coastline, and then return one year later, you will need to update the map. Coastlines are constantly changing due to the action of waves, currents, erosion, and tides. It would be ridiculous to think that the same map we initially created would still be at accurate representation of a dynamic, responsive, ever-shifting shore.
The same is true for you.
And perhaps you understand my emphasis on this tool. My intention is here is to remind you that no matter how experienced you are, or become, returning to the basics is always, always valuable.
Ultimately, your practice is about so much more than removing a harmful substance or behavior from your life. It’s about creating your own unique path to healing and self-actualization. It is not straightforward, it is not-linear (would that it were linear!). You adapt and evolve this tool again and again as you adapt and evolve, as you move with the tides of your life, as you learn to interact with reality rather than fantasy.
You don’t need a clear destination to get started; you only need a direction. Updating your map (quarterly? annually? It’s up to you) is a way to get clear on direction. You evaluate, make adjustments, and allow your next steps to be revealed to you. You make the road by walking. You create the map as you go.
And now, I’d like to share my humble contribution.
Introducing
<DRUMROLL> ….
BASELINE
I created Baseline as a practical adaptation of the Recovery Map. If a Recovery Map is a helpful tool to orient you to where you are, and what’s next, and to get clarity on the direction you’re heading, BASELINE helps you ground in the present. Think of it as how you *actually* tend to yourself holistically, how you move from thought or imagination and into action.
I’ve used the same four quadrants: Inner World, Outer World, Environment, Relationships. But within each quadrant, everything listed is an action I can take. None of it is abstract, conceptual, hypothetical.
If you take one action from each quadrant once/day, that will help you maintain your overall BASELINE. Having this nearby can also helpful in those moments where the squirrels are unleashed in your brain or your skin is too-tight or you catch the inner-engine starting to rumble and want to do your best to keep the train from leaving the station. In those moments, which are often the moments all practices and tools fly out the window, you can look at your BASELINE and take a non-harmful action. Sometimes, it’s as simple as drinking water, or realizing you haven’t had a proper meal all day. Sometimes, you know you need to get out and move your body in a way that exhausts those damn squirrels.
I’ve listed four actions in each quadrant. On a good day—a day where I’m rested, and work isn’t too busy, and I have legit time and space—I might hit a few things in each box. And, on the days where that is not the case, again, I know that if I touch into one action in each box, that is enough to keep me tethered to myself. Don’t put too many! Three-four are plenty.
BASELINE allows me to be flexible. If you look at my examples, there is a range from simple—>complicated in each quadrant. Take the top right quadrant, “Outer World.” On a day where I have energy and time, I might take all the actions in that box. But I can also simply focus on drinking a lot of water, or prioritizing one home-cooked meal.
Every single last one of you are swimming in the destructive waters of perfectionism. BASELINE is not about checking boxes, and then berating yourself when you fall short (and you will fall short). Instead, let this tool be a manual that moves you closer to what you need, what would be helpful, in any given moment, and out of your own personal wilderness. A tool that connects you to your inner authority, rather than moving you farther away. An opportunity to ask yourself what you need, and then actually listen to that need, rather than forcing yourself toward some unhelpful standard that keeps you stuck in a familiar loop.
So often, when you’re dealing with Big Life Stuff (you know the stuff: transitions. Grief. Betrayal. Frustration, disappointment, heartbreak, stress, existential angst, etc.), you want answers right now. You want someone to tell you what to do, you want to immediately feel better. You get caught up in your looping thoughts, you perpetuate patterns that keep you in the stress response. BASELINE is a way to offer yourself nourishment along the way. To disrupt the thought loops, if only briefly. To give yourself something to do in those moments where you don’t know what to do. To demonstrate to yourself that the answers are inside of you.
This week, I invite you to create your own Baseline.
Incidentally, in this week’s Wednesday Group Call, we’ll be creating our BASELINES together before going into small groups to discuss. So, if you’re like me and you read this type of thing with the best of intentions…and then never actually do the exercises, come to Wednesday’s call for some accountability 🤗.
I often recommend that my 1:1 clients take a photo of their BASELINE and save it as the background on their phone. You also might set a couple of alarms throughout your day, and when the alarm rings, use it as a reminder to check your BASELINE.
➡ Picture it: Hand on heart, three deep breaths.
➡ <Inhale, Exhale> What do I need in this moment?
➡ Baseline at the ready. One simple action. One massive disruption to what might be yet another autopilot moment.
➡ Even if the relief only lasts thirty seconds: Look at me! I’m doing it.
➡ Tiny, quiet moments that begin to accumulate until one day we look around and we have a whole new life.
*This* is how we change.
What do y’all make of this? Would love to hear your thoughts/feelings/opinions/ideas/questions/comments and if this generated anything for you <3
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SELF MADE is a 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.
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Thank you.
Love the baseline model! It makes the four quadrants more accessible + understandable. Thank you.
Love this, Dani 💕😍🏋️♀️