How do you know you are safe? Safe from what? If you don’t know who your enemy is, how can you ever be safe?
The solution is obvious: Choose the enemy! Make the enemy!
You can make anyone or anything your enemy, as long as you can prove they ‘did something bad’:
* from a partner who did not fulfill your hidden expectations,
* to a team mate who gave you unexpected feedback,
* from a projected authority figure - a teacher, guru, boss, spaceholder who must the reason for you not doing what you want,
* to mosquitos! I mean how can something so small be so evil?
* from any cluster of ‘human’ — atheists, gays, meat eaters, COVID-vaccinated, people with guns, etc — who are not quite human because of their actions/beliefs go against the ‘good of all’,
* to time: there is never enough time!
* from life when it does not dedicate itself to make you happy
* to yourself: you can make yourself the bad person who hurts others and who is never good enough. (Side note: turning against yourself can easily result in an auto-immune disease, where your body is physically attacking itself).
Having an enemy has many perks, not the least of them is to give you a good reason to be stay in high-alert, triggering an continuous flow of adrenaline in your system.
All facetiousness aside, looking for an enemy is a dis-ease of patriarchal culture. Cultures of dominance and violence thrives on finding who has done ‘us’ wrong. Look at our history! During the patriarchal human era, our stories are that of wars.
But it does not have to be so. The shift from a culture of war to a culture of collaboration starts at a personal level. How can you unhook yourself from the reflexive necessity to look for someone to blame?
In my current research, I found two sideways doors to exit the double-purposed pattern of ‘trying to be safe’ by ‘finding who/what is wrong’.
I. Whose Moral Binary System Have You Adopted?
For most, the moral division between what you consider ‘wrong behavior’ and ‘good behavior’ does not even come from you. It comes from some external authority figure.
Are you interested in getting your life back?
Find out who you got the map from: was it your dad about how to ‘make it’ into society? was it your mother who taught you how to be a good child? was it the church who made you the promise of eternal life? was it the advertisements and corporations who are looking for more customer? was it from politicians who want your vote?
The experiment is: open your Beep! Book, draw a line in the middle of a page, title the right side ‘Bad Behaviors’, title the left side ‘Good Behaviors’, and start filling in the lists embedded in your Box.
The thoughtware that glues things to being ‘right or wrong’ serves survival. The ‘good guys / bad guys’ map is trying to give yourself a semblance of control in a world that is truly groundless.
When you have had enough of looking out for the villains in your story, this may be the signal that you are ready to meet a world in flux. That’s when skills for navigating your liquid states are needed.
II. Navigate Your Liquid States With Authority Into Creation
Being in liquid state melts down the certainties of your crystallized identity. For your Box, a liquid state is the definition of being ‘unsafe’.
That’s when the true purpose of ‘Making People (And Yourself) Wrong’ gets revealed: you do it to avoid the familiar fear that accompanies uncertainty, loss of identity, and the collapse of your original strategies.
The fallacy of trying to ‘Love Yourself’ or ‘See The Good In Others’ is revealed as the other side of the same survival coin.
The invitation is to recognize the signal for what it is: you are entering a potential liquid state. This is a celebration! You have worked hard for this part of your Box to crumble under the clarity of growing up. Your certainty has become a prison, and you are escaping it.
What you may be missing is the resilience and capacity to enter a liquid state and stay present. I talked about this in a previous STARR: ‘Having Authority While In Liquid State.’
One basic skill is learning to navigate your Fear consciously. When your Box stops hoarding your Fear for safety, a new world is in reach — one where discovery walks hand-in-hand with a relaxed nervous system.
Your experiential journey with conscious Fear starts with practice! If you want to join an authentic live feelings practice space where Fear is met as an infinite resource, not a problem to fix, here are ones that I know and frequent:
* Heart Gym: daily 45-min practice at different time of day, free.
* Conscious Feelings Space with spaceholders from the Year Long Spaceholder Training, free, in exchange of being privately recorded for the purpose of feedback and coaching.
* Fear Club: a space of initiation into the magic of your fear. Find the next Fear Club online or offline in the Possibility Management Calendar. The filter ‘Fear Club’ is on the left side of the page.
