How can we find balance between Discipline — the scaffolding that allows us to build and maintain something meaningful in our lives — and Organicity — following the flow of the present moment and responding spontaneously as life unfolds?
👋 Welcome to humanBeing. Where we gather to practice being more skillfully, creatively human together — not toward some impossible ideal of perfection — but toward greater authentic connection.
Throughout my adolescence as a ballet dancer, my life was consumed with technique. The exact positioning of this finger, the proper engagement of this muscle... the right way to move from here... to there.
And then, as I became disenchanted with the world of professional ballet ‒ as I began to feel it to be lifeless and hollow ‒ I pendulum-swung the other way: bouncing around — more accurately, being bounced around — by life: reacting in the moment to whatever came my way.
Later on, after much pain and suffering as a result, in part, of this reactive bouncing through life with no sense of agency or intention‒ my pendulum swung back once more. I became obsessed with structure: following all the latest Youtube trends on habit building, productivity practices, time tracking, and the myriad other ways to turn oneself into something closer to a machine than an organic being. This was, surely, the best way to escape the battering at the hands of the unpredictable ‒ and the misalignment in the face of the unintentional ‒ that had characterized my life between ballet and this born-again obsession with structure.
👆 As you may have guessed — and very well might have experienced yourself — these efforts would, of course, inevitably crash and burn through the sheer unsustainability of their intensity.
Now, based on the booming Hyper-Productivity market out there, it seems that perhaps — for some! — that sort of intense, moment-by-moment, machine-like structuring can become a truly sustainable way of life. Perhaps. We all have different ways, and different ways that serve different needs at different times!
But for me, I found myself yearning to find a greater sense of balance between these two seemingly irreconcilable extremes of Release and Control I had rebounded between my whole life.
In my last piece on Finding Home I spoke about the importance of finding our Inner Home — the place from which we can feel ourselves, feel our way, and move from throughout our lives and our day.
Today, I want to talk about this duality of structure and emergence that — long before finding a sense of inner home — bounced me back and forth between:
🫲 Over rigidity on the one hand...
🫱 And a complete lack of agency and intentional direction on the other.
And what I'm currently discovering about how these two forces can work in beautiful, enlivened, inspiring harmony.
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❓ Why this? Why Now?
Building a House for the Spirit to Fill
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❣️ The Importance of Positioning Myself in My Work
In the past two pieces I've done, I've given the Professional Acting world — my former career — a very hard time. And, to be fair, I think with good reason!
But it also feels important to me to acknowledge that there was much in my acting training that not only changed my life for the better, but actually turned out to relate very directly to my current vocation in Somatic Restorative Facilitation and Therapy. I'll be doing many more pieces on the powerful correlation between the performing arts — at their best! — and the healing arts.
But to begin with, I want to share a story that actually comes — not from my own life — but from my mother's life as a young actor in New York City.
One of my Mom's teachers — the great Kathryn Sergava from the famous HB Studios in Greenwich Village — once said something that has always stuck with her, and she passed it down to me. It goes something like this:
When you're up on stage, playing a part... there are days when you step out under those lights, in front of that audience, and something truly miraculous happens. You simply transform. You become the character, in a seamless, emergent moment of divine creative inspiration. And then there are other days... when you don't. The magic doesn't seem to just... occur. It is for those days that we study technique and develop our skillfulness. It is to aid us in bringing about more of the former days and less of the latter. Because while we cannot force the inspiration to come ‒ the magic to occur — we can build and cultivate the House Inside of Us for the Spirit to Fill... to create an environment wherein that spark is more likely to catch. And to get us through a day where perhaps no fire comes at all.
As I have progressed in my journey of healing — especially as it pertains to escaping from that pendulum swinging rollercoaster of Over Structure vs Aimless Wandering — I have come back again and again to this story. When the inspiration just comes: when we wake up filled with the Spirit of Life, bursting out through our eyeballs and drawing us toward those actions which will best serve us, each other, and our world... Amazing! We can follow it, flow with it, drink it in and let it move through us with relish and gratitude!
But for those days when we wake up and suddenly feel somehow unplugged from the Life Force ... where no matter how long we wait at the Bus Stop of Inspiration, the Bus just never seems to come... This is where I've found structure and practice to have the greatest potential to aid us in finding our way back into a beautiful reconnecting dance. As the seminal choreographer Twyla Tharp says:
You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident. - The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
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🤔 What about you?
Movement: Muscle & Bone
One way I've found to illuminate for myself the balance of these two forces has to do with movement and the body. Healing and Performing Artist Daria Halprin speaks about the Expressive Body as a source of wisdom for us to better understand our selves:
Just as the physical body gives us a literal and concrete structure that expresses who we are, so every part and function of the body can also be understood as metaphors for the expression of our being. - The Expressive Body in Life, Art, and Therapy: Working with Movement, Metaphor and Meaning
In this case, I've been thinking a lot about the crucial interplay between muscles and bone.
Muscles have this amazing ability to be stimulated into contraction by the power of our mind's inspiration.
Bones have this incredible capacity to hold structure and form— to give contour and substance to our physical existence.
But without muscles, bones are simply static shape— Lifeless Sculpture: they need the magical spark of the stimulated muscle in order to come alive.
And without bones, muscles are simply erratic twitching masses, enlivened but with no arrangement, agency, or direction: they need the shape and solidity of bone to pull against — to anchor their inspired contractions.
Both muscle and bone are needed, working in concert, for meaningful movement to occur.
This imagery helps me when I find that old familiar pendulum in danger of swinging toward Over Structuring or Over Meandering. I remind myself of the crucial importance of both the Bone and the Muscle to achieve the sort of initiative I seek.
I ask myself if perhaps I might be villainizing one or idolizing the other, and I examine how I might redress the balance between them: allowing them to come back into greater balance and harmony.
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🧘🏾 Time for a quick Body Break!
Praxis: Action & Reflection
In my learning about the nature of learning and liberation, I was taught this concept known as Praxis. While the origins of the term can be found in Ancient Greece, the evolution of its meaning in the context of liberatory pedagogy comes from the transformative educator and activist Paulo Freire — who wrote the seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Freire (1972, p. 52) described praxis as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it”. He argued that it was not enough for people to study the world, they also had a responsibility to act to create a more just world. For Freire, praxis was “a central defining feature of human life and a necessary condition of freedom” and he argued that “human nature is expressed through intentional, reflective, meaningful activity situated within dynamic historical and cultural contexts that shape and set limits on that activity” - Glass, 2001, p.16
While this is a slightly lateral connection to the topic of Structure vs Emergence, it feels important to mention for two reasons:
☝️ Because it takes the conversation of "habit forming" or "flowing and growing" out of the purely individual and connects it to the communal sphere of how we endeavor to bring about meaningful change in the world through our daily actions and intentions.
✌️ Because it serves for me as yet another reminder of the crucial, balanced interplay of extremes. Reflection and introspection are indispensable as a means of informing action. Action resulting from our contemplation is crucial, lest our intentions become anemic in their lack of real world application.
The Form outlined by Bone is useless ‒ stagnant! ‒ without the Muscle of Action.
The Muscle of Action is directionless without the Shape and Direction given to it by Bone.
Not only does this highlight to me the crucial balance of both elements — Structure and Emergence ; Reflection and Action — but it also introduces the last element of this dyadic dance I wish to speak to today.
This balancing interplay of opposites doesn't just play itself out in any given moment — but over the course of Time.
Cycles
Originally the study of how animals survive in their environments, one of ecology’s first lessons was that, beneath all the change in nature, there are steady states characterized by cycles. Every participant in the cycle literally lives off the others with only the ultimate energy source, the sun, being transcendent. — The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, Lewis Hyde
One of the ways that the Hyper-Productivity movement let me down was in its exclusion of the reality of Cycles beyond the 24hour daily one.
Given that the cultural milieu out of which this movement rises is largely based on patriarchal post-industrial values, this isn't a big surprise.
Preindustrial, pre-clock time was perceived as running in long cycles, and not as a linear succession of uniform hours, the system we have adopted since the rise of railroads and factories, where schedule keeping has come to dominate the concept of time. And long before that, ancient civilizations took the cycle of days, moons, and years, and sliced them into minutes, hours, weeks, and months, to subordinate the natural order to the purposes of kings, nations, and religions. — Layers of Time: Learning, Purpose, Meaning, Stowe Boyd
What would it feel like to think about finding balance ‒ not just within a given moment, or a given day ‒ but within a given month or a given year? Or even a given season?
The challenge I've found with this exciting idea seems to be twofold:
☝️ Firstly, the world most of us operate within during our day to day lives still counts time in the linear success of uniform hours — the 24h daily and 7 days weekly cycle. So how might be find a way of existing within such an unnatural system while exploring a different way of moving through life for ourselves? That feels like more of the metaphorical Muscular challenge, in our ongoing metaphor.
✌️ The second challenge — the more Skeletal one — has to do with intentionality. To achieve balance across these longer cycles of time would seem to require some semblance of broadening our awareness: a way ‒ or ways ‒ of lifting our gaze from the day-to-day to the horizon of these more expansive arcs: months, seasons, years.
Both of these conundrums feel to me to relate once again to our old friend ‒ the lack of cultural connection and connection to Earth that many of us in this current time and place experience.
In the shape of these problems I see the outline of where ritual belongs: the daily coming home to ourselves through Practices passed down to us. The seasonal tasks dictated by the cycles of Nature.
So what can we do?
In their absence, I have been attempting to create for myself a more individualized journaling and tracking methodology which incorporates some toolsets and frameworks from the Hyper-Productivity world, but brings into concert with a desire to reconnect to more Cultural and Natural Rhythms.
❗️ Practice...
I'm going to be launching the humanBeing Community Circle — which will include an interactive, imaginal, embodied, creative Practice specifically designed to explore this theme — very soon! If you'd like me to let you know when that's available, make sure you've signed up with your email at the bottom of the page! I can't wait to see you there!
One Final Thought on the Power of Rhythm
Lastly, I want to speak about the power of Rhythm.
Because while Cycles feel like the Bones of longer term balance, Rhythm feels like the Muscle.
The pathways of the brain are literally organized according to the impulses that are repeatedly fired. Based on research on neuroplasticity, these pathways can be changed by changing one’s habits and thoughts. The result is that impulses travel a different path and the pathways of the brain change. I mention this because it’s worth noting that rhythm is not simply a metaphor here but a physical phenomenon. Thought happens through pulses in the brain. — Rhythm, Rumination, and Habit Formation, Lexi Eikelboom
In my experience of noting what habits and structures ‒ Practices ‒ are able to maintain, persist, and resonate alongside the emergence of day to day aliveness over time... a key element seems to be the relative sense of aliveness inherent in the Practice... To keep the structure itself somehow organic and enlivened ‒ yet still a strong, discernible container for the emergent spirit to flow into.
This concept is one that I invite you, in your own life, to explore. Can you feel the difference between a habit or structure that has a quality of Aliveness versus one that feels more stagnant?
What characteristics set one apart from the other? I'm really curious to hear what you share as you discover, and to share what I'm discovering along my own exploration.
🕐 Time For Your Wisdom! 🦉
The part I'm most excited about!!!
My goal in creating these pieces is to cultivate community around the ideologies and practices that have contributed to deep healing and greater wholeness in my life. To begin nurturing the seed of what I hope to grow – together with you and the rest of my community – into a lifelong place of creative engagement around what it means to be more skillfully human – not toward some impossible perfection, not toward some hyper-productive, hyper-individualist self-improvement addicted never-ending frenzy of impossible ideals to measure up to...
But quite simply toward greater authentic connection
With ourselves
With each other
And with the broader living community here on this awe-inspiring planet.
So...
Sign up below to engage with the Practice as soon as it's released!
And be a part of shaping it from the beginning, by contributing the wisdom of your lived experience so we can grow this digital meeting space to be a place of nurturance, insight, and healing!
Questions for Pondering
And sharing below, if you feel called!
❓ What are you noticing as you finish reading this piece?
❓ Did you write anything down or sit with the question I asked after sharing my story earlier? Has your understanding of over-flexibilit — a lack of a sense of self — or returning home to your center, changed at all since reading the rest of the Piece?
❓ How does this concept of Structure vs Emergence — Bone & Muscle, the House & the The Spirit — resonate with you? What doesn't resonate?
❓ Is there anything these ideas help you better understand about your own life and experience? Did you have any "Aha" moments as you read thru?
❓ What doesn't get addressed in these ideas that feels important to you not to leave out of this discussion?
❓ How about my questions here at the end? Can you feel the difference between a habit or structure that has a quality of Aliveness versus one that feels more stagnant? If so, what characteristics feel like they set one apart from the other? If not, I encourage you to sign up at the bottom of the page so I can let you know when I release my practice focused specifically on this discernment!
I can't express how excited I am to engage more with you!
So until then...
From here
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Thru here
❤️ 👈
To there
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~ Sending so much care! ~
📝 N o t e s
🔼 Overculture. The mainstream, dominant norms from which we unconsciously derive many of our beliefs and standards of behavior. Coined by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
🔼 Fractal. Existing in distinct yet recognizable forms on the individual, communal, and societal levels. A concept I was first introduced to by the incredible writer, facilitator, teacher, and nonviolent activist Kazu Haga.
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