The Dip: No analysis, no tactics, no tools, no tips

Someone asked me “how do you think people should be prepping to deal with the emotional trauma?”. What I’m reading this question as is this: “How can I be with this moment, in darkness, in fear, now or in the future?”. My truth in response to that is one thing only: we dip. We dip right in, we dip right through. We can’t get out of it, or conquer it or banish it, we can only offer curiosity and love to it and go through it, feel through it and come out on the other side. Surprisingly unscathed, surprisingly more alive and light and enlightened.

• A client tells me his biggest fear is that his company will go bankrupt. I tell him, go bankrupt, right now. Tell me what that’s like.
• Another client tells his biggest fear is that his father will disavow and disinherit him. I tell him he’s disavowed and disinherited right now in this moment – I ask him what that feels like.
• Another client tells me their biggest fear is to die. I ask her to die, right now on the spot. And to tell me what that is like, what that feels like.

My experience of life is in order to be truly alive, to avoid becoming a zombie that we’ve so well metaphorically depicted in countless movies, we need to go right in.

Most of my clients, even after months of working together are sometimes still surprised that my response is nearly always moving in. Not a moving out, not a justifying or a minimizing. Not a strategizing or an analysis. No tactics, no tools, no books to read, no tips, no advice. But to go into whatever it is that’s right there. Another client tells me he feels like a wrench screwed in too tightly. I tell him, screw it even tighter and tell me what happens. It’s counterintuitive, it’s the exact opposite of what I and we, I imagine, usually do in life and what I think most of us have learned to do. But right there I’ve learned that what’s most at odds, is often exactly what life calls for. A moving in, a being with, right there, with the thing in front of us. What is it? That fear, that anxiety, that excitement. How does it feel? And where? What does it want? How does it want to move? How does it want to dance? When we bring up the courage of our natural human curiosity even towards the deepest, darkest parts inside of us, something always seems to shift.

Then we dip, right into it. And we dance and cry and shake and move.

with love,
Leo