It's Hard to Know What to Say

I need to be honest. When it comes to writing right now, I’ve been lost trying to find my voice. I’m in the soup of deep feeling and inquiry and my words and thoughts about racism and justice aren’t formed well enough to share in a meaningful or helpful way. I’ve been sitting here with a blank page for hours wondering what the hell I’m going to say.

So, it’s ironic/perfect that my task today is to tell you about the upcoming live, online course I’m leading starting July 9th, Erotic Embodiment and the Triune Autonomic Nervous System. I’ve REALLY had to lean into observing myself and my reactions as I've started over and over, only to erase what I’ve written and start over again. Really, there could be no better time than now for me to study the limits of my own system as I prepare to lead this class.

In the last few hours I’ve oscillated from forced focus, back to breath, into distraction, back to my body, into hand wringing, outside for a walk, over to punishment, until finally, I’ve landed in the sweet spot where I feel safe to stretch into my discomfort and let you into a little bit of my world. Here I am in ‘The Learning Zone’ and things have started to flow.  

We all have a Learning Zone but the exact terrain is different for each of us. We enter the Learning Zone when the specific conditions of just-enough unknown combines with just-enough safety in the Nervous System, availing us to a wider range of feelings and experiences.

When we spend time in this sweet spot, we literally grow new neural pathways of aliveness, flexibility, and resilience in our bodies. New levels of generative presence (AKA erotic embodiment) and an increased ability to stay present in the unknown is the outcome. Knowing about our range and what tips us out of it helps us ground and deepen our capacity to meet personal and global challenges with coherence and strength. When we’re outside of the Learning Zone, we’re immobilized by reduced blood flow to our frontal cortex and we spill over into flight, fight, or freeze responses.

What happens in our early development shapes – and often habituates – how our nervous system responds to our environment. This can work to our benefit and to our detriment. Personally, I’m wired towards sympathetic arousal and when I’m feeling safe enough, I gravitate towards excitement and passion. When I feel distress, I collapse into fear and agitation. You might be wired towards the parasympathetic response which has you orienting from contented relaxation and pleasure when you’re feeling safe enough. When you are stressed, you might find yourself slipping into apathy and boredom, or even dissociation and freeze. Learning to track our baseline, in-the-moment responses to our present circumstance helps us recognize our need for more safety or more challenge in real time. 

The Learning Zone is one of the topics we’ll cover in our upcoming class, Erotic Embodiment and the Triune Autonomic Nervous System. Understanding its architecture in my own system has been pivotal in my ability to be with myself and others. And today, I got to use it to calm myself down and let go of the expectations so I could actually sit down and write this email. 

Reading this, you might be aware that you too have been feeling internal pressure to respond to our current social environment before you are prepared or ready. Notice if you’re feeling frozen or agitated, or excited and curious. Your level of activation is dependent on your personal Learning Zone.

I passionately agree that our culture was built on a fundamentally unjust foundation and I feel responsible to add my voice to the call for solidarity and racial justice - but the reality is that I’m a barely informed white woman. Trying to force myself to speak up before I was ready compromised my actual ability to respond – to listen and learn, to grieve and rage, and to take action towards lasting change.

So for now, my way of coming into alignment is to look deeply at my own relationship with race and privilege, to educate myself, to have conversations, and to take direct action towards systemic change. My hope is that each of us feels permission to tune into right-time, right action while leaning into the safe enough challenges - remembering that until we are firmly seated within our Learning Zone, whatever we offer is not likely to be helpful.