Facebook Publication Date: 10/20/2019 23:10

One of the most important parts of walking together is what we here call Minding The Slosh.

That’s another way of talking about what is called Emotional Regulation.

Why is emotional regulation important in this space we have co created together?

Because the ability to hold on to oneself, to hold on to ourselves, is so crucial in in being able to have difficult conversations with minimal slosh. We make the choices to neither blow up, shut down or run away.

This is about ourselves, but, as with so many other things, it is not only about ourselves. We do not, we cannot, do this walk alone. We need to be mindful of that, and mindful of both how we process information, and how we express ourselves in light of the information we receive.

By definition, the work we do has the potential for volatility. For that very reason, being able to hold ourselves moderate is crucial for our walking together. Why?

We ask much of you here. We ask that you approach material that is new, or familiar but with a new slant; a new angle. We ask you to pivot and consider perspectives you may not have before. We ask that you hold on to yourself, even as you hold hands with fellow walkers.

This is a big deal. It is all about trust; all about knowing that the people who are walking with you will stay the course with you, will slosh you minimally if at all, and trust that you can hold your own bucket with grace.

As has been said more than once here, the material we present to you here is important, but secondary.

I care less about that than I care about who you are as you confront the material and who you are as you engage in your walk across the Lumpy Crossings.

Yes, I want knowledge. But knowledge, by itself, only gets you so far.

I want you to be able to hear hard messages by me, and by voices you can hear well, yes.

But, as always, I want more.

I also want you to soften up. To be willing to allow words from people whom you find difficult to hear to penetrate as well.

Because that is how the light gets in.

Everything we do here is in service to your lives outside your screens.

I imagine you all as you go about your days. Who is Julie when she walks through New England?

Where does Varda find and overcome her clench in her workplace?

When Leonie finds a whoosh in herself, does she examine it with curiosity, or do her defenses go up and nothing gets in?

This has been the sadness for me as we found ourselves deep in the lumps these past days. I care that you find community here. I hope that the lessons and examples and the dialog here is helpful. I am so proud of the progress made and growth seen. I said in one of those threads from these past days that one reason I do deep and long engagements with ‘problematic’ people, is that the reward is so great.

Here is a secret. Almost everyone here that has proven themselves to be reliable and resilient and faithful to our mission and our method started out as ‘problematic’. They fought with losing strategies, blew up, even flamed out or ghosted for awhile. Almost no one in this space comes in with all the tools needed to engage here well, or how to generalize those skills to their outside lives.

It’s not an expectation. It’s why we exist. To help you walk better, both here, and in your circles of influence.

If you can hold on to yourselves here, chances are you are getting better at holding on to yourselves out there.

Same for staying the course. Same for engaging with curiosity and compassion. Same for building the muscles to hear and internalize.

Emotional Regulation is essential for Relational Ethics. As we consider the Other, here or outside, there are choices to be made before the first word is spoken.

Who am I committed to being within this encounter?

Am I willing truly Meet the Other? Is my safety paramount? Or is the safety of the Other as important as my own?

Have I considered how I will manage any ‘whoosh’? What are my plans to bring myself back to baseline and be fully present?

So, what’s Involved in Emotional Regulation?

Emotional regulation has two elements—calming down and gearing up.

When we are in stressful or overstimulating situations, we would do well to have the tools at the ready to calm our emotions to acknowledge and assert our agency, to manage our behavior and become available to learn and cultivate a willingness to be changed.

On the other hand, when we are faced with an intimidating and activating material and or situations, we gotta be able to gear up sufficient and appropriate emotion to attempt the challenging task of bucket management.

To complicate matters, the ability to both calm down and gear up are almost always needed to be done at the same time in order to ‘stay in the game’, grounded, owning ourselves, remembering and mitigating potential triggers, and refusing to act out, but also refusing to shut down or run away.

We saw what not to do. And we are going to talk about them. But negative identification can only get us so far. For our purposes, we need to be able to gear up, and engage our whole and best selves when we enter this space, loins girded *not*, or not only, for own protection, but for love of this space and of each other. When conflict or difficulty arises, we now need to use the tools we have talked about and will learn even more as this week goes by to calm, to mitigate, ourselves in service to our shared ethos and shared footprints.

My greatest joy (yes, I say that a lot) is when I hear of how this space influences you in your day to day lives. When you use the tools, and remember why you are who you are, and act from that grounding and that core.

Thank you to Drs. Brinton and Fujiki for their article which made it easier to bring this concept to you.

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