Assuming you read last week’s essay and began incorporating practices for grounding, you will have laid some groundwork for this next grouping of small revolutionary goals: practices for following the life force. Here, we’ll attend to how and where we experience vitality, how to build our capacity to to be with that experience so that it can grow, and how we can use it to guide us towards making our dreams real in the world.
We started with attempting to name and visualize a big dream or desire in order to create a connection to what we’re moving towards. But it’s not the exact vision that we’re going to usher into reality. It’s the connection itself. It’s the way in which our boldest, brightest, most open-hearted dreams connect us to what is most alive in us. The feeling is what matters because life force is inherently migrant. The vision that you started with, although important for many reasons, is likely to shift and change along the path. So our imperative is to integrate practices for reconnecting to the feeling of vitality, which is itself the bridge between the imaginal realm and the temporal realm.
The quality of the energy that you’re building with will be the quality of what you will create. We can’t build our bold new world with overwhelm, obligation, or resentment. It’s ok that we have these feelings, but we have to be willing to let them move rather than maintain an attachment to them by justifying their existence.
Generally speaking, I don’t think many of our lives are set up to provide the spaciousness for experiencing flow. There are just so many damn things to be responsible about, to keep track of, and to not let slip through the cracks. A couple years ago I went to a psychic who said she saw a vision of me as a small child standing on the sidelines of a playground dressed in business casual attire and holding a briefcase. Although it was a funny image, I could feel what she was tapping into. As early as kindergarten, I got myself dressed and ready for school before my parents even got out of bed. I’ve always had a strong impulse to take responsibility for my life, but I had unwittingly directed a lot of energy towards the responsibility part and not enough to the life part.
The essential component of these practices is about simply directing attention and awareness to the life part. That in itself will be revolutionary. Audre Lorde reminds us, “When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self negation and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society.”
Here are two questions to start with in order to give you a door into engaging with these practices:
As of now, what are the sources of vitality and the erotic in my life?
As of now, how do I recognize the feeling of life force? What are the emotional expressions? Does it show up as pleasure, joy, whimsey, anger, sexuality? How does it feel in my body? Is there a temperature? How could it be expressed in movement or music?
You may experience an inclination to delineate an impulse like anger or sexuality as wrong or bad. More than in any other category of small revolutionary goals, here, it will be crucial to set aside any inclination to label a feeling through a moral lens because that may lead to a barrier as you’re trying to follow the flow of vitality.
Practices for following the life force:
Simply prioritize this feeling in your daily life. Since you now have this list of sources of vitality, pick one of those things and schedule time for it. It really doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. After I saw the psychic, I knew that it was important for me to pull myself out of my low energy pattern so I started scheduling a 10 minute joy session onto my calendar every day. At first, the only source I could come up with to reliably pull me out of my funk was dancing. I later added swinging on a swingset down the street, but for the first couple weeks, when my joy alarm went off in the middle of my day, I begrudgingly went down into my basement, turned up some Rihanna, and let my subpar, yet enthusiastic dance moves lift me into a new state.
Let yourself be romanced by nature. Hone your capacity to swoon over sunsets, be enamored with weather patterns, embrace endless curiosity about each individual bird’s song. Feel into the mystery of every living thing around you and resist the urge to explain the other as if it were something you could ever truly know. There’s a reason we call it falling in love - we’re letting go of the false safety of the easily explained and counterfeitly captured.
Prioritize beauty. This one is mostly an expansion of the previous practice, but here we’re making space for beauty that can be found outside of nature as well. Notice and appreciate at least 1 beautiful thing every day. Notice where there could be room to make a decision based on aesthetic intrigue rather than the tipping point of your pros and cons list.
Engage with a new creative practice. Challenge yourself to keep it as small and simple as possible. Maybe you experiment with 1 new ingredient each time you cook dinner or choose a new ingredient to incorporate in different ways for a week. Create a mood by engaging with specific sounds, colors, textures, and smells that invoke that mood. Create a new connection every day - either between you and another person, between one friend and another friend, or between you and the squirrel who frequents your backyard. The key aspect of any creative practice is to eliminate judgment and sideline inner critics. A creative practice can be anything that is free of your previously held guidelines and restraints. Rule-breaking is encouraged.
Write love letters - not necessarily to send, but to be indulgently expressive. The key is to describe (rather than explain) what you love about someone or something in particular. Don’t stop once you’ve written to all of your obvious loves. Write to people or objects that you have a relationship of indifference with and watch how affectionate description changes your energy. Here are some ideas of who/what to write to: your mailbox, high-fives, Ted Lasso, Sunday mornings, churros, the park down the street, whoever decided that parks should be a thing, palm trees, the barista who always remembers your coffee order, your favorite window.
Forced laughter: This is a good one because it doesn’t require any preparation or forethought. If you can’t be bothered to list out your sources of vitality and don’t feel like you have the energy to get creative, this is probably a good one for you. Laugh out loud every day. The key to this one is not needing someone else to make you laugh. Initiate your own laughter, either by thinking of something funny or just laughing out loud for no reason. Like a crazy person. In fact, do it right now just to see what it feels like. Take note of the effect that laughter has on your mood and energetic state.
Breathwork: It could be said that breath is life energy itself. The Sanskrit word prana can be translated as breath, primary energy, or vital force, so breathwork might be the most direct link to engaging with the erotic flow of life. These days you can find infinite resources for learning more about breathwork and many different patterns of breathwork techniques, but there are 2 simple rules that I find useful: 1) for increasing energy: lengthen your inhales and shorten your exhales and 2) for grounding and calming: lengthen your exhales and shorten your inhales. Box breathing ( inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4) has recently become popular with the knowledge that Navy Seals use it for a balanced state of focus before entering high pressure situations. If it works for the kind of intensity that Navy Seals deal with, it will probably work for you too. In terms of small revolutionary goals, try 10 breath cycles for increasing energy. Be sure to breathe through your diaphragm, rather than solely your chest and upper part of your torso. You’ll know you’re using your diaphragm if you feel your belly expanding on the inhales.
You can take any of these ideas or come up with your own. Before I go, I wanted to remind you to maintain your practices for grounding, along with these new ones. I know I know, that sounds like a big time commitment. You know how sometimes it can seem like you don’t have time to do a fun or light-hearted thing because you have so many responsible things to do, but then you do the fun thing anyway, and you realize that it actually gives you more time because it increases your energy? That’s how this works too.
Flow researchers from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to Steven Kotler have asserted that within flow states we experience time dilation, or the quality of time passing strangely. It might not seem logical that adding more to your day will increase your time, but give it a try. The research on flow states also indicates a big uptick in productivity so you don’t have to worry about getting all of those responsible things done too.
But as we’ll discuss next week, productivity might not be the most helpful end goal. I’ll meet you back here next week for part 3 of small revolutionary goals: an exploration of practices for nonproductivity.