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Series 2, Ep21: The Cost of Contortion V Capacity Gains of Coherence

 

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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this episode of the Unmasking Unschool Podcast, a continuation of four bridge episodes from this podcast to the next. And I'm taking each episode to speak about one of four internal areas of change, arenas to focus on. And this one is about energy. Having energy, your capacity to. Be with what life has to offer, and I'm going to speak to it in a way that may be hard to hear because I'm going to be both naming what are things outside of your control around how much energy you have or don't have, but also naming how much choice you can have to do something about it and what that actually involves.

In the last episode I spoke to how your [00:01:00] belief system shapes how you interpret your world and who you are within it. Not only what you believe you are responding to, like what is real, but also how you respond to it. And your belief systems are shaped by social and economic systems. And so there is a lot of personal power to be garnered from you consciously.

Changing your beliefs to better reflect the life, the future, the relationships, the work you wanna be doing. But that power is in knowing how to create in your body. The experience of this is possible for me no matter what the, this is. I've come to think of the process of transforming beliefs in a specific way, right?

It's not enough to do just CBT or thought work or question everything. Read your way to theoretical freedom. If your body isn't on board, your body is where your belief system lives. It's the [00:02:00] reality that your nervous system is most adapted to. That's what your beliefs are. The expectation of what is real that has become your unconscious norm.

And so if you have, for example, a deep desire to make more money from the work that you most care about doing in the world, or you want to be more visible in that, if you want to expand the reach of your work beyond you. If your body doesn't believe that someone like you gets to have that happen or gets to be okay in that, you will reject the experience when it comes.

This looks like self-sabotage, shame, or not seeing the opportunities that you do have because they never seemed available to you. This happens to me every time I hit a new revenue level, the feeling in my body that someone will come and tell me off. It also happens sometimes when I experience. Quote, unquote, too much joy above what my current belief system can support as something I can handle, [00:03:00] and each time.

I go to these tools. I work on my belief system. I transform that comfort level and what I believe is possible, what I believe I can be okay with, and there's a whole dimension of this, which is around your capacity that goes hand in hand with your beliefs about what your life could be like. And all of this is not your fault, right?

If you have a low capacity, if you have low energy, if you are. Uh, regularly treading water with overwhelm. If you don't believe in yourself, if you don't believe in what you actually deeply, truly want being available to you, then you can do something about it. And one of my favorite things is to see when those I work with get it.

When it like this clicks and the cascade of self and world unfolding, that just becomes how they do life. And these are people who many times have [00:04:00] had every reason not to believe in themselves, right? Not to believe in themselves in the world because of how the world positions them, their identities, or because of their track record in how hard it has been to navigate the world or because of what's unprecedented in their work.

And so the ability to choose what reality you are operating in and with, and what what you are connected to as being possible and real is a kind of freedom. It's a kind of freedom to be in integrity with what you actually most value, because if your belief system matches it, then your actions will follow suit.

You won't have the kinds of responses that just reject it because it feels unsafe or wrong, or like something bad is going to happen. And so in the last episode, I've spoken to all of this as well as how starting with low belief is just part of the work and what happens when a practiced belief gathers enough evidence.

You reach a, a crescendo of conviction, like [00:05:00] a swelling in your belly of there is something more possible. And then that is when a leap of faith becomes available. In this episode, I want to go deeper into this frame of belief, living in the body and speak to capacity, and I want to give you a very specific directive for how to think about your energy and your capacity that I haven't said before that I don't often hear is something.

People are invited into. So capacity, capacity is your bandwidth. It's your limits for how much of life you can be with in the moment. Handle, be present to have energy for without disconnecting, right, without your body deciding. I don't have energy for this. I can't do this. This is too much. And also knowing when that energy withdrawal from your body, like, oh, this isn't something that's possible.

When that is correct and right and good for you. Right. Actually, I don't wanna do that. [00:06:00] Actually, my instinct in my energy levels is saying, no, maybe not. Right? So that's also part of it. And if you are someone who has learned that you have to manage your energy, that your energy is a. Resource that you have to pay close attention to.

Then you might have also learned to think about your energy and your capacity as entirely to do with your body. Or if you just get enough rest or you just do enough somatic exercises right, then you'll be able to handle your life. And what I want to underscore in this episode is if the fundamental structures of your life take and extract from you and don't replenish, then the structural work is the capacity work.

You wanting to create more energy has to be you looking at what is working and what is not working about the actual structures of my life. Now, [00:07:00] obviously there are levels to this and to how much power you have to shape and influence the impact of the structures that you are inside of, right? And so there are these wider systems.

Money, politics, borders, economics, education, time, work, law, systems of knowledge, gender, race, healthcare systems, policing, geopolitical systems, defense systems, border control, immigration. Like gazillions, right? And they also interact. And then you zoom in and you have your local political arena. You have your local community, the place that you are in, the field of work, that you are in the place of living, the relationships you are in, uh, if you're in a family system or several.

So we are interacting with these systems and structures that have a flow of resources. That are often predetermined and fixed from [00:08:00] above, and that often both offer and require of you different levels of demands, but also different levels of resourcing. And so just naming the context within which you do or don't have energy means that you can consider it as something that is far beyond your own body.

Far beyond your own influence a lot of the time and the energetic. Deficit you might be experiencing is not just a symptom of your own body, it's the symptom of how your body is having to function to deal with the wider systems that you are in, right? And so the goal is to find where do I have choice?

Where have I also adapted to this as if it's normal and as if I have less choice, and what would I choose and for what would I choose? You have to have connection. To the signals in your body intact, there has to be a relationship of trust between you [00:09:00] and your body and what it has to say and what it has to say are offered up in sensations in your body.

And those sensations are organized around. What your belief system offers about what is a threat? What is placing a demand on you and what is resourcing, what will be a benefit, and your responses will be shaped by that to determine what are you bracing against, what are you adapted to, what are you readying for, and what are you.

Responding to in ways that actually don't feel good and your judging is bad, and something to resist or something that's too big or too bad to feel. And then also the urges in you of what you actually want and what you might have also learned to. Think of as right or good or socially validated desire.

What is safe to want? What inner signals are safe to act on? So capacity work is [00:10:00] liberatory. When you locate that, the work is both the internal nervous system bandwidth and the responses you have and the external structuring of your level of resourcing. In your life. And so capacity work is collective work.

It's the work to transform our systems to transform where there is unequal resourcing, unequal demand and stress. But also it's also your work to recognize and claim agency over the systems and the structures that you do have choice over. And so to summarize, if you are wanting more energy and you are thinking that you need to just find a way to have more energy to deal with your existing life before you start dreaming more, before you start changing things just becomes a justification for them, right?

It's you learning to better [00:11:00] function. For what actually often doesn't work, and that will have you in a continual loop of, I can't add more because more will be too much. I can't handle my current life, so I cannot dream bigger. And if you are learnt, so your protective vigilance around your energy will be high, it also might feel like it's something that you get wrong, quote unquote, a lot.

Trying to guess ahead of time how much energy you're gonna have for the social thing three days from now, how much work you can take on or clients you can take on, how many projects you are capable of, how much energy that will demand of you, but also how much recovery time you'll need. Weighing up the social risk of no versus yes versus the energy consequences.

And so. This type of relationship with your energy where you are trying to cope better, [00:12:00] treats your energy like it's a finite resource that gets emptied, that needs a lot of space and time to drip back up into having enough. But what if your energy isn't finite? It's only your ability to stay in stress or survival states is the thing that is finite.

A lot of people I work with have learned that the best state that they get things done in is a state of stress, and you might not see it as a state of stress. It might be like deadline drama, like the saving everything to the last minute and then using that as fuel. It might be creating arguments with people around you to give you something to kick against, to be angry at.

It might be a chip on your shoulder. It might be the way that you punish yourself to get things done. And so your relationship to doing to what you have energy for can also be shaped by the kind of state that you think is the one, which [00:13:00] is you getting things done. This can lead to a belief that I'm only creating value when I am exhausted or contorting over adapting over functioning when it's costing me my life.

And so it can seem like the management of your energy, your capacity to do life, to be with what life has to offer is about managing energy, when actually it's about managing the cost of how much contortion you're doing, like managing the impact of that contortion, managing the fact that you are oriented to what is and are having to manage the impact of contorting to fit a system.

It's the orientation of I need to give to things that don't give back to me. And so it's not that you lack energy, it is often that you think you lack something and you need energy to compensate for that lack, that you aren't enough as you are, that [00:14:00] you aren't good enough, that you need to fit the system in some way.

That there are expectations that you have to meet, like all of that. That is the energy drain. So I'm gonna pause for a second because all of this can be really hard to face and I am here with you. To face it, right? I'm here with you. Knowing that facing it does good things. I've seen it time and time again.

How much can change, how much people can go from feeling so depleted and so lacking in energy to changing the actual structures in their life in ways that release that energy and that mean that they are oriented too. Doing much more and more and more of the things that replenish them. And I'm gonna speak to that replenishment in a second.

But first I just want to stay with what happens when you are in energy management, when you are in managing the [00:15:00] cost of over adapting or contorting, because it doesn't just show up in how much energy you have, right? It also shows up in. How you take action and how much you feel able to trust yourself to follow through on things, right?

It depletes your self trust. It also shows up in terms of knowing what is okay to dream and what is okay to commit yourself to, to decide. I'm going for that. It also shows up in terms of how much you. Protect the value of your work and build the value of your work because you'll often be overgiving and undercharging.

It often means that you are then also not building momentum. You're not seeing yourself progress. There's a sort of maintenance pattern happening and. Ultimately what's happening is that you are not valuing with your actions, with the [00:16:00] structural choices that you make, the human life that you are, the worthy being that you are, and thinking that your value is in pleasing a system that also doesn't value.

What you have to bring who you are. So this capacity work also means looking at that and saying, no. The systems I've been in, the messages I've received, the reality I've adapted to is wrong, is not true, is a lie is based on a lie. Often that means that your internal signals like this is not okay. This doesn't feel good, are things that you've had to override.

And you might have just picked that up. You might have absorbed that into your nervous system, right? I'm just gonna work hard. I'm gonna compensate. I'm going to work harder than everyone else. I'm gonna push harder. And that pushing past of a no in your body is the thing that depletes your capacity. And so you are in [00:17:00] shutdown.

You are pushing past with stress, energy, and then shut down again and then pushing past, and then in stress, energy, and it's that cycle. If that's your normal, if that's the pattern that you are in, it will deplete your bandwidth. That is burnout. So you lacking energy doesn't get solved or you wanting more energy doesn't happen if you are still oriented to managing the cost of contorting and work.

Your work in the world is the linchpin, right? It's the core piece of where does your energy go. And there is a misplaced logic I see, which is I can only work on my dreams for my work, right? I can only work on my dreams when I have more energy, when I have a bigger capacity, when in [00:18:00] fact it's the other way round.

When you claim what you actually want, when you claim your dreams, your desires, and you orient to that. Is when you start to work on having the energy and being ready and creating the belief. This is the orientation of Flair House. It starts with a desire. It means realizing that you get to decide that you are worthy of going for that.

Even if circumstantially right now you dunno how, or you don't have energy yet, but it does mean you being willing to question the structures that are creating that circumstance for you. And not everyone is up for that. Not everyone is up for imagining and believing that you are chosen. Most fulfilling, most satisfying work could also be the thing that is generative for you in terms [00:19:00] of economically, energetically, relationally resourcing for you.

You have to see, therefore the value in your dream beyond you. You have to be connected and resourced by that, by what does it mean if you are doing that in the world? And you have to face and confront how much energy gets wasted when you don't, and when you actually value what you actually value with your actions, with your choices, with the structures of your life around what's life sustaining for you when you align with that, when your choices are congruent with your truth, with your desires.

That is when your belief about what you can do in this life, your ability to be in the skills building required and the identity that you can become, someone who can move reality in that way starts to become more possible. [00:20:00] And this is a skillset, right? This is transforming your internal systems and your external systems at the same time.

And it's not a giant leap. It's lots and lots of tweaks. Sometimes it's a giant leap. Sometimes those I'm working with come at the point of readiness to make that leap. But this is a skillset, and when you have that skillset, it changes everything, right? It changes your energy, your capacity, your belief, and who you think you are and what life is like.

And it doesn't mean you don't have bad days, right? It doesn't mean that you never get overwhelmed. It doesn't mean that you never find yourself in free state or bracing against your own dreams. It doesn't mean that you aren't still having to sometimes function in ways that are pleasing a system. But it does mean that you know that that's what's happening.

It means that you know what the work is that will take you out of states that you don't wanna be in. It [00:21:00] means that you know how to get through more difficult days. It means that you are able to take on and face challenges, not just the ones that are the problems that. Come to us just through being alive, but also the ones that your dreams, your desires represent those challenges as well.

You have the capacity to turn towards them facing the wind and say, bring it on. You also have the capacity to. Be in the hard parts, be in the disappointment, the frustration, the inevitable failures along the way, and not have them be something that trips you up for weeks and months, but something that you know how to move through something that is a signal and a sign that you are doing things and that you are on track.

It means that you are able to experience feedback, rejection, people saying no, people not wanting what you have to offer or bring, [00:22:00] and the resilience to take that as it is, not as something that you need to recoil away from in shame, but rather that it's just information. And it also works in the other direction, right?

It's also the good stuff of life. Having the capacity, the bandwidth to be with the success, to be with things, working to be with setting your sights higher, and actually changing and shifting your reality above and beyond what it's supposed to be or what you thought was possible. Being in the discomfort of that and staying there to make it your new normal.

And so it's being someone who can keep moving and therefore who keeps evolving. You might fall off, but you get back up and that movement builds more belief. It changes your relationship to your future. It means that you can set your sights higher for what you want, right? It changes [00:23:00] the way that you plan and that you dream.

It changes the degree to which you're able to access the state of creativity, of self-worth, of being able to just contribute to build the value of your work, and you aren't so focused on what you need or have to get from this particular person or this particular thing going well. And this is also you growing the capacity for your own.

Voice for making choices that other people don't like for feeling grounded and secure your responses to other people and to problems that pop up. Feel more intentional, more congruent, less reactive, and you aren't punishing yourself to get things done or using deadline drama. So there's a level of being boundaried and secure in holding high standards.

And deciding the value of what you're doing, deciding the value of the way that you do things, and not [00:24:00] bending and shaping and contorting when other people can't see that or don't appreciate that, but having instead the discernment to say, you are just not my person. This is not my structure. This is not my opportunity.

And moving on, knowing that you have the energy to create more. So you want more energy. You've got to get on board with what you actually want in life with your dreams and with how much changes when you make the tweaks and structurally shift things in your life to make that more possible. Even from a place of it feeling impossible, you dunno how to do it.

You've never done it before. People might judge you. Uh, it might look strange. It doesn't fit with how people think of you, right? All of that also comes into capacity. And one of the most resourcing things, one of the most energizing, helpful things for you in this work is having someone [00:25:00] who can see you in your desires, who can affirm you, reflect back to you a higher belief than you have.

There have been groups I've been part of that I'm still part of, that are affirmative to the parts of me that are in that desire, right, that are going for things, and that is deeply resourcing to the parts of me that are growing into the version of me that's done it. The experience that some of you have, which is the experience of chronic illness or having a condition, that means that you do have to manage your energy closely.

It is a massive consideration. It means that you have to set the bar really high, right, for what you engage with. It has to be something that also gives back to you. And I also want to say that you seeing the value in that. Is also part of this, you also recognizing the creativity that you have [00:26:00] to bring in order to hold those higher standards and those higher boundaries, but also like this idea that you are in deficit.

Doesn't recognize the ways in which, so, so many people don't want to be reminded, right, of their mortality. And so if you are someone who is sick, who is chronically ill, that is also part of what you bring. And if you can get to a point where you see the value in that. Where you recognize how that draws different structures out of people and things around you, that there is a life experience and insight, things that you are connected with and that you know.

That not everyone faces and knows, and that that is part of the value you bring, not something that makes you less valuable. And so you building your work, you offering value is not just about your productivity and how much energy you have to go and make things happen and [00:27:00] create things, but it's also what is the value in who you are and what you bring.

And how does you protecting and stewarding that change the way that you need to relate to things? And that doesn't mean that there aren't aspects of it that is just hard and is just unfair, or is just things that you wouldn't want to be happening. Right. You are likely interacting with healthcare systems, relationship dynamics, the demand to produce humans or tax for the government, the ways in which you are likely more dependent on people seeing the value of supporting you.

But this doesn't mean that you are outside of this conversation. It also might mean that the way that I'm describing that might not quite fit for you, right? So take from this what's useful. Take the parts that are feeling good and relevant to [00:28:00] you. Leave the rest. So that is energy capacity, the cost of contorting.

In the next episode, I'm going to speak to building skills on your way and how that interacts with capacity and [00:29:00] [00:30:00] [00:31:00] belief.

 

 

 

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