Today I am up against a familiar feeling of frustration that grows frantic with grasping for an answer, and is unwilling to trust in the awareness that there just isn’t one in the way I am thinking. In the past, these moments have felt debilitating. They have rocked me into a state of denial, inaction, and ultimately retreat. This is not the kind of regenerative retreat where I am able to renew my feeling of connection to the world and find healing in my heart and body. It’s the kind of retreat when the zombies are coming at me 7 deep and I run screaming for the hills.

I am so grateful for my lizard brain that makes decisions so clearly. It is a pure surge of unadulterated unmitigated choice. Choosing fight or flight has a purity and a simplicity that comes from its most primal and purely biochemical roots and memories.

But right now nothing is trying to eat me, and no one is trying to kill me. So opting to pull the emergency handle is way too extreme and frankly a bit melodramatic. But that’s the point. If I am unwilling to let go of my need to make sense of what is going on, then being theatrical is the only way that I can make sense of things. It’s here that a beautiful question has arisen.

What if I stop making sense?

In the face of confusing and frustrating circumstances, what if I engage the world using different resources? Making sense is another way of saying, “taking control”. As I sit and cultivate the robustness of my own emergent vulnerabilities and direct them toward my developing practice, I am learning that control is an illusion. Shaping my response to the world based on how much sense I can make of it, is kind of like building a house of cards on a foundation of dried leaves. At the very best it is highly fragile and flammable, and really it just doesn’t work.

As I strengthen my voice with the tonal qualities of an embodied emotional awareness, I deepen my capacity to experience the feelings of others and not grow frustrated or frantic in needing to understand them. I ask for help that matters, and can listen for invitations.

Instead of being concerned with what it all means, it’s time to pay attention to how I feel, as well as how those around me are feeling, in a new way. When I can share from emotion and not expectation, and can listen with curiosity and not reactivity, then I can sit more comfortably in things that may appear contradictory. I can build solidarity, and I can break down distrust.

There is so much distrust in the world. There is so much inertia moving our relationships away from uniting and down the slippery slope of skepticism and divisiveness. I believe that it is our need to make sense of things that drives wedges between us.

How can I support myself in a practice to “stop making sense”? How does that practice reinforce personal boundaries while creating greater collective opportunities?