Life in Color
The gifts of feeling my feelings
This is adapted from a post that I started one year ago and then put down because I was too afraid to share it. I’ve since edited it a ton1, but the same bones are there.
I’m writing this sentence on the morning of Sleepawake’s second NYC Intermediate Friendship2 workshop, which feels like an appropriate time to be telling this story. About two years ago, I went to that same workshop with my new housemates. As I walked through the doors, I had a sense this would be an adventure, but I didn’t know what was going to happen. I had heard great things from some friends, but at that point I was thinking I would mostly learn to just become better at communicating. In many ways, the path of my life these past years has felt like I’ve been walking through a series of doors that feel connected. I’ve written before about my relationship to pronoia, and my connection to Sleepawake feels very representative of that.
Who am I? Part Three
"One of my favorite concepts is pronoia, or the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing that the world is conspiring against me, I love to believe that instead everything is out there for my own benefit, and I can turn a curious eye to every opportunity to find those positives."
Many of the folks reading this have already heard me rant and rave about my transformative experience and how everything is different now. That’s not the point of this post — I’ll try to avoid being too culty here, and my stance about emotional work is different than it was a few years ago. I’m in what I call my “open palm era”, meaning everything I’m sharing is intended to be seen upon an open palm — without any pushiness. I should say early though that I now work for Sleepawake, which makes me an obviously biased narrator. This is not me trying to convince you to come to Sleepawake, but instead I’m sharing some of the gifts I’ve received and reflecting on how life has looked since.
Before going on the 30 day retreat (I generally refer to it as “camp”), I looked positively at my life. I saw myself as living a life that was going well. I was happy with the friends I had3 and happy with the opportunities I was finding. Part of me had some uncertainty about going, wondering if this wasn’t for me. In fact, my parents echoed these hesitations — they posited that it seemed more for people who “needed help” or who “had bad childhoods”. But still, something pulled me towards an experience that was offered to be an expansion of my horizons.
In the first few days of camp, we set intentions for our time, and mine was to Be Beautifully Human. An important point of this intention is that I was working towards becoming more full rather than becoming better. This distinction reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Adi4 more than five years ago. We were disagreeing on trajectories of life — I had asserted that my hope was for the aperture of life to get smaller as family and financial stability began to be the focus, while Adi’s hope was for life to get fuller and more expansive over time. These days, I can’t say I feel fully one way or the other, but I’ve certainly been embracing expansion for a few years, and I don’t see myself stopping any time soon.
A metaphor I use these days is that through the time I was at Sleepawake and since then, I have started to see more color in the everyday. I wasn’t working with just black and white anymore. At camp, I confronted my anger, grief, and fear. I had the chance to uncover suppressed desires and get in touch with the depths of my inner love and shame. Eventually, it felt like I was hiding less from myself and others. And now, life feels more vibrant with higher highs and lower lows, while also building a stronger sense of resilience.
Of course, this has not come easily. I consistently found myself facing challenges that felt new and uncharted. It felt like I was constantly walking up to cliff edges and jumping off. At camp, this came in the form of being invited to let out my inner rage during an exercise, which initially felt terrifying. I had spent all of my life thinking I just wasn’t an angry person, but all it took was one beautiful demo for me to feel in my body what had never been allowed before. Later in the month, I got in touch with terror I didn’t know existed, being asked to journal about what scared me. I wrote about bees5 for a bit, before noticing some suppressed parts of me calling out. Thirty minutes later, I was sobbing in my friends’ arms about being afraid everyone I knew would betray me.
During and after camp, I would find new bold colors that hadn’t fully been in my landscape before. Red anger, green envy, and blue grief joined my palette. At camp, I learned to notice the sensations in my body that were telling me when I was hiding from scary feelings. This showed up in many places at home, including when I would feel like I was hiding desires in relationships with others. Now, when I would hold back a hard conversation, I could actually feel that my body didn’t like that. And so, I started to do more scary things. I said the hard things in relationships6 that were holding me back from connection with myself and others. And I started to do big scary things in my community.
I began identifying as a community builder, and putting in a lot of work cultivating a community that I was excited about. Before I was able to do that though, I had to realize that I was feeling lonely when I came back home. I came back to NYC after Sleepawake and there were only two other alumni across the city. Despite being surrounded by people, I realized that not all of them felt like the right ones I wanted to build a life with. In particular, I felt like I had just learned that there was a new way I wanted to move through the world, and nobody around me was moving in that way! So I realized that I either needed the people around me to start moving that way, or find new people!
It didn’t take long to realize that I couldn’t just “get” the people around me to be the way I wanted them to7. Even when I was warned at the end of camp that I would try to do this and fail, my hubris got in the way. I thought that I could convince my friends that they were feeling their feelings wrong and they only had to listen to me and my newfound wisdom. The part of me that felt superior bore its ugly face, and my community did not like that. I made lots of mistakes in the weeks and months that followed my time at camp. As I was learning to use more colors in my expression of life, I found that sometimes I would use the wrong ones. My painting would get messy, and it’s easier to notice mistakes when you’re using bold colors. As I learned though, that was part of the process. After all, you don’t learn to ride a bike without falling! And boy did I fall…
I had an extreme relational rupture with my parents after some miscommunication led to some ugly spiraling. I remember feeling incredibly defeated. Each new mistake made me feel more distraught, believing that I was rupturing something that couldn’t be repaired. But each time, I would get back on the bike and learn that I was just getting stronger8. Eventually, I would learn to not make the same mistakes. And then I would still make them! My favorite poem these days that I first heard at Sleepawake tells a story of falling into sidewalk holes time after time. There’s a shift when you fall into a hole that you’ve fallen in before multiple times and realize that eventually, it’s your fault and you can just jump right out! I have fallen in many sidewalk holes, and each one has taught me so much.
For much of my life, I had thought that I wasn’t supposed to make mistakes. Or at least I had told myself that if I set up my life in a specific way with the right job, right friends, and right partner, I would be immune to making mistakes that cost me too much. But paradoxically, this came with its own cost. I had created such a rigid structure that precluded me from being able to let in softness and wonder. I was never trying things that were hard enough that I could fail. What I learned was that I had to fall apart to come together stronger, and I was finally beginning to be able to do that through this idea of falling forward — making mistakes and jumping right back in.
Over time, I started to get the hang of things. I was showing up better in my community and able to actually share the gifts of my learnings in a way that felt more open-palmed. I learned to be more of a Buddha and not a Buddhist9, and I realized how it started to work much better. I was still making mistakes, but rolling with the punches more. I started hosting regular spaces for my community to do emotional work together. I put in a lot of time and energy into fostering a feeling of safety among the people I love, and I was able to see the fruits of the labor. As I let myself be more of me, asking for what I really wanted and saying no to others even when there were consequences, I saw others do the same. I was inspiring others, and feeling inspired by the bold people around me. The colorful pictures we were all painting together led to more and more beauty. Everything felt connected.
A year after my time at camp, I really felt like I was embodying the values of Sleepawake. I was still going around singing its praises and sharing my experience with anyone who would ask10. I would call Ellie, my friend and Sleepawake’s Executive Director, daydreaming about what was next for the organization. And then, at the beginning of a pronoid series of events, Ellie listed a job posting. Days before she was coincidentally visiting New York, she expressed that the team was looking for a new Operations Manager. I texted her that I wanted that job and was applying immediately.
After many weeks of interviewing, completing a (unsurprisingly to me) fun hiring test, and talking to the team, I eventually received an acceptance on the night of my 28th birthday party. This felt like a perfect gift that was coming full circle, knowing that I finished Sleepawake the year before on the day of my 27th birthday11. I was met with many congratulations from my loved ones, including a joke(?) from Cormac telling me that I’d never beat the cult allegations now. This felt like a dream job that I didn’t know existed until a few weeks before. It worked perfectly with my schedule, I would get to go on every retreat, and I would get to formally give back to this organization that I felt like I was already a mascot for.
In the eight months since then, I’ve loved this job. I’ve run operations for countless calls, several online workshops, three full retreats, and now a workshop in my home city. Each day, I get to come to work with brilliant colleagues who I learn from on an intellectual and emotional level. I can cry at work without being the weird one! And it hasn’t been easy, especially in a space where it’s much harder to hide from the hard feelings. I’ve had to do the hard emotional work within the organization, even while navigating the work I’m being paid for. But as I’ve heard my colleagues say, “that is the work.” I have so much love for what I am doing here, and I’m just getting started.
P.S. As a slight easter egg, I’ve set up this post such that each of the four sections broadly map to the four principles that guide every Sleepawake Immersive12.
When I first reread it I cringed a lot — it was bad! And that makes me wonder if I’ll cringe next year at the one I post today.
But this time, I’m in charge of the ops!
A few months ago I had started to really feel like a part of a community for the first time, having moved in with friends — hi Corm, Mel, & Exa!
Adi, a friend of over 15 years, has brought many gifts to my life, including Sleepawake.
Yeah at that point I thought I was really only afraid of bees…
I call this “pressing the button”, something I will be writing a post about soon.
But yes, two years later, much of my community has in fact gone to or plans to go to Sleepawake. And perhaps they would have gone earlier if I wasn’t pushing it on them so much when I got back.
In many ways, I feel like good relationships are quite antifragile, meaning they get stronger from repeated strain!
Another favorite Sleepawake quote, suggesting a focus on doing the work instead of just preaching it to others.
Yep, believe it or not I was waiting for people to ask!
I have since referred to that day as my “rebirth day”.
Already perfect, always evolving. Resistance is fertile. Get it wrong. Everything is connected.