Agile Warrior

My human friend Seven and I were in the desert, far from our homes, away from friends, jobs and lip balm. We got along just fine without all of those things except the last one. Soon our dry lips were talking about letting our sources of strength come from within us versus from the external world. Sourcing our own power opens us up to shift from one group to another, travel to different locations, slide from one style to another, move from one community or belief system to another and always – always – feel tethered to something real and unchanging. Oh man, Seven is so self actualized she chose the name Seven. Not to stand out (her birth name is Rex) but because it’s her choice. I’m thinking now of this line: What they call you is one thing; what you answer to is something else. The external world is in constant flux. And we can either get tangled up in all those changes or we can be steadfast no matter what come round.

When we place our own power outside of ourselves – we end up more chained to something in the external world than supported by it. It could be a person, community, or contextual identity. If we define ourselves by our badass jobs then find ourselves with a group of people who never talk about work, in that moment we can feel almost ethereal, fragile, ghostly. What are we, who are we? Lost.

Seven and I felt lost so we gave each other a pep talk about how if we were tethered to an internal set of resources and skills rather than any particular social group, religion, look, lover or job then we could move with strength through myriad settings. We would be agile warriors.

This metaphor about agility and movement pairs nicely with one about heavy armor and boundaries. Agility and movement come when we develop an internal skillset that travels with us everywhere we go AND it is interconnected with the boundaries we bring with us everywhere we go. To move freely, we don’t want to be tied restrictively to anything in the external world AND we want to check out the internal habits we bring with us that might be too heavy.

Imagine a warrior who puts on a huge suit of armor to protect herself. She becomes like a jousting knight that can do only one thing: she can joust but can’t otherwise move. She can’t walk, run, or even lift herself onto a horse without help. No one can touch her and she can't feel much. In the interest of protecting ourselves we become disconnected from others and removed from our own feelings. We armor up and numb out. We have all been there.

So how do we get free? We set the intention to create boundaries that are more about movement and noticing -- dynamic boundaries. When we have this super power, we can move while simultaneously letting certain things in and keeping others out. There’s a skillset and a nuance in and around what we decide to let in, let pass, and gently block. Setting boundaries in real time so we can embolden that agility to go anywhere and stay strong and nourished.

Seven named this metaphor three years later after that pep talk. Back home in New York, I was having a hard time and she looked at me and said “Let me tell you the story of the ‘agile warrior’ she brought me back to myself. Ever since then we have this little banter and we say,

“Are you being an agile warrior right now, or are you being numbed out and removed, what are you tethered to? Tether to yourself!”

Chances are, if you cook banana walnut pancakes for thirty mostly random people, something interesting is bound to happen. On the morning I’m talking about Seven and I were again in the desert, hanging out with friends, being luxurious, being generous with one another, making coffee for each other, pouring cold syrup on each others’ plates, having the most magnanimous, magnificent time because, well, pancakes in the desert is a most magical treat. In and amongst the chatter and conversation someone mentioned an installation and poem I was currently showing when a stranger named Joy interjected to ask if I knew the poem by heart. When I said yes, she asked if I would share it. All my friends started echoing the request so I stood up on the table and performed it (with all the loudness and enthusiasm of someone who had been performing slam poetry in Manhattan’s bars and black box theaters for seven years) some people – quite a few, actually – started to cry. The poem was about moms and mothers – wanting them and missing them. Joy was crying, I don’t think she thought her request would leave a lot of the group in a sweet puddle of love and longing and appreciation for our moms, who were mostly gone from this earth or very, very far away. Joy stood up abruptly and addressed the core group: “Does anybody want a miracle?”

I took a second look at her and noticed she had Maori tattoos all over her skin and was wearing an impressive amount of seemingly ancient jade necklaces. It turns out that Joy was shaman (yeah, who woulda guessed?) – a real-deal shaman. She looked thirty-five but was about fifty, soft blue eyes, smile wrinkles around those eyes, sun-browned skin. Thirty years a shaman. Joy saw us providing this experience to her as a genuine gift: food, shelter and a poem, and it was her practice to return a gift with her gift . She approached us one at a time and did something with each of us. I watched my friend JC break down in her arms, I watched Lina kind of star gaze into her eyes then start welling up, I watched Seven smile and coo with tears; she and Joy were singing something softly to each other.

Ummmm I was kinda terrified. I thought, “Who is this woman, what is happening, and why is she making everyone cry?” Then she turned her face to mine and started pounding on my chest with her fingertips. Shaking from the impact, trying to not fall over, I said to myself,

“What is this? What is happening? Why is this happening? I don’t understand, I made you pancakes.”

Joy braced my back with one spread hand to keep me from falling and with the other hand she was boom…boom… booming, banging below my collarbones banging into my upper rib cage.

And then Joy told me,

“You have brick walls around your heart.” She put her forehead to my forehead and went on saying “you…have…brick walls…around…your…heart.” She was beating all around now and then she quietly whispered in my ear, “Your job now is to throw those bricks out, one by one.” She made the motion of pulling something out of my chest and throwing it over my shoulder and she held me in her arms and said, again and again, “one by one.”

This set me on a path of trying to understand the ways that I had put up huge heavy boundaries around my heart. I started practicing a meditation every day in which I imagined pulling a brick out of my chest and throwing it into Pyramid Lake, a big, beautiful lake near that desert. I'd say,

“I built this brick wall to protect myself, and I love myself for doing that.”

We don't want to be mad at ourselves for the boundaries that we put up to protect ourselves. We do want to realize that when we built them this was a way that we loved ourselves AND these walls are now not letting anyone in.

Appreciate the fact that we successfully wall out the person/s who hurt us, AND realize there is a more deft way to protect ourselves. A great trauma therapist once told me, “When you go through the big hurts, everything becomes black or white. It’s either yes or no. We make binary decisions, we go partially colorblind and cannot see any colors, not even grey.”

When I was four years old, I was bitten by a big dog at a beach. From then on, I never wanted to go to the beach… any beach. So that’s in a kid, but how does trauma echo in an adult? Well, in a strikingly similar way. We are mostly toddlers when it comes to our emotions. If we're intimate with someone who bails on us or is cruel then we say “I’m never getting close to anyone ever again… anyone.” We can hold that space for months, sometimes for years, sometimes for years and years.

Or you go on dating apps and meet someone. They seem cool but they show up looking totally different than their photos and you end up feeling really hurt by that, betrayed. You go, “Online dating is a disaster, people are liars, all the apps are useless.” Anytime we’re blocking out a whole genre, we’re building a brick wall around our hearts saying, “I’m not going to let that hurt in again.” This happens with the big hurts.

When the big hurts are remembered our brains are likely not integrating that memory as something that happened in the past. We feel we are in real life in danger right now. We free associate colors, smells, images, sensation in a dreamlike way with the original hard experience. And we are often tossed right into fight or flight.

If we are not in mortal danger, let's try something more skillful, something more nuanced, let's see the grays, and navigate the tricky amazing path.

We want to be able to sift things delicately to say “I want to let that in, but I don’t want to let this other thing in, they look similar but they are not the same.” The moment right after you freeze up, get angry, or run, you can then be agile and start discerning the grey. Once you see the grey path through you backtrack.

Your heard me right: I said backtrack, go for it, do it. Run away… then run right back.

If your heart reflexively jumps behind the big brick wall imagine it jumping right back out again and saying "Tada!" If you look down and see that you have reflexively strapped yourself into a rusty ole metal chest plate. Check for danger and then, fucking rip that sucker off. Give a little war cry if you need to, pound your chest, run all around. Move, darling, move!

You have to go back and forth a bit to create new nuanced boundary. You will find the brilliant grey path forward like phoenix from the fire.

Okay it likely won’t feel like that the first time… you might feel like a bit of a rookie, like you are in new territory, vulnerable and fledgling, that feeling means you are agile and alive.

What does this brand of agility look like? It’s a person-specific or situation-specific boundary.

This person stood me up so I don’t make plans with them in the future. If I run into them and we have a great time, awesome. However, because they stood me up three times and left me waiting somewhere for a long time and that was a terrible feeling, I don’t make plans with this particular person. It’s a more person-specific boundary than “I don’t make plans with anybody because people are all flake.” If my ex-girlfriend chases me across four lanes of traffic wearing a bridesmaid’s dress and screaming at me like a hurricane, hey ok, I am definitely not going to tell her where I'm going.

These things are instinctual. My boundary for this person is this, and my boundary for this type of situation is that. You’re going to know right away, there’s only a couple re-emerging people or patterns in your life that are affecting you in an adverse way at any one time, just say, “This is what I’m working on right now with this person or this relationship pattern, or this habitual behavior.”

You’re going to take the big self-limiting boundary down, little by little, AND at the exact same time you’re going to replace it with specific boundaries for specific situations and specific people. You’re going to squint your eyes and try to see the grey. Ask yourself if there’s a way to move through this safely vs. running, fighting, or numbing.

I used to have explosive arguments with my father. This went on for about ten years, which is long enough. I noticed he would yell then I would yell, and we’d just go crazy on each other, red-faced, veins popping out, hands flailing, angry tears, lots of words. This went so far, it was terrifying to me as a child.

Once I got a little older and could leave, I stopped seeing him all together; that’s a big boundary and it served me for years. Then I set a new boundary. This very specific-nuanced boundary, I will never yell, he will never hear me yell, never again. Now all of a sudden I would see him and he would yell but I didn’t yell back and the dynamic totally changed. So this is an example of an agile boundary that is specific to a specific person, and a specific situation and actually a specific language style.

With him, this worked. He would get deflated because I didn’t engage. For this specific person, my dad, this works. How do I know it’s working? Because I feel safe.

I trust you to figure out. Remember you can backtrack if it doesn’t work.

Now let’s not go too far and say that yelling is never good, sometimes it’s self-defense. We always want to care for and protect ourselves, and sometimes that means yelling in someone’s face.

A flag is when we have thought patterns that have been running in the same loop for years. Three years ago we put up a boundary and it has kept us atrophied for awhile so our stimulation around that topic is almost non existent so nothing has changed. Like when Valentine’s Day rolls around and we’re still upset about that card that we received three years ago from that human who loved us really, really well till they broke up with us in a text message. Time to move, let's take down the boundary that has stopped us from enjoying valentines day and allow some new experiences in.

We can go slow, as slow as a snail.

There is a genius in what Joy said to me, she said brick by brick. Ask yourself, “Is there space for movement now or do I need to heal more? Do I need time to rest here first?”

Snails can be phoenixes too. The Snail Phoenix is actually an ancient spirit guide in the Maori tradition. (lying I am lying - but I do really want a pet snail phoenix)

Try to get very specific for instance:

“To this person, I open my mind but to this person, I do not. In this situation I open my heart, and in another awesome situation I open my body. AND in this super amazing cushy lovely dovey situation I open my mind body and heart.”

This is what we’re really grooving towards: moments where we can be open for business in all regards because we’re safe and we are not wearing habituated irrelevant tired armor that we put on because of old experiences. We’re able to move ourselves out of negative situations and step into new nourishing environments.

We can’t actually get to new, amazing places with the heavy boundaries and creaky armor because let’s be honest, we can barely move.

Here is an example of a boundary that includes a lot of movement and laughter. I remember being on a dance floor at a big happy spacious party and this huge guy total stranger, got in my space, all crotch jabbing me, he put his arms out to kind of contain me. I just ducked under his left arm and sprinted about fifty feet to the right, sprinting to the beat of the music mind you, and laughing the whole way, it was my new dance move. I vanished. One minute I was there, the next I was gone from his sight. With about seventy people between him and me, I got back into my groove. My boundary: Strangers can’t put their crotches on me. In this specific situation, I could move fifty feet to the right. My 18-year-old friend was there watching. She jumped into my dancing space, having seen that sprint and we both just busted out laughing. I said, “That’s why you wear sneakers to a dance party.”

These are the themes of lighter boundaries:

1) movement

2) safety

3) specificity

4) newness

Visualize boundaries that have these characteristics. I imagine thin translucent gossamer nets that sparkle and surround me, they are as strong as titanium, they sift and protect. When I don’t need them I tug on them gently -- they come down silently gracefully.

Trust your capacity to create boundaries that are more nuanced and more interesting that allow you to to get into similar, but not the same, situations and enjoy them.

Set the intention to move towards agility and flexibility.

Little by little you will start to trust yourself to know when to lightly say, “Nope.” And you’re going to move and discover new nourishing situations and say, “Yep!”

#insightdrop

here is a video about the same content

Edited by Sarah Norris & Nathan Boone