Five Ideas I’d Like to Hold on to From 2023
On Thursday, I’m going to be co-facilitating a live online workshop that will use holotropic-style breathing to help us release our baggage from 2023. But before letting it all go, I want to reflect real quick on what I’d like to hang on to.
A lot of really wonderful things happened in my life in 2023, so there’s much to be grateful for and much to nurture in 2024. But more specifically, I want to reflect on the ideas that arose from my work with clients, groups, and projects in 2023—and whittle them down to the five big ones I want to intentionally bring into 2024.
I’ll list these ideas in reverse order, just to keep with the end-of-year-list vibes. I’d love to hear if any of these resonate for you!
#5 - Goal-setting is bullish#$% (if you want to create something new)
In this newsletter from January 26, 2023, I wrote about the work of Kenneth Stanley, a computer science professor who demonstrated that following one’s curiosity and using what one finds as stepping stones to something else new and interesting is the way to really innovate. Goals are for well-known things that have already been achieved (like losing weight or running a marathon).
I love this idea of prioritizing free-flowing curiosity over rigorous goal-setting, because I’ve come to believe that curiosity has a spiritual dimension to it. No one chooses what they are curious about. Their curiosity emerges or comes to them from some mysterious inner source. Tap into that, and you’re in touch with something much bigger than your practical, worried, obsessive parts of your mind.
#4 - You can’t think your way to healing
In this newsletter from June 1, I wrote about those of us who have hyper-analytical parts who want to think our way to healing. These parts believe if they can just figure out why, grasp the correct analysis, and re-frame their situation, then they can heal.
The problem with this approach (which I know all too well because of my own hyper-analytical parts) is that it’s just parts trying to heal other parts inside. From the IFS perspective, healing is experiential, and comes from building a relationship between a part and capital S-Self.
I tell clients all the time: IFS isn’t an analytical practice, it’s a relationship practice. We’re just building relationships between your capital-S Self and all your parts. And the relationship is where the healing happens.
#3 - Self-compassion is impossible (until you discover your capital-S Self)
In this newsletter from February 16, I talked about how I never really understood self-compassion until I discovered Internal Family Systems. Despite all of the mindfulness and meditation trainings I’d been to that featured self-compassion, I just never got it. Who is supposed to be compassionate to whom?
In discovering IFS, I learned that:
Self-compassion requires coming into contact with your capital-S-Self. It can’t happen any other way. We can try to make parts of us be nicer to other parts of us, but it’s always going to be tentative and dependent on external factors being just right (like when family, work, friends, health, etc. are all perfect, it’s a lot easier to feel nice inside).
The type of self-compassion that comes from your capital-S-Self isn’t dependent on anything else. It’s always there, always has been, and always will be. All you need is to learn how to slow down, listen to, witness, and be with your parts so they feel safe enough to relax back and let your Self shine through. And when that happens, the compassion simply flows.
As I’ve built other IFS programs this past year, self-compassion remains the number one outcome I’m aiming for. It’s absolutely transformative for parts of us to feel––and I mean really feel––compassion coming from the deepest part of us.
The catch is that this almost always requires at least a little 1:1 IFS coaching because so many parts of us are fighting each other, and in the process end up blocking the compassion coming from our Self. If this sounds familiar, I encourage you to find an IFS practitioner (me included!) to help guide you inside to the capital-S Self, the only real source of self-compassion.
#2 - Psychedelics probably won’t “heal” you but they can definitely be a major catalyst in your healing
As I’ve written about several times in 2023, I got the chance to build and grow a psychedelic-assisted, IFS-based program called Root Work. I was just talking with a colleague a few days ago about how in 2015, years before we knew each other, on opposite sides of the country, we both read Michael Pollan’s New Yorker article on new clinical psychedelic research, and we both thought: I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I’m going to be working in this space some day. And here we are.
What I’ve learned over the past year is that psychedelics blend beautifully with Internal Family Systems practices to create more space inside for profound self-awareness, deep self-compassion, and whole new avenues for self-expression.
In this newsletter from September, I wrote about five well-known pharmacological explanations for psychedelics’ potential healing powers. But I added three non-pharmacological explanations that show why psychedelics blend so beautifully with IFS. If you missed that one, I’d love for you to check it out!
#1 - We need post-church spaces in our communities
From March to May this past year, I sent out a series of newsletters outlining my thoughts on “post-church spaces.” I gathered all the newsletter posts, cleaned them up a bit and posted them as one long essay here. I also did a few podcasts on the idea here and here.
Ultimately, we do our healing not simply to relieve our own suffering. Once we reach a certain threshold in our healing, we naturally want to share ourselves in community with others. We want to help, we want to connect, we want to celebrate life together.
But traditional religion is not the avenue available to most of us for reasons I lay out in the essay. What we need has not yet come into being. It’s hard to describe exactly what it is that we need, so I’m left with unsatisfying term, “post-church.”
It remains as obvious and urgent to me today as it did when I started the post-church newsletters back in March. We need diverse and authentic forms of community connection; non-dogmatic, intellectually honest practices of transcendence; and relational, everyday practices for personal growth.
I believe such spaces are emerging in partial form. I can’t wait for fuller post-church spaces to come into being. The exciting thing is that we all get to be a part of writing this story.