Reflections on Writing and Struggle - A Process Snapshot

Public writing is wrapped up in one of my oldest and most persistent psychological tangles. I've been completely unable to publish anything to the internet except under intense outside pressure. The last time I did this was several years ago. Trying to use my methods of introspective psychology to resolve this issue basically didn't work. I could make lots of progress causing shifts of various kinds that seemed like they should be helpful, but the overall pattern always recurred in basically the same form. I found this to be very demoralizing.

The pressure is on again, so I'm getting to experience how things are different now. I've been working on various pieces of writing for my website and finding that it takes basically everything I've got just to stay with the process.

I'm going to go really meta here and describe the process that I've been in of writing this very blog post over the past week and a half. The idea is to give you a sense of what it's like to do inner work in an area of intense struggle. This is something of an experiment, so we'll see how it goes.

I had determined that the next piece that I needed to write was a blog post. I wanted to write about something that was very live for me and somewhat vulnerable so I thought that I would describe an issue I was struggling with that I had started calling "preparationism" - the tendency to get stuck in loops of trying to improve myself or otherwise become better prepared before taking action in the real world. This was cool because I could use it to talk about some of the potential pitfalls of introspective practice. It's easy for any kind of inner work to feed into preparationism and this had been happening to me for many years but I felt like I was in the process of coming out of it...or at least I hoped I was. At the very least I needed to. I could use my experience trying to write over the past few months as a source of examples.

I went through several rounds of drafts over which I started honing in on what I most wanted to say about this topic and how I wanted to present it. While doing this I got to experience my current writing process and notice what felt new and what was working and not working.

I noticed that one of the most important differences was an ongoing shift in how scope changes were occurring. My writing process used to be plagued by scope expansion. Whenever I actually managed to write something, I would quickly notice ways that it could be "improved" by shifting the scope to become more abstract and comprehensive. I would also make new connections and feel like I just had to find ways to include them, or they would change the frame that I was using to think about the area and my old way of expressing it would feel dead and outdated.

There was a real issue here - how could I share my understanding through writing if the process of writing was continually changing the state-of-the-art of my understanding? The cool thing about this issue is that mirrors one of the basic principles of introspection - the act of introspection always changes the mind that is introspecting. I am getting ahead of myself though, because I only realized this toward the very end of the process of writing this post and it would wind up being the key that caused everything to come together.

In the meantime, I was finding myself in a new pattern that was the opposite of my previous pattern - when I ran into difficulties, I would narrow the scope and try to be more concrete and descriptive of my first hand experience. This was happening as I honed in more tightly on figuring out how to actually produce something. It was increasingly obvious that the scope expansions were being driven by a deep fear of exposing myself to the world. Fortunately, I was developing an increasingly powerful desire to expose myself and finally get in contact with the world and this was preventing the fear from completely running the show.

Another key difference was that my introspective process was no longer completely oriented toward changing myself. This shift had occurred very slowly over the past two years, largely as a result of my practice in the Diamond Approach. It used to be that any feelings of inadequacy would quickly lead to me engaging in some introspective process aimed at resolving those feelings. You can see how this would feed into preparationism - it basically *is* preparationism. There were many many pieces holding this pattern in place and it took a long time for me to loosen the death grip that I had on it. This involved running very hard into a variety of walls over and over again, including some cases in which the attempt to solve some problem was the most important single cause perpetuating it. Lots of pain, but valuable lessons.

One of the problems that I couldn't solve by trying to remove its causes was, of course, preparationism itself. Trying to fix preparationism is an example of preparationism. It is trying to improve myself first before acting. Instead, I had to act out the relationship that I wanted to be in with the world before I felt like I was ready. When intense confusion and insecurity came up in the process of writing, I would ask myself if it was possible to continue to act in the presence of those feelings rather than looking for the generators of those feelings and trying to change them. This reinforced a slowly developing sense of steadiness and confidence in myself and strengthened my determination.

Despite these helpful changes, writing was still really hard! I was just barely able to get little pieces of writing out into the world and it always felt like a struggle in surprising ways. It was obvious that I would not be posting anything on the internet if it wasn't for the external pressure.

The next piece had to do with my relationship to struggle itself. I had always hated it. I realized that this was my current edge as I was writing the second draft of this blog post. Something felt different. I used to get more wound up in the face of struggle in a way that I couldn't avoid except by disengaging. Now there was a sense of the gradual settling of reactive patterns even in the presence of struggle. It was clear that the patterns would get stirred up again, but this no longer seemed like a problem. It seemed like part of the process.

Struggle was itself part of a tangle for me. A huge part of my motivation for engaging in inner work used to be the elimination of struggle. "Inner Peace." I took some time to engage in an inquiry process with this new experience of struggle because I was curious. This is how it showed up:

• As the emotional reactivity settles, more of the experience of struggle seems like it is about the actual mechanics of the writing process.

• I don't have a lot of experience writing for an audience, so my process for doing so isn't smooth - it's very choppy and that choppiness is disorienting. I find myself repeatedly thinking that I know how things will go from here only for that sense of knowing to fall away, leaving me unsure about what to do next.

• I recognize this pattern as part of what it's like to be doing something that I'm not very skilled at yet. There is an absence of familiarity and so I often don't know what to do.

• Here my comfort with not-knowing supports my process. This is obviously not a situation that can be changed by dropping out of the activity and trying to fix something. This isn't a bug, it's just part of the territory.

• My process will get smoother and more efficient as I accumulate more experience with writing, but it will probably never be perfectly smooth. That wouldn't even be a good thing to aim at because that would imply that my writing is entirely formulaic.

• Dropping into the unknown repeatedly will always happen whenever you are working at your edge and I expect the writing that is most alive will often come from working there.

This actually felt like a meaningful shift in my relationship to writing. I was planning to just end the post there, but it was only about half finished when some other stuff came up and I got super busy for several days. By the time I was able to come back to it, something had changed. I didn't quite know what it was, but I didn't feel like I could just pick up from where I left off. This was frustrating and threatening because it felt like getting stuck in the old scope-shifting pattern again. I did feel like I was able to sit down and run an inquiry process about that, which seemed better than nothing, so I did so.

As I tuned in to what was going on in my experience, I noticed a powerful flow of energy, like thick, chunky lava pouring out of a cracked sphere of volcanic rock around the center of my heart. It wanted to flow out, meet challenges and engage with opposition. This felt like a continuation of what had begun a few days ago. It was much more robust and energetic and felt like it was happening on its own. This was surprising and also somewhat reassuring.

As I described this ongoing experience, it also become clear that it wanted to be displayed. Specifically, the sense of flow wanted to be displayed. The thing that felt most alive to display with my writing was the natural flow of my process, just as it happens. This resonated with a longing that had formed several months ago for the form of my writing to be a reflection of the process by which it was produced. Other kinds of writing had taken priority since then, but it felt like now was the time to try it out.

I wasn't clear on how this related to my previous plan to finish the blog post, but later that night I realized that there was a way to do both at the same time - I could simply describe how my relationship to struggle and the process of writing this post had unfolded over the past week. This felt far more satisfying than filling out the skeleton of what I had already written. This connected deeply with that longing to display my process more directly.

This new approach felt right and filled me with excitement, but it could easily have just been more avoidance. I didn't actually know, but I trusted my intuition. It had the sense of being a forward movement rather than a sideways or circular movement. I felt more grounded rather than more floaty when I thought about doing it. These are experiential indicators that I've come to trust over time. If it wasn't the answer, it would at least help me to find the answer or teach me a valuable lesson.

It felt like the first step was to get to know where I actually was currently with respect to struggle. I would run an inquiry process from my current state and have the end point of that be the end point of the blog post, then I would work my way through my previous writing sessions and describe how I got there. Simple enough.

The process I ran turned out to be a real banger. I kept going for almost 3 hours straight because I just didn't want to stop, only taking a brief snack break in the middle. I was originally planning to include my process notes in this post, but it wound up being far too long, so I made it into its own companion post that you can read here (I'll probably wind up writing a third post that reflects on some of the general principles that show up in it).

In case you don't want to read through all of that, here is a very compressed summary: My newly emerging sense of wanting to engage in struggle and challenge wound up unifying with compassion, joy and curiosity. There was a suppressed part of me that wanted to dominate and intimidate others in order to have freedom that dissolved, revealing a warrior aspect that displayed grace, power and compassion. These qualities provided further support for the arising of curiosity and determination in the face of challenge.

After this process I felt even more drawn toward challenge than I had previously - there was a sense of being locked on to precisely where the struggle is rather than sliding off and around it like my attention did in the past. I felt further pieces of my plan to perfect myself in isolation falling away. That was obviously impossible.

I also noticed that there had been a kind of wisdom in the "scope expansion" process that I had moved away from. The wisdom was in noticing that there was something dead about the output of my writing process. It had felt artificial and dishonest because it was trying to construct something in a form that had been decided in advance. It was not a reflection of reality. The problem was that I couldn't respond to this recognition appropriately because I was too constrained by my fear of exposure. This led me to go in the opposite direction of what was actually needed. I retreated into abstraction because it felt less vulnerable. What I needed to do instead was lean into concreteness and specificity so as to be more real. Honesty is the only real defense - the defense of no defense.

Ironically, despite the fact that all of these shifts were in the direction of embracing struggle, this post was by far the smoothest writing experience that I've had in over a month. Of course, this isn't really surprising - to embrace struggle is to dissolve it...it just doesn't work if you're trying to make it happen.

There was one more key insight, however - a huge part of why writing this felt so smooth is that the new method of allows for my understanding to be constantly developing in response to the process of writing itself. This is actually the resolution to the problem I flagged near the beginning - how to write about an understanding that keeps changing. The answer wasn't to freeze my understanding into a finished form and then race to publish before it shifts again. It was to let the writing itself unfold in time, the way my introspective process does. This way writing and understanding aren't competing - they develop together. The very thing that used to derail my process (new insights arising mid-draft) becomes something the form can accommodate. I hadn't made this connection until halfway through writing this post, but it felt like I could easily include it without having to rework everything.

This process is still ongoing. As I sat down to write this new version, I noticed that there was an unusually clear sense of not being open to allowing myself to change while I'm in the middle of acting. This is something that's been bugging me for years - whenever I have to take action in the world, it feels like my unfoldment process grinds to a halt. This is another part of what has kept me from more active involvement in things. This new clarity seems like it may allow something here to start to shift.