I have committed this week to sharing something about Regenera every day.
Throughout the last month, I have felt a near-daily panic about how I can possibly document and share the extraordinary (and ordinary) aspects of what it is like to live life here. The main thing in my way has been my commitment to the unreachable standard of perfection. As a result of this commitment, I have picked apart half-finished pieces, agonized over word choice, and berated myself for my long-winded and over-complicated writing style. This has created results that don’t work for me - I have only shared one piece here, which I started writing way back in January.
My practice this week is to make it really simple. I write, I publish. I unstopper what is inside me, and create space to really enjoy it. To open to the pleasure I have in wandering between academic references, feelings, and stories. To embrace how much I love starting a sentence with an infinitive verb. To get distracted in the middle and come back. To share something that is not finished, “neat,” “meaningful,” well-ordered, or groundbreaking.
Here I go!
Fresh out of the Regenera April intensive, I am sitting with a phrase that has come up over and over again: “the map is not the territory.” After hearing the phrase at least once a week over the last month and a half, I finally looked up where it comes from. In his 1930s’ work Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski posits this as the first of three principles of general semantics, his discipline focused on understanding how language shapes human perception and behavior. The three principles go like this:
The map is not the territory;
No map represents all of its presumed territory; and
Maps are self-reflexive; i.e. we can map our maps indefinitely. Also, every map is at least, whatever else it may claim to map, a map of the map-maker: her/his assumptions, skills, work-view, etc.
So far at Regenera, “the map is not the territory” has been a cautionary tale. We have used it as a warning bell - did someone share or speak with a certainty that precluded there being other options? Did we detect in someone a rigidity that this is the way, or the only way? This phrase has guided my navigation between clarity and humility - can I be both audacious and modest in the importance and impact of my discoveries? How can I and we be trailblazers, sharing the results of our experiments as valuable and meaningful findings, without closing our fists around any attachment to value or impact?
This warning bell rang over and over again in our intensive because we spent quite a lot of it delivering “maps.” Distinct from the standard English-definition of a map (n.: a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features), these are conceptual maps intended to make visible, comprehensible, and workable one interpretation of an inner, relational, or systemic experience or process.
Personal Maps: A Map For The Map-Maker
As I write this, I’m turned on by the idea of creating personal maps as a way to make visible to other people what happens inside of me, or to chart a new path forward if I want different results.
A somewhat spontaneous version of what a map like this could look like:
I noticed yesterday during a check in with another Regenera collaborator that, when he showed signs of being tired or wanting to rest (we were, after all, reclining), that I immediately stopped sharing what was happening for me. After some gently guided inquiry, I discovered that the following process was happening in me:
I am sharing something about myself --> I notice that the other person is tired/distracted/for some reason not fully present with me --> I feel scared because my story is that this person will resent me for disrupting their rest --> I stop sharing.
In mapping this out, or making it visible to myself and someone else, I was able to see a key assumption that was controlling this process: my belief that, when someone else is tired, they don’t want to or can’t continue to be with me. This assumption was based on prior experiences that I was continuing to bring forward with me and re-create by including it as a step in my “map.”
My companion offered me a new option for how this could go - he shared that he deeply values the open and exploratory quality that tiredness can bring to conversation, and that he would communicate to me if he no longer wanted to, or wasn’t able to, be with me as I shared. As I continue to integrate and heal the part of me that believes that the above map is “true,” I am trying out a new map:
I am sharing something about myself --> I notice that the other person is tired/distracted/not fully present with me --> I pause and share what is coming up for me --> I check if the other person is available for me to continue sharing --> If yes, I continue sharing --> If no, I negotiate around what I need (either to come back to what I am sharing at a later point, or to find someone else who is available to support me more immediately).
This process of individual mapping, while witnessed by another, opens up more options for me in the future - in this case, more options for connection with others by revealing myself. This is also a very explicit, targeted version of “the map is a map of the map-maker.”
Trail Maps
But coming back from that digression - in this type of “personal” mapping, I am being deliberate to specify that this is a map of how it goes in me, for me. During this intensive, however, I received feedback that, sometimes when I was presenting a map, or sharing more generally, my words landed with a certainty that, in their experience, did not allow for disagreement or other options. My first reaction to this feedback was some level of defensiveness - I want to trust that everyone around me holds their own autonomy such that my unconscious certainty cannot unseat their beingness. I want those around me to hear, “this is my experience,” “this is one option,” or “this is something to try,” implicit in everything I share, because my reality is that I am one human being in the infinite sea of humanity.
And yet, while I can want this to be true, and I can support myself and others in our practices of sovereignty such that this becomes a possibility, this was not what was happening. Thanks to me standing up in front of the room at a board (school conditioning), me and the other members of the “core” Regenera team delivering the intensive (rather than the emergent, leader-full space we had cultivated in the intensive days in March), and my own level of assertiveness and precision in how I speak, my map delivery landed as trying to control the territory.
An example of this feedback came up when some of the core team was sharing a “Map of Withholds” (more to come on that later this week), which outlines a step-by-step process of how to share something I’ve held back from someone in order to restore clarity and closeness to our connection. One of the Regenera members stopped us, and shared that he felt scared that this map would actually keep him from sharing withholds, because he would be too scared about not going through the process perfectly. He shared that he often found himself aware that he was withholding something, but wouldn’t know what it was until he had entered into a space of discovery (untethered to the Withholds Map’s process) with the other person about what was coming up.
The new definition I am trying on for “maps,” in response to this vulnerable share, is a trail map. Any map that I share is of a trail that I myself have walked from one point to another. From the point of wanting something (intimacy, connection, clarity) to the point of having created it. I will be audacious in stating that this map has worked (or not!) for me, and that I want to make a generous offer to others who may want to try the pathway. I will be humble in saying that I will very rarely (if ever) be the first person to have walked this trail, nor make an assumption that this map will work for anyone outside of me. And ultimately, I will return to the third principle, that no matter what topic or process a map explores, it is at its core a map of me, a way in which I reveal what I value, and my interpretation of how I experience the world.