How to use cognitive dissonance for liberation.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
Several years ago, I was in a ten day intensive in Bel-Air with 25 other participants.
I paid $26,000 for the experience using the last of my 401K.
One of the things intensives are best known for is amplification.
The intensive environment literally turns the volume up on whatever is ready to transmute. For everyone involved.
That's why they call it an INTENSive. :)
Up until this point in my life, I used my information-hungry intellect to find facts. I believed myself to be the gatekeeper of knowledge (though I would've never said that about myself then). I was the queen of saying "Did you know....?" and following that with information I felt others needed in order to be informed; in order to be safe. Safe by my own perception (which, spoiler-alert, was skewed because of my own background).
I was really smart. And really sophisticated. And a little bit paranoid.
There were some energetic things that were "off" about the environment leading up to and at this intensive. I had been recently love-bombed and then was energetically blocked when I arrived.
It was incredibly disorienting for me, and my information-hungry intellect was struggling to find facts that I could grip onto.
Finding facts and making sense of things and drawing conclusions about it all was one of my most effective coping strategies. It was how I felt safe.
And so I didn't feel safe because I was incapable of coming to any conclusions about anything at all.
By the third day, I was crumbling. I believed I was in pursuit of the truth. I believed something needed to be exposed so we could all come to resolution. I begged for it, only to discover that my pursuit of truth was actually a pursuit of facts that would help me draw conclusions so that I could continue to stay safe by my skewed definition of safety.
And I used things like righteousness, justification, and indignance as my fuel-source.
I was the literal embodiment of the Tower tarot card (and not-ironically, during one of the exercises of this intensive, that was the card I drew).
During this ten day intensive, I hit rock bottom and "died" no fewer than three times. My reality dissolved around me, I would attempt to reconstruct it, it would dissolve again, I would reconstruct it, it dissolved again and then I finally realized that reconstruction was futile.
That was the day I peeled my skin off in the bathtub.
The key to my final dissolution was in this realization: righteousness, justification, and indignance were not evidence of my rightness or of having discovered The Truth.
This internal experience did not prove anything other than that I was activated.
Activated = reactive = perceived threat/danger = fear.
Fear of not being right. Fear of being wrong. Fear of not knowing. Fear of the unknown.
I had been feeding into that fear for as far back as I could remember. I genuinely couldn't find a time where that wasn't my fuel-source, so dependent on it I had become.
And I finally knew I could let go of all of that in an instant. Cold turkey. Whether or not my perceptions of my environment were true didn't actually matter.
In many ways, these few days were the most defining moments of my life.
It took me months to give language to what I now know occurred during that intensive.
I woke up to the ultimate non-conclusiveness of life and as a result, I got free.
Later, I woke up again to the reality that this realization did not mean I had, in any way, arrived anywhere.
I've woken up again, at deeper levels, many times since then. And the only thing I'm sure as spit about is that I will continue on this trajectory.
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Liberation is not *needing* to know, so that The Truth can reveal itself.
Over. And over. And over again.
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I see a lot of people arguing about facts right now. Many have drawn a line in the sand and staked their claim: pick my side and be right, or pick "their" side and be wrong. Both sides seem to be prematurely coming to conclusions that are then used to justify whatever position they've taken.
What if I told you there was a way to be discerning but non-judgmental?
What if I told you there was a way to be active without being activated?
I feel strongly about bringing things into harmony. In many ways I feel like I was built to be of service toward resolution specifically.
I know conflict is sometimes necessary in order to heal and repair. I've lived that. Dissonance is an essential ingredient in all transformation. But if I've learned anything from my own experience, it's that righteousness, justification, and indignance never serve anyone, nor any cause, nor contribute toward the revelation of any important Capital T Truth. They are not useful fuel-sources. It is only ever evidence of activation and of imbalance in ourselves.
Truth reveals itself as a byproduct of resonance. And so our work here is to be with the dissonance consciously (that does not mean ignoring it, by the way!) so that it can resolve on its own.
This is not a game of passivity. When you really go into this, it will require everything of you. You will have no other choice than to hold space for this process because doing so is to be in service to love, and love doesn't do anything half-way.