⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🧭 The Life You Secretly Want Starts Here: Desire, disobedience and the art of becoming. Read it here.

🦋 On Monarch Butterly Migration: Oh to be a butterfly traversing a continent. Watch it here.

👁️ The Inner Landscape of Beauty: One my favorite podcasts episodes ever featuring the late John O’Donohue in conversation with Krista Tippett. Listen here.

💌 Want More? Down The Rabbit Hole readers also enjoy these awesome (and completely free!) newsletters. Explore

🎇 Image of The Week

On June 23, 2022, in Moorefield, West Virginia, Debbie Parker did the near-impossible. She captured the exact moment a lightning bolt struck a tree—a flash that lasted less than the blink of an eye.

 👁 The Society of Self

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

This quote from Walt Whitman is a classic way of describing the vastness of self.

The self is not singular. It's made of many aspects and depending on the context, certain qualities will have more prominence in our external expression and interior experience.

In a therapeutic setting, people navigate these various elements of self using parts work and internal family systems.

I had a realization a couple of weeks back that I'd like to spell out for you today...

Imagine the self as a large room with many individuals interacting.

These rooms can vary dramatically. For some people, their rooms are tidy, everything is well ordered and everyone falls in line like a military assembly.

In other cases, you have a chaotic, free-flowing party environment.

In some instances, it's like a warzone with emotional bombs going off constantly.

If each of these rooms represents a micro-culture or society of self, what sets the tone?

What dictates the rule for engagement between parts?

The answer is the internal caretaker or ideal parent figure.

This part, well developed, is mature, loving, strong, and sage-like in its navigation through messy conflicts.

In lieu of this part being well cultivated, you can see the emergence of an authoritarian tyrant who monopolizes strength, discards warmth, and rules through fear.

You might also find a floaty, hippy parental figure that prioritizes warmth, demonizes strength, and denies the responsibility to preside.

You might also find the complete absence of this figure. This is the scenario in which most of the bombs go off.

I used to consider the internal caretaker/ideal parent figure just another part among many.

But now I see it can serve as a metapart in some ways. It sets the tone, shapes the culture, and creates the boundaries in which other parts interact.

Just like a mother attending to two of her children in a scuffle.

Her approach to the conflict will transform how the children interact in the future.

Her approach can intensify future conflict, promote the repetition of the pattern, or create a learning moment that reduces future conflict.

So focusing on the cultivation of the internal caretaker is a powerful enterprise that can have sweeping and long-lasting effects on our experience of life.

Done well, it affords us a wellspring of deep love as well as reasonable guardrails to guide our behavior in a generative direction.

The cultivation of this part takes patient loving awareness and the wisdom to be aware of cliffs in the distance to steer towards safety.

So ask yourself: In the way I relate to myself, do I need more warmth? More strength? Both?

If it's warmth, try practicing Metta Loving Kindness Meditation as a place to begin.

If it's strength, work on giving yourself structure and sticking to it (start small at first).

Just be mindful that in adding what you're missing you do not subtract what you already have.

Don't swing from warmth to strength or vice versa.

Bring your warmth with you to strength. Bring your strength with you to warmth.

And one final prompt to stimulate the emergence of this metapart:

With the knowledge that you will sometimes fail, try to embody the nurturing love and encouragement that a superwise future civilization would possess. Relate to yourself like you were parenting a child in that world.

The "how" to this prompt is vague and imprecise. It's fog we all need to walk through. And perhaps, if we do this today, it might support the becoming of that civilization in the deep future.

But that's another conversation...

🔮The Enchanted World

Ponder these thoughtful words from Robert Moore

🤓 Learn This Word

Volta: A Greek word that refers to certain hours of the early evening, around dusk, everyone in the town who might feel like going for a walk takes a saunter or stroll up and down the main street

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇

The artistic impulse permeates throughout history: from the “primitive” cave art of the Upper Palaeolithic through to the introduction of perspective and foreshortening during the Renaissance, rules which would later be subverted beyond recognition by the artists of modernity, who sought to express new ways of seeing and ushered in an era of visual experimentation. Either as creators or consumers, art remains ever-present in the modern world, both a vehicle for expressing our innermost thoughts and desires and a medium through which we can escape into new realities and emotions.

What is it that leads us to create art? Is there a psychological drive at work, a subconscious force which simmers away beneath the surface before emerging in an explosion of creativity? Is there an innermost essence to this process, something which embodies our propensity to express ourselves through art?

A brief look at some historical examples of artistic geniuses and it is tempting to believe that there is something approaching madness in the creative spirit; that art is intrinsically bound with insanity, great works of art functioning as a cathartic mechanism – something which both purges and purifies the spirit –  without which the artist would be confined to the asylum. The fascination of the link between mental illness and creativity emerged in the late 19^th century and remains with us to this day, where heightened creativity can be seen to correlate with states of mind such as hypomania – a state of mind today most commonly associated with bipolar disorder –  where inspiration emerges from the fluctuations between euphoria and depression.

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