In this episode, I talk about how we tend to oversimplify things and how we can make space for complexity in our lives by learning to hold one thing and its opposite simultaneously.
Also, join us for the next Playdate with the Crone on April 16th!
Get notified when the Silken Mirror membership opens in 2023 : http://eepurl.com/dxzCk9
Follow us on Instagram @moonlitpathchannel
This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
If you're enjoying the podcast, consider sharing it or leaving a review on Apple Podcast :)
In this episode, I talk about how we tend to oversimplify things and how we can make space for complexity in our lives by learning to hold one thing and its opposite simultaneously.
Also, join us for the next Playdate with the Crone on April 16th!
Get notified when the Silken Mirror membership opens in 2023 : http://eepurl.com/dxzCk9
Follow us on Instagram @moonlitpathchannel
This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
If you're enjoying the podcast, consider sharing it or leaving a review on Apple Podcast :)
[00:00:00] Laure: Hello, everyone here I am back from a weekend of woodworking with a friend and spring is here. The garden smells like honey and sounds like bees. And today I want to talk to you about complexity. Or at least my idea of complexity. The way that I define complexity is the ability to hold one thing and its opposite as true simultaneously. To have a great range of perception for all the different layers of a situation or a person and to hold that in the human experience many, many things can be true at the same time, even if they seem mutually exclusive.
[00:00:59] And nothing in our culture supports that, you might have noticed, and nothing in ourselves also supports that especially when it comes to situations that trigger, you know, fear for safety or just like emotional triggers that we can have because in those moments, usually we revert to a very young prism or like a very young filter for seeing the situation or the person or the world in general. And in that very young filter, we don't have a lot of capacity to hold complexity, to hold nuances And so I want to talk to you about that because. Something happened last week that triggered the shit out of me as it might happen sometimes to you as well.
[00:01:50] And I was really finding myself kind of oscillating between the part of me that was triggered and the part of me that could hold the complexity or all the potential explanations for the situation. I guess you could call it the rational, but it's not just the rational, it's also the ability to see an array of reasons for whatever's happening, potential reasons. Because most of the time, we don't know, that's why we, we project simplified scenarios onto life, onto other people, onto situation, onto life events, onto world events. We are always trying to simplify so that we can grasp it better, and so we can feel like we control things better and we can know which side of the equation to stand on.
[00:02:46] And and so we're always trying to simplify things. Not even trying, it's kind of an automatic response and we can see it in the world right now in multiple instances. But I feel that that's part of why things are not going so well for us is the inability to make space for all the aspects of an issue, all the complexity of human beings in general. Cause it's also the way that we treat ourselves, right? Like we're always trying to figure out whether we're being a good child or a bad child, which is an extremely simplified way of understanding human behavior and human beings in general.
[00:03:32] But that's what stays with us from our childhood a lot of the time and is really reinforced by the culture. A lot of the stories that we see in the culture are overly simplified and especially as children. And there's a lot of stories about the good guy and the villain. And that's a very Western, by the way that's a very Western model, the good guy and the villain.
[00:03:59] And you know, you have to win against evil and uh, like all of this endlessly retold and re-imagined tale of the male hero, usually male hero or heroine sometimes, but that is the good one, the one that fights for the light and has to win against the shadows. And then that's the goal. And then when they win the story is over and that's great, and... That's basically the story that we are told by the culture in many, many different ways from very young, at least if you live in the Western world and that's pretty terrible. That's a pretty terrible story if you think about it. First of all, cause it erases complexity completely. And it doesn't really give you any tools for life actual life. You know, life is not about being the good guy gets the villains. Like that's not... If you see life that way, you're going to be very unhappy, probably.
[00:05:03] And when I started learning Japanese and I started being more exposed to stories, you know, like anime and manga and all of that, I was really taken by the fact that I thought that a lot of those stories first are about loneliness. I mean, it's not surprising as a culture, but it's really interesting.
[00:05:26] And also a lot of stories are not about winning. Like winning can be a part of the story, but the story is really about how to persevere in the face of failure, which I thought was fascinating, really interesting. And much more useful. You know, I'm not saying it's better, but it's definitely more useful for life. You know, if we had stories that told us how, how to persevere in the face of failure, or even in certain cases how to accept failure gracefully that would be actually way more useful than a lot of the stories that we are exposed to from the moment that we are, you know, three years old.
[00:06:06] And I know there are a lot of stories that tell other things. And I know that there are a lot of options, but I'm talking as a society, that's the overarching, the dominating story is that. And the trouble is that it creates immediately categories of good and bad in which you can then file everything from people to experiences, to, you know, whatever it is. And life is so much more complex than that. And people are so much more complex than that. And I'm not saying there are not people who are actually really bad or really evil, but it's never as simple as they're really bad or really evil. There's always some complexity around that. And there's always, always, always a systemic reason that creates that it's not just them.
[00:07:02] It's the whole system. There's a whole system behind them that is kind of at works. One thing I love about constellation and which I think why I, I recognize myself in it, or I found my space in it really easily is that it's one of the modalities and I guess a lot of modalities do it, but in the case of constellation, it's really clearly articulated within the modality that there is space for everything. And when you say everything is absolutely everything, like as a facilitator, you have to have space in yourself for the perpetrator as much as for the victim, because otherwise you can't work. And I find that that really aligns better with my understanding of the world and my understanding of human beings. And obviously it's much harder. It's much harder to find that space or to have that space in yourself to hold, to have a place for terrible things or terrible people within yourself and not go straight to exclusion.
[00:08:13] But in constellation, the source of all woes very often is exclusion. Exclusion of, you know, good people, and, but also exclusion of bad people leads to pretty terrible consequences. And so I find that really for me, I find that really restful. And also really, it gives way more capacity to respond to life than to have like the general binary good versus evil, which is kind of like, Judaeo-Christian inspired, right? Where you have to be good otherwise you can be sent to hell. Like that's like, That's probably the basis for this kind of thinking. But that's such a limited vision. And more than that, it leads to so much exclusion and separation because in order to see someone else as bad that means that you have to exclude that in yourself first, right? And so that's an endless cycle of self denial and of self hate and that, that doesn't lead to anything good in my experience.
[00:09:24] But the thing is that in order to have that stance where you have space for everything you need to practice your own capacity to hold complexity, to hold things that are, that are not simple, that are multi faceted. And that's not something that you get to practice so much in life because that's not the general current of the world, right? And if you spend a lot of time online, if you spend a lot of time watching the news or watching social media. There's almost nothing on there that will invite you to practice that, to practice holding and expanding your capacity to be with things, to be with people, or to be with the idea of people.
[00:10:18] Obviously nobody's asking you to sit with like whatever your version of evil is, but to at least be able to sit with the idea of it without having an instant reaction. And there's many spiritual traditions, right? That preach the same thing, or that's practice that. And I'm thinking of Eastern spiritual traditions, mostly where the whole work is to be with what is in yourself and in everybody else. Obviously, when you practice that you practice or you develop capacity for complexity. Because otherwise we're kind of always categorizing things in the good and bad categories with the innate idea that the bad category shouldn't exist, like has no place literally. And that's not true in any shape or form. Like, unfortunately maybe like, you can say it that's too bad, but like it's not reality.
[00:11:19] That's not reality. That's not the world. The nature of the human world is that there's a polarity. And some people have to hold the quote unquote evil polarity of the world, if you want to be able to experience the other polarity. In the same way that if you don't let yourself experience sadness, you're never going to know what joy feels like. It's the same. It's much more complex than saying, oh, you know, everything should be good. And every people should be good. And, but that's just not real. It's just not how it works. And even the people who are holding that polarity have incredibly complex universes in themselves that cannot be summarized by, oh, this person is bad. One of the reasons why we struggle so much with complexity is because ultimately if you start making room for it, you understand that most of the world, most of the things are too big for you to understand fully or to even grasp fully with your cognitive space.
[00:12:27] And that's not a state that human beings like very much, that's really scary for most people. It's scary for me too, you know, and, and very often when you get to that space of actually I cannot hold the comprehension or I cannot have control because the story is so complex, people are so complex, the world is so complex, I actually have no control because I can't grasp any of this. And that usually brings us back, for most of us, it brings us back to really, really old feeling of helplessness in the face of trauma or in the face of neglect or in the face of whatever happened in your childhood.
[00:13:12] And those feelings are unbearable very often. They bring back despair. And so it's much harder, especially in the face of world events that are really traumatic or stuff like that, it's much harder to kind of try to hold the complexity of the situation and of the people involved, because then you really feel that there's no way to grasp it.
[00:13:37] That in a way it would be like if you had to make your body work with your head, if you had to think in order to make your heart beat and breathe and all that, you just couldn't do it. That's too much, right. That's too big. And it's kind of the same for other people, for situation, for stuff.
[00:13:59] When you start really holding their complexity, you understand that you have really very little control over anything. And I'm not even talking about the actual control, obviously of changing the situation, right? I'm saying that the way that we simplify things is a way to try to get some control, because if we can simplify it in our minds, then we have the illusion that we control something, you know, that we know which side we're supposed to be on and we know what we should do, shouldn't do and what should be done or it shouldn't be done. And it's a way to not feel as helpless as if you really hold the complexity of the thing. And you're like, actually, I don't know. There's no way to know because it's so complex. And when you start including people's pain, no matter what, that also becomes very hard to hold and it also brings more complexity to the table. But it's so uncomfortable. You know, it's very uncomfortable because we are raised from the beginning of our lives to recognize good from bad and to exclude the bad in ourselves, in others, in the world and all of that.
[00:15:19] And so far that has never worked. I don't know if you noticed. But you can try as you might to exclude the bad and it never works. There's always pushback. There's always repercussion. There's always like... Systemically, it doesn't work. And so we need to start thinking about another way to go at it. And obviously it always starts with ourselves, right? And accepting that we are also more complex than we can comprehend in a way. And stop pressuring ourselves to be either, or, you know, you're either a good person or a bad person. No, actually you're a good person and a bad person.
[00:16:04] And it's the same for everything else. As humans, we have all the range of human behavior, abilities. Whatever you develop as a human being depends on where you were born, what community, what family, what happens to you... That's just a fact, you know, that's just a fact that completely normal, quote unquote, normal people can become monsters or can become heroes depending on the situation. And nobody wants to see that because that's really uncomfortable to look at, to think like, oh, if I was born somewhere else, or if I was now in a situation that is different than my situation, maybe I would behave like this person that I look at, and I think they're evil. And that's complex.
[00:16:50] That's complexity for you like to look at that in yourself with objectivity and to sit with it, with the feeling of it. That's really not comfortable. Nobody wants to do that, obviously. It's much more comfortable to stay in the simplified view of the world, of us versus them, which is also by the way, ingrained in our reptilian brain, right? As humans, we have like a "us versus them" that's really ingrained in our physiology, survival physiology. Like if you belong to my group, you're not a threat. If you belong to the other group, you're a threat. And that's something that's just there and we have to deal with it, but we don't have to give into it.
[00:17:32] And we don't have to give into the oversimplification that is carried by the society in general and our minds that really want to grasp on any situation and because also very often we're wrong. And in this case, I'm talking mostly about personal events, like personal situations where whatever, you know, somebody didn't answer your phone call and immediately, depending on your relational wounds, whatever they are, you will ascribe meaning to that. "Oh, they didn't answer cause they don't like me or they don't care for me or they're unreliable, like depending what you believe already, you'll oversimplify in the, in the direction that you believe already and most of the time completely wrong.
[00:18:21] So it's interesting to interrogate. Okay. How can I start bringing complexity in my own life. And I guess the first thing would be to at least notice when you categorize things into good and bad, whether they're people behavior, or people themselves, or your behaviors You know, like if I'm productive, good. If I sit on the couch bad, if I'm nice, good. If I get angry bad, you know, like all of that, because if you start doing that, like if you start at least noticing, "okay, what in my world goes into the bad corner right away?" You can get a sense of what you 're excluding in yourself, in other people, in the world in general and, and start feeling into, "oh, well, can I include that in any way? Like, is there any way that I can hold that?" as just one of the gazillion human behaviors and traits that we all have available. And it's just an exercise. That's a lifetime process what I'm offering you right here. Like, I'm definitely not there yet.
[00:19:33] It's gonna take me probably until my death to get in a place where I can really kind of hold everything or welcome everything without resistance. Without feeling like I don't want this. This is bad. But I'm working on it and I, and I encourage you to work on it as well. Cause I firmly believe that if we have a future as, as a species that's where it is.
[00:19:56] That's where it lies. Cause otherwise we will self-destruct I'm pretty sure. Without wanting to like, be all doom and gloom and mess up your evening or whatever, but excluding the bad doesn't work. And so there's something to do in that. There's something there, "oh, how can I be with it? How can I include it in myself?" It's a good start to notice. Cause we have judgments basically all day long. If you start looking at yourself, you start really observing and that's the start cause when you start observing, then you start having a certain distance, just a small amount, but still. If you start observing, you'll see that all day long, whatever happens, whoever you with whatever you're doing, whatever you're watching,
[00:20:47] it goes into the good or bad jars. And that's so simplistic when you think about it first that's so simplistic. And second, one of the issues is that those drawers are separate. They cannot co-exist. You cannot be both at the same time and that's a lie. You can absolutely be both at the same time.
[00:21:13] And I wish we saw it more in the stories that we hear and, you know, there's some characters in stories that have been demonized by Christianity, but that kind of embodied that at some point, I'm thinking for instance of Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga, after Christianism, became this very scary witch that eats children and is very dangerous and she does hold wisdom, but she's characterized as the villain. But if you go back to the earlier version of those tales she really embodies the wildness, but also the wisdom of the earth, and yes, she is somewhat dangerous and she's somewhat... she can be tricky, let's just say, or she can be violent. She can be, but she she can also be extremely nurturing and supportive and resourceful and resourcing for whoever the character in tale is.
[00:22:12] And so she's both at the same time, she's both the villain and the fairy godmother. But in most of our tales there's no characters that can be both the villain and the fairy godmother, the wicked stepmother and the fairy godmother at the same time. But the truth is that most of us are, most of us are both. We're both the villain and the fairy godmother and to start to reconcile that in oneself and in other people, obviously, it makes for, I think, a more spacious life, a more spacious and expansive way of looking at the world and of relating with others and also with oneself because again, when you start observing you gained some distance. And I'm not saying that you're going to stop doing it because it's really hard to stop doing. But when you start observing and gaining some distance, you can see what you're doing. You're like, oh, oh, I'm putting myself in the bad drawer right now.
[00:23:15] Or this is happening right now. I'm feeling all of these emotions. And so I'm thinking that the other person is being bad, is being mean to me. Or I'm being mean or whatever it is. And once you gain a little bit of distance, you can start having more agency on how you're going to relate and how you're going to behave. And some of the times it won't be possible and you'll still be in the good versus evil or in yourself mostly. We do that in ourselves a lot " I'm being a good girl. I want to be a good girl. Don't want to be a bad girl. I need to be this way and why am I being this way?" and...
[00:23:55] But we do it with other people as well. We project on them and we simplify to explain their reaction and to have a sense that we can understand and control them. But the truth is we're never going to have access to the complexity of perception that another person has. I mean, we don't even perceive colors the same and you know, we live in completely different realities most of us. And that's impossible to reconcile if you don't make room for complexity. Because then it's going to be really impossible to communicate and the more you're used to seeing your reactions and seeing your oversimplifications of things and starting to open your own perception and your own reflection about things and thinking, "oh, you know what I think I'm, I'm oversimplifying this right now." And I'm not saying like stay in toxic relationship. Like, I'm not saying any of that shit, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying like give people the benefit of the doubt, even when they're abusing you.
[00:25:03] That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying that exclusion doesn't work and you can certainly cut off relationships in your life for instance, of like, "okay, this person really isn't good for me". And that's one thing. And then you're making the decision for yourself. Even that energy is different than, "oh, this person is really toxic." That's completely different energy to say," I can see that this is not good for me. And so I'm going to do this for myself, for my own wellbeing, for my protection, for the love of myself". And that's inclusive rather than saying, I'm going to cut this person off because she's toxic or he's toxic . It's a different stance, I guess. And it's a complex subject as usual to start talking about in a 30 minute episode. But I'm sure I'll touch on it again. And if you have questions about any of the episodes I do. Cause sometimes I start talking and I get into the depth of a subject and I'm like, wow, this is really complicated.
[00:26:01] I know what I'm talking about, but I wonder if they will know what I'm talking about. So if you have any questions anytime, or if you want me to go deeper into an aspect of something that I touched upon, please feel free to email me, write a comment on Facebook or on Instagram, and I'm a happy to do that. I'll be happy to go deeper into any subject or to better explain something that I said if that's something that you were struck by, or you didn't understand what I meant or, or I didn't have time to go in depth enough or to explain enough. I'm happy to take requests in general. But for this episode, I think I'll stop here and I leave you with this. I'm like, okay, how much capacity, how much space do I have for the complexity of the world and of human beings within me? And where in my life do I oversimplify things into a good and bad polarity that is mutually exclusive. Those are already good questions to ask and to look at. They will get you somewhere probably.
[00:27:11] So I leave you with those and you will hear me again in a couple of weeks talking with my friend, Kim Pinkley about healing and life in general, and many things and stories, of course, as usual. And two weeks from now, there will be a Playdate with the crone on April 16, with the theme of DREAM. So if you've been to a play date before and you want to come back, or if you've never been to a play date and you want to try here's your chance. I'll try to do more of those as drop-ins throughout the year. And if you want to be notified of these you want to sign up to my newsletter on my website, my personal website, which is laureporche.com. And with this, I leave you in the smell of honey and the sound of bees.