The Structure of Your Freedom.

 For a long time, I have been exploring the relationship between things.

(Bear with me on this one, we may need to meander around the garden a little before we arrive.)

I have been especially interested in what could be called the meta-relationship, or maybe the primary relationship: Yin and Yang, the Feminine and Masculine, and how this relationship reveals itself at different levels of our experience and the impact it has.

I like to describe this relationship as Yang being the direct, illuminating white light (white light has the potential for all the colours of the rainbow, but is unified into one), and Yin as the moving water that refracts and disperses that white light into the colours of the rainbow of experience.

The Yang seeds the pattern, the Yin gives it body.

The Yang gives structure, the Yin brings life to the structure.

One very practical way to understand the relationship between these two is to think of a game.

A game is a balance of these two poles.

We have the Yang — the rules, the boundaries, the intention, how to win — the structure of the game, what is known.

We have the Yin — the spontaneity, the fluidity, the movement, the coin toss, the roll of the die, the card turn, the return of serve — the non-structure, the unknown.

If I were to say to you, "Let's play a game."

"We take turns counting from 1 to 10. I'll go first. One..."

That's not a game. It's all rules, it's all known, it's all structure. You are imprisoned by the order. There is no freedom, all of the potential is already realised.

If I said to you, "Let's play another game. You go first..."

"Go..."

You wouldn't know what to do, how to play. It's all possible. You would now be unable to move, but not through constraint, rather through a lack of constraint.

A game balances these two forces. Perhaps that's part of why we love playing them: they bring us into this fundamental balance.

It is the balance of unity and diversity.

The Yang creates identity. Identity creates unity. This is important.

A soccer team is a team because it wears the same badge, the same kit, has the same aims and goals, and therefore the individuals can act together as a team.

Now, the nature of that identity, and how that identity is managed, will dictate the freedom of the individual's natural expression.

Stay with me.

Let's say I am a naturally gifted soccer player. Joining a good soccer team with a coach who appreciates my gifts and wants to cultivate them within the team can help me to realise far more of my true nature as a soccer player than if I had refused to join a team so I could be free of any identity.

However, if I am in a team with a coach who doesn't align with my gifts and represses too much of my individuality for the sake of the whole team, there can come a point where my natural potential is being curtailed.

A healthy structure, an aligned identity not only supports what is already there, but helps bring to life more of what could be.

Why am I telling you all of this?

My exploration into this recently led me to consider the relationship between essence, or essential experience, and the structures that arise to preserve these essences, recreate these essential experiences, and how they sometimes break down.

Let's take the example of a hypothetical religion.

First comes an essence (let's call that, in this example, the divine).

Then an experience of that essence — someone has an interface with the divine.

Then comes an attempt to preserve that essential experience and make it transmissible, so it becomes codified in rituals, stories and practices. A Yang structure.

Let's say this is effective and others become able to participate with this essence via these transmissions, forming the basis of a religion.

That makes the transmission of the religion important, as it offers access to participation.

Therefore, an institution arises to preserve the religion. A further Yang structure.

The institution becomes important, as it's there to protect the religion.

Therefore, ideological dogma arises to protect the institution.

A further layer of rigid Yang.

By now, much of the participation with the essence may be lost.

Now participation is with the ideology.

While I was contemplating this,

I was also experimenting with a new Instagram account, one that I set out with the intention of sharing from a place of what is most true and alive to share. Basically, trying to commit to sharing my essence with people online.

To begin with, I struggled. I kept finding that I was performing myself, or manufacturing myself, each time I turned on the camera.

At a point of frustration, I looked to the heavens and exclaimed:

"I actually just want to be helpful, even if I just help one person."

And with that, suddenly I heard internally:

"I have a message."

So I turned on the camera and, without knowing what was going to come out, said:

"I have a message. It might be for you, it might not be for you."

And what flowed from there felt like my essence.

Now, since then, that phrasing, "I have a message. It might be for you, it might not be for you," has become my first Yang structure, created as scaffolding for my true essence to come through.

But what I see is that if I become more wed to that structure than I am to the essence, it could soon replace the very thing it was there to preserve.

I also recently had one video outperform my others by double. So then I notice the temptation to learn from that and add more structures — this worked, therefore add it in.

There is no harm inherently in adding these structures. It is, after all, the structure that allowed the essence to materialise. The risk is when the act becomes in service to the structure, and no longer the essence.

For me, this distinction is felt in the body. I can sense when I'm performing rather than expressing something organically, both in the moment and in how I feel afterwards.

So let us arrive.

Thank you for joining me for that walk around the garden of my thoughts.

I realised then that this Instagram experiment is just a reflection, or cross-section, of how I am in every moment, every day.

I asked myself:

Are my structures serving my life?

Or is my life serving my structures?

Am I without some of the structures that will allow my true nature and self to materialise?

Or have I calcified into rigid structures that are inhibiting my individuality?

To know this on my Instagram, I listen to the feedback of my body, my heart, my field. I'm honest with myself about my motivations and intentions. I pay attention to the powerful forces of recognition and validation, and how they could tempt me away from what I have vowed to serve above all of those things.

Am I being as aware of these things in my wider life?

How do we create the conditions that support our natural essence to come to life?

My intuition is that it comes when these two forces are in a healthy dynamic within us.

It's worth asking ourselves:

Is the identity I hold myself to so fixed that it cannot incorporate and express the unique, new or marginal aspects of my nature?

Or, conversely, am I so reluctant to commit myself to an identity that I am denying my nature the consistent and reliable structure through which its gifts might materialise over time?

Perhaps we need to remain intentional, but surrender, or at least hold loosely, our ideas of how things are supposed to look, so we can come into closer relationship with what is, and what wants to emerge.

Because you might just surprise yourself.

Until the next time,

Peace and love,

Alex