Primal Foundations

• Digital technologies generally reduce our agency and make a habit of shifting attention away from our own lives. That is incompatible with the Primal way of being.
• By the end of this stage, we recover our agency and aliveness from the degrading passivity and two-dimensionality of the digital world, and we create the open space for moving into the Primal way of being.

Process

• A Digital Decluttering (modeled on Cal Newport), followed by rebuilding our digital technology usage, selectively and strategically, in alignment with the Primal way of being.
• Sample elements:
  • Replacing always-on digital interaction with limited, set periods of interaction
  • Choosing the severity of minimizing each tech use, ranging from a blanket ban to increasing physical barriers to access and four levels in between
  • Developing intentionality in tech use
  • Identifying emotional triggers of compulsive tech use
  • Creatively harnessing digital technologies to enhance the Primal way of being
  • Accountability buddies

• Unprocessed emotional activation solidifies into long-term physical and psychological tensions, narrowing our perception and capacity to genuinely experience.
• Our self-regulatory systems are naturally equipped to deal with emotional activations of all forms. However, they need time and space to operate.  
• By the end of this stage, we recover the basic capacity of our emotional self-regulatory system – and regain our ability to fully experience life – through the skill of doing nothing.
• Doing nothing is an action – doing. But the doing is in the opposite direction from what we’re used to, towards releasing our driven, directed conscious mind so that our emotional self-regulatory system can function openly.

• Stage 3 releases us from the central pillar of the Western way of being: the illusion that civilization and nature are separate worlds.
• What does it mean to feel their unity?

• 1. Instead of interpreting civilization as a huge mass of problems relative to a utopia, we feel it as a miracle of life in which we participate.
  2. Instead of trying to ‘grab’ nature from our civilized state, we feel it as part of the same flowering of evolution and life force that we are, connecting to it warmly and authentically without rejecting the “civilization” inside us.
  3. The wilder part of ourselves (the “nature”) becomes more integrated into our daily life, while the ordered, controlled part of ourselves (the “civilization”) comes to feel more organic, embodied, and alive.

• In Stage 4, we dissolve the self-rejection at the core of the Western way of being: our rejection that we are already fully existing.
  Something is always wrong and needs to be better first – about ourselves, our environment, or the world – before we can allow ourselves to simply exist. But we are always already fully existing!
• The “civilization vs nature” illusion creates this self-rejection – we are always trying to either escape our “civilized” parts or dominate and control our “wild” parts, instead of harmonizing them. 
• Dissolving the oppressive motivation to improve just to reach a state of being allowed to fully exist enables our more authentic motivations to drive us instead – like passion, love, joy, and awe.

Process

• Sample elements:
  • Immersing in the memories, associations, and emotions of a familiar smell
  • Exploring our anatomy from the inside out, with our senses
  • Observing familiar animals in unfamiliar new ways
  • Discovering the incredible, divine power of our hands, evolution’s greatest miracle
  • Projecting our issues onto nature and discovering resonances
  • Developing a new, more organic way of experiencing our work and social life
  • Connecting to our dreams

• Living fully as the human creatures we are means enjoying our incredible ability to learn complex skills, ranging from engineering to art, from sports to loving. It is one of the great gifts of being alive.
• In the Western way of being, we learn these skills mechanically, for instrumental purposes. The joy, aliveness, and magic in mastering a skill is distant from our lives, available only to elite athletes, artists, intellectuals, and leaders or in made-up fantasy worlds – such as Marvel and martial arts movies, anime, video games, and novels. 
• But actually there are many lineages of finely honed skill we can learn, with masters to teach them, all around us! You might even be participating in one already without realizing it.
• By the end of this stage, we learn to fully inhabit, as an embodied and alive human creature, the rich experience of learning a complex skill through a lineage, and make a conscious decision about which ones we would like to join.

• In the Western way of being, we learn that art and literature are separate from our personal lives. We admire works of art and literature for their beauty, analyze them, enjoy the relief from our daily lives, or feel into the artist’s life experience, then return to our daily lives. 
• That attitude runs counter to what the best art actually is: a personal communication from a fellow human being about the experience of being alive. True artists and writers want you to resonate with their work personally. They want you to feel it within your life, not at a distance. 
• Museums and literature classes are a mutilation of the true spirit of art.
• In the Primal way of being, art is like a nurturing parent, a wise guide, and an intimate friend, helping us on the journey of being alive and awakening us to the fullness of our experience.
• By the end of this stage, we open ourselves up to the revelation in art and literature of intangible and internal experiences that defy ordinary language. Our lives become richer, more meaningful, and more varied as the depths of the experiences we’re already having are opened up to our conscious awareness.

• The final stage is the most difficult to understand prior to beginning the program. It builds heavily on the transformations of the previous six stages.
• Mythical energy is the feeling that the journey of our own life has intrinsic meaning, however it unfolds, without needing to disembody into an impersonal system or cause. Just by being alive, we are already connected to the world around us and participating in something greater than ourselves.
• Mythical energy is us, as a human creature, fully becoming what we already are.

Process

• The first six stages get us most of the way to reclaiming our mythical energy. Stage 7 completes the process by connecting us emotionally and personally to our family lineage – that is, to the continuities and breaks within ourselves of the patterns, emotions, and character of our family.
• By understanding and sensing ourselves mythically through our family lineage, we develop empathy for ourselves and our family members – without needing their or our own behavior to change.
• We connect to our own suffering and pain without escapism, and we unlock deeper layers of bravery and self-respect.
• Our decision-making acquires a mythical depth, which sharpens its connection to our true reality and strengthens our ability to genuinely shift our lives into alignment with our deepest values.
• Connecting to our family lineage happens independently of our current relationship to our family.

This process is the final rite of passage into the Primal way of being.

For more details on Stages 6 and 7, check out this podcast episode.