Toodles Productivity Hacking // Hiii Capacity Tending
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote, and what a couple of weeks it’s been. There have been big + small playful nod-winks of affirmation from the universe, urging me to keep - clumsily, gracefully, shamelessly - dancing with the art of getting out of my own way so that Life can move me, move through me.
(Not that Life and I are separate…but linear language is a peculiar game of hide + seek, so let’s play while remembering it’s a game ;) )
That time of taking stock of all that’s been experienced by the body and psyche over this past year is here. For me, 2023 has been a non-negotiable deepening into a process that began several years back: the journey of unhurriedly allowing my body + nervous system’s capacity to be the choreographer of my particular dance.
Not always ‘easy’ or ‘fun,’ because it involves getting into a discerning alignment + trust with my Self - my soul-body - which calls for the releasing of things, people, situations, spaces that no longer feel aligned or nourishing. This asks for a deepening into the willingness to be disliked and disapproved of…which ends up organically expanding my capacity for Life within a felt-sense container of liberating boundaries that I don’t need to rigidly ‘enforce’.
Most challengingly, this capacity-rooted alignment calls for the releasing of the misaligned ‘should,’ that violates + depletes the soul’s soil (the body) in the name of social fawning (people-pleasing) and that behemoth of colonial exploitation: productivity.
Can we look at the concept and industry of ‘productivity hacking’ from the perspective of soil regeneration for a moment?
One of the key principles of soil regeneration is little to no tilling (hacking) of the land. When the soil is allowed to rest and restore itself, free from the harassing disruption of constant tilling for endless productivity, soil microbial abundance and diversity increases. This leads to improved microbiome communities and soil structure, which offer larger ecological benefits as well as resilience to crop stressors, all of which naturally lead to better crop quality and yield.
So as soil lies relatively undisturbed, the thriving and diverse microbial ecosystem that emerges nourishes its very essence. The ecological and economic benefits of this are a powerful example of Nature’s law of least resistance in practice.
I’m making the bold assumption that if you’re on this list, you’re in agreement with (or at least curious about) the Truth that our bodies are extensions of the Earth - which is a fundamental tenet of indigeneity.
((Post) colonialist systems would have us believe + live otherwise.)
The way my body experiences the concept and practice of ‘productivity hacking’ is how the land experiences industrial farming’s violation of constant tilling and chemical interference for relentless productivity - which as we all know leads to soil erosion and nutrient depletion + toxicity in the food our bodies consume.
Just as the process of soil regeneration takes space, time, attunement and tending, so too with our psyches and bodies. The cyclical process of unhooking from the ways that we’ve been taught to dominate our bodies and make them productivity machines can feel viscerally unsafe, not to mention the ways we’ve been trained to equate our self-worth with how productive we are.
It’s completely natural for it to feel unsafe to unhook - so let’s not make this another opportunity to beat ourselves with the fixing/self-improvement stick.
For me, looking back on this year, the more I’ve rooted into tending my capacity from moment to moment, day to day, the more it has expanded, the more I’ve been able to ‘get done’ without overriding my Self, the more I’ve been able to release what’s not necessary, the more I’ve been able to anchor into the felt-sense safety of all this in my own body and move towards the healthy discomfort of sustainable growth.
And that feels like a radical redefinition of success, much like the quality of the soil is how regenerative agriculture measures success. The nourishing, abundant yield then gets to be enjoyed and experienced as part of a larger cycle and process.
Also, tending is way more fun than hacking.
Lately, I’ve been tending-celebrating my Self by taking a little dance break at least once a day (free from joyless should-ing). Dancing and letting my body move me to celebrate + integrate all the small + big things I’ve done…and not done (including forgetting to record the recent Decolonizing our Relationship to Money workshop - #sensationalfacepalm - but we did a take 2 and recorded it.)
Dancing like no one’s watching - not even/most especially big brother algorithm-machine - is a seriously-not-serious and powerful way to tend my body’s regenerative garden, and the magical mycelial network that is my nervous system.
I have a dedicated and growing playlist, from which I’ve been particularly enjoying these two recently…
Let’s Dance by the eternal David Bowie
Another capacity nourishing game-changer for me in 2023 has been returning to and recultivating a simple, effortless daily meditation technique from ancient Indian Vedic tradition - based on Nature’s law of least resistance, on the truth that rest is the basis of activity, and the deeper the quality of rest, the greater the potential for dynamic activity.
Along with trauma-informed somatic practices, this allows for tending and stewardship of the Self to become the ways we can create systems of resilient sustainability in our bodies, our psyches and our lives.
Come play and practice on Sundays at The Light Gets In