The Sleepawake Immersive was a profound experience for me, and it’s been fascinating to see the degree of experiential consistency between Immersive cohorts.
While participating in other retreats, running mini-retreats and coliving experiments one of my motives has been to understand the structure and dynamics of the Immersive to replicate the experience, in particular in the context of home.
I think I’ve come to a partial understanding of the structure of the retreat, which has been shared specifically with the ISTA retreats I’ve participated in.
The way the Immersive and ISTA are both structured (which I suspect isn’t a coincidence, I bet Sleepawake was directly inspired by ISTA and other retreat experiences) is that roughly 30-45 attendees join a 1-week experience, facilitated with 3-5 experienced practitioner-facilitators.
Each day as a specific theme, and the day is broken in a consistent structure, in order:
- Dance to get into your body
- Open circle — where attendees can address the full community
- Subgroup exercises
- Lunch
- Dance
- Subgroup exercises
- Dinner
- Connective activity
The main norm of open circle, exercise, and activities is opt-in radical transparency. I talk about at length in Transparency as an All Win Scenario and each of these formats take advantage of the fact that transparency only offers upside benefits, provided its downside risks can be spaciously and skillfully held by facilitators.
What does that concretely look like? In a specific subgroup exercise, which is some kind of emotions or interpersonal game, transparency is invited in the group, as one person transparently and vulnerably shares their experience, all other members of the group can recognize points of similarity, complementarity, and contrast with the share. All three kinds of connection are rich and meaningful and provide different kinds of value. What this experientially illustrates is that transparency can be met with connection.
At the same time, there are real downside risks in the forms of judgement and conflict, but as discussed in the aforementioned essay, there are ways of holding both in such a way that they’re both safe and part of an all-win scenario. This means that all outcomes can be met with safety, which has healing effect through providing disconfirming evidence, especially where there’s shame. Shame assumes that a certain experience will be punished by the group, and the new experiential reference point of it being held can be healing in and of itself, by illustrating a kind of proof of existence so that some groups can hold it safely.
By demonstrating richness and safety in a variety of exercises and subgroups, a bottom-up field of trust is built at the level of the entire group, over the course of the retreat. This group field of trust is then illustrated and tested in the daily Open Circle. In this context attendees have a collective experience that’s analogous to the exercises, where an individual can share to the group, it brings up points of similarity, complementarity, and contrast and demonstrate the ever-present possibility of connection, and if its safely held, it then permissions everyone else to take greater risks.
Zooming out, what this creates is a “spiral upwards” where the “opening up” process accelerates as individuals take larger risks of transparency, which in turn demonstrate more connective and healing value and safety, which in turn promotes everyone taking even bigger risks with bigger connective and healing payoff. Provided this process can be held safely the positive feedback loop feels enormously connective and healing.
Where does this “healing” come from? Why is it so broadly applicable to so many of the attendees?
I would argue that within nuclear family and hierarchical institutions of school, college, and the workplace all teach us experimentally that our emotional experience must be hidden for us to get what we need.
When a child has a legitimate emotional experience and a parent doesn’t have the capacity to hold it and lashes out, this teaches the child that their emotions aren’t safe to have. Expression may threaten their needs by threatening their relationship with their caregiver. This teaches very early that it isn’t safe to express or even have one’s emotional experience. This teaches numbing, dissociation, and shame as successful copes. As I discussed in Nuclear Family Was Never Enough, scarcity is structurally inherent to nuclear family, which means this experience is broadly shared. This cope is only refined in institutional contexts.
But what this means is that there’s a _default compulsive hiding of one’s experience as the norm. This norm is so default, so endemic, that it’s basically individually and culturally invisible.
What this also teaches is to compulsively shape-shift and orient around others, rather than orienting around one’s embodied experience, because safety comes from outside.
For me one of my most profound experiences at the Immersive revolved exactly around this. Over the course of the week I received recurring feedback that I was constantly seeking reassurance from everyone, which came off as needy and imposed micro-obligations on everyone.
I felt guilt and shame for this, and in an Open Circle like context I reached some kind of breaking point. At this breaking point two tendencies were in conflict. On the one hand, my pattern of reassurance was a way of trying to check if the outside was safe. As part of this pattern I was compulsively tracking and shape-shifting to be as palatable as possible, so that my relationships with others remained safe. On the other hand, I wanted to explain this to the group so they could understand I wasn’t bad, I was doing it because I felt unsafe within myself, and I was simply seeking safety. This desire to explain is yet another consequence of emotional experience not being acceptable — only emotions that can be explained and justified in rational, legible terms deserve consideration, otherwise they’re irrational and bad. In the latter case, it doesn’t even make sense to bring them up socially, bringing them up causes more harm than good.
So in this moment, I was desperately calculating how to shape-shift to everyone and I needed to explain myself, to feel like others could understand where I was coming from, and in being understood, I could both feel validated and safe to have my experience of unsafety, and feel like the group didn’t think I was a bad person. The result the the shape-shifting calculation collapsed into overwhelm and I shared a brief but intense kind of confession, where I explained that I seeking all this reassurance to remain safe, and that I was sorry for the way I was.
Implicitly I expected punishment, misattunement, shame from this confession. Instead it was met with… nothing. This was an immense, embodied relief. What I suspect it demonstrated was that actually speaking my authentic experience in a group context could be met without pain, it provided a kind of proof of existence that until then had alluded me, or had been met with loss aversion grounded in all the times I had been punished for sharing my experience.
This critical point triggered a massive process of unwinding. So many of my reflexes were and are designed around hiding my experience, and this experiential proof of existence provided powerful disconfirming evidence that this conditioning was no longer needed. I was also in position of privilege where I didn’t need to return to an institutional context where hiding is required to survive. As a result, I could fully lean into this unwinding process, and shift my attention away from constant tracking, narrativizing, and managing my environment to remain safe, and towards my embodied experience and internal sense of grounding and safety.
My experience doesn’t seem to be unique. After meeting many alumni cohorts it’s surprising to see how much continuity of experience there is between cohorts. Moreover, the experience appears to be a kind of one-way function, where once there’s awareness of what’s been missing, it’s extremely difficult to return to ignorance. In some cases this has been quite painful, in particular for people who have to return to stressful jobs where dissociation and numbing were very effective copes.
This represents a complete inversion of my attention from the inside-through-the-outside to the outside-through-the-inside; while in the past my internal experience was allowed to the extent that it was safe in my external environment, now I could increasing have my internal experience irrespective of my external environment, and in doing so, much more of my embodied senses, intuition, and receptivity remain online to meet my environment. This inversion ironically produces better results from a safety standpoint than my original orientation because it more fully utilizes ones faculties and allows a more harmonious relationship between oneself and one’s environment.
In the inside-through-the-outside process, one of the earliest and most compulsive layers of the process was coming to narrative sense of the outside. This narrative sense where I fit and how a certain context, situation, or system worked, kept me safe by explaining how I could and should relate to the outside. What this meant was that I had an intense clinging to narrative, and that situations of narrative uncertainty could trigger intense anxiety. As the inversion process continued, my grip on narrative loosened, and as it loosened more and more embodied information — senses, feelings, intuition, could be accessed and factored into my narratives. This meant that my narratives hinged on my experience rather than the other way around, in effect flipping a dynamic that’s I’ve had for decades of my life.
My goal now is to continue the work of unwinding while also learning how hold a norm of radical transparency in my home coliving context. My hope is that such an environment means greater and greater ease, as I can increasingly trust it to hold my authentic experience, and feel increasing safe and celebrated at home.