Creating a Copacetic Collective with the CaNDY Principle

I remember being a little kid and deeply, personally understanding that feelings are never bad or wrong. I remember seeing the feelings getting stuck in people’s bodies and being so confused. I remember being consoled and told I didn't need to cry. I remember being sent to my room when I expressed anger. I remember watching my mom put on socks one time while my dad got dressed across the room and not understanding why it felt like everyone was swallowing knives.

I remember seeing my dad push my mom against the bathroom wall. I remember the looks on their faces. I remember looking into my dad's eyes when he came at me other times later on when they no longer lived together. I remember him not really being there, his eyes muted in a hot glare while electricity shot through his hands. I remember watching my mother's light dim and wanting to find the switch. I remember wondering if she would off herself behind the bedroom door she so often closed leaving me on the other side.

The truth I’ve come to realize is that we’re always abusing ourselves when we don’t let the feelings simply pass through and how fast self-abuse multiples into interpersonal atrocity.

I have a dream of deeply getting along.

We habitually stuff our sensitive bodies with the charge of unwelcome feelings and what doesn’t fit in the overcrowded storehouse of our flesh we leave lying around and looming all over our living environments. The stagnant feelings linger uncomfortably. We trip and choke on them and tend to blame, shame, acuse and complain about others and external things. We blast holes in our personal responsibility bubble and lasso ourselves to outside stuff then wonder why we are so tired and heavy.

My nervous system naturally synced with theirs (my parents) in unnatural ongoing shut down. I mirrored the ways of being that had me fall in line, tired and heavy, but I’ve always dreamt that I’d figure out how to get along with people and that the people around me would get along too.

I grew to superficially accept a shallow seemingly pleasant version of getting along (suffocation central), but I dream of getting along in a way where it’s completely evident that each of the people knows how to get along with themselves so much so that them getting along with each other is very very simple, and also ongoing.

I dream of emotionally intelligent environments for my kid to grow up in so he can truly be himself - somewhere between autistic (me) and schizophrenic (his dad) - authentically free to be as sensitive, open, and dynamically intelligent as he is designed to be.

This is my confidence - that we are designed intelligently and that if we perceive our (fluctuating and flexible) experiential realities as diseased and disordered it is simply a sign that the charge of unfelt feelings is stuck in our systems blocking the pathways that, when clear, would allow us to exist as secure beings having a safe, surrendered, and sincerely kind exchange no matter the configuration of our processing capacities.

I have a dream we learn to stop being afraid of ourselves and each other.

What I wish my parents knew back then is that we are all just tubes and bubbles and our dynamic multi-layered body beings (emotional, mental, physical, spiritual) are always just poiting us in the direction of getting along. The message gets confused when we're not accustomed to listening.

Embracing ourselves and each other as both tubes and bubbles: supports us to be radically compassionate (far-reaching thorough compassion); helps us to notice where more compassion and discharge are needed; makes discharging stress and trauma very accessible and even enjoyable, and encourages us in our natural capacity to ride the YES current of the universe - to flow, to thrive, to get along immacultely with ourselves and each other.

I'm an idealist, and I am okay with this.

We’re all the same this way - tubes and bubbles - even when there are disturbing, distracting, triggering differences between us. Even when our bodies or minds look or act different than others, tubes and bubbles is always true. It's an energetic reality that equalizes all of us, no matter what. Engaging with myself this way is a primary tool I use to deal with what's disturbing, distracting, and triggering.

The basic principle of the tube is that we are made to move energy up and down. That's the main pathway. If we want to create specific results, we move energy up and down with clear intention, rather than haphazardly splooging our precious energy reacting towards someone or something. We can also call this being grounded, centered, open.

When we aren't operating this way, we burst our own bubble.

Typically, we drain ourselves in exhausting entanglement when we lack the self-responsibility to move energy consciously up and down. We're groomed by our predecessors to bypass the value of feeling - emotion always inherently beyond logic and reason- so we don't acknowledge that feelings can pass through in a simple way (up and down through the tube). In this we disrespect our realm of responsibility.

Our bubble is our realm of responsibility. Everything that goes on inside of it is within our realm of control. Everything outside of it is beyond our realm of control. So if we want to have power in the landscape of our lives, this is where we must strengthen our presence.

In experiencing ourselves as tubes traversing the terrain between above and below (the earth and the cosmos), we are held in the center. Similarly when we allow ourselves to consciously inhabit our own person bubble, we are held within this healthy boundary.

When we don't let feeling be a priority, we disassociate from the body and live mostly from overheated heads and it's like a traffic jam on the highway, a partial or total blockage in the tube, a diconnect (un-copacetic reality) in the layers of our personal system.

Quick Recap

Strategy number one is being like a tree, a tubular vessel circulating energy up and down. Feelings are not garbage, they are recyclable. Feelings, like thoughts, are just charged energy needing to pass all the way through. We will have the easiest time when we allow this central highway within ourselves to be open.

Strategy number two is always bringing your attention back to your own bubble. This is your domain, your kingdom, your access to benevolent sustainable power. Anything that catches your attention outside of your bubble is a reminder to notice that same thing within your bubble.

Life is a fractal universe, a hall of mirrors, and there's a fine line between madness and enlightenment. We learn to be excellent tight rope walkers of that fine line when we consciously notice and engage with ourselves as tubes and bubbles. We will probably experience a lot of resistance here, but it gets more and more fun as we practice.

When we learn to play with ourselves this way, as tubes and bubbles, we have vastly increased access to copacetic reality within our own personal system and then getting along amongst each other becomes radically easier.

"Copacetic" means in excellent order. My baby daddy taught me that word before there was a child between us. This was his dream for his family after four decades of feeling pushed and pulled, torn apart by intimate feuds and shallow agreements, caught in a constant fury of conflict between absolute love and total rejection.

We poured a lot of effort into attempting to create "copacetic" for ourselves early on, let alone when a kid and pets came into the mix. All that trying was awfully ugly before we arrived at some core understandings mostly through trial and error on our own because the mainstream approach is to sedate people like us into relative functionality (aka blending better with the accepted dysfunctional state of the norm).

“Be who you needed as a kid.”

is a phrase I saw years ago and it’s always stuck with me.

I needed people who weren’t afraid of fully feeling. I needed less trauma drama and more, MoRe, MORE authentic present connection. I needed people who weren’t afraid of themselves and the crazy-cool natural functions of their many layered body beings. I needed someone(s) dynamically intelligent.

As far as I can tell we all have five intelligences:

Emotional. Intellectual. Physical. Spiritual. Moral.

They are all equal and designed to exist in copacetic relationship with one another. Copacetic relationship between our emotional, intellectual, physical and spiritual bodies is what we access when we engage with ourselves as tubes and bubbles.

To engage, allow, and even prioritize this could be our moral code that allows for infinite circulation of energy within our own personal systems and throughout community and collective.

Infinite circulation would look like living in a state of continuous overflow - an absence of conflict and scarcity - a really sweet life.

Following the tube and bubble strategies (especially when discord arises or we are triggered by something in the outside world), we must resource ourselves to allow the feelings to be fully felt (otherwise it's more stored charge in our bodies, more trauma). This supports us to maintain a spacious presence where we can take responsibility for the reflection outer unwellness within our own personal system.

It's tough for me to choose not to go way deeper right here right now because I am so passionate about this stuff as I am experiencing it as the LOOPHOLE to our suffering - both as individuals and as a collective. This is my special interest. I could talk about this until I die (and that's pretty much my plan). It might sound all complex and blah blah blah at some points, but it always comes back to really basic energetics:

a tube to let the thoughts and feelings move through and a bubble of responsibility to focus on and center yourself in.

Do you want to feel HELD? HEARD? SEEN?

This is it, babe.

This way of being offers us the safety and security we are all fighting and hustling for. This is why I am committed to exploring and expressing these concepts in a variety of public interactive art exhibits and experimental social media presentations over the coming year(s). Grant propsals are filling themselves out enthusiastically and all ages workshops are happening to gather input and perspective from community.

While I am commited, I also experience fear (among the rest of the full spectrum of feelings). This is life altering stuff. In order not to let the fear (or any thought/emotion combo) clog up my system and dismantle my efforts, I use the CaNDY principle.

COMPASSION. NOTICING. DISCHARGE. YES YES YES.

1. COMPASSION. RADICAL COMPASSION.

All thoughts and feelings are allowed. They are allowed to move through the tube. None of them define us if they are allowed to keep moving. Thoughts and feelings are just energy and energy is meant to always be in motion.

I remind myself and say this aloud to pretty much anyone that talks to me about anything. This is how we be gentle with ourselves in a society still highly influenced by Patriarchal prioritzation of thoughts over feelings. We want the value of thoughts and feelings to balance and we want to no longer cling to either thoughts or feelings as our identity if our goal is to be free. They are all just energy passing through.

Have compassion that freedom is a highly sensational reality our nervous systems are not very accustomed to. There are parts of ourselves that will fight it even if there are other parts that are fighting for it. This is the internal conflict we can address and realign into copacetic personal reality through the tube and bubble strategies. These strategies slow us down to take responsiblity for the possibility of openness and thriving (rather than draining our attention outwards when our biggest opportunity to affect the world is through attending to our own tube and bubble).

Having compassion for ourselves - allowing all parts of us to be heard and seen and held, primarily by our own attention and presence - translates immediately outwards in a ripple effect.

Compassion is seeing sameness regardless of difference. We give equal value to our minds and bodies and their senstivities. We take responsibility for our minds and bodies as that which is in our own domain, our bubble of power. Relationships are for relating and our primary relationship is always with ourselves (even if we ignore it). It sets the tone for everything else in our experience. Compassion in your tube and bubble is essential for offering actual sustainable compassion towards anyone else.

2. NOTICE. JUST NOTICE.

Compassion breathes room for noticing. When there's no more right and wrong (judgment) there's room for the simple flow of energy and we won't be so resistant to noticing the blockages.

Becoming the kind observer you will be out of your own way more than ever - letting feelings and thoughts be transient things just passing through the tube. There's nothing to do other than allow.

The mind is made to be an observer of sensation within the body, much more so than the decision-maker role we force upon it. When we embrace being tubes and bubbles we come to know a spacious reality where attention is available to be drawn to where more discharge is needed so that the thoughts and feelings can simply pass through. When they can pass through, so can consciousness, aka the solutions to all our issues.

Congratulate yourself for noticing instead of being hard on yourself for whatever is happening. As we quit the blaming, shaming, acusing, and complaining that's been a primary function of our inherited socializing, we will notice that it originates in painful judgment of ourselves. Neutralizing judgment, uplevelling this function of the mind into discernment (aka listening to the body), will come naturally as we practice noticing.

Oh wow. Isn't that interesting. Isn't it all so curious and fascinating. Noticing is the innocent function of child-like wonder and awe at everything. It's all just playing and experimenting with ourselves.

3. DISCHARGE. DAILY DISCHARGE.

Embodiment means actually inhabiting the body, willing to be present with it (particulary as a transittter of wisdom through sensation and the charge of feelings). It can be so scary and genuinely very challenging to be embodied when the body is where the trauma is and we are trained not to feel it (point of compassion).

Thoughts play off of our feelings and feelings play off our thoughts. It can be a very dizzying, disheartening experience trying to analyze and understand why, why. why. Instead we need to clear the pathways (to keep the compassion and noticing going) (to manifest the realities of our dreams with ease, grace, and kindness both inwards and outwards).

When we see ourselves as tubes in our own personal bubble we can become confident that we can handle feeling the feelings, we know where to direct them, and we know this is our realm of responsibility, of control, of power. And so, we stim.

Conscious stimming is anything we do to engage any one of our senses and keep us landed in the body. Being in the body we can choose to let charged energy pass all the way through instead of overstimulate us into disassociation and compouding trauma.

We do not need to store anything. Everything we need in any moment is available to us in that moment. This requires trust. When we practice compassion and noticing, using the strategies of being tubes and bubbles, we ground, center, and open - trust is natural here. We can let go. We can shake or dance or sing. We can sniff, taste, focus on a sound or texture. We can do whatever we prefer to relax us back into our bodies instead of disassociate (escape into our minds and conceptual vs emboied spirituality).

When we are relaxed in the body it will either automatically discharge or show/tell us how it wants to discharge whatever stress (stuck energy/emotion/thought).

4. YES. SAY YES.

Say YES even to the "no, no, no". Ride the yes current of the universe to be in the moment. "No," aka resistance, shows us where release is needed.

We will meet the edges of our willingness again and again as we expand in these practices. We will meet fears and contractions, judgments and pain. We are designed to be able to handle all of it, aka allow any and all of it to pass through the tube. We will have to be with, aka notice and feel through, those predetermined boundaries that limit our flexibilty and openness.

We say YES to working with all of it as tubes within the safety of our personal bubbles. If there's any doubt about whether you can keep this up, "Yes. Yes. Yes" is your mantra. Engaging your body any way that feels like a yes, letting that YES energy move through you, opening up your system to circulate energy freely - for clarity, compassion, ease, abundance - for overall flow, flow through you and around you.

Taking up all the space in your bubble, claiming this as your territory, claiming this as your truth.

I have a dream of people getting along. I have dreamed of getting along with myself in the way I do today and it is my greatest pleasure to continue this work in private and ask myself to extend it into the public sphere.

I have a dream that we are already free.

I dream of devotion to emotion as charged energy simply trying to pass through; that when allowed, delivers consciousness, openness, relief - ALL the answers to every question ever asked.

I dream of living among deeply relieved people.

I dream of projects and poetry in motion that engage us in the equalizing factors that enable each of us to actually authentically LOVE being alive.

I dream of getting along with ourselves and each other.

I dream of conflict transmuted into creative dynamic tension, the layers of our beings in an infinite dance with each other, stretching into our very natural, truly accessible capacities for compassion, noticing, discharge, and positivity/optimism/acceptance.

I dream of no longer being afraid of ourselves and each other.

I have a dream that stimming saves the world.

I have a dream that oppression is optional.

To Sum It Up

I leave you with these mantras below that I open every gathering and workshop with. I plan to repeat these to myself every day both verbally and nonverbally (see video below), and to know deep within my being that this is my biggest, brightest, best contribution. I look forward to playing with myself, each and every day of this rough and tumble life, as both a tube and bubble.

Have Compassion.

You are safe inside yourself. You're a very capable tube and bubble, even if you were trained and shamed to forget.

Keep noticing.

It's your recognition that you most desire. Noticing tames the ego that reactively tries to protect you while accidentally poking holes in your bubble. Noticing soothes the layers of your being into copacetic reality.

Discharge throughout the day.

You are responsible for your own state of being. Let everything go. Your surrender to your own attention, presence, and spaciousness, is all that you need - everything else arrives naturally.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

We're sovereign beings on an interdependent matrix. We're doing it. You've got this. When you falter or flail, keep going with CaNDY to maintain your relationship with yourself as a very capable tube and bubble. You are free! You have quantum access to copacetic reality.

P.S. This video is eleven minutes long (not linked to any promo of any kind) and says ALL of the above nonverbally. Seventeen self-regulation tools in a sequence that: speaks to us as tubes and bubbles; acknowledges many places in our bodies where charged energy (feelings) gets stuck; and calls forward your inner knowing that OPPRESSION IS OPTIONAL and STIMMING SAVES THE WORLD. Do it every day?