Practice 9 – Release the Future      

All his life has he looked away to the future, the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.

Yoda

Summary: This may be the most radical practice of the ten practices. Our attempt here is to go beyond the thought patterns that so often create anxiety, “stuckness” and their consequent tensions. So much of this comes from time pressures and how we view the future. We ease up on our constant attention to and resultant resistance to time and its passing. Practice 9 aims at keeping us centered and grounded in the peace and contentment that comes from letting ourselves and life unfold and emerge, from living inside out. It touches on accepting our big and lasting identity even as we need to live our smaller temporary ones, the ones dictated by our roles in the world. This helps us savor the vast inner and outer spaces always there for the finding.  

Go Inside Out, Not Outside In

The mind, especially when we are working predominantly with the left hemisphere of our brains, tends to keep us on the track of finding and creating the next satisfaction. The right hemisphere tends to see life differently (in both complementary and competitive fashion) and does not settle for satisfaction. It goes for relatedness, appreciating the big picture, the new and the meaningful. It takes our attention more within ourselves, even while also sensing our connection to that which is outside, and has a better appreciation for lasting value. This is a significant difference, and it brings in heart energy because of the relatedness factor. (Remember: brain hemisphere pioneer Iain McGilchrist provides all these insights.)

Joy and gratitude, being inner sourced and involving the heart, takes us past the drive for acquiring satisfaction by the ever-elusive special somethings outside of us. We find the source within—some inner flame beyond anything we created– and we don’t give our power away to the outer world as something to manipulate for our feel good.

Our sense of time that goes inside out is a kind of timeless time, kairos, not sequential time chronos, to use the ancient Greek terms. (The Greeks, like most cultures, no doubt sensed the difference between the work of the two brain hemispheres). Kairos is what we mean with practice 9– “release the future.” Release the sole dominance of chronos-logical awareness. Of course, plans need to be made (don’t go to the bank applying for a business loan and tell the loan officer you are planless and are “releasing the future.”)  Sequences of steps are part of the everyday—buy the food, cook the food, eat the food. “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, is impactful guidance we were given on the overlap of the domains in which we live. We don’t want to mix up the rules of the two domains. Non-linear, inner-oriented kairos and linear, outer-oriented chronos have different rules because we live and breathe in both domains.  

Since there are plenty of writings on Caesar’s domains, the outer side, practice 9 and all the practices are about that other domain, the understory, the invisible energies, or whatever names we give it.  

Let me give you a few of the truth-saturated words to a great song about the two time domains, one I like to perform when it fits the context of the workshop, that you can find on YouTube: Standing Still performed by my friend Greg Tamblyn and composed by Mike Mahaffey.

We are flying high; we are making time. We love corners cut; we don’t like lines.

We have wheels that turn; We were made to build. We’ve lost our knack for standing still.

…An inward look in a quiet place; a loved one’s touch, a child’s embrace.

A private prayer for the truth revealed, that our hearts to be moved to standing still.  

Research for the Heart’s Wisdom

All day, every day chronos/left hemisphere awareness can be a limiter. It takes us to the domains it knows. The timeless time, the flow that we can slip into like a stream and let ourselves go with it, has no way to enter our lives when we plan plan plan plan/do do do. Then we wake up and do it all over again.

Findings from Heartmath, the research center devoted to the life-enhancing powers of the human heart, points to this alternative mode of being, facilitated by the vagus nerve, which is the

mechanism whereby input from the heart to the brain could inhibit or facilitate the brain’s electrical activity… This suggests the heart and nervous system were not simply following the brain’s directions… Rather, the autonomic nervous system and the communication between the heart and brain were much more complex, and the heart seemed to have its own type of logic and acted independently of the signals sent from the brain.

With practice 9 we continue our shifting to the heart’s (and the mindful mind’s) logic system, versus the logic of the thinking mind all by itself. As Iain McGilchrist puts it: the left hemisphere is a wonderful servant and a terrible master. The vagus nerve provides us with the logic that surpasses what the smaller versions much of society and our own minds automatically put on our mental screen. We go past being pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding organisms and our expansive selves show up, the ones with the purposes from our inner source, the ones guiding us to higher human possibilities.

All of our principled decisions and actions —to be a good neighbor, lower our household waste, accomplish good work, cook healthy food, parent well–come from this inner side of our identity. Our principles do not look for gain but for expression. They are timeless, hovering over every instant of the calendar. Getting to the inner side takes work, and practice 9 is one more way to do fruitful interruption of the limited domain that can be too much with us.

Release the Future  

At age 48, at the peak of my midlife run and going for the brass rings careers offer, I stopped setting extensive annual goals. I was not sure of why I did this, but I knew it was a first step to begin the move into trusting other parts of me and life and to making room for new views of time.

Now 26 plus years later, this posture of release continues to ease me out of my thinking mind’s drive for satisfaction from the outside-in, which includes distraction, not just acquiring. I now know more about this notion of release into the flow of kairos. I have gone from a vague notion to more an actionable set of practices. I am still a rookie, a learner here, of course. Below I share the practices I have been using and give it my best shot at describing them.  

Practice for Releasing the Future

–Let the world be. As we move through our days, we regularly take the tack of improvement or fixing or condemnation of what we are observing—”wow, what an ugly blouse, or, somebody should fix this paint job, or, how come he insists on doing that?” We release the future when we stop judging how something should be versus what it is. Even at work, where problem solving and incremental improvement is rightly rewarded, take regular breaks from improvement thinking and go to see-and-appreciate-what-is thinking.   

—See the kernels of good in the bad and the bad in the good. The drive to be right and more than right, to besuperior or better than, is so strongly a part of human nature. Let all that go. One way to do that is to diminish that need to be superior, to be one up, even if only a little bit. Notice the need, how often it comes up, and let it go. Remember the following poem as a keeper. It came from coach Mary MacDonald Gollan, originating with her nurse-leader grandma in New Jersey, who used to remind those around her:

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it does not behoove any of us to criticize the rest of us.

This is big. Letting people be is a great place to start the practice of releasing the future.  

–Move from managing the world to becoming the energy you want more of in the world. A few wise guides have something to say about this. Gandhi told us to become the energy we want to see in the world. My mentor Peter Block, ever the provocateur, looks at it through another lens–how are we contributing and colluding with the problems in the world we most complain about. Managing your part of the world to manage is a good thing. Participate wholeheartedly and with full attention in the duties that your social roles bring. And more than manage and participate from the outside in, become what you want to see from the inside out. This is the move to a state of being that releases the future.

—Move from self-authoring to self-emerging. Remember when we think inside out, we “happen to ourselves.”We are entering our “field of unknowing,” the stance of self-discovery, with a positive and patient expectation. In this open-minded stance releasing the future includes relaxing the self-imposed, and self-designed improvement projects while trusting that bigger parts of us, ones we may not be fully aware of, will bring us into the next phase. Self-improvement includes lists of actions and commitments, and it also, when we release the future, includes and even emphasizes self-unfoldment. The developmentalist Robert Kegan calls this self-emerging phase the self-transforming stage. You may enjoy reading about his work if you do not know it.

OK, almost done. Releasing the future is advanced work. Let’s move to practice 10.

If you missed the introduction to this series and the earlier practices here is the link that started the series.    http://www.evocateurblog.com/2023/09/14/ten-practices-helpful-habits-of-mind-and-heart/