Feeding Patterns

I’ve been thinking a lot about feeding patterns lately, which is probably a strange thing to say and admittedly has gotten me some weird looks at various social or work hangs but is nevertheless true. It started because for the last 6 or 7 months I’ve been digging a bit deeper into myself around my own connections to the various things I traipse through on a regular basis, and running what would amount to unit tests on them to see how they actually behave outside of my broader wilderness. If you’re not familiar and don’t want to click that link, unit testing is when you take a small piece of code, say a single function, and run a bunch of different input scenarios through it to make sure it works the way you think it should. A really basic version of this is if you have a function that adds 2 numbers, you would run a bunch of different types of numbers into it to make sure it can add, say, whole numbers and also decimals and so on and so forth. So, I’ve been doing the slightly more abstract version of that on myself.

Or maybe it started 4 and a half years ago. A shaman told me sometime around then that the way to know yourself is through tracking. To let yourself be both the animal and the hunter, so to speak, and follow the paths wherever they lead. What I’ve learned over time is that the best way for me to map myself is by testing resistances, similar to the way water can solve a maze using its own surface tension if the conditions are right. So, starting with what paths in myself do I not feel able to follow the animal down, and then which ones do I not want to follow the animal down, and then why not to both. And then later, following the animal anyway, and then after that learning from what I observe there, and so on and so forth.

This process goes on forever I think, and collides very nicely for me with a lot of the Western spiritual completionist fantasies that I formed around at different times in my life. It becomes easier for me to breathe and be present in my own life when I’m not a problem to solve and instead just an animal in the woods, or a tree growing in a particular patch of soil, or what have you. And studying my own feeding patterns and connections becomes interesting information that can help heal things I’m avoiding or hurting from in addition to letting me know what I love to do or am most interested in. Said another way, I’ve been learning how the database of my life is really just a map of how I’m hurting, and why I love the things I love.

I’m almost at post 60 for Radio Bebop, and already the things I’ve learned about myself by going back over this first section of posts has been insanely helpful, as have been the different notes I’ve gotten from some of you as I’ve gone along. I’ve been tinkering with something that will help explore some of these topics in some pretty cool (at least to me) ways and I’m stoked to share that with you soon.