Growing a Human Life
(Part IV - The Cambium, Chapter 19)
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
〰 Wislawa Szymborska 〰
Growing is the Heartbeat of Life
There is in all things a hidden wholeness.
〰 Thomas Merton 〰
In an ideal world, humans would grow forever. I’m not suggesting we should live forever. I’m thinking of growing as the essence of living. I’m thinking of growing as long as I’m living in this human body. I’m talking about growing up.
Most people don’t. Or we often struggle to do so. Not because we don’t want to, but because it’s damn hard, because we have very few role models. Perhaps our ‘elders’ learned how to grow into grownup roles of their era. Very few individuals grew into genuine wise elders.
The lack of elders gives an indication that the world we live in is neither ideal nor natural. All indigenous cultures have their wise elders to guide the younger generations. In our non-ideal ecosphere (falsely hailed as ‘the pinnacle of civilisation’), we do grow up physically and legally, if we are lucky to live long enough. But living a physically and legally long life in our culture is no guarantee for growing up.
As I write about growing, I’m tuning into a process and activity which I’ve come to understand as the heartbeat of life. This vital core dynamic that sustains life from the moment of conception until the final breath is a natural process, misunderstood and abused by anthropocentric agendas. The phenomenon, which goes by the name growth, which is a cousin of green, applicable to grass, has been groomed by greed, greatness, delusions of grandeur, and devoured by the cancer industry.
In part IV of Synchronosophy, starting with this chapter, I wish to reclaim the true power of growing, which is embedded in every cell of Consciousness, which is our indigenous inheritance, and redirect it into grit, gratitude, and grace.
Like so many words we use casually in everyday life, the word growth | ɡrəʊθ | carries a whole trunk full of meanings. We’re not going to unpack this baggage here. Some of it will be discussed on my parallel substack Symbiopædia. It will take several wordcasts to do so.
Here we delve straight into the practice of inner growing which is relevant to Synchronosophy, which is about the relationship between personal experience and embodied knowledge, which comes through practice and engagement with everyday living.
Growing, as defined here, is a vital principle associated with Holonomy (= the laws of wholeness, see definition in the glossary). The principle of growing states that every living organism develops from an immature state into its mature form while making a symbiogenic contribution to the regeneration of the ecosphere of which it is an indigenous native.
Growing is a cyclical unfolding through natural phases of developing, including regenerating and degenerating, profound inner and outer changes, transforming and transmogrifying, nurturing new living and accepting the dying off. Growing is intimately affiliated with healing, becoming, and evolving towards wholeness.
The principle of growing states that every living organism develops from an immature state into its mature form while making a symbiogenic contribution to the regeneration of the ecosphere of which it is an indigenous native.
A No-Dig-Trail to Inner Growing
It takes courage to grow and become who you really are.
〰 E.E. Cummings 〰
The discipline and practice of Synchronosophy nurtures inner growing. Over the past four decades, many new methods have been developed, or ancient ones ‘resurrected’, to promote ‘personal and/ or spiritual growth’. Synchronosophy is not such a method.
Synchronosophy is designed to stimulate the healthy development of indigenous inner populations who have had a hard time growing up, due to personal, ancestral or collective so-called ‘adverse experiences’.
The past decades have also seen booming births in a whole new market catering for the healing from trauma. Since the contents of this book are more than touching upon this subject, I need to point out that Synchronosophy is not a trauma therapy, or any ‘therapy’ for that matter (keeping in mind that the term ‘therapy’ has been watered down so much, it has become rather fluid and slippery).
Synchronosophy is a practice designed to do yourself, or in exchange with trusted companions, to nurture the inner mindscape. Most, if not all of this work can be done by the practitioner themselves, but it doesn’t require solitude. Given the right conditions of mutual trust and understanding, it can be done in a casual setting, alone or with a friend or small group, during a stroll in nature, or at a quiet time in your favourite café.
We approach the inner mindscape as a piece of land; and like any private or communal garden, we can cultivate this land in different ways. The practice of Synchronosophy is comparable with permaculture in so far as we use a ‘no dig approach’ to cultivating the inner space. This is an important conceptual principle to keep in mind. It helps to distance ourselves from the idea that any ‘negative experiences need to be brought to the surface and disposed of’.
When beginning this work about two and a half decades ago, I was under the impression ~ in accordance with the zeitgeist of the times ~ that there are certain flawed aspects of myself which needed fixing or eradicating. Consequently, I approached this project with the belief and attitude that ‘once I get this inner work done and these imperfect parts of myself sorted out’, I can live happily ever after.
The belief in fixing and eradicating in order to achieve perfection lead to the further assumption that this work can be done within a certain time frame. Therefore, the harder I try and more efficiently I do the work, the faster I’ll reach my desired state of perfection.
Right? ››› Wrong!
This materialistic interpretation has turned out to be the biggest fundamental error. Human Consciousness doesn’t need fixing. The inner mindscape is never ‘finished’. Therefore the perfectionist approach, so widespread in contemporary cultures, is not only unhelpful. It is counterproductive and a serious obstacle to this work.
A more fruitful metaphor has been to view the inner mindscape as a garden, which can benefit from some loving attention. Nothing that grows in this garden needs to be removed. There are no obnoxious weeds to destroy, no pests to kill off, no deeply rooted ‘toxic beliefs’ to eradicate.
All indigenous natives of this inner landscape have a right to be there. If we don’t (yet) understand their use and purpose, it’s an indication that certain natives in our inner space are immature and have not yet fully developed their latent gifts. Anything that is not indigenous but has ‘gone native’ will either fall by the wayside and be composted or find its rightful place.
Applying the no-dig-approach means that we don’t look for ‘negative aspects’ to get rid of. You also don’t focus on ‘positive aspects’ with the intention to promote, propagate and spread them out all over the inner space. Instead, you practice engaging with whatever comes up on any given day with an open mind and compassionate attention.
All indigenous natives of the inner mindscape have a right to be there.
Anything that is not indigenous but has ‘gone native’
will either be composted or find its rightful place.
Growing after Trauma
We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in.
〰 Ernest Hemingway 〰
In contemporary trauma literature, including some memoirs by ‘trauma survivors’ and non-fiction written by psychologists who specialise in trauma therapy, I have come across objections against and rejections of the notion of post traumatic growth (PTG). These sources claim that the phenomenon either ‘doesn’t exist’ or they dismiss it as ‘anecdotal evidence’, reserved for the lucky and privileged few. Some even suggest that it may be dangerous to talk about PTG because it ‘adds insult to injury.’
Apparently, the mentioning of PTG puts trauma victims under pressure, not only to fully recover from the hardships life has thrown at them, but to come out of it stronger than before.
In my view, this conclusion reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. PTG was disovered by various researchers and therapists in the mid 20th century when working with groups of people who had survived severe traumatic events. One of these researchers was Aaron Antonovsky, medical sociologist and founder of Salutogenesis (see Chapter 13)
Antonovsky’s observations made a significant contribution to our current understanding of PTG. He didn’t claim that anyone who goes through trauma must come out stronger. His work was one of the first to raise awareness not only that it is possible to grow out of and beyond the most devastating experiences of life. He also showed ways to stimulate this growth, and attributed it to the crucial ‘sense of coherence’.
Antonovsky’s work was later confirmed by Peter Levine, one of the wise elders of contemporary trauma research, who famously said that, “trauma is not a life sentence.”
Although Synchronosophy has gestated and sprouted in the soil of my personal trauma history, it was not conceived as a ‘trauma therapy’. This discipline and practice focuses rather on natural phenomena and how they interact with subjective negative experience.
In its concept and practical application, Synchronosophy is a path of self-knowledge, rather than a ‘method for trauma healing’. Although overlaps between the two are inevitable, growing is a natural phenomenon, which we can resist but not avoid. We are driven by an urge to grow as long as we live because growing is core feature of living. In other words, while we’re alive, we cannot not grow. That’s a fact, a natural law, a basic principle of how life works.
The only choice in this matter is how we want to grow. Because growing is not always constructive. It can unfold as a regenerative force as well as a degenerative one. We know this, for example, thanks to the work of Dr. Gabor Maté, who revealed in his book The Myth of Normal that a resistance to inner growth can show up in autoimmune diseases and other chronic conditions, including malignant growth.
This research is not my expertise, and I am not claiming that Synchronosophy can save you, or myself, or anyone else from developing cancer (or any other degenerative illness). But the thought that there is a direct connection between our physical (and mental!) health and how we interact with our subjective everyday experiences ~ especially the painful ones ~ may be an interesting one to keep in mind.
Growing is a core feature of living.
As long as we’re alive, we cannot not grow.
The choice we have is not of if but how we want to grow.
Raising the Indigenous Inner Population
We usually associate ‘growing’ with up, not down into the shadow, body, and depths.
〰 Matt Licata 〰
In Chapter 18 I have introduced the concept of the inner permafrost, which is where the indigenous inner creatures can get frozen following any exposure to traumatic events. This is an expression of the familiar ‘freeze’ response always mentioned in the context of trauma.
You may not remember what happened when part of your inner population got caught in the inner permafrost. It may not even be something that happened to you personally in your own lifetime. Thanks to the work of Franz Renggli (Swiss prenatal trauma researcher mentioned in Chapter 18) and others we now know that trauma responses can be passed down through ancestral lineage, if the traumatic experience has not been processed to break the spell, so to speak.
So how can we find out whether we are carrying any ancestral (or personal, or collective) trauma patterns?
The answer is uncanny, uncomfortable, and straight forward all at once: Anything that triggers a negative emotional response ~ especially when there is no objective reason for having an adverse emotional reaction ~ can give an indication of some underlying unresolved trauma. In other words, trauma, no matter whether known or unknown, keeps part of your inner indigenous population stuck within the inner permafrost.
As mentioned in Chapter 18, especially an emotional overreaction can be read as a signal of an immature inner creature letting the owner of individual human Consciousness (IHC) know that it needs some attention.
To reiterate the concept behind this way of thinking: the Noctarine represents human Consciousness is a living organism (as opposed to a machine constructed of ‘parts’, or a type of computer which can be ‘programmed’). The living organism of human Consciousness is a microcosm, a whole world teeming with creatures, all of whom make contributions to what we call ‘experience’.
The vast majority of our indigenous inner populations operates under the radar of our awareness most of the time ~ just like the physical organism who keeps quietly and nicely ticking away without giving you any hassle, until you stub your toe or twist an ankle, for example.
That’s a good thing! If we had to control all these inner populations, we would have to earn a degree in intro-cosmology before we can even start living. That’s obviously not necessary. We’re all born into this life and have to hit the ground running, oblivious to how life works and what we’re supposed to do when things go wrong. A lot of the time life works out fine, despite our ignorance… until it doesn’t.
When you hit obstacles in every day life, and the tools handed down or acquired in whatever way prove ineffective to overcome them, you are presented with an opportunity to develop new skills, acquire new knowledge, and gain a new pearl of wisdom. That’s what Synchronosophy is essentially about.
With the help of the Noctarine, we can navigate the inner mindscape to identify members of the inner population who have been adversely affected by the inner permafrost due to personal, ancestral, or collective traumatic experiences.
We don’t need to know what happened. We don’t need to dig around in the past, because this is not about pulling out some invasive weeds, or getting rid of ‘harmful information’, like a computer virus. What we need to do is unfreeze the immature creature stuck in the inner permafrost, bring it into the fold of the mature indigenous inner population, and give it whatever it needs to grow up.
Our goal is to unfreeze the immature creatures stuck in the inner permafrost,
bring them into the fold of the mature indigenous inner population,
and give them whatever they need to grow up.
The Practice of Kairotrophy
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
〰 Virginia Woolf 〰
The actual work I invite you to do is deceptively simple. Which doesn’t mean it is easy! As you will surely know, there is nothing you or anyone can do to make anything grow. Growing happens by itself.
Because growing is an expression of the life force inherent in any living creature, it makes sense that this life force also drives the immature inner creatures stuck in the inner permafrost. But this doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do either.
Like a gardener in the outer landscape, you don’t make plants grow by pulling at the leaves. You give them the care and nourishment they need in order to do what they know best to do by themselves. This universal principle applies to the inner mindscape too.
What if we are each expected to become custodians of the living creatures who populate our inner space? We can choose to take good care of them, to do what we can to provide them with their basic needs so they can thrive, grow into maturity, and make their contribution to the wellbeing of our Consciousness. Since the wellbeing of our inner indigenous population ensures the health of the entire organism, this is the best we can do for ourselves too.
What you can do is give your frozen inner creatures the right nourishment at the right time. This is what we call Kairotrophy [from Greek kairos = opportune moment + trophē = food, nourishment]
There are countless ways to nurture frozen immature creatures who have been left stranded in the inner permafrost, sometimes for generations or an entire era. As pointed out earlier, Synchronosophy is not a method to teach you ‘how to change your life in 3 or 7 or even 64 steps’. That’s not how life works.
Having said that, Synchronosophy is a method ~ in the original sense of meta-hodos ~ in pursuit of a way. Synchronosophy is a path of seeking wisdom. It is not, however, a ‘method’, in the sense of a tried and tested practice to be be taught or followed verbatim with the expectation to achieve certain results.
We are all unique and different. Everyone’s life’s journey is so different. I can’t tell you where to go from where you are now, because I’m not you, and your journey isn’t mine. No-one can tell you how to get to where you want to be, which is most likely not even known to yourself. Your journey is unlike any other.
Moreover, this growing process is not something you do to get out of the way once, and be over and done with it. Growing is an ongoing journey of discovery ~ a hodos in pursuit of wholeness
The Noctarine is a map which can guide you to inner treasure. Not because some higher forces in their divine wisdom have hidden some magic gifts there for us. But because the indigenous structures and strata of the living organism of human Consciousness know where and how to preserve intrinsic treasure, and when and how to reveal it.
Synchronosophy is a way of life which views the experience of life itself as a treasure hunt. The clues along the way are, paradoxically, disguised as our own negative subjective experiences.
Why? Because they show up the exact areas where we can and need to grow the most at any given moment. Negative subjective experiences show up incoherent spots and features. They direct us precisely to our immature inner creatures, who need a little TLC and the right nourishment at the right time. (See also Chapter 10 Subjective Experience as a Living Source of Knowledge)
The timing of our negative experience is significant too. Kairos tells us that when the shit hits the fan, this is the opportune moment to delve deeper into the inner mindscape.
Trophy, in this context, is not a gleaming medal, a coveted prize or award to be won at the end of a challenging race. Trophy means nourishment. And the food that nurtures human Consciousness more than anything is love.
Love ~ I know, another one of these words that can mean anything and nothing. What exactly does it mean here? Loving, as food for Consciousness, translates into accepting unconditionally, allowing, attending, meeting with awareness, being with, befriending, caring, offering companionship and compassion, embracing with empathy, integrating, approaching with kindness, kinning, listening, practicing mindfulness, being non-judgmental…
Loving can also mean nurturing, parenting, patience, presence, giving quality time, rooting for, taking responsibility, siding with, sponsoring, supporting, surrendering, tolerating, transcending, trusting.
Did I say ‘Synchronosophy is not a therapy’? What I mean is, this is not a ‘therapy’ in the sense of a medical or curative treatment administered by someone trained or self-appointed as a ‘therapist’.
Kairotrophy is a therapeutic practice in the sense of the original Greek therapeuein |θεραπεύειν| = to attend, serve, take care of, which is restorative and can have healing effects.
The Noctarine is a treasure map, where
experiences of life are clues for a treasure hunt.
Synchronosophy is a meta hodos, in pursuit of this way,
a journey of seeking wisdom, a path in pursuit of wholeness
Kairotrophy is the kairotic therapeuein, taking care of whatever calls
for attention at the right moment.
As an introduction to the practice of Kairotrophy, a resource sheet is attached for download. You may want to reserve the exercises for true kairos, when spontaneous negative experience signals the opportune moment to attend to an immature creature waking up in the inner permafrost.
The moment always came when poets had to close the doors behind them,
strip off their mantles, fripperies, and other poetic paraphernalia, and confront
– silently, patiently awaiting their own selves –
the still white sheet of paper.
〰 Wislawa Szymborska 〰
Missed the earlier chapters? Click the links
The Rootstock of Synchronosophy
Chapter 1 The Mycelium of Synchronosophy, Chapter 2 Sub-Soil of Synchronosophy, Chapter 3 Nutrients for Synchronosophy, Chapter 4 Adjustments to an Unnatural World, Chapter 5 Loss of Self and Identity, Chapter 6 The Destructive Trail of Trauma
The Heartwood of Synchronosophy
Chapter 7 Emotional Messengers, Chapter 8 Love Thyself, Chapter 9 The Birth of the Noctarine, Chapter 10 Subjective Experience, Chapter 11 The Inner Wilderness, Chapter 12 Polarity and Wholeness
The Sapwood of Synchronosophy
Chapter 13, Symphony of Senses, Chapter 14, The Rainbow of Consciousness, Chapter 15 Ancestral Will, Chapter 16 Acts of Knowing, Chapter 17 Powers of Knowing, Chapter 18 Structures of Knowing
background information about Synchronosophy in this interview from April 2024
Such a perfect metaphor! We’ve been practicing “no till” gardening for years now and I can’t fathom ever doing it differently. But now, applying this metaphor to the indigenous inner beings, our own landscape of self, I’m excited on an entirely new level. It’s Unfixed, explained in the most practical terms: EVERYTHING BELONGS. And within Kairos time, the cycles are non-linear, some parts emerging while other parts decaying, but collectively serving the whole.
Veronika thank you for your endless insights!
I’m with Jamie, planning on devouring this wonderful post slowly. Soooo much rich food for pondering. I’m so glad for your next chapter. I recently read about “fix” as one of the stress-default F words, as in fight, flight, freeze, flock. Likewise, I think of the Courage & Renewal touchstone “No fixing, saving, advising or correcting” as a key to creating safe/brace space for inner work. The principle behind that is “true self already has the inner wisdom it needs.” I love your gardening and growing metaphor for cultivating the indigenous natives and tending to creatures stuck in the permafrost. I look forward to your other wordcasts unpacking the word Growth. (Loving all on the verbing in this post too!) Thank you so much for your wording and sharing! 🤗💕🌸✍️🌱