"Accelerating Wisdom" Episode 4: Mapping Your Transformation
Article #4 of 8 in the Accelerating Wisdom Series.
Guest Expert: Devin Martin. Based in New York, Devin is one of the world’s best transitional coaches. His expertise is helping high-performing individuals with big decisions and life transitions.
Woo rating: 4/10 (all Leading Edge content will have a “woo rating” reflecting how far from the current consensus worldview it is. But we will never cover topics without direct practical applications).
If there’s a core theme in the pursuit of wisdom, it's the need for constant “rebirths.” This applies for all scales and timeframes. As we saw in Episode 1, cognitive flexibility requires an unusual capacity to destroy and rebuild your working model of the world. Applied to a lifelong timeline, midlife often requires a complete reversal in the way we have operated. We ideally transition from left hemispheric, narrow and egocentric, to right hemispheric and open to attractors (Episode 2). This can be a horrendously difficult process. This week’s episode discusses frameworks and tools to help you navigate this treacherous path.
We’ve lost the map for transitions
A recent working paper1 that studied 500,000 people in developed nations found that major indicators of mental duress (depression, thoughts of suicide, stress, headaches and alcohol use) peaked in midlife. This happened regardless of income, nationality, gender, or whether or not people had kids. The authors concluded that the sheer scale of the problem “has not been grasped by the affluent world’s policy-makers.”
This is because the Western world doesn’t have a map for understanding or facilitating midlife transitions.
When properly understood, the perception of midlife transitions can morph from a shameful and lonely crisis to a difficult necessary, evolution of your personality. If the self-reported wellbeing trough doesn't start improving until retirement, this so-called “crisis” is actually an opportunity to flourish far earlier in your life.
In fact, framed as a call away from deadly stagnation and towards the pursuit of wisdom, a recent study makes the importance obvious:
Wisdom is the best predictor of life satisfaction in both men and women and can offset the influence of negative age influences on life satisfaction. Wisdom has a greater influence on life satisfaction in older adulthood than health, socioeconomic status, financial situation, environment, or social engagement.2
Yet how many people deliberately pursue wisdom? That’s what this series, and The Leading Edge community, is here to help address.
I frequently encounter people in various degrees of distress caused by being stuck or lost, mostly professionally. I offer them all a profoundly optimistic insight. I believe your present suffering is directly proportional to your future potential. I can’t see how it could be any other way. If you had no latent potential, and were content to be stuck in a mediocre life, there would be no psychological pain. One of my favourite quotes comes from Brené Brown in the best article I've ever read on midlife transitions3: "your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts."
Yet Western capitalism is abjectly lacking economic or social chrysalises into which our new selves can grow safely. I speak from harsh experience following an incomprehensibly hellish three years of my own life.
Midlife transitions often happen when financial burdens like college tuition and mortgages are greatest. We hit “peak earning years” at exactly the time we are called to transition towards a different mode of being. Research from Herminia Ibarra4 has found that major career transitions take three to five years. Professional, financial and familial pressures often make that an unrealistically long transition time.
What’s missing from our map? An understanding of the structure of life transitions, as well as safe spaces to explore them. We also need guides.
What are we missing? Guides and Spaces
This episode’s expert is Devin Martin. I have interviewed him previously and he recently gave a spectacular interview on the Talking Billions podcast wth Bogumil Baranowski.5 Therefore this was more of a straightforward discussion of the models, practicalities and tools for managing a life transition in the real world (Spotify link here).
First, how do you know you’re on the cusp of a life-transition? Devin’s clients tend to be professionals who have achieved enough success to realize that no more success is going to make them happy. The more you’ve been living out of alignment, what he calls lifestyle integrity, the harder it can be to get back on track.
This is one area where maps and frameworks can be especially helpful. One model Devin has found consistently useful is Ken Wilber’s integral theory.6 It’s well worth a quick diversion.
One of the central insights from Wilber’s audacious attempt to create a theory of everything was the process of “transcending and including.” Like a Russian doll, every level of greater complexity both transcends the limitations of the previous level, but also includes the less complex structure. For example:
Molecules transcend and include atoms,
Cells transcend and include molecules,
Organs transcend and include cells.
The whole body transcends and includes organs, and so on.
If you think back to the attractors episode, complexity is a mix of increasing differentiation and integration. Consider this article you’re reading right now. An individual letter “O” becomes a part of a WORD, that becomes part of a sentence, then a paragraph, then a story. The letter “O” completely retains its own integrity by being included in a word, but it also becomes part of an increasingly complex structure. Within evolution, we are each being drawn to become a completely unique letter, so that the whole story can become ever more complex. Instead of 26 letters to tell its story, the Earth has 8 billion. The more unique we get, the more complex the world gets. It’s an elegant idea!
This is an especially relevant framework for this series because Wilber believed that the evolution of human consciousness also involved “transcending and including” the prior level. What this means in practical terms is that we don’t evolve through cutting off parts of ourselves, but by finding ways to integrate them. As we get wiser, our worldview actually becomes more inclusive of other perspectives. We just get better at discerning which parts are useful. This is an excellent functional definition of wisdom. Wilber believes that as a society we are currently transitioning from Green to Teal below. Which color best describes you or your peers?
Wilber talks about how, when moving to a more integrated stage, we often pathologically “repress” the previous one instead of integrating it. While he says this is as sensible as “denying our own feet”, we can see it constantly at every level of reality. Critics of capitalism call for the entire market system to be scrapped. Critics of technology fantasize about an era before the internet. But we can’t move backwards: these stunningly powerful systems need to be reincorporated within a more positive-sum framework.
This integration process is also consistent with the idea of returning our left hemispheric skills to the guidance of our right. This suggests that midlife is when this transition should happen. According to some traditions, we spend the first eighteen years of life becoming individuals, the next eighteen building the “left hemispheric” skillsets that gives us a strong ego structure. We then transcend and include those skills in service of something more meaningful to ourselves, and the world in general.7 The most effective approach to life transitions in this context is to devise experiments that use your left-hemispheric gifts in service of something that you find meaningful and will help others.
This can be particularly difficult because the left hemisphere is fundamentally competitive with the right. It’s surely part of why we don’t even have a modern framework for midlife transitions. Moreover, Devin finds the more high-achieving somebody is often the less kind they are to themselves. They often have a savage internal monologue (the left hemisphere is considerably more verbal). I often think of the expression “if you don’t give a Husky an interesting problem, it becomes an interesting problem.” If you don’t walk your Collie or Beagle they will tear your apartment apart. I used to have an adversarial relationship with my inner monologue. Now I give it satisfying work; the analysis and synthesis of meaningful ideas.
In the previous episode, River Kenna talked about how Bill Plotkin’s work is central to understanding life transitions.8 Plotkin argues that midlife initiations are a time when we are drawn to find our own unique ecological niche. This relates back to the idea, discussed in Episode 2, that attractors lead us to the place of maximum differentiation and integration. The place where what only we can do meets what the world needs. A unique letter in a beautiful story. Devin talks about this process in terms of “radical self indulgence.” One of his core beliefs is that if you are radically self-indulgent then what you feel called to do is actually of service to the world. This flies in the face of the type of self-discipline and self-denial that’s the hallmark of most successful people. Devin regards true spontaneity (not impulsivity) as the sign of mental health. Once again, this is resonant with Joseph Campbell’s concept of following your bliss.
Practical tools for transformation
One of Devin’s strengths is that he’s relatively agnostic towards different transformational modalities. The golden thread running through Devin’s work, and the whole of this series, is the extraordinary importance of cultivating a more subtle sensitivity to the world. Like River Kenna from the last episode, he emphasizes both breathwork and somatic practices. He regards breathing exercises as the “golden path” leading to transformative practice. “If you want to do meditation, if you want to do psychedelics, start with your breath.”
In a strong echo of the last episode’s emphasis on an ecology of wisdom practices, Devin also emphasises the need for “emotional diversification.” If all one cares about is a single relationship or job we become incredibly fragile and incapable of weathering even minor fluctuations, setbacks or criticisms.
How do you find a new path? The expert for Episode 2, neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff, recommended you become an “anthropologist of your own life.” She suggests you keep a journal of all your activities for at least 48 hours, and noting what makes your energy rise and fall.9 Remarkably, Devin suggests something closely related:
“Start a journal where you keep track of whether things are increasing or decreasing your energy and then commit to doing the things you usually do and something new and just notice, do I feel more or less energized?… And I think if you want to take it to the next level, you share this with somebody. You don't do this in isolation as a way of disconnecting. You bring this to other people and talk to them about it.”
Recall that the theoretical “syntropic attractor”10 that guides us towards wisdom is an energetic life force that works against the pull of entropy. It is connected to our solar plexus. The right hemisphere is energetic, somatic and non-verbal, and also much more connected to our heart and body. If that’s true, keeping an energy journal and running experiments around it would be an incredibly smart way to navigate fresh paths for your future growth. The ability to detect and follow these attractors is often the reward that follows the struggle of a midlife crisis.
Suggested Experiments and Commitments:
If you’re interested in taking the benefits of these concepts beyond the screen and into your own life, here is a recommended short-term experiment and longer-term commitment.
Experiment:
As explained above, start an "energy journal." Devin stresses the value of doing it within a community.
Commitment:
Commitment: Devin has recommended the Art of Living breathwork course.
Join us in a couple of weeks for Episode 5 on Myth's Hidden Wisdom with Dr. Stephen Larsen.
Thanks again to Devin Martin! Hit Subscribe to follow the rest of the series.
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