Life Support Paradigm

A Function-Focused Framework for
Understanding and Influencing Lived Experience

Video introducing life support and the Life Support Paradigm.

  • Individual Nourishment

    How we feed our minds, bodies, hearts, and spirits, considering everything from food and drink to what we watch and read to the people and places we encounter.

    By expanding the basic human need for food to include all the stuff we consume and the experiences we have, the individual nourishment node of the Elemental loop pulls our attention to what's coming into the system.

  • Communal Connection

    How we connect to the broader world around us, including each other, our spaces, and our communities.

    Humans are communal creatures. Contact with others is both something we fear with the passion of a thousand nuns and something we crave.

  • Material Interaction

    How we care for the physical things we encounter, from our bodies to our homes to the entirety of our environment.

    The role of material interaction holds the most central node of the Life Support Paradigm because it mediates our interaction with all the other parts of the paradigm. It makes a ton of sense for the two parts of the Life Support Paradigm to connect at the Material Interaction node as material bodies move through time, and the node represents the current moment we’re experiencing as embodied beings.

  • Emotional Tide

    How we understand, contain (as necessary), and express the emotional variations we experience.

    As we move below the Timeline, the Elemental Nodes become less focused on the tangible. The Emotional Tide node, while not the most elusive of the nodes, does come with a three-part metaphor in an effort to acknowledge that our internal experience may not correspond to external behavior or how people would guess

  • Energy Calibration

    Calibration How we manage our physical, social, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy levels.

    The final node of the Elemental loop is, in my experience, the most elusive of the nodes to conceptualize and understand. It's also where the connections between each of the nodes becomes the most apparent to me.

    Within the Life Support Paradigm conversation, energy is the fuel available to our human system to experience our lives and see to our work.

  • EARLIER

    As humans with a limited understanding of the world we’re born into, our earlier life experiences inform much of who we are and how we interact with the world. Our earlier experiences, particularly our early history, establish our ‘go-to’ stories for understanding our place in the world and often defines our expectations for our behavior and the behavior of those around us. We’ve all lived so much (even if we’ve been stuck in the doldrums) that looking at our history helps us identify our patterns and cycles. A full awareness of our lived experience can create the internal space we need to have self-compassion as we bump and grind along our path toward experiencing more wholeness.

    Being able to talk about earlier times confirms that we survived. It might have been messy and by the skin of our teeth. We may have bumps and bruises we need to attend to. And, yet, looking back allows us to know we can do hard things. Maybe, not as gracefully as we’d like, but they get done.

  • NOW

    The now point holds the robust promise of the Life Support Paradigm because it contains the point where we can do something to influence our future.

    Now represents where we have access to the agency and capacity necessary to bolster, modify, or influence any part of our lives. Action-taking, whether intentional or conditioned, occurs in the now. The now point and the physical interaction element occur concurrently because that point represents both the access point to the life support elements and the action point where we have agency.

  • LATER

    Many of us reach for a life somehow different from the one we live today. We may want to throw in the towel and begin again, or maybe we want to find another way to make money, or even have more than cats to come home to. There are so many possibilities for what your life could look like later - whether we're talking months or years from now. We can influence some of what happens later by accessing the agency and capacity in our lives now to start making the changes that get us where we want to go.

    For some of us, knowing what we want or even looking forward to later takes courage.

    As you think about later, choose a manageable time frame for yourself. And, if you're trying to take a significant "anything but this swing," use that to frame the later you define.

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Dive into the Life Support Paradigm

Join me for an eight-week trip through the Life Support Paradigm as we talk about what it is, use it to define our present moements, and dream into the lives we want to have.

Using the Life Support Paradigm

As a mental model, The Life Support Paradigm stacks the five core life support elements onto a timeline. By linking our history with our future through our actions today, we have access to the information we need to evaluate what works and what doesn’t work as we adjust our life support actions in the now. This combination allows us to try, fail, and try slightly different ways to get to the life we want.

Even as part of my brain groks the form, connectedness, and tidy nature of the Life Support Paradigm, there’s an engineer part lifting an eyebrow and asking, “What am I supposed to do with that?” Totally fair ’cause the elegant idea illuminates its usefulness by being applicable on the ground.

When we define life support as doing the things necessary to support the life we want, we establish an intention for what we want to achieve with the tasks under the life support umbrella. The Life Support Paradigm serves as a map, identifying possibilities of where we might spend some time and attention figuring out how to best support ourselves.

The core elements of the Life Support Paradigm act like little library sections on our map, each with its own flavor, and all work together to support the life we want.

The Timeline, anchored in the physicality of now, allows us to access the stories from whence we came and the stories about who we want to be.

Effort Required

Unfortunately, unlike the mall, life doesn’t come with the occasional map of what’s available to us in this life, complete with a star marking “You are here.” Nope, we’re left wandering through dales and over hills hoping we’re headed in the right direction.

When the wind supports us from the back, and we can see where we’re going, the lack of a map becomes less significant. However, when we’re stuck or if we feel like we’re just running around in circles, not having a map becomes life-threatening. We may not die out here, but we are less likely to get to the life we want.

As we approach digging into the Life Support Paradigm core elements, we will do a quick situational awareness check to determine our focus for the next bit.

Some of you live in a society actively trying to harm you. I offer my witness and solidarity. As a cis-gendered, relatively abled, white woman, I have no bleeding idea what those never-ceasing slings and arrows feel like. Especially as they land over the wounds we all attract just by being alive. I hope the Life Support Paradigm offers you some increased sense of agency and capacity within personal realms where you maintain influence.

Life treats all of us to challenges of one form or another. So, suppose we’re trying to get out of a hole or re-tether ourselves to reality. In that case, the scope of what would be most helpful to spend time with is relatively narrow and closer to the minimum requirements for sustaining life. As our daily living conditions become more stable and supportive, we can expand the scope of our focus.

And here’s your gentle reminder that where you’re at is where you’re at. Many of us would like to be further along than we are, and some of us find ourselves back in a place we’ve moved on from. It’s all OK. We’re alive, we’re breathing, and we can find some portion of a Life Support element we want to center.

Defining Your Now by Digging into the Core Elements

When you're ready to shift something, start by knowing where you are. Parts of me want to whine and fuss because I’m here again, dagnabit, or because map-making takes time, and I want to be there now.

Having been here before, I take a deep breath and calmly remind myself that sometimes what we want requires work, effort, and time. It doesn't mean we're never going to get there. It just means we're not there now.

An Arthur Ashe quotation sums up my approach to figuring out where I am on the map. It’s this: “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

Start Where You Are

Aka, ask yourself a metric ton of questions (or what feels like it, anyway). Pen and paper or an electronic journaling method are your friends as you identify and think about your elemental loop. Be as methodical as possible while working around the Elemental loop. Also, address these areas and questions at a pace that keeps you moving. If looking at one of the areas starts to feel like it's sucking you into a vortex of stuckness, write that down and carry it along to the best of your ability.

  • Individual Nourishment

    Audit what you consume that nourishes areas of your mind, body, heart, and spirit audit. How are those things supporting your life?

    How are those things introducing obstacles into your life?

    Are any of those things acting at cross purposes?

    Where does rest fit into your life?

    What about your current nourishment patterns that could use some shifting?

  • Communal Connection

    Survey the links between the parts of yourself, between yourself and your close relationships, and between yourself and the broader world.

    How would you describe the flavor of those links?

    How would you describe your perspective on the health, usefulness, or desire for those connections?

    Are there places where the ties to yourself or others knot and become challenging to manage?

    What about your current communal connection style needs attention?

  • Material Interaction

    Inspect the processes you have in place to care for our bodies, homes, workspaces, and the entirety of our environment. Not everything we call “process” here is written down and orderly. Sometimes a process can be just doing it when I realize it needs to be done.

    For the physical things you encounter regularly, how would you characterize your care for those spaces?

    Do you find the spaces support the life you’re living now?

    What challenges do the physical nature of those spaces pose as you walk through the world?

    Where in your interaction with the physical world would you remediate?

  • Emotional Tide

    Identifying what the emotional water’s experiencing and how your emotional regulation boat is doing.

    Imagining your experience of your emotional state as a boat riding the emotional tides. How loaded is that boat?

    Whats up with the water?

    How close are you to being swamped? How much is that boat rocking?

    Are you in danger of being thrown out?

    Is your boat trying to be a flagpole because it’s overloaded in the front or rear?

    Where are the stabilizing forces for the ride coming from?

    What is moving your boat?

    What part of this ride would you like to smooth out or goose?

  • Energy Calibration

    Canvas the quality and condition of your interconnected physical, social, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy reservoirs.

    What are you using to fill each reservoir?

    Environmentally, what impacts the levels of each pool, and how?

    Where are the big outflows of energy?

    Where are the small bits being siphoned off?

    What collections consistently stay between their min/max ranges?

    What tanks regularly run low?

    What basins tend to overflow?

    What part of the system needs your attention?

Use What You Have

To finish this step of understanding where you're at, take a couple of minutes to go back through each life support element and list any tool or skill you have that supports that area of your life. Some tools or skills may occur in multiple places. Some tools or skills may feel odd or silly to write down, particularly if it’s stuff you “just do.” As an example, one of the things I “just do” is pulling language apart and reconfiguring it. I don’t really think much of it. And it’s a tool fundamental to the nourishment of my mind.

Wow, you’ve answered a metric ton of questions and done a lot of work. Find a way to celebrate and acknowledge all the effort you’ve made.

Dreaming Your Later

For many of us, figuring out the life we want represents the undiscovered country. If you've spent a lot of time in survival mode, just hoping that tomorrow will somehow be better, thinking beyond next week and imagining a different way of life may feel foolish and impossible.

As you dream into your later, start with what you can do. Some people can imagine a life five years from now, and some can’t. So, pick a timeframe for “later” that gives you some room to practice shifting things - I wouldn’t go shorter than three months - and start thinking through what that life would be.

  • How would you be nourishing yourself?

  • What would your social connections look like?

  • How would your body’s experience of the world be different?

  • What would be different about the spaces you inhabit?

  • How is your emotional boat sitting?

  • What are the conditions of your energy reservoirs?

You’ll notice that we started by returning to the elemental loop to paint the picture of where you’d like your life to go. Much of our daily activity defines and fosters our experience of our life. This is why it matters that we attend to those things.

In addition to looking at the elemental loop, this would be a great time to revisit your values so that you can look at the life you want to create for yourself and verify it supports the way you want to walk through the world. Identifying your values and describing how you want to practice them serves as a way to verify you're aiming your later in the direction you want to go. The words we select as values serve as quick reminders as to why we picked the path we've chosen when that path encounters a challenging situation or conversation.

As you define your later, know that you can totally work incrementally. Even more importantly, what you want your life to look like can be vastly different than it is today or look similar to today with the shifts occurring internally.

Do What You Can

To tie the later to the now, we return to the quotation from Ashe and do what we can right now to move forward.

Often, our desired later requires multiple steps and lessons we’ll experience as we walk our path in that direction. To figure out your first steps, sit down with your understanding of today’s Elemental Loop and the picture of where you want to go and ask, where are these two different? Which one or two of those differences needs to be addressed most urgently? Is there anything that must be adapted to something new before you proceed? Which of the differences do you actually want to make?

Dr. Jerome Lubbe often talks about these improvements as being relatively small. Shifts of 1-3% month over month or year over year will get us where we want to go in a way that keeps us on the path. It

Life, being what it is, part of the process of getting to later becomes learning to have faith that the shifts we make now are heading in the right direction, even if we seem to be in western Nebraska.

Using the Timeline for Growth

Once you've figured out where you're at and where you want to go, making and sustaining the shifts you've chosen becomes the work. This is where the rubber meets the road, and many of us find ourselves challenged. We can know what to do, have all the best intentions of doing it, and find sliding back into old approaches after just days or weeks.

The Timeline layered over the elemental loop allows the Life Support Paradigm to help us address the push-pull between our history and our desired future. Frustrating totally normal, some degree of back and forth between established and new approaches characterizes this type of growth. Historically, the stuff we do in the now worked for us, and occasionally still does. The Timeline allows us access to historical data that can be useful when we troubleshoot the challenges we’re having shifting.

Looking back on how that pattern of behavior showed up for us as children refines our understanding of what that approach did (and possibly does) for us. With the new insight, we can cultivate our present-moment awareness and nurture our capacity for grace when we backslide.

Stepping into the Work

Understanding our elemental loop, conceiving new possibilities for our elemental loop, and dancing along the Timeline takes practice and the ability to disentangle ourselves from our story. Additionally, many skills we're looking to start practicing are complex and nuanced. Part of learning to use them involves a progression from blunt to subtle that often creates strain in the system from the parts that holler, "Why don't you know that yet."

Admittedly, in the United States, we live in a culture with a prevailing attitude of “see to your own bootstraps,” which underestimates the advantage of having someone support and witness our progress as we engage in timeline work. Ideally, those supporting you as you two-step along the Timeline actively engage with their own Timeline and have cultivated the compassion, curiosity, and courage needed to hold space well.

Like many models we use to understand our walk through the world, the Life Support Paradigm initially looks pretty simple. Then you look closer at the bits and bobs, and the interconnectedness of the vast array of elements becomes apparent and possibly overwhelming. As you engage with the Life Support Paradigm, I hope you integrate the associations and interdependence of the model into how you support yourself as you find joy and growth in the life you have now.

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