When considering a model, it’s often helpful to know the guiding principles at play during the creation of the paradigm. For me, it serves as a way to see why you structured something the way you did and may pinpoint some of the places where I need to adjust something to fit my understanding of the world.

Holistic and Functional

The Life Support Paradigm is explained and defined as broadly as possible. Each of us comes to trying to understand our lives so we can shift our approach and make what we experience more in line with the life we want to have differently. We all have different scars and soft spots. We have different combinations of skills and inclinations. We see the world differently.

Common ways of modeling a holistic approach to life include thinking about what roles you fill (friend, parent, student), what parts you have (teenager, engineer, creative), or what places you show up (work, home, with friends). It’ll surprise no one by this point that I don’t like any of those approaches to understanding how I walk in the world.

At the end of the day, functionality remains my first consideration. So, the Life Support Paradigm shifts quickly into a model of functionality, particularly on the elemental loop. As an example, a simple check-in path around the loop would look something like this:

How are you nourishing yourself?

Who have you been connecting with lately?

How are you interacting with your body and your spaces?

What’s happening with your emotional tide?

What calibration does your energetic system need?

The emotional tide bit feels less functional from the outside. As I work through that node of the loop, I’ve noticed the metaphor I’m using to understand that node has layers. I’ll let you know when I’ve managed to work more of my way through that.

Integrative

Much of the focus on how to take care of yourself tends to circle around one particular area of our experience, like how to take care of your body. This type of unlinked siloing approach leads to some really unhelpful myopia. I’m too easily pulled into one area or another and manage to miss taking care of the other stuff that supports my humanity.

The Life Support Paradigm was designed to connect elements of the human experience rather than boxing out roles and parts. This explicit acknowledgment of the link to the whole of our lived experiences, even as we zoom in on one area, eases the transitions between types of tasks.

It’s also designed to meld how we think about taking care of ourselves with how we take care of our lived experiences. By blurring the line, we can transition self-care tasks from some particular classification to something we do because that’s how we live our life.

Scaleable

Life is messy, and our capacity for dealing with it changes all the time. The paradigm is designed to contract and expand based on how you’re experiencing life in the now.

For times when life’s shoes have you curled in on yourself, the elemental loop shrinks to match you. Shrinking the loop makes the connections between life support elements closer together, which means that doing anything supportive on the loop can more quickly impact the other life support elements.

For times when life’s shoes walk you toward flourishing, the elemental loop expands to match you. Expanding the loop makes the connections between the life support elements further apart, which means that sometimes the impact of supporting one area of the loop may not be echoed at the same scale in the other life support elements. At this state, being intentional about supporting multiple nodes of the elemental loop may serve you best.

Bottom Line

Admittedly, how I describe and teach the model reflects my bias toward calm seas and daring safely. And yet, it provides what is hopefully ‘just enough’ of a framework for you to feel safe enough to use it.
The Life Support Paradigm is here for you to decorate like a high school textbook slipcover. Make this model work for you. Put your own stamp on it. Use your own words. Ask your own questions.