Yay, There’s the Life Support Paradigm! Now What?
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 somehow applicable on the ground.
When we define life support as doing the things necessary to live 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 as we figure out how to best support ourselves in this season of our lives.
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.
Individual Nourishment → How we feed our minds, bodies, hearts, and spirits.
Communal Connection → How we connect to the wider world, including ourselves, each other, and the communities we inhabit.
Material Interaction → How we care for the materiall things we encounter, from our bodies to our homes to the entirety of our environment.
Energy Calibration → How we manage our physical, social, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy levels.
Emotional Tide → How we understand, contain (as necessary), and express the emotional variations we experience.
The timeline, anchored in the materiality 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, all of us 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, I recommend you 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 and 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 life support loop. Be as methodical as possible while working around the Life Support 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 along to the best of your ability.
Individual Nourishment - Audit what you consume that nourishes areas of your mind, body, heart, and spirit. 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 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?
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
Material Interaction - Inspect the processes you have in place to care for your body, home, workspaces, stuff, and the entirety of your environment. Not everything we call “process” here is written down and orderly. Sometimes a process can be just doing it when you realize it needs to be done. For the material 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 material nature of those spaces pose as you walk through the world? Where in your interaction with the material world would you remediate?
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 out-flows 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?
Emotional Tide - Identifying the status of your emotional boat in the water. (Yes, I’m remixing the metaphors, bear with me.) So, imagine you experience of your emotional state as a boat riding the emotional tides. How loaded is that boat? 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?
Use What You Have
To finish off 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 really 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.
Defining your later
For many of us, figuring out the life we want represents the undiscovered country. Particularly 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?
What are the conditions of your energy reservoirs?
How is your emotional boat sitting?
You’ll notice that we started by returning to the life support 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 life support 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 difficult 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 Life Support 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 changes 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
Becaue life is often a PitA, 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 where so many of us find ourselves challenged. We can know what to do, have all the best intentions of doing it, and find ourselves sliding back into old approaches after just days or weeks.
The timeline, layered over the life support loop, allows the Life Support Paradigm to help us address the push-pull between our history and our desired future. Frustrating and 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 life support loop, conceiving new possibilities for our life support loop, and dancing along the timeline take 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 nuanced 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 your progress as you 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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