(This is part 4 of a series on equanimity. You can read Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 here.)
In Authentic Relating, there is a meta-practice you can engage in which is called “tracking your holograms”.
In short:
If you take a hologram and cut it into smaller pieces, each individual fragment still contains the entire image. Not unlike William Blake’s famous line “to see the world in a grain of sand”.
The idea behind tracking our holograms is that our smallest interactions often contain the entire image of something much bigger that shows up in every area of our life:
They contain part of the hologram of how we currently are.
By tracking these little “hologram moments”, we can get incredibly rich insight into our way of being. Often things we’re normally blind to. But because Authentic Relating is practiced with others, we get the benefit of being mirrored—and the opportunity to toy with our holograms if we’re willing.
So far in this series we have looked at relational qualities such as dignity, humility, equanimity, shame and shamelessness.
Then we explored the idea that these are “relational stances“: A way we hold ourselves when we step into relationship with someone (or something).
Relational stances are particularly suitable for exploring your holograms, because we all have a set of default stances.
What’s a Default Stance?
In a fight, a martial artist will fluently shift between stances, ideally the ones best suitable for the person’s ever-changing situation. These are tactical maneuvers.
But nearly every martial artist has a default stance too: one they rely on as a starting point for balance, mobility, and protection.
The same is true for our relational stance:
Sometimes, our stance is a specific response to something external (e.g. someone we don’t trust, something we’re attracted to, an emotion rising up).
Absent of such triggers or changes, we fall back to our default stance.
This default is particularly valuable to become aware of, because it is a stance towards the whole of existence.
Why is this the case?
Because remember: Our stance is the way we currently hold ourselves.
A stance with floppy spaghetti legs is having floppy spaghetti legs no matter who or what we interact with. The things change, the stance doesn’t.
So if, for example, if your default stance is paranoia, then the mistrust is not towards a person, it is a mistrusting way of being. It applies to everything.
This is good news. It’s huge news. The best. Because this means that, through your default stance, you have the possibility of addressing infinite issues at the same time.
Lots of superlatives, I don’t like using them. But I think it’s hard to overstate the power of this:
1) If the same problem shows up in all our relationships, independent of who the other person is, our default stance is likely not helping us.
2) If it is our default stance, it’s probably showing up in like, a million other ways for us, that we don’t yet understand. (It’s a hologram)
3) If we can identify the stance and slowly shift it, it can change all these things at once.
4) If it shows up everywhere, that means we can start this shift wherever we want, wherever’s most accessible.
Even recognizing this already moves one step closer to equanimity. Because shifting your stance in itself is acting in a way that doesn’t demand reality to be different.
An example of how I’m currently playing with this:
For years I’ve been showing up less aggressively than I normally do.
This has many reasons, but the reasons all seemed intimidating to approach (as they would, when you’re less aggressive, lol).
I also keep facing situations where aggression is the bottleneck. Where what’s needed from me is initiative, forward movement, pursuit. To make waves.
So I started shifting my stance through my body. Not to a more aggressive one per sé, but to shift my stance in subtle ways that are more prepared for aggression should the necessity arrive.
But it’s no coincidence that I’ve been sending you long-form almost every day. That the Dojo launched. That I run into more unpleasant discussions with other people lately. The default stance is shifting. Even my writing is slightly different.
That is the power of moving your default stance. When the hologram moves, so does everything inside it.
Equanimity Towards Life
So, as we continue our exploration of equanimity in this series:
What does a default stance of equanimity look like in terms of the way it makes us relate to life itself?
Here’s a recap of the dignity/humility framework so far, followed by how it translate into our general attitude towards life:
Here’s the dignity/humility framework, adapted for life itself:
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Let’s have a look at what we see here:
Dignity here becomes agency: The experience of having free will and using it to direct your actions.
Its shadow version is force: Force is not agency. It arises from the erroneous idea that we would be powerless if we couldn’t control the situation.
Humility becomes surrender: Understanding that ultimately, life always gets the final say no matter how we relate to it. Which becomes despair when dysregulated.
As you notice, the bottom of the map goes deeper than the original framework (so does the top, but that’s less relevant here) and contains some extreme-sounding words.
Why?
Just as it’s normal for all of us to occasionally slip into posture, it’s normal to occasionally slip into force.
And it has the same function too: It allows us to access agency when we can’t access the clean form of it.
But while agency does contain a grain of surrender (after all, we must accept reality before we can collaborate with it), force does not. Force is a compensation for despair.
The danger of this is that force can be addictive to a despairing heart. And what’s better to avoid feeling so weak in the face of life than to increase the amount of force and grow really confident in your ability to control it?
This is how you develop hubris. And it is the exact reason why you may be surprised to read “devilish” on the bottom right. In the myth of Lucifer, an especially bright angel fell into excessive pride, believed he was stronger than God, and basically tried to stage a coup d’État in heaven.
Religious connotations aside: This is exactly what hubris leads to.
At some point, it leads us to believe we are a master over life itself, immune to the rules and laws of this place, and we can become quite devilish indeed.
(I explain this concept in much more depth in my book, Effortless, where there is a chapter about the slippery staircase of morality.)
On the other end of the map, Nihilism provides cope for despair that goes beyond reactivity. Once we reach nihilism, we are no longer reacting to life. We have concluded life is inherently meaningless. And, just like posture and collapse are intertwined, it is no coincidence that nihilism and hubris often go hand in hand.
But ultimately, when you give in to the belief that nothing means anything, you go down a path of destroying everything. Either out of carelessness, or just to feel something. Because after all, what does it matter?
Collapse towards life is surrender to the metaphorical devil. It is still surrender, but in a world that’s upside down.
I’m heavily leaning into spiritual metaphors here, and there is a reason for that:
Yes, there’s a lot of copium, quakery and abuse coming from spiritual teachers and religious institutions. But if you read between the lines of the teachings, having equanimity towards life is surprisingly central across religions:
I never noticed this, until Ari and I started to watch the series “The Chosen” and I paid attention to the way the character of Jesus was portrayed.
It is probably the cleanest example of the body language of equanimity I have seen in any movie or show.
(Side, if you know a non-religious cinematic example, I’d love it if you could share it with me. Religious examples can create a communication barrier for people depending on their default stance toward religion. I myself was allergic to such symbolism for a long time.)
The path of spirituality is relational. It is about our relational stance towards life, reality, and divinity. Which encompasses everything else. It is, as Daniel Thorston so aptly phrases it, developing secure attachment with reality.
That said, the beautiful thing is that you don’t need to follow any guru or saint to develop this.
(In fact, in many cases, doing so might lead to the opposite.)
If reality contains everything else, then you can develop secure attachment to it by shifting your relational stance towards everything.
You do this by learning to hold yourself with equanimity towards as much of reality as you can handle right now, and to keep leaning into expanding that capacity.
How to Practice This
Remember the concept of tracking our holograms?
This means that our default stance towards life/reality will likely show up in our relationships too, and vice versa.
Spending time consciously observing how we relate to others—and slowly but surely shifting what’s not working—improves more than our relationships with them. It can change the way we show up in life in general.
Because every interaction with another person is an interaction with life itself.
You can play around with this:
1) Notice the next time you’re angry towards someone. Or playful. Or negligent.
2) Notice the moments that preceded it. What did the other do? How did you feel? How did you both act?
3) Ask yourself: Does this show up in my relation to life as well? How do I behave or feel when life is like this?
In this way, we are all constantly offering mirrors to each other in which we can check our stances.
We can see the world in a grain of sand, and see our souls in each other’s glances.
(And if we gaze deeply enough, we may find out they’re oddly connected.)
Life-Changing Conversations
When we think of a conversation that changed our life, the most common image that conjures up receiving exactly the right advice at the right time.
But when you track your holograms, any conversation can change your life. Whether it was a troll in the comment section or your best friend.
It doesn’t really matter what you talked about, what was discussed, how deep or superficial the whole thing seemed.
If you were present enough to notice your default stance, found the agency to make adjustments to any parts that don’t seem to serve you well, that’s life-changing:
Your default stance just moved, and with it, the metaphorical timeline you aligned with.