Pace Layers of the self
I wish I understood the complexities of brain science, and since I don't, I'll rely on metaphor and poetry for making sense of my 7 days in darkness at @skycaveretreats . We are sense-making creatures, the 1st image is my draft take on pace layers for the self, the 2nd is the original.
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As I spent more and more hours alone in complete absolute darkness, navigating my self and my mind with breath, I started noticing that I could more consciously access different levels of awareness. On the final day, the diagram of pace layers came to me. It was conceived of by Stewart Brand and Brian Eno in 1996 as a way to describe the stability and evolution of complex systems.
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"Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power."
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Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle, systems with pace layers yield as if they are soft. Being in the dark was helping me access my own self's pace layers, allowing me to rebuild my self with more resilience and to unwind some chronic trauma patterns, to become less brittle.
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Breathing deeply, with longer exhalations, signals our parasympathetic nervous system to decrease anxiety, fear, racing thoughts, rapid heartbeat and shallow chest breathing. Everytime I got tangled in a terror loop, I would breathe in 4, breathe out 6. Even if it was ragged and uneven, eventually it worked every time. It's a practice that I will bring out into the light.
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In our daily lives, fast gets all the attention. The flood of external stimuli and information constantly collides with us and sends us spinning off onto random vectors, crashing into each other and disregulating us. We don't often access the deeper layers of being and become chronically disregulated with ourselves and each other.
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In the darkness, it was possible for me to drop into deep slowness. It felt like learning to play scales: both fast/high and slow/deep are necessary for my full experience. Going into isolation in darkness helped me find those layers and start to learn how to access them by choice, to drop below "fast."
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#darkretreat #deepmeditation #pacelayers
