Because there are two styles of attending to experience, and because these styles are represented in clusters of traits, activities, and attitudes, we find ourselves with a lot of opportunities for moving not just away from the Systematic style, but towards the Spontaneous style.

On the Systematic side: we have a whole cluster of things to recognize in ourselves, and become equanimous towards. It’s unhelpful to get angry or frustrated with—for example—the compulsive inner monologue and its looping thoughts. Anger at the inner monologue only feeds it.

But if we instead become equanimous towards it, if we notice it but pay very little mind, we withdraw that feeding.

But that’s only half of the equation.

The other half is on the Spontaneous side: we have a whole cluster of things to recognize and become energetically playful and curious towards. All the energy that we withdraw from the Systematic style can be redirected towards the Spontaneous.

If you notice yourself lost in the inner monologue, use that as a cue to move towards whole-body awareness, or humility.

If you notice yourself grasping for certainty or tending towards arrogance—withdraw the frustration at yourself and instead use it as a cue to re-focus on the interconnection of everything around you.

Rather than reactively drawing a straight line between traits in each cluster (ex- inner monologue triggering a push for inner silence), this clustered view allows us to take a non-linear approach, skillfully redirecting energy and attention in less fractious and friction-y ways.

Below, I’ll put two columns of highly impressionistic, non-canonical, non-exhaustive lists of Systematic and Spontaneous traits, qualities, activities, reflexes, etc. Try noticing when items from the Systematic list are present, and try cultivating a reflex for using them as cues to jump to items in the Spontaneous list.

note: as always, keep in mind that the Systematic mode is not the enemy; it is a useful, powerful, and absolutely wonderful ally when it stays in its ecologically appropriate niche. We aren’t trying to destroy it, just to uproot it from inappropriate areas of our life. Most relevantly, we’re trying to uproot it from being our default mode.

Systematic

• blinkered focus
• surroundings feel distant / unnoticed
• obsessiveness
• disconnection from the body, feeling “stuck in your head” and unable to get out”
• using words (written or spoken) to avoid something beneath words
• noticing the body the way you’d notice an object
  • this can even be present in highly granular and time-consuming embodiment practices, if the focus is on optimizing some quality of the body, rather than on listening openly to it. —Don’t think just because you’re doing an embodiment practice that you’re automatically out of the Systematic mode
• abstracting ideas to the point of irrelevance
• compulsive thought loops
• arrogance, preconceived certainty certainty that you’re right—even when the main evidence for your rightness is simply that you feel right
• building conceptual castles, taking delight in the cerebral connections that take shape
• writing a heavily footnoted 1200 page thesis

Spontaneous

• open awareness
• delight in surroundings
• not fixated on any particular thing
  • can be difficult to get some types of work done in this state, if the work doesn’t call to you
• keen awareness that words are just the iron filings revealing the magnetic field—your focus is on the field
• little to no separation between “I notice x” and “the body notices x”
  • difficult to describe—but this can feel like your intuition is kicking in. Eg- you stand up and walk to a local restaurant to eat, and only later notice that you never thought about being hungry or where you should eat, you just went
• disinterest in ideas that don’t have real applications or potential to ground you into life
• inner silence, the ability to soften or let go of verbal thought
• exploratory humility, an excitement about how much you don't know, how much there still is to open up to
• resting in experience, allowing what’s here to be here and be heard
• writing a poem and then closing the notebook, never caring if anyone else reads it or not

Next Steps:

Somatic Silence