In my explorations of what else is possible in the I don’t know that I don’t know, I have come to discover deeper, more expansive understandings of myself and my daughter.
In our tiny slices of reality, which are completely unique to us and created by our programming and experiences, we bump up against what we label as problems or challenges. We believe that our current reality is something that is fixed. We tighten into the triggers and divert up to our intellect to figure it out and come up with a plan. Not wrong, might create some changes, and there is more available for us when we give ourselves permission to just be in the I don’t know that I don’t know.
If we open into that moment in and through our body, we will feel sensations and stories might present about what is going on. If we keep moving back into our body into the experience of the sensations and trust the information wanting to integrate, we can access what is called the “green dot” moment. That is the result of the integration and completion of that information in that moment. It often brings with it a deeper clarity of the next step, from diluting the experiences that we have anchored in our neurology while making room for new ones to emerge. We might have an AHA moment, and we also might engage something very differently, where we experience a very different outcome.
When we can slow down long enough and allow the body to lead, we can reach the potential that exists in every single moment to create with intention.
The default we have been taught is not this process, and that is why it feels hard. It is my belief that it was always our natural way of creating our reality. Children intuitively know it. Neurodivergent children are wired into it, and most times refuse to live differently from what is intuitive for them. We label it lots of different things, unfortunately.
This way of engaging can be highly inconvenient and triggering. It means we need to pause and pattern interrupt, rather than push forward with the currents of expectations around us and within ourselves. It means we feel all the uncomfortable sensations and invite them in, rather than manage and move away from them. It means we give priority to what wants to move deeply inside of us before we engage the outside world as we live in real time. It means we create boundaries that honor this process. This is something that I am moving deeper into myself with curiosity. It is allowing what is there and engaging that more as I live. Not during a moment, I could label a big challenge, but in the more subtle moments we often miss and live out in habit. The ones that add up before things feel more intense. Upstream yet in THIS moment and each one after.
Yesterday at the fair, my daughter and niece were heading to the next big ride. My niece was building up her courage, and my daughter, in the midst of her own trigger, declared NO. I am not going on the ride. I want to leave now. My niece was in her own trigger of wanting to go, and now being told she couldn’t because her cousin was walking in the other direction to get away from the ride. I was triggered because my undercurrents were also swirling. I still had a fistful of tickets, and my programming wanted to make it all better for both of us, and there was only one of me. I tried to manage the situation, and their signals just danced more intensely. I was not fully accepting my daughter’s “no” in that moment, so she declared it a bit louder, without apology. We left, and everyone had a chance to come back to themselves at a playground nearby. We created space on the environmental level away from the noise. We came up with a plan that my daughter would go back to my mother’s for a bit, and I could come back with my niece so she could have what she really wanted as well. That option was not even available to me in the first moments until I allowed what was moving in me space to integrate a bit. The girls agreed, and we all felt like we were back into a flow again.
When my niece and I drove back to the fair, there were 10 police cars there at the entrance, and police were going in with guns. We didn’t go in. I wondered whether we would have been there in the moment that safety didn’t exist anymore had I not honored my daughter’s internal sense of safety when she said no and insisted on leaving without reason. If I had viewed that as her being selfish and not considerate of anyone else there (which absolutely came up for me at first when I felt my own triggers in the situation before I was able to dilute that in my own body), would we have been hurt or watched a very scary situation unfold?
When I think back, I was starting to feel a bit unsafe before all of this unfolded. The Ferris wheel bucket was making weird noises, and we couldn’t wait to get off it. Some of the fair ride operators felt sketchy. I didn’t engage with what swirled in me; I kept going while ignoring my own internal state. This was no doubt calibrated in my daughter’s nervous system without a story available to articulate it. What now comes up is how else can I engage my own more subtle internal states, not because I am doing it wrong, but for the simple sake of my own evolution as I live. When I do this, it models to my daughter a very different way of engaging her own as an option, not a command.
I could look at the entire experience and see all kinds of problems in my little slice of reality in that moment. I could reflect on what I could have done differently and look more into understanding it all, which was all valuable. What I discovered, though, with moving into the I don’t know that I don’t know into the fear in me that presented was that there was huge intelligence playing out. My niece and I both had more moving when we noticed how unsafe it all became, and there were charges in her own undercurrent that just really wanted permission to have space to move. We got to spend some time together at a playground nearby before we went to pick up my daughter (who really wanted to be with her Grammy and had a blast with her earlier that day, gardening). It was not what I thought should happen, and yet it really was all perfect and inconvenient.
We all made our slice of reality a little bit bigger in that. Our nervous systems had space to allow movement, and we created flow.
It reflected to me a new aspect of myself where I can become more curious about my own boundaries to honor what moves deeply in my body as I create my reality.
In the end, everyone was happy and regulated once we gave ourselves permission! It just ended up looking different than the expectations because we engaged our authenticity and honored what was moving in our bodies. We all became more.
