When Life Answers Back

I’ve spent a lot of my life studying how humans change.

Therapy has taught me to understand the deep biographical roots of patterns. Somatic practice has taught me to listen to what the body knows before the mind catches up. Meditation and spiritual practice have offered glimpses of something larger than the defended self.

All of this has changed me.

And then another human being walks into the room.

Sometimes something wonderful happens. We laugh until we can barely speak. A conversation takes a turn neither of us could have anticipated. Someone sees something in me I hadn’t noticed, or offers a way of understanding the world that would never have occurred to me.

And sometimes the pattern I understand beautifully is happening again. The body tightens. The old expectation arrives. I want to get closer, get away, explain myself, fix you, make you understand, make myself disappear. Excellent. The real curriculum has arrived.

This is the territory I’m exploring in Between Us, a practice field within Humaning.

I’m interested in what happens when we practice becoming more available to life under the particularly revealing conditions of relationship—where another person has their own needs, history, perception and freedom, and does not reliably follow the script in my head.

What might become possible when we make more room for ourselves, for each other, and for whatever is actually happening between us?

The choreography we bring

At first, I imagined Between Us partly as a place to notice our relational patterns and experiment with new possibilities. If I usually withdraw, what happens if I stay? If I usually accommodate, what happens if I speak?

I still think experimentation matters. But I’ve become interested in how much of our relational life is organized before anything particularly difficult happens. We each have familiar ways of arriving.

Some of us become helpful before anyone asks for help. Some take charge, make people laugh, ask excellent questions, explain things, smooth over awkwardness, or quietly disappear into the wallpaper.

I have my own well-rehearsed choreography. Sometimes I can be so busy being the person I know how to be that I miss what’s actually happening with you.

These familiar moves aren’t necessarily problems. They often carry real gifts. But they can become so automatic that other possibilities barely get a chance to appear. And we don’t invent this choreography entirely on our own.

We inherit cultural instructions about how to be a proper person: independent, competent, productive, self-sufficient, in control. Modernity has taught many of us to approach even our relationships as things to manage, improve or get right. These assumptions can be difficult to notice because they don’t feel like assumptions. They feel like reality.

Then there are the moments when something touches a sensitivity and the whole production becomes considerably more dramatic. Suddenly I’m not simply being helpful or competent. I’m afraid of disappointing you. I’m trying to prevent rejection, avoid shame, defend my dignity or recover some sense of control. My world gets smaller.

Our familiar choreography, cultural conditioning and sensitivities aren’t separate compartments. They’re tangled together, shaping what we notice, expect and do. The question isn’t how to get rid of them. It’s whether I can become available to more than the familiar dance.

Starting with the knot

Sometimes that begins with noticing what’s happening in my body. Something happens between us and I feel the contraction. Before I decide what it means or what I should do, can I feel what is actually happening? And can what I find be welcomed? Not welcomed so that it will go away. That’s rejection wearing a namaste T-shirt. I mean welcomed in the deeper sense: allowed to belong.

This understanding isn’t mine. I’ve received it through many streams of mystical and somatic teaching, especially through two of my teachers, Patrick Conner and Thomas Hübl. Both, in different ways, have helped me experience what becomes possible when a contraction is not approached as something to fix, but is met within a much larger field of loving presence.

We might call that larger field Love, Being, God, awareness or life. I don’t feel a need to settle the metaphysics. What matters is that this has become experiential rather than theoretical. When the knot is warmly welcomed without resistance, while held within something larger than itself, sometimes what has been clenched begins to unwind. Fear can be here. Anger can be here. The part of me that wants to run can be here. And this is where another lineage enters.

My friend and teacher Vanessa Machado de Oliveira has offered the wonderfully useful image of the Bus Within Us. The Bus helps us notice the many parts, histories, inheritances and contradictions traveling together inside what we conveniently call a self. What interests me especially now is the possibility that we are the bus. We are the host.

The practice isn’t to identify the wisest, most mature passenger and put her in charge of all the troublesome ones. It’s to increase our capacity to host the whole unruly company without requiring any one passenger to become the whole of reality. Hello, inner Project Manager. I see you have prepared an agenda for this conversation. Thank you for your service. And what else is here?

Maybe the part of me that wants to play. The part that’s curious. The part that doesn’t know what to say. The part that’s frightened. The part that wants to say no. The invitation isn’t to replace one passenger with another. It’s to make room for more of the bus. Sometimes the charge changes. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, there may be more to notice than I could see when the knot filled my whole field of vision.

The field between us

I’m increasingly interested in what becomes possible when this larger field isn’t something each of us has to access privately. What if a group can become a field in which there is enough warmth, presence and permission that I don’t have to hold what is happening entirely by myself?

This doesn’t mean the group heals me. It doesn’t mean everyone becomes an ideal parent to everyone else’s wounded child. And it certainly doesn’t mean that sitting in a circle automatically produces a field of unconditional love. I’ve been to workshops. It means we can explore whether our collective presence makes more room for experience than any one of us could make alone. Then, perhaps, I can feel the knot while also feeling the room. And from there, I may be able to see you again.

But something else can happen in that room, even when nobody is particularly contracted or in need of healing. Someone tells a story that changes how I see them. A joke becomes a running joke, acquiring a life of its own. Two people discover that they’ve been using the same word to mean entirely different things. A disagreement becomes interesting rather than threatening. An idea appears that none of us brought into the room.

Sometimes another person’s delight is contagious. Sometimes their perspective rearranges mine. Sometimes we’re simply enjoying one another, with no improvement project in sight. I’m interested in all of it. Because you are not merely the trigger for my healing. You are not a mirror arranged by the universe to reveal my unhealed material. You are another subject.

You have a life I cannot fully know, perceptions I may not share, desires that may have nothing to do with me, and possibilities I cannot predict. So do the other people in the room. And inconveniently, your life does not revolve around my development.

This is one of the places where Vanessa’s meta-relational work has deeply influenced Humaning: the invitation to widen the boundary of perception beyond the individual and attend to the relationships, histories and conditions we’re already inside. My fear may be shaping what I perceive. You may actually be pulling away from me. Both may be true. Or perhaps you’re offering something I didn’t know how to ask for. Or perhaps we’re discovering a difference that matters, and neither of us needs to make it disappear.

Between Us lives inside that uncertainty.

Staying isn’t always the practice

There’s another complication. Sometimes I can stay in contact with you while feeling what has been activated in me. Sometimes I can’t. For years, I’ve sometimes needed to leave a difficult encounter before I can feel what is happening fully. I need quiet. I need distance. I need enough safety for my defenses to loosen before I can find the tenderness underneath them.

I’m coming to see that this isn’t necessarily a failure of relational practice. Taking space can be part of the practice. Staying in relationship does not always mean staying in immediate contact. I may need to say, Something big is happening in me. I can’t meet it while I’m also tracking you. I need some space, and I want to come back. That can be an act of relationship rather than an escape from it.

And sometimes even with space, the contraction isn’t ready to soften. Then we don’t make it. If something cannot yet be welcomed, that too needs to belong. We can stay at the edge of what is possible, find whatever safety is actually available, or recognize that this particular knot needs another place, another kind of support, or more time. Nothing has to open in order to belong. I find enormous generosity in that.

And greater availability doesn’t always mean greater closeness. Sometimes it means recognizing a boundary, acknowledging harm, saying no, or discovering that a relationship needs to change. The point isn’t to remain endlessly open to whatever comes our way. It’s to become more able to recognize what’s actually happening and respond to it.

Then life answers back

When we make a little more room, something may become possible that wasn’t available before. Maybe I speak differently. Maybe I hear something I couldn’t hear before. Maybe I discover a boundary rather than greater openness. Maybe nothing visible changes, yet the familiar dance between us no longer has quite the same momentum.

But maybe we also stumble into laughter. Maybe someone says something that overturns my assumptions. Maybe we discover an unexpected affinity—or a difference so interesting that we want to keep exploring it. Maybe I find myself doing something I didn’t know I could do because of what has become possible between us. The experiment is no longer simply, Can I behave differently? It becomes: What becomes possible between us when we make more room for what’s actually here?

Then life answers back. You respond. I respond. Something changes between us—or doesn’t. What comes back becomes part of the next encounter. This is where different streams of practice are beginning to meet for me.

The mystical and somatic teachings remind me that transformation can happen beneath behavior, as contraction is met within a larger field. Vanessa’s work keeps widening the frame, reminding me that what I experience as “mine” is also entangled with relationships, histories, cultures and systems—and that the other is never reducible to a character in my healing story.

Between Us brings these understandings into the living unpredictability of relationship. Not as a synthesis I’ve completed, but as an experiment I want to enter. Because change isn’t entirely an individual affair. What humans experience as private patterns was shaped in relationship with families, cultures, histories and larger social worlds. And what shifts in one of us doesn’t remain sealed inside the skin. We affect the fields we’re part of. I don’t mean that healing my abandonment wound will topple capitalism by Thursday.

I mean something quieter and more literal: how I show up matters. If fear, domination, separation or control organize me a little less, I may participate differently in the relationships and systems I’m already inside. If I become more curious, playful, attentive or able to encounter difference, that matters too. And because those relationships are entangled, the consequences don’t stop neatly at my boundary. Nor can I know in advance what all those consequences will be.

Practicing availability

I’m beginning to understand Between Us less as a training in relationship skills and more as a practice of availability within relationship. Can I notice the familiar role I’ve walked in wearing, without making it wrong? Can I recognize the assumptions shaping what I expect from you?When something contracts in me, can I make room for it without insisting that it change? And can I remain curious about you—this other mysterious person who is not here merely to confirm my story, satisfy my needs or facilitate my growth?

Sometimes greater availability means staying. Sometimes speaking. Sometimes leaving and returning. Sometimes it means discovering a clearer no. Sometimes it means delight, mischief, affection, deep difference or an unexpected possibility neither of us could have imagined alone. And sometimes nothing changes except that I stop fighting what cannot yet change.

Maybe that’s part of what love asks too. Not endless openness. Not perfect regulation. Not a better performance of relationship. A growing capacity to include more of what’s here, to discover what’s possible and what’s needed, and to participate with greater freedom in the living mystery between us. Because whatever we bring into an encounter, we don’t get to write the whole story.

Life answers back.

A note on collaboration: This essay was developed in conversation with Dorothy Ladybugboss, a customized AI dialogue partner I’ve been working with as Humaning takes shape. Dorothy has served as a provocateur, developmental editor and thinking companion, helping me notice patterns and contradictions, test ideas, make connections, and find language for what I’m discovering. I remain responsible for the ideas, interpretations and choices expressed here.