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description= What would it look like to build a movement for the 100%? To create an us without a them ?
This is a monthly(ish) newsletter exploring these questions, in service of building a world where everyone — and everything — belongs. Click to read Bridging toward Belonging, by Brian Stout, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.;
author= Brian Stout;
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aboration particularly with core building belonging team member christina and for incipient explorations with belonging scale partners kai cheng thom rajkumari neogy and pat mccabe i still struggled to express my feelings externally and allow others to feel my vulnerability and i fear i didn t do a great job of letting go of my need for others to recognize my light ongoing work that i ll carry into 2026 key learnings from 2025 almost everything fits under the broad heading of shadow integration i spent the first half of the year exploring my relationship to control and surrender and closed the year with a deep inquiry into my relationship or lack thereof with the dark emotions grief anger and shame and their more extreme manifestations in despair rage and hatred one frame i used for the work becoming right sized where in my childhood i took on more than was appropriate too big in too small a self in my adulthood i fear i ve swung to the opposite pole shrinking my bigness for fear of the impact on others shadow integration for me has been a process of discernment in reclaiming my appropriate size and yes i am large this also corresponded to relational work right sizing my relationships to where we can best thrive slow ongoing and both beautiful and painful at the same time but without further ado key learnings which i will spend 2026 trying to integrate 1 i am neurodivergent the biggest mistake i have made and sadly continue to make in my life is assuming that other people will think react the way i do i fear i have caused lots of avoidable harm to myself and others with that mistaken assumption while i have long known accepted that i am different i just wrote it off as a personality thing we re all different and this is just my unique brand of weirdness but this year my partner leela encouraged me to look into it through the lens of neurodiversity and i learned that many of the ways i think and process the world in my nervous system are very different from most people i will write a separate post on this but i am coming to understand that the core feature of my neurodivergence in childhood is what the literature calls asynchronous development which though different from other expressions of neurodiversity like autism or adhd shares atypical neurological development as its distinguishing feature advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm in my case i have always seen the world in systems and patterns and think and perceive and feel at all scales simultaneously i we and world where most people develop physically emotionally and cognitively at the same pace my intellectual and empathic capacities i resonate with some of the discourse around highly sensitive person far exceeded my nervous system s ability to hold them at a young age i was recognized tracked for my intellectual gifts while largely unseen unsupported in my emotional existential grappling this has been a profound shift in my self understanding around my sense of loneliness and alienation an aha that i am still sitting with it is also giving me a lot more compassion for others and helping me replace my self protective judgement with more curiosity instead of an angry why can t you see i m trying for a curious what do you see 2 i have shame this is one of those things that most people would react to with no shit sherlock but for neurodivergent me it felt significant i can be a little slow sometimes i was hung up on brené brown s definition of shame as i am bad and associations with low self worth which i don t resonate with and i struggled to differentiate my adaptive trauma response which i acknowledge from the feeling of shame but a long session with chatgpt helped me name the specific form of shame i struggle with what i am accepting as relational capacity shame this is the adaptive mechanism downstream from my trauma and shows up as me not trusting others to be able to hold all of me so i hold back and don t share my full complexity humanity emotionality bigness i found it helpful to distinguish between my trauma response which shows up as bodily activation think fight flight freeze fawn etc whereas my shame shows up as subtle armoring withdrawal hypervigilance and attempting to manage other people s reactions emotions more in the cognitive emotional realm thus they require different approaches for healing sticking with our jungian theme this looks like me projecting onto others before they can project onto me a self protective strategy i would very much like to let go of 3 once i embrace my light it s much easier to take accountability for my shadow last summer i finally welcomed in an exiled piece of my light what the enneagram calls the challenger this too will land with those who know me as not at all surprising like i said i can be slow for years i ve hidden behind my primary enneagram type of the enthusiast finding it more palatable in social justice circles where the challenger is viewed with suspicion and even hostility especially expressed in bodies that look like mine dominant culture but it turns out i m definitely also a challenger and once i acknowledged that i found myself much more able to the great relief of my collaborators to take accountability for the shadow dimensions of that gift as xavier dagba notes the brightest light casts the darkest shadow 4 i aspire to credibility not legibility i desperately want to be understood part of my feeling of loneliness alienation is feeling that others don t get me this year i explored a shadow side to this what if a part of me likes being misunderstood what if feeling misunderstood keeps me safe if a funder chooses not to support my work i can say well they just didn t get it this saves me from the vulnerability of rejection or the possibility that maybe they did understand and there s something i m missing this year i want to confront that fear and put a different spin on my desire to be understood yes i want to accept the responsibility to communicate complexity see intention 3 below and i want to set a different bar what if instead of being understood with connotations of cognitive comprehension i aspired to being believed as a trusted friend told me brian your ideas aren t credible they re just too far out there for most people especially in the context of a short 45 minute pitch session but you are credible so while i still long for people to understand my ideas what i think of as intellectual legibility i m going to hold myself accountable for something different i m going to ask them to believe in me personal credibility this feels much more vulnerable and also much more honest about how humans work we trust people first and ideas second i want to lean into that vulnerability this year this in the context of fundraising but it has broader applicability for how i try to connect with others including my parents e g around my work one helpful dimension here for me that i m still sitting with my parenting partner jennifer also introduced me to human design work this year speaking of things i don t cognitively understand but nonetheless can deeply appreciate and got me a session that i found really powerful part of what it revealed which feels consonant with my emerging self understanding in the context of neurodivergence is that things which feel intuitive obvious true to me do not feel that way to most people which leaves a credibility gap that at best leaves my interlocutors feeling confused at worst mistrustful understanding this difference in our design or our neurotypes if you prefer feels like a powerful unlock for learning how to communicate across that gap if i know something is likely to be met with skepticism i can acknowledge that pre emptively and support my interlocutors in meeting me in my difference as with 2024 s lessons these feel like insights that i have intellectually grasped but will take lots of work to actually integrate into my body and change my behavior very much work in progress for the year ahead i m not sure where to capture this but i did want to celebrate another major victory this year i did some incredible work on my jaw which i recognize as the central axis of my trauma and tension the hinge between my head and my heart between my calm external presentation and my often intense existential interior emotional life during my psychedelic journey in late september i was able to recognize some of my jaw tension as ancestral pain and trauma it was stunning i worked up my matrilineal line and gained consent to let go of a burden that many of us had held for far too long and it was like flipping a switch my jaw has been so much lighter since then it s still an early warning sign that i m approaching the limits of my capacity when it starts firing i need to pay attention but it is no longer a constant tension some choice quotes to capture for posterity from therapists partners and insights that all landed in me with the oof of truth and helped me arrive at these core lessons brian he who holds space for everyone except himself stop tolerating abuse to get to love you ve been living in other people s projections your whole life what gets exiled comes back hostile martin shaw quoted by tim merry healing is about becoming better at feeling this one via afsa rosette i wasn t emotionally developed enough to handle you with the care you need also afsa the more you feel your emotions the more others will be able to feel you i didn t deserve that my personal unlock to access grief what is the sensation in my body of giving or receiving love my self love practice belonging is the antidote to shame hat tip to rajkumari for this one 2026 intentions my intentions are efforts to act on and integrate my learnings in the direction of my calling back in february i arrived at a new commitment building on my intentions for 2025 i am a commitment to embodying power without domination i will bridge across differences shining my light without insisting that others see it this still feels right and i ll carry it with me into 2026 here are the four intentions i ll be working with this year 1 listen to the darkness this is a subtle but important shift from my 2025 work last year i focused relentlessly on integration naming and reclaiming my gifts and my light in order to take more accountability for my shadow and bring it into my consciousness where i could work with it but i still saw darkness as something to be overcome integrated rendered in service of light this year i m leaning into something that feels very edgy for me just accepting the darkness and listening to its wisdom without trying to transform it darkness and light are different energies they are a polarity that work together what if the work isn t to integrate but to respect the difference soul friend lindley mease introduced me this year to the indigenous aymara concept of ch ixi which i find very challenging to my natural disposition toward integration and higher synthesis ch ixi asks us to hold polarities without trying to integrate them here s silvia rivera cusicanqui the notion of ch ixi reflects the aymara idea of something that is and is not at the same time it is the logic of the included third a ch ixi color gray is white but is not white at the same time it is both white and its opposite black the potential of undifferentiation is what joins opposites ch ixi combines the indian world and its opposite without ever mixing them as a natural bridger connector integrator this cosmology is provocative for me i ve always been drawn to difference but my instinct is always to include and transcend always seeking a higher synthesis what if i didn t this points to my work for the year can i listen to the darkness without insisting that it become integrated with the light 2 explore my relationship to grief and anger this is related to the above i m aware that i don t have much relationship to the dark emotions i can access the full range of light emotions happiness and joy curiosity and awe e g but sadness takes intentionality for me to drop into and i don t have any relationship with despair anger takes effort and i don t feel connected to rage this matters for two reasons one i want to reclaim my full humanity and two i see all my work as fractal and i understand that the energies driving fascism and this moment are ones that i can t locate in my own body i fear that i won t be able to respond effectively to dynamics that i can t understand feel in myself i want to bring in an update to my 2024 lesson on detaching with love and re work last year s intention around naming the ouch it turns out i m still not very good at that i ve learned that when i feel pain or am hurt the first thing i do is humanize empathize with the perpetrator there is light in this i refuse to fight fire with fire and i recognize the wounding that is driving their behavior and there is shadow i tolerate harm and even abuse in an often vain effort to encourage their healing telling myself that on the other side of their healing genuine love awaits ouch instead this year i want to try this practice feel my own pain first name harm to myself and allow my nervous system to feel the injury state my boundary clearly this behavior hurts me it s not okay hold compassion second not first compassion as truth not bypass sit with their experience after i sit with my own ugh so hard for me let their healing be their responsibility instead of my relational labor check in with myself about my own willingness what the relationship means to me an honest assessment of their capacity and ask their consent both to do the healing work and to accept support absent those conditions it is time to detach with love 3 experiment with the embodied exemplar i first named this archetype last january in borikén and this year i want to lean into it what if in addition to my work as a bridger connecting people i also practiced the role of the beacon shining a light to invite people back home there are a couple components here the first is practicing what i preach which is acknowledging that we trust people first and ideas second am i willing to be more vulnerable and make myself the thing i am asking people to invest in i ve long sought more examples of the embodiment i aspire to power without domination collaboration without coercion could i begin to share my own embodiment as one example in that direction not as answer but as invitation instead of seeking others to follow or asking others to follow me to invite mutual accompaniment on a difficult and lonely journey after all as gloria anzaldúa reminds us the bridge is made by walking the second is to lean more into story as part of my commitment to letting go of being misunderstood yes my theory of global systems transformation is complex of necessity and it is my responsibility to find a way to 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