Is this an expression of my aliveness or is it a tool to deaden?

I did a strange thing six months ago.

I gave up caffeine.

I was going on a retreat - taking my first steps into contemporary shamanic practice - and the facilitator asked us not to drink caffeinated drinks during the retreat.

I didn’t want to be in withdrawal for the retreat, and so I stopped a week or two beforehand.

Then, once the retreat was over, I noticed my curiosity and my desire to test myself in interesting ways taking over: now that I’ve got through the withdrawal, do I want to go back? Or do I want to experiment with this for longer?

Anyone who has followed my work and noticed the strange things I do to challenge myself will know what the answer was.

The answer was: I want to experiment for longer.

What I found honestly shocked me.

I shared with my biographical counsellor that what stood out from the early days was that my two cups of coffee each day were really one of the few things I genuinely looked forward to.

She laughed at the idea that I was voluntarily choosing to take those two moments each day away. What does that say about me?

And as I maintained my experiment, two things continually showed up as I got used to life without caffeine.

Sadness.

Tiredness.

These, I realised, were the two things I had been numbing every day through my use of caffeine.

They were the things that this small, exciting, pervasive drug were helping me insulate myself from.

In my life and my work I tend to live by this rule: it’s never better in the long term to avoid something or push it away. It’s better to integrate it.

If I hate the agressive part of me, or the sexual part of me… Or if some part of me doesn’t believe I’m allowed to be angry, or to be selfish… my job is to meet it, love it and then through that gain access to the power that can come from those qualities. Power that, if I push that part of me away, I am denied access to.

But what of the sadness? What of the tiredness?

Am I really ready to integrate those things?

My experiment brought to mind something I once heard the author Michael Neill say at a talk of his I attended. Asked about his views on Social Media, Neill said something like this: ‘They’re like anything addictive. They can be great and they can be terrible. The question you have to ask yourself is: is using it an expression of aliveness, or is it a tool to deaden?’

That is a powerful question.

I learned through another experiment, years ago, that it’s possible for things to be both. When I spent a year or so asking myself, every week, ‘what one thing that drains me of energy will I stop doing this week?’ I started to see the nuances.

If I played on a frivolous computer game for a certain amount of time, it was an expression of aliveness. Then it started to deaden me.

The drugs that are in our societies are similar: most people have drunk an alcoholic drink or a coffee and found their conversation or their dancing or their creativity become more alive.

And many of us have used alcohol to deaden our experience of pain and caffeine to deaden our tiredness.

In my Meaningful Productivity work, I often see people using busyness as a tool to deaden. But of course in the moment when the project lifts off or inspiration strikes us, the busyness that emerges can be an expression of our greatest aliveness.

We aren’t always ready to face the things we suppress.

We don’t always have the support network around us needed to integrate deeply suppressed parts of ourselves.

We may feel that the people we love can’t afford for us to be tired right now, can’t afford for us to be sad right now.

But in the end, if we suppress things for too long, they will explode.

Like the metaphorical pressure cooker.

And something will break.

So it pays to ask: is this an expression of my aliveness or is it a tool to deaden?

And if it is a tool to deaden, am I brave enough to set it aside and start to find my way back to aliveness?

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PS My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose

This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.