The Effective Disconnect

Not only connection but disconnection is vital to experience. If we do not effectively disconnect often enough from devices, demands, and those identities we inhabit much of the time, we may very well come to forget the more that we are—the vast, unrealized potentialities within us, our essential orientation “toward a plus factor in existence,” as Jack Finegan once put it, and the power we each possess to become, beyond any personal prisons that cage us. There is thunder in our hearts and lightning in our veins with which we are barely acquainted. A storm searches us as old as time, an inner maelstrom and constellating chaos, truly fearsome when we sense its movement and yet altogether beautiful and alluring as well, like spirited solar winds forever agitating our inner atmosphere with the ability to illuminate an aurora for the dark night of the soul. We tend to treat this chaos as taboo, and shun it, even though we need it. “One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star,” Nietzsche wrote. “I say unto you, you still have chaos in yourselves." We are all familiar with the chaos that swirls inside; it is what prompts us toward meaning-making systems of belief that would comfort us and bring at least some coherence to the confusion. But rather than imposing meaning on the mystery, we might instead consider actually losing ourselves to the whirlwind, embracing as is the full force of this inner energy and its ability to destroy and create, actualities and possibilities within us. As Peter Levine notes in his more than forty-five years of work with children and adults healing from trauma, the raw, instinctual energy of creativity is often forced underground by oppressive oversocialization or when we find ourselves overwhelmed by toxic stress through overdependence. Disconnecting from others and the world regularly to enjoy the eremitic, therefore, can be an essential frontier through which we rediscover the wild within and the creative power we have to reimagine our very lives. Rather than fearing the storm or forcing it into a semantic system, we can acknowledge and honor this elemental energy chaotically coalescing inside us, without constraining or explaining it—as if that were possible—and instead, be born by it and through it.