A Mason's Work

[00:00] Here's the thing that nobody warns you about when we start talking about masks and performances
[00:04] and the cost of calibrating yourself for every single room you walk in.
[00:11] Most of it feels like good behavior.
[00:15] Feels virtuous.
[00:17] Doesn't feel like self-betrayal.
[00:19] Doesn't feel like weakness or suppression or this slow accumulation of a debt we talked
[00:24] about yesterday.
[00:24] It feels like maturity, like professionalism.
[00:30] It feels like being the kind of person who has enough self-control not to say the first
[00:35] thing that crossed their mind, not to react in the way the body wanted to react, but to
[00:39] keep it together for when keeping it together is what the situation required.
[00:44] And sometimes that's exactly what it is.
[00:47] Genuine discernment.
[00:50] Choosing your response rather than being driven by it.
[00:52] And that's awesome.
[00:54] That's the kind of thing you learn to do over time and keep yourself upright under pressure.
[01:01] And that's exactly what you want to do.
[01:03] But there's another version of that behavior that looks identical from the outside, but it
[01:10] costs three times as much from the inside.
[01:13] It's not discernment.
[01:15] It's suppression.
[01:16] Wearing discernment's clothing.
[01:18] It's the discernment.
[01:24] Suppression masquerading is discernment that really adds to the toll that we talked about
[01:32] yesterday.
[01:32] And the only place you're going to find that is in your body.
[01:36] Discernment is a choice that's made from a clear place.
[01:39] It's a moment of recognition, a genuine reflection and understanding and a weighing of things.
[01:45] It's a response you'd make again under similar conditions.
[01:49] And physiologically, there's a cost.
[01:52] You know, it's calories and all that kind of stuff, but it's real and it's proportionate
[01:58] and appropriate.
[02:00] Suppression underneath is really, really quite a bit different, even when it looks the same
[02:05] from the outside in.
[02:05] There's a tightness, a specific kind of breath, a sensation of something being pressed down
[02:13] rather than set aside.
[02:15] And the cost is different.
[02:17] It doesn't resolve after the moment passes.
[02:20] It carries.
[02:21] It adds to this ledger in a way that discernment doesn't because suppression doesn't complete
[02:27] the transaction.
[02:28] It kind of defers it.
[02:29] It pushes it along to another time.
[02:31] It accrues a debt and that gets pressed down and it's still in the account, but it's accumulating
[02:39] interest.
[02:42] This distinction is practical.
[02:45] And if you're going to learn to use interoception and understand your body and what it's telling
[02:52] you as the instrument for finding where all these costs are being calculated, you need
[02:56] to know what you're looking for.
[02:57] It's not fatigue in general.
[02:59] It's not tension in general.
[03:02] It's specific.
[03:03] It's a specific quality of sensation that follows when you are doing that kind of expensive
[03:11] suppression.
[03:13] And it's, it's just a, it's a genuinely different feeling.
[03:17] Here's a sample kind of example, starting point.
[03:20] Think back to the last time you were in a meeting or a conversation and something came
[03:25] up that you didn't respond to organically.
[03:30] Honestly.
[03:31] Now I want to be clear here.
[03:33] Honesty, um, is not, we're not suggesting, and I'm not suggesting that when you don't respond,
[03:40] honestly, you're being disingenuous.
[03:42] That's not the same thing.
[03:44] Responding honestly, meaning you had a response that you have filtered.
[03:51] It was different than how you would like to react.
[03:55] It's not necessarily dramatic.
[03:58] It's just an ordinary moment where the way you wanted to react and the way you did were
[04:06] different than each other.
[04:08] Somehow you'll probably notice a feeling in your body when you did that.
[04:14] Uh, maybe a tension, maybe a drawing of the breath, maybe a furrowing of the brow, right?
[04:22] Whatever it is, it's somewhere in the chest or the throat or the gut.
[04:25] It's a compression.
[04:26] It's a, it's a tension.
[04:28] It's a held, um, tension for lack of a better way to say it.
[04:34] And it's something that kind of, we wanted to move, but it didn't go.
[04:38] So that sensation is the beginning.
[04:43] It's an entry point.
[04:44] It's a place to start noticing, noticing.
[04:47] And, and all of what we're doing over the course of this process is where all of the fun stuff
[04:55] happens.
[04:55] We're trying to gain, um, access to the instrumentation that we have buried under layers of what felt
[05:06] to be good choices.
[05:08] Uh, and now we have lost touch with, so we're looking for indicators.
[05:13] If you were out, uh, you know, trying to understand maybe the mysteries of ancient Egypt, digging in
[05:19] the sand, you have to look for parts that are sticking up.
[05:22] You have to look for the parts that are sinking in.
[05:24] And in that process, you'll get to the tender stuff underneath.
[05:29] And this exact interoceptive sort of perspective or understanding is what we're trying to build
[05:37] in practical terms on a daily basis.
[05:41] It's looking for these hesitations.
[05:44] It's looking for the places where you recognize that you're out of fuel and you start noticing
[05:53] maybe what the cause might've been.
[05:56] Now, look again, if you're out there and you're running a marathon, literally running a marathon,
[06:02] it is entirely appropriate for you to be tired.
[06:06] But if you're not, and you're not doing anything close to that, there's a good chance that this
[06:12] is that technical debt, that debt that's just accruing in the behind the scenes of you having
[06:17] this ego depletion, this, this, uh, expense of sacrificing yourself in service to the present moment.
[06:30] Again, sometimes it's good.
[06:31] Sometimes you need to do it.
[06:33] Uh, but when it becomes a problem, it creates this burden.
[06:39] That's really hard to get out from under.
[06:41] So look for those.
[06:42] If you find that you're sitting in the car after a meeting, if you find that yourself,
[06:47] you know, that you, that you need to take these moments and you're not really even doing
[06:52] anything, uh, to try and recover.
[06:54] This is a good indicator that you've got these, these things, these stories, these masks, this,
[07:00] this weight of this masking process that is consuming you.
[07:04] So think about it.
[07:07] And tomorrow we'll get a little bit more into what to do when you find it.