A Mason's Work

If there is a role in cognitive role in the craft that I struggle with more than most,

it's probably the junior awarding is certainly up there in the top 10, probably in the top

five.

Not in terms of execution and inside the logic experience, but in terms of my own ability

to self-regulate.

And a lot of that has to do with the subverted expectations that we have.

We're taught, a lot of us as men are taught to just tough it out or suffer through.

And we enobal that and we call folks that don't have that capacity.

We give them names, we call them lazy, we call them weenies or whatever.

And when that happens, and I expect to get tormented for that, when that happens, when

people have that kind of social pressure to perform past the limits of their beyond the

limits of their ability to sense what's going on, and maybe even subvert their own physiology,

what happens is all of those needs that aren't getting met or all of those knobs and

dials internally that might be flashing in the red, essentially kind of spontaneously

in a lot of ways, just go dark.

And those needs get pushed into other behaviors.

So for example, and I'm not trying to trivialize this, so if you're a medical mental health

professional, please email me and correct me where I'm wrong.

But a lot of physiological needs that get subverted, where you just tough it out, you just kind

of muscle your way through, turns into a self-medicating behavior.

So a lot of folks that self-medicate effectively do so because they have lost the ability to

understand the nature of the problem they're experiencing in their own body, in their emotional

content, whatever the case might be.

So they just kind of numb the pain away to the point of essentially not understanding

it at all.

So much so that the pain numbing becomes part of a habituated pattern which turns into

a long-term addiction.

Very likely addiction is something that affects all people either internally or through

the behavior of others.

You may or may not have addictive behavior.

I don't know you yet, but certainly would love to find out when it comes to how you've

overcome maybe some of those self-medicating cycles that again, I think a lot of people

fall victim to.

In my own case, those social signals of toughing it out, of suffering on behalf of other

people, right?

So giving selflessly, whatever that might mean, all turns into essentially a certain amount

of turning a blind eye to your own needs.

The junior word and roll really requires you to meaningfully begin to notice what those

needs are and how you can honor them in a way.

Again, not to suggest that I have an algae and therefore I shouldn't go to work, but

rather notice that as you are experiencing something that is uncomfortable, that you

shouldn't push it away.

That is okay for you to notice it and also to continue.

True resilience requires this because there are some pains that you cannot continue through.

There are some hurts where the most prudent decision is to stop, is to take a break, to

take a breath, to go out and take a couple deep breaths or take a hike.

Again, I can't tell you how to charge your batteries, but I can tell you is more often

than not that recharge cycle is a lot more effective than the self abuse talk of, I'm

just going to muscle this out or tough it out because I'm not a whos.

When you start that mental process, you start negatively evaluating the feedback your

body is giving you.

You say, this feedback is no good, it's not valuable to me or it's not helping because

I do need to get this objective complete.

That starts to happen, you essentially start pushing away a part of the dashboard of

indicators that you're going to need in order to be effective in the world.

For a lot of folks, this happens over the course of their childhood or over the course

of their life and then they spend the balance of their adult life trying to figure out why

they're doing the things that they're doing even when they know they're not good things

to do.

This junior award and function, this noticing, this pursuit of interception, this mindfulness

practice is absolutely vital, I think, to effectively become a meaningful agent of change

because if you don't know yourself and if you can't read the behavior of others, when

it comes time to create something new or something true, it's all built on systems that you

don't understand and can't regulate.

So I can't recommend this mental role play, this perspective strongly enough.

It's interesting that in most progressive lines, the junior awarding is kind of the first

elected officer and you move from first this capacity to regulate.

Then if you remember in the senior awarding the capacity to understand the benefits and

how to close and then in the virtual master role, the ability to really understand how

to create spaces where work can be done to achieve an objective.

All three of these things fit together.

It's a real powerful statement that our ritual encourages you to be a junior awarding first.

See you next week.