On Influence

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." -Heraclitus

A little over a year ago, I was sitting with a dying man- a former employee of my father who had become more like family over the years. His energy was exhilarating to witness, as he feverishly tried to impart as much wisdom as possible to those who were there to listen.

"You need to be careful with your words in life," he warned. "You can't stop a bullet after you've pulled the trigger!" 

This is an image I've returned to many times since, not just in considering the consequence of my words but also my actions and general presence around others. Whether or not we like it, we're tethered to each other in some sort of strange energetic web that no one can fully grasp. But, even with the gap in our current understanding, I think it's fair to say there's mutual and simultaneous influence occurring between all of us. 

"Pulling the trigger," so to speak, not only affects our target but us as well. After all, neither person could ever be the same afterwards. And, interestingly, each one of us does this all day long, in big and small ways. 

I'm going to set aside the question of what our personal responsibility is in this matter, as that's a much bigger conversation that needs more diversity in thought than what I can offer. What I'm interested in briefly exploring, though, is how we can affect the quality of our own "outputs," should we want to do so. In other words, how do we help ensure that we're at peace with our words, actions, and presence around others, given the influence we all inherently seem to have?

I'm not smart enough to provide a universal, definitive answer here, but I can share what's been most useful to me as a starting point:

Learn how to regulate your own nervous system. 

It took me most of my life to understand that cultivating self-awareness around my nervous system would create a ripple effect for those around me. Somatic therapy has helped me quiet the part of my brain that had been stuck in survival mode so I could free myself up for better presence and more creativity and complex problem solving- you know, the really juicy, good stuff. The deeper I got into somatic therapy, the more I felt like I was projecting a kind of energy I was profoundly comfortable with- and that created a positive shift in the interactions I was having with others. 

Ask anyone who's close to me, and you'll learn I'm still very much a work-in-progress. But I do take the work extremely seriously. It's just that: work. It's ongoing and, at least to me, endlessly worthwhile.