Full Potential
Hey beautiful people,
The Stoa’s blackbird, Raven Connolly, has launched her new course called Broken Gender, “a course about sex, sexuality and gender in the 21st century.”
Sign-up to Raven’s Substack to get a sense of what the course will entail and how to apply. You can also watch her recent talk at The Stoa below. Patrons of The Stoa will receive a generous $100 off the course.
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing. Every Tuesday @ 2:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Journaling. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Pop Magick: A Simple Guide to Bending Your Reality w/ Alex Kazemi. December 14th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted events:
The Virus and The Machine w/ Paul Kingsnorth. December 20th @ 1:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Liminal Web w/ Joe Lightfoot. December 20th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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December 13th, 2021
The first question we asked initiates of The Club was this …
Are you living up to your full potential?
They had to have their eyes closed while answering, and they always said no. I then yelled at them …
Why the fuck not?!
The Club was an intense philosophical “debate club” that mixed Socratic inquiry with boot camp sergeant energy and this opening salvo was designed to show the initiate what they were getting into.
I imagine there are a few eyebrows raised after reading this. That is totally understandable. I do not recommend engaging in something like The Club without great care. The experience was beautiful though, as all the members, including myself, had a chance to experience the loving intensity of being in the hot seat.
Members of The Club soon realized that their philosophy was entangled with so many unprocessed emotions. For that reason we had to bake more loving group processing into the experience, à la “T groups.” Demons were being released, and demons are unpleasant mainly because they are malnourished in love.
I am returning to The Club now, which ended years ago, because something is curious to me about why we started with that question for initiates. The thing that drives me nuts about self-help literature is that they throw around words like “potential” with sloppy non-definitions. Most people have an intuitive understanding of what potential means though, along with the subsequent shame of not living up to it.
So, what does the word really mean? Some dictionary definitions: “existing in possibility” or “capable of becoming real.” These definitions open up a bifurcation: one can have a positive potential or negative potential. We have the potential to do wonderful things and a potential to do terrible things. Negative potential is not what most people think about when thoughts of their own potential come to mind. The following dictionary definition gets closer to what the word connotes for many...
A latent excellence or ability that may or may not be developed.
The “may or may not be developed” part is where all the emotions are and the “latent excellence” part speaks to what most people’s sense of the word potential means. This is why at The Club we asked about “full potential.” It is the “full” part that people fear not living up to.
What does full potential mean? If you search this phrase you’ll find a slew of unsatisfying definitions from the self-help world. Let me see if I can discover a more satisfying one now. The word “full” has the key. When something is full it means that it is completely filled, so “full potential” may mean an existing possibility that makes you feel complete.
“Complete” does not mean something is necessarily finished, it just means the necessary parts are there. Perhaps “whole” would be a better word to use. I find life tends to start feeling meaningful when all the necessary parts are being recognized. When I am denying something, usually something unpleasant, my sense of meaningfulness goes away.
I am getting a better sense as to why the first question we asked at The Club was about potential, why everyone answered no, and why there is so much emotional congestion around that word. We were looking for the parts that were always there, but not being recognized, or worse, being denied, hidden away from ourselves and others.
People often look to external aspects that others can readily see to check if they are living up to their full potential. Doing this often reinforces the sense of incompleteness. I sense what is really needed is to look directly at the spots where the incompleteness is felt, then shine all the love you can on them.
Committing to your full potential is committing to love all of you, as well as what comes through the porous borders of you and others. This is going to be scary as fuck, especially if so much is being unloved. If you are reading this now, I sense you are ready enough to get after this love.
With that said, I will end this entry by asking us a better question than the one we asked the initiates of The Club...
Are we committed to living our full potential?
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