Meta-protocol learning loop

This is a tangent I pulled out of Open Letter: Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam in 2022. It may make more sense if you read that, and reading The meta-protocol for human trust-building might also help. But also I think the core learning loop describes here has a kind of general applicability. 10/30 of the way through my indie inkhaven challenge of publishing a blog post each day of Nov. This one is super short!

It seems to me that: as a result of having been raised in cultures that didn’t adequately welcome us and help us learn to welcome everything into awareness, we each learned many automatic patterns to suppress what we deem unwelcome.

I have also learned that when I am being rigid and inflexible, I am usually in the grip of an emotional reaction. The rigidity is a compensatory reaction to an uncertainty I am not able or willing to experience
—A Trackless Path by Ken McLeod

It seems to me that: in order to deeply rest at home in a fully-welcoming culture, and to access all of our wisdom and experience collaborative culture internally, we need to learn not just how to inhibit the default reactions and do something else, but to welcome those reactions and the knowings underneath them, and find out how to bring them into dialogue with the rest of what we know. My understanding here comes largely from learning and internalizing the Emotional Coherence Framework. The basic tension between releasing the emotions directly in the moment, and finding out their roots to release those, is described in Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation.

It seems to me that: in the meantime, it is possible to try out the basic stance of the meta-protocol in our interpersonal relating, and have powerful experiences of connection and trust as a result.

It seems to me that: there’s an interplay between trying out the stance and understanding the stance—each supports the other. In particular, one core feedback loop seems to look like the diagram below. Both the means and the end of the loop below are an embodiment of the meta-protocol. In other words, the meta-protocol is developed and learned by following this loop, and enacting the meta-protocol also consists of following this loop.

In 2018, when I originally came up with this concept of developing collaborative cultures via such a bootstrapping process, my understanding of it involved only three steps—utterly missing was the “Integrate with other knowings” step. I got that piece in 2019 when I went to the BioEmotive workshop and then dived into the Emotional Coherence Framework via reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain.

My previous concept was that the new experiences would simply enable new understandings directly, which, because they were better than the old understandings, would supercede them. A curious relevant tangent: I looked up “supercede” just now to see if I was spelling it in the standard way, and I wasn’t—it’s conventionally spelled “supersede”:

The form supercede is commonly considered a misspelling of supersede, since it results from confusion between Latin cēdere (“to give up, yield”) and sedēre (“to sit”). The original Latin word was supersedēre (“to sit above”)
– https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/supercede

Playfully, the confusion between the two of those etymologies can be used to point at precisely the confusion I had about how learning worked, before. I previously thought that how learning worked was that if I learned something new and better that contradicted something old, then the old understandings would cede/yield to new better ones—that they’d let go. Instead, it seems to me now, unless the old & new understandings get to dialogue with each other and come to a deeper viewpoint together, the new understandings simply sit above the old ones, in a state of compartmentalization and self-disagreement. They become a new layer on top of the old layer, but the old layer is still there and while repressed it’s still part of one’s sensemaking even if one denies it.

It seems to me that it is possible for a kind of yielding to occur, but it’s always fundamentally both understandings/perspectives yielding to some larger understanding/perspective that integrates both, not one of them yielding to the other. And if I think I have a larger perspective but the smaller one isn’t yielding to it, well… my larger perspective may be larger but there’s something it’s still failing to integrate from the smaller one.

I wrote a short dense ebook describing in much more detail how people can go about doing this learning loop in community with each other, which you can learn more about and buy here.

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