Expanding Your Continuum

Video Blog Transcription: Expanding Your Continuum

(00:00):

Welcome to the Natural Way of Being Video Blog. This video is titled Expanding Your Continuum. Now, by the word continuum, I'm talking about a kind of our range of human experience between two opposite poles or possibilities, if you will. So the example I'm going to use for most of this video is the range between being passive and being aggressive, and then there's every nuance or gradient in between those two things.

(01:06):

Another example of this, which is kind of made famous by the Myers-Briggs, is to have introversion and extroversion on either side of the scale. And then there are levels between the poles. So some people say I'm balanced, but they might be balanced between introversion and extroversion. They may be in the middle, or I'm mostly slightly introverted, or I'm really introverted.

Other examples would be masculine and feminine, gentleness and strength, or yin and yang. These are examples of what I'm calling continuums.

And so my premise for this video is we tend to get stuck in certain parts- usually on one side of the continuum or the other, or sometimes in the middle. It might benefit us to expand our continuum and encompass more of the possibilities of life.

And for our journey today, I have my first-ever video blog visual aid, which we'll call a prop. And it just shows a continuum or a scale between zero and ten, zero being down here, ten being up here.

(02:16):

So the example that I'm going to use is that I'm going to have passive be over here, so totally passive is going to be zero, and totally aggressive would be ten. Now, some of you say assertive is in the middle, but we're just going to call this an aggressiveness scale- zero aggression here, total aggression here. So it's a scale of aggression.

And so what we tend to do, I'll use myself as an example. I'm going to use myself as an example quite a bit in this video. We tend to get stuck. So when I was, I was conditioned as a kid, I was conditioned to be passive. So I hung out between, let's say, just about between zero and three, I think three is about here, and that's where it was safe for me to be; it was only safe for me to be between zero and three.

(03:19):

It was not safe to be four or five, let alone eight. Actually, these numbers were reserved for my father, who was not passive. He was more aggressive. And so I was conditioned to not be like my father, mostly from my mother, but that's a whole other story. And so this was my range. He got the other seven. So anyway, that's a little more psychology than maybe we needed to go, but just so you know, that's where these things come from.

So I was conditioned to be between zero and three. So as I started dating and I went to college, I started seeing that this was limiting. I saw my friends going out here, and I wasn't. And so what I started doing is I started expanding myself and expanding my continuum. And that’s my premise, that there may be a benefit from expanding that.

(04:20):

So there are two primary ways that I benefit from expanding my continuum. The first is that, as I mentioned earlier, I get more possibilities. I get a more dynamic range of possibilities. And while I only get 30% of my possibilities between zero and three, I get a hundred percent if I have the whole thing.

Now, you may say, well, do you really want to be hanging out as total aggression? Probably not, but every now and then, it might not be the worst thing to be a 10. If I need to defend my child or if I need to defend my life, it might not be bad to be a 10.

But anyway, the idea is that we get more options, more possibilities if we expand. And in each one of these, each number or each phase along the way, each gradation, as I'm getting more aggression, has a different energy.

(05:29):

So if I experience four, say I push myself, and I get out of my comfort zone, and I experience four, I get to experience the energy of four. If I get really rowdy and experience seven, I get to experience the energy of seven. And then I awaken that energy inside of me. And then people can feel that. When I express myself as a seven, it feels different than expressing myself as a three.

And so then I get to be more dynamic. I have a larger dynamic range of energy, possibilities, and behaviors. And that's one benefit of expanding possibilities.