As I slog through my multi-year project to archive what’s still timely from many hundreds of essays, both published and unpublished that I have written over these many decades, I happened to look through the first few years of the exopermaculture.com site yesterday. That site is still up, as its own archive, and functioned from early 2011 through August of 2021, when I transitioned over to this site, annkreilkamp.net. Exopermaculture includes probably 10,000 posts.

Right away, I noticed a number of very early posts on exopermaculture that are actually more timely now. For example this one,  from March 1, 2011, which carries the same title as this piece and begins by describing a harrowing airplane trip home from a UFO Congress that lasted many many hours and involved an extraordinary group process. (Well worth reading, if you’re interested.)

Now, in September 2022,  I decided to repost the rest of that piece here.

 

 

THE PIVOT POINT:

“Pivot in Place, Absorb and Integrate. NOW.”

 

Excerpt from a post on

Exopermaculture.com

March 1, 2011

 

For many years, during the time when I was undergoing a personal evolutionary process so strong and continuous that I knew I had to stay centered to stay sane, I thought of it as being “on point,” like a dancer, balanced. That image was static; now the phrase that comes in is dynamic, “the pivot point.” By this I refer to being able to “pivot in place,” to absorb shock and integrate it, instantly. The process of pivoting is the integration, and doesn’t knock me off my center.

The phrase first came to me when I noticed my response to a situation where I had almost joined someone else on his website, as a writer. Both of us were excited about the opportunity the project presented. Then, after five hours of talking long distance by phone over a three day period, we discovered that our visions diverged in certain aspects essential to both of us. I started this website instead.

What impressed me about that five-day adventure was that I had managed to integrate it almost immediately. My excitement had allowed me to absorb both his worldview, and the opportunity our partnership presented — to the point where we could find that we were not aligned after all. Had I not allowed myself to become excited, I would not have fully opened to absorb it. Had we joined forces, I would have gone against my nature, and the longer I went before I admitted that it wasn’t right for me, the more difficult it would have been to end it with integrity.

Thus the pivot point: to eagerly and swiftly absorb the entirety of a situation, and move it through to completion. To pivot on point is to end the long-running or sporadic dramas that have dragged my emotional and mental bodies into the mud. Pivot in place. Absorb and integrate. NOW.

But how to do that? And why is it important?

It seems to me that the longer we take to let go of dramas, the harder time we will have in flowing with the fast track of events that accompany the acceleration of time that has been predicted by both Mayans and astrologers, and manifested through our symbiosis with swiftly emerging technologies.

For me, once I woke up to the fact that I had been engaging in patterned dramas since the time I was a child, I started to identify these dramas while they were happening, and to discover how to integrate them. At first, such processing took years, then months, weeks. . . I was learning to both extract myself from dramas and then allow and honor the emotional hurt feelings that accompanied them — until the feelings transformed. I was learning, in other words, to let go what had formerly held me fast, in suffering.

The point is, we can be excited without being attached. We can fully enter into a situation —body, mind and soul — without identifying with it. In fact that seems key. While our bodies undergo certain trials (like lack of sleep, cramped conditions, unexpected shocks one after another, the stress of airborne turbulence), our minds and spirits can remain detached. This takes practice. For me, I credit tai chi and chi kung, but there are many other meditative practices that also inculcate the gradual letting go of attachment to any situation in which we might find ourselves.

Where this becomes important is when we find ourselves both individually and collectively having to face situations that are unexpected, uncomfortable, even painful, and prolonged. I don’t know how I’ll do when and if, for example, our transportation system breaks down and food is no longer on the shelves of chain grocery stores. I don’t know how I’ll do when I am cold for weeks because electricity has been off again. I don’t know. But what I can do is practice detachment and compassion. I can pivot on point, integrate shocks one by one while remaining centered. Meanwhile I can serve to help create an atmosphere of love and calm in the midst of turbulent storms.

This kind of skill, for it is a skill and it can be learned, will become more and more valuable during the coming years as we transition from our insular world-view that sees humans all alone on a resource-depleted planet in a cold and scary universe into a vastly expanded world-view that recognizes all beings, whether on or off-world, as aspects of the divine in a universe of unlimited potential for abundance of every kind we can imagine — and then some!

We are in transforming into oneness. Let us make the most of it. Welcome to the adventure!