Expanding our "stretch zones" to build "Beloved Community", ft. Kazu Haga

How do we warm up our plasticities of change?

Today, I'm sharing about…

• darkness & dark adaptation;

• warming up our plasticities for change; and

• queering our abilities/senses/comforts.

Then I introduce my latest interview with Kazu Haga of Fierce Vulnerability, who invites us to look at our “comfort zones,” “stretch zones,” and “panic zones” — and how being in each influences our our brain chemistry and openness to growth, connection, change, and healing.

Enjoy! x

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My dad grew up reading books on the backs of water buffalo in rural Taiwan, where my grandparents had built an earthen home as sharecropping, subsistence farmers.

Living without electricity, my dad would often study and do his homework in the dark of the evenings, only barely lit with the soft, flickering glow offered by oil lamps.

I was always fascinated by how he had perfect vision throughout his entire childhood in spite of what would later become “common knowledge” — to never read in the dark because it is supposedly horrible for our eye health. For my dad, actually, it wasn’t until he moved into the city for his later studies, where he became used to having his apartments well lit every evening while he read, when he started developing visual impairments.

I am no eye doctor, and there are so many other possible lifestyle factors at play. I do have some of my own working theories, but I share this story not to draw some universal conclusion or as cautionary tale.

I was just reminded of it over the last weeks when I had friends traveling from big cities visit me in my off-grid home. Returning to my place after sunset, they would automatically turn on every single light switch (even in rooms they were not actively hanging out in) — with every dimmable light turned all the way up, with the screen brightness on their devices also turned all the way up.

It is, of course, very important to make the distinction between disabilities and comfort. It is also important to hold empathy for any reactions that might be trauma responses. Though I think there is space to blur some of these concepts as well.

By mainstream optometrical health measures, though, my friends have “perfect vision.” For them, these autopilot actions were not about accommodating visual challenges. They were about habit, and a conditioned narrowing of comfort and adaptability.

And I don’t judge nor blame them for it.

Every body is unique in their own baseline levels of ability, sensitivities, and comforts — shaped through a combination of “nature,” “nurture,” and other life experiences. But much like muscular or neural networks, there is still plasticity that allows for stretching, (re)training, and (re)storying. This plasticity looks different for every body, for different areas of our lives, and across different contexts that might either “warm up” or rigidify our flexibilities to change.

I have many of my own habits, tendencies, and ranges of comfort/discomfort that I am still working to unravel — with acknowledgment that the process of rewiring takes time, a sense of commitment, and an understanding of a deeper “why,” towards different ways of being and becoming.

Nevertheless, I am still curious to question many of these conditionings.

What are they culturally oriented towards? How do they shape our unique human experiences? And who do they benefit and serve?

Queering our filters of perception

Having had to adjust my own lifestyle to the limits of a modest, used solar system, where I have had to sparingly live with dim lighting or candlelight in the evenings and be okay with occasional power outages, I have worked to expand my comfort level with darkness. I actually now enjoy and feel stimulated by how accustoming to dark spaces has enhanced my night vision and also my non-visual senses of spatial awareness.

It has also greatly supported my sleep quality. There is plenty of research looking at how lighting is the most important environmental cue for our circadian systems, how our body clocks are “more sensitive to evening light than previously thought,” and how exposure to lighting in the evenings suppress our bodies’ production of our sleep hormones (source).

Even still, this adaptation took years for me. And I could imagine that suddenly dimming or turning off the lights on my friends would freak them out. So I maintained compassion for where they are in their journeys, went into my own room to unwind, and kept it nice and dark ;)

Obviously, I am not superhuman. I have dry eyes and astigmatism. Relative to my personal daytime experience, I cannot see as vividly when it is dim or dark.

But maybe the bigger question is, why should I do everything I can to create some perfectly controlled, constant environment to privilege and accommodate one particular “filter” of perception? What other “muscles” of sensory engagement (literally or metaphorically) would I allow to atrophy by choosing to narrow my range of comforts? And what might I miss by forgoing certain experiences that are actually crucial to life on/as Earth, such as darkness?

This isn’t about minimizing ourselves and “living with less.” Honestly, I have never really resonated with the framing of “minimalism” in how it still centers materialism in its orientation. For me, this is about maximalism and “reorienting growth” — experiencing more of life's pleasures and mysteries, queering the ways that I perceive, diversifying the ways that I relate, and opening myself up to more of life’s offerings.

“Everything grows in the dark. Babies gestate in their mother’s wombs in the dark. Seeds grow in the dark of the earth. We can only see the stars in the dark of the night. And we’ve so banished darkness...

People [talk] about walking towards the light. I would say, ‘What about walking in the dark?’” – Perdita Finn via Green Dreamer EP422.

Funnily, there has been an increasing number of research now showing the benefits of “Dark Therapy” and “Dark Adaptation” (allowing our retina to do their thing and slowly adjust to low-light) on our eye health, and even on our neuro-plasticity.

In a guided imagination practice that I lead in ~alchemize~ entitled “You are a seed,” I invite participants to speculatively envision themselves as a dormant seed resting in the dark crevices of the underground world.

And I draw on Dr. Mohamed Buheji’s research about how “confronting complete darkness enhances the mechanisms of the brain's neuroplasticity”:

“Our diverse sensory experiences in complete darkness increase our self-consciousness and break the shield of being afraid of uncertainties. The overwhelming blackness enhances the appreciation of our capacity for meaning or curiosity. […]

True darkness has become a rare and unrealised essential asset of our contemporary life. […] Once our hearts and brains live in unfamiliar sensory cultures and spaces, we heighten our sensitivity and the capacity to see what others cannot see.”

Expanding our plasticities for change…

Our plasticity, but in the context of how we show up for ourselves, our communities, and broader socio-environmental movements, is what I'd like to invite us to land on today — as guided by my latest interview with Kazu Haga of Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse.

Drawing on the work of Karl Rohnke, we chat extensively about our comfort zones, stretch zones, and panic zones, and how they are unique to every body and context.

As Kazu shares:

“[Rohnke] says that for most of our days, most of us spend time in what he calls our ‘comfort zone,’ […] — when we're able to connect deeply with other people.

That's a good place to be. [But] we grow, we heal, and we learn in what he calls the ‘stretch zone,’ which is, by definition, a little uncomfortable. […] The ‘stretch zone’ is when we're being challenged with new perspectives or trying to learn new things.

The key to being in the stretch zone is that we're still able to take in information… consider different perspectives, have empathy for the other side.

But if we push ourselves too hard, we go into what's called the ‘panic zone,’ [which is] when our emotions are completely dysregulated. At the brain chemistry level, the amygdala takes over and shuts down the prefrontal cortex that can think about nuance, that can have creativity and vision, that can connect with different perspectives.

Everything, then, becomes binary—our body goes into a fight or flight state.”

Furthering the threads of my last newsletter on slowing down in the face of urgency, Kazu continues by expanding on what is at stake if we respond to panic from a place of panic.

“We are living in a time of the erosion of democratic processes, climate catastrophes, and pandemics. There are so many triggers for our panic and our trauma. […]

But if we respond to that panic from a place of panic, then we're only adding more panic to the world. And that is not a place that is conducive to healing.

So what we're trying to encourage particularly people in social movements to think about is, what are the practices that we need to do for ourselves so that we can stay grounded and connected to our highest selves?

When we’re in panic, we’re responding from a place of trauma. Our capacity to practice nonviolence, to think about the complexity of the world, to have long-term visioning, goes out the window.

The invitation is for us to learn to be more comfortable in the stretch zone.”

An invitation to stretch our stretch zones…

So how do we sense into our different areas of plasticity — and notice how they shift or warm up in different seasons, settings, and contexts? How do we stretch our stretch zones?

Here are Kazu’s invitations for us:

“If you feel like going out into the streets and joining demonstrations and things like that is a stretch for you, that's where I want people to stretch into. And at the same time, if you feel like slowing down is a stretch for you, and perhaps doing some work looking at your shadows and healing some relationships in your community and your family is a stretch for you, that's what I would invite people into.

Wherever you feel that stretch, lean into that stretch.”

I welcome you to softly stretch yourself into our full conversation (Green Dreamer EP451) here or via Spotify, Apple Podcast, or any podcast app.

And if you are a supporting subscriber, you can also watch the extended, bonus video version of our interview here.

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Episode artwork by Lauren Rosenfelt; Song feature by Leïla Six

“Our commitment to healing and spiritual practice, paired with the courage to get into the streets and say ‘no’ to injustice, is so desperately needed in the world. We need both to be happening in a deep relationship with one another.” — Kazu Haga

About Kazu Haga

Kazu Haga is a trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and restorative justice, a core member of the Fierce Vulnerability Network, a founding member of the Ahimsa Collective, a Jam facilitator and author of Healing Resistance as well as the book Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse.

Invitations into reflection & action:

• As an invitation into deeper self-awareness, briefly describe the sensations you personally experience when in your comfort, stretch, or panic zones — as well as a few examples of activities, events, environments, topics of discussion, etc. that might move you into each zone. How can you practice more compassion and love for how your body has been uniquely storied to respond in the ways it does?

• What activities, actions, or areas of your life do you sense would move you into your stretch zone? Which of these do you feel most interested in leaning deeper into first, and what can best support you in this “exercise”?

• If you're curious to explore your relationship to ambient darkness: What is one small action you can take that would shift you into your stretch zone (but not panic zone!) and make you feel more comfortable with darker environments?

Dive deeper…

• Learn more about ~alchemize~: radical imagination for collective transformation

• Abby Reyes: Engaging “the slow work” in the face of urgency (EP450)

• Alnoor Ladha: Sacred activism and contextualized spirituality (EP324)

• Perdita Finn: Sitting with the wisdoms of darkness, death, and decay (EP422)

What’s next?

We decided to bump up the publication of this episode with Kazu Haga due to its relevancy with the previous one on engaging “the slow work” in the face of urgency.

But, my conversation with Paul Hawken of Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration will be next! More soon, and much love to all that you do!