To live a full life we must learn to tolerate Ambiguity

Ambiguity: the quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness.

There was a time in my life when I was constantly thrown from one extreme emotional reaction to the next. I was always looking for justifications for the extreme feelings I was experiencing which would result in me placing blame on something or someone. The end result for me and those close to me, was a lot of unhappiness and close calls with serious trouble that could have even placed me in some form of forced confinement.

Luckily, I was able to make a few good decisions, getting married to Kim, going to Kent State University, moving to Washington State, meeting and then Marrying Susan Brieninger (Mix), and reconnecting with my native roots through the Sweatlodge ceremony. But among the many blessings of those days was the healing influence I found in working with Jim Miller, an extraordinary therapist who had been trained by the great Alexander Lowen who in tern had been trained by the legendary Wilhelm Riech. 

With a background in the Somatic approach to psychotherapy therapy and being a practicing Sifi, Jim had a unique understanding and insight into the spiritual nature of our emotional lives. He understood the vulnerabilities that go along with living in a physical body, while also understanding the heart centered portal that leads us to a deeply felt connectedness and a higher state of being and living. 

Jim taught me to feel my feelings but do nothing in response... "your task, your discipline is to let your feelings come and go, and do nothing". This discipline or practice was to teach me to observe my feelings and to grow a tolerance for the situations or actions of others that triggered emotional reactions in me. Jim went on to say that ambiguity is a concept or perspective that is not well understood in our culture and that people are not equipped to handle or tolerate the feelings associated with it. As a result people are creating or perpetuating a reactionary drama in their lives as they seek to judge, good or bad, and therefore justify their choices and actions.

Learning to tolerate ambiguity requires a discipline of inaction that enables us to bear witness to the many changes and processes that make up the bulk of our life experience. 

Alternatively, it is also clear to me that in order to move through the world with any kind of potency we have developed the ability to identify things of importance and then decide what steps we need or want to take accordingly. Once we know something has value to us we usually give it a name. Naming a thing is one of the great powers we have as human beings since once we name a thing we are able to focus and learn, change, control or manipulate to what ever end we choose. But the act of naming can also be a great weakness or flaw in our makeup. If we name a thing as say bad, simply because we don't understand it, then we are lost in a self generated illusion of absolutes. Good or bad become flip sides of the same flat coin, and we loose the emotional dimensionality and depth of life.

This is where learning to tolerate ambiguity, the lack of observable absolutes, becomes a practical discipline that can give us the internal room to simply allow processes of change to play themselves out, without our interference. This discipline of tolerance then becomes a powerful tool that enables us to learn from simple observation and the understanding that comes from knowing our place in relationship to what unfolds, not as a person of action or re-action but rather as person of inaction capable of pause, restraint, and reflection, a person able to hold (or tolerate) ambiguity rather than succumbing to some default position based in our limited perceptions and biases. 

The play of opposites, the good and the bad, no longer hold a dominant positions of influence in our minds but gives way to an expansive process that allows for the development of more subtle qualities and skills that become part our personal makeup... patience, consideration, curiosity and the appreciation and even an attraction to those things that are deferent from what we believe to be true, good or beautiful.