What is it like to live from the inside out?
This is not a commonly used phrase,
So there is no set meaning for it.
What I'd like to do here is to tell you what it means for me.
A good way to start is to say what it does not mean to me.
It certainly does not mean to me avoiding the outside world,
Being self-absorbed.
Far from that.
It is actually,
To me,
A better way of being involved with the world.
One way to express that is to describe what it would be like to do the opposite,
That is to live from the outside in.
What that phrase means to me is lacking the capacity to contain,
To absorb,
To digest experience,
So that everything comes as if totally new and potentially threatening to us.
So,
To summarize it,
There is nothing inside to contain and absorb outside experience.
And so we're at the mercy of outside experience all the time.
In contrast,
What the phrase living from the inside out means to me is that there is a sense of a container,
Something from which we can absorb and digest experience and see it in a greater context.
Now,
This may seem very abstract,
And of course it is because I'm just talking in generalities.
But let's go back to a very basic experience that we've all gone through as infants,
Negotiating our relationships with the environment and with the caretaker.
As we start to develop past the earliest infancy and we start to gain a little bit of a sense of exploration,
We negotiate on the one hand our desire to stay close to the caretaker and feeling protected and connected,
And on the other hand the desire to expand our horizons and walk a little bit farther or crawl a little bit farther.
And so imagine the little infant crawling out of sight of the caretaker and suddenly feeling very scared.
And maybe the little infant retraced their steps,
But maybe they don't even know how to do that at that moment and cry.
And so the caretaker walks to the infant,
There,
There,
I'm here,
I'm here,
It's okay,
You got scared and it's okay.
And little by little,
Through a variety of experiences,
The infant learns to go beyond that big all or nothing binary that there was at the beginning,
Either being connected to the caretaker and not being able to explore or being able to explore and then losing the caretaker.
Little by little,
The infant learns that it's possible to be connected to the caretaker and to have moments of being away and exploring and then coming back.
And there is a sense of safety and trust that builds and that is able to go beyond what at first seems like an insurmountable dichotomy between connection and autonomy exploration.
Our sense of self is made of such experiences,
A sense of stretching,
But not stretching so much that it's beyond our capacity to survive.
We are able to grow and develop because we have the ability to digest experience and incorporate that digested experience into a sort of database that allows us to contain new experiences and make sense of them through what we have learned.
There is no reason to stop learning from experience when we grow up and that's what living life from the inside out means to me.
