Who are you?

I was twelve years old when that question first popped into my head.

I was watching Saturday morning cartoons in South Central.

Two Jehovah's Witnesses came to the door, and instead of closing it politely, I held them there for forty-five minutes.

I had been deep in my Encyclopedia Britannica. Black holes. Neutron stars. The things that activated my imagination. I was twelve and open -- no religion, no ideology, just curiosity. My friends were Christian, Catholic, and Jewish. They all seemed to have a decent understanding of things. I didn't. I was raised with questions, not answers.

So when the Witnesses stayed, I peppered them.

Where is God? Where is heaven? Where is hell? How do you get there? What existed before any of this?

They had answers. Those answers didn't satisfy my questions.

We went back and forth until they were visibly frustrated that I had held them there as long as I had. They left me with a copy of The Watchtower.

I had more questions.

Have you asked a question so big nobody around you could close it?

That is what happened that afternoon. And it did not stop.

As I got older, I kept digging. Philosophy. Western civilization. Ancient religious practices. When I got into Dungeons and Dragons -- and I played it hard, from fourteen to thirty-one -- I got into deities and demigods. That opened something up.

I could see that Zeus, Odin, and Ra were all pointing at the same thing. Different cultures, different names, same underlying structure. I didn't have the word archetype yet. But I understood the concept.

That became a habit. I would fish for people's beliefs wherever I could find them. Not to win arguments. To find someone who had a real answer.

The clearest memory of this is sitting with a Catholic priest at thirty-four.

I was engaged. She was Catholic. Her church required a meeting with the priest before the union could be blessed. He asked what I believed. I told him. He asked for my thoughts on his faith. I shared them.

By thirty-four, I was armed with science. He couldn't punch through my perspectives.

I kept it light. I asked him why angels needed swords and leather breastplates in heaven. Where do they get the leather from up there?

He didn't have a great answer for that.

Everyone I talked to seemed to have something that satisfied them. A practice. A tradition. A story their culture could plug into.

And here is what I understood very clearly, sitting with that priest.

No one actually knows.

That was around the time I became atheist.

If nobody has a real answer, I thought, I'm going to lean hard into science. Physics. Biology. Anatomy. Mathematics. Every field I could get into. I figured if the answer existed anywhere, it was in there.

I stayed in that space for a few years. Then drifted back to agnostic.

Not a hollow feeling. Just never got a satisfying answer from that direction either.

So I moved on.

Do you know that feeling? When you have tried every door in a hallway and none of them open?

You keep walking.

June 2020. A group of us went camping to get out of our heads.

LA was in the middle of the protests. I had been at home wiping down the mail -- trying to keep COVID off the envelopes -- while something much larger was burning in the streets outside.

We dropped acid.

For most people at a gathering like that, it means fun. Dancing. Laughing. Getting out of the usual patterns of thought. For me, it has always gone introspective after the first few hours. The first half is all of that -- light, social, free. The second half is when my mind zooms way out and starts seeing things it usually filters out.

At some point in the night, I crossed paths with a friend's wife in the forest.

She asked me how I felt.

Simple question. The kind of people who ask and don't usually expect a real answer.

And what came out of my mouth -- without thinking, without choosing it -- was: I don't accept myself.

We both stopped.

Eyes wide. Neither of us expected that.

She said: You better go work on that.

I went deeper into the forest.

What I saw out there, I am still processing years later.

The way society is actually organized when you strip away the language and look at the behavior. A hierarchy where money sits at the top and everything else sorts beneath it. Black women at the bottom of the stack -- the most culturally powerful force on earth, placed furthest from its resources.

That is not economics. That is a collective psychology made visible as structure.

I did not have language for it yet. But I knew something had cracked open.

The next morning, I started meditating.

What are the invisible structures organizing your life, today and right now?

By November, I had my first real spiritual experience. By February, I had mapped enough to understand that something much larger was at work.

I spent the next year and a half going deep. Two to nine hours of meditation a day by 2021 and 2022. AB testing every emotion, every nerve, every word associated with every nerve. Every breathing technique I could find. When something created relief, I documented it. When it didn't, I discarded it.

What I kept finding was imbalance.

In myself. In my work. In my partnership. In the culture around me. Everything out of balance.

I needed a word for it. Sanskrit spoke to me at that point in my practice. The word Tula came out. It simply means balance. Not the sexiest word. Exactly right.

Because I make games -- and games are mechanics- and systems-based -- I built it as a system. The letting-go techniques came first, from the mind work. The energy transmutation techniques came when I got into the body. The more complex techniques came when I got into the energy. The embodiment work came when I got into the upper compass.

It was a discovery, not a construction. I had to come across this on my own. And then recognize that other cultures had different pieces of it. I put the pieces together, felt what was semantically accurate, and dismissed the rest.

Here is what I found.

Have you noticed how we often lean into our worst impulses?

We snap. We telegraph anger. We project our pain onto people who had nothing to do with it. We bend the truth to protect someone's feelings -- and end up protecting our own discomfort instead. We hold a grudge year over year, decade over decade, when all that was needed was one person saying I'm sorry. We” We tell our boss to go to hell when we should have said nothing. We're proud when we should be humble. We're stuck in logic when we should use empathy.

That is the downward spiral. Adversarial behavior. The pressure of unresolved emotion snaps like a whip -- and instead of doing the right thing, we do the reactive thing. Every time.

But you have also noticed the other direction.

Someone is generous when you weren't asking. Someone offers a kind word when you need a hug. Someone recognizes their own pain in you and does what they can to elevate your situation. Someone tells you a hard truth because they love you. Someone shows up.

That is the upward spiral. Feeling connected to truth. To love. To beauty.

One pulls our actions down. One pulls them up.

Both are driven by accumulated psychology. By what we have resolved and what we have not.

The spiritual journey -- the clearing of the shadow, the lower compass -- is what every framework I examined was pointing at, from different angles, in different languages.

Maintain a regulated nervous system.

That is the whole instruction.

Over the next two years, I tested that idea against every framework I could find.

The ten commandments. The 613 laws of the Talmud. I ran them through what I was learning about the body.

One of the 613 laws says you cannot wear moldy clothes. That sounds strange until you understand that disgust is one of the nine core emotional states -- and chronic disgust dysregulates the nervous system. Smelling bad all day, being avoided, commented on -- that is a nervous system cost built into daily life. The ancient law is a maintenance instruction. It just got packaged as religion.

Truth-telling works the same way. If you tell the truth all the time, you never have to spend energy tracking the deception. You never have to worry about being caught. Lying is a continuous nervous system tax. Truth is free.

I found the same logic in Dante. Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. A compass. Downward, middle, upward.

Buddhist monks talking about the upward and downward spiral. Same compass. Different language.

They were all describing the same field. The same two directions. The same accumulated psychology is playing out across individuals, cultures, and centuries.

Every tradition I examined was pointing to the same instruction: maintain a regulated nervous system. The language was different. The destination was the same.

Here is what it looks like when a pattern releases.

A release statement names the pattern that is running you and lets it move. Most people carry stress by avoiding the sensation of it rather than moving through it. The avoidance becomes the behavior. The behavior becomes the life.

You name it directly. I'm letting go of believing I'm anxious. Then you ask why. Why am I anxious? Because I'm late on a report. What do I think will happen? I'll get in trouble. Keep going. Why does that feel so certain?

Eventually, you trace it to the root. For me, anxiety goes back to third grade. My mom and my teacher are sitting across from each other at a table. My report card is between them. The first time that particular feeling registered in my body.

I can feel it in my chest right now, even saying that.

Releasing the belief at that level -- I'm letting go of believing I'm in trouble for not turning in my homework -- changes the present-day version. The third-grade moment was holding a perspective in place across decades. The release lets it move.

A friend called me during one of the worst financial stretches I had been through. Weeks of low-level panic. Couldn't see options. Couldn't see a way forward.

She said: Use your stupid magic.

I sat down. Found the feeling in my body. Said three things out loud: I'm letting go of believing I'm stuck. I'm letting go of believing I'm trapped. I'm letting go of believing I don't know what to do next.

Under a minute.

The panic was gone. Not managed. Gone. And the options that had been invisible became visible. They were there the whole time. The pattern was a filter. The release cleared the filter.

That is the method. That is what this series is built around.

The question is still Who am I?

It has been running for forty years. I don't have the final answer. Nobody does.

But I have a map of what is in the layers of the onion. And the tools to peel them.

I am continuing work that began long before me. The Gita. The Bible. The Tao Te Ching. Every person who refused to let the available answers be sufficient. They got much further than they are given credit for.

I am picking up where they left off.

You can say a word a thousand times without ever having felt what it describes.

Courage. Love. Peace. Integrity. The word is not the experience. Most people are living inside labels they have never actually felt. The work is the difference between the label and the experience. Between the definition and the behavior. Between knowing the word and living in what it describes.

This practice is where that difference becomes real.

Before the next issue -- try this.

Find somewhere quiet. Sit down. Bring your attention to the center of your chest.

Think the word yes. Slowly. Ten times.

Notice where it moves in your body.

Then think the word no. Ten times.

Feel the difference.

Yes tends to move upward -- toward the brain, toward openness, toward expansion. No tends to move downward -- toward the gut, toward closing, toward contraction.

That is not a metaphor. That is your nervous system showing you, in real time, that your body and your mind are the same system. Your body does not speak in feelings. It speaks in physical signals. Most people are never taught to read them.

If your attention keeps getting pulled out of your chest -- if the mind floods with noise the moment you try to stay there -- that is the first place the work goes.

You cannot take care of yourself if your heart is always contracted.

Feel that.

It is already information.

The question Who am I? does not live only in the mind.

It lives in the body. In the places that hold and the places that open.

That is where we are going.

One body. The tools and the stories to free it.

If this landed -- forward it to someone it is meant to find.

Hit reply and tell me where you felt it.

If you want to go deeper than a newsletter can take you -- three coaching slots open this month. Message me directly: wa.me/13105000884

Lance Powell Artist. Soul Architect. lancepowell.art