111: How to Not Know

Intro: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love. Wow. Oh gosh.

Intro: Oh my God. A little to the left and faster. Faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders. It can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships. And its hidden costs and shadows

Intro: In a world where we other people, where we build walls and just tear down walls, fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it.

laura: Hey y'all, welcome back to How to Make Love. I'm Laura and you're here for a podcast episode designed to grow your love and courage and liberation muscles. And I hope you did a warmup before arriving here because we're going to jump right into our workout for today. And I want to start with a sentence that might stir a little something in you and we'll see. Certainty is a colonizer and love can move without a map. I'll say that one more time. Certainty is a colonizer and love can move without a map. Let's take a minute to actually break down that sentence. Certainty is a colonizer because it's a strong statement and it's worth grounding around. So colonization didn't just happen through guns and ships, it also happens through stories, through the imposition of one way of knowing or one worldview or one truth. And that's what's meant when someone refers to a colonial mindset.
This sort of way of thinking that says, I know it's best, and it maps and it names and it owns and it extracts and it organizes everything into categories that it can control or extract from. And so certainty becomes one of the main mechanisms for this particular type of domination because it justifies invasion, it silences local knowledge, it criminalizes ambiguity. Sometimes it even criminalizes culture. And the thing is that logic still lives in basically all of us, and it flares up when we insist that there's one right way to heal or to organize or to love or to work or to think or to be in the world. And when we start to value being sure over being in relationship. So when I say certainty as a colonizer, I'm not saying clarity is bad. I'm saying that the need to be certain can become a type of violent force if we're not really careful about it, especially when it overrides our ability to be present, when it overrides our ability to listen, when it overrides the fact that there are always multiple truths, often intention coexisting alongside one another in the really complex ambiguity of life.
So to decolonize is not just to redistribute land, that's a part of it, but it's to practice a kind of humility, a kind of spaciousness, a sort of way of being that is much more open and welcoming and much less attached to rightness or to understanding or to control and orienting that way is really deep work. And it begins inside our mind, inside our relationship to the way we move around in the world. So we're living in a time that rewards performance over presence, hot takes and fake news over deep truth and having answers over honesty. But today I want to make a case for not knowing, not as a failure or a fallback, but as a really sacred posture, a radical act, a place from which we can lead and create and relate and love and heal. So let's dig in.
Let's be real. Most of us are really deeply addicted to clarity, not just in our culture, but in our bodies. Clarity soothes the nervous system. It gives us a sense of control. And it's not bad to want clarity. It makes sense. We've been taught that not knowing means you're incompetent or unprepared or unserious, and there's been so much undue societal pressure on all of us to know what we're doing to have expertise. And that pressure has been insurmountable on people of color and marginalized people in particular who have had to go above and beyond to show competence in a world that refuses to see it or acknowledge it. So I want to say all of that to say there's really good historic reason to crave expertise, to crave certainty, to really want to be right, but that sort of safety, that sort of control we think we get from knowing it's not real.
It can keep us from being curious. It can keep us from being in right relationship with people we love or around us. It can keep us from listening. It can keep us from apologizing. It keeps us often from staying open. And I want to name something right upfront. This episode isn't about glorifying confusion. So this isn't an excuse to stay engaged or vague or spiritually bypass the complexity of action. This is an episode about cultivating a deeper spiritual and political maturity, for lack of better phrase, one that can stand in ambiguity without collapsing or without rushing to try to fix something. Because sometimes there's no clear strategy, there's no hero with the answer. There is only us in the fog reaching out together, feeling lost. So let's turn in word for just a moment. Certainty can feel like safety, but sometimes it's just an armor.
So I'm going to offer a few questions, self inquiries really to help you notice when you might be being driven by the need to know instead of the willingness to listen. So here are a couple little Cosmo quiz questions for you. Number one, what do I tend to do when I don't have an answer? Number two, where in my body do I feel the discomfort of not knowing? And how do I usually respond to that physical sensation? Number three, have I ever rushed into a decision just to escape the discomfort of ambiguity? Number four, who taught me that not knowing was a failure or something to be ashamed of? Where did I learn that? Number five, where in my life do I tend to perform certainty in order to feel more safe or more in control or appear more? And number six, when someone says something like I'm still figuring it out, what happens in me?
Can I let that be enough? Especially if it's an intimate relationship. Now you don't have to answer all of those. Just sit with the one that lands the hardest, because often our certainty reflex, it's not really about clarity, it's about control. It's about fear. It can sometimes be about ego and naming that is a really powerful beginning to a different sort of freedom and awareness for ourselves. So let's shift to the skill component now that we've done a little bit of reflection. Not knowing is a skill, a really liberatory skill or can be if we allow it to be a conscious practice? Not knowing can be a profoundly liberatory skill. It takes practice to sit with tension and hold steady. It takes practice to not rush to resolve or to fix someone or something. And it takes practice to not pretend that you know just to preserve credibility or avoid discomfort externally or internally.
So what if not knowing is a deeper kind of wisdom? I want you to just sit with that for a minute. What if not knowing is so much more of a profound way of being than anything? You've even taught about certainty, a way of being that holds space, a way of being that waits and one that say soft when it could harden one that seeks collective wisdom and really values it over individual rightness. I think that's what we need to be working toward and on in movements and relationships and personal healing. We often want the plan. We want the one thing everyone can agree on. We want the perfect statement with the right words, the perfect method. But that's just very rarely how transformation actually works. Instead, we need to learn how to ask better questions, to stay really humble, to collaborate, to be corrected, to let strategies emerge and people emerge and relationships emerge instead of forcing them into being.
So there's a set of skills around liberation for us and not knowing. There's also a spiritual skillfulness to not knowing where there can be, because not knowing requires staying present. Even when the path isn't clear, it requires tremendous amounts of mindfulness. Not knowing also requires your humility like real humility, not performative humility, because not knowing acknowledges that you are one of billions and that you can't possibly hold all the knowledge and be right about all the things. So humility is about becoming more porous, honoring of mystery and saying, I have no idea, but I'm here and I'm listening, and I've got my open heart. That shit is healing, that shit is holy. Or it can be. So I want to offer you a small invitation this week. What's one thing you could do without needing it to be right? And I'm putting right in air quotations.
And what's one thing you could offer or try or speak or rest into without needing it to resolve anything or prove anything or do any work? I'm also going to challenge you to think about this in the relationships that you're in, whether with a partner or at work or with an ex or a child or a boss. What would it look like? What could it mean even to be a little less right in that relationship as a practice of liberation and as a spiritual practice? Let it be imperfect. Let it be alive. We don't need more answers. We need more presence. We need more people willing to move without a map because I really believe love knows the way, at least if we can surrender our certainty to it. There are lots of folks who've been pointing to everything I'm sharing for a very, very long time.
I'll name a few of them for reference. Gloria anal wrote about the capacity to know through other ways deeper than logic. Adrian Marie Brown reminds us that emergence happens in patterns, not plans with nature, and to be in flow versus gripping to or trying to control what's trying to emerge. Bio kafe teaches us that the answers may come precisely because we slow down, not because we speed up. And indigenous and decolonial thinkers have always reminded us for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years that wisdom is often communal. It's contextual, it's in motion, and it does not reside in the brains of individuals. So if we're not supposed to be certain, what are we supposed to be? Well, I'd say present accountable, teachable, learnable in process. That's how love moves without domination, without maps, but with deep integrity. Thank you again for being here. Thank you for letting yourself not know. And thank you for still showing up. Until next time, my friends, bye for now.