Metal ’25: Evaluating our Value System 

This is the fourth excerpt from the first free hour of my Metal ’25 retreat. You can find the previous installment here, with more installments coming over the next two weeks. May your autumn be gracefully honed.

Yes, what we’re looking at here is a balance between our value system and the Will of Heaven. If it’s if it’s too easy to yield to the Will of Heaven, you probably didn’t have much spine in the first place.

You’ve got to have a spine. You’ve got to have a value system. It’s necessary in order to breathe and take a shit. You need to be able to say, “Hey, the air that’s outside of my lungs is better than the air that’s inside of my lungs. I’m going to chuck this stuff in my lungs, and get a grab full of that new stuff out there!”

This is a value system. We wouldn’t breathe without it. We’d be saying, “Oh, you know, the air that’s in my lungs is good enough. We’re fine.”

No, I want better! I can do better than this old air in my lungs.

Now, to shit, we need to make the evaluation, “Empty space would be better than this. Out!”

So we need to have our value system.

Is our value system living and breathing? Yeah. Does our value system stay exactly the same? Let’s hope not. We are growing and maturing, and this process of refining our value system is inherent in the grieving process—at least the healthy grieving process.

There is a question that I love to use, to turn this around for clients who are saying, “Everything is perfect, and if don’t like it, there’s something wrong with me.” I love the question, “In light of this loss,” or “In light of this disappointment,” or even just “In light of this occurrence,” if it’s too touchy to reference loss and disappointment, “I now know that I love and value____________.” Fill in the blank. What does this experience—that you may not even want to call it grief or loss—lead you to realize that you consider valuable, beautiful, excellent? This helps us to start admitting that we have a value system, and that our value system is valuable.

That’s one of the best descriptions of a value system I’ve ever heard: an invisible structure inside of us that is determining our choices. It’s an invisible structure, and the person who’s willing to stand in it—even through hard times; even through great inconvenience—that’s the quality of backbone.

It does lead to that secondary question of, “Is my value system in a continuous upgrade system? And have I checked lately whether my value system is killing me?”

This is always the biggest question in autumn: Is my ____________ (fill in the blank) killing me, or is it just beautiful, or I just love it, or I feel really like a good person because I have it? Has it served me thus far? Have we reached the summit? Hooray, you did a great job with that value system… It kept a lot of relationships going. Let’s celebrate its graduation.

Now what?

Enter the void with backbone, which is not just an incipient source of strength as we move from Metal to Water; first it’s a source of alignment. Is my compass needle straight? Is my body organizing around truth? Is my value system organizing around truth: not my opinion, but the way it actually is, like it or not, in higher law.

Autumn is a time for identifying our own value system and auditing our value system, both in terms of 1) how much does it align with truth, the Real, What Is, and 2) what is its effect on us? Does it true us up, or does it put us in some really weird prison that we get to walk around in, feeling virtuous about feeling terrible?

Absolutely yes. If you want to take it even further, go to YouTube and search “dodsing” or “death diving” as they call it in English (They really shouldn’t; there’s no death involved). It’s a kind of diving from even higher up than the most crazy normal diving, and landing differently. And what people do in the air! They call it air awareness. It is astounding. It’s usually snowboard and trampoline kids who want to do something in the summer and who do these things in the air that absolutely amaze. They’re turning, posing, moving independently within the void, and then boom down into the water. It’s Very Great Abyss, Lung 9 the spaciousness of the void, and finding our orientation within it, even in free fall.

Enter Majesty, preparing to lose every—which one could say we do every time we exhale. We are learning how to lose everything, and we have a whole season dedicating to losing everything.

And then you know what? Inhaling again, which is not saying “La, la, la, la, everything’s fine.” That’s spiritual bypass. We are going through a process that will preserve our spine and allow us, after we have bowed, to stand back up again; after we have exhaled, to inhale again.

Consider evaluating your value system this autumn. Is it serving you, especially in the face of loss and disaster? Is it breathing, growing and changing?

How have you been preparing for the endings that are coming with the season, or coming with the times?