I arrived at BayNVC the other day, to teach the second day of a  two-day training. Seemed all would be easy and fine, but not so: I was still going over what practices to include in the training when I got a message from the volunteer assistant at the very last minute that he was sick. And there was some confusion around registration and pre-requisites. And then I walked into the next room and it was raining. There is something so unusual with indoor rain. It took a moment for me to realize that the roof was leaking seriously, water dripping on desks and computers, and parts of the ceiling had caved in, the carpet all soaked.

Luckily I knew who to call, but as the workshop participants arrived (most of them late, me managing the intercom while also trying to be present for and lead activities for the group) I found myself rather distracted, to say the least. Soon the group was to practice “self connection and expression”. As I demonstrated the exercise, I connected with and spoke of my unmet need for “predictability”. The shift in my internal state was palpable: I relaxed and became way more present with the people in the room; I joked about how absurd the situation was. It’s almost as if speaking an unmet need has an effect of “meeting it” at least a bit. I have found this many times, how connecting with and naming a presently unmet universal need seems to relax my system. As if “the need” knows that “I am aware of it”.

There really was no request I could make to meet this need for predictability. Sometimes – or perhaps more often than we’d like? – circumstances are way outside our control. Surrender is called for, to disengage from attachment to outcomes… But surrender does not mean to dismiss the universal need itself! I see needs as “life expressing itself” through each of us at any given moment: when we start paying attention deeply, we find that there is a “no-self” quality to them, and not at all the egotistical connotations we often associate with the word “need”.

I say to my clients: “stay attached to the need, not the outcome” and repeat often that for each and every universal need there are endless strategies for having them met, endless number of requests we could possibly make. Awareness and articulation is a very good first step.

Last year was one where my need for predictability was unmet on several levels almost all the time. It took a year of hanging out with that – making requests when I could, but also acknowledging my lack of control, naming over and over how I’d want more predictability, and mourning how little of it I’d had in my life – until predictability is beginning to show up with some ease. The indoor rain of last Sunday marks a day when naming it and laughing about it for a minute was all it took to shift from distraction and stress to focus and presence.