The Story, State, Action Model
How to Approach Material Reality as Decolonial Improvisational Art
Hello, and welcome to the night garden, where I talk about the interconnections of creativity and nondual animism in order to help artists, educators, leaders and caregivers help themselves & their community express more critical agency in the face of addictive domination patterns.
This is the big FREE post for March 2025. The big FREE post last month was my write-up of the 2025 yin wood snake year.
Today I will be presenting a refined essay that brings together much of my experiential learning around psychology, behavior, play and so-called trauma healing, addiction recovery and mental illness theory.
Think of this like a ten-thousand-foot clear view of an ecological system, made up of horizontal and nested ecologies. As always, this is not medical advice.
Introduction
"True refinement seeks simplicity." — Bruce Lee
“Healing trauma” and “mental illness” is excruciatingly simple, but I can only speak about it simply because I have disillusioned myself via practice and experience. I don’t think (western) society at large is willing to have this conversation.
To have this conversation seriously, with sincerity, would disrupt capitalistic, western, dualistic, materialistic, theistic, and idealistic worldviews of how this whole (pathology-based) system is propped up and reinforced. Ignorance and miseducation benefit the few at the expense of the many.
We are, in the western world and its victims, indoctrinated into a member of the oppressed class, which comes along with various symptoms we can call “trauma” and “mental illness”, because we are consistently made to practice wrong story-wrong actions.
Addiction and relationship to “power” are at the root of it all.
These addiction processes and relationships to power, together with wrong actions, create neuro-chemical physiological states, that, when combined with Wrong Story, create a constructed “identity” that exhibits (defensive/aggressive/chronic) negative behaviors and symptoms as its identity/personality.
Another way to say this is that unmanaged intensity over time under oppression sparks habitual behaviors of prediction and defense that mal-adapt neurology. Yet another way to say it is that addiction and all forms of narcissism and codependency are oppressed, repressed and/or suppressed creativity.
Here is the simplified flowchart:
Stories → states → actions, which reinforce states and stories.
Wrong story → addiction states → aggressively defensive, trauma and/or “mental illness” actions. (These words are not absolutes, but instead populist terms that are relative and mutable, however rooted in colonial pathology-based Wrong Story.)
This is the Mal-adaptive Cycle.Right story → creative states → dignified actions.
This is the Adaptive Cycle.
If you have Right Story, then even if you have a disease, disability or injury (pain, fear, hunger), you can still act (behave) with dignity and this short circuits addiction states.
You have to reinforce right story through right actions. This strengthens creative states (rather than addictive states).
Your actions are only ever reinforcing right story or wrong story.
Wrong story promotes addiction states, which produce symptoms of great intensity and co-arising defense actions which reinforce that entire ecology.
You have 3 Leverage Points/Doors: your story, your state and your actions.
Examining, crafting and shaping any of these 3 will begin to reinforce choice, agency and play. Creativity instead of addiction, codependency and learned helplessness.
This does not mean you’ll become rich, famous, loved, pain-free etc. You’ll still have to work through neurological decolonization every moment; it becomes a lifestyle of dignity.
The State Leverage Point/Door
Changing your state (aka your nervous system tone plus emotional mood) can be very fast. But it also can “change back” quickly as well. This is not a bug but a feature, as your state is like an early-warning system for surviving in a 3-D world. Think spiderman’s spider-senses tingling. However, we have to be able to check and verify this system of threat response as it is highly susceptible to previous causes and to sub-conscious behaviors such as predicting future events.
Prediction is always an imaginal process, never really real, yet the body and mind can “believe” what it predicts, causing a mal-adaptive feedback loop, a self-fulfilling prophesy of negative attention and bad feelings which lead to a reduced optionality in the present moment.
If we can use state change well, we can have the best of both sides of this warning system: we can craft our state and we can listen to our state as a kind of smoke detector that may be inaccurate.
States can be changed through awareness of them, via interoception, reflection, and mindfulness. States can also be “reverse engineered” via actions, see below for more.
The Action Leverage Point/Door
Changing your actions can also reveal a wealth of new and novel data. The practical, embodied angle of this is that they are behaviors, movements and postures that utilize the body and senses to create agency. A common example of this is exercising, even when you don’t feel like it — the actions themselves create a change in state, which over time, should reinforce a knowledge that performing X ACTION equals Y FEELING/STATE.
The takeaway here is that even if we don’t like the way we feel (state), by performing conscious, deliberate actions, we can interrupt and transform our state.
The Story Leverage Point/Door
This is what I consider the most “upstream” leverage point. It is like the “master controls” in some sense. Story, which can also be called VIEW, or Cosmology, involves biases, beliefs, cultural conditioning, and learned (often subconscious) narratives. It is often highly conceptual (abstracted) and based in and around language.
Transforming Story involves reflection, examination, analysis, and critical conscientization. It often involves talking through and/or writing out the narrative in real time, in order to discover fallacies and fantasies inherent in the underlying narrative one is acting out. It requires broad study (consideration) and communication with peoples outside of your cultural zone or bubble.
This is a naturally confronting process that will often trigger intense phenomena such as nausea/disgust, shame, fear, hate/anger, blame, guilt, confusion, dissociation and more, so one must go into the process carefully with a strong ability to change and maintain one’s state of dignity, integrity and light-hearted curiosity.
Because this article itself operates at this leverage point, you may feel some of these disliked symptoms just from interacting with the ideas here.
The upside to this often-uncomfortable process is that when one strongly transforms their Story, then positive, deliberate State and Action changes will become easier over time. The “new” upstream Story will influence downstream effects.
This requires reinforcement at the level of Story through various means such as creative writing, storytelling, self-talk, poetry, prayer, etc.
The Twin Dragons of Improvisational Creativity
Dragon A: first thought/best thought; iterate fast; go with what’s next/right in front of you; stream of consciousness; no editing; yes, and; small wins; chunk down; follow your curiosity; just do it.
Dragon B: wait & see; listen before responding; check in with authentic desires; pause; reflect; breathe; silence is golden; sometimes doing “nothing” is the best action; chunk up; no, and; what if?
This analogy is designed to help you understand the yang and yin waveform of reality as applied to creative actions and strategies (stories). There is always an “active”, expansive phase and a “passive”, contractile phase. Both “sides” are complimentary, not oppositional, and must be employed as partners in the entire process I am talking about throughout this article and my larger body of work.
Having robust options in regard to both “polarities” or phases is key to application of ideas to material reality. One must be able to apply yang power and yin power to Story, State & Action in order to have a complete, holistic, complimentary skillset.
“You have to learn the differences between oppositional and complimentary in your own nervous system and mind.” — Dare Carrasquillo
A State-Change Poem
When I write these things, I’m writing Story FROM a State, to reinforce and deepen the State, via the Action of writing it. As I refine/edit the writing (which can go on infinitely), the process fractalizes (which is not the same as fracturing).
It is a rehearsing. A play that is practice.
The point is to be able to bridge between various systems of the body-mind, in essence: thinking/mentalizing/describing ←→ feeling/being/experiencing/emoting ←→ sensing/doing/expressing/crafting.
These roughly correlate to the 3 doors — Story, State, Action. Each “mode” described above via various associated verbs is a node in the network of the whole, meaning each mode/door can access and is connected to every other door/mode. Even if we think of the process linearly, as a river (upstream/downstream), we can also understand it non-linearly, as a distributed network. 3 nodes are enough to envision how a distributed network functions.
The exercise is below:
Jazz is a state of immediacy.
Non-oppositional complementarity.
Listen-feeling as action-state-potential.
A deathpractice.
It is not only about musicians in a band playing instruments, but a way of being-doing that can be replicated by any human if they are willing to go into their pain/fear/hunger as wisdom-play.
It will reflect and reveal where you are the problem.
Where you are unable to be with the present moment.
Where you are wasting your attention and feeding WrongStory.
And that is why it is grace.
Honesty.
Love.
Not as absolute, segregated visions, but as horizontal ecologies without beginnings or ends.
It forces you to play in the heat of your addictions and preferences, your intolerances and ghostly perceptions.
Jazz is Nature’s Mirror, which cannot be separated from what it reflects.
It is the glimpsing of what is behind the veil and the veil itself.
The unknown as pre-eminent creative play.
An infinite game that appears as nothing until it appears as something.
I repeat, I repeat repeating, until repeating transforms into being and non-being.
In the state, story and action of Jazz, all is music musicking through the vast sea of music which positions as silence.
Advanced Meta-Awareness: No Story
The above introduction is some of the most simplified, decolonized, coherent systems thinking I’ve come up with in all my time working on this stuff. But it is still not the whole story, because the whole story is nondual, and the whole story is No Story at all.
To introduce Story in all 3 modes, Right/Wrong and None, is advanced work and obliterates many westerners. They will spiral off into dissociation and panic very quickly. You may even be doing that as you read this, so don’t say I haven’t warned you.
Imagine that there is a 4th door to my model and graphics above, but that 4th door is actually underneath and all around the 3 other doors. This is the door of No-Story.
Before I can really facilitate Story work with people, I have to make sure that they can do 2 things:
Change their State at will.
Change their Actions at will.
Both of these are “bottom-up” or we can say more yin-based processes.
But a human being is not just yin! That would be an unmoving, stagnant, cold, rigid, inert form. Humans need yang and are yang too. Yang is “top-down”, it is the sun and heat and light that radiates outward and allows yin to move, have electrical and thermodynamic process such as metabolization, digestion, mitosis, inflammation, etc. Without the right dynamic balance of yinyang, a human becomes dysfunctional and unable to be generous in their community. We need just enough yang to help yin move around and not become stagnant. Yang moves quickly, expands, rises, disperses, and when in excess, consumes and depletes.
All the bizarre, lopsided, biased ideology of the west stems from a preference of one over the other. The cult of yin or the cult of yang. This is the dualistic addiction of polarity and polarization running rampant all over the world by ghosts and demons. Ghosts = malignant yin/water. Demons = malignant yang/fire.
State work and Action work are a good way to grow a healthy foundation of yinyang dynamism. Once we can deliberately play with State and Action at will and under stress, then we can move into Story work. First looking at Right and Wrong Story, which helps to understand relative position and relative perception, in the dual world. When someone can change their States and Actions at will, then they can conceptualize and do narrative work without harmful dissociating, decontextualizing and excessive abstracting. They can PLAY with Story and maintain dignity, agency and chill.
Eventually, and with the addition of non-conceptual meditation, one can encounter the non-event that I am calling the door of No Story. They can let go of (forget) their story, states and actions to experience the true ground or sky or basic space that is at the source of all things, forms, and dualistic, relativistic phenomena. That true ground is totally inclusive and “nothing”.
No Story, No State, No Action.
Maybe we experience only flickers or a glimpse but that is perfectly fine. When one has confidence in their ability and capacity to change their states, actions and stories at will, then letting go is not a problem and No Story is not a problem to be solved.
Before this point, the lack of conscious agency creates a terror inside the system that freaks out when it is confused. So going straight into No Story is very risky for some people. I am not advising you to do this, I am just reporting on what I have seen and experienced in my own practice and working with others.
The fluid blending of No Story and Right Story becomes like a primordial awareness of nature-as-nature, nature-being-nature, and nature-doing-nature. Nature naturing. Yet there is still critical reflection grounded in the present moment with all of the dualistic, relativistic phenomena which includes our real-time perceptions as a dream.
In this way we can experience all reality as Jazz, beyond preferences, yet preferences still arise and resolve. This is also the grace/mercy/relief of death, and thus deathpractice without a need to polarize. One will manage (play) their embodiment and perception in whatever form it takes, in whatever dream they may find themselves, without perfectionism or panic.
End Quotes
“Simple is elegant and extremely efficient.”— Marie Forleo
“Simplicity is complex. It’s never simple to keep things simple. Simple solutions require the most advanced thinking.”— Richie Norton
“To do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.”— R. Buckminster Fuller
“You can’t change the way people think, all you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking.”— R. Buckminster Fuller
“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”— R. Buckminster Fuller
“If you can't explain something to a first-year student, then you haven't really understood.”— Richard P. Feynman
“What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right.” — Albert Einstein
Postscript:
It’s come to my attention that during the writing of this, and the previous months of work on this, that Tyson Yunkaporta has written a new book called “Right Story, Wrong Story”, and I’m definitely looking forward to reading it.
However, my version of the same catchphrase comes from a slightly different origin, so I would like to explain that now. My dead teacher Liu Ming spoke often of View, and my own experience of learning view is that view IS story. The first draft of my model was centered around “Right View/Wrong View”, and I slowly changed View to Story to make it easier for westerners to understand.
I also work with an Indigenous, decolonial business coach, Clarinda Tuvoli, who calls herself a Storykeeper, and says that business is essentially the ceremony of storykeeping in a good way. It’s from these lenses, and my own history and experiences with creativity, improvisation, meditation and related fields that I am speaking from.
Housekeeping
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This year, 2025, I’m unveiling a second community subscription service in which I go deeper into Dream practice, Artmaking and more Somatics/Improvisational Methods. You can check it out here: patreon.com/deathclown. There are two Hardship tiers - 88 or 108$ USD per month. True Cost tier is currently at $150.
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Lastly, I am going to playtest some introductory workshops based on this model this year, so if you have a group, cohort, etc and would like to host me digitally or in-person around this work, let me know.
2025 yin wood snake links
Below is a living document where I compile all of the various lunar new year analysis by colleagues.
May all benefit from resolving their inheritances and transforming their karmas!
Introduction to the model: The Story, State, Action Model
Story, State, Action Diary series
Diary 01: Dying on that hill, Falling on that sword
Diary 02: How Your Senses Have Been Colonized
Diary 03: How to Become Normal Human*
Diary 04: Normal Human = Sublime
Diary 05: Normal is not Normalized, Normalized is not Normal.
Diary 06: Chaos, Our True Home.
This explains the effectiveness of a ritual I used to do every time I heard a word I perceived as having an opposite/polarity/antonym. I'd do a playful dancing-shrugging gesture while saying "meh...<word>...<opposite>...meh..." and then reframed what was said using: observations without using words that have an opposite, blameless emotions, and needs expressed and/or arising. Doing that consistently for 3 weeks changed my life 9 years ago in powerful ways (most of the intense phenomena you listed dissipated, minus anger & confusion in times of stress). This still left me slipping into undignified ways, though with a much easier time of learning through most of them. When i apply what you've written to the description of the practice I just wrote, I notice clear explanations for which challenges since then were addressed upstream & which weren't. This helps me see how I can refine the practice. Most nourishing, on a scale of most-to-most. May all beings find/choose/learn/experience/play/jazz/dance/sing/feel/ /.../ <breathe> / /write/live/die/pee/poop liberation and the causes of liberation.
10/10 thank you for this