KEENING/STRESSLOCK
Keening is basically design-based energetic mechanisms and manifestations that occur due to extreme usage of your Powers. Although that may sound like an alarm bell or something to be avoided, Keening is actually necessary in order to perform extreme usage of your Powers in athletic performances, studying for an exam, or accomplishing other feats that require pushing yourself to your limits. It’s especially important to understand Keening as it applies to your configuration to be able to note when extreme usage of your Powers is actually occurring. Keening can be caused by Extreme-Momentum or Extreme-Modulation, or even Over-Momentum or Over-Modulation, all of which can come from the person and/or the environment. Extreme Momentum is not a bad thing, it is just intense Momentum, but then you have Over-Momentum, which implies too much. Then with Modulation you are going to have Extreme Modulation which is okay as long as you don’t go into Over-Modulation.
Despite its necessity, it takes great maturity to handle revving your Powers up to such extreme levels in order to avoid losing control of where their energies go. It can create a feeling of a loss of control on its own, even though Keening itself isn’t a loss of control, as that happens in stages, but merely the beginning of the possibility of a loss of control. A good analogy would be taking a slight to increasing penalties in an RPG game based on heavy momentum stress or modulation stress.
Others could interpret Keening as a loss of control or give it a variety of other attributions based on their development, their mojo, their experience with it in the past and your own self-awareness, development and current usage of the Keening.
Nyy
• Momentum: Cross-contextualizing and Riffing
• Keening 1: Fantasying – As you get Nyy Momentum going, you are going to start to be a bit casual with the environment, you will feel like you are in the story you are in, and when you are in the environment, you are experiencing it as in as acting out a fantasy. When this happens you may not pay attention to details other people might think are important, which is not a problem because that lets you be Buoyant. It can be a problem when it is used the wrong way, and when you are floating around then you have to make sure you are doing it at the right times.
• Keening 2: Faerie Flight – This is when you get excited, and you want to pull other people in, and get action an excitement going, which is cool because you can get people off couches who were just going to be lumping, because you have some much contagious enthusiasm, which is cool. However, it can get to where you are being a bit clumsy, or maybe shallow with people, or maybe a bit impetuous.
• Keening 3: Delirium – Delirium can make it so you are literally getting intoxicated off possibilities and things unfolding. When this happens, they are sort of combining their fantasy world and this world as one at the same time, which allows them to highly move people and be magical creatures, but the energy gets very worked up, and there is a danger of the mania turning to paranoia, or like thoughts being scattered, and not being able to control them. The Upside is it allows for a tremendous amount of excitement that can radiate from you out to projects and people, but you have to make sure it doesn’t get turned into a delirious dance that is not fun. At times like this it is good to have some kind of safety net or contingencies, and familiarity with the experience, so when the Delirium is getting out of hand you can scale it down to more manageable levels.
Xai
• Momentum: Internalizing and Empathizing
• Keening 1: Me Time Tracktor Beam – This is an intense desire for “Me time”. When your Xai gets worked up, it tells you to come in and look at yourself and see if you are doing good. This is like a magnetic pull inward, and it will literally pull you away from other things that have attachments over you, which generally is a good thing. This becomes a problem if this is not controlled and the energy is not processed, you can stay inside too long, and it can become depressing, and also you become very sensitive to people interacting with you.
• Keening 2: Wildness – This is generally a good thing because it doesn’t let you be controlled, which is a good thing when you shouldn’t be controlled. For example, if the world is trying to incorrectly Modulate you, you may have to keep up to a keening degree of Xai, and that means getting into a wild state, which is necessary to kick up the Xai into the next level. Obviously you have to watch out that you are not doing collateral damage to yourself and others that you are not going to regret later.
• Keening 3: Purging – This is the intense desire to make oneself clean, pure, or untainted, things like this that you will do anything for. The upside is that you will exert yourself greatly, and you will remove yourself from things that maybe would have had a hold on you, but your will to be pure removes it’s hold over you. So this is a very strong and heroic power, but this is a third degree of keening, and so it is profoundly intense. The issue if this is not done correctly is you could do purging at the wrong time, if you misunderstand something, or if you are not doing it from the best place, you can purge either internally or in your environment to be pure, but it is actually not being pure it is just doing a lot of damage that you are going to regret later, so you have to make sure you are doing it from a good place.
Zyy
• Modulation: Organizing, Strategizing and Articulating
• Keening 1: Keeping Score – Keeping Score is something that is needed in order to train hard. The Score keeping is something that can be done on the outside, not just internally, where you are keeping score of what other people are doing for example, perhaps you are thinking a person is not acting the way they should, so you are start keeping track of how the Zyy of how they are contributing. So the Keeping score can be a critical thing, which can seem harsh, but it is how you make sure you and other people are staying strong, and doing the right things.
• Keening 2: Giving Scores – Once you actually have a score, there comes a point where you may need to actually give them, for example to yourself, where you declare that you are this good at something. This is not being egotistical, for instance when you need to give you credentials, I’m so and so and I know what I am talking about because such and such, you need to explain that to people. This also relates to other people when you have to give them their score, saying to them “here is how the game works, and here is where you are.” When this is bad is when the Zyy is giving out scores that are either incorrect, inappropriate, or it is not coming from a good place, and does not serve any positive purpose.
• Keening 3: Drastic Action – This is when you are making decisions that are going to affect the game, for example does a person need to stay or go, how much a person needs to get an A versus a B. Or Maybe a person is having a question of whether something they did count or not. This is not just determining something’s score, but you are determining something’s fate. Dramatic decision making based on the logic of something, so at this point it is an extreme changing of the game, which is totally necessary sometimes, but you have to make sure you are doing it from the right head-space, if you are doing it from the right headspace then it is just keening, and you have to do a dramatic move now that is going to change things because it was untenable, so you can get out of untenable situations by calling shots. That is a lot of responsibility, but it needs to happen, when it is not done for the right reasons then it can be seen as railroading people, or ramrodding them, or even beating up on yourself and pushing yourself too hard, that is when it comes something that is not good for you, that is stress-lock. But it is naturally Keening and that is when it is good and heroic.
Vai
• Modulation: Permanent Record and Standards of Excellence
• Keening 1: Pensiveness – You can think of this as worry. Worrying is not necessarily bad, excessive worrying is when it goes bad, although there is a correct about of worry that is a good thing, even when it is uncomfortable, sometimes that is the amount of pensiveness that is appropriate. It is Keening, but it could be heroic Keening. If you are worrying something obsessively that is not necessarily useful or helpful, that is when you are going into stress-lock. If the discomfiture that you are putting yourself through does not yield a healthier result, then pushing yourself that far is just causing damage.
• Keening 2: Absolutely On-Point – Being on point gives you a meticulousness of being, that’s going to be Modulation, because going into that mode will heavily modulate your Buoyancy. Although a lot of Nyy’xai use this for good reasons, like for preparing a presentation or a performance, or during either of these. Making sure you stay on track of the important stuff, or the plan, this is a lot of intense focus, which is a good thing. That intense focus is Modulation, but not necessarily a bad thing, it gets to be a bad thing when you cannot flow because you are so worried and focused about sticking to some details, like sticking the landing, so much to the point where you can’t let your Nyy fly like it is supposed to. Without that excessiveness, being on point about important details is great.
• Keening 3: Legacy & Morbidity Report – Thinking about these things is naturally going to go away from what is Momentum for a Nyy’xai, but they can be extremely important. This is heavy Keening as it is the 3rd degree, but thinking about life and death, where your life is going from here, or how much time you have left in general. This is heavy thinking, but it can help you go down the right heroic path. So it is something that you should be careful not to obsess about to a point of it freezing you, or makes you depressed and takes away from your resolve, but you do want to think about these things enough so you can make wise and informed decisions, and be prepared for what is up ahead, so it strengthens your resolve. So you want it to propel you forward, and not have it become a crushing weight.
There are parts of the keening process that humans were so fortunately designed with by Natural Law so that one can safety channel massive amounts of energy efficiently, and we refer to this as Fetishing. Fetishing is particularly necessary for the modulation Powers, since they are more costly energetically. For example, Fetishing allows the Nyy’xai to specialize in certain Vai-heavy and Zyy-heavy activities so that they don’t demand as much of your energy banks and you are more resistant to succumbing to over-modulation when performing those particular tasks. In addition, Fetishing allows you to line up your modulation and momentum so that the extreme energy dumps that you receive from your top Powers are able to be pipelined into a masterfully focused and controlled use of your modulation. This is a powerful exercise in Synomnia.
Two more vital concepts relating to keening are the Warning System Sequence and the Shut-Down System Sequence. The former is going to open with Nyy for the Nyy’xai, and it is through Nyy that, if all is going well, you will first be notified that there are stressors on your Peak Pathway. The Nyy will start to be off-flavor, and you won’t notice much else at first since Nyy is the area that you would naturally have the most energy and confidence to adjust yourself with and the easiest of all of the Power Flows for you to fix. Eventually, the stressor will have a more extreme effect as it goes down from Xai, to Zyy, to Vai. Each Power in the sequence is activated as the previous Powers are unable to handle the stressor.
The Shut-Down System Sequence is the opposite of the Warning System Sequence that we just delineated. This is because when you become severely stressed, parts of your Peak Pathway will begin to literally shut down. If you are in a vulnerable spot, the vulnerability inducing hits that you take are absorbed by your Polar Vai first, since it is the most sensitive of all of your Powers to impingement. Upon taking the hit, it will be knocked offline since it required the most energy to maintain its activity. This will extend to Zyy, then Xai, and finally reach the Source Nyy. The Source Nyy is always the heart of your synomnia, and it is therefore the final sequence to the shutdown process.
Another term you’ll hear us use is locked up, which is related to stress-lock. Stress-lock essentially means that one is keening to the point of over-modulation or over-momentum, and you’re taking according damage and/or penalties, and you’re losing performance capabilities because of it. Over-modulation holds your energy on a very short leash and over-momentum will result in it leaking all over the place with a lack of control, like water gushing out of a pipe filled with holes. However, with stress-lock you are still in command of your energies and are capable of consciously and carefully ending the stress on your system; this is much like being in the gym when you are working too hard and you feel your muscles burning or getting a cramp. You can then stop and properly heal yourself. You’ve pushed it to where your performance is being compromised, but you can back off. Being locked up, however, means that you’ve injured yourself to the point that you’re going to need rehabilitation, and you are dealing with habitual stress-lock and improper possession. You can’t just stop doing what was causing the over-modulation and wait until your condition heals on its own. There’s a lot to that, and Pod’Lair theory deals with all aspects and it’s an ongoing research project as well. To start you want to go with resetting your peak pathway. There are activities that immerse you with correct math and that can help reboot your system to go back online such as mojo reading, hanging out in your own temple and with other social alchemies such as Inspiration and Augmentation, and those activities are appropriate to instigating the healing process. This proper alignment with correct math will realign your Peak Pathway in your own mind, and you will be able to reboot and re-set it to regain your health.
Keening is basically design-based energetic mechanisms and manifestations that occur due to extreme usage of your Powers. Although that may sound like an alarm bell or something to be avoided, Keening is actually necessary in order to perform extreme usage of your Powers in athletic performances, studying for an exam, or accomplishing other feats that require pushing yourself to your limits. It’s especially important to understand Keening as it applies to your configuration to be able to note when extreme usage of your Powers is actually occurring. Keening can be caused by Extreme-Momentum or Extreme-Modulation, or even Over-Momentum or Over-Modulation, all of which can come from the person and/or the environment. Extreme Momentum is not a bad thing, it is just intense Momentum, but then you have Over-Momentum, which implies too much. Then with Modulation you are going to have Extreme Modulation which is okay as long as you don’t go into Over-Modulation.
Despite its necessity, it takes great maturity to handle revving your Powers up to such extreme levels in order to avoid losing control of where their energies go. It can create a feeling of a loss of control on its own, even though Keening itself isn’t a loss of control, as that happens in stages, but merely the beginning of the possibility of a loss of control. A good analogy would be taking a slight to increasing penalties in an RPG game based on heavy momentum stress or modulation stress.
Others could interpret Keening as a loss of control or give it a variety of other attributions based on their development, their mojo, their experience with it in the past and your own self-awareness, development and current usage of the Keening.
Nyy
• Momentum: Cross-contextualizing and Riffing
• Keening 1: Fantasying – As you get Nyy Momentum going, you are going to start to be a bit casual with the environment, you will feel like you are in the story you are in, and when you are in the environment, you are experiencing it as in as acting out a fantasy. When this happens you may not pay attention to details other people might think are important, which is not a problem because that lets you be Buoyant. It can be a problem when it is used the wrong way, and when you are floating around then you have to make sure you are doing it at the right times.
• Keening 2: Faerie Flight – This is when you get excited, and you want to pull other people in, and get action an excitement going, which is cool because you can get people off couches who were just going to be lumping, because you have some much contagious enthusiasm, which is cool. However, it can get to where you are being a bit clumsy, or maybe shallow with people, or maybe a bit impetuous.
• Keening 3: Delirium – Delirium can make it so you are literally getting intoxicated off possibilities and things unfolding. When this happens, they are sort of combining their fantasy world and this world as one at the same time, which allows them to highly move people and be magical creatures, but the energy gets very worked up, and there is a danger of the mania turning to paranoia, or like thoughts being scattered, and not being able to control them. The Upside is it allows for a tremendous amount of excitement that can radiate from you out to projects and people, but you have to make sure it doesn’t get turned into a delirious dance that is not fun. At times like this it is good to have some kind of safety net or contingencies, and familiarity with the experience, so when the Delirium is getting out of hand you can scale it down to more manageable levels.
Xai
• Momentum: Internalizing and Empathizing
• Keening 1: Me Time Tracktor Beam – This is an intense desire for “Me time”. When your Xai gets worked up, it tells you to come in and look at yourself and see if you are doing good. This is like a magnetic pull inward, and it will literally pull you away from other things that have attachments over you, which generally is a good thing. This becomes a problem if this is not controlled and the energy is not processed, you can stay inside too long, and it can become depressing, and also you become very sensitive to people interacting with you.
• Keening 2: Wildness – This is generally a good thing because it doesn’t let you be controlled, which is a good thing when you shouldn’t be controlled. For example, if the world is trying to incorrectly Modulate you, you may have to keep up to a keening degree of Xai, and that means getting into a wild state, which is necessary to kick up the Xai into the next level. Obviously you have to watch out that you are not doing collateral damage to yourself and others that you are not going to regret later.
• Keening 3: Purging – This is the intense desire to make oneself clean, pure, or untainted, things like this that you will do anything for. The upside is that you will exert yourself greatly, and you will remove yourself from things that maybe would have had a hold on you, but your will to be pure removes it’s hold over you. So this is a very strong and heroic power, but this is a third degree of keening, and so it is profoundly intense. The issue if this is not done correctly is you could do purging at the wrong time, if you misunderstand something, or if you are not doing it from the best place, you can purge either internally or in your environment to be pure, but it is actually not being pure it is just doing a lot of damage that you are going to regret later, so you have to make sure you are doing it from a good place.
Zyy
• Modulation: Organizing, Strategizing and Articulating
• Keening 1: Keeping Score – Keeping Score is something that is needed in order to train hard. The Score keeping is something that can be done on the outside, not just internally, where you are keeping score of what other people are doing for example, perhaps you are thinking a person is not acting the way they should, so you are start keeping track of how the Zyy of how they are contributing. So the Keeping score can be a critical thing, which can seem harsh, but it is how you make sure you and other people are staying strong, and doing the right things.
• Keening 2: Giving Scores – Once you actually have a score, there comes a point where you may need to actually give them, for example to yourself, where you declare that you are this good at something. This is not being egotistical, for instance when you need to give you credentials, I’m so and so and I know what I am talking about because such and such, you need to explain that to people. This also relates to other people when you have to give them their score, saying to them “here is how the game works, and here is where you are.” When this is bad is when the Zyy is giving out scores that are either incorrect, inappropriate, or it is not coming from a good place, and does not serve any positive purpose.
• Keening 3: Drastic Action – This is when you are making decisions that are going to affect the game, for example does a person need to stay or go, how much a person needs to get an A versus a B. Or Maybe a person is having a question of whether something they did count or not. This is not just determining something’s score, but you are determining something’s fate. Dramatic decision making based on the logic of something, so at this point it is an extreme changing of the game, which is totally necessary sometimes, but you have to make sure you are doing it from the right head-space, if you are doing it from the right headspace then it is just keening, and you have to do a dramatic move now that is going to change things because it was untenable, so you can get out of untenable situations by calling shots. That is a lot of responsibility, but it needs to happen, when it is not done for the right reasons then it can be seen as railroading people, or ramrodding them, or even beating up on yourself and pushing yourself too hard, that is when it comes something that is not good for you, that is stress-lock. But it is naturally Keening and that is when it is good and heroic.
Vai
• Modulation: Permanent Record and Standards of Excellence
• Keening 1: Pensiveness – You can think of this as worry. Worrying is not necessarily bad, excessive worrying is when it goes bad, although there is a correct about of worry that is a good thing, even when it is uncomfortable, sometimes that is the amount of pensiveness that is appropriate. It is Keening, but it could be heroic Keening. If you are worrying something obsessively that is not necessarily useful or helpful, that is when you are going into stress-lock. If the discomfiture that you are putting yourself through does not yield a healthier result, then pushing yourself that far is just causing damage.
• Keening 2: Absolutely On-Point – Being on point gives you a meticulousness of being, that’s going to be Modulation, because going into that mode will heavily modulate your Buoyancy. Although a lot of Nyy’xai use this for good reasons, like for preparing a presentation or a performance, or during either of these. Making sure you stay on track of the important stuff, or the plan, this is a lot of intense focus, which is a good thing. That intense focus is Modulation, but not necessarily a bad thing, it gets to be a bad thing when you cannot flow because you are so worried and focused about sticking to some details, like sticking the landing, so much to the point where you can’t let your Nyy fly like it is supposed to. Without that excessiveness, being on point about important details is great.
• Keening 3: Legacy & Morbidity Report – Thinking about these things is naturally going to go away from what is Momentum for a Nyy’xai, but they can be extremely important. This is heavy Keening as it is the 3rd degree, but thinking about life and death, where your life is going from here, or how much time you have left in general. This is heavy thinking, but it can help you go down the right heroic path. So it is something that you should be careful not to obsess about to a point of it freezing you, or makes you depressed and takes away from your resolve, but you do want to think about these things enough so you can make wise and informed decisions, and be prepared for what is up ahead, so it strengthens your resolve. So you want it to propel you forward, and not have it become a crushing weight.
There are parts of the keening process that humans were so fortunately designed with by Natural Law so that one can safety channel massive amounts of energy efficiently, and we refer to this as Fetishing. Fetishing is particularly necessary for the modulation Powers, since they are more costly energetically. For example, Fetishing allows the Nyy’xai to specialize in certain Vai-heavy and Zyy-heavy activities so that they don’t demand as much of your energy banks and you are more resistant to succumbing to over-modulation when performing those particular tasks. In addition, Fetishing allows you to line up your modulation and momentum so that the extreme energy dumps that you receive from your top Powers are able to be pipelined into a masterfully focused and controlled use of your modulation. This is a powerful exercise in Synomnia.
Two more vital concepts relating to keening are the Warning System Sequence and the Shut-Down System Sequence. The former is going to open with Nyy for the Nyy’xai, and it is through Nyy that, if all is going well, you will first be notified that there are stressors on your Peak Pathway. The Nyy will start to be off-flavor, and you won’t notice much else at first since Nyy is the area that you would naturally have the most energy and confidence to adjust yourself with and the easiest of all of the Power Flows for you to fix. Eventually, the stressor will have a more extreme effect as it goes down from Xai, to Zyy, to Vai. Each Power in the sequence is activated as the previous Powers are unable to handle the stressor.
The Shut-Down System Sequence is the opposite of the Warning System Sequence that we just delineated. This is because when you become severely stressed, parts of your Peak Pathway will begin to literally shut down. If you are in a vulnerable spot, the vulnerability inducing hits that you take are absorbed by your Polar Vai first, since it is the most sensitive of all of your Powers to impingement. Upon taking the hit, it will be knocked offline since it required the most energy to maintain its activity. This will extend to Zyy, then Xai, and finally reach the Source Nyy. The Source Nyy is always the heart of your synomnia, and it is therefore the final sequence to the shutdown process.
Another term you’ll hear us use is locked up, which is related to stress-lock. Stress-lock essentially means that one is keening to the point of over-modulation or over-momentum, and you’re taking according damage and/or penalties, and you’re losing performance capabilities because of it. Over-modulation holds your energy on a very short leash and over-momentum will result in it leaking all over the place with a lack of control, like water gushing out of a pipe filled with holes. However, with stress-lock you are still in command of your energies and are capable of consciously and carefully ending the stress on your system; this is much like being in the gym when you are working too hard and you feel your muscles burning or getting a cramp. You can then stop and properly heal yourself. You’ve pushed it to where your performance is being compromised, but you can back off. Being locked up, however, means that you’ve injured yourself to the point that you’re going to need rehabilitation, and you are dealing with habitual stress-lock and improper possession. You can’t just stop doing what was causing the over-modulation and wait until your condition heals on its own. There’s a lot to that, and Pod’Lair theory deals with all aspects and it’s an ongoing research project as well. To start you want to go with resetting your peak pathway. There are activities that immerse you with correct math and that can help reboot your system to go back online such as mojo reading, hanging out in your own temple and with other social alchemies such as Inspiration and Augmentation, and those activities are appropriate to instigating the healing process. This proper alignment with correct math will realign your Peak Pathway in your own mind, and you will be able to reboot and re-set it to regain your health.
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