This woman’s healing process began when she changed her mind about fear. Before, the experience of fear told her that something bad was about to happen. Feeling fear meant that she was about to be hurt or was actually in the process of being hurt. The connection between the feeling of fear and the experience of being physically hurt was established a long time ago in quite different circumstances from what she experienced now as an adult woman. With coaching, she made a new decision about fear. Fear no longer meant that she was about to be hurt. Fear became a neutral experience, without meaning. The wiring in her mind changed from “Fear equals being attacked” to “Fear equals fear. Fear is fear.” The new wiring is true. The new wiring opens the door for her to use the wisdom and energy of fear to inform and empower her life.
After some practice with her new decision, this mother could freely feel fear, even maximum Archetypal fear. As fear became an acceptable and recognizable experience in her life, she noticed that she experienced fear around her sons, which was a complete surprise to her. The fear had been there all the while, but now she could experience the feeling consciously without automatically taking defensive or separative actions to protect herself. By letting the fear get larger and larger she suddenly saw that the fear was not actually about her children but rather about children in general. She could trace the fear of children back to its source in the incidents of her own childhood: While being badgered and attacked by her schoolmates she had made a life-shaping decision – “Children are dangerous.” Seeing her old decision with clarity permitted her to reassess the situation and make a new decision: “I am no longer a child. I am an adult woman. As an adult woman I can easily take care of myself around children. Children are not dangerous. Children are children.” As a result of her new decision she is not automatically afraid of children anymore, but neither is she naïve. She can open herself to children because she can take care of herself around children: she can use her voice, make boundaries, say “No,” express her feelings, and ask for what she needs. Being close to her sons has now become a warm and safe experience.
SECTION 5-E
Two Phases of Feeling Work
Reconnecting to our feelings involves two distinct phases. Phase 1 in feelings work is learning to feel. Phase 2 in feelings work is learning to use feelings responsibly. You cannot do Phase 2 without first doing Phase 1.
Knowing that there are two phases is important because thinking that we are in Phase 2 when we are actually in Phase 1 can be expensive in terms of the mistakes we might make. For example, going up to your boss and lam-basting him with 100-percent righteous rage about the way he treats you, only later to realize that he is treating you appropriately but that you are projecting on him the ancient rage about your authoritarian father that has been stored in your guts since childhood, could cost you your next promotion. Here is how to pay attention to Phase 1 and Phase 2.
Phase 1 with feelings is simply to learn to feel the four feelings with clarity, from 0 to 100 percent, distinguishing one from the other. You should be warned that starting Phase 1 can be like blowing the top off a volcano. Long repressed resentments and grievances erupt in irresponsible abandon. It is important to start Phase 1 feelings work in an environment where no one will be harmed by the scatter blast. As you become more comfortable “erupting,” you learn to start and stop on purpose. You can intentionally direct your feelings to a rage cushion or a wringing cloth in the privacy and safety of your own bedroom.
You may notice how childishly or irresponsibly you are behaving in Phase 1. This does not matter. What matters is that you feel, intensely and authentically. Learning to feel is so precious and important that the few weeks or months during which you are expressing your feelings irresponsibly as blame, resentment or a sense of betrayal are well worth the prize you are earning. Focus on going all the way – 100 percent big! – with clarity and full conscious power, in each of the four feelings. When you have succeeded you will enter Phase 2.
Phase 2 with feelings is to use the energy and information of your feelings as fuel and wisdom for creating responsible results in your life. The transition between Phase 1 and Phase 2 may take place at different times for each of the four different feelings. Such transitions do not happen by accident but rather through repeated conscious efforts. You will find yourself taking steps along the way, making mistakes and learning, trying again. You can detect Phase 2 happening when, for example, you start to feel scared that someone is doing something they should not be doing, the fear is followed by anger, and you notice your feelings instantly. Then you use the energy of the feelings to go directly and immediately to that person to see what they are actually doing. If needed, you ask that they do things differently. When the process is over, which may only take a few seconds, Phase 2 has happened, but only if you did not actually feel terrorized or volcanic during the process. Instead of your feelings using you, you were using your feelings. Upon observing your success you might find yourself in sudden ecstasy, ready for the next Phase-2 feeling experience. Great! Welcome to the high level fun of responsible creating with feelings. Welcome to Phase 2. Just remember, you cannot do Phase 2 without first doing Phase 1. Keep practicing.
Stellating Archetypes
We human beings have within us Archetypal structures, lying dormant, waiting to be brought to life. Purely expressing one of the four feelings with 100-percent intensity initializes an Archetypal structure. Each of the four feelings energizes one particular Archetype: anger the Doer (or Warrior/ Warrioress), sadness the Communicator (or Lover), joy the Responsible Leader (or King/ Queen), and fear the Creator (or Sorcerer/ Sorceress). The Doer, the Communicator, and the Creator work in the service of the Responsible Leader. We hardly know what these Archetypes could mean for us in our relationships as men and women because we have few role models. Becoming an Archetypal force of nature is our birthright, is straightforward, and is necessary for entering the Archetypal realms of relationship. We will repeatedly return to this subject throughout the rest of this book.
Bringing an Archetype to life is a process comparable to changing a planet into a star, called “stellating.” The difference between a planet and a star is that a planet absorbs more energy than it gives off. A star radiates more energy than it absorbs. Human beings are designed to live as stars (creators, producers), but our culture trains us to live as planets (consumers, judgers). As already mentioned, traditional cultures bring a fifteen-year-old child through a rite of passage into adulthood, stellating their four Archetypes into radiant, joyous, productive maturity. Our culture does not provide such a rite of passage for us. To stellate our Archetypes we must venture outside of our normal culture into certain environments that are designed specifically for the purpose of stellating Archetypes. To be safe and stable, the stellating process takes its own time, somewhere in the neighborhood of at least two years. (The Map of Stellating Archetypes is provided in Chapter 13, Underworld.)
SECTION 5-F
Loving Your Body
Huge international corporations annually spend billions using high-tech psycho-emotional manipulations to hypnotize you into thinking that your body is not okay exactly the way it is. The reason companies want you to be forever dissatisfied with your face, your eyes, your hair, your skin, or your odors is so that they can forever keep you buying their products to rectify your deficiency. They want your money. The reason companies keep trying to hypnotize you into dissatisfaction is because it works. Corporate advertising budgets more than pay for themselves by the profit they generate from the cash you give them from your bank account.
Companies want you to try to make your body match the images they manufacture of what a man or woman should look like. (What is hilarious is that these marketing moguls do not even look like their images themselves!) And we get “hooked,” meaning our free attention gets trapped and our emotions mechanically react. Year after year we read the magazines and pour through the catalogs and, at some point, we begin to believe that we are defective
. We look at ourselves in a mirror and we are shocked. What we see does not match the computer-edited airbrushed photos in the media. “Magazine people” are obviously rich, successful and happy. We want to be rich, successful and happy like them. If we don’t look like them, we cannot be like them. So, we examine ourselves in the mirror and reject our body as it is.
We judge that something is wrong, and then pick and pick at our body. To compensate for our imperfections we paint on a whole body mask. We color our body, curl it, tan it, muscle it, plump it, thin it, deodorize it, smooth it, shave it, tuck it, paint it, suck it, shake it, perfume it, cream it, and after all that, we cover it up with clothes. The goal of marketing teams is to make us incessantly unsatisfied so that we never stop buying. To a large extent in Western culture, the businesses have achieved their goal. Our culture does not promote well-being. Our culture promotes trying to look good. There is a huge difference between these two.
Advertising tells us that we will fail to attract a partner if we do not look good. Amazingly, we continue our neurotic body hatred even after we have been with our partner for five or ten years. This is where the false-image syndrome becomes malicious: If we are convinced of our physical unacceptability, then, when our partner expresses their authentic appreciation of our body, we hate them for being so naïve. We cannot accept their love of our body because we ourselves refuse to love our body. If we give our authority to marketing departments of large corporations, then, we conclude that our partner’s love of our body must be manipulated as well. They cannot love our body when it is unpainted, because the advertising says that our body is disgusting unpainted. But if our partner loves our body when it is painted, then they love what we know is a false image, a cheap fantasy. If our partner loves a cheap fantasy then they are cheap. We lose either way. Our partner loses too. The loss is devastating. In our culture the false-image syndrome is rampant.
Every bit of energy that we direct toward beautifying the little details of our mask is energy unavailable for nurturing our heart, feeding our soul, or building our being. Where our attention goes, our energy flows. Our energy goes only one way or the other. When it is used, it is used. You have to ask yourself what you want. Do you want a relationship that is heart to heart, soul to soul, and being to being? Or mask to mask?
The way out is for us to stand in our basic dignity, nobility and authority at a deeper level than cultural programming can undermine. This means taking back our authority and deciding that, for no reason and without evidence, our body is beautiful and lovable exactly as it is. Every part of it.
Our body is where we get to be. Our body is alive. If we fail to declare our body’s “basic goodness” (Chögyam Trungpa), with a simplicity that is beyond the grasp of cultural prejudice, we will only create neurotic conditions in our relationship that no amount of makeup can disguise. So, get off it about your body. Your body is exactly what it is, with its bulges, pockmarks, scars, its lack of a tan, with its wrinkles, farts, hairs, moles, smells, aches and pains. Let your body be exactly the way it is through your unceasing and reasonless acceptance. There are other more interesting things to pay attention to than trying to meet someone else’s fantasy-world expectations of what “sexy” looks like. You were born sexy. You still look sexy. Go do something else with your life than trying to fake a sexiness that is already there.
SECTION 5-G
Brain Chemistry
Thoughts affect our feelings. Feelings affect our brain chemistry. Brain chemistry affects our thoughts and feelings. It is an amazing mess. Brain chemistry is a profitable field of play for researchers at the large pharmaceutical companies these days. They are trying to develop a pill that modifies brain chemistry to make us unconditionally happy. Unfortunately for them but fortunately for us, the human body is not unconditionally anything.
The human body is a skin sack wrapped around a saltwater-jelly computer. The gray slimy organ in our head is the most complicated structure yet discovered in this universe, and it is designed to evolve. Evolution is a state of flux, not a state of stasis! Most of our original models of the brain, life, physics and the universe start with the assumption of steady state conditions. Steady state conditions are purely theoretical because everything is in flux (“Panta Rhei,” everything flows, Heraclitus, 500 B.C.). Humans are still generating theories and models for dealing with systems in flux. What we mostly end up with are estimations about how things should be, and the observation (along with a curse) that things are only seldom that way.
For example, in Western civilization we have somehow gotten the idea that our goal in life is to be happy. In other cultures such an idea is childish, shortsighted, and immature. Happiness is irrelevant because the context of life is living life rather than trying to limit the experience of life to only one of the four feelings. In other cultures the idea of trying to be happy is as silly as a dog trying to catch his own tail. Happiness is recognized as the basic condition and experience of human existence. We start out and remain in organic joy. Why should we try to be what we already are without trying?
In many ways our Western culture is “crazymaking.” Trying to be happy is one of the ways we drive ourselves crazy. The fact that three quarters of our daily feelings are classified as negative (fear, anger and sadness) leaves us in a quandary, somewhere between massive denial of what we undeniably feel in our physical body, and massive self-criticism, in which we worry deeply about trying to solve the “serious” problem of having a “negative” feeling that in actuality is not serious, not negative, and not a problem.
The invitation here is to simply let the brain do its thing. If we are on the path of evolution we can reasonably expect that our brain chemistry will periodically fluctuate all over the map, and we will encounter the feelings of anger, sadness, fear and joy several times every day. We can simply feel the feelings. Just because we are feeling depressed does not mean we have to blame our partner for causing our depression. Just because we are feeling angry does not mean we have to throw the dishes on the floor. Just because we are feeling ecstatic does not mean we have to quit our job and move to New Zealand. How ridiculous. No matter what mood you are in, no matter what feeling you are feeling, if you just wait a bit you can be sure it will change. By paying objective attention you will notice that nothing remains the same.
Another hint that will help create clarity about brain chemistry and relationship is to notice your use of the concepts of “never” or “always.” “Never” or “always” are produced by a mind that can imagine perfection. When we use the concepts of “never” or “always” in regard to our life and relationships, these are very strong thoughts. Consistent use of strong hopeless thoughts like, “You never listen to me,” “You always think of yourself first,” “I never get to do what I want,” “I always have to give in to your needs” and so on, definitely generate chemicals in our brain. With “never” or “always” thoughts you can talk yourself into depression in almost no time.
In reality, “never” or “always” do not exist. Life has more exceptions than rules. The Box uses impossibly perfect concepts like “never” or “always” as weapons for fortifying its own defenses. You should be extremely suspicious if you ever hear or use these words in your communications. Thoughts or mental sentences that include the words “never” or “always” are strategic Box lies, designed to support the internal politics of perception and Box-favorable positions. Learn to identify self-deceptive “always” and “never” thinking loops and make it a practice to exit those loops immediately.
Where does this leave you? Through accepting the tides of feelings and brain chemistry, you liberate your free attention and have greater permission to explore intimacies in your relationship. You will not stay stuck in having to behave in a certain way as a reaction to what you are experiencing. You no longer get trapped in “always” or “never” loops, yours or your partner’s. These are big liberations.
The further we move along the path of evolution, the g
reater the depth of the reordering we go through. As surface layers are explored and healed, a greater freedom of movement is experienced. At the same time, more profound layers of the Box come to the surface for transformation. As we slowly work our way through the labyrinth of evolution, a capacity emerges for undertaking more complex and sophisticated experiments. Projects and relationships evolve away from mere personal survival into broader, more service-oriented, world-level games. With diligence we can prepare ourselves for surfing on or rolling with the vaster forces of evolution that will enter our lives. And, sooner or later along the way we will get interested in creating extraordinary human relationship.
PART III
The Extraordinary
CHAPTER 6
Extraordinary Human Relationship
The ideas in this book are not rules. Do not make these ideas into rules. If you make these ideas into rules then you will stop feeling and deciding, and you pass responsibility for your life over to the rules. Abdicating responsibility for your life is misusing this book. This book is about you taking more responsibility for your life, not less.
A distinction will be made here between ordinary human relationship and extraordinary human relationship. Without you making significant efforts to live each breath of your life in this distinction, creating extraordinary human relationship will only occur for you by accident.
With both the culture and your Box designed to prevent you from creating extraordinary human relationship, the chances are not very promising that you will have such an accident. You will have to do it on purpose. This chapter is about how to do it on purpose.
Before making a distinction between ordinary human relationship and extraordinary human relationship, you only had one category in which to place qualities of human relationship. There was but one criterion against which to measure and classify your behavior. Making a distinction between ordinary human relationship and extraordinary human relationship gives you greater resolution on your Map of Relationship (see p.110). The value of the Map of Relationship is that you can find out where you are on that map, and you can find out where else it is possible to go. As you will see there are some very interesting, previously unseen places to go.
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