5) Discovery Speaking is a rare and delightful experience both for the speaker and for the listener or listeners. Discovery speaking runs on a different energy than normal or adult interactions: the energy is purely electric – you feel it in your bones and the space sings. The discovery speaker acts as a space holder, a navigator, and a lightening rod in service to the other participants in the conversation. The discovery speaker is in charge of the conversation but does not know what they are talking about. This leaves the field for discovery wide open for explorative questions, careful observations, and sharing of experiences by all participants, including the space holder. Working together, the group casts unanswered or unanswerable questions into unknown territory at the edge of what is already known. If a question hooks onto solid ground, participants work as one team to pull themselves toward the question and therefore into unexplored domains. If you document what you find and share it with others, you become reliable to again be admitted to undiscovered territory. There is no end to the undiscovered.
Don’t expect to suddenly be able to do possibility speaking or discovery speaking based on what you just read. Developing these skills usually requires demonstration and guided practice (such as in “Expand the Box” training and Possibility Laboratories; see Contact Information at the end of this book).
But go ahead and start experimenting without requiring yourself to understand it entirely, without demanding that you do it perfectly. Adult speaking, discovery speaking and possibility speaking are all natural human capabilities. It can be inspiring to recognize that there are levels of relationship and communication that can be explained or engaged in but that you cannot yet wrap your mind around. Then, you realize that there are greater subtleties, levels and dimensions of communication to experiment with than you may have suspected. As with the four kinds of listening, each of the five kinds of speaking becomes a tool for you in the moment that you name them clearly and use them on purpose. Your competence will come through attentive, persistent practice.
SECTION 6-R
Centering
We have two kinds of “center.” We have a physical center, which is our center of balance, located directly between our hipbones and halfway back in our body. The location of this center is relatively fixed.
We also have a “center of being,” which starts out about the size of a grapefruit, and which is mobile. We in Western civilization tend to keep our center of being located in one particular place in our body. Where is that?
Yes. In our heads. For the most part we are not aware of what we are doing with our center of being. However, outside of our awareness, we still move our being center around for various purposes. One particularly effective yet insidious use of moving our being center is as a Box survival strategy. We can energetically disempower ourselves around whomever we perceive as an authority figure by giving our center to them. If we give our center away to an authority figure we are no longer a threat to them. When we give our center away we arrange to be no longer responsible, no longer capable of creating, no longer able to make decisions, no longer able to ask dangerous questions, and no longer able to take the initiative to change things. We put the authority figure on an untouchable pedestal and establish ourselves as their follower. Wherever or whenever we give our center away, we then act out with typically adaptive behavior and thus inescapably create ordinary human relationship. It is important to learn about your center because, in any case where you wish to enliven extraordinary human relationship, you cannot be giving your center away.
Please note that no one can take your center away. There are people in professions of authority who may have slipped into the habit of providing you with a strong invitation to give them your center, for example, a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, a policeman, a competitor, a boss, a condo-salesperson, a mother-in-law, or a child. Certain people might surround themselves with “eggshells,” or have too much fear of being present to enter spaces without dominating them with their loud commanding voice, implied threats, or hysterical rants about unsolvable problems. They might smother spaces with normal neurotic babbling and try to force you to abandon your center to them. You might indeed give them your center, but no one can take your center away.
If no one can take your center away, why would you give your center away? Basically to feel safe – so someone else will take care of you; to avoid responsibility; to avoid making decisions and facing the consequences; to protect yourself from blame if something goes wrong; to avoid the “horrible” consequences of a confrontation. If you give the “authority figure” your center you are no longer “dangerous” and they do not have to “kill” you (fire you, demote you, belittle you, blackball you, tease you). The Box then assures you that you are safe.
MAP OF CENTERING
GIVING YOUR CENTER AWAY
RESULTS IN CHILDISH, SCARED, NEEDY, ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR
2 Kinds of Leaders:
1) Gremlin Leaders surround themselves with followers and feel safe.
2) True Leaders are “leader makers” and surround themselves with leaders. They do not want your center. They want you to have your center so you can be clear and responsible; so that you can make decis- ions, take actions and be creative, etc.
BEING CENTERED
Being centered means to have your being center on your physical center What do people who are centered say to each other?
Why would someone else want you to give them your center? Interestingly enough for the same reason – safety. When someone collects people’s centers, he or she surrounds themselves with followers. With only followers around, no one represents a serious threat. The authority figure then feels safe. The only price the authority figure pays is enduring day-in and day-out ordinary human relationship. If they know of no alternative, if they long for nothing deeper, ordinary human relationship is not too high a price to pay for the illusion of feeling safe.
But you … you may be longing for extraordinary human relationship or even Archetypal Relationship. This means there is no way around learning what you are doing with your center. Extraordinary human relationship only becomes possible when you place your being center on your physical center to “be centered.” Being centered you can then “ground yourself” with two feet flat on the floor and a direct connection from your centered being to the center of the Earth. You are now “on the spot,” as Tibetan Master Chögyam Trungpa used to say, committed, at risk, participating, capable of being present and attentive, making contact, and actually saying “Hello” to whomever you are being-with. By placing your being center on your physical center you may interact with conditions and situations more productively than when you are not centered.
The entirety of being centered includes positioning your being center on your physical center, minimizing your now so that your experience of now is very small, and minimizing your here so that it includes only the present conditions. For most of us, being centered is a rare to nonexistent experience. When centered, we enter a state of calm receptivity and equilibrium in which our attention is no longer directed to meet the expectations that other people have about us. It is a condition of being simply ourselves. If we ever do have this experience, it feels like we enter a completely new world. The new world is extraordinary human relationship, and being centered is a gateway for entering that world.
How do you learn to put your center of being on your physical center? First you must be able to place your attention on your being center to find out where it is. Then you move your being center to your physical center and split your attention enough to monitor your being center so that it stays on your physical center, even when your husband or boss or child bursts into your room demanding your attention. Finding your center is one thing. Keeping your center is another level entirely. Finding your center and keeping your center both require, or at least deserve, years of practice.
Keeping your center does not mean being belligerent, stubborn, heavy or inattentive, although it may sometimes appear thi
s way. Keeping your center does not mean not getting out of the way, being resistant to, or ignoring signs, although it may sometimes involve these things. Keeping your center means that when you respond, you respond by choice, not by being adaptive.
A Centering Experiment
You are left with the sophisticated and utterly simple task of discovering how to be yourself and still be in relationship, how to be in relationship and not give your center away. You now have all the intellectual clarity you can possibly get, and this is as far as a book can take you with learning to be centered. From here on it is your job to proceed, beyond merely thinking about the practice of centering. It is time to put your body on the line.
Many of the Asian martial arts include centering as one of their core skills. I suggest that you find yourself a local Aikido class with a teacher who practices in the original form as delivered by Morihei Ueshiba Sensei. Some “teachers” have taken it upon themselves to “modernize” the traditional form of Aikido – I suggest that you try to avoid working with these teachers. Attend one or two Aikido classes each week for a year. Be sure to get yourself a wooden practice sword, the Bokken, and attend Aikido sword work and Jo (wooden stick) classes as part of your centering lessons. The sword work is elegant food for your Archetypal Warrior or Warrioress, and an exact metaphor for the clarity “sword work” that is naturally required in establishing and navigating extraordinary human and Archetypal Relationships. And while you are at it, watch The Last Samurai film with Ken Watanabe (what a King!), Koyuki (what a Lover!), and Tom Cruise (what a Warrior!). Learning to center is magnificent relationship training.
SECTION 6-S
Feeling Communication
The Map of Four Feelings and the Map of Mixing Feelings were shown in Chapter 5, Some Amazing Things About Having A Body. These two maps can provide marvelous clarity for navigating your way within extraordinary human relationship and Archetypal Relationships. However, having clarity about feelings is not nearly enough. You also must learn to feel. We do not know what this means – “learn to feel” – because such knowledge is outside the experience of our culture. To get this experiential knowledge you will need to take yourself beyond our cultural limits.
Back around 1985 I had returned to California from world travels and thought that by then I had certainly collected enough new and interesting ideas to start writing useful books. One evening I ended up in someone’s private home at a meeting with a psychic-reader. She was a middle-aged woman with a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense attitude as she looked over her fifteen guests. Individuals started asking their personal questions. I waited, listening to what she told them and watching their reactions. It seemed that each of her answers was precise and, as far as I could detect, accurate. Near the end of the meeting I finally risked being vulnerable enough to ask my question. “Is it time for me to start writing books?” I asked. She looked at me for a moment and then without a word she started laughing. It was not a cynical laugh. The laughter erupted out of her like a swarm of disturbed wasps. She could not help laughing at the ridiculous implications of my question. She had not laughed like this at anyone else. In fact, she had taken their questions quite seriously. To me the question could not possibly warrant such a response. So I sat there with a puzzled expression on my face, waiting. When she could finally get control of herself, she rhetorically asked, “How could you expect to write useful books when you do not even know how to feel?” Four years later I attended my first training and finally began my journey into feelings. In 2003, after fourteen years of feelings-work and eighteen years after I thought I was ready to write, my spiritual teacher told me to start writing books.
There is a significant connection between being centered and learning to feel. Being centered gives us back our power, our ability to take action, our ability to be responsible, to create, to choose, and to fully enjoy our moment-to-moment present experience. With all these benefits you would think we would naturally want to enter the state of being centered. But a big part of us does not want to be centered because we are not prepared for the impact of the emotion-rich “being centered” experience. Our Box automatically – often-times more quickly than we are aware – avoids being centered to avoid the accompanying feeling reactions that are triggered.
It turns out that when we center here and now in our body we automatically start experiencing feelings that were locked away ever since childhood, or perhaps even before. Back then we were unwilling or unable to experience the feelings because they were too intense, too big for us, too “dangerous,” or too overwhelming. The unexpressed feelings gradually locked into our muscular system and have been there ever since. The sum total of accumulated unprocessed feelings turns out to be quite massive for most of us – like an immense mountain materializing out of the fog of our denial. We semi-consciously know the feelings are in there. From time to time they rumble around in us, an ancient grumpy dragon knocking around in our dungeon. We semi-consciously decide to maintain our strategy – ignoring the dragon, hoping that it will go away all by itself. But the dragon does not go away all by itself. It waits for you to build up enough pain or enough courage to come to the dungeon and learn what it has to say.
If you wait much past fifty years of age before you undertake the journey to learn from your dragon, then your Box’s structure may get brittle hard. Your beliefs, attitudes and assumptions can solidify into a high-security prison that will not likely be breached before the end of your life. You know people who are crystallized in this way. They might even be your parents. The invitation here is to avoid getting caught in the trap of ignoring your feelings-work until you cannot do it anymore. By the time you read and understand the implications of what I have just said, you will already have barely enough time to do the work needed to free yourself of enough psycho-emotional baggage to enter extraordinary human relationship and Archetypal Relationship domains. You have no time to waste.
Learning “inner navigation” skills for exploring the territory of feelings can be greatly enhanced through the direct assistance of a coach, trainer or guide. At a certain phase of your development there is no substitute for getting your butt into a chair in an environment that is safe enough, clear enough and authentic enough to provide you with experiential feelings training. I strongly advise arranging some single coaching sessions or, better yet, participating in specific kinds of trainings. Such trainings are founded in the possibility of transformation, in making sudden shifts. The possibility context is very different from the therapeutic or psychological contexts that are generally more acceptable in Western culture and therefore more readily available. Possibility trainings can indeed be found if you search more on the cultural fringe. Make the time to meet the trainer and ask questions of other participants before you jump into something you have never heard of before. There are definitely a range of offerings to choose from. Make sure you choose something that you feel comfortable with and excited about.
Feelings do not occur in your mind as thoughts. Feelings do not occur as intellectual concepts. Feelings do not occur as words or diagrams on paper. Feelings only occur in your body, personally, immediately, as experience. Learning to navigate your way through feelings is a set of skills that we could have started learning when we were seven years old (or perhaps even earlier). But neither our parents nor our teachers had that clarity themselves. They could not pass it on to us.
Wanting to learn how to feel is like wanting to walk barefoot on fire. You were probably not taught firewalking in school. To obtain the experience and knowledge of firewalking you would need to inquire into a fringe information source such as the bulletin board at a health food store, the advertisements in a new-age magazine, by talking to friends who have friends who already did it, or by searching for firewalking websites on the Internet. You would locate an extra-cultural association, contact the organizers, choose a date, register, pay the tuition, and go to the firewalking training. Each step in this procedure is a potential barricade for your Box
. Internal and external resistances mysteriously appear. Each hurdle could stop or delay the whole process because there are parts of your Box that do not want you to learn something beyond your Box’s present possibilities. There are also people in your life whose Boxes do not want you to change, because if your Box changes, then their Box must accommodate to your Box’s new size and shape.
In 1986 I was driving down the highway and realized that I wanted to walk barefoot on fire. I made inquiring phone calls, found a firewalking instructor (…this was before the Internet. Can you imagine that there was a time before the Internet?), selected a date, registered, and paid the tuition. As I got into my car to drive to the firewalking site my two closest friends stopped me and said, “Don’t go!” It was not a request they made; they demanded that I not go. Apparently, whatever I was about to learn would change me, and if I changed, then my friends would have to change too. My friends were afraid of those changes so they set up barriers to try to keep me from changing.
If you decide to undertake additional training in feelings-work, negotiating your way through the many powerful barriers will take serious intention on your part. It is possible to succeed. But while you are trying to attain enough momentum to actually dial the number and register, the people in your life might regard you as seriously, maybe even dangerously demented. If you make it through your Box’s resistances and their Box’s resistances and our culture’s Box’s resistances, the courage to participate in the processes becomes almost insignificant by comparison. It is “feelings-work” just to get to the feelings-work. Once you succeed, a wide range of impressions and new experiences enter your world. You go through the liquid state, your Box’s structure evolves, and the expanded reference points serve you for the rest of your life.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 28
