Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth Page 6
The price of lowering your numbness bar is to be more conscious of pain, more sensitive to your own feelings and the feelings of others. Lowering your numbness bar also makes you more aware of the consequences of your actions and the actions of others. Greater awareness brings greater responsibility.
MAP OF THE NUMBNESS BAR (NEW)
World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org
You can gradually and responsibly move your numbness bar ever lower. In doing so you become more vulnerable, perceptive, relational, and responsive. The intention in modern culture is: avoid pain. In next culture the intention is: seek beauty. Perceptions of pure beauty can be intense.
Lowering your numbness bar is neither philosophical nor conceptual. It is experiential. The bar cannot be lowered for free – it takes work and you must pay full price. The price of more consciousness is pain. The more you are aware of, both within you and around you, the more pain you feel. If you are not skilled in inner navigating the four feelings – if you do not live in the clarity that pain is just anger, sadness, fear or joy – then lowering the numbness bar may seem overwhelmingly intense. An adult human being is designed to be 100 percent conscious, and to experience and make use of 100 percent intense pure feelings. These skills and this knowledge are not provided by modern culture, but are basic to next culture. They can be learned in extraordinary trainings. It can help to remind yourself that the practice of gently but steadily lowering your numbness bar is less about being perfect and more about being human, present, and alive.
GIVE YOURSELF SOME SLACK
The journey from numbness to feeling is part of an archetypal rite of passage into adulthood. Such a journey may begin at childhood’s end, but any true master will tell you that you must practice until your last breath.
Once the journey is begun it does not help to try to hurry things along. Also, do not be too disappointed if from time to time you recoil at the strength of your own feelings and temporarily recede into periods of numbness. When you notice that you have gotten numb again, simply return to your feeling practices and keep going. Do not beat yourself up about vacillations. Two steps forward and one backward seems to be how it goes.
Most people reading this book are old—at least older than fifteen. If we were prepared as adolescents the rite of passage shift from unconsciously feeling to consciously feeling would be swift and sure. Formal rites of passage to adulthood over the past 100,000 years have shown that human beings are designed to leap into conscious responsibility for 100 percent maximum archetypal feelings at fifteen.
But the farther past fifteen we are, the creakier our psychological joints seem to get. Shifting from unconsciously feeling to consciously feeling involves flexing in places that may have begun to crystallize. We may face rigid old beliefs, petrified interpretations, opinions that we have magically transformed into truth, and inarguable assumptions about who we are, who other people are, or how best to survive in this world.
Old beliefs have stayed in place long enough to become old because they never give up without a fight. Nothing has previously caused them to waver. Don’t expect your beliefs to just politely bow, step off their pedestal, and walk away now that you have decided to lower your numbness bar. More likely they will laugh in your face.
Remember, laughing is one of the most important times to pay attention and observe. While the patterns are laughing at you, do not look away. It is an opportunity to notice minutiae. Fine, almost trifling details of structure reveal weaknesses and ways through the mind’s clever maze defending its status quo. Be patient. Time is on your side. Even a defense strategy tires itself out by defending itself.
Seek to identify the phrasing of each of your self-defining limits as precisely as you can in terms of when and why you established it in the first place. Beginnings are the most delicate of times. A seed holds all the secrets of the thorny weed it is to become. By empathizing with a defense strategy’s opening phrases (such as, “You never . . .,” or, a sigh followed by a head shake and the phrase, “I don’t know . . . ), its original purpose is understood. Its original purpose was to try to protect you, to try to take care of you and arrange for you to survive.
It is here that you can admit that taking care of yourself is a noble purpose.
Let me say that again.
Figuring out ways to protect and take care of yourself is noble. It is no one else’s job. It is your job, and you accomplished it! The ways you figured out to take care of yourself succeeded marvelously, because indeed you have survived!
MAKING A NEW CHOICE
As a child you could well see what was going on in your family or in the world with clarity and indignation. Perhaps you feared that if you spoke out against it, if you challenged your parents or other authority figures, you would be punished or destroyed. You could accurately assess the situation but you concluded that it would be safest to disem-power yourself. So you did just that. Think what a powerful action it is to disempower yourself.
Boys with guns. It’s time to grow up. Growing up begins with lowering your numbness bar so you feel the consequences of your actions. Consciously experiencing your feelings confers the authority to choose to do something completely different.
Perhaps you adopted a pattern of being shy, of doubting your instincts, or of confusing yourself rather than speaking out about what you saw. The pattern may have saved your life. But after all these years you may have forgotten the moment in which you chose to install your survival pattern. You may think that the self-doubting actually defines who you are rather than being merely a clever defense strategy that allowed you to make it through your childhood.
Your circumstances may have changed drastically since you made the life-saving decision, but the old decision remains actively in place, still influencing your life today. Taking conscious responsibility for having made the original survival decision is the point at which you gain the option to make a different decision. This time you have the power to choose to live instead of to merely survive.
Merely surviving may no longer be a sufficient response to the glorious and precious opportunity of having been born. Your essential being has grown to the point where what once served to protect you has now become your prison. The patterns that saved your life then now impede your life’s onward journey.
Releasing yourself from outdated defensive limitations becomes a simple matter of letting them slip away, like outgrown snakeskin, while maintaining complete respect for them having accomplished a job well done.
Taking on a new way of being is actually a simple matter, but it may not feel that way. It may feel like losing your mind. In this case, it helps to learn how to learn.
THE FOUR STEP LEARNING SPIRAL
STEP 1: The first learning step is the hardest. That is because the first step is to recognize that what you already know is not working. You are faced with admitting your own incompetence.
How uncool!
The first times you practice a new behavior you are guaranteed to look bad, because by practicing a new behavior you admit to having used an old behavior for all those years.
How embarrassing!
This is often the biggest barrier to learning new skills—the fear of looking bad. The point is that, in any true learning, looking bad is unavoidable. It is the first step in the four step learning spiral, moving from Quadrant 1, unconscious incompetence, to Quadrant 2, becoming conscious of your present incompetence.
The shock of becoming conscious of your own incompetence can provide enough inspiration to practice new skills.
At the beginning every effort feels totally strange, bizarre even. There can be a majority opinion in your mind thinking this whole thing is just stupid, a waste of time, and totally embarrassing besides. Just observe it.
MAP OF THE FOUR STEP LEARNING SPIRAL
World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org
COMPETENCE
This map shows a spiral going clockwise round and round, circling straight up out of the page. Learning happens when any of the four driving forces actively takes you to the next level. This means that although you can learn by making different kinds of efforts, completing the learning cycle includes a balance of all four forces and goes through all four stages. The step from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence feels awful because everyone sees that you do not already know. This step cannot be avoided. It helps to decide ahead of time to go ahead and learn even if you look bad. Listen to feedback, because feedback guides you to the treasure of gaining new competence. Once completing a cycle, fierce learners do not hang out in unconscious competence for more than about fifteen seconds before seeking consciousness about a new incompetence. (The original source of this Map is disputed, possibly D. L. Kirkpatrick 1971, W. C. Howell 1977, or T. Gordon in the 1970s. This thoughtmap is also similar to the famous Johari Window. The driving forces of learning were added to the map by Clinton Callahan in 2006.)
STEP 2: To move from Quadrant 2, conscious incompetence, to Quadrant 3, conscious competence, requires persistent practice in the face of repeated failures. Even if you never seem to get it right, keep practicing.
Hints for improving the effectiveness of your practice include:
• Ask for (and listen to!) feedback and coaching.
• Select one feedback distinction at a time and practice making only that one shift.
• Make subtle changes in your posture and breathing.
• Pay attention to where you place your attention.
• Stay aware of what your purpose is.
STEP 3: Sooner or later (and probably not as soon as you might wish) you behave in the new way without so much pain, without having to plan, without having to remember what you are suppose to remember, without even thinking about it. Voila! You have entered Quadrant 4, unconscious competence.
STEP 4: You have achieved a stable new level of competence. The shocker is that no matter how hard you struggled to achieve the new way of being, the mind quickly adapts to it and soon transforms the remarkable new perceptions and benefits into a new normal. The honeymoon is over. Our miraculously tender and pleasing intimacies of infatuation are suffocated without effort by being taken for granted. And herein lies the value of continuing on in the spiral of learning. Success is the doorway to the next failure.
STEP 1 AGAIN: In the moment you become truly competent at one thing, you become truly incompetent at a whole new level of things that you could not be incompetent at before. The next cycle of learning begins in Quadrant 1, unconscious incompetence, again. You can never know the next thing you don’t know until you are able to know it. As soon as you discover (or have it pointed out to you) that there is a next thing to learn, you again enter Quadrant 2, conscious incompetence, and the spiral of learning continues.
It can be useful to know that if you are to learn anything, you will be looking bad until you don’t look bad anymore. That’s all there is to it. But it seems to help to know this. Then you can simply plan on looking bad, just like everybody else.
My friend Ken Windes used to say that we have a choice. We can be on the learning team, where it is guaranteed that we will look bad. Or we can be on the looking good team. Whenever he noticed me holding back, trying to save face, trying to keep safe, he would come over to me and say, “Looking good, going nowhere.”
Along the path of shifting from unconsciously feeling to consciously feeling, it is guaranteed that you are going to look bad. Welcome to the learning team.
BEGINNING THEORETICALLY
Do not think that anything should have happened for you already. This whole chapter has been theoretical. We haven’t actually tried anything yet. We’ve been dancing around the theoretical possibility of lowering your numbness bar, but not actually doing it. We’re just warming up. The next two chapters are additional warm-ups. When you are so warm that you are almost hot, then in Chapter 4 we will actually start some conscious feelings work. By then it will go almost as if by itself.
If you are thinking that it might be a good idea to jump ahead right now and go directly to Chapter 4, I have a different opinion about your idea: it won’t do you any good. There is a lot that you don’t know you don’t know about feelings. Believe me, I had to learn the hard slow way that there is no way around the hard slow way.
2. EXPANDING INTO ALL FOUR BODIES
This chapter will present you with a series of thoughtmaps from beyond the understanding limits of modern culture. Looking at modern culture from the outside puts its limits into a new perspective. The observer perspective permits you to better see what modern culture is and what it is not, what it has provided for us and what it has not. Having new thoughtmaps where before there were few makes it easier to navigate into a culture of more significant responsibility than modern culture.
For example, modern culture provides the thoughtmap that a human being is no more than a body with a mind. If you conceive of yourself this way then you force yourself to stay numb to a rich array of inner intelligences and valuable personal experiences arising on a daily basis that don’t fit the body-mind thoughtmap.
For instance, a wide range of subtle ongoing feelings naturally arises in a human being. These feelings are stimulating and satisfying from the archetypal perspective, but they don’t fit into the picture when we only understand ourselves to be a mind with a body. Instead of embracing our personal experiences we cling to the commonly accepted model. In exchange, modern society sells us MP3-cell phone-camera-GPS-Internet-clocks, soap operas and game shows on cable television, mail order catalogs, and 24-hour online gambling.
Another example is our inspiration. Modern society keeps us busy, busy, busy. If we slow down below modern society’s usual speed-of-mind action-packed days, we may sense an inner longing to fulfill a vision that sits deep in our soul. Sticking with the cultural model cancels having a vision that truly inspires us. In its place modern society sells us international sporting events, new-model cars, tropical vacations, and the unfulfillable longing to be a rich and famous movie star.
Living without authentic feelings and without inspiration may seem ideal for subsisting as an uncomplaining cog in an industrial machine, but it provides little foundation for exploring the magnificence of our innate human potential.
Permit me to offer a slightly more complex model of what we human beings are.
On September 3, 2005, I saw the original Map of Four Bodies spontaneously drawn on a flip chart by Possibility Manager Wolfgang Köhler during a three-day Possibility Lab. The new thoughtmap splashed into the training space like a boulder in a puddle. As the tsunami settled down we found our perceptions sparkling with many new facets of clarity.
The Map of Four Bodies starts like this. Rather than imagining yourself as merely a physical body with a thinking mind, imagine yourself as having four distinct bodies layered one on top of the other, all in the same place.
The foundation body is your physical body with sense organs that experience touch, sight, sound, smell, taste, instinct, and centeredness.
Layered on top of the physical body are three additional bodies, each with its own unique properties.
One layer is your intellectual body with your mind that generates thoughts and holds knowledge, opinions, beliefs, reasons, expectations, interpretations, memories, conclusions and insights.
Another layer is your emotional body with your heart that generates feelings of anger, sadness, joy and fear, can sense those same feelings in others, and resonates and expands with love.
And another layer is your energetic body with your being that has presence and will, directs your attention and intention, accesses imagination, and is inspired by your destiny principles and your vision of what is possible.
MAP OF FOUR BODIES
World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org
Each of our four bodies has its ow
n unique kind of food, pain, liquid state, ecstasy, intimacy, and intelligence.
STARVING HEARTS AND SOULS
Without distinguishing four bodies you miss out on a wealth of experience and understanding that would add deeper appreciation of the quality of your daily life. For example, each of the four bodies requires its own unique kinds of food, experiences its unique kinds of pain, liquid state and ecstasy, and enjoys unique forms of intimacy. Clarity about these added dimensions opens the doors to perceiving and entering new depths of relationship with other human beings and with what is possible to create in life. Viewing yourself and others as having four bodies instead of just one, provides expanded opportunities for self-expression, satisfaction, relationship and community. Without distinguishing the four bodies these added dimensions are often blocked from nourishing you.
Since mainstream culture’s standard education does not include the four bodies you probably haven’t noticed that something is seriously missing. The single-bodied life seems normal to you.
To understand the new model you can begin by thinking of food groups. If you do not recognize the four basic food groups then you might eat only your favorite brand of fast-food fried chicken and starve yourself to death, all the while thinking you are well fed. This is an exact metaphor.
Modern education force-fed your mind a massive overdose of information. To round out the program you were instructed how to kick a ball around twice a week for physical exercise. If you were lucky enough to receive any lessons in art or music, they were most probably directed exclusively toward your intellectual body. Modern education completely ignores your emotional and energetic bodies so they remain under-developed and immature, wasting away from malnutrition. Because the whole of modern society is distorted in this same way, your hideous deformity is only vaguely apparent until you become aware of the Map of Four Bodies.