As this is the first little effort in 2011, I thought I would just muse a little – in a roundabout way of course; when was I ever different – about the value of the work for me. I have in the past written on the “Teaching not the Teacher” but these exchanges, lifted verbatim from a course in 2009, rather nicely amplify those thoughts from embodied experience. Make of them what you will; there may be resonances. NB The…
This site has been up and running for some time now and although, when we started I promised to deliver a new entry every two months, I have, in fact, put up something each month – albeit sometimes a little late. As we get to the end of 2010 and beginning of a New Year, I realise that there are some of you I have never met and some I have not been in personal contact with for too long….
Some bits of this month’s submission may be familiar to some of you. You may have heard me or someone else say something very similar. I do not too much mind this; it has become apparent to me that one can go on and on saying something very similar, in slightly different ways until, suddenly, the right wavelength, attunement, is there and someone clicks, gets it; or I get it myself, finally and understand at a felt sense level, what…
I am sorry this submission is so late. I have been a little snowed under but have now broken free and the next two offerings should follow closely behind. I am a bit chattier than usual, I think. Please let me know what you think. Random thoughts around Confidentiality, Buddha, Craniosacral Therapy, Meditation and other trifles… Mike: It seems to me we have two subjects here. One subject is the value of recording, and the other subject is confidentiality. Is…
As I have explained before, I consider that the sharing we do, of the experiences that arise during the hands-on sessions, is probably, the most important segment of the work. Important in the sense that what we are listening to is someone’s embodied experience of the life story that they have identified with as being “me.” If the group is safe, and the trust is there, the revelation may well be at a deeper level than the speaker has ever allowed…
The contents of this book emerge, for the greater part, from relationships with students in classes over the last fifteen years or so. As each chapter, each article I could say, stems from a different time, place, space and grouping of people from every other article, the result is a collection of think-pieces; some quite well put-together, some containing quite well put-together sections. The whole needs form and I am working with others on turning it into a more traditional…
Do please look at the responses to the June entry, they deserve it. There is a perennial wisdom that pervades all cultures. It manifests time after time after time in different forms according to time, place and space. The form may be Dance, Speech, Painting, Poetry, Film, Sculpture, Songs; whatever is indigenous, no one of them can be better than the other, it is quite simply, the truth taking form. The Teaching speaks, when it is true; it is not…
Addressed to therapists but also, in a broader sense to everyone in relationship. What I have learned from Milarepa, a Tibetan rogue then saint of the 11th century, in particular is, that when I don’t like what arises, I try not to get rid of it but rather, get to know it better by schmoozing it. Offering tea with finely cut cucumber sandwiches, would be the English way but schmooze will do. It is not my job to teach how…
From time to time, I offer a session where the whole group just receives, in silence, whatever feeling, thought or sensation reveals itself as they sit or lie in a receptive mode. My task is to approach the group, energetically from as deep and still a place in myself as i can muster. There is no doing only trust that the synergy, or the work, will do the work. After the session, usually about 20-30 minutes, we all share any…
I think this article might well be read in conjunction with The Teaching not the Teacher, which is in the Introduction section of this book. People quite often ask me whether I think they are ready/ripe to teach this work, so these are some reflections stemming, largely, from my own experience. First, lets get the matter of “levels” out of the way; it seems that every time I try to explain something, I have to say, “of course, it depends…
I hope 2010 has got off to a calm start. One of the main purposes behind the lead article this month, is to empower people to be able to work with just what is for them, at that place, in that time, in that particular relationship. I think that so often, we get restricted by looking for what we think, or have been told, we should be looking for. First off though, do please read the two responses under last…
I think it would be useful to examine these words. I have been quite preoccupied with them both in recent times. At the level of feeling/emotions they represent, in my thesis, the two prime emotional forms arising out of Emptiness, at the emotional level. All other emotions are a step-down from one or the other. They are the great, relative, opposites in feeling. I say relative as, being forms they have no inherent tangibility but are reactions, at the feeling…
Teaching #2 October 2009 I much enjoy e-mail conversations with Gill Siefer, a well-respected Psychotherapist in New York and a spiritual adept who I count as a friend and one of the Elders. (seifer@verizon.net ). We are both about 80 and both suffer from the disease of continually asking “and….?” I hope the conversations will continue. You may like to read a recent part of this conversation; Gil says ….. I have come across some teaching of Ramana Marharshi about…
If, according to Erich Fromm, the emergence of the `mature man’ is the aim of both Oriental Zen and Occidental psychoanalysis, and if the man on that level has shed his petty fears of insecurity, his one-sided logically reasoned propensity, there is hope for human beings to arrive at a better grasp of the meaning of reality. That this implies the shedding of greed in all forms and the overcoming of ego-worship goes without saying. Thus satori, or what we…