As I have written before, the book I am reading now is the Metaskills.
The author is a designer, and looks at life through a designer’s glasses.
The article “You live in a world of your own design” is one of the favorite articles on my site. People want to design their lives.
The popularity of the program, Mind Movies builds on that desire to design… but the requirements for design are not there, not there for 99.99% of humanity… What is there is something else, something that doesn’t allow for design.
The basics of being a designer is what is most missing in life… if you really look, you can see it.
What there is is reacting, changing, and fixing. Deciding and options.
Designing is a creative process that gets killed by deadlines, and any force.
If we needed to find one word for humanity’s dominant attitude, it is forceful, maybe even violent.
I know it doesn’t sound good, but it’s what it is, not good. It’s forceful. Tree of Knowledge of good and evil… And your life reflects it.
The good life, Eaudaimonia, the excellent life, is not forceful. Actually you cannot achieve a good life if there is any force.
Look at a juggler. No force. Fluid. Neither internal, nor external tension.
I am trying to teach muscletesting to one of my students. Remotely, of course. So it is a written conversation, hard to convey how to hold the fingers.
His muscles are aching… He is pressing. Forceful. I am holding my fingers lightly together, both hands.
I don’t force anything.
- Hurry is force.
- Worry is force.
- Having an agenda is force
- Focusing is force.
There is no force on the creative plane. No argument. No right and wrong. No frustration. No anger. No spitefulness. No resistance.
- I have decades of practice in no-force activities.
- I was a gymnast on the uneven bars. It is impossible to do it well with any force… the secret is to be loose and effortless.
- I was doing pantomime for three years… impossible to do pantomime with any force
- I was beaten for two decades: impossible to stay well beaten if you resist any of it. Even when you are kicked off the stairs… Just stay loose and you’ll be fine.
Life is done best when you mount no resistance.
I only feel resistance, your resistance, when I am connected to you. I feel what life is like for you, and I feel your pain.
I don’t know how you learn to not resist and not force. It is not passive… it is actively remaining loose. Catching force, catching resistance, catching the tension, and letting it go.
One of my students wrote today: “Why am I such a pushover?”
Non-resistance doesn’t mean pushover. It doesn’t mean you’ll be swept away by anyone’s action.
There is a pushover, ragdoll state… and then there is the effortless standing. Effortless moving. Effortless everything. Free of tension.
It all depends on core strength.
And it all goes back to Self.
The most important thing you can do is to separate your self from your “not-self”.
As long as they are collapsed, as long as they are treated, by you, as a unit, you have NO core. NO self.
It’s taken me a long time and a lot of work to get to be able to say that sentence.
The truth is: there is a self and there is a false self, or “not-self”. Even a baby has both after a day or two being alive.
And yet, most people either identify with their collapsed self which is 99% “not-self”, forceful, violent, domineering, or they feel that they are empty inside.
The way to distinguish anything is to find what it isn’t. To find what are its boundaries.
So is with the Self.
The Self is definitely not the “not-self”. To define the Self, you have to be intimately familiar with the “not-self”.
Your clues about the not-self are the internal dialogs, or monologues… the voices in your head.
They are the not-you. And they are carrying the day for you… and the you doesn’t have a chance, until you separate the wheat from the chaff… like Cinderella did.
It takes time. It takes patience. And it takes a light hand… the moment you try to force anything, try to fix anything, try to change anything, try to kill anything, you are creating the next era, where the internal conversation goes so deep underground, it’s going to take excavation to get to it.
Some of you are already there: you are the most forceful soul correction. You probably only hear 2-3-4 sentences, but your life is forceful, your life is full of resistance, stuckedness.
So what do you need to do to hear, see, feel the internal conversation? To bring gentle curiosity to it?
You may need to learn to relax your body. Tons of free guided meditations on youtube.
You may need to start bringing that relaxed state to your life.
Some of you even force relaxed states. Some of you immediately go into an unconscious state.
Just stay with it. It is innate, and you’ll know when you have it. It’s like balance… until you have it, all the words in the world won’t help you… But once you have it, you can get back to it, faster and faster with practice.
- You can notice your breathing.
- If it is shallow, you are tense.
- If it you can feel any part of your body: you are tense.
Keep on practicing.
Just like there is no chance for creativity to emerge if there is force, there is a deadline, or there is a goal… your relaxed state and your internal conversation will not come up.
And your life will remain as it is.
If it is painful, you are tense.
