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I have a few students who take pride in not getting upset or getting upset less often, or less upset than they used to.
As if the purpose of life is to have it be smooth, easy, and emotionless.
Death is smooth, easy, and emotionless. I guess they are practicing for death… or maybe they misunderstand something.
Being upset, being angry, weeping, shouting, is normal human feelings and their expressions is also normal.
Without them you are sheep… dead but don’t know it.
Feelings are there for a reason: they indicate that you need to do something. Something different. Do something. Communicate something, stop being complacent, stand up for yourself. Go out and fight. If need to: kill.
Pay attention to your feelings, to your emotions. Underneath there is something that you said… and now pay attention to what you said. There is something to own, there is something to do. There is something to take responsibility for.
This one student automatically flies into impotent rage, yelling, or alternatively into impotent depression.
Depression is a state where you are suppressing life so you don’t need to do what you wouldd need to do if you didn’t use depression as a coverup.
I was often depressed in my 17 years as an architect, plus 5 years as an architecture student.
I was covering up that I wasn’t a good match for architecture, and that I was giving up on pursuing what I was uniquely fit for.
Changing midstream, facing my parents’ reaction was scary, so I opted to go into depression instead. Cowardly.
Ultimately I didn’t quit architecture until I was not allowed to do it any more… thank heaven for setting me free.
It still took me another few wild turns, but eventually I found my groove.
I have another student whose affect is flat… Flat affect is also an indication that there is something you avoid, that there is something you are not doing. In his case it is changing his mind about himself… that he needs to do.
Now that I am looking, I actually have two flat affect students… In both cases they have something to hide… something they are not willing or not able to take responsibility for… because they cannot see it through their own eyes.
Each and every student of mine has some way of expression, that is on the top of an unexpressed ‘guidance’ of the soul: you are doing the wrong things, you are not being yourself, buddy.
I just finished watching the 10-episode Amazon video, Hunters.
Some of the characters are really well-formed, surprisingly well for an action flick.
I could use it to teach what I am teaching: inauthenticity, split self, the cost of being not true to yourself.
The black FBI agent, the rich leader of the Hunters, the young boy who never knew his parents, or his grandfather. The actor whose father told him that he was nothing.
The couple whose beautiful son… the girl who couldn’t keep his name…
Should you watch it? I don’t know. I don’t think you would see the same movie I saw. It’s been a few days, and I still cry myself to sleep at night.
The most complex character in the movie was Millie, the Black FBI agent… with her conflicting inner and outer drives. Will she ever have the courage to be herself?
Whether you watch it or not, just please know that your strong feelings, anger, sadness, confusion, hesitation, emptiness are guiding feelings, and when you ignore them, you are ignoring guidance.
Of course knowing what the guidance is, you need to know, intimately, the invisible dynamic of reality… the invisible undertow of humans… yours.
If the goal of life is to be yourself, to become your best you can become and do what your best self can do, every little bit of guidance is useful.
Just please learn to interpret them accurately.
If the guidance says: you can do it, please understand that it says: you can learn how to do it. It rarely means you should jump into it with two feet, without a second glance. Life doesn’t work that way.
If your guidance says: you can’t do it… please understand that it says that without learning how to do it, without having a purpose to do it, you won’t do it…
If you guidance says: you are beaten down… it probably says: and if you continue doing what you have been doing, you’ll stay down, no matter how much bombastic self-talk you bring up to dupe yourself. So enjoy being beaten down, use it to see what you have been doing that got you where you are, and design a better way of doing things.
Life gives you experiences not so that you can survive them, but so you can learn from them.
Refuse to learn? You’ll repeat it again, guaranteed.
You see, the problem with 99.99% of humanity is that they can only see the world, themselves, what happens to them from one fixed point: from behind their own eyeballs. Often they assume to see how they effect others, how what they say lands, but the operative word is assume. They are not able to hear themselves, see themselves, from a different vantage point, or points.
Life looks different from different vantage points. If you think you have moved your vantage point, but life doesn’t seem to change, then you didn’t.
My Playground students attempt to do the work of becoming themselves, instead of staying split and torn between two worldviews, through the partner calls.
The core element of the partner calls is telling and looking at incidents, current and past, and looking at them from different directions so the many faces of reality can be seen.
The DNA capacity to do that effectively is called Driftwood, the name Igave it, that allows looking and seeing the same thing but from different directions.
The dead giveaway that the person can’t do it, is that they tell the incident the same way. Same details, same emotions, same everything, they wording, same attitude.
When you look at an incident, a movie, anything that is happening, every person sees it differently, because every person looks at it from a different vantage point, their own.
Then you can look at it through the eyes of ‘god’, the ‘devil’, a saint, an ‘angel’, the director, the cameraman, the writer, the actor, you look at it isolated on the timeline, or you can look at it on a time-continuum, past, present, future. You can look at it from the cockpit of a helicopter. From the vantage point of a mouse. From the vantage point of different cultures. From the vantage point of anything… at will.
Each vantage point will tell a different story… But you, my friend, without the Driftwood capacity, you are stuck with one story… and that is that. The story that defines the way you have been, unhappy, unaccomplished, not loving yourself or life.
After watching the Hunters, I did some work looking at the story from each character’s point of view, my mother’s point of view, the Nazi point of view, Trump’s point of view… That didn’t diminish the grief and the crying, but it made me see that how I saw it is just one singular vantage point of a person who lost their whole family in the Holocaust.
Grieving is important… suppressed: it slowly kills you.
I used the Driftwood capacity…
Want to learn how to do it and then have the DNA capacity activated? Probably not. Probably you are very comfortable being self-righteous that you have been slighted, not loved enough, not given everything that was your due.
But if you dare to risk seeing more than that… the Driftwood capacity is available.
If you dare… you are one in a million…
Go to step 2
