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To learn to come alive… you need to come alive.
To lose your chains, your limitations, your bad habits… you need to play full out without them.
They are all imaginary. They are in language. YOUR language. They are not real chains.
To really learn what you need to learn you need to teach it… Teach it, not teach about it.
You can’t teach what you can’t do
This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I am PLANNING an experimental communication course right now.
Experimental course means that I invent what to do from what is developing.
The course happens, seemingly, in the classroom. But really the course, for it to be real learning, should happen in the participants’ life, between the class sessions and beyond.
Last night I didn’t sleep because I was pondering this. I was talking to an ex teacher of mine in my imagination.
I wanted to know why and how could teaching be more effective with more students actually doing what they learned to do, so they can come alive, so they can have Personal Power, so they can live a life worth living.
When I looked, carefully, I came away with two things I got from the course, that was a year long and cost me to 10 grands.
- 1. You live in a world of your own design… so you better learn to design the life you want!
- 2. Who/what is driving the car that is your life? Are you leaving the driving to circumstances? Can you drive your life really? Can you drive it whiteout? Will you be able to drive it on ice? What will you do if you drive into a lake? These are all parts of knowing to drive.
I looked if it was worth to me ten thousand dollars. Maybe. Maybe not.
What makes a course worth it?
Maybe it’s not knowledge. Maybe it’s aliveness… More space to play, more space to be alive.
When I looked at the year long course, and the number of hours I invested in it, what I so that what I got, what I was left with was meager. I cried. It wasn’t that it wasn’t taught… it’s that I didn’t learn it.
Why didn’t I get more out of the course? Who or what is to blame?
Maybe because the technology of the course did not translate to life for me?
The course was intellectual and visual.
I am neither.
Things don’t have any real use for ANYONE unless they are kinesthetic.
Unless THEY can act it out with sound and fury… lol.
Acting it out on the Tree of Life. Experimenting. Giving it voice. And giving it shape. Giving it rhythm. Giving it life. Psychodrama.
Especially moves in communication..
The most important thing I didn’t get when I was IN the course: shifting out of a role… in a conversation.
Or more precisely, the spaces where I am the mother, or where I am the father… The roles inside those spaces. The spaces that limit what can be said and how, what can be understood and how. Those spaces that limit joy, freedom, and expression.
If you watch people, especially children, they behave differently with different people. With their father they won’t joke, they won’t make faces. It is not safe.
With their mother they act demanding, condescending, or vying for protection.
With their playmates they act silly, competitive, very different.
The relationship defines the space inside which the behavior happens.
I wasn’t able to see the roles I play until I tried to teach what I’d never learned well myself. Until I gave little skit assignments to my experimental course. Until I showed them how it’s done… with my voice, my laughter…
I probably would have done a lot of pantomime, and dancing, and somersaults, if it were a live course where we all gather at one location. I have done courses like that, and boy, I can yell, I can dance, I can drop dead, I can fight… The me I need to honor is rambunctious, and childlike.
Skits, like: Tell your girl friend you want to break up.
Tell her from the role of a nurturing mother. Now tell her from the role of a friend. Now tell her as an admirer.
Identify the space… and your role.
Tell your customer that unless they comply with your rules, you fire them… lol.
Tell your clients that you are the boss that is why you are paid the big bucks… and although you have a lot of room for them to be assholes their best bet is to listen to your advice if they want to get their money’s worth.
Sound and fury… All the scenes were dramatically different, and I felt myself coming alive.
Suddenly the concepts leaped off from the intellectual plane, and became real.
Real life is not concepts, real life doesn’t happen flat and theoretic, real life is blood, sweat and tears, dangerous, and joyful.
Recognize, evaluate and shift if necessary. And shift again if necessary. And again… until communication starts working. Until life starts working.
Understanding (in this realm, in the realm of real life) is definitely a booby prize… understanding won’t help anyone but your mind. And nothing life-like will ever come out of the mind.
This is a life-thing… You needs to experiment with, play it out, and practice it.
Life came to everyone without a manual, and…
…all the books and all the articles in the land won’t help someone who is not willing or not able to put them on the stage of life and see if it works.
Experimenting.
My job, as the coach, is to provide participants what I didn’t get in any of those goddamn expensive courses… guiding the practice. So they can FEEL and EXPERIENCE life surging through them. So they can SEE if it works.
The opportunity to Recognize, evaluate and shift if necessary. And shift again if necessary. And again… until communication starts working. Until life starts working.
You didn’t, can’t get it in regular courses. Not even in the courses that were teaching something to do, like leading an introductory session…
Only those who were already good at leading classes won. Those who had years of practice to find out who to be in front of people, how to look in their eyes, how to take your attention off yourself.
Or, when I look back at my architecture school years, only the people who already knew how to do the basics won. The rest of us never had a chance to really practice… we were thrown into deep water without knowing what it feels like to swim…
People like me… I did not win so much.
The most cherished parts of my life are the parts where I can experiment. Where I can dance and make mistakes. The parts where I can express with my body, my voice, my laughter. Where I can be the child again: nothing is sacred, nothing is out of bounds, it is all experimentation.
This course, the one I was leading, has produced unexpected results for me in that I find myself irresistibly funny, and also noticing funny everywhere. I laugh out loud ten-twenty times a day.
Fun, laughing, mocking, punning are all kinesthetic activities, and I am coming alive. Crying is kinesthetic too. Talking is kinesthetic. And for me listening is kinesthetic. If and when it isn’t: I don’t hear it. Reading is kinesthetic. Words are kinesthetic. Tree of Life. Alive. In sync. None of that deadness.
I have students living in the house on one side… one of them does a lot of whooping and squealing… I was irritated by it for months, but suddenly I am getting it. He is making sure that in all that bookworm life he is allowing a little bit of life to come in.
Culture, political correctness, has painted us in a corner where being subdued, proper and mute: this is what society seems to want us to be.
No self-expression. Don’t run in the halls. No singing aloud! Don’t laugh so loud! Be proper.
Don’t yell… This is how it’s done…
Life, aliveness dies in you…
But the spirit wants to be alive. So it will do what it can: resist the authority, conspire, and fail it… as it is its last recourse for feeling alive.
You don’t do what you are supposed to do. Even if it is cutting your nose in spite of your face.
Some people actually do the cutting. Others get drunk. Yet others play video games, and refuse to be obedient.
One of my students wrote to me this morning, that keeping her budget is an issue. This doesn’t seem to be connected, but it is… keeping your budget as a child is very painful. Being suppressed. Dominated. Told what to do.
I don’t often find myself in ‘father-child’ or ‘mother-child’ where I am the child. And I make sure I don’t… lol.
Because I don’t do child well. I don’t do obedient well.
It just dawned on me, that when I did find myself in a father child some 20 years ago, I managed to do something absolutely ingenious: I said no to the ‘father’ figure, a class leader, and I declared myself: ‘I am never going to be anything less than magnificent.’
Authority tries to suppress you, authority wants you to be dull.
Your job is to bring creativity and genius to remaining alive with pep…
It is YOUR word that defines who you are, not theirs.
Now, bringing that to keeping the budget may be stretching it, because keeping the budget is boring, and flat.
But living like a king on a pauper’s budget is not boring and not flat.
That is how I live. Like a king. Raucously, flamboyantly, and unsuppressed.
On a pauper’s budget.
My time: ditto.
I decide what’s important and what isn’t, and house cleaning isn’t. Picking up the place isn’t. Answering the phone isn’t. Taking a shower every day isn’t. Getting regular hair cuts isn’t…
I can’t imagine myself lying on my deathbed regretting that my hair wasn’t cut every month… lol.
But that I didn’t dance, didn’t laugh, didn’t joke, didn’t shine… I would regret that.
Find your resistance, find your obedience, find your deadness.
They are your guidance.
Resistance should tell you where YOU haven’t declared yourself. Declaration is not your usual beating yourself up drivel. Declaration is like the Declaration of Independence. It is solemn, and it comes from your core.
Obviously you have never done it… because obedience, deadness, and resistance have been your life. I can see it, I can feel it.
But you can start looking… it all begins with that: looking.
In the 67 step coaching, aka Reclaim your life, we do just that. Looking, and when we see, and when we are ready, we put in tiny changes…
Resistance turned around can be the source of aliveness… Just remember that.
You have your linchpin… the linchpin that holds all that deadness together. I’ll have a complimentary class where we’ll locate your linchpin and maybe even find a communication move to allow you to drop it when it comes back. It will… But if you know how to get rid of it when it does, you can become alive again.
Unless you are in my [communication] group, you won’t get an invitation…
Join the communication group
