Playing with smack-talk

Posted on June 12, 2010 by Josh

In the physiology tracking arena open to us in play are many areas where we’ve experienced trauma in our lives – whether that’s negative emotions or feelings, or physical trauma.

An emotionally sensitive place that many of us may be familiar with is trash-talk on the playground or in sport.

While it occurs, and many folks approach it from the perspective of – “why is the other person trash-talking…maybe they’re insecure/abused/etc.” – I prefer to take a different tack.

Specifically, what is happening inside you when someone talks smack to you? How are you reacting? What does that represent for you?

For some of us, talking smack was just part of the experience. It’s nothing weird, or out of the ordinary. Sometimes it results in fist fights or hurt feelings, other times in heightened aggressiveness in the game or nothing at all.

For others, it was anything from insulting and aggravating, to a deeply humiliating experience.

Many people may have experienced both feelings at different times and in different situations.

The Bard of Trash-Talk

Some of the experience has to do with our own perceived level of competence (or lack thereof) in the game being played. Some of it has to do with simple social dynamics – not wanting to feel less powerful than another person. Some still to do with our level of commitment or connection to the game – if we’re not invested in it, it doesn’t really matter.

But none of that has anything to do with how we experience those feelings, and how we use that emotional energy to get what we really want out of the game.

Instead, most of us in life fall prey to those feelings. Yes, the other person triggers them, but once they are in us, they are our responsibility.

So how do you do that?

This is a little biased, but I think play is an excellent way to confront these feelings, to work into them, to acknowledge them as part of ourselves, and then to find a way to use them to get what we want from the game.

Try playing “the smack-talk game.” In this game, we play whatever other game we want, but when one person “loses” the other person rags on them relentlessly.

Just as with any other game, communication is key. Both parties need to be able to say “a little less rough,” or “a little more rough,” if their partner/opponent is not giving them what they need to grow.

There should also be a way to call timeout or uncle, if things get too crazy. These rules should be stated up front and agreed upon.

As with all games, once the players have bowed in, everything from there on out is play. It is supportive, aimed at learning and growth, and done in the spirit of wanting to continue the play.

Your momma sucks eggs!

Suffer the Wound of Love

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Josh

When I was younger, I always associated “love” with the feeling of sexual passion – the intense desire, the suffering in that desire, the longing…and the consummation of that longing and desire.

For a while, “love” was just my addiction to the chemical “squirt” in my body that I felt in moments of passion.

Now, love means much more to me. It isn’t an instantaneous thing, but a process. Love is still passion, still that desire/fire, but it is also the process of suffering the wound of separation…remaining within yourself, appreciating the other person’s path as their own, and not interfering…loving them from “so close, yet so far away.”

Or, updated a bit…

This recent article in Parade – A Connecting Flight – sums up part of this so well, I had to post it. Please read it, I think it’s worthwhile.

We often forget, in moments or relationships, in that wonderful gush of chemicals flooding our body, that there is another person, another individual, there with us. Or that we are an individual person, with our own history, issues, joys, and desires – that all are only, ultimately, experienced by us alone.

And what happens when that high wears off? When we become used to the presence of that cocktail in our system?

No one else feels what you feel. We agree on meanings of words, and approximate agreement on what we’re feeling inside by using those words…but it’s only ever an approximation.

No one ever feels what you feel. And you never feel what someone else feels.

To try to even get close requires so much space, so much observation, so much silence, and listening, that most of us never get there. But that’s what love really is…the attempt to get there. The attempt to give that much space, observation, silence, listening, care, facilitation, whatever you want to call it…

We’re so busy with our lives, with our own feelings, and our ideas of what the other person may be living or feeling, that we rarely clear space to see if we can really experience that connection.

In the article above, it often only hits us, as with so many things in life, too late. Or, if we’re lucky, when we meet someone who can wake us up to that.

Part of the goal of “physiology tracking” is knowing your own physiological responses to things, so you can see those in others. So you don’t have to rely on words – which are never good enough.

But to track, you have to be silent. You have to be careful. You have to clear your mind of opinions, and let the signs guide you.

Another goal of physiology tracking is to stay true to yourself. Only if you know yourself, your physiology, can you be aware enough to keep it in check when it threatens to overrun you, or allow it to overrun you when you most need or want it to.

Learn to be a tracker.

Desire, as my Sensei, Mick Dodge says, is Fire – it is an ember within you, and you have to carry and protect it, to tend to it, like a fire bundle, and to stoke it into life.

The rhythmic process of the rise and fall of desire/fire can be encouraged. And then it becomes a relationship with yourself, a new lens through which to see things, a new way to experience different dimensions of “reality.”

Part of love is respecting the other person’s path, their full path – the place where their desire ebbs and flows – as the thing that you loved, inseparable from the rest, and the thing that you love now.

Even if it’s the pair of slippers you trip over every day.

But to feel this, you have to agree to suffer the wound of love, the suffering (which is what “passion” really means, by the way) of the whole person of the other, of the realization that the other is complete, and you are too, and you embrace it all.

It’s not all internal…

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Josh

I got a couple of comments on my last two posts from readers who asked me if I thought all events are really just internal.

I didn’t mean for it to come across that way, so please allow a little clarification.

While I think that our reactions are internal, and that those reactions can offer us a lot of insight into ourselves, what triggers those reactions – the “external” world – is very real.

I suppose the main thrust of what I was trying to say is that, if your reaction to something outside of you is very strong – for instance, you love it, or you hate it – it’s reflecting not just the nature of that outside thing, but also a lot about your own inner state. Also, if you hold onto that feeling, without seeing it as part of your own process, and without letting it continue to be a process, and continue to grow and change, you lose a lot.

So that’s not to say that the external entity isn’t really lovely (or hateful), or that you don’t really love (or hate) it, just that, it seems to me a lot of times we latch onto things – either the external “thing” (that is really an ongoing process), or our own emotion – without either allowing it to continue evolving or growing, or without tracing its source within ourselves.

Sometimes, we put so much emphasis on the external causing our emotions, that we forget to get in touch with them within ourselves. Other times we feel so strongly about the external thing that we hold onto it tightly and smother it (the source of the saying – “if you love something, set it free”).

Then, when the external situation changes and you’re still attached to it as “the thing that makes me feel xyz way” you stop growing, you’re stagnant. You’re attached to a static idea of something that, like the river, is always changing. And you’re also keeping that external thing locked into that way that you see it.

“Setting it free” you can allow the relationship between you and that external reality to continue to grow.

It’s like a garden. If you restrict everything to certain spots, you will miss out on where certain plants grow the best, due to slight differences in soil or water in different parts of the plot. If you just let everything go, it will look crazy, weeds will sprout up, and eventually you can’t really call it a “garden” anymore. But if you allow the plants to find their own place, and foster their development, your development expands as well. You’ve learned to work with, instead of on or in, your garden. It becomes more and more a piece of you, and you of it.

Suffering isn’t bad. Often you have to suffer the wound in order to receive fully the gift of the experience. That path is a multi-directional one, though. It is external, in the processes you’re attached to, and it is internal, in the path only you can know. So try to be in touch with both (or all) of the directions or dimensions your emotions are reflecting. Cultivate your relationships with the “outside” world as you would a garden. Become part of the process, and the “suffering” seems to fade a little bit, because the life of the plants, and their beauty, begins to sustain you just as you cultivate it.

Hope that makes it a little clearer…and not more confusing! Hahaha!

Happiness withdrawal…

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Josh

Here’s a great way to experience what I like to call “physiology tracking.”

The next time you go visit friends, and have some good times for a while, pay attention to your physiology. There is a chemical composition of “happiness” or “joy” happening inside you during that time.

But the time you might notice the effect the most is afterward, when you go through chemical withdrawal.

Some people will call this “sadness” or “feeling blue,” and it is…but it is also “happiness withdrawal.”

The symptoms will be the same as any kind of withdrawal. What will you feel? A lack, as if something is missing. Maybe you’ll notice how much/little of that feeling you had before. That, at least, can help to determine in part how powerful the withdrawal might be – a marker of how much you’ll crave that feeling.

You might notice, upon reflection, that the feeling of withdrawal means that you aren’t feeling that enough in your life…happiness. You might need to figure that out.

If that is the case, the withdrawal feeling points to something we’ve excluded from our lives. Why has it been blocked out?

In that way, withdrawal can help to point us in the direction we want to go (or don’t want to go!). It can serve as a homing beacon (come closer).

Perhaps a lighthouse is a better analogy…it signals both potential safety and potential danger – the shoreline is here, you are safe!… or…the shorelines is here, watch out! dangerous rocks!

In either case, this is the place where you can sublimate your withdrawal into wisdom and action.

The “internal alchemy” here is to follow the feeling of loss or lack…to stick with it, and to track it well. Find what it points to within you, and meet it face to face.

Most “indigenous” cultures have methods for doing this that often involve dancing, singing, playing, (and sometimes, drugs) that allow the tracker to pursue more deeply, free from inhibition.

I think you’ll get plenty deep without the drugs, so try it that way first…but it’s almost always fruitful at some point to take your feeling out into motion in the world. Run, feel your breathing, and use your feeling of withdrawal as your mantra, your training device/guide. Keep it right in front of you. Let it tell you where to go, how far/fast, how many repetitions, and keep pursuing it more and more deeply…listen…listen…

Good luck.