Posted by: Edward | May 7, 2009

Simple State Changing

Changing your state is a skill that you can learn. It is composed of three parts, noticing you are in an emotional state which you don’t want to be in, picking a different emotional state, and shifting your attention to the new state.

At first the hardest thing will be noticing that you are in a particular state. One way to work on this is to periodically ask yourself “how do I feel?” Or even “is this the best I could feel now?” If you make it habitual you will naturally find yourself asking these questions when you are in a state that isn’t serving you well.

When you are examining your present state pay attention to your breathing, posture, facial expression, muscular tension, tone of voice, any images in your head, or self talk. Just take a moment to breathe and watch yourself.

Now you can ask yourself “how would I enjoy feeling?” Feel free to give this desired feeling a name. Think about and visualize how you would breathe, hold your body, facial, tone of voice, etc.

Now you can step into the image of your prefered state and simply fake the state. Match the ways you are holding yourself with the ways you would in the state you’d like to be in. Notice how you feel as your feelings shift to fit this new state. Just breath and be in this state for a moment or two. Then go do what ever you need to do, in this state.

 

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Posted in bodywork

Posted by: Edward | April 6, 2009

Four Phase Learning Process

My learning process is based on the assumption that the unconscious processes of the mind do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to learning. To take advantage of this I have crafted a four phase cycle of learning. Those phases are saturate, incubate, systemize and apply. Ideally what you are learning is a skill or topic that is going to come up in your day to day life. This will allow you many opportunities to practice or review your knowledge without a great deal of conscious attention.

Saturation

When you have decided on a skill or subject you dive into it, read as many books or articles on it as possible, spend every available moment practicing or thinking about it. Engage all your senses in it. When I’m saturation a topic I’ll even play related audio files while I sleep. The idea is to flood yourself with the topic from as many angles as possible.

It is a very good idea to take notes during this phase. Because this is an unconscious learning program it may be hard to tell where certain ideas came from down the road. Another reason to take notes is that you are increasing your saturation with the material if you are outputting it in addition to taking it in. The way I suggest you take notes is to cite the book, article or recording and to write down your own idea or comment about it. The literal content that you are referencing will be presupposed in your comment. You integrate material better that you use to form your own thoughts and you can always use the citation to look up the original material later. It is also goo dif you can relate the new material to the ideas of another author or a different subject. Associational richness will help you learn, remember and apply the material.

Incubation

When you just can’t keep up the intensity of saturation, you can stop flooding yourself with the information and trust your unconscious to continue working on it. It helps if you have continued exposure to related ideas or situations in you day to day life but you don’t need to go out of your way to get it. This phase can be very hard for some people because it seems to them that they are doing nothing or being lazy. Experience with this process will make it easier to trust that the unconscious is hard at work without you needing to look over its shoulder. You may notice bits of the material you were saturation slipping out at odd moments, this is a sign that your brain is integrating it for you.

Systemization

A good point to start this phase is if you start having startling new insights about the topic or skill. Alternately you can start when you feel like the matter has been left long enough. It may take some experience to learn the best times to switch phases. Systemizing is a review and polish activity. Write down what you understand about the topic and how its parts relate to each other and to other parts of your life. This is also a time to clean up and simplify your understanding. If you find you have gaps in your knowledge, you can directly study those missing pieces to fit them into the whole. Mind maps are very useful in this phase.

Application

Now that you have reviewed and systemized your knowledge of the topic or skill, you can stop putting direct effort into learning. Instead you should find opportunities to make use of your skill. Ideally you should stay in the application phase until it does not take special effort or attention to make use of your knowledge. Only then should you consider a new saturation phase. Remember that you always have your notes and mind maps to refer back to if you need to.

Bringing it all together

This cycle is a process for lifelong learning and can be repeated and reused with any number of skills. You can even use it to learn more than one skill at the same time if you stagger them and if they are sufficiently different that saturating one skill will not interfere with incubating another. As you gain experience with this cycle you will find that the incubation phase, and sometimes the application phase, will grow longer and longer while the saturation and systemization phases become short intense spikes. The more information you can cram into your brain in the shorter amount to time the less you are able to consciously filter it and the more your unconscious can work with it.

There can be interesting results to this style of learning such as knowing something but not knowing where you learned it. Also, you may find yourself using a knowledge set in an area it isn’t normally applied. Finally, you may become aware of implications that your sources were not aware of. Congratulations, these are new ideas that you can use.

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Posted in coreprinciples

Posted by: Edward | March 23, 2009

Operating Principles for Life

I try not to base my existence around beliefs, or content layer descriptions of reality, rather I find that having a very simple structure for action serves me best. Ultimately life comes down to what you do, not what you believe. So my operating principles are a simple structure to help me choose actions. They are as follows:

What does The Body want?
Can I live with the consequences?
Where do I start?
0-60.

What does The Body want?

Asks you to think about the outcome you want. You take action because you want to rather than because you should. If you should do something but you don’t truly want to, you will not give it your all. I use the wording, “The Body” both to remind myself to take into account bodily desires and as a holistic concept, the sum total of the situation – the body of reality. It might help to think of it this way, the sum total of the universe that you can perceive and conceive exists in your brain and the brain is in The Body. So, What does the body want?

Can I live with the consequences?

This is the most basic system of morality I can conceive. Every action, every choice has consequences. Whether you do what you want or not that choice leads to results. This question asks you to seriously consider possible results of your decisions. Think about the obvious outcomes and about the unknowns. If you can accept full responsibility for the consequences of your actions then you should do them. But if deep down your feelings tell you that you couldn’t live with the consequences of a course of action it isn’t a good action for you. It isn’t really what you want.

Where do I start?

When you know what you want, or why you are acting, and you’ve decided you can live with the consequences, it is time to decide on an action. This question asks you to think about how you will get to your goal and where you are now in relation to it. You don’t need to plan the entire path from where you are now to your goal, often that is impossible in the beginning. Better to pick an action pointing at your target and get going. As your understanding improves you can revisit this question. No matter how close or far from your goal, whenever you take action you are just starting.

0-60.

Now that you know what you want, that you can live with the consequences and where to start, START. This principle isn’t a question as you’ve already answered the necessary questions, this is a suggestion in how to proceed. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Once you know what action you are taking, focus on it and throw yourself into the activity. If you are taking action towards something that you truly want there is no point in doing it half-assed.

Putting it all together

These operating principles are nested, each one rests on the one above it. If you get stuck in the action phase of 0-60 or you complete the action, go back up and ask, “Where do I start?” If you find you have emotional resistance to what you are doing, check it against, “can I live with the consequences?” If you find yourself unmotivated or you’ve reached your goal, it is time to reconnect with, “What does The Body want?”

I hope these principles serve you as well as they serve me.

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Posted in cybernetics

Posted by: Edward | February 12, 2009

Void the Warranty

You don’t truly own something until you’ve broken it a few times. Until you’ve voided the warranty by taking it apart to see how it works and putting it back together again and having a few extra parts left over that you keep in a jar by the microwave.

Do you own…
…What you own?
…Your relationships?
…Your Life?
…Your Self?

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Posted in Coaching

Posted by: Edward | February 7, 2009

Five Minute Life Coach

What would you do if you didn’t have to do anything?

What would you do if time, money and talent didn’t matter?

Take that list and list just the verbs. For example, “Sing in a Band” becomes “sing.”

How many of those verbs do you do now?

How many of them could you do right now, if you just went and did them?

Go do them.

You can figure out the rest later.

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Posted in Coaching

Posted by: Edward | January 22, 2009

Journey from Jung to Tao

I became a Taoist by accident. I suppose I was exposed to the ideas years ago but I hadn’t thought about them seriously in years. What I had been studying was Jungian psychology and the phenomena of synchronicity. What follows is an overview of the evolution in my thinking over the last year.

I engage with synchronicity to a rather extreme degree. At this point I would actually have trouble making decisions without it. In my engagement with it I came to the conclusion that these synchronous occurances weren’t separate but interconnected into a web structure. More importantly these occurrences seemed to have distinct intentions in terms of my actions and my life. If I was following the promptings of these meaningful coincidences things went almost ridiculously in my favour but if I did the contrary, well… My friend and I made a saying to explain it. “One should not attempt to leave the synchrotrain whilst it is in motion.”

We also noticed that the patterns we were subject to related to the hero’s journey or monomyth. What we called jumping from the synchrotrain Joseph Campbell had called rejecting the call. The intention of synchronicity distinctly seemed to be that I engage with my mythic story and work on becoming who I am, individuation. It was shortly after recognizing similarities between the hero’s journey and the synchronicity experience that I began sweeping life changes that have only intensified in the year since. I am shocked at how different I am from who I was even four months ago let along a whole year.

I got more into Jungian psychology reading about how he structured the psyche, how libidinal investment works, and what roles the main archetypes play. Unfortunately Jung was not very systematic in the presentation of his ideas. He was more like an explorer in the land of the mind, describing things as he encountered them. The best book I’ve yet found on his ideas is The Jung Lexicon by Daryl Sharp, which lists key concepts and defines them using excerpts of Jung’s own words. A little work on my part to understand the connections between concepts has given me an understanding of Jung’s thought that I am quite happy with.

Analyzing situations in terms of Jung’s style of libidinal investment, as opposed to say Freud’s, and using the myers-briggs typology system based on Jung’s work lead to me making quite a number of stunningly accurate predictions about people’s behaviour. I noticed also that the symbolic communication of synchronicity and the investment analysis told me the same things. I came to the conclusion that they were both ways of looking at the same underlying structure. That there was a sort of internet structure of unconscious communication of libidinal investments and their archetypal expressions underlying our experiences and leading to the irruptions of meaning we label synchronicity. I called this structure the infranet, stealing a term from comic book writer Grant Morrison.

I lived by this combination of accelerating self growth and understanding of others, trying to stay on the path indicated by the “synchrotrain.” Over time I noticed a kind of pulsing in the flow of events. Sometimes I was really going and things happened with ease and other times there just didn’t seem to be any energy to get anything done. After observing this pattern for a while, I started to call it ebb and flow. I realized that in addition to the situation conditions of ebb and flow, I had a choice of attitudes of action centering and extending, which were terms I borrowed from Aikido. I found that when things were in a flow condition I was best served by an attitude of extending or going with the flow. When things were in an ebb condition an attitude of center was most effective, conserving and concentrating my energy.

After practicing matching my attitude to the conditions for a while, I began to realize that I could feel ebb turning into flow and flow turning into ebb. Ebb turning and flow turning gave rise to two new attitudes, willing and setting. This gives us a four phase and cycle of action: willing, extending, setting and centering. When ebb turns into flow is when willing the direction that you will extend in will be the most effective. When flow is turning into ebb it is time to set or solidify your gains rather than pouring more energy into achieving more. The system of the I ching also has these four phases.

It was shortly after this point that I realized that at any given moment the conditions could be described in terms of three ebb or flow conditions. There was the condition of the moment, the condition of the day and of the period. The period length shifts around a bit but it seems to hover somewhere between a week and a month. I realized that my personal model had a high degree of overlap with the trigrams of the I ching. This lead to me doing some rereading of Taoist texts. I discovered that between my ebb/flow observations and my intuitive interactions with synchronicity my personal model was essentially Taoist. For that matter so was Jung’s.

I’ve since been getting into Taoist internal alchemy which syncs up nicely with the ideas of Wilhelm Reich and I’m beginning to see how the ideas of Reich and Jung can be reconciled, a project I’ve been interested in for at least a year.

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Posted in jung, taoism

Posted by: Edward | November 14, 2008

Introduction to Dream Work

Dreams are a fascinating phenomenon. They’ve intrigued psychologists as long as its been possible to call people psychologists. Before that they bewildered mystics, priests, shamans and soothsayers. I’ll be honest my own treatment of dreams owes nearly as much to the shamans as it does to the psychologists. I see dreams as a window into the unconscious processes that do the bulk of our mental work largely outside of our awareness. I see dreams as a particularly intense phase of pattern recognition software sorting through sensory experience that we normally filter out of our experience of reality. The dream process throws sensory remix on the internal screen and works out the patterns with narrative analogs or higher order metaphors. These unconscious pattern processes are further narratized by the presence of the low level dream consciousness which needs a story structure to understand the goings on.

Making Use of your Dreams

Now, all of this mental work isn’t going to waste if we don’t remember it. The dreams are helping us learn new skills and understand things that will surface later as intuitions or emotional reactions to situations. If we forget our dreams though we are missing an opportunity to find out what the rest of mind is concerned with ahead of schedule. This is one reason why dreams are often related to being able to see the future. Your dreams can point out things you don’t know you know yet, including projections of how things are going to go in the near future. We have an opportunity to look in on our unconscious processing phase when normally we only see its output, the intuitions and emotions. This can give us insight into whey we are having various emotional reactions we didn’t understand before. It can also allow us to alter what we pay attention to consciously to feed the processes different information. We also have the opportunity to alter those unconscious processes. Just by paying attention to our dreams they will start to shift. It’s like the observer effect in quantum science. The fact that you are paying attention to you dreams means your dreams get a larger stake in the data that the dream take part in processing. If you want to take advantage of these opportunities there are three basic practices you could institute in your life. These are keeping a dream journal, interpreting your dreams and incubating your dreams.

Keep a Dream Journal

Keeping a dream journal is the easiest and probably the most important of the three. Store a recording device such as a pen and notebook or an audio recorder within easy reaching distance of where you sleep. Then simply record whatever you remember when you wake from a dream. Try to move as little as possible when reaching for the journal as maintaining your sleeping posture makes it easier to hold onto the dream memory until you start recording. In order to strengthen the habit, you should record even if you wake in the middle of the night and even if you don’t remember the dream. When recording the dream, stick as close as possible to the sensory details of the dream, try not to interpret at this point as it tends to distort the memories. If using pen and paper feel free to draw things from the dream. After you’ve exhausted the dream memory then you can put down some of your thoughts about the dream. I suggest that you put down a three word tag that you feel sums up the feeling town of the dream. Record date and time as well.

Interpret your Dreams

Once you have developed the habit of keeping a dream journal the next practice to work on is dream interpretation. It helps to look across several dreams for patterns. Look for recurring images, themes, characters. Try to take the dream at face value first. then look for ways to relate it to your day to day life. Look for dream situations that remind you of things in your normal life. You can write down your dream interpretations on facing pages in your dream journal if you only write/draw dreams on one side of the pages. I also suggest that you start a personal dream dictionary for recurring symbols starting at the end of the dream book. Organizing it in this way can make the dream book a potent tool for self exploration. Make sure you take your interpretation and self insights and apply them in your life.

Incubate your Dreams

The third practice is called dream incubation. Dream incubation is when you load your dreaming mind with a topic or subject to work on. If you’ve established the prior two practices then you’ve got a solid basis to start incubating specific subjects into your dream processes. The basic practice of incubation is to choose something you want to dream about or work out with your unconscious and to concentrate on it before bed. I like to do a brief meditation session and then declare what I want to work on that night. If you pray it is reasonable to pray to dream about what you want to work on, In fact, many religions have specific prayers for this purpose. It can help if you make the declaration rhythmic and rhyming and highly sensory as this makes the idea easier to remember. It can also help to relate your topic to personal symbols from your dream dictionary in the back of your dream journal. The next morning try to interpret your dreams in terms of what you incubated. Don’t be surprised if it takes you some time to get dreams that make sense to you in terms of what you incubated as you are training your mind to include consciousness in a feedback loop that you’ve not included consciousness in before. And if you can’t remember the dreams you’ve incubated, don’t worry, your unconscious is working on it anyways.

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Posted in jung

Posted by: Edward | October 29, 2008

Becoming Sensitive to Ourselves

Its funny the day to day ebb and flow of energy and feeling that dictates our lives. If we are aware of the waveform then we know to push when its pushing time and collect and center when its ebbing. Today I’m tight and centered, this is a position to move from. Yesterday I was low ebb and distracted, that was a time to collect and center. After a push, successful or otherwise, your energy is loose and dispersed. You need to collect and center it so that when you move again it can be a focused beam not an unorganized dissipation. If we synchronize this personal rhythm with larger ebb flow patterns we will be much more powerful.

One should work on developing sensitivity to the subtle signals our body sends us. Whether its the feeling we get telling us that this posture is hurting us, the little voice warning us about danger or the gut feeling telling us to go for it. Being aware of those signals and learning to understand what they mean is a key to unlocking a vast pool of intelligence you already have but haven’t been applying effectively. The more you attend these little feelings and quiet voices, the clearer they will be.

These little feelings and quiet voices are unconscious processes sending their output, the information they’ve already processed, to consciousness so that you can incorporate them into your decisions and actions. Your brain has already done the work of thinking about these what your conscious self’s job is here is to make sure that this part of the processing gets included in the decision making. Otherwise you aren’t using some intelligence that you already have. It’s like running a business and setting up and paying for a research department and then ignoring their reports just because the research department head has a quiet voice.

Given that you have this research staff working for you can always push them to research things you are concerned about. When you feel those feelings or here those voices, ask about what you need help with. You might not get an answer right away but over time your unconscious processes will learn to give you more information about the kind of things you ask them about. I suggest one of the main things we could work to be more sensitive to is the ebb and flowing of our own energy levels and whether the environment is favoring bold action or centering and collecting of our energies.

When the time is right and the quiet voices and gut feelings are telling you to…

GO FOR IT.

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Posted in taoism

Posted by: Edward | October 27, 2008

Building Accomplishment Machines

I recently did a personal inventory that I do periodically and was amused to discover that the segment of my life I had the most sorted out was my exercise regime. I shouldn’t have been surprised given how much effort I’ve put into that aspect of my life over the last year but it is contrary to the image I (and others) have of me.

I’ve worked very hard to get the results I’m seeing in that aspect of my life and it is so rational, easy to see, how the effort leads to results. The activity is intrinsically rewarded with increased energy and endorphins. It is also directly tied to very powerful drives. That is how you build a machine, or personal program, that works.

So how do I link together other pieces of my life to form similarly powerful mechanism? My writing, not book production but the writing itself, is organized in a similar fashion with the coffeeshop, notebooks, word tracking, blog and blog stats. I’m gathering the pieces to build another one with the toastmasters, NLP and consulting components. Once I have them I’ll need to be on the lookout for other components, arrangements, drives, rewards and rituals which are needed to construct a machine out of it.

You can take aspects of your life and with slight adjustment of how you do them and how you fit the peices together, you can build them into accomplishment machines as well.

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Posted in Coaching, Deleuze, habits, little tricks, NLP

Posted by: Edward | October 22, 2008

Acts of Power

There are certain actions that I take in my life that leave me more powerful than I was before I took them. No matter how low ebb I’m feeling these will improve the situation.

One of these is simply writing about the situation. It helps me put it in perspective, separate myself from negative feelings and generate insights towards resolving the situation. Even when it does nothing else, it is taking action which shifts the attention into an active focus.

This is an act of power for me so its value for you is less certain but you can find your own acts of power. Reflect on what things that you do leave you stronger, smarter and happier. Maybe its going for a walk or talking with someone you care about.

Whatever your acts of power are, see if you can do them more often. If you find yourself at low ebb, pick the act of power most appropriate to the situation, or just the easiest to do, and do it.

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Posted in Coaching, little tricks, taoism

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