The Veils Parted, then Snapped Shut!

Before I knew anything about the Enneagram I was coaching the head of a nonprofit agency in Cincinnati (let's call him "Brad"). After interviewing his staff and board members, I shared their feedback with him. The short version:

"According to your staff and members of the board, you're highly entrepreneurial, with a strong drive, and you're a masterful networker, building support for your organization's goals with the board and with influential members of the community. But your focus is perhaps too much on being 'Mr. Outside.' Your staff says you're not involved enough in the day-to-day, nuts and bolts aspects of running the organization, and they have a strong desire to build more teamwork. While consensus is a stated organizational value, they describe you as persuading people to do things your way in what is only apparently a consensus-building process."

"Why, that's exactly my profile on the Enneagram!" he replied. "Style Three." 

I was blown away by this response because, serendipitously, only the day before I'd received Helen Palmer's The Enneagram in the mail, mistakenly ordered instead of the book on genograms I was researching. Had Brad not made this connection I would have sent the book back to the publisher. Instead, I decided to read it so I could speak a language familiar to him.

That Saturday morning I sat in bed and opened Palmer's book. Her description of style Three's patterns gave me such insight into Brad's personality I decided to read more, starting with Enneagram style One, and to figure out my own. All had characteristics I could relate to, and I was beginning to give up on identifying myself. Finally, I made my way to style Nine.

As I read, I fell into an intuitive state of knowing: You're on to something big!  Every molecule of my body was tingling with the sense of veils parting, something I'd needed to know that had been standing slightly behind me, waiting to be seen. And here it was!

Underlining style Nine's mediator qualities, I thought, My whole consulting career has succeeded because of my skill in resolving other people's conflicts. I've used my gift in a positive way, but it's been reinforced so much, I've failed to look at my personal avoidance of conflict. I've been too busy helping other people not make waves! Continuing, I became excited to learn about this personality style's distractibility. This is so important to me. I'm going to go make a pot of coffee and spend the entire day reading about this wonderful system.

I wandered toward the kitchen, but in the hall on the way noticed a pile of dirty clothes I'd set out to wash, so I made a trip to the laundry room. When I returned to the hall I realized I hadn't started the coffee, but on my way to the kitchen saw the telephone and remembered I hadn't called my Mom in a week, so while the coffee was brewing I called her and we talked for almost an hour. The veil had snapped shut! 

As I sipped my third or fourth cup of coffee I walked around my condo, trying to decide what to do with the rest of the day.  

First, I'll get dressed.

There in my bedroom I saw Palmer's book lying on my bed where I'd left it more than an hour earlier, and again the veils parted.  

Not only had I been given a new vision of my gifts, I'd experienced a prime example of the ego-state that had held me captive -- distracting myself from the most important of my own agendas, to find myself behind the programmed patterns.

We'll See

"Such bad luck," said the villagers when a farmer's horse ran away.

"We'll see," replied the farmer.

When his horse returned with three other wild horses, they exclaimed "How wonderful!"

"We'll see," he said.

Then his son was thrown while trying to ride one of the untamed horses and broke his leg, The villagers, of course, offered their sympathy.

"We'll see," said the farmer.

Because of his broken leg, the son was passed by when military officials came to draft young men into the army.

Responding to the villagers' congratulations on his good fortune, the farmer replied, "We'll see."

This Taoist tale came to mind when one of my clients expressed frustration with the lack of growth in his business. "I might have to get a job," he said. "Horrible!"

His anxieties brought to mind my own concerns early in my career. Seeking a logical solution may be helpful to some, but the failure of logic can be a cue to access your intuition. Maybe you'll only feel a nudge ("Something feels right about this, though I'm not sure why"). I've learned, even with experience that seemed at the time to be a failure, how important it is to keep your vision intact. Here are several examples from my own career: 

After completing my PhD at age 42, I quit the job that had carried me through the final years of graduate school (during a decade of post-divorce single parenting) because I got angry at my boss. I naively thought I could create my own consulting business but barely managed to squeak by for almost nine months and finally reached the point where I couldn't pay the rent. I was getting desperate when a friend called. One of his former students worked for Shillito's Department Store's HR Department, and they were looking for an internal training consultant. The salary was barely a living wage, I regretted having to bypass my vision of independent consulting, but I had no other options.

We'll see.
 
Among other duties at Shillito's, I was responsible for sales training -- a real stretch for me as I was shy and extremely self-conscious in front of a group. During my time there, I also worked on a project for the Director of Executive Development from the parent company Federated Department Stores (FDS), only a block away in downtown Cincinnati. He wanted a project quicky summarized in writing and I was confident about my writing skills so I'd volunteered.

Three years into the Shillito's job, I was offered a job by a friend for twice as much as my current salary, working as an educational consultant with a software technology firm. I left Shillito's feeling somewhat disloyal, but I was barely making ends meet and couldn't turn down the extra income.

We'll see.

Three months after that, out of the blue, the FDS Director whose writing project I'd completed offered me a corporate OD job that again doubled my income. He said internal policies were such that I would not have been a candidate for that job if I hadn't left Shillito's.

In the corporate OD role, I gained experience coaching senior executives in Federated's many retail companies who were being primed for key positions in company leadership. Again, a big stretch for me, not only to overcome my shyness, but learning to deal with the resistance of executives who resented me in my corporate role. Four years later, FDS was bought in a hostile takeover and their OD department eliminated. The severance pay was enough to live on for at least six months, but I had just turned 50 years old, and didn't see any opportunities in my future. 

We'll see.

A week later the Senior Vice President of Human Resources for CSX Corporation hired me as a private consultant for senior executive development in their subsidiary companies. I negotiated a contract with CSX that took me all over the U.S., yet left time to develop other business. I would not have known how to close that deal had I not had the sales training experience. And I'd not have been approached by the CSX HR person except for my work with Federated's executive development methodology, which he'd adopted for his corporation. Again, I would be sent from a corporate office to "help" individual company executives, but I now had the training and experience to quickly develop their trust.

In the early stages of my new career as an organization consultant, a Cincinnati client introduced me to the Enneagram, which he'd learned in a spiritual retreat with Richard Rohr. Fascinated with how this model gave me useful insights into my clients' patterns, I started asking my clients if they'd "barter" a couple of hours with me--I'd work free for two hours if they'd tell me their stories and help me learn the Enneagram in depth.  I eventually taught it to all of them and their teams, taking extensive notes. This was early in the Enneagram's development beyond a small group of seekers, and no one was yet writing about its applications in business settings.

Intrigued by a request for articles on business applications from Clarence Thompson, then editor of The Enneagram Educator, I contacted him, he was interested, and my articles began appearing in The Enneagram Educator. I was exhausted from all the travel required by my coaching business and my second marriage was sinking, so I retired, started a web site, and focused on writing.

We'll see. 

When that marriage ended, I had enough retirement income to live on and was free to move to Florida to be near my family, but I was devastated emotionally and not paying attention to my investments . . . until the high-tech market crash and no more retirement income!

We'll see.

This was a few years after Coach U had become well-known, and the word "coaching" had become part of business vocabulary. In another development that would serve me well, though no effort of my own, other coaches had made coaching by phone a popular option. The Enneagram was also becoming more popular, and now I was one of the few with experience in both coaching and the Enneagram.

Meanwhile, Clarence had not only begun publishing my articles--he'd become a dear friend and eventually my co-author of Out of the Box Coaching with the Enneagram, the first Enneagram coaching book published. On the strength of our book and riding the waves of Enneagram popularity and phone coaching as an option to extensive travel, I began to build a phone coaching business, even though I was now in my mid-sixties!

I could not have predicted or planned for the wavering trajectory of disappointments and opportunities that fulfilled my vision of having my own business, but on a scale of much greater experience and learning. Nor could I have known that path would eventually lead me into happily coaching by phone with clients all over the world until I was 82 years old.

I'm now in my second year of a diagnosis of autoimmune disease that's attacked my lungs, and living quietly tethered to an oxygen tank, not knowing how long I have to live or what my quality of life will be. 

We'll see.

Open Will, Open Heart, Open Mind

In his book Keys to the Enneagram: How to Unlock the Highest Potential of Every Personality Type, A.H. Almaas writes about "a Fourth Way approach of bringing the full intelligence of the centers to whatever phenomenon [arises] in our consciousness." 

Inviting awakening from the gut, heart, and head centers entails "grounded presence, openheartedness, and a willingness to experience with an open, receptive quality of mind." 

This is ancient knowledge that Enneagram enthusiasts too often miss in focusing overmuch on the nine "types" or ego ideals.

Otto Scharmer has shown a parallel between opening the will, heart, and mind with seven sacred teachings from an aboriginal community — bravery/courage, respect/love, humility/honesty/truth:

• bravery/courage (open will: relaxing into the unknown vs. fear),
  
• respect and love (open heart: compassion vs. cynicism),
• humility/honesty/truth (open mind: curiosity vs. judgment).

"K" is for Krishnamurti

The devil and a friend were walking down the street, when they saw a man stoop to pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket.

The friend said to the devil, "What did that man pick up?"

"He picked up a piece of the truth," said the devil.

"That's a very bad business for you, then," said his friend.

"Not at all," the devil replied, "I'm going to help him organize it."

This was a favorite story of Jiddu Krishnamurti, fondly remembered as "K" by community members of the Krishnamurti Centre in England, where I worked as a co-op for two weeks several years ago.

K maintained that "Truth, being limitless... unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized, nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path."

Imagine the paradox Krishnamurti then faced: trying to teach the unteachable. He came to this pathless path years after being "discovered" in adolescence by leaders of the Theosophical Society and groomed to be the World Leader of what later became the Order of the Star.

After experiencing his own process, a state of clarity I would call presence, he realized he could only embody the teaching by not being a leader. His proclamation met with dismay within the Order, but to me is the ultimate example of "walking the talk":

"I do not know how many thousands throughout the world -- members of the Order -- have been preparing for me for eighteen years, and yet now they are not willing to listen unconditionally, wholly, to what I say... You use a typewriter to write letters, but you do not put it on an altar and worship it." (Proclaimed leader in 1912, disbanded the Order in 1929).

Krishnamurti frequently claimed that the great religious teachers had come not to found religions but to destroy them, and throughout his life he asked questions of his audience to lead them toward discovering the path within themselves. 

"In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give either the key or the door to open, except yourself."

Accessing A Meditative State of Mind Through Art

Many of us have heard about the benefits of meditation, but sometimes find it hard to do. Fewer of us know about the profound benefits of artistic expression. Creating art, however, is another way to access a meditative state of mind and the profound healing it brings. Maia Gambis, "Why making art is the new meditation," The Washington Post,  25, 2015

Nancy Bell Scott

I've come upon a most fascinating centering practice. I'd been painting with oils for most of a decade, then experimenting with acrylics and abstract painting, but always especially drawn to the interaction of arts--ekphrastic poetry, for example (poems written in response to visual art), found poetry (a collage of words that refashion existing texts), and art that uses words as part of the design, such as Kenneth Patchen's work.

Several years ago I discovered asemic writing in art, though Sam Roxas-Chua's Echolalia in Script: A Collection of Asemic Writing and the work of Nancy Bell Scott.

I'd also been following Jane Davies' Facebook page and, when she offered a downloadable workshop called "Text and Image," happily bought it. Some of my consequent text and image pieces included both asemic writing and lines from my own poetry. and I was charmed by the playfulness of this work, still thinking of these efforts as learning a process.

Mary Bast: "A Course of Action"

Then one of my clients went to the Helen Frankenthaler "As in Nature" exhibit and sent me a copy of the accompanying book.

Mary Bast: "Frankenthrall"

Instead of following the work others had done to combine words and art, I played with cutting out new shapes from Frankenthaler's paintings, and collaging them in abstract patterns, using her colors and textures as inspiration, making marks with black pen, frankly enthralled with the results, left.

I learned a lot about this artist, but more important, a new mode of expression had popped up from out of the blue, calling me to a completely centered creative space. There was no plan, no thought, no judgment, simply free association, playfulness, and joy.

This also drew me to the realization that I knew little about women in abstract expressionism, and quickly discovered I was not the only one. So, for many months I studied the works of historically underappreciated artists and created collages as tributes to their work.

When I had a pile of shapes, I put on disposable gloves, got down on the floor with a canvas, a big jug of M. Graham Acrylic Gloss Medium and Varnish, a brush, and just let things happen. Once the canvas was covered, and I felt the rightness of colors/shapes, I let it dry, then drew lines, circles, outline with a fine point Sharpie pen. New eyes. . . pure expression:

Contemplative beholding of art - indeed of anything - can lead to the animation of whatever is before us. New eyes, "the right eyes," suddenly open, waking us up, and consequently awakening everything around us. Arthur Zajonc, "Meditation and Art," Psychology Today, January 05, 2011.

A meditative approach [to art] advocates that we would be best served if we focused less on the "self" and more on the expressive part of the creative process. Such an approach is called pure expression rather than self-expression, because one has learned through meditation how to let go of the relentless self-referencing, self-dialoging, self-consciousness, self-criticism. "Art, Meditation, and the Creative Process," Shambhala Times, March 1, 2015.

Embracing Pain, Overcoming Fear

Soul Collage: My Creative Self

Tonglen is a Buddhist breathing practice to overcome our fear of suffering, awaken the compassion inherent in all of us, and release the fixations of ego. Anytime you suffer, this practice will be healing. 

Even if you can't name your pain or experience it fully, you can sense it in your body. Stay in contact with that awareness and breathe in your pain with the wish to take away your fear. 

Note that you are not asking to take away your suffering, but rather your fear of suffering. Then breathe out relaxation, relief, joy. Do this for several breaths.

You can also begin the practice by taking on the pain of someone you know, breathing in the wish to take away their fear, breathing out relaxation, relief, happiness for several breaths.

Doing so, you may come face to face with your own fear, resistance, anger or any form of personal pain, often when you are feeling stuck.

Then you can change the focus and do the practice for yourself and all others like you who are feeling the same pain. I especially love this third aspect of tonglen practice, breathing in the pain of everyone in the world who suffers the same feeling, breathing out relaxation, relief, and joy. It touches me as a reminder that none of us is completely alone, that all our emotions are shared with anyone who has ever lived.

Tonglen may be a formal meditation practice. You can also use it any moment you experience pain or see others in pain. As you invite this larger view of reality, you'll begin to notice your perceptions changing. Your assumptions of how things are will not be nearly as solid as before.

I Grok Spock

"Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed — to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science — and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man." Wikipedia quoting Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Michael, the hero of Stranger in a Strange Land, was born on Mars — where grokking was taken for granted. So he was unencumbered by the barriers to intuition many humans encounter. As an example, he grokked grass before walking on it to ensure he was not causing another creature pain.

Grokking seems such a natural concept and so appropriate to any conversation about presence — one can't logically explain exactly how to do it, but I think we're all capable of envisioning a connection so deep we are both one and all. I like Fred Lamotte's definition of grokking because it's more trusting of humankind's ability than Heinlein's suggestion that it means as little to us as color to a blind man:

‘To grok' is . . . the best Western term I have ever encountered for what in Sanskrit is called ritam bara pragyam: that subtlest level of energy that ripples on the verge of transcendental silence where all things are grasped as a whole before they become manifest in the multiplicity of the material world.

I've always considered the Vulcan mind meld to be a form of grokking - again, we must leave the Earth to find beings for whom such a deep connection comes naturally. So, I was delighted to find there's still a craze for "I Grok Spock" t-shirts. Why is that I wonder? Possibly because we are the strangers in our own land, longing to be able to grok, to meld.

What a combination--a deep mental understanding (which also requires physical contact) aligned with a complete emotional-intuitive awareness of another: body, mind and heart attuned.

Imagine! 

I See You

When I saw the film, Avatar, I was, of course, entranced by the fabulous technology. What stuck with me the most, however, was how the Na'vi on Pandora greeted each other: "I see you." The meaning of this phrase goes beyond the simple act of visual recognition; rather, it communicates, "I see into you, I see and acknowledge and honor who you really are."

In her Skin in the Game blog entry, Mutual Gaze, Sara K. Schneider describes how Buckminster Fuller returned the greeting Hello, how are you? with the reply, I see you... "a customary greeting in the central African highlands... the most intense of our mutual gazes imply deep connection, as well as the opportunity for sitting with both the dignity of our separateness and the beauty of our oneness."

Early in my coaching career, when I found myself disliking the behavior or values of a client, I would visualize myself bowing and giving the traditional Indian greeting, Namaste (acknowledging "the spark of the divine" in another) - as a symbol of my desire to be present to the person, without judgment.

What better way to remind ourselves to be fully present?

Namaste.

I see you.

The Yin and Yang of Presence

Any problem you encounter can either feed your old, destructive patterns or provide an opportunity for major growth. A primary goal of change is "waking up" to habitual patterns. 

Borrowing from Stephen Gilligan (Summer 1999 Milton H. Erickson Foundation Newsletter, page 8), full presence requires both yin (receptive) and yang (active) qualities:

In the yin mode, providing sanctuary, listening deeply, receiving with curiosity and open heart, and bearing witness with kindness and understanding.

In the yang mode being relentlessly committed to your spiritual growth, attending fiercely, guiding, setting boundaries, and challenging self-limitations.

Our yin/yang balance can be lopsided if yang is overly activated by a prolonged sense of danger or other stresses. When this happens, we need to invite more yin with time for healing and regeneration.

A moving meditation such as qigong can heal gut, heart, and mind energies, to provide physical health, open the heart, and bring spiritual clarity.

A Leap of Imagination

Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society illuminates an approach to change that Tim Flood and I developed, based on the premise that staying completely within metaphors is an exciting and powerful way to bring about personal transformation.

Metaphor-driven change work also requires the coach to be fully present. But what is presence?

We first thought of presence as being fully conscious and aware in the present moment. Then we began to appreciate presence as deep listening, of being open beyond one's preconceptions and historical ways of making sense We came to see the importance of letting go of old identities and the need to control... leading to a state of "letting come," of consciously participating in a larger field for change (Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers: Presence, pp. 13-14).

Spontaneous presence is absent of all preconceived notions, all self-talk, all assumptions and beliefs. It is trust in a knowing that has nothing to do with logical efforts. This knowing is absolute, unmistakable, and has a kind of magical quality.

The authors of Presence describe organizational examples. Here are two personal examples.

"Cloisonne Vases," by Mary Bast

In January 2008 I signed up for an oil painting class, purely from a desire to understand the medium so I could better appreciate works of art. To my utter amazement I found an affinity for painting, a complete engagement in the process: from preparing the canvas and setting up the palette to cleaning the brushes at the end of the class. I brought no expectation of being a "good" or "bad" painter, no preconceived notions, no need to control the outcome. By the end of the first year, I had completed a large painting of two Japanese cloisonne vases that had been in my family since my military father was stationed in Japan in the 1940's. I felt as if the canvas painted itself and I was the vessel of its creation by virtue of holding the brush in my hand. No one is more astonished than I to see the beauty and depth of those vases that "I" painted.

My second example happened when Tim Flood and I were finalizing the materials for a conference play-shop about metaphors. We wanted to keep people moving and out of their left-brain preconceptions without a lot of talk/direction on our part, so we envisioned notebooks that could hang from ribbons around their necks with clear instructions for each next step of the process. We used every kind of logic to figure out the length of the ribbon, how to attach a pen, etc. but -- no matter what we did -- when testing the prototype the ribbon pulled the binding loose from the notebooks. Finally, when we were feeling "brain dead" (a good thing, as it turned out), I started laughing hysterically. Tim thought I'd gone completely off my rocker. When I could speak, I shared the image of a kangaroo with a pouch, my internal judge translating it as something "silly." But as I slept that night my self-critic also slept, and I awakened the next morning with the clear image of a two-pocket folder that could be converted, with a little snipping, into two "pouches." We had our solution.

When Intuition Becomes Psychic

I’d been thinking about how to teach a method for heightening intuition, struggled for two hours, reviewing books and articles, choosing quotes, feeling blocked, decided to take a walk, let my mind wander and suddenly thought, “You’re trying to explain it rationally. Use your intuition.” Duh!

We’re all trained to some degree to be analytical, and consequently to doubt intuition that isn’t tied to direct knowing or experience. In her introduction to Inner Knowing: Consciousness, Creativity, Insight, and Intuition, Helen Palmer admitted that her “anchor in intellectualism made it difficult to accept even profoundly convincing intuition as being meaningful and real.” Palmer was referring to several incidents of her own inner knowing, the first of which occurred when she was deeply involved in the East Coast movement of resistance to the Vietnam War: “my imagination became as believable and solid as the furniture in my room.” She knew, for example, that a friend must take a different route across the Canadian border than the one planned and later found that others who’d taken the original route were stopped and arrested.

Many people describe intuition as a hunch based on experience. A New York Times review by David Brooks (1/16/05) of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking summarizes the author’s opening story. The Getty Museum in California was going to purchase a supposedly ancient Greek statue for almost $10 million. A team of experts with state-of-the-art measurement tools took more than a year to assure its authenticity. Then several art experts looked at the statue and knew instantly it was a fake. When asked to explain how they knew, one said he “heard” the word fresh, which seemed odd to him – on further examination he realized the statue was too “fresh” to be that ancient. Another felt a wave of intuitive repulsion. The outcome? “The teams of analysts who did 14 months of research turned out to be wrong. The historians who relied on their initial hunches were right.”

Well, certainly I encourage you to develop trust in your experience-based hunches. But the intuition that has served me so well is the kind Palmer experienced, the kind that led her to found the Center for the Investigation and Training of Intuition. Here’s what happened to me (a version of this was published in Charles Tart's "TASTE: The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences"):

More than thirty years ago, I attended a Silva course in mind training. Over several weeks we were taught relaxation and visualization techniques, including the development of a mental laboratory complete with desk, calendar, files, visual screen, a door beside the screen, and healing medications.

We were also told we would have an experience of extrasensory perception on the last day of the training, which I found intriguing but presumed impossible for me. For the final session we were instructed to bring in slips of paper, each with the name of an individual who had an illness or physical problem.

We first practiced on our own by placing the body of someone we knew on our mental screen and scanning for problems of any sort. I was mechanically following instructions when suddenly I saw a car colliding with a motorcycle at an intersection. I couldn't see the person's face, but because the friend I was scanning owned a motorcycle, I was alarmed. The instructor suggested I visualize the date of the accident and, if it had not yet happened, to send healing, white light to my friend. I pictured the calendar in my mental laboratory and was surprised to see the pages turning rapidly until they stopped at June 8^th. I assumed this to be in the future, as the session took place in February.

After a break we were assigned a partner. As instructed, my partner – whom I’d never met – handed me a piece of paper that bore only a man’s name and the city where he lived. I closed my eyes, visualized a man on my mental screen, and saw that his whole left side appeared darker than his right. Using one of the techniques we'd been taught, I imagined putting on his head, and was immediately torn by depression, sorrow, and resentment. I could feel that my left side was crippled, that I had no hearing in my left ear and no sight in my left eye. I knew that hearing was intact in my right ear, but vision in my right eye was limited in some way, though I couldn't describe exactly how.

Then my partner told me this man was the son of a dear friend; he was only 21 years old and very bitter because he'd been crippled on his left side in a motorcycle accident at a four-way stop where a car had failed to stop. He had no hearing in his left ear and no sight in his left eye; his hearing was normal in his right ear, but he had tunnel vision in his right eye.

I was spooked by this, almost afraid to ask when the accident had occurred. My partner named the same date I’d seen on my mental calendar: June 8^th. The accident I had pictured earlier that morning, before being assigned to her as my partner, had occurred the previous year!

Like Palmer I found this hard to believe, but the accident I “saw” was as real as the flash of an ad when watching TV. It was visible on my mental screen and in Technicolor, with sound effects.

See also, Spiritual Emergency: When 911 Can't Help, Reframing Spiritual Emergency as Positive Change

The History of Metaphor in Change Work

For as long as humans have had speech, we've been drawn to stories. Story-tellers and bards were honored and respected, their tales and poems used to teach, explain, and/or entertain. Harvard Business School leadership guru John Kotter said,

Over the years I have become convinced that we learn best – and change – from hearing stories that strike a chord within us... Those in leadership positions who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies and for themselves.

You know from personal experience how some stories have affected you, changed your attitude, inspired you, provided hope. So, the time-honored therapy tradition to use stories for healing is no surprise. A therapeutic metaphor can help clients gain the personal resources and enhanced world model they need to be able to handle their problems. Typically, as in the general history of storytelling, the therapist decides what story or metaphor will have the greatest effect.

There's also a growing interest in listening for a client's metaphor and running with it, while still staying alert to a direction that might resolve the problem. I used this more client-centered approach with a client who said she always felt "like the new kid on the block" when with her colleagues. I entered her metaphor by saying, "OK, I'm here with you. You've just moved in, and you're the new kid. What's that like? What are the other kids doing? How do they treat you? What are some ways you can get them to include you?" Notice how, even though we were both in the client's metaphor, the form of my questions kept me in charge of what direction to take. I was eager to find a useful outcome, and we did find one when she said, "They want to play with some of my cool toys!" She was then able to recognize "cool toys" in her current repertoire that helped her feel more comfortable with colleagues.

More recently, I explored symbolic modeling. Instead of the coach determining the direction of clients' metaphors, open-ended questions preserve clients' terminology and facilitate their self-discovery and self-development: "And being like a butterfly is for you...?" "And when does (your words)....?" "And then....?" "And just before that....?" The facilitator's questions are called "clean language," meaning they're not compromised by left-brain theories of where to take the session; the questions typically follow the client's lead.

Symbolic modeling theory has a formal structure, however, so the emphasis still leans toward tools the helper brings, which keeps the left-brain processes in gear. In the past few years I've moved into a more right-brain use of metaphor where I follow the client's lead, trusting that wherever we go will lead to a healing place.

Creative Listening

In the executive summary of Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges, Otto Scharmer writes:

Why do our attempts to deal with the challenges of our time so often fail? Why are we stuck in so many quagmires today? The cause of our collective failure is that we are blind to the deeper dimension of leadership and transformational change. This 'blind spot' exists not only in our collective leadership but also in our everyday social interactions. We are blind to the source dimension from which effective leadership and social action come into being. ("Addressing The Blind Spot of Our Time").

To access the source dimension, Scharmer suggests we slow down our listening, moving from the limitations of downloading ("Yeah, I already know that") and factual listening (the scientific approach, noticing what differs from what you already know), and even past empathic listening (knowing how the world appears through someone else's eyes), to generative listening (attending to the emerging field of future possibility).

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

We love our egos, don't we? We get along so well together. And what a relationship! It’s been life-long, predictable, we’re safe—more or less. 

OK, fine, we get angry, we feel hurt, we challenge our constraints but, oh, the seduction of familiarity. 

And, typical of any long-standing relationship, breaking up is difficult—no matter how strong the desire to end it.

I’ve coached many clients to observe and break free from habitual patterns. But I must admit, for them and for me, ego much prefers to wear its mask.

Years ago I was scheduled to be in a workshop where I'd be videotaped describing my lifelong change process, and one of the questions would be about Enneagram style Nine’s fundamental belief: I don't deserve to exist. Though I didn’t consciously feel this way about myself, I knew the story was in there somewhere, and spent weeks prior to the workshop being mindful of clues to that belief. Slowly, I began to see evidence.

As a small example, I became aware how fast I read, even when enjoying fiction or poetry for pleasure. I heard, as if magically radioed in from my past, Mary is such a good girl. She does exactly what she’s told and she does it quickly. I remembered being praised for how many books I could read in a week. That expanded to memories of being praised at work for how quickly I completed projects. I saw how this fed my unconscious story: If I do things quickly, people will praise me, I’ll feel worthwhile, and deserve to exist. 

But I didn’t experience the belief, it was still an idea. This continued up through and past the workshop — interesting insights, a deeper level of awareness, a new perspective on coaching clients by looking for their fundamental stories. Still, I hadn’t yet experienced the truth of my story.

Several weeks later, I received the DVD of my interview, eagerly turned it on, and boom! I saw myself as fat, old, and BLAND. I was completely crushed. I could not identify with that woman on the screen!

For a full day my ego danced around looking for ways to accept the external evidence that contradicted my self-image. I read about strategies for embracing growing old. I considered following the path of aging boomer artists Alice and Richard Matzkin (The Art of Aging: Celebrating the Authentic Aging Self) and painting a self-portrait, warts and all — still feeding the story by trying to refute it: I am worthwhile as I am! 

Then, on the second day, I experienced the fundamental story that had been deeply unconscious until that moment. I am worthless. I don't deserve to exist. I felt it down to my bones, my heart was full of shame, and I knew it to be true.

On the third day, I fell through. The phrase fell through is inadequate to capture the experience. I can, however, describe my reaction when I again viewed the DVD of my interview. I felt compassion and even delight, a feeling akin to Oh, so that’s the body and mannerisms my soul is riding in. 

Since then I've seen significant changes in myself. My defensiveness dissolves more quickly — and in a way that’s very different from tamping down feelings — a sensation of lightness, each molecule more alive. 

I’m not saying I’m transformed, of course. In the immortal words of Valentine Michael Smith from Stranger in a Strange Land, “I am only an egg.” 

Om

To a yogi, no symbol is more powerful than the syllable OM, as witnessed by these words from the Mandukya Upanishad:

OM: this eternal word is all what was, what is and what shall be.

In the Sanskrit letter the long lower curve represents the dream state, the upper curve stands for the waking state and the curve issuing from the center symbolizes deep, dreamless sleep. 

The crescent shape stands for Maya, the veil of illusion, and the dot for the transcendental state. 

When our individual spirit passes through the veil and rests in the transcendental, we are liberated from the three states and their qualities.

Living Ourselves Into New Ways of Thinking

We stand in the middle, living and fully accepting our reality, neither taking this new awareness on from the power position nor denying it for fear of the pain it will bring. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.  Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs

We've all had peak experiences, times when we were washed with a sense of clarity, of deep appreciation, of being at one with the universe. Perhaps you were watching the sunset from a sailboat, or feeling unconditional love from someone who matters to you, or being present at the birth of a child, or hearing a piece of music that touched you deeply. 

This awareness need not be serendipitous. You can invite it.

Rohr suggests that when trapped in "the ways things are" we have to allow ourselves to be drawn into sacred space, to remain on a threshold where the old world is left behind but we're not sure of the new one yet. In this realm, where we hold a naïve awareness, everything belongs: darkness and light coexist, paradox is revealed.

In our everyday world, what we think we know is a world we've made up. In what Rohr calls the "second naïveté," that everyday world falls apart and a new one is revealed. In this return to simple consciousness (beginner's mind), "we are finally at home in the only world that ever existed." 

Some years ago I was entranced by the film Little Buddha, about a boy who might be the reincarnation of a revered Tibetan teacher. The acting was reserved and there wasn't much action or character development. Why it so appealing to me? Probably because it spoke to some of my personality patterns, an attraction to being Buddha-like. 

People feel safe with my peaceful nature. But one of my most difficult patterns to release has been the tendency to avoid conflict, the only path to real relationship. (Who are you dealing with if I agree with everything you say, if I distract myself from my own agenda, if I don't set clear boundaries about what’s important to me?)

Suzanne Zuercher (Enneagram Spirituality) writes of active contemplation, not passive surrender to the process, but carrying a posture of awareness, intention, and readiness throughout our daily lives: awareness of our habits of attention and how they play out uniquely for us; intention to invite our unknown and disowned parts to come forth, and readiness to take specific actions that shift our focus of attention: doing the things most difficult for us, staying present without avoiding or denying or projecting blame. 

When we remember to be present with naïve awareness, with beginner's mind, we can live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

Think in the Beauty Way

In Be Careful What You Pray For, Dr. Larry Dossey describes the Navajo belief in the power of words, the importance of positive thinking and speaking in "The Beauty Way."

Dossey, a physician and researcher who has helped bring credibility to alternative therapies and to spirituality in medicine, distinguishes between 'loosely coupled systems' and  'tightly coupled systems.'

A lawnmower's gasoline engine is a loosely coupled system -- the parts are relatively autonomous and can be individually replaced when they malfunction. Far too many physicians treat their patients as if a physical malfunction is much like a faulty lawnmower part. Instead, human bodies are tightly coupled systems and highly interdependent.

So while doctors don't usually intend to do us in, the harm is nonetheless real when they make such pronouncements as "You're a walking time bomb" or "There's nothing more I can do." 

In contrast, researchers at Dartmouth Medical School have found the factor most highly correlated with survival and a positive post-operative course after surgery is the degree of spiritual meaning in a person's life. 

Whatever crisis you face, medical or otherwise, think in The Beauty Way. Ask yourself: 

How can I participate in my mental and physical health and not be a victim?

What is my purpose?

What is meaningful to me?

How might I make a difference in the world?

A Rose is a Rose

A rose is a rose is a rose. Gertrude Stein, 1922.

Behold: the rose:

Pay close attention, be fully in the moment. This is mindfulness.

The inexpressible beauty of nature reminds us we, too, are organic.


We are not mechanical, not race cars, we do not need to "go from zero to sixty in sixty seconds" to prove our worth.

... glory does not stay / And early though the laurel grows / It withers quicker than the rose... A.E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young,

So, as you go through your day:

• Engage in each task with full attention, without anticipating the next task.
• When you read something interesting, take time to let it sink in.
• Notice your body's responses; at the first sign of tension take a deep breath, relax. 
• If you're hungry, fully taste every bite; stop when you're full, appreciate that feeling as well.
• When you realize you've been rushing around, stop and smell the roses.

Dancing to a Larger Dance

Guest post by Tim Flood:

In The Presence Process Michael Brown argues that significant, authentic change can only be achieved by a full excavation of the psyche -- from external projection, back through behavioral and intellectual biases, to the emotive patterns that have kept the whole show up and running.

Though this may be old news, it comes alive again with presence as its vehicle and with metaphors bridging between behavior, thought processes, and emotive patterns. Presence is the nurturing receptivity essential to what Brown calls our witness-observer, and metaphors are the language of presence.

A transformative metaphor reduces resistance to zero by including and accommodating our complex emotional, intellectual, and physical patterns. Metaphors are the voice, the song, and the dance of the witty, kind, and intelligent inner observer. 

Listen for the rich and various ways people express themselves in metaphor:

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well. Diane Ackerman

Now listen for your own metaphors. Be present to yourself.

The Pattern That Connects

"Premonitions open us up to each other and to the greater world... they show that we are part of something larger than the individual self, that we are an element in the great pattern that connects." Dr. Larry Dossey

The opening story of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking should convince even the most skeptical that there are ways of knowing beyond the ability to make logical connections:

"A team of experts with state-of-the-art measurement tools took more than a year to assure the authenticity of a supposedly ancient Greek statue the Getty Museum of California was going to purchase for $10 million. Then several art experts looked at the statue and knew instantly it was a fake. One said he "heard" the word fresh, which seemed odd to him, but on further examination he realized the statue was too "fresh" to be that ancient." (David Brooks, New York Times).

We all have the capability to access these versions of a "sixth sense" although many shy away from that possibility, especially those who fear the unfamiliar. Even the word premonition carries an aura of foreboding - that something "bad" is going to happen.

When we're fully present, however, the possibilities are neither good nor bad, we're simply open to a broader context of knowing, a larger "mind" or "field" as others have named it. One of my experiences is described in The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences.

Whether you experience this knowing as a feeling in your bones, an image, or a nagging thought, it is saying to you, in Larry Dossey's words, "Wake up. The evidence for a larger world is staring you in the face."