Franis' Voicebox

Small Talk Skills

2012-01-04T03:00:00.001-10:00

I've worked for a long time to make small talk meaningful. From my experience, even standing in line in a supermarket talking to others can be a fascinating experience, if one of us can figure out what we have to offer each other in the time we have together to spend now.

What I look for in others to indicate what this "magic topic" might be, beyond the niceties of over-used one-liners. Now, how do I do this in such a short time? Turns out it pays off to examine the assumptions of social cliche` and come up with other avenues that yield high-interest answers.

To do this yourself, you would follow the same routine as others expect, but ask similar essential questions that are more to the point than the stock questions. I came up with these alternate questions by wondering, "Why is this common social question really being asked?"

For instance, "Where did you grow up?" This is a question with the motive to find out what environment made the person who they are. So I'd avoid asking that question in a way that will illicit the answer of a town or specific location. Instead, I might ask, "Can you describe environments that you most enjoyed playing in as a kid? What did you like about those sorts of places? Do you ever do something like that now?"

Different answers to the same question, (Why is this question being asked?) will point in alternate directions. Perhaps, this question of "Where did you grow up?" might be: to find out what subculture influenced childhood. So why not ask that as a direct question? "What sort of subculture shaped your early experience?"

Obviously, this is a technique that can offer high yield possibilities for any set of mundane conversations that would be under the heading of "small talk." It can also be a source of humor. "Where did you come from?" This can now be answered with a smirk, "My mother of course - wasn't that true for you too?"

Find A Mentor

2011-12-29T11:19:00.000-10:00

Why would I consider apprenticeship? That began with a college experience.

I had previously had the experience of adopting a mentor with a professor named Dung Fong Lee at U.S. International Univ. in Poway. I was in the habit of "checking out" my teachers before taking a class. After sitting at the back of this teacher's office all afternoon, I observed to him how I now understood the confusing comments I had gotten about his teaching style from his previous and current students. He seemed to radically change his persona to suit the needs of each student, (joke & storyteller, factual info dumper, sparklingly polite conversationalist, bumbler, impolite psychologist, political leader, confessor) without being concerned with presenting a consistent identity. His reply was that he believed this ability to be the mark of an excellent, flexible teacher - and that I probably also had this ability because I had noticed it in him. This began a very interesting relationship where he allowed me to hang out with his family and included me, (and my boyfriend at the time) in his social life. He also taught me Chinese at a breakneck pace for seven weeks. (Since he decided I already knew the content of a introductory class on the I Ching that he offered; he proposed I learn something else.) Later he offered me an opportunity to travel to Taiwan where he would continue my Chinese lessons and set me up teaching English. But I wasn't able to accept at that time, as I would lose the remainder of a four year college scholarship. (One of my life's regrets!)

I believed Lee and I crossed over into a personal relationship partly because he was from another culture and how the USIU college had been intentionally structured to encourage such behavior. Probably my being orphaned as a teen also had something to do with it. So that is how I found out how the apprenticeship experience could go far beyond the content of what was being taught. The few situations where I adopted a position of apprenticeship happened in the course of my various work projects, but later I got the nerve to propose it barefaced... (By asking, "would it be OK to ask you a few more questions again later?") Of course, the questions and answers became more elaborate as they had the inclination and time to teach me and as I showed more interest.

The next mentor I adopted I found by landing a job doing illustrations for a sales booklet of a solar design sales course for a sales manager, Chuck Lewis. This was a presentation meant to be displayed during a home sales call by a troupe of salespeople to introduce hot water solar panels to customers. He was also writing a book of aphorisms about life lessons, and needed a cover illustration. We spent quite a bit of time together because he wanted to explain the book to me so I'd understand how to make the cover...and we enjoyed talking with each other. Then he began to write another book, (eventually titled "You're Gonna Love It!") about sales, so he wanted to talk to me about that too, to help him write the book because he said I was his "perfect customer" that he wanted the to be written for. The book grew from our personal conversations about how to teach sales to people who formerly had assumed that selling and marketing was vulgar and beneath their ethics about how people should be treated. He also taught me quite a bit about telling jokes and how to invent them, which seemed to be a supporting subset skill of salesmanship.

Another person I routinely called where he worked and jokingly asked for the "Terry Delsing School of Comedy." (Which of course, was not where he was really working. But his boss put up with it.) Terry would tell me a joke. I would figure out why it was funny, change around the particulars and tell him the joke I'd just invented. It only took less than five minutes a call. We did that ongoing maybe once a week for a couple of years until I spaced out calling him for too long.

My next mentor, Ray Belange of Apache Signs, came from attempting to paint and fabricate signs as a business. The way I found and adopted Ray as a mentor is the most easily translated to any genre.

I had developed this strategy, when I wanted to learn to do something practical, to call up people cold out of the phone book who were in the business of doing what I needed to learn and asking them a few questions about it. The first few people I asked about what was the proper terminology for the field; the next few I asked how to phrase useful questions I could ask other people and so on... My reasoning that people were willing to answer a few questions was sound, because they were busy at work, and I was asking for free advice. So I just kept calling different people until I had the whole picture, (short of actually doing it.) As I got involved in the process of doing it and hit a snag, I'd call again on those people who seemed willing to talk with the the first time around because some time had passed. They seemed interested in my progress too.

Ray was someone who, as I explained my thinking about what I was trying to do, recognized that we thought alike in an unusual, original way. Turns out, he had expanded on the same idea I had independently originated too. So he invited me to his shop and not only showed me how he'd designed his way past the questions I had, but where to find suitable materials, how he had expanded and innovated how to use the materials, where to find new customers, as well as the joys of riding on motorcycles in foreign countries and living in RVs and warehouses as a lifestyle. (He had raised five kids as a single parent that way!)

Since then, I've hit on the idea of contacting admirable authors and volunteering to help them in whatever way I could be useful. In return I've gotten many free perks in the form of trades of me writing reviews for their book which they sent me free...to helping them using my writing abilities in exchange for their lessons in an ongoing way. One time a mentor I had contacted like this put me in the hot seat of representing them as a tele-workshop host, despite not being trained formally by them. This experience taught me that I had an unusual proclivity for talking coherently, being a high idea producer when everyone else had run out of idea, all while tending the engineering side of an online workshop, (being a natural multi-tasker) which was a talent that I never knew I had, (but Barbara Sher had recognized the ability in me.)

So - mentoring needs a dream - a focus that's practical involving what you are trying to learn to do. Then you ask for help - a little at a time. You find examples of skills you admire in people who enjoy offering the benefits of their experience. You don't admire them, but ask them specific questions about what you'd like to do, encouraging them to be the authority and to think about how they do naturally what you cannot do. If they have other students, you offer the benefits of what you're learning to others who aren't as far along as you are. As you show interest by involving yourself in what they love to teach - you're on your way to learning something and having an interesting relationship with them. Sometimes you're in the position of giving them an idea of how and what to teach others that they couldn't imagine before they met you...

Good Enough

2011-12-24T17:50:00.002-10:00

It's Christmas Eve, and lots of kids might be wondering if they've been good enough. Just think of the pondering poor Santa has to do about each and every character, deciding who might deserve something or not. I was thinking about that, as I was drawing this picture.

Playing Santa is not for sissies - as can be heard in the tune below...

Horrifying October

2011-10-02T19:40:00.000-10:00

Partly the reason I love October, is that in most places, fall makes dramatic changes. It makes me feel like getting busy. This is probably a squirrel-like urge to sock away food for the winter. I still enjoy fall in Hawaii, even though there isn't much evidence of change. It's making me think about getting ready to paint holiday windows in the San Francisco Bay area again.

Of course, as as artist, I find that it's also fun to mess up people's windows during this time of year - as I did here for a "Fright Shop" in Hawaii. It's so much fun for me to just draw big, improvising along as I see what happens in front of me.

I enjoy the images and themes of Halloween; the magic and the unexplained happenings. I love the idea that it is, for one night, socially acceptable to assume and act out as another persona - even if it is just for a costume party or an evening of dancing.

But strangely enough, I really cannot watch horror films. I'm just too impressionable. Horrifying images make it into my dreams and haunt me in ways that aren't at all fun or even have a purpose. Movies are intentionally designed to get an emotional reaction from movie goers; in a horror film this is overkill.

This doesn't make much sense to me, because I do enjoy taking chances and being adventurous. It seems like a strange purpose to look for horror on purpose, when so much real challenge is available in the world.

But extremes are entertaining to some people.
If you enjoy horror, what is it about the experience that you enjoy?

Recluse

2011-06-09T00:23:00.000-10:00

There are many reasons why a person ends up being alone. Some of them are negative, and some are positive, and some are accidental, and some of these choices happened "accidentally on purpose."

Sometimes you make choices to do what you think you want to do, and only later find out that you've inadvertently chosen to do it all by yourself after you're entirely committed. If you think about how long it takes to get exactly what you want, how long people work to set themselves up for retirement - it's a long haul. Most people don't know what they're going to do with themselves when they retire because they never had a chance to do what they loved to do - or they're not able to reinvent themselves.

Sometimes it is just that we cannot "sell" to others our desire to have things the way we want. There has to exist someone else who wants share that situation with us, and that is sometimes a tall order if our dreams are unique. Or sometimes, we end up alone because there is something we do that is not socially acceptable to others who would usually want to hang out with us - too much "baggage."

I am overwhelmed with how many of my peers have become alcoholic as they age - probably somewhat because "it doesn't matter now." Some people go through a process of "giving up" (sometimes necessary) without ever coming out on the other side of it to understand what they positively do want. Some just decide not to bother learning anything new and get along with what they have. For them, it's just too much trouble to feel like you don't know what you're doing. This is one example of circumstantial isolation. If you don't change with the times, you get left behind. And possibly disillusioned about what you believe is not possible now.

Relationships teach you about yourself. (At least, that is how they have always worked for me.) In a way, it's expending less effort to be alone. All those character defects that are irritating to someone else don't matter when you're alone. Nobody else is there to accept the consequence except you. If you're OK with what you do, you can have things be any way you want. Of course, some older folks get very "set in their ways." But think of the advantages, you don't have to explain or apologize about the way you are, how you work, why you do what do. There is nobody to answer to. Being alone is both an advantage, and a disadvantage.

Someone asked an old woman past 100 what is the best part of being old - and she said, "No peer pressure."

Lightly skipped over by most is underestimating the power of a significant booby prize that is the strangest feature of being lucky enough to get old. Watching those twenty, thirty, forty year friendships dissolve or suddenly disappear is not for sissies.

I don't know what your experience with death and the process of grieving is, but in my peer group - people do not want to hang around someone who is grieving. Oh, after someone dies, people will gather to console one another and commemorate, but then, they go away. They don't call, they don't make contact again for another...three months or so. Then it's only a light check-in.

Somehow the person who is grieving is supposed to "get over it" or "deal with it." Most of your friends will get tired of hearing about how you feel when you miss someone who has died. This distaste perhaps reminds them of how they have trouble thinking about their own death. Maybe it's just too close to how unpleasant it would be to be the one who is left after best friends and lovers are gone - as you are now. It's as if grief is a state of social quarantine.

There isn't much social support either for accepting each person's unique process of going through their own grief. Instead of recognizing that grief is a special time of self-knowledge, if the process of grieving goes on "too long," it is labeled "depression."

It's not depression, it's grieving - but this is the cloak that society wraps it in. This mistaken label for grieving as "depression," is yet another very good reason for circumstantial isolation.

In A Fight

2011-05-30T11:20:00.000-10:00

In brain science and in hand-to-hand combat, the person who has the ability to calm themselves under the threat of fighting has the upper hand. A person who can calm themselves can use an incidental strategic advantage as well as their faster reactions of their reptile survival brain.

A friend of mine was once in a bad situation where a group of thugs were threatening to roll him and rob him. He looked around, figured it would be easier to defend himself if he were in a small space where one person at a time was going to come at him. So he backed in between two parked cars against a dead end wall and proceeded to wait. The thugs taunted each other to go in after him; but eventually one of them said, "Look at him - he's too calm. He's got a gun. Let's go."

Defending oneself in real fight is a whole different matter too, but again - calm observation and questioning one's own assumptions paid off...

At 24 years old, I was once walking uphill on a one-way switchback to the little Mesa to a party in a remote place in Bolinas near the beach at night. As I walked, I began to suspect that someone was behind me, matching my footsteps. Was it in order to sneak up on me for some nefarious purpose? I shuffled my feet. The person behind me matched my footsteps again. The houses I was passing had occupants who were on vacation, or gone to bed and locked their doors... So I decided my advantage was that he did not know that I suspected what might be going on.

At fifteen paces, I turned around, still walking backwards and started blabbing to him in an over-friendly way in the dark silence. "Oh, hi! Were you at the beach like I just was? I didn't notice you there. Did you get that shirt at the freebox? I love the Freebox... I'm going to a party; are you going there too? "

He stopped, somewhat shocked...not answering me. Which indicated to me that he might have untoward intentions and wasn't very smart because now I knew what he looked like. But there we were...walking along, twenty feet apart. So I kept blabbing to him and decided to choose my battle ground to conduct a little test to allow him to get closer to me to see what he might do when we came to a steep switchback.

When I reached my chosen spot, at that point I said, "Oh shit! Forgot something at the beach, gotta go back..." Sure enough, he ran the last ten feet uphill across the street towards me and pushed me down. But I was on the ground parallel to the outside edge of the road; next to me was a steep drop off. I had the advantage of familiarity with the terrain.

While I was on the ground, I realized that my legs were a whole lot longer than his arms. I remember thinking, "I must have been planning this." As he loomed over me, still saying nothing, I crouched in a fetal position. As he bent over me, all I had to do was extend my legs and plant them in his crotch to toss him over the steep edge of the road. Then I got up and ran while he took the time to get up. When I breathlessly arrived at the party and explained what had happened, people went out looking for they guy. But there was enough time to for him to disappear.

Later I went back to the scene of the crime and saw that what I had done to evade the attack was an even better plan than I imagined. Where he'd landed off the side of the road, there were many poison oak bushes...

Manifesto

2011-05-14T00:08:00.000-10:00

I'll put what I mean in the positive,
leaving behind passé routines and shortened regrets.
Who, how and what I love shows my genius.
Coincidence-control is my delight.
I count on timing to take my talents for the ride they deserve
Around a cycle of return, they're crying, "Me! Me now!"
Humility dazzles wealth.

I'll help with respect, merging with your bonding language
to inspire, laugh & free you -
because I am so often connected,
helped, awed and laughed.

May my ruthless emotions be artful & tactful;
allowing others to misunderstand,
accepting who they are now,
releasing the curse and blessing
of glimpsing what is not yet born in everyone.

I'm always learning what "appropriate" means,
expanding connections & meaning-making.
My complaints are fodder.
I will design a way though artfully
dancing around my own resistance & fears,
forgiving myself again, in gratitude
as I learn what I can do, and
how I can do what I know.

Where's the Music?

2011-04-09T09:35:00.002-10:00

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(The last stanza of Keats's "To Autumn." when he was dying of TB.)

When I read a poem, I wonder..."where is the music to this?" For me, unless a poem has a tune and is sung, it's not complete. When I hear poets read their poems, or rappers rap their lines, I think, "that person really wants to express themselves and they haven't learned to sing yet."

I love it when poetry is lyrical or when poetry is an expression of meaning that has additional images or experiences in context with it. But by itself, usually poetry just doesn't do much for me. Part of the reason I don't really get into poetry is probably because there's no music attached, or I'm not connecting with the emotional content that's being expressed.

Words and grammar structure meaning - and poetry is where words become free of their structure. Poetry is how you can rub words together and they can become something original that hasn't been meant before. But unless you're skillful, the reader won't know what you're really saying and will read things into what you wrote that you didn't mean. Understanding is constructed by the person who is experiencing it. Their assumptions and perceptions trump your intent as an artist.

Sometimes poetic words will be so delicious on the page that I can actually imagine them complete without a tune attached. But usually that is when I can imagine images that go with the words instead of a tune, as I can do with this stanza from Keats. The poetry that goes beyond this "lack"of no music will evokes its own images that completely affect me. If a poem doesn't "do it for me," then usually it just doesn't contain enough of what it's hinting at. It's not "juicy enough." Hints are OK, I guess, for those people who like them, but I'm after experiences, or the hints of experiences that I have yet to embody.

Oddly enough, this is also the reason I listen to mostly instrumental music. It's also the reason I carefully select the films and video content to which I expose myself. If I listen to music with lyrics without selecting the content of it, (the radio, for instance) I am often so disappointed with how much drivel is out there. It's that I'm so affected by any art that I must be deliberate. When there is a song with words worth listening to, I never get tired of hearing it and may even take the time to learn to play and sing it. But frankly, most of what my culture imagines is valuable to say in a song or violent movies are ...not what I want to program into my psyche by repeating it. We humans seem to be preoccupied with the sounds of our own self-indulgences - we're verbal and like to blab - even when we don't have anything to say.

Being an artist, how can you tell if what you have to say is going to be considered notable by others unless you say it? Any expression seems to find it's audience. It's always interesting how "great" works of art continue to grow in meaning as the culture changes. People continue to find new meanings in "timeless" artistic vision. What is most personal becomes the most universal, as it is artfully expressed.

What do you think?

Relationship Stages

2011-03-05T11:02:00.000-10:00

An interesting view, that relationships have stages. Regarding the few intimate relationships I've had, would say the stages are:

1. Who is this person? What might we do together as a team?
2. Wow, this is wonderful. I'll do anything for her/him.
3. Wait a minute. Is what I'm doing to demonstrate love working how it's intended? Maybe this needs a bit of investigation and adjustment so the demonstrations I contribute to create love in the relationship goes where there are intended. In return, what I allow them to do for me also constructively floats my boat.
4. Trades, offerings and tacit agreements evolve and are enjoyed.
5. A way to update these agreements becomes necessary. Whether agreements are made tacitly, verbally, as trades or as "standing" agreements - is everyone on the same page about what the agreement is? Who does what for whom and who gets to wait for their desires/needs to be met, and how long do they wait? Does the "waitee" ever get what it is they want/need? Can agreements-customs be changed or updated as various member's needs change? For instance, if one of the members of the relationship gets injured and needs care to heal from the other(s), can the relationship be flexible enough to provide that care and later re-establish independence after healing without breaking apart?
6. Over time, everyone's challenges, shortcomings, strengths and/or style or preferences become familiar. Can each member accept the person's intent to do their best in bettering their character flaws, or accept these flaws? How to support and/or encourage improvement of personal character development and learning? How does each member "help" one another? Do the agreements that have evolved merely adjust and compensate for shortcomings? Or is there a recognition of a process that improvement is also evolving? Can personal change be accommodated? The answers to these questions makes or breaks the relationship.
7. If a "break" is happening, character flaws are assigned the role of punishment. It would be so nicer for ME if the person improved - they must not love me enough to improve themselves and make it easier on both of us. Mountain out of molehill sensitivity develops, noting the most minuscule expression of these character flaws in spite of ongoing improvement. The relationship must end; the pressure of having someone so invested in your shortcomings or successes is too pressurized.
7. a. From my own experience, the way out of this is to re-prioritize the constant recognition of the objectionable behavior(s.) Make a specific time to express objections all at once, (without defense is best) instead of constantly having uncontrolled emotional reactions come up all the time. Meanwhile, constructively rebuild the relationship based on enjoyable, bonded experiences so the enjoyment of being together is renewed.
7. b. Of course, if you work this out, you can start new projects together. If you don't navigate this stage very well, the two of you part ways, with various clean-up work ahead. Or you get so damaged that making further agreements are impaired, but you keep going anyway.
8. I've heard after twenty years together, the partners change places in what their shortcomings have become. The shortcomings and complaints each used to have about the other swings in the opposite direction...sort of hilarious!
9. But by now, there's been some track record of getting past difficult times and hopefully, communication skills have increased well enough to continue indefinitely. Unless significant lifestyle changes intervene that make a liaison no longer practical or preferable for various reasons...

Why Teach?

2011-02-28T20:25:00.001-10:00

One of my standard questions I like to ask strangers that is designed to tell me something about a person is, "Did you have especially interesting or memorable teachers during your school years?" What is really sad is when the person cannot think of a single teacher during all their schooling who stood out as memorable or interesting! Those who have had no stand-out teacher in all their years of being a student makes me feel exceptionally lucky. These teachers below are only some of the highlights...

There was that Spanish teacher who put up with me sleeping in her class in first period in middle school who did not mind that she had to repeat her question to me once she woke me up. She began by teaching the class songs, which had my heart right off. It was also OK with her if you came up with a different way to say the same thing on a language test, which isn't allowed these days.

Then there was the middle school art teacher who, after teaching me how to enter art contests and win them, sat me down and said, "You could be a great artist, if you wanted to do that. Not just a popular artist, not just a famous artist, but a great artist." With his help, I won $4000. in art contest awards - a tidy sum in 1968!

There was the high school history teacher who, by assigning me an event in the Civil War era and then having me research that one event in multiple history books - he taught me about point of view, bias, inflationary language, how a conqueror changes history documentation, how persuasive language works in newscasting, advertising, etc. etc. I'd have to say that was the most useful class of any I ever had, with the exception of learning how to read.

Then there was the college professor scholar from Taiwan who, after giving me credit for a class he was teaching in the I Ching, decided he would see how I was at learning Chinese - just for fun - in the three weeks left of the quarter we had left. He strung together the broken apart elements of very complex Mandarin characters by telling a story about how the history of the meaning of the parts of that character were related. It was only later that I realized he had been teaching me at a breakneck pace of 100 characters a week - and he made it completely easy to remember! (Of course, I've forgotten all of it forty years later.) It was one of the regrets of my life that the temptation of a full college scholarship I had received made me unable to travel back to Taiwan with him to teach English and complete my studies of Chinese. When I met him I observed that he seemed to change himself around to reach specific students, who were so self-involved that they never realized what a shape-shifter he was or the apparent inconsistency of how he presented himself. In one afternoon, he presented himself as a joking fool, an authority, a political refugee, a data mine, or a friendly, grandfatherly, absent-minded professor. At that time I was about to choose a particular affectation of how to present myself, being afraid that it was some form of character dishonesty to present myself inconsistently. When I told him what I'd observed in his shape-shifting ways that afternoon, he replied, "It must be that you have this characteristic in yourself, which I believe is the rapport of good teaching."

A Chinese saying: "The best compliment to an excellent teacher is to teach another." Have taught upwards of 3000 people how to juggle three items when I used to have a business making juggling balls. I still teach people to juggle. The way someone learns and unlearns says quite a bit about who they are. So I teach people to juggle partly in order to get to know someone. Sometimes I'll use the process of learning an unfamiliar skill such as juggling to draw parallels in learning another skill - Alexander Technique - which is part of the way I make a living. Alexander Technique is a subject I teach for the love of it, and because of the value I've gotten from it. A flexible attitude of continual learning can be a form of enlightenment. I never tire of giving people that first lesson in Alexander Technique - because even though it's a skill akin to the devotion of learning a musical instrument, I keep wondering if someone in that first lesson could get the whole thing, in a flash of epiphany.

Another reason I teach is the same reason I love to listen to improvisational music - I love to be around discovery when it's happening.

As has been mentioned, I also teach in order to know my subject better. Using my sharpened and sensitive observation skill has got to be another one of the biggest thrills for me - especially when I can making someone aware of something about themselves they never noticed previously that turns out to be extremely useful for them. Some of learning is uncovering what the person senses they already know innately, but have somehow forgotten and have become dulled to sensing from habitual repetition. Learning to unlearn what is unnecessary has the most delightful effectiveness - and it's so elegant.

It doesn't matter to me whether I'm the teacher or the learner, but sometimes it's easier to play the part of the learner. I once put a relationship back together that was on it's way to falling apart by choosing the most enjoyable and conflict-free situation as a "standing date." It was being the learner and my partner being the teacher at a skill we could do daily.

But the most enjoyable part of teaching - for me - is to simplify the subject, to not merely repeat the way I was taught. I LOVE to innovate ways to communicate the subject so that my students can learn it faster, easier and more thoroughly than I did.

Being Santa

2010-12-08T21:38:00.000-10:00

When I was a teen, my boyfriend's family in San Diego had adopted a Mexican family from Tijuana to be the recipient of their donations. I was the first person who could translate between the two families and got to hear an interesting story.

It all started when the San Diego family had bought a used car and wanted to fix it up and sell it to make a little money. They found this shop over teh border where eleven kids were running around. The mechanic did an excellent job on the car, and later an excellent job redoing the interior - the reconditioning was perfect. After realizing the poverty level of the Mexican family, the family from San Diego decided to buy another car and this time give all the money they made on the sale of the car after it was fixed to the mechanic and his family.

They did this multiple times.

It took the sale of four cars for the mechanic and his family to figure out what was going on. Each time the San Diego family came with another car and some money, the mechanic assumed that as a customer, they wanted an even BETTER and more expensive job fixing up the car they had brought. ...While the family from San Diego just wanted to give the Mexican family some money that represented their true efforts from the sale of the cars on the other side of the border.

Hope that you're in a position to make someone's life better this Holiday season!

Going Muraling

2010-12-07T21:45:00.000-10:00

Always Loved

2010-11-18T13:04:00.001-10:00

We are not the roles we assume. Roles are like jobs that can be replaced. People are not their roles of being a spouse, lover... Although the world assumes this is true and react accordingly.

Once I open myself to being intimate with someone else and grow to love them, from that point on it doesn't matter what they do next. I will always love them wherever they go. They must work hard to injure and destroy that love of mine - unintentional injury doesn't count.

If enough time has gone by, that can't be done completely - unless they intentionally and willfully work pointedly to do so. Even then, the time we spent when we were in harmony is always mine should I choose to keep it for myself. In time, I may find someone else to craft an alliance with that is more appropriate to needs, but that second person is not a "replacement" for the first. If we part, nobody can ever hold the same connection we shared because it was and is still unique. With each connection, (believing that great relationships are made and not found) I have been indissolubly changed by my experience of intimacy with them. In knowing them. It is as if I grow appendages that are uniquely shaped just for their connection of holding hands with me.

At least, that's my experience so far.

In Another Life...

2010-11-06T19:34:00.000-10:00

Perhaps in another life, (one I got very close to choosing,) I would have been a translator. Being born in California, the only living language that I could learn was my local dialect of Spanish. Mostly from a brilliant teacher in middle school, I learned enough to fluently play the translator between two families who had become friends without knowing each other's language. Then a full scholarship took me away from the border town where I was raised. Without use, I forgot most of what I had learned. Now I know enough to tell what someone is talking about, but I no longer know what they are saying about it!

I had stumbled on the I Ching one day in the library when I was twelve while looking for "magic books." Here was the first completely foreign universe of completely dissimilar symbolism that I could not grasp, although I could read the words. So I began to collect different translations of the I Ching and compare them as I used the book for an oracle. The ability of the I Ching to give the same reply to similar questions, even when asked years apart, this completely fascinated me. How did this synchronicity Jung talked about really work? I am still fascinated with this question. In my documentation of my experiences with the I Ching, I now have a sort of catalog of my questions about what to do with my life, what choices to make and why make them. Using the I Ching has helped me gain the benefit of being able to compensate for time of arrival of possibly related information.

My lifelong interest in the I Ching was partly fueled by a college professor I had when I attended U.S International Uni. He was a scholar from mainland China who's affiliated institution bestowed a degree on the head of my school merely for hiring him! Because I already knew the content of the class in the I Ching he was offering (and because I could already handle a brush as an artist,) this professor taught me Chinese for seven weeks while giving me a guaranteed "A" in his I Ching course.

Of course I had a private teacher and no classmates to compare myself against, but it was only later that I learned we had gone at a breakneck speed of a little more than 100 characters a week. He made it simple for me, after learning about my ability to memorize song lyrics. Essentially, he showed me about how different "character families" were related to each other symbolically. He did this by taking a very complex character that had many brush strokes, and teaching it to me backwards, one stroke at a time, using a story to link the meanings together. We did probably five of these "character families" each day and they were somewhat related to a larger story. When I think back about it, this was inspired teaching.

Probably the one decision in my life that I regret was to keep my college scholarship to go to art school instead of taking advantage of an opportunity offered by this professor, Dr. Dun Fong Lee. This professor, (who I'd spent quite a bit a time with socially,) offered to set me up teaching English and to continue our lessons in Chinese - as he was returning to Taiwan when I was getting ready to transfer my credits at that school to art college. Leaving my boyfriend was unthinkable, (it didn't occur to me that perhaps he could accompany me) there was no way to stay in touch from so far away in that era except for letters that took forever to arrive - and I was an orphan who had no parents to remain interested in what happened to me. So there were many reasons to not go. Still, I wish differently. I did attempt to contact him a few years later, once I had taken advantage of my art school scholarship, but I could not find him. Perhaps he had died, because his was in his late sixties.

But my interest in languages remained. It was another stumble during college that took me into a book about the Wharf-Sapir theory. Here was another book I couldn't understand, even though I could read the words. It suddenly made me realize that there were worlds of cultures out there containing different thinking styles that possibly could not be conveyed in English...

Later in college I designed an independent study class in "communication" to explore how many ways meaning could be conveyed. It took me from animal training, (inter-species communication) through symbolism and body language via gestalt therapy experiments and the examination of how adapting built habitual routines and contexts, into artificial intelligence, toward learning a bit of the Hopi language, back into polling surfers who were encountering dolphins to evaluate the surfers on their proprietary sense of owning their surf spot.

Eventually I finally buckled down and spent the ten thousands hours plus in learning to write in my own language. The experience of traveling to Europe encouraged me to start a "travel journal," ...and the rest you can read right here.

Hunch or Prejudice?

2010-11-03T06:26:00.001-10:00

What is the difference between an intuitive hunch and a prejudice? This is one of my virtual questions that I enjoy asking.

It's curious to me how each and every perceptual attitude that someone can adopt seems to have alternate ways of describing it. These descriptions, definitions and interpretations seem to color how the subject and person is defined to express another bias or prejudice. Some can get quite...colorful, with pointed accusations.

For instance, students often stop themselves from asking a question of a teacher out of respect for that teacher. But from the teacher's point of view,, "why don't my students ask ANY question?" In my culture, you can have rapport or you can have respect, but not both.

Another instance, it's obvious from my posting here that I enjoy to take the time to offer the benefit of my observations to other people. I've taken the time to learn to write to do this, which has been an effort for me because my talking style isn't easily translated into the forms of writing. But now others are coming to recognize my investment of being able to write. Whenever there is recognition of "talent" or ability, people inevitably wonder why you do such a thing. They assign a motive to your actions - sometimes these motives are not what you would answer if they had asked you. In some cases, they react as if the person who has invested value in an opinion must be a proselytizer or a salesperson.

But sometimes, people complaint that I am being "too" helpful. They seem to not appreciate my motives or my open-mindedness because I don't communicate that very well.

If I come up with creative thinking ideas on their behalf without warning them or getting their permission to do so, they react strangely. They're slightly intimidated. They don't know why I can do it or why I would do such a thing for them. Perhaps they assign nefarious motives to what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. I've been accused of "co-dependence," but I just don't have the vested interests and addictions to go along with the profile. Demonstrating my ability to think has also often gotten me defined me as "analytical," as if I am an inflexible one-trick pony. Am of the opinion that everyone has multiple talents, often undeveloped.

I've learned to actively refuse to defend myself and instead invite participation. But sometimes it just doesn't work. People misread my communicating as being upset. They don't dare to confront or engage, fearing they might offend.

Would love to open a conversation to suggestions on how to better this state of affairs, because I think this same issue affects many, many interactions with many people. Perhaps I just need to joke about it more often.

Anyone have any suggestions or explorations...stories? Probably not. Somehow, the way that I write doesn't invite comments. Not sure what to do about that.

Sculptural

2010-10-29T15:47:00.003-10:00

In honor of deva spirits and witches everywhere, I made a witchy nymph.

What you don't see in this picture is how I had to splint and graft two pieces of the stick into one to get the witchy nymph to have arms as well as legs.

While I was doing so, I was thinking about how many of us wounded healers there are, partially broken... How many there are who have had to go from being broken to making themselves whole again. This journey seems to be necessary to make compassionate teachers with some real answers for those who find themselves in dire straights.

Haywired

2010-10-09T02:40:00.000-10:00

It is a fact that no matter how much "better" your sensory judgment gets, you are always going to be using your senses in a 'relative' way. 'Absolute fact' doesn't exist. It's not how people are wired. We're made so that we get used to being whatever we have learned, so what is new can get our attention. So whenever a significant change is made, it will always feel "strange" and "abnormal."

After recovering from over-doing and needing to adapt to terrible or extraordinary circumstances of life that nearly everyone encounters, it is pretty amazing how it's still possible to uncover your original subtle sensitivity. Eventually with the right sort of attention, you can get your bearings and learn to do things easier as you used to be able to do it when you were innocently younger. As this is happening, the changes that register as "significant" get more subtle, but they are still changes with those same "weird" sensations of newness.

I believe that sensory appreciation is far and away more important priority as a principle than most Alexander teachers give it. Most give it lesser billing as a sort of "special effects" in relation to the other "more important" principles - but I think motor sensory amnesia has center stage as the one of the three most important concepts of Alexander Technique. Sensory appreciation is the principle that needs to be introduced first.

It's important because students need to know from the beginning how to recognize that something new has happened. most people disregard happenings that are "unclassified flukes" because they don't fit preconceptions - they're not anywhere near the radar of expectations. If students don't understand what a discovery looks like, how are they going to know they are making one when it happens?

As far as humor goes - more teachers should use it!

Seven Minute Drawing

2010-09-19T02:05:00.001-10:00

The illusion of depth works best if you can blur your view, simulating the ability to stand back from the image.

Sploosh!

2010-09-11T01:23:00.000-10:00

Fifteen years ago my then-significant other named Pearl and I had loaded the back of the pickup truck camper for an extended trip to Baja California. We were located along Highway One an hour north of San Francisco along a tightly winding road. After situating everything we could possibly need in a primitive desert environment such as Baja by the means of car-camping in the back of the pickup truck, we set out at a leisurely pace for a ten hour drive to San Diego to my brother's house.

It wasn't slow enough. Or perhaps we hadn't tied in the water container well enough. Or perhaps we were too excited about who else we were about to visit on the way there. At any rate, as the driver I swung a little wide on one of the turns and over-corrected a little too fast...and the 5 gallon water container dumped it's contents on our bed.

My significant other pointed to a steep driveway to pull off the road. With the nose of the car pointing up, most of the water went out the back of the tailgate so didn't spend more than thirty seconds soaking the back of the truck. We got out of the car and re-tied the water container after mostly emptying it.

Back in the car and driving down the road, we admonished ourselves for filling up the water dispenser before we left, and not tying it down properly so it fell over.

"Hey," I looked at my significant other and said, "SPLOOSH!" and I started laughing.
"Sploosh? What is Sploosh?" he ranted. "How can it be so funny that our bed and stuff in the back is soaked!"
"Sploosh!" I explained. "We're driving for the next ten hours in the desert with the windows open, blowing hot air on our bed for hours."

Later, we found ourselves halfway down Baja to "Bahia de Los Angeles" on the Sea of Cortez side of Baja. I had become more than a little worried because somehow, despite having a really cool calculator-calendar, Pearl had mis-calculated the amount of gas required to get home. (He had an excuse, which was he had just quit smoking and wasn't in his right mind.) We talked about calling my brother for a rescue when we got closer to the Tiajuana border, or leave our truck and getting just ourselves back to San Diego and going back for the truck...or something. In the meantime we figured it wasn't any different if we continued our camping trip; only the change of heading home the most direct route.

A little closer to the border, I was cleaning out the car near Bahia Conception to repack after camping for our last week, intending to get the dust out of the car. Hidden under the driver's seat footwell mats by the previous owner, I found three stained old travelers checks that totaled three hundred dollars.

"Hey, check this out! As I brandished the checks. "Apparently, a fateful redemption."

"Oh yeah," Pearl quipped. "Sploosh!"

Scapegoats

2010-08-16T13:39:00.001-10:00

Blame is an interesting activity that is worthy of study. When there is something wrong, it's very curious why people first have the urge to go looking for someone else who can be the reason for their problems.

Have to admit, this same thought of being a victim often happens when I must look for something that I have misplaced. What really happened was that I found a "secure" spot for it in a remotely "safe" location. In an attempt to foil possible theft, I hid the item from myself! Nobody stole it from me. But this is what I begin to fear as I frantically look for it.

No wonder people look for scapegoats. Someone to blame is so convenient to have around.

Sophie Lhoste Are polite relationships draining your energy?
Read: http://bit.ly/co9kuH

Reading this article leaves me to wonder how those energy vampires feel about people who label them.

Beyond the judgmental conclusions of name-calling, what do loving people constructively do about this situation? Couldn't people who complain and label just learn more gracefully and tactfully to ask for what they need or want as a questionable point continues to happen routinely? Why do we need to resort to name-calling to demonize others for allowing some room to adjust to each others evolving needs?

I'm asking these questions because I really want answers. A mark of true friendship is to be able to hear other points of view without imagining it is an attack. I don't intend to deliver my opinions veiled as questions. I want to let the spin cycle come to a close before we open the oven to see if the souffle fell. Divorce seems to be a rite of passage, rather than a last resort. People are too quick to come to a conclusion that writes off others. They could look for new ideas about how to deal with a new situation that is unfamiliar.

Let's think for a moment from the point of view of these people you want to blame for taking your energy.
What would they say they are doing to deal with how you are acting?
The first platitude that makes sense is "live and let live."
Can it be OK to say: "if you can't say something constructive, don't say anything"...?
What about the tolerance and compassion of, "OK, whatever floats your boat"!
Isn't it supportive to indicate," I'm gonna leave it up to you to call me when your available again."

Is it a requirement that those closest to us should ALWAYS read our minds so they can provide exactly the support we need in the moments they determine that we must have it?

Isn't that a bit self-involved to expect from the mere humans who happen to have already been loving us?

Why should every moment, every support, every activity be so much drama that we must come to a resolved conclusion about What It Is and arbitrarily determined we should cut off the relationships that we have decided must be "draining us"?

It's the empty spaces that get left up to us to provide content. Leave some dead air for a change and have it all be OK. Assume love. Those people who used to love you might want you to be happy, but are they could be innocently clueless about what you want them to do because you're not being all that articulate. Get a little more proactive and indicate what is appropriate and constructive. Just...take a nap or go for a walk; play with the pet or the kids. Nobody is sucking you dry, just stop expecting there is a trade or tacit agreement of exchange as you give.

Animal Portraits!

2010-07-18T10:41:00.002-10:00

Do you have a favorite kitty or canine? Send me a picture and I'll apply my artistry... It's not expensive - Only $100. per drawing, unframed. You'll have a lasting keepsake of your charming, loyal or playful animal companion.

Language for Perception

2010-07-09T10:37:00.001-10:00

How do you perceive? Well, you just do it. That's an inadequate answer, so I decided to do some thinking about this.

Perhaps the way I teach people to observe themselves would be relevant to making up a language for perception. It's my business to be teaching people to perceive what they take for granted by teaching Alexander Technique. I use the often ignored kinesthetic sense as a medium, rather than the visual or auditory...but maybe we can cross-pollinate with it. Maybe we can use the same process and apply it to perception in general - say, the visual sense.

In Alexander Technique classes, students walk across the room and try to describe how they are walking. They can't, usually. So I introduce them to categories to form some questions for themselves. These categories function like thinking tools to organize and focus their point of view.

The categories are:

timing
sequence
quality
direction
relationship

Once they have these categories, their ability to describe what they're experiencing for themselves gets unleashed. Their new ability to observe and describe what is happening works so well they can later design, on the fly, inventive ways for getting past some pretty serious self-imposed limitations.

So perhaps we could do this with perception in general. We could make general categories to help people ask themselves specific questions. Answering these questions would give us new perceptual information out of what we usually take for granted.

We're talking about the raw perception, not the content. So - how we direct attention to say, the visual sense with these categories? If I were to apply the same categories I just mentioned, I'd get something like:

Quality: attention can be focused, like a searchlight, or diffuse like an overhead light.

Timing: depending on when you pay attention, different things will be happening. A frozen image will show you stuff that you would miss in a movie, for instance. Bits and pieces do not have the same effect as the whole. Timing will influence the figure-ground relationship of what you can see. If you're moving fast while traveling, you'll have a whole different experience compared to moving slowly.

Sequence: chains of paying attention to one thing after another bring different results; and mixing up sequences actually has an associative emotional effect. It's easy to mistake sequence for cause and effect.

Direction: Where we are oriented contributes to Point Of View. POV and motive about what you want others to do, react and agree with you will color how you describe what you see.

Anyone else want to try one or more of these four categories about perception that I made up and apply them to help generate a new language for perception?

This is using your Thinking Skill bag of tricks!

Love and Respect - Mixed

2010-07-02T21:16:00.003-10:00

Respect can be so often offered as a deal or a trade - but I guess that can also be true about love. Many people attempt to negotiate tacitly while professing to be offering "love."

Marriage, for many people, just allows everything about the relationship be implied rather than specified. Have always regarded marriage as a lazy person's way to say, "Hey, rather than negotiate and really make agreements specifically that we're going to keep with each other, let's get married and that umbrella will take care of the whole conversation about our agreements." Once the situation of defining what, exactly, the agreements really are, things can fall apart...because people who didn't know how to talk to each other tried to use marriage for the substitute of not having a clue how to make agreements.

In a sense, many marriages are all about expectations about how the husband or wife role is "supposed" to go, as if it's a slot or a job. If the couple's cultural assumptions match, then all is well. Most often in this era, these cultural assumptions do not match. In addition, cultural assumptions about love often do not match people's own needs because the times have changed.

Professing love, many people are really only making a deal without knowing what they are actually getting or giving. Of course, people can get disappointed if the deal is not suitable - but I'm not sure if it's actually love that they're getting or giving. There's really nothing wrong with making a deal. In a sense, a deal is an agreement.

It seems to me that respect contains quite a bit more sanity than the passions of love. so many people destroy their relationship by allowing the small indulgences to determine the course of how they "please" each other. Rather than showing the petty, dark and small side and allowing it to "run" the relationship, respect allows the positive, constructive side to be the driver.

Passion - looking at the root of that word is really interesting in the origin and history of the word "passion." Rather than an intense striving sort of meaning the word has come to mean in today's culture, it turns out that "passion" is related more to "pass." It is a surrendered state, an allowing sort of action. The word passion comes from meaning of "passive."

So it's not just that there is love or not love, but what sort of love there is, what sort of respect there is. Quality is everything in love - and in respect!

Respect can be had out of fear as well as love. Of course, there is a twisted sort of love that is also mixed in with fear or power to wound which would be a variation of "respect" in parent/child love when control or authority is an issue.

Many emotions may be mixed in with each other. As long as it is partly "love," does that mean all of it still Love? I think not.

For instance, love mixed with blame or a sense of cause and effect or consequence gives an impression that the other person is causing love to occur. One of the interesting characteristics of love is that it is something like a fountain of one's own.

It is common to be notoriously inarticulate when it comes to misunderstanding or mis-naming one's own emotions. Many people use the more general term "love" when a better word for what they are doing might be "care," "admiration," "compassion," "desire," "attraction," "infatuation," "absorption," "attention," "adulation," etc.

This is true for other emotions as well. Pride without fear is a desire for excellence. - (a quote from a friend of mine named Chuck Lewis, author of "You're Gonna Love It!" - a book on selling for artists.) Pride mixed with fear - it is one of the seven deadly sins of self-involved arrogance. A big difference exists between the two.

If that's true, why is anything with a little love mixed into it called the real thing?

Does this idea that emotions can be mixtures make you curious the next time you think you think that you know what emotion you're feeling?
Tell me about it...

Back-firing, Suggestions?

2010-06-16T05:31:00.000-10:00

I have many talents, but many of them seem to be back-firing on me at once. My headlights went ON when I discovered creative thinking as a teen. Since then I've been experiencing what I've read is quite common that many inventors run into head-on as they attempt to present their new ideas to others.

Proselytizers are icky - that's how many creative people interpret and respond to my enthusiasm when I bother to show it. They don't understand why I have suggestions for them. (Only Barbara Sher's Idea Party crowd really gets it.) My magic power is a high-idea talent generator that keeps the ideas coming when everyone else is spent.

Evidently, there is a cost to doing what is new. People can't imagine what motivates, so they assign the motive they can imagine. Most people are not very imaginative. Most commonly they become quite concerned with self-preservation while they freak out.

Of course, you're different. You're imaginative! You love to think!

Here are three situations where my brilliant creative thinking is causing chaos rather than solutions. Please offer your suggestions and bright ideas!

1. My ideas and experience of Alexander Technique are random acts of senseless beauty here:

In the situation of being able to come up with many ideas for their benefit, people mistakenly assume that I have some sort of investment in controlling them by telling them how and what else it is possible. This doesn't happen on the internet, because I don't know who they are, where they are or if they take my ideas for a ride or not and I've put a great deal of thought behind making it simple. This is great deal why I put so much of my energy into writing about creative thinking and writing about Alexander Technique. This takes up a great deal of my time without me getting much personal benefit back from it. But it's fulfilling on many levels because at least my intent is clear to others. So I spend 'way too much time doing it online - how can that be more productive time?

My way of teaching Alexander Technique in private lessons doesn't happen with the right timing for people. When I show someone how to get free of restrictions, (and what else is possible once you get free,) it's sometimes too effective hands-on. But teaching that way it takes too long and makes students dependent. So I make it more simple and "hands-off" so students can do it themselves from the very beginning. Then it's too simple and repetitive so they trivialize the usefulness of the information. (Obviously, there's a fine line between simply accessible and a topic being so conceptual that it becomes watered down and useless.) What would you prefer? Hands off or hands on? Or what else? Could you suggest a way to solve both these issues at once?

2. Relationships

If I know the person intimately, I'm a great observer with a long memory who can compensate for time of arrival. So I can describe for them what patterns of behavior I see them doing over this long period of time, (patterns that they have determined are in their way from before they met me.) So when I give them a way out, they tell me I have an investment in changing them and fight me because I handed them this observation and gave them keys to significant improvement. So, I let them fly on their own and they fall down, because someone who was "trying to change them" for their own selfish convenience wouldn't allow that freedom. Them identifying my care-taking as "twisted co-dependence" meant I could not express my care for them at all! Perhaps because I predicted their fall after seeing the pattern, they get rid of me because I "caused" them to fall, (the "kill the messenger" approach.) I regard this as being part of a pattern that is bound to re-occur because it's inherent in the caretaker/care taking role. This issue is surely to evolve if I hook up with a partner who will eventually need care - or I will eventually need help.

3. Social Change

Other people who don't know me very well imagine I'm really weird to broadcast my bright and wild ideas that shows them what else they can do (to be more imaginative about relationships, for instance.) If I show the benefit of my own inner understanding of myself, (my lack of jealousy, for instance,) they react by being afraid of me. The feedback I've heard about that is I am flaunting my maturity and insight... toward various negative effects only limited by their lack of imagination. In one case, my motive, (according to one person,) was supposedly to make a splash and incite controversy as if discussing the idea was going to result in me doing the idea personally. (Not my intent. But I can see how most people personally identify with their ideas. So at least I can understand where this assumption originates.)

OK - any ideas on one or all of these three? You can blog a long-winded answer, leave a comment, give a tweet on #ideaparty or call me up on the phone and talk to me... if you have my number. I'll add them to future posts...

Any Questions?

2010-06-10T00:52:00.002-10:00

A kid and a Jehovah Witness came to my door last week. Before they started in with their religious invitations, I engaged the youngster in learning to juggle. He was a kid of around ten years old. Because I'd given him something of value in learning juggling, the kid wanted to give me a booklet that was a digest of their bible. I took it and read some of it.

In this condensed Bible there was an admonition where followers were urged to burn the books of "evil" false prophets such as Tarot card readers, psychics, astrologers, etc. It got me thinking how threatening it is to religions to have competition to their cornering the market on interpreting answers to spiritual questions. Probably nowadays, anyone who dispenses advice and wisdom based on their personal experience is going to be threatening to a church. Made me wonder what definition of "evil" this threat would actually include. Pretty much whenever you decide certain people are "evil," it's only a matter of time before many more people end up in that same category.

I thought of all the people in social networking who are urged to "brand themselves" and be the number one special version of the dispenser of value gained by their followers. In a flash of inspiration, I saw every social networker on Twitter as having their own religion...and respective followers... How would threatened religions and churches burn e-books...?

In the time of Christ there must have been quite a few people out preaching "Truth." Probably there were lots of swindlers who were looking for followers who would pay them money to support their efforts, just as there seem to be now. In that era to perform the miracle of raising the dead, all you had to do is have the skill of recognizing someone in a coma who is might wake up eventually.

That Bible held up as the "word of God" was written by "psychics" who probably did not have much means to advertise - but they could write. Just getting materials to write something down must have been challenging. Probably being someone who knew how to read and write was something you had to keep secret, because people in that era were threatened by it. Creativity was probably low on the list of those cultures deliberately designed to control huge classes of people. Urban myths about anyone, translated numerous times and painstakingly hand-written and copied by those who could READ - it must have been such a privileged, rare gift to be literate in that era. Maybe all those stories in the Bible were about many people, and they all got lumped together into being about one person. (Bait and switch was a common historical tactic of religions.)

Now anyone can have their blog printed on demand. Anyone can dispense "wisdom" and write their own Bible. No wonder religions are being threatened.

Some people believe words have a firm, factual reality in themselves. They think words "mean what they mean." But this is not true. Words shift and flicker depending on context and expression, just as symbols do. This is what makes poetry and the symbols of religion and belief interesting.

Many people have an ability to think, but their ability to express their thinking may not reach the listener or reader for many mutual reasons. The topic or context may be incomplete or indistinct. Or the communicator's natural style of thinking may be so different from our own that it is difficult to figure out the communicator's intent. What is their associative pathway from point to point and how can I follow? It may be tricky to follow thinking paths - especially if thinking is original thinking.

In this way creative thinking is similar to religion - in that really original ideas must be carefully interpreted for the listener.

So often religious bureaucracy seems to want to control how people think because they invest in being the interpreter for the public of their respective "holy scripture." Religious leaders want to be the ONLY interpreter for the believers, claiming "all others are wrong or evil."

Each time they read or listen, each person is reconstructing meaning from reading what someone else has written or said. Someone who has written is pointing at...something about what they intend to say. Their skill and familiarity with their language use is a factor, in addition to their ability to think - but also their ability to articulate and guess at the assumptions of their listener. They try to answer the virtual question: "What would the listener want to know?"

It is up the person listening or reading to fill in the blanks, follow the traces or indicators while the listener reconstructs the thinking pathways of the communicator. In this way, listening is almost a spiritual practice. It is a spiritual question when a person seeks a way to express that which cannot be directly expressed. Spiritual, intuitive, or virtual questions often beg for symbols and indirect ways to express their messages and intent.

Of course, the way you frame a question structures and points to the answer. Have any questions now? Hope so.

Outside Language

2010-05-25T02:12:00.002-10:00

People seem to have a really hard time thinking for themselves. They're not practiced at thinking on demand at all, especially when asked to think about what is missing. You really can't demand that others "think stuff outside of the box" and then not come up with at least one example right on the spot of what that is all about.

The most interesting idea is to use language to point out how it's possible to think beyond language.

The easiest example is to get out the video camera and film people walking. Then ask them to describe what they actually did as they walked. Or ask people to demonstrate a skill and teach it to someone else in a way other than how they learned it. Some more examples... point out why art exists - because people can't describe the making of art in words. Or ask music fans to describe, in words, what musicians do that allows them to improvise with each other. Ask movie fans how come a series of movie scenes makes people get startled or what really happened in the movie scenes before the whole movie theater just sucked in their breath simultaneously, or offered some other group reaction. ...They can't do it! Only those who work in those fields are conscious of these "nuts and bolts." Even these professionals who do these things don't know HOW they do them well enough to articulate how it works in words.

Many people are able to demonstrate something successfully, but they can't describe what they are doing without sounding trite, inane and fumbling. As a collective culture, we're just not used to observing for ourselves and using our own words to describe what we are experiencing.

Why isn't self-observation taught as a foundation skill?

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - that language structures thought ability - is not merely limited to mere specific word definition. It's also related to how words are put together. It points out the perceptual assumptions within the sentence structure of language also traps us.

For instance, important to English sentence structure is the direct object. This has the whole culture being quite concerned with who is doing what to whom. We are constantly thinking about how much someone is lying, (not whether they are lying or not!) Everyone is constantly having to ask themselves, "What percentage of what so and so says should be believed?" Since the direct object is so important in our language, Westerners so often focus on what we can do to something outside of ourselves. It's all about who does what to whom, who gets whose way and who has to wait and for how long they wait - and does the one who waits EVER get what they might want or need?

This why people are so concerned with status in our Indo-European culture. It's impossible to open your mouth or write without adding to the cultural trance of defining the nature of reality. People are constantly in the position of attempting to determine how much another person is lying, teasing or joking and what their motives are.

Really, how does someone understand what another person MEANS to say? People are confronted by descriptions about what the world "is" constantly - every advertisement, every newscast, every piece of gossip, every narration of the nature of the world, every description, every lesson, every comment - any utterance that involves the possibility of word choice.

All of these constructs of words involve a unique point of view. As a listener, we must reconstruct a workable meaning out of what we hear. Nothing IS what it IS. Everything is "open to interpretation! We all must do this in spite of having little or no knowledge, appreciation, sympathy, empathy or compassion for that other person's point of view and/or experiences. We must guess at all of these or communicate directly.

For instance, although there are many lip-serviced references to an inter-woven body-mind connection, we still combine two words to discuss the feature - and the word is a noun, rather than a verb. In English at least, we are still cramming the concept of psycho-physical into our old mold of the two being separate - even though it it common that our culture now acknowledges that bodies and minds are inseparable in one person.

OK, I'll stop ranting now. Tell me what you think.

Thinking While Angry

2010-05-21T09:53:00.000-10:00

I have taught myself to creatively problem solve while angry. It was a very strange skill to learn, not a skill which I'd recommend to others. Better to not to get to this level in your ability to have to manage anger in the first place!

Twenty years ago, I had a relationship going with a person who was quite skilled in being manipulative. When I entered into the relationship, I observed that he also possessed ethics on when and where to apply his considerable skills in argumentation and debate. Ten years into the relationship, he eventually used his superior memory recall and debate skills to fight with me - something which I did not anticipate would ever happen. I had to firmly establish my boundaries and keep them in place as he decided that all things we had established and agreed upon previously were renegotiable. It was a trying time, but I managed it.

He came to expect me to do so. Had I not groomed the ability to creatively problem solve possible options of what to do next in spite of being angry, our relationship would have ended immediately. As it became clear later that staying in the relationship had become a toss-up whether it was good or bad for me personally, I was relieved when the relationship fell apart for practical reasons. I'm sure that the demands for training the skill to be able to problem solve while angry mitigated unpleasant reactions and effects; but perhaps it also prolonged the inevitable conflicts that later ended the relationship.

A more common situation where this skill would be useful to model would be during the parenting of teens - who again, would come to believe that everything should be renegotiated.

There were some prerequisite skills to make this ability possible. These were the ability to stop, pause or interrupt one's own habitual reaction. This can be best practiced when one is not in the throes of an intense emotion. It requires quite a bit of practice concerning the ability to surrender one's goal. There is a short window of time, (a quarter-second,) available to veto an action. You are already preparing to act as soon as you think of doing so, long before you realize you "want" to do something. It's quite telling when people around you believe you have first gotten angry - usually this is quite a bit further back before you realize it yourself.

Because of this lack of awareness, it's very difficult to veto a reaction that has already begun. This skill implies sophisticated exploration of expectations. Also useful during the learning process are pointedly specific observations of how a specific person's anger routinely works.

I learned this skill through the study of Alexander Technique. I'm not sure there is any other forum to learn such a thing, but I imagine anger management class would have these elements. Most commonly, this skill is usually described negatively as "poor impulse control." As far as I know, there is not any place suggested where "good impulse control" is taught - other than very early in life by parental guidance.

There is recently a field of study that seems to teach this skill specifically, but it's tailored toward adults. It's in the negotiation field, ( "Appreciative Inquiry,") the field of mediation or arbitration. Also, at www.newconversations.net there are free e-books on communication tools that seem quite useful. Some interesting books on this are classics in negotiation by Ury and Fisher. It's a series that started with "Getting to Yes." "Getting Past No, dealing with difficult people" More recently Fisher wrote a book with a guy named Shapiro dealing with how to manage emotions during negotiation called "Beyond Reason, using emotions as you negotiate."

Most of these contain stories and philosophy, but some of them provide practice suggestions. It's those offerings of practice that are most effective.

In an ongoing relationship, it is a good thing to make the general agreement that only one person in an argument is allowed to be "out of control." Obviously, it's best for the longevity of the relationship if safe expression of anger can happen as this role is rotated. It has been documented that women in particular suffer quite a bit in their health more than men if they do not speak up and make their "not very nice" concerns known.

I did hear about a study where four year olds were told that if they waited to eat something yummy, they could have twice as much of it when the grownups returned. Or they could eat the smaller portion that was in front of them now. The study afterwards followed the kids as they grew up who managed to wait compared to those who did not. It was found the ability to wait possibly resulted in a significant difference in general achievement.

My own mother was also a great model for how to deal with anger. She and my sister used to fight when I was a kid. By the time I became a teen, she had learned a few things about anger. She told me that people do not bother to get angry if they are not concerned about the relationship. She also modeled "cleaner" ways to fight. She never brought up "the kitchen sink" i.e: unrelated issues. She never tried to wound intentionally, retaliate or say things she might regret later. She would never accused me of being stupid and managed to resist telling me to do what she did not want me to do. But she would yell when she was upset, "I thought you're smart enough to think ahead about how your actions affect others." Her words were quite carefully selected. This instead of the classic name-calling angry routine of: "You thoughtless, selfish, cruel complainer. Why should what you want come first?"

She also made it quite clear to me that people who are out of control while angry say things they don't mean. She said this is mostly because people get scared - fear is a big component of anger. She gave me ways to calm myself down when I got angry and left me the time and place to do so. Then she modeled the ability to talk out the concerns that made us want to get angry with each other, once we were calmed down enough to figure out what we really thought and wanted.

So it was this fortunate, firm foundation, along with learning Alexander Technique, that led me to be able to manage to learn later to creatively problem solve and actually think while angry. I believe it's a rare thing. It should be more common.

Favorite Pet?

2010-05-06T22:48:00.002-10:00

Do you have a favorite pet?

Here's an example of a photo I was shown to be able to draw a likeness of this kitty named "Josie." You can see the drawing I made. What do you think?

Lucky

2010-04-28T13:30:00.000-10:00

This is a drawing I made of a very lucky tabby kitty cat named Grover. He was rescued out of the engine of a car after he got tangled up when the car started. His people were nice enough to put Grover back together. Now they have a kitty who winks at them a lot.

Drawing Kitties

2010-04-27T00:40:00.002-10:00

Black cats are often passed by in shelters in favor of other kitties who are more brightly colored ...because they're black, I guess.

Besides being tricky to take a photo of a black cat, they're also tricky to make a drawing of too.

The nicest kitty I know is black. Her name is Jasmine. She's the second black cat I have met with that name. What makes Jasmine such a nice kitty is that she never gets mad at her person when she goes away. Instead, Jasmine gets mad at the person who "took" her person away for ten whole days. (The only person she ever bit!)

This kitty has never scratched or bit anyone. I'd tell you her name, but I don't know how it's spelled. Minjka? I hear that this kitty I have drawn a picture of here is a one-person kitty. This person gets to have this kitty sleep on their bed and happily snuggle up to them and purr. But this kitty really doesn't want anyone to know she exists, because - well, you know how faithful a dog can be. This cat is faithful like a dog.

Wish I could purr.

Give and Take Collection

2010-03-22T13:35:00.002-10:00

One of my ideas about blogging on so many subjects has been that themes would emerge by themselves. As I saw this happening, I reasoned that I could sift out the posts related to a certain theme and use them to start a targeted blog subject. A new subject seems to have emerged! Having written so extensively on this subject, I have decided that I should collect these posts into a separate blog that specializes in this subject alone. This post is a collection of the various posts on this subject, collected for your pleasure.
Reciprocal "give and take" is so essential that I've decided to collect them into the subject of a new blog - to be announced. I've been exploring this phenomena for some time now. Written about the different aspects of the problem quite a bit, as you can see here.

It's going to get to be a big factor as the baby boomers get to the point where they need to accept care gracefully during aging. For that reason alone, this issue could become a really important one to discuss.

Would you subscribe to a blog on just this subject as a way to allow yourself to free up the acts of gracefully accepting and learning about well-placed giving?

Here's where I ask questions about the different style of how gifts are offered, http://is.gd/5JfL6 asked around the gift-giving fervor of Christmas time.

Tacit Obligation http://is.gd/bMfhY
If someone has difficulty accepting, many times if you can vary the style of how the gift is offered, it will result in making it easier for them to accept. Making light of it's value is sometimes effective, because the best situation between giver and "givee" is when the thing is of great value to the givee and is easy for the giver to offer. But sometimes an action carries much more weight than anything they might say about it. Thus, accepting a gift incites obligation that may be only tacitly guessed. Why can't people accept a gift? A mystery part of a person is not sure what is the (sub)culturally tacit agreement about this gift; talking about it probably won't help.

Random Acts http://is.gd/bMeST
Some people feel a need to remove themselves from the act, so that the receiver has no idea where the gift came from. It becomes impersonal. Thus we have all of the organizations that specialize in accepting tax charitable gifts and doing the messing actual giving to others.

Giving Back The proper way to "give back" is not always to do the exact same gesture, because needs are different. The mistake many people make in selecting what to give is they assume their value system of what is valuable is identical to the givee. This is not true. Being able to put oneself in the shoes of the givee is a thoughtful, compassionate act. So this is often a good reason to reject the offer of help - because what is being offered is misplaced and not of value from the point of view of the givee.

Gifts That Fit http://is.gd/bMeDi
In the small town of Bolinas, CA, we have a "freebox" where mainly articles of clothing are dropped off to be made available to anyone who wants them. The proper way to give back for the value of what you have gotten from it is to clean and organize the Freebox. Many people focus on the stuff itself; they mistake that the proper way to reciprocate is to bring more "stuff." Actually, having a place to bring your stuff to get rid of it is also a significant benefit. So the proper way to reciprocate is more like assuming the role temporarily of a "shop-keeper." A person who wanted to reciprocate would make the good stuff available to those who stop by looking to get something, (like pairing up shoes,) glean out the trash and every once in awhile, clear out the Freebox of all of it's donations so it's empty again to accept more stuff.

Allowing Benefits of Being The Giver http://is.gd/bMeMk
The Hawaiian spirit of Aloha is a wonderful template. It observes that you must allow someone to give, even if what is being offered is not of value to the givee. Being able to give is a human right, and by gracefully accepting, you are allowing this pleasure of giving to be exercised.

Consequences of Acceptance Generally with people who have trouble accepting being given to, it's important to ask what the accepting of gifts symbolizes. To some people, accepting what is offered is a "one-down" position in a competitive sense. To others, they are fearful that accepting the gift will make them obligated to play the role eternally.They fear they're going to lose their independence as they learn to rely on the gift being provided routinely, and will act to prevent the source going away.

Independence Declarations Causing a Split I've also seen repeatedly a situation that seemed to be a direct result of mistaking the roles and pleasures giving and receiving. The situation was where a partner was forced to accept help because of a temporary injury. Evidently after recovery, the person who had been injured wanted to reject help from their partner to re-establish their independence and self-respect. ANY help was rejected entirely, so often and completely that even the "normal" pleasures of doing things for one's sweetie symbolized infantile dependence to the person who was in the process of recovering. If this was not purposefully addressed, it caused a breakup!

Respect http://is.gd/aTqdM
Giving and receiving seems to be connected to how respect is shown. In our culture, you must choose between respect and having rapport. Here's a post where I explored it's application in how respect is signified in the context of speaking in a group interaction. It's curious how listeners are valued socially, (which is a receptive role) when in the situation where the gift is tangible - suddenly the giver becomes the authority.

Suspicious of Greed It's also curious that when someone is in a situation of getting or having gotten a personal benefit, somehow what they offer or receive is suddenly suspect, because there's now a "invested interest." This is what happens when a person is really passionate about a belief in how something works for them and wants to communicate the benefit of their experience to others - everything they say about what they are passionate about is suddenly considered in that light or frame. They're proselytizers, rather than merely sharing their experience. I'm not sure why people believe that someone who is enthusiastic about something is self-involved or selfish.

Bonding http://is.gd/aTspT
Some people take the giver/givee challenge to the point of refusing to establish the bond of a relationship entirely. I talk about that here: There are many rituals of establishing a bond as there are subcultures.

Entitlement http://is.gd/aTtf1
Here's another post where I talk about the anger that results when the givee decides they are "entitled" to what the givers are offering before they're getting it. This talks about greed.

Compliments http://is.gd/aTsR9
Complimenting is also an interesting way of giving back that some people feel strange about accepting. Of course, it's a benefit to find out that what you do easily is notable for others - because it signifies what could be a valuable talent. Some people automatically reject them out of hand as an expression of the deadly sin of pride or ego. Some people regard compliments of the possession of an item as a way to ask for the thing to be offered by the person who has it. Here's a story about why I believe that complimenting is an important thing to do. In my culture, handing out a compliment implies the person was (like a puppy) explicitly seeking your approval, which may not be true. Rejecting the gift implies that you would prefer to give yourself the approval. There are many other values signified by accepting a compliment that have people have reacted negatively to it.

Surpassing Expectations

2010-03-17T22:19:00.000-10:00

"What is it about your environment, history and values that encourages you to surpass limiting social expectations?" It's a very interesting question to ask in polite conversation of any grownup. Asking it in a non-specific way leaves the answer open.

Curious answers occur. When you ask the question of a woman, you must take the replies with a grain of salt. Women tend to "tell troubles" to bond with other women. To understand much more of how all this happens and more about what the issues are concerning women and those who do not match the current social trends in their conversational style, I recommend the very conversational but content-rich books written by linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, PhD - especially her book "Talking 9 to 5."

It took me a great deal of thought about this question to find the answers for myself. There were three pivotal experiences for me.

What made the biggest difference motivating me to think for myself first happened when I was only five years old. My idol, which was my elder brother of eight years, gave me a snake for a pet - sanctioned by my parents. It was 1959, and in that era, snakes suffered from many social misconceptions about their nature. At a crucial stage when I was going to transfer my family's authority toward the authority of school & a greater social world...Here were these serious mis-matches about snakes that I knew was completely urban legend. People I did not know or trust mistakenly thought snakes were dangerous, contradicting what I knew to be true according to my family and the San Diego Zoo. This experience encouraged me to think for myself and put out effort to learn the true nature of things before I accepted societal norms. It inoculated me against cigarettes as well as sent me to college, because I decided at five that you could be free of fear if you knew more of the facts.

Of course, the most obvious solution to change the minds of young people would be world travel. Becoming an exchange student during middle or high school is the most socially acceptable way, but spending at least six months in another culture works just as well. Once you have been a young person in a radically different environment, you return and realize how self-absorbed your peers are. Not to mention how regional fashion codes really are.

The other pivotal issue was attractiveness and the social authority that went along with it. It upset me that, according to society, women were expected to be helplessly manipulative to get things done. The social fact that an attractive female asking for a "favor" gets it from a male who has temporarily lost his reasoning - this bothered me.

For me as a young girl, there seemed no way to "opt out" of that game gracefully. I did not want the power men handed me; they wanted me to deny or accept their attention. Because of the accident of birth making me coincidentally attractive, I had to deal with this issue early on. Only later I realized that this was a social reality for almost every girl. (If you're a straight guy reading this, imagine if you had to deal daily with attention from people you did not want - from other guys, for instance. This is the environment young women find themselves.)

What eventually remedied this issue for me was learning about body language. After this education, it was indisputable that how I behaved was evident for anyone to see. What sort of a person I was, my values, showed beyond my physical features. A person's character is expressed in their walk, how they move, where their attention goes & the quality of attention used. After learning about body language, I had to accept there were, in me, obvious additional desirable qualities of character. That they were there in addition to matching social definitions of beauty - well, I could accept the attention I was getting now. The attention was my fault, instead of purely an accident of nature.

So I would recommend to teach body language as part of a relationship communication class as a solution for the common desire for membership and bonding - in high school or earlier. (For me, studying Alexander Technique in a classroom situation worked.)

There are many reasons why there is a sudden drop in confidence when girls (and boys) reach middle school age. They realize how they do not match the social norms, and there is the tendency to envy what they are not. This is when girls first must grapple with social questions about how they are going to deal with sexual attention. A desire to for membership and to belong becomes important, as well as trying on what roles might suffice to deal with this big question.

The last pivotal experience for me was when I discovered creative thinking skills. Not just the result of thinking creatively by making things artistic, or modeling creative people I admired. I'm talking about the actual nuts and bolts of how to do problem solving in a situation of decision-making.

Creative thinking skills taught me HOW to think for myself. Wanting to think for yourself in spite of societal norms and actually doing this thinking constructively are two very different things. Edward de Bono has a series of proven simple but effective creative and strategic thinking skills designed for middle school aged students and older. Again - not What to think - but How. Young people have refreshing bull-pucky detectors. These natural talents can be fostered into effective and constructive rebellion. In fact, the more rebellious, the better this education works to help you go your own way more intentionally...against the crowd.

Probably nobody is going to take my word for it. But if creative thinking skills and relationship classes were taught in high school (instead of so much of what is ridiculous mind-reading for "correct" information that is taught now,) society would experience a big jump in social responsibility from all young people.

Stereotyping and trying to be "right" affects everyone.

Lifesaving

2010-03-06T03:05:00.004-10:00

Was on a remote beach by the RCA towers in California, in a time before cell phones, on the first sunny weekend in April after a storm. Was watching someone hang-glide, while the guy was trying to land on the beach. Because I was watching and knew something about gliding trajectory, I could predict the hang glider was going to touch down crotch-deep in the surf. Not good. Because nobody else seemed to be watching, I got up and ran all the way down the (naked) beach to help out before the guy landed. Before I arrived, the guy was immediately pulled out by 6-7 ft waves. Couldn't figure out how to unwrap the guy from the lines when he would pop up, so I had to swim away, knowing that he could get caught underwater as he was pulled further out by the high surf and his glider maybe got hung up on the nearby reef.

When I was out in the high surf after freeing the hang glider's hands, I looked back at the nine people lined up on the beach watching us. If at that point I had thought about what this experience was going to mean to me, if I had personally known the hang glider, if I had reacted with outrage at those nine observers, I might have drowned. My ethics had been (up until that point) to help without thought to my own needs. At the time, I realized that I was out far enough off shore in heavy & rough, cold surf without a way to cut the guy free from his glider. Saving myself was now the new priority, so there were not two people drowning. So I swam away.

The nine others watching imagined I must have known the guy. They concluded the only reason I swam away was that I didn't have a knife. So they sent their best swimmer who knew life-saving techniques out - with a knife. Once I stumbled onto shore, my admonition that this was not the movies and just one person doesn't have to be The Hero, everyone else who could swim jumped into the water to help out too.

The hang glider guy was saved from drowning. Standing there looking at him as a wet cocoon by the fire people were building to warm him up, I realized how often I had tried to save people I loved in my own life, and how close I was to being pulled under in those situations too. It had profoundly affected me to turn around on that hang glider, knowing that I could do nothing more about saving him. It was quite a gift for me to know the real boundary between saving someone else and saving myself.

Fortunately, I didn't have to pay with regret that my "life-lesson" had resulted in a death. If I had not jumped in, the trained life-saver wouldn't have thought to ask among others on the beach for a knife.

I never did find out the hang glider's name. I just walked home down the beach, exhausted and happy that he was alive.

Getting Confident

2010-02-02T06:08:00.004-10:00

Sit up and pay attention now. I know quite a bit about confidence and you'll be gettin' it in one swell foop. Hope you're rising to the occasion.

On the road to confidence, each piece of the puzzle offers the reward of a new world. Gaining confidence is not merely a struggle to get to zero as many assume.

Sometimes behind a lack of confidence is usually some sort of fear or assumption about the consequence of revealing thoughts, feelings or values. Such as, "If I get noticed, then I'll get squished like a pretty bug." Suspect these conclusions of "If....then...." Once conclusions get uncovered, check them out and see if they are really true. Many times these are mistaken assumptions and logical fallacies are involved. But if they are true, your question would be - how can I change this part I'm playing, maybe I'm feeding into this? How can I invite these what I want to experience from others?

Often feelings don't make sense. Reassurance can use the proof of reason and observation. Find out how to reassure yourself without having to lie or follow it with a snide remark. Figuring out how to do this will make anyone a better observer of what happens. Observation will tell the difference between responsibility and accidentally associated sequences that are circumstantially affecting outcomes.

Delivering reassurance to one's own fears may also teach a person to deliver effective compliments that can't be brushed aside or suspect. Remember, each new skill is a lie before you learn it. Don't worry if you have to "fake it 'til you make it."

If you said to a woman you admire, "you are so confident!" I'm sure she'd disagree with you, because women are taught that confidence is arrogance. (Women modestly often just get down to the business of doing what needs doing. The proof is in the pudding.) But if you offered your specific observation that, "Your openness works like a virus that disarms people," she might laugh and tell you about someone who wasn't affected in this way.

Often these mistaken conclusions involve mere opinions that are backed up with self-selected memories. This is a common phenomena that happens to many people when they feel bad. In a bad state, people often flicker through all similar situations of their past, seeking a factual basis of their own inadequacy or short-comings - or other suspected negative emotional state such as sadness, stupidity or thoughtlessness, etc. Questioning the point of doing this to yourself is productive. Never discount physical comfort as a contributing force.

The reptilian survival brain works in images. This part of the brain doesn't listen to linguistic qualifiers such as "Don't ...." Once you know more how this works, then you can also construct moments when you intentionally select the positive outcomes and positive effects of your compassionate and capable resourcefulness as well as other admirable qualities.Practice that for the thirty plus days it takes to change yourself - and you're good to go.

Because of the unknown and unpredictable nature of reality, it's easy to imagine that the contents of thoughts magically affect outcome. For instance, it's very common for someone to feel responsible for a death of a loved one in some way, even when they actually had nothing to do with it. You may find that it's not so much content, but it is the routine means of thinking that affects outcomes. Learn creative thinking skills. Be careful what you let yourself repeat, because you'll train yourself. ~It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. ~ as an old jazz song says.

Also, believe others when they tell you the positive ways about how you affect them. Absorb compliments when they come without imaging you'll suffer from evil effects. For instance, as a young girl I used to feel my mouth didn't look attractive. At thirteen, a cute young man in his mid-twenties saw me holding my mouth funny at a public function. He followed me around repeatedly, taking photos of my "beautiful" mouth while reciting how notable of an artist and photographer he was. I'm not sure he even had film in his old-format camera, but by doing so, he got me over a self-consciousness about my appearance.

After checking assumptions out about conclusions, if you decide they are true, you can deal with them in various ways. Often the consequence of the feared result is not all that bad as you imagined. If you try it voluntarily, you may actually prefer it. You can also regard the consequences if they're a force of nature and not pointed specifically against you. "You are not the target"- Laura Huxley.

One of my big discoveries in the process of losing my shyness (Me? Shy? You'd never believe that now!) was that other people were very self-involved, especially young people. The older ones are on auto-pilot. Most people are a product of their conditioning. They have much less control over the ways they effect others than they would prefer. Just as a surfer must figure out a few facts to ride a wave successfully, there are a few things you may be lacking to successfully navigate in the social world. Learn them and become aware enough to use them appropriately, without getting upset that you should already know these things. Forgive yourself. Nobody can help where they start from, but they can decide what they're going to do about it from now on. Just as a perfect wave doesn't care if it gets surfed, these factors, (that may involve people's reactions) may not care about your feelings, or even your survival. "Know thyself, then get over yourself" - Mr. Natural

A lack of confidence can be a defensive stance of hiding to protect...something. You may think you know what this "something" is, but usually the meat of it is hiding behind the reaction of shrinking, shirking or avoidance. This takes persistence to uncover. Trace the reaction back to right before it's about to happen, and there you'll find the original feelings that put the hiding, shy or shirking solution in place. Of course, your reactive solution was viable at the time you designed it originally. It only later became obsolete. Now that you've grown and know the origin, you can choose another way. The habitually reactive solution is still there to use in a pinch.

Sometimes you can just ask people, "How do I affect you?" But beware of setting in place a tacit agreement that you'll always be agreeable. The danger of asking is then the responsibility will be on your shoulders to accommodate other people's short-comings that you supposedly "caused." It's never a good thing to allow fears or short-comings to run the course of relationships, whether they be personal or social.

Finally, observe the positive state in others you want to embody and note how they express it. Quiz them. Try stating these observations positively, not merely stating them by defining what you do not want. If can't you say what you want completely or only in a metaphor (as you've done by saying it's a colored attitude,) you can always find more practical evidence of how it actually works as you move toward it.

One of my most useful observations about happiness came from realizing that it's subtle, calm qualities were very different from the strong intensities of my imperative need to rebel against unhappiness. Happy confidence was not a dizzy, drunk intensity - it was curious, quiet, unassuming & absorbed. This has turned out to be true for other topics as well. The positive expression of what is desired probably won't have the same qualities of what you don't want.

For instance, if you realized that modesty and being humble are expressions of confidence, make observations about how are those qualities expressed in behavior. What happened when these expressions of that value were practiced by you? Did they have the intended results on others and the situation? Did things improve when you gave up specifying results? As you gain more experience in the world, how might you improve the expression of your values as they become more refined, flexible and sophisticated?

The ability to ask questions, personal questions about yourself is a sign of strength and admirable character. Vulnerability is an asset. You can reinterpret the "heat" that might come your way for doing so as respect - and sometimes people are threatened by confidence. Enjoy before integration.

Heartbreak Resistance

2010-01-26T09:50:00.004-10:00

It's very personal. What is most person can become the more universal when expressed. I'll leave some of that really personal stuff out, but I'll try to tell enough of this story to make you understand how much of a cross-roads it was for me. Well, maybe I shouldn't parade a story this heartbreaking here, since everyone knows who I am here in real life. Ah - I guess it doesn't matter what the content of the problem was. You can guess. It was a baaaad thing. Instead I'm going to talk about the solution.

You know all the stuff people tell about how to get past your self-sabotage? Well, it doesn't work when things are really baaaad. This is a story of what did work for me.

The problem was a huge gaping wound. It had already been resolved, and now I had to deal with how I felt about having resolved it the way I did. Talking about it didn't help. Crying about it didn't help. Freaking out about it didn't help. Couldn't stop thinking about it either. It was eating out a heartbreak.

I'm trained as an artist, but for some mystery reason I was resisting making art. I think what happened is that this thing heartbreak was preoccupied with bothered me badly. Suddenly, making the art became less stressful than everything else I was experiencing.

That's the thing about resistance that I've just learned about from a podcast by Barbara Sher. Learn it yourself here.

Behind resistance is an avoidance of something important, something that totally makes sense. You've got to find out what that is, because it's often hiding from you. Using positive affirmations just signals the resistant part of you that it's time to protect you even more - positive stuff doesn't really work. Positive thinking never helped me stop procrastination; it actually made it worse. In fact, using affirmations can make the resistance so strong, it can cause me to hurt myself to put a stop to all progress. As my friend Chris once said, "Got in a fight with myself and I lost."

If you can find the source of your resistance, then the stress and pressure of not being able to do the thing vanishes. You can go forward with no problem into whatever you've been avoiding. The tricky part is finding something inside of yourself that part of you is dead set about protecting you from noticing while you're busy running in the other direction.

So that's what happened with me. My concern that was eating at me finally outweighed the resistance I'd been experiencing about being an artist. I began to make art. I had to make art - I had no choice. I painted and painted and painted. I hung a huge roll of paper on the wall in my garage and slung paint at it. I pulled out another length of paper, got more of the paints and did it over and over and over. I painted like a fiend for a solid week.

I felt better.

A week later than that, I stood back and looked at the art. It was completely and totally abstract. I had done it without any thought of what I was making. Yet, somehow, accidentally on purpose, images, symbols and scenes had emerged in every single painting.

I sat there and looked at what I had painted. I hung them all over my walls and looked at them. they went floor to ceiling - they were huge. Somehow, these paintings had turned out to look like exactly about what I was upset about. I don't know why I was surprised about that. All of the images in every one of these paintings was directly related to why and how I felt about being upset.

What I had painted in each picture was just like one of those "magic" drawings for kids in "Highlights" magazine, (does that magazine still exist?) where there were images hidden in other images, and it was a game to find what they were and where they were. I had done it by slinging paint around - completely by accident, yet, obviously not by accident at all.

The whole process of what happened totally blew my mind. How could I have been painting completely abstract and had these images emerge in the work? What was really going on that something like this could happen? I rolled up these paintings, stuck them in my storage unit. Later I burned most of them. Think that I have one left somewhere. I have never again painted like that since. It scared me, but at the same time, being able to paint like that satisfied something big inside of me.

I've done little glimmers of being able to paint like that before. I'd been told that I could be a great painter by someone who knew enough for me to believe they knew what they were talking about. They said, "Not just good, not just famous - but great." Tried it for a little while, being a painter. But I didn't like the art scene and had no clue how to get into a gallery. So I became a sign painter. It allowed me to work big, which was something I liked to do. It paid the rent, which was also nice. I didn't like painting in a studio, I liked painting where there were people around, so painting on the street was fun for me.

The really weird part was that, after making these hugs paintings, I wasn't upset anymore about this thing that I'd been preoccupied with for months and had tried to accept but couldn't. Whatever I had done when I painted had resolved what I had been so upset about. It scared me that in order to paint like that, I had to feel that intensity of emotion. But painting worked as the solution to express the pain. I guess it worked because the pain got expressed in a non-verbal way - accidentally on purpose. I did something to externalize how I was feeling that went beyond words. So now - art is what I resort to when I can't use words.

So now, even though it's can be difficult to remember what works when I feel that nothing is helping me. When I get really stuck, sometimes it dawns on me that I can paint.

What do you do when nothing works to express how you're feeling?

Worried Today, Time to Make Art

2010-01-22T22:49:00.007-10:00

Thinking of what to do to improve the level of my own happiness today. I'm worried today because money to pay rent hasn't appeared on the horizon. Realized that making art has worked for me before when I've felt like a deer in the headlights, so decided to draw a picture of a kitty who was nice enough to tame herself so I could be her friend.

Shared her with Janet after I began a mobile lifestyle, so I even have corroboration about how unusual this kitty truly was. This pussycat became my icon for the proof that a specific character could surpass the character traits of her species. In her case, she was thoughtful and compassionate about others, when felines are known for being completely and shamelessly self-involved. I wrote about her story previously here.

Her name was "Squeeker," affectionately known as, "Ms. Vanilla."

Most Magnanimous Kitty - Ever

All my cats have had "theme songs," usually parodies.

Squeeker's theme song is sung to the tune of

"Look At That Stupid Girl" by the Rolling Stones.

~I'm not talkin' about the cutest squeak she has....

~ Look at that fluffy kitty

~ I'm not talkin' about the ever-wafting baths...

~ Look at that fluffy kitty

~ The way she packs a punch

~ Poor mice fast become her lunch

~ To me the sweetest cat in the world

~ Greet that fluffy kitty!

~ I'm not talking about the kind of dust she wears

~ Check out that fluffy kitty...

~ I'm not talkin' about the twisted fang she bears

~ Look out for that fluffy kitty...

~ The way she bathes her friends

~ Her peace-makin' never ends

~ Her lack of vanity plus times ten

~ Gotta pet that fluffy kitty!

No Other Night

2010-01-07T00:07:00.003-10:00

In my late twenties, I had joined a Brazilian dance troupe. A fellow dancer, a Brazilian, had asked me out on a date to a Brazilian nightclub. After he picked me up at my girlfriend's house, he grilled me about my relationship to her. When I asked why, he indicated that us two girls had been so much more affectionate to each other saying goodbye than other women in America. He wanted to know what made us different from the other, more commonly not-so-affectionate women. I explained that some people grew up in families that were much more physically affectionate than the prevailing culture. They find and bond to each other as friends privately once they reach an understanding of what their displays of affection mean.

He turned to me and said, "Be with me tonight as if there were no other night."

What he meant was, "Feel free to be as affectionate as you would like with me. I will not imagine you are giving me permission that you are available sexually before I know you." I'm sure he had no idea how romantic a phrase he had just uttered to me, being new to the culture.

So we walked into the Brazilian club with me having a much more interesting understanding of Brazilian culture concerning the display of sexuality. I took to heart his suggestion, and it attracted quite a bit of attention in the whole club - attention from women as well as men.

The owner of the club invited me behind the bar in the noisy club. He gave me a copy of the album of the band. When I asked him why he was giving this to me, he told me, "Because tonight you act like a Brazilian woman - you must go to Brazil."

With almost every guy's eye on me, I turned to my very respectful date and said - "You see, this is why I do not display my natural sensuality. I am not sure I like all these eyes staring at me, watching my every move. How do I put an end to this unrelenting attention of all these men in this club?"

After asking my permission to solve my question, he gave me a big, sloppy kiss. Every other man looked away. Evidently in Brazil, once a woman indicates she has chosen a man, she is then unavailable to all the rest. Have to admit, that it did effectively solve the problem at hand.

Being Authentic

2010-01-06T00:48:00.002-10:00

There's a cost to honesty and to drawing personal boundaries. Certainly being "honest, real, and ethical" as defined by you is a good thing to do. However, if you care about others, you still must deal with how others feel about how you're acting. How do you want to affect others and the situation while communicating effectively?

It's wise to choose your battles deliberately. Sometimes it's better to tell a white lie and go through some meaningless social niceties than it is to announce your contrariness just out of the starting gate. Asking for permission is more complicated than asking for forgiveness.

I know I'm an unusual person with unusual values; it's not important to me anymore to broadcast that quality to the world. Now I let others figure that out about me on their own. I've learned a little friendly reserve helps others not be intimidated by my lack of social constraints. I decided that I do not enjoy people being afraid of me because of my social "daring". Hard to imagine this person in the picture is the one I'm describing, isn't it?

Have always been surprised how others seem to assign the lowest motive to actions they don't understand. To respond to this, it's best to explain motives and go from there. Often, opting out without revealing why is a better strategy. My rule of thumb for making these decisions has been, "keep you eyes on the prize." The virtual question is: "What do I want to create here, and are my means congruent with my goals?"

Someone who is "ethical" and treats people well is actually is in the act of protecting the other person, while leaving themselves vulnerable. In a perfect world, the other person is being ethical to watch your back, but that's not always the case. So that's why wonderful people lose out, and find themselves paying prices they didn't expect to have volunteered for making the sacrifice. That's one of the costs of "being real."

Success Wreck

2010-01-01T00:07:00.002-10:00

Yes, I've had emotional train wrecks just after major successes as many other people experience. Feels like a tsunami rolling over me at best. Had to take some time to re-group and think carefully about how to provide for my own needs and desires, hopes and fears. This was often days of time.

In order to get some freedom, I seemed to be capable of pretending that I was smart; or at least it seemed to me that I wasn't as smart as others considered me to be. When growing up, every once in awhile I'd get a teacher who was smart enough to use what I had to offer. They must have been wise enough to understood some of why I was acting the way I did.

For instance, my Spanish teacher in middle school was brilliant. It didn't matter to her that having eaten breakfast made me fall sleep during her class every day. She was smart enough to observe that I would soak up everything that was going on around me in this half-asleep state. It was fine with her that she had to call my name to wake me; then she'd repeat her request that she was passing around the room for everyone to answer. The test was that I had the answer that would satisfy her criteria. She was so kind to not penalize me in any way for sleeping with my head on my desk.

Every once in awhile she would give me something interesting to do that would keep me awake enough; the job of making flash cards for the class - or tutoring my classmates who were slower to learn. By the time I had spent three years in her class - I was completely fluent and could think and even tell jokes in Spanish. I joke now that I've forgotten many Spanish words... but the truth of the matter is it comes back to me when I go to Mexico. Pretty much I can tell what someone is talking about in Spanish, but not what they're saying about until I hit the books a bit again.

I knew where this wound came from in my past, but that didn't help much figuring out how to get past it. When I was a kid in the 1950s, I studied tap dancing at a gym - it was also a place where kids got rewarded (with the equivalent of twenty bucks now) the first time they could walk across the length of the gym on their hands. Had a funny flash-back that seemed to be lodged into my body when I attended a stretching class thirty years later as I bent backwards into what is called a "bridge" to "spider-walk" - walk on one's hands and feet belly-up, back arched with one's head hanging upside-down and backwards. As a five year old, I was such a fast learner of routines in the gym and dance classes that the teachers put me at the head of the troupe and had the other kids to just follow my excellent memory.

The problem happened at a huge group recital. Some other kids not in my group sat in the wrong line. When the line of my group was called me and a couple others in my troupe who were supposed to be at the head of the group did not get to go out on stage. I was completely crushed that I'd been pumped up about how important my role was as leader and then no grownup noticed I was not at the head of my group to perform. How important could I be if I was not even missed?

The event producers offered to let me go out on stage with the other two kids in my troupe, but I could not stop crying. My mom even stuck me into the car and drove me around the block to try to calm me down. She tried to give me a pep talk that I was doing what actresses do - throw a fit when I had been short-changed. I had been successful and now it was time for the show to go on. But it didn't work because I had not had any practice in calming myself down after being really upset. I had never gotten so freaked out and disappointed in my sweet, short life before.

I recognized myself in a scene of the movie "Wave Rider." A young girl works hard and skillfully to prove to her grandfather she is qualified to be the spiritual leader of her community. But he refuses to allow her recognition because of her gender. She successfully fulfills many trials, in spite of being spurned, and she is even actively prevented from learning by being excluded from her grandfather's classes - for boys only. In one scene, she has learned complex Maori chants and performs them with tears streaming down her face, in spite of the fact that her grandfather has refused to attend her performance.

For some reason, the producers of that even long ago would not allow me as a forgotten performer to express myself by crying while dancing. Why not? Where is this rule that performers must be happy?

The movie does not go into why the Wave Rider protagonist cannot give up the role she is meant to play for her people. But this is what I need to know - for myself. How can persist and continue to fulfill the role I know I am supposed to play without allowing setbacks to prevent me from eventual success?

Anyone who does not fit into the mold that language usage or culture has established to be "normal" is left to flounder - this is just as true for people who are good looking, talented and smart as well as those who are on the other end of the social spectrum.

Part of being an adult to know what it is you need and go out and provide it for yourself. My own secret has been to figure out how to ask for or get what I needed in other ways, other avenues that did not excite societal reactions, to sneak under the radar...to go in the back door rather than the front door.

I'm not sure that this "back door approach" will work for me in the future. Self-doubt has reared its ugly head for me.

Incarnation Objectives

2009-12-27T22:33:00.002-10:00

A friend of mine who had been trained as a Shaman told me he had a special talent. This was to take someone back to have a little talk with the "Advisors" who had been around when the person incarnated. The useful part was these Advisors knew what your particular intent was for being alive. Of course I was interested in learning what "purpose to life" I had intended to play out. Although he cautioned me that once I got the attention of these busy and rather serious ethereal "advisors," I had better be getting with the program if I was off-course - I still wanted to know. Who would want to waste an opportunity like this if it was useful?

The experience was not particularly notable; at the start it seemed to be a garden-variety hypnosis session that was fun to tell about mostly because of the sense of humor of my particular advisors. But the session had an unexpected result. The two of them were a little like an edited conversation between Homer Simpson and Groucho Marx.

The message for me was, "if you want to help people, don't let them obligate you." This message was delivered as these Advisor characters pulled off me a strange webbed, sticky stuff. The session was an interesting experience in synesthesia, because I could hear it coming off as well as feel this stuff sticking to me as it was pulled off the backs of my legs and in places where I'd had injuries. That had never happened before in a hypnosis session.

It was obvious that helping others was my purpose, and I'd been already doing just that much of my life. It was how I was doing it that evidently needed to be reconsidered. Most of the rest of the session gave me hints about specific ways I could take more effective care of myself. Some of these choices of how to best provide for my own needs were in question for me.

What surprised me was the immediate effect afterwards. In fact, it was rather shocking. Soon after, I got a call from one of the beneficiaries of my help. There was a significant surprise in the experience of the call for me. It's as if my dopamine receptors had been scrubbed clean again. Somehow, my friendly Shaman had taken me back to a brightness level of emotional and perceptual sensitivity of decades ago! Somehow, I'd accidentally-on-purpose shut myself off from my own emotional reactions to the people I'd been helping without realizing what that would mean for me. Part of the reason I had questions about how to provide for myself better was because I'd lost this sense.

Of course, recovering my "brightness" knob of emotions had mixed results. It made me realize the cost I'd been paying for hanging out with people that most would shun. This was something that I'd actively ignored because of my convictions that these people needed help from someone - and I had nominated myself to be that "someone".

The experience my Shaman friend gave me has me re-evaluating what I actually do for people and how it realistically affects them. Since I seem to have this bent, perhaps I should be more professional in how I express it rather than personal?

Naaah.

Givers and Givees

2009-12-24T03:49:00.007-10:00

I know most people think that Christmas is about giving, but what about those who are on the receiving end? Christmas is the one time of the year where it's appropriate to be a graceful and thankful and even overwhelmed recipient. What would giving be without a receiver? Without a Givee, there wouldn't be a chance to be the Giver.

There are so many types of giving.

There's the sort of giving that happens when someone takes you under the wing and includes you in how they take care of themselves, which is a brand of sharing or mentoring. There's the kind of giving where someone imagines what you might be missing and fills in something the givee never knew they could use or might want to have. There's the sort of gift that works like a tool that begs to be taken for the ride it deserves. There's the gift that has the potential to transform the life of the givee. Or the kind of gift that is an experience rather than a thing that the givee doesn't know about or would imagine was too expensive to provide for themselves.

My favorite is the sort of gift that is no trouble for the giver to be giving, but it has a fantastic benefit for the person who is receiving it. There can even be an advantage for the giver in a win-win situation.

Then there's the sort of gift that "costs" the giver quite a bit, but that person believes the gift is could be so valuable to the givee that the giver really wants to benefit them...and will accept no refusal.

Whatever the sort of gift you have received recently, it's great to think about what it costs the giver so you can be a graceful and grateful givee - and "pay it forward" to someone else if you feel so inclined.

I Could Do Anything, If Only...

2009-12-24T03:45:00.005-10:00

If only I...

...was funnier, could make people laugh.
...could balance my desire to take care of others with the ability to walk my talk - for myself.
...If only I knew how to inspire others.
...if only I would exercise. I hate exercise. I need a goal, somewhere to go, something to do that makes me get out and move. Instead, I think of how much it's going to cost me in money that I don't have to get in the car and go swimming.
...If only I hadn't started from being so twisted up physically. Sometimes I am so discouraged that I'll never totally undo the limiting patterns I learned since before I learned to walk.
...if only I could afford to fix my teeth, maybe people would listen to what I have to offer. I hate that I have to accept social norms and can't control the petty things other people think about me.
...if only my own standards did not expand just ahead of my abilities, so that I'm always chasing behind what I feel I should already know how to do.
If only I could be a better example that people would recognize as the beauty, grace and effortlessness of where I'm pointed. If only people could see how far I've come, how much I've learned. Instead, people want instant results.
...If only I didn't have to educate people before they could even recognize that they desperately need what I have to offer. Why do I always pick these skills that marry the physical with the mental, beyond what anyone else could imagine is possible? If only I wasn't attempting to educate on subject that are "before my time."
...if only I could quit training for livelihoods that require me to keep appointments. It's always been such a struggle for me to be on time.
..if only I .would get over having "just enough money" to survive. I seem to be so quixotic, always putting the surrender of my beliefs ahead of my own comfort. If I don't have a deadline or someone to show off my work to, I'll drop the threads that could bring me into a position to offer so much more to so many more people.
...if only those twenty projects wouldn't be clamoring for my attention, like gremlins. ME! ME! Work on ME!
...if only it wasn't so tempting to fritter away my time. At least I don't watch TV anymore, but there is still not enough time.
..if only I could stop creating interdependence by choosing others to take care of who are "bad risks" who need my help so desperately. They're energy drains, but I've learned to dance out of the way of their negativity, but this leaves me a dancing fool. So I have these non-functional adults who love me that I have to hold up if I want friends. Other people who are functional don't want these useless people around who are my friends, so they isolate me.
...if only establishing boundaries did not have a "cost". I don't like being a respected authority, and yet I crave to offer the benefit of my own observations and resourceful ideas. I'd rather have rapport with people, but my emotional maturity scares people away.
...if only I could just be OK as a hermit. I have so much to do to "polish my stone" that I could pretty much stop relating to people and just work. But I crave belonging.
...If only I knew how to communicate what has been so valuable to me. Even though it takes people into a backlash beyond fear itself, I know it is one way through because it has been so for me.
...if only I could live long enough to be respected.
...If only I could accept that in my culture, a woman can only have either respect or rapport.
...If only I could find a way to marry rapport and respect, because at heart I know am a teacher who is brilliant at rapport and at simplifying what others have stumbled over for decades.
...if only I was better at managing groups and could accept that I will never be "normal."
...If only I could believe that I don't need to be an authority that part of me loathes, because I feel as if I'll be squished like a bug if I show my own brilliance. I can merely have something to communicate.
...If only I could find a way to present what I know is valuable so that others could recognize its value.
...if only I knew more musicians. Live music inspires me.
...if only I wasn't so long-winded. No wonder I'm not a raging success with all these "if onlys."

So there.

Tactful Bonding

2009-11-27T02:01:00.002-10:00

How to express tactfully one's intentions or needs? To marry intention with action - this is a life skill. If we do not have someone to model after to train this skill in the context of the subculture in force, we are bound to make social mistakes casting around for appropriate way to express ourselves.

Establishing rapport is the most important ingredient. Deciding how to pop the question that may accelerate a "non-obligatory" state of friendship into reciprocal give and take is tricky. Key seems to be noticing how people treat their friends with whom they have already established trust of this sort.

Usually, the answer is often that there has already been a "give and take" in the context of the relationship that you may have missed noticing. Each person has a certain language of bonding built out of unique combination of experiences they find essential to establishing trust. Trust in this context is earned, not a given - although many people will declare that they tend to offer strangers the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

For some people this is attending school with them; for others it is working together. Some cannot trust you until you find out a revealing secret and forgive or ignore it; some keep you away until they have a need so great they must ask for help. As they realize you are stellar at offering what they need and they also find out the offer was not an "exchange," it wakes them up that the two of you have established what connection means. Sometimes establishing this connection can happen by merely emulating the way their family members and good friends treat them - gradually. Sometimes this connection is just that the two of you have more to talk about, or that you sense some aspect in character in common or differing in each other that you'd like to explore.

Sometimes I believe there are people who create energy from being with others and spend it on accomplishment...and people who get energy from doing things and spend it on relationships. It is the category of people who love to do things and spend it on relationships, the more dynamic ones who are dangerous. Sometimes people who like to accomplish things are lousy at relationships, because they're somewhat scared of intimacy. You would want to make sure you are NOT making a deal with this sort of person. Otherwise you might get lost in an endless "deal-making" competitive activity with some "aftertastes" of hidden agendas.

Whereas, with people who are into "hanging out," they often have no problems being generous with their time because they will be getting a benefit from your presence, without any directed benefit. No "invested interest" or agenda, in other words. It was modeling those connecting people can allow a dynamic person suggest to "take turns" benefiting each other to establish a warm and fuzzy feeling of mutual benefit.

Multi-talented Issues

2009-11-13T14:51:00.002-10:00

Soon I'm going to be painting windows again for Christmas holiday decorating. It's the most fun I can have and get paid to do it. I think working large is the kick for me - I'm not sure that the content matters for me, but the experience of putting a very large image on a nice, smooth surface is what floats my boat.

But now...now I'm wading through the problems getting the phone book completed - which involve a phone and DSL connection that is not working correctly. Usually I'd expect this to happen in Hawaii, but here, it's a real pain in the butt. So I have absolutely no time. I'm not sure that I like being so busy and so frustrated at the same time.

It's very similar to how I used to feel before I started to accept myself as a multi-talented person. I felt that I had no time and also that I was doing nothing but wasting my time - all at once. I think this comes from being in a Catch-22 situation where anything you commit yourself to takes away the possibility of doing something else. This is a question that electic multi-talented people constantly face.

It's as though when we walk in to a room - all of our projects are like greedy little gremlins that beg us to work on them, making us feel guilty for whatever we are doing. Me! Me! They scream at us in high pitched voices...

If you're interested to see the art I'm about to get to do on glass, I'll back post it when I'm done...

My First Sub-Culture Artist Friend

2009-09-24T05:28:00.001-10:00

When I was twelve I used to make art at a table where each of us who shared the table was from a different race or culture. We joked that we all made "highly integrated" art. My art table friend was American Indian girl, who encouraged me to follow her home one day after school.

When we arrived, her whole family (seven more people) were sitting on two couches that faced each other. No other furniture except a lamp, a TV on a table in the corner and a coffee table. The TV wasn't on.

I sat down, squishing myself in where they made room for me to sit as she did. She introduced me to her family. We giggled a little about something that had happened at school that day. The conversation died down. I asked what the dog's name was after some time had gone by. Another five minutes went by. Her family members told me the story, a sentence at a time from almost every person there, about how the dog arrived and came to be adopted into the family. Another long silence.

I looked at everyone. They didn't seem to be expecting anything from me, so I just sat there. We sat for about a half hour. Her mom got up and offered us all iced tea because it was hot. We drank the tea and rattled the ice cubes together. Nobody said anything for the next half hour.

Then as if on some cue, everyone got up. We said goodbye to each other and they asked me to come back again and visit. They said they really enjoyed meeting me and was looking forward to seeing me again. They were happy their daughter had such an interesting friend. I wasn't really sure why they thought I was interesting. Then I walked home, feeling lucky I'd just been in another world where I could be interesting for just sitting on a couch keeping my mouth shut.

I kept making art with her and hanging out with her at school and lunchtime, but I couldn't figure out a reason to come back to visit her at her house and she did not press me to return. She said everyone she brought over to her house did not feel very comfortable there. I wanted to be different, but at the time it was just too strange for me too. I'd never traveled before and didn't really understand that I was going to a different culture when I was really just visiting that house down the street.

Helping a Disabled Person

2009-09-15T19:14:00.003-10:00

Today I helped the person who handles my mail while I'm away in Hawaii to set up a blog. She's going to talk about having to handle California's budget cuts as a partially disabled person.

Tammy's blog is: here

Tammy has been awarded In Home Support Services hours. She has had the help of someone who gets paid for one day every week to drive her to her doctor appointments, carry things up and down her stairs and help her pick up groceries, as well as do some of the cleaning that would make her back worse. She's a disabled person who lives in Novato, CA.

Tammy can't drive because of the nature of her medication. She used to ride the bus everywhere. She would often walk from Fairfax to San Rafael with pleasure. Awhile ago, she fell on some ice on her deck and developed a slipped disc. Everything changed. Since then, she's needed a little bit more of additional help. Her doctor was nice enough to fill out a sixty page report to help her get IHSS hours.

Now California is cutting IHSS for those disabled people with less than thirty hours a week. I'm hoping that Tammy's blog will make it more clear to people what it is she is facing.

She decided to start writing this blog because of the lame and clueless suggestions that people were giving her. She found herself getting angry at her friends when they began to repeat what the newscasters on TV had said that she should get along without this IHSS help because she "wasn't REALLY disabled." She found herself screaming at people, "Well, who is going to help me? Because I can't live by myself!"

She realizes that being upset about this issue is going to drive away the few friends she had who might help her. She wanted some place to refer people to who thought they had suggestions so their suggestions would be more constructive.

Tammy jokes with her black humor: "By eliminating services, California is helping disabled people to hurry up and die." After knowing a little more about her situation, it's sadly starting to sound true.

Gaining Parental Respect

2009-09-06T16:02:00.002-10:00

By the time I was a teen my mom was a widow. We used to have conversations late at night in the summertime, because we were both "night-owls." There was a time for me when I was sixteen when my mom and I suddenly realized that I had something to offer her. Finding out our relationship could work in another direction was a momentous occasion for me. It was a significant shift between parent and child from a one-way energy flow - to the recognition that her teenager had meaningful wisdom to offer her that the she did not already possess.

My mom had already learned that it did not do any good to complain about relationships or circumstances. The way she said it was "It's pretty useless to cry in your beer." I had the benefit of growing up in a household where there was not much bitching going on... (I know, that in itself was extraordinary!)

In this particular late-night conversation when things changed, I described to my mom what I was trying to do with my friends to allow us to uncover the reasons why we were having relationship problems. Of course, my mom recited her maximums about the uselessness of bitching and complaining about what was too complex to change. Then she realized that what we were doing was not merely complaining - it was a very original type of problem-solving for relationships that was working for us.

She got curious. She hung out with us kids and asked us to tell her more about what we were doing. We were more than happy to explain it to her and I guessed we did that successfully. She was impressed. She talked about it to her live-in house mate (who I hope was her boyfriend) and they used the same process to work out something that had been a problem for them. The guy even thanked me and my friends for teaching the two of them how to communicate easier.

Another thing happened around that time. For some reason my mom and I were joking around about seeing each other in bad or good moods. It was a conversation along the line of how each of us knew to stay away and give the other person lots of privacy, and when each of us was willing to talk to the other. As an example of how the other person appeared to us, we mimicked the postural attitude of the other person in a bad mood or in a good mood. As my mom walked across the room trying to behave like me, I have to admit that I was completely shocked and did not realize how sensitive my mother was to my moods and how much she was able to notice about how I felt. She was also affected by how much she was influencing me with her own moods as I demonstrated to her how she looked to me when she was in a good or bad mood. This interaction led us to give each other permission to remind the other person to smile more often.

Many parents can never imagine that their child has something to offer them that is not tangible - although these parents are often the first to declare they have knowledge of who this child is that is not tangible. If you cannot describe and communicate in a way so as to become useful to each other, how can you declare you "know" a person? You only know a part of them. I would say that knowing only a part and attempting to bring forward that part (to the exclusion of all other possible ways of acting) encourages a lack of growth. People who know us well can sometimes have this awful tendency to encourage dependence, even while they are attempting to extend care in hopes of that person eventually not needing to be cared for! Really, a person who knows us well often knows merely habits and patterns and not our potential. In fact, some people inadvertently stifle potential. They seem to only want to interact with their preconceptions of who we have been for them. These expectations come from what they think they already know about us. These expectations can be tragically limiting.

Of course, one solution is to acknowledge the state-specific quality of the self and respect it. This is part of why adult children have trouble "updating" their relationship with their family members who seem to want them to remain the way they were. It's tricky to change your half of the relationship when the other person seems to want to address the outdated part of who you used to be. By doing the work to change yourself and the qualities of how your part of the relationship interacts with others, you inadvertently change the quality of the whole interaction. The other person eventually realizes that you are different and responds accordingly.

The other way is to take the relationship into different circumstances. People are different in different situations - and while interacting with different people who bring forward unique qualities you might have never seen in them.

Differectioning

2009-08-04T22:03:00.003-10:00

I'm thinking about taking this blog in a new direction. I've transferred the content of this blog to another location where I've been posting since then.

http://myhalfof.blogspot.com

So, if you've enjoyed this blog so far, head on over to that address and read more of the same.

I've decided to take this other blog in a much more personal direction.

Content or Presentation is King?

2009-07-11T15:23:00.002-10:00

How can people not get seduced by content or what everyone else does? How can people focus instead on strengthening the constructive means - the How of thinking skills? What motivates people to remember to think?

Some ideation (the new word for "brainstorming") on those questions:

Make the content boring, funny or not make sense so the "How" becomes focal.
Need ways to compensate for time of arrival. (Blue hat, yes; but I'll bet there are further perceptual means & actions that might contribute to this.)
Enhance the meaning of the result - in a sense, make the goal more attractive. (Such as in story-telling and testimonials of how people have benefited.)
Make a way for people to interject as they are respond to what other people have done -" I could do better than that!!"
Appeal to people who love to brag or show and tell, they will popularize the activity to others and make it into a "fad." ( Bumper stickers, Badge of identity - "I Think Before Reacting. ...Usually!") ...would be great on a car bumper.
;o)

OK, back to the question itself. For me, questions that are framed in "opposites" beg to be restated in the positive. (Thus, my proliferation of restatement.) What is "opposite" is culturally defined. Instead, take away the implication that one concept is at odds with the next concept.

Some of these could be:
How come thinking tools - and frameworks - improve thinking skills the way they do? Can we describe more about how thinking skills and examining the frames of how we are thinking work more effectively than discussion to better, problem solve & create?
Frames...Re-Framing...Why not draw more pictures (mind-mapping style) while linearly discussing to help note our tangents and return to what has been left out? (Mind-mapping in this case would be used during discussion as a variant of recognizing the value of framework.)

So, reversing the directive here: Transform discussion by applying tools of thought. (As opposed to the urge educated people usually have to imagine we can transform thought by applying tools of discussion, ie: taking turns at lecturing.)
Since, seldom is there "only one" answer to everything... once we ask that question some of the answers might be...

Take out the desire to convince (the debate model) from the discussion activity.
Go slow - speed of arrival tends to activate habitual routines, as well as get everyone excited & encourage them to compete for things like "most original", "fastest delivery", "limited time."(That's why this medium is so wonderful! I can take as much time as I need here.)
Ask specifically for a certain person's contribution. (This brings reticent people forward, because talking style doesn't have anything to do with thinking ability and this action might minimize competition.)
Ask others to figure out other ways to invite contributions.
Allow 'secret ballot' contributions. - (The idea of a free-play space without the authority of authorship where ideas are separated from who had them.)

Then the second question: Understanding vs Practical Application

Since I was a person who tended to use words such as "Never" and "Always" I have learned to spot these words as an indicator that some powerful assumptions could be in place that might benefit from examination and revision.
Idea: Identify certain words or perceptual cues as trigger indicators that Thinking Now Would Be A Good Idea

Let's say skillful use doesn't come from habit, it comes from fascination. (That has been the case with me.) How to foster fascination for applying what you "understand"?

Perhaps appeal to the "gamboling chance" of novelty: a significant result or insight often occurs unexpectedly. Hindsight is 20/20, but foresight is...boring and careful. What if thinking skills, i.e: foresight were presented as a way to get ready to be lucky? A way to shine intuition? A person would hone thinking skills because it would sometimes result in a "jackpot" of benefits. Most of these "jackpots" of major scientific discoveries come from noting accidents. Insights come from noting points that were never before combined.

These new accidents don't have a chance to happen if experimentation is not allowed. This photo taken by Marti Holland out his back window looks like a Maxwell Parish painting, but it's just a photo. "I make as many mistakes as it takes." - Kenneth Feldsott

So practicing the tapping of the unknown would extend tolerance for unfamiliarity. What is new feels strange, unclassified, so a tolerance for what feels strange at first needs to be practiced. Otherwise people revert to habitual means, and the ease of creative thinking is regarded as "hard to do."

This could be practiced at a perceptual level. (Provide people with perceptual illusion experiences to butter them up? Make them laugh?) Sustaining a state of unanswered, unknowable questioning enhances the ability to be open to spotting an assumption that had been overlooked, the inception of discovery. Perhaps there is a pre-discovery phase we are passing over without noticing? Make a list of your favorite virtual questions...

Influences In Creative Thinking #1

2009-05-29T10:57:00.001-10:00

I have had a lifetime of benefits from using de Bono's creative thinking ideas, even though I have merely enjoyed the humble success of an interesting and creative life. My choices have led me to put time to be creative ahead as a priority, which has turned out to have been a rewarding, satisfying and happy choice.

I'll start out with how I used de Bono's thinking skills in the first five years after I ran into them from reading one little book called "PO". This book was the start of many inspirations to seek out "new perceptual assumptions" during the course of my life. You'll also read a number of additional points about how de Bono's ideas affected me as an adult - (I am now 55.) I still enjoy seeing many parallels between de Bono and other brilliant observers - great minds often think alike.

Let me tell you some of the first ways I used these ideas when I was a teen. The first book I read of de Bono's affected me deeply. It was "The New Word, PO" that I stumbled across in the Riverside, CA library when I was fifteen, (1970.) The effect of reading "PO" on my personal life was immediate. One of the first expressions of problem solving that I applied as a teen was for the challenge of getting along with my group of friends.

Thinking skills as way to ask for participation
By far the greatest advantage for me that ran through the book PO was that I could now had ways to ask others to play thinking games with me. The many de Bono books that I later read, continued to give me terms for asking for participation in many of the thinking skills that I had already innately been doing, but had never been able to describe to others. These terms also helped me to explain to others my motives for using thinking skills. It helped to minimize authoritarian resistance to the question of who defines the priorities & criteria of what constitutes improvement. In short, it stopped conflicts over who had or wanted to have control.

Interpersonal relationship problem solving
At the time it was obvious to us that we teens had no clue how to deal with interpersonal relationships, so we were quite open to new ideas. When interpersonal relationship problems would occur for us, it involved many members of our whole group. So we problem-solved as a group. From reading de Bono's book, we separated the description and expression of our problems from what we were going to do about them. Then we could try out various solutions and improve them. We discarded what didn't work and redesigned other experiments until we did find some useful processes.

The form of problem solving we stumbled on was similar to co-counseling - (many years later published and popularized by an adult psychologist who had the same idea independently.) But our way had an additional value. Somehow we figured out how to work together toward continuing improvement without inciting further conflict with each other.

After we had listed all of what might be bothering us or speculated possible causes of internal and external conflict in each of us, we united as a group and categorized those concerns which seemed to be about similar issues, noted those which seemed to be unique and connected those which seemed to be related to our relationship with each other. This activity put us on the same side of the question.

Because of the reversal example in the book PO, (and because of the story of the pan being used to iron a shirt;) we figured we had made assumptions that could be at the core of our misunderstandings of each other. So we actively looked for a way to uncover what those assumptions were.

We noted how each person's explanation of shared situations differed. As we listened, we found ourselves coming up with various conclusions or judgments. These conclusions became a signal for us that there must be an operative assumption underneath them. Until we noticed the provocation of a reaction, these assumptions were hidden. We decided we didn't really know enough to determine conclusions and pass judgments. That is when and why we decided more experiments were needed and this had to be an open-ended solution that could be improved.

Once we had all the pieces of the content, we came up with ideas how to deal with the issues (which included our own illogical feelings,) including problems of how to implement our bright ideas in real time when they were most needed.

Our teen discoveries
We decided that "truth" of what "really happened" didn't matter and was a dead end. Each of our points of view about what happened were valid, because of the emotional content and because of how important we were to each other. So in a sense, we invented a concept of "emotional truth."

For instance, one of those problems was how were we going to deal with deciding if we should do what we had said we were going to do as a group together when one or some of us were distracted. Nobody wanted to be left out and nobody wanted to be rejected. So we came up with a codified way to notify (or give a "chance to listen" as we described it.) This phrase was designed to give distracted members of our group a chance to answer back with a momentary "date" ("give me 5 min. then I can pay attention to what you're asking.")

If or when anger would come up, we learned a great deal about how little awareness the angry person had about how they were affecting others before they realized they were angry. So who was starting a reactive fight became quite an interesting question that held rather surprising answers for all of us. To find this information out, some of our experiments were quite volatile! During our experiments, we managed to remain friends - two of these women I am lucky to count as lifelong friends over the last 40 years.

Designing independent study courses
As a teen, another form my creative thinking inspirations took was to dare to propose an independent study of history credit during my first semester of my sophomore year in high school. After reading a specific historic account, I compared how various history books had described it. This research taught me some miraculous insights about point of view, bias and persuasive language. It taught me specifically to recognize exactly how language may be used to promote certain invested interests. Later I understood that teachers use language in this way to bring about an experience for their student, so manipulation and promotion wasn't all bad. (Of course, as a teen , I was quite reactive at that time to being controlled by adults.) From this experience I realized that going through a process could have results that I could not foresee.

During college, I was also led by a curiosity about perceptual assumptions to explore how behaviorism and animal trainers seem to be at odds with each other in a college independent study communication credit at USIU, Poway, CA. Since my final paper explored some of the possible differences between the Whorf-Sapir ideas as well as issues of inter-species communication, I invented what is now called mind-mapping to express and synthesize these divergent results in pictures and flow-chart style.

The skill of reasonable motives
As an adult, most fascinating to me were the de Bono ideas about encouraging speculation for what was motivating people in mysterious situations. I really took these mysteries to heart. At first, speculating about unknown but reasonable motives was useful for my own entertainment in people-watching situations. Later the skill took on another useful result.

This creative ability of finding positive, reasonable explanations, (requiring deliberate, skillful practice,) saw an unexpectedly handy use. Strangely enough, the skill became useful to get people to behave in a civil manner. These were difficult people who were complaining, acting mean or were apparently pursuing revenge. Whether it meant the person suspected I was incurably gullible or that I was merely stupidly hopeful didn't matter. My creative skill to come up with a perfectly compassionate and understandable explanation made difficult people motivated to not disappoint in the future.

Probably in hind-sight this was a mixed advantage, but it was one that I was attracted to nevertheless - so having practiced this skill offered me useful means of avoiding and mitigating difficult situations. Projecting positive outcomes had the effect of negotiating how "difficult" people should treat me in a civil fashion. Of course, in most cases I had to actively guard against violation, set boundaries and enforce them. However, I was able to work personally with seniors, the disabled & homeless, despite their culturally disenfranchised.

F.M Alexander skill training & de Bono's thinking skills
Building a separate new perceptual assumption frees creativity, as does uncovering self-limiting patterns of thought. Positive, forward thinking movement during creative thinking is indespensible - this is absolutely the same with F.M. Alexander's work. I became interested in Alexander Technique in 1976, and have been a teacher since 1985. I see these as parallels exist between de Bono's work and the principles of F.M. Alexander's. Alexander Technique provides a tool for carrying thinking into action that includes training a new perceptual assumption - proprioceptive assumptions. I was also happy to note additional interesting parallels between Alexander Technique and de Bono's work in the Masterthinker series.

Plus, Minus, Interesting, Unknown
I have since used the Cort thinking skills in many situations where decision making was tricky. I especially found useful the Plus, Minus and Interesting to help me explore many factors to stop them swimming around within my concerns. Over time I came to add another useful section to this activity, which was "Unknowns." Having this "Unknowns" section, (Positive-Negative-Interesting-Unknown,) got me to form questions about what was missing. Having questions helped to point me in the direction of where to go next to get these missing elements. Not knowing where to go next is often a great deal of the content that tends to result in unproductive resistance. Sometimes the unknowns were what was stopping me from acting.

Thinking skills taught patience for extending questioning time
Knowing what my questions were also motivated patience. Meaningful questions can become virtually unanswered, but many questions require patience for answers to arrive. Some unknowns are not answerable at once, because the time when they could be answered hasn't arrived yet. It's impossible to anticipate everything, but that shouldn't be a reason to stop the project. There are many times when you must stand on the step of where you are going to be, in order to see ahead.

Thinking skills revealed, extended and developed my natural talents
Before I ran into what de Bono had written on creative thinking, I wasn't very creative in a practical sense; I was only able to identify a happy accident - to be creative accidentally on purpose. I had always been a fast learner, but I mostly learned through osmosis and imitation. Once I had structure to hang my brain on such as the ones proposed by de Bono's ideas, I became deliberately creative. You can head out to www.franis.org for the long list of my multiple creative abilities.

Creative thinking welcomes improvement
I decided to enter this competition because my 97 yr. old Alexander Technique teacher Marj Barstow had called me the most resourcefully creative person she had ever met, (and she had taught many professionally creative performers during the course of her life!) Possibly what makes me notable as a creative thinker is because I am not intimidated by social constraints as has limited most women that stops them. I can problem solve when being criticized, angry or emotional. This characteristic in myself was no doubt the result of some great parenting, but I believe in part it has been from the benefit of having run into de Bono's ideas at an early age. Without that, I never would have learned how many benefits there were to being blessed with the ability to think.

Testimonial toward effectiveness
For the ability to manifest my creative thinking, I owe a great deal to de Bono's ideas. They have been a significant and fascinating benefit to me, my relationships and my work during the course of my life in the last forty years. Without thinking skills, intelligence and multiple talents are mostly a nuisance, spawning wild ideas that never culminate into results.

If you'd like to check out Edward de Bono's new forum for thinkers:
http://www.debonosociety.com/forum

Reactions Fascinate

2009-05-04T00:52:00.002-10:00

Had an old friend of mine (gone now) who would say self-deprecating things out loud to people, and it was hilarious. He'd chase someone down who had fled when the conversation lagged for a moment...he'd ask them, "Ahhh, does that mean I'm not interesting enough to hold your attention long enough for you to say good-bye, or did you just need to run away for another excellently secretive reason?"

People who "rile", strangely enough, fascinate. Noticing a reaction sometimes points me to a value that I wouldn't have known was there because I took it so much for granted. Humans only seem to notice "mismatches" or "contrasts" that stand out, so anyone or any situation who brings something like this to my attention is offering me a strange, back-handed sort of gift.

Sometimes the assumption is mine, sometimes it's theirs - but it's always interesting to stop and do what you imagine would be a good idea for the other person to be doing. Then if you do it yourself, they will tend to follow your lead - especially if you have some degree of self-possession to determine your own motives and examine your own assumptions.

But sometimes, it riles them! It helps to explain your motives before you step into areas where defensiveness may occur.

Women, for instance, have many ways they establish "we're in the same boat" attitude as a base agreement. Sometimes women do this with mutual complaints or bitching; sometimes by addressing what is most commonly a cultural assumption about motive-in-common, (such as all women are trying to lose weight, beauty, want money, have problems with men, etc.) Sometimes women try to negotiate an agreement to not tear each other up competitively or pass judgments on each other, to not gossip, etc. Seen in this light, pretty much all these "nasty & thoughtless" topics listed above are, in fact, positive intent.

For instance, if someone is bitching about how bad things are, the best response (as Barbara Sher suggests) is to take the bitch far beyond "normal" bounds to where it gets hilarious.

If you don't fit social expectations, you'll get weird routine comments from people over and over again, "you don't look like dumb enough to want to get sweaty...except in bed." If this is the case for you, this is your chance to come up with a quip (or many quips) that can become a stock answer(s): "Yeah, athletes with brains have to hide it because they don't want to threaten those who feebly try to compete."

I have a standard reply that can make people groan and also get them thinking about assumptions. When they meet, people will commonly ask: Where do you come from? I learned to answer..."Like most people, I came from my mother, originally." Then when they repeat the question, I can say, "Oh, you mean, where was my mother located when I was born?... In a canyon." This helps them to be more specific with their questions to me. Then I can tell them that the hospital where I was born was torn down to be rebuilt across the street when the highway was widened. My mother would point to a bare spot in this canyon when we would drive over a bridge and she'd say, "that's where you were born." I have a chance to explain to them, this is why I'm motivated to examine assumptions and to question people who are questioning me what they mean, exactly. I want to set this person up from the beginning to understand that I do not question their assumptions in order to get them to defend themselves. I ask questions merely because it is all too common to misunderstand.

My intent is to gain information and to get people to think for themselves - not to incite defensiveness. To defend is the more common reaction for people who wary to being "snubbed." Defense cuts off creative thinking ability and directs the blame on to the person who "incited" the defensive reaction...which of course, I do not want them to think about me. I want to encourage people to feel free to talk to me, not shut them up.

Well, sometimes I want to shut them up. As the woman who looked for her license as the cop tried to engage her to get her admit she had a "good excuse" to be speeding, I've used the ruse that I am preoccupied if the person offers me the wrong lead. I'm using the word "lead" here as in the leading the conversational intent somewhere where I know I do not want to go because I know that it is not positive or constructive. There's a rhythm to who gets to lead, when - so watch for this rhythm and redirect when it is your turn.

But if you determine that someone knows your boundaries, and they are still "testing" these boundaries, now it's a Training Issue. If the person, (who knows better) is intentionally "messing with you," if you don't slap them down in the moment, you'll just be encouraging them to blithely disrespect you again and again. You've expressed your preferences and limits, and now you must enforce them... or cut off the relationship. Assuming that you'd like to keep the relationship going, you can try other tactics: distraction, humor, a "pattern interrupt" action. Other bright ideas are to change your pacing, slowing down or speeding up the tempo of the exchange, communicating with body language & actions...all these are handy. Some of the time, they actually work.

Communication is a tricky thing, but you get relationships out of it.

One of my rules of both thumbs is "Never Say What You Don't Want Them To Do - It Confuses The Animal." It helps to remember to "Keep Your Eyes On The Prize" and state what you do want. It allows other people to play what I'm playing, but it makes me feel a little like I'm selling something.

If I want to inform someone that they have jumped toward making a mystery assumption and I'd like to know what they did, maybe I'll ask about their motive with a story that explains why I'm so insatiably curious, (such as the one above about my birthplace).

Even if their motive was apparently a "mean" one that they suddenly are having a very hard time explaining, I've found that coming up with an innocently positive explanation for their rather obviously "nasty" comment will make them behave better towards me. Every time, (whether they are secretly imagining I'm an insufferable "PolyAnna" optimist or stupidly gullible,) as they choose the more positive explanation that I've dangled in front of them, they are acting as if they are a much nicer person. Whether they are a "nice person" or not, they're getting trained to be - by me.

Where Are People Who Are...?

2009-04-13T13:26:00.004-10:00

The short answer to this is that great relationships are made and not found. You make relationships that are based on ethical, positive, encouraging and forward-seeking interactions on purpose. There are people around here on this forum who are just like that - you're not SEEING them! There are people around you LIKE THAT, you're not noticing them.

One way to recognize people like that is to talk to anyone you believe is "like that" on the phone using Skype, if you can't find people close to you. Once you have some of Those People to talk with, then you'll get better at recognizing them when you run into them in person. That's what I've been doing lately.

Partly, I recognize people like this because they have other friends and aren't isolated. But sometimes, that's not always true. People who are good at relationships have lots of friends - usually from all walks of life. People who don't have lots of friends sometimes find themselves in that position because they're in a situational bind, have moved house to a new location...or sometimes these are older people who have out-lived their passel of long-time friends. Or sometimes they've gone through a breakup, grief, etc. Interesting to note that one of their characteristics of people like this is that they are not people who put accomplishing things in front of their friendships. Relationships come first, then accomplishments. Of course, there's always a trade-off.

The other thing is that people who are ethical usually had a pretty OK childhood...OR they HAD to put out quite a bit of "inner work" to change the effects of bad conditioning for themselves. Although an interest in "inner change" can outline the gaping, jagged edge of where someone falls short and continues to fall short, sometimes it's at least an indicator of intent. So if you get this agreement from people, you can be on the road together, forgive the shortfall in each other generously, and have fun along the pathway to continuing self-improvement.

I learned quite a bit from books and websites. Whenever I saw someone doing that "Take On Personal Challenge" in real life, I would sidle up to them and get to know them personally. For instance, I met Dennis Rivers at an ongoing David Bohm Dialogue group. Dennis was able to get the group to try things that nobody else could convince them to do because someone would always object - Dennis' ways of communicating could quiet people's objections and defensiveness! What he has to say about this on this website is brilliant: http://www.newcoversations.net He's also got a free "workbook" to help teach better communication.

But watch for this; lots of people who can write do so as if they have the answers. But they cannot deliver because they are lousy teachers. What they say is the way to learn what they are doing will not work...or won't work for you if you do not have identical point of view compared to theirs. The way to learn from these people is to get in their presence and "soak it up" from them...while disregarding their confusing presentations. Look for those who offer their content from a sense of being on a mission to better the world...sometimes this does NOT include being "market savvy."

The short list of books that helped me recognize people who are forward-thinking and capable of having long-term relationships are:

"Don't Shoot the Dog" by Karen Pryor It's a book on why reinforcement works during training - both positive and negative. It brings together the intellectual ideas of behaviorism with the practical experience of training, which is communication through example and action rather than language.

Check out all the books by William Ury and Fisher that are in the series on negotiation skills, such as "Getting Past No" and "Getting to Yes" , etc. There is a new book I think it was Fisher just wrote about the emotional factor that is brilliant. Here's an article:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118596957/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
These books on negotiation make you realize that you are building tacit agreements when you start any relationship that can become problematic or be a foundation later on...at times it's not possible to "think ahead" when you don't know what you are doing...so this is how to re-negotiate tacit agreements before they become problematic enough to require professional intervention.

The area of non-violent communication is also an interesting field...Also is the "Speaking Circles" authenticity work by Lee Glickstein
http://www.speakingcircles.com/Programs/SCIprograms.html

Learning As Loss

2009-04-10T17:45:00.003-10:00

Sometimes a person doesn’t know what they have to gain from a course of action until they do it. Sometimes it's not possible to see ahead until you stand on the next step that you can see ahead. By stepping up to a challenge, perhaps that is the only way to find out for yourself what you are getting from it after you have done so. Sometimes this finding out takes time to allow its effects to seep in enough to show up. This is especially true when the course of action involves losing something intentionally - sort of like losing weight.

Learning from intentionally subtracting a course of action is a "Very Weird Experience." As adults, we're so used to adding things. We don't think of undoing them.

I guess the religious practice of Lent is somewhat applicable here, where people intentionally give up something to experience the lack of it. Perhaps it's a course of action designed for the result of sacrifice or gratitude when you get back the activity or consumable that you gave up. Perhaps the Easter holiday this weekend is making me think of such things. Probably it's merely how much I used Alexander Technique and David Bohm style Dialogue both to practice subtraction for sharpening my own self-awareness.

It's a odd characteristic: as you are giving up something, you know well what you are giving up. What you may have to gain can feel like only a promise; an uncertain elusive conviction of faith or a whisper of potential. Often, you can’t have both - you must choose to continue either the old comforts you know well - or make the leap of faith. Because sometimes, you can’t go in two directions at once, having your cake and eating it too.

I have experienced myself leaping into the unknown. It feels like a complete willingness to risk everything. To me - it feels great, even if it's a little shaky from being a new thing. Sometimes there's a cost. But at least I've decided.

Creative Problem Solving: "Jack's Notebook" Review

2009-04-06T14:57:00.007-10:00

Teaching creative problem solving is so often done with diagrams, acronyms and theories. Many good systems exist, but key would be remembering to use their points at moments when new ideas are needed. Did this hunch to write a story that also teaches work as advertised? Turns out that linking the steps of using a process to drive the plot of a story makes new points memorable. I've started three businesses from scratch from pretty much nothing. This story had a great deal in common with my own personal experience of start up - containing both the serendipity of how priorities are established & reinforced, along with why investors want to endorse your particular idea so you might get a better idea of who to approach among those people you already know to make your business idea available for their financial backing.

This story is a fun one to read because it portrays a young man who learns how to gradually become an entrepreneur instead of the wage slave he has been trained to be. From having a couple of dead end jobs, Jack seizes a way to make his many dreams come true from a seemingly random meeting with an interesting person who offers to help him with advice and new thinking strategies. Exactly what "help" means becomes more and more fascinating and involving as Jack's story unfolds.

Applying one of the creative thinking techniques from this book spurred me to re-read it from the point of view of the mentor. Culturally, we don't have many examples of people who use their authority compassionately and thoughtfully; this mentor character portrays an example worth emulating. Many would use the term of "Angel" for a key person who is in the position to open doors for us. Reversing that, it struck me how unusual it seems to be to find even one learner who would actually take advantage of what a mentor has to offer wholeheartedly. What makes the mentor character believable is his ability to choose how he is going to react to circumstances. This mentor has rather humbly learned to trust the value of observing, thinking strategically & creatively under pressure, when survival instincts usually cut off options. But this old guy knows how to open the conduit to ideas by suspending fear & judgments - and he teaches how.

This book struck me how, no matter what my age is, what if I had the opportunity of a lifetime dream staring at me in the face now - could I recognize it on the front end? What resistance in myself would I need to answer? What are the opportunities to make my dreams come true now that are going over my head? Does there exist now among people I know an effective mentor for me? Are there other people who could offer me the sort of support and information that I need, the sort of support and good ideas that this young man in this story got at the right time and way? It even had me thinking of how would I recognize a student who wants to learn what I have to teach.

That this new form of using fiction to illustrate a learning process would spur me to ask these questions for myself made Jack's Notebook meaningful for me. Perhaps this story and its teaching information will work that way for you too. Jack's Notebook is highly recommended.
Here's a link to get the book on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/ca92bt

Why I Hand Out Compliments

2009-03-02T11:35:00.007-10:00

My father had just turned fifty in December in 1941. He had wanted company to celebrate New Year's Eve with, but instead had found himself alone and bereft of friendship at all.

He carefully considered his state of affairs. He observed about himself that he had been focused for a great deal of time during his life on what other people had thought of him.

He considered what he was going to do about this, because it made him unhappy not to have the pleasures of lasting personal connections. Perhaps the answer might be to offer to others what he so desired for himself. There were many people he knew who were amazing people. They had amazing qualities that came to them as naturally as breathing. So he decided to show people how much he thought of who they were, what their special innate qualities were and to express what all of these meant to him.

He settled in San Diego where he met my mother, a woman 25 years younger and married her, starting a new family and a new life.

As his youngest daughter, I got to see firsthand how he expressed his resolve to bring out people's better qualities many decades later. I was there when he brought a woman to our house so he could show her an antique painting that he'd collected.

When she entered the house, it was obvious that she was a self-conscious person who was shy about even shaking hands to greet our family. She had tried to make herself look more presentable. Evidently she was not comfortable with the the fact that she did not match the current social opinions of what was considered "attractive."

My father ushered her up to where the painting had been hung. From a fascination with lighting and also to protect the pigments, he had located the painting in a very dark room with its own light. The woman took off her sunglasses.

My dad pontificated a bit about the painting while he pretended to fumble for the light. "We have reason to believe that this painting was the last of this style for this artist of that era. Some believe it was his 'masterpiece.' The title inscribed on the back was 'Love's Folly.'" He clicked the light on that illuminated the painting and stood back.

The painting depicted two hands; a man's hand reaching over the wall to hand a flower to a woman's hand which included many rings.

My dad backed off to admire the painting, and took his visitor's hand in his to invite her to walk closer to examine it. "This artist, in the masterpiece of his career, chose a woman's hand that looks remarkably just like your hand for the subject to depict the most stunning, irresistibly beautiful shape for hands that he could imagine."

My father held her hand up next to the hand in the very realistic painting. She couldn't deny her hands could have been the artist's model.

The woman sputtered. She was used to compliments from others that she could turn aside as untrue, because she was certain of her "ugliness." But this compliment stared her in the face in a way that made brushing it off impossible.

After being admonished with a comment from my mother of "Oh, he just does these things to people," the woman decided that it was an entirely admissible possibility to accept such a compliment from a happily married man. She managed to finally be able to leak out a meek, "Thank you."

She had a much different smile on her face on her way out the door than when she arrived.

Tacit Agreements & How to Change Them

2009-02-21T10:58:00.002-10:00

We love to work, play and live with people who "read our minds" successfully. Like playing music together, tacit agreements coming from a shared subculture can sometimes give a very pleasurable conviction of bonding. It's is pleasurable how easy it can be to “read” each other's intentions and needs in the context of shared values and circumstances. However, tacit agreements can be tricky to manage if they need to change.

Many of these circumstantial "agreements" and tacit understandings are made below the awareness level of their long-term effects that can cause unintended conflict somewhere down the road. This can happen for many reasons.

The people involved may be playing a role that may or may not fit who they really are – or who they are becoming or have become.
Perhaps an extraordinary circumstance goes on and on that later comes to emphasize differences between the two people's values or situations when previously they felt similar.
Perhaps a person wants to be the best of who they can be, so their intent is to step into their dreams of who they want to be - no matter that they aren't quite there yet...and the other person decides they're a "lying poser" because they're in the position of cleaning up after the mess left behind.
Perhaps someone is going through a phase in their life where situations are changing; later they settle into what they will become that could be much different than how they were - when they were poised on the edge of the act of changing.

It's really handy if another new tacit agreement can be allowed to evolve so it can take the place of an outdated one. This benefits from taking some thought to what has worked splendidly in the past. Many of us have trouble observing and spelling out what we have done as naturally as breathing; but this is quite valuable to groom as a skill.

For instance, a couple who worked and lived together found themselves always arguing about differences they once regarded as advantages. They decided on a three-point approach to their problem; every time conflict rose up, to apologize and note down what they wanted to communicate immediately and save it to be delivered all at once at a regularly agreed time. They decided when the concerns and complaints, although some of them needed to be communicated, were too volatile to be delivered in person, they would write them down. They also decided to use classic co-counseling techniques. Then, they brainstormed to figure out what was a guaranteed fun time they could share together regularly as a break in their work day. Since they had been together long enough so they couldn't go back to "dating" per se, they decided to learn something new that they could do together. This gave chances for new experiences to happen that emphacized harmonious, constructive experiences that re-newed the significant connections of the constructive difference of the two people that had been previously making them fall apart.

How people feel about changing things usually need to be factored in. As many people know, it's sometimes easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission - especially when the answer will always be "no" or "I'm scared." The challenge in tacit agreements is to find out how much it matters to the people involved if the agreements are done differently or are not done.

Being able to do this artfully will avoid the ritualistic ways of fulfilling the expectations of a relationship that most people must fall back on. Relationships can go sour when a person must play a role instead of being themselves because, so many roles are like jobs that can be done by others. Better for the people involved to have a means for ongoing delightful surprises and potentials that change with the times.

Sometimes the whole idea will make you feel like a turkey.

When starting a relationship and with your every action concerning the other person, you are evolving a tacit agreement of how people are supposed to treat each other. Problems come when you tacitly agree to match slightly different cultural standards, causing what could become endless confusion where these differences overlap. In that situation, tacit agreements may require you to do more than you really want to continue doing, or to accept or assign a meaning that you don't want your actions to have. This is why it's handy to clarify tacit agreements.

There are a number of ways to clear up tacit agreements gone bad.

One way is to conduct a situational 'test' that involves what the person might do if you do this or that to see what they do. Now, many of us aren't very practiced at designing these tests or interpreting them. So the longer you can go on without decided what the results are, the better, because then it allows for more experiments to be done before the conclusion is delivered.

The next step is to conduct these "tests" and indicate clearly in a positive way what you'd like the result to be or why you're wondering why they always do the same thing. This is a way to see if the person is willing to go for what you propose. You can tell them what it means to you and if they are paying attention, this may help the two of you get on the same page. A good question is how can each person have free rein to invent ways to address each other's concerns, without having to read minds?

At some point with relationships where tacit agreements are being established, you'll need or want to find out how much what you are doing matters to the other person in proportion to how much trouble it is for you. If either person can't make changes for implied or expressed agreements with their partner, it’s not good for either of them or the longevity of the relationship. Either way tacit agreements can lead to big disappointments when people figure out that the deal they thought they were making or definitions of bonding in friendship or love was quite different for their partner than they expected.

Accident Of Birth

2009-02-19T07:18:00.000-10:00

Beautiful women must make peace with how others react to them at some point in their lives. Problems coming from other women must be dealt with as well. Lots of people wouldn't have much sympathy for these sorts of problems; like having to deal with being rich. But they are very real.

I speak from experience. Once I was young and stunningly beautiful. I did not need to hear about how beautiful, how skinny, how I looked like a model, how my nose was perfect, my lips were so luscious, hair so easy to manage, how I should just wave my ass to get guys to do things for me, anything I wanted.

Heard it every day of my life from someone, if not in words, in the looks they gave me. Wildly resented being born by an accident of birth and defined as sexually beautiful by my culture. Then the odd looks when I commented that it was very strange to be beautiful and to always wonder if someone was doing something for me or with me merely because they liked looking at me. It was sort of like being rich and wondering if your friends liked you because of what you had or because of what you could give them at some point in the future.

My response when I would get these admiring and sometimes cutting, envious comments from other women was to use humor. I would declare some platitude about the nature of comparison of bodily parts and it's wiser to compare yourself to yourself... in a suitably stupid and lousy Indian accent. I learned to trot this one out by preparing it ahead of time. To finish off the humorous effect, I tell them, Oooops, again I must have been spontaneously channeling Baba Hagen Daas. They will laugh and that will be that.

Now I'm not-so-happily fat while being treated for a hereditary hyperthyroid problem that has swung my weight to the other extreme. It's helping me to remember my reply to other women about how did I stay so skinny: "Probably something WAS wrong with me" - and it turned out to be true! Funny, huh? Not a bad idea to watch how you reply or react in this situation because by making the comment I made, perhaps it was "installing" some program with the reaction. Sometimes I wonder if this was true for me...but that's pretty obviously superstition. I was probably just stating facts.

To make peace with being beautiful by confronting the whole idea dead on, my first idea was to so what people told me I was: become a model. This did not work. Turns out I hated dealing with the sort of people who really were only concerned with how I looked and had no idea that who I was inside. They didn't get how the inside me was connected to what they saw on the outside. With a natural charisma that I had no idea how to turn on or off, when I walked into a room, everyone turned to look at me - and I did not know what to do with the attention. Hated the idea that beautiful women were trained to manipulate to get what they needed. Couldn't get rid of the attention I got, no matter how hard I tried to hide myself. I dressed in the most trashy, bulky, loose clothing I could find. It was an era of my life I would never wish on anyone.

A number of coincidental things happened to me in that era. I read Laura Huxley's "You Are Not The Target." It stunned me. At that point in time I was also learning Alexander Technique by attending daily teacher-training classes. As I learned to see postural expressions of character in other people, I realized that others could see my own postural attitudes and how they expressed who I was on the inside as well. Realized that people were probably responding to my own body language that expressed my internal character on some level - as well as the fact that I was a young, beautiful woman. Even if these guys were not conscious how they could discern this information, they could respond to it anyway. I had to give them credit for that, whether they knew what they were responding to or not.

Suddenly, getting this attention became my fault, instead of being an accident of birth. Learning that piece of the puzzle suddenly made my own attractiveness to be a little bit of my fault rather than just an accident of birth. Voila! A turnaround. I was so relieved.

Upon examination, I realized that men seemed to be handing women the power to make or break getting attention. In the past, I didn't want that power. Now that I knew what was going on, I could play with the energy handed to me when my natural charisma was turned on. In the past I was desperately trying to hide my own beauty and the power and interest it generated. I realized that I was making myself responsible for their story. Once I realized men were handing me power and then getting mad at me for having it, I could let that go. I could hand back the energy. It was OK that my interest in them was going to be construed by them to be a sexual interest - that was their business. All I had to do was to make it clear that wasn't what was happening for me on my end and move on. It had been essentially a virtual question posed by many men that I was refusing to answer. Now I could answer it.

Another interesting piece of the puzzle for me was a book about the differences in the way that men and women use language to establish rapport or trade information. She's written quite a few - the author is Deborah Tannen. Any one of them will do, but the one called "Talking 9 to 5, Power and control in the Workplace" is the one I'm thinking about that would be relevant to your situation.

In my life, I had hung out with men mostly in your life and probably adopted their speaking style to a great extent. Because of the company I kept I misunderstood what women are doing and why they are doing it. Women are so often looking to do the "trouble-telling" approach in order to establish rapport as a ritual. They are expecting another woman to say, "Hey, I've got other problems as serious as your weight stuff, check this out." Perhaps they are curious what you will do since you do not have their same complaints or objectives that are so obvious with them...

Anyway, interesting topic. Although many people feel that the question of women's liberation is a "been there, done that" subject, it's still very operative in our culture. Currently the topic has receded into the background - which makes it even more important to remember its cultural influence and power.

Time Flies & Slows

2009-02-14T18:34:00.000-10:00

This year is the year of the boar, (if I've gotten it right.) Got to participate in pageantry by holding up a forty foot Chinese dragon. It was quite a challenge physically because I was near the front, untangling bamboo spines and hoops, but was quite a fun time.

I was born in the year of the water snake in the Chinese astrology, in the hour of the dog - which makes me an awfully sociable snake lady. Do you know your Chinese astrological sign?

Was thinking the other day how time seems to speed up and then slow down, back and forth during the course of my life. What reason it does it do that? What do you think about this?

Perhaps, the more events being noticed means more of time slowing down. When nothing in particular stands out, the faster time speeds up...

There's a species of tick that sits around on a branch for up to nearly 17 years in a state of semi-hibernation. ...Until a nice warm body happens to come within jumping reach and it seizes opportunity. In only a few days, it feeds on blood, makes babies and dies. Can you imagine what its perception of time would be?

How does time work for you?

Make Time: Sleep Less

2009-02-04T11:48:00.008-10:00

Sleep less and you'll have the time to be creative, make more money at a second job or whatever you want to do. But don't just deprive yourself of sleep - get smarter about it.

When I was going to Alexander Technique teacher training school and had to pay for it myself AND live an hour commute away, I came up with the brilliant idea of a split sleeping schedule. Went from nine hours a night sleep to a daily total of five hours with no ill effects. After around three weeks to get used to the schedule, it worked beautifully. I had no trouble keeping it up for over a year - so my experiment stood the test of time! Now whenever I want to stay up late for music or dancing, I can switch into that schedule without having to "get used to it."

I've become a "happy napper"! To my mind, the ability to nap is one of life's secrets.

The best schedule was a split sleeping time. Heard this hint from learning about a study with college students where the minimized sleeping schedule of 12 hours apart was the most common cycle tolerated by the most people. Decided to be sleeping 12 hours apart. For most people, how long to sleep two hours apart would be determined by the timing of their own sleep cycle. After experimenting with how awake I felt after sleeping certain amounts of time, I observed that the best sleep cycle for me turned out to be 1 1/2 hour plus a little time to get deep into falling asleep. So two hours was a good minimum cycle for me that gave me much more sustaining energy than a random "nap."

Rather deliberately because it worked into my schedule, I chose the actual times from 4am-7:30 twelve hours apart, which gave me two cycles each. It turned out that I could get by with the afternoon cycle being only two hours; from 4pm-6pm. It worked elegantly in practice. I would go to sleep at the end of the day and wake up, having all night to be awake...then go to sleep at the end of the night and be awake to have all day.

The only thing I missed is that I never got to see the sunset during the winter.

The trick to start the routine is to pick a time when you want to take a nap anyway. Turn off the phone, lock the door, make the room dark if possible - and it also helps to go through your nightly "routine of going to bed" rather than just treating it as a nap.

With this schedule, you could have two jobs, have more time for the internet or for doing your creative projects, have time for yourself while the kids are sleeping, etc.

Warning: don't let friends who show up from out of town talk you into skipping your sleeping times. You can't "catch up" later once you establish these times. You'll have to sleep ten hours if you get knocked off your routine; or at least I did the two times this happened to me.

Discerning

2009-01-22T01:21:00.004-10:00

By nature, I'm a very discerning person. Meaning, I perceive subtle factors by nature, as a talent/obsession. Without even using much effort, I am talented at catching the subtle differences that may be making a difference. I zero in on them.

When I was younger, these were usually things I would spot that "stuck out". They seemed to need attention or fixing or were "wrong" in some way. I realized that I was attracted to things that I could influence, and that I gained a nice feeling from fixing stuff that could go wrong, or preventing calamity, as well as mitigating and sweeping up after others who were so directed at doing something important that they didn't have the concentration to deal with details...and the devil was in the details. I so enjoyed being there to put out fires when chaos hit the fan.

But as I learned some wisdom, I began to seek the things that could make a big difference that were not present anywhere or were not obvious at all. I suspected my means, which was to zero in on something, was not the means that would really bring me the benefits I wanted. So I decided to change my actions that I was using to bring about my desires. I decided to change my focus. Instead of "zeroing in" I decided to expand the focal length and regard the bigger picture.

I realized that it was a much more challenging possibility (and a much better use of my observational abilities and intelligence) to imagine what could be done to improve a situation by considering the whole situation. It took relationship skills to reassure and question people who were involved to craft solutions acceptable to everyone involved.

Pretty much anyone could just point out what was wrong with something or someone. It seemed that such judgments about supposed evil motives were so very often wrong. Think about it. People naturally gravitate toward the worst possible motive if they are confronting some event or some person they do not understand. Why is that so common? Because of the commonness of self-preservation.

It's a very interesting discipline, when you find yourself passing a judgment, to realize it is coming from a sense of fear or self-preservation in yourself - or others. It gets to be a very interesting challenge to imagine a reasonable explanation for the motives of the person you have judged to be suspicious. Or to find ways to reassure others that there is no need for their suspicions or fearful concerns.

Turns out it's a very handy and valuable skill too. Fascinating to come up with a reasonable and compassionate explanation when someone does do something in a mean-spirited way to their face. It makes mean people behave, even while they're thinking you're the most inane Pollyanna they've ever met.

The Curse and Blessings of Being Eclectic

2009-01-16T12:43:00.003-10:00

I am very confused...I have my whole live problems, that I have a lot of ideas, creative writing, being a yoga teacher, playing a music instrument, painting, drawing and have business careers. But unfortunately, I have started a lot, like flamenco dancing, tai chi, yoga, meditation, painting but I don't do something to an and, I haven't goals for my life, what is very frustrating for me, but I don't know, if I am a scanner, or I have depressions, or fear not to be good in the things I do. I am am perfectionist. Do you think I am scanner? What could help me to cope, deal with it? Can I find one goal, what I can reach, go on?

Whoever said "Life is short, but it is wide." - they were an eclectic too.
Yes, you're obviously what Barbara Sher, career counselor, calls a Scanner. No, you don't have to choose between your interests, usually you can do them all.

The challenge (rather than to choose one interest) is to figure out how to accommodate your multi-interests into a lifestyle that works better for you. It's also a challenge of how to deal with the pressure from others designed to get you to specialize. You are not like them, you NEED to have multi-interests. They assume there is "something wrong" with you. You'll find out it is "something right" with you as you learn about Scanner-hood.

It is also a challenge to deal with the pressure you apply to yourself concerning this confusion. Most scanners buy into this idea there is something wrong. This pressure to specialize has been working at odds with who you really are.

You're a generalist, not a specialist. You're a swan growing up in a barnyard of chickens who tell you that you should act like them.

Did it help - or have you read "Refuse to Choose" by Barbara Sher? If you haven't read the book - it's available at your library, usually if you can't afford to buy it.

According to Sher, there are different types of scanners. For instance, there are the popularizers who jump from livelihood to livelihood. These types can learn to record their journey in some way to make what they naturally do useful to others, or another cool solution.
There are the virtual students, who keep learning.
There are the fast-motion scanners who can multi-task, (Barbara calls them "plate-spinners.")
There are scanners who cycle among their interests, or their multi-interests have a recognizable "theme" that's possible for them to make conscious.
There are also many more kinds of scanners, which are in the book.

In Refuse to Choose, Sher gives you templates about how other people who are scanners live their lives in meaningful ways that work to provide a living. If you want, you can use these examples to help you design a lifestyle that fits you personally.

The reason we haven't found these examples is that scanners are rare and unusual characters. Barbara Sher has a forum where Scanners can congregate together. It's a place where being multi-talented is common. There it seems as if EVERYONE is an eclectic!

What People See In Art

2009-01-07T12:17:00.002-10:00

There are a number of motives about why an artist is making art. There are some factors in each case: to notice the artist's motives, to learn how difficult it is in factual terms for the artist to follow their apparent intention, and to come up with alternate intentions. The viewer's participation needs to be enough, in either case, to put together the content of what the participant is getting out of the art.

It seems that quite a few people seem to need to learn to understand how to be a participant of the art. My favorite book on this is a little-known book of the past called: Why Cats Paint
http://www.monpa.com/wcp/documentry.html

If an artist is making images to communicate, then they must release the content of the communication. Mostly because people are going to see whatever they see in the art! In a "really good" piece of art, a person will notice something different in it almost every time they look at it.

That difference may be reflected in what they believe the piece of art "is", it may be a detail, it may be a virtual question such as " is that figure coming or going?" which is something about what is apparently depicted. That is, every person may interpret the art to "mean something" a little differently.

This phenomena seems to work sometimes, even though the artist is self-referent. It depends on HOW the personal vision is displayed. This seems to boil down to - if the artist is an interesting enough person to start with, this will work for others. At best, the artist just displaying their "personal" building blocks is enough, so that the personal becomes the universal.

Snowboarding Santa Happily Merry

2008-12-22T23:42:00.004-10:00

Guess Santa can surf too!

Tippy-toe Santas Delivering Soon

2008-12-15T23:33:00.000-10:00

How fast does Santa have to go to do all that work on Christmas eve? Sounds like it will be a quantum Santa, but magic is magic, after all. Hope you're having fun being Santa this year, if that's your role.

Requests

2008-12-02T19:50:00.001-10:00

Sometimes I get certain requests for specific subjects from my window painting jobs. Here was one. Dogs commonly would come to work with their people, so it was more than appropriate.

Flying Frosties

2008-12-02T19:23:00.001-10:00

Blistering heat while I was painting this snow scene. Had to stop and get a glass of water...

What Santa Does On His Days Off

2008-12-01T19:52:00.000-10:00

Many people spend time imagining what Santa must do on all those other days of the year he doesn't have to work. The answer is that Santa is a farmer, of sorts, who has lots of free labor to do all his assembly work. He gets the glory. Here, Santa is having a good time at the bowling alley in San Rafael.

Window Contest Missed by a Hair!

2008-11-27T19:27:00.000-10:00

Today I did the outside of a classic car dealership that I've been decorating every year for the last thirty years. There was a windowpainting contest in the area, with prizes. Sadly, both the car dealer and myself didn't know that we had to register to win - and we would have won because we were the best!
The next one below is a detail of the one above. I did the lettering with three different colors of markers, outlining on both sides with shadowing.
Feeling festive yet?

Flying

2008-11-22T19:55:00.001-10:00

Sometimes I get to make a picture of something besides classic holiday stuff. Like this bird...

Gearing Up For Window Painting

2008-11-20T10:12:00.005-10:00

Got my markers and paint smearing equipment together. Now I'm on a mission to mess up people's windows for this year's holiday season. Yesterday did a really fun Santa on a bike for the Fairfax Cyclery. The guy who owned the store had the novel idea of trying to get more in trade for the cost of his window. So far, nobody has taken the bite, but he got a really nice Santa on the BMX. My apprentice Denise held up the bike while I drew it on the window.

Tomorrow on Friday I'll be taking her to the biggest job I do - the Marina shopping center in San Mateo. There are all kinds of businesses there - mostly small "Mom & Pop" stores such as a bakery, liquor, pharmacy, restaurants and even a barbershop. The place has a decidedly Asian theme, which makes for great lunch breaks. We'll have a great time, and we may even take a few more pictures of how the time got spent that we'll post here.

The hardest job on my plate these days seems to be cleaning out my RV. Unfortunately, somehow I aquired a pet rat who took up residence in the RV while I was gone. The challenge of finding a spot to schlep the stuff in the RV to is being solved by two friends of mine who have given me a place to stay. Thanks Martine and Gino!

There and Back Again

2008-11-11T06:18:00.003-10:00

Now, it is November and I've flown off from the Big Island of Hawaii to mainland California since after election day. My objectives are to clean up my act and to paint up windows for the holidays.

Last week, I've already done a holiday window for a game store in Concord, CA. They deemed that having a winter scene with Bilbo Baggins in it would be suitably festive for the holidays. They mused that perhaps the same fantasy scene would do for attracting attention the entire year. This scene is supposed to depict the part of the story where Smaug, after talking with an invisible Bilbo, heads out to destroy the nearby town on the river. This was the first time this year's window painting apprentice got to see me in the mysterious act of drawing on windows.

Evidently, the story by Tolkien of "The Hobbit" is getting some attention in the news. Heard that Peter Jackson, who produced "Lord of the Rings" is going to be in on the production of "The Hobbit," slated to come out at the end of next year. So that's why it's all related and the images from the fantasy are going to be appropriate for the entire year. Hope it works for this game store!

After working, I discovered that next door to the place my apprentice and I were painting was an electronics store called Fry's. Wow, what a candy store. Went into there originally because I needed to replace the hard drive that stopped working on a computer I have that is still in Hawaii. Then I couldn't help but buy a toy which will allow me to create podcasts. (That would be a digital sound recorder.) Then, of course, I also found out that I had to have a little tool that created a USB drive on my older laptop that had been smashed so it didn't work...and on, and on. A hundred bucks later, I made my exit. But, it does means that I will have a way to make podcasts, a desktop computer, and a second laptop working now, whereas before I had only one ancient laptop.

Anyway, maybe this will get you into a festive mood already?

Bittersweet Nostalgia

2008-10-22T00:55:00.005-10:00

I get a bittersweet sense lately. As a piece of music that must end at some point, our time together is limited.

Guessing that progress is cumulative in some ways. Maybe it also cyclical? I keep coming around again and again to a rash of activities that I seem to be abandoning at the same time. I drop the threads and pick them up again. Then I come around to the other things I dropped again and again.

Author Barbara Sher would say that I'm a scanner.

Perhaps this longing in me comes from words being sequential - we can't say it all at one time because we don't have the shorthand concepts to encompass it all in entirety. So we can only discuss pieces of the whole story, the whole life.

Used to think that I could bring someone I knew up to speed on my life - to fill them in on what has been happening. I'm beginning to realize that I can never do that. I've experienced too much.

Reminds me of the story called "Smoke of Memories" written by Jorje Borges about a young boy who has decided to isolate himself; he wants no more experiences because he has a photographic memory and his mind has filled up to the brim.

When Is Selling Manipulative?

2008-10-12T02:12:00.000-10:00

I prefer to be honest about as what a person is "selling" to another. For instance, "Wouldn't you want to.....?" These actions of "selling" are, in a sense, manipulative. Manipulation is, at it's best, the ability to create a desire for an experience. The ultimate value of the experience is, of course, determined by the user.

Of course, permission is implied, as in the teacher/student relationship or in the forms of the assault of advertising. People understand that others have to make a living, so they listen to their "pitch" about the
value of what is being sold. People in business attempt to create a "NEED" for their services. Students buy courses orchestrated by teachers.

In our culture, the more someone must pay for an experience, the more they tend to value it. In some forms of manipulation, permission is disregarded to the point of coersion. There's a fine line between implied permission and coersion.

For me - when this permission gets violated, it really upsets me. Makes me wonder when or how I agreed to it so I can use whatever power I have to retract that permission.

Fear of No Money

2008-10-11T00:53:00.000-10:00

There's lots of concern about a lack of money in my culture lately. Lots of people are reluctant to spend their money. Credit is tight. There are many other stories that seem to be anticipating horror and paranoia that supposedly is going to happen. So I'd like to tell you a story about the first time I thought I might have to borrow some money in my distant past.

What happened, circa 1977, was that it was a Friday. I had just written a check to my prospective landlord for first and last and a security deposit to rent a place that would hit my checking account on Monday. The problem was, that the amount was $361. more than I had in the bank.

I wasn't worried. I guessed that someone I knew personally would loan me the money over the weekend because I had never asked my friends for a loan before. Money was coming to pay it back as soon as the job that I was working on was done, which was a matter of days. The sum was pocket money for a few of the people I knew. I had always been careful at managing my finances and had started my business by building it from nothing, without ever needing credit.

At the time I was working as a sign maker. I was putting the finishing touches on a sign the proprietor had specified belonged on an old, hardwood mantelpiece at the Pelican Inn in Muir Beach over the fireplace. A dremmel tool was how the letters were being carved out. It's a tiny drill with a bit of a certain shape on the end of it that I was using to shape the letters.

Well, that day, the bit finally wore out and all the letters were not done yet. Calling the hardware stores nearby, they all said they had dremmel bits. But I had to go to three stores before I found the right shape. All this running around had to be done by hitchhiking, because my car had stopped working the day before.

So, after some trouble, finally I come to the hardware store where the right bit shape was available. They ask me what was the specific shape used for what purpose. I told them about the job I was finishing. After hearing what I had to say, they expressed an interest in having new signs on their window. So I sat down and drew up their order. At that time, my estimate process was codified; pricing was figured by the standing inch per letter.

The total came to $361. I had the job done and installed by Sunday. The cash to cover the check I had written was in the bank on Monday.

As I was gilding the letters that I had finished carving out on Monday, it was then I reflected how curiously relevant the content of the sign over the mantelpiece had been to my experience over the weekend.

It happened to say:

Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. No one was there.

Creative Thinking While Angry (or Self Involved)

2008-09-28T02:16:00.001-10:00

Anger is an intense emotion. Anger is an emotion that most people would not really prefer to keep hold of for very long because it results in fight or flight reactions and if kept indefintely, health problems. Comparatively, self-stroking of ego is much more self-deceptive because it is pleasurable.

So - is it possible to actually think, problem solve and come up with something new if you're in the throes of anger or self-involvement?

Perhaps it's the self-deception that is the culprit in itself, not which emotion, pastime or action a person is blighely engaging in?

To relate it to the above, it's coercion itself that seems objectionable to me in this case. Not the subject about which the fascistic application is taking place. If these two are not congruent and the person has forgotten to "Keep their Eyes On the Prize", then you have something such as; "OK everyone, you all there just be having fun now or I will kick your ass!" Or the common parental problem of a distinct lack of imagination, "Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about!"

However, my point: With quite a bit of practice, I learned to learn to creatively problem solve while also being angry. It happened because I was challenged to do so repeatedly without the usual characteristic of defensive self-preservation being a feature. If I did it, I know it's possible for others to do.

From this personal experience, I know that it's possible to marry precluding "opposing" characteristics so that having and either/or is not necessary. You can have both, and sometimes you can have it all - up to a point...IF - (and this is the big conditional deal-breaker If,) if you train the skills that are needed to make it happen.

Now I know this is unusual, because in most people, the intensity and the nature of the emotion will shut down the ability to creatively problem solve. People who are angry in this way are similarly blinded to people
who are "masturbating their ego". People can be distracted by being absorbed in any habitual state - emotional, physical, mental. People get distracted by the status quo. They space out and miss stuff they're not anticipating that could be useful, because it's not what they expect.

So - perhaps the ability to STOP, PREVENT, SUSPEND is the crucial one activity that is CRUCIAL to model. Whatever the habit that is in place, in the way of flexbility is the ability to respond to circumstance appropriately.

Granted that "I" "I" "I" "I" "I" "I" is a really strong habit in some people, but there are many strong habits just as important - if not MORE important to suspend as that one. A style of assault coersion is MUCH more dangerous habit than the "I" "I" "I" "I" "I" one.

But I guess the relative importance of it depends on if you have someone around you who is doing one of these that you can't get rid of - it's a little poisonous to have to deal with a person who constantly wants attention who is not a child.

Why Surrender?

2008-09-02T02:08:00.001-10:00

We're talking about the idea that, in order to observe, the nature of observation needs to be free of the quality that you are in the act of observing.

I can think of exceptions in my own experience for this statement. Granted, it's tricky to do, but these characteristics are not mutually exclusive. Otherwise how would we use the mind to observe itself? How
would be be able to observe at all if we could not articulate some of the differences that make a difference - no matter if we are trapped within them or not?

Why is being free a prerequisite? The ability to observe, creatively problem solve or to stop or replace a habit that you don't want for whatever reason is a skill. The nature of skills is that these abilities can be learned and sharpened. Granted, it takes practice. Practice is more effective in the context of when and how you would like to use a skill. It takes the capacity to imagine an advantage to go to the trouble of bothering to train the skill.

Now, the next question that begs is: what could be the advantages of surrendering continuous self-referent activity - in that it may even be a pleasurable activity that someone would want to continue?

For me surrendering self-referent activity is a social advantage. I'm able to imagine what someone else might experience and become able to establish rapport and connection with them.

For someone else who is not particularly after personal connection, perhaps this ability might be the ability to act as a channel for art or psychic prediction. The ability to surrender self-reference could mean to the person some sort of livelihood advantage related to the cultivation of a skill.

For instance, if for some reason you thought you might like to surf, it wouldn't do you much good to think that the ocean is out to punish you and how dangerous it is - it's more constructive if you realize that there are factors of balance and skill to uncover that you would need to practice and learn about the nature of what it takes to surf. Of course, you would have never learned to swim because you have to surrender fears generated by self-involvement...unless you have a good teacher.

This implies that there could be an attraction coming from the lack of something - perhaps the ability to turn off repeating nuisances of internal talk that spin someone into depression would be a great advantage? These are the benefits - the payoffs. Different strokes for different folks sorts of things.

I'm sure people could think of more of these - and I'd like to hear 'em.

Communicating Humility While Writing

2008-08-30T01:57:00.001-10:00

Ok, talking about motives. Going after one preference over another means that someone would be making the selection because of getting a certain payoff from it, right? No matter what the payoff, correct? The payoff could be a paragon of personal martrydom or another one of the rainbow of motives. It's whatever gets you off, so to speak. Different strokes for different folks. The payoff is still some sort of a motive that drives the definition of value of making the selection.

To be honestly self-referent, the payoff I get from writing about thinking is immense, actually. I don't know why this is true, but it motivated me to learn to write in order to do this very thing I'm doing now.

The medium is important, not the massage, ah..er.. the message. The WAY something is done is often overlooked. If I wanted to pound in a message the way DonL likes to pound in his message of how arrogant and self-deceptive the "I" "I" "I" "I" "I" action is, it would be that one. But I don't like to pound, because I regard repetition as a disrespectful tactic of advertising. Guess that is also why I find it distasteful to "sell" what I feel is valuable.

Why can't people just GET that these things are valuable and take the value of what I have to offer them? Why do I have to SELL what I feel is valuable? Why don't people just look at me and figure out they could be as deliriously happy as me if they'd just...

I guess because people would never otherwise have a clue that the value even exists.

The connection between the medium being congruent with the message defines the level of effectiveness. If they match, the message is related in a much more powerful fashion. (This is, in a nutshell, what is the defintion of ART for me.) The way the selection process is communicated (or imposed on others) is important - not the content of the selected value.

Gawd, I feel like a salesperson sometimes when I write this stuff.

For me, putting "I" before something or using qualifiers such as IMHO, etc. means that it's coming from just little old me. That what is being said not the BIG TRUTH with a CAPITOL "T" - I'm not puffed up into wanting to define the nature of life, the universe and everything.

Funny, huh? I regard the use of "I" to indicate a directly opposite evidence that of how DonL regards it. Don believes that writing without the "I" is evidence of less egotism. For me, the humble use of "I" implies a lack of arrogance, a lone voice in the wilderness speaking from the point of view of one person's experience - one person who speaks only for themselves and not the Royal WE of those who have empowered me to represent them.

Because one person talking doesn't imply the puffed-up importance of defining the absolute FACT of The Way Things Are. That's how it comes across to me when the "I" is left out of what is being expressed. I think that it deceptively hides the content as if it is "fact" when it is only merely someone's opinion.

Why Did I Do That?

2008-08-20T01:43:00.000-10:00

Do people do things for negative reasons?
I used to imagine they do. I used to think I did. But now as I have come to watch myself and others, I don't think that is the case.

What someone chooses to do, their choices may have negative consequences. It can be argued in many cases that people are a product of their conditioning - their own, environmental and parental, etc. So they don't really have a choice. But, (as far as I can tell,) everyone chooses an action (or lack of it) because of its positive aspects, not the negative ones.

Often the choice is not so wise, or the selection doesn't take crucial things into account that should have been obvious to the person. Even more commonly, the person feels as if they "must" make the choice for various justified points that they are aware are negative. Such as choosing between two evils, such as what we have to do so often when we vote. Sometimes people are aware of the negative aspects, but they decide the costs are "worth it," possibly because sometimes the costs are deferred until "later." Some people like to gamble and play the odds, imagining they won't be the one to suffer the common consequences.

I quipped lately, when in the presence of a friend of mine who is a confirmed drinker, (alcoholics go to meetings) that has more time than a smoker to change her ways, because drinkers live much longer than drinkers who smoke.

Most often, I think what happens when people make what later turns out to be a "negative" choice -- it's that their priorities changed somewhere along the line. They got trapped. Sometimes they forgot to consult all the priorities, or to even realize they might have had priorities at all.

It's as though, sometimes, we are a multitude of shifting priority. Not every priority is present at every moment. So it's possible to make a decision that caters and answers to one particular member of the multitude of priorities, and forget a crucial one that got left out. Guess this is where the ideas of the subconscious came from.

Some of the time, nobody can anticipate the sum total of how things will turn out. So it's not possible sometimes to know how a particular choice will affect things on down the line. You just have to find out, and change things as you go.

Advice for Problem Solving

2008-08-02T21:03:00.003-10:00

Had an ex who tended to add up his distresses that separately were merely a little annoying and together turned into a landslide. In typical Drama Queen style, he would use the process to completely re-evaluate his life, and jump immediately to make the changes, usually to its detriment. Although your problems are more serious than contrived, when things that are bothering you begin to pile up, it's very tempting to add them together - and then your mind ranges from thing to thing in a horrendous circle of "Queen for a Day" sort of way.

Things have a way of working themselves out in the wash. What will happen, happens - and then you can decide what you are going to do about them. I would want to plan the whole thing ahead of time, but sometimes you need to act to get somewhere before you can stand on the previous steps to see the step ahead. Now for myself, I have come to regard worrying as a signal that I need to goad myself to act in some way - that I really care about outcomes and I'm not doing anything about them. Also realize that it's a significant challenge to come up with creative solutions when you are thinking in terms of survival issues.

Taking a cue from the example of the ex, creative solutions come to me easier if I address the fact that I'm upset first and do things that I know will spell effective indulgence and "mini-vacations" for me personally. Once I'm in a much better state - fed, watered, pain-free, comforted, bathed, calm, etc. then I think of my "problems" with a pen in hand and a big piece of paper for a "mind-map" to get everything out. Writing for me helps with stopping the cycling around over and over of the same issues in my brain. Then once they are out on paper, I can stop thinking about them incessantly. It may be another activity besides writing that allows you to "clear your mind" and see the situation with a more objective eye - but perhaps you can make this approach work for you.

Without committing myself to a course of action, also you might do some research about ways that other people have dealt with the same problems. You might access others who seem to have some creative ideas about your issues at http://globalideasbank.org/site/home/ which is a website with interesting ideas about how to solve social problems.

Perhaps check out Edward de Bono's creative thinking techniques outlined in his books.
For instance, if it's a decision such as "do I move to where my parent is, or do I move my parent in with me?" - might do a Consequences PMI - make separate lists for the positive, negative and Interesting parts of what could happen, given however many certain possible circumstances.

Anyway - my intent here is just to open up possible solutions for you that you can do for yourself. From what I'm reading, it sounds as if you are allowing the circumstances to run you around instead of exploring how you may be able to influence them. There's sometimes only so much that you can do about certain situations, and then your only option is to wait and ask yourself if there will be consequences to putting off making decisions once the outcomes are there. Helps to be able to anticipate the point of no return when the decision will be made for you unless you act, so you know when your options are closing down.

Good luck!

Fostering Acquaintanceships

2008-07-31T23:13:00.007-10:00

I'm not a loner.

I meet so many people that I want to stay in touch for some reason or another. Have learned that I MUST keep track of this reason, or I will lose the thread that connects me to them. So have learned to write down with their contact information what it is that we talked about or why I should get back in touch with them again.

Great relationships are made and not found. For me, finding people is somewhat like thrift store shopping in that you meet the person and then find a use for them in your life or visa versa. For me, the essence of relationships is reciprocal - doing something for people and accepting what people have to offer me.

Have a sense that the world is filled with people who have something to offer me, and lately more often, the other way - I have something to offer them. So, the trouble is finding out what this offering is, exactly, in the time we have to spend together.

Sometimes, find myself rising to the occasion using an unreliable brand of psychic ability and guessing. It works amazingly well. Somehow I can establish rapport with quite a few people in the world as I run into them, even though people can be so unique and nobody seems to take the time in this era to develop relationships with people.

I think there is a big need for lots of new words describing relationships. There are so many unique relationships in the world that are lumped together under the heading of "friendships, " or "lover-ships," or "acquaintanceships." The traditional words don't really describe the rainbow of subtlety that is there in all those categories.

More on this later....

Ego and Making Art

2008-07-22T23:26:00.003-10:00

My personal experience as a young person was of being someone who had very little identity or ego. I seemed to not be able to put aside my ego/identity because it wasn't formed enough yet to purposefully influence. For me it was almost as if giving up ego was so natural and irresistible, that I was not in control of purposefully suspending it or using my ego - there wasn't much difference I could sense between one action and its "opposite". It wasn't until I could sense what "I" wanted as a separate ability as I gradually developed a sense of self - that I was able to put this ego sense of self aside purposefully.

I believe that, as an artist, suspension of ego "just happens" in the process of being the conduit to the image coming through. Art was my first ability that I spent quite a bit of time doing, so this is probably partly why I had a natural talent to merge and blend and give up ego.

What made it imperative that I develop an ego was to be able to communicate in relationships with people. Previous to that ability being developed, I was very successful in guessing what people wanted me to do and doing it before I realized I was responding to someone else's desires or goals for me. Strangely enough, I would experience their desire as my own - but I was "shape-shifting" as I later decided to call it.

This ability of mine was so exaggerated that it was almost to the point of freaking people out. Because I would "read their mind" successfully without being told in an eerie psychic fashion, showing up at their doorstep unannounced when needed with the right stuff in my hands for helping them, and so forth.

Wow - it's really raining here right now. Sounds like I'm right next to a stream.

In the late seventies, Psychology Today, (an American magazine which is still published) did a survey to find out if the training and schooling that psychologists were getting was actually resulting in "good psychologists." Recent graduates from various programs and universities were interviewed by top psychologists and evaluated for their suitability for the field. Turns out that those people who were trained in art were considered to make the best psychologists by this study.

Having been to art school myself, I can see how this happened. Art makes a person more sane, partly because of a suspended "ego-less" sort of conduit sensation that people commonly experience while making art.

Historic Egolessness Related to Shape-shifting

2008-07-22T01:39:00.001-10:00

My personal experience of being someone who had very little identity or ego as a young person. I seemed to not be able to put aside my ego/identity because it wasn't formed enough yet to purposefully influence. For me
it was almost as if giving up ego was so natural and irresistible, that I was not in control of purposefully suspending it or using my ego - there wasn't much difference I could sense between one action and its "opposite". It wasn't until I could sense what "I" wanted as a separate ability as I gradually developed a sense of self - that I was able to put this ego sense of self aside purposefully.

I believe that, as an artist, suspension of ego "just happens" in the process of being the conduit to the image coming through. Art was my first ability that I spent quite a bit of time doing, so this is probably partly why I had a natural talent to merge and blend and give up ego.

What made it imperative that I develop an ego was to be able to communicate in relationships with people. Previous to that ability being developed, I was very successful in guessing what people wanted me to do and doing it before I realized I was responding to someone else's desires or goals for me. Strangely enough, I would experience their desire as my own - but I was "shape-shifting" as I later decided to call it. This ability of mine was so exaggerated that it was almost to the point of freaking people out. Because I would "read their mind" successfully without being told in an eerie psychic fashion, showing up at their doorstep unannounced when needed with the right stuff in my hands for helping them, and so forth.

Now That I'm Situated...

2008-07-13T01:29:00.006-10:00

Got a sweet place to live in Honoka'a, which is on the north end of the Big Island - away from the dreadful VOG that is haunting most of the south coast. A really nice person shares the house. There's even a breezy ocean view through the ohia, banana and the Autograph tree!

Hope some of my friends come and visit, now that I have a guest room for them... So - c'mon, fly to Hawaii this summer! Bring a top-sheet or light blanket, it's about 80 degrees daytime, 70 degrees at night...we have a double futon, a massage table or camp cot reserved for you. The house is only a block and a half from "Honoka'a town," which is about the size of Stinson Beach and Bolinas combined. The butcher shop is superb. So is the Farmer's fresh food stand and the Asian food store and the Market. There are two world-class restaurant and a bargain one. A library, a movie theater, a pharmacy, a credit union and bank...and a pool - are all within five blocks from home base. So far I think it's a great place.

Managed to buy a '91 4WD Subaru Legacy station wagon with only 120,000 miles on it for only $1200, which was less than it would have cost to ship and register my own car. Fixed up a free ancient Toshiba laptop so it's functional to get back online by buying some cheap RAM. Got the DSL turned on and it's only a little slower than cable. Ordered the refills for the color printer. Teaching some private lessons in Alexander Technique to nearby astute students. Looking for more work...a "good enough" job would be great.

There's a ten year old "Tortie" kitty Diva who already lives on the property. Her name is "Bizkits" - because her favorite thing to do is to sit in your lap and paw you while she's purring and padding. Kitties aren't allowed inside our house because our landlady is allergic to kitties and has provided these beautiful rugs for us to use. So the cat has learned already to jump up onto this outside porch, sitting and waiting politely for me to come out and pet her each evening when she hears our voices. She is an amazingly sweet kitty who doesn't even call out to announce herself, just waits for me to notice her.

Am about to learn how to SKYPE with the Magic Jack, so I'll let you know about that when I get enough savvy to call you - wherever in the world you are... So let me know your phone number so I can call you for free! You don't even need a SKYPE account - I'll be able to call land lines and even some mobile phones.

Let me know you're there! I'm sort of lonely these days because I don't have many friends yet in Honoka'a.

Writing As You Think

2008-06-22T00:39:00.000-10:00

Not all of us think exactly as we write! I write very differently than I speak, actually. I suspect that phenomena is more common than some people's extraordinary ability to write exactly as they speak.

For me, it's a factor that I must slow down my thinking in order to have the flow of words keeping up with my ability to type - which is only 40 wpm or so. This rate is still much faster than I originally had to do in longhand. So I think that if someone had learned to type, they would be better at writing as they speak than I was. I had to learn to put my thoughts in words first in long-hand - difficult. Can remember when I used to write everything out, then take the sissors to what I'd written, and then put what was better related together and totally rewrite it again. Decades ago. I'm so happy I can type now.

I also discovered that when I write, I tended to intermix my prepositions. This expressed my ability to recombine elements and come up with new direction, but it confused people when I wrote in this way. I tended to naturally speak in hugely dependent clauses - which people understand while speaking, but in writing, this style of talking this is awful to follow. Sometimes when talking, I'll be referring to three or four different points, perhaps unrelated, all at once. It's completely bizzarely confusing to be writing in that manner. I do find people who are capable of talking that way much more commonly. Women in particular can follow me just fine.

Enjoyed turning on the tape recorder while I was having an interesting conversation with a musicologist and then transcribed it. At the time, I thought it was an interesting conversation that expressed the unique
thinking patterns of the person being interviewed. Others found it disgusting to follow our multiple trains of thought going all at the same time. Some people could keep up with it, but most who read the transcript
were completely mortified and accused us of nonsensical rambling and ranting. Probably I still have the transcription somewhere as an example if anyone is interested.

What I've Been Up To Lately

2008-04-28T17:37:00.000-10:00

Well, I'm just packing up leaving another successful house sitting gig. This time it was for two friends of mine who are moving from Oakland to go "back to the land" in rural Oregon. It's sort of exciting to watch them get six hives of bees, etc. as well as some land to do gardening and be caretakers for six months or so. They own a really fine kitty, actually, he probably thinks that he owns them - a hugely perfect sweet jet-black shorthair named "Shakti." We made famous friends and understood each other perfectly, except when he wanted me to wake up this morning at 7:30 and feed him. Was cute though - he plopped himself right down next to my head, purred and made me wonder if his claws were going to go through the sheets to puncture the air bed. Very effective to make me wake up to shoo him away - a smart kitty.

I'm slogging away at completing another edition of the 868-Directory. This time I was able to sort out over computer problems how to do the billing yet again. I can't wait until I can afford to get a "newer" old laptop to consolidate the contents of two ancient computers, but I'll have to wait until people pay their bills to know if I'll have any extra after paying the printer bill. A new version of Ubuntu Linux is coming out that I'm going to do a dual boot on...or maybe I'll do a more "modern" routine where I can run Windows through Linux if I have enough RAM. We'll see how it turns out with the machine I end up getting. I can't wait to not be wondering if my computers are going to crap out when I need them to work the most.

I'm hoping that I haven't set my sights too high to have a car in Hawaii, a newer laptop and enough to do the first and last on a house when I return. Chris thinks I should ship my little car - but at $1300. for shipping, tax and license I could surely find a pretty good car in Hawaii and not be worried about shipping it back if I want to come back. I still haven't bought my air ticket yet; I think I'm going to have to be reduced to using AirTech yet again; even though last year they made me wait almost a whole month until I could get a flight when my departure window was supposed to be three days!

Airfare I guess will just go up, like the price of gas. Who knows which side of the Pacific I'll be on when the shit hits the fan. I'm beginning to realize that I may have to choose at some point and that my lifestyle of coming back and forth to do my work will get to be non-sensical as the prices of air fare go sky high, along with gas prices.

My sweet friend Janet bought me a really cool book as a present - World Changing. I'll tell you more about it as I read it again.

Ways I've Made Money When There's No Money Coming Anytime Soon

2008-04-10T20:15:00.000-10:00

Tonight I'm staying at a friend of mine's house who is hosting a couch surfer down on his luck who has been unsuccessful looking for a job. He has been encouraging me to lately reflect the many ways I've made money when faced with destitution.

One of the ways that I have done that is to be constantly thinking like an entrepreneur instead of thinking like a wage slave and imagining the answer would be having a job. When faced with a time of no money, I would look for possibilities that could be turned into a situation for money coming to me where there were none now. Today we were at an "Everything is a Dollar" store when I saw these little boxes designed to be decorated with crafty stuff. I imagined one of these things turned into a glue and paper covered purse...

This reminded me of the time I hitched to Lincoln, NE to attend an Alexander Technique workshop without knowing how I was going to get home or eat. I had fifty bucks in my pocket when I arrived, so I figured that gave me around a week I had to come up with something. It was easy to find a free place to stay there with someone who lived there at the location of the workshop. Fortunately, that person had a sewing machine that was OK for me to use. So I went shopping at the thrift store to imagine what I could make to turn into money. Somehow, I spotted some upholstery pieces for a song that made me decide on making juggling balls. Sold around thirty sets to people in the workshop without a problem. Even my teacher bought a set from me. When it came time to find a way back to CA I was offered a ride, but there was no room in the vehicle for me. Somehow, I managed to spot a roof rack while walking by a machine shop in Lincoln that fit on top of the possible car so there was room for me to catch a ride across country back to were I lived in CA. So it all worked out for me that time.

I guess that sign painting has always saved my butt when times got unpredictable, but being a sign painter usually required having a vehicle. When stranded without a vehicle, I had to rely on my other resources to imagine what it was I could do to make immediate money. These resources involved imagining how to do something for others without bulky tools to carry around. Some of the things that I have done for people without having a vehicle is to babysit, do massage or bodywork, cut hair, be a tutor for various subjects such as beginning computer access, do home organizing or drive them around in their car. I have also painted pictures of their pets or washed their dishes.

Wonder now that maybe what made it so easy for me to get out of compromising situations where I could have been desperate, is that people around me seemed to want to have me do something for me to make myself useful in order to help me, just as much as they wanted the thing I might be offering. To a large extent, I noticed that people would buy things from me because they wanted to support my efforts to support myself.

I guess in that way, the money you spend everywhere counts by supporting a particular someone whom you pay for services.

Green-eyed Monster

2008-03-22T01:05:00.000-10:00

In my distant past, I discovered that jealousy (for me) was made up of a catch-22 between a desire for privacy/autonomy and a fear of being left out/loneliness. There was nothing I could do about making either choice because it precluded the other. But there was a third emotion in there that I could do something about - competition. As I stopped my competitive urges in the moments of feeling envy - (which was really an insecurity comparing myself to this other woman because I didn't really know what made me attractive to the guy I was with,) it disassembled the whole jealousy thing for me. It made me invite the person to be closer to me as well as him; the girl I was jealous of felt the shift and disappeared, because being close to both of us was too wierd for her. Was a very interesting experience.

Lately experienced other people expecting me to be jealous. A regular friend of my boyfriend tried to "diss" me by dis-inviting me on a camping trip, and a few other events. She attempted to redefine my role in my relationship with my boyfriend as "mothering. " Perhaps she didn't know that his relationship with his mother really sucked - and that he really needed the "mothering." For some reason, she regarded our ongoing relationship as "dependent" without knowing much about it. Obviously, she didn't have much of a clue about the sort of relationship we were having.

But at the time, it really confused her how I was reacted to her, because I think that I was supposed to get jealous and forbid him to be able to see her, or I was supposed to break up with him - or something like that. He finally admitted to me that he'd been in love with her for awhile. I replied, "Of course you'd be in love with the person who makes music with you; music opens up your heart. Doing something you love makes you grateful to the people who do it with you. " This was not what he expected to hear.

I pointed out that although he had thought about how much he loved her, he didn't break our monogamy agreement. He pointed out that the reason he didn't was because she wasn't interested in him, particularly. I pointed out that she was getting all the advantages of being in a relationship without "putting out" anyway, and that if he did get involved with her, she'd shelve him after a couple of weeks as we had watched her do to the last five men who had courted her... except for the guy who had other "regular" sometimes women like her. She came back to this guy pretty regularly every four months in between the other guys.

I could totally see how and why my boyfriend liked her so much. She was a blast to hang out with, never a dull moment. We would laugh and make up songs and giggle some more in slumber party mode until we were so drunk with connections. She had a wonderful way with her kids that made them into great people. But she was also dangerously reactive and defensive and had a habit of voting with her feet. It made her quite a natural gypsy.

I'm actually writing this post after the fact, but I'm putting a date on it at the time it was happening. I don't really like drama, so I tend not to write about such things in my blog until after they aren't happening.

Later she decided to avoid me entirely. Perhaps it was because she finally decided to take my boyfriend for a spin after I'd moved out and I guess she was afraid I'd bite after that. Although I had a great relationship with her daughter that I would have liked to continue, she said I was "weird" to a friend of ours. When grilled exactly how I was so weird, she replied, "I dunno, just ...weird." I didn't react the way she imagined women should react - be defensive, back-stabbing, catty and competitive. Go figure.

She back on the island now after declaring she was moving to the mainland. But, since I decided to forgo bringing people into my life who are difficult to deal with, I guess that I'm going to forgo helping her out - although I know she needs a footing. Which is too bad, because I really enjoyed her daughter's art connection with me, and it was really fun updating her blog with her daughter when she came over to play with me. It was such a pleasure to spend time with a very dedicated artist; even if she was only nine years old. I'll miss her. It's too bad her mom thinks I'm weird.

Yesterday's Swimming Adventures

2008-02-27T09:44:00.000-10:00

As a reward for finally getting my errands done today, I went snorkling yesterday at an old cane field dock camp, called "Mahu Kona." It's usually got fascinating junk in the usually clear water, with lots of fish - in the past I've seen octopus and other interesting sea life. In the last few months, a new ladder has been installed at this old dock that was much lower to make getting out of the water easier.

The wave action was higher than usual, about four foot waves that periodically were sloshing over the surface of the swim dock about every fifteen minutes. There was nobody else in the water swimming when I first got there, so I watched the ocean for about twenty minutes before I decided I could handle getting in and out even at its worst. This is usually a very clear snorkling area, but with the wave action I was going to have to swim pretty far out to be able to see any sea life. While I was waiting, I talked to a local to check that the area I had the idea to swim into didn't have strong currents. So I got trussed up in my full wetsuit and both my fins to give me more time being in the water without getting chilled. It was my maiden voyage on my slightly dicey formerly sprained ankle I've been babying that I thought was OK now, so I wanted to be able to take it easy.

I made it out without running into surge. Another young woman jumped in the water five minutes after me who was a really great swimmer. Since we were the only two people swimming, we partnered up to make it safer while we were keeping away from the wave action close to shore. Her name turned out to be George. We decided to head out parallell to where dolphins sometimes are sighted where the water was likely to be more clear and we could see some fishies - about a mile swim 200 ft. offshore. Without fins, this girl swam about as fast as I could with fins! Wow, it was fun to have her as a swim partner. We stayed out for a little more than an hour, and did find a place where the water was clear enough to see some fish and coral heads. I particularly enjoyed a whole school of forty or so Sargent Majors, Yellow Tang and Butterfly fish.

Getting out was a little dicey for me. A set of waves happen to come along just as I had gotten my fins off and tossed them onto the dock, so I had to launch back off the swim ladder at the last moment to avoid getting schmushed into it by one of the sloshing big ones. Then there were the three waves after that that almost tossed me onto the rocks. But George, (she had said that she had lifesaving qualification,) was standing there on the dock watching me in case I hit my head or really couldn't make it. So I mustered the courage and timing to paddle back up to get out between waves all right, even though I was worn out from the swim. I know that I would have been much more careful about waiting for a wave set to have passed if I was swimming alone. It was exciting, even though not exactly the sort of excitement I would choose!

It made me feel young at heart again to have dared and won and not gotten hurt after all. Also enjoyed hanging out with George and her girlfriend watching the sunset and cooking over the fire later, even though they're both traveling gypsy-camping girls that I'll probably never see again. A really fun adventure.

Respectful Advice

2008-02-10T12:05:00.000-10:00

I realize that my current and historical ways of delivering or brainstorming information needs updating to become more effective and to be received in the ways that I intend. Essentially, I need to ask more questions while I'm communicating or teaching, generating or sharing ideas. Being both a rebellious and tolerant person who has had to resist over-control by others, let me share with you some of these questions I have learned to ask myself. They are often about how I might determine if or how much I should trust or suspect another person's motives who is offering me suggestions.

Do my advisors just seem to have their own priorities, preferences and agenda to push on me that I might not agree with?
How often are they making attempts to find out and take my special criterias, needs and requirements into consideration above their own?
How do they receive it if I fill them in on the fly as I notice possible missing elements or points?

If I do suspect or want to question their agenda, most of the time I realize that is very different than suspecting or questioning their personal integrity or ethics or that I am handing out a personal attack. To do this, I might offer a possible sample motive that we'll agree about. If I have an ongoing relationship with them that could benefit from establishing further agreements about being on the same page, I might just ask them directly about what their motives or ground rules or assumptions are. Some people are taken aback by such daring. Doing this before I react or flee, this approach answers my urge to defend myself and avoids making the situation negative when it might be uncomfortable for both of us.

Please feel that it's perfectly OK for you to ask me about it if you suspect I have a distasteful agenda to push onto you. In my better moments, I have gleefully practiced suspending my own personally defensive reactions to others who question my motives. In my past I have been so often misunderstood that I do not mind doing the work to establish further trust and understanding. Instead I happily consider it to be an investment in our relationship - or at least practice of a skill that can be used with people are are increasingly different from myself, (thus having complimentary skills.)

Usually, I don't have much specific personal interest of gaining or losing something for myself concerning the specific issue, although it may seem like I'm blowing up the issue beyond all proportion because nobody else would bother to articulate it unless they did passionately care. This is a point I ask myself about others to find out if they have something to gain by convincing me or changing my behavior toward them. I regard working such things out between people as a long term investment in bonding and trust that I'm more than willing to make with you... If the issue is a pattern of mine, there will be people like you in my future.

My motives and priorities are often intended to help people use forethought & to think for themselves. I know that I also assign a high priority to justice and fair treatment, and that I feel compassion and understanding are important. My obvious talent (or obcession) to make fine distinctions in order to note and reveal differences doesn't necessarily imply that I'm assigning a value or judging another person's actions to be wanting because they don't match my own. I tend to prefer to contrast in order to reveal missing differences and to not be so concerned about mis-matches. A basic strategy of others that I know is quite different from mine is to seek for matches that reveal and look for similarities.

Innately, my being with others brings out ways in which I feel similar to them to start with, so I find it more useful to seek for differences to establish my own autonomy and stop the need to second-guess what they think of me. Usually it doesn't make much difference to me whether MY choice or points are the ones chosen. This was a feature so often that I would get lost in decision-making with too many options that are equally attractive or are canceling out each other. In my past I often needed to physically get away from others so I could determine my own thoughts on matters, because I was "too" compassionate.

Offering possible alternatives or giving out some more choices isn't perfect as a strategy, but people who get to know me usually understand my motives of why I'm saying such things. Now that I use contrasting to reveal differences, it works so well for me - so much that now I have become the one who seems imposing or threatening!

Also, I have come to appreciate how others in my subculture wouldn't as a rule bother to spell out what is so personal in so much detail, if they did not personally care about it. So that's why my motives of why be talking about assumptions is often misunderstood. Others have often reacted like I'm blowing up the issue beyond all proportion or prematurely bringing up issues that seem petty or don't have enough reason to change now. I bring things up like this because I have come to appreciate how long it takes to change a significant character feature or thinking strategy.

Can you and I find a way around this issue of advice/respect between us, even if we are both willing? I'm willing and, I think, able to change myself to accommodate communication in this case, but I might not be able to deliver in the limited time we have together. As a rule of thumb, I want to start working on changing it long before it becomes a problem. You may not feel it's worth it. So, let me know and I'll be happy to just avoid or mitigate the issue in the future as well as I can. But it's not in my nature to ignore such a thing without having agreed to do so. I really hate it when the tacit agreement seems to be "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than agreement."

Sometimes I do have something to gain for which I am negotiating. Especially when others are going to be giving up something for me to be involved, I want to offer a benefit to them and find out if it's worth it to them to get or have what I'm offering. It is OK with me that they would that your needs be put first - it's not "selfish" because we spell out and agree with the priority applied. There are usually other options that can accommodate everyone's needs by compensating for arrival time rather than simultaneous fulfillment. I don't mind waiting my turn so I can get exactly what I want at some point. Who gets whose way and how long they must wait is a basic relationship ground rule to establish, according to me.

I'd love your suggestions and examples about how I could word what I mean to say in a way that is easier for you to recieve. I do know that I obviously need to work on finding more tactful ways to deliver information (to not just you) about ways to do stuff easier and how to remind in a way that would help people remember points that I can tell are missing.

In the meantime, please try to take the benefit of what I say without being defensive about how I'm saying it. Please don't become more touchy about this as I get more skillful and tactful and start to improve too gradually after you've gotten to the end of your rope, OK?

Right Brain "Baby Mind" Learning

2008-01-28T12:50:00.000-10:00

Definitely there are occasions in adult life where it is useful to go into "direct absorb" mode and not filter learning through language.
Take for instance learning any movement skill, such as juggling...playing on a pinball machine, pool, golf, the directing of Alexander Technique, or a skill that involves another language such as playing a musical instrument.

What I prefer to determine, as an adult, is if this person I might be learning from is "worthy" to be absorbed in this completely open way. Then I deliberately open myself to them - as wide as possible and - take them and the skill in. There is no dividing line.

It actually happened not long ago for me. I was visiting a fellow collegue of Alexander Technique to trade work with him. He showed me this x-ray of his lower back; evidently four months previously, he had gotten into an unfortunate auto accident. The seat had come apart and crushed his tailbone so that it had to be removed. Usually when this must occur, the rest of the vertebrae above collapses into the empty space occupied by the tailbone. But here was the x-ray that showed this was not happening. He believed this condition of affairs reflected his discipline of deepening his work in Alexander Technique. I agreed. When he did table work with me, I was most happy to reinforce the sense he had of direction, as he encouraged me when it was my turn to move away from old patterns concerning how I had learned to walk from doing something funny to myself in the area of my hips. The effect was superb; for only the second time in my life I was able to completely move out of the twisted way I had learned to walk as a child.

Now I would say that my ability to absorb this information had to occur on a pre-verbal level, possibly because I had learned to walk incorrectly before I learned to talk. It's a common experience in learning Alexander Technique that the teacher will indicate a motion at odds with the student's established assumptions - and this was no different. It was such a surprising direction, which yielded an amazing result that I had to ask - what happened there? To which he replied - "think of that as dynamic opposition."

Anyway - in my life this "baby-mind" ability to absorb beyond language is still happily an occasional event.