Relationship Stages

 

Personal Relationship Stages
 

 

 

 

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 or endured.
  
  
• 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 possible for various practical reasons... But some relationships can spend time apart and get back together ongoing.
  

Language for Perception

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!

Success Wreck

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.

Respectful Advice

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?

Insights About Hierarchy and Intelligence

Was thinking tonight about how most people assume that there is a hierarchy concerning intelligence. It seems this hierarchy idea is also extended to individuation and spiritual development. A common notion is that there exists a "higher self" and that there are steps someone can take to be on a path to individuation by expanding one's consciousness or spiritual capacity or ability to be happy - and this takes a "higher" intelligence. Those who are further along on this path do not want to be around those who are behind them, because they are "dragged down." Those with higher intelligence are generally considered to possess the ability to evolve and learn, while those with lower intelligence must repeat their problems until they practice enough to "get beyond them." Progress requires minimizing one's ego.

I have found many of these assumptions not to be true.

The first assumption I used to hold was that more intelligent people than myself could teach me more and offer me better opportunities to learn than less intelligent people. Through trial and error, it seems that intelligence didn't have much to do with learning; pretty much anyone could teach me something valuable. What I discovered is that we seem to be limited by the ability and the challenge to find what we might have to offer each other in the time we have to share together. Apparently, it's more of a psychic ability, an emotional intuition, the ability to ask questions or the willingness to play around that helps to discern what this possible shared opportunity is - rather than the factor of intelligence.

Intelligent people often practice an arrogance that gets in the way of their ability to question themselves personally. They can act as if they know it all in their speaking style as well as their actions. This favoring arrogance as a strategy or mannerism seems to come from having been challenged or sparred with. Men in general are often the culprits of this pastime of sparring for position or recognition, whereas women tend to covertly spar for the attention of others. Cultivating arrogance is one way to deal with being challenged. Also using classic debate techniques, such as those that discredit the challenger, etc. are often favored. So this is why arrogant people won't question themselves, because doing so is regarded as a weak sign of self-doubt in the context of debate.

Being open to questions is a strength. Vulnerability is an asset.

Although I can debate and defend effectively, I often choose not to do so. However, I will play and compete vigorously in the context of a game if I believe my gaming partner will "fight fair" and not be hurt during the process. I won't fight for the sake of jockeying for status or in order to be respected or believed. Women in my culture seem to use self-effacing tactics to attempt to demonstrate their membership status, which I won't participate in either. If it seems I tend to come across as openly declarative and seem to flaunt a lack of social constraints, I don't mean to freak out others. Sometimes men think I'm trying to tell them what to do, when I'm merely relating what I've done. I do love to problem-solve, trade notes or invent. Women assume I'm bragging, because women in my culture aren't supposed to talk about their successes.

I find that debate, which men tend to do, to be counter-productive. I feel the same for defending or second-guessing what people might want, which women tend to do. Instead, I merely ask questions and offer observations about assumptions that others might not approach. My goal is to become intimate and connected with people, but some people won't allow me to get close because they feel pressured by my unusual questions. I guess I'm not all that elegant in how I might ask these questions. Some people are freaked out about me asking, so they go away - which is usually fine with me. I can't control (nor would I want to control) whether someone will answer me or not or what they will think of me asking these sometimes "forbidden" questions. To me, it seems more constructive, compassionate and loving to find out someone's motives without threatening them with manipulation or attack if they reveal themselves. But some people have a hard time trusting that I'm not going to use information against them - perhaps because these motives seem to be so unbelievable. Of course, my stating what my motives are make them all the more suspect! So people confused by my actions assign other, more negatively small-minded motives to me that seem to make more sense to them.

So these assumptions about intelligence and the ability to evolve tend to build on each other. It goes on from there. The commonly held assumptions are that those who possess higher intelligence and can learn faster are attracted to others who are more or equal intelligence and speedy at learning as they are. Someone who can learn faster would not want to put up with someone else who is slower. Someone who is going through what the intelligent person feels they have already worked out or "gone beyond" is generally regarded as "behind" and the person who has already experienced this issue is "ahead."

I have discovered that I cannot blame someone for being where they are at. We all started from somewhere, and we were all given a better or worse start in life by how we were treated as children and what happened to us since - as well as the meaning we made of our experiences. I have learned that it is much more common for people not have had the lucky breaks of having had wise parents that I experienced. In fact, if they had bad parents and turned out to be nice people by and large, it gives me more compassion and patience with them.

Instead, it's the willingness to progress that I measure. The ability to face one's demons and challenge oneself to grow is my criteria of who I want to associate with, rather than intelligence. I realize this is a demanding criteria. So I also trust that people will know for themselves when they need to lay back and take a break from pushing ahead as well as know when they may be over-extending themselves too far. This is something I also must trust in myself, though I often deplore my own "laziness."

The longer I live, the more I realize there isn't much of a hierarchy of needs when applied to the ability to individuate, as Maslow and other psychologists have offered as a hypothesis. People seem to learn in fits and starts. Their ability to sustain new behaviors is erratic at first, no matter where they are starting from. A person who is learning may grasp the whole picture all of a sudden, as in an epiphany, or make erratic leaps. They can go gradually step by step as many people seem to do. Their pathway may not be the same as someone else's, but at the same time, people do have principles of progess in common. A person who has experienced what another person hasn't can offer some questions or examples, but not much else unless they can actually directly give or create the experience first-hand as good teachers can. This is what a writer, artist or the skilled & educated are sometimes capable of doing. That's why it's tricky to"help" someone else until you help yourself first, because in a sense as you communicate, you are modeling the behavior you have in mind.

Someone who seems to be "high" or "holy" is often the worst and most self-indulgent at another particular character defect. Ironically, they often tout what they most need to learn. Associating personally with someone who advertises themselves as "evolved" is no guarentee of enlightened and compassionate treatment in the future, so I tend to hang out with people who obviously do need help.


I was thinking about all this because I was remembering a study on how appearance will bias how people are treated socially. Those people as myself, who have high foreheads and small jaws appear to others as if they are still children. As such, these sorts of people are socially considered to both have the capacity to learn and the tendency to stay in a childhood state throughout their adult life. The drawback is people such as myself are considered to be without authority.

This is sort of funny, well, because I am an author. Maybe being just a blogger doesn't really count as authorship?

It's my suspicion that there are many, many people out there who are "saints" and are merely minding their own business, enjoying life. I run into some of them from time to time...

Christmas Catharsis

My partner been on the receiving end of a great deal of my consideration, forethought, money and support for some time, with good reasons. Lately, a catharsis is happening for him and between us that I believe presages his ability to give back. I believe his situation, both financially and emotionally is just about to radically improve circumstancially. Of course, this is when the shit always hits the fan because something in him can tell that the status quo is about to change that will require a significant adjustment on both our parts. The nuts and bolts of these tacit renegotiations usually involve some degree of chaos. In this case, the chaos has taken the form of breaking his right hand, just about the time he's become impatient with having me "mother" him too often.

Curiously, all these people around him are advising him to cut and run from me. He and I are amazed how so many people would be advising such a thing. Strangely enough, it is his boss, even counselors who are advising to "get rid of" me "just in case" I might become a problem or become the focus of his anger. He has no history of spousal abuse under much more aggressive stimulus. I can see why a boss would recommend this, but why would a counselor recommend pulling away from family support?

He said in our last conversation that I am the one in his life right now who has "been there" for him without judgment when he went through previous changes that were significant leaps for him in the past three years. Nobody else has been willing or able to do that for him, either now or in the future. Now that change involves the giving/receiving part of our relationship and not just a significant change for him personally, he seems to be confident that I'm capable of making a change with him, (as am I.) He'll need to think ahead about how he might give back to me - which is a little weird for him because he's sort of an Emergency Responder who assumes if the wheel doesn't squeek, it doesn't need attention. It will be nice, but unfamiliar for him to receive more autonomy and respect, or so he has said to me.

One of the marks of having been abused is a continuing fear that asking for needs will result in complete abandonment, even if these needs are reasonable and fair. A tactic of manipulators is to isolate, to pull the rug out from under someone else's additional means of emotional support so there is no where else to turn, except to face the issues alone. It also serves the authority of an abuser to be the sole means of fulfilling or witholding needs.

So, let's explore what those people would have to gain if I wasn't present to offer my support. Without me to encourage my partner to negotiate for a fair payment for his work, his bosses could take advantage and milk him dry until he collapses - or use it as a reason to blame him for the collapse as a personal defect without ever examining how they participated in his demise by not providing a fair living wage.

As far as why his band members would want him to break up with me, I guess that without me living with him, his band members, who live in their van, would be staying in his house on the weekends as they have done while I have been gone to the mainland. (Except that this doesn't match. I do enjoy them hanging out. But with the threat of possible conflict, the band members have been staying away, even though there hasn't been any conflict from either of us around them yet. Perhaps they have been on the listening end of conflicted issues from him?)

So my partner has been patiently waiting for this raise to address his needs, while he has been paying out a third of his paycheck in gas, resulting in having to live on less than $7.50 an hr. while enduring a great deal of stress on the job. I've been taking up the slack for him by loaning him money for gas at the end of every pay period, and helping save him time at work by doing work errands for him. I did make his bosses horrified when I joked that I should be on the payroll for doing these things. Where is my $1200 in company stock options that I've contributed in gas since June that I've not been paid back?

On this particular day that he broke his hand, he was very upset at being stood up by his boss who were too busy to do their part to allow the work to be completed on time in spite of an imperative deadline - par for the course. Later, he found out this had been the same problem for others who had done his job in the past and the reason they had quit his job.

Certainly a serious part of this quotient for me is alcohol use. I have seen that a person can turn to drinking when they cannot think of anything else to do. If I do not pass a judgment on whether the drinking has the desired effect and instead look at the effect it does have, I see that there is an intentional motive to release frustration and blot out pain...along with an unwanted effect of determined self-destructiveness. It's intentful self-destructiveness that makes me want to withdraw, because this twists my naturally helpful interdependent urge to give and receive freely into suddenly becoming codependence.

If people had other choices that worked, most would use them. If a person was alcoholic that would not be true - everything that happened would be a thin excuse to drink more alcohol. Most commonly, they would not be capable of keeping their alcohol consumption under control; for alcoholics, a little alcohol encourages drunken binges. What I have observed in this situation makes me wonder if possibly the beginning stages of diabetes is more of an operative factor rather than alcoholism.

Of course there are other choices available to deal with frustrations, such as talking about it to friends or professional counselors, using music to change emotions or making music, even writing songs, exercise, meditation, taking a break or trip, or my unique favorite, making really big abstract art. I might be tempted to turn to alcohol as a band-aid if that option of making art to resolve emotional pain were closed to me. I see that running has been eliminated as a possible coping mechanism for him. It is common to forget under duress that we may have additional ways to work out and express highly emotional issues; these solutions are uniquely tailored for us and usually, we know they have worked in the past for us personally. So it pays to remember these expressions of catharsis so we can use them in important times of need.

I have to admit, having helped him financially and emotionally for the last three years, I would really like to stick around because I do have faith that he is very close to coming completely out of the "chocolate mess" he has been. Having made a significant investment in him personally and in our dream of moving to Hawaii, I do not believe it's practical to withdraw my support now without sending him back to being homeless without a vehicle and perhaps causing him to lose his job because he doesn't have a vehicle. Perhaps that is what his bosses had in mind - they need an excuse to fire him? From knowing his current financial situation, I know he's not capable of paying me back in payments because there is no "extra" money no matter how well he budgets the money he's getting paid now. I can't afford to give him my half of everything we own together or to forget about the money he owes me.

My partner has always had trouble thinking of what the rewards of continuing our relationship have been for me because he has gotten so much value from being close with me. So I'd like to spell those out for him. I could have never moved to Hawaii and situated myself without his help and efforts, so indirectly, he has provided me with health care. Besides the fact that I enjoy his company, he feeds and cooks for me, even under pressure, he has always been easy at communication for me and with me. Partly, my being around the band and the social music scene that I have encouraged him to invest in has been a vicarious outlet for my musical interests and also a social pleasure. I am inspired as I see him opening up to his emotions and having more love in his life as he expresses the creative musician he is. He has mostly lived up to his promises, and if he slipped, he's not afraid to apologize and reaffirm them. He has been faithful, accommodating and considerate. Most important to me, he embraces facing challenge, change and growth and inspires it in me. He doesn't arrogantly belittle my differing interests. He supports my own creative expression in practical and encouraging ways. He has always been a pleasure for me to work with. He usually goes to the trouble to ask about my motives before he jumps to conclusions about what I mean by my actions or by what I say. He trusts and understands me, even though he knows I can threaten others by daring to disregard social norms, because I will directly ask rather than guess about meaning, assumptions or implied motives. Thankfully, it's a mystery to him how I am misunderstood by others who do not take me at face value.

I see this whole event as a catharsis containing constructive growing pains; I could foresee that this issue and stage of relationship would eventually happen so I'm not blind-sided. I see this time as a positive step in a constructive direction that must occur for any relationship to evolve to a more equal exchange of energy going both ways. There is usually a time when the status quo of any relationship must evolve, and it usually involves a character change on the part of both people.

Thought Proprioception

I believe the way thought and movement work together are quite similar to the way thought works when it has no corresponding overt motion to express its effects. Intention is response, whether it has a word attached to it or not.

Some people translate action or reaction into language before they move, some don't. Sometimes translating intention into words will make their movements delayed.

Decision is the first part of response, but there can also be a habit that recognizes and handles reactions too that can work very fast.

As a technique, if you think any movement through step by step, you'll detour the "trigger" word and the corresponding sets of habits - whether they have words or not. That this works is really handy, because it can point you to a decision you made historically and then forgot.

Proprioception of Thought and Movement

I believe the way thought and movement work together are quite similar to the way thought works when it has no corresponding overt motion to express the affects of a thought. Thought has no proprioception built into it, but the judgment of movment does. But proprioception only senses differences, it is not an absolute measuring device.

Intention is responding, whether it has a word attached to it or not. Some people translate action or reaction into language before they move. It makes their movements delayed. Decision is the first part of response, but there can also be a habit that recognizes and handles reactions too.

As a technique, if you think any movement through step by step, you'll detour the "trigger" word and the corresponding sets of habits - whether they have words or not.

My Decision Making Style

Thought that I'd talk about how I entertain different conclusions about what I might do while in a decision making process for my own life. I know everyone does it differently, so I thought I would tell you how I make decisions. What is your style of decision-making, if you could describe some of it?

I might reorder different facts, prioritizing them alternately, and then given the selected ones, make the obvious decision that follows. Then I would go back and select other factual priorities and see the obvious decisions that come from those alternate particular sequences. By doing this, I'm able to trace back how long preparations will have to be made so I can be in the position to be able to make this decision at the time it may be possible to choose. Because opportunities come from both the ability to see them coming before they are ripe, and the ability to be ready to recognize what they mean and grab them when they fly by on the merry-go-round.

So often I get a sort of flow-chart such as, if this happens, this will be the result, and if this other possibility is happening, then I will be able to put into action this other decision will this other result...etc. In this way, I can see what possibilities mean after they unfold, even though they are now in a very small 'seed' form.

What all this often tells me is how long I can put off making the decision, in order to determine what events can tell me more fact before I act. Putting off making the decision also tells me when is the last cusp of action in which a default will occur if I refuse to alter events by redirecting them by choosing to act. I've also learned that, without experience, sometimes I cannot forsee the situation adequately until I take the step that puts me up into the perspective of being able to understand what the next best step can be toward my purposes. So this is why I would want to put off making the decision as long as possible, but not so long that I'd lose possible options.

Here - I'll give an example of how I used some of these ideas of mine about how to make wishes come true. One time I needed a place to rent, and I don't enjoy moving regularly. I was living in a location where people often rented their houses before they sold them. Also, landlords often wanted top dollar for their rentals which I could not afford. However, I could afford to wait for the right place.

So I thought of my situation as being an advantage to a very unusual person that I needed to put some effort into imagining. I listed my needs as characteristics, and then imagined who might want what I had to offer, rather than only noticing what I would be getting from my own benefit.

So I realized that, though I couldn't afford much money, I could stay indefinitely in their house. I could fix or take care of maintaining the house while paying my measly rent on time if they paid for the more expensive materials. I decided that this next landlord of mine was someone who had trouble communicating with people and would want me to talk for them to arrange upkeep on their house. Perhaps this person lived on a fixed income that would be decreased if I gave them more money than the cost of taxes, etc. and also they wanted to keep the house indefinitely for some reason.

Then I waited for this landlord to appear, now that I knew how to recognize them. When I saw that situation, even taking a temporary place to wait for the place to possibly become available was not too much trouble. I could forsee that the carpenter who was living in that house I had my eye on was commuting too far to his other jobs, and it was only a matter of time until he moved out. After waiting four months, I rented this house at an incredible bargain rate for 13 years. The landlord only raised the rent once, thirty dollars when the taxes increased.

So, this is an example of how some creative thinking on my part after assumming the point of view of someone completely different from myself paid off immensely. Not only do you need to wish for what you want, but it helps to recognize the wish so you can have it.

On Identity

How can people get past the programming of culture that they are a separate individuality and why would they want to do that?

I find the once you have an identity, it's easier to give it up. That's the value of identity for me. I regard identity is a control issue. Courts define identity so they can take away these "granted advantages" (of a driver's license, for instance.) Nowadays a judge/court will suspend your license for punishments that are completely unrelated to your ability to drive a car safely, for instance. This way authorities have power over you to get you to give them money and behave correctly as defined by societal law. Of course, it still doesn't work in all cases, it just makes some people further out of control of their lives who have an inability to deal with bureaucracy.

I've often said that is something you should get training in high school - how to deal with bureaucracy. That would be an interesting class to design.

If I am just there in the undifferentiated state of not having an identity, my actions and experience of the world is all so undefined and amorphous that I cannot know what actions are influencing what results. Things just happen and there is no ability to tell the cause and effect, so there is no way to quiet myself.

So identity to me is defining your own sense of what affects are your responsibility and what effects belong to others. That's why I believe that everyone should live alone for a little while - so they can see exactly what their own affects are on their environment. I think the idea is once a person has been "programmed" by their culture to have an identity, people can sort of quiet their actions and gain the ability to put action aside and find out what they do that has a result and what does not. Really, I have no idea if that's true or not. People seem so chaotic and uncontrolled; or so controlled by the uncontrollable emotions and by others. By comparison, I have usually had the ability to decide to not react. But this seems to be an ability many people never learn.

There are many ways of gaining an identity - people can use one of the ways of directing attention and manifesting a formerly merged and unidentified expression of themselves by using an action, a medium, an expression, or any action taken to the level of artistic expression. People can follow the culture's definition of individuality. One of my faves is going on walk-about. Guess I had to figure out my own ideas about a rite of passage into adulthood that meant something to me.

I'm thinking that not having so much of an identity is much more common than you imagine and that our culture holds it up to be something valuable that it is not - it's just what it is, some people's identity is undifferentiated.

The feeling of being in a couple or having sex is a human experience that has a sort of loss of personalhood and an experience of merging. You would think that through the common experience of a meshing of mother and child or family in general, people could experience a merging and a lack of personal identity in that situation which would be somewhat common in human experience. In many other cultures other than the one we're in, people are not so driven to discover and preserve their individuality. Their cause and effect on others and the world is just what it is, and they aren't concerned about it.

Truth for Yourself

What do you think of the questions on this page about how to determine truth for yourself?
by David Gorman

I really like the idea that he says we have a built-in value meter that tells us when something needs attention. I also enjoyed the way David outlines some of the points of how evaluating can be done by yourself.

It has always been curious to me how people will go to the trouble of training themselves to do a new thing, and it never occurs to them to consider or question the need for why add this new habit. I guess hindsight is 20/20 - and most other wise sayings apply here. It always also fascinates me how people can so easily misunderstand each other because they have such original meanings of the words themselves in how they tell themselves what to do.

It's always interesting to me how people mean a very different thing when they use a word. Take for example the word, "grounding." When different people say they are 'grounding' themselves, they all do a very different thing - so it's not a very good word to use if you want people to participate with you and do a specific action. It seems more accurate to describe the active parts of what you want people to do, because the word "grouning" seems to be a somewhat all-inclusive and popular word in certain unique subcultures.

Alexander teachers would think about how everyone is doing a different thing in response. Others might think of "wiping the slate clean" so they blank their minds. Some people think of their new age teacher, so they close their eyes to shut out distractions. Some think of their yoga teacher's class, so they inhale a big breath. Some people think of their American Indian ancestors or the sweat lodge, so they imagine their spirit animal. Others think of using creative thinking strategies to improve themselves, so they brainstorm. Some would think of their balance, sigh or yawn. Dialoguers would think of the holographic universe that allows the fly-eye perceptions of multiple realities, as I would. (But then I know I'm rarely representative of what most people would do.)

So this quality makes me much more careful how I tell others and myself to do something if I have a reason to communicate precisely.

Opening Conclusions About Fate

The assumptions of cause and effect have some crucial factors that would change "luck" and create "coincidence." What most people regard as "bad luck" in a brand of fate can be a functional superstition - which is sort of a pre-conclusion with a mystery means or function that self-selects to reinforce it's proof.

I've noticed that superstition is a sort of associative self-training process, where the person can't imagine how they caused the effect. So they just remember that when they did THIS, something else happened that they wanted, etc. Just try to walk by a trash can and not look in when yesterday you found money in it serendipidously.

In a social arena, the mystery means can be a cluelessness about what a person could possibly be doing that encourages others to treat them in a certain way. It's a disconnect between personal intent and how social events tend to continue once they are put into motion.

A social example of holding an unconsciously pained expression on your face will encourage manipluators to zero in on you. This may give you a belief that you have a fateful tendency to pick the wrong people to befriend who fatefully later turn out to be nasty.

Or, perhaps your desire to be attracted to people who "like to play the edge" or "enjoy fun" leads you astray without you realizing it, making it easier for you to impulsively go along with a bad idea because you have agreement. (One of the proven social factors is that a group can make a much worse drastic mistake than less people alone.) This disconnect can also occur compared to the way the world works - Nature doesn't care about you personally, and can kill you just the same if you're in the wrong place trying to play with it.

My other observation is about coincidence and recognizing opportunity. If someone has a schedule, they are less likely to notice unusual events that could be opportunties...because they can't deviate from their plans to check out these coincidental opportunities anyway.

That's why so many people are young, they have life-shaping adventures. Once a person opens up, it leaves room for unexpected things to happen. Possibilities for coincidental connections exist out in the world all the time, and most people walk blithely by them and never notice. Older people can't recognize as many spontaneously changing patterns because they've trained themselves to adapt and usually don't know how to undo things. So it usually takes time and significant personal insight to undo limitations and find the ways you're contributing to them that you're unaware of. For me, believability in the characters in a story or movie comes from watching this process.

I've found that by sharpening my attention and asking good virtual questions, I can open up a specific, desired opportunity for myself much quicker than most people. This makes me seem wildly resourceful, but it is what anyone can emulate by example. It's amazing to ask yourself whenever you have a moment to talk to a stranger, "How can I find what we might have to offer each other in the time we have now?"

If you don't recognize "a diamond in the rough" for what it could be, then it can never begin to be it's potential. You have to notice a "turn of fate" is happening long enough to grab it out of the mud and clean it off and use it. If you don't make yourself available, opportunities will pass you by.

The thing about evoking pattern recognition advantages is to do some strategic thinking beforehand. This thinking is often determined by motivation, so it's good to know your criteria. Obviously, desire needs to be coupled with awareness so you can have an opportunity. If you are asking the related and pertinent questions for yourself and tell others about what you're looking for, you're more likely to be able to recognize "fateful signs" when they pop out in front of you. If you don't, they won't happen. So - by putting yourself into a "flux" situation, (such as hitchiking, traveling, & the other environments where the wild card opportunities are,) you make it more likely that the opportunity you want can happen.

My point is that what conclusion someone comes to about their fate or coincidence is determined partly by motives, (the why) and also by when they are motivated to make a conclusion.

Don't forget the factor of the different ways that someone can culturally interpret meaning and come to a conclusion for themselves. For instance, when a person is in a bad way, they are more likely to feel cursed rather than after enough sleep, food, etc. It's often better to decide that the process isn't done yet and this is not the time to come to a conclusion - or to make a sort of working conclusion.

It's Thorny Studying Freedom By Yourself

People write to me and ask how they could learn Alexander Technique on their own. You can always learn some on your own, but it is much faster to use an Alexander teacher, or any teacher, for that matter. By working with the Alexander principles, you can improve your own ability to observe yourself. The going will be slow - so be patient and persistent with yourself because habits can be fast, tricky and insidious.

In addition to some of the other resources mentioned on the alextech list, I've got some resources on my website that might be useful to the two of you. In particular, see "ideas" about what some of the principles are and how they work may be of use.

Alexander Technique Simplified

Without a teacher, you may not be able to figure out what to do about what you notice about yourself - your situation if you haven't had any example of where to go to create a new possibility. Knowing that, you can experiment.

Generally, when working by yourself without a teacher, you want to avoid crafting more habits, (even if you think they are "better" ones.) Instead, just subtract what you can perceive you may be doing that could be unnecessary. These changes might involve moving, but try to detour adjusting yourself to where you think is a "good" place for your body to be. Instead let yourself move, allow or discover where you might want to go to move away from what you know you don't want. If you have a sucess, go back to the steps that got you there - rather than trying to recreate or re-live the success.

The other problem without a teacher is deciding on how you're going to measure success. Sometimes you can be doing better, but because of an inability to sense differences that might create an improvement, you get stuck. Principles of AT suggest a new possibility: Measure the results of your experimenting by asking yourself, "is what I just did easier?" The reason this question is best is because what is new and easier can feel a little strange when you have gotten used to overdoing. Since you want to reduce what is unnecessary, less and less overdoing is what you want, so you want to get ready for feeling odd and ask yourself if this sort of odd is easier.

For what to use for experimentation, use the tiniest preparations of movement, as what you do when you begin to lift your instrument to play or as you being to think about moving. Create a definite starting point. Learn to describe what is happening rather than to decide whether you "like" the results or not.

Let the activity, or a mirror, or a recording, or another perceptual cross reference tell you what you are really doing. Such as on the flute, the quality of the start of the sound or how the pads' sound as they go up and down, or the new angle, etc. Or in walking, the sound of your feet, notice where your eyes are in relation to your stomach, etc.

When I began to study Alexander Technique, I was working a very repetitive manufacturing job that I could only do for five hours a day before exhaustion made me stop. Taking a five minute break every hour by merely laying down semi-supine, (whether I needed it or not,) immediately improved my ability to work to seven or eight hours. So taking a regular five-minute break is something you can do right away that may help you. In fact, just moving directly from semi-supine into holding your flute or doing whatever activity you want to improve may give you some valuable information about how you don't have to curl yourself up. (For those who don't know, semi-supine means laying on your back with your knees up. Or you can lie with your feet supported on a chair while your back is a flat surface.)

Perhaps you both may also learn a bit from an encyclopedia article I wrote on Alexander Technique? on Wikipedia...
Take it easy!

Qualities of Attention

Part of what you are practicing with learning Alexander Technique is a new way of using your attention and thinking. If you remember back, it was a little overwhelming when you first learned to blow a now-favorite musical instrument or when you learned to drive a car. As you practice, new ways become much easier to sustain, no matter how strange it felt when you began.

Most people favor a certain way of using their attention and exaggerate it because it is the only attention style they know. There are many variations on applying attention. Perhaps now your attention works somewhat like a searchlight or field glasses - whatever you direct your attention to takes up all the capacity you have. If that were the case, a great deal of effort would be required to redirect this kind of all-absorbing attention. The same would be true of having a butterfly-like attention span of only a few moments. Your ability to appropriate the quality of your attention is stuck - no matter what the pattern it's stuck in.

The brand of attention that the use of AT cultivates could be described as a widening of the field of what is going on at one time; a multi-tasking ability. You also learn to shift your attention lightly, easily and precisely. These are qualities that most people find unusual.

Secretly, there are also more effective and strategic moments for when to apply the process of AT rather than just generally whenever you can remember to do it. Some people find that a little thought to making what you're doing easier is best applied before intending to act. Try experimenting as you start moving and during pauses as you continue doing the action. The preventive strategy behind this works because once a habit starts and assumes full control, it is more difficult to stop it. So the way you start what you are doing determines how you are able to continue doing it.

Timing, Direction, Sequence & Quality

I've always had the ability to observe. At 16, I was invited into a inventor's problem solving 'club' after I untangled a fisherman's line at Sunset Cliffs in the dark. I carefully observed and then pulled one thread and having the whole mess come apart. My function in that inventor's group was they used me to figure out how to present and explain what they were inventing by answering some of my questions.

From that experience, and others, I realized that articulating properties and describing qualities is the stuff that you want to do when you're problem solving. Too often our assumptions are clumped up into concepts or conclusions that we don't remember ever deciding on. It can be tricky to extract the original observations that led to the assumptions, especially if they were accepted from someone else's conclusion in the distant past. It's tricky to be so caught up in the sequences you followed that you can't abstract or simplify them. Or you can't go in the other direction to analyse and break apart to discover or describe the crucial factors and say what they mean for other people.

Of course, the more flexible you are at discovering what you are leaving out, the more you don't need those other people who are good at other strategies to fill in where you are weak by using your innate assumptions. However, a group of people are invaluable for this reason, because there seems to be always something valuable that you didn't think of yourself. That's also why I love dialogue.

Suspension functions as a precursor to analysis for me and that's why it's so often valuable. Suspension is a sort of subtraction process where I wipe the slate of my mind clean and act "As If" I'm starting over, without some level of my conclusions about results. I imagine suspension as sort of an onion, where I can undo ever more complex levels of assumptions as far down as I want to go. Often it's not useful to start all the way back at square one - I usually need some level of functional assumption to be practical.

Sometimes I use a stepping stone to generate results in problem solving - some sort of way to break up my preconceptions and loosen up my attachment to gaining results - and then put the results together. For instance I find that reversing sequences is strange enough to get me to think about something differently enough. Essentially to mix up my thinking, I often would experiment with what I consider to be direction, qualities, sequences, timing of whatever I was dealing with.

In service of teaching Alexander Technique, I've made up those four categories that are useful for describing observations and I'm often struck with how they can be broadly applied as I so often do.

In AT we're dealing with observing motion - and as the teacher I would try and get someone to use them in a sentence as they described their own motion. (They can be used in any order)

• Qualities, (after describing them, what sort of value of quality do we prefer to apply and why prefer it? This is a sort of making of a hypothesis or question that helps us to have something to pay attention to when it changes.)
  
• Direction, (once we describe where we are, where do we want to go or what to do? Essentially, this helps to describe purposes or relative location.)

• Sequence, (how does priorty-making influence relative value, and how can grouping concepts influence results? This involves suspending expected results and crafting how the act of reasoning, constructing or adding or subtracting influences results.)

• Timing (after we've experimented some, spotting crucial factors that are valuable to pay attention to one after the other. These are our functionally bright ideas and when exactly to use them.)

Anyway, I love creative thinking and articulating how it can work easier. I imagine that the world could also benefit from some articulation of plain old functional thinking also.

Recording Your Choices

I've spent quite a bit of time learning to decipher the I Ching, and using it to decipher my intentions...since I was 12. When I was in my twenties, I decided to keep a journal over the years and ask the I Ching every time I made a major life decision. In the beginning I had NO idea what the symbols were saying of course. But just by writing the questions down, a very consistent "catalogue" of what questions I had asked emerged over time - with the corresponding answers. Strangely enough, some of the questions and corresponding answers from the coin tosses were EXACTLY the same, even when the same reoccuring question was asked over a period of years.

I still keep that journal of questions, and add to it.

So eventually I learned quite a bit about what this Chinese symbolic language meant, because the book helped me remember what I tried last time I got that same symbolic answer. Trying something else in the now similar situation gave me another option to try out. I could recognize that this was a similar situation from getting a similar answer from the I Ching the last time it came up in my life. Otherwise I would have never noticed any similarities because too much time had passed in between what turned out to be very similar, virtual questions. I would have never connected the
two circumstances if I hadn't had the I Ching to draw the parallel.

So literally, the dangerous Hexagram # 29 says to "Be like water, follow your true nature to emerge from the ravine." What I found that meant to me was much more practical. It meant that I'd already imagined in the past about what I was going to do in this rather precarious situation, so I'd better not change my mind now about it. Make a new decision about how to proceed when I'm out of the danger, not when I'm in it. Not bad advice, under those circumstances, no matter what the means of getting the advice.