Elephant features

My student and I have these fantastic conversations as we travel to and from work.

In the main, we muse and ponder philosophy, kung-fu, meditation/awareness and embodiment; and the practicalities thereof in so far as they fit and don't fit in modern daily life.

At the certainty, or at least at the risk, of hubris, they remind me of classical philosophical dialogues or parables... or maybe a web-comc (I'm looking at you, dinosaur comics):

1. We're always taking the same path,  (heading towards the rising sun or the setting sun) & arrangement (side-by- side in the car)
2. Sometimes the above topics are explicitly discussed (“What do you think the relevance of practicing forms is to learning from our reactions at work?”)
3. While other times we happen upon them like an errant euro in the corner of a jacket pocket (“You know, what you just described there reminds me of an outcome from practicing this meditation,…)

More than any other practice/habit I have these days, the dialogues have shaped how I've behaved and trained in the last year... at least as far as my various cognitive biases allow me to assess. They're a touchstone to the qualities I want, moments to reflect on whether I'm moving towards or away from them, discussed with a like-intended (not necessarily like-minded) companion.*

Particularly in 2016, there was a wonderful shift in dynamic; the dialogues, they became much more "dialogue-y"; His own practice and learning were taking root; I couldn't just tell him "like it is" and have him nod sycophantically without digesting it.**

In our dialogue from last week, he was telling me about how he was reframing certain experiences by approaching them  with enthusiasm; converting nervous energy or contraction that arises from "having to do something" into something with clearer direction and momentum; he'd encapsulated a certain way of being in a word that he could take out to help him when necessary. It was great stuff, reminded me of Wendy Palmer's Leadership Embodiment Fundamentals.

I did have one reservation about it though.

Something that I've struggled more than once, when employing a cue to incite a change, is that their ability lead me down the garden path, away from what I wanted. I suggested he try and dig in, develop an introspective snapshot of the state he wants; The introspective snapshot - I described it like being able to paint a landscape, every detail, not just "the trees are green and the sky is blue."***

I remember one time, I was working with a client that wanted to feel more confident. I offered the image of a rockstar. It certainly had the desired effect on me - the image of a charismatic star on stage, radiating, larger than life, etc. But for him...It went terribly, he focused on the status change, that people would be beneath him, "fuck 'em”, developed a sneering attitude and became slightly aggressive. Different strokes for different folks.

The cues, what we've judged to be key features/phenomena of a system - itself a defined and limited piece of the universe - are simply a shorthand for something that people have written, spoken and dreamed about millennia- physical, mechnical, spiritual, biological, physiological, social, sexual, abstract - something that has roots going back to the dawn of life.

But for simplicity's sake I'll reduce it down to a phrase or image. Perfect.

Much like fabled the elephant, if I only know an elephant from grabbing his trunk, my cue for the experience won’t be useful for you if you’re on the other end cupping his testicles.

Our models and stories have their limits.

The danger in a cue, an arbitrary defining feature is not knowing its limits; If you find something that works for you see how far you can lean on it before it breaks; find out how others look at it.

Expect that your knowledge and tricks will one day fail you.

As the goatherd told me in the Sahara ten years:

The world is too big for your philosophy

*******

*He gets dragonball Z and Supernatural references°

**He told me once: after work, he really wanted to sit in silence, that even the sound of the radio got on his nerves. I,  apparently, told him he should leave the radio on and work with that discomfort.  He did this for weeks, essentially self-inflicting what the Geneva convention forbids.. a time later, he told me that he couldn't handle it anymore and had since switched off the radio. I balked at what he had been doing to himself; and told him that sounded like a horrible, masochistic idea; I had no recollection of advising it.

***Full disclosure, I didn’t say that at the time, but while I was writing this post, it came to me and I thought it was worth embellishing.

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°...and I suppose a common language in training and observation helps too.