May 20, 2025 • 64 mins
These Fools contemplate a case from Boaz’s coaching practice, in which play is proposed as an antidote to the voice of excessive self-criticism (perfectionism.) They discuss the ideas of play and its role in human development as well as the psychology of self-criticism, and explore how these topics interrelate (and how they don’t.) What constitutes play for an adult? What is meant by “integrating” psychological material? How do we move towards greater authenticity? Tune in and join the conversation!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:14):
Good afternoon, Brian. How are you doing today, Sir?
I'm well, thank you. It's moving quickly through
spring here in Philadelphia and starting to feel like summer.
I think I might have heard a mosquito buzzing.
Oh wow, at some point today. Yeah, we're sunny, but still a
little chilly. The wind is out so.
Yeah, it's hanging around. Yeah.
(00:36):
Well, we'll see. I mean, I I got really used to
not having to worry about mosquitoes in New Mexico,
although the gnats on the Mesa were really awful the last
couple summers, so. We've had some mosquitoes.
I've not yet, but I started getting those Donuts you put in
your stock tanks. Oh yeah, and they have some
(00:57):
critter in there that gets. Instead of putting a fish in
there, I remember once you were putting goldfish in your stock
tank. Yeah, I could have.
This year. I kept enough water.
No, that's actually a good way to get the light to reflect the
the the on the surface of the water.
Boy, every kind of critter crashlands in there and that fish
(01:18):
just just like a smorgasbord allday.
Yeah, yeah. So I have a coaching client that
I've kind of been having an interesting development with
that I thought we would expound on and and maybe our audience
would like it too. So, so this person was kind of
(01:41):
struggling with with what I think the way we're talking
about it is their self critical voice and self critical nature
is dummying up their creative expression.
And the strategy that they firstcame up with to get after that
(02:06):
was what they called playing offense, which I interpreted
through our conversations as kind of regardless of what these
voices are saying, powering through and making a creative
expression happen despite. And so they tried that for a
(02:28):
week and basically came back andsaid, you know, the critical
voices were stronger than ever, maybe also more apparent because
there was more of an awareness of them, but there weren't a lot
of experiences of successfully manifesting creative expression.
They were, they were like, it's more like banging a head against
(02:48):
the wall. And so the strategy they came up
with next was dropping the word offense and just playing.
And, you know, I've got a, a baby who's just about 100 days
old and I'm watching like the play instinct emerge and I see
(03:09):
how driven he is to crawl and make eye contact and laugh and
grab stuff and put it in his mouth.
And like, you know, this drive is innate, right?
It's an A priori intuition to develop some skills here 'cause
I'm not encouraging him specifically in any of.
(03:29):
Us. This is Swisserol's
intentionality. We aren't passive and we don't
just have all these things just happen to us.
Consciousness reaches out and that is that first expression of
intentionality. And yeah, you see it in the baby
and people want to say, oh, it'sjust instinct.
It's just instinct. No, because there's a.
(03:50):
Grind. Behind it in a different way, so
it's the first chapter of a different story let's put.
Yeah, well, let's let's include that.
But the, the main topic that I wanted to OfferUp is what about
play? And, and you know, when, when,
when I divorced, I did some playtherapy with my kids and learned
(04:12):
that play is a tremendously valuable way for kids to process
material, internal material and integrate it even.
And, and parents participating in play with the kids can help
the kids integrate material if parents participate smartly.
(04:33):
But you know, when's the last time you played?
Or, or or maybe you're playing right now, or you know, how do
you think about it? You know, I attack what I heard
when you said take the offensiveaway and think about playing.
It feels closer. And the reason is because, you
(04:56):
know, I identify to that as an artist.
And when amateur artists are, you know, when or when artists
are beginning and they're not trained yet or they don't
understand the, the steepness and the height of the mountain
maybe that they need to climb. They start out and they're very
(05:16):
attached. They're like, here's my
painting, you know, here's my painting look and this and that
and this and that and this and that.
Successful professional artists aren't so much like that.
They're a lot more like, and it's all, you know, like in what
(05:38):
what it means is that what what playing the other side of
playing is not attachment, right?
And so that means that I'm not attached to this piece that I
just put out because the next piece is on its way and the next
piece is on its way. And I'm focused not on the
product, I'm focused on the process.
So playing is discovery, playingis non attachment to results,
(06:03):
action without lust for result. And that's kind of that's what
shuts up that self censuring voice.
You're attached to the results and that's not play, right?
That by definition, I mean, eventhough, yeah, we play baseball,
we want to hit the ball and we want to get around the bases,
everything, but still you won the game, you lost the game, you
(06:26):
go home, you have suffer. It's all the same, right?
It's play. And so that would be my feeling.
And you know, the other thing that leaves to mind is that
censuring voice relates to what Freud used to call the Super
conscious. And I don't know off the top of
my head the word that he used inGerman.
(06:46):
That is probably some something would be revealed if we dig that
out. But but that's like the voice.
OK, I had one. Here's a personal story.
I can remember being a teenager back in the day in the 70s,
nineteen, not 18. And I was playing music loud.
(07:11):
And my father was, you know, he would commute.
And so he was pretty predictablehow long it took him before he
would show back up in the house.And for some reason that escapes
me, he showed up early and I hadthe music up way loud.
Now, I didn't have it wasn't like I had, you know, naked
(07:35):
girls dancing or a cloud of marijuana smoke or that like
there was just the music was just a bit loud, right?
And I got a shitstorm that just would blow your mind just about
this, you know, deal, right. And so, but you know, I'm a
(08:00):
teenager. So it's like, oh, fuck you,
whatever. And but years later, when I'm in
my own place and I would turn upthe rate the the music I would
actually hear in my in my head, some version of that voice
freaking out, right. So I try to turn the music up a
(08:25):
little more when I hear that voice, right.
But what I'm pointing to is that's that self censuring and
it got, you know, we've we talked before that all our
voices are not our own. All the voices in our head are
not our own. And the way you spoke that it
(08:45):
seemed like they were on to that, like they knew this is an
influence. I can, I can separate myself
from that perspective, right? So, so, so that's already the
right direction, you know, But to understand that it's kind of
a download, and you might even be able to spelunk back and see
(09:05):
whose voice that really is that's echoing in your head, you
know? But regardless of whose voice
and regardless of why it's there, as an artist, you must
set yourself free. As a creator, you must set
yourself free to allow yourself to see what can come out before
you start to censure it. Right now you're going to pick
(09:27):
your best stuff and later you'regoing to go back and say, OK,
well, that one's a little too green or that was a little too
dark, or this should be a littlebigger.
Of course there's always that stuff, but it that's post facto,
right? That that doesn't interrupt the
creative process. You know, I might have mentioned
before that back in the day, thelady who they were saying had
(09:48):
the hot had the the highest IQ. They ask her what makes people
stupid and she said letting the thought I'm not getting it take
root. Well, the reason that we don't
that we don't want that thought,I'm not getting it to start to
start listening to that is because it interrupts the
process of getting it. And this is the same sort of
(10:10):
thing. And I seems like they're aware
of that because they know this voice not helping right now.
There are voices that do help. I was a Goldsmith and I had to
have a little voice in there that said, no, that's not good
enough. You need to get that cleaner.
You need to get that shinier. You need to.
So, So that's, it's not that that's not part of the part of
(10:34):
the creative process, but what we're talking here is not a
technical thing. This is more of a psycho
emotional thing, right? And so, yeah, that voice just
has to sit in, it's in the rightseat.
So we need the usher to to wake up and do his job here
internally and just say, OK, this sits over there in the
(10:54):
cheap seats and we'll when I want something out of you, I'll
come and get it, you know, and that and but you know, the
voices of my teachers, what are you doing right?
Or, you know, those are there and one has to have a certain
relationship with them. If you do it right, they'll work
(11:15):
for you. But if you do it wrong, they'll
just beat you up, You know, if you don't, if you don't have the
right relationship. That's what I mean by doing it
wrong. You know, So that's kind of what
comes up to me. And often what it means is you
just need to do a bunch of it more, a bunch of it more.
And, you know, think as an artist, you'd say, OK, my first
(11:38):
hundred pieces are going to be throwaways.
You know, I think I told that with Quanah, right?
So now he's on guitar number. He just sent me a picture of his
latest he's in 30 or 40 in and Iprobably told him 100 right?
Well, I lied because he's damn good already at Fort, but
(11:58):
emotionally? Might be different than than
than something else. But but emotionally, he needed
to set himself up for 100. And, and so, you know, that's
why it's a good thing that sometimes Potter's will do this.
They'll throw a pot, they'll make it perfect and then they'll
just lump it up and do it again.And you know, there there is
(12:19):
that's shifting also to the process from the product.
What am I really doing here? And this is the pay dirt, right?
You've been engaged in a creative process.
It's revealed what's going on internally and yourself
management things. And now you realize for that
external process to be right, I need to put, I need the usher to
(12:41):
put everything in the right seats and then I'm good to go.
So what was the work? Was it the outside thing?
Or was it the, the inner work, right.
So you could actually say, wow, I am seeing these voices now.
I'm really covering ground now. Like now I'm really getting
traction because I'm seeing the obstacles.
(13:01):
I know that's kind of a, a flip,but that's really honestly from
my seed and from having seen people grow through the creative
process, that's what I would see.
And that would be the model I would probably suggest you know.
I think it's, I think you, you probably had this experience
too, of things are too easy and then you experience some
(13:25):
conflict and you think, oh, now we're getting into it now.
Now something useful is happening, something productive.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to come back to play a
little bit more. I, I think the the question of
these censure censuring voices is, is a good one And, and there
(13:49):
might be more to mine there too.But but when it comes to play,
right, we, it seems like the role of play in our adult lives
is greatly curtailed compared towhen we're children.
And in a way that makes sense because the amount we have to
learn. And maybe in particular, maybe
(14:11):
let me know what you think aboutthis.
Maybe we're learning so much culture stuff and play is
especially important for integrating culture stuff like
values and morality and ethics. And you know, like what?
How do we treat one another? Certainly gets expressed through
play by children as maybe the biggest theme.
(14:34):
I don't know. I'm not a, I'm not a
psychologist. But yeah, it seems like we don't
do it a whole lot. Or if we do it, it's in subtle
ways, but it seems like the payoff could be amazing if we
did it more. Right, right.
I mean, I think it when, when you first started to say that
and you said we don't play much,the voice in my head said, and
(14:57):
we don't learn as much either when we stop playing.
And those are not just arbitrarily associated.
You know, I, I, I have 3 little ones that are, that are playing
wolf all the time. And you can see that they are
compelled to exercise that capacity.
And play is obsession. And it's also never for keeps,
(15:25):
right? So it has that nobody's throat
gets ripped out, right? But it is, it is like trying on
the results. What would it be like if and
children do that? You know, you're going to be the
dad and I'm going to be the mom.And you know, which is a sort of
that trying on and seeing how things, which which is all it's
related to the basic human function, right of of trying to
(15:49):
predict the future. This is where we have an an
intimate relationship with sent a sensibility around causality,
because if we don't have a graspof causality, we can't cast into
the future. And play is a very elaborate,
multi dimensional way to run those experiments.
(16:13):
And I think dreams might might sit one or two lanes nearby that
and that it that it is part of, you know, the higher functions
is where we start the the higheranimals is where we start seeing
play like we can't really perceive in an amoeba,
(16:34):
particularly a play time. They seem to pretty much amoeba
along on an even keel. But as these higher functions
that have to go through a more rigorous developmental process
to work, if that's where it seems like play starts to creep
in, where we need to run these circuits, you know what it all,
(16:56):
what it relates to in my head is, you know, when we have the
strategy deck, one of the cards in the strategy deck is called
the practice field, and the ideaof a practice field is taken.
I'm not sure our our audience knows anything about the
strategy deck. Do you want to introduce that a
little more? Oh, well, I think, you know,
(17:18):
years ago I was introduced to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategy
deck, which is an app now you can download on YouTube or on
Playskool or whatever they call that, you know where to get your
stuff and it's free. So it's fun and it's for artists
and it's about Oblique Strategies.
And it was originally a deck so that you could shuffle it and
(17:40):
you pull out one and it gives you an idea, a new angle to
consider. And so I thought, well, you
know, it's interesting because why do they why not a non
oblique strategy deck? And what would that look like?
Because I'd had all these downloads from all these
different teachers in there. And you know, and some of these
were very nuggetized. And like we spoke with Jeffrey
(18:04):
using metaphor, we can take thatnugget and we can see if that
metaphor fits any of these othersituations.
And if it does, then the, the piece of information that goes
with that metaphor might apply also in this other situation.
That is the content, the signal in that, in that the payload of
(18:25):
that metaphor might be useful inthat new situation.
So, so that's what a practice field is.
And maybe it doesn't show up as play, but you know, flower
arranging, ikebana, there are certain principles and there's
certain, you know, when there isa working out, there's a thing
you're kind of after and there'sa chance to do that.
(18:47):
But like we mentioned, you are part of that.
So your sensibilities are refined and you have you get a
chance to look at yourself and the way that you do things.
For example, and ikebana, my little bonsai sneers, you always
cut on the exhale. You never cut on the inhale.
(19:08):
You know, Well, why does it matter?
The plant doesn't know whether you are sucking in or blowing
out when you cut it because it'snot just about the product, it's
about the process. It's about right.
Zen archery is one of those playareas, practice fields, but the
thing that we get from it were meant to take out everywhere.
(19:32):
You know, when I was young, I left Peter's school where I had
been for several years. And I got into, you know, all
these different situations as one does.
And I would see and I would watch myself deal with it in a
certain way and almost kind of surprise myself.
Like, wow, that didn't ruffle melike it ruffled everybody else.
(19:53):
I what's going on with that? You know, and I actually went
back. I came to the conclusion that
that Peter had really been teaching me Zen.
You know, after I sat with a Zenmaster and then I, you know,
kind of trace back these things and I went back and I watched
him for any signs of ulterior motive.
Not there at all. He was just doing the deal.
(20:16):
And it was in the deal that all that stuff came out, so to
speak. And so, so that's the value of a
practice field, you know, and that might be something also
that might be useful for your, for your client is to find areas
to specifically not be perfectionist about that
(20:38):
represent, you know, for example, in Zen archery, we're
not, we're, we're not trying to shoot with the same internal
condition that say a Western Archer might be.
There's this idea that the arrowis released like a ripe fruit
(20:58):
falls from a tree. And I'm sure the breath is
involved. Got to be right.
And so, so there is this wholeness to yourself in this
process of manifesting this external thing.
Get all the traditional they're called doze, right?
So it's EI dough if I'm pulling the sword out right, it's karate
(21:22):
dough if I'm fighting empty hand, it's judo if I'm doing the
gentle stuff. And then and that dough
translates as a way. It's not just a way to arrange
flowers or a way to shoot an arrow.
It's a way to the realization that Zen talks about and that's
why they're called it's Zen. In fact, there's a book I'll put
(21:43):
in the in the show notes called Zen and the Ways or Zen and it's
Ways. And it talks about that relation
and a lot of things are revealedthat way and we work them out in
effigy and then we find out thatwe've onboarded that capacity to
apply it improv, you know, so, so there might be something to
that. Yeah, yeah.
(22:07):
And as, as you're giving examples of play through the
practice field idea, it occurs to me that we have a lot of
different meanings of play or expressions of play.
So there's kind of like, like onthis podcast, we're playing with
(22:29):
ideas in in a very real sense, we're unscripted.
We're kind of like letting thesethings come up and we're batting
them around to see what they do and how they work and how they
work together and how we think about them today as opposed to a
different day. And do they, you know, do they
(22:51):
help us interpret this situationor not or so.
And and then we're also playing with the idea of this medium as
a vehicle for the transmission of, let's say, these kinds of
frameworks or strategies that we've colloquialized and think
(23:19):
others might benefit from having.
So, so there's play happening here, but it, it doesn't have
the kind of rigor I don't think it does of like a Zen archery.
Maybe it could. And then there's also ways that
(23:42):
we play that are even less formal than what we're doing on
the podcast, right? Sure, maybe formal is not the
right word, but structured and maybe those serve different
purposes even. Yeah.
And I think you know, like, like, for example, if I think of
the kids when they're trying to learn a skateboard trick that
(24:02):
they can't do, are they playing,are they working?
Are they practicing? Are they experimenting?
All of those kind of live very close to each other.
And but they implied a differentvoices manifesting in the head,
right? Because we dress those up
(24:24):
differently in our heads. And a lot of times, you know,
one of the things that we didn'tget to talk with Jeff about that
I did want to point out because I thought it was so important,
but there's so much good stuff there was he said that you
should be focused 80% on asking questions and getting
information and 20% on providingthe solution.
(24:47):
And that we tend to do that in an opposite way.
So that 80% that asking questions, that's where I would
put, I would put play into that 80%.
I would also maybe call it getting dirty with the thing,
right? Which means sometimes you got to
get in there and you don't know and you got, you know, and I've
been a shade tree mechanic and sometimes you don't know how
(25:10):
you're going to get that thing off and you so, so is it play?
Is it work? Is it is it sailing into the
unknown like Captain Kirk? I think so in part.
Well, I think it it describes, it's not, it's not so much the
80% asking questions as the how of that question asking because
(25:31):
you could go in there with a list of 30 questions that you
rattle off. Right.
That's not what you're talking about.
There's a, there's like a yeah, what what you said about
(25:52):
practicing and experimenting and, and all of these different
adjacents having interrelationship, I think is,
is where I'm ending up too. Because the, you know, there's
almost a how you ask the questions that relates to how
much intuition are you using andhow much rational components are
(26:17):
using and how much emotional components you're using.
That is, doing the internal refinement like the skateboard
trick improvement at the same time as learning about the
external world or learning with the external world to
(26:39):
potentially propose solutions or, you know, integrate the the
material surfaced by the questions in some meaningful
way. Sure.
And and again, it's handling, its balancing or managing the
relationship with those different voices, right.
So for example, when I'm going to a water system and there's an
(27:04):
issue, I've I've always got or if you're trying to make a car
run troubleshooting, there's always a melange of facts that
throw themselves at you, right. OK, the car is blue.
OK, that's probably not a fact. It's going to solve the the
(27:27):
problem of why it won't start. But what you'll find is that you
make two kinds of mistakes. You take a fact and you think
it's significant, but it turns out in this case, it's not
significant. It's not as obvious as the color
of the car being what you know. And then there's the opposite,
where there's one that you thinkis significant and it's not
(27:48):
right. So you can miss them and you can
hallucinate them when they're not there.
And it's always a voice in your head that comes up with this.
I bet it's. The what's the word I mean other
than philosophical machine? Mental model I guess.
Yeah, yeah. And doctors go through this.
I mean, the better ones, some, some sit at a computer and the
(28:10):
computer goes through that for them, but it's the same process
and that is you got you. It's almost like we talked about
with the with the phenomenologists and them, this
idea of bracketing. It's like I want to hold off
from making conclusions. I want to just get immersed in
more data and more data and moredata and more data until the
(28:34):
answers just leaps out. And if I'm going, is it this or
is it that I need to be immersedmyself in the pattern more?
You know, like when I was a kid,I used to work as an to assist a
carrier air conditioning repair business.
And I remember and I was just the guy that helped carry stuff
(28:55):
from the truck. And I would go with these
mechanics that were years mechanics, right?
So they had their think method very well established and we
went to one mall and we go into this mall and it's clearly hot
in here. This is not supposed to be like
something's not the outcome isn't the desired outcome.
(29:15):
And we went through all these places in the mall where nobody
ever, the public never gets to go up into these rooms, up in
top of these huge machines that are big air handlers, you know,
and all these things. And we have a set of
thermometers and we put these thermometers in different places
in the vents to get temperature differentials and every kind of
(29:38):
thing. And we go, we go through and we,
and we're at this for hours and nothing is screaming at us,
right? There's not, but the building's
not cold, right? And so we, it gets to lunchtime,
we still don't have any answer. And we're sitting there down in
one of the cafes in the restaurant, we noticed the clock
(29:59):
on the wall. It's like we, we, we got off at
lunch or we stopped for lunch at1:00 or 1:30.
The clock there says it's 11, right?
Well, that was it right there. It doesn't seem like.
(30:20):
Do you get it? The power had gone out for 2 1/2
hours. The power had gone out and I it
was probably longer than that. It was probably like four or
five hours so. The the air conditioning was
catching up. The other thing I thought it
could be is that that that made you realize that a timer in the
air conditioning system was set to PM and should have been set
(30:43):
to AM or something like. That right, right.
Except that it worked perfectly up until then.
Yeah. So we were the only ones that
touch the machine. So we go in there and there's
the little spin wheel that has the little things you unscrew
and it hits the switch when it spins by that turns it on and
turns it off. And no air conditioning system
is designed to take a building from peak heat of the day to
(31:07):
cool. It's definitely.
You got to start in the morning and can build as the day builds,
and then you can taper off. And these, and of course these
machines are well engineered, but it turns out there was
nothing wrong with it. And the solution was that was
just to turn that dial back up to make it set in the time and,
(31:29):
you know, and then we drove home.
But all the scenarios, right? And you're getting constantly
the searching for clues. Well, you just have to keep
going until finally some piece of evidence flags this direction
to look, you know. You know that that kind of makes
me land on a different a different topic than play
(31:54):
because I've I've found this really interesting recently and
I think I experienced it with Jeff Moore in our interview with
him. Also that there are people who
know their business inside out, upside down, left and right, and
they say things that seem reallysimple and they say them in
(32:17):
really simple ways. And I'm thinking of a of an
engineer that I worked with because your your story reminded
me of a similar experience I hadcrawling all over the the big
community rec center in Santa Fe.
I'm trying to figure out why it was using like 3 times as much
energy as had been predicted andturns out there wasn't a single
(32:40):
reason for that. But putting the ice rink right
next to the gym or the heated swimming pool.
Excuse me And not capturing the waste heat from the ice rink and
putting it in the swimming pool is a factor and also contributed
to some condensation in the in the basketball gym that.
Yeah, so, but you know, I was, Iwas crawling all over that
(33:05):
project with an engineer and this this engineer that I worked
with for a while, he would he would say things like, you know,
he was a heating, heating and cooling guy.
And, and he would say really simple things like he would just
remind me that Btus are dependent on flow.
(33:26):
Like it's not just temperature differential, it's also flow.
So you can have a really small temperature differential and a
really high flow and that can deliver just as many Btus as,
you know, high, high differential, low flow.
And he used to walk around with this little reference that that
(33:47):
showed how many Btus could be delivered at a given temperature
differential at a given flow rate through a given pipe size,
right. And there's, so he would, he
would just refer to that all thetime and just really simple,
like there weren't that many core tenets that in concert
(34:09):
allowed him to do really sophisticated things.
And so I'm just thinking about that because of, of what you
brought up. And there's a there's a strategy
in that too. Well, I think that's phronesis.
Say more. Well, you know, that idea of
phronesis is practical knowledge, and it's described as
(34:29):
knowing what to do. And every doing is not generic.
Every doing is specific. It's a doing here.
Pardon. Deterministic.
Yeah, well, I mean the outcome might not be, but the the event.
Has to be transition from the probable to the to the
(34:50):
determined. Right.
And so, so every doing has to solve the problem of How do I go
from general principle to this application, which we've talked
about before, we talked about philosophy, looking at all the
general, all the specifics and trying to distill out the
general. But when we, when we get back to
(35:11):
doing, we have to do, we have toundo that because now it's this
particular case. How do those principles help me
apply in this particular case? And that's a, that's a more
difficult problem. You know, this is what Kant was
talking about in the Critique ofPure Reason back, you know, if
you really want to mess your head up for a few weeks.
But that's basically part of what the issue is.
(35:33):
How do how do we do that effectively in a probabilistic,
possibilistic universe, Right. And so so yeah, that doing what
do we do is the core of phronesis.
And it's got moral aspects to it, but it's also got prudence
aspects. And that according to Aristotle,
(35:55):
this is, of course, one of his terms.
You don't, you can't get it froma book.
It's not the product of reason. It's the product of experience.
So the best way is to learn it from someone that has the
experience. And that's why apprenticeships
are so powerful. Mentorships are so powerful.
You know, you want to find whereyour leak is. 1 old clever water
(36:19):
operator will show you how to use the big pipe wrench.
You know, how to manipulate the valves so that you can hear the
slight singing of a leak if it'sbig enough.
But you might have to do it at 3:00 AM because that's the only
time other things won't be, you know.
So there's tricks to these things that that I know I
learned the hard way and it in some cases I could have been
(36:45):
filled in, but the choice was made not to tell me, let's put
it that way. Choices were made.
Choices were made. Presumably for your benefit.
Yeah, not so much this was, I benefited, Yeah.
But it was kind of a set up. It was, I think that to, to make
(37:08):
it look, to make the job look harder than it really was.
And it would be, you know, wouldenhance the, the, the reputation
of people who'd done it before if I was to screw it up a bit
beforehand. But I foiled that plot.
And but, but anyway, there is something.
(37:30):
And that's one of the things also that's relates back to the
very first question. And how do you handle those
voices? Well, part of that is what I
like to call time body. And time body, like the way that
I always think of it, is in a Marshall Encounter, when I'm
standing in front, in front of my opponent, I'm not just
(37:50):
standing there. I'm standing there with all of
my years of experience that thatcognitive model that's been
built up from all my exposure and all my practicing and all of
those things. So all of my years of experience
are standing there with me. And so in that respect, now at
(38:12):
65 years old compared to when I was young, I have an enormous
time body. So I'm able to stand in front of
an opponent and just go what which is that non judgmental
open flood me with information so that.
Playful question. And it's like open to
(38:36):
possibilities, right? And I would argue that it's
probably more right brain, rightbrain than left brain would be
my guess. But when you're beginning, you
don't have that kind of chops. When you're beginning, your,
your, your internal dialogue is a lot more like, oh, oh lordy,
what's going to happen now? Is he going to do this?
(38:56):
If he does that, maybe I'll try to do that.
And if he does this instead, then would that work?
Or maybe I'll do this other thing and there's just this
chatter. So, so with time body, with
having gotten that experience, with really being able to rest
in knowing what to do, all thosevoices, you know, they can just
(39:22):
go, go entertain themselves, right?
Because my, my attention is no longer vulnerable to that.
You know, same thing with a woodworker.
You know, any skill set. I, I pointed this out with Quan
and his guitars. It isn't that you're a master
because now every time you do it, you do it perfectly.
(39:43):
That's not a thing in real life.You're a master because you kind
of know the things that tend to happen and you can take the
precautions you need to prevent them from happening.
But sometimes shit happens and when it does, you know what to
do. Now you've got Frodesis, but you
don't start there. You don't ever start there.
(40:06):
Self Second guessing is part of that beginning phase.
So how do you get past that? You get your first 100 in.
You know, and, and somewhere along there you will have
stopped thinking about it because you're so engaged in the
process, not the product, the process that you'll go, oh, I
(40:27):
don't, I guess I'm not in my ownway, the way that I used to be.
Somewhere I got pulled out of myself and into the process.
That so. So let's go back to how we deal
with our critical inner voices in real time, because you you've
(40:51):
kind of tossed out a few different models for that and I
think a little more taxonomy would be useful.
So earlier you said something about meeting an usher to direct
that voice to the correct seat in the auditorium and that if
you need something from that voice, you will let them know.
(41:12):
And that's not a light handed comment.
There might be times when you doactually need something from
that voice. So, so I think where where I'm
going is, is we have a, a tendency to try to critical away
the self critical voice. We try to suppress it.
(41:33):
We try to tell it to go away andleave us alone.
We try to, we try a lot of things that constitute being in
conflict with it. And in my experience that
doesn't really work. We need ways to integrate it.
And so there's like the acceptance or the awareness
acceptance action loop that theyteach in 12 step or, or in IFS,
(41:57):
right? The internal family system of of
therapy, you identify which of your internal selves or
archetypes this voice representsand try to find out what that
person or archetype really needsand fulfill those needs or, you
(42:18):
know, have some negotiation withthe the internal person that
that voice represents. Which is a process, which is a
process. And that, and that's kind of
what I'm saying is that we worked that out in process.
You know, the way that I think of it is is like the conductor
of the orchestra, that critical mind is like that oboe player
(42:42):
that just will not observe the rests.
You don't play every theme in the Symphony.
I will point to you when the part that's written on your page
comes up. And until then, I don't want to
be hearing out of you. Right.
And but still, until you've played that piece of music, I'm
(43:03):
not sure the, you know, a bunch.I'm not sure the oboe player
ever listens, but the but the but yeah, I mean, like, you
know, he's got a you got to go through a repetition.
Yeah, but we don't want to kick him out of the Symphony because.
There. Are.
Parts just to make sure. Yeah, we're never going to get
Peter and the Wolf together if we don't have the oboe player,
(43:25):
right? But he can't keep trying to play
the timpani parts, right? So, so there's something about
things internally being being well organized.
And I think that that just happens with with time.
You know, the old expression, I think we mentioned this before,
to have sand in your belly, whether it was from the cowboy
(43:47):
or the sailors, what it did was it gave mass so that you're not
blown off course quite as easily, right?
And yeah, you just get that through through cowboy and up,
you know, and, and, and I think sort of realizing that this
(44:07):
isn't, it isn't a problem, it's just an imbalance that you grow
through and you'll get out of, and everybody does versions of,
you know, salt faces, versions of that.
So don't stigmatize it. The fact that it's on the screen
means it's in the process of working out and not everything
(44:30):
that's going on inside of us is obvious to our ego attention.
Some of it is just learning process that we're going through
and it's inevitable and. This client is coming up on on
his midlife transition also. OK.
So, so I take it as a really great sign that these voices are
(44:53):
apparent to him and ready to be integrated and that his creative
will is really trying to manifest through that.
Yeah. Yeah, well, it sounds like a
fruitful time and and that's why, you know, I would say
initially it's, it seems like a sign of the process, you know.
(45:17):
And so I, I do think that there is, there are, we do have these
psychic processes that have their own intelligence and they,
they sort of time release, you know, and some of it is stuff
when you finally got enough distance from it.
So, you know, for me, it was around midlife.
(45:37):
When? When, You know, before that, if
you would ask me if there was aninfluence in that area, I would
have said no, there's no influence from whatever this
past event, none whatsoever. And look how functional I am.
And da, da, da, da, da. And then after that transition,
(45:58):
I could see that in fact, the influence was so pervasive, it
was everywhere. And that's why I couldn't see it
because, like, a fish can't see water.
Yeah, and that now I, you know, there's a kind of an AHA that
comes when you allow that to integrate.
(46:19):
And but if there is an allowancecomponent to it, it isn't all
just realization. You know, that's why I think I
mentioned before that Freud wentinto resistance therapy trying
to see what's the thing that's being protected because that's
the core of the issue. Well, sometimes it takes the
personality getting a distance from the cause of that thing
(46:44):
before the resistance can dial down enough for natural
processes to work through it. That might be a cause and effect
or there might. I like, I like the phrase time
release that you used a little while ago because, you know,
sometimes we need distance, but sometimes this is just a
developmental process that takesits own time.
(47:06):
Like we're, we're more than willing to deal with it, but it
just won't reveal itself until we.
Yeah. And sometimes it's because
there's a lot on our plate. When you're getting chased by
the bear, you're not worried about subtler issues that might
show up over time. But as soon as the Bears dealt
with, now it's time to think about getting something to eat.
(47:29):
Yeah. Or, as Jeff said, you know, once
you realize you're playing in the second-half, you know that
that changes motivations, too. And attachments, yeah.
So so we use the word integrate a lot, and I realized that's one
of those words that could mean something different to everybody
who says it and everybody who hears it.
(47:49):
So let's close this episode out talking about the word
integrate. And what did you mean when you
said you know that that the pastexperience was ready to be
integrated? Well, I think for me it was, you
(48:18):
know, part of our cognitive model is related to how we
understand ourselves. And we have a picture of who we
see ourselves to be. We also have a picture maybe of
who we want to be seen as, and those are not typically the
same. We might have an intuition for
(48:42):
who we are to be, which is that a priori sense around identity
and which we kicked around with Jeff a bit.
But I think that when we're young, these we're tight around
these issues. We hold them with whiter
(49:04):
knuckles because it our our survival seems more dependent on
them or how we are about them orsomething.
And so then as we deepen it, as our sense of ourselves deepens,
we can integrate more difficult things and we can have little
(49:25):
Ahas around it that maybe if we had, if we'd been exposed to
them before, we would have just would have rejected the idea out
of hand or just would have seemed like complete left field
or But then you go through and then you kind of see maybe how
(49:46):
all those that does add up. I can now see those little
patterns and now I can maybe accept that about myself, even
though I might not know entirelywhat it means.
You know, like for me, what doesit mean to be born an orphan?
And not just what does it mean in the outcomes, but what does
(50:09):
it mean on the level of mind andexperience that what's the
what's the message of that? And and so the integrating of
that is part of wrestling with understanding that not that you
ever understand it. You maybe just come to peace
with it. You know, that might be what it
really amounts to. It's to you know, you you cut
(50:34):
yourself a lot of you cut yourself more slack because you
realize the components that you brought and the ones that were
circumstantial and put upon you.And that's also part of those
voices, those you know, which voices are motivating you and
the voice of that the that Uber eek that you'd mind out there.
Yes, the over I. Yeah.
(50:56):
So, so maybe let me propose a definition and then you can tune
it up. So I think when I say integrate
and I think this is aligned withwhat what you were just sharing,
I think there maybe are two important elements. 1 is that
(51:17):
the internal thing becomes conscious, so we're in
relationship with it, and then that the relationship with it is
friendly or peaceful, I think you say?
OK with. It is with it, yeah.
You have to be OK with it. And then maybe there's 2 levels
(51:39):
to that. We probably have to be OK with
it on some level even to see it,to have it rise up into
consciousness. And then once we get it, we have
to be OK with it, to bring it inas a part of our story, as a
part of ourselves, and understand that it is a part of
ourselves and it is OK. Integrate into the self is an
(52:05):
important element there that I Iwasn't being explicit about, but
right. We allow this thing to be part
of the whole that we are insteadof trying to let it drive or be
in resistance to it or, you know, whatever the the
alternatives might be. Or being hung up on a meeting
(52:26):
that's been front loaded along with that.
So yeah, so there's a lot, there's a lot to that.
And that is still part of that individuation process.
You know, we we're we're sniffing a lot around Carl
Jung's territory here. And this idea of the shadow and,
you know, the shadow being something that we reject, but
then we have to bring in to havea holistic existence.
(52:50):
And so understanding that and itbeing OK that that's the way it
is and somehow using that as a starting place to work from.
And because we're all just kind of, we're all in that
Heideggerian throneness. And so, you know, for Heidegger,
(53:10):
we needed to have the right relationship with ourselves to
come into authenticity. That was that idea.
And coming to terms with our being and what, you know, that's
was one of his workhorse terms. So it gets into the title and
being in time, right, Because time turns out we can't separate
(53:32):
it from being because being is about existing through time.
And, and, and that's what we're talking about is our being now
existing through time and authenticating itself by
becoming whole. And you know, the integration
is, is built on that intuition of coherence, right?
(53:53):
To cohere, to stick together that all the pieces fit each
other and each piece in its place and each place with its
peace. And so that, so that, that, but,
but you know, we don't start there.
That is the process. And I would argue that's where
we're going with Aristotle when we're looking for eudaimonia,
(54:15):
right? That's when when that's that's
the eudaimonia is the good life or you know, good spirit, good
fortune, good, you know, correcton.
Hold we're we're on a trajectorytowards coherence.
Yeah, yeah. To, to, to higher levels of
(54:36):
coherence and that you know, we could push that and say that the
more coherence I have manifestedinternally or guess you don't
manifest it internally. You I've I've assembled
internally attained internally starts to manifest as coherence
in my outer existence. And you know we talked about
(54:56):
that with the when the master isin on the inside, then he
doesn't show up on the outside. You know what's an example of
that it working for yourself. If you're the kind of person
that can hold your own feet to the fire, then you need a boss
to do it for you and then he's going to take a piece of the
action. But if you actually can manifest
the boss or internalize the boss, then you get him out of
(55:21):
the formula in the outside world, you know, that's that
same, same idea. So that there's a resonance from
between the inside and the outside.
So, so it sounds to me like that's sort of what your client
is working on is getting that resonance between the inside and
the outside to kind of and seeing the, Gee, there's things
(55:45):
there that maybe need to get worked on, but they're just
tunings. They're not like broken bones,
right? They're just imbalances.
And these are things that life does tune us as we go, as long
as we're open to it. You got to bring that.
You got to be willing to see what you see.
You know, you got to be able to handle the truth, as Jack
(56:09):
Nicholson would say. Yeah.
But you know, yeah, I mean, and maybe this is where we also get
into a kind of a metaphysics because if you understand that
you are part of, you know, we, we Jeff, used the same example
of Intellichy that everybody uses that I've used, which is
(56:31):
the acorn turning into the oak tree.
Well, so what's hidden in the idea of the acorn turning into
the oak tree is all the acorns turning into the forest, which
turns into the perpetuation of the forest, Right.
So, so we, we might have a metaphysic that tells us that
(56:53):
we're not part of the forest, that we're an acorn doesn't even
necessarily maybe it's just squirrel food.
You know, like that, that, that it's all accident somehow.
And the accident is a component of it.
Because without that we would have, there would be no novelty,
right? Could all be a book that we'd
(57:13):
already read already. And life is not that.
There has to be novelty, right? So but anyway, yeah, if you feel
like you're disconnected and there's no part of the strategy,
then maybe you feel like everything that's not perfect
yet is your fault. And there might be peoples all
(57:33):
around you that want to pathologize these processes for
cash and prizes. And that's why I always am
trying to say that, you know, this is all part of a natural
process. This is the nobody, nobody, no
experts are needed for the acornto turn into the oak tree.
It's a natural process. But he may have to grow around
(57:54):
some logs on the ground and it may have to, you know, handle
some chewing here and there fromvarious creatures.
But, you know, it's still withinit to fulfill itself as an oak
tree. And that's the idea of the
forest is to have the oak trees,right?
So you're, you're nested inside of these things.
And so is that that agenda of growth?
(58:17):
And so we can actually trust that a little bit, you know, and
yes, sometimes things go wrong, but in general, that's not the
case. In general, things unfold, you
know, and, and that's where thatmidwifery idea comes in.
So it's a natural process. Doesn't mean it can't be
dramatic at times, might be really messy, but this is a
(58:40):
process that all that has a birth at the end of it, you
know, so like that. We'll have to do an episode on
that. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot there.
And and, you know, trusting the process when we talked about
Giordano Bruno, the universe is a place out of which you cannot
fall. You know, we're sort of
(59:01):
translating that maybe more metaphorically than he intended
it. But but that idea there is sort
of like that's where the licensecomes from to for it to be OK,
to let those voices kind of justchatter away, keep going.
(59:22):
You have to really get that it'sOK.
And then you don't need that attachment to any of these
outcomes, you know, and then watch if the attachment doesn't
come because if you had that switch to bestow now because
it's not about the attachment, it's about bestowing, which is
exactly non attachment, right? So, so yeah, I mean, if an
(59:47):
artist thinks of their work as agift or a prayer, you know, to
the universe, then you know, youcan do a beautiful painting and
have no attachment to it whatsoever afterwards.
You know, or you know, I worked for one for one Goldsmith and he
the guy that taught me goldsmithing and he brought a
(01:00:07):
piece to a gallery in Santa Fe. And the guy gallery owners are a
particular type of psychology. We could do, we could write a
big fat, ugly book about that. But so, yeah, maybe.
But so he brings him these pair of earrings that he'd spent a
lot of time on it were quite unique.
(01:00:28):
And the guy goes, yeah, OK, thanks.
And he puts them in the drawer and put.
And now this guy was a great artist as far as the expertise
part, but he was still on the young side.
And when he saw how that guy didn't actually look at them and
appreciate them and sort of feedhim back some of what he wanted
(01:00:51):
from that, he's like, OK, give me those things back.
We're not, we're not going to play.
If you're not going to treat my creation with respect, then I'm
I'm not going to play. Right.
And he was in a position where he could do that, right.
But as a beginning artist, you can't, you can't think that your
work has, has inherent value until you've made and, and you
(01:01:16):
know, hundreds of them. And not that it doesn't have
value, but you can't afford to think that it does, or you'll
start circling that instead of expanding out, right?
You got to see what's next. You have to be more compelled
about what's next than censuringyourself about what's happening
in front of you now. You know, so you kind of got
(01:01:36):
maybe the maybe the idea is after that much time, you
realize that you're not really the creative source, that this
process is the creative thing. And so you just need to like not
get in the way of it. And so you're not going to take
as much credit or attached to it.
Like this is me. It's like, no, it's not really
(01:01:57):
me. It's really just the creative
forces of the universe that are using me as an outlet.
So I can't get all, all crazy with it and be pumping myself up
because I mean, you can do that.It's just stupid.
Either way, right? It's the same, it's the same,
right? It's it's attachment, right.
(01:02:17):
So, so I would be looking at what's the root of that
attachment are are you, if you're, if you're still trying
to feed your ego, then the then middle life is a very hard
chapter. So there's a reason your body's
changing. There's a reason that you're
that life doesn't show up the same way as it did when you're
(01:02:37):
20. And and being 50 isn't just
doing 20 really, really, really well, you know, really slowly.
Yeah, right. It's a whole other thing, right.
It really is a whole other thing.
And that's one of the big takeaways from Jeff Moore and
that is that know the chapter you're in and be using the right
(01:03:02):
frameworks and value systems andthinking methods that are
chapter appropriate to that chapter.
You can't think chapter 1 when you're in chapter 5.
That means that when you turn that page between chapters, you
have to adapt to that change. And, and that's tricky.
(01:03:26):
I'll give it to you. It's tricky.
But without that, there's no, we're not going anywhere, right?
We're all 20 year olds forever. So God save us from that.
Cool. Very well.
I think let's leave it there andI think we'll come back to a
couple of these topics maybe next time.
(01:03:46):
I'm so yeah. Thank you Brian for the great
conversation and I will see you soon.
Sounds good Sir, see you next time around.
Good afternoon, Brian. How are you doing today, Sir?
I'm well, thank you. It's moving quickly through
spring here in Philadelphia and starting to feel like summer.
I think I might have heard a mosquito buzzing.
Oh wow, at some point today. Yeah, we're sunny, but still a
little chilly. The wind is out so.
Yeah, it's hanging around. Yeah.
(00:36):
Well, we'll see. I mean, I I got really used to
not having to worry about mosquitoes in New Mexico,
although the gnats on the Mesa were really awful the last
couple summers, so. We've had some mosquitoes.
I've not yet, but I started getting those Donuts you put in
your stock tanks. Oh yeah, and they have some
(00:57):
critter in there that gets. Instead of putting a fish in
there, I remember once you were putting goldfish in your stock
tank. Yeah, I could have.
This year. I kept enough water.
No, that's actually a good way to get the light to reflect the
the the on the surface of the water.
Boy, every kind of critter crashlands in there and that fish
(01:18):
just just like a smorgasbord allday.
Yeah, yeah. So I have a coaching client that
I've kind of been having an interesting development with
that I thought we would expound on and and maybe our audience
would like it too. So, so this person was kind of
(01:41):
struggling with with what I think the way we're talking
about it is their self critical voice and self critical nature
is dummying up their creative expression.
And the strategy that they firstcame up with to get after that
(02:06):
was what they called playing offense, which I interpreted
through our conversations as kind of regardless of what these
voices are saying, powering through and making a creative
expression happen despite. And so they tried that for a
(02:28):
week and basically came back andsaid, you know, the critical
voices were stronger than ever, maybe also more apparent because
there was more of an awareness of them, but there weren't a lot
of experiences of successfully manifesting creative expression.
They were, they were like, it's more like banging a head against
(02:48):
the wall. And so the strategy they came up
with next was dropping the word offense and just playing.
And, you know, I've got a, a baby who's just about 100 days
old and I'm watching like the play instinct emerge and I see
(03:09):
how driven he is to crawl and make eye contact and laugh and
grab stuff and put it in his mouth.
And like, you know, this drive is innate, right?
It's an A priori intuition to develop some skills here 'cause
I'm not encouraging him specifically in any of.
(03:29):
Us. This is Swisserol's
intentionality. We aren't passive and we don't
just have all these things just happen to us.
Consciousness reaches out and that is that first expression of
intentionality. And yeah, you see it in the baby
and people want to say, oh, it'sjust instinct.
It's just instinct. No, because there's a.
(03:50):
Grind. Behind it in a different way, so
it's the first chapter of a different story let's put.
Yeah, well, let's let's include that.
But the, the main topic that I wanted to OfferUp is what about
play? And, and you know, when, when,
when I divorced, I did some playtherapy with my kids and learned
(04:12):
that play is a tremendously valuable way for kids to process
material, internal material and integrate it even.
And, and parents participating in play with the kids can help
the kids integrate material if parents participate smartly.
(04:33):
But you know, when's the last time you played?
Or, or or maybe you're playing right now, or you know, how do
you think about it? You know, I attack what I heard
when you said take the offensiveaway and think about playing.
It feels closer. And the reason is because, you
(04:56):
know, I identify to that as an artist.
And when amateur artists are, you know, when or when artists
are beginning and they're not trained yet or they don't
understand the, the steepness and the height of the mountain
maybe that they need to climb. They start out and they're very
(05:16):
attached. They're like, here's my
painting, you know, here's my painting look and this and that
and this and that and this and that.
Successful professional artists aren't so much like that.
They're a lot more like, and it's all, you know, like in what
(05:38):
what it means is that what what playing the other side of
playing is not attachment, right?
And so that means that I'm not attached to this piece that I
just put out because the next piece is on its way and the next
piece is on its way. And I'm focused not on the
product, I'm focused on the process.
So playing is discovery, playingis non attachment to results,
(06:03):
action without lust for result. And that's kind of that's what
shuts up that self censuring voice.
You're attached to the results and that's not play, right?
That by definition, I mean, eventhough, yeah, we play baseball,
we want to hit the ball and we want to get around the bases,
everything, but still you won the game, you lost the game, you
(06:26):
go home, you have suffer. It's all the same, right?
It's play. And so that would be my feeling.
And you know, the other thing that leaves to mind is that
censuring voice relates to what Freud used to call the Super
conscious. And I don't know off the top of
my head the word that he used inGerman.
(06:46):
That is probably some something would be revealed if we dig that
out. But but that's like the voice.
OK, I had one. Here's a personal story.
I can remember being a teenager back in the day in the 70s,
nineteen, not 18. And I was playing music loud.
(07:11):
And my father was, you know, he would commute.
And so he was pretty predictablehow long it took him before he
would show back up in the house.And for some reason that escapes
me, he showed up early and I hadthe music up way loud.
Now, I didn't have it wasn't like I had, you know, naked
(07:35):
girls dancing or a cloud of marijuana smoke or that like
there was just the music was just a bit loud, right?
And I got a shitstorm that just would blow your mind just about
this, you know, deal, right. And so, but you know, I'm a
(08:00):
teenager. So it's like, oh, fuck you,
whatever. And but years later, when I'm in
my own place and I would turn upthe rate the the music I would
actually hear in my in my head, some version of that voice
freaking out, right. So I try to turn the music up a
(08:25):
little more when I hear that voice, right.
But what I'm pointing to is that's that self censuring and
it got, you know, we've we talked before that all our
voices are not our own. All the voices in our head are
not our own. And the way you spoke that it
(08:45):
seemed like they were on to that, like they knew this is an
influence. I can, I can separate myself
from that perspective, right? So, so, so that's already the
right direction, you know, But to understand that it's kind of
a download, and you might even be able to spelunk back and see
(09:05):
whose voice that really is that's echoing in your head, you
know? But regardless of whose voice
and regardless of why it's there, as an artist, you must
set yourself free. As a creator, you must set
yourself free to allow yourself to see what can come out before
you start to censure it. Right now you're going to pick
(09:27):
your best stuff and later you'regoing to go back and say, OK,
well, that one's a little too green or that was a little too
dark, or this should be a littlebigger.
Of course there's always that stuff, but it that's post facto,
right? That that doesn't interrupt the
creative process. You know, I might have mentioned
before that back in the day, thelady who they were saying had
(09:48):
the hot had the the highest IQ. They ask her what makes people
stupid and she said letting the thought I'm not getting it take
root. Well, the reason that we don't
that we don't want that thought,I'm not getting it to start to
start listening to that is because it interrupts the
process of getting it. And this is the same sort of
(10:10):
thing. And I seems like they're aware
of that because they know this voice not helping right now.
There are voices that do help. I was a Goldsmith and I had to
have a little voice in there that said, no, that's not good
enough. You need to get that cleaner.
You need to get that shinier. You need to.
So, So that's, it's not that that's not part of the part of
(10:34):
the creative process, but what we're talking here is not a
technical thing. This is more of a psycho
emotional thing, right? And so, yeah, that voice just
has to sit in, it's in the rightseat.
So we need the usher to to wake up and do his job here
internally and just say, OK, this sits over there in the
(10:54):
cheap seats and we'll when I want something out of you, I'll
come and get it, you know, and that and but you know, the
voices of my teachers, what are you doing right?
Or, you know, those are there and one has to have a certain
relationship with them. If you do it right, they'll work
(11:15):
for you. But if you do it wrong, they'll
just beat you up, You know, if you don't, if you don't have the
right relationship. That's what I mean by doing it
wrong. You know, So that's kind of what
comes up to me. And often what it means is you
just need to do a bunch of it more, a bunch of it more.
And, you know, think as an artist, you'd say, OK, my first
(11:38):
hundred pieces are going to be throwaways.
You know, I think I told that with Quanah, right?
So now he's on guitar number. He just sent me a picture of his
latest he's in 30 or 40 in and Iprobably told him 100 right?
Well, I lied because he's damn good already at Fort, but
(11:58):
emotionally? Might be different than than
than something else. But but emotionally, he needed
to set himself up for 100. And, and so, you know, that's
why it's a good thing that sometimes Potter's will do this.
They'll throw a pot, they'll make it perfect and then they'll
just lump it up and do it again.And you know, there there is
(12:19):
that's shifting also to the process from the product.
What am I really doing here? And this is the pay dirt, right?
You've been engaged in a creative process.
It's revealed what's going on internally and yourself
management things. And now you realize for that
external process to be right, I need to put, I need the usher to
(12:41):
put everything in the right seats and then I'm good to go.
So what was the work? Was it the outside thing?
Or was it the, the inner work, right.
So you could actually say, wow, I am seeing these voices now.
I'm really covering ground now. Like now I'm really getting
traction because I'm seeing the obstacles.
(13:01):
I know that's kind of a, a flip,but that's really honestly from
my seed and from having seen people grow through the creative
process, that's what I would see.
And that would be the model I would probably suggest you know.
I think it's, I think you, you probably had this experience
too, of things are too easy and then you experience some
(13:25):
conflict and you think, oh, now we're getting into it now.
Now something useful is happening, something productive.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to come back to play a
little bit more. I, I think the the question of
these censure censuring voices is, is a good one And, and there
(13:49):
might be more to mine there too.But but when it comes to play,
right, we, it seems like the role of play in our adult lives
is greatly curtailed compared towhen we're children.
And in a way that makes sense because the amount we have to
learn. And maybe in particular, maybe
(14:11):
let me know what you think aboutthis.
Maybe we're learning so much culture stuff and play is
especially important for integrating culture stuff like
values and morality and ethics. And you know, like what?
How do we treat one another? Certainly gets expressed through
play by children as maybe the biggest theme.
(14:34):
I don't know. I'm not a, I'm not a
psychologist. But yeah, it seems like we don't
do it a whole lot. Or if we do it, it's in subtle
ways, but it seems like the payoff could be amazing if we
did it more. Right, right.
I mean, I think it when, when you first started to say that
and you said we don't play much,the voice in my head said, and
(14:57):
we don't learn as much either when we stop playing.
And those are not just arbitrarily associated.
You know, I, I, I have 3 little ones that are, that are playing
wolf all the time. And you can see that they are
compelled to exercise that capacity.
And play is obsession. And it's also never for keeps,
(15:25):
right? So it has that nobody's throat
gets ripped out, right? But it is, it is like trying on
the results. What would it be like if and
children do that? You know, you're going to be the
dad and I'm going to be the mom.And you know, which is a sort of
that trying on and seeing how things, which which is all it's
related to the basic human function, right of of trying to
(15:49):
predict the future. This is where we have an an
intimate relationship with sent a sensibility around causality,
because if we don't have a graspof causality, we can't cast into
the future. And play is a very elaborate,
multi dimensional way to run those experiments.
(16:13):
And I think dreams might might sit one or two lanes nearby that
and that it that it is part of, you know, the higher functions
is where we start the the higheranimals is where we start seeing
play like we can't really perceive in an amoeba,
(16:34):
particularly a play time. They seem to pretty much amoeba
along on an even keel. But as these higher functions
that have to go through a more rigorous developmental process
to work, if that's where it seems like play starts to creep
in, where we need to run these circuits, you know what it all,
(16:56):
what it relates to in my head is, you know, when we have the
strategy deck, one of the cards in the strategy deck is called
the practice field, and the ideaof a practice field is taken.
I'm not sure our our audience knows anything about the
strategy deck. Do you want to introduce that a
little more? Oh, well, I think, you know,
(17:18):
years ago I was introduced to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategy
deck, which is an app now you can download on YouTube or on
Playskool or whatever they call that, you know where to get your
stuff and it's free. So it's fun and it's for artists
and it's about Oblique Strategies.
And it was originally a deck so that you could shuffle it and
(17:40):
you pull out one and it gives you an idea, a new angle to
consider. And so I thought, well, you
know, it's interesting because why do they why not a non
oblique strategy deck? And what would that look like?
Because I'd had all these downloads from all these
different teachers in there. And you know, and some of these
were very nuggetized. And like we spoke with Jeffrey
(18:04):
using metaphor, we can take thatnugget and we can see if that
metaphor fits any of these othersituations.
And if it does, then the, the piece of information that goes
with that metaphor might apply also in this other situation.
That is the content, the signal in that, in that the payload of
(18:25):
that metaphor might be useful inthat new situation.
So, so that's what a practice field is.
And maybe it doesn't show up as play, but you know, flower
arranging, ikebana, there are certain principles and there's
certain, you know, when there isa working out, there's a thing
you're kind of after and there'sa chance to do that.
(18:47):
But like we mentioned, you are part of that.
So your sensibilities are refined and you have you get a
chance to look at yourself and the way that you do things.
For example, and ikebana, my little bonsai sneers, you always
cut on the exhale. You never cut on the inhale.
(19:08):
You know, Well, why does it matter?
The plant doesn't know whether you are sucking in or blowing
out when you cut it because it'snot just about the product, it's
about the process. It's about right.
Zen archery is one of those playareas, practice fields, but the
thing that we get from it were meant to take out everywhere.
(19:32):
You know, when I was young, I left Peter's school where I had
been for several years. And I got into, you know, all
these different situations as one does.
And I would see and I would watch myself deal with it in a
certain way and almost kind of surprise myself.
Like, wow, that didn't ruffle melike it ruffled everybody else.
(19:53):
I what's going on with that? You know, and I actually went
back. I came to the conclusion that
that Peter had really been teaching me Zen.
You know, after I sat with a Zenmaster and then I, you know,
kind of trace back these things and I went back and I watched
him for any signs of ulterior motive.
Not there at all. He was just doing the deal.
(20:16):
And it was in the deal that all that stuff came out, so to
speak. And so, so that's the value of a
practice field, you know, and that might be something also
that might be useful for your, for your client is to find areas
to specifically not be perfectionist about that
(20:38):
represent, you know, for example, in Zen archery, we're
not, we're, we're not trying to shoot with the same internal
condition that say a Western Archer might be.
There's this idea that the arrowis released like a ripe fruit
(20:58):
falls from a tree. And I'm sure the breath is
involved. Got to be right.
And so, so there is this wholeness to yourself in this
process of manifesting this external thing.
Get all the traditional they're called doze, right?
So it's EI dough if I'm pulling the sword out right, it's karate
(21:22):
dough if I'm fighting empty hand, it's judo if I'm doing the
gentle stuff. And then and that dough
translates as a way. It's not just a way to arrange
flowers or a way to shoot an arrow.
It's a way to the realization that Zen talks about and that's
why they're called it's Zen. In fact, there's a book I'll put
(21:43):
in the in the show notes called Zen and the Ways or Zen and it's
Ways. And it talks about that relation
and a lot of things are revealedthat way and we work them out in
effigy and then we find out thatwe've onboarded that capacity to
apply it improv, you know, so, so there might be something to
that. Yeah, yeah.
(22:07):
And as, as you're giving examples of play through the
practice field idea, it occurs to me that we have a lot of
different meanings of play or expressions of play.
So there's kind of like, like onthis podcast, we're playing with
(22:29):
ideas in in a very real sense, we're unscripted.
We're kind of like letting thesethings come up and we're batting
them around to see what they do and how they work and how they
work together and how we think about them today as opposed to a
different day. And do they, you know, do they
(22:51):
help us interpret this situationor not or so.
And and then we're also playing with the idea of this medium as
a vehicle for the transmission of, let's say, these kinds of
frameworks or strategies that we've colloquialized and think
(23:19):
others might benefit from having.
So, so there's play happening here, but it, it doesn't have
the kind of rigor I don't think it does of like a Zen archery.
Maybe it could. And then there's also ways that
(23:42):
we play that are even less formal than what we're doing on
the podcast, right? Sure, maybe formal is not the
right word, but structured and maybe those serve different
purposes even. Yeah.
And I think you know, like, like, for example, if I think of
the kids when they're trying to learn a skateboard trick that
(24:02):
they can't do, are they playing,are they working?
Are they practicing? Are they experimenting?
All of those kind of live very close to each other.
And but they implied a differentvoices manifesting in the head,
right? Because we dress those up
(24:24):
differently in our heads. And a lot of times, you know,
one of the things that we didn'tget to talk with Jeff about that
I did want to point out because I thought it was so important,
but there's so much good stuff there was he said that you
should be focused 80% on asking questions and getting
information and 20% on providingthe solution.
(24:47):
And that we tend to do that in an opposite way.
So that 80% that asking questions, that's where I would
put, I would put play into that 80%.
I would also maybe call it getting dirty with the thing,
right? Which means sometimes you got to
get in there and you don't know and you got, you know, and I've
been a shade tree mechanic and sometimes you don't know how
(25:10):
you're going to get that thing off and you so, so is it play?
Is it work? Is it is it sailing into the
unknown like Captain Kirk? I think so in part.
Well, I think it it describes, it's not, it's not so much the
80% asking questions as the how of that question asking because
(25:31):
you could go in there with a list of 30 questions that you
rattle off. Right.
That's not what you're talking about.
There's a, there's like a yeah, what what you said about
(25:52):
practicing and experimenting and, and all of these different
adjacents having interrelationship, I think is,
is where I'm ending up too. Because the, you know, there's
almost a how you ask the questions that relates to how
much intuition are you using andhow much rational components are
(26:17):
using and how much emotional components you're using.
That is, doing the internal refinement like the skateboard
trick improvement at the same time as learning about the
external world or learning with the external world to
(26:39):
potentially propose solutions or, you know, integrate the the
material surfaced by the questions in some meaningful
way. Sure.
And and again, it's handling, its balancing or managing the
relationship with those different voices, right.
So for example, when I'm going to a water system and there's an
(27:04):
issue, I've I've always got or if you're trying to make a car
run troubleshooting, there's always a melange of facts that
throw themselves at you, right. OK, the car is blue.
OK, that's probably not a fact. It's going to solve the the
(27:27):
problem of why it won't start. But what you'll find is that you
make two kinds of mistakes. You take a fact and you think
it's significant, but it turns out in this case, it's not
significant. It's not as obvious as the color
of the car being what you know. And then there's the opposite,
where there's one that you thinkis significant and it's not
(27:48):
right. So you can miss them and you can
hallucinate them when they're not there.
And it's always a voice in your head that comes up with this.
I bet it's. The what's the word I mean other
than philosophical machine? Mental model I guess.
Yeah, yeah. And doctors go through this.
I mean, the better ones, some, some sit at a computer and the
(28:10):
computer goes through that for them, but it's the same process
and that is you got you. It's almost like we talked about
with the with the phenomenologists and them, this
idea of bracketing. It's like I want to hold off
from making conclusions. I want to just get immersed in
more data and more data and moredata and more data until the
(28:34):
answers just leaps out. And if I'm going, is it this or
is it that I need to be immersedmyself in the pattern more?
You know, like when I was a kid,I used to work as an to assist a
carrier air conditioning repair business.
And I remember and I was just the guy that helped carry stuff
(28:55):
from the truck. And I would go with these
mechanics that were years mechanics, right?
So they had their think method very well established and we
went to one mall and we go into this mall and it's clearly hot
in here. This is not supposed to be like
something's not the outcome isn't the desired outcome.
(29:15):
And we went through all these places in the mall where nobody
ever, the public never gets to go up into these rooms, up in
top of these huge machines that are big air handlers, you know,
and all these things. And we have a set of
thermometers and we put these thermometers in different places
in the vents to get temperature differentials and every kind of
(29:38):
thing. And we go, we go through and we,
and we're at this for hours and nothing is screaming at us,
right? There's not, but the building's
not cold, right? And so we, it gets to lunchtime,
we still don't have any answer. And we're sitting there down in
one of the cafes in the restaurant, we noticed the clock
(29:59):
on the wall. It's like we, we, we got off at
lunch or we stopped for lunch at1:00 or 1:30.
The clock there says it's 11, right?
Well, that was it right there. It doesn't seem like.
(30:20):
Do you get it? The power had gone out for 2 1/2
hours. The power had gone out and I it
was probably longer than that. It was probably like four or
five hours so. The the air conditioning was
catching up. The other thing I thought it
could be is that that that made you realize that a timer in the
air conditioning system was set to PM and should have been set
(30:43):
to AM or something like. That right, right.
Except that it worked perfectly up until then.
Yeah. So we were the only ones that
touch the machine. So we go in there and there's
the little spin wheel that has the little things you unscrew
and it hits the switch when it spins by that turns it on and
turns it off. And no air conditioning system
is designed to take a building from peak heat of the day to
(31:07):
cool. It's definitely.
You got to start in the morning and can build as the day builds,
and then you can taper off. And these, and of course these
machines are well engineered, but it turns out there was
nothing wrong with it. And the solution was that was
just to turn that dial back up to make it set in the time and,
(31:29):
you know, and then we drove home.
But all the scenarios, right? And you're getting constantly
the searching for clues. Well, you just have to keep
going until finally some piece of evidence flags this direction
to look, you know. You know that that kind of makes
me land on a different a different topic than play
(31:54):
because I've I've found this really interesting recently and
I think I experienced it with Jeff Moore in our interview with
him. Also that there are people who
know their business inside out, upside down, left and right, and
they say things that seem reallysimple and they say them in
(32:17):
really simple ways. And I'm thinking of a of an
engineer that I worked with because your your story reminded
me of a similar experience I hadcrawling all over the the big
community rec center in Santa Fe.
I'm trying to figure out why it was using like 3 times as much
energy as had been predicted andturns out there wasn't a single
(32:40):
reason for that. But putting the ice rink right
next to the gym or the heated swimming pool.
Excuse me And not capturing the waste heat from the ice rink and
putting it in the swimming pool is a factor and also contributed
to some condensation in the in the basketball gym that.
Yeah, so, but you know, I was, Iwas crawling all over that
(33:05):
project with an engineer and this this engineer that I worked
with for a while, he would he would say things like, you know,
he was a heating, heating and cooling guy.
And, and he would say really simple things like he would just
remind me that Btus are dependent on flow.
(33:26):
Like it's not just temperature differential, it's also flow.
So you can have a really small temperature differential and a
really high flow and that can deliver just as many Btus as,
you know, high, high differential, low flow.
And he used to walk around with this little reference that that
(33:47):
showed how many Btus could be delivered at a given temperature
differential at a given flow rate through a given pipe size,
right. And there's, so he would, he
would just refer to that all thetime and just really simple,
like there weren't that many core tenets that in concert
(34:09):
allowed him to do really sophisticated things.
And so I'm just thinking about that because of, of what you
brought up. And there's a there's a strategy
in that too. Well, I think that's phronesis.
Say more. Well, you know, that idea of
phronesis is practical knowledge, and it's described as
(34:29):
knowing what to do. And every doing is not generic.
Every doing is specific. It's a doing here.
Pardon. Deterministic.
Yeah, well, I mean the outcome might not be, but the the event.
Has to be transition from the probable to the to the
(34:50):
determined. Right.
And so, so every doing has to solve the problem of How do I go
from general principle to this application, which we've talked
about before, we talked about philosophy, looking at all the
general, all the specifics and trying to distill out the
general. But when we, when we get back to
(35:11):
doing, we have to do, we have toundo that because now it's this
particular case. How do those principles help me
apply in this particular case? And that's a, that's a more
difficult problem. You know, this is what Kant was
talking about in the Critique ofPure Reason back, you know, if
you really want to mess your head up for a few weeks.
But that's basically part of what the issue is.
(35:33):
How do how do we do that effectively in a probabilistic,
possibilistic universe, Right. And so so yeah, that doing what
do we do is the core of phronesis.
And it's got moral aspects to it, but it's also got prudence
aspects. And that according to Aristotle,
(35:55):
this is, of course, one of his terms.
You don't, you can't get it froma book.
It's not the product of reason. It's the product of experience.
So the best way is to learn it from someone that has the
experience. And that's why apprenticeships
are so powerful. Mentorships are so powerful.
You know, you want to find whereyour leak is. 1 old clever water
(36:19):
operator will show you how to use the big pipe wrench.
You know, how to manipulate the valves so that you can hear the
slight singing of a leak if it'sbig enough.
But you might have to do it at 3:00 AM because that's the only
time other things won't be, you know.
So there's tricks to these things that that I know I
learned the hard way and it in some cases I could have been
(36:45):
filled in, but the choice was made not to tell me, let's put
it that way. Choices were made.
Choices were made. Presumably for your benefit.
Yeah, not so much this was, I benefited, Yeah.
But it was kind of a set up. It was, I think that to, to make
(37:08):
it look, to make the job look harder than it really was.
And it would be, you know, wouldenhance the, the, the reputation
of people who'd done it before if I was to screw it up a bit
beforehand. But I foiled that plot.
And but, but anyway, there is something.
(37:30):
And that's one of the things also that's relates back to the
very first question. And how do you handle those
voices? Well, part of that is what I
like to call time body. And time body, like the way that
I always think of it, is in a Marshall Encounter, when I'm
standing in front, in front of my opponent, I'm not just
(37:50):
standing there. I'm standing there with all of
my years of experience that thatcognitive model that's been
built up from all my exposure and all my practicing and all of
those things. So all of my years of experience
are standing there with me. And so in that respect, now at
(38:12):
65 years old compared to when I was young, I have an enormous
time body. So I'm able to stand in front of
an opponent and just go what which is that non judgmental
open flood me with information so that.
Playful question. And it's like open to
(38:36):
possibilities, right? And I would argue that it's
probably more right brain, rightbrain than left brain would be
my guess. But when you're beginning, you
don't have that kind of chops. When you're beginning, your,
your, your internal dialogue is a lot more like, oh, oh lordy,
what's going to happen now? Is he going to do this?
(38:56):
If he does that, maybe I'll try to do that.
And if he does this instead, then would that work?
Or maybe I'll do this other thing and there's just this
chatter. So, so with time body, with
having gotten that experience, with really being able to rest
in knowing what to do, all thosevoices, you know, they can just
(39:22):
go, go entertain themselves, right?
Because my, my attention is no longer vulnerable to that.
You know, same thing with a woodworker.
You know, any skill set. I, I pointed this out with Quan
and his guitars. It isn't that you're a master
because now every time you do it, you do it perfectly.
(39:43):
That's not a thing in real life.You're a master because you kind
of know the things that tend to happen and you can take the
precautions you need to prevent them from happening.
But sometimes shit happens and when it does, you know what to
do. Now you've got Frodesis, but you
don't start there. You don't ever start there.
(40:06):
Self Second guessing is part of that beginning phase.
So how do you get past that? You get your first 100 in.
You know, and, and somewhere along there you will have
stopped thinking about it because you're so engaged in the
process, not the product, the process that you'll go, oh, I
(40:27):
don't, I guess I'm not in my ownway, the way that I used to be.
Somewhere I got pulled out of myself and into the process.
That so. So let's go back to how we deal
with our critical inner voices in real time, because you you've
(40:51):
kind of tossed out a few different models for that and I
think a little more taxonomy would be useful.
So earlier you said something about meeting an usher to direct
that voice to the correct seat in the auditorium and that if
you need something from that voice, you will let them know.
(41:12):
And that's not a light handed comment.
There might be times when you doactually need something from
that voice. So, so I think where where I'm
going is, is we have a, a tendency to try to critical away
the self critical voice. We try to suppress it.
(41:33):
We try to tell it to go away andleave us alone.
We try to, we try a lot of things that constitute being in
conflict with it. And in my experience that
doesn't really work. We need ways to integrate it.
And so there's like the acceptance or the awareness
acceptance action loop that theyteach in 12 step or, or in IFS,
(41:57):
right? The internal family system of of
therapy, you identify which of your internal selves or
archetypes this voice representsand try to find out what that
person or archetype really needsand fulfill those needs or, you
(42:18):
know, have some negotiation withthe the internal person that
that voice represents. Which is a process, which is a
process. And that, and that's kind of
what I'm saying is that we worked that out in process.
You know, the way that I think of it is is like the conductor
of the orchestra, that critical mind is like that oboe player
(42:42):
that just will not observe the rests.
You don't play every theme in the Symphony.
I will point to you when the part that's written on your page
comes up. And until then, I don't want to
be hearing out of you. Right.
And but still, until you've played that piece of music, I'm
(43:03):
not sure the, you know, a bunch.I'm not sure the oboe player
ever listens, but the but the but yeah, I mean, like, you
know, he's got a you got to go through a repetition.
Yeah, but we don't want to kick him out of the Symphony because.
There. Are.
Parts just to make sure. Yeah, we're never going to get
Peter and the Wolf together if we don't have the oboe player,
(43:25):
right? But he can't keep trying to play
the timpani parts, right? So, so there's something about
things internally being being well organized.
And I think that that just happens with with time.
You know, the old expression, I think we mentioned this before,
to have sand in your belly, whether it was from the cowboy
(43:47):
or the sailors, what it did was it gave mass so that you're not
blown off course quite as easily, right?
And yeah, you just get that through through cowboy and up,
you know, and, and, and I think sort of realizing that this
(44:07):
isn't, it isn't a problem, it's just an imbalance that you grow
through and you'll get out of, and everybody does versions of,
you know, salt faces, versions of that.
So don't stigmatize it. The fact that it's on the screen
means it's in the process of working out and not everything
(44:30):
that's going on inside of us is obvious to our ego attention.
Some of it is just learning process that we're going through
and it's inevitable and. This client is coming up on on
his midlife transition also. OK.
So, so I take it as a really great sign that these voices are
(44:53):
apparent to him and ready to be integrated and that his creative
will is really trying to manifest through that.
Yeah. Yeah, well, it sounds like a
fruitful time and and that's why, you know, I would say
initially it's, it seems like a sign of the process, you know.
(45:17):
And so I, I do think that there is, there are, we do have these
psychic processes that have their own intelligence and they,
they sort of time release, you know, and some of it is stuff
when you finally got enough distance from it.
So, you know, for me, it was around midlife.
(45:37):
When? When, You know, before that, if
you would ask me if there was aninfluence in that area, I would
have said no, there's no influence from whatever this
past event, none whatsoever. And look how functional I am.
And da, da, da, da, da. And then after that transition,
(45:58):
I could see that in fact, the influence was so pervasive, it
was everywhere. And that's why I couldn't see it
because, like, a fish can't see water.
Yeah, and that now I, you know, there's a kind of an AHA that
comes when you allow that to integrate.
(46:19):
And but if there is an allowancecomponent to it, it isn't all
just realization. You know, that's why I think I
mentioned before that Freud wentinto resistance therapy trying
to see what's the thing that's being protected because that's
the core of the issue. Well, sometimes it takes the
personality getting a distance from the cause of that thing
(46:44):
before the resistance can dial down enough for natural
processes to work through it. That might be a cause and effect
or there might. I like, I like the phrase time
release that you used a little while ago because, you know,
sometimes we need distance, but sometimes this is just a
developmental process that takesits own time.
(47:06):
Like we're, we're more than willing to deal with it, but it
just won't reveal itself until we.
Yeah. And sometimes it's because
there's a lot on our plate. When you're getting chased by
the bear, you're not worried about subtler issues that might
show up over time. But as soon as the Bears dealt
with, now it's time to think about getting something to eat.
(47:29):
Yeah. Or, as Jeff said, you know, once
you realize you're playing in the second-half, you know that
that changes motivations, too. And attachments, yeah.
So so we use the word integrate a lot, and I realized that's one
of those words that could mean something different to everybody
who says it and everybody who hears it.
(47:49):
So let's close this episode out talking about the word
integrate. And what did you mean when you
said you know that that the pastexperience was ready to be
integrated? Well, I think for me it was, you
(48:18):
know, part of our cognitive model is related to how we
understand ourselves. And we have a picture of who we
see ourselves to be. We also have a picture maybe of
who we want to be seen as, and those are not typically the
same. We might have an intuition for
(48:42):
who we are to be, which is that a priori sense around identity
and which we kicked around with Jeff a bit.
But I think that when we're young, these we're tight around
these issues. We hold them with whiter
(49:04):
knuckles because it our our survival seems more dependent on
them or how we are about them orsomething.
And so then as we deepen it, as our sense of ourselves deepens,
we can integrate more difficult things and we can have little
(49:25):
Ahas around it that maybe if we had, if we'd been exposed to
them before, we would have just would have rejected the idea out
of hand or just would have seemed like complete left field
or But then you go through and then you kind of see maybe how
(49:46):
all those that does add up. I can now see those little
patterns and now I can maybe accept that about myself, even
though I might not know entirelywhat it means.
You know, like for me, what doesit mean to be born an orphan?
And not just what does it mean in the outcomes, but what does
(50:09):
it mean on the level of mind andexperience that what's the
what's the message of that? And and so the integrating of
that is part of wrestling with understanding that not that you
ever understand it. You maybe just come to peace
with it. You know, that might be what it
really amounts to. It's to you know, you you cut
(50:34):
yourself a lot of you cut yourself more slack because you
realize the components that you brought and the ones that were
circumstantial and put upon you.And that's also part of those
voices, those you know, which voices are motivating you and
the voice of that the that Uber eek that you'd mind out there.
Yes, the over I. Yeah.
(50:56):
So, so maybe let me propose a definition and then you can tune
it up. So I think when I say integrate
and I think this is aligned withwhat what you were just sharing,
I think there maybe are two important elements. 1 is that
(51:17):
the internal thing becomes conscious, so we're in
relationship with it, and then that the relationship with it is
friendly or peaceful, I think you say?
OK with. It is with it, yeah.
You have to be OK with it. And then maybe there's 2 levels
(51:39):
to that. We probably have to be OK with
it on some level even to see it,to have it rise up into
consciousness. And then once we get it, we have
to be OK with it, to bring it inas a part of our story, as a
part of ourselves, and understand that it is a part of
ourselves and it is OK. Integrate into the self is an
(52:05):
important element there that I Iwasn't being explicit about, but
right. We allow this thing to be part
of the whole that we are insteadof trying to let it drive or be
in resistance to it or, you know, whatever the the
alternatives might be. Or being hung up on a meeting
(52:26):
that's been front loaded along with that.
So yeah, so there's a lot, there's a lot to that.
And that is still part of that individuation process.
You know, we we're we're sniffing a lot around Carl
Jung's territory here. And this idea of the shadow and,
you know, the shadow being something that we reject, but
then we have to bring in to havea holistic existence.
(52:50):
And so understanding that and itbeing OK that that's the way it
is and somehow using that as a starting place to work from.
And because we're all just kind of, we're all in that
Heideggerian throneness. And so, you know, for Heidegger,
(53:10):
we needed to have the right relationship with ourselves to
come into authenticity. That was that idea.
And coming to terms with our being and what, you know, that's
was one of his workhorse terms. So it gets into the title and
being in time, right, Because time turns out we can't separate
(53:32):
it from being because being is about existing through time.
And, and, and that's what we're talking about is our being now
existing through time and authenticating itself by
becoming whole. And you know, the integration
is, is built on that intuition of coherence, right?
(53:53):
To cohere, to stick together that all the pieces fit each
other and each piece in its place and each place with its
peace. And so that, so that, that, but,
but you know, we don't start there.
That is the process. And I would argue that's where
we're going with Aristotle when we're looking for eudaimonia,
(54:15):
right? That's when when that's that's
the eudaimonia is the good life or you know, good spirit, good
fortune, good, you know, correcton.
Hold we're we're on a trajectorytowards coherence.
Yeah, yeah. To, to, to higher levels of
(54:36):
coherence and that you know, we could push that and say that the
more coherence I have manifestedinternally or guess you don't
manifest it internally. You I've I've assembled
internally attained internally starts to manifest as coherence
in my outer existence. And you know we talked about
(54:56):
that with the when the master isin on the inside, then he
doesn't show up on the outside. You know what's an example of
that it working for yourself. If you're the kind of person
that can hold your own feet to the fire, then you need a boss
to do it for you and then he's going to take a piece of the
action. But if you actually can manifest
the boss or internalize the boss, then you get him out of
(55:21):
the formula in the outside world, you know, that's that
same, same idea. So that there's a resonance from
between the inside and the outside.
So, so it sounds to me like that's sort of what your client
is working on is getting that resonance between the inside and
the outside to kind of and seeing the, Gee, there's things
(55:45):
there that maybe need to get worked on, but they're just
tunings. They're not like broken bones,
right? They're just imbalances.
And these are things that life does tune us as we go, as long
as we're open to it. You got to bring that.
You got to be willing to see what you see.
You know, you got to be able to handle the truth, as Jack
(56:09):
Nicholson would say. Yeah.
But you know, yeah, I mean, and maybe this is where we also get
into a kind of a metaphysics because if you understand that
you are part of, you know, we, we Jeff, used the same example
of Intellichy that everybody uses that I've used, which is
(56:31):
the acorn turning into the oak tree.
Well, so what's hidden in the idea of the acorn turning into
the oak tree is all the acorns turning into the forest, which
turns into the perpetuation of the forest, Right.
So, so we, we might have a metaphysic that tells us that
(56:53):
we're not part of the forest, that we're an acorn doesn't even
necessarily maybe it's just squirrel food.
You know, like that, that, that it's all accident somehow.
And the accident is a component of it.
Because without that we would have, there would be no novelty,
right? Could all be a book that we'd
(57:13):
already read already. And life is not that.
There has to be novelty, right? So but anyway, yeah, if you feel
like you're disconnected and there's no part of the strategy,
then maybe you feel like everything that's not perfect
yet is your fault. And there might be peoples all
(57:33):
around you that want to pathologize these processes for
cash and prizes. And that's why I always am
trying to say that, you know, this is all part of a natural
process. This is the nobody, nobody, no
experts are needed for the acornto turn into the oak tree.
It's a natural process. But he may have to grow around
(57:54):
some logs on the ground and it may have to, you know, handle
some chewing here and there fromvarious creatures.
But, you know, it's still withinit to fulfill itself as an oak
tree. And that's the idea of the
forest is to have the oak trees,right?
So you're, you're nested inside of these things.
And so is that that agenda of growth?
(58:17):
And so we can actually trust that a little bit, you know, and
yes, sometimes things go wrong, but in general, that's not the
case. In general, things unfold, you
know, and, and that's where thatmidwifery idea comes in.
So it's a natural process. Doesn't mean it can't be
dramatic at times, might be really messy, but this is a
(58:40):
process that all that has a birth at the end of it, you
know, so like that. We'll have to do an episode on
that. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot there.
And and, you know, trusting the process when we talked about
Giordano Bruno, the universe is a place out of which you cannot
fall. You know, we're sort of
(59:01):
translating that maybe more metaphorically than he intended
it. But but that idea there is sort
of like that's where the licensecomes from to for it to be OK,
to let those voices kind of justchatter away, keep going.
(59:22):
You have to really get that it'sOK.
And then you don't need that attachment to any of these
outcomes, you know, and then watch if the attachment doesn't
come because if you had that switch to bestow now because
it's not about the attachment, it's about bestowing, which is
exactly non attachment, right? So, so yeah, I mean, if an
(59:47):
artist thinks of their work as agift or a prayer, you know, to
the universe, then you know, youcan do a beautiful painting and
have no attachment to it whatsoever afterwards.
You know, or you know, I worked for one for one Goldsmith and he
the guy that taught me goldsmithing and he brought a
(01:00:07):
piece to a gallery in Santa Fe. And the guy gallery owners are a
particular type of psychology. We could do, we could write a
big fat, ugly book about that. But so, yeah, maybe.
But so he brings him these pair of earrings that he'd spent a
lot of time on it were quite unique.
(01:00:28):
And the guy goes, yeah, OK, thanks.
And he puts them in the drawer and put.
And now this guy was a great artist as far as the expertise
part, but he was still on the young side.
And when he saw how that guy didn't actually look at them and
appreciate them and sort of feedhim back some of what he wanted
(01:00:51):
from that, he's like, OK, give me those things back.
We're not, we're not going to play.
If you're not going to treat my creation with respect, then I'm
I'm not going to play. Right.
And he was in a position where he could do that, right.
But as a beginning artist, you can't, you can't think that your
work has, has inherent value until you've made and, and you
(01:01:16):
know, hundreds of them. And not that it doesn't have
value, but you can't afford to think that it does, or you'll
start circling that instead of expanding out, right?
You got to see what's next. You have to be more compelled
about what's next than censuringyourself about what's happening
in front of you now. You know, so you kind of got
(01:01:36):
maybe the maybe the idea is after that much time, you
realize that you're not really the creative source, that this
process is the creative thing. And so you just need to like not
get in the way of it. And so you're not going to take
as much credit or attached to it.
Like this is me. It's like, no, it's not really
(01:01:57):
me. It's really just the creative
forces of the universe that are using me as an outlet.
So I can't get all, all crazy with it and be pumping myself up
because I mean, you can do that.It's just stupid.
Either way, right? It's the same, it's the same,
right? It's it's attachment, right.
(01:02:17):
So, so I would be looking at what's the root of that
attachment are are you, if you're, if you're still trying
to feed your ego, then the then middle life is a very hard
chapter. So there's a reason your body's
changing. There's a reason that you're
that life doesn't show up the same way as it did when you're
(01:02:37):
20. And and being 50 isn't just
doing 20 really, really, really well, you know, really slowly.
Yeah, right. It's a whole other thing, right.
It really is a whole other thing.
And that's one of the big takeaways from Jeff Moore and
that is that know the chapter you're in and be using the right
(01:03:02):
frameworks and value systems andthinking methods that are
chapter appropriate to that chapter.
You can't think chapter 1 when you're in chapter 5.
That means that when you turn that page between chapters, you
have to adapt to that change. And, and that's tricky.
(01:03:26):
I'll give it to you. It's tricky.
But without that, there's no, we're not going anywhere, right?
We're all 20 year olds forever. So God save us from that.
Cool. Very well.
I think let's leave it there andI think we'll come back to a
couple of these topics maybe next time.
(01:03:46):
I'm so yeah. Thank you Brian for the great
conversation and I will see you soon.
Sounds good Sir, see you next time around.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.