Vulnerability Project - Week 3 Practices From Group Call

First, some Q/A:

Q: Can you share more about the idea that the feeling itself is the message, and that we don't need to interpret the feeling in order to benefit from this process?

RC: Well, the most important thing at first is that you stay with what you’re calling feeling and what we could also call sensation. Actually, the way that you know that you’re having a feeling in that moment because maybe there’s a tightness in your chest or there’s a rumbling feeling in your belly. And if you surf that for a good minute or two and don’t have some insights that come or something similar, then you can be pretty sure you don’t need to keep going in that way, unless you find that you’re surfing but you’re still not feeling that you’re more open and connected.

Let me say that another way. If you surf just a feeling and that’s all you’re getting, is the feeling, and doing that takes you to an open present expanded state, then you did what you needed to do and no image or color or insight was necessary for you. Make sense?

Q: Yes, that makes sense. Sometimes there’s a relief. I mean, I’m not getting any information, so to speak, but there’s more of a presence, an openness.

RC: That means you’re doing really well. And in other times, either you’ll be surfing for a minute or two and you won’t have that openness yet, and then you’ll be able to use some of those advanced practices I put on the video for this week or just keep surfing a little while longer. Sometimes if you do keep surfing a little while longer, you might get an image, an insight, etc., but those aren’t necessary in order for you to be doing this well and getting the benefit of it because really, the number one reason that we’re doing this is to come into greater self-connection and greater presence, and you can do that just by surfing and with nothing more.

There is a question that came up that kind of dovetails with Randy’s question from somebody of one of the groups who was asking how long are we supposed to do this and how often with difficult issues where we may surf at one time and then it comes up again and again? And what the person says when I use examples both on the call and even in some of my books, it seems that people maybe surf in a kind of a neat format and they go through something and in 3 minutes then it’s over for them. But what about, this person wondered, when that isn’t the case?

And there are different ways of approaching this great question. The first thing I want to say—I don’t think I’ve gotten to it yet in the program—is that some a prominent neuroscientist has discovered that the life span of most difficult or painful emotions, when unfettered, is really just a couple of minutes. And that what prolongs these difficult emotions is our resistance to them, as we’ve been exploring. So that, in a way, seems alarming when you first hear it, for a couple of reasons. On the one side you could think, “Well, does that mean that people go through their whole life sometimes in great pain and suffering because they’re resisting something that could

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be over in 2 minutes if they just let it come through?” And in some cases, I think you could say the answer is yes.

On the other hand, that idea makes it seem that things are much neater and tidier inside of weak human beings and they really are. And ultimately, if we keep remembering that the only goal, so to speak, of all of this is to come into greater self-connection and presence, then it doesn’t matter if the feeling, let’s say it’s grief, is here now and we cradle it and it softens and releases and then it comes back 10 minutes from now and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, because what we’re attempting to do is not get rid of anything. If we thought the idea was to get through and over this grief that is besetting us, that would a kind of bargaining. But really, what we’re doing is practicing a full yes to everything that arises moment by moment, especially including our emotions. So many times, emotions will be met over and over again. And sometimes even if you’re surfing them beautifully well, they’ll come back over and over because that’s what’s meant to be here for you in your experience over time.

Then, of course, there are the emotions that we hold onto that I talk about in the video for this week, at the very end of it, longer than they need to hold on to us or ways we perpetuate emotions and difficult ones, especially through our resistance. So what I’m hoping to make clear is that we can definitely, through resistance, keep things going, keep ourselves stuck, but even once we release most of our resistance, things are going to come and go, come back over and over again, because that’s what’s here. And the more fully we can embrace what’s here, the more peaceful we’ll be no matter what it is.

Q: What I have been aware of as practice is a certain form, I think, of resistance where I just feel like a big fear comes up, like my body is so afraid of allowing myself to fully feel what’s there. Is there anything that could help with that?

RC: I really appreciate the question. I think it’s really important. When you try to drop into the feeling and what you get is fear, then fear is what’s happening. And you can’t go around that fear or talk your way out of it or somehow make it go away. You actually have to surf that first. And it’s sometimes the biggest challenge because fear flashes bigger often when you turn your attention to it. It seems like it’s overwhelming, but there’s just no way that you can even get through it. And so it can really throw you out of the process and make it so you can go forward. But what you don’t usually know in those situations is that just a few more seconds will get you through.

I want to tell you a brief story about that. I think everyone will be amused by it. I was doing this process of connecting emotionally with somebody for television and they were in a couch. And the mic was taped to the floor and run up underneath their shirt and clipped to their shirt. And so it was a kind of a confining setup. And we were going into anxiety, and the fear that was coming up was really big, along the lines of what you’re describing. And I just encouraged this person to stay with it and to stay with it. And after about a few minutes, there was a big tremble and a kind of “ahhh”; a release, a getting to the other side of that fear. And what happened after the cameras stopped rolling is that the person said to me, “I can’t tell you how grateful I am that all this stuff was taped to the floor, because if it wasn’t, I would have thrown out the microphone and ran out

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of the studio.” And so, it was only because of the forced confinement that we were able to get past, because otherwise those extra few seconds wouldn’t have happened. And so I think that’s something that for all of us we can take to heart.

And one more thing: I’ve worked with people who were having full-blown panic attacks. And they’re saying, “Take me to the hospital. I’m going to die.” And that’s how overwhelming the panic response is. We couldn’t even say fear in that moment because the panic just takes over everything. And I’ve stayed with the person and helped them get from the place to, okay, first there’s panic and we don’t run away and we don’t make it an emergency, but we just stay with it physiologically. And then in the example that I’m thinking of, the next thing that happened was that the panic turned to rage. And the rage was really intense for a minute or two and then the rage turned into sadness and to fear. And what was so empowering about that situation for this person with the panic attacks was that she got a chance to see that when she stayed with the panic and just used our simple practice, she wasn’t in panic anymore. And the whole thing about the panic attack is that you don’t know how to get out of it. That’s why you end up at the emergency room often and you need the shot or whatever it is that you get. But here, a person realizes, “Wait, I was in panic. I thought it was a life-threatening emergency. Then I was angry, then I was sad.” And of course it becomes much more manageable to be sad, but more important, once you go through that kind of experience, you’ll never be the same again because when you’re in that panic, you have a frame of reference that is experiential that you never had before.

Q:I think part of it, from what you described, is the added challenge of doing this oneself without the partner. Oftentimes, with a witness, whoever it is, it helps me to drop into and stay to do the surfing as opposed to just like sitting alone.

RC: I really hear you, and I think some people just have a natural inclination towards doing it alone where other people, it’s harder. I would say overall, though, we’re not meant to do it alone. And by "it," I mean pretty much just about anything. We find ourselves through our relationships with others and one of the things that I’m trying to do around that understanding is to setup an international network of people who are trained in doing this process so that when you don’t have a friend or a neighbor or a family member who you can be witnessed with, in the way that we’re talking about, that you know where to find someone. You can even find them at a moment’s notice. That’s how passionate I am about the idea of not being meant to do it all alone, and I’m going to try to do my best so that you won’t have to.

Now, someone else noted the very deep relationship, and maybe intertwined relationships, between thinking and feeling. And she was noticing that often her thoughts stimulate her feelings and then she’s not having any feelings, but then she starts thinking again and the thoughts come back. And this leads me to a recognition that thoughts are different than feelings in that you don’t really surf in the same way, you don’t really have to surf in the same way. And here’s what I mean. Thoughts are electrical. They’re instantaneous. They don’t have to move through the fiber of a physical body. So when you turn towards a thought in a welcoming way, it’s actually not there anymore and the thought pattern is interrupted. So there’s a way that I recommend you do this and I’m going to exaggerate it and I’m going to use words to describe what wouldn’t have

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words, but it’s more of an inner sense. So you notice you have a thought and the thought it debilitating or resistant in some way or it definitely has the potential to stir you back up again if you stay with it. So what you do is you turn your attention to your thought as if you’re saying, “Welcome! Thank you for coming!” Stay as long as you like and take up all the space you need.

Now, a resistant thought cannot actually survive in that environment. So then you can go back to the body, surf whatever is there, and get present much more quickly. And if 10 thoughts come up within just a few more seconds, if you just meet them in that way instantaneously and go back to the body, what you’ll do is you’ll interrupt that cycle of thought, feeling, thought, feeling, which exacerbates things and makes it harder to get all the way to the expanded state.

There’s one other thing about a particular type of thought that someone else wrote about. And that’s where start to have a feeling and it’s intense and suddenly we worry, “I can’t be with this for even just another minute more, let alone 5 minutes if I have to.” Or we even have a story about how if I let this really wash over me completely, I’ll die. And what’s happening in those moments is that we’re telling ourselves a story about the future, that it’s something we can’t know, but what it does do is it serves to take us out of the experience in the present. And in all of my years of doing this work, I’ve never found anybody who has ever died, let’s say first and foremost, from feelings. I’ve known a lot of people for whom not feeling has contributed to their dying. But nobody has broken apart into a million pieces from doing this. So what we need to do is when we recognize, we’re telling ourselves a story about the future, just gently allow and welcome and recognize that and then just come right back to the here and the now. And that story about the future may be for you one of the most common ways that you’re used to, defending against the intensity of the feeling. So it can be very powerful and help you get to the other side, just like that person who had the microphone taped to him. If you just explore the idea of letting that story be, not aligning with it and coming right back to the feeling.

Somebody asked, in regard to trauma: Is there a way that somehow doing this work could be re-traumatizing or could be too stressful? And there are a few things that I would like to say about that. The first one is that most of the work that I do with people individually is centered around trauma. So I’m very sensitive to the nuances of that work and how delicate it has to move forward. That’s one of the reasons why I said to you in the last video that we can only go forward as fast and as fully as the flow of the most sensitive parts of ourselves can go.

And it’s also really important in trauma work to do what a trauma expert, how Peter Levine calls Titration, which is if you go into a feeling and it becomes too much and overwhelming to pull back out of the feeling and give yourself a chance to find that resource of well-being inside of yourself before you take it any further. That’s also the zooming in and zooming out technique that I talked about is another way to work with traumatic experiences so that they don’t become overwhelming. But generally speaking, if somebody has a history of trauma and they’re doing this work, they really need to start doing it with somebody who’s trained and can work directly with trauma in a very skillful way. I wouldn’t recommend people doing it on their own and I wouldn’t recommend them doing it even with a partner if that partner wasn’t trained, at least

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until they got a lot of good experience and they felt like they really understood it from the inside in terms of how it works for them.

So even for people in this program, if you notice that somehow you’re accessing trauma and it doesn’t feel safe to be doing that, I definitely wouldn’t go forward. You can write to me about that or you can work on other issues that don’t feel as traumatic. On the other hand, what I want to share with you is that most of the time, what is re-traumatizing for people are not the actual felt experiences in the body that we work with. In fact, it’s the story that has to be re-told and re-told and re-visited that actually creates that painful and un-healing re-traumatization.

And some of you may know that famous story that Peter Levine, who I just mentioned, tells us about the gazelle in the wild, but it’s worth repeating. That when a gazelle is chased by a lion and has that whole surge of adrenaline moving through it. And then it escapes the lion, and still is stuck with all of this trauma of the chase, of death being so imminent and so much fear, that what the gazelle knows how to do the we humans aren’t so good at is it finds a safe place, like behind some bushes, and it starts to shake. And it shakes and shakes and shakes, sometimes trembling for like 5 minutes. And what it’s doing is it’s literally shaking the hormones and the stress out of its system. And that’s how it comes back into balance. And it doesn’t lose the memory of the chase and anything that it might need to learn for next time, but it loses the trauma of the chase, so it’s not debilitated by that, going forward. And that’s essentially what trauma healing is; it’s a chance for us to be with the experience at that level so that it can let go of us and really shake out of our bodies, so that we’re free.

Now...the practice

Emotional Connection For Getting Unstuck

A man came to me who wanted to write a novel. And he really felt like he had it in him. And he cleared his schedule so that he had enough time early in the evening, when he still had good energy every night. He got a really nice laptop. He found a really good corner of his living room that was a peaceful place to write, and he was all set up. And then he noticed, as he would walk towards the computer, he’d always find a reason to do something else. You know, suddenly the blinds all needed to be dusted or he needed to cook some food for tomorrow’s lunch. And this happened repeatedly until he noticed that he even was starting to avoid the living room entirely. And he didn’t really understand it because it’s what he wanted more than anything. And when he came to me to work on this, that’s where we started.

And I asked him to, in his mind’s eye, go to that place in the living room where he usually stops short of the computer, and to just notice what he was feeling in his body. And he used our practices and he felt a band of tension across his chest. And I asked him to be with that for a few moments. And after he did, I said, “If you decided to actually sit down and start writing at the computer, what’s the worst thing that could happen?” He thought about it for a moment and he said, “Well, I guess, that it would be terrible. That I would write it and it wouldn’t be any good at all.” And I said, “So okay, let’s say that you did write it and that was the result. How do you suspect you would feel?” Paused for another moment and he said, “Well, I think, total loser.”

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So now we had enough material to work with. And I asked him to go along with me on a kind of imaginary ride. Let’s say I told him that you actually sat down at the computer for the first night and you started to write. Lo and behold, that first night, you got a paragraph out, and it was pretty good! You wrote it a couple of times, but by the time you ended up finishing your session, you thought, “I like this!” You had a good feeling about it. You came back the next night, felt a little easier to sit down, and it really started to flow; a few more paragraphs. And one of the things you love is that you came back the next day and the one from the night before actually still seem pretty good to you, so you’re on a roll! And one night led to another and lo and behold, you have your first chapter done! And you’re starting to feel really good about this. You think you’re going to be able to do it after all.

And then chapter 2 and chapter 3 and chapter 4 and it’s really taking shape and it really, actually seems like it might be pretty good! Now you’re excited and you actually look forward to sitting down to write. And more chapters and more chapters and pretty soon you’re closer to the end than you were to the beginning and you know you’re going to finish. And you keep going and you keep going and finally you write the end and you can’t believe it! And you let it sit for a little bit and then you read it and then you still like it but you have to make some revisions, and you do that and you’re feeling actually even proud of yourself for having done it.

And there’s a friend whose taste you appreciate more than anyone, who’s standing by to read this draft when you’re ready to send it. So you let him know it’s ready and you send it off by email and now you’re just waiting to hear. A day goes by, you haven’t heard anything, but you’re not too worried. You know it takes a while to read; people are busy. Second day, maybe you start to feel a little worried about it, but you know, you don’t want to push or anything. Trying to make yourself feel calm. And then the third day, you haven’t heard from your friend and you think, “Should I call him? Maybe he didn’t get the email.” And then you think, “No, no, no.” But you still have some fear that’s welling up and it’s really difficult, but you wait and you make it all the way through the fourth day.

Finally, the phone rings. Your friend. “You read it? Did you get it?” “Ah, I read it.” “Well, what do you think? Tell me!” “Do you really want to know?” “Yes, of course! That’s why I sent it to you.” “Well, I have to be really honest. It doesn’t work. And to be really honest, it’s really bad. And if I’m going to tell you the truth, because you value the truth and I’m your friend, I have to tell you that I found the whole thing really offensive.” Okay, right there, turn your attention to your body. What are you noticing?

My client noticed that band of tension was back but even more intense than before. And I asked him to stay with that and surf it for a few moments and then [Inaudible – 0:45:48] on his belly because it just drops down right there. It was really hard for him to stay with it. He looked up at me and he said, “Failure.” I said, “Okay. Let’s see if you can just cradle that feeling of failure. Not the thought that you’re a failure or the verdict, but just that raw feeling in your belly, to see if you can stay with that.” Then he breathed into it and he stayed with it. For a minute he started trembling a little bit, almost like that gazelle I mentioned earlier. A little tearing up happened.

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After just a few minutes, there was one of these (exhaling) kind of whole body sigh, and he looked at me and he said, “You know what, it’s not as hard as I thought it was going to be.

The truth is if I did have to feel like that, I feel I’d much rather I wrote this thing than I didn’t.” And you could say at that moment, this client had removed the one thing holding him back from writing his novel, because it was his resistance to the experience of failure that was in the way. And once he released that resistance and he was willing to have the experience of failure, then he also allowed his brain to update. Failure as a feeling in my body is not the same thing as footsteps in a dark alley. And therefore I don’t have to avoid that feeling at all costs, and therefore I don’t have to avoid my computer and the whole novel writing project altogether.

Now with this person, I also introduced him to the international fraternity of writers because the only thing really that distinguishes writers from non-writers is that writers can feel that fear of failure and even that failure itself and still move it and keep going. I used to tell the story and I would say that that’s probably true for every writer in the world except for Stephen King. He seems to write a new book everyday. But then I read an essay of Stephen King’s in which he was talking about his own mortal fear of failure that rises up in him, just as it does for the rest of us. So out of that story, we can glean some very simple steps that apply our practice.

The first one—and I’m going to use some kind of lingo that we use for the Oprah magazine when I wrote about this on my second article that’s also available on my website. The first step is called...

Find The Flinch

This means notice where you could be taking a positive step towards the goal, but you hold back. And it doesn’t have to be something as literal as sitting down at the computer and writing. It could be doing some research to learn about something, it could be making a difficult phone call to tell a truth to a friend or a family member. But it’s something you know is in your highest good and perhaps in the good of those you care about, but you keep flinching and therefore not going forward.

The second step is called...

Cut to the Chase

This means ask yourself what’s the worst thing that could happen if I did go forward, and then if this worst case scenario did happen, how would I feel? Sometimes you know the answer right away and sometimes you don’t. And it can help to dialogue a little about this, which you’re going to get a chance to do.

The third step is called...

Weather the Storm

This means see if you can create a little bit of that actual motion that you’ve been resisting so that you could give your brain a chance to update. Now, it’s not real life. It’s not like going up

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and asking someone who you have a crush on to dance with you when you’re not really at the dance. So that’s why in the story that I told you, I amped up the situation to an almost absurd degree, because what kind of friend would respond the way that the one did in my story. But I did it on purpose so that it could be extreme enough to arouse the real feeling even though we were in an imaginary situation. So weather the storm means see if you can find the way to bring up the feeling, even though it’s a practice run, so to speak.

Tthe last step is called...

Repeat as Necessary

Sometimes it just takes once, like with this client who then was free to write his novel. And other times, it takes a few rounds because maybe there’s more than one emotion that’s involved, or you didn’t really get enough of it going the first time. So repeat as necessary is just to make it clear that you may have to practice a little bit more in order to get that update that I’m describing.

(This will be described as a triad exercise. All the instructions are also relevant to dyad and solo practice.)

So let me talk about how you’re going to have a chance to be doing this. And what’s going to happen is you’re going to be with 3 people and you’ll decide together which person goes first. And the person who goes first is going to share a situation in which he or she knows that they’re a little bit stuck, not moving forward, and would like to be moving forward. And they’ll dialogue with the other two people in the triad about what is the worst case scenario if they went forward and how they might feel. Now this might just take 1 minute to get to or it could take a lot of your sharing because sometimes it’s not really clear and it needs some good reflective listening and good open-ended questions like you practiced on in one of our last call.

So once you get to that sense, if you do, of what would be the feeling if you were just wide open, undefended, and had to feel it in the worst case scenario. If you have time when it’s your turn and you choose to go forward, then you and your partners can try to drum up some of that feeling and they can support you then by asking you what’s happening right now and can you be with it, as we practiced before, to allow you to stay with the feeling. But you also may not have time to do that or you may not feel like you want to do it in the context of this call, and so you may just be grateful to leave it there. I recognize what the feeling is and now at another time, I’ll work on weathering the storm, whether it’s with my counselor or with Raphael or somebody else, either one is okay with me. But you’ll each have about between 15 minutes, just for the focus to be completely on you and for the other two people in your group to be supporting you.

Here's a recap of the different people's roles:the first person will share what the block is and the other two people will just dialogue with open-ended questions to help the person see if they’re not already clear about what the worst case scenario is and how they would feel if the worst case scenario came to pass. If they get to that and the person wants to surf it, then together they can kind of all three put their heads together and see is it possible in these few minutes for me to

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imagine my way into that scenario, enough that the feeling could surface. And if so, at that point, they’d be there to ask our two questions, what’s happening right now and can you be with it, to keep encouraging the person to stay with the feeling.

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