Acknowledging your relationship with yourself – letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves

Sometimes poetry because it speaks from an aesthetic point of view can be more real than ‘factual’ reality. You could think of ‘factual’ reality as living in the black and white world and living from an aesthetic point of view in the rich world of colour. If you haven’t watched the film Pleasantville this illustrates this beautifully.

The title is a line from one of Mary Oliver’s poems ‘Wild Geese’. You can find a lot of Mary’s poems by Googling her name, this one is from the book Dream Work. Here’s the poem:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver published by Atlantic Monthly Press © Mary Oliver

The line I like is ‘let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’ because when you do this it changes how you experience the world.

One of the problems people often talk to me about is that when things go wrong they wind up beating themselves up. Like when something goes wrong in their relationship, or when they are trying to get into a relationship with someone else and they get turned down or to use the worst metaphor or way of thinking it imaginable they ‘crash and burn’. This beating yourself up doesn’t make things better it makes you feel worse. Yet this has become such an ingrained habit for most people that they no longer have conscious control over this or realise that they can have control over this. In addition the normal schooling process and just growing up in western culture, the process of enculturation or the learning process of fitting in to your surroundings you learn to place your attention on what isn’t working and fix it. Remember all those mistakes they circled in red at school, that is what they were telling you to pay attention to, what wasn’t working, how you don’t get what you want.

So instead of beating yourself up just let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Here’s how you do this:

Pay attention to your body and how you feel. Whatever you feel acknowledge that and notice for what would make you feel better. That’s likely to be a treat like chocolate or your favourite biscuits or whatever it is you use to make yourself feel good… If it’s really bad you may be thinking about drowning your sorrows with alcohol or having a cigarette to relieve the stress. Whatever it is pay attention to that feeling. I’ve had people tell me that it feels like they have been wounded. You can even think of being given a hug. But what is really interesting is that when you do this you’ll start to feel better. NOT eating the chocolate or the biscuits or any of the other things. Simply letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves will change how you experience things.

From the neuroscience point of view what you are doing is letting the neurological cascade that you had started of bad feelings and emotions subside and replacing those toxic brain chemicals with good feelings, good brain chemicals that you generate yourself with your body, you create a new cascade of positive good feelings that washes away the bad toxic stuff.

Go on try it.

Next time you are feeling bad. Just stop. And let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Time to wake up it’s not about transcendence

So you wake up. That’s it.

OK, that might not be too much help. But like that IS IT.

How you do it is of course a completely different question.

What’s interesting is that there is so much interest in waking up, or enlightenment or spirituality, but how many people have actually woken up?

I’m awake, but I should really define what I mean by that.

I have the choice to not react automatically to what is happening around me and to me, but to act intentionally for what I want.

So yes I have an “I”. I disagree that the purpose of enlightenment is to get rid of the ego. If you didn’t have an ego you wouldn’t be able to function in the world. OK if you have sangha or an ashram to take care of you but I suggest this is a fundamentally disabled way to be as opposed to an abled way to be. You want to be becoming more able to do than less able to do. I’d point as an example to some of the Buddhist teachers who have fabulously healthy ego’s. They are nice people to be with, they are living life and enjoying this life.

Another way of saying this is that it is not about transcendence. As in going beyond the physical level. That is death.

A lot of ‘spirituality’ confuses this idea promoting transcendence in that you can ‘bliss out’ and leave the problems behind. This of course is very popular as people want to get away from their problems. One of the psychological tools that is often appropriated by ‘spirituality’ is the idea of changing your environment. If you were in a better environment you wouldn’t have the problems that you do have now. You would have more freedom to grow without the difficulties and limitations that keep you stuck where you are now…

Nice idea but the reality is of course very different as exemplified by the people who in the 1960′s went to India to ‘find themselves’ and of course took all of their problems with them because they were their problems not a product of the environment.

Yes if you radically change the external environment enough you can’t sustain the problem. But that change needs to be so extreme, like living in India like an Indian with the standard and quality of life that the majority have not the wealthy minority. Often having a bigger problem, like being able to get food and survive, drives the smaller problems into insignificance or the boundary conditions that keep the problem intact as a problem dissolve because when you change that boundary they can’t be sustained.

In other words if you change your direction and rather than heading towards transcendence you head back in the other direction to the visceral real world and immerse yourself in accomplishing something here. Something worthwhile let’s say. Something that would make your life worthwhile, a reason for living let’s call it. Then when you take on that bigger problem you can’t sustain the boundary conditions of the other problems that you were trying to transcend away from.

Why do you want enlightenment, why are you interested in spirituality? If your answer involves ‘other’ that’s futile, like all the good you could do or the benefit you could be. This is all delusion. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world. It has to start with you.

Time to wake up.

Is your relationship evolving or devolving?

Are you in a dependent relationship? This is the relationship that most people are in, probably you, even though you might not think of it as ‘dependent’. It’s just normal. You do certain things and your partner does certain things different to you. But they’re probably things you don’t like to do, or don’t feel comfortable doing. Like maybe they are the high energy fiery person and you are the chilled earthy person or vice versa. You probably think of these as complementary. That you complement each other in these ways. Which is probably how you got together. In addition to the sexual attraction there was just ‘stuff’ about the other person that you liked… All this complementary stuff.

You would say there is nothing wrong with this, that this is natural and normal. But unfortunately what is also natural and normal now is that around half the people who get married also get divorced. So beyond the commitment of living together, actually committing to spend the rest of your life together and committing to a marriage doesn’t work for about half of the people that commit to doing that.

So how does this happen? How come these people who want to spend the rest of their lives together change their minds? How come it doesn’t work for so many people?

I’ve worked with thousands of people both men and women, and I used to help the original Flirt Coach Peta Heskell run her flirting and attraction workshops and I’ve lost count of how many of those people told me that the reason that they were looking for a new relationship was their old relationship broke down because either the person I was speaking to had changed and no longer wanted to be with their partner or their partner had changed and because their partner had changed they no longer wanted to be with who their partner was now.

My reaction to this was: “How come if your partner changed you didn’t notice that they were changing or how come if it was you who changed your partner didn’t notice that you were changing?”

Unfortunately I knew the answer before they told me whatever they told me, even if they didn’t know themselves. Because it is how most people hold the representation of their relationships in their mind. And that is statically, they have a still representation.

If you’ve studied NLP you’ll know the idea that people make visual representations and these representations can have different characteristics or sub-modalities. And one of the visual sub-modalities is whether the image is moving or still. I’m actually talking about a more advanced version of this as the representation is held not just visually. But this is an easy way to think about this.

So how come one of the most important decision that you are likely to make in your life you are doing incorrectly?

If you are in a relationship now ask yourself how you think of your partner? If you had to describe them to someone else and it was totally ok to be completely open in expressing everything you feel how do you describe your partner? The reason for doing this is understanding that your language expresses how you think. And how you can get in touch with what is normally out of your conscious awareness is to talk to someone who has the skills to understand the structure of what you are saying. Because they can help you change the representation that you currently have which is highly likely to be still or static to something that is moving. Movement is one of the fundamental characteristics of life. If you want your relationship to be alive you have to nurture it so that it grows.

Are you taking more care of your garden and your plants rather than your relationship?

Next: How relationships evolve. From dependence to independence to interdependence.

YOU are the PROBLEM

It’s easier to want the other person in the relationship to change rather than you having to do all of the work.

It can be easy to go: “If they loved me, if they cared then they would know that I want things to be different.”

This mind-reading is actually an act of giving up responsibility. How you make progress, how you make things work is by taking responsibility for the results of your communication.

It’s one of the presuppositions of NLP, that the meaning of your communication is the response that you get. It’s all about owning your communication, and what’s interesting is I even see people trained in NLP not take responsibility for getting what they want in their relationships. In fact learning NLP can be a major cause of relationship break-up. One partner goes to a course and learns some really good techniques, but doesn’t teach their partner. In fact they come home and do the techniques to their partner. And their partner doesn’t particularly like it.

There’s a quote I like from to Woody Allen. He says that relationship is like a shark, it has to constantly move forward or it dies.

How most people conceptualise their partner they are in a relationship with is as something static. When they or their partner changes the accusations come out: “You’ve changed!!”

We’ll I would hope so. One of the signs of life is movement. And just like Woody Allen’s shark story, the relationship is dying when there is this lack of awareness of movement.

Another way of saying this is the awareness of growth. You may love your garden, you nurture it and watch it grow. But how come this relationship you treasure, you are not noticing for the growth?

Taking responsibility you intentionally notice for growth.

In which direction is the relationship growing?

Hopefully it is growing inwards and deepening. If it’s growing outwards it’s growing away from you.. Watch out!!

My friend was telling me how much she likes this old car she has with manual steering. She said she could really feel what the car was doing. She had the sense of the wheel in her hands connecting directly to the wheels and could drive with precision, feeling for every bump in the road and compensating easily.

This is how responsibility works. It’s having the feel for where you are going. AND knowing when you are going off course because you can feel that.

I’ve had people tell me that they didn’t know that their partner was seeing someone else. That they didn’t know things were going wrong. That they didn’t know the things that they were doing were the cause of the problems.

BUT looking back the signs were obvious.

How on earth could they miss these signs that they claim looking back were obvious?

The answer is they had gotten out of the driving seat, their hands weren’t on the wheel, they had no sense of where the relationship was going.

They had given up responsibility for where the relationship was going.

Why people laugh at Woody Allen’s line that relationship is like a shark, it has to constantly move forward or it dies. Is not because it is that funny, they laugh because they feel the recognition that their relationship is not moving forward and that scares them.

If your relationship isn’t moving forward, isn’t growing and deepening. You should be scared. That is your problem. And if you don’t sort it, their won’t be a relationship to sort.

Have a nice day