Powerlessness


Ken: Here we are back again. You’re getting hit with a lot today, but I think that’s okay. More this afternoon. You can digest it all this evening. First off, any questions coming out of our work earlier this afternoon? Sophie.

Sophie: I was just curious about this whole notion of power because when we were using the sword I got the sense that we were forming a relationship with it. And yet when I reflect on it, I think of situations where you are powerless. And I felt like in a way, it, the exercise said that if you’re not a victim, you’re not powerless. And yet, you know, children are powerless or someone has a gun or a knife, you’re powerless. So I guess I got kind of confused with the exercise a little bit.

Ken: Interesting you should ask that. Because the next exercise we’re going to do is going to speak straight to that.

Now the sense of powerlessness is an idea. It’s not a fact. There are situations which arise where one has very little recourse. They are, however, relatively rare in our experience. And I want to focus our attention, not on those relatively rare and extreme circumstances, but on the myriad situations that we face in the course of our lives, where we feel we have no power or we feel we are a victim and it simply isn’t the case. I think this is far more common. Anybody go along with that? How many of you have had the feeling that people were doing things to you?

Yeah. This is something you and I have discussed quite a bit, Carolyn.

There’s a psychological phenomenon, which comes right out of Pavlovian conditioning, called learned helplessness. In which a dog, say, has been conditioned to reach for food, but every time he reaches for food he’s electrocuted. And there was no escape from this. And once this conditioning has been established even if the electric shock has taken away, the dog will not ever reach for the food. And undoing that conditioning actually takes several hundred forced repetitions of showing the dog that it can actually reach for the food and not be electrocuted.

Most of us have grown up in families where certain behaviors were acceptable and other behaviors were not, which ones were deemed acceptable and which ones weren’t, vary considerably from family to family. But we carried those ideas very, very far into our lives. So that when we run into situations where one of those “unacceptable behaviors” is called for, we feel completely helpless. Anybody relate to this? It’s just not within our vocabulary.

Several years ago, a friend and I were giving a workshop on power to 25 women in Orange County. It was an interesting two days. At that time one of my students was an agent in medical fraud. And she carried a gun to work. She’s now in Washington, I haven’t had any interaction with her for a long time. She was great. She just spoke straight, absolutely straight, very, very down-to-earth, straightforward woman.

One of the exercises we did, we were demonstrating, or talking about the various elements. And in most interactions there’s a good deal of water going back and forth, things flow back and forth. So one of the women asked, what would earth look like in conversation? Well, I had this student there, who’s pretty familiar with earth. So I said Barbara, could you demonstrate earth in a conversation please? And she went, “no”. And the other woman went, “I didn’t think you were allowed to do that”. That was her conditioning. So in any situation where just being right there and saying, “no,” this woman would have been helpless.

Now for how many of you is this striking any chords? You can remember how your conditioning says, “No, on this ground you shall not tread.” Okay.

When we talk about power, which is being present in action, being present with what we’ve called that acceleration, that increase of energy, which actually happens very, very quickly, you have no idea what you’re going to be called upon to do. And it’s one of the reasons why it is important to develop a very wide range of possible responses in the relationship with all of them so that you can actually act. And almost every time someone consults with me about a conflict situation, the reason that they’re stuck in the conflict is there is an action, or a position being called for which their own conditioning won’t let them go to.

There is no enemy


Ken: So, I want to take this a step further. There is no enemy. Now this is something that has taken me far too long to come to understand. I learned about such ideas many, many years ago, But in all truthfulness, it is only relatively recently that I think I actually have some idea of what this means.

When we find ourselves in opposition to somebody or something—and I would like you to think of a situation in which you experience opposition and for the purposes of this, not the really extreme or dramatic one, but just something, you know, disagreement with your partner. That’s plenty. And bring that situation to mind. You’re on one side of the issue. He or she is on the other side of the issue. And there’s opposition.

And I’m going to make the suggestion that in that experience of opposition, there’s a feeling inside you that you don’t want to experience. It may be you’re angry with them, but this is a person you’re meant to love, so you don’t want to feel that anger. It may be that you’re afraid that if you say anything, something will happen. It may be that you’re proud, but you don’t want to admit that feeling of superiority to yourself. Any of you connect with what I’m talking about here?

What I want to suggest, what I’m suggesting here is there isn’t any enemy out there. There’s the unwillingness to experience that feeling in here. So take that situation, and you can do this in your imagination. The situation isn’t here now. It’s quite safe. And open to that feeling right here, right now. That may cost you something, may not be entirely comfortable, but it’s okay. We’re just here now. It’s possible. Open to that feeling. Let it actually be there. What happens? Anybody?

Student: My chest gets tight and heavy. I stop breathing.

Ken: Okay. So intentionally breathe and experience the feeling. What happens. Alex?

Alex: The sense of conflict disappears.

Ken: Say a bit more. There’s a couple of steps in there I suspect. First start with the feeling. You experienced the feeling. What happens as you experienced the feeling?

Alex: There’s a sense of alienation, of being pushed out of affection. And there’s a new strategy based around that feeling.

Ken: A new strategy? So you see a new possibility?

Alex: A new way forward in the conflict.

Ken: Yeah. Okay. And then the sense of conflict as it was dissipates.

Alex: Yeah.

Ken: Yeah. Okay. Pat?

Pat: Before the dissipation, I experience a contraction that’s almost immobilizing. So I’m not rushing to the next step. I’m like, like a cell, like a nerve that can’t fire anymore.

Ken: When have you experienced this before today? Did anybody experience something like that when they took out the sword? This was the wound. You’re feeling the old pain and it is our unwillingness to feel, to open to what is actually there inside us, that is projected out and forms the enemy out there or the opponent or the opposition or so forth. So that’s exactly right.

Pat: I think in relationship and in intimate relationship, when that starts to happen, that projecting out begins this kind of ricochet.

Ken: Things escalate pretty quickly. Don’t they?

Pat: At least we didn’t say accelerate.

Ken: That too. Yeah. And so you had these two people. One moment they’re feeling this nice connection, next moment they’re completely at odds just with … That’s exactly right.

So there’s a story here:

A shepherd would take his flock to a very verdant meadow by a very beautiful lake. One day he saw three extraordinarily beautiful women just come out of the lake. And the woman in front, as soon as he looked at her, he fell completely in love. He didn’t have anything with him to offer her except for his lunch. So he offered her a slice of bread that he had with him. Then she took a crumb, tasted it and said, “This is too hard, not interested.” And the three women went back in the lake.

That night, he baked a new loaf of bread, but he didn’t over-bake it this time. So it wasn’t so hard. He went to the same place with his flock of sheep. The three women appeared. When he offered the lead woman and she took a tiny bit, she said, “This is too soft, not interested.” They went back into the lake.

That night he was really careful about how he baked the bread. Next day, the same thing happens. He offers the bread. She says, “Okay, it’s baked properly this time. What do you want?” And he said, “I love you. I’d like to marry you.” She says, “Okay, but there’s one thing. You hit me three times without reason I will leave you. You will never see me again.” He said, “Don’t worry about that. I love you. I’m not ever going to hit you.”

So she comes home with him and in some strange way, he starts to prosper, his herds, flock of sheep. And many lambs. They have two very healthy sons and everything’s very happy. With his growing wealth he’s able to buy a horse, a carriage.

One day they’re invited to dinner at some friends. And they’re meant to be there at a certain time and it’s getting late, and he says, “Come on. We need to get going.” She says, “I’ll be right there.” So he goes out to the carriage and he’s holding the horses when she comes out, and just as she’s about to get into the carriage, she says, “Oh, I need to get my gloves.” And he taps her with the reins and says, “Well, hurry would you. Just get your gloves. We’re going to be late.”

So she goes and gets her gloves and they get in the car. And as they’re driving, she says to him, “That was once. Take care of not to do that again. You are concerned with the social niceties. It doesn’t matter for a few minutes late, there was no reason for you to hit me.” He takes note.

Sometime later, they’re at the wedding of some friends and during the wedding, she’s crying and crying. Everybody else is laughing and joyous. She’s crying. He taps her on the shoulder and says, “Don’t cry. It doesn’t look good.” Then she looks him straight in the eye and says, “I’m crying because you know how much suffering they’re going to experience. And that was the second time. Be very careful because if there’s a third time, as I said, I will leave you.”

And sometime later they’re at a funeral and everybody there is crying and she’s laughing and joyful. He taps her on the shoulder and says, “Please don’t laugh. It looks bad.” Then she looks at him and said, “I’m laughing because he’s now free of the pain of ordinary existence. That you’ve hit me a third time without any reason. So I leave you now.” And she left and he never saw her again.

When her two sons were grown, she and her two companions came and gave them many gifts and they became great healers. But the shepherd, he never saw his wife again.

This happens to us all the time. We never notice it.

Exercise: running the gauntlet


Ken: So now we’re going to do another exercise. This is strictly on a volunteer basis. I need 12 people.

One. Please stand up here. Just come forward. Valerie, just come forward. Okay. I need two more people. Okay. We have 12. Okay. Let’s clear out the center of the room. And you two people form a line. Six on one side. Six on the other. Okay.

No, I think lengthwise will be best. Six on one side. Six on the other. Okay. Stand up. Certainly in a straight line, please. Okay. A little closer, a little closer together. Not quite that close. A little farther apart. Okay. Now any of you may volunteer to run the gauntlet. These people are not going to do anything. They’re just going to stand there. You’re going to start at that end. The freedom is at this end. And you walk down. Who wants to do it?

Student: Did you say walk or run?

Ken: Yes. But feel it. If you’re actually intent on freedom, would you be looking at them? Jim, if you were intent on freedom, would you be looking at them?

Jim: I wasn´t afraid of the situation.

Ken: Okay. Do it again.

Jim: Same way?

Ken: Mm-hmm.

Okay. Anybody else?

Okay. Do it again Christina. Actually be in the experience this time.

Okay. Anybody else? Stephanie?

Do it again. Half speed. Do it once more. Now did you feel fear that time? Okay. So establish your presence and do it.

How was that? That feel different to you in line? What was different? Please hand the microphone.

Student: I could feel energy coming from her that said, “I’m somebody—don’t mess with me.”

Ken: Okay. Anybody else standing in line? What did you experience?

Student: She felt strong. I felt strength and she felt equal.

Ken: Ok. Guy?

Guy: I had the feeling she was accepting whatever was going to happen.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else want to run the gauntlet? Including any of you who are in the line? So could we have three replacements for them please? Okay. Now you walk down this with the feeling that your life, your body, is on the line with each step and you are intent on the experience of freedom. Laura. Okay. Sophie. Do it again Sophie. And be completely in your body with everything that is going on. Nowhere else.

You’re aware of everything. You don’t have to look at anything because you are aware of everything. Take as long as you need to settle right into your body, and feel the ground with each step. Don’t look down. Yes. How was that? Okay. Betty. Take as long as you need to settle. Take a microphone. What did you experience?

Betty: Waves, bounces, waves, and sort of vibration in my own body. I don’t know.

Ken: Okay, good. Betty, could you take his place? I’ll take that. Again Alex, from that end, this time in your body, please. You don’t need to look at anything because you are aware of everything. How was that?

Alex: There was a tremor around my heart.

Ken: Okay. That’s the wound. Good. Anybody else? Guy. Don’t look down. Want to do it again? You notice the tendency for people to look down. Might explore that. What’s going on there? What was different?

Guy: It was just like that issue of acceleration or opening, being energized by what’s coming at you, rather than … letting that fuel awareness rather than reactivity or closing.

Ken: Good. Yep. Anybody else? More and more as time goes by. Settle into the center of your body Janet. Let your weight sink into your feet. Jeff, do you want to help her? How are you doing? The microphone is right here.

Student: I feel inside out.

Ken: Yeah. That’s about right. Very good. Who’s next? Someone take Carolyn’s place please. Thank you, Alex. Okay. Anybody else? Okay. Valerie and Kerry and Patsy. So we need two people up here, please. Right there Guy. Valerie?

Valerie: It’s odd because I had many more open-hearted emotional feelings when I was standing here. And although I thought at the beginning I opened, it was all pretty even walking down the line.

Ken: Do it again. This time, open to everything. Please. Was that different?

Valerie: It was, it was different. And I felt a huge surge of energy come out here.

Ken: Okay. This is what’s involved in being present in action. Ok. Carrie? Okay. Good. Patsy? He’s right here. Want to do it again? What did you do this time to avoid feeling it? Whatever you did, don’t do it this time. No, it’s not about doing it right? You could sense it yourself.

Student: I´m speechless.

Ken: You’re speechless. Okay. All right. Thank you all. Oh, yes. Peter. Want to do it again?

Peter: Yeah.

Ken: You wanted a word of advice from Jeff? How was that?

Peter: I’m not, I know I’m not feeling anything in a way. The first time I just felt a sense of complete overwhelm, a rush. This time I felt just, just plain.

Ken: Okay. Guy.

Guy: It feels to me as if the more present someone is the less I feel. I don’t know if that’s true.

Ken: Thank you all very much. Another time we’ll juice that exercise up that as you walk by, if people feel you’re not present, they’ll touch you on the shoulder. But for now that was enough. Jeff.

Jeff: I’ve been aware for a long time of a peculiar postural arrangement that I see in a tremendous number of people. This gave me a lot of information watching. Some of what I saw was I think a lot of us go through situations, very bravely that are on some level really frightening, but we go through them in a variation of this, not necessarily so extreme. We leave our heart behind and we try to push our way through it. This allows us to not feel what the cost of trying to do, what we wish to do might be. So here, and this is an exaggeration—

Ken: Not too much actually.

Jeff: But your heart, your chest is retreating away from where you’re going. And you, you go forward with your intention, your thoughts.

Ken: In effect you’re trying to protect your heart.

Jeff: And working with the person that has done that for a long period of time, the bone, the sternum bone, and the way the ribs attach, hardens. And it becomes like a plate and won’t move anymore. That’s quite interesting. That frequently is a piece of it. I mean, this would be a real exaggeration carrying it through.

I had the experience of when I was working in Colorado, a client came, who had been on I think eight different narcotics. He was in so much pain for about five years. He came in, hobbling on a walker, big tall guy, about 40 years old. And he’d gone the medical route and it hadn’t helped him. And he somehow come across Feldenkrais on the web and decided to try it and see if it would help him.

It was the first time I saw him and I got these ideas and I very gently, you know, tried to move, I think, a shoulder or something. And he went into an a whole body seizure. And he’s crying. He’s in so much pain. And I’m going, “Oh, shit!” Because I could really feel just how horrifying this was for him. But I had to stay right there. He was coming for my help and feel that, and then try something else. I tried something else. Same thing happened. And I was even gentler. I eventually tried rotating his little finger to see if he could differentiate. No. Whole body seizure.

I ended up working with this man for a number of months and he found great improvement, but every time I see him, it is frightening to me because the results of my actions are so huge. Big pain right there. What I did on some level initiated it, at least at this moment. And yet my intention is to do my best to help this person.

So that’s what you do when you show up in the situation, when you show up in your heart and you open to what happens when you act. Sometimes it is really, really serious.

So just like a lot of you, probably most of you discovered when you walked through the gauntlet, you wanted to get to the other side. In order to be present in the experience you felt something. So showing up in the heart is essential for staying with your intention as situations change. You have to keep feeling what’s going on, keep feeling what’s going on. If you don’t feel it you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know what’s going on in yourself at least. And probably don’t know what’s going on in the situation. Yes.

Ken: Pat.

Discerning intention and results


Pat: If you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know how you’re holding yourself. Just if you don’t know what’s going on, and if you were holding yourself different, what was going on might be different. I don’t know if I’m making sense here, but the question I’m trying to ask is when you’re unconscious about certain things, what’s the shift, how do you shift into the consciousness about that?

Jeff: Well, that’s what we’re doing here, which is not being glib. It’s on some level, you know that you’re not doing something, or you didn’t get to the four immeasurables retreat. And that’s a very good question. I mean it somehow has to be brought to your attention.

Student: But can I ask at another level? Do each of us have a little pinky thing that, that a little alarm bell that could go off where there’s a little reminder that a cue, a red flag, where you can come to awareness? Is there a body message that helps you get back into awareness?

Jeff: All the time. Yet it’s usually fairly subtle. So we have to train ourselves to be aware of it. That’s why, I mean, we’ve been emphasizing over and over again, come back to your actual experience in your body.

Ken: And then to add to that. What we’re introducing here is a way which you can start to train, practice. The first indication that most people have, that what they’re doing isn’t being effective is that what they get as a result is different from what they intend. Are you with me? So what you get as a result is different from what you intend. I’m going to do this because it’s going to bring this result and you do this and you get something else. That’s the first indication that something is amiss.

Now what happens with an awful lot of people is they blame what’s out there. And what we’re saying is when the result is different from your intention, start paying attention to what you are doing. Start getting curious about that. And that’s going to lead you more and more into your experience. And you saw that happening with this gauntlet exercise, because someone would walk down and I could tell by the way they were walking and by the way, the way that they were moving at the end, that it was different from their intention. And I would just say, do you want to do it again? And they would say, “Yes,” because they’d recognize that. You follow? I didn’t have to say what it was. They knew that something was amiss.

So they come back and then Jeff stepped in and gave them some ideas about how to be in the experience differently, through little configurations or changing the relationship with the body in some way. And then they do it again. And then it was either closer or it was where they intended or how they intended. So this business of paying very close attention to what’s my intention, what’s the result. When there’s a discrepancy, get curious.

Jeff: It’s training yourself to notice differences on any level. So if you can’t tell the difference … I mean, on a gross level, we know that we put your hand on the burner, it hurts. We can tell that difference. When it comes down to actions where the difference is subtler and subtler, your level of attention needs to be finer and finer, your ability to discriminate between your intention and actually what happens. That makes sense?

Student: So how to recognize it and not get involved in the bad result? I was hoping you were going to give me that cue Jeff.

Jeff: Yeah. I saw this person the other day, who finally admitted that she was coming to me for a magic bean. And I had to admit, I had none, and that the only way she was going to get what she wanted was to begin paying attention. Practicing over here, so that when you’re in that complex situation, you begin to be able to notice. Trying to do it, you know, magically, you know, neuro-linguistic programming has anchors they can set and stuff like that, and I’ve never seen it work. It doesn’t work. In a complex situation, you have to have trained someplace else to foster that capacity and the know-how that you can do it when it gets more complex.

Ken: You need to move to the story.

Student: Jeff, I just want to make sure I understand the point of your pinky person’s story. Okay. Are you saying that because you were present, this person was able to trust you and was willing to stay there in spite of having repeated experiences of extreme pain, or that because you were present, you realized that you needed to back off dramatically in what you were doing. But then in the latter case, as a professional, wouldn’t you have done that, whether you were present or not.

Ken: Not exactly how I know some professionals work.

Jeff: No. I mean, no. A lot of professionals cause pain over and over again, and they just think that the person is either a wimp or that’s just what you pay.

I have no idea about the first, whether that caused them to trust it more. His experience had been that he was always caused pain. And I told him that if he experienced pain, that was not a good idea. We’re going to do something different. So he had that level of trust.

But for me, it was being willing to feel the result of my actions, to help me find a thread. And finding a thread is sometimes all we can hope for. We had to find a thread that will lead us through. We can’t expect to know how to get from here to there. We start and we follow the thread through.

Ken: And what Jeff I think is saying here is we find that by paying complete attention to our own experience, not trying to figure out what to do out there. You’ll find the answers in our own experience. Is that right?

Jeff: Exactly. Yes.

Ken: David, do you have a question?

David: I was just wondering about a situation with the same exercise, but where the parties that formed the gauntlet have negativity toward the person moving through and what that says about … I often think in exercises like this, about what if you’re working with prisoners, for example. What would the difference be for the person who’s going through the gauntlet? Because there’s this sense of shielding that occurs as well as awareness, that maybe, we can’t accept just the raw stuff.

Jeff: That’s too hypothetical for me. I think from … in order to hit my chest, again, I’d have to be in this situation with something like prisoners to be able to have an idea about that. I did wonder what if the postures of the people forming the gauntlet had changed? What would that have done? That might’ve amplified it too much.

Ken: This is the first time we tried this exercise. It’s all Carolyn’s fault. She gave me the idea from our discussion this morning. So you can blame her. We thought it would be a way of getting another level of attention into it. Now there are several ways we could take this exercise and develop it, but when I’m trying a new exercise, I like to keep the energy at the basic level until I have some idea of what’s going on. Because I didn’t really know.

David: I just want to add that I thought it was a very, very informative exercise because it’s so complex what you’re encountering. And that’s often what happens in life, in daily life, when suddenly you encounter a very complex situation in terms of the number of people and therefore the number of triggers for projection. And I found it very, very informative that way. My two cents.

Ken: Stephanie?

Stephanie: Yeah, it was very powerful to walk through it, especially the third time when I was there, but it was equally powerful to be part of the line because I tried to set an intention as each person came through almost to be in that role of the gauntlet, of the judge. Should this person pass or not. And I found myself reading them and them telling me what my answer would be. There were some I let through for pity. There are some I let through going, “Oh yeah, you were right.” You know, we physically let everyone through, but I had a different stance with each one and it was what they told me.

Ken: Yeah.

Stephanie: That was very powerful.

Ken: Jeff. We’re going into supper time now.

The White Bird: part 3


Jeff: We are going to have a before-supper story. So coming back to the white bird story. This episode, you might begin to notice relates more and more to what we’ve been doing. If you hadn’t noticed before. I think we left off that the prince upon his horse had been galloping along and had come to a vast desert with nothing in it but the bones of others before him who had tried to get to the tree of happiness.

Fortunately he had his horse and the horse knew the way. And it continued to gallop right across that desert. And they traveled for a time going across that desert, the bones all around. Until finally, he saw that they were approaching a large tree, which he recognized must be the tree of happiness. And as he got closer, he noticed that there were three huge giants at the foot of it. And each one of them had a giant club with spikes in the end. They were asleep. He was wondering what to do about this. I mean, there was that tree and there was the fruit. And there was these huge giants between him and the fruit.

So he took out his book of knowledge and opened to a page. And it said, “Fear not the giants for they will not awake, but do not take the gold fruit or the silver fruit for they’re not for you.” He closed the book. “Yeah. Okay. That makes sense to me.” And he walked up to the tree and as he got there, he looked up at a beautiful gold, translucent apple, and nearby was a wonderful silver apple. Then there was a shriveled, gnarly old apple that looked dead.

He looked at that and he thought, “Oh, I haven’t come all this way to just have a dead fruit. Surely the gold fruit is the one for me.” So he reached up and he plucked the gold fruit. Then the tree started, started to shout, “Help! Help! He’s picking our fruit. Help! Help!” And the giants jumped up and they whipped up their clubs and they were advancing, ready to pound him into smithereens. And he began to pray and beg and beg and pray.

The biggest giant said, “Wait. Okay. Wait, wait. If you will bring us the sword of brightness that shines in the dark and cuts through whatever its edges is turned against, we will not only spare your life, we’ll give you fruit from the tree of happiness.”

Well, the prince didn’t argue. He took the deal. He went behind the hill and pulled out his barley straw and threw his leg over it. His horse appeared. “Take me to where I can find the fruit of the tree of happiness.” “Excuse me. We’re already there.” “The bright sword that shines in the dark and cuts through whatsoever its edge turned against.” And off they thundered.

Let’s have dinner.

Ken: As you can see, we wield power in virtually everything that we do. As I said this morning, when you’re serving food, when you’re eating food, when you’re opening a door, be right in the experience. Do you open the door with more force than necessary? Do you close it with more force than necessary? Sit down, move a bench, pick up a kettle. All of these things. Let the environment become alive and just, as Stephanie and others were explaining, let the environment inform you where you are so that every time you act with intention, it’s actually the result you intended and not something different. Okay.