One Dojo Gym exercise

Feminines as feminines:

Tend towards being ignored

Tend towards being unwilling to own their desires

Tend towards being unwilling to fight to be engaged with as they want to be engaged with.

With the “tends towards being ignored”, the first bit was, “To ignore something, you first have to see it.” So, if you don’t know something is, you can’t be ignoring it.

Which is kind of interesting twist, “Am I being ignored or do they not know that this is here.”

In Dojo, knowing your audience is pretty important.

So, I’m over here.

I’m a feminine.

There is this hypothesis that I tend towards being ignored.

From a Dojo perspective, that is both internal and external, I tends towards ignoring myself and I tend towards others ignoring me.

Stepping into Dojo, “I want my life to be different. I do not want this tendency towards ignoring to be a major player in my life.”

Now we have to break down this ignoring dynamic and see what there is to work with, how do we actually construct exercises that will put us in the place where this pattern kicks up so that we can both stop it from happening and create something to take it’s place. From a Dojo perspective, you just can’t stop the undesired thing from happening, you have to create something to take it’s place.

For the dynamic of ignoring to take place, something first has to be noticed.

Ok.

This is actually what we did last night in their Dojo Gym.

They are a couple, feminine and masculine, and this is an identified dynamic with the feminine.

So, what is something that you feel ignored about?

I want to live in a cleaner, tidier house.

Ok. Addressing the whole house might be too big of a bite. Can you go smaller?

“Making the bed.”

“Great. Easy. Fast. Very evident if it’s been done or not. So him making the bed every day?”

“Sure.”

“But what time?”

We danced around with that for a bit before settling on 0800.

So, she looked at him and was very clear, “Make the bed by 0800 every morning.”

And he agrees.

So we know that if it doesn’t happen, it’s (from her perspective) due to him ignoring her and not him not knowing. 

Ok. That’s the set up.

The workout is that he is going to accomplish the desire for two days.

On the third day, he is not going to.

He is going to ignore her request.

And she is going to walk into the bedroom at 0801, see that she has been ignored and proceed to lose her shit.

The theory is that the pattern is not only about the being ignored but what happens after that. Since patterns are usually laid down at a very early age, how do we bring up the worse-case scenario and not engage with the old pattern, engage with the circumstances from a new perspective.

She could identify with “loosing her shit and having very bad things happen so that I learned never to lose my shit.”

What’s the worse-case scenario if you are being ignored?

“Losing my shit.”

So let’s set up an exercise where you get to trigger the pattern, feel the pattern wanting to do it’s thing and you do the thing that it’s so not wanting to have happen. You get to demonstrate to your selves that now is not then. Patterns tend towards “believing” that now is then, that the trigger that is happening now is happening in the same environment when the pattern was laid down.

So, we will see what happens.

He’s making the bed today.

He’s making the bed tomorrow.

Saturday, he’s not.

The Dojo theory is that once she loses her shit AND the dreaded consequences don’t happen, there will be more room around the issue of “being ignored”, that we can bring more different kinds of nuances and exercises around it.

Being ignored will no longer be the threat of a three-alarm fire, setting off the threat response.

Being ignored will be a thing that she will learn to deal with in a variety of ways, possibly very different from her threat response that is operational now.

I like the exercise because it’s very simple, very black and white, not a lot of moving parts.

She has a chance to dive deep into her response.

What is being worked is her relationship to her meaning-makings.

She is no longer in the house that she was raised in.

Her parents are no longer here.

Can she not-hide her personal reality that she learned to hide from them?

Can she free herself from the historical meaning-making chains around this one thing?

As with all exercises, there is a learning curve.

She can come back, maybe 5 or 6 times, and ramp it up.

I do not think that she is going to touch bottom on her first attempt.

Sometimes it happens. 


I don’t encourage planning for that to happen.

Know when you’re running out of air and get your ass back to the surface.

Stop doing the ado-masc thing about getting as close as you can to failure and then, pulling it off, "proving how awesome you are".



It’s a crap way of being human.

It’s a crap way of being in relationship.