Dojo in times of crisis
/One of my favorite ways to entertain myself is to go meta with most anything.
Always looking at the specifics and asking myself, “How is this an example of a generalized something?”
I do it with all kinds of things and the most fun is with how humans be.
Reading and listening about the C-storm, “Certainly does seem like a crisis, on many levels, and in many different ways for people.”
I pause and go meta.
And what I land on is, “Oh, this is what Dojo does. But in a very narrow and focused kind of way.”
Then I take it one step further, “Oh, this is what any new learning is like.”
Basically, I’m presented with a situation that my BOS either can’t handle or that I don’t like the way that my BOS is handling or dancing with it.
For my BOS, it’s a crisis.
Depending on how my BOS evaluates or makes meaning of it, it can be as little as a minor irritant or it can big enough to send me into full-blown trauma response.
I can do what I normally do, follow the evaluation and decision-making of my BOS.
Which is what I think a lot of people are going to do with the C-storm. They are going to grit their teeth, stiffen up, make the best of it and, when it passes, will try to go back to business as usual.
Just as anyone can meditate in a temple, anyone can do something different in a crisis.
Or I can try to create a new way of being with the crisis.
I can actually put some new values, some new ways of doing things, some new vocabulary, some new skill sets into place and try to make them more solid than my old way of doing things.
Knowing that when the crisis is over, my BOS is going to do its damnedest to reassert itself and its reality.
In Dojo, the focus is on creating a crisis for your BOS.
One that you have constructed some ways of being that are outside your BOS’s frame so that you can bring a new way of being with THIS particular set of stimuli.
In light of that, we’ve put together an 8-week, online course.
Meets once a week, on a Wednesday, for two hours.
Each week, we will focus on a general human relational arena and create an individualized manageable crisis within that arena for each and every participant.
The areas are: Sex, Power, Relationship, Diet, Pleasure, and Avoidance.
On the webpage where the description is of the 8 weeks, there is “here is a general outline” that is a hyperlink that will give you the broad outline.
IT IS NOT SET IN CONCRETE.
And it’s pretty close.
I think it’s a really, really, really interesting time to examine what might either turn up as a constriction or a doorway within each of those areas.
Identify what the particular situation is that you’d like to be different in.
Identify how you’d like to be different.
Identify what skill sets you’d need to employ to have that different experience.
Identify how to titrate.
Set up the exercise.
Do the exercise.
Report in as to how it went.
Figure out how to change it up to get more of what you want.
Six different areas of your life where you get to experience what it’s like to own that this isn’t going how you want it to, identify how you would like it to go, create an exercise that possibly could lead in the direction that you want to go, execute the exercise, and evaluate the exercise.
My goal is to offer up the experience of crafting exercises in six different areas of your life in the hope that the physics of crafting exercises stays with you.