My partner Caitlin is a master of compassionate inquiry. For years she has been working with Byron Katie’s work, using it with herself, in her coaching practice and with our family. She was recently interviewed for Byron Katie’s next book on how the work has changed her parenting, and that interview appeared today on Katie’s website.
A bonus she has discovered in her new way of being is that her children involve her more in their processes. They trust her to be present and simply curious with them about whatever they’re dealing with. Together, they come up with ideas and create solutions to problems and conflicts. “They know I’m with them–present in the moment and not gone, lost in all those thoughts as I search for my Parenting Plan and Theory…In that clear place we can really hear each other and connect, and there are so many more options and possibilities.”
It’s what we try to do daily with our kids and also in working with clients.
[tags]Byron Katie, Caitlin Frost, parenting[/tags]
“We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy and the one facing what we do to the enemy.”
–Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road, p. 301
Three Day Road is about two Oji-Cree soldiers who fight for Canada in the first world war. They survive the fight with the enemy on the battlefield, but they lose the war to the other enemy, the one that lurks on the inner front.
It is only *I* that holds others as “enemies.” No one is born into this world as my enemy. I create that story. My prejudices are my own, whether they appear to be generated by others or not. How do I know this is true? Because not everyone treats everyone else the same way.
In my martial arts training, we speak of our “enemies” as opponents. We offer respect to our opponents by bowing to them because having an opponent helps us to discern our real enemies – our thinking. It is very difficult to best an opponent if you think of that person as an enemy. To fight and survive you must be clear. You must be engaged with what is happening, not your story of what is happening. The moment you forget this is the moment you stop fighting your opponent and start fighting your enemy and is the moment your opponent has beaten you. Truly, you have beaten yourself. A bout with an opponent, whether it is in dialogue or in the dojang, should lead us back to confronting our enemies and they, as Pogo said, are us.
There is no relationship between winning or losing on the mat and in the mind. You can lose a bout on the mat but overcome one more prejudice in the mind. And, like Boyden’s characters, you can win on the mat but what is unconfronted in the mind will destroy you. For me, peace is the when I eliminate my true enemies – the thinking that imprisons me. And so, I bow to my opponents for their helping me discover what it is I need to confront in myself.
There is something ineffable about being held in a space that is hosted. One of the key things that simply can’t be taught in any facilitation training is “presence.” It’s possible to talk about it, to model it and even to help others connect with it, but you can’t transmit it. It is not a technical piece. It is a practice.
I make a lot of connections between hosting practice and martial arts practice. Today, looking through some of the handful of martial arts weblogs I read, I discovered this post:
Regardless of how many years you’ve spent in the dojo, the possibility always exists that you’ll encounter something you’ve never seen before in your training. So how do you avoid this ugly scene before it happens? Believe it or not, this starts by how you present yourself to the world. If you appear arrogant and look for trouble, there’s no doubt you’ll find it. However, if you perceive yourself as a victim or a loser, you’ll end up for sure as someone’s target practice. The key is to combine equal amounts of humility and confidence that you have developed from your training into your daily life. Humility and confidence are the yin and yang of the martial artist’s persona. The great swordsman/strategist Miyamoto Musashi once said, “The warrior must make his warrior’s walk his everyday walk”. This is a quality of living that can’t be faked, and its essence can be felt even by strangers. I’ve read accounts of how martial artists should carry themselves in public; exuding grace, good posture and so on, but I believe that there’s an ineffability to the martial artist that goes beyond the physical.
You can discover more advice from Musashi in The Book of Five Rings. I’m always curious about how others describe this ineffable part of working with people. What’s your practice?
From a paper on Korean poetry comes this poem by Ko Un, “Ode to Shim-chong:”
Indangsu sea, shine dark blue,
come rising as a cloudlike drumbeat.
The waters, the sailors who know the waters, may know
the dark fate of the world beyond
that lies past the path that sometimes appears,
the weeping of children born into this world,
and the sailors may know my daughter’s path.
How can the waters exist without the world beyond?
Full-bodied fear
has now become the most yearned-for thing in the world,
and my daughter’s whimpering stillness in the lotus bud will be such;
might love be a bright world and my eyes be plunged in utter darkness?
Daughter, already now the waters’ own mother,
advance over the waters,
advance over the waters
like the mists that come dropping over the waters.
My daughter, advance and travel through every world.
Shine dark blue, Indangsu. Weep dark blue.
Are we not called to be in those waters, as sailors who know the dark fate of the world beyond, willing to stand in the full bodied fear that this world craves?
There is a lovely new translation of the Tao te Ching online, which I discovered thanks to the ever mercurial wood s lot. From the introduction to the Book of the Forest Path:
I am trying to accomplish a couple of things in the translation that follows. First of all, I have a particular philosophical interpretation of Taoism, and I am trying to see how far it can be reflected in a translation. I think it is not compatible with the translations I’ve seen. Second, I’ve tried to make it plain and cool English. My objection to the existing translations is basically philosophical and it is fundamental. I think the going translations (even the ones I like the most (Mitchell’s and Red Pine’s, for example)) still reflect a dualistic metaphysics. They take Taoism to privilege emptiness over existence, inaction over action, yin over yang, and so on. That is understandable and does emerge from the text. But I think the reasons for that are, from a certain view, historical accidents: they reflect a Taoism that is dedicated to a critique of Confucianism. Nevertheless the considered position of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu (another great Taoist sage) is that, finally, both yin and yang, both the world and the emptiness at its heart, must be approached with a perfect affirmation, and that they are, in fact, the same thing. I have tried to apply that insight – surely fundamental to Taoism, throughout the text. So, for example, the first chapter in my view just can’t possibly say that namelessness is good and naming bad, that desirelessness is good and desire bad, and so on. Such views would be more proper to Buddhism, for example.
In addition, the Tao Te Ching is an anarchist political text, and its radical attack on political authority and wealth have often been obscured by translators: I have tried to restore a sense of its pointed political critique, its direct attack on inequalities of wealth and power in ancient China.
Finally, I regard the work as more playful and aware of its paradoxes than most other translations make it out to be. There is a touch of irony, emerging in part from the self-awareness with which it says what it says cannot be said.
I never get tired of reading this book, in its myriad interpretations and translations. It is the best life guide I know of, and has the best sense of itself of any sacred text: what I am about to tell you is a teaching that cannot really be told. It exhorts us to practice.
My own version of the classic, The Tao of Holding Space, is free for you to download, and this summer I will be releasing a printed version as well.
[tags]taoism, tao te ching[/tags]