I haven't formally announced it yet, but I'm rebranding, going back to the name the work had a couple years ago: 9JOYS. And I'm developing a much stronger video facilitation program for the new website. There's now enough of it running that I've taken down the video facilitation here on this site. Please go try it out. The 9JOYS Practice Interactive Video Facilitation.

What happens when you combine the transformative imagery of Tangible Minds with the opportunity to move your body any way it wants? Let's find out!

Hello friends,

I've got a great class coming up in June, combining the transformative imagery of Tangible Minds with improvisational dance practice. I'm calling it Soul Juice. Here's what you can expect. Details are at the bottom.

In each class, you'll choose to explore one feeling state you'd like to express in movement. I'll lead you through the Tangible Minds mapping practice with that feeling. As a result, your experience of the feeling will be more vivid and tangible. You'll use that image and your heightened access to the feeling to inspire authentic movement.

Then, we'll transform the original feeling, again through the Tangible Minds practice. You'll move again, inspired by the new feeling state. Finally, you'll explore the movement space between the two feelings. You'll find a freedom in being able to move at will between darkness and light.

This is a great opportunity to embody the Tangible Minds practice. It is also an opportunity for dancers to add more soul to their dance, whether free-form ecstatic-type dancing or choreographed or improvisational performance.

If you're wondering about my dance experience, I've been dancing since 1987, performed in Philadelphia with Group Motion and Ausdruckstanz, and have been studying improvisation in Seattle since 1994. I'm really excited to blend these two passions in this new class.

Soul Juice

Monday evenings in June (2-30)
6:00-7:30pm
Velocity Dance Center, Studio 3
915 E Pine St, 3rd floor

The class is part of Dance Art Group's "Movement Arts Research" series, and I feel honored and excited to be making my debut as a teacher in the Seattle dance community. This is a class I've been mulling over for years, and it's finally going to happen thanks to my friends John Dixon and Lila Hurwitz who encouraged me to just do it.

In the early days of developing this work I stumbled upon a perplexing discovery.

I asked one of my clients to focus on the felt sense of her “witness,” the part of her that was consistently present as she turned her attention to mapping one feeling state after another. She mapped this witness just as easily as an ordinary feeling state, with a distinct location, size and shape, texture and weight, color and temperature. She said it felt like “me.” Interesting.

Curious, I asked her to go a step further. I had her focus on the feeling she held when mapping the witness. I arbitrarily called it the “watcher.” I was surprised when she easily mapped this second level as well. OK, I wondered, how far could she go with this?

She hit the limit with the third level. When I asked her to describe the feeling she held when mapping the watcher, she went blank and took on a profoundly serene visage. When I prompted her to describe her sensation, she just shook her head.

“It’s like god or something,” she said, “there’s no way to describe it.”

Whoa, I wasn’t expecting that! And to be honest, I wasn’t ready to turn this work in the direction of spirituality. There was too much more to be done in studying ordinary feeling states.

So I stopped asking people to map these witness states for the next decade. But the question always lurked. What was that? And was it important?

Recently I’ve come back to the question and begun mapping witness states again. And with all the hard work I’ve done in the meantime, I can now understand their central importance. Here is what I am finding.

• The First Witness is our front-row seat on life. It allows us to observe our full experience in perspective and avoid getting pulled into one emotion or another. It enables us to choose where to focus our attention and feed the positive rather than be ruled by the negative.
• The Second Witness is our source of guidance and holds the wisdom of our highest good. It can not only see what is, but it can envision what wants to be because it can connect to our ideal self. When we have access to a strong Second Witness, we become proactive creators of our lives instead of passive victims at the mercy of circumstance.
• The Third Witness is our connection to universal consciousness. This is the awareness sought by all spiritual and meditation practices, and grants the felt experience of oneness with all of life.

All three of these Witness states are easily accessible through the Tangible Mapping process. For those of you who haven’t experienced it yet, Tangible Mapping is a way of asking questions about the inner sensations of your feeling mind. Questions about location, size and shape, color and temperature, texture and weight, sound and movement call to mind very concrete, tangible images representing even the most nebulous feeling state.

The tangibility these questions bring to your feelings allow you to interact more easily with them, freeing you from old patterns and accellerating your learning and growth. Mapping the actual, felt experience of these Witness selves is a particular focus of the work which can enhance and strengthen any personal growth work you might already be doing.

For my clients, applying the Tangible Mapping process to the Witness states has been the single most life-changing event in their work with me. Their capacity for reflection and self-direction leaps forward. They gain a detachment from their ongoing emotions-in-the-moment. And they take on a fascination with their own growth as well as a strong sense of empowerment.

The Tangible Witness work can be a great foundation for any practice. This is true whether your path involves meditation, creative or performing arts, martial arts, devotional prayer, ecstatic dance, athletic competition, wilderness contemplation, parenting, tantra, or psychotherapy. Having direct access to the three witness selves bumps your practice up to the next level of satisfaction and performance.

Being able to willingly access the objectivity of the First Witness, the vision of the Second Witness, and the transcendence of the Third Witness means you’ll be able to apply everything else you’ve learned in your practice with far greater mastery. And if you’re just starting, no matter what path you are choosing, Tangible Witness work will put you far ahead of your novice peers.

Even if you aren’t pursuing any particular practice, Tangible Witness work makes everyday life easier to navigate. As one of my clients put it, when you recognize and have access to the single source for all that is good in your life, it puts everything else in perspective.

• You’ll stop biting the hooks other people put out, and keep yourself from getting all worked up over other people’s issues.
• You’ll avoid falling into old traps of frustrating interaction. Instead, you’ll notice the pattern and make different choices about how to engage.
• You’ll catch yourself in negative self-talk, and be able to turn your attention to what you’re grateful for and aspiring to.
• There are many more ways you’ll find benefit, depending on your unique challenges.

There are so many ways to apply this work, and I am excited to share it with all of you. So I’ve cooked up a class series that anyone can afford, and will be offering it at several different times to accommodate any schedule.

Ghandi said, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." — But how are we to do that?

One part of you wants to fight against injustice. Another part prefers to lie low and stay out of the fray. Both parts frame life as a battle.

So how can you contribute peace to the world when your very soul is divided in conflict?

This is a conundrum which has defined human history, so ingrained that we fail to recognize its power over our lives. And so the harder we try, the more pain and confusion we seem to propagate. The discovery of the feeling mind resolves this paradox.

A single person's feeling mind is more powerful than all the logic and analysis on the planet.

The feeling mind absorbs conflict in childhood, taking the shape of that conflict into its own structure. In adulthood, it then magnifies and projects that conflict into its surroundings. The feeling mind uses logic for justification, but its fundamental motivation is to project a mirror of itself into the world. When this power is unconscious, it can devastate personal lives and wreak havoc opon the entire global community.

When we bring conscious awareness to the feeling mind, however, it reveals itself as an indomitable force for good. By placing attention on the actual felt experience of rage, terror, or despair, and inviting that part of us to reconnect with the wholeness it desperately wants, the feeling states transform. They remember their original states of peace, safety, and joy and in remembering, they awaken to their potential as a creative force.

In this awakening, the feeling mind naturally and spontaneously aligns itself with personal truth, integrity, and creativity. It becomes a force for good, resolving conflict instead of causing it, contributing peace in every action, every communication, every expression.

We can each one of us become this creative force, simply by awakening the feeling mind within us. Together, we can apply the natural wisdom of the feeling mind to transforming the world, bringing a new era of equality, sustainability, and harmony to the planet.

Until now, the feeling mind has remained obscure to us. Over the centuries it has been brushed aside, romanticized, or misinterpreted. Today through the introduction of a simple practice of awareness called feelingwork, the intimate structure of the feeling mind has been revealed in all its elegance.

This website is dedicated to the proliferation of the new wisdom of feelingwork in the service of personal truth and global transformation. Please enjoy the benefits in your own life, and spread the word.

So let me tell you succinctly about the full scope of Tangible Mastery.

1. Tangible Mastery is sacred work. The feeling mind is the raw material out of which the world's great spiritual teachings are crafted. Tangible Mastery takes you face to face with the awesome grandeur of life and the profound nature of your own soul, without regard to your particular spiritual beliefs or lack of them.

2. Tangible Mastery is a life practice. Through Tangible Mastery, you learn to know yourself. As a teacher, I facilitate that learning with gentle questions that lead you into the magnificence of your own feeling mind. This work goes beyond coaching or therapy into a realm that transcends "issues" and offers deep, personal meaning.

3. As a practice, Tangible Mastery is a foundation for all other practices. No matter what your spiritual or personal growth path, Tangible Mastery clarifies and grounds your core experience, helping you enhance the effectiveness of your chosen practice.

4. Tangible Mastery is peace work. When you resolve and integrate the conflicts you hold within yourself, you "unhook" yourself from the conflicts around you. You become an instrument of peace, wherever you are.

5. Tangible Mastery is a radical retelling of the human story. Your feeling mind remembers your original state of wholeness. Tangible Mastery takes you back to that state, and helps you remember that your deepest nature is pure goodness. When you fully experience that, you will no longer be able to buy into the idea that humans are flawed beings.

6. Tangible Mastery is universal. Every person on the planet shares embodiment. Because Tangible Mastery casts the essential values of all humans in the universal terms of actual, felt experiences of being, this work offers a potential vehicle for bridging differences and spreading peace around the world.

There's more here than we can explore for the next several lifetimes, and more potential for good than we can imagine in our wildest dreams. Dive in with me, will you?

Any time you’re feeling distressed, take a quiet moment to ask yourself these three questions:

1. What am I feeling? (Name it, notice the actual felt experience qualities.)
2. What does this part of me want to feel instead? (Allow an inner shift, notice the difference.)
3. What does this part of me want me to know? (Information about your needs, desires, possibilities.)
   
   Optional: What else am I feeling? (Go back to the beginning and repeat the series.)

Use these three questions multiple times a day, whenever you feel something that disrupts your balance. If you need to, print it out and keep it with you (see the little print button below). These three shifts of awareness follow the pattern of healthy functioning for feelings. It’s how they’re meant to serve us:

1. Pay attention to current reality.
2. Access desired reality.
3. Move to close the gap.

Enjoy!

Take any dysfunctional human relationship, from the one between you and your mom to the relationship between the US and the Taliban, and you can find one single fear that binds them. What is that fear? It is the fear of others' irrationality.

We operate with this idea that a safe person is one who is consistent. That if a person says he believes one thing, he believes that thing but never its opposite.  If he says he wants to do something, it's not an option for him not to want to do it. But there's a problem with this idea.

The problem is that we actually are far from consistent. The fact is, the feeling mind is made of distinct, interactive parts or nodes. Each single one has its own view of the world, and very often different parts of a person hold different ideas, perceptions, beliefs, motivations, and feelings. This is a perfectly natural thing. 

But because we cling to the unreasonable expectation that a person be completely consistent, several things happen to sabotage relationships:

1. We hide parts of ourselves which might be perceived to be inconsistent or irrational. So we are never fully present to our lover, our business partner, our friend, our enemy.
2. In order to maintain our own self-perception of consistency, we hide inconsistent parts from ourselves. So our fears, frustrations, or over-enthusiasms with the relationship get buried. And when they get buried, they have a habit of getting back at us. They pull the strings on our thoughts and behavior from behind the curtain, and we find ourselves acting irrationally, and wondering why.
3. When we see the other person acting inconsistently, we judge them and remove ourselves from engagement with them. Or we condemn them and force them to back away from us. We bring a great deal of energy to this because of the intensity of the effort we must apply to hold ourselves in check. "If I'm going to be consistent," we say, "they better well be consistent too."
4. Whenever irrationality shows up in either ourselves or the other, it raises our anxiety. With that raised anxiety, whether conscious or not, comes increased control. We try to lock things down, keep them under wraps. We avoid certain topics of conversation, keep from getting too close, stockpile our options to escape out the back door.

What's the solution?

The solution is to embrace the multiplicity of the self.

1. Assume that whatever a person says, it is also possible that its opposite may be true.
   
   
2. Ask the question of yourself and others, "What else...?" You can complete this question with just about anything:
   
   "What else are you thinking?"
   "What else do you believe?"
   "What else are you feeling?"
   "How else do you see that?"
   
   You might consider softening the question with language like the following:
   
   "I'm wondering if you have any other feelings about this?"
   "Is there any other part of you which has an opinion about this?"
   
   And some further variations include these:
   
   Is there something else you want?
   Is there anything else we should consider?
   Is that all?
   Tell me more...
   
   
3. Lead by example. Use phrases like, "One part of me wants A, but another part of me thinks B would be better." The more you can reveal yourself as a manifold self, the more the other person will feel comfortable being open to their own inner diversity. 

You will find that when you open up an invitation to others to include more parts of themselves, they will begin to feel safer with you. They will start to feel ok sharing more of themselves with you. And in combination with you revealing more of yourself, together you will create more closeness, more trust, and more consciousness in the relationship.

So go forth, armed with these two powerful words, "What else...?" and spread the harmony. It's a good thing to keep in mind during the holidays and beyond.