ridiculously long dreamwork post

over the last week i have had three dreams pointing to the value of something i called felt sense, a term from some therapeutic techniques from the 70s humanistic psychology movement

in the first i was being ignored and dissed at a tennis game (i was replaced while chasing down a ball) and then at a party in my own apartment...the interesting thing being how normal it all felt, which triggered a remembrance of what it was like growing up in my family...this is something i have been aware of in my memory, but having it come up in dreams brought a different vividness to the memory of feeling nearly invisible and generally unworthy of consideration, a quality allowing me to seamlessly connect a host of issues in my psyche, by way of this sense of feeling or felt sense

the second involved me leaving an army boot camp and being checked for ID i kept thinking i had, only to have the documents i handed over turn out to be a library card and other random stuff, prompting me to say to the guard, "Real ID is coming soon anyway...and i'll be elsewhere!", only to have her call my bluff on actually leaving the country, and hearing myself meekly admit "yeah probably"...this all reflects the powerlessness i often feel in regards to personal power in this increasingly fascist society, and in particular a recent NPR report lauding our NM senators for assuring us new mexicans we would be able to travel across state borders this holiday season despite being behind in our institution of national ID cards...now i want to make it clear this NPR report was real waking life and not a dream, but so bizarre i must have needed to process it in dreamworld, the most bizarre part being the unspoken understanding that i/we have all understood this is already happening and agreed to!...perhaps this is how the news works these days, as another avenue for big brother psy-ops, the felt sense of both this dream and report being a growingly familiar sense i could call cognitive dissonance

the third, last night, involved following on the heels of a leader i admired moving quickly up flights of stairs, helping a few others carry some of his furniture, and while i couldn't see his face, i think it was JFK, which was confirmed by the posters of him in my hand...the main aspect of the felt sense was an immense quality of internal support...it was profound to feel the presence of someone so committed to human progress, who i really hadn't been thinking about recently except in the general sense of seeking mentors and benevolent examples of authority, yet who i now feel more personally connected with...

the dream continued into a scene of him resting to pull out a flask to have a drink, his face had grown a little more hick-ish, with a beard like mine, so ironically resembling castro and che (who was a doc), the drink anyway represented his acceptance and even indulgence of his own shadows, and thus while surprising seemed no less leaderful, yet he was called to medic tent at that moment (like a scene from MASH) and so spilled his drink on cue on his shirt and collar, it being red likely symbolizing his assassination...so he instead of drinking, pulled a cig--a set of which he had magically stashed in his mouth between his cheek and gum...i think the felt sense here is my own need to claim both my own leadership and shadow in the midst of a growing relationship that offers so much but whose structure may challenge my expressing these particular core aspects of my own power

the dream turned nightmarish as hick-JFK was now driving a carriage with a horse whose legs were looking dangerously ready to tangle, and as my friend and fellow conspiracist jai and i watched, as JFK attempted to use a lance (like a knight?) the carriage reached a tunnel and mangled chopped up horses started flying around, and i couldn't look, so i ran to my room growing up, and tried to close the door which despite using a chair, pressed back open with a force i could not control, so as i screamed on my bed, jai came in agitatedly yelling "1/70th of a meter!", with my response of "yeah?" sounding incredibly wimpy like a sad broken child, and expressing the felt sense of powerlessness

and i woke--oddly to an NPR interview with wife Vicky about Ted Kennedy's autobiography and life--to think what was 1/70th about, and asked myself what happened in 1/70...along with it being the beginning of a new decade with the 60s being over, it was the month after my family moved to Seaford, and i was placed in the same bedroom with my younger sister, a situation that would last until i was 13, leading (i have realized through therapy and self-analysis) to a definitely repressed public expression of my sexual side, out of the safety and respect needs of those many years being in close quarters with my sister...the uncloseable door = unmet needs for privacy = missing self-empowerment particularly manifesting as codependent boundaries, which are all probably also coming up in terms of burgeoning relationship and the question of how to be myself within it

all of this helps to unlock one mystery of nonviolent communication practice--why it is sometimes profound and sometimes completely unmoving, the dialog level of human needs sometimes offering a deep window into what is going on inside for us (in my three dreams: respect, integrity, and support respectively), the difference between the mundane and profound experiences of nvc connection being whether we are just finding the words that match our experiences or finding the connections within--the felt sense--that those words point toward

rebuttal to Obama

In response to Obama's moral equivocation to the Nobel Peace Committee, philosophically justifying war by way of his position as commander-in-chief, along with calling on the official and false accounts of the September 11 attacks, one could certainly restate the overwhelming evidence of US Government complicity in those attacks.

Instead, I will turn it over to a letter I have come across, which I had not heretofore been aware of. It may have been the last letter ever written by Leo Tolstoy, and was sent to none other than the young Mohandas Gandhi. I feel his moral argument for the necessity of nonviolence, in means as well as ends, to be both emotionally moving and--in clearly spelling out the contradiction which Obama now perpetuates--intellectually profound.

[From letter to Mohandas Gandhi, 1910.] The longer I live, and especially now when I feel keenly the nearness of death, I want to tell others what I feel so particularly keenly about, and what in my opinion is of enormous importance, namely what is called non-resistance, but what is essentially nothing other than the teaching of love undistorted by false interpretations. The fact that love, i.e. the striving of human souls towards unity and the activity resulting from such striving, is the highest and only law of human life is felt and known by every person in the depth of his soul (as we see most clearly of all with children)—known by him until he is ensnared by the false teachings of the world. This law has been proclaimed by all the world's sages, Indian, Chinese, Jewish, Greek and Roman. I think it has been expressed most clearly of all by Christ who even said frankly that all the Law and the prophets hang on this alone.
. . . He knows, as every reasonable person is bound to know, that the use of violence is incompatible with love as the basic law of life, that once violence is tolerated in any cases whatsoever, the inadequacy of the law of love is recognized and therefore the law itself is repudiated. The whole of Christian civilization, so brilliant on the surface, grew up on this obvious, strange, sometimes conscious but for the most part unconscious misunderstanding and contradiction.

. . .This contradiction kept growing with the advancement of the peoples of the Christian world and has recently reached the ultimate degree. The question now obviously amounts to one of two things—either we recognize that we don't recognize any religious and moral teaching and are guided in the organization of our lives only by the power of the strong, or that all our taxes collected by force, our judicial and police institutions and above all our armies must be abolished.

. . . Socialism, communism, anarchism, the Salvation Army, the growth of crime, unemployment among the population, the growth of the insane luxury of the rich and the destitution of the poor, the terrible growth in the number of suicides—all these things are signs of this internal contradiction which ought to and must be solved—and, of course, solved in the sense of recognising the law of love and renouncing all violence. And so your work in the Transvaal, at the other end of the world as it seems to us, is the most central and most important of all tasks now being done in the world, and not only Christian peoples, but peoples of the whole world will inevitably take part in it.

community organizing

so i decide it's movie-going month, just to do somethign different, and i go out to the guild to see the baader-meinhof complex, which fills me in on the decade-long spree of violence from the extreme leftist german group RAF, useful info for me culturally

and i see that mark rudd from the Weathermen, their american sixties counterpart, although not a fraction as destructive, is going to be speaking after the late show of the movie wednesday/tonight, as he is now a new mexico resident

since i won't get to that, i look up his blog, and it turns out he's (unsurprisingly) renounced the violence of his youth, but what i enjoy most is his systematic exploration of how he came to this

he goes on to promote nonviolent methods of activism, including educational forums and civil disobedience, and then specifically promotes something he undermined in his earlier violent approach--the community organizing movement that was so big in the sixties: talk to people, share experiences and ideas, get to know each other, and build community

and i know it seems obvious, but i've been having a gestalt around it this week, it just ties so much together

_______________________________

over at the peace and justice center, there are dozens of posters and fliers and petitions to partake in, but i never seem to really connect enough to bother

meanwhile i am holding space for a group to practice empathy and nonviolent communcation, which is an often pleasant practice, but somehow never gets around to doing anything in the world

i attend a workshop on restorative justice circles, which i feel really excited about...but then the follow up practice groups are completely dead to me, with no sense of community, sitting in a cold, fluorescently-lit room watching the clock drag mercilessly by...leaving me to wonder if this inspiration too will just slip away into abstraction

i've been in men's groups professing to belong to an organizaiton committed to action in the world, but seen the groups inevitably end up recycling inner process work

and so on, begging the question of why it is so hard to bridge a gap between inner lives and the world

______________________________________

and i think of the times i have actually had the space to connect to and speak not only my thoughts and experiences to others as Rudd suggests, but my visions for the world, my hopes and dreams, my values and goals...and have been attentively heard, or have heard another in this context, and there is a movement within me that is hard to describe

to paraphrase Dominic Barter, discoverer of restorative justice circles, when i went into the ghettos trying to teach nonviolence i was ignored; when i just starting talking to people, they would eventually open up about what their needs and longings were, and things became much more interesting

and that is a powerful conversation i want to have more of, to practice empathic listening yes, but within a context of what really matters to each of us, to develop a community around supporting one another, in whatever it is we are really here to do

isn't it bizarre how abstract something so basic to our human nature has become?

how bizarre is it that with all the empathic listening we rarely get to the heart of people's visions? how bizarre that most activists are so caught up in doing their thing they never get to hear and relate to and support others' dreams? and how bizarre that it takes me 46 years to come across a concept so basic it was apparently ubiquitous in the sixties?

community organizing, a place where autonomy and interdependence can meet, where the tools of empathy find purpose...i wish i could express the gestalt with a little more distillation, i guess it'll have to suffice for now to express my excitement at this form of deep inspiration that is also very doable

nvc stuff

tonight i host the monthly empathy practice group at the peace and justice center at 6, i expect the usual turnout of two to three, hopefully growing as word gets out

it'll be minimal on the lecture, and more about just holding space for mutual empathic listening and supporting whatever other needs are present

i volunteered to begin hosting when the previous host expressed some ambivalence, i have done this kind of thing before so feel pretty comfortable with whatever happens

except for the fact that it was recently shown to me that nvc doesn't actually work in the world, like when sitting in the internet cafe, a seriously obese woman kept coughing and sneezing next to me without making any attempt to cover her face, and there is really nothing to be done in this situation, particularly because i did not in any way wish to make contact with her, which is an essential part of the nvc process

which begs the question of how many people really wish to make contact with those who are threatening their well-being, which is at the root of many if not most of the much larger conflicts in the world, and hence seems to invalidate the nvc process, does it not?

for the comfortable middle class who are, not coincidentally, most drawn to the nvc process, there is something to be said for their relative position of power, from which i have found empathy to be substantially more effective, such as when i was manager at the museum shop a few years back, and this is not surprising since the process originated from the experiences of a Ph.D-educated charismatic associate of famed humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers

nevertheless, there's usually something useful to come out of ironies such as finding this disillusioning clarity after recently joining the board of directors for nvc new mexico, which by extending this current analysis, may be more useful for the relative position of power it provides than anything that actually gets done

i am still pressing for someone to step up and do some nvc "de-escalation" training with the cops

THE SECOND HALF

getting clearer on what this second half of life is about for me

after 40 days of clean living i developed a low level chest cold, which i am guessing is another layer of pot detox, since the main symptoms was night sweats, a sign of kidney system weakness, and lung discharge

woke today with newfound clarity on many levels, such as why in recent years i have been involved in the activities in the realms of dancing, tantra, polyamory, zen, prayer, yoga, pot, travel, music, empathy, and conspiracy

essentially when one is young and virile, it is fine and even good to be loose and explore many things, have fun and find your way

in one's forties, there is a certain need for renewal in order to remain fully alive, creative and growing

it is these various activites have been what i have been guided to in recent years, and while they have all had their shares of ups and downs, they have provided a way to maintain a living soul

pot is just such a synergistic satisfier, meeting so many needs so rapidly, that other practices tended to fall by the wayside for me, leaving me ultimately less capable and confused by this, dependent and wanting little else

what i realized this morning is that i can utilize all these other non-dependency-forming practices that have come and gone in the meantime, the internal tantra practice particularly and likely yoga also offering great energetic motivation with which to live one's life, remain open and curious of others, courageous and loving

and i felt liberated by this sense, and the idea i won't need to live ther rest of my life hibernating from the world in the basement listening to espn radio

then i saw don schraeder as one of the few walkers along with myself on sliver amidst this morning's cold, who i think has a lot of things right in his idiosyncratically personal activist lifestyle, writing letters to the editor extolling vegetables and holding up signs about gay love in front of unm

and while i'm not gay, i thought maybe a more vegetarian approach is also coming down the pike at some point here too, whether or not i walk down central nearly naked in summer is yet to be determined

music review

Got a nice review on my fiddle playing in the Alibi last week, can be found online, along with cd samples apparently, at http://alibi.com/index.php?story=29845&scn=music

amidst the irony of my dislike of the cd being one of the final straws for quitting the band, it's still nice to get some positive feedback...