Classroom Talk
Winter 2002 Archive
The so-called "Nine Moves of the Awareness Game." Posted by John on March 18, 2002 at 15:27:13:
Hi, Folks,
An interesting visitor to the Coach's Office emailed to ask me to lay out the "Nine Moves of the Awareness Game" that I had alluded to in one of my
very early postings on this website, without ever revealing after that what these "magical nine moves" were. Heh-heh. I'm prone to that sort of thing.
My response to this good fellow might serve to bring the rest of the class more up-to-date on this:
Your query about the Nine Moves of the Awareness Game is oh-so logical. I appreciate your asking for that. But, I think I may have mislead you
when I mentioned that in one of the earlier postings on the site. Actually, there are *scores of moves* that can be learned in the awareness game.
Different ones of them are being mentioned every week in class—recently, for instance, "diving for the space," and giving a "non-committal response"
like "I hear you," when someone is getting in your face about something, and others.
The so-called "Nine Moves" was a simple *format* for a chart that I worked out a long time ago for sorting out the scores of awareness game moves
into relevant categories, for remembering all the many good moves in this game—like a mnemonic device, a teaching tool. I've gone looking for that
chart in the boxes of files I have all over my house, and didn't come up with it. Heh-heh. I can sort of re-create it for you here.
• Waking up to "score on the phenomenological scoreboard*—i.e. realizing there are perceptible tensions in the field that tell us there is an
"engagement" going on with another person. That's "entanglement." At least one of the parties is not being at peace, and the parties are not acting in
harmony. (This sudden awareness of score on the scoreboard is the "starting buzzer" of the awareness game.)
1. Dealing with one's own emotional reactions—i.e. class discussions about what we call "processing feelings" refer to this—waking up and processing
the reactive tensions in your own body.
2. Being aware of the other person's obvious emotional feelings. Acknowledging that, as reality, and not denying them that. (I'm about to have a few
words with Pauline about this in my next class.)
3. Dealing with one's own thinking reactions—for instance, waking up and noting the judgments one is having at that moment, knowing it is "only
thinking"—and seeing if one may be able to find contrition for one's own part in the matter, by reflecting upon the situation like this.
4. Waking up and recognizing the thinking (that is, the out-loud speaking) of the other person for what it is—automatic knee-jerk reactions to one's
own behavior with them). Realize they are asleep—i.e. not being mindfully awake—and on "automatic pilot," with no ability to govern their own
behavior coming out of a centered awareness that is awake and aware of what's going on.
5. Dealing with one's own ego reaction. Waking up and being aware of what one is wanting to do about it . . . the scenario that one's ego has made
out of the situation, in "making something out of it," so to speak, "making a big deal out of it."—see the "Scenarios" wheels in the wheelbook). Wake up
and realize: "What's my big stake in this?"
6. Being awake and attempting to recognize the ego scenario that the other person is operating out of. In realizing where they are coming from in
this—from what you've already seen of them emotionally, and heard them saying—and understanding what their stake in it is, see about the
possibility of forgiveness on your own part for what they are doing. Also, in recognizing clearly what they are wanting, this might present clever
options for giving them what they want (without sacrificing one's own peace in the situation).
7. Dealing with one's own personality reactions—waking up and attempting to recognize the nature of one's own incipient reactive manipulative
behavior in terms of the types of habitual conditioned ego-driven personality patterns—some of it aggressive, and some passive—that you know you
are conditioned to do from daily practice in observing your life. And attempt to have the presence of mind to step aside from acting that "funny stuff"
out, as you usually would do, automatically and unconsciously. In practicing mindfulness every day, regularly practice stepping aside from your
conditioned behavior before it happens. (There's a good description of this exercise in my last posting in class to Sally in the hotseat.)
8. Being awake and recognizing the personality reactions of the other person for what they are—unconscious, habituated, automatic knee-jerk
reactions to the situation that lies at hand. Realizing that is just their habituated personality patterns, which they would be doing *the same way* with
anyone else standing in your shoes at that time—realizing, in other words, that you don't have to take what they are doing *personally*!!! It is *their*
conditioned behavior!!! And even if they are throwing "stingers" (wounding words) at you, practice letting that go right on through you without
"gaining purchase on your physical body, and thus not causing more physical emotional reactions in your own body to whatever they are doing—i.e.
not letting your own body get uptight, whatever the other person is saying. "Being space to it." Letting it go right on through! (By awarely cutting
down on such knee-jerk-reaction clutching-up which would only cause more emotional reactions to the situation—beyond what happened at first
when score was discovered on the scoreboard—that is, by "being space" to other provocations—you thereby also cut down on a lot more confusing
reactive thinking, more reactive ego-wanting, and more reactive spring-loadedness to act out ego-driven personality behavior unconsciously from your
side of the issue. — When we are stirred up, each of these automatically give rise to the next: unperceived emotional reactions give rise to thinking,
which gives rise to our ego making something out of the situation, which gives rise to acting-out the aggressive or passive forms of personality
behavior that we are *the most conditioned to act out* in those very circumstances.)
9. Wake up and pro-actively address the other person (not with the habitual automatic manipulative forms of speaking that come from our ego-driven
personality), rather, speak instead with forms of expression that are non-manipulative—not aggressive or passive—expressions that are forthright,
candid and simply truthful in sharing *one's own real experiences* of the situation (rather than putting the matter onto the other person, which the
personality always does). (See the Candid, Non-Manipulative Communications page in the wheelbook for examples of this.) In this way, one can
express everything one needs to get said, speaking "right on through" the person's personality reactions on the outside—*on purpose* if one is being
mindful—and intentionally addressing the core of who they really are directly, as a human being, at their heart within—instead of being caught up in
the surface of it, engaging with the ego-driven personality on the outside that they present us with.
• One is playing the awareness game to wake up and take score off of the phenomenological scoreboard. Each of the above nine moves takes some
of the tensions off the scoreboard. Nothing to nothing, as to two parties relating with each other, is the winning score in this game (i.e. when you
don't have any tensions against me, and I don't have any tensions against you. We can each, then, be at peace. And we can then proceed together in
harmony in whatever it is that we are or aren't doing. The game as a whole represents the aware methodical transformation of human relations from
"entanglement" to "companionship."
Hope this has been helpful. I realize it may not apparently be quite what you maybe thought you would be getting, a short list of strategic moves to
breeze on through, so to speak, and "have the whole game down," so to speak. But at least this does lay out a map of the territory. Thank you for
bringing it up! . . . another opportunity to practice that chart for me. I'd thought of posting this kind of a chart in Classroom Talk at the end of 2002,
as a kind of a retrospective memory jogger of the whole live class up to then (filling in the many separate moves of the game where appropriate on the
chart). In the meantime, we go on every week now in our actual class dynamics, learning and, I hope, practicing the different ones of these many
moves of the awareness game which seem to match up best, strategically, *at the time*, with whatever students in the class happen to be posting about
in the here-and-now.
........................................................................
Thought this might be interesting to some, if I passed it along.
Coach (Day-offing it!)
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