Classroom Talk
Spring - Summer 2002 Archive
A dawdling prelude to regrouping. Posted by John on April 25, 2002 at 16:19:29:
I'm going extra slow this week, and patiently attempting to gather my thoughts about re-grouping and finding direction for the Sixth Grade. I'm keen
on making hay while the sun shines during the remaining eight months of this year. And, as always seems to be the case around here, while I am
being quiet, I'm finding a lot to enjoy in the postings that you students share. This comforts me with a satisfying sense that I don't have to be in any
big hurry.
As usual, I've been laughing out loud at your jokes, Pauline. And I agree with your admiration for "The Daffodil Principle." That fits my disposition
like a glove, thanks, Sally. And yes! "Start now." That's a key. It doesn't matter that you haven't known these idea and practices during the past
years of your lives. Take them as you catch on to them at this point—if you like them—and start putting them into play. Start now. Start afresh.
Make some changes. Try some new and "impossible" things. There is plenty of time that lies ahead for you, and you can embark on a new kind of life
that will start showing you new things right away. Change your world, one daffodil at a time.
Grandpa John, if you cultivate patient persistence this way, a day will come when your little guy is, say, fifteen years old. What a field full of colors
you will have planted for him by then, just taking it one day at a time. Then a day will come when he is twenty . . . and then twenty-five . . . Oh,
there's plenty of time! What we need to get used to as mindful warriors is waking up and intentionally using that time in a masterful way—without
hurry, without hesitation—using time skillfully—now a pause on purpose, now a leap into space on purpose—one conscious moment of now after
another . . . doing the "impossible." ;-)
You said I could share that chart in class that you sent to the Coach's Office, John. And I'd like to. For whatever technical reasons that I don't
understand, everything in your attachment before and after the chart showed in HTML code, and I couldn't download it or print it. The columns of
the chart, itself, were somewhat scrambled, but somehow the words were there. (?)
So I could make out the good work that you've accomplished in working all that out—a chart of detailed characteristics that you've observed in your
own behavior that match up with your three most probable personality types. It seemed to me those characteristics were accurately apportioned
under Dictator, Judge, and Doormat. If that's what you see, that must be it! And just reading through it, I saw my understandings of the home
situation you've been describing doubling, and even tripling in some of those well-noted details that you've picked up on. "Ah, this explains
everything!" I said to myself. It all sure seems to hang together with what you've been talking about, doesn't it?
By all means, share it with the class, if you'd like. Maybe break the characteristics for each of those types down into three separate paragraphs for
each type, instead of attempting a side-by-side chart like that. Maybe that would work.
For awhile now, I guess, I've owed you some promised feedback on that ten-day vipassana workshop that you described. First of all, you were
obviously following vipassana instructions in that, and you demonstrated that vipassana *works*!
For six days you experienced a painful "sankara," or bodily sensation. It was a searing pain in your shoulder, with accompanying "thoughts of fleeing"
which you didn't act upon. And it's good that you were able to make a mindful distinction between the feeling there and the accompanying thoughts.
You thought of those thoughts as "anger" at first. ("Fight or flight" thoughts sounded specifically more like an accompaniment to the emotion of fear to
me, and the location of the tensions you experienced seemed to match.) You braved it out, hung in with the instructed process. On the tenth day, the
pain subsided, along with the thoughts that you'd noted. So it worked, and you were brave enough to stay with it and find that out!
Later on, when you felt that same shoulder pain during other situations in your life, you explored your process awarely, looking for angry
accompanying thoughts, but not finding that. That's good, exploring that way. You have got a fine mindful exercise going for you here. Maybe we
don't know now if it was fear, or anger, or quite possibly both. But you are going about this inward research in a very good way.
And if you *do* have Dictator and Judge in your conditioned make-up, having reactions of both fear and anger is very plausible. And you picked up
on some Doormat thinking along with that, without knowing it, when you expressed that sense of "I wasn't good enough." Perhaps the bodily
emotional feeling of shame was in the picture, too.
On your own, you had an insight that it was fear that was going on. And out of these struggling efforts at Self-study that you put in on your own
initiative, it came to you to start having a strong wish that there were some writings around that "cataloged" these associations of feelings and thinking
in greater detail than what you had then at your disposition. Next . . . out of the Web-searching that you did with that quest in mind, well . . . . . you
happened, like the very few others of us who are here, to find your way to this very class, where—unlike most such schools on the Web—a more
detailed break-down of such things is actually presented.
Coincidence, maybe, most people might say. I thought that process that brought you here was quite charming. I don't care to be called
"superstitious," but . . . . . Maybe it illustrates how doing a piece of mindful working out like that on one's own may bring a person closer to whatever
they are looking for . . . sort of . . . "Seek and you will find," as that Rabbi in Jerusalem used to say.
I don't know. But for whatever it turns out to be worth to you, I'm glad you found your way here. Keep up the good work, indeed . . . all of you
that are here!
Coach
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Archived 08/26/2002