Classroom Talk
Fifth and Sixth Grades Archive
Is this the beginning of "a new me?"
Posted by John on 01/27/2003 22:43:29
In reply to Re: "Tis better to have loved and lost . . ." posted by Rakesh on 01/26/2003 02:28:44
Hello, again. Thanks Pauline and Rakesh, for your healing teachings this week. I think I'm beginning to feel the emergence of "a new me" in certain
ways. Certainly I'm less spun now, late Monday night, than I was last Friday.
I wondered some afterwards about posting "Tis better to have loved . . .". What kind of person who calls himself "a mindfulness" teacher would tell a
story like that in class? I remembered a remark Deirdre made a long time ago, when someone questioned whether a certain conversation going on
then would seem "appropriate to the Coach." And Deidre said she thought anything that proved "productive" (I think that's the word she used)
would be okay with me. And I "knew me" in hearing what she said, I recognized me. I'm *that kind of a person*.
Classroom Talk isn't supposed to be any "exalted" place, in my sense of it. There is no sort of "decorum" that is supposed to be observed around here.
We are just here to be productive. We are here to be productive of learning about ordinary human life. That's what this class is about. This is just a
place where people can talk honestly and candidly about ordinary human things in life, things that may happen to any of us, or all of us, indeed . . . . .
and see whatever we can learn from studying these ordinary things with mindfulness.
The phenomenon of "falling in love" is as common and ordinary as any human phenomenon. And we can examine that here if we wish to, and talk
about it here, whether tenderly and sensitively, or boldly and frankly, even humorously, and even outrageously.
Let Classroom Talk become, in this New Year, more bold and frank, I say—more humorous and even outrageous than it has ever been in the several
years of it that we have seen go by here in the past.
That's one of the things I like so much about your jokes, Pauline. They are *outrageously* funny to me. And when you speak up and tell them in class,
they confront us, they shock us, and make us look within at the great human comedy that we are all so very much a part of together. (Would you tell
us the one about the befuddled man who wandered into the river and got "baptised, please?")
>How **blessed** your lady friend was to have known you.
Ah, that blessing was "the real baptism" to me, Pollyji. Somehow, I "needed that." I say that because I was going around trying to figure out what
was the effect of my presence in her life. Was it a harmful presence? Or was it beneficial? I was hoping that some woman in our class or several
would shed a little light on "a woman's perspective" of the events that I had described. I expected I would not get very "high marks." It seems we
men, in general, do not have such a good record with you women. (I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, especially in this class, men who are by
nature are wonderful to the women they hang around with and fall for.) But what can we men understand of how it is for you women in these
encounters we have together that represent the touching and often dangerous human mating dance?
Your remark, Pauline, knowing me as well as you do for so long, was cosmically comforting to me. It said to me: "It was a good experience for that
lady, too." That's what I was left wishing for when the dust had cleared. And you reasssured me of that.
The lady's mother, who was staying with her throughout this time, and seeing me at least briefly nearly every day, became a friend, as well. She
asked me one time: "Do you have some central strategy in the way you live your life?" Good question, yeah?
I said, "I try to have the presence of mind to do things differently now than I always used to do them in the past." She liked that, and being well-
educated but not familiar with my coaching work, she likened it to a "spiritual" way of life. I grinned.
If there was one central "strategy" in the way I related with her daughter, it was, consciously, to try to be different than probably all the other men
that she'd known in her life. I think I must have succeeded in that. And I wondered if that may have been good for her. Hoping for some
confirmation of this, I approached Perk one day with the question of whether the mere way that I behaved during that time might have had some
kind of beneficial or therapeutic or healing affect that she had been looking for in her life. (Remember the question: "What did she pick me *for*?).
Perk told me—and I hadn't heard of this before—that there was such a thing as "an emotionally corrective experience" that was recognized in
psychotherapeutic literature. He said this would be a parallel kind of experience that worked out substantially differently than the emotionally
traumatized way that it had worked out when the person was a child (or could be the trauma occurred as a young adult, or maybe over and over
again as one was growing up, and this time, it came out differently—it came out okay.). In other words, this would be a similar experience that didn't
"go wrong" and traumatize the person so terribly much. It would sort of "balance things out," so to speak, and show the person that life didn't always
have to turn out in the emotionally traumatic way that it had turned out back then.
But we were just two men talking about this. What could we know of the way it really is, in a woman's experience of this kind of a situation? And
then, when I heard your remark, Pauline, I felt somehow encouraged that, yes, this may well have been an emotionally corrective experience for that
remarkable woman. Perhaps she picked me, and went on picking me for *that*.
In any case, it *was* a blessing for me to hear you speaking up. I was able to feel satisfied at last with the part that she had played. *I was able to feel
satisfied at last with the part that I had played*. I can go on now without that burden troubling my mind. Thank you for that healing gesture.
Likewise, Rakeshji, your last posting on this subject is all teaching, and I've taken it in like medicine.
I'm feeling tired now. It's getting very late. I'll pick this up tomorrow, if I can.
Coach
Archived 09/22/2003