How change happens from “just” being with it
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Gonçalo writes: “In this last weekly tip -#246- you touched something that I have been wanting to ask you for a long time. It’s about emotional change not coming from catharsis or insight but from staying with what is just as it is right now, inside, as Self-in-Presence. I’ve been really interested in this question for a long time and you seem to have something clear about this that I don’t have and I don’t seem to be able to understand it. Could you please expand a little more on this? I would really appreciate that.”
Dear Gonçalo,
Of course! It’s a pleasure to say more about one of my favorite topics.
Let me start by asking you a question that might seem unrelated, but bear with me. What are we? Are we objects, or are we processes? Are we machines, or are we something more?
Surely as humans we are not objects and not machines, right? And yet the metaphors of person-as-object and person-as-machine are pervasive in our culture and our language. We speak of our emotions, for example, as if they were things, to be manipulated, gotten over, gotten around… but without understanding that they themselves have an inner life that implies change.
Come with me into a room and look at a table on which I have placed two somethings. One is a table lamp, and the other is a potted plant. I can act on both of these to make them change. I can turn the lamp on and off, give it a different shade, etc. I can trim the leaves of the potted plant or even re-pot it.
But only one of them will change if I DON’T act on it. Only one of them changes according to its inner blueprint, in the direction of its fuller life. Only one of them is alive.
If you are following me this far, then perhaps you can see how this key distinction makes a pivotal difference in how we understand a change process inside us.
If I am sensing a tight scared feeling about a decision I need to make, I can choose to treat it like an object or like a process… like a table lamp or like a potted plant. If I treat it like an object, I might try to think about it, figure it out. I might breathe into it to try to release it. I might tell myself to relax. All of these are DOING-TO, and essentially they come from not trusting that change arises on its own in the right conditions.
If I treat the tight scared feeling as a process, I give it company. I stay in such real present contact with it that I can describe it, and I can sense how it is more than my descriptions. I don’t push it or demand anything of it. I trust that it contains a “knowing” of its own change direction.
So it changes. Because change is in its nature.
Giving space and being with it as it is
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In one of my favorite quotes from Gene Gendlin, he writes: “Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness.”
This lovely quote says the same thing I am saying. The energy toward “rightness” is already there, contained as “potential energy.” (Elsewhere he calls this “implying.”) There is no need to cry it out, shout it out, figure it out, talk it out.
All we need to do is give it space. Keep it company. Because it itself knows its own change.
Isn’t that cool?
