My Half Of...

What is Genius?

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:40:00 +0000

It is genius to combine details or characteristics that most of the rest of us have passed over into what becomes, over time, into being a new synergistic synthesis. The person who sees whole systems where none have seen it before - that is my definition of a genius. These new systems can sometimes emerge as an entirely new paradigm that can supersede what has gone before. Because these systems are new, it is often difficult for others to understand their significance and what the discovery could mean to them. The significance of a brilliant idea is often difficult to determine at the time it happens by the genius!

Of course a leap of insight of any magnitude needs to be honed and worked on to explain it. The seed of an idea always needs work to turn it into something useful. Sometimes the world of geniuses who find a specialty is so unique that it seems impossible to explain it, even to those in the field!

When I was sixteen, I untangled the fishing line of a discouraged fisherman who had given up. He had walked up a long flight of stairs carrying his equipment and returned for his flashlight to find out that I had spent that entire time looking at the tangle. Then I pulled one strand and the whole mess unraveled. This man decided my problem solving ability was useful to his "Think Tank" of inventors. At a later meeting, they showed me one of their inventions, and wrote down my questions about it to help them introduce the invention to others.

There are many instances when a spark of genius emerged quite young and determined the course of a person's life. As a teen, Philo Farnsworth imagined the TV by looking at plowed rows of dirt and realizing slight variations could create pictures viewed from afar. He spent his adult life figuring out how to take that idea for a ride - and he didn't even get credit for inventing TV until after his death.

As a teen, Marty Roberts compiled his observations of wild mustang herds. From these observations, he originated a whole new approach to training horses that allowed him to "join up" (rather than "break') a completely wild horse to a saddle in as little as fifteen minutes.

Of course, there are countless more great stories of brilliant ideas.

Do you have genius in you? What you love to do points to your genius nature!

Centering

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:06:00 +0000

Colleagues in my Alexander Technique community were talking about how various Eastern disciplines involving movement commonly use a concept about "centering."

Bruce Fertman blogged: http://peacefulbodyschool.com/2013/04/21/on-the-grounds-of-modesty/ and he also wrote:

Just thinking out loud. yes, there is a geometric center. Instead of a circumference you could think of your periphery. or you could see diVinci's man in the circle and the square and conceive of a geometric center. or we could think of the center vertically, as in where the equator is. and then there is center as in a core. core gets closer to what i think many of us experience inside of our work. a sense of core support, but metaphysically as well, the core of our existence, a sense of depth, deepness. then there is the word central, and central gets close to alexander's word primary, that which is deepest, or most important. it's interesting how much we seem to need this concept of a center. in my answer to the student's question about the center of the body i attempt to lead him to considering what it would be like to drop the concept of a center or the need for a center. It reminds me of the first time i was invited by Dieter Pruess to teach in berlin. It was before AlexanderPlatz went up. We were walking in the center of berlin and dieter said, Do you know why berlin is a buddhist city? he smiled and said, because at its center there is nothing, emptiness. German humor. but it is closer to my experience, this positive emptiness. First there was emptiness and then there was AlexanderPlatz. Jewish humor.

Tim Soar, www.the-alexander-technique.org.uk wrote:

My own experience is that to "find my center" is not to do with finding a location in my body (like noticing my sitting bones for example) but describes a process. My image of this process is one of bringing several lenses into concentricity with each other to make something like a telescope. The various lenses work together towards a single result. The lenses represent the different parts of my Self, in the broadest sense. When I'm centred, something comes into focus. In terms of physical movement, when I'm centred I seem to move "as one" - nothing leads, nothing initiates, nothing lags behind: "I" move! Perhaps a physicist watching someone move in this way would have some observation about the center of gravity?

So I thought I'd say a few things too...
Everyone is going to have a different way of expressing it, but it seems all of us are attempting to describe a common human experience. Perhaps another matching description might be Maslow's "peak experience," or Csikszentmihalyi's "flow"?

Also agreeing with Tim - my insight about the center being an ever-moving fractal spiral of complementary DNA quantum dance also came partly from my experiences with being tossed around while studying Aikido. Later I found similar rapport in establishing and Directing experiences that involved social, solitary and the natural world relationships.

It seems to me that any performance art, or activity with a physical expression, (even a sport, dancing, making pottery, many jobs and hobbies, etc.) can become a source of continual insight of "being centered within movement." Many disciplines studied with an openness to continual learning can potentially offer the effortless non-action wholeness of transforming the activity into an art form.

The signature sensations seemed to be "there is no wrong" because perception becomes enlarged, inclusive and unites paradoxical opposites with a sense of wholeness...but there's still a possibility to not lose oneself, to influence, being mindful of the timing of when to insert the surrendered intention.

What do you think?
Have you had experiences such as what we're trying at describing here?
How would you describe them?

Ant Story

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 04:57:00 +0000

When finding spiders in their house, many people go to the trouble of taking them out into the garden rather than more easily killing them. Doing such a thing makes me feel that I'm doing a bit to accommodate how humans have eliminated the habitat of so many other species. Here's a mysterious thing that happened when I did something like that...

While driving across country by myself in the summer of 2001, I stopped to camp in Colorado in Dinosaur National Monument. Because I had been driving at night to avoid the heat, I was spending nights awake and still wearing shorts.

My campsite was a beautiful one on a ridge. I had made a fire in the camp ring to pass the time by burning the wood that had been lying there for some time left by the campers before me. It was so dark that I could see the light of the fire slightly illuminating the other side of the canyon if I looked away from the fire for awhile.

Of course, without a moon I couldn't see well except for the light of the fire, so it took awhile before I noticed a few carpenter ants who were running around on one of the logs I had used on the fire. I was both amused and horrified to imagine what it would be like to be one of these ants, because they were milling around very fast as if they had to dance to not burn their feet on the warming log. To give them a way of escaping being burned to death, I found another stick and placed it from the log the ants were on to the ground. Delightfully, they figured it out at once and made a beeline for safety.

After arriving on the ground, most of the group of perhaps a dozen ants set off. One ant reversed and came in my direction. When this ant ran into the road block of my bare leg, it stopped and touched my leg with its antennae for quite some time. Then it turned around in the direction of the rest of its comrades and proceeded to catch up to them - post haste.

What I've always wondered was, did that ant say "Thanks?"

Happiness Sensations

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 18:12:00 +0000

How do I tell when I'm happy? I have had lots of trouble with answering the question for myself. Here's a report on my discoveries.

First problems were my misconceptions about the nature of happiness. From having lots of tragic intense experiences, what I didn't want was obvious - and it was repulsive: a huge NO! I made the mistake of assuming that what I did want would have that same intensity of feeling. The admonishment to "Find my passion" did not help.

Inside of me, it turned out that happiness is subtle. Happiness is absorbing, It is something that I do so naturally it's pretty easy to miss it in action. Something I'm doing that makes me happy doesn't tell me that it is making me happy - only in retrospect does this realization of "I was happy!" happen for me. While I'm doing what makes me happy, I'm so absorbed my it that I am too busy to notice how I feel. It soaks up my attention like a sponge. I'm engaged pretty much completely. In fact, the intensity of this engagement can make me a bit scared. I will surface from doing what makes me happy as if I've been asleep and I've just woke up in a fog. Like Rip Van Winkle, who slept for eons, I'll experience a jolt as I if I'm waking myself out of doing what has been making me happy and wonder what has been going on while I've been gone.

Another characteristic of happiness for me is that it's an unnoticed, irresistible action. I can't resist not doing it. Of course I'm going to do things that way, silly. Doesn't everyone? It was a shock to realize that "everyone" didn't value what I thought was "obviously valuable." I began to realize that I needed to consider that other people might wanted to be treated differently than I did, and act accordingly. I also needed to find positive ways to tell other people what I wanted, valued and enjoyed so it could come true for me and them.

For instance, it turns out that I have some big opinions on how I prefer to be touched. As a kid, my brother used to love to have me scratch his back. He wanted to scratch my back in "payment" for getting me to scratch his back, but that didn't work for me. I really did not want to be scratched - it doesn't do anything positive for me. People tend to scratch me too hard. Being touched "softly" is also an issue for me. If someone "tickle touches" my skin, it is slightly irritating because my skin becomes numb rather quickly to the creepy-crawly surface sensations. It feels to me as if a bug is crawling on my skin! In Hawaii we call this sensation of goose pimples, "getting chicken skin." It is as if my skin is too sensitive for such pastimes. But if another person makes calm or firm contact with my muscles underneath my skin, it's heavenly. I love to be massaged deeply. I love to feel someone's body warming my own. I love to feel contact with another person and have them relax and lengthen their muscles, taking contraction away from themselves while they are in contact with me.

One time in my early life when I was first struggling with this question of how to feel what I wanted and what made me happy, I tried a radical, time consuming strategy that worked well for me. I went back to a time when I really wanted something. As a kid, I constantly wanted a horse. At one point in my early twenties, even though I didn't want a horse anymore, (because I'd grown up and my priorities had changed radically) and *because* I didn't know what else I wanted...I got a horse. Clearing the time it took to have a horse helped me to have something to give up when I finally did get a "real yes" about happiness.

There was another more serious problem about recognizing happiness for myself. Decisions that didn't involve considering external circumstances or other people just did not register on my radar. Having someone in front of me who had an opinion one way or another about what made them happy completely outshone any emotions I did have by a mile. Other people's wishes distracted me so completely, that I did not experience my own emotions. Not know what you want is a real deal-breaker in relationships with other people, because they can't tell what to to expect that you might do.

So I had to work on drawing a curtain between me and them to experience what I really wanted to do, irrespective of what they wanted me to do. This meant at first actively seeking solitude - and it was hard to sense my own emotions even then. On top of everything I was even rebellious with myself. I had a hard time picking something I knew I enjoyed doing that didn't take but five minutes a day and doing it every day regularly because I had so much resistance about setting any deliberate routine in place. But with practice, (this took five years or so) I became much better at checking in w/myself and getting an answer. Now I'm almost sixty. All I need to do to find out what I feel is to look away from someone's face for a bit or excuse myself from their presence.

But the way I worked out deciding what I feel is a bit odd too. I only discovered this by taking a poll about how other people determine what makes them happy. I discovered that my own feelings and emotions did not "rise to the top" like cream does, in a hierarchy. This was the most common way most people have access to their feelings. They can merely ask themselves "What would make me happy here?" and they get an answer that is their first priority.

Discovering my own feelings is more like a two step process. It's as if I'm fishing in a mysterious cauldron of potential, pulling up what comes out, describing it. Then I must draw statistics on the results of how I feel about it, after having described it for myself a number of times. I have learned that it's not a good idea to narrate this process in front of others. Because they might assume that because I dredged it up and mentioned it to them, it must be my first priority for wanting it...and that's just not true for me. Many things I want come up, irrespective of "time of arrival." I have learned for myself that when it comes to emotions, it is an important consideration for me to compensate for "time of arrival."

How does feeling what makes you happy work for you?

For Your Own Good

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 01:05:00 +0000

Actually, I find the opposite strategy of slowing down to be a productive strategy. Except at my current pace, it seems that I'm slowed to the point of irritating productive, functional people. I've been accused of being passive-aggressively slow, which is not what I intend.

I do feel a bit self-righteous when I'm driving exactly five miles over the speed limit and I still hold up a line of cars behind me. I can feel the anger of those who are tail-gating me. Then we pass a cop car and they all fall back, obviously thankful that being behind me while I was driving slow prevented them from getting a ticket for speeding fifteen miles over the speed limit as a matter of course.

I used to feel self-righteous about the level that my culture doesn't want to touch each other too - almost to the point of "forcing" or "training" people to allow me to touch them and to invite being touched.

There were many other actions I did that violated people's cultural expectations about autonomy, independence, personal space and respect that I needed to become aware of and problem solve. I've had to learn so much about body language to be able to deal with feeling rejected, isolated and misunderstood. For instance, being near-sighted and not comfortable with glasses or contacts, I tended to stand too close to people when talking, encouraging them to back away from me or flee during a conversation.

When I finally gave in and accepted that it was OK that people in my culture did not want to be touched, I think others lost out on the value I could offer them about the importance of being touched. But they didn't seem to want it anyway.

It happened at the point where the mother of my stepson gave me this little talk about how the people closest to children are the ones who are most likely to be sexually molesting them. She got it from the news, so I could have merely cast it off as a fad. But I couldn't help but take what she had said personally. Because it resulted in her son no longer wanting to enjoy being read to while sitting in my lap, or hang out with the family and friends on the couch draped over each other. It was as if his mother was, in a roundabout way, trying to accuse me personally of molesting her six year old son by cautioning him not to trust people about an issue which he had no clue what it meant at the time. It really made me angry. But it also made me realize how an accusation like that is pretty much the same as a conviction. So I decided to let sleeping dogs lie and stop trying to get people to touch each other more often. I think my decision at that time was a mistake, in retrospect.

At what point does an opinion or belief in a value become a coercion or a sales technique or proselytizing?

People are getting hit with so many advertising ploys, making persuasion into a skill that is getting every so much more sophisticated. I can understand how consumers tend to be suspicious of extremes when they catch wind that someone believes in what they are saying. A person must be very sophisticated in their use of language to gather any sort of support for what is important and personally valuable to them, even if they have no invested interest in the sale of the product itself. Probably jaded from being sold too much useless junk too often, people have become too quick to brand an endorser or a convinced believer as a fanatic.

Music Theory Book Review

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 07:34:00 +0000

http://www.amazon.com/Music-Theory-Decoded-Strictly-Numbers/dp/125701983X

If you've always been confused about music theory, this book will make it understandable. If you've written music by ear and don't know what you did, this book will give you the tools to be a better composer and communicate with other musicians. If you're worried about how to pass your college level music theory class, this book will rescue your ass. If you were afraid to open the can of worms about delving into music theory because it's too complicated, this book will be your Rosetta Stone.

I really can't say enough about how practical and interesting a tool is the book "Music Theory Decoded - Strictly by the Numbers." Lessons are not complicated or long winded, (although the subject of music theory is famous for being that way.) Each lesson has pretty much everything you need on the facing pages that present it. Of course, it takes what it takes to learn, and there is no substitution for practice, but if you're going to spend your effort to learn music theory, this is the fastest and easiest way to do it.

Now - why use Mr. Natural's interval system? Because it makes a very complex subject simple; it starts simple and gets complex in an understandable way. Imagine a beginner's reverse-engineered jazz theory system that continues to build and make sense the further on it goes in complexity.

Even if you've already studied music theory, you must check out this book to get the map - which is what this book offers. I've seen people already trained in music mistakenly dismiss the "intervalometer-slider" as a beginner's simplistic graphic representation of the scale, perhaps useful for transposing from one key to another but not much else. Many tools seem simplistic at face value. The book is filled with simplifications about music that are going to become an indispensable map for a musician at any level. Even if you have already learned the classic succession of street name directions orienting you to musical letter names, learning from this book will set free your ability to command what you've been playing at.

For example, Mr. Natural has invented a handy "wheel" of numbers that have a skipping pattern of 1-3-5-7-2-4-6. These numbers represent the classic order of the skipping pattern inherent in chord structure that has been spelled out (street name style) as C-E-G-B-D-F-A: "Cows Eat Grass But Don't Fly Airplanes." By using the slider and the wheel together, the book teaches a pattern that can be applied to any key and in many situations. Lessons take you through these situations in two page chunks of information. For instance, it shows how to make sense of finding any chord, even augmented and unusual chords, (and why there are confusing theoretical exceptions.)

One of the things that this book includes that I've never seen anywhere else is eleven pages about how use two "sliders" to modulate from different modes and keys, allowing the musician to become aware of a sort of "trap door" that can be used to move between the two. This is jazz level ability music theory - made simple!

Aside from the essentials of every sort of chord formula, mode, and how to learn them, there's a graph of the relationship between chords that's handy for composing, ways how to use chord substitutions in chord progressions, song examples, it's got many brilliant shortcuts...and so much else. If you want to understand music theory, this book is the most direct pathway.

I was disappointed that this book did not include Natural's original system of notation. If you've heard of "Nashville" style tab notation, Mr. Natural's way is a system like that, movable to any key. But Natural's style of notation includes a shorthand to jotting down melodies and rhythms as well, allowing composers to figure out the chords and translate the song into classic notation later. Evidently his system of "Natural Notation" is going to be included in his next book, which will be more geared toward composers. I can't wait!

Get the book on Amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/Music-Theory-Decoded-Strictly-Numbers/dp/125701983X

Are You an Endgainer?

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:51:00 +0000

To Endgain - to be an endgainer - endgaining

Thought you might enjoy learning an interesting new word. It has been in use by the Alexander Technique community since 1930s, invented by F.M Alexander. The word endgaining describes the irresistible urge to gain an intended goal that activates a habitual response connected to using one’s will. It describes the dark side of the expression, “Go for it!” - the troublesome limitations of using one’s will in the face of a new challenge.

The word in the Alexander Technique community is most often used to express a lack of success, for a number of reasons. The best example of the issues may be illustrated by the metaphor of a conductor and orchestra. The conductor assumes when they give the direction for a certain musical effect, that the musicians are skilled and practiced enough to do what it takes to make the conductor’s direction to come true. The success of the in-time response to the conductor will be in direct relationship to the amount of practice the musicians have invested in the skill of playing their instrument, what they expect from their familiarity with the music they have prepared to play and their ability to make sense of what the conductor is indicating. A lack of practice will result in a lack of success and a frustrated conductor.

The first issue is the effect of practice and how repetition builds abilities. Endgaining relates to this because the skill that has been practiced the most will jump forward to carry out the imperative direction to “do it” whenever the signal to do an act is given.

The other feature that determines success is motivation or drive, which is popularly expressed in the use of will. A lack of success expressed in the word endgain is backed up by brain research. Movement actions have already been prepared to occur before conscious awareness of action happens. Technically, a person prepares to go into action long before that person is aware of their desire to act. Humans have only 1/64th of a second to veto or shape the way they are going to do an action that is already been prepared and is in progress inside of them before it becomes expressed in an overt action.

Bet you didn't know about that brain science fact!

So – using one’s will power to carry out an intention only works in relationship to how familiar and practiced a person is with the required skills needed. Endgaining means there is a primary motive towards reaching an aim, disregarding the method used to achieve the intended goal.

If we ignore the way we do things, the means we are most familiar to get our goals will happen. If the goal requires a familiar means for success or successively matches similar skills previously trained, all is well. But a new situation requires a new and unfamiliar means, there might be undesirable consequences. During situations that do not match previously trained skills inappropriate to the situation, pain, illness and injury occur. It will not matter how imperative the need or will to succeed is. An epic fail can still happen in the presence of the most arrogantly successful confidence and drive.

The Alexander Technique demonstrates a process that allows a successful approach to establishing a new means to deal with unfamiliar circumstances. It's one of my favorite and most useful pastimes.

End-gainer's Anonymous

To be an endgainer when a more effective process is available marks the student as naive. They need more practice in the skill of temporarily suspending their goals to allow the use of unfamiliar means. Without using the new indirect means, our responses will most likely follow the dominant and most often practiced movement patterns. These old routines recreate a series of sense perceptions that feel ‘right’ to us – but they are merely the comfort of doing what we know best. To get an unfamiliar new benefit, we need to stop doing what we have practiced and know how to do. We need to be willing to feel “strange” and take a gamble. We need to suspend the goal and stop our will-to-do that wants to endgain.

So how do we tell when something notable has happened and that we have indeed stopped endgaining? Effortlessness and lightness are new signals of success. Isn't that interesting"?!

Published

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:58:00 +0000

Left to right: Paul, Gail (holding a copy of our compilation book - Coconuts & Pearls), John, Marie, myself in the visor, Greer and Jim

When I first came to Hawaii, I wondered where the smart people were. Found some of 'em. This is a pic of me with the the hardcore movers and shakers of my writer's group who meet at Tutu's House in Waimea-Kamuela. Luckily, where this group meets is located a short walk from my home these days.

It's really fun to read what they're writing in installments as they do it, because most of them are fiction writers. It's really lucky that they put up with listening to me write about non-fiction subjects that are quite a bit more boring to wrestle with - but they are really a tolerant and observant bunch. People who join this writer's group learn about what constitutes constructive observations - because people can ask for any sort of feedback they want to get from the group as they read their writing out loud. It's an awesome bunch of smart people to be able to know.

One of the projects that has drawn the group together was spear-headed by Paul, who taught us how to self-publish books. Of course, at Paul's helpful presentation aimed at individual writers making their book happen, I piped up, "Why doesn't the whole writer's group do their own compilation?" This turned out to be an idea that everyone else pounced on immediately; I didn't even have to lift a finger for my own writing to be included along with the writing of 20+ members of the group too. "Coconuts and Pearls" is a compilation of poets (Gail's poems beg to be sung as a sort of female Bob Dylan!) excerpts from novels in progress, (Jim's novel is about his mom's experiences in early Hawaiian culture,) short stories, (Greer writes a brand of "magical fiction" that will fascinate your old "Twilight Zone" fantasy bone) as well as my article titled "Creative Hit List."

Copies of the book are available at Tutu's House - and the proceeds are donated to Tutu's House to help with their wonderful contribution to the community. The writer's group wanted to benefit Tutu's House to help them to continue providing free workshops, meetings and events for the Waimea-Kamuela community.

Cross-Cultural Relationships

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:30:00 +0000

It's quite a common assumption that just because you both speak the same language, that there are not serious cultural differences. I spent ten years with guy from a very British family who had come to the USA to work as librarians. Our connection came partly from his need for quite a bit more demonstrative affection than was part of his former UK culture. But when we would visit his parents, (and it took awhile for this feature to dawn on me,) suddenly we weren't touching at all!

Even if you share values, there are many assumptions about how values are communicated that are quite different among those who come from different cultures or subcultures. For instance, rubbing up against the UK culture revealed to me that my assumption about politeness was quite different. For me, mannerliness is something you do for others to show you would like to know their preferences. Once those personal preferences specifically are revealed in context, you can dispense with the show of politeness and enjoy a greater degree of intimacy because you have forged an understanding based on tailor-made considerations. This strategy works pretty well among the various American subcultures and among most other cultures I have encountered, but not for the British.

My partner's mom wanted the politeness itself. This made me feel as if she was keeping me away at arm's length. Although I understood what was going on was a cultural difference and talked to her about it, I never did feel comfortable with her or trust her in quite an animal sense.

Strangely enough, eventually the time came when this mother-in-law did provide me with a meaningful token of respect. It only came after I had separated from the relationship a decade later. She made a point to thank me for my part in mediating with her son's ex-wife while raising her grandson, allowing the kid to have so much time with his dad.

This respect also turned out to be a bonding force that helped deal with cleaning up a mess that was left when their son committed suicide six years after we had dissolved our relationship. Even though I wasn't intimately involved with their son at that point, it was still up to me to be the hostess for everyone who showed up from out of town because we knew each other. It was a relief to finally realize that there was a firm connection that went beyond politeness that was functional and in place at such an intense time for everyone. Sort of sad that it took a death to reveal it for me, but it did provide me with some degree of closure.

Cultural differences are powerful - even though slight. It seems when you first meet someone, you see similarities. As you know them, the more differences emerge. If you are lucky enough to have twenty year relationships or more, you'll actually switch roles to deal with their evolving challenges of character!

Enjoy Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 18:18:00 +0000

When I was a kid, I learned by imitation; gaining rapport with my teachers was irresistible. When I was a teen, I learned by accident, in spite of myself. I was lucky to have teachers who accepted that I was learning while half asleep. Once I got to college, I began to learn by absorption - so I started to choose my teachers carefully because I realized I had no idea what I was absorbing. After college, I thought knew how to spot a fantastic teacher. I became fascinated with what makes a teacher worth the topic they're teaching.

For this community musical "Carnival" in 1989, I learned how to walk on stilts, how to juggle clubs, how to hang and build sets, install stage lighting and manage drama queens. There I am on the ladder in the middle.

Sometimes I would just learn whatever a fantastic teacher had to teach. Fantastic teachers seemed to bring out talents their students never knew they possessed. I had to admit that often what attracted me to being taught was trivial, irrelevant or downright foolish. It was only after my ignorance had subsided that I could say there was "a method to madness" for wanting to learn that particular thing. My tolerance extended for learning about something before making up my mind about its value. While learning, I gained and defined the value and use of what I'd gotten on the fly.

Absorption is still my favorite style of learning, because I realize that many people who attempt to teach come up with an explanation that doesn't really match what they actually do. It's the doing of something that I'm often interested in more than the explanation. People teach how they learned - if they take what they learned further, they often don't have ways to explain what they're really doing, so they use their former teacher's words. A learner sometimes needs to ignore that presentation, and get to the source in a more direct way.

What I mean by "absorption" is to merely open up as wide as possible to the skill that is being demonstrated. With absorbing, time of arrival or sequence does not matter. Pretend as if you can already do the skill, even though you are vastly inexperienced. Imitate everything you perceive - body language, attitude and facial expression. Cast your attention wide to take in as much as possible at once, and see if it's possible to juggle all these unknown factors. "Fake it 'til you make it." Count on "beginner's luck" to fill in the blank spots. You have nothing to lose, because you have nothing invested.

Since college, have always been able to learn from books. Surprisingly to me, this is rare. People seem to get a book to "have" the contents or refer to it, seldom do they get a book to really learn it. I outline a book if I think it's something I want to learn. Learning using a book by outlining it can be done with a library book; it's cheaper than buying the book - and I have the contents that I want to use or remember after I outlined it.

The learning skill that has been the most useful for me as a learner has been to observe. Observation pays off when choosing a teacher; barefaced self observation allows faster learning. Each discipline, skill, world of knowledge or study has it's own sense, body language and lexicon, which it pays off to learn - but not at first. I find that I want to directly experience a subject first, before I'm trained into looking at it from the traditional point of view of how most people learn it. After that direct experience as a complete beginner, I'll understand what the classic solutions have answered. Sometimes confronting a subject directly will allow me to innovate beyond the classic learning procedures. Sometimes the way I give back to teachers is by asking them original questions that they haven't yet thought of asking themselves. The way to come up with these original questions is to note what puzzles you or fascinates as you first encounter the skill or subject, before you know what others think is "important" about it.

How do you learn best? What do you enjoy about learning?

Stories Drive Invention

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:09:00 +0000

Since the art of telling stories is so essential for the articulation of almost anything that is communicated, I thought I'd bring forward the continued inspiration for new creative inventions that I get from the field of screenwriting. What fascinates me about screenwriting is how it is the art of selecting what is relevant to a story that "drives" the plot line forward - and of course, what is left out as extraneous. For this reason, I'm always curious to look at movies that are inspired by much longer and more detailed books to bring forward this selection process, scene by scene.

One point that's not obviously revealed by merely watching movies is how movie viewers have been educated over the years to figure out what is happening in a story. Viewers are shown what has been determined by producers to be relevant to the story in the scene action of the actors, set and events. Of course this also includes indications of time frames, foreshadowing of later events, suspense, drama, character building, etc. Movie watchers are, to a great extent, completely unaware of how much work they are doing to construct the plot, events and characters as a story unfolds - and good storytelling never disturbs the illusion of how a viewer must continue to be tracking these elements to make sense of the illusion that is being created as an experience.

But how to put an ability to observe and analyze into becoming a new invention? Comparing to reveal differences is my favorite means. Then the differences can be used as a model or form, plugging in the different content from an unrelated area that then becomes related.

Recipes are an obvious example of this. You can take the form of a casserole, for instance - which is some sort of grain or starch in a container that is baked, containing some sort of vegetable or meat and a type of topping. Now you can take a genre of food, such as Lasagna which is a baked dish - and switch the contents to another country's food style - and you can make a Mexican food casserole instead of an Italian one and have an original combination that wasn't obviously apparent.

To apply this idea to music and screenwriting, there's a fascinating parallel that imagines a piece of music as if it were a story. This suggested to me how musicians could be playing roles in carrying out what this story will become using their ability to improvise. If you'd like to see the result of this invention that was inspired by this parallel thinking of marrying the genre of screenwriting to musical performance, check out the unique advantages of playing with the arrangement and instrumentation of a musical piece as if it were a story.

http://www.franis.org/out4improv/

Any invention takes a bit of investment to wrap your mind around, and this one is no different. It's unpredictable what happens when you take one genre and use it to inspire unique characteristics in another arena. It often creates a synergy type combination, that is often useful for more functions than could be originally expected. Using and playing with a unique combination of genres will make these characteristics apparent. Projects need to be "born" and brought to maturity by figuring out what they are good for. Any baby is lots of trouble and not really good for much of anything until it grows up into a person who can do stuff - ideas are similar.

In this case, what started out as a convenient way to combine the differing abilities and involvement level of a large group of performers turned out to have other uses. As I used this newly invented system to describe existing characteristics of musical styles that already existed to see if it was relevant to them, I realized it could be used as a way to invent a completely new musical style that could be infinitely varied. It can also be used for one person to compose arrangements of a performance piece...as a way for a music teacher to have all of their students to improvise together, as a way to discuss musical arrangement in general...how to give form to generalized "jamming" among musicians who do not know each others songs. Possibly it could be crafted into a composer's game with some programming - but I would think that the experience of making music together with other people would be it's most interesting and fun application. Of course, that means you would need a "troupe" of people who played music on instruments or performed and were interested in playing together with each other, which may be a unique situation to find in this day of virtual reality.

For instance, a business application of such descriptive function in common with the A-Game I invented is apparent in the "music genome" of Pandora.com. Musicians working with Pandora listen to music and describe the characteristics of common factors such as instrumentation, style, use of harmony and rhythm and these descriptions are correlated to other "similar" songs. These commonalities are now organized into a database, so now any user of the site can specify a type of music they like and a whole radio station is generated from these descriptions, containing songs that the user would not normally become exposed to knowing about.

I'd love to know how you think the field of screenwriting could be applied to your favorite project.

Small Talk Originality

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:21:00 +0000

I've worked for a long time to make small talk meaningful. It's my favorite application of thinking skills. From my experience, even standing in line in a supermarket talking to others can be a fascinating experience, if someone can figure out what people have to offer each other in the time they have together to spend now.

What I look for in others to indicate what this "magic topic" might be is their spark of interest, beyond the niceties of over-used one-liners. It might be inside an example they give, a little story they have to tell involving people with whom they spend their time who are important to them. It can be inside of their hobby, secret wish or dream.

Now, how do I do this in such a short time? Turns out it pays off to examine the assumptions of social cliche` and come up with other avenues that yield high-interest answers. You can follow the same routine as others, but ask similar essential questions that are more to the point than the stock questions. I came up with these alternate questions by wondering, "Why is this common social question really being asked?"

For instance, "Where did you grow up?" This is a question with the motive to find out what environment made the person who they are. So I'd avoid asking that question in a way that will illicit the recitation of a town or neighborhood location. Instead, I might ask about the environment that formed that person's experience, such as, "Can you describe environments that you most enjoyed playing in as a kid? What did you like about those places?" Or perhaps, this question of "Where did you grow up?" might being asked to find out what subculture influenced your childhood. So why not ask that as a direct question? "What sort of subculture shaped your early experience?"

Obviously, this is a technique that can offer high yield possibilities for any set of mundane conversations that would be under the heading of "small talk."

Finding a Mentor

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Why would I consider apprenticeship? That began with a college experience.

I had previously had the experience of adopting a mentor with a professor named Dung Fong Lee at U.S. International Univ. in Poway. I was in the habit of "checking out" my teachers before taking a class. After sitting at the back of this teacher's office all afternoon, I observed to him how I now understood the confusing comments I had gotten about his teaching style from his previous and current students. He seemed to radically change his persona to suit the needs of each student, (joke & storyteller, factual info dumper, sparklingly polite conversationalist, bumbler, impolite psychologist, political leader, confessor) without being concerned with presenting a consistent identity. His reply was that he believed this ability to be the mark of an excellent, flexible teacher - and that I probably also had this ability because I had noticed it in him. This began a very interesting relationship where he allowed me to hang out with his family and included me, (and my boyfriend at the time) in his social life. He also taught me Chinese at a breakneck pace for seven weeks. (Since he decided I already knew the content of a introductory class on the I Ching that he offered; he proposed I learn something else.) Later he offered me an opportunity to travel to Taiwan where he would continue my Chinese lessons and set me up teaching English. But I wasn't able to accept at that time, as I would lose the remainder of a four year college scholarship. (One of my life's regrets!)

I believed Lee and I crossed over into a personal relationship partly because he was from another culture and how the USIU college had been intentionally structured to encourage such behavior. Probably my being orphaned as a teen also had something to do with it. So that is how I found out how the apprenticeship experience could go far beyond the content of what was being taught. The few situations where I adopted a position of apprenticeship happened in the course of my various work projects, but later I got the nerve to propose it barefaced... (By asking, "would it be OK to ask you a few more questions again later?") Of course, the questions and answers became more elaborate as they had the inclination and time to teach me and as I showed more interest.

The next mentor I adopted I found by landing a job doing illustrations for a sales booklet of a solar design sales course for a sales manager, Chuck Lewis. This was a presentation meant to be displayed during a home sales call by a troupe of salespeople to introduce hot water solar panels to customers. He was also writing a book of aphorisms about life lessons, and needed a cover illustration. We spent quite a bit of time together because he wanted to explain the book to me so I'd understand how to make the cover...and we enjoyed talking with each other. Then he began to write another book, (eventually titled "You're Gonna Love It!") about sales, so he wanted to talk to me about that too, to help him write the book because he said I was his "perfect customer" that he wanted the to be written for. The book grew from our personal conversations about how to teach sales to people who formerly had assumed that selling and marketing was vulgar and beneath their ethics about how people should be treated. He also taught me quite a bit about telling jokes and how to invent them, which seemed to be a supporting subset skill of salesmanship.

Another person I routinely called where he worked and jokingly asked for the "Terry Delsing School of Comedy." (Which of course, was not where he was really working. But his boss put up with it.) Terry would tell me a joke. I would figure out why it was funny, change around the particulars and tell him the joke I'd just invented. It only took less than five minutes a call. We did that ongoing maybe once a week for a couple of years until I spaced out calling him for too long.

My next mentor, Ray Belange of Apache Signs, came from attempting to paint and fabricate signs as a business. The way I found and adopted Ray as a mentor is the most easily translated to any genre.

I had developed this strategy, when I wanted to learn to do something practical, to call up people cold out of the phone book who were in the business of doing what I needed to learn and asking them a few questions about it. The first few people I asked about what was the proper terminology for the field; the next few I asked how to phrase useful questions I could ask other people and so on... My reasoning that people were willing to answer a few questions was sound, because they were busy at work, and I was asking for free advice. So I just kept calling different people until I had the whole picture, (short of actually doing it.) As I got involved in the process of doing it and hit a snag, I'd call again on those people who seemed willing to talk with the the first time around because some time had passed. They seemed interested in my progress too.

Ray was someone who, as I explained my thinking about what I was trying to do, recognized that we thought alike in an unusual, original way. Turns out, he had expanded on the same idea I had independently originated too. So he invited me to his shop and not only showed me how he'd designed his way past the questions I had, but where to find suitable materials, how he had expanded and innovated how to use the materials, where to find new customers, as well as the joys of riding on motorcycles in foreign countries and living in RVs and warehouses as a lifestyle. (He had raised five kids as a single parent that way!)

Since then, I've hit on the idea of contacting admirable authors and volunteering to help them in whatever way I could be useful. In return I've gotten many free perks in the form of trades of me writing reviews for their book which they sent me free...to helping them using my writing abilities in exchange for their lessons in an ongoing way. One time a mentor I had contacted like this put me in the hot seat of representing them as a tele-workshop host, despite not being trained formally by them. This experience taught me that I had an unusual proclivity for talking coherently, being a high idea producer when everyone else had run out of idea, all while tending the engineering side of an online workshop, (being a natural multi-tasker) which was a talent that I never knew I had, (but Barbara Sher had recognized the ability in me.)

So - mentoring needs a dream - a focus that's practical involving what you are trying to learn to do. Then you ask for help - a little at a time. You find examples of skills you admire in people who enjoy offering the benefits of their experience. You don't admire them, but ask them specific questions about what you'd like to do, encouraging them to be the authority and to think about how they do naturally what you cannot do. If they have other students, you offer the benefits of what you're learning to others who aren't as far along as you are. As you show interest by involving yourself in what they love to teach - you're on your way to learning something and having an interesting relationship with them. Sometimes you're in the position of giving them an idea of how and what to teach others that they couldn't imagine before they met you...

Where's the Music?

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 07:56:00 +0000

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(The last stanza of Keats's "To Autumn." when he was dying of TB.)

When I read a poem, I wonder..."where is the music to this?" For me, unless a poem has a tune and is sung, it's not complete. When I hear poets read their poems, or rappers rap their lines, I think, "that person really wants to express themselves and they haven't learned to sing yet."

I love it when poetry is lyrical or when poetry is an expression of meaning that has additional images or experiences in context with it. But by itself, usually poetry just doesn't do much for me. Part of the reason I don't really get into poetry is probably because there's no music attached, or I'm not connecting with the emotional content that's being expressed.

Words and grammar structure meaning - and poetry is where words become free of their structure. Poetry is how you can rub words together and they can become something original that hasn't been meant before. But unless you're skillful, the reader won't know what you're really saying and will read things into what you wrote that you didn't mean. Understanding is constructed by the person who is experiencing it. Their assumptions and perceptions trump your intent as an artist.

Sometimes poetic words will be so delicious on the page that I can actually imagine them complete without a tune attached. But usually that is when I can imagine images that go with the words instead of a tune, as I can do with this stanza from Keats. The poetry that goes beyond this "lack"of no music will evokes its own images that completely affect me. If a poem doesn't "do it for me," then usually it just doesn't contain enough of what it's hinting at. It's not "juicy enough." Hints are OK, I guess, for those people who like them, but I'm after experiences, or the hints of experiences that I have yet to embody.

Oddly enough, this is also the reason I listen to mostly instrumental music. It's also the reason I carefully select the films and video content to which I expose myself. If I listen to music with lyrics without selecting the content of it, (the radio, for instance) I am often so disappointed with how much drivel is out there. It's that I'm so affected by any art that I must be deliberate. When there is a song with words worth listening to, I never get tired of hearing it and may even take the time to learn to play and sing it. But frankly, most of what my culture imagines is valuable to say in a song or violent movies are ...not what I want to program into my psyche by repeating it. We humans seem to be preoccupied with the sounds of our own self-indulgences - we're verbal and like to blab - even when we don't have anything to say.

Being an artist, how can you tell if what you have to say is going to be considered notable by others unless you say it? Any expression seems to find it's audience. It's always interesting how "great" works of art continue to grow in meaning as the culture changes. People continue to find new meanings in "timeless" artistic vision. What is most personal becomes the most universal, as it is artfully expressed.

Do you think about poetry and how it works with music?

Unexplained

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:09:00 +0000

Partly the reason I love October, is that in most places, fall makes dramatic changes. It makes me feel like getting busy. This is probably a squirrel-like urge to sock away food for the winter. I still enjoy fall in Hawaii, even though there isn't much evidence of change. It's making me think about getting ready to paint holiday windows in the San Francisco Bay area again.

Of course, as as artist, I find that it's also fun to mess up people's windows during this time of year - as I did here for a "Fright Shop" in Hawaii. It's so much fun for me to just draw big, improvising along as I see what happens in front of me.

I enjoy the images and themes of Halloween; the magic and the unexplained happenings. I love the idea that it is, for one night, socially acceptable to assume and act out as another persona - even if it is just for a costume party or an evening of dancing.

But strangely enough, I really cannot watch horror films. I'm just too impressionable. Horrifying images make it into my dreams and haunt me in ways that aren't at all fun or even have a purpose. Movies are intentionally designed to get an emotional reaction from movie goers; in a horror film this is overkill.

This doesn't make much sense to me, because I do enjoy taking chances and being adventurous. It seems like a strange purpose to look for horror on purpose, when so much real challenge is available in the world.

But extremes are entertaining to some people.

If you enjoy horror, what is it about the experience that you enjoy?

Relationship Stages

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 09:02:00 +0000

An interesting view, that relationships have stages. Regarding the few intimate relationships I've had, would say the stages are:

1. Who is this person? What might we do together as a team?
2. Wow, this is wonderful. I'll do anything for her/him.
3. Wait a minute. Is what I'm doing to demonstrate love working how it's intended? Maybe this needs a bit of investigation and adjustment so the demonstrations I contribute to create love in the relationship goes where there are intended. In return, what I allow them to do for me also constructively floats my boat.
4. Trades, offerings and tacit agreements evolve and are enjoyed.
5. A way to update these agreements becomes necessary. Whether agreements are made tacitly, verbally, as trades or as "standing" agreements - is everyone on the same page about what the agreement is? Who does what for whom and who gets to wait for their desires/needs to be met, and how long do they wait? Does the "waitee" ever get what it is they want/need? Can agreements-customs be changed or updated as various member's needs change? For instance, if one of the members of the relationship gets injured and needs care to heal from the other(s), can the relationship be flexible enough to provide that care and later re-establish independence after healing without breaking apart?
6. Over time, everyone's challenges, shortcomings, strengths and/or style or preferences become familiar. Can each member accept the person's intent to do their best in bettering their character flaws, or accept these flaws? How to support and/or encourage improvement of personal character development and learning? How does each member "help" one another? Do the agreements that have evolved merely adjust and compensate for shortcomings? Or is there a recognition of a process that improvement is also evolving? Can personal change be accommodated? The answers to these questions makes or breaks the relationship.
7. If a "break" is happening, character flaws are assigned the role of punishment. It would be so nicer for ME if the person improved - they must not love me enough to improve themselves and make it easier on both of us. Mountain out of molehill sensitivity develops, noting the most minuscule expression of these character flaws in spite of ongoing improvement. The relationship must end; the pressure of having someone so invested in your shortcomings or successes is too pressurized.
7. a. From my own experience, the way out of this is to re-prioritize the constant recognition of the objectionable behavior(s.) Make a specific time to express objections all at once, (without defense is best) instead of constantly having uncontrolled emotional reactions come up all the time. Meanwhile, constructively rebuild the relationship based on enjoyable, bonded experiences so the enjoyment of being together is renewed.
7. b. Of course, if you work this out, you can start new projects together. If you don't navigate this stage very well, the two of you part ways, with various clean-up work ahead. Or you get so damaged that making further agreements are impaired, but you keep going anyway.
8. I've heard after twenty years together, the partners change places in what their shortcomings have become. The shortcomings and complaints each used to have about the other swings in the opposite direction...sort of hilarious!
9. But by now, there's been some track record of getting past difficult times and hopefully, communication skills have increased well enough to continue indefinitely. Unless significant lifestyle changes intervene that make a liaison no longer practical or preferable for various reasons...

Gifts Get In

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 07:38:00 +0000

Really fun to do a detailed window like this. Inspired from various coloring books, but the hatted sleeping moon is all mine. You can see the real thing at the San Rafael IHOP where 3rd and 4th St. come together at the start of what we call the "Miracle Mile."

Values

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 08:11:00 +0000

The part that is tricky for me is how to reveal my own underlying values. In myself, the deepest values often are taken for granted and are completely obscured.
It is only in an extraordinary situation when I am paying attention that I can sometimes catch that a "good question" has been asked that could become quite valuable to me. Usually this value needs some thought to reveal it's meaning. I need to "put it together."
Probably because of the practice of TV watching, even when a valuable question arises that could offer significant insight, the non-sequitur change of topic glosses it over and so, no thinking or experimenting is done about it and the potential value disappears.
I am wondering if a better word would be motives. People rarely think about values. They speculate all the time about the motives of others.
Since I am human and part of a culture, usually it is easy to find others who share my deeper values. Having people who share your values make it largely unnecessary to know what these important assumptions are.
In fact, if you attempt to examine values as a thinking discipline around other people, these people regard it as a useless exercise in intellectual or philosophical pastimes. If you begin to systematically articulate these assumptions about values, people tend to imagine that you are being trite or insulting their intelligence by articulating the obvious.
At least, these are the reactions I've caused in polite company when I bring up values in a specific rather than general way. I've even caused these reactions at the de Bono website, when answering a person who didn't have English as their first language. Someone who was a native English speaker imagined I was "talking down" to the person who had asked for the explanation, complete with it's related assumptions about putting myself in a superior position with my answers-information. Men tend to deliver information; women listen...when the deliverer/listener genders are reversed, some imagine there are control issues.
As you continue to ask the question about values, (and context) something interesting emerges when the value is related to a mismatch where the values were not shared. It's only in a mismatch that the importance of sharing values is revealed; otherwise there is not enough of a reason to bother with values.
The other situation where values are revealed for me has happened in a group dialogue where people are discussing a topic about a human situation. A significant insight about an assumption for me came from listening to a conversation about the proselytizing of family members. I had never realized that I essentially believed relationships should be reciprocal, not competitive.
Another way is reading about the study of it. Cultural or gender mismatches in the expression of values are in a series of books by the linguistics professor Deborah Tannen.
So far, although I'm practicing the "value shoes" of Edward de Bono and asking myself questions from the model - this model doesn't help me with revealing values I did not know I had. Whereas, these other situations have done so for me.
Maybe, back to the drawing board? Or have I not understood the process clearly enough?
I guess what I'm imagining is that there must be assumptions I hold that I'm not aware of having. Can imagine that I know it all!

Hunch or Prejudice?

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:49:00 +0000

What is the difference between an intuitive hunch and a prejudice? This is one of my virtual questions that I enjoy asking.

It's curious to me how each and every perceptual attitude that someone can adopt seems to have alternate ways of describing it. These descriptions, definitions and interpretations seem to color how the subject and person is defined to express another bias or prejudice. Some can get quite...colorful, with pointed accusations.

For instance, students often stop themselves from asking a question of a teacher out of respect for that teacher. But from the teacher's point of view,, "why don't my students ask ANY question?" In my culture, you can have rapport or you can have respect, but not both.

Another instance, it's obvious from my posting here that I enjoy to take the time to offer the benefit of my observations to other people. I've taken the time to learn to write to do this, which has been an effort for me because my talking style isn't easily translated into the forms of writing. But now others are coming to recognize my investment of being able to write. Whenever there is recognition of "talent" or ability, people inevitably wonder why you do such a thing. They assign a motive to your actions - sometimes these motives are not what you would answer if they had asked you. In some cases, they react as if the person who has invested value in an opinion must be a proselytizer or a salesperson.

But sometimes, people complaint that I am being "too" helpful. They seem to not appreciate my motives or my open-mindedness because I don't communicate that very well. If I come up with creative thinking ideas on their behalf without warning them or getting their permission to do so, they react strangely. They're slightly intimidated. They don't know why I can do it or why I would do such a thing for them. Perhaps they assign nefarious motives to what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. I've been accused of "co-dependence," but I just don't have the vested interests and addictions to go along with the profile.

Demonstrating my ability to think has also often gotten me defined me as "analytical," as if I am an inflexible one-trick pony. Am of the opinion that everyone has multiple talents, often undeveloped.

I've learned to actively refuse to defend myself and instead invite participation. But sometimes it just doesn't work. People misread my communicating as being upset. They don't dare to confront or engage, fearing they might offend.

Would love to open a conversation to suggestions on how to better this state of affairs, because I think this same issue affects many, many interactions with many people.

Anyone have any suggestions or explorations...stories? Probably not. Somehow, the way that I write doesn't invite comments. Not sure what to do about that.

Witchy

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 01:59:00 +0000

In honor of deva spirits and witches everywhere, I made a witchy nymph. The face sort of looks like mine, doesn't it? That was an accident...

What you don't see in this picture is how I had to splint and graft two pieces of the stick into one to get the witchy nymph to have arms as well as legs.

While I was doing so, I was thinking about how many of us wounded healers there are, partially broken... How many there are who have had to go from being broken to making themselves whole again. This journey seems to be necessary to make compassionate teachers with some real answers for those who find themselves in dire straights.

Haywired

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 12:42:00 +0000

It is a fact that no matter how much "better" your sensory judgment gets, you are always going to be using your senses in a 'relative' way. 'Absolute fact' doesn't exist. It's not how people are wired. We're made so that we get used to being whatever we have learned, so what is new can get our attention. So whenever a significant change is made, it will always feel "strange" and "abnormal."

After recovering from over-doing and needing to adapt to terrible or extraordinary circumstances of life that nearly everyone encounters, it is pretty amazing how it's still possible to uncover your original subtle sensitivity. Eventually with the right sort of attention, you can get your bearings and learn to do things easier as you used to be able to do it when you were innocently younger. As this is happening, the changes that register as "significant" get more subtle, but they are still changes with those same "weird" sensations of newness.

I believe that sensory appreciation is far and away more important priority as a principle than most Alexander teachers give it. Most give it lesser billing as a sort of "special effects" in relation to the other "more important" principles - but I think motor sensory amnesia has center stage as the one of the three most important concepts of Alexander Technique. Sensory appreciation is the principle that needs to be introduced first.

It's important because students need to know from the beginning how to recognize that something new has happened. most people disregard happenings that are "unclassified flukes" because they don't fit preconceptions - they're not anywhere near the radar of expectations. If students don't understand what a discovery looks like, how are they going to know they are making one when it happens?

As far as humor goes - more teachers should use it!

Thinking Process Example

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:53:00 +0000

A generous friend gave me a futon mattress that had been in storage too long and went to the trouble of re-building a bed stand for it so my bed is now off the floor. But the mattress was moldy, even if it wasn't apparent at the time. Going to the trouble of cleaning it, putting it out in the sun didn't seem to make any difference. With the assumption that cleaning it needed to be done a different way... (and the frustration of having spent a great deal of time on it already...)

Wild idea: stuff it in the dryer until it catches on fire.
Observation: the dryer is hot.
Is there a way to administer heat that would work like a clothes dryer?
To use heat to kill mold by putting the mattress into a parked car and leaving it in a hot place for a number of days.
To get/borrow a steam cleaner; put a mixture of tea tree oil, bleach & detergent in the steam cleaner or on the surface of the cover of the mattress...which area all known to kill the mold that has gone into the middle of the mattress... THEN put the mattress into the parked car to dry it out.
...all the while going without a bed again.

Then I started thinking how sometimes I'm allergic to some sorts of clothes detergent. This shift to "allergy" rather than "cleaning" suggested a different solution... a mattress cover exists to help people deal with dust mites who are allergic - this cover could just as easily be applied to seal off mold!

But then the problem was - I don't have the money to buy this mattress cover right now. So...I started thinking about what else I could do to seal up the mold in the mean time. I realized I had saved an old camping air bed which was flocked on one side that I could cut up, make a bag out of it and insert the mattress into it. I could cut it open, cut the baffles out of the inside of the camp mattress and tape it shut with good old duct tape after the futon mattress was inserted.

Wow! Instant solution with free materials! Now we'll see if it works...

Love, Respect and Co-Independence

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:32:00 +0000

I was thinking about Independence Day, about independence in general. If you're familiar with the concept of "Co-Dependence," it seems to me that many counselors, (who supposedly have wisdom about the nature of "healthy" relationships,) have merely elevated independence to a state of Co-Independence.

After living alone for awhile, it seems to me that a state of inter-dependence is preferable to independence. Tomorrow I'm moving into a living situation with a friend of mine. Am very hopeful that it's a change for the better!

Respect can be so often offered as a deal or a trade - but I guess that can also be true about love. Many people attempt to negotiate tacitly while professing to be offering "love."

Marriage, for many people, just lets everything be implied rather than specified. Have always regarded marriage as a lazy person's way to say, "Hey, rather than negotiate and really make agreements specifically that we're going to keep with each other, let's get married and that umbrella will take care of the whole conversation about our agreements." Once the situation of defining what, exactly, the agreements really are, things fall apart...because people got married because they didn't have a clue how to make these agreements. In a sense, many marriages are all about expectations about how the husband or wife role is "supposed" to go, as if it's a slot or a job.

If their cultural assumptions match, then all is well. Most often these cultural assumptions do not match. Cultural assumptions about love often do not match people's own needs.

Really, professing love, many people are really only making a deal without knowing what they are actually getting or giving. Of course, people can get disappointed if the deal is not suitable - but I'm not sure if it's actually love that they're getting or giving.

Respect contains quite a bit more loving sanity than the passions of love.

Passion - looking at the root of that word is really interesting in the origin and history of the word "passion." Rather than an intense striving sort of meaning the word has come to mean in today's culture, it turns out that "passion" is related more to "pass." It is a surrendered state, an allowing sort of action. The word passion comes from meaning of "passive."

So it's not just that there is love or not love, but what sort of love there is, what sort of respect there is. Quality is everything in love and respect.

Respect can be had out of fear as well as love. Suppose that there is a twisted sort of love that is also mixed in with fear or power to wound which would be common in parent/child love as well as between consenting adults. Many emotions may be mixed in with each other.

For instance, love mixed with blame or a sense of cause and effect or consequence gives an impression that the other person is causing love to occur in you. Not sure that so many people are capable of love. Before love can happen, a person seems to need to open themselves up to loving and being lovable. That can be a challenge, to think of oneself as lovable in certain circumstances of life.

This is true for other emotions as well. Pride without fear is a desire for excellence. - (a quote from a friend of mine named Chuck Lewis, author of "You're Gonna Love It!" - a book on selling for artists.) Pride mixed with fear - it is one of the seven deadly sins of self-involved arrogance.

Many people use the more general term "love" when a better word for what they are doing might be "care," "admiration," "compassion," "desire," "attraction," "infatuation," "absorption," "attention," "adulation," etc.

It is common to be notoriously inarticulate when it comes to misunderstanding or mis-naming one's own emotions.

Any Questions?

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:04:00 +0000

A kid and a Jehovah Witness came to my door last week. Before they started in with their religious invitations, I engaged the youngster in learning to juggle. He was a kid of around ten years old. Because I'd given him something of value in learning juggling, the kid wanted to give me a booklet that was a digest of their bible. I took it and read some of it.

In this condensed Bible there was an admonition where followers were urged to burn the books of "evil" false prophets such as Tarot card readers, psychics, astrologers, etc. It got me thinking how threatening it is to religions to have competition to their cornering the market on interpreting answers to spiritual questions. Probably nowadays, anyone who dispenses advice and wisdom based on their personal experience is going to be threatening to a church. Made me wonder what definition of "evil" this threat would actually include. Pretty much whenever you decide certain people are "evil," it's only a matter of time before many more people end up in that same category.

I thought of all the people in social networking who are urged to "brand themselves" and be the number one special version of the dispenser of value gained by their followers. In a flash of inspiration, I saw every social networker on Twitter as having their own religion...and respective followers... How would threatened religions and churches burn e-books...?

In the time of Christ there must have been quite a few people out preaching "Truth." Probably there were lots of swindlers who were looking for followers who would pay them money to support their efforts, just as there seem to be now. In that era to perform the miracle of raising the dead, all you had to do is have the skill of recognizing someone in a coma who is might wake up eventually.

That Bible held up as the "word of God" was written by "psychics" who probably did not have much means to advertise - but they could write. Just getting materials to write something down must have been challenging. Probably being someone who knew how to read and write was something you had to keep secret, because people in that era were threatened by it. Creativity was probably low on the list of those cultures deliberately designed to control huge classes of people. Urban myths about anyone, translated numerous times and painstakingly hand-written and copied by those who could READ - it must have been such a privileged, rare gift to be literate in that era. Maybe all those stories in the Bible were about many people, and they all got lumped together into being about one person. (Bait and switch was a common historical tactic of religions.)

Now anyone can have their blog printed on demand. Anyone can dispense "wisdom" and write their own Bible. No wonder religions are being threatened.

Some people believe words have a firm, factual reality in themselves. They think words "mean what they mean." But this is not true. Words shift and flicker depending on context and expression, just as symbols do. This is what makes poetry and the symbols of religion and belief interesting.

Many people have an ability to think, but their ability to express their thinking may not reach the listener or reader for many mutual reasons. The topic or context may be incomplete or indistinct. Or the communicator's natural style of thinking may be so different from our own that it is difficult to figure out the communicator's intent. What is their associative pathway from point to point and how can I follow? It may be tricky to follow thinking paths - especially if thinking is original thinking.

In this way creative thinking is similar to religion - in that really original ideas must be carefully interpreted for the listener.

So often religious bureaucracy seems to want to control how people think because they invest in being the interpreter for the public of their respective "holy scripture." Religious leaders want to be the ONLY interpreter for the believers, claiming "all others are wrong or evil."

Each time they read or listen, each person is reconstructing meaning from reading what someone else has written or said. Someone who has written is pointing at...something about what they intend to say. Their skill and familiarity with their language use is a factor, in addition to their ability to think - but also their ability to articulate and guess at the assumptions of their listener. They try to answer the virtual question: "What would the listener want to know?"

It is up the person listening or reading to fill in the blanks, follow the traces or indicators while the listener reconstructs the thinking pathways of the communicator. In this way, listening is almost a spiritual practice. It is a spiritual question when a person seeks a way to express that which cannot be directly expressed. Spiritual, intuitive, or virtual questions often beg for symbols and indirect ways to express their messages and intent.

Of course, the way you frame a question structures and points to the answer. Have any questions now? Hope so.

Outside Language

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:03:00 +0000

People seem to have a really hard time thinking for themselves. They're not practiced at thinking on demand at all, especially when asked to think about what is missing. You really can't demand that others "think outside of the box" without at least one example right on the spot of what that is. I'll see if I can use words to point out how it's possible to think beyond language.

The easiest example is an experiment. Get out the video camera and film people walking. Then ask them to describe what they actually did as they walked, and have them look at the video of themselves. Or ask people to demonstrate a skill and teach it to someone else in a way other than how they learned it. Most people can't describe the making of art in words. Or ask music fans to describe, in words, what musicians do that allows them to improvise with each other. Ask movie fans how come a series of movie scenes makes people get startled or what really happened in the movie scenes before the whole movie theater just sucked in their breath simultaneously. ...They experience it, but usually can't say how. Only those who work in those fields are conscious of these magical "nuts and bolts." Even these professionals who do these things sometimes don't know HOW they do them well enough to articulate how it works in words. They just do it.

Many people are able to demonstrate something successfully, but they can't describe what they are doing without sounding hesitant, trite, inane and fumbling. As a collective culture, we're just not used to observing for ourselves and using our own words to describe what we are experiencing.

Why isn't self-observation taught as a foundation skill in education?

I think this has something to do with our language structure. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which puts forward that language structures thought ability - is not merely limited to specific word definition. Perceptual assumptions trap us within the grammar sentence structure of language.Thinking is also related to how words are put together.

For instance, important to English sentence structure is the direct object. This has the whole culture being quite concerned with who is doing something to who or what is being affected. We are constantly thinking about how much someone is lying, (not whether they are lying or not!) Everyone is constantly having to ask themselves, "What percentage of what so and so says should be believed?" Since the direct object is so important in our language, Westerners so often focus on what we can do to something else - the focus is directed outside of ourselves at the direct object.

It's all about who does what to whom, who gets whose way and who has to wait and for how long they wait - and does the one who waits EVER get what they might want or need?

This why people are so concerned with status in our Indo-European culture. It's impossible to open your mouth or write without adding to the cultural trance of defining the nature of reality. People are constantly in the position of attempting to determine how much another person is lying, teasing or joking.

How does someone understand what another person MEANS to say? People are confronted by descriptions about what the world "is" constantly - every advertisement, every newscast, every piece of gossip, every narration of the nature of the world, every description, every lesson, every comment - any utterance that involves the possibility of word choice.

All of these constructs of words involve a unique point of view. As a listener, we must reconstruct a workable meaning out of what we hear. Nothing IS what it IS. Everything is "open to interpretation!" We all must do this in spite of having little or no knowledge, appreciation, sympathy, empathy or compassion for that other person's point of view and/or experiences. We must guess at all of these, even when we ask directly.

For instance, although there are many lip-serviced references to an inter-woven body-mind connection, we still combine two words to discuss the feature - and the word is a noun, rather than a verb. In English, we are still cramming the concept of psycho-physical into our old mold of the two being separate, even though most of our culture now acknowledges that the body and mind are one.

You can probably tell that I've talked about this before. I'll stop ranting now. Tell me what you think.