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L’Chaim …

L’Chaim …

by ·

“To Life …”

 

This morning I was inexplicably brought back to a memory of sitting on a small bench overlooking the bridge that crossed the pond at the Blue Dell Farm in Pemberton, NJ during a break, while at an NLP training with Roye Fraser. I’d gone there to study NLP with him, and discovered he was weaving a magical score with something he called “The Generative Imprint” using NLP to deliver and train in this model of transformational change he’d been developing for about a decade at that time.

This was an unusual way to teach NLP, not by a series of exercises to teach either concepts or techniques, like representational systems or swish patterns, but in what he called “wholeform” (something I’d come to appreciate more as I delved into the work of the quantum physicist David Bohm).

We’d all sit in the “Hypnotorium” Roye’s name for the room we worked in with him, that was a converted mechanics garage on the property he owned there in Pemberton. Roye would begin talking about something, then he’d ask us all “What do you want?” and someone would say or do something that would catch his attention and he’d “bring them up” … meaning he’d bring them to the front of the room and begin working with them. Not demonstrating a concept or technique, but using concepts and techniques to create profound transformational change with whomever he’d brought up tot he front.

Then we’d be instructed to “Go do the exercise.” … and, everyone in the room would be like, “What exercise?!!???” (even though the exercise was clearly spelled out on a flip chart with steps to take to do whatever it was that we’d be working on at that moment) … because, we’d just seen a seamless flow of concept and technique customized to the exacting needs of an individual that no one there at the time could hope to replicate. So we’d walk off, spellbound, to do our best to “Do the exercise.”

It was in the Hypnotorium with Roye that the phrase, “L’Chaim” uttered in a deep, resonant, voice with a ting of a South African accent, usually proceeded or followed by a deep, roaring burst of laughter, became etched in my mind.

“L’Chaim!” … TO LIFE!

The work Roye did was about “LIFE!” … discovering the wonder and joy of being alive … fully, completely and with abandon.

I took this on in my years of apprenticing with Roye, dedicating myself to helping others find for themselves “the wonder and joy of being alive … fully, completely and with abandon.”

“L’Chaim!”

Many times since those early years I myself uttered that phrase after completing a piece of work with someone … often to Jewish clients I’ve had who I hoped would recognize my toasting their new awakening to themselves, sometimes to gentiles like myself who I hoped would recognize the intention if not the literary meaning of the phrase.

A way I’ll often end a piece of work, or a training session, or even many of my posts is with the bastardized Italian-American, “Buona Fortuna and Abundanza!” … which I state as a prayer and a blessing, i.e.: “May you have good fortune and abundance in your life.” (there is no word “abundanza” in Italian, the Italian word is “abbondanza” meaning “plenty”).

Another phrase I picked up from Roye was his colorful way of sending folks off, “Go forth and fructify.” … said with a glint in his eye and a conspiratorial tone to his voice.

fruc·ti·fy

ˈfrəktəˌfī/

verbformal

verb: fructify; 3rd person present: fructifies; past tense: fructified; past participle: fructified; gerund or present participle: fructifying

1. make (something) fruitful or productive.

◦ bear fruit or become productive.

Origin:

Middle English: from Old French fructifier, from Latin fructificare, from fructus ‘fruit.’

You may think, “Ahhh, this Roye fellow was a very playful sort!” … and you my friend would be correct. But, you’d be missing the deadly serious side of him. He was playful only in respect to achieving the outcome, i.e.: to lead his clients to living their lives … fully, completely and with abandon.

More than anything that’s what I got from my years with Roye, first to, “ live my life fully, completely and with abandon” and then to commit to this as the first principal of the work I learned with him as I share it with others.

After some years I began to bring my own approach to this work to life, the MythoSelf Process. This model was born from drawing on some distinctions that came from my own personal history and the study of other intellectual and transformational giants … folks like the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell, and the masterful somatic practitioner Moshe Feldenkrais, and seeing how our life stories are carried within us in word and deed.

I began to develop a unique way of working with folks using both transformational stories and subtle somatic interventions to shift the fundamental position of perception and decision making of the clients I work with today. This way of approaching transformational change that leads to breakthrough performance emerged from that early work I began learning with Roye in the Hypnotorium.

Roye taught me to attend to gross and subtle “idiosyncratic movement” aligned with “ideomatic phrases” … individualized ways people express something that is not easily captured in language and is highly unique to them personally. From this early training I began to notice something more about what I today refer to as “micro-muscular response” and “dynamic patterns of movement” … the basis of the Soma-Semantics model I’ve been developing and refining for the past thirty years.

In my observations with clients over tens of thousands of hours of doing work with them in training rooms, groups and one-to-one private work, I’ve noticed how deep values that guide perception, decision making and behavioral responses are reflected in the way the body configuration adjusts to reflect the mind of the individuals I’m working with irrefutably and absolutely.

As a person accesses these values, that are the basis of their personal identity, i.e.: what’s most meaningful to them before any conscious awareness or processing take place, they automatically and irrevocably make somatic adjustments that are the physical manifestations of what they are accessing.

The resulting somatic pattern generates a state change, or a way of being, that is consistent with the values and identity position they have been accessing.

This is a physical declaration of themselves, like a bold pronouncement, “I AM THIS!” … or at a more fundamental level of awareness that is barely conscious for them most of the time, “I AM!”

This then becomes the basis, or the ground, from which all the work that proceeds is built upon.

From this most fundamental, unspoken declaration of “I AM!” we work to extract the narrative form in story and in idiom, often expressed in paradoxical form, e.g.: “supple steel” … “calm intensity” … this is the semantic expression of the Soma-Semantic pair.

When these are firmly inhabited they individual who possesses them has the basis for accessing how they know themselves to be alive in the most fundamental and primal way possible (NOTE: to get here takes a bit of expertise and tradecraft).

This has now become the starting point … beginning the journey that follows, remaining always grounded in and tethered to the fundamental distinction of being alive …
fully, completely and with abandon …
—
“L’Chaim!”.

It’s not always so easy for clients who haven’t yet experienced the wholeform way of learning that is the basis for the MythoSelf Process and the Soma-Semantics model to see the value of investing in getting to this fundamental position from which to live their life.

Far too often folks are consumed with the urgency of the immediate …

– resolving some crisis that has arisen

– paying the bills

– sending the children off to school

– getting the next promotion, contract or client

– growing their business or practice

– caring for an elderly parent

– insuring their own future or legacy …

whatever is staring them in the face in the moment.

Yet, doing all these things, even extraordinarily well, will not bring you peace or peace of mind. These things will not satisfy the deep existential and ontological longings you have to know and live your purpose, and to fully manifest and express all you are capable of being.

And, despite the deep, compelling call of the adventure Jospeh Campbell speaks of in the Hero’s Journey … i.e.: to become fully human and realize yourself in all your magnificent splendor … most folks will pursue the urgent and trivial at the cost of the significant and substantial.

But, I persist because I have seen the difference that establishing the fundamental awareness and access to this way of being makes in every other moment of one’s life.

Instead of trying to “get somewhere” the basis of the work I do with clients is to have them stop where they are and experience themselves in this moment … fully, completely and with abandon.

This is difficult, I know.

To simply slow down enough to face yourself and come to the complex realization of where you are, how you and who you are in this moment … before rushing off to the next thing, or just proceeding to get on with your life.

However, all the accomplishments, achievements and accumulation of wealth and material success in your life will never satisfy you if you are missing this fundamental grounding in being fully , completely and with abandon present to yourself and your life as it is … right here, right now.

Then you can make the essential and substantive decisions you need to that will both satisfy your existential and ontological longings, giving your life meaning, purpose and direction … and, also ”get on with it”, knowing that where you are aiming yourself is a destination worth arriving at in the end.

Not having this one distinction in place keeps virtually everyone stuck without the hesitation, concern, worry, anxiety or fear that stops them from being able to “get on with it” … and create the life they desire and dream of for themselves, and those they care about and love.

Even when all the other pieces are seemingly in place, ignoring this crucial foundation for everything else will leave you at the top of having climbed the wrong ladder, and possibly with no way of getting back down to start over or the time left to do it if you could.

In fact, the greatest challenge is having enough success to dig in and fortify the position you’ve established, even when you sense that the peak you’re standing on isn’t one that serves you or those you truly care about and love.

Here’s the good news …

I’ve worked with enough folks, from 5 – 95, to know that remembering the deep call to life … your source code to living fully, completely and with abandon … is available to you regardless of where you find yourself standing today.

You may have to give up some of what you have, to get what you truly and deeply want, but the reward is worth the sacrifice every time.

The realization of yourself, and the potency of action that comes with that release, will allow you to build the significance and substance you desire in your life, both on your own and with others.

If you are ready there is a way …

“L’Chaim!” … it’s still ringing in my ears after all this time.

With grace and humility,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process and SomaSemantics

(On a snowy morning from) Parsippany, NJ

P.S.: If you’re interested in exploring experience Foolish Wisdom with me live in Lambertville, NJ, 2-days Live, Saturday & Sunday, 31 March/1 April (or join me for just one day on Saturday, 31 March).

Find out more: Foolish Wisdom
Let me know what you think otherwise in the comments below or by sending me a private message …

BUONA FORTUNA AND ABUNDAZA!

Claiming Your Right To Be … Become The Buddha

Claiming Your Right To Be … Become The Buddha

by ·

Taking A (Semantic) Stand …

What Would It Take To Get You To Put A Stake In The Ground, And Claim That Space As Your Own?”

 

[“I am Diogenes.”]
One version of the story about the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree seeking the complete unfolding of consciousness tells of his last challenge by the gods before his enlightenment. Just prior to realizing his final enlightenment the gods, represented by the demon Mara had him send his most beautiful daughters, sometimes thought of as “Lust” and “Desire,” to seduce the future Buddha, but he was unmoved by them, so they departed.

Then Mara sent his monstrous army into the fray, and again Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha, sat unmoving and untouched. They launched their weapons, arrows and spears darkened the sky they flew in such profusion, but as they reached the future Buddha they fell around him having turned inflight into a shower of flowers. 

Finally Mara himself stood against the future Buddha, and he proclaimed his right to the seat of enlightenment by the virtue of his spiritual accomplishments, and his armies of demons and monsters all stood with him acknowledging his accomplishments as well. With this Mara asked, “My army speaks for me, who will speak for you?” and the future Buddha seemingly unmoving but for the single gesture of reaching down with two fingers of his right hand touched the earth, and in that moment claimed his right to be and the space he sat upon, and he was enlightened.

This single, final gesture of the future Buddha is captured in the “earth witness” mudra, where the left hand rests palm up upon the knee of the folded and crossed left leg, while the right hand reaches down to touch the earth and claim witness for one’s right to be. This simple expression of one’s being is the ultimate representation of steadfastness, and the silent exclamation, “I AM!”

I’ve always found this part of the story profoundly moving …

I yearn for Siddhartha Gautama’s steadfast stillness, his willingness to simply be … needing nor wanting anything more. Even when the irresistible temptations of mana … power, prestige, authority are thrust upon him he resists, or when irresistible beauty, lust and desire threaten to seduce him he never falters … remaining silent and unmoving.

As I’ve shared before I’m a “good” Roman Catholic boy by indoctrination if not actualization, and as a good student I’ve learned my lessons well. This moment of the Buddha’s reminds me as well of the moment the devil tries to seduce Jesus in the cave with temptation of worldly gain and power, even trying to trick him with simplicity by offering simple bread and water for his cavernous hunger and blistering thirst … to which Jesus replies, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds. out of the mouth of God.” rebuking Satan and his temptations.

These mythic forms of claiming one’s space, one’s right to be, have always been compelling for me.

For almost my entire adult life I have sought to incorporate and assimilate this simple understanding for myself, one’s right to be” – and to explore it and share it with others who share my fascination with this thing that I think is the ultimate expression of what it is to be human … our ability to claim our right to simply be, without adornment or even proof beyond our being itself.

The right to be shows up for me most in the idea of what I call one’s mythic form … the deep, often pre-conscious autobiographical narrative that defines and drives us. This narrative, unlike most stories that are told pre-exists in form and precedes language … it’s more somatic than it is semantic.

It’s been thirty years this year that I will have committed myself to unearthing the mystery of mythic form as I conceive of it. What I’ve convinced myself of in these three decades dedicated to the realization of, what it means to simply be, is that it is held and contained in what drives us to action, and comes to expression in our acts … on our own, with and in relation to others.

This beingness, if you will, is the source of our personal power, it is the seat of our personal performance, and yet it remains elusive at best for most of us.

So we seek to come to terms with our being, what we perceive rumbling unceasingly beneath the surface, driving us, seeking expression, willing us to become .. and, we know it only through what we can call our ‘worldview’ … the totality of the way we know the world around us and ourselves in relation to it … our private realities.

These realities are what I think of as mythic form, the massive, imposing, singularity of the autobiographic narrative that precedes language, and at the same time dominates everything thing we think and speak. Our mythic form is unmistakable in our actions, in deed and in word. And, can seem to us “a given,” fixed in space and time, an irreversible, unchangeable aspect of ourselves … ”who” we know ourselves to be.

Yet this simply isn’t true, we become what we claim to be, much more fully than what we’ve known we were. This then is your key to freedom, your key to become fully human, as the renowned scholar and mythologist Joseph Campbell suggested.

This ability to claim our future being is all about what it is to be human, and it requires us to drive a stake into the ground as surely as the Buddha showed us in his simple act of claiming his right to be be by touch the earth with the two fingers of his right hand. In his moment of defiance Siddhartha Gautama was the stake in the ground.

So, as is my wont at the start of the new year I give voice to my stake in the ground, the spot I will sit upon for this revolution of the earth around the sun.

This year I lay claim to “MAD SKILLS” … the expression of virtuosity in action, in my deeds and words. And … I invite you to join me in claiming MAD SKILLS for yourself as well, beginning at the core, with the unfolding of the mythic form, the worldview that drives you.

This surely is at the heart of it all … the chain of causality that determines not just what we do, what we accomplish, realize and gain for ourselves and with others, but ultimately who we become … the worldview we hold, the seat of our perceptions, sense-making, decision-making, action-taking … the results and outcomes we achieve, and fail achieve … our pre-conscious, and ever-present, mythic form.

I share with you that at the very center of our ability to choose and decide who we are in this moment, and who we will become in the next, is our commitment to building ”MAD SKILLS” … virtuosity in our action-taking.

There is a paradox I invite you to explore with me this year … that our doing both proceeds from our being, and precedes it as well in our becoming.

My invitation to you is to enter the liminal space of exploration that exists just before and between our acts, to take control of who we are and who we are aiming to be as well.

This is the space that opens before the Gates of Perception that determine how we know the world around us, and our place in it …

Are you ready for the journey of your life?

Remember, this ship you are upon set sails but once for you … lay claim to who you will have been and who you have become before it docks for the last time …

Best,

Joseph Riggio,Ph.D.
Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process and SomaSemantics

P.S. – Click this link to find out more about the Gates of Perception and how you can dive in deeper … much, much deeper than you probably ever have now.

Reinventing Reality …

Reinventing Reality …

by ·

Why Sir Issac Newton Had To “INVENT” Calculus … (and why his reason should matter to you)

Defying Gravity - One-person-acrobatic-jumping-scene-symbolize-vitality,-aspiration,-success,-progress-000010811119_400px“If you can’t tell if it’s reality you’re dealing with, you can’t possibly expect take action to create the results you want.” – Joseph Riggio, Ph.D. author of “The State of Pefection: Unleashing Your Hidden Code To Mastery”

For decades I’ve been on about the alignment between our perceptions of reality (all I believe we ever have with regard to our sense of reality and our ability to act in the world as we know and experience it) and …

What’s beyond beyond our subjective, or constructed, experience .. the manifest and extant data in the environment … “objective, empirical evidence” … what we must accept as true even when we don’t agree with it or like it … as we know it to be through our own empirical, sensory perceptual experience.

BUT … this is no ordinary or easy task … i.e.: arriving at an empirical experience of reality that simultaneously allows for what cannot be known except by one’s own subjective, empirical perception and understanding.

AND, I beleive it is what Newton solved in creating “the Calculus.”
Give me a minute or two more and I’ll explain why I believe that … and what it means to you too.

 

Newton’s “Fluxional” Calculus:

Okay, to begin with we can’t really know if it was actually Issac Newton or Gottfied Leibniz who actually invented modern Calculus (the term was in use long before either of these 17th century genius, but referred to mathematics in general before it was formalized in the approach that we simply refer to as “calculus” today).

And … I don’t really care either …

The reason I want to focus on Newton is because his path to “the Calculus” was more general and applicable, and less theoretcial and sweeping philosophically than Leibniz’s approach.

Leibniz believed that “the Calculus” was a metaphysical explanation of change, i.e.: beyond the material realm, but nonetheless fascinating as a method to explore what was not possible to capture in the physical plane of existence, his was the “Infinitesimal Calculus” the sought to explore infinitesimal events as they were held as concepts of thought.

Newton on the other hand saw Calculus as a general explanation of change, and in specific a way to mathematically understand, capture and describe the motion of objects … especially when dealing with the magnitude of the motion of the objects in question.

Another reason is that I love the way Newton referred to what we know think of as formalization of the Calculus he developed; “Fluxional Calculus” … it just appeals to me.

However, the deep distinction in Newton’s calculus was that he tried to avoid infinitesimals, i.e.: that which could not be grasped empirically, but defaulting to a strictly rigorous epiricism. His was a task of explaining “the indisputable fact of motion” by accepting that as objects moved they were transiting a path that was continuous and not made up of infinitesimally small increments of movement.

This is a distinction between the empiricism of the analog in motion and the imaginal of the digial points that a moving object occupys in some unique, divided and separate instant from all other instants it occupies along the path it transits.

&nspb;

Why Newton HAD To Invent Calculus”

 

It’s claimed that Newton “HAD” to invent the Calculus to gain acceptance of his theory of gravity with the Royal Academy of Science in England … and there’s some truth to that, but it wasn’t the only reason he began or became obsessed with the path that led to his Fluxional Calculus.

Newton HAD to invent calculus to give him a way to describe the world that had become empirically obvious and undeniable to him … a world filled with motion and change that was constant, continuous, inevitable and unbroken or indissolvable into discreet and distinct separate elements or moments in space or time.

One of the most fascinating things about Newton’s (and Leibniz’s) calculus, that described motion and change, to me was that it demanded the creation of an entire new system of mathematical representation for the elements and concepts that it was addressing and workign with as a “tautology” … a closed, self-contained, way of considering reality as we know it, with it own set of self-referencing, self-organizing principals, rules and language.

 

So Why Should You Care About Any Of This???

 

The reason to care about this is simple … because your life depends on it!

Okay … Okay … maybe I’m being a little melodramatic for effect.

BUT, let’s say that the quality of your life, and the experiences you have, do actually depend on it … i.e.: your ability to describe reality beyond yourself, or your solipsistic, singular way of knowing.

To put it another way … YOU NEED TO HAVE MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW TO MAKE SENSE OF ANYTHING BEYOND A WILD HALLUCINATION OF WHAT YOU THINK IS “OUT THERE” IN THE WORLD BEYOND YOURSELF … that thing we call “reality.”

You see your own personal experience of anything is “non-falsifiable” as your experience. Your experience is what it is absolutely, undeniably and indisputedly … just like an object in motion is an object in motion.

However, to make sense of your experience in relation to the world beyond yourself … the experience others are having – of themselves, of you, of the world you are experiencing in simultaneity … or, the events that are occuring that are beyond your ability to contain personally … just about any event that includes more than just you yourself experiencing just you yourself … you must have a way to “triangulate” and navigate your experience in reference to what is beyond just you.

(I recommend you slow down … go back … and re-read that paragraph a few more times. It’s both essential to what I’m offering you here, and also critical if you want the value of what I’m offering you here as well.)

This is the essence of the work I refer to as accessing “The State of Perfection” … a way of moving towards a more rigorous empiricial position that begins by having access to and the ability to sustain multiple points of view …

  1. One point of view that you must gain a handle on is what we can call a “first person point of view” (FP-POV). A FP-POV is the point of view that you have from within yourself, i.e.: your experience of your experience … the point of view that is absolute, undeniable and indisputable.
  2. Another point of view you can have is a “second person point of view” (SP-POV). A SP-POV is one in which you consider what it would be like to experience the experience you’re having if you were another person having the experience of being with you … having your experience.This one’s a little more complex in that you have to hold two points of view simutaneously to get there … the point of view of what it would be like to notice another person having an experience of being with you while you’re having the experience you’re having … AND, the point of view of noticing the experience that other person would be having of being with you.
  3. A third point of view could be one in which you are simply in an observer’s position noticing what there is to notice without referencing it as subjective experience … for example; “My arm is moving” as the pure experience of noticing that your arm is moving in detached way, almost as though it’s not your arm that’s moving … like you would notice someone else’s, anyone else’s arm moving. This would be a third person point of view (TP-POV).What’s significant is that you can extend the TP-POV to experiences that are not externally observable, for example: “I am angry … AND I’m feeling it as a tension in my abdominal area, while my hands and jaw are clenching, and I’m constracting all the muscles along my back from my waist to my next far more than I am usually aware of contracting them … and, I also notice that my field of vision seems to be much narrower and more tightly focused than is usual to me.” without becoming attached to any of that description beyond noticing what’s there … i.e.: not wanting or needing it to be anything other than or different than what it is “as is.”The TP-POV would then become a kind of “empirical” or “epistemlogical” phenomenology … i.e.: an examination of the content of your own experience as though from a position beyond, or outside of yourself, where you are extremely interested in and observant of the data about what you are experiencing without attaching any meaning to it beyond a pure description of what you’re observing about it.

When you can access these multiple points of view, especially a TP-POV … an epistemological phenomenological” point of view … you will be infinitely better at managing your perceptions and actions to direct them to the outcome positions you most want to attain.

This is how you will begin to gather the ability to optimize all your experiences … regardless of the circumstance or situation, on your own and/or with others.

 

So Why Bring Newton Into This Conversation About Optimal Experience Then???

 

There are two reasons that the discussion about Newton creating Fluxtional Calculus are important to this conversation …

  • First, because it clarifies the distinction of subjective and empirical perception. Newton based virtually all of his discoveries and genius on holding a TP-POV that opened up a window to perceiving reality from simultaneous, multiple points of view … a kind of “G-d’s Eye” position, where Newton could and did perceive more of the hidden and elusive nature of reality than is immediately or ordinarily observable.E.g.: that gravity was a universal and constant force, that was changed depending on the factors of mass and distance of the objects exerting and being effected by the force of gravity … or the idea that white light was only a single way of perceiving multiple spectrums or bands of light that were simultaneoulsy present and experienced by the human eye as a single band of light, i.e.: white light, and that white light is unique in that it contains all the other bands of light that humans are capable of perceiving.
  • Second, because Newton needed to create a separate specical language to describe the unique characteristics of reality that he was observing. Without the Calculus not only was it not possible to share with others what he was empirically observing as he experienced it … but it was impossible to share with them the ability to make similar observations and discoveries for themselves.Yet, with the new “language” of Fluxional Calculus anyone who choose to could use the tautological space created by it to replicate the observations of Newton from all three perceptual positions described above, a FP-POV, SP-POV or TP-POV, and also using this “language” begin to describe observations of their own and share them with others who could also experience them from a FP-POV, SP-POV or TP-POV for themselves including observations that Newton had not made, but opened up the possibility of making using the new form he had created and shared with them.

 

You Need A SPECIAL LANGUAGE To Describe The Otherwise Indescribable

 

In my own work, the MythoSelf Process model, I deal with an set of observations about the world that are premised on some special conditions as well …

  • Starting from a uniquely positive point of view – the “excitatory state” or the neurological condition of the system remaining open to the inclusion of new data, even data that is contridictory, unfamiliar or previously unknown or unaccceptable
  • Assuming a stance of possibility rather than limitation – the premise that any data, evidence or experience can lead to the next step to be taken toward as desired outcome, and not a limitation that prevents the possibility of achieving the outcome eventually
  • Using the body as the basis of primary data about what is happening, rather than the distortion of tranforming sensory data into intellectualizations and abstractions – holding an embodied and situated way of experiencing real and imaginal events by attending first and foremost to the sensorial data, i.e.: the experience of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling, as well as the body sense of balance and proprioception in an integrated and cumulative way as the singluarity of the felt sense of the experience as well as the individual components that comprise it (the felt sense)
  • Organizing the totality of experience as containing the singularity of space and time as mythic form – understanding the primary autobiographical narrative that is your own Life Story, i.e.: who you perceive yourself to be in relation to the world-at-large and the cosmos within which that world is situated
  • Recognizing the “storied nature” of experience and how we tend to experience events in an integrated way happenign simultaneously in terms of all the data that is present along a continuum of time that we later describe in discreet packets of information – e.g.: first this happened and then that, separating the analog nature of actual space-time into a digital representation of space-time
  • Defaulting to the premise of wholeform learning and communication in that we accept that all experience is wholeform with all events containing all the information present in simultaneity – this presupposes that all of our experiences are also had in simultaneity with all of the data impressing itself on our senses as a singluarity in any given space-time moment, despite our desire to keep things discreet to make sense of them as individual events happening in parallel, i.e.: there is no separation posssible in the events we experience that happen in the same space-time moment
  • That we can and do create our own experiences, constructing them out of wholeform structures, and then accept our constructions as what is “real” – and, by accepting that our experience is at least in part “made up” by us in wholeform that we also have the ability to choose the form we give to our experience
  • That the primary mechanism we have for managing the way we construct our experience is somatic, i.e.: body-based, and that our somatic experience gives rise to our stories and the meaning we make of them, i.e.: our semantic experience – knowing that we only know what we know, and know what that (what we know) means, in the form of the stories we tell ourselves and others, and in the stories others tell us
  • Only be integrating and aligning the somatic and semnatic forms we hold can we arrive at an integrated sense of ourselves and the world-at-large, as well as the cosmos and our place in it – this is the basis for the approach and methodology I use in working with the MythoSelf Process model, i.e.: Soma-Semantics, a way of simulaneously accessing and address the somatic and semantic forms that are the ways we represent reality to ourselves and others

So, fundamentally to do the work I do I had to create a tautology for the model, i.e.: a self-contained, self-referencing, self-organizing system with it’s own set of principals and rules, as well as it’s own language … in much the same way that Newton and Leibniz had to do to form a way to capture and describe the nature of motion and change that is the Calculus.

In my case, the approach and methology of Soma-Semantics, is the form of describing how we capture and describe the nature of subjective experience and change within it. This is the basis for transformational change – the changing of our experince of reality NOT the change of what we do in response to our experience of realty.

Within the application of the MythoSelf Process model from the transformational shift that becomes possible using the approach and methodology of Soma-Semantics, a second possiblity emerges … that of realizing a significant performance breakthrough, which is only possible to the extent that it is when transformational change has happened first, i.e.: a shift in the fundamental perception of reality.

The essential starting point for achieving transformational performance, where transformational change and performance breakthrough intersect, is the State of Perfection the state experience that is established at the start of the application of the MythoSelf Process work. Without this body-based, felt sense of being in the world what follows would not be possible, with it nothing remains impossible …

Yet, once you have accessed and sustain the State of Perfection all things become possible to you.

 

 

All the Best,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.

Creator of the MythoSelf Process and Soma-Semantics
New Hope, PA

23 February 2016

PS – If you are interested in experiencing the State of Perfection for yourself … click on this link for more:
The State of Perfection

 

PPS – I will be holding a special one time only 2-hour webcast event, “Accessing & Sustaining The State Of Perfection” on 8 March 2016

Revisiting Bliss …

Revisiting Bliss …

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Follow your bliss …

and the universe will open doors

where there were only walls.

Joseph Campbell

 

Coffee & Croisant Sq 200px

 

Wow!


I was a little stunned myself at how much more clarity and focus about what counts in life can be achieved in about the time it takes to have a cappuccino and a croissant.

 

If you’re … lost … tired … unmotivated … or, yearning for something elusive that you hope will give you the sense of destiny and  fulfillment you desperately desire … but have been unable to find … what I discovered accidentally one morning over breakfast with a friend may just be the answer you’ve been looking for …

But first indulge me in sharing a little bit of background.
Joseph Campbell is remembered by many for his injunction to …

Follow your bliss …

It always amazes me how little people expect of life that really counts for something, and how hard they are willing to work to get it.

 

I think that’s mostly because they don’t get what Joseph Campbell meant when he referred to “bliss” …

Most people think “BLISS” refers to being happy or comfortable, or more than that a kind of ecstasy of spirit. 

Yet, I’m confident it has nothing to do with any of those things …

As I understand it, and work with my clients around it, “BLISS” refers to being fully and completely aligned with one’s self … identifying and moving in sync with your true nature.

Think about it … Joseph Campbell says when you follow your bliss “the universe will open doors where there were only walls” … he says nothing about feeling “happy” or “being comfortable” …

In Joseph Campbell’s magnum opus, “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” … he lays out the structure of the “Hero’s Journey” and shows us that the hero/heroine must enter the “belly of the beast” first … facing their fears and overcoming many trials before achieving their bliss.

But, while the “Journey” can be wrought with difficulty it doesn’t have to be that way …

Joseph Campbell also points us to other aspects of the “Hero’s Journey” … in this case specifically the “Guide” and the “Magic Helper” … Luke Skywalker’s “Obi Wan Kenobe” and “Hans Solo” in StarWars, or Daniel’s “Mr. Miyagi” and “Ali” from The Karate Kid are examples … but, my favorite guide and magic helper are Carlos Castaneda’s “Don Juan” (Juan Mateus) and “Don Genaro” (Genaro Flores).

The guide and the magic helper are crucial when you are ready to transcend what limits you.

In the past there were many who fulfilled these traditional roles of guiding the seeker over the threshold … the shaman … the medicine man/woman … the witch doctor … the priest/priestess … and on and on.

Today some hope for this kind of facilitation with their psychologist, counselor or therapist … yet the medical models these folks work from is often completely lacking in achieving such transcendence.

However, all is not lost … there are still some models which seek to fulfill these sacred roles … I got this many years ago when I was apprenticing with Roye, my own mentor.

A little over two months ago I began something extraordinary … a *NEW* program for one to one private work I designed, i.e.: the Breakfast Discovery Process … an extremely focused, a single 45 minute coaching session.

Both my client and I agree at the outset that the intention of our time together will be to arrive at an extraordinary clarity about the current situation and the realization of a direction leading forward … a path through the next steps to take.

According to great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, there are two tasks of life:

  • In the first half of life arriving at ego differentiation … to find yourself at home in the external world.

  • In the second half of life the task becomes about … discovering who you are as an individual.

I had a conversation about a month ago with a twenty-something client who was striving to achieve the realization of the first task … to find himself at home in the external world, i.e.: to know what to do with his life.

The conversation began naturally enough, around how he was not sure about what to be doing with his life … the direction he should be taking to build a career and find success in his life. The real issue was one I’ve heard again and again, “I get started on something new with a sense of excitement and hope that this thing will be it … then I quickly get bored and disinterested.”

Twenty-somethings … Thirty-somethings … even some Forty-somethings find themselves lost in this loop … looking for bliss in their lives, but only finding boredom instead. 

This comes with incredible possibility … with options and choices, i.e.: boredom common to folks who are ambitious and desire more from life than a guarantee of a place to go from 9-5 everyday and a paycheck at the end of the week.

Transcending the re-occurring boredom that comes with opportunity requires a special kind of vision and perspective to see beyond the obvious. Yet, when that special perspective is achieved what had been hidden with it becomes obvious as well.

This is the foundation for BLISS.

We discussed a lot of things, beginning with an exploration of where he’d been in his life and where he found himself in the moment … all very casual, all very conversational.

At some point he began revealing his deeper thoughts and desires … what really held him back and where he really wanted to be … what it was exactly that he was revealing, all spoken outside of his conscious awareness (… and that’s what made is so unavailable to him).

Although it was now obvious to me the path forward remained inaccessible to him …

The key to his movement was actually remarkably simple … a single powerful insight followed by an equally powerful single action were all it took to transform his blindness to clarity.

A critical point is that insight without action is most often meaningless … yet, insight followed by action can be the most powerful transformative process available to you.

Now like most things … any old action won’t cut it.

The action must be precisely aligned with the insight, and the insight must cut through to the core of your hidden identity to create the alignment that leads to BLISS.

My client wanted to know the next steps …

  • First of all he was (and is) a truly talented programmer … code comes to him like babbling comes to a baby.
  • He was a dream employee for every up and coming start up he ever worked for … for the first month or two … and then he’d simply get bored and lose interest in the project and ultimately the company.
  • Then he’d move along to the next bright and shiny thing that came along (usually at an increased salary and bonus package) … doing well, until that too got boring … and so it went.
  • What he kept missing … that was actually supremely obvious despite how elusive it was for him … was that he was the world’s best starter and problem solver when it came to coding … and the world’s worst finisher … he didn’t get bored with coding, he got bored with finishing.
  • What he was really missing was a way to structure his talent in relation to a team that could and would support what he was best at … that would allow him to step away and move on as soon as he began to get bored BEFORE he lost interest.
  • Next step … get hired in a leadership role with a team under him to support his remarkable talent as a coder and a way to keep him motivated about moving the project forward without him having to be responsible for doing it himself.
  • So we designed a way for him to find and move into role where he could get just that, including all the steps he needed to take immediately to make that happen … and he was on his way.

Okay, so you get the idea … a carefully crafted conversation that leads to the insight and action creating the transformation from existential angst to BLISS is what my accidental discovery led me to … and I built an entire process to deliver this kind of clarity to anyone who wants it in about 45 minutes.

I call this process the Breakfast Discovery Process (or BDP in my personal shorthand).

I have a limited number of openings available at the current investment level … and when they are gone the price will more than double.

I’m also including bonuses worth more than three times what the current investment for BDP | Breakfast Discovery Process is today that you’ll get when you register before 1 January 2016.

Here’s your link:

Get all the details and register here:
The Breakfast Discovery Process

 

All the best,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
New Hope, PA

PS – If you are ready to get started here’s the place to register before the program investment more than doubles (from $447 to $975) … and you’ll get my year-end special bonus package when you sign-up before the 1st of January 2016 … including permanent access to TCP | The Complete Package … my premier Personal Development DFY (done for you) program, and Story Control … the complete videos from the three-day program I ran with Jamie Smart … the bonuses alone are worth about three times what I’m charging for the BDP | Breakfast Discovery Process before I raise the price in less than two weeks from now.

The Breakfast Discovery Process

 

Applied Mythology 101: Reflections On Heroes, Mentors and Stories

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Applied Mythology, ala Dr. Joseph Riggio and the MythoSelf Process, Is NOT About The Telling Of Old Stories …

Applied Mythology IS ABOUT How To Incorporate The Structure Of Mythic Form Into Your Life To Make It More Whole and Wellformed … i.e.: More Blissful

 

Heroes and Mentors

I have a couple or “Intellectual Heroes and Mentors” folks whose intellectual/academic work has spurred me on in my work. Some of my heroes and mentors I found many years ago, some are newer to me. These are folks I’ve spent a lot of time with, reading their books, writing about their ideas, incorporating and applying their ideas in my own work, using what they developed as a platform to leap from in developing my own fledgling conceptualizations, methods and processes … and finally, in some cases, coming to the point where I truly believe I have mastered the ideas they wrestled with first and made accessible to me in their life’s work.

When I talk my intellectual heroes and mentors I’m not talking about the folks who necessarily had the most actual influence in my life. The folks who had the most influence in my life would include those closest to me, family, some teachers, friends and very near the top Roye, my own mentor for nearly twenty years.

My intellectual mentors and heroes are folks like,

  • Carlos Castaneda (yes … it’s true, very influential to my thinking in my late teens and early twenties … his writing opened up the entire possibility of alternative realities and magical thinking to me)
  • Suzuki Roshi and Alan Watts (very early on … around 11 years old … I began to become interested in and to train in martial arts, this led me to writings about Zen, Taoism and Bushido, and by 15 I was “sitting” regularly myself … and reading Watts caused me to question everything)
  • Milton Erickson (in my twenties I developed a profound fascination with hypnosis and began reading intensely on the subject … then I found Milton Erickson, and everything I’d though about hypnosis shifted for me)
  • F.M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais and Thomas Hana (the idea of how the body was influencing the mind … and subsequently my behaviors had me … for more than a few years, from my mid-twenties through to my mid-thirties, I was diligently working to figure out where the interface was and how to operate it)
  • Dudley Lynch (leading me to) Clare W. Graves (there was something in Dudley’s book “Strategy of the Dolphin” that caught my attention deeply when it came out … later I found he was pointing to a true genius of social evolutionary thinking, Dr. Graves … I’ve now spent many hundreds (or possibly thousands) of hours deeply contemplating and applying the Graves model in my work)
  • Edmund Husserl, Soren Kirkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittengenstein, John Searle et al … (I tracked the movement of modern philosophy from phenomenology, through to existentialism, and then onto analytic philosophy I delved deeply into what these folks had to say about the Philosophy of Mind … and by the time I got to the analytical philosophers what they were saying about language and reality as well)
  • Charles Sanders Pierce, John Dewy, William James, Richard Schusterman, et al … (I love the work of the American Pragmatists … this is a philosophy that draws deeply upon the aesthetic and it speaks to me deeply … I get the sentiment and the soul of pragmatism, in the way that it shows up in life, like no other philosophy)
  • Joseph Chilton Pearce, Daniel Siegel, David Abram, Jeffrey Schwartz, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Nicholas Humphrey, et al … (there a whole host of neuroscientists, linguists, cognitive scientists, etc. who are exploring the ideas that are at the heart of my fascinations and they have all at one time or another influenced my thinking … some more deeply than others)
  • Richard Bandler & John Grinder (I’ve read everything they’ve written … jointly and solely … some of their books ten or more times … and some I barely got through once … but the work of NLP still holds my attention like little else, especially in the direction it took under my tutelage with Roye)
  • Joseph Campbell (I saved him for the last because he surely ranks as one of the folks I literally consider to be an intellectual hero and mentor to me … much of my thinking has been influenced by the writing and speaking of Joseph Campbell and his take on the structure and form of mythological thinking)

Believe me that’s the short list … but I want to share a range of the kind of folks I’ve been paying attention to over the years. It has been a funky, fun, interesting and enlightening journey … and I’m guessing I’m now about halfway there.

 

So What’s This Got To Do With You?

HECK … ONLY EVERYTHING …

I’ve laid it out before and I’ll do it again … YOU ARE YOUR STORY!

The sources that inform your story contribute to the form it takes … i.e.: WHO YOU BECOME! Of course, I’m not saying that you become the story of the sources that inform your story, you become something like a multi-hued reflection of the multiplicity of sources that you continue to absorb that inform the story you are living. Keeping it simple if you were to see a tree from the point of view of an Impressionist painter reflected on water, the seemingly infinite number of leaves are the equivalent of the sources that inform your story … and there is a main trunk that is unique and singular as well.

Now, before I keep jumping forward let me make it really clear that within the structure of where I place my attention, “YOUR STORY” is really a bunch of stories that are interwoven like a tapestry that forms what you experience as the ground of being in your life … for you this tapestry defines “what is real” and how to make sense of what you encounter in an ongoing way. I use the word STORY and not tapestry because for most people the tapestry I refer to is experienced in the form of an autobiographical narrative.

NOW HERE”S A MAJOR POINT …

Most people experience their own unique autobiographical narrative as “absolute” … meaning that at any given moment in time what you believe to have happened and is happening is actually true to fact for you. For example you believe you are reading these words and in this moment no one could dissuade you about that as being a fact. This is true even though there are a thousand other things that are true in that moment that just passed and in this one as well … that you ignored, deleted and distorted.

Let’s expand that one just a little … you think you are reading “THESE WORDS” – but YOU ARE MUCH MORE LIKELY TO BE READING WHAT YOU THINK THESE WORDS MEAN … and not the words themselves. Let me demonstrate what I mean … in an hour you’ll have a memory of reading this, but what will you remember, the words you’re now reading, or what you think these words mean? It’s that simple at one level and it’s levels all the way down …

For most people this also represents what they experience their memories like as well, i.e.: absolute narratives of what happened. You are as likely to do this about what happened less than a minute ago as you are about what happened a decade ago … and you’re as likely to be just as wrong about both. It would be foolish to trust that you’re memories are accurate to fact, they’re just not. You can find overwhelming evidence that your memory works as a flawed system, and that may in fact be in your best interest. So while you’re memory may be flawed, your memory will be how the world world was and continues to be for you.

Okay so what does this have to do with you again?

At the most basic level it would be useful to recognize that what you are creating in your interactions with others aren’t really experiences, but flawed representations of those experiences called memories. People will not remember what you say or do, they will remember the impression of what you say or do has on them … and it will be different from what you say or do in some measure, large or small.

We could go on with the practical aspects of what this has to do with you, but for now I’ll stop with that example there.

The main point you want to get from this, if you get anything at all, would be that they are all stories … and those stories collect into an Über Story that becomes the Gestalt you are living. The gestalt of your life may be best thought of as a “reality filter.”

 

Living Your Life Story

I’ve been making the point that you are living your Life Story. This story represents only one way of interpreting all the events that have happened and are happening, as for as long as you have this story, what will happen too.

You have no choice but to live your Life Story … BUT you do have a choice over what story you are living!

[NOTE: You may want to add into this narrative that you’re reading now that one of the most powerful ways to choice your Life Story would be to pick the stories that go into it.]

The stories you accept as being “real” are only a part of the construct of your Life Story, i.e.: your memories of your experiences as you know them to be. In addition to the things we experience, and the things we “know” there are the things we can’t explain … that we yearn to have an explanation for nonetheless, e.g.:

  • Why do bad things happen to good people? …
  • Why did that happen to me, and not to them? …
  • Why did that happen to them, and not to me? …
  • Why am I here? …
  • Who am I? …

 This may be the most profound function of myth,
to answer the unanswerable.

Now I am not saying that myth, or more properly in the way I am using this idea – mythic form, has literal, concrete answers. Rather than providing literal, concrete answers myth shows the way … it’s is about the path, the journey, the process … not about the content. Myth gives us what we cannot possess … as way to see ourselves. The eye cannot see itself, the finger cannot touch itself … the eye must have a reflection of itself to “see” itself, the finger must be touched to “touch” itself … in this way myth provides the reflection and the touch for us to know ourselves beyond ourselves.

Myth places the most significant and urgent information “out there” beyond the limits of how we “know” things to be … including ourselves. This information may be simply revealing, “Oh, now I see how I am like that too.” … or educational/instructive … “Now I get how I can move beyond this moment in which I have been stuck.” or it may reveal, educate and instruct us about others and the world we share, “Ah, now I get how he/she/they think the world must be.”

This information comes to us as an impression, not as a “fact” or “absolute.” Myth offers us the means to use our innate intuitions about the world to construct a reality that fits our experience. The opportunity myth provides can and will take us beyond self-imposed and socially-imposed limitations if we allow it. We are built to “guess” at “what the world ‘is’ out there” – we don’t have the equipment to “know” the world out there, we miss too much of it, and make up most of it as we go along. The philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists … and others have been hard at work for centuries proving how limited and flawed our perceptual capacities are in fact.

To use a Robert Anton Wilson phrase:

“Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.”

(from Prometheus Rising)

So you can say, once we find the way to reset our “Thinker” we have found the way out of our own limiting beliefs … because the “Prover” will prove whatever the “Thinker” thinks!

The trick to resetting the “Thinker” has always been the same … A, B, C

  • A) Give the “Thinker” new data in the form of experience and information to work with
  • B) Make the experience and information that you provide the “Thinker” with emotionally compelling … i.e.: make it “feel really good” or “feel really bad“
  • C) Create a recursive somatic loop in the “Thinker” that connects the experience and information to the feeling in the body where it will be stored and accessed/re-accessed later

 

“We act based on how we “feel” about things that prompts us to “think” things are as they are for us … i.e.: change the association to how we “feel” about things and we change what we “think about them.”

“Applied Mythology, as mythic form, gives us the mechanism to change how we feel about what we think.”

“We can update our Life Story by encountering powerful stories that are emotionally compelling and create new associations between what we “know” and how we “feel” about it … this has always been the appeal and power of mythology, literature, theater … and more and more today the stories we encounter in film.”

– Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.

 

This is my quest … to follow my myth wherever it leads … and for now it leads me to be an applied mythologist.

So I have an invitation for you … will you join me on your journey?

As always I look forward to seeing, reading and responding to your comments …

 

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D., Princeton, NJ

Architect and Designer of the MythoSelf Process & Soma-Semantics

 

PS – There will be an Applied Mythology 102, or 202, someday soon … promise. In that installment I’ll share some of my thoughts about the “Social Myths” that keep us stuck where we find ourselves today … and some possible stories that might help to free us in the societies we are constructing going forward … my little take on “Social Ontology”