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Living Mythically

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Living Mythically … Taking Control Of Your Story

From the beginning of my professional practice I referred to what I do with clients as “a piece of work” and suggest to my clients do their work. There’s a bit of danger phrasing thing in this way, in that “work” is often heard and thought of as negative, something that’s hard or difficult, or as something in opposition to fun and play, something that’s not enjoyable. And, yet I think that to be a very small minded and limited point of view, that only applied to work you should never be doing in the first place.

My “work” is aiming my clients to live and perform in their lives mythically. By living mythically I mean taking control of their autobiographical narrative, or writing the scripts they live by, their own life story. There’s nothing I find more playful, enjoyable and worthwhile than doing this work, yet it can be challenging and sometimes downright daunting, and even then it remains completely playful, engaging and fun for me to do.

Establishing A New Profession …

Another way I speak of what I do professionally in my practice with clients is that I am a “Clinical Mythologist.” I guide my clients mythologically to discover the stories they have been living from, the story they are living, and the story they are living into. Once we uncover these stories we take it further to begin to take control of the narrative these stories create collectively … the continuity of past, present and future as a singular way of understanding who you are fundamentally. This is an “ontological/ aesthetic” way of knowing yourself … as a being experience life sensually, contained in the iconic, symbolic representations you form about yourself and your life. One way we do this is in the form of language, the language we use with and about ourselves, and the language we use to describe reality as we know it, including others and our relationships with them.

A “piece of work” then refers to uncovering an aspect of revealing the autobiographical narrative someone is living from, and the affect of that narrative in their life as a mythic form. Of course this also means we’re revealing them to themselves. The revelations we uncover are both ill-formed and well-formed.

Ill-Formed Or Well-Formed Personal Mythology?

Ill-formed myths are fundamentally distortions of reality, not real in some way. Ill-formed myths disconnect you from your life, especially in regard to your purpose, passion and power, and away from living playfully. The ill-formedness creates cognitive dissonance, meaning that when you are operating from ill-formedness what you experience doesn’t make sense, the pieces don’t fit and you cannot form a coherent narrative, or mythic form through time.

Ill-formedness in your personal mythology … the autobiographical narrative your living from that describes reality as you know it and the way you relate to it … leads to what I call mythological distress and ultimately mythological crisis … the story your living doesn’t fit you.

Eventually, an ill-formed personal mythology will lead to ill-formed behaviors, that cannot and will not create the outcomes you desired, or produce the life you intend to be living, the relationships you want to be having, the accomplishments you want to be realizing.

Well-formed myths on the other hand are those that match you intrinsically, the arise from deep within you, before any traumas or comprises of yourself were experienced or occurred. A well-formed personal mythology contains and describes reality as you know it to be as free of distortions as you are capable of achieving. This view of reality leads to coherence that led to a a natural sense of awe and wonder, and a way of being in the world that is playful, childlike but not childish.

Wellformedness in your personal mythology opens you to the possibility of living a life of joy and splendor, experiencing yourself and others in enchanted and enchanting ways … you begin to experience the epiphany or what it means to be fully human and fully alive … life becomes meaningful play, filled with purpose, passion and power without struggle, effort or compromise.

Taking Control Of Your Story, And Your Life

What I’ve found in working with thousands of clients individually, in groups and within organizations and institutions has been that doing the work of living mythologically requires simultaneously becoming aware of your autobiographical narrative and taking control of it. The way this happens begins with choosing to be the author of the scripts you are living from, and rejecting the scripts that others have imposed upon you … often without any conscious awareness that that has happened, or that the script you are running is not your own.

The “writing” of your story, and the scripts you run, rests on the ways in which you perceive and make sense of the experiences you have, the meaning you apply to those experiences, and the decisions you make that lead to the action you take … and, this of course leads to the outcomes your create, as well as those you don’t.

As one of the huge benefits of “doing your work” of uncovering, revealing and taking control of your personal mythology you’ll free yourself from the ways you found yourself stuck in the past … procrastinating, hesitating to act, acting poorly, running in circles and finding yourself trying everything and anything you can think of to move forward, and yet still finding your stuck either not moving or moving and winding up where you began.

I’ve worked often and intensely with clients helping them to get unstuck in many ways and places in their lives, including extremely often in the ways they relate to others in their personal and professional relationships. When you reset your personal mythology it frees you from conflict, resentment, envy, shame, guilt and all the other things that so many people struggle with … without ever needing to wade through the suffering of revisiting those emotional sinkholes.

I find another thing that comes up almost as often can be the way that you relate to your sense of discovering real purpose and meaning in your life and career. Knowing you personal mythology makes how what you do professionally evident to you, the meaning it has in your life, and in relation to others too. Passion come from knowing why you are doing what you do, regardless whether we’re talking about actions you take personally for yourself and with others, or professionally. One of the most powerful things this does for you will be a natural reset of your relationship with money … earning it, accumulating it, spending it and sharing it as well.

It’s also extremely interesting to observe how my clients experience a positive change in their health, physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually, when the take back control of their autobiographical narrative. When you choose to be the author of the stories of your life … what they are, what they mean, and how they organize you to experience your life as it unfolds and you move forward through it … everything becomes clear to you and you have choices about it all, including how those experiences affect your health and wellbeing.

You cannot not live in relation to your life’s story, the autobiographical narrative that shapes and forms you, your experiences, your relationships and the life you are living. Either you choose to take control of your personal mythology, the story you are living, or you are controlled by it.

What’s Next …

As I shared with you at the beginning I love “doing my work” … shaping the story I’m living and sharing my client’s stories, because by keeping my attention here I can help you “do your work” too, and become the author of your life. Let’s get together sometime and tell some stories, eh?

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

Sarasota, Florida

P.S. – WHEN YOU’RE READY … you can always set up a time to arrange a complimentary call with me when you’re ready to begin again … YES, Joseph I’m Ready, let’s get together to explore my personal mythology and the life story I’m living.

P.P.S. – Get my book “Experiencing the Hero’s Journey” and go a bit deeper into the journey of your story by reading a bit about mine … in it I reveal the deep structure of ill-formedness, well-formedness and how to discover your own personal mythology and story.

“I”Am A Narrative

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Searching for the Self …

Probably since we first became self-aware humans have been exploring and attempting to make sense of the concept of the self, or the “I.”

Maybe these times more than any other in recent history demand that we achieve the self awareness necessary to process reality as it is … and not as we hope for it to be …

Modern cognitive neuroscience suggests that the “I” must be a function of neurological interactions happening deep in the brain, most of which are occurring at a pre-conscious level of awareness. These interactions are a function of neuronal functions and synaptic connections that happen as a result of what can generally be called learning.*

Exposure and interaction with the external world form patterns that become imprinted in the brain in a process called myelination. These interactions include the sense of self that arises as physical awareness of one’s being, largely experienced and organized in the cerebellum. My sense of this process is that “rear brain” cerebellar processing interacts with “front brain” neocortical processing to create an awareness that forms the self we know ourselves to be.

A neuroscientist, Dr. Masao Ito at the Riken Brain Science Institute in Japan, suggests that it is the cerebellar processing that forms what he referred to as the “implicit sense of self.” In fact, these particular interactions that form the implicit sense of self, or the awareness of the “I” are a kind of recursive, infinite loop that regress upon itself, until only the representation of the “I” remains on the internal screen of our mind as an absolute representation that seems immutable. Yet we also know at another level that this “sense of self’ changes through time.

Essentially I interpret this thinking about the “I” that I know myself to be as a set of neurological interactions as a pattern held intact around a central conception that has many representations that have varied over time. The “I” I know myself to have been at say 7 or 8 years old, doesn’t not correlate in a one to one, isomorphic way with the “I” I know myself to be today. Yet that earlier “I” of 7 or 8 I do know to be a representation of myself from another time.

The kind of variation of my sense of myself as “I” has many forms that are equally me, at points in time that can vary by years or decades, or for that matter minutes or maybe even seconds, as when a particularly strong emotion overtakes me and changes my sense of myself seemingly instantaneously. Yet, some core sense of self, i.e.: “this is me,” remains throughout the varied representations I have as I experience them through time.

The Narrative Of The Self

This “sense of self” as I’m referring to it is contained in narrative, where narrative is the sequencing of events within events as they unfold, e.g.: this happens then that happens … and so on. It could also be languaged as, “this happened, then that happened” or “this happened, then this is happening” or even, “this happened, now this is happening, and then that will happen” so time becomes flexible within narrative.

Also, time isn’t limited to progressing from past to future in narrative, e.g.: because I know that this will happen, I remember that happening, and now this is happening, where the placement in time can be freely moved between moments, in the past, present or future, in any ordering so chosen by the narrator/author. Entire events can disregard any point in time in narrative such that every that has occurred, is occurring or will occur, is the only time referenced.

For each consideration of time, events also need some place to occur as well, e.g.: that happened there, this is happening here, and what will happen will be felt both here and there. This confluence of space and time, is a space-time moment, which I’ll call a “moment” for simplicity, meaning that a “moment” is a reference to a specific space-time where the event in a narrative happened, is happening or will happen.

In any moment each of us has a sense of self that we reference as our “I”… the “I” … or more concisely, simply “I.” Each of the “I”s I experience is considered within the context of the narrative that I hold about the event and the moment within which it occurs. Let me make this clear about the universality of what I am saying to include the event of just thinking about my “I” … for example, who “I” am, or who am “I” … such that there is no experience of self that does not happen as a moment in the narrative.

Since the “I” remains malleable in regard to the moment in which the “I” engages in action in the world, the question of which “I” has the experience comes up as a natural consequence of this understanding. Furthermore, the “I” that has the experience also determines the actions that I take, and the outcomes I produce (including of course not producing an outcome that I intend).

Given all of this, it makes it essential to have some sense of the “I” that would be most likely to haven the experience I want to be having, as well as the “I” most likely to produce the outcomes I intend. Or stated differently, what narrative most likely supports my having the experience I want to be having, and producing the outcomes I intend?

Another, maybe more direct and simple way to consider all of this could be stated as …

The narrative I am holding and operating from determines the experiences I have as well as the outcomes I produce, so in taking control of my self narrative I can direct both the experiences I want to be having and the outcomes I want to be producing.

Fortunately for us we are organized innately to understand narrative, and we posses an innate skill in both responding to and creating narrative on the fly. This of course doesn’t mean we all do this as well as any other, any more than suggesting that we all walk, run or swim as effectively as any other person, but yet possess the innate ability to do these things naturally given the opportunity to do so.

Also, like walking, running and swimming we possess the ability to increase and improve our knowledge, skill and performace in responding to and creating narrative. This suggests that we have an ability to notice for what narrative we are experiencing and responding to with greater facility and effectiveness in regard to producing our intended outcomes, and the ability to increase our facility and effectiveness at creating narratives that are better suited to allowing us to have the experiences we most desire and, those we use in producing our intended outcomes.

Another way to refer to the self narrative form is by the phase “autobiographical narrative,” in this case this refers to the self narrative told by you, about you, to yourself, and to others as you choose. The autobiographical narrative is your “life story” … the way you represent who you have been, who you are and who you will become in narrative form.

If we accept these premises as true for us, then the ability to know you life story can be seen as critical to your self awareness, and more importantly to how you are directing yourself to have your experiences and, how you will respond to events and create the outcomes you do, or fail to do.

Building The Critical Narrative

The narrative you hold as your life story, the autobiographical narrative, is the key to organizing what I call the Ladder of Perception …

  • Perception
  • Sense Making
  • Meaning Making
  • Decision Making
  • ACTION! –> Results/Outcomes

We know the world, and our experience of the events that occur, as a function of who we know ourselves to be in relation to them. This begins with whether or not we even perceive them to begin with, i.e.: we have awareness of the event/s past the threshold of our sensory system processing them for sense making and meaning making.

There are perceptions that occur below the threshold of awareness … i.e.: we are present to the sensorial data, but what we perceive sensorially never reach the level of stimulation necessary for us to become consciously aware that we are perceiving the sensorial stimuli. Yet this transformation from simple impressions in our sensory system, to which we may be responding in a reflexive ways, never make it to the level of conscious processing, i.e.: they remain out of our conscious awareness.

For example many of our phyisological homeostasis responses operate in relation to external, environmental stimuli that we never become aware consciously until they exceed our thresholds of familiarity, comfort, priming , or targeting. Specifically, we can use the sense of temperature changes that we respond to almost instantly via our internal regulation system, keeping our core temperature steady, yet until the range of temperature change exceeds the threshold of comfort we remain largely unaware of these changes happening.

Familiarity and comfort remain largely out of our conscious awareness until these thresholds are breached, e.g.: how salty our food actually is when served and tasted. Yet both priming and targeting can influence the threshold levels we experience. For instance if we are specifically tasting food for the level of salt it contains we become much more sensitive to the taste impression of saltiness. The same is true if we are testing the ambient temperature, say with an intention to dress appropriately.

These threshold conditions are primed in part by the autobiographical narrative we hold, i.e.: how we know ourselves to be in relation to the events we experience. This tends to be especially true in regard to how we experience the “other” … those people we interact with in our lives.

We can build the experience of others into our life story in one way by categorizing people we know as well as those we don’t … e.g.: family, intimate/close friends, casual friends, acquaintances, strangers … enemies. As soon as we fit someone into a category our sense of them (in relation to ourselves, as well as who they are independently of us) becomes influenced by the category into which we’ve placed them.

This example of categorizing people as a reflection of our life story then runs into our ability to make sense of someone immediately upon recognizing them (perception –> sense making), and then almost as immediately making decisions about how to respond to their presence (sense making –> decision making). This in turn determines our response to them (ACTION!) and their response to our response (results/outcomes).

These loops then reinforce or diminish our sense of the validity of our life story as an accurate representation of reality. So for us, reality and the story we tell ourselves and others about it are the same. This remains true for us even when the evidence we’re confronted with presents a contrary view.

Dealing With The Cost Of “Truth”

When confronted with evidence contrary to our life story we typically experience extreme cognitive dissonance, leading to immediate rejection and avoidance in most people. I’d argue that only those who have specifically trained for dealing with cognitive dissonance when it arises in any other way fall into the trap of rejection and avoidance that allows them to keep their pre-existing life story intact.

You pay the cost of failing to produce the results and outcomes you expect, intend and desire … acting insanely, i.e.: being incapable of any action related to what is real beyond your projections of self … when you are living from, and operating in relation to, a life story that rejects and avoids contrary evidence.

Philosophers call this way of thinking and acting “solipsism” …

sol·ip·sism/ˈsäləpˌsizəm/ noun

  1. the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.

Psychologically a solipsistic personality exhibits Solipsism Syndrome …

Solipsism syndrome refers to a psychological state in which a person feels that reality is not external to their mind. Periods of extended isolation may predispose people to this condition.

In my experience a large portion of my clients experience either periods of solipsism or respond solipsistically to events in their lives that are contextually driven. I’ve especially seen this when people are going through periods of personal and/or social transition. This prevents them from exiting the loop they find themselves in, where they seem unable to move beyond what limits them, often despite previous success (even in the same domain of consideration).

These folks seem categorically unable to process that “This isn’t That” … or the need to frame what they are experiencing in relation to their pre-existing life story, and the contextual framing represented by it. Their life story has become impenetrable in relation to whatever they are confronting that limits them.

Making the shift that allows your life story to be more porous and permeable in regard to what you confront that leads to a sense of cognitive dissonance provides both relief to the discomfort that leads ordinary folks to rejection and avoidance, and also a way to update your life story to encompass a greater range of possibilities in regard to creating results and outcomes … on your own and with others.

Helping clients make this shift is the primary thing I do … in my webinars and programs, in my 1-to-1 Private Work work with clients, in MythoSelf Process training and mentoring … essentially, I’m all (and to some degree “only” about) helping people to become aware of their life story, how it drives them, and showing them how to modify and update it.

While there may be a million and one ways to tap into the power of your life story, and what could be possible when you update it to more closely reflect reality “as it is” and not “how you want it to be” my singular approach aims at developing profound cognitive adaptability and maturity as personal developmental evolution to achieve new levels of awareness and personal performance. I call this approach the MythoSelf Process, and now you know a bit more about it too.

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Architect & Designed of the MythoSelf Process and SomaSemantics
Sarasota, Florida

P.S. – If you’d like to arrange a time to explore and discuss working with me privately or joining one of my programs, including the upcoming 2021 MythoSelf Certification programs let’s chat about it …

Schedule A Complimentary Call With Joseph Here

If you’d prefer you can start by requesting more information about the upcoming 2021 MythoSelf Professional Training and Certification Programs …

2021 MythoSelf Professional Training and Certification Programs Info HERE

*NOTE: I dealt extensively with explaining the process of learning, presented as the concept of “wholeform learning” … what others might prefer to refer to as “natural learning” … in my book, “Experiencing The Hero’s Journey” available at Amazon and other booksellers.

Changing Minds …

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Escaping The Matrix

“Remember … there is no spoon.”

(Author’s Note: This one is going to go deep fast, and then loop around a bit, all requiring some commitment, probably demanding a few readings, but I bet it will be worth many readings after you’ve read it once … ENJOY!)

Take A Walk With Me On The Wild Side of POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE

For thirty years I’ve been working with clients personally and professionally helping them become more:

  • Powerful in their lives, i.e.: able to take the action that leads to the results and outcomes they intend
  • Creative in how they approach thinking and decision-making, with an aim at helping them become more adaptable and artful in acting strategically
  • Influential in their interactions, becoming masterful at communicating authentically and persuasively to engage, enroll and empower others

This is ultimately about how you can develop deep personal mastery so you can create the life you want to be living … a life lived on your own terms, without compromise.

So if you’re ready walk with me for a bit and we’ll explore the journey I’ve take to where I am today in the work I do.

A Little Background:

In the early 1980s I began developing a model of thinking about thinking, or more specifically thinking about how to improve thinking, that I called “Transformational Applied Philosophy” … T.A.P.

I named what I was working on Transformational Applied Philosophy because I was focused on building a phenomenologically grounded model of transformational ontological change, designed around the work of a few philosophers I was reading deeply at the time.

The philosophers I was reading at the time included: Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel (post-kantian logic and phenomenology), Edmund Husserl (existential phenomenology), Arthur Schopenhauer (aesthetic existentialism), Martin Heidegger (existential ontology), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (embodied ontological existentialism), Ludwig Wittgenstein (metaphysics and analytic philosophy of language), and John Searle (analytic and linguistic philosophy/philosophy of mind).

Then I went on and found a few more philosophers who I added to the mix of my reading, social ontologists like Gilles Deleuze, a couple of the hermeneutic philosophers like Jurgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and those in the domain of philosphy of mind, neurophilosophy, cognition and embodiment like Patricia Churchland and, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

All of that reading was significant because philosophy has been informing people about how to live their lives well, to find a path of authenticity and purpose. Reading philosophy can be challenging, it dense and sometimes very dry too. And, one thing literally leads to another … and another, and another … ad infinitum, until you’ve read the entire canon of Western Philosophy at least (which of course I haven’t, and neither has anyone I know of, but some professional philosophers sure seem to have read 90% of it!).

I still read philosophy actively, more of the later kind … philosophy of mind, cognitive science and neurophilosophy … and this forms a great deal of my background, and current focus, about how I think about thinking, and help others to think better … i.e.: with greater clarity and more precision, leading to a dramatic increase in the ability to think with passion and strategically.

My realization was that while approaching my work with clients philosophically had great and deep value, what I am aiming at required something more than what staying just in the domain of philosophy offers me and my clients.

Going Beyond The Basics

When I found them I fell in love with informal logic and embodiment. This was especially true as the embodiment movement led through the extended mind phase led by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s work (following Gregory Bateson), and evolved to an understanding enactivism/enactment, where the premise is that the mind exists in the interaction with the environment. Quite literally the environment, and the objects in it, the total context, is as much a part of the mind of the individual as the individual’s neural processing and physical/sensory experience.

So I began to look more and more into the domain of somatics and folks from F.M. Alexander to Moshe Feldenkrais to Thomas Hanna. That took me deep for many years, way into anatomy, physiology, and eventually into neuroscience too. But, because I was led there by an interest in the idea of undifferentiated body-mind singularity my focus for about five years centered on studying cerebellar response where movement predominates thinking, proprioception and vestibulation.

HEY, PLEASE STAY WITH ME … WE’RE GETTING THERE …

Somehow this stuff made sense to me as a set of intertwined connections linking and weaving it all together, especially when I began looking at it through the lens of narrative and mythology, and the structure of storytelling.

This phase of my work was deeply grounded in studying the work of Joseph Campbell, the renowned mythologist, and his “Hero’s Journey” model. There’s no way you can do this and avoid looking at the work of many other folks in related fields from psychology (e.g.: Carl Jung) to ethology (Konrad Lorenz) and anthropology (e.g.: Gregory Bateson), linking what I call the biological imperative with the creative imperative, leading to an aesthetic orientation.

Sometime in the late 1990s I was introduced to the work of Clare W. Graves, the developmental social pyschologist. Dr. Graves work impacted my thinking on many levels and shifted the framework of the model I been developing for almost ten years by that point. For the next ten years I would study the work of the post-autonomous, post-conventional developmentalists including Jane Loevinger, Susanne Cook-Greuter, and William Torbert.

OKAY, WE’RE THERE!!! (WELL ALMOST THIS TIME, REALLY …)

Mythological Expressions

By the early 1990s I’d begun referring to my model as “The Mythogenic Self Process” which became the “MythoSelf Process” by around 1994.

That was because of the impact of Joseph Campbell on my work. Adding up all the pieces led me to take a mythological turn, or what I think of equally as a narrative turn. I began to realize that our entire relationship to reality is structured like story, i.e.: in narrative or mythic form.

I’d moved well beyond the limited philosophical approach I’d begun thinking was the way to achieve significant transformational change with clients.

The way I approached transformation early on was based on a premise that the way we hold and process information in our brains as the manipulation of representations, both sensory memories and/or abstractions. That’s why I became (and to some extent remain) so fascinated with a philosophical approach. This approach has great validity when dealing with the cognitive process of making sense of and manipulating information, e.g.: language.

What was missing were the two elements that have become the signature pieces of the MythoSelf Process, sensorial cognition and dynamic movement. When I added these to using a narrative approach to uncovering the mythic form of the frame of reference that holds reality intact for an individual or organization, i.e.: the externalized temporally organized markers that are then internalized and acted upon, it all came together … finally!

(FWIW, I know this all very technical sounding, but I warned you up front this was going to take some commitment, but that it would be worth it, right? BTW, you can ask me about anything you want me to clarify in the comments section below.)

By 1999 I’d already begun training and certifying others to use the model and process I’d designed with great success.

For the next twenty years I’d continue to develop and refine the work I’d designed, and extended the reach of applications from sales and leadership training, to executive coaching, to team development, to intensive individual coaching, to mentoring coaches and consultants to use the model and process with client groups in virtually every specialization imaginable and with clients from eight to over eighty years of age.

What I had in hand was …

An aesthetically oriented, phenomenologically grounded and embodied model of transformational ontological changework that took into account developmental levels of awareness engaging the mythological form that supported the fundamental autobiographical narrative from which individuals and groups define reality as they know it to be in any given moment, operating it enactively.

WOW!!!

That’s surely a mouthful (and why I just refer to it simply as the MythoSelf Process model).

To get what it really is we’re dealing with all of that is actually essential. What makes this so strange to consider however is the typical orientation to reductionism, silos and linear thinking versus synthesis, integration and systemic thinking.

BUT … you can’t deal with dynamic complex systems, e.g.: human systems, without addressing the reality of that they are in fact dynamic complex systems!

The model of transformational changework I built, the MythoSelf Model, then is a model that shifts the fundamental way you perceive, think about and act in the world.

What’s at the center of the model is the shift in thinking from linear to systemic, and from fuzzy to precise. This requires a whole new way of using your brain than most people have ever experienced, one that is both more integrated and, far more embodied and wholeform than your education has ever made available for you to access.

Two other aspects of using your brain in this way is how embodied the experience becomes as you being thinking through and with body-based processing (somatically organized) as well as mentally-based processing (semantically organized) as an enfolded and entwined processing model of thought … and, how sensual and aesthetic this way of thinking is organized. When using the MythoSelf Process model as the basis of how you experience, perceive, process and act in the world aiming for beauty and elegance in form becomes a most sought for characteristic. Essentially this drives sensuality into decision making and performance (strategic action aimed at an intended outcome), making them beautiful as well.

Storytelling & Narrative Communication As A Control System

Way back when … virtually at the same time I began this journey from my study of the philosophers I’ve already mentioned, I also was beginning to read in the field of cybernetics, and cybernetic control systems based in communication.

I felt from the start that there was a direct correlation between what I was reading in cybernetic theory and the work I wanted to master in helping individuals and organizations make transformational changes. What I couldn’t put together was the mathematical orientation of many of the cybernetic thinkers I was studying at the time and how to apply them directly to helping people make the changes they desired.

The idea of systems that provided and operated on feedback made perfect sense, yet the mechanism of how to apply this directly with my clients eluded me for many years. It took the connection between mythological form/narrative and developmental theory to make sense of it as I now have and apply in my work with clients.

While the idea of a primary cybernetically organized mechanism to assist clients to make change made perfect sense, the specific methodology was a bit trickier to fully explicate and define.

When I brought together all of the systemic work I had been doing with individuals and organizations, as well as the mechanism of mythological form/narrative applied within a developmentally organized approach, it all became very clear that what I knew was working could be codified.

Stories are intrinsically cybernetic in the sense that they are self-contained systems. In stories language “controls” the movement of the narrative in terms of content, space as place, and temporality.

Where someone perceives themselves in space and time relative to the content in consideration determines what the content represents to and for them, and what’s possible as a result.

Narrative structure is based in organizing temporally, and placing actors and agents in relation to one another relatively in space, i.e.: who’s affected by the events that happen and how, where the events are happening, as well as when the events happen, are all part of narrative structure.

Organizing the stories we tell ourselves and others, as well as the stories others tell … especially those they tell about us … are all part of the mythic form of our life that organizes who we know ourselves to be in relation to reality as we know it to be.

Therefore the most powerful skill we can possess may be our ability to design, craft and tell potent stories … in storytelling we contain POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE simultaneously. When we tell stories intentionally, to ourselves or others, we shape and reshape reality as we know it, and in regard to how we relate to it.

Transformational storytelling sits at the heart and soul of the MythoSelf Process model. Storytelling is the essential and central skill that allows someone to create a future possibility that doesn’t exist for them as they are today. Using stories also opens up the possibility of shifting away from those things that limit an individual or organization.

I’ve designed the MythoSelf Process to allow facilitators of the Process to help clients make significant shifts towards what they want, as they simultaneously reset their relationship to what had been limiting them in the past, using narrative form as a means of updating their personal mythology.

Using a wholeform approach that takes into account sensorial and dynamic movement processing, as well as content driven sense-making, meaning-making and decision-making, defines the MythoSelf Process more than just a narrative or storytelling methodology as they are normally approached.

The MythoSelf Process creates a new wholeform reality by blending somatic and semantic modeling within a narrative, storytelling process that resets the temporal and spatial relationship of a client to the future-based position they intend to achieve.

Holding The Space For Clients Until They Can Hold It For Themselves

The new wholeform reality created by combining somatic and semantic modeling using a narrative, storytelling approach shifts the filters of perception and the sorting patterns that lead to sense-making, meaning-making and decision-making that precede taking action that produced the results that lead to achieving outcomes.

Only when an individual’s or organization’s filters and sorting patterns are fully organized and aligned with the outcome that’s intended, will the trajectory of action create the results needed to achieve the outcome that’s desired.

By shifting the filters and sorting patterns to align with a newly intended future, the individual or organization shifts the way they are paying attention, what they notice for, and how they notice for it, as well as what it means, needed to create that future intended outcome. This amounts to stepping into and living a new story that forecasts and leads to a new emergent reality.

Like this, what to do becomes obvious, even when it requires significant work to accomplish. In this way, operating from within the new story structure, moving towards the new emergent reality becomes effortless … regardless of how challenging it may be to do what’s necessary.

As the agent of change, “I” was the primary mechanism I had been seeking, and the specific way I could organize myself in relation to my clients to assist them in bringing about the change they sought when they engaged me became instantly clear as well (although it’s taken me another ten years to document and codify it fully).

There are two aspects to applying the MythoSelf Process in the way I have been building up to and describing … first by establishing the stories that need to be told and re-told, and second by holding a position in relation to your client that demands they operate from the position they’ll be in when they achieve their outcome. Doing this requires understanding all the “science” part of what I’ve been laying out here, as well as the “art” of knowing how to step into and adopt the position of choice.

In this way bits and pieces of what your clients need to be aware of starts becoming obvious to them. As the become aware of what they need, they simultaneously become more able to hold the position they need for themselves where noticing in this way is automatic and natural for them (without needing you to provide the structure and stimulus to prompt them to hold this position).

Over time the new position, actually a new reality for them, becomes how they are without effort or trying, it’s quite literally who they become (with your help of course, until you don’t need to help anymore).

This is a radical departure from how most processes, approaches, methodologies and models of transformational change operate. In virtually every other way of prompting transformational change it’s what the change artist does with or to the client that makes the difference. In the MythoSelf Process model the way you are as you do what you do with or to the client is what makes all the difference.

“Holding the position” is a cybernetic process, and personal communication … including the art of storytelling … is the ultimate control function in the system.

Stories form the mechanism to provide the intervention, or interventions, required to shift the system so the individual can find a way to permanently occupy the new position of choice, opening the pathway to a new possibility, a new future, beyond what would have been possible before resetting the system to the new position created in the relationship between the client and the facilitator.

In the end becoming that person, the one who can hold the position necessary makes it all worthwhile to have done all the reading, study and the thousands of hours of client work required to know how to discover what to do and how to do it, and then to do it.

Best,

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

Sarasota, FL

P.S.: – If you would like to discuss the MythoSelf Process more, either as a coach or consultant … or, with the intention of exploring how experiencing the MythoSelf Work might help you personally … let’s talk, set up a complimentary consultation at your convenience: Schedule Time To Talk With Joseph Now

Further Down the Rabbit Hole …

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Imagine for a moment that you have entered a restaurant in a foreign city center … an amazing, beautiful and mysterious place … one that you were referred to be a local stranger you met in a cafe over a coffee earlier that day …

She recommended it because you asked in the course of your causal conversation if there were anything they thought you absolutely must do while visiting their city, and the only thing they insisted was essential if you wanted to have the experience of a lifetime as a visitor was to reserve a dining experience at the restaurant you’ve just entered.

As you continue to reflect on how you got here you recall a sense that the stranger was indeed strange, sublimely attractive in a way that no one would likely call beautiful in a trite runway or cover model way, but indeed beautiful in a deeply radiant way. In fact as you continue reminiscing about the exchange you recall you couldn’t take your eyes off her … no, that’s not right, you couldn’t take your eyes off her eyes, feeling like they were inviting into somewhere completely familiar and yet utterly unknown.

“May I Help You”

You are slightly startled by the maitre d’s voice as you suddenly recall where you are, and respond, “Yes, I have a reservation.” and give the maitre d your name, and he walks ahead, leading you to your table.

It is a small round table, clearly set and ready for two, yet you clearly said your reservation was for just one. The maitre d assures you that the reservation is for two, as this small adventure gets curiouser and curiouser, and you decided not to challenge his clearly incorrect assumption.

Shortly a waiter arrives at your beautifully set table … filling the crystal goblet in front of you with water. Sitting just to right of your water goblet is the most unique wine glass you’ve ever seen with an etched bowl depicting a hunter chasing what appears to be a deer or maybe an elk with a bow resting on a gold leafed stem. It is clearly a glass intended for a deep red wine, large and rounded, with a large opening for the wine to rise and open.

You ask for a menu, and the waiter just smiles and walks away, barely acknowledging your request. Within a minute another waiter returns with an appetizer, a small beef tartar, very traditional, decorated with a few sprigs of watercress. It’s literally perfect!!!

An Appetizer and More …

Tender … flavorful … just the right amount … and the crisped toast points compliment it ideally. But how did they know that beef tartare is both your favorite appetizer, and your “test” dish for a new restaurant if it’s on the menu???

Now you just decide to settle in and with the flow, expecting a entree will appear shortly as well. As you lean back in your chair, feeling the weight you’ve been carrying from the day drop away the original waiter arrives back at your table, and you realize he’s very well put together, groomed to a “T” and wearing an immaculate tuxedo, all the way to his perfectly white, white gloves.

Behind him is a second person to whom he hands you empty dish and utensils, and almost magically a bottle of a fifteen year old reserve brunello di montalcino appears in his hand as he fills your wine glass, without a single drop going astray. It’s magnificent, like liquid velvet of a deep purple red, just barely translucent in the dimmed light of the restaurant. Again, how did they know?

Of course you want to pick it up, you can feel your arm tensing and your mouth wetting with saliva in anticipation, but you restrain yourself for another moment to take in the beauty of the entire setting as you allow your gaze to go from the glass to take in the entire restaurant, the patrons dining at other tables, the way the room is decorated and appointed … all of it somehow providing a matched frame to your glass, the brunello waiting there for you to indulge, your favorite of all red wines.

So you pick it up, and even before it reaches your lips you smell the bouquet … it fills your nostrils, tickling the front of your brain and exciting your taste buds already. You take the first sip and it expands from the front of your tongue to the back of your mouth. It’s exquisite, and it’s as though time has stopped between the moment of taking that sip and swallowing, and as you do swallow once again you are filled with the bouquet of the wine, and the subtle sweetness of the grape at the back of your throat. Ahhhhhhhh … this alone would have been worth coming for …

You open your eyes, not realizing you had closed them, and in front of you is a filleted Dover sole menuniere … the simplest and most elegant of presentations. Brown butter, lemon and parsley forming the sauce the lightly dredged fish was sauteed in directly. This meal is wonderful beyond words, and literally since you asked for the menu that never appeared you haven’t spoken any.

What’s next, can there be more, can it get better???

Coffee and A Surprising Dessert

You refuse a refill on your wine, as you fork the last morsel of your sole. The plates are unobtrusively removed and the crumbs wiped from the tablecloth, and again, almost as if by magic elegant china coffee service appears before you. You can’t help but raise the empty cup for it’s beauty and it’s so fine the light shines through the translucent side walls, and transfixes your gaze for a moment.

As you bring your cup back down to the saucer, and pick up your gaze again sitting across from you is the stranger from the coffee shop again, with the same beautiful china coffee service before her as well … smiling back at you mischievously.

Once again you wonder for an instant when she arrived and sat down, because you missed it entirely, but this evening has so far been unusual enough to condition you to allow this to pass without comment. As that thought floats away your guest says simply, ‘Good evening. Did you enjoy your meal?”

“Thoroughly, it was the most magnificent meal I’ve ever had!”

“That’s wonderful.” she says. “But you haven’t had desert yet … just wait the meal isn’t quite finished yet.” As if on cue the waiters appear again, with covered silver platters they place before you and your guest.

The waiters glance at one another and simultaneously lift the silver covers from the platters, and you almost laugh out loud as you see what’s on the platter before you … three small donuts … a glazed doughnut, a chocolate cake doughnut, and an iced doughnut you don’t quite recognize.

After this extraordinary meal it feels so incongruous to be served donuts. Your guest seemed not to have moved a muscle, and has remained smiling, if anything possibly a little more of a smile now than when you first noticed her sitting across from you.

She nods towards the donuts, so you pick up the first one you noticed, the simple glazed one. You’re surprised as how light it is as you lift it. As you bring it up to take a bite, you are hit by the subtle smell wafting up to you you’re sure it’s citrus, but not sure what exactly, it’s familiar but you can’t quite place it. And, you take a small bite …

The taste is out of this world, this is unlike any doughnut you’ve ever had … bergamot and lime sublime!

Your hand feels frozen, as you look back and forth between the doughnut in your hand, and the two left on your platter, and your guest literally laughs out loud as she she’s your indecision … “Go ahead, finish it, you’ll be able to finish those two as well, that’s why they make them so small … no one has been able to resist yet.“

So you do, in one more rather small bite, and smile yourself. Then, you take a sip of the still steaming, strong, black, French Roast coffee in front of you. It’s bitterness hits you as the ideal way to cleanse your palate preparing you to try the chocolate doughnut. Again, it’s as if they knew how you like your coffee, hot, black and strong. How?

Your guest has already finished the glazed doughnut, and has already taken a bite out of her chocolate one. She looks almost intoxicated, so you reach out, lift the chocolate one yourself, and in almost direct opposition to how light the glazed one was this doughnut feels heavy and solid in some way.

This time you don’t hesitate, you take a bite and it is indeed dense, and then immediately melts in your mouth, almost like a divine chocolate truffle, and much less like any doughnut you’ve ever imagined.

This time the second bite, finishing the second doughnut, follows almost immediately and you feel you could giggle like a child, but you resist and feel a grin stretching your mouth happening beyond your control.

Coming Full Circle …

You realize you’re very happy, and you feel very close … even intimate with your dinner guest sitting across from you. How did this happen? What have these people done to you? Whatever it is, you realize you’re pleased they have … and, of course you realize you decided to accept the suggestion your guest gave you over coffee, and have participated in each act in the theater of this dinner.

Now, after another sip of your coffee, you feel an excited, anticipation about trying the mystery iced doughnut. Almost as soon as you have it in your fingers you realize what it is … carrot cake! The icing is cream cheese, and the flavor explodes with a remarkable balance of sweetness, spice, dark caramelized sugar … this time you do actually giggle, which turns in a moment to a laugh forcing you to cover your mouth because you haven’t quite finished your first wonderful bite of carrot cake doughnut.

After you wash down the final bite of dessert, you look across to your dining partner, and ask her, “So what’s really going on here? This meal has been the best of my life, and of course I want to thank you for your recommendation, and I will most surely come back, sit here again, and indulge in another fine meal like this one.”

The Last Laugh!

Now it’s your guest’s turn to laugh out loud again, literally tilting her head back as she does, and says, “No, no, no … you won’t! You see this is what we call the ‘Front Room’ for first time guests only. There are many more rooms in this building, each taking you further into what our chefs are capable of preparing … much more than you can even imagine from this meal alone!”

You find your head reeling with what you’re hearing. How could this be the simplest meal you’ll have in this amazing restaurant. “How … how can this be this not be the best meal they are capable of preparing, I’ve never experienced anything like it!”

“I can only ask that you trust me, and come back soon. This meal was specifically designed to begin what we think of as both satisfying you completely, and training your palate for what’s to come.”

“My friends and I,” at this point you notice the waiters have returned to your table side, “would love to see you again and take you much deeper into the adventure you’ve just begun.”

Now imagine how, at this point as your new found guide looks across the table, you realize that what she has just said is exactly how you feel sitting there … content, confident and curious about what’s next.

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

Sarasota, FL – 9 Oct 2020

Surviving Myself

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117791/

Beginning again … and staring anew …

A little more than thirty years ago last month, September 2020, I began a journey that I didn’t fully understand as I took the first steps on the path that led me to where I find myself today. 

Truth be told if I properly unwind the spiral of time, tracing back the tendrils enfolded within to the source, the journey began long before … and I can’t actually tell that story because I don’t really know it.

That story began before I was able to track what was happening, or how, let alone having any consideration of why. 

The story I refer to, that must remain unknown, is common to all … the story of our becoming before we know ourselves to be, at least in any truly conscious way. 

“My people” … those who cared for me, raised me, instilled me with my earliest beliefs and examples of how to be in the world … set me up to become who I know myself to be today in ways I doubt could ever be fully unpacked. 

I believe myself to be who I know myself to be, and it sure seems and feels that this is ‘me’.

At the same time I am astute enough to know that many aspects of ‘me’ are actually remnants of my upbringing and of hundreds or thousands of subsequent experiences that have embedded themselves on and within the ‘me’ I know myself to be … which seem from the inside to be aspects of my own creation, because I’ve long ago lost the source of how they came into being in the first place.

So I’ll ask you to indulge me and allow me to begin my story much later this time, around the age of 30 give or take a year or two either way.

BEGINNINGS: The MythoSelf Process

For the years since then I’ve both unofficially and officially been practicing what I call the MythoSelf Process, or when first conceived originally, the Mythogenic Self.

Most of all this is an idea, a concept or notion, if you will, that points to a way of knowing ourselves to be, that places us at the center of the Universe.

Now it’s important to state that this particular way of referencing and organizing one’s self doesn’t preference you to be uniquely at the center of the Universe, but places anyone who is contemplating their place in the Universe simultaneously and without cessation at the center of the Universe … so you and everyone else is at the center of the Universe by virtue of the simple consideration that makes it so.

This idea, of being at the center of the Universe, is not the most complex idea in the model I’ve been practicing, the MythoSelf Process model, but until it’s grasped … or better groked … it remains a bit confusing to most who are used to Cartesian thinking and especially Cartesian graphing. 

THINKING … in more than one dimension

That’s largely because most people have been trained to think in only two dimensions … for example …

This and That, or, Here and There, or, Then and Now … and so on.

Rarely you have someone who can actually process in three dimensions …

This and That or some other thing, time place … and so on.

And, damn few who ever ever consider living in relation to four dimensional thinking …

This and That or some other thing only now and then not now … because the Universe is both dynamic and fractal by all evidence we have at our disposal.

So let’s change the language and labeling just a bit to avoid some of what might otherwise be confusing.

Let’s call the first kind of thinking, two dimensional, This and That, binary thinking

Let’s call the second kind of thinking proposed above, This and That or some other thing, multidimensional thinking.

And, let’s call the third proposed pattern for thinking, This and That and some other thing only now and then not now, fractal thinking. 

THINKING … Part 2: Why Bother?

OKAY … if you made it this far you might be asking “WHY?” … “Why bother with all this Joseph?” 

Fair enough, because when you upgrade your thinking you improve your life. That simple.

For the entire thirty plus years I’m referencing that’s been my focus …

How do I upgrade my thinking and the quality of my life, and subsequently, how do I help others do the same themselves?

That essentially is what the MythoSelf Process work is all about, so I’m starting at the core, not necessarily the beginning. 

I’ll assume for argument’s sake that you’re beginning to grok even more than you think about the MythoSelf Process and why I believe it’s so valuable to myself and others.

Let’s start again with more of the early story, and I think that will make all this much easier to grasp. 

In late 1980s I participated in Werner Erhard’s “The Forum” … as he described it then, a conversation that we are in even when we don’t recognize that we have been engaged in it for as long as we know ourselves (my phrasing, not his).

That experience was transformational for me, and led me to study NLP, meet Roye Fraser, start training people, develop the MythoSelf Process, and build and international training and consulting organization, and coaching and facilitating thousands of people in the essential fundamentals of the Process.

Quite frankly, the beginning was so pretty, because it began when I was largely out of sorts about myself and my place in the Universe, not feeling much like I was at the center at all. 

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was coming to the end of my first marriage, I was struggling to make ends meet financially because I’d just walked away from a lucrative role as partner in an Interior Architecture and Design firm I helped to found with two other partners, I had just begun training dogs full time in transition to I don’t know what, and soon I’d be living back at “home” with my parents for a few years … 

What I did know was that I was unsettled, and the source was internal and not external. I had to come to terms with something about myself that was unsettling, but I didn’t quite know what it was, or in reality even where to begin looking for it. 

I’d already done a lot of self examination and searching. I was a product of the 1970s, and the near universal quest to “find oneself.” 

I’d read all the pop psychology and spiritual books that were prominent at the time. I practiced meditation, tried yoga, fasted, followed a path of Christian contemplative mysticism, read a lot of the books on Zen translated into English at the time, even tried ‘sitting’ for a while … but my mind had been trained in a Western form of thought, and while all those things continued to fascinate me, they were “The WAY” for me personally.

But in my late teens I’d come across some reading that opened another possibility to me, including Carlos Castenada’s “Don Juan” books and a particular book by W.D. Norwood, “The Judoka.” 

Finding the 4th WAY

The difference in these books was that the main protagonists were active, not sitting still contemplating their internal world, and I had an innate sense that “The WAY” for me was about being in the world, not apart from it. 

That led me to G.I Gurdjieff and the idea of a ‘4th WAY’ … rather than profound meditation, contemplation, prayer or yoga, I could move in the world and use that movement and the interactions that arose as a result as the grist for the mill of deciphering the meaning of life. 

This suited me greatly at the time … so I began going further into the idea of living meditation as I thought of it, seeking to extract meaning from the day to day living of my life.

I think that the main thing I was seeking was a purpose for my life, a reason to wake up and get going, but I still lacked an essential quality … directionality.

Pursuing DIRECTIONALITY & Discovering EFFORTLESSNESS

That’s a word I got from my years studying with Roye Fraser … DIRECTIONALITY.

It’s a quality of mind that organizes action in a direction that is aligned with one’s being.

It’s about knowing where and how to direct yourself to take action that supports both who you are and who you intend to become by virtue of where and how you place your attention, and then how you act in relation to what you perceive and intend. 

The result of operation with DIRECTIONALITY is that you build a level of precise focus of attention and the action that flows from it such that you’re ability to create outcomes becomes effortless for you, regardless of how difficult the tasks involved.

EFFORTLESSNESS shifts radically when you’re operating out of profound DIRECTIONALITY, because it no longer references how difficult or hard something is to do as most people might measure effort.

For example, imagine a world-class athlete performing at the very top of their game, and engaged in competition in a state of pure flow … in that performance there is no effort.

Or, you might imagine an A-List entertainer … an actor or musician … engaged in a particularly demanding performance, even one that is physically draining or exhausting, but again you’d find their experience while in the performance to them might seem truly effortless. 

“… there is no time.”

There is a great scene in the movie Surviving Picasso where Anthony Hopkins playing the character of Picasso is approached by Natascha McElhone who’s playing the character Francoise Gilhot, Picasso’s lover at the end of his life. 

In this scene Gihot approaches Picasso who’s been working non-stop in his studio for nine hours and hardly eaten or drunk anything and implores him to take a break because he must be exhausted she thinks, especially because of his advanced age. He refuses, and she reminds him that he’s been at it for nine straight hours. As I recall, in the movie scene I’m referring to here, Picasso simply replies, “When I am working there is no time.”

This is the essence of what EFFORTLESSNESS means within the model I’m beginning to describe and share with you here.

I hope to share a bit more soonest … 

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

Sarasota, Florida 2020

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