Aesthetic Space

Learning is a Conversation - Excerpt from Getting Messy

In the 1920s, Lincoln Steffans was a history student at the University of California Berkeley. As a freshman, he became engrossed in history and read everything he could find on the subject. It soon became clear to him, however, that these scholars of history did not agree. He discovered that history was not a set of facts set in stone. Rather, history was an ongoing conversation, a conversation in which he himself, as an undergraduate, could participate. He wrote,

What I had was a quickening sense that...every chapter of [history], from the beginning of the world to the end, is crying out to be rewritten. There was something for Youth to do...Maybe these professors, whom I greatly respected, did not know it all. I read these books over again with a fresh eye, with a real interest, and I could see that, as in history, so in other branches of knowledge, everything was in the air. (quote found in Danielle Lafrance’s Berkeley! A Literary Tribute.)

We can only really know something by forming our own relationship with it. You can read a book on a particular topic and pick up various pieces of information, but the material will not come alive for you unless you develop a personal relationship with it—a relationship that inspires your own questions and responses. This is when learning becomes expansive. We don’t know what this relationship is going to hold for us and we don’t know how it’s going to shift and change over time. In the process of developing this connection, we uncover our values and beliefs, which in turn shape our perceptions and subsequent learning. We also discover this particular topic’s questions and areas of debate, footholds where we are most likely to want to participate in the conversation.

In I and Thou, Martin Buber wrote, “All real living is meeting” and that is true when we learn. Learning happens when we form a relationship with the thing we are seeking to understand. In Buber’s words, we cannot “have” the ocean, we cannot have any thing—but we can engage in relationships in this world. We can enter into a closeness with other people and with things, and this relationship with “other” is what is transformative. There is a sacredness in this relationship, in this “space between” us and our subject.

What is required when we teach in dynamic, continually-changing environments, environments where we are working entirely with the mystery of human nature?

My approach is to be a learner, and just as Lincoln Steffans discovered in the example above, learning is a conversation. Learning happens when we move out of our individual bubbles to participate and interact with something outside of ourselves. Then we step back “in” to reflect on our experience. Breathing occurs in the same manner: in-breath, out-breath, in-breath, out-breath. As we move forward, taking steps out and in, we begin to develop our own relationship with the topic. In this book, we are exploring what it means to be teachers and learners—in both cases, we ask questions, test them in action, and then go back in to reflect on what has occurred. In-breath, out-breath, in-breath.

The educator and philosopher John Dewey wrote that learning is a venture into the unknown that always involves risk. It requires courage, vulnerability, a degree of humility, and the willingness to be present to the unfolding. We may not know how to respond to some particular thing, but we are willing to learn.

Excerpted from Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination for Teachers, Trainers, Coaches and Mentors © Rawberry Books Publisher. For more information, go to the book page of this blog.

Happy holidays everyone!

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Being Headless

When I teach, I work with something I call "third space." Third space is that creative place of openness, when new possibilities have space to come in. But in order to get to third space, I have to take off the “expert” cap and simply be present and open to what wants to happen. When I try to control or "be the expert," I lose third space. What happens when we exert our authority, either through maintaining strict control, or being the only one in the room who knows anything, is that we create a polarized situation—-us against the students.

We will not reach third space when there’s a strong polarity--meaning the teacher/leader/instructor is heavily invested in either their own expertise or maintaining control and authority. No matter how much of an expert we are, we need to be "learners" when we teach--holding what we know in one hand, holding the other hand empty. You could call this being "headless." If you can’t do your work when you’re headless, it’s probably not your right work.

At the time I wrote Getting Messy, my experience creating third space in group settings was new and experimental, but since that time I have come across Adolg Guggenbuhl’s wonderful book Power in the Helping Professions, in which he discusses something very similar. Guggenbuhl, a Jungian psychiatrist, does not use the term “third space,” but he does detail how those in the helping profession create polarities with clients, students, the elderly, and so on when they take the role of “knower.” He calls the polarization a “split archetype.” In Guggenbuhl’s view, as soon as we know what’s best for our patient (or mother, father, student, friend, lover), we have split the archetype. One of us is all-knowing and all-powerful, and the other is ignorant, neurotic and powerless. In such a situation, no healing or creativity has the space to occur, because the interaction is now about the polarity. Emilie Conrad, the founder of a bodywork method called Continuum calls this model the dominator model: “I will do this to you.” Unfortunately, in educational settings, the dominator model is what is typically expected. But the dominator model can happen in any situation in which a power imbalance exists--health care, government, and so forth...

Teaching as Creative Process

The creative process is how we engage with life, and all of us engage with life in a variety of ways. Teaching has been my creative passion because it seems to me to be the ultimate “meeting of life.” When we work with a new group, we have no idea who is going to show up or what challenges (or gifts) lie before us. Jacob Needleman, one of my favorite authors, says that a sense of meaning is more important than anything else in life. Without meaning, we are in despair. He writes, “We’re built to serve something greater than ourselves.”

Getting Messy is a book about the beauty and richness of teaching. Here’s an excerpt from the Conclusion:

A friend who loves metaphors asked me what metaphor came to my mind for this book. My subconscious mind immediately gave me a very clear image, but I didn’t want to share it, because my image was the mushroom cloud after the atomic bomb was dropped. (That certainly was messy.)

My subconscious had been influenced by a play I saw recently about the science that led up to the bomb. What I remember from watching the play is that two different substances collide which results in the splitting of atoms, and the splitting of atoms creates an enormous amount of energy. Finding myself curious, I looked it up on wikipedia.org:

“In 1898, French physicist Pierre Curie and his Polish wife Maria Sklodowska-Curie had discovered that present in pitchblende, an ore of uranium, was a substance which emitted large amounts of radioactivity, which they named radium. This raised the hopes of both scientists and lay people that the elements around us could contain tremendous amounts of unseen energy, waiting to be tapped.”

There is something about the line “containing tremendous amounts of unseen energy, waiting to be tapped” that has to do with why this particular image came up for me. Getting Messy is about learning, creativity, imagination, and traversing into unknown space. It presents a higher vision of teaching and learning, a vision that bridges two well-established polarities: learner-expert and learning process- creative process. When we bridge these polarities, we create third space—imaginal space. Like the radium discovered by Pierre and Maria Curie, imaginal space is already present in our everyday lives. It is unseen energy waiting to be tapped. I believe it’s time for us to tap it.

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Note: The quilt at the top of this post was made by Essie Bendolph Pettway. See more Gee's Bend quilts at http://www.auburn.edu/academic/other/geesbend/explore/catalog/slideshow/index.htm

Getting Messy Facebook Page!

Please check out my new facebook page for Getting Messy:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Getting-Messy-Taking-Risks-and-Opening-the-Imagination/201587503232115

Hope you're all having a wonderful summer. I just finished reading Adolf Guggenbuhl's book, Power in the helping professions. My favorite quote was written by John Haule in the preface:

“As soon as we know ‘what’s best’ for our patient or student—we have in Guggenbuhl’s language ‘split the archetype.’ One of us is all-knowing and all-powerful, and the other is ignorant, neurotic and powerless.”

The Amazing Lily Yeh

Before the 2009 Bioneers conference, I’d never heard of Lily Yeh. She was one of the main speakers and I cried through her entire presentation. Yeh is an artist whose mission is to heal. Among other courageous things, she went to Rwanda and made art with the survivors of the 1994 genocide. Below is an excerpt about it from her new book, Awakening Creativity. (from the foreward by Robert Shetterly):

“…Lily Yeh asked me if I would travel to Rwanda with a small group of Barefoot Artists to continue the work she had begun in a village of survivors of the 1994 genocide. I agreed, but with considerable trepidation. I had read the accounts of the genocide. Rwanda seemed a frightening place. And I had also read about how poor this village was. After the genocide the new government built a few villages to provide a safe place for the victims. But cement floors had not been poured, water and electricity was never hooked up, septic tanks never completed. No jobs provided. The bureaucratic agencies tasked with this job had disintegrated into half-measures as the funding dried up. Extreme poverty was compounding the trauma of genocide and reinforcing it with the trauma of neglect.

After our group arrived in Kigali, we were driving several arduous hours in the back of a jeep to Rugerero and the survivors’ village. I’m no longer sure what I expected when we arrived, but certainly not what happened. The back doors of the jeep were thrown open and there was a throng of joyous children calling for Lily. “Turabi Shimiya!” they shouted. “Turabi Shimiya!” “Happy to see you! Happy to see you!” On and on—ecstatic! Lily, not much bigger than the children, descended into their midst and shouted the same back at them. They all began running, shouting, around the village, on the hard dirt between the unfinished houses that had recently been painted with murals designed by these same children under Lily’s direction. Bird and beast and decorative motif murals transformed the depressing gray mud brick. Then came the warm embraces of the adults, bending close and inadvertently exposing machete scars on necks and arms and legs. Then came the singing and dancing. As friend’s of Lily’s, we were all their best friends now. What had happened in this land of grotesque violence to provoke such joy?

Yeh says that the places that are the most broken are the ones that are most ready for transformation. Her website is http://www.barefootartists.org/

What is an Image

I'm really lovin' Lynda Barry's book What It Is.

"When I was little... I would hold myself as still as I could and make my eyes like a toy's eyes that don't movce and I would wait. I would wait for the other things in the room to forget about me and begin to move...I knew I had to be patient and wait for a very long time...I believed there was another world that would show itself to me in the smallest ways. The gray kitten in the picture by my bed would accidentally blink his eyes. The girl in the picture would breathe....Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real. But what caused the disillusionment?...What is an Image? At the center of everything we call 'the arts' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive."

River Light Bookstore, Dubuque Iowa

A fun bookstore in my hometown now has Getting Messy in stock. River Lights Bookstore in Dubuque, Iowa is a charming bookstore in a charming old town on the Mississippi River... and they deliver books for free by bicycle anywhere downtown. (And they're pet friendly too!)

News, updates and Getting Messy

A fellow in Spain has started a blog about my book Getting Messy. Here's the link: http://bm31-liburuak.blogspot.com/2010/07/getting-messy.html. He is from the Basque region in Spain, so I don't know if anyone reading this can read Basque. If so, please let me know what it says!

My book has also been inspiring some good messes. Here are a couple photos of my artist friend Asandra's creative mess:

Aren't they inspiring?

There's also a new review up on Amazon about Getting Messy. Click here to read it.

Finally, I'm going to be teaching a four-week workshop on imaginal space at Book Passage starting in November. Click the Events & Classes page of my blog to get the details.

Happy creating!

Love is Destructive

It has been said that love does not want to destroy, but to preserve. Quietistic love has been praised, [yet]...mere passivity is surely no true love. The process of love is a creative drive, a force which, in spite of its tranquility of the present, lives a life of active realization.

I've often told the story of how I came to teach my Psychology of Metaphor class. I was speaking to the president of a small university, he asked me what class I wanted to teach, and the word "metaphor" popped out of my mouth. Since I didn’t know anything about metaphor (except as a literary device) I was a bit taken aback. He said, "Great! We'll call it the Psychology of Metaphor" and I walked out of the room wondering what I'd just gotten myself into. I was set to teach the course in three months to 20 Ph.D. students in Psychology.

The part of the story that I haven’t shared is just as amazing. I would go to my favorite table at the San Francisco Theological Union library and odd books would just sort of happen to be sitting there, having been somehow missed by the librarian who was responsible for re-shelving them. One of these odd books was Martin Foss’s Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience. Published in 1949, this book had been out of print for decades. I’d never heard of it. I did an internet search and learned that Martin Foss is considered by many to be a greater philosopher than Martin Heidegger and that Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience has been called one of the most important, yet forgotten, books of the 20th century. (Although they both share the same first name, Martin Foss has no Wikipedia entry...)

The opening quote is from Symbol and Metaphor. Here is another:

Love sees in failure the ground for its necessary work. Therefore it is distracted neither by painful nor by joyful expressions. Disappointments do not reach into the depth of love—on the contrary, they stimulate love to stronger efforts…The eyes of love are not fixed on the moment, not on the social position, not on the habitual character, not on the narrow status of profession, not on the achievement and success which are important for those only who are indifferent to higher values. Love sees the future which it anticipates, and in the scope of this, its wider vision, failure and success look very much alike.

You might wonder what love has to do with metaphor. I’ll let you read the book to find out.

Foss, Martin (1949). Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Mary Lee Bendolf, 1998

On play...

By perceiving the complementary opposites in any phenomenon, you open the door to play."

--Jessica Porter, The Hip Chick's Guide to Macrobiotics

Finding Third Space

The other day someone asked me how to get to a place of “third space” when one teaches or facilitates groups. Third space, which I also call the “imaginal” realm, is a place of expanded knowing and intuitive wisdom that happens when two or more people come together for a shared purpose. When it occurs in groups there’s a palpable feeling of connection, community, magic, surprise, and deep wisdom. This wisdom is “third space” and it’s bigger than any individual person. Many people ask me for techniques for creating third space, but third space isn’t created through techniques. Focusing on techniques means you’re viewing teaching as something that you’re doing to a group and third space comes from exactly the opposite frame of mind: Your job is to create the space, not fill the space. The space will get filled by the group process itself. I’m often reminded of something Eckhart Tolle wrote in his book Stillness Speaks: “Most people confuse the Now with what happens in the Now, but that’s not what it is. The Now is deeper than what happens in it. It is the space in which it happens.” Your job as teacher, counselor, or facilitator is to work with and hold that larger space of “The Now.” It is your task to create and hold the space. Of course you may also be responsible for the agenda, but that’s not your primary task. The agenda is always secondary in importance to the space you create.

So aside from spending a lot of time reading Eckhart Tolle before you teach, mentor, or facilitate a group, here are some ideas (in no particular order) for inviting third space. They seem quite simple, and I think perhaps that’s the point...

1) Create a space for yourself to be inspired. Teaching is a creative process and in order to access third space, you need to be in your own creative flow. Go somewhere where you feel expansive, somewhere you can look out on a vista—climb a mountain, hike along ocean cliffs, and so on. Stay until you feel your heart open and can breathe this expansiveness back with you. In order to inspire others, you have to stay inspired yourself. It’s a process—you may lose it for awhile, it may shift, it may be buried under your fear, and if you’ve taught something several times, you may have to work a little harder to find it. But in order to touch others, you need to be present with what it is that moves your own heart.

2) Be more interested in what the people in your group have to say than in what you have to say. Even if you’re teaching something heavily content-oriented, like how to read CT scans in a Radiology department, your students have questions, concerns, and points of interest. These questions, concerns, and points of interest are important. What you have to say is not so important. Take yourself and your own opinions, thoughts, and beliefs out of the group. If you have something you really want them to know, hand it out as written material for them to read. Your job is to facilitate what wants to happen, which doesn’t have anything to do with you personally. In order to get to third space, you need to drop not only your ego, but all of your ideas, expectations and attitudes, and teach from a place of emptiness. The English philosopher Douglas Harding calls it being “headless.” Check out his website at www.headless.org. A friend of mine believes that if you can't do your work when you're headless, then it's not your real work.

3) Have a sturdy structure that gives each person equal time to share. This may seem obvious, but I believe great teachers are really sensitive about this issue and some people are more sensitive than others. There are people in your group who are shy and need encouragement and if you structure the group in such a way that they have space to share, it’s amazing how frequently they will offer the situation something brilliant, something that shifts the entire group in a deeper, richer direction. Of course, don’t push people to share if they don’t want to. Rather, have a structure that naturally gives each person equal time. It’s not true that the people who appear to have the “loudest” process need the most space inside the group. There’s a fascinating article that Jo Freeman wrote back in the 1970s titled “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Freeman describes in detail how in groups that don’t have proper structure, the people who are more dominant (more educated, more assertive, more well-spoken, more extraverted, and so on…) will move in to “take up” the group space. Don’t let this happen. You will definitely transform the group process if you just follow this simple principle. Alan Briskin gives a great example in his book, The Power of Collective Wisdom. In his example, it is 1966 and Cesar Chavez is holding a large community meeting with the goal of figuring out a way to reach the workers at a farm labor camp where his fledgling United Farm Workers have been barred from entering. The meeting was almost over when an old woman in the back of the room finally stands and timidly says that she knows she is “not qualified” to speak, but she has a little idea to share. This woman’s idea was what they had been waiting for.

Teaching is a great paradox. We’ve been trained to think that it’s about “leading” others, or filling up people’s heads with what we know. A friend and I often joke about how it often seems like we haven’t done anything at all. He’ll say to me, “Sometimes after a particularly amazing group, they’ll thank each other, but not me.” John Heider wrote this about group facilitators in his book The Tao of Leadership: “…their leadership did not rest on technique or theatrics, but on silence and on their ability to pay attention…They were considerate. They did no injury. They were courteous and quiet, like guests.” To reach third space, we need to remember we are guests in this experience, along with our students. What an honor.

I’m offering an upcoming workshop at Esalen Institute that is all about exploring third space and the imaginal realm in a group setting. In addition to structure, creative inspiration, and the importance of hearing individual voices, we will also be exploring the use of art, imagery, creative process, and intuition, as well as anything else that our process brings up. If you’re interested, please join us! To register, call Esalen at (831) 667-3005 or to sign up on-line go to Esalen's website: http://webapp.esalen.org/esalen/workshops/8283

The Gate of Access . . .

In his novel Ulysses, James Joyce wrote:

Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access . . .

Joyce's quote reminds me of something Herbert Marcuse once said about art:

Art [functions to] break open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle…The encounter with the truth of art happens in the language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life. (Excerpted from The Aesthetic Dimension.)

May you all find your gate of access today...

The Blind Men and the Elephant

The coolest thing about publishing a book is the community and connections that happen. I didn't know it would be this way. Many years ago I had a vision of plunging into a dark abyss. It was scary of course--we never know what's going to happen when we plunge into dark abysses. In fact, our minds usually come up with something quite frightful to keep us on safe terrain. But in the vision, what happened was quite the opposite. Rather than being eaten alive or some other horrible fate, I eventually landed at the bottom of the abyss, which was a brightly lit room filled with interesting, passionate, joyful people. All of a sudden, brighter possibilities than I could ever have imagined were in front of me. I was grateful I'd had the courage to take the plunge. (Interestingly, that's what Getting Messy is all about...taking the plunge.)

Writing and publishing Getting Messy has been like plunging into that dark abyss. I had no idea what would happen to me or the book. Since I'm working with very limited financial resources, each thing that happens has been amazing and at the risk of sounding sappy, has brought joy to my heart. (I'm even tearing up writing this...) One of the true pleasures has been hearing people's responses, thoughts, and reactions.

So in that vein, I'm going to share a response that I received from a friend after an author event at Pegasus Books in Berkeley last week. My friend's analogy about the Blind Men and the Elephant has continued to stay with me. Here's what he wrote:

I wanted to congratulate you on last night's meeting. You were there in front of the unknown, and you walked the talk. Right from the beginning you upped the chances of educing collective wisdom from the group by setting up the chairs in an oval, rather than the serried ranks that were presented to you. Sometime in the middle of the group you said something like, "I like it when people speak up and contribute, it gives me something to work with". That fits in with the oval set up ..namely, when you have a truly interactive group that goes into unknowing with the support of the leader... then creative discoveries and learning are inevitable... and, as you pointed out.. each person learns what they need to learn.

Reminds me of the Blind Men and the Elephant metaphor-story (which I have been using when teaching psychotherapists-in-training). We all have our idea of reality .. and reality is much bigger than any of us can apprehend. So therefore it makes perfect sense that we interact with curiosity and openess and with a sense of unknowing in order to better learn about reality.

Wowie.. I had never taken that metaphor that far.. into the area of how to best teach. And it is in the process of writing to you that that new connection emerged.

We're all here connecting with our own piece of reality. Thanks to each of you for sharing your piece of reality with me.