Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
I suffered from horrible panic attacks almost my entire life….sometimes 5 or more a week, until my early 40’s about 15 years ago….I discovered that I had food allergies. And I was busy eating everything that made me sick…..emotionally overwhelmed.
It started with coffee, BHT, BHA, MSG…the list just grew and grew and grew…..now I still am recovering even though I can’t remember when I had my last one……one a year or something now…but this time has been the longest ever since I was 4, when I had my first one.
The passing of these has coincided with a humility of understanding the immense burden that others feel in their inability to communicate for fear of losing control, of being outted, of being criticized or rejected…Ironically, then…I end up coaching many people through really difficult areas of their lives where they are stuck or stiff and feeling recalcitrant towards their own inner voice.
Sometimes people want permission, to pass along, to pass by, to pass through, or event to pass over……this kind of prepositional thinking is an awareness they have that something has to happen first before they can move along in life, and so I walk that bridge with them. So, what may seem like intelligence in me to others is really my listening deeply to the lessons that others are teaching with their lives: motivation, inference, self-abandonment, illogic and repression, blame, shame, guilt, anger, depression, and a host of really interesting hoops they use to keep feelings at bay and responses at further than arm’s reach…. and so I listen and see the unfolding and watch how they travel, and maybe make suggestions but mainly I edit what they are saying and say it back to them in an unusual form and they are jolted by that, even though it may be only a rearrangement of their own words…they have not been able to listen to themselves.
This jolting, these koans made on the fly, are simply then the truth in what they have been saying to themselves all along but they were unable to hear deeply enough to engage or understand that what they had said was a message to themselves. Deep listening then is a tool for ferreting out the real sense of what someone is saying to themselves subconsciously.
As you talk then, I can listen to you, to you personally……and it does not matter the outer subject, because language discloses the subtextually inferred subject without meaning to, unavoidably, without real resistance. Even though people attempt to hide or avoid speaking in an upfront manner, for fear of overwhelming or disclosing, or of becoming disarmed and vulnerable, they can’t help but to reveal themselves, and so any conversation becomes sacred and reveals their profane thoughts and insensitivities as well as the honest and vulnerable sides. It’s both charming and alarming to realize that we are so shallow and profound all the time. And the comical thing is that we have some ill-conceived notion that we are capable of being less than transparent.
I talk with people all the time, and I see their trying to hide behind a twig or a broom stick, and I put my hands over my face with the slits between my fingers open and I ask, “Where are you?” It’s a fundamental part of the formalities of the game of self-opening that people will pretend to not be aware or will work at misunderstanding until such time as the whole ruse is a sham and that they have known all along. Usually, it ends with an, “I know, I really do know.”
My role then is to say, “No, you’re not a fool, and you are not stupid, and I don’t think that you are silly.” And then we have become friends by that time…and often I have to go through my own process of self-disclosure since it is only fair, and I tell my story and it becomes a point of rote access unless I actually arrive at a point where I too have to let go of my own defenses and worries, my own fear of vulnerability, or my own edges of analysis, which happens all the time…because if it is worth helping others to do it, it must be worth doing. So, I constantly go through the same process every week myself with several people and shed my skin and my own version of reality, as often as I breathe it seems. It’s a work that works on me as well as on others….and it is terribly intimidating and humiliating to try to defend against my own transformations, and so I have to let go all the time….and just allow it to happen, like I am asking others to do…..it’s only fair to do myself what I have asked of others. If it is worth doing, then it is worth doing too.
And the work I do on myself is posted on my wall for everyone to see….what I work on or what I am passing through…and it happens in waves like an excavation….regardless….since there is no hiding anyways, so I put myself in plain sight, out in the open where no one would suspect since it is the last place we look. My best defense then is to put it out there and let it go with the wind.
I have no idea why I have said this other than to say, this is what I do and who I am. Whatever.
runningturtle87
