https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nc846nzdNs8
Welcome everybody to another Voices with Hervéki. I’m here with Steve March. Steve reached out to me a while ago. He’s got this amazing program. It’s kind of hard to categorize it with sort of because I say like a coaching program. It really doesn’t capture what’s going on with Steve’s work. And for reasons you’ll see very clearly and very soon, just calling it a self-improvement program is also inadequate in some important ways. I’ve had an off-camera conversation with Steve. I’ve taken a look at an article he’s written. I’ve read it carefully, taken a look at his website. I’m very impressed with what Steve is doing. I’m glad he reached out to me because his intuition of what he’s doing is a powerful response to the meeting crisis. I think it’s very, very well placed. So welcome, Steve. It’s a great, great pleasure to have you. Please add to my introduction as you’d like. And then we’ll start into the dialogue. Yeah, so it’s really great to be here. And I’ve been a big fan of your work ever since discovering you probably about a year ago. And I’m impressed with the volume of content that you’re putting out and still feel like I’m always catching up. So it’s fun to be in this conversation with you and to contribute to that. And yeah, I’m not sure what else would be interesting for your audience to know about me. I’ve been in the coaching field for about 20 years now and been involved with training coaches since 2003. So almost as long. And yeah, I’m also looking for a new word to talk about this. I think coaching, you know, I call it coaching. I call myself a coach. I train coaches, they call themselves coaches. And yet, it’s clear that there’s so many versions of coaching out there in the world that just don’t fit with the principles and the practices that we’re actually doing. So, you know, sometimes I call what we’re doing in Aletheia as like a leading edge new generation of coaching, like a fourth generation and I’ve articulated and others have articulated multiple generations of methodology as the field has grown and developed. So, maybe, maybe one of the things we can get up to is inventing a new word for this. That’d be wonderful. Well, let’s start that. And a good place we both agreed to start that is you make a very clear distinction between self improvement and self unfoldment. And there’s a lot built into that and eventually we hopefully will get to talking about the roots of what’s obviously even behind the name of what you’re doing Aletheia. Yeah. But let’s start there. You make a very clear and important distinction between self improvement which is everywhere self help self improvement, and what you’re doing self unfoldment and I think this is an important distinction. Good place to start. Yeah, right. So, you know, being a coach for such a long time one of the things that I noticed is that, you know, everybody has sort of taken off with self improvement and I think over the years it’s just grown and grown and grown and there’s a lot of good intentions behind that and a lot of a lot of really wonderful things about, you know, taking up the taking up the mantle of okay I can, I can do better I can learn I can grow, you know, so, so all of that is really really great. So, where I’m trying to make a distinction here is more on the methodological side like how do we actually approach that. And what I noticed is that oftentimes the very start of self improvement is feeling some kind of self deficiency, like we feel like well I just don’t know if I have what it takes, you know, I’m not feeling skilled here I’m not, maybe I’m not good enough, maybe I’m just not good enough. And so naturally when we feel that way, you know which many of us do every, every New Year’s Eve right when we set out our new resolutions like I’m going to do better this year. Right. And the challenge that I noticed and I saw just loads of my clients and students go through this is that that good intention that good effort would often meet with some kind of bumpiness along the road whether it’s internal resistance or difficulty and in actually making these kinds of improvements embodying them establishing them in life. And very often what they did was just reinforce the sense of self deficiency. And so there was a good intention here, but the, the way of going about it actually wound up reinforcing that starting point and never actually arriving at a place. And the challenge is is that very often what people conclude is something like, I just don’t have the discipline. Right. Willpower or something willpower exactly it’s like I just don’t have what it takes to make this improvement to integrate this into my life, which kind of, you know, makes makes that self improvement approach. Well intended but also self sabotaging at the same time. So I started to experiment with, you know, in the, the late 2000s and Aletheia is now was was founded in 2013 but I was playing around with this methodology even before, before that, in earlier versions of it. So, instead of asking what’s missing, which is a very common place that coaches stand in when they’re meeting a client listening like okay what’s missing here. How can I help the clients to improve or to develop or bring or build or something, so that that’s not missing anymore. And I asked a kind of provocative question the provocative question is, what if nothing is missing. And, and I mean that question not in the sense that, you know, yes of course skill can be missing like, you know, we can lack a skill and we need to practice to build a skill. What I’m more and pointing to is, is, what if nothing is missing in our beingness, like what if we’re already a whole human being. And I think that gets glossed over and it gets missed. And very often this is a sort of startling question. And it really invites someone into if they say well, I think something is missing. The question is well, what if nothing is missing why don’t we take a look. And so it’s a it’s a it’s an invitation into the present moment into what’s tangibly palpably here. And instead of looking for what’s not here. We look instead for what what is here we feel the body feel the emotions work with exactly what’s here in a way that unfolds the client that unfolds a deeper sense of themselves, a richer sense of themselves, a richer sense of what it is to be human. And this is where it’s maybe helpful to start to talk about depth a little bit because what unfolds is this deeper self contact. And that is that’s the really big distinction is it’s like you, it’s a difference in starting point. Right. And as a result of that a difference in how the conversation and the journey unfolds from there. So, so this is very, I love provocative questions. They’re the very best. So, I really find this very thought provoking. So, instead of, I mean so instead of engaging in a in sort of a self improvement project. It sounds like this is much more. And maybe, and the Socratic illusion is intended. This is much more of a self knowledge project. It’s coming, and the unfoldment. And I don’t and I don’t mean just theoretical or propositional knowledge. Right. Yeah, right. The unfoldment is through levels of depths of ways in which this self knowing can can can come into being. Am I, is that, is that landing with you am I am I getting this. Yeah, it is, it is. And, you know what I would say is it’s, it’s, it is about becoming more self aware becoming more self understanding, but in a deeply participatory way so there is, there isn’t an, there’s an active engagement with, with life so just to give you a little example. You know when clients come in. What we do as coaches in this approach is we set up what I call a developmental container, which is what is what is your goal what are you trying to do with yourself with your life with your job with your relationships, whatever it is. And essentially what are the impediments that you’re running into, you know, so I say to the client it’s it’s your goal it’s not my goal, but I want to know what are the, what are the challenges the difficulties you’re running into, bring those into the coaching conversation and we’ll work with them to reduce or eliminate those challenges. This is actually an idea rooted in a really old concept from Kurt Lewin of basically minimizing and reducing the restraining forces, which tip the homeostatic balance of that exists in And things begin to move forward simply by reducing the resistances. And we do that in an unfolding style, which we can get more into. So we’re in a deep engagement with what’s going on in the client’s life, and whatever unfolds in the coaching conversation then feeds directly back into their life. Right, right. So there is fundamentally an action orientation to the coaching. And I think it’s not just about self understanding or self awareness but that right self understanding and self awareness plays a central role in that. Well that that makes it even more so practical to my ear, because the point of the whole whole self knowledge for Socrates was for the cultivation of virtue, which is a way of, you know, relating to the world and relating to others in a profound sense. So that that speaks well of what you’re proposing to me. It speaks well to me what you’re proposing. I should have put the call in the wrong place. So, one of the things that you’ve already alluded to, and something that you develop in your paper, which is I think a very powerful argument is that certain. I think that certain interventions or practices are relative to sort of the depth at which the person is doing this self unfoldment, and there isn’t sort of a panacea process, the processes have to have sort of a proper sequencing, if that’s even the right word but something like that. So could you could you expand on that idea, because I think that’s a. So, for me what what you do is you provide this underlying psychological cognitive existential grounding for a particular way of integrating many different kinds of practices together and so that they hang together in a pedagogical, you know, program that makes a lot of sense. So, yeah, yeah, exactly. So there’s kind of two things wrapped up in your question. One is that in Aletheia, we work, one of our central models is a model of depth. These are depths of the present moment. The others, and I’ll describe what these are here in a minute because it’ll be helpful to have the language in our conversation. So one of the things in your, in your question is in terms of the sort of methodological steps. I call them gestures because, you know, steps, steps are kind of instrumental in a certain kind of way. Right, and just a gesture is a gesture of being, it’s like, it’s like, all of us is engaged in in in in enacting this. Right. So I prefer to talk about them in terms of gestures which is, you know, probably a philosophical point lost on most of my students It aligns with my, with my understanding of how this works. So there are four depths and these are depths of the present moment that can be phenomenologically experienced. And, you know, everybody experiences these although mostly language for this really isn’t in the common culture. It’s not in the vernacular, but anybody who’s taken up a meditation practice will immediately know that in the beginning when they were meditating, their meditation. When, after they had some experience they look back retrospectively and they say you know, I think my meditation practice has deepened over time. Yes, everyone will say that, but what do they really mean by that right that’s the whole idea. So, so the depths that we work with are called the depth of parts which is the shallowest, which is the depth that most of us are just naturally inhabiting living in, even without knowing about depth. And so, the real hallmark of being in that depth and inhabiting that depth is the sense of separation. And so we look around and you know, you look around the room that you’re in you see things as separate I’ve got my desk here my keyboard and microphone and some water and, you know, you and I are separate from each other and we’re separate from the chairs or the couch or the floor, you know. And there’s something you know pragmatic about just recognizing those separations. I always joke that we all prefer to have, you know, separations between our bank accounts, you know, it’s, you know, there’s something that’s just practical about that and there’s nothing wrong with that except that a lot of that separation. As it’s turned inwards we wind up with a fragmented sense of self. And that can generate all kinds of. It’s the root of all kinds of suffering which we can expand more on later. So there’s a, there’s, there’s this reciprocal mutual shaping. I hear going on here, you have a world that is divided into parts. Right, and in correspondence, even resonance with that is a psyche that is divided into parts and they’re mutually reinforcing each other in some fashion. Yep, that’s exactly right. And I mean it in in psychology these these relationships might be called object relations. You know you have a self image on one side of the object relation and an object image on the other, usually connected by some kind of an emotion or reactive emotion. You know and so these these become the psychological building blocks that we actually work with inside of coaching conversations. And we work with them, you know, directly in the immediacy of experience. We work with them exactly as they are and in a certain kind of way that allows the part, once it feels seen and understood loved and valued, exactly as it is the structural part begins to actually soften and melt. And that softening and melting spontaneously will drop the client into the next depth down, which I call the depth of process. Before we move to the depth of process could be just so that that so when you’re doing that work with the parts so that they soften, which is a very, very interesting metaphor. I really like that. Just to give people an idea. There’s, is this basically it’s sort of a dialogical process. I know you make reference to internal family systems theory, is it. Is that how you’re working with the parts, that kind of approach. Yeah. In fact, the way that we practice parts work in Aletheia is very inspired by internal family systems by Dick Schwartz. We have some slight modifications to that because essentially IFS which is internal family systems doesn’t doesn’t have this model of depth. Right. I agree. Right. So there’s a couple tweaks that you have to do to the method to integrate it into depth. So that’s what we’ve done in Aletheia. But essentially what we’re doing at the depth of parts and parts work is that we’re, we’re relating to the part from presence. And, and so we’re relating to our fragmented selves the multiplicity of us from the singularity of us in a certain kind of way from the from us as a unitary self. Now, I’ll describe later when we get into the depth of presence more which is the third depth down that we actually take a view of presence that is differentiated into qualities. And this corresponds to the virtues that you were talking about earlier. Right, right, right. But essentially, the parts work is a kind of relational process it’s a dialogical process in which those parts, essentially the way to think about it is parts want to feel seen. It’s a normal psychological need that we all have we need to feel seen we need to feel accepted. We need to have a sense of belonging and togetherness. Right. I mean, Heinz Kohut, you know founder of self psychology brought a lot of this in his study of of narcissism this fundamental need for mirroring. Right. So all we do in, in our, in our version of parts work is we meet those normal psychological needs that parts have the need for mirroring the need for idealization the need for belonging, etc. And what happens is those parts actually melt, they soften they relax, which we actually understand as a kind of emergence of a particular quality of presence. So in fact the whole practice can be understood as the play of presence, the kind of dance of presence, which is another thing that I fs doesn’t doesn’t have within it. I agree, agreed. And there’s a lot about the idea of the parts sort of like dissolving and softening is also not a prominent feature of standard. I fs. Yeah. Right. And so, and so, by the way, everyone, Aletheia is a Greek term for truth but it also means disclosure unfolding. It’s from height, especially a height of Gary and reading of it. So, you’re, what you see the, excuse me, the parts work is doing is it’s affecting a kind of change in right in that internal dialogue and also external dialogue. And that softening actually is affordance a disclosure of something else. Right, which is, I take it to be a deep move into a deeper level. Is that correct. Yeah, the way I like to say it, just saying the same thing that you’re saying but just in slightly different words is that when we practice parts work parts become more permeable to depth. I like that’s much better. Yeah. So, you know, we don’t take any kind of change agenda this is part of actually creating the conditions for that unfoldment. Right. So, in fact, that’s the whole method the whole method is how do we create the conditions for unfoldment, because unfoldment will happen spontaneously when we do that, we don’t actually do unfoldment. Right. We’re just creating the conditions for that we’re allowing a natural process to do its magic. Yeah, that’s another thing that it’s very similar to what I talked about dynamical systems with virtual engineering, you know was setting up the constraints, which are not the same thing as restraints. So, so what’s the next when they become permeable tool to depth. Yeah, what discloses and then what’s the practice you then move into to get into right relationship with that deeper depth. So as parts begin to soften, they spontaneously give access to the next step down with the, which is the depth of process. This is a depth of kind of, I call it the fluid flow of felt experience. And so, and so it’s a real contrast to this more structural depth which is parts. We have process so things are fluid and flowing parts are like moments of time frozen in some kind of way so parts are often, you know, living in reaction to something that happened in the past like we felt hurt in the past and so now we have a part of us that protects us from feeling hurt like that process is very different. So, it’s the only access process in the immediacy of experience. So I could say to you, john, oh I just discovered a new part of a new part last week let me tell you about it. And, and if you were my coach you could say oh that’s interesting do you want to work with that right now. And we could actually shift into working with that because it’s got some kind of recurrence over time it’s got a persistence because it’s structural processes And so I think that if I said to you, I had this felt since last week let me tell you about it. Well firstly, I don’t even know how I would do that because a bodily felt sense and this is how we access processes through the body, and through the consciousness. These are channels. And oftentimes they’re simultaneous channels. Right, right. And what we feel and experience at this step is so intricate and precise and so rich and textured that in fact it beguiles our language for it. And so, first when we encounter it, because we can’t say we can’t categorize it we can’t say it’s a this or it’s a that it first feels murky and vague and we’re not sure. So it’s sort of in collate for people. It’s for sure it’s in quite yeah. So it feels like that but, but what we do to work with process, very much being inspired by Eugene, Jendlin’s focusing practice. Is to palpate with language. So instead of describing with language which is how language operates at the depth of parts here we palpate with language we might say something like, I’m sensing this thing it’s in my chest and it, it feels a bit like it’s swirling but actually I’ll give you a second as I’m talking about it it’s not really a swirl it’s like, it’s like a dropping in, you know, so we, we do this thing that I call feeling saying we feel, then we give, we say, but we also then feel what we say. Loop, back and forth. It’s very much like for me. I mean there’s practices I do that are like that, but this may be something that has a, if you’re if you’re if you’re writing poetry, it very much has this to it. It’s very much, you’re not describing something as it is you I like I like your metaphor you’re palpating it, and you’re sort of caressing it so that it will take shape. And you’re right and the language is much more trying to conform to something outside of the language, and you’re not just pointed something that’s already stable. So you’re nodding so it sounds like I’m, I’m on the right track with that. Yeah, exactly. In fact, you know this is another whole thread of conversation that we could get into but in order to practice this kind of coaching, you have to shift into a particular way of attuning to immediate experience. Yeah, and this is something that I got really sensitive to from from studying Heidegger. Yes, and you know his the whole distinction between a technological attunement and a more poetic attunement. Exactly. Yes, yes, yes. Right, we can unpack this a little bit if you want to, but Aletheia has to be practiced in a poetic attunement or it doesn’t work. These practices just don’t work and, and the distinction between the technological attunement and the poetic attunement is aligned with and corresponds to the distinction between self improvement and self unfoldment. Right, right, right. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it also this. I don’t know if you got a chance to see it or not. I had a recent conversation with john russon. And he’s also like me as if somebody involved in phenomenology and trying to bring it into deep conversation with Platonism as a means of sort of making a lived and livable form of Platonism, but in his wonderful book bearing witness to epiphany he talks about a musicality to intelligibility, which isn’t the same thing as, you know, the sort of denotations. I mean, the attunement to it sounds to me like there’s a sort of a stereoscopic attunement. There’s an attunement to. And I think you’re getting this with the feeling saying, there’s an attunement to how this is unfolding the poetic attunement. And I think that’s the point of the poetic attunement is to how it’s unfolding in you. But there’s also an attunement to like a language that is more like logos that’s shaped taking shape of on its own. Right, and you’re you’re sort of participating in it shaping. And I get like the, when I went to practices I do there’s sort of a stereoscopic feel I feel like both the, the, this word is so useless. The experience and the language are co shaping each other in this really almost musical fashion. Yeah, exactly. So, another way to say it is that language at the depth of process is performative. Excellent. Well said, well said. Right, exactly. And this, you know, for the philosophers in your audience this ties into the work of john Austin, Searle on speech act theory. And, you know, the idea that that we’re not just describing with language that we’re actually doing something with language. Right. Yes. And so when we practice feeling saying at this steps. Yes, there’s an attempt to communicate like I’m in contact with this thing and it, it’s almost as if we’re trying to describe something. And yet what we pay attention to more than more than getting the description right is what happens when we try to express and give voice to what we’re feeling because that changes what we’re feeling and so the actual act of feeling saying is what unfolds. Yeah, yeah, right. We get this kind of unfolding engine going. Yeah. And it’s my sense, by the way, that, you know, the whole thing that we’re doing in Aletheia is learning how to inhabit all of our depths all four of these depths. And that is actually what plugs us into the logos. Yes, yes. Yes, we can see the, you know, that, that these parts that are in reaction to the past, in some sense, are, you know, sort of rigid ossified and block us from actually being able to see what’s going on. And we’re not able to access to these depths. So in some sense, they’re in the way of, of gaining access and embodiment and expression of the logos, as they begin to relax we drop down into the first, the first time we actually come into contact with something like that which is at the depth of process, and it can go deeper. This reminds me of Grimes notion of the pathy logos where instead of pathology you the logos get sort of frozen and locked in certain ways. I’m not familiar with that I’ll have to check it out. Book on philosophical midwifery, which I still need to read I’ve read a little bit about it. He’s part of the philosophical counseling movement. Okay, yeah. Okay, so this is exciting and I don’t want to break the narrative too much. Okay, so people are working with process, they’re getting right there’s, they’re starting to feel the vitality of the logos in some way, both the intelligibility within their experience, and, you know, the intelligibility that’s emerging within their, you know, conceptual interaction with it, and that’s unfolding in this loop like you say, then what happens. Yeah. So one important point about about the depth of process I don’t want to make sure to leave out is that what what we’re really experiencing at this depth is felt relatedness. Yes, the religion. And so, at the depth of parts it was separation but now that those have softened and melted what do we melt into we melt into a field of deep and implicit relatedness. And so what we’re actually feeling is, is us is what’s happening here. Right. So, this is a tremendously powerful resource that I work with with coaching clients because now work with executives or leaders, and, you know, in a position of leadership they’re constantly having to read the room. Right, like, what’s happening in this meeting, how is this going. And do they do that in a completely rational way, I mean, of course they, there is a rational element to that. But a lot of times they can they can if they have access to this particular depth this resource, they can drop it and they can feel how it’s going. Right. So I’m wondering what I mean that’s a powerful thing. And it’s, I talked about the, you know, we’re virtue and virtuosity start to meet. I’m also, I’m also want to bring up, like to get a change, I mean, separation, and then when people move into this, this felt sense, and it’s not just a physical sense it’s also like it’s, it’s also a cognitive sense it’s it’s simultaneous right. So, so really sense, like when we talk about making sense right. So, when they’re doing that when they’re getting this felt sense of connectedness. I mean, there’s a lot of research showing that meaning in life is this felt sense of connectedness to yourself, to other people to the world, do people start to talk about their lives become, I can see the first one being the first the first process would be, you know, therapeutic. I’m not saying you’re doing therapy but you know I mean it’s alleviating it’s ameliorating. And the first one, like I can feel, I could see people starting to sense flourishing they could start to sense meaning in life, do they start to talk about their lives are becoming more meaningful, when they, when they, when they, when they, when they drop to this level. Yeah, exactly. And the way the way that I would say is that the work at the depth of parts is unblocking, because our parts are basically, it’s like they’re trying to help us they have good intentions but very often because they’re structural, there’s a rigidity and ossification there, they’re actually blocking us in a particular way. Now, mostly they’re blocking us from having a deeper self contact where we, where we can understand and embody our other resources, our virtue, for example. And so they’re blocking, but as people deepen into this, their lives, their relational lives just become enriched. Yes, right. And so, their sense of themselves their sense of what they’re doing their sense of of navigating. And so, the frame that I use in my work is really drawn from complexity science and and I view human beings as complex systems living embedded within layers of nested complex. As do I, very much. Yeah. And so, and by the way this really sells easily in the corporate world where I, when I go in and speak about complexity and you know no one argues with me when I say life is complex, right, what you’re doing is complex. And so the question really is if it’s complex, and you know that we immediately run into the limits of problem solving in dealing with complexity. And so how do you learn to navigate that complexity. Well actually dropping into the depth of process gives you an immediate access to the feeling of being in a complex system and gives you gives you experience that allows you to orient and navigate in that. And so, it actually becomes very, very practical and this is something I try to emphasize because the deeper we go to some people it seems like we’re getting really esoteric. And what I want to keep bringing it back to is actually this is super practical. This is like, this is like bringing online the exact things. The concepts of being human that we all are and have that help us to be natives in this complex habitat, and to navigate it with skill. Right, so many lines, we could pick up on but I definitely want you to come back Steve, but I want to keep going with the narrative right. Yeah, so people are doing, they’re working at the level of process. And at some point when you and I will talk about this and how this related to, you know, relevance realization and the four kinds of knowing because it seems like it’s exactly. I’m very interested in the conversation. Yeah, but let’s let’s let’s finish the exposition and really concentrate on that today. So people are working at the level of process and then how do they drop deeper. What happened. Yeah, so, so process flows, and, you know, one of the things that that Eugene Jendlin claimed in it, and it seems to be confirmed by my work as well, is that where it’s flowing towards is it’s flowing, flowing towards the core of the self in some kind of way. And so what will happen as things are flowing, is that there will be kind of one of two things that happened, generally speaking, there will either be a kind of felt presence that begins to arise, or a felt absence. And really, I call these portals into the next depth down. And so what we actually do to drop into the next depth down is we have to collapse the subject object dichotomy. Right, right, right, right, because that dichotomy is actually what’s keeping us out of that next depth down. So we have a way in the method to actually collapse that and drop into one of these felt absences or felt presences and feel it as the feeling of yourself. What are the practices around that? Yeah, it’s sort of duality practices of some kind or. I can share with you right now it’s really, really simple so if the client let’s let me be an example is here so let’s say the client is is starting to actually feel the client is starting to actually feel as they’re sensing their bodily felt sense and we’re exploring the issue of what’s going on in their life, they’re starting to feel a sense of boldness, a sense of courage. They’re feeling like hang on a minute, you know, and they’re really feeling that they’re feeling a sense of vitality that begins to emerge and it’s embodied and it’s here. And so as a coach, what I what I might say is, what if you feel this vitality and boldness is the feeling of yourself. So instead of feeling it as a feeling, which is, which has the, the subject object dichotomy. I see. What if you feel this is the feeling of yourself. What is it like to be bold. Right, so you move from a having to a being, and you’re trying to get to do an enacted identification. Exactly. Right, right. So we move from that having that feeling an object to being what is felt, what is and I always, you know, end that with that question like what is it like to be this, what is it like to be bold. What is it like to be loving what is it like to be soft, what it’s like to be tender, what it’s like to be whatever the I see. Right. You pre you prefigured this. So these are the virtues coming in. Oh, I see the virtues coming in. So then we drop into the third depth down, which I call the depth of presence and absence and this is a depth. This is the depth in which we land into our wholeness, but our wholeness in a is differentiated into qualities. And here this differentiation is is a differentiation that integrates, as opposed to a differentiation that fragments. Right, right, right. At the depth of parts we have a differentiation that fragments and separates here what we have is a differentiation that integrates, and the best example of that is a hologram. Right. Right. So it’s a holographic depth in which, you know, we might be embodying virtue of courage, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not loving right courage is in the foreground love is in the background. You know, that doesn’t mean that that’s suddenly not the case. But when love is in the background, it also love comes at the foreground, courage is still in the background so you you have you have the complete interpenetration going on. Right. Exactly right. So what we can say is that all qualities of presence are existing within all qualities of presence. Yeah, yeah, right. And so what can happen is we land into we land into one of these qualities of presence which is what I call these virtues. And, and we feel resourced deeply and innately this is and this really answers the question like well what if nothing is missing. Like we didn’t try to improve anything we just worked with exactly what was here, and it kept unfolding naturally spontaneously even. And we land into this, and the client says, Actually I’m feeling, I’m feeling this boldness and then the question is okay. How, how can you integrate this back into your life how what kind of actions occur to you from this place. How does that whole situation we started with occurred to you now, and very often clients will say things like, it’s not a problem at all I know I know exactly what to do. Yeah, right, right. Sometimes things vanish entirely and they they realize nothing no action needs to be taken. Right. So we circle back into that situation having unfolded their sense of self, and the world looks different. Right. So, when our people. Well maybe this is part of moving to the dropping down to the fourth. But are people aware of that sort of living interpenetration between the virtues, that’s my term, but what right like, like, did they get a sense of. You indicated there’s a sense of wholeness here like there’s a holographic thing. But did they get a sense of, I’m struggling for a term, I want something like field, or a sense of that all of this right is being held in and made possible in some profound way do they get a sense of that while they’re in there or is that maybe opening up to a deeper level or. I think if I’m understanding what you’re, what you’re kind of reaching for here. You know what happens is that after, after doing this practice for some period of time could be months could be years. You know, many different in many different differentiated qualities have been realized. And the more you, the more you realize any quality the faster it is to realize more of the qualities there’s a there’s a quickening that happens because you’re, you’re kind of greasing the skids right you’re, you’re, you’re, you know you’re you’re making the pathway from from the shallows into this depth, much more easily navigated and spontaneously navigated. And so yeah people do eventually starts to recognize presence as a unity, but it’s a unity in multiplicity it’s it’s it’s both at the same time. Right. And, and it’s integrating in that kind of way so it’s not an either or it’s really a both and in that Yeah, that’s exactly. I guess what I what I wanted to say maybe this is better. And this goes back to the Socratic, I would argue the Socratic notion of the unity of the virtues. They come to see boldness is a way of being wise in this situation, and kindness is a way of being wise in this situation, and patience is a way of being wise in this situation. That’s what I was trying to get at that that sense of there’s wisdom and the wisdom is constantly sort of evolving. Right, and shaping these are all bad. Right. That’s it. That’s exactly it. So, in fact, what I what I most noticed in the beginning is that everything, all these different qualities feel like qualities of love is very common thing in the very beginning of this. It’s like yes I’m feeling bold and I really want to set a boundary here. Why, because I love. Right. It’s a boundary created from love not a boundary created from fear. Yes, right, very different kind of expression and so what begins to happen. And, you know, this is getting on into a sort of a more advanced levels of development, but there’s this rich integration and this capacity to sometimes I call it the the kaleidoscope of presence, the presence where one quality if you’re inhabiting this this step consciously, one quality will flow into another quality in a dynamic non dual responsiveness with the needs of life. Right. So this is the other, I think, amazing thing and I’m, even though I know this and I experienced this it’s always a marvel every time I do, which is that if these qualities are actually unblocked in us, they arise spine to spontaneously. And that’s what’s needed in life. You know, so you might be having a, you know, a wonderful day you’re, you know, you’re, you’re in a joyful place, you turn the corner and suddenly you’re confronted with a situation that that that joy is not is not being present with that situation anymore. Maybe what you need is courage suddenly. Right. Or you’re here because your place. Yeah. Yeah. So, so one of these, one of these qualities of presence can actually emerge spontaneously. As long as there is nothing blocking it. And that’s what often happens is that parts are constellations of parts live in the, in the, the belief that something is missing. And that something is missing is what they’re trying to overcompensate for they’re trying to fill in the gap of what’s missing. They believe that what’s at depth is absence. Right. Right. So that’s why I call this depth the depth of presence and absence because what we can also experience when we drop into this depth is seems at first almost like a confirmation that something is missing. We drop into a sense of absence, and the actual unfolding work that happens at the depth of presence is in absence. We can most easily understand it from the Taoist perspective of kind of Yin and Yang. Yeah, where if you go deeply enough into Yin, Yang is born. And if you go deeply enough into Yang, Yin is born. And we see these things as as mutually co arising. Yes. And so the work at that depth is actually to hang out in the absence, and really be it. Now there are all kinds of defenses against doing that. We just turn and do parts work with that relax back down into it. But if we hang into that, what what begins to happen is this gestalt shift from absence into presence. Yeah, yeah, this is like Nishitani’s, the great doubt in the self overcoming of nihilism and in religion and nothingness that in his So this is like Nishitani’s, Nishitani couldn’t go deep enough into this. He couldn’t go into where you get that fundamental aspect shift, gestalt shift, where the absence goes from being the absence of privation to right to the no thingness of the superlative no thingness, that that sense of inexhaustible resourcing. So, is that, is that the last stage that people can. So that’s not the last stage and just to give to give another illustration of this, the one that I typically use in the class is this, this really old line drawing of the old woman and the young woman it’s And you know, depending upon which perspective you look at. That’s actually how it functions is that absence and presence are there immediately. They’re there both of them at the same time, and you sink into one, and you really work in an open awareness state beholding the whole of the field. It’ll, it’ll flip on you and you go wait a second. This isn’t a nothing. This is something. It’s a presence. It’s not an absence. Chris Chris and I use the Rubin’s vase, which is the right yeah the goblet or the two faces kissing when we were talking about exactly the same kind of shift in paper we published last year. This is, this is such an important realization to have because prior to that realization, the tendency is to is to connote presence as good and absence is bad or one is right and one is wrong. And here what happens is we recognize there is no presence while that absence and vice versa. And so once you do that you that there is so much that relaxes and in fact, what I observe is entire constellations of parts actually relax. So, when we actually drop into this deeper depth, we’re simultaneously doing parts work but at another order in a certain kind of way. So things just really relax and open up. And then that opens up the possibility of doing one more move into the fourth step, the final depth, the deepest depth, which is the depth of non duality. And the depth of non duality, you know spoken about and taught about in a lot of the world’s wisdom traditions, but you know Buddhism advice to Vedanta, you can see roots of it and esoteric Christianity and Judaism and neoplatonism Islam and neoplatonism etc. You know it’s east west all over the place. Right. And what we do is, is we, we settle into presence and absence and the simultaneousness of those things. Yes, and we feel both at the same time. Yes. And at first what begins to happen is a flickering, we flicker back and forth because what we’re actually trying to do is You know, for something to be in the foreground, something else has to be in the background and you can’t get there at the same time. So what happens is, and this is true of all styles of non dual work, we do multiple styles of non dual work in Aletheia but the first style that we learn is this kind of failing into non duality. Right. And so we actually try to feel both at the same time to be both at the same time. And we actually fail. And that failure drops us into a non dual state, which in the hallmark of non duality is non separation. And then we end opposite of the part of the depth of parts which is separation. So here we drop into into an experience of non separation. And then we use other styles of non dual work to explore that space in in more detail. Right, right. I like the stereoscopic flickering. It reminds me of some of the progeny of work that I’ve done. Yeah. So, I mean this, this sounds like I understand there’s going to be considerable variation between individuals, giving their, you know, given that their psychodynamic backgrounds and environments, etc. But this sounds like something that on average would take years to do. Is that is that is that I need to get to that that. But you know what I mean. Yeah, to get to that that that that deepest level. Is that, is that, is that fair. I mean, that doesn’t mean it’s not rewarding at every step. I’m not saying that right right right right because I get it what you’re saying is every one of these steps or gestures as you call it, better word, right. Is valuable is intrinsically valuable and again not in some just sort of conceptual idealistic way but in the vitality of a lived life. But is that fair though for me to say that, you know, on average this is, it sounds like it sounds like a life course right it sounds like something you’re going to engage in for quite some time if you wanted to get to the deepest level. Yeah, so when I first Kurt when I first started working in this way, you know, just to back up a little bit to give some context to my answer to your question. Sure, I, you know, I’d studied parts work I’d studied process work and focusing I’d studied, you know, in the diamond approach, who, you know, in that tradition of differentiation of qualities. That’s really, I learned that studied in Buddhism in some nondual traditions. And this is how I recognize depth for the first time because I noticed that all these methods work and don’t work and how do you explain that. And I realized the, the insight that they all work because they work at a certain depth. Right. And so, at first, what I really profound insight. It was it was it was, it was a kind of epiphany really, you know, of really seeing something that just stood out in relief in such a stark way. And when I first tried to work with this idea of depth what I thought was that I would work with somebody at the depth of parts for some period of time let’s say months or maybe even a year, and they would graduate into process. Because they were at a stage where they were ready for that and then then there would be some process work for maybe who knows a number of years or something and then they would graduate into presence. And when I started coaching people with this idea of depth in mind and really being in a question of what depth are we working at. What I found was that actually in the span of a single coaching conversation, clients are navigating up and down. Back and forth. That’s really powerful. Yeah, I’m a big critic of the monolithic mind proposal that the mind is a monolith that moves stage to stage to stage so your experience was no that’s not what’s going on. It’s, it’s multi that multi level, right from the get go. Yeah, and so, and everybody will say this in the developmental coaching world you know all developmental models are presented in this linear way. But everyone will claim but development is nonlinear. Right. Yes, and, and that is absolutely true. In fact, and, you know, this is a developmental style of coaching, but at no point do I even do a developmental assessment. There’s literally no need for it. Right. All we do is relate to the client in a particular kind of way create the conditions for unfolding and let, let it happen. Right. So, what I found is that clients are navigating up and down and typically what will happen is we’ll start with an issue there’ll be a part that’s reacting we work with that part, it softens and relaxes the client gains access to some process unfamiliar apart reaction says hey that’s scary let’s not look there we go and we work with that part it relaxes we drop back down. And we do that for a little bit and then the client can kind of hang it process and then they flow for could be even three or four minutes five minutes, you know, then there’s an emergence of a felt absence or a felt presence, we flip into that collapse the subject object dichotomy drop into presence. Let’s say we drop into an absence right apart comes up and goes well that’s scary looks really dark in there. Right. So we pop back up into parts work we do a little parts work with that build trust that that part has that it’s okay to explore that and feel into that absence. We drop back down into your process so it kind of goes like this. Now, that last step into non duality. Well, I have actually seen even people within my level one classes who’ve been, you know, doing this work for literally months have had experiences where they’ve dropped spontaneously into non duality. Because the method creates the conditions and the unfoldment is spontaneous now that’s pretty rare to actually have that happen. What’s far more common is that people are navigating up and down in the first three depths that I talked about parts process and presence and absence. And, in fact, this is one of the reasons why in the later, more advanced curriculum when we’re really focusing on non dual work. I bring in other styles of non dual work. Right, because, in fact, there’s sort of four different styles of doing non dual work, because I found that if we switch into other styles, we can actually go from the depth of parts directly into non duality. And sometimes call it the Express train, you know we’ve had we skip the local stops. And you know this would be a sudden awakening, you know, special insight, you know you might know it as special insight meditations, you know where we’re looking at things like, you know, the self as a construct and noticing the emptiness of the emptiness of self and realizing the emptiness of self and just dropping straight in. So other styles of non dual work can, in a way, or they’re all, they’re all implicit within the core does the core process, but they can be made explicit and then amplified in particular kinds of ways to become methodologies for non dual work, and we do that in the, in the later curriculum. This is so fascinating, so fascinating. So, I mean we’ll, we’ll put all kinds of contacts in information in the description for this video. But I’m interested to guess in it, just a general question. You talk a lot about sort of going into the business world but do you also just take like courses or classes for people just coming in who want to engage in the program. Like, do you do that kind of work as well. So that’s actually where Aletheia started but that’s not what’s currently happening right now where Aletheia started it was just a self development school, we’re just going to take people who were just interested in self development. And, you know, I ran actually two groups, it was a long curriculum in fact one group we just and we just ended after nine years of a group being together and working, working through all this. And it was really the kind of the testing ground for a lot of this methodology. But even as of the second year of those projects what I started to realize is I was coaching people in a way that I needed to train other people, other coaches to do because I couldn’t coach everyone. Right, right. And so then I started a coach training school. And the coach training school in the end has turned out to be a better, a better and more, you know, sort of financially sustainable business, right, right, rather than the self development school and so I’ve kind of steered things in that direction. Now, you know, coming into this you have to, there’s no way to learn this methodology without doing the work yourself. Of course, because the deeper you go with the client, the more how you coach is an expression of your own development your own familiarity with inhabiting those depths, and the methodological moves these gestures are not well defined. You know, the shallower, the shallower you are and the more structural you’re working with in terms of depth. The easier it is to say the gesture looks like this, you do this, then this, then this. I get it. Yeah, right. Right. Right. At some point, I may return to the idea in fact the, the self development school I called the Aletheia Academy. And, you know, at some point I may return to that idea and restart the Academy but right now it’s just coach training. I just asked because you might get interest from this video. Yeah, I want to go through this like I want to do this kind of thing. So, yeah, and the most powerful way to to experience it for yourself is is curiously to actually learn how to do it as a coach. I don’t have the aspiration to go out and to coach people because sitting in that in that kind of space with people is, I mean even even if even when you’re not the client. This is one of the things I love about this work even when you’re not the client. You’re developing in the middle of this. This is very secretive. Yeah, and the best teaching is when you’re learning and the best learning is when you’re teaching. Right, very much. Well, Steve, I think this is maybe a nice chunk. Yeah, and I definitely want you to come back, because there’s a lot we more we want to talk about. We didn’t get into memory consolidation at all. That’s right. We didn’t get to talk about Heidegger yet very much. And we’ve made some illusions. I want to do the memory consolidation part of me. What did you say? Or how we do this semantically. There’s a whole way to talk about this and yeah, medically or the group work. Yeah, I want to talk about all of this. I want to talk about all of this very much. But, yeah, I think this is a good place for our first. So, I like to give people who come on my show, the opportunity to give sort of a last word, something they’d like to say. And then we’ll bring it to a close. Yeah. Well, I’m, I’m really excited for this conversation and what can come from it. I’m really interested in hearing from you about this, you know, how your work maps onto this. So I just want to say that to start with and, and, you know, this, this work is unfolding itself. Right. It is, it is, it didn’t, it didn’t come out this way it’s unfolding. You know, the logos is speaking in this way. That’s what I sense. That’s what I sense. And that’s what really that the beauty of that is really caught my eye. That’s what I really said. And this is, you know, when I, when I am out there, you know, on the, the client side on the student side, looking for traditions that I want to learn from. This is the number one thing that I’m looking for as well is, is it a living tradition. Exactly. Exactly. So I don’t, you know, there’s probably many things I could say as an ending point but I’ll just leave it at that. That’s a beautiful ending point. Okay, so, Steve, you’re, you’re, you’re going to come back probably for multiple more discussions. This has been so wonderful. Thank you so very much. It’s been a lot of fun for me too. I look forward to that.