https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BLcFk8yRjpw
Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Welcome everyone to Another Voices with Vervecki. I’m excited to talk to somebody who’s been on this channel before and I’ve been on his channel and he’s currently doing some amazing work for the Vervecki Foundation. And this is Seth Dillinger. Seth, it’s great to have you here again. We’re going to talk about a lot of stuff connected to your work and your thinking, but maybe a very quick introduction just in case somebody’s seen you for the first time. And then maybe a little bit of what you’re doing for the Vervecki Foundation and then what you’d like to talk about today. Great. Well, it’s such an honor to be here with you, John. I just kind of want to almost take one breath just to feel that I’m here with you. As I mentioned you, I feel like I’ve been in conversation with you since the last time we were here together. Really, your work has been so important to me. And by way of introduction, I would say that I am a teacher of the healing arts. And I use that phrase as a kind of an abbreviation because there’s many different practices now that I do. The last time we spoke highlighted quite a bit the Feldenkrais method, which is a somatic practice. And what I like to say these days, and I didn’t say this before I met you, this is one way you’ve helped me clarify, but I would say it’s a wisdom practice disguised as a movement practice. That’s a good tagline in any case. And so I also lead meditation. And again, through you, I got connected to Guy Sengstock and the Circling Institute. So I’ve become certified in the art of circling. And, you know, sort of in a nutshell, I like to do all of those things. And by just combining them, I’ve been finding these areas where, you know, the whole is greater than its parts. I’ve been finding just, you know, kind of like, does this thing fit into this thing? I don’t know. And playing with that has opened up some really incredible things. So something that you’ve really innovated is what you call the ecology of practices. And I even had the pleasure of going to France recently and being part of the Respond Practitioner retreat, where one of the big discussions was around these four sort of pillars of practice that you’ve outlined, the acronym being DIME, the dialogical, the imaginal, mindful and embodied practice. And so what we’re doing at the Vervecki Foundation morning practices, these are half hour sessions every day, it’s literally the DIME practice spread out through the week. So you have a day of authentic relating, where we’re really just practicing being in conversation with each other, but noticing, wow, this is really powerful. When two people look at each other and do what you and I are doing right now, it’s like this could go all these directions. But then we have these habits, there’s like things I don’t normally say, what’s it like to say the thing I normally don’t say. So a whole practice of authentic relating. On the second day, we’re doing journaling. This is something that’s newer for me, I’ve kept a journal forever. But people like Ethan Kobayashi, who you’ve been talking to recently have been showing me or Taylor does a lot of journaling stuff like- Tanner Barrett. Yeah, Taylor Barrett. When you write in your journal, in fact, you could enter into dialogue with yourself. And there’s so much that can happen there. We do meditation, and then we do embodiment. So anyway, the four days of the week, and there’s a group of people who are showing up every day. And I just want to make a plug if anyone loves to watch your channel and they haven’t joined in yet. I think this is where the rubber meets the road. It’s been really interesting for me to listen to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and After Socrates and all these things, because I don’t have that deep history of reading all of these thinkers. And yet what I notice is I process what you’re talking about through my body. You talk about opponent processing or eidetic deduction. And I notice I can imagine something and then I can feel something and then I can understand something. So for someone who’s maybe been immersed in the books, I would invite them to come, you know, dialogue, journal, meditate and practice embodiment with us, because I think it’ll take you further into John’s work. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you, Seth. Yeah, the Verveci Foundation is feeling how we can much better make use of Seth’s talents. Maybe this goes into something we could start talking about a little bit more. Of course, part of DIME is the embodiment issue, and that is the one that has been the most challenging with the virtual medium. And, you know, why don’t you teach Tai Chi? Well, you can’t really do that over Zoom. It just doesn’t work. Right. And but I know you’ve been having some success with some of the stuff you’ve been doing. And I wonder if you want to say a little bit more, because I know you’ve been sort of turning your mind towards that challenge about how could we really properly and I like the way you said it, bring in these embodiment practices as cultivation of wisdom in a virtual space, given all of the weird constraints that we’ve never had to face before in human history. So a lot of our legacy traditions don’t have anything to tell us about how to do this. We go to the dojo. Wait, no, you can’t. Right. And so I wonder, you know, what do you think about that? And where’s your thinking at? What are you considering maybe potentially offering to the Verveki Foundation or on behalf of the Verveki Foundation? So what do you think, Seth? Yeah. Well, I definitely, you know, am deeply indebted to Moshe Feldenkreis for what I learned from him. And although I’ve incorporated many other practices, as I mentioned, I think his way of thinking has been a model for me. And, you know, one of the reasons I was so eager to talk about him when I talked to you for the first time was, as I said, I feel like what he was doing was a real wisdom practice. And, you know, because there’s a way that our bodies, they’re just a way of accessing our entire lives, our entire being. And, like, to speak more technically to this conundrum of what do we do online? Well, Feldenkreis had this one particular innovation in teaching movement is that he didn’t demonstrate the movements. He described them in words. And if someone wasn’t doing the movement correctly, he thought either, well, either my words aren’t, you know, clear enough. But then if you looked around the room and everyone else is doing it, except that person, he would think that person doesn’t have a clear image of the movement we’re talking about. And so, you know, even to say something like put your hand on top of your head. Okay, like someone put their hand on top of their head, they followed the instruction, but it’s like, what do you mean by hand? Which part of your hand are you thinking of? So even though, you know, I correctly followed the instruction, this is only one version of following the instruction. You know, there’s so many different things. So he actually saw that as an opening. So maybe put your hand on your head 20 times slowly and start noticing all the different ways you can do it. Oh, you can which part of your head, you know, like suddenly, oh, this feels different in my ribs, or, you know, if I touch my face, it feels a little more intimate or all of the there’s like your phrase of combinatorial explosion, right? And then there was another layer, right? Like, put your hand on your head and someone goes, it’s like, oh, this person’s really wanting to be obedient and follow instructions and like, no, this was an invitation for you to get to know yourself except he’s aware that, you know, because I put on the hat of a teacher and the person comes in and student, there’s a whole power relationship. And we need to actually see if we can dissolve that because he would say what I’m trying to teach you is how to become your own teacher, right? And so just noticing that in the simplest of actions, you know, we’re constrained by so many things, we have these ideas. And maybe this is pointing a little further down where we could get to in the conversation, but just to foreshadow, you know, what your work has done, I think, for me, and probably for many people is it’s helped me to really shift my worldview, right? But when I walk down the street, let’s say I live in a nihilistic world where, you know, I’ve had some dark moments in my life, right? And not only did I feel hopeless, but the world kind of felt meaningless. It felt like, you know, everything’s supposed to be logical, but it’s too complex for me to figure out. It’s illogical. I can’t, right? And your body feels heavy, right? And so if you can come to a place of having like a kind of a mystical experience or something like that, and I have some stories I could share with you of how embodiment can actually lead to mystical experience. But let’s just say if suddenly I find myself on another day walking down the street, and it’s beautiful in Washington DC right now, the fall leaves, the sunlight through like this like burst of fire in the tree of like red and orange and gold and brown and the light coming through, it could just feel like God is present. And how it feels to walk down the street when God is like shining through the trees, and I don’t actually, you know, I’m not part of an organized religion, but it feels like that, right? And so that’s where we can begin to go through embodiment, and we don’t have to invoke anything supernatural. We can just learn to know ourselves through our bodies in a much deeper way, where suddenly the experience of just being alive and breathing or walking down the street can become so much more magical. And then when life is magical, you know, I relate to my family members or my friends differently. All of these things are kind of layered in there. So, you know, well, so I have a program now that I’ve developed. It’s a 16-week curriculum called Grounded Connection. And this combines some of the main areas already talked about. Embodiment practice, I like to call it as a kind of a play on words, somatic inquiry. And yeah, I mean, that’s basically drawing on Feldenkrais, but I would say that my teaching of the Feldenkrais method since encountering your work and some other important people, I would mention, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Rob Berbea, who is a Buddhist teacher who was… I’ve heard of, yeah. Right, the soul-making dharma. People like Sheryl Shue, I think, has dove into his work a lot. But he really just explored the imaginal and kept exploring it and kept exploring it and started noticing, you know, what can we do with this stuff? So, there’s somatic inquiry. And with meditation, I offer in the program 12 different forms of meditation, the idea being, can we develop meditative creativity? So, you know, I meditate, I focus on my breath. Good. But maybe, for me, I’m the person who finds that so difficult in the beginning, that it just demoralizes me and I can’t, you know, go on. I think the way you taught meditation helps a person into that. But then again, there’s other forms. So, what if today focusing on the breath doesn’t work? Well, I have this toolkit of all these ways. And ultimately, meditation is just like, what’s my relationship to my thinking? So, you know, and I teach it that way. The third piece, of course, is dialogue. So, I have live calls with the people in the program, and we do interpersonal work. And just one last thing, and this is also what I think, you know, I brought it into the ecology practice starter sessions quite a bit, and is how do we bridge these into life, which is something that you talk about a lot. Yeah, yes. So, so I have this phrase, anytime, anywhere awareness. Like, okay, it’s the morning, you sit on your cushion, and you meditate. Great. But you know, now you’re in traffic, and you’re frustrated because someone cut you off, and you’re running late. And you know, you had an argument with your spouse, like, how do you in this moment, you know, apply what you were doing on your meditation cushion this morning. And one particular practice that I think would be fun to explore with you here, that I’ve created, and it’s growing out of the Feldenkrais work. But I think it accompanies encompasses the imaginal and some of the other aspects even of worldview, is something I call the presence mantra. And the mantra, it’s a mantra in the sense of, like a mantra, it means you repeat a series of words, but it’s only a mantra in so much as it’s like a noma-monomic, what do you say? Yeah, like dime, you know, it helps us remember dialogue, imaginal, mindful, and embodied. So the mantra that I give to all my clients is breath, ground, space, sound, light. And once they have those five words, I’m asking them throughout the day to pause and notice those five, I’ll say things if I’m being very general, but when I’m being precise, I call them relationships. Yes, yes. Let me pause because I’ve already said that. There’s a lot there. Yeah, that was good. So first thing, sort of going back to the beginning, I heard you say, I acknowledge that you’re doing much beyond the Feldenkrais, but that’s still the skeleton, no pun intended, of your work. And one of the advantages of that for this medium is it was actually not taught via demonstration. It was taught through description and helping people discover sort of the imaginal in the practice. And then I heard there was something like idetic induction, where you’re getting people to notice all the variations, and what’s running through those, and how are they different, and how are they connected? And I heard that. I heard the wonderful idea that your body is this access to so much of who and what you are. And it’s a living symbol in the profound sense of symbol, not just as something that stands for something else, but something that allows you to participate in a reality. So the body is very much a symbol of your participation in the physical world, the biological world, the social world, etc. And of course, this jives with so much for e-cogsci that’s trying to tell people to stop thinking of cognition as in the abstract space in their head, which is by the way, not how they experience it. That space inside your head, I want everybody to remember, because we all forget, Sati, remember, that space inside your head is also imaginal. It’s not literally there, you’re not literally seeing. And the fact that we are culture, we got it sort of right with the brain doesn’t mean much. Aristotle thought it was here, the Egyptians thought it was here. And so where they experience that inner space was very different. And of course, you have to learn to do that. Little kids can’t do that introspection, that imaginal thing. So you have to understand that even that space in where you think you’re thinking inside your head free of embodiment is actually imaginal and therefore embodied. It’s making it’s accepting your sensory motor system and all kinds of other stuff. And so the call that I hear you uttering is like a deep remembering, a deep remembering, which of course is the meaning of Sati mindfulness, a deep remembering. And then you were talking about how, you know, the thing I’ve been asking a lot is how does it transfer? How do we make it a ritual and not just something we’re doing in an isolated way? And you were talking about this, the presence mantra as a way of helping give people a bridging practice so they can carry what they’re cultivating into their everyday life. I think those were some major themes. And so I see and I want everybody else to notice how Seth is, like he’s picking up on so much that’s being talked about often. And this can be problematic, I acknowledge, but often very theoretically and abstractly in my work and on this channel and in this community. But he’s saying, no, no, but there’s ways of actually directly putting this into practice and not just practice, but embodiment. So it gets access to the core of who and what you are and how you’re showing up in the world. How did that come back to you? Yeah, really good. I’ve just, you know, knowing that I would be talking to you, I’ve been re-listening to some things and I’m always glad when I do that because you notice all the things that you didn’t understand the first time. But in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, when you really go deep into relevance realization and all of the different aspects, you make this point, you say, and you might need to remind me of the phrasing of it, but you say there’s two things that are separate that we sometimes confuse. One is, can I make a plausible theory that might explain this? And on the other hand, there’s the phenomenological mystery. Yes, yes, yes, that’s right. Yes, that’s right. That’s well said. So relevance realization, you know, if I attempt to put it in very everyday language, it’s like, how do I know what to do next? Or how do I know what to pay attention to next? And, you know, in your series, you talk about the way the synapses are firing and you talk about small world networks and self-organized criticality and a person can watch that and go like, wow, John’s really explaining it to me. But it doesn’t necessarily help me when I’m walking down the street and I’m faced with the phenomenological mystery of like, what do I do next? Right? So the thing about the presence mantra is, you know, no one’s surprised the first word is breath. There’s so many practices around, let’s be aware of our breath. We all know that we’re always breathing. And if I tune into my breath, it changes something about my attention. But ground, space, sound, and light are always ever present in our experience. And each one of these five relationships, we could, this is a little crude, but for a first sort of pass, maybe it’ll work. We could say that each one of these has a continuum that we might say on the one end, there’s well-being. And on the other one, something that’s moving away from well-being. I mean, obviously, if I hold my breath too long, that’s the end of me. Right? Now, what’s important to notice here, I was talking with a friend of mine about it, and I was saying something and I was shorthanding it a little too much. And I said, you know, breathing’s better than not breathing. And, you know, first of all, there’s the objection of like, well, I need to hold my breath to dive underwater and those kinds of situations. But there’s also the point which Werner Stegmeier makes in the book, What is Orientation, which I’ve been reading thanks to you. He, so I’ll say what my friend said, and then mention Stegmeier. But my friend said, you know, when you can’t breathe properly or basically you’re tense, like that’s still information. Like you might prefer to be calm and might prefer to feel great. But when you don’t feel so good, you should pay attention to the not feeling so good. And Werner Stegmeier, you know, and again, I’m sure you can articulate better than I can. But what I’m getting is he’s saying, you know, before we think a thought, we’re in a body, we’re moving through a world, we have to get oriented. We have to know where we’re going, what we’re doing. And then, you know, when we become and we go through life and now I’m an adult and I have a job and a family and, you know, like, oh, okay, I’m talking to John today. Well, when does the Zoom call start? Where’s the link? And I’ve got to deal with all of that. That’s all orientation. Right. And even like when I was logging on to talk to you and then the link was wrong and I had a moment of like, oh, wait, this isn’t right and I’m late. And what did I feel? I started to feel a little tense. And so what Stegmeier says, which I think is so interesting is like, apart from, you know, the well-being continuum, there’s a continuum between calm and anxiety that’s letting me know if I’m really calm, it’s like, I’m oriented. I’ve got everything I need to deal with kind of figured out. If there’s an anxiety, it’s like there’s still something to figure out. Oh, that’s the correct Zoom link. And now I can calm down again. So when I sense that anxiety, when I sense, you know, during the day, because maybe I’m practicing the present mantra that my breath is a little short, I might, you know, think, how do I know through breath work or something to get a fuller breath? But I also might ask myself, why is my breath short? What is that indicating to me? So in that sense, the quality of my breath, it’s like something rising up from the wordless depths of my body to indicate something to me. And then ground, space, sound, and light, we could talk about each one of those, but they all have something like that. Well, I’ll give you the one example of ground and just to flesh it out a little more. Ground, people can think of posture, right? So my feet are on the ground. I can feel my bottom on the seat, but my head is balanced on top of my skeleton, which is, so that’s how my head is connected to the ground. And you said about Feldenkrais that it’s the skeleton, the work, he’s the skeleton over my shoulder. And it’s not a mistake. One of the things that people notice when they start working with the Feldenkrais practitioners, you keep talking about my bones. And then after I’ve been working with the practitioner for a while, it’s like, I kind of notice my bones more, like there’s a solidity in me, right? But let’s say, you know, let’s say I can’t find the Zoom link and now, you know, I’m worried that John’s waiting for me and like, oh, I feel awful. And like, I start to sink, right? I lose the integrity of my posture. And again, it could be something biomechanical, like, oh, this person needs to take a class on good posture. But it also might indicate like life feels heavy. It’s weighing me down. And like, why is it that I’m, you know, and so I can again notice I’m slumped. What’s going on here? And again, I can correct my posture, but I can also, there’s an indication there. Yeah. So that’s fascinating. And the idea is people are doing this throughout the day. And that acts as like a scaffold bridge for everything else that you’re teaching them to be brought into whatever they’re doing or wherever they’re at. Is that the idea? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is the primary thing is, you know, like so Feldenkrais is often a situation relying on the floor and doing all these movements. Well, you can’t do that all day. But, you know, the other thing that’s going on in a Feldenkrais class is the teacher is not only giving you indications of what to do with your body, but they’re guiding your attention. What happens if as you move your arm this way, you maintain attention on the length of your spine? It’s like, oh, if I allow my spine to sort of collapse and shorten, my arm feels heavier. But if I use my mind or as you were saying a few minutes ago, the imaginal, because I can’t see my spine, but I can imagine my spine is long. And, you know, I mean, someone watching us right now might have just adjusted their posture because they keep hearing, you know, there’s this guy talking to John Brebaker, he’s talking about spines. But it’s like the other thing I would say, and I say this, you know, in my program is like, when we’re talking, we’re showering each other with images all the time. And so this is another piece of the imaginal. This is something that Robert Bayer makes really clear is like, we could do an imaginal practice, something like the view from above or whatever. But we could also just be kind of going about our day, not realizing that we’re forming images in the back of our mind, you know, which sometimes are to our detriment, like, oh, the world is meaningless, you know, nobody likes me. You know, those are actually imaginal propositions in my head, in a kind of way. And so if I, so, you know, like many practices, if I repeat the presence practice, or the presence mantra enough times, it becomes more like just in the guts of how I perceive things, right? So I’m adjusting my posture constantly, just because if I sit like this doesn’t feel good, but I don’t, it’s like, there’s another thing you did in awakening from the meeting crisis where the person stops to get gas because they see them here, but they don’t speak in their head and tell themselves, I need to now drive to the gas station. It’s just, it’s just it, right? And so it can become like that. It can also come into relational practice, right? So if we talk about space, one of the questions I might ask someone is like, okay, do you feel that the space around you is welcoming? Or does the space feel a little, you know, you’re not sure about? And so if space feels welcoming, my body might be expanding, because it’s like there’s no danger to expand. But what I might notice, and sometimes I just notice it on one side of my body or in a particular location, it’s like, I’m pulling away from the space. I’m kind of doing this, right? And it might be that when I’m with another person, you know, I’m talking to them and I’m relating to them, I might even come closer because I’m supposed to, but internally, I’m pulling away, right? So the space between me and the other person is something that I can begin to put my attention on and notice. So, you know, like one of the things I said before is put these practices together and they add up to more than the whole. I discovered recently, when I did a training that was more along the lines of authentic relating, but then I thought, well, let’s, you know, kind of warm up and get embodied at the beginning of each day. They started to interact in a way where it was like, oh, practicing embodiment and relationship at the same time, it opens up something else. So we start to have practices where we’re discussing our present moment phenomenology, or we do an embodied practice. And then in partners, we talk about what was it like for you when you were meditating and you lost track of your breath and we go into that. It’s like, oh, I felt terrible. And then I, you know, I thought I’ll never do this right. And then the other person says, oh yeah, I couldn’t really stay with my breath either. And then they start noticing, oh, you’re dealing with that too. And then they start relating not so much to how good a meditator am I, but like, oh, like meditation is this practice with challenge and we’re both doing it together. And, you know, so they start to, I noticed that I keep going. I think it kind of reflects maybe some of my own issues, let’s say. But I also, I have this sense at a certain point that all these practices, it’s too simple to say it, but it’s like, they’re all the same practice. Yeah, they’re all at one in an important way. I get that. There’s a lot that’s coming up and your enthusiasm is very much appreciated. So, I mean, yeah, reminding people throughout the day, not in a propositional sense, but in an enacted sense that how the presence of the imaginal, and like I said, even thinking in your head is an imaginal act, right? I mean, people have forgotten that. Or the way we think of the future in front of us and the past behind us and all those sorts of things. We’re living poetry in that way. We’re embodied metaphor. So, but I keep hearing another theme that’s coming up and you’ve even spoken it once. This notion of wordless wisdom. And of course, I’m very much about the non-propositional, but you seem to be not saying anything contradicting that, but you’re trying to articulate something a little bit beyond the theoretical, some way in which this is showing up for you powerfully, both your teaching and your practice. So, talk a little bit more about this wordless wisdom. What do you mean by it? How is it showing up and what do you think it ultimately points to? Yeah, so I was saying before that as I walk down the street, models of component processing in the small world network might not help me. But in a funny way, we could say that when I’m walking, it’s decision making. Right now, of course, there’s a way I can go on autopilot because I taught myself how to walk a long time ago and I don’t have to think right foot, left foot. But again, if we think of the way Feldenkrais taught, how many different ways can I step? How big is my stride? And again, now I’m using words to indicate something, but each step happens like I’m not doing a propositional, but if I start walking uphill, I adjust for that. If I step in a pothole, I adjust for that. And here’s a more kind of a, I’m not going to claim to be incredibly wise, but here’s a moment that I felt a little bit wise, let’s say in my body. So, I like to run in the park near here. So, it’s an uneven trail and potential to twist your ankle. And in fact, when I go running, I roll over my ankles quite a lot. Like I step on the edge of the foot and then my foot goes like that towards the top of the foot. And if you, you know, I said, we’re like, you’re doing it now, you’re like cringing because you’re like, oh, that sounds bad. Right. And I used to, I used to, I used to hurt myself in the past. What I can tell you is I haven’t sprained my ankles for several years, even though I keep rolling over my ankle from time to time. So, what happens, I step on my right leg in a funny way that’s going to damage my ankle if it keeps taking pressure. And this is definitely not a moment where I can wonder about the small world network. It’s like, it’s happening. I am about to twist my ankle. And I didn’t twist my ankle. What happened? And that happened many times until I stopped just thinking I was lucky because I started saying, what did just happen? Well, my head went to the left. All of the, all of like, I suddenly flexed my body. And so by moving my head to the left like this, I took all the weight out of my right leg. So my, my, my, my right leg is still collapsing in this funny way onto the outside of my foot, but now all my weight’s shooting over the left. And I kind of go, and it’s very awkward, but I catch myself on my left leg. And then I stand up. Not only did I not twist my ankle, I also didn’t crush my skull just now. Tanner Iskra And, you know, something that will happen often, a lot of Feldingkrais practitioners will report is that a person will come to their class one day and say, they say, how are you doing? They say, oh, pretty good. But I fell down yesterday. And it’s like, uh-oh, because, you know, especially some of the older people, but they’re like, yeah, but I was fine. Or there’s a practitioner, a long time practitioner, who’s also a martial artist. And he, at a certain point suffered a stroke. It was, you know, not so major that he wasn’t able to recover. So later he was teaching a workshop that I attended. And he told the story. He said, yeah, well, I was in the hospital and I got bored and I got out of bed. And they started walking down the hall and the nurses said, what are you doing? You know, and he’s just like, I know how to fall. So these are kind of like examples of the thing about movement, the thing about how should I step right now, it’s too fast to be propositional. Or we might say it’s too fast to access words and concepts. Right? I mean, another way of saying it is just that you and I are sitting here trading words and concepts, but we’re also not falling over or maintaining our uprightness. We’re breathing, we’re doing all of those things. And so we might say that there’s playing around, there’s a word full, word full wisdom and wordless, and they’re actually in an interaction. Yeah. So there’s both at the same time. So I’m interested, did that ability to not be so fallible? Perfect, yeah. Is the original meaning of fallibility is falling. Do you and I’m putting because it’s trying to set up the question, do you find that translating into things in your life other than that specific correction and running? Do you find that you’re able to recover without harm in other ways that you might sort of more metaphorically be falling, metaphorically be falling because we, we of course fall all day long. I mean, just to play with it, it would be wonderful to know how to fall in love in the way you’ve learned how to fall. Right? And so on. So, and you don’t have to go in any of those directions. That’s just trying to help frame the question well. Do you feel and do you have reason to believe that it’s transferring beyond the events of running that lesson you learned? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that’s yeah, for sure. It’s funny when I was actually thinking of something related to falling in love and then you named that. So a year or so ago with the love of my life, we had one of those moments where maybe this isn’t working, right? We kind of took a pause and I’m happy to say the pause has ended and everything’s fine. But that was a really, as you can imagine, a really, really dark moment for me. Like, you know, here’s this person who’s so important to me, feel so connected and I might just be losing that. I might just not have that in life anymore. So around this time, this is actually, I don’t know the exact timing, but I mentioned this meditation teacher, Robert Bay. I mean, he has a ton of online stuff you can find, like Dharma retreat after Dharma retreat that’s been recorded. And he teaches a number of practices. But in any case, I was really relying on this guy because I’m heartbroken, right? And so what can I do? I can sit on my meditation cushion. Well, one of the things that he taught was it was leading into what is known as Jhana practice. There’s something, I’m sure you know the term, but maybe some of the viewers don’t. There’s something called PT, where if I’m meditating, I can get into this really nice feeling that literally it feels physically pleasurable. And then, you know, that might come as a result of just slowing down and working with my breath. But when that sensation arises, I can actually put my attention on the PT itself, and I can sort of spread that. And this is doing imaginal work, but it’s really palpable. Like my body feels like it’s bubbling. It feels really good. You know, and in the talks that he was giving, he would also point out, look, if life is hard, but you know that you can sit on your meditation cushion and generate feelings of wellness throughout your body, you might feel more resilient. And that was precisely, you know, here I am heartbroken. I like, I don’t want to get out of bed every morning. But I remember, and I had these moments at a certain point of like, partway through my day, just realizing, oh, yeah, later, I’m going to sit on my cushion and get some of that PT. And it like, it helped me through, you know. And so this is analogous to, you’re about to twist your ankle, and that you’ve got a way of reorienting that compensates. Is that, am I understanding you correctly? I mean, it’s a little maybe of a stretch when we try to bridge those two. It’s definitely a different time continuum. There’s definitely propositional thinking in so much as I’ve learned this technique, maybe I’ll apply it. But there’s a moment where my eyes are closed and my body is filled with this sensation that I actually forget to be heartbroken. You know, and then what I notice is, even heartbroken is a state of being kind of that is built on my history and my experience. And if I had never met that person, but I knew how to feel this way in my body, I would just walk out into the world and maybe meet a new person or you know, like, like, so, so as I mentioned, you know, it didn’t turn out this way, but I certainly spent a lot of time with maybe this, this, you know, romance is, is completely history. And that is a kind of like a turning point in one’s life. I’ve understood and you’ve like directly helped me to understand like that’s not all of life, but I certainly probably in a past life did, because, because I was, I was living in a meaningless world, right? So the most meaningful thing for me was a romantic relationship. Right, right. I think I’m beyond that. But, but let’s say, let’s say you’re not, then, then this becomes a really deep existential question. So, so the connection with, with the, you know, twisting the ankle is just, I guess, the question of resilience. But, but, but, okay, but I get that. So what about something intermediate? You about to see yourself falling into a bitural pattern. Yeah. And you are able to correct and right yourself. So you don’t fall into that pattern. Now that’s what you’re training in the knot, twisting your ankle. How about that? Is that showing up more in your life for you? Will you, you get a little bit of that space where here’s why I would normal, let’s say it’s interpersonal. Here’s why I’d normally fall into this pattern with people wait, and I can shift. And I’m even doing like the way you shifted your, I can shift and come at it another way without falling into the pattern. Have you noticed that perhaps that kind of transfer happening? Yeah, for sure. And that that’s, that’s hopeful to maybe move us back in the direction of wordless wisdom, because that noticing, oh, I’m doing it again. Yeah, it might be kind of like needing gas at the gas station. I might not have to fully articulate it. But there’s, there’s another kind of ancillary anytime awareness, anytime, anywhere awareness practice that I give people along with the presence mantra. And I got it from a good friend of mine, whom I’m hoping to introduce you to Ken Mannheimer, who’s a practitioner of contact improvisation dance. So I just want to give him credit, but you asked two different questions. And the first one is, what are you noticing? Right? And it’s just a sort of reminder that, you know, if you would stop thinking about all of your to do list and everything that, oh, I’m in a body and that kind of thing. And so you ask a person to do that. But then the next question is, what are you not noticing? Yeah, or relevance really. And of course, I have no idea what I’m not noticing, but it means I have to, like, intentionally reorient. And so I think I do do that often, like, yeah, with my daughter, even driving her to school this morning, teenager, you know, like, adults and teenager, how are we going to work this pattern? Yeah, I get it. Some days I feel really, like, you know, skillful. And other days, I feel like, oh, I got stern and scolded her and she acted like a teenager response. That was predictable. How did I fall into that again? But I can sort of hear the words I’m about to say, just like musicians talk about, they hear the notes they’re about to play. And I can catch myself like, well, that’s what I mean about you. You feel like your ankles about to go and you don’t say anything you notice is perspectival knowing. And the noticing is carries with it a shift. You catch yourself. Notice how the language is now mapping very readily. That’s what I’m really interested in. And you know, and I’m really interested in getting, you know, both theoretical and phenomenological expertise on, okay, what are the like, what are the bridges and how, how big can the bridges be? And how many, how do we line up bridges so we can build bigger bridges? Like, these, these are questions, I think, well, we’re all exploring them. But I think the work you’re bringing adds a degree of embodied refinement to that noticing that I think is particularly apt, because for me, and this word is insufficient, but if I, if I start to, if I, if I start to presence the feeling of catching myself from physically falling and reorienting, and I can sort of coax and caress that feeling into more psychological situations, I can sometimes get the skill to transfer. I’m sorry, this is really, really sounds very like fluffy. I don’t mean it to but like, okay, this is what’s happening when I’m sparring or something. Okay, what does that actually feel like when you okay, I’m in this situation, try and get that feeling back. And does that open up? Right? And then you start to get the skill transfer into the more, you know, abstract, symbolic kind of situations. Does that land for you what I’m saying there? Because I find the body as one of the best bridges in that way, if I can get into the felt sense, like, and part of it, part of it requires the meta skill that you’re teaching, which is the skill of re inhabiting your body, if I can put it that way, when you get better at re inhabiting your body, then what you can do is you can read, you can choose to re inhabit your body in order to say, Okay, I just did that really well. What does that feel like? Like, but not here, but I’m in a sudden situation, try to remember what that was like, like an embodied relive it, don’t just recall it, notice the shift from spoken to non spoken, right? relive it, don’t just recall it. And that often, I would say more than just sometimes that often helps transfer the orientation, the skills, the framing, patterns of noticing the patterns of inhabiting that allow me to bring the skills that I’m learning there, here, where I might not, in an untutored fashion, transfer them. So that was a long way of trying to explain what I’m talking about. But is that making sense? Yeah. So, you know, what I like about the example of twisting my ankle is, at first, I told you, Well, I just thought I was lucky. And then I noticed I’m moving my head and do it. Yes, but I still feel lucky. Yeah. So to report that I moved my head that way. I still can’t explain to you how I did that except to say that if I go to Feldenkrais practice, which I think I primarily can credit with saving my ankle on those occasions, well, what do we do? And we do this in meditation, we do this in authentic relating, we do this in every kind of practice, we take something complex from life. And we take the tiniest fragment of it, and then we slow it way down, we open up the space. And so, you know, a Feldenkrais lesson could be in all kinds of positions, but they’re definitely like in our previous conversation, I was describing to you something called the plane that divides, and this is about practicing balance. But the thing is, I might spend 45 minutes doing that, and you know, doing all the idetic induction of the feeling. And the sort of reward is that I stand up and I feel balanced. That’s just a feeling in the moment that’s wordless. But a lot of words from the teacher happened to cue me what to do. There was a lot of words in my head as I went through it. I even had to go through a lot of my psychology to notice, oh, it’s okay if I make a mistake, I don’t have to compare myself to the person next to me. Because that literally messes me up, even if the goal is better physical balance, right? I get stuck in my social experience. So what you were just describing is something that I call imprinting. So let’s say we’ve just done a practice together, and we feel, you know, transformed our body just feels, you know, clearer, we’re breathing nicely, all of these things. I’ll just say to people, you know, take a snapshot of this. Ah, you know, like, feel this, or, you know, if someone comes to see me here in my studio, I will encourage them, if you’ve got time, don’t just get in your car, like, walk around the block and feel what it’s like to walk, you know? Yeah. Well, I’ll say to people, try to make a memory of this, not one that you’ll merely recall, but one that you’ll relive. Yeah. That’s how I try to get people to, and that’s my understanding of sort of Sati from the Buddhist tradition or Prochiron from the Stoic tradition. But I like that imprinting. Did you get that from sort of Lorenz and animal ethology and things like that? Is that where they came from? No, I don’t know who that is. That particular word just popped into my head. But, you know, it’s funny. I mean, I’ve had the experience of listening to you talk about different thinkers and going like, oh, that’s what I call, da-da-da-da, you know, because it’s coming. But so to get a little more specific, let’s say I have a rigidity in my thinking. Let’s just say that my day-to-day routine is very fixed. I always see the same people. And let’s say for some strange reason, I decided to sign up for Seth Dellinger’s program. And now I’m in module three, and module three is all about, I think it’s called, unlocking the doors of possibility. But it’s essentially, it centers around this idea already mentioned of, like, what are you noticing? What are you not noticing? But then another aspect, aside from shifting perspective, is just the sense of how open am I versus how closed? So, you know, when we get to that module, we talk a lot. In other words, we share propositions about openness. We talk about why being open is a good thing. But then we have a practice where I ask the person to open their mouth. And then I ask them to open their mouth and think of the left side of their mouth and think of the right side of the mouth and think of the back of your mouth and, oh, the back of your, the top of your throat can open and close. Oh, can you open the front of your mouth if the back of your mouth is closed? No, that messes me up. Does that remind you of when you want to say something and you swallow your words? Oh, yeah. You know, and suddenly, like, when you open your mouth, what happens if you imagine your ears opening so that you can hear further away sounds? Oh, that changes how I open my mouth. What about imagining the space between all the pores in your skin opening? Oh, and suddenly opening my mouth is like an embodied metaphor for openness. And like, I’m feeling as if, you know, your words kind of like go more deeper into my body as we speak because I’m more open to you now. But we did a kind of a physical opening practice. But they really, in a fun, like, I always question myself, is this really like, I really feel more open if I just do these opening movements. And it’s kind of like, yeah, I kind of do feel more like it. I mean, I have always suspicious, but it’s amazing how well it works over and over. This is really cool. And this is converging with some of the stuff I’ve been working on and others and working with others on. I hear you say, well, we get the theory and it’s propositional, and then we take it into embodied gesture. And then we get people to really like mindfully re-inhabit that embodied gesture. And then we play with it, serious play. And then when they take it back up out of the practice, they are able to like be more open in their thinking or their perspective taking or their role taking in the way they weren’t before. Which is really interesting, this process, right, of taking it out of the propositional into the gestural, making it more mindful, seriously playing with it, opening up possibilities, and then letting it be re-exacted back up into more everyday consciousness and cognition and experience. That’s really cool. That’s really cool. And I like, like I said, I like the fact that you’re figuring out ways, two things here that I think are really important, especially at this time, you’re figuring out ways in which you can really do embodiment with people, like, and I don’t mean trivial move your body, but what you’re doing is not. It’s like profound, like you say, wordless wisdom, embodiment practice, that in a way that can happen virtually, because we could do that practice together right here, right now. But also, I mean, you’re keeping a keen eye towards this issue of transfer appropriate processing, doing it in such a way that it will transfer like you just did it, you know, vertically in the alignment of different levels of the psyche, but also out into as many domains and as deeply as possible in people’s lives, because that’s what gives it its transformative power. So first of all, I want to just compliment you on that. I think that’s really, really cool. I just wanted to take this moment to do a shameless plug for the fact you’re going to be doing something for the Verveki Foundation August 16th that lines up with a lot of what we’ve been talking about, maybe speak a little bit to that. Yeah, thanks. So I’m just going to be doing one of the workshops, it’s going to be two hour workshop and it’s called Coming Home to Your Body. Coming Home to Your Body. And, you know, I’ve actually, I need to go back and listen to your whole presentation on home. This is, this is, I mean, this is one of the ways we feel at home in the world is that my body feels comfortable. I’m not, you know, constantly dealing with aches and pains. And, you know, I mean, we have different situations, but let’s say I’m dealing with aches and pains, how can I navigate that to feel more at home despite that I might have a long term situation that’s difficult? I know that you’re exemplary in that. I mean, you know, I’ve seen you leaning against the wall to meditate because that’s, you know, what’s necessary for you sometimes when things are more difficult in terms of like the situation that you’re dealing with. So, but in any case, the workshop, first of all, it gives people an opportunity to do a more in-depth Feldingkrais practice. But what’s so important is also to have a conversation at the beginning about the idea that there’s wisdom that you can cultivate through your body and just introduce that idea and to go through the practice and then to, you know, afterwards to share about it. And what I always say to people is don’t think that we’re going to, you know, log on and introduce ourselves because we always introduce ourselves at the workshop, at the start of a workshop, do a thing and then have a conversation to recap the workshop. No, when we’re sitting here talking to each other, we’re practicing right now. Like, you know, I mean, something I’ll often say is, you know, when you talk, something’s vibrating in your throat. Can you feel it in your chest? Like, you know, go into just the awareness of being embodied. Or I might invoke one of my favorite lines from Guy Sengstock, who always says, listening begins when you notice you’re not listening. Right. Which is not unlike, you know, I start paying attention to my breath when I notice I’m not paying attention to my breath. And just, or, well, I’m doing it again. I get excited to stay on this workshop. I mean, essentially, it’s an opportunity to come in and taste this practice, get your questions answered. But I guess what I wanted to highlight there is that the relational practice, because if I led a Feldenkrais workshop five years ago, I wouldn’t have had that piece. That’s a piece as well. And, you know, the kind of questions I might ask are something along the lines of what we were discussing with the imprinting. Like, okay, if you just discovered more ease in your body, how are you going to show up differently, you know, at dinner tonight with your family? You know, that really is… That’s a good idea, though. You know, I’m going to put a pin in that. Just get people to imagine a specific event in the future, not too far, and ask them to practice now, how would you show up with this, what you’ve cultivated here and now, then and there? Give them even a specific, at least, I think this is a good thing to think about practice, doing specifics, or I’m thinking of like shooting an arrow, right? Give them specific trajectories of transfer with specific targets until you get the habit of transferring and then it opens up. Well, that’s very good. That’s very good. That’s… I like that. That’s very powerful. Sorry, I interrupted, but I wanted to put a pin in. Oh, it’s fine. It’s fine. Maybe I could throw out something that, you know, it’s tricky, because I want to talk about wordless wisdom, and of course, there’s a bunch of words that are going to flow out of my mouth to do it, and there’s even, you know, propositional areas that I’ve been trying to explore, but what I want to underline is, if the proposition has any validity, what it’s saying is, go do that practice. There’s a practice you can do. That’s the point. But yeah, I thought to myself, because you hear this phrase sometimes, oh, look at this person, they have a wise body. Like, I don’t know, you look at an incredible dancer or an athlete, like there’s a certain wisdom that they have that the rest of us don’t have, but what would that wisdom consist of if we were to break it down? And there might be others, but I would say there’s three words I came up with, which are perception, action, and orientation. And so just to sort of briefly say, action, let’s go back to the athlete, look, they can, or Rafe Kelly, watch what he does. Okay, he could perform really skillful actions with his body. Got it. Okay, that’s a form of wisdom. But another, like I mentioned a few moments ago, Guy Sengstock, his capacity through his body to listen and to perceive things and to pick up on things, like really rich perception, right? Really like just, right? And then orientation, as we mentioned before, this is like, how do I do what I’m doing moment by moment? Maybe this is relevance realization, but I would also say it’s where perception and action come together. And even another aspect of wordless wisdom, this conversation I mentioned before we started that you were having with Matt Seagal, where he’s talking about what do we do with that place where we literally don’t know, like, I don’t know, like quarks, they’re just too small to see. Or, you know, when I’m falling and it’s too fast, but I can throw my imagination into the gap and I can work with imagination. And this is where I’m just throwing something out and see what happens. But perception, action, and orientation. And then when I’m listening to you describe the meaning crisis, one of the things you said as well, there’s three orders that have been undermined and they are the nomenological order, the normative order, and the narrative order. And so here’s my attempt, but the nomenological order, nomenological like naming, like the things I can say, that’s sort of like how I explain how reality works to myself. Yes. Okay, good. Please feel free to correct these. But it’s both the logic of how you do it, but it’s also it picks up on the law-like structures of the world. Yeah. And I mean, to keep us grounded in what we’re talking about, physics is how the world works that’s really important to me when I don’t twist my ankle. And that’s an example, right? Because if my head went to the right, I would have had a twisted ankle. So I would maybe relate that to perception. And we can come back to that, but there’s more to say in terms of how I conceive is like a backdrop that I’m not like my worldview is back here somewhere. Which is a perceptual metaphor. Yeah, go ahead. Right. Right. Right. And so then the normative order, my sense of what is the good, what does it mean to move towards the good? I might relate that to action. Yep. And then the narrative order, which is kind of like, as I understood it, it’s like, at least for an individual, it’s the course of my life. So it might relate to purpose and all of these things, but it also relates to, you know, what am I doing? How am I orienting? Yep. Through the world. So here’s a proposition, which hopefully points towards something that’s non-propositional is if I develop a more refined perception, if I get more skillful in my action, if I find that I’m overall more competent in the art of orientation, even if that’s all on the wordless level, like if there’s a part of my life that’s filled with words and concepts, it sits on top of all of those things down here. I think that’s right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And so about the three dimensions of wisdom, which map readily into what you’re talking about, view, care and action. Yes. I think that maps on really readily. And I think what you’re doing in addition to that mapping is you’re saying that ultimately maps on to sort of fundamental dimensions of our embodiment. And I think that’s right as well. I think that’s fundamentally right. I mean, I always like to quote Wittgenstein at this. You know, even if the lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand them because they have different bodies and they’re embodied in a different ways and they orient differently. Right. And blah, blah, blah, blah. And so even if they could use English, they would make connections of relevance and salience that would be like, what? That makes no sense to me. And if you say that, oh, that’s not possible. Talk to a three year old and they can use English language, but their salience landscape and their relevance, even their embodiment, right. Because their head to body proportions are fundamentally different than yours. Right. And so yeah. And that’s why it’s like, whoa, that was really bizarre. And yeah, that’s exactly it. But what you’re doing is you’re getting people to relive that and reinhabit it in a powerful way, which I think allows for the possibility of replaying it, which again, is a play on words, right? We use talk about replaying like memory, but you’re replaying with it. And so you can now play it differently. And I think that’s really wonderful. We’ve only got a couple of minutes left and I always like to leave my guests with the opportunity with the last word, however they want that word to be. Well, there’s something I wanted to share that we didn’t get to and it could go longer. I’ll try to be brief, but I’ve had two, what I think I could describe as mystical experiences that came out of embodied work. And one was I’ve just discovered the Feldenkrais method maybe a month before I’ve started working with practitioners, started thinking about my skeleton. I don’t really understand how it works, but I’m doing this practice at the time. I’m actually working in a meat factory and so I’m walking around, you know, carrying stuff for one, you know, headed over to the bandsaw. I’m wearing boots. I’m walking on a concrete floor. And, you know, I’m kind of like something’s different. I’m doing this new practice. I take a step, I take a step, I take another step and I shoot through the roof of the building and I fly out into the sky. Now, of course, I didn’t really do that. But if people are like, what the hell, what I believe happened, and I know that the phenomenology literally it was like that, but all the weight in my body just disappeared. And it’s like, so Feldenkrais talks about walking can feel like levitating and it can’t, like that’s what happened. And it’s, you know, there might be more, but it’s like if you land right on your skeleton, the amount of muscular effort you need just diminishes. Let’s say it doesn’t disappear, but it diminishes to a degree that I had never felt that effortless before. So in my experience, it was as if I shot through the roof. And the thing about that is it changes the way you think about what’s possible in life. Right. Like you were just talking about children, like they might believe in flying. We don’t believe in flying. On some level, that’s a handicap because even being an adult who knows that I can’t fly, if I can imagineally think of flying, like, I mean, that’s kind of what I’m doing when I do the view from above, you know, so it changes my whole concept. And I’ll end on this one. And this is, I’m indebted to you for this, but it was a moment a few years ago where I’m meditating and I’d found your course. And so I was going through it. And one of the things that we’ve already talked about that you emphasize in that course is, look, how do you translate this? You know, so one of the things you teach is, well, we end our meditation, we sort of speak about how we’re going to, you know, I think there’s a series of Buddhist vows that you drew on, but you sort of also invited the person like, you know, you live in the modern day, like, like, shape it to you. But so I would meditate and I would say a series of things. And here’s the thing, the way I joke about it, I was raised as a devout atheist, right? Now you can understand part of my nihilistic experience. And I was having a rough day, I was having a rough week, maybe. And I meditated, I got to the end, I said all my vows, and it was like, life is still hopeless and meaningless, even after all that. But I was speaking already. And I got to the end and I just went, please, like, this is kind of pathetic, like, please. And then I went, who are you talking to? And I described that moment as the the absolute curtains on my atheism. Because it just happened, I didn’t debate if there was a greater power, but I found myself already speaking to something that was beyond me before I knew it. And the thing is, my whole body changed again. It was like, you know, again, it was probably muscular. But it’s like, and so that’s, it’s like, life hasn’t been the same since that day. And so I, you know, even my program, we get to the end, there’s a module called dialoguing with divinity. Because if you have one worldview or another, it’s actually going to change how you move your body, it’s going to change how you feel, how you relate. So anyways, that’s amazing. Obviously, you can tell I’m kind of bubbling over by the opportunity to talk to you. So I’ll leave it there. But I just enjoyed this so much and so appreciative of your work and the opportunity to be collaborating with River Reiki Foundation. So thanks so much, John. Thank you. So everyone. Thank you, Seth. Everyone, consider checking out the daily practice that Seth mentioned. And you’ll find that on the awakening to meaning platform. And also, Seth’s workshop December 16, which you’ll also find on the awakening to meaning platform. And Seth and I, of course, will be talking again. Thank you so very much, Seth. Thank you. Take care.