Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

When you begin to understand that the rules are self-imposed, and if you don't like the game then you can change them, you can play a different game, and you can do it again and again until you find the game that makes life into a joy again, then ...

If I now am able to feel the discomfort of writing and can allow myself to feel it and don't have to flee from it, does that mean that I have vanquished procrastination?

Ha ha ha, aren't you cute?

In a word: no.

But I have noticed what procrastination feels like.

And here's what procrastination feels like: nothing. Procrastination, I'm discovering, is a way of passing time without feeling anything. I can get wrapped up in web surfing or Game or whatever, and while I'm doing it, the experience happens in my head only. There is no associated feeling. Time simply passes. My attention is on what I'm doing. And I'm comfortable in that state.

Interestingly, until I really examined it, I would have said that procrastination feels awful, but that's not true. In procrastinating, I am choosing the anodyne comfort of numbness over the sometimes terrifying experience of actual moment-by-moment feeling. Upon real examination I saw that it's the recognition of procrastination that feels bad. And frequently the response to that recognition is to dive right back into procrastination. Ah, welcome numbness.

From that perspective, I began to wonder if procrastination is merely the name for a particular manifestation of not-feeling. Perhaps an essential numbness has been my practice for years, and procrastination is merely the form it takes when I think I should be working. Actual creative work always entails risk--risk and vulnerability being at the heart of every creative endeavor--and perhaps that level of risk means that there is no way to avoid the feelings of fear and the like that arise in that space. Numbness in that space obviates the work--it becomes simply impossible. And so maybe procrastination is what arises in the space of intention to work while (actively or passively) refusing to feel. Words simply won't come. Hello, Game.

If that's true, then what explains the however-many hundred-thousand or million words I've written over the years? How did I manage to write them if I was so numb?

Let me propose that unawareness of feeling is not the same thing as numbness. No matter how successful the practice of numbness/not-being-present, sometimes the will to create pushed me beyond it, and there the essential need to be present and vulnerable forced me to some degree to feel.

Energetically, it occurs to me that maybe this is what was going on: I was forced to feel--writing demands it--but the feelings were unpleasant: uncertainty and fear and the like. As such, I had two mechanisms for dealing with them: one was to fight to avoid feeling too acutely, to ignore the feelings or to push them away, which demanded a fairly substantial amount of energy. The other was to not feel them, to return to numbness, which is easier. One manifested as work that tended to burn me out, the other was long periods of procrastination.

I notice I procrastinate less now, but it still happens all the time. And it still feels comfortable and familiar and ... nothing. It has always felt like this.

But writing has not always felt like this.

If I had to summarize in briefest terms what Jerry teaches, I'd say he teaches the ability to feel what's actually present, which is less obvious and much deeper than it perhaps sounds. I'm finding most people avoid feeling most of the time.

This work has provided me with an unanticipated benefit in relation to my writing. When I really started writing again in earnest, I discovered that I could now feel the struggle of writing.

It hadn't occurred to me that it was ever otherwise, but quickly I could see that so much of my writing career, especially during the big gaps when I excused myself from writing at all, happened as a reaction to a feeling that I didn't let myself actually feel. The stress and fear of writing was something I simply avoided, without even realizing I was doing it.

But once I got better at feeling things--discovering them in the body, letting them be what they were, breathing through the sensations with as little judgment as possible--I could witness what felt unpleasant about writing but not stop writing. The unpleasant sensations were just unpleasant sensations. They had no real solidity, were just bodily manifestations of my conflicted emotions about writing. If I just let them be and kept writing, they might or might not go away, but I didn't have to stop writing to avoid them, or bother to avoid them at all.

How deeply I feel them now depends on the day. I've zero-drafted something like 75,000 words since the winter solstice, and some days it's easy to write to 1,000 words and beyond, and some days I can just get myself to 1,000, and some days it all hurts and some days it doesn't but in general I am showing up and getting my writing done, and I think by not stopping the writing, irrespective of the sensations that arise, fewer unpleasant sensations are arising.

In the initial drafting, anyway. I'm meeting a lot of uncertainty in the editing, and many days when I click that "Publish" button, I feel straight-up fear.

I'm sure you can write the punchline yourself: these feelings, too, simply arise and then pass away.

Jerry offers his spiritual teachings sneakily, through a hard-to-object-to back door: he teaches centering and grounding via basic breathing exercises, and then takes that technique into the gym and starts you working with lifting weights. If you pay attention and really work with his techniques, the results can be pretty literally mind-blowing.

Oh, and you'll get stronger, too.

You have to understand: I started lifting weights during my first semester of college. I am now 40 years old, so I have been weight-training for literally more than half my life.

I went to do my first workout after Jerry taught me his techniques and I entered that space as I normally did, by putting my earphones in and putting some music on. I tried to do a simple bench press, and discovered I couldn't do what he'd taught me to do that way. I had to stop the music to really concentrate. Imagine my surprise. In that moment, I discovered that despite having been benching for over twenty years, I didn't know what a bench press felt like, I only knew what it looked like. I had positioned my hands and determined the range of motion entirely by sight. When I tried to use the cues Jerry taught me--center my energy, inhale on the exertion phase, let the breath determine range of motion--I found that I had never felt a bench press, not ever. And feeling the exercise was a radically new experience.

Let's see if I can adequately articulate what a mind-fuck that was. Maybe a reasonable analogy would be this: imagine going through your whole life seeing only in black and white and shades of grey. Imagine having someone point out that if you just breathe a little differently and pay attention to the breath just so, things will be different. What the hell, you say. I could use some different. So you try it and all the sudden you start to perceive, dimly at first but more vividly as days go on: color. And it never, ever occurred to you before that it could have been any other way. Shit, you even thought you were good at perceiving hues.

Pay particular attention to that last bit, because that bit is about identity. Something once seen cannot be unseen. There's no stepping off the path once it is truly revealed. And suddenly you might find yourself having a new relationship with the questions, "Who am I?" and "What the fuck is happening?"

By the end of our first meetings, after an hour or two in the gym and an hour or two at the coffee shop discussing the writing, it was clear that while Jerry may be teaching in the gym via weight-training and fitness, that's not what he's teaching. I now had an understanding of why he said he didn't know of anyone else doing what he was doing, and why he was having trouble writing about it.

I asked him, Why this particular path?

"Fitness is easier to teach than spirituality," he said.

At this point I'd been lifting weights for more than half my life.

When the student is ready the teacher appears.

I met Jerry at Ed's weekly poker game. He was a nice enough guy, initially a bit of a nit at the table (but then so was I). At some point he committed to improving his game under Ed's tutelage (as did I), and his game got stronger. And for a long time those were the main things I knew about the guy. I mean, we shared details and stuff, but this was guy camaraderie at its finest: whiskey, sports talk and poker. Neither a complicated recipe, nor a complicated result.

So over the months I picked up that he was a fitness consultant, and he seemed to specialize in helping people recover from injury.

One night at the game, right around the time in early August that I hit bottom, he was talking in a bit more detail about his work, and how no one he knew of does exactly what he does, and he mentioned that he'd been working on a book for more than ten years, but he never seemed to be able to find the traction to get it completed.

Well, I know a few things about stuckness, and I told him, "I can help you with that."

Not long thereafter, Ed, Jerry and I met for brunch at Snooze here in Boulder. I remember the conversation as pleasant, enjoyable, and relatively far-reaching. I remember a beautiful summer morning. I remember where we were sitting, and that my friend Charity (who works there) sent us one of their special pancakes, gratis.

Beyond that, there's only one specific detail I recall: I was describing the difference between how I approach skiing and snowboarding. When I ski, it's like I'm trying to dominate the mountain. On my snowboard, I play more; my approach is more about flow, and I remember how I illustrated this: I held my hand out in front of me, oriented vertically, and moved it back and forth, not unlike a fish swimming through water. From that detail I surmise that we'd gotten talking about energy and flow.

I must have explained something about my writing techniques. Jerry thought perhaps I could be helpful. He told me I'd have to understand what it was that he did, and that to do so I'd have to come work with him at the gym because he couldn't really explain it simply in words (perhaps explaining somewhat his difficulties with the book). Seemed reasonable enough. I agreed.

Funny how sometimes the things that turn out to be most fateful don't seem all that remarkable at the time.

We started working together a bit more than two weeks later, on Friday, September 5th. We met in the gym for him to show me what he does, and then we went to a local coffeeshop to discuss the writing. By that point I was a month into making big changes in my life, and so I was primed, and what Jerry showed me turned out to be immediately and startlingly profound, and after that things started to move very quickly indeed.

I've noticed this, in connection with the rules I've been playing with in getting these pieces written and published, and also in connection with my life over the past several years: I find making rules scary. It's scary because when you decided you're playing soccer, you can't at the same time play football.

But what if football is better? Better to not decide.

Am I the only one who hears voices like that?

In recent days, though, I am also seeing a converse come into clearer and clearer focus: Once you decide that you are playing soccer, you can start to relax. Now you don't have to worry about playing football anymore. Now you can just play soccer.

You meet someone and she tells you she's a surgeon. "Oh yeah?" you say. "What kind of surgery do you do?"

"Well, I don't actually do surgery on people," she says. "I work on my technique at home in my kitchen, on apples and stuff."

"Umm," you say.

You meet someone and he tells you he's a tennis player. "Oh yeah?" you say. "Who do you play against?"

"Well, I don't actually play against people," he says. "I go to the practice courts and hit the ball against the wall for hours and hours."

"Umm," you say.

You meet me and I tell you I'm a writer. "Oh yeah?" you say. "Where can I read what you've written?"

"You can't," I used to say. "Almost none of my stuff has been published."

---

A surgeon without a patient, a tennis player who never puts himself across the net from an opponent, a musician without a listener, a teacher without a student, a writer without a reader: Practice, study and the like are necessary, but they aren't sufficient.

You aren't playing the game until you dare to enter the arena.

Remember: the main rule of zero-drafting is that you can't do it wrong. Therefore every experiment is valid.

Experimenting is much more fun when there's no such thing as failure.

However, just because you can't do it wrong doesn't mean you can't do it better.

You can't do it wrong: No one can stop you. You aren't going to get fired. Maybe the haters will set their sights on you, but that ain't no thing: haters gonna hate. Don't take it personally.

You can do it better: You start a zero draft because you want to say something. How do you know when you've said it? Well, how closely are you paying attention to how you feel? How you feel: the zero draft will show you if you let it. There's your teacher.

---

As I've worked with this process--in the initial zero-drafting, and then certainly in the editing and now the publishing--I've been feeling a lot of fear. It permeates my body.

I don't remember feeling so much fear. But I'm pretty sure it was there. Apparently the rules I'm working under help me feel fear in a way I didn't before.

It's easy to not feel fear when you don't change anything and don't take risks and live in a tiny little shell.

I remind myself that I started changing the rules when it became clear that my choice was either change or die.

Maybe feeling fear is a good thing?

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities. How do I keep control in the face of all this uncertainty? This has been an ongoing story in my life. My answer has tended to be to seek to control via contraction: I clamp down.

Thus the possibility of expansion has felt deeply threatening to me.

So in many ways I have lived a small life, bounded by my need to feel in control, and I have hated the smallness of the life I've allowed myself, but until now that's what I've allowed myself.

Now, finally, I am practicing expansion.

---

I am practicing expansion:

What if life could be so much more than it currently is?

Well of course it can.

Then why isn't it?

My teacher, Jerry, points out that I am attached to the struggle. He says, "Ben, it doesn't have to be so hard."

Hmm. What might that look like?

---

"Play with it." Jerry gives that instruction a lot.

Somewhere over the course of my 40 years, it became a lot harder to find play in what I'm doing. How did that happen? And why?

---

What might that look like?

It would look a lot like play, I think. It would look like taking chances and seeing what happens.

It's a little weird to think about how I've lost much of the ability to find play in what I'm doing, and at the same time I say that I'm a professional writer. I mean, what else should writing be but playing with words?

---

What might that look like?

It would look like deciding to publish every day, and then facing the fear and the not-knowing, and then doing it anyway.