Follow Up From The Eighth Transformation Workshop

In our seventh transformation workshop together we focused on the Creating function. We discussed what can get in the way, or the shadow side of it - the over-identification leading to Free Spirit, the under-identification leading to being Buttoned Up.

Building on what you discussed in the workshop please continue to notice and simultaneously ‘feel into’ BUTTONED UP or FREE SPIRIT as either arises in you.

• Notice the sensations in your body, any contractions or excessive energy and the patterns in your posture as either arise.

• Allow yourself to be with what arises, compassionately relating to yourself with curiosity.

• Then make conscious choices about what you want to shift and what new capabilities you need to build to do that. If you want to work with BUTTONED UP allowing yourself to feel your feelings is a good start. If you want to work with FREE SPIRIT consider finding an outlet to express that energy so you can move it, become more familiar with it and have access to channel it when needed.

• Here I attach the slides on the Creating function.

Please appreciate that BUTTONED UP is subliminally encouraged in certain contexts. And FREE SPIRIT, if used in service of the existing system, is accepted. The question becomes (in Nora Bateson’s language) “How shall I tend to the premises of what is possible to communicate”? NOTE she does not advise changing the premises straight away, but tending to them and (I would add) then seeing what becomes possible from that. This subtle yet powerful work that requires a different type of attention - one could say more Right Hemisphere oriented - attending to the whole.

A healthy relationship with our Creating function can enable us to shake things up, whilst staying in relationship, staying attuned and gauging how far to move things in different situations. It requires deep sensitivity to ourselves and to others. Consider what might open up for you as you continue to come into a conscious relationship with this aspect of yourself. It is so important.

JUICY

But isn’t it interesting that the erotic is so removed from the study of life? How?

And how?

And how to bring it in?

There has always been a school of lovers, rigorous in their studies ~ They could not-not see, could not-not describe life as juicy.

But the bookishness held its sway on slabs of concrete and stainless counters.

There there is no place for lusty mossy forest floors and shameless blossoms to explain themselves.

The real flat-earthers are the ones who make life into a flat description.

It will not serve now.

Now we go into the breath,

So we can breathe.

Now we go into the sensual, So we can sense. Now we go into the intimacy, So we are not alone, Now we go in. Or we go out.

~ Nora Bateson, Combining