My friends Harmony, Sahil, and James created a practice for relating called Stemless. They’ve written about it here. The core question of Stemless is “what does it take to own your experience?” Stemless is not prescriptive about how to do this, merely insistent that you keep attending to the question.
Unlike practices like Circling, in Stemless you don’t particularly try to own your experience by using stems like “I have a story that…” or translating your sense of betrayal into a body sensation plus a request or whatever. Instead, you’re invited to recognize the shocking fact that we are all in some ways exquisitely owning our experience simply by having it and by acting from it at all. Very dzogchen-flavoured (and, I think, -inspired).
There’s something about it that feels deeply relieving. Some sense of “wow, the right hemispheres just get to talk now, and the left hemispheres are a bit confused but along for the ride.” And a sense that it immediately gets to the meat of what’s actually going on, rather than caught up in endless preamble. Clarification is done not by backing up and pinning meaning down, but by beholding it in all of its nebulous glory and then saying whatever needs saying give however things seem to be landing.
And it’s not exactly a skill so much as a stance, although there are perhaps skills that can help scaffold the process of shifting stances.
In Dream Mashups, I write:
Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation and their old emotional meanings. Like dreaming you’re at school but it’s also on a boat somehow. And as in dreams, somehow the weirdness of this mashup goes unnoticed.
Stemless is about noticing the weirdness directly and bringing the emotional meaning into the foreground—at least for yourself, possibly also out loud. “I’m sitting in a classroom and the prof has tried to answer another student’s question, but he didn’t understand the question, and I’m supposed to re-ask the question but better, to get clarification.” That’s a thing I said at one point during tonight’s session.
It’s in part about noticing the supposing process, that creates the supposed-tos. Someone says something, or does something—or outside of a conversation, I notice something or read something—and I feel compelled to respond in a particular way. Quick: what is the scene I have just cast on the situation, such that that’s obviously the next move? You can’t tell me what mine is, although you have whatever you’re sensing and it might shine some light for me.
Leaning into blame
One playful thing that the Stemless hosts encourage is leaning into blame. One way to really see the situation you’re in is to find the way in which you feel a totally helpless victim—where reality is just forcing you to perceive things a particular way and there’s nothing you can do about it.
What will happen if you don’t say something immediately in response to what someone else said? It depends on the person or the situation, but various answers might be:
And then you can ask “why’s that a problem? who’s going to punish me? where is this urgency coming from? who’s forcing me to respond this way?”
Not to disagree with it or try to shift it, per se, just to take it as object and allow it to more fully exist as the force that is compelling you. Although indeed, once you bring it into conscious awareness, you’ll often find that the urgency vanishes and the compulsion fades. After all, if you’re doing something to please your mom and she isn’t even in the same timezone as you, well, maybe you will find that you don’t have to do it quite so urgently.
The point is not to enact the blame, but to see how the world you experience is pre-generated by a bunch of stories you don’t remember choosing. By externalizing the sense of where that all came from, you can see it more clearly than if you go looking for your interpretations as something you are already aware of doing. Your interpretations will just feel like reality. Your sense of things.
There’s a common trope in spiritual or personal development circles that what someone says about you says more about them than it does about you. Sometimes this will even be stated as the extreme “it has nothing to do with you; it’s all about them.” This is a confusion, in my view; if it weren’t for you doing what you’re doing, they’d be projecting some completely different weird thing onto you.1
But there’s also a deep truth to it worth seeing, and Stemless does a great job of pointing at that truth in direct experience, and actually taking it seriously.
“If that’s so…” it says… “…if everybody can’t help but speak only out of their own entire momentary visceral crazy world with even the smallest utterance… then what are we doing pretending there’s any such thing as small talk, or any such thing as real judgment?”
Someone just said a thing to you that feels kinda underhanded. Well, they may have not been honest on a surface level, but they’ve actually revealed to you in high-resolution their own construal of the situation by the precise way in which they avoided showing themselves. And then you feel some whole sort of way about that, because of all of the past experiences you’re projecting onto it in order to make sense of it. And that’s all going on in vivid detail for you—and maybe if you turn your gaze quickly enough you can glimpse it before you’re just acting into the story.
Right now: what is your situation? You’re at the end of reading a blog post, whether on my site or in your email inbox or some reader. What does that mean? What are you compelled to do right now? How does this last, more direct addressing of your situation change that from what it might have been if I’d ended with the previous paragraph? Can you glimpse it?
Yesterday I published hostility is a sign of too-closeness, which featured my response to a friend from my former community, about his desires for the logistics and culture of a co-living house he was creating. In that post, I talked about how blame can be downstream of people pretending they are a good fit for living together (or working together, or whatever) when they actually have some real conflict or incompatibility that they’re trying to convince themselves they have to put up with, but on some level they know they don’t have to… which turns to hostility.
In this post, I continue my response, reflecting on a more specific phenomenon central to the puzzle of living together: how do you talk about the dishes? …and have it work out. And not just the dishes but the dozens of other places where your patterns of life will need to interface smoothly for living together to feel good. Even for people who are very compatible, there will still be points of tension and friction, and you’ll need to figure out how to talk about those.
So. One of my friend’s desires for the shared purpose / culture of the space was:
impacts can be shared freely, and can be received as impacts rather than hearing impacts as being judgement or blame
And below is my response:
First of all I want to name how vital this is for sane living—how crazymaking it is to be living with someone and unable to acknowledge simple impacts without it either turning into “so you hate me” or getting rounded to “nbd whatever”. And largely we all know this in the extended upstart scene, but since I’m a bit of an apostate these days it feels worth making explicit that YES, THIS MATTERS, and I see that it matters, and am speaking from there.
So then given that this bullet as described is clearly ideal, how do you handle situations where that isn’t working? What does the pathway look like to get from not-flowing to flowing? Merely intending this doesn’t necessarily make it happen.
It seems to me that the situations where blame comes up can be described in a few different ways, both as distinct situations and as distinct understandings/framings of those situations, where the language used to understand them has an effect.
So: a few ways impacts can be received:
Breaking these down a bit, with their implications:
» read the rest of this entry »I was recently talking to a friend who was navigating a situation where he was frustrated that his girlfriend of a few months kept implying that something that had just happened might be grounds for breaking up… something that seemed to my friend pretty minor, or even just a misunderstanding.
“She keeps threatening the connection!” he would say, and at first I thought he meant something about emotional warmth, but it was more about this sense of security. And implied was that somebody more mature or more collaborative, if they were in the same situation, would be able to convey the sense of “this is a problem” without the sense of threat. And I agree the move is problematic (not just unpleasant) but I see it as (usually) a symptom of a deeper problem: you got too close. The coalition that draws you together is facing coup attempts by the subsystems it’s oppressing, which were not consulted on the distance.
It’s not that there’s supposed to not be tensions, is that those tensions need to be included at the negotiation table—welcomed into the coalition, rather than forced outside it.
Anyway! With this basis, I want to explore the origin of this kind of blameful relationship-threatening. I used to see it as a behavior to be addressed, but now I see it, as I said, as more like a symptom of a situation to be addressed. “This isn’t supposed to be happening” can be viewed as a failure of spiritual acceptance or equanimity… or it can be viewed as a sign that, well, maybe you’d be better off if you made something else happen.
As the central case study for this piece of writing, I’m going to share some replies I made to someone in the extended network of the culture incubator I was part of in my 20s—the one whose magic I boggled at in Wtf is the Synergic Mode? He had put out that he was looking for people to come live with him, and listed out elements of his vision, including a dozen bullets about various “practical house things” about windows, AC, aesthetics, bikes, kitchen., as well as “shared purpose” items that referenced some of the cultural resonances of that scene:
- desiring the information of what others’ experiences are like
- an inviting space for grief to be felt, and for feelings in general to be felt and not suppressed – also, freedom to experience grievance as a pathway into grief when grief cannot easily be accessed – also, a context-sensitivity in expressing grievance, and an awareness of the impacts that grievance can have in a space
- impacts can be shared freely, and can be received as impacts rather than hearing impacts as being judgement or blame
- blame to be expressed only within a context of desiring to shift out of blame – I don’t want this to sound like I’m creating a “rule”, rather I’m sharing that I just find it uncomfortable to be around people who are feeling entitled to their blame-mindset. This goes both ways – I also wouldn’t want others to egg me on if I’m finding myself on the edge of going into blaming someone for anything.
And I wrote a response!
blame to be expressed only within a context of desiring to shift out of blame
I’ll make a general comment from my own experience that while I’m hugely in favour of shifting out of blame and not feeling entitled to end up in a conclusion that is based on blame, I’ve sometimes found that trying to shift the blame away too early makes it hard to even think the thought that I’m trying to think—to access the wisdom in/under the blame. Sometimes there’s something sacred that I care about, whose first way of expressing itself involves blame, but if I can welcome it fully without trying to change how it articulates itself, then it finds a clearer perspective, beyond blame etc. And that this is the kind of failure mode that can show up in a mindset learning community, that is focused on “avoiding blame” instead of something more like “welcoming everything that arises”.
» read the rest of this entry »
