Sunday, August 13, 2006

Oh Those Conflicting Intentions!



There’s an old saying in baseball, from the man known as the ‘Fordam Flash’, NY Giant announcer, Frankie Frisch. He was a stickler for fundamentals and he was known to wail his catchphrase, “Oh, those bases on balls.” For the non-baseball fan, Frankie’s complaint was that well, simple; make the other team beat you and stop handing them easy opportunities. When a pitcher walks the leadoff batter, that runner goes on to score 60% of the time. In somatics, the fundamental equivalent to this baseball self-sabotage surfaces in the form of conflicting intentions.

Dave Buck, President of Coachville.com, defines conflicting intentions this way…
Conflicting intentions - intentions that are unspoken and often unseen - are caused by conditioning from your past. Conditioning that causes you to try to be something that you are not and believe things that are not true for you. The intentions that come out of this conditioning are typically in conflict with what you really want in your life. http://www.coachville.com/conf/absenceofyou.html
These suckers feed into one of Dave’s best Venn Diagrams (and these life coaches are full of them!) to illustrate how this plays out in terms of life experiences…
From this principle, Dave then spirals into a discussion of these 12 Core Dynamics that feed into our conflicting intentions. Now the Venn Diagram gets a bit stickier.
The beauty of somatic awareness, and the elegances of the 4 Domains gets us beyond dissecting these from a psychological perspective and allows us to go down to the biological roots of these cyclical, patterned, intrinsic aspects of being.

Here’s the 12 Core Dynamics listed in order…

1) Resisting Feeling Things Fully
2) Ignoring Your Intuition
3) Being Judgmental
4) Avoiding The Present
5) Looking For Yourself Where You’re Not
6) Mistaking Need For Love
7) Resisting Change
8) Limiting Self-Expression
9) Forcing An Outcome
10) Excluding Other Perspectives
11) Manufacturing Interpretations
12) Over-reacting To Circumstances
If we simply place these 12 Core Dynamics into their proper domain, we get…
Now if you know which somatic orientation you’ve ‘claimed’ as your primary domain, the conflicting intentions you apply are now revealed to you. What’s also uncovered are the way these 12 core dynamics arrive at a wholeness of their own. When you know how the 4 Domains all ‘fit’ together, the infrastructure of what was once a purely psychological construct, suddenly surfaces in the somatic terrain. You can begin to see how we get stuck in these conflicting intentions when you know the inherent ‘conflicts’ or antagonisms of the 4 Domains. This awareness becomes part of your somatic fundamentals as you become more adept at embodying your intent. Let me give you a quick example of this process…


A PHYLO, let’s say good old Jessica Simpson, has a conflicting intention about her career path. She used to be seen as a wholesome, religious, pop icon, but now, like Britney before her, she’s morphed into a divorced, decedent diva. Her old fans, now moving into their late teens are no longer aligned with her. What can she do?
Well, what’s the conflicting intention here? Jessica wants to remain popular, yet she cannot get there with the old formula. Her new one, while still popular, is bringing her negative press from her ONTO detractors. Jessica, as a PHYLO, has to find a way to overcome this, but not from her primary domain. She has to decide where her core dynamics issues, which led to this dilemma [1, 5, and 12] are being perpetuated and then shifting her somatic orientation to that domain. To help her discover her ‘source of coherence’, let’s revisit
Dave’s original Venn Diagram…


Now that you can ‘see’ Jessica’s conflicting intentions mapped out with an awareness of her primary somatic orientation highlighted, her path to back to wholeness is to ‘exchange’ #12 with #9. This means, she needs to stop over-reacting, which in somatic terms boils down to vulnerability. Remember a PHYLO gets their source of coherence from their relationships. She needs to shift to the domain of core dynamic #9, which deals with forcing an outcome. That’s an ONTO somatic orientation. The source of coherence for an ONTO is their map of reality, their intrapersonal world. In a nutshell, Jessica needs to go within more.

If we were working with her using the tools of The Extended Self Program, we’d tell her to open her somatic centers, right? But PHYLO’s stink at this for the most part. They have trouble paying attention to internal processes for very long. So we can take the same 12 core dynamics and plop them into the somatic interfaces…
If we study the YES Factors, we’re aware that they are 12 Blissful Practices related to them. Each YES Factor has 2 Blissful Practice, one for sensing, or passively witnessing and one for mobilizing, or actively witnessing. If we just matched up the 12 core dynamics and the aligned them with 12 Blissful Practices, here listed in parentheses we’d get…

The 12 Core Dynamics With Their Blissful Practices
1) Resisting Feeling Things Fully (#1 Hang Time)
2) Ignoring Your Intuition (#2 Window Seat)
3) Being Judgmental (#3 Cheshire Cat)
4) Avoiding The Present (#4 Jungle Eyes)
5) Looking For Yourself Where You’re Not (#5 Scratch Match)
6) Mistaking Need For Love (#6 Elevator Meditation)
7) Resisting Change (#7 Feature Focus)
8) Limiting Self-Expression (#8 Innocent Bystander)
9) Forcing An Outcome (#9 Elbow Room)
10) Excluding Other Perspectives (#10 The Other Hand)
11) Manufacturing Interpretations (#11 Safe At Home)
12) Over-reacting To Circumstances (#12 Already There)

Can you see how by placing Jessica in the physical position of the Elbow Room practice, which amounts to that Superman stance of having your hands defiantly on your hips, would induce an ONTO somatic orientation and generate a new source of coherence? This is easier than attempting to open her somatic centers from the inside, where PHYLO’s get lost. Again, I’m not trying to ‘teach’ this in detail here. All I wanted to point out was that by understanding a few somatic fundamentals, you can approach psychological barriers to wholeness from a nonverbal angle…

This whole subject taps into the underlying transitional state we’re experiencing during this lunar cycle. We’re shifting from the SECURITY we established last month to the more dynamic transitional state of MOTIVATION. Take the rest of the falling side of this lunar wave to examine your motives in the projects and plans you have for the rest of the year. You can take the verbal route and use the Rip-A-Day-Diary method and end each day with some stream of consciousness writing. Write whatever comes to mind for a few minutes, read it, and then throw it away, always to the left of the body so it’s neurologically filed in your past.
The faster way to self-assess your conflicting intention is to test these 6 primal patterns of movement. Consult the chart below to map that self-check into somatic practice.

Or, you can be like me and just do your SIMPLES and enjoy your rest week!

ECO in 10, MRF 08.13

Further reading…
http://www.baseball-fever.com/showthread.php?p=299564

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