I’m excited about this new course! It tracks my own personal growth leaning into the vulnerable edge of unshrouding long hidden inner experience. Giving voice to that in honest self-expression is enlivening, empowering, and healing, giving a different confidence for navigating the field of life and relationships than does empathy.
Why might you want to explore specifically the direction of honest self-expression?
You may also be off balance in the direction of listening and giving empathy more than bringing your own voice, speaking your feelings and needs, sharing your life’s experience and requesting what you would love.
Or you may have found that when you do try and bring yourself it doesn’t seem to land so well, doesn’t bring the hoped for results or the longed for care and responsiveness. Perhaps you give up, withhold, play passive-aggressive or score keeping or resort to attempts to extract what you want. Maybe you believe you have to ‘choose your battles’ and only bring your experience and needs to the table when things are really bad.
My experience (with myself and others) is that when we give up on the possibility of being heard it leads to frustration, resentment, lost life energy, and a sense of distance that’s created because we are not fully and congruently present. A Hebrew expression refers to it as being “one thing in the mouth, another in the heart”. This sense of being divided inside and out costs us and our relationships.
Giving voice to life, the art of honesty is about letting life flow through us. Because of our jackal conditioning and others’ jackal ears, just speaking our jackal doesn’t usually work so well and often leads to the above experiences. So in this course we look at getting in touch with our inner experience and speaking from embodied presence with resonant language. In my mind, much of deeply effective honesty has to do with the place we’re speaking from more than the words we use. We will explore this direction experientially and reflectively and relationally so that we can speak powerfully, from the heart, committed to our needs and open to different outcomes, with care for ourselves and others. We will cultivate the courage and the craft of being honest, powerfully and effectively vulnerable and human, and of asking for what would make life more wonderful.
Topics we’ll explore are likely to include:
- Embodiment and congruence (do our words match our energy and intention? Is what we’re transmitting nonverbally and energetically supporting what we hope?)
- Freeing ourselves from demand energy
- Taking care of jackals
- When and how using empathy can support space for honesty and the other being open to really hearing you
- Juicing your own needs so you can speak from the depth that will “strike a chord of responsiveness”
- Using dialogue requests to help ourselves be met and stitch together inclusive dialogue
- including the other in consciousness and expression while focusing on your own experience and needs
- “we consciousness”
- Street giraffe for self-expression (or framing ‘weirdness’ of using formal giraffe and when that’s useful)
- ways of looking, beliefs about human nature and how to intentionally marshall the fabricated nature of perception to prime yourself for connective expression
For me, this approach to being deeply in touch with Life as it flows through us and knowing how to confidently give voice to that is a spiritual path and practice. It is an integral dimension in the art of being alive and of being alive together. As we learn and lean into it, we can discover and develop an exciting creativity, enlivening power, and pathway for intimacy, meaning, and effectiveness.
Practicalities:
This course will be taught on ZOOM by Danny Cohen with assistants.
As a level 3 course, prerequisites for this course are levels 1 and 2 or the equivalent.
Time: Mondays 9am-12pm PT, 12:00-3:00pm ET, 7pm-10:00pm Israel
Dates:
July 17 - September 18 (we will likely take one week off, TBD)
Money
This course is offered in the gift economy. The gift economy seeks to reclaim our interdependent nature as human beings in community enjoying caring for each other and mobilizing the flow of resources to needs. Rather than associating cost with 'value', as a barrier to access, or in the transactional orientation of the exchange economy (highest value, extracting as much as possible in exchange for as little as possible (getting 'bang for your buck' or 'coming out on top'), we step into the vulnerability and trust that needs matter and people can offer money as a gift, gratitude for contribution, and support for continued living and giving.
Sharing these teachings is my passion as well as the source of my livelihood. Your financial contribution helps me and my assistant(s) meet our needs so we can live, give, and teach from a resourced place. At the end of the course there will be an invitation to contribute and you will be invited to feel into what you would like us to receive and what works in your budget. If you want a suggested range for consideration of what would be sustaining, I invite you to consider $350-$750.
$80 Registration.
Some quotes for inspiration:
“Nonviolence rests on three pillars: courage, truth, and love. Many people prefer to call NVC Compassionate Communication instead of Nonviolent Communication, which, to me, misses the crucial point of courage and truth. Within this context, Nonviolent Communication can be summed up as the courage to speak truth with love.” ~ Miki Kashtan
“One of the major symptoms of the general crisis existent in our world today is our lack of sensitivity to words. We use words as tools. We forget that words are a repository of the spirit. The tragedy of our times is that the vessels of the spirit are broken. We cannot approach the spirit unless we repair the vessels. Reverence for words - an awareness of the wonder of words, of the mystery of words - is an essential prerequisite for prayer. By the word of God the world was created.” ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel
