Q:

I feel so connected now. This is amazing. How can speaking about my fear of connection create connection?

A:

Being vulnerable about your vulnerabilities creates connection. Being authentic about your inauthenticities makes you Authentic. Most of us have felt disconnected for so long, that the relief of feeling the connection, even through a video call, is a big sadness of recognizing our loneliness. We offer this for you to use as a Practice which you can keep on using after the WorkTalk.

Let's say you are standing in the checkout line in the grocery store. You turn around and say to the person behind you, "I am afraid of connecting with you because…" What would they do? They might say, "Thank you." They would probably not call the police. Later in the day you do it with your neighbor. After developing a little more skill, you do it with your mother, but get some practice first.

Q:

I want to share that I was in the breakout room and all of us women had the same fear. I was afraid of connecting because I am not connected to myself. I feel like I have been numbing myself so that I cannot feel the emotional sadness properly in my body.

A:

I want to reveal a secret about that. There is a bizarre concept going around called 'Being connected with yourself.' The bizarreness of the idea comes from noticing that you are already connected to yourself. It is impossible to disconnect from yourself. Whatever to do, however you think, or feel, or behave, or don't behave, this is it. This is all there is. This is all you get. This is you. But we don’t discover that we are inherently connected with ourselves until we start to tell other people our fear of connection in general, and then our precise fears of connecting with them personally.

If you experience this numbness, you think that you are disconnected from yourself. But numbness is fear. Experiencing numbness tells you that you are feeling fear. So instead of saying or thinking, "I am numb," just say, "I feel scared because…" Will you try that as a new Practice? Understand that your numbness is your current experience of fear. This tells you that you are already connected with yourself! You don’t have to worry about being connected with yourself anymore.

Then when you feel numb you can tell the person that you are afraid to connect with who is standing there in front of you that you are afraid to connect with, "I am afraid to connect in general because..." Then immediately after that you say, "I am afraid to connect with you personally because..." and Voila! All of a sudden you are connected with them!

It does not cost you anything to be connected with someone else. I used to think that if I connect with somebody, then I owe them something or they owe me something. I thought it would be an emotional or energetic burden to connect with someone. I would spend all my time calculating exactly who is the 'right' person to connect with, and then I would miss everyone the Earth Coincidence Control Office is sending my way to connect with.

Another that you can make relating a burden is the idea that you want to belong. You want to be part of the tribe. You want to be loved. You want to be seen. And in order to belong, to be part of the tribe, to be loved, and to be seen, you twist yourself to try to match what you imagine other people expect or need you to be. But by twisting yourself, you are betraying yourself - actually Abusing Yourself - because you think you have to do that to be in connection. This is a heavy thing to carry to connect with someone else. You are being a fake person just to try to be with somebody else.

These are important realizations about connection. Just remember that 'the way out is the way in'. Meaning, if you disconnected yourself, you can also connect yourself.

If you are being fake to be with somebody else, even if they like you they won’t like you, because the 'you' they like is fake. Connecting already isn’t working from the beginning. When you realize this, you have to try something else. It doesn’t matter what you try, just try something else. You can try one thing on Wednesday, another thing on Thursday, another thing on Friday, and on the weekend you can give up all the 'trying' and just be yourself.

Q:

Even if I can leave behind my inauthenticity, how can I leave behind my survival mechanisms and all my unconscious habits that block connecting?

A:

Here is how to do that. It is simple. Memorize this authentic sentence: "I don’t know what to say next that would be authentic."

Will you practice saying this in Polish right now?

(She does...)

Thank you. Was that so difficult?

Q:

Just saying that sentence, no. Not difficult.

A:

When you say that sentence, I guarantee it will clean the space and give you 'Tabula Rasa'. The space gets to start over. You won't know what to say next. The other person won’t know what to say next. Then both of you will be connected in this space of not knowing what to say next.

After you say this sentence one-hundred times, and you start space over at zero one-hundred times, you can start saying things you never said before. Which is the same thing as authentic connection. If it is new, if you are saying things that you don’t already know, that you never said before, there is no place for your survival strategy to hold onto. You have shifted into a fresh place.

A lot of us are trained to make things into problems, and then to try and solve the problems by looking backwards to see how we solved this problem before, and then to copy the previous solution in the present. This takes you immediately away from the present into the past and automatically makes you into a robot, a Zombie repeating what you already think is safe. This is the psychoanalytic orientation, to try and fix the past.

In the space of Possibility, you slip into the tiniest Present, and from there you create something new for the immediate future to explore and evolve together. This is an offering, a gift to the other person that you just made for them to play in with you.

How can you say the future? You cannot. You are Inventing a new future each moment instead of trying to fix the past. This offers no grip for the old things to hold onto. Plus this ongoing Creation is High Level Fun. It is a challenge, an Adventure.

It turns out to be extremely difficult to install a roadblock in your mind and accomplish not doing something which you have done over and over again perhaps thousands of times already. It is a habit, a groove in your brain patterns, perhaps even an addiction. It does not work to say, “I am not going to do my survival strategy”. This requires putting yourself into a straight-jacket and a prison cell. It is not life. The proposal here is that instead of trying to stop something, you start something entirely new. You shift into a new Space which will call forth a different Identity in you and the others. You open up new territory and let the old territory die out from lack of attention when you leave it behind.

You can ask this question, "Which group is bigger? The group of things that I have already tried? Or the group of things that I have not yet tried before?"

If you think that the group of things you haven’t tried before is smaller, you have not been watching enough good movies. We have made 613 websites so far in the StartOver.xyz universe, and we are not slowing down. One of those websites is called Possibility Films. I am sure that most of those films are either dubbed or subtitled in Polish. If you watch 100 of these films, you will gain so many openings for new ideas that whole new invention spaces will open up for you. Plus you get to eat a lot of popcorn. If you watch the film Don Juan deMarco, with Marlon Brando, Johnny Depp, and Faye Dunaway in it, you will even learn new ways to eat popcorn.

Q:

How do I stay connected with myself, and also be connected in the relationship? How can I keep both of those connections at the same time?

A:

I have a question back to you. What is 'a relationship'?

Q:

A 'relationship' is a partnership where I share the time and the minutes of my life with another person.

A:

I don't think that what you described just now is 'a relationship', which is a noun, a thing. I think that what you described is called 'relating', which is a verb. Relating actions are actions that you create in an unlimited and growing field of possible actions that you could take.

If your question is about 'a relationship', you are talking about a fake world, a fantasy story world, filled with Assumptions, Projections, Expectations, Conclusions, and eventually Resentments and Revenge. Your question is about how to be a fake person in a fake world, where you do not get to be yourself. You probably read some of those 'relationship' books that give you a method for how you are supposed to be a certain way to be in a relationship, and then you are being fake. You are not there to connect with. Your original question is a trick question. You have been confusing yourself about this. You are talking about the verb of relating, and not the noun of 'having a relationship'.

There is a whole world of wild and amazing skills to learn about relating.

One of the first relating skills is to learn how to keep your Energetic Center. Do you know what I am talking about?

It can take a while to experience enough pain about not being Centered in relating. Your question seems to come out of this pain. The more pain you are aware of, the more energy you have to figure out all the ways you are ongoingly giving your Center away to your partner or to the relationship, to please your mother, to please the church, and so on. The pain about giving your Center away is rocket fuel for you to learn how to keep keep your Center.

Do you do Kegel exercises? Do you know what the Kegel Muscles are? You tighten up these muscles down between your legs and then you keep yourself together. It is the same with keeping your Energetic Center. You hold onto your Center and refuse to accept any invitation to be adaptive or childish or quiet. Start doing daily Kegel exercises to keep your Center.

There is a story about this guy who gets married. He is so glad because he has finally captured a woman in a relationship. He did everything the books said to do. So they go home together on their first night, and the guy starts to get ready for bed. He takes out his false teeth, then washes the makeup off his face. He removes his colored contact lenses. He takes off the girdle that was holding his stomach in. He takes off the shoes that had lifts inside to make him seem taller. He takes off his toupee. By then the woman is looking at his guy and she does not recognize him at all. He is becoming this completely different person. She says, "What the hell are you doing to yourself?" He says, "I am getting ready for bed." She says, "But I got married to the other guy. I want him! Not you!" She gets out of bed and leaves. That is the end of the story.

Try to notice everything you are putting on or hiding in order to be relating. Try to notice everything you think you must sacrifice for relating, and instead, skip that part. Let it slide past you. This might involve doing several Emotional Helaling Processes (EHP) about not disappointing your mother...

An Experiment you can try is to forget about relating altogether. Instead, do what you love to do. Visibly create what you love to create. Do it enthusiastically, unreasonably. Once you are more on track with yourself, the Earth Coincidence Control Office can work with you directly. Eventually one day, as you are doing what you are here on Earth to do, delivering your Nonmaterial Value through your Archetypal Lineage, someone else will be doing something similar to what you are doing. You will be undefended about what you are, and what you love. You will be relating in the world unguarded, naked, without a plan. Then accidentally, coincidentally, someone will be working at your side, relating with you. Hmmmm... how did that happen?

There are some hints about that. Very few people in the world, actually love the game soccer. Very few! But because thre are so many televisions in bars and cafés showing soccer games, and because of marketing, and the politicians thinking that if people are distracted by the soccer competitions they won't notice what the politicians are up to... everybody thinks that everybody else likes soccer. You may be acting as if you like soccer in order to be accepted by all the other people who are also pretending as if they like the game of soccer. What a mess...

When you are actually doing what you love to do, you have to figure out which 'you' is deciding what that is. Is it the 'socially good looking' identity, trying to look good? Is it the 'rebel' part trying to look different? Or the part that is trying to impress people to get their attention? You have so many different Parts in there. It is an entire underworld ecology, a zoo in there.

You know that people are a zoo because when you are talking to them and their phone rings, suddenly they start talking to someone else. Their face changes. Their posture changes. Their voice changes. Their speech patterns change. They use their inner Part to speak with this other person in a way that you may have never seen them behave before. Then when they hang up, they go Zwippp! and change back into the personality who was talking to you. Which one of them is real? Who is the true person? Did you ever see anybody do that before? Guess who else does that?

This makes it useful to know your Parts. Each of your Parts has its own opinion of what it loves to do. When that part is in charge, sitting behind the driver's wheel of your life, its opinions seem so realistically to be your opinions. But which one of those Parts is you? What if it is none of them? Now you are starting an interesting conversation.

Q:

My question is about letting love in. I notice that I have a hard time letting myself be loved.

A:

What is interesting about what you just said is that you reveal that you are having a war inside of you between two of your Parts. There is a Part that wants to be loved. There is a different part that refuses to let you be loved because it is too dangerous. What you have done is keep both of those Parts inside of you and then you are confused. Here is an Experiment to try. Put both of those parts into a rat cage and let them fight each other outside of yourself. Then you go and love life. This is a new approach. We call it 'Rat Cage Psychology'. Somebody could earn a PhD Doctorate degree if you write about this.

You asked us a 'trick question'. It is a 'trick question' because you secretly keep the two rats fighting each other inside of yourself and you love the impossibility of someone else separating the two rats from fighting. They won't stop fighting because they are rats. You keep them both in there, and the only food they have is to keep fighting each other. You keep the show going about how you want them to stop fighting, and then you ask us to stop the show for you. We are not going to do that because you actually love the show. It entertains your Gremlin. Mostly it is people from America who do stuff like this. They surround themselves in a sticky complicated, sophisticated, marshmallow-creme buffer-zone so no one gets too close to them, and then complain that they are lonely. You wouldn’t happen to be from America, would you? It was a trick question. It is one you need to figure out from the inside. We recommend Gremlin Transformation work...

Q:

Are there symptoms from any of the 5 Bodies that I can distinguish to notice when bullshit enters the relating? How can I distinguish which parts are active in the relating?

A:

You can sense with your energetic body, for example, when your Energetic Bubble Of Space is inside of someone else’s Bubble Of Space. This is not relating. This is abuse. It is control, manipulation, enmeshment. When your Bubble is inside of someone else’s Bubble, your Purpose is to take something from them, or to consume something from them. On the thoughtmap about the Evolution Of Relating, you can see that this is Child Level Relating. In your Energetic Body, the sensations of enmeshing is someone else's Bubble, or someone else invading your Bubble, are clear and easy to detect. To practice sensing this, sit next to someone at a dining table in a café or restaurant. Move your water glass too close to their dishes and silverware. They will feel it immediately. You will also feel it immediately. Move your glass slightly back and forth until you can sense exactly where the boundary of their Bubble Of Space is. If your Bubble goes inside of their Bubble, this is invasion. It is abusive. You might be unconsciously doing that in your daily life simply because you are still in your mother’s Bubble, still wanting your mother to take care of you.

We built a powerful website called Radical Relating, which explores how you won’t necessarily feel warm fuzzy feelings in your belly while doing Radical Relating. The warm fuzzy feelings in the belly are not the feelings of love. They are the feelings of a Fantasy World that you think is true. If you are looking for those warm fuzzy sensations of security and you think this indicates that you are in love, it does not. It means you are trying to make a Fantasy World into reality. In Radical Relating, which is the kind of relating that Initiated Archan Adults do, you are using Negotiations, making Proposals, accepting offers, trying Experiments during 5-Body Intimacy Journeys.  

During Radical Relating, you will ongoingly feel sad, scared, glad, or angry, but mostly NOT about the other person. The feelings provide energy and information for your co-creation. But at first, if you are feeling any of those feelings about somebody else, it is probably an Emotion and not a Feeling, and can serve you best as a gateway for an Emotional Healing Process (EHP).

I encourage you to refuse to use your partner as your therapist. Do your inner healing and transformation work with somebody else as Spaceholder. There are whole other activities to do with your partner. Your relating space is not a feedback space, even if you are really professional at being a coach, healer, or spaceholder.

Q:

If I have so many Parts, and none of these parts are me, how can I have this clarity within myself that this is the Part that stands within me in relational space, this part without bullshit? How to get the clarity?

A:

If you think that relational Clarity occurs in your mind, that will mess you up right away. Would you please stand up and show everyone Position 3 as if you are holding your Bokken wooden practice sword? The Sword is out in front of you. Yes, like that. The secret I want to share with you is this: Let the sword speak. The sword itself has Clarity. The Sword is faster and more complete than your mind, which is fully occupied trying to figure it all out according to some method, trying do it the 'right' way. Instead, let your Sword lead. Let your Sword speak and move and decide.

Q:

Where do we learn those positions for holding the Sword?

A:

In Poland, in August, during the Possibility Labs. It is possible to do sword work at Aikido classes, but they do not teach this kind of relational Clarity.

Q:

You are saying that I should use this 'Rat Cage Psychology' and I should somehow ignore these Parts while they are fighting?

A:

I propose that it is the other way around. What I think is that you are actually understanding the 'Rat Cage Psychology' proposal, and that you are afraid that you are getting it. I think you might be asking out loud, wondering if you are actually going to make the leap and just do it. What do you think?

Q:

Yes, I think you are right...

A:

Those Voices in my head are just like Rats. A Rat is going to do what a Rat does. I have never seen anyone successfully change a Rat into a human being. A Voice can only live in my head if it repeats itself over and over again, so it tries to find another repeating Voice in my head to fight against. While fighting each other, these Voices suck out my life energy so I do not have Attention enough to find something more interesting to do with myself than listen to Rat Voices endlessly fighting each other. I have a choice to make. I can live in this Rat Cage with those Rats. If that is happening, how can I be Present long enough to deeply enjoy my caffe latte? Or, I can put both Rats outside of me, over there in their Rat Cage, and let them fight it out to their heart's content. There they are, over there, those Rats in that Rat Cage, fighting each other. Oh, well... Mmmmm.... this caffe latte is so delicious in so much inner silence. If I leave the rats in the rat cage for a couple of months, they’ll just fade away. Their purpose is over, finished. I get my energy back.

If you are thinking about doing this, if you actually use Rat Cage Psychology and put the Rats over there outside of yourself to fight it out in their Cage, it seems like you might be creating a bright future for yourself.