The traditions of spirituality and psychotherapy are missing a holistic foundation

Introduction to Tuning In

Inviting the whole person into therapy and existence:

I’m going to give the short version, and then the long version of what I want to talk to you about today.

Put simply, I believe that there in a dynamic intelligence within every person that moves towards finding the best logistically possible situation and rendition of itself in which all the intelligences and desires of the person can live within the complexity of existence in a harmonious way.

I believe that none of the currently existing traditions of spirituality, psychotherapy, or self transformation, are adequate enough to cater for the full powers and dynamism of the whole person that makes this possible. I do believe that all the resources for this to happen are already here in these traditions, just in a very fractured way. In the absence of a unified model that can be assimilated into mainstream cultures world-wide and shape our institutions and systems, human civilisation will continue operate unintelligently and destructively at every level in the ways it currently does. I believe I can provide an adequate

rendition of this unified model.

This is an ongoing human effort stretching across time, and this is my best attempt to resolve it. I am a fallible person, and this is my best attempt. This model will grow and develop and change over time, but I believe it does all that I say it does in resolving the problem I’ve outlined. I would love more perspectives in to fine tune it.

During speaking about the model I always want you to be both open to entertaining what is said whist keeping your critical faculties on standby and never losing your ability to develop and form a response to what is being said. This may seem a simple and common sense request, yet, I am wanting to avoid or balance out many of pre-established ways of speaking about big philosophical spiritual historical issues like this, all of which I believe can undermine a listeners ability to participate in the development of whats being said, and rather inadvertently manipulate them in some way to take what is said as true, which is unsafe and pedagogically insufficient, given that we need all our intelligence and carefulness to enter the process of self transformation.

The first of these ways I want to avoid is that of the storyteller who weaves a huge tapestry of narrative of historical events and everyday realities into a world so immersive that its easy to feel like the internal coherence of the world being weaved is equivalent to its truth.

I want to avoid being the guru or sage who speaks with a knowing twinkle of a cosmic joke in his eye as he tries to speak simply and with levity to these issues and subtly makes you feel foolish for having reservations about what is being said.

I want to avoid being the no non-sense down to earth coach, who speaks in opposition to the guru as someone who speaks honestly, plainly and cuts through nonesense, subtly implying their perspective is matter of fact.

Finally, I want to avoid being the charismatic madman in the box who seems like a possibly mad but genius revolutionary loner who just might have the next big thing and lies in opposition to all the stuffy traditions. Thats not to say there wont be some elements that resemble these manners of speaking, I just need their excesses to be moderated.

An image I like that corrects some of their manipulative aspects is that of a co-researcher or speculative explorer. I am presenting a project for your consideration and want this to be a dynamic shared experience of co-learning and development. I’m initially going to present my ideas in full as a way forward and need you understand them exactly as I mean them theoretically and practically, but then am ready for the position of co-researcher as soon as I’ve set out my best rendition of whats happened. At this point I want to be challenged and work through till the end until we have something we can agree on as making sense and would like to practice and venture into together. This will surely has elements of storytelling, emotion, humour, cutting to simplicity and radicalism. Hopefully now I’ve highlighted these other positions though, you can ensure you remain both open to the new, and centred and moving at your own pace through what I’m saying.

Now I have introduced the general direction and approach of this lecture, we can begin.

The weave

One of the most important tasks that face us, and always has, is to understand how we can live out our best potentials as a species, and to embed this understanding at every level of how we live. By necessity and curiosity, across history people have explored the nature of what we are, what’s going on, and how we can live with ourselves and the conditions we face in a way that works for what’s important at the time. These understandings crystallise into cultures within science, technology, industry, family, relationships, media and so on. It can be hard to appreciate given how strongly people fight to preserve, celebrate and spread their cultures, but a culture is not just the relics of this process of exploration, now in the stasis of a finished product. Nor is a culture just the different ways of living in and curating of the world we see today among different people. Each culture IS also at heart this continuous task and ongoing effort to create a world in which people can live authentically, knowingly and well in existence. A world that can support the great powers, sensitivities and complexities in the human situation as we are thrown into existence. To varying degrees, cultural forms from families to communities to nations are better or worse at recognising and facilitating this effort successfully. But it is the unity of this human struggle that forms part of the bedrock of possibility for human uniting across our differences.

Across history, trans-personal complex weaves of culture, technology, infrastructure and institutions come to embody this ongoing effort, as well as the forces that come resist this need for adaptation and development. This weave consists of many kinds and scales of systems of meaning and objects that form the reality people are introduced to, whether they be philosophical systems of thinking about the deepest questions, in the development of kinship systems, science, political and economic arrangements and so on; from nuclear weapons to the etched voices of advice passed on by loved ones one telling you to always push past doubt and weakness. Each person and generation is born into this weave and conditioned by it, having to sink or swim through its inner contradictions and its efficacy in carrying through all their needs, wants and questions. As their lives and experiences prove to resonate or reject its sense and efficacy, there is the inner push and opportunity for a deepening, modification or wholesale upturning of aspects of it. For many reasons, this may not happen. This generation dies and for better or worse the weave remains as the constant dynamic texture for the future to go on in. A weave that is both sustained by the combined actions of everyone currently alive but also embedded increasingly in more than human material infrastructure or effects that are not immediately susceptible to change by human efforts.

This effort of peoples and cultures has led to incredible diversity and many wonderful and forms of human life and tradition that also do directly answer the core struggles underlying cultural evolution. I believe at a species level however, the continuing problems of the world we see today show that this effort has been drastically insufficient, even if we can recognise all we have inherited from past efforts. I personally believe that all the resources are already here to bring about a harmonious global revolution in how humans experience and live out existence together; it just hasn’t been brought together and formulated in a coherent way. Succeed or fail, my intention is to provide this here. To provide the best rendition I can of a transcultural theoretical and practical foundation for robust and dynamic personal and global harmony and evolution.

There are places in this weave directly involved in exploring and then educating people in understanding the full breadth and depth of their powers and potentials as humans and the nature of the reality we exist in. Across these places, we have at best a fractured approach to this task. Often, approaches are largely actively counter-productive. Education and mass information systems for example often work people into becoming passive consumers drifting through life with their centre of gravity focused on external sources of validation and meaning. A crucial source of intelligence for these systems come from psychotherapy, philosophy, science and spiritual traditions, who take head on the task of exploring and educating on the nature of the person and how to structure life in the best way. These core exploratory efforts and institutions in society give a very fractured response to the theory and practice of how to understand, experience and live out the best of ourselves. Even current efforts within these communities responding to this fracturing that have synthesised many of these are themselves not enough to truly invite the whole persons being and intelligence into existence.

The details of these shortcomings would have to be covered fully in another lecture; the headline is that the richness of knowledge and skill regarding human potential is spread out across traditions that often have severe edges to each other insights or to the whole nature of what a person is and is capable of. Given this division in the places meant to guide the rest of society, there is no easy manner in which all of this intelligence can be brought into the weave of human systems that need to know how to educate and embed the best of ourselves in all that we do. I do not believe the problems in the weave are primarily moral failings at all nor down to the inherent dangers of power or hierarchies or human differences. I believe they are a failure at the level of the institutions who take this task head on to provide a holistic and practical manner on living the best of ourselves at every context in which we live.

In my opinion, we are still waiting on a trans-cultural model of human nature and transformation that can provide a holistic and concise foundation for human cultures worldwide to bring out the best of every person they educate. I hope to show a possible model of what a truly holistic transformational practice can look like, one that can bring all of humanities best in our efforts towards the future. Talking about this model will also provide a framework to talk precisely about the limitations of current models and traditions as we go on.

Experiential process therapies and a core process model

Lets start with the core of what living is and how it happens well. Some of you may be aware of the existence of a class of therapies sometimes referred to as “experiential” or “process-orientated”. Focusing, Hakomi Therapy, Experiencing Therapy, phenomenological existential psychotherapy, Accelerated Dynamic Experiential Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Process-orientated Psychology, holotropic breathwork. These are all examples of therapies that are for the most part process-orientated or experiential.

The foundation of each of these therapies is the belief that, with time and the right facilitation, there is an intelligence within every person that can find what needs to happen next in order to live past any stuck point in a satisfying way. Unlike other kinds of therapy that focus on a niche or specific way in which this intelligence can move itself forward, these therapies look at the general ways in which ANY process can creatively be worked with.

We frequently come to points in various situations in our lives where the ways we currently think, act and feel can no longer help us move forward with whats happening. We may come to an emotional stuckpoint in our thinking when we can no longer imagine and feel how to live with two opposing sides of ourselves or with a partner; maybe we come to a social or cultural stuckpoint in which we find no voice to speak in our workplaces, schools, politics; perhaps it’s a spiritual stuck point and we can find no way to find a deeper sense of self or a way to articulate or embody an uncanny experience. In all these situations, we come to a point in which pre-existing ways of living do not work, and some novel way forward needs to be created and enacted.

At these junctures, the intelligence of the life process essentially attempts to weave all pertinent facts about the situation and inner resources together into an implying of next steps forward. The solution is implied in that it rarely comes to us in a eureaka moment of a clear way forward or insight. Rather, most often it comes as a vague but distinctly felt sense of a way forward that requires our participation to flesh this solution out and put it in explicit terms and actions. Living is this movement forward of generating and carrying through next steps in this dynamic tension between the organism and world.

Crucially, this “implying” of next steps to move things forward can be directly felt in the body or formed freshly in the body about any situation. It is this implying that process orientated therapists work with by trying to assist in forming, tuning into it and carrying it forward into its next steps. Most importantly, it doesn’t matter what topic or theme a process is specifically about or precisely trying to achieve; there are general ways we can learn of facilitating any life process to imply and carry itself forward successfully. Looking into these ways will be the main topic of this lecture and is the core material of the cross-tradition synthesis model I’m proposing. As I hope to show along the way, most traditions can find a comfortable home in this model even if they must open to the idea that there are more rooms needed in their house to make it a happy home.

Its useful to see what this process-orientated understanding offers to the popular approach to therapy called “person centred”. The difference between being process-orientated and person centred is that you look for or try and form this implying before the work can truly begin. The implying of next steps always has an open-endedness and pregnant ambiguity that’s leading to very precise, currently unformulated ways forward. It is not the pre-formed ideas or emotional responses that the person has already formulated and played out regarding their situation. These ideas and responses are usually easiest and most frequently drawn upon as they use ideas or patterns the person has already tried, or cultural generalities about “what people do in these situations”. Yet they often circle around and unsuccessfully try and carry forward a central confusion in how to go on.

This confusion usually is fact the implying itself beginning to formulate in a hazy fashion as never before enacted possibilities begin to emerge. This implying simply requires skills and attunement that most people would never have learned before and in many ways are actively discouraged from using by many aspects in the weave. We will be learning about these inhibitions to processing well as we go on as unlearning them is a vital part of this approach working and people returning to themselves. In light of this cultural prejudice or unawareness, process orientated therapists therefore feel some additional awareness and training is needed for someone to access the implying and work with it intelligently so their situation can move forwards; it won’t simply emerge from empathic listening and nor will the person trusted to be the driver of a person centred approach know any of this. In other words, the person needs some training to tune into and speak from their deepest intelligence before they can become a productive centre point for themselves in the therapy space.

Research conducted as early as the 60’s showed how vital these training skills were in successful therapy. Gene Gendlin, who later founded the process-orientated school of therapy called Focusing, worked alongside the founder of PERSON-CENTRERED humanistic therapy Carl Rogers. In conducting exploratory research on what worked about therapy, Gendlin found that successful therapy outcomes could be predicted in the first few sessions. He noticed that clients that were successful were those who seemed to engage their inner life with a special kind of attention, one that involved lots of making space for ambiguous feelings to form fresh ways forward, rather than merely intellectualising around them or resorting to pre-formed emotional responses to their situation. Crucially, he noticed that this vital kind of inner-stance did not develop much over the course of therapy with humanistic therapists; it needed to be trained. Gendlin created Focusing therapy as a means to train clients in tuning into the growing edge of their life process, and developed a metric called the experiencing scale to gauge the level to which clients were tuned into their process in this way. Focusing skills will be learned as we go on, and the experiencing scale will be learned in lecture 2.

So being process orientated is dynamically facilitating a client to notice or form and then follow this implying to carry itself forward into its next steps, and also registering these changes deeply as needed. And it is this central process of implying and carry-forward and registering shifts thats generates the moment to moment direction, approach, goals, techniques, concepts and theories, and relating styles of therapy. All of these aspects of transformation are emergent in the process that’s trying to happen. They aren’t things we need to prescribe or direct from the outside, we just need to know need to know how to engage the way the life-process moves. The action and results of any practices or interventions or techniques you use will only ultimately succeed and sustain themselves if they engage this central process.

Now there are at least five key dimensions of engaging this central dynamic. This first module series of 9 lectures continues via deep dives into each of these, though we are going to touch upon them all now in this introductory lecture. I’d like to explain the first of these now, which are the aspects of the implying forming optimally and the shifts that occur being received optimally.

The basic implying-carrying forward

So how do you start being process orientated in a session or reorientate things in a process-orientated direction?

The first thing to do is to notice whether there is already an implying-carry forward flow in what the person is saying and not merely an intellectualising or emotiong about a situation with pre-existing ways of living. There should be a sense that there is an edge which the client is attending to, speaking from and novelty and changes are occurring. As mentioned, there is a measure developed by the Focusing community called the experiencing scale which can assess the extent to which the client is speaking and formulating freshly what is being implied. If this not currently happening, one can ask a client to pause and make space for something internally new to emerge. Then they can ask into the body to form a fresh feeling of the situation as a whole and then wait for it to form. Alternatively, you can ask the client to hold space around two or more conflicting issues, let go of the reigns, and allow the body to form the implying of a gradual synthesis of these elements alongside some participation from the client. There are a couple aspects of the process in which the implying forms that you can notice and play around with.

One of these is the degree to which a process requires the person to integrate their various intelligences and inner resources or be integrated with their environment before forming an optimal implying of next steps. Bringing the person into their whole body, bringing about coherence between the head, heart, gut, dan tiens, chakras, brain halves, integration with the environment are all things that can be implied and precondition the forming of next steps.

Another aspect is the level of context that the body is asked to bring into the focusing of its intelligences and resources into the next steps. It may be for example that the process simply wants to stay within the immediate context of whatever situation you are in, say an argument with someone and the narrow context of who did what to who and when. However, the process may also be shifting contexts asking something like “what is the meaning of this within the context of my whole relationship with this person, or within the general archetypal issues of human relationships, or within my whole life, or within existence itself?”. It may be that certain other contexts that are currently being brought in need to be dropped or next steps are impossible.

Tuning into these two aspects regarding integrations and context can produce an optimal forming of the implying of next steps.

Once an implying forms successfully in the body, we tune into it and slowly get a sense of what would carry it forward. Tuning into a life process regardless of whether its before, during or after an implying has formed has its own aspects to think about. The location of the feeling, its quality, texture, the depth and breadth of it, whether or not it is compressed. All these and more constitute important skills to learn when being able to tune in successfully.

When we are able to do something to carry it through and changes or insights do occur, the changes that are now possible in your life often need to be registered explicitly across many contexts of your life or by the various intelligences in your body. We can ask questions like? How deeply/where can this shift be registered and received or not? Where does it need to be received most? This ensures that we are integrating all our work thoroughly into the person as we go on and we don’t end up needing to repeat anything or struggle for more than is necessary.

Again all of these aspects of the central process will likely be missed by people not trained to notice them, and put simply, the person transforming and living beyond their stuckness will not happen. If it does it will likely happen partially without its full potential. Tuning in, forming and receiving an implying optimally is further explored in lecture 2 and 3 of this series. Let’s move onto another dimension that applies to any life process. Channels.

Channels

We live on many different layers of existence all of which have unique functions for living a full life, and that may become pertinent at any moment in a life process. The life process for example exists as a material body of bones, sinews, fascia, fluids and muscles, there is the body as animated by the breathe, as a thing that is effected by and produces sound, as something that expresses meaning in movement and posture, in the realm of the imagination, as patterns of logic, reasoning, and narrating and storytelling existence into being, as a sexual entity, as something with relations with other people, with relations with the land and more than human entities in the natural world around us, as movements of energy, and as parts in wider systems of interaction and living.

So lets say you are forming an implying or picking up on one that is already operating: how might it show up? Each channel has its own indications that a process is happening there. Lets take the imaginal channel as an example. Within just the imagination, we have quite a few modes in which a process can show up, and each have their own indicators that can be noticed. Something may come up as a flash of a vision, fantasy or simulation, as a hallucination, as a dream, as an imaged scene we seemed to be actively living in during the day, or lucidly during the night, or the feeling that through the imagination we have entered another world independent from our psychic life.

So once a channel does become implied, how can you work with it in a process-orientated way. Lets look at breathing channel. If someone you are working with suddenly begins having difficulty with their breathing, or it noticeably shifts, or becomes emphasised, its likely there is some part of the process is implying the breath to be a certain way to create some effect that will carry the process further. When this is noticed, there are many aspects of any breathing pattern that you and the client can tune into and check if these aspects are being implied to be a certain way. For example, you could ask “what does it feel the site of the breathing wants to be? What about any intonations in the breath? Does the breath want to synchronise with any present or imaginary rhythm, what is the rhythm? Whats the ratio of the inbreath to the outbreath and whats the pace? Is any emotion being carried or dispelled by the breath? In asking all of these questions you are facilitating the implying to fine tune the breath into exactly what is needed for that moment and make the change that will bring a step in the changing of the situation.

If you follow life-process like this you will likely see most forms of therapy and practices are naturally reinvented as you go on as well as new ones being created. Since we are process orientated, we can trust the process knows what it needs in that channel, so we just need to know the aspects breathing that could be being implied and support that happening. More precisely than prescribing breathing practices for the moment, the body will know exactly what is needed. We can help the body to create its own bespoke breathing practice for that moment.

However, once we have established basic competency in these aspects of the breath it is then useful to go through breathwork practices that achieve very precise results, as the body then has this additional intelligence built into it to consider next time it implies in the breath channel, or it might make it more likely to imply the breath channel once it knows it can produce these effects and can do it reliably. In this way introducing pre-established content can accelerate a process-orientated approach and the body doesn’t need to reinvent the whole history of breathwork all by itself but can benefit from all that’s come before. Then even more novel and precise forms of practice may be invented by it by bringing in elements from all of them to fit precise new moments.

So channels are another dimension of inviting the whole person into therapy and life. If your approach did intend to do this, you would be competent in all these channels and be able to facilitate any aspect of what may happen in it.

From what ive seen, most therapists either work with limited versions of the reasoning, relationships and at a push aspects of other channels or more usually just use specific pre-established content practices they know for a channel. Alternatively, they specialise and just focus on one of these other channels which then become seen as alternative and out there such as people who just work using energy, sound, breathworkers and so on. Learning to optimise both process and pre-established content orientated knowledge for the channels will be explored in lecture 4 of this module, and even deeper in Band 2 of the training series. This will be explained later.

Relational positions

The dimension of relational positions refers to the that fact although some processes can happen easily when a person is by themselves, most processes either necessitate or greatly benefit from different kinds of interactions with another person. These shifts in how the relationship needs to be must be distinguished as they often drastically change what client or therapist is doing at anyone time. Most forms of therapy generally stick to two or three of these and usually either aren’t aware of the others or hold against them for various theoretical reasons that we go into in lecture 6. For Tuning In, I’ve listed ten kinds of relational modes or positions which therapist and client can take to each other that seem to be necessary when working very dynamically with another person.

We have being worked on or led, when the client wants to be in a passive position and wants a process done to them in some way. This could be done in any channel, anything from massage to leading someone through a guided imagination journey or energy healing to hypnosis. Then there is empathic communication, when there is an implying for a very precise understanding or empathy with a position, feeling and situation. Facilitating Tuning In, when there is an implying for therapist to facilitate a strong attunement between a client and the actions needed to facilitate their own life process without contributing to trying to figure out what a process may be about. Attachment and bonding, when there is an implying that the therapist enables the client to feel safe and cared for enough to feel, understand and independently assessing and facilitating their own process. Holding space, when a client needs a therapist to create a context in the space which a client can deeply tune in and pursue their process independently without the therapist contributing any content. There is being an organ of perception, which is when the therapist attempts to erase their own agendas or thoughts and simply tune in deeply to the clients process as of it was happening in themselves and offer anything that comes up for them as a possible way of moving things forward. There is taking over in which a client wants a therapist to take on responsibility for some inner psychic function as a means to free them up to take up another process- this could be taking on a role of another person in a transference, repeating words or thoughts, holding an emotion, taking a clients physical weight so they can tune into a feeling of passivity and so on. Projective screen is when a client wants the therapist to be totally blank to allow them to fully project an inner relational dynamic with some element in their lives onto the therapist so that it can be explored more viscerally. There is the implying for entertaining of ideas in which a client wants the therapist to be more feisty for a back and forth exchange, a freedom to critically challenge the clients ideas with expertise or opinion and or facilitate a speculative thinking process. Finally, we have the therapist as a psycho-educative tool of information in which the client wants the therapist to speak and educate but may not want to engage personally in the process.

The transformational space of therapy is a very novel interactional environment so there are often no words for clients or therapists to name these subtle shifts in how they want the interaction to be. Going through all these explicitly with clients builds a shared language so they can read their implying in that moment and see what wants to happen with you. Or if you want a change as a therapist you now have a shared vocabulary to suggest it too. And this is another dimension of bringing the whole person into therapy and their own lives. All these kinds of relating and all the unique things they can achieve by means of them, some totally unique to a transformational space.

Structures of subjectivity

Many forms of therapy ask the question: what is the true nature of the person and what is the correct relationship and method people should use to work with their inner life. Ask an existentialist and you will likely get talk of a self being an exstasis of being, a radically openness and freedom that necessitates a method of developing awareness, personal power and taking responsibility in the face of the givens of existence. If you ask an internal family systems practitioner or archetypal psychologist, there is talk of a person being inherently multiple personality, complexes, parts, and necessitates a relationship and method of inner negotiations and eternal balancing act of the autonomous forces inside us. If you ask a spiritual practitioner, you might hear the term witness consciousness and observer, and the relationship of watching, letting things pass by, being non-attatched, and not-identifying with the content of consciousness till it liberates itself. Finally, if you ask a psychedelic or transpersonal therapist, you may hear of the non-dual self which erupts as a spontaneous upsurge of personal, interpersonal and transpersonal concerns and a method of amplification or non-doing or total surrender to the life processes intelligence. Which of these is right? Well the process-orientated answer is to any choice is always “yes please and please may I have some more!” as each of these can be accepted as a possible way for the life process to effectively construct itself and relate in any given moment. Noticing which of these is happening and possible right now determines the general method you take when working with a process, and how the person needs to work with themselves in that moment.

Lets go briefly through each to see what they are and the issues with insufficient and excessive tendency to allow the life process to structure itself in these way.

“outpouring of own nature river changing course”

In first person, there is a direct, immediate relationship with the life processes organisation and direction. This is the mode people usually wish they were in more often, when how they actually show up is congruent with their reasoning and insights in that moment. In first person, if something occurs to you as true or makes sense, you will immediately be able to begin the process of actually living in this way. There is no gap in a first person mode between practicing and preaching, walking and talking. The method of relating to the life-process, how its inner logic plays out, is via reasoning, insight, choice, decision, exploration willpower and responsibility, as well as being able to speculatively experiment and create new forms of living in situ.

Most forms of western psycho-spiritual practice are about emphasising and strengthening the first person mode of relating to the life process. There are very good reasons for this. It is very easy in the face of the complexity of existence and the capacity for destruction we have to abandon direct responsibility for our inner life, to take charge of our faculties and to reason our way into living the best lives we can conceive. There are many forces that cause us to dissociate for our faculties and our bodies which lend them to simply being organised by survival responses and very narrow contexts of life. However, the first person mode of relating to oneself is not always implied as the way to carry a process forward. Sometimes a process needs to be related to, or we need to disappear, or let the process fully take over. An overemphasis on first person leads to an inflated sense of the actual ability we have to always directly shape our inner life, and thus an overdramatic sense of tragedy and loneliness in existence can often be the result, especially when we never learn that we can actually let go and rely on our inner intelligence rather than always directing it. To put it more strongly, the excess emphasis on first person as THE mode of relating to oneself is the reason that most forms of psycho-spiritual practice fail to produce the results they advertise, and also lead to people taking the responsibility for this failure of a lack of discipline or will power, rather than the inappropriateness of willpower for them to move forward in their development in that moment.

Then we have 2nd person. In 2nd person there is a mediated relationship with the life-process via an autonomous complex or part. It shows up usually as a feeling of an active withdrawal, or inner voices, or powerful emotions that try and push or pull you seemingly against your will in that moment. This part or complex is its own cluster of desires, beliefs, memories, strategies and emotions that is not directly related to or effected by insights and reasonings that a person may have. These parts usually have their own very specific needs, aims, and relationship with the other parts and forces of the person. As such the method of relating to the process cannot be one of simply reasoning or experimenting through what makes sense or can happen, but rather a method of establishing connection, trust, communication, understanding, healing and negotiation.

The issue around a deficiency in adopting a second person relational position to process is huge. In western psychological and spiritual traditions alike second person life -process are given demonising names in order to somehow encourage more willpower in not buckling to their stubbornness to move forward. In Buddhism we have the monkey mind or demons, yoga we have the burning of the seeds of conditioning or the ego, in integral psychology we are asked to videotape the process to death, in cbt we have them called “instrusive thoughts” and so on. The tragedy is that after a thousands of years of putting them down these kinds of processes only needed to be related to lovingly and responded to with an intelligence of how they operate and why they come into being, usually through issues of trauma or simply developmental stages that society never provided rituals or means of moving beyond them. There are issues with overidentifying with this however, which is that a person always seems to be in a condition of negotiating everything with their parts, never quite able to take a unified position, and often also can lead to erratic shifts in behaviour.

Lets look now at third person. In third person there is an immediate but non-directive contact with the process in which the self becomes a facilitating context in which a process then has the space to go on in when its ready. The method of relating is one of relaxing around, non-attached holding, being with, witnessing. As in the image, the subject fades into the landscape as an anchor for it to live. The issue with underuse of this is huge, as without being able to be “nothing” or “emptiness” the truth that a person can exist peacefully without having to take on some form or be doing anything may never be shown. As such, there will be a constant survival anxiety around being formless, having inner quiet, or not knowing how things will go or who one definitely is if certain forms of life or efforts aren’t always happening. The issue of excess here however is huge. The emphasis of the self as a witness leads to a huge diminishment of personal responsibility and vulnerability for exploitation, as can be seen currently in the explanations given by Buddhists regarding their massacres of muslims in Burma. They simply enact the weave and due to the lack of first person, it becomes seen as destiny and impersonal what comes from them.

Now we have 0 person. In zero person the subject disappears completely, and the process unfolds via surrendering into it as implyings erupt, emerge and resolve as they can. At these times you experience yourself almost as the experiential inside of the process. You are simply the shifting experience of it moving through all the channels, phases, and relation positions. The openness that is created when the subject fully disappears also encourages most the transpersonal experiences to emerge including experiencing spirits, past life regressions, outer body experiences, divine experiences and so on. The issue of deficiency here is that you may never be able to fully experience the true visceral intelligence of the process without fully merging with it and being taken on a ride by it. also many of the transpersonal experiences that come to answer deep questions about the true nature of our existence may never surface for you. The issue of excess is madness, as 0 person encourages fracturing, spontaneity, wide openness and receptivity to things around you, which need to be regulated by first person that can make a decision to pursue something or not and also weave insights gained into a coherent way of living. People who have taken lots of psychedelics often report very lofty ideals but in their own lives are actually very dysfunctional in a way they can’t see, as they have a visceral experience of the best selves or big truths, but cant connect this with their actual lives.

Finally, we have survival mode. In this mode, the life-process takes over and narrows the context of concerns to provide forms of safety for the person. This could be anything from flinching from a burnt finger to cutting off an emotion that we feel that looks like it would compromise our attachment to an early care giver. In short bursts and especially when we are young and cannot fully fend for ourselves, this kind of structure of subjectivity is of course very useful. We need the automatic responses to prime us for action, or relaxation, or reflex responses in threatening moments. However, if over a long time first person is not experienced and layers and layers of existence and ones faculties become associated with a survival concern, this kind of narrowed contraction is experienced as what a person is. Being a person is experienced as layers and layers of anxiety, and people confuse being in survival mode with being in first person. Usually, these processes need to be related to with another person establishing safety conditions and trust to allow them to relax enough to be related to in second person, or for other structures of subjectivity to emerge. As mentioned regarding second person, which can be seen as what happen to a survival process when it is able to be related to rather than simply taking a person over, survival mode has historically been seen as THE biggest issue on understanding our true nature and living our best lives. The spiritual path for some can almost be defined as the quest to see what exists in oneself once one allows oneself to completely relax in the face of existence.

We need to be able to identify and work with all forms of subjectivity if issues aren’t just to persist, as again, only by working appropriately to the implied structure of subjectivity can many issues be resolved and not become circular.

Phases

One of the givens of existence that we are constantly contending with is that there are numerous forces and facts that we are always living amougst or against. We must find a way for our life to make sense without being drowned out by nor ignoring this complexity. In other words, existence is complicated enough that there needs to be a constant strategy of interacting with other parts of itself because it cant just be open to all of its parts and contexts at once. Phases refers to the different ways a life process can relate to other life-processes or contexts and in existence in a way that can allow the process to develop at its own pace.

In brief, we need to be able to pursue aspects of existence with some peace from the rest of it, we need to be able to establish and defend a life-world that supports what a process needs of the moment, be able to flow into other aspects of existence to understand, learn, and live sensitively amongst them, and be able to relax and let go of the whole struggle sometimes and enjoy things from a detached and fluid perspective. Lets look at these in turn.

Phase 1 is about blotting out the complexity of existence in order to individuate and develop a specific aspect without being overwhelmed by everything else. When clients are dreaming up healing or aspirational scenarios of possible lives that could have been or may be this is a phase 1 activity, as it is when clients are tentatively exploring new ideas about their lives or their world – it usually kills the process in these scenarios to constantly check them for being realistic or appropriate or moral or the same as or superior or inferior to other ideas that may already exist. First person phenomenological observation and philosophical thinking cannot occur without moving into phase 1 by reducing and withholding from all the contexts and facts we think we know of and are relevant and allow a fresh look at things on their own terms. In conflict scenarios or if people have been suffering for a long time they need to be in phase 1 to have periods of rest, relaxation, having fun and not having to think about anyone else. Phase 1 can be summed up as “I don’t want to think about other things! I just want to do this for now!”.

So, phase 1 can be defined as any process that becomes possible and optimal when certain possibly contrary aspects of existence are purposefully ignored so this aspect can be enjoyed and or individuated.

For every phase there are issues with both blocking it out and fixating on it. If someone blocks out ever being in phase 1, they are unlikely to be able to relax and recover, unable to go back to an innocence of dreaming about life, unable to move past obstacles with people and build the foundation for future healing to occur and so on. Fixating on phase 1 usually leads people to be constantly focusing on pleasure, suppressing or repressing or neglecting those around them and the impact of their behaviours on the rest of life. Equally it could be that excessive phase 1 leads someone to being a workaholic or addict of some form. Whatever it is, they will become very one sided.

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Now for phase 2. For any premise, emotion, way of being, person, culture or technology or nation to exist, certain conditions need to hold in the rest of existence for it to be optimal or even to survive. In the progressive movement none of the new sensitivities and awareness developed in marginalised groups can exist comfortably unless society changes in its structure; no new idea in any field can be itself if there are those attempting to supress it or simply not be open to receiving it; no new alternative community can exist sustainably without eventually facing off the law. Phase 2 is about establishing the conditions for a process to operate within the complexity of existence by differentiating it from other aspects clearly and taking to task all the obstacles to it functioning. This is the phase of relating contexts where all explicit human conflicts play out.

You could be pursuing a process and suddenly another process emerges inside to somehow inhibit that one being progressed, usually because there is a fear that doing so will threaten things important to another process. Alternatively a process could be about a phase 2 theme. This could be by the process struggling with and finding out ways in which other forces in existence stop it from happening. This could be by bringing up rank and power issues and historic versions of these, or by clearly making claims of comparison, superiority and inferiority, truth, demands for other aspects of existence to move into different phases to provide the other side of the differentiating and so on. So phase 2 is about highlighting the very aspects of existence that phase 1 hopes to avoid and instead to challenge and shape them in some way. Phase 2 is about finding ways to challenge, adapt or undermine other perspectives to suit some part of existence remaining undisturbed or flourishing.

Avoiding phase 2 means avoiding the prospect of revealing to the rest of existence what you experience and need for fear of having to deal with lack of understanding or conflict or bringing up the past or rank and power issues. It means you can’t create a life-world around you that supports what you need.

Overidentifying with phase 2 can make you overly aggressive and also forget about the core of what may being defended. Some people may have been so used to being in phase 2 that they never actually explore the thing it is they are defending and whether it is right. In a society where the prospect of real change is usually doubted, people are largely in phase 2 when people bring up their behaviour. In phase 2, you may forget that other people and perspectives exist and may in fact change your mind about the thing you are fighting to establish.

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In their best forms, in phase 1 we have the possibility of establishing something new and phase 2 we have the possibility of creating the basic conditions to reveal and support this new thing against other forces in life. Phase 3 introduces a movement away from this individuating and establishing process moving rather into leaving ones centre and journeying into other aspects and centre points in existence. There is a leaving of the self and a willingness to understand, switch roles, find commonalities and new synthesis between positions. When a client seems ready to let go of blame and look to understand someone who has hurt them they are entering phase 3; when someone seems ready to look into aspects of themselves they formerly judged they are in phase 3; when people are ready to entertain the intelligence or worth or sentient and non-sentient life around them they are ready for phase 3. Phase 3 is for when a world that can sustain all of us, and not just ourselves, wants to be experienced and developed.

Part of the despair of the modern world is partially that we are struggling to expand our phase 3 capacity to imagine humanity and all life at a global scale with all the differences and complexities others have from us, and that our own position that we protect in phase 2 is often formed by a materialist capitalist system that further and further brings us into isolated pockets, echo chambers, with less and less social responsibility.

Overidentifying with phase 3 on the other hand can lead to a person so willing to decentre themselves in understanding, that their own needs and dreams can become drowned in the many others they are considering. It is also very difficult to take someone to task for their behaviour in phase 2 if they are constantly trying to appeal to universal empathy and trying to empathise with you.

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Phase 4 comes with a deep release into the absolute complexity and diversity and powers of existence. There is a surrender from the struggle with this, and an attunement and flowing with whats is happening. It can be calm and meditative, dynamic and exited, aesthetic and profound, tragic and somber, and in each, a sense of surrender and going with the spirit of the moment. Although as process orientated we ultimately want all phases to be involved, usually the person develops a capacity to always have a foot in phase 4 no matter what. This dynamism greatly helps the rest of the process go along smoothly. This is a philosophical transition as much as anything else and reflects fully integrating the complexity, transience, death and so on as givens of existence that we capable of experiencing, but also must, contend with.

Giving a brief example from my own life, I came up with the idea for this model just after university. There were massive pressures to get a job and be financially stable, and I was actively discouraged from being concerned about the issues that necessitated the model by many of my peers and teachers. Memorably for me a philosophy teacher described me as the ghost at the feast on our leaving do as I described my sense of reasoning for wanting to formulate the model. With this lack of support, my process pushed me into a severe alternation between phase 1 working and phase 2 blotting out the rest of existence and pursuing all my research alone and defending my actions to others and pushing for help and understanding. As I wasn’t process orientated at the time, this came at the expense of me body, health, relationships. A momentary break of phase 3 came as I looked at a white board in my room that had 20 different to do lists related to researching and practicing this model, and I realised none of them included improving my relationships with the people dearest to me. The big break from this only came with a big break up, leading to a complete fixation of phase 3 to understand all the neglect I had given to other parts of my life, leading to me an intense guilt as I forclosed the possibility of being in phase 1 or 2 and being able to emphathise with or defend or explore other aspects of myself. Finally, after developing the model, I was able to enter phase 4, settle into the complexity of my situation as both beautiful and tragic, and move to creating a more dynamic interplay between moving between phases regarding different aspects of my life. And the phases rolled on and still do.

The use of the dimension of phases is that by knowing what phase a client is in either towards their feeling or towards the world, you can explicitly get a sense with them of what the implying of this phase is for and what would satisfy it, which is rarely ever done. Decades can be lost by not explicitly thematising this, not knowing what will stop protecting the rage or hurt inside of phase 2, or not knowing what drug or activity will ever be enough for a need for phase 1 relaxation, or ever be able to finally come back from thoughts of others to oneself of phase 3, or finally ever be able to finally relax into ones capacity for existential maturity and belong to existence in all its complexity in phase 4. We need to move through all four at some point, and there is immense pain and suffering either caused by or us experienced by us if this doesn’t occur dynamically. As with the other dimensions of process we will explore, its not always vital to explicitly bring up phases, but knowing about it may be vital for a process to carry itself further on and not get stuck for a long time.

The mezze and deep democracy

So we have covered the 5 dimensions of process that are always in operation that we need to be able to tune into and facilitate if we are to actually put the persons process at the heart of therapy and actually constitute the person themselves as a productive centre of therapy. We need to be able to work with every channel, relational position, structure of subjectivity and phase if we want to give the person a truly holistic understanding of the dimensions of their being and how to move forward and change.

When I introduce therapy to people I often talk about the image of a mezze. A mezze with lots of delicious opportunities and ways of working that can be introduced into our work. I want therapy to seem exciting, important, interesting, cool and related to all things, which it is. I don’t want them to be bored or feel like it’s a slog when we as therapists are part of the team representing what is possible for the lives of human now and in the future. I want therapy to seem as free, dynamic and successful as our future can be, and we need nothing short of a holistic intelligence of all these aspects of process-minimum, for this to happen. I want to strongly counteract the scepticism and cynicism people have towards change in general stemming from the limitations in traditions of psycho-spiritual transformation and the weave of society.

One thing that very important to notice about the Tuning In model is that’s in one important aspect its ontologically flat. What I mean by this is that there is no stated hierarchy of dimensions or modes of dimensions in any way. Many models of transformation set things up theoretically into hierarchies, such as claiming that always thinking of the highest and greatest good is superior to thinking within a context of the immediate desires you have in a situation, or that the body plane is transcended and included in energy plane, which in turn is transcended and included in mind plane, and finally in spirit plane. Perhaps with this there is an emphasis on the body plane as being temporal and the spiritual being timeless. From the perspective of Tuning In, there is no practical need to make claims about any of this. We just need to ensure that the life-process is aware of its full range of capacities and let it decide in the moment what may be important and how to move on with what is has available.

This reflects a central principle behind Tuning In called deep democracy. Deep democracy is a respect for every bit and form of existence as an equally valid part of tapestry of things moving forward. The only emphasis is on the freeing the intelligences within each thing for this to happen so there is no true stasis, regardless of whether in one moment something is manifesting its positive or most integrated qualities or whether it is part of temporal or eternal reality. Each moment of existence is given full ontological priority as another expression of the ever-changing process of life moving onwards. We will talk more about the core philosophical principles and values behind Tuning in in lecture 8.

True nature of self

What is this thing that exists in all these channels, across all these structures of subjectivity, that navigates the complexity of existence and wants to be related to dynamically like this? If we have good experience of the full diversity in the life process and then contemplate this question, we can sense what this is. We can experience at the heart of the life process a fluid and vibrant intelligence that always has inner space to transcend conditions, a slight blissfulness and ease, and an existential maturity to be fully present and dynamic in the face of what is; an overflowing generosity of spirit that is at home forming and reforming in the crucible this complex of existence. I refer to the core of the life process and pure life.

This dynamic readiness for new forms of life needs to be paired with process intelligence we have talked about or this its true dynamic nature cannot be fully embodied and worked with. If you reliable access to be an enact both, you are in a position where the whole person can be in a process of perpetual self-understanding, creativity and maturity and love. This is the person needed for the future to be a hopeful one and is the ultimate promise of the psycho-spiritual traditions of humanity to find the best we can be in existence. This is the person we need to be weaving and shaping the systems that the past present and future goes on in.

Practice

Overview:

So for this practice we are going to experience a taste of working with the life-process in dynamic way. I’ll be taking you through a partially structured practice that goes through forming an implying and tuning into the different dimensions. This practice is mostly emergent in nature in that the instructions that structure the practice are all invitations to check whats going on, rather than directing you to format the life process in any way.

With every practice in this lecture series, I try and invite people to choose something that feels light, close to the surface and something they feel they are happy to play with during this time. However, it is unavoidably personal. Only go as far as you feel comfortable with and prepared for, and drop out if you do not feel safe at any moment. You can have your camera on or off. I’d like everyone to keep their microphones off and to message on the chat to ask for questions.

Forming an implying of the moment using focusing checking three process dimensions dimensions.

Form implying of the moment.

Check structure of subjectivity: How are you experiencing yourself in relation to this process?

Check relational position: How would you want someone to be with you right now?

Check channel and work through amplification methods in movement, breath and ecological channels.

Check phase and work with 1,2,3,4.

Wholebody-Focusing: Just focus on breathing. Allow the breath to become natural, so we aren’t trying to control or improve it in anyway allow it be as deep or as shallow as it wants to be. Just see if you can find the deepest place in your body that it feels the inhale begins and rest your awareness there for a moment. Tune into the support of your skeleton and all the contact you have with the ground, and notice and release unnecessary efforts to keep yourself upright. Notice the atmosphere in the room around you, the temperature, how light it is, how it feels. Now just gently entering 0 person, just see if you can allow the breath to animate spine and movement and jaw. Now with your inner voice ask inside the body to form an expression of anything that wants to come out in this exact moment. Give space to what might want to process itself right now, and just find the place in the body where this implying response might be forming; now just wait a minute and see what shows up, remember you are looking for a body feeling, but it could also come up in any channel of awareness as an image, movement impulse, body tension, thought, movement of energy. it might feel quite subtle, or even like a sense of ambiguity or stuckness if you are lucky. And just see if you can come up with one or two words that describe the quality of the thing that showed up.

Now ask, what structure of subjectivity is being implied. Do you feel like a first person direct relationship with this is possible, does it feel autonomous and outside your reach, are you being brought into a witnessing position, or does it feel you want to erase yourself and let the process spontaneously emerge by itself, or some survival response.

Now check how one wishes to be related too;

Now, check what channel one is in, gently tune into it.

Now see if you can consciously bring this out as a movement. If this was a movement how would it be. Think about these aspects. Now as a breathing pattern. Now as flirt from the environment.

Finally, check what phase you are in.

A synthesis of process-orientated and content orientated approaches

We’ve had an overview of the Tuning In model and a flavour of what its like to work with. I’d now like to set up a training framework for how a person would take things further in deeply understanding everything we’ve learned and bringing it into works with clients right away. In order to talk about how the Tuning In training course is structured, its important to appreciate its synthesis of two broad types of psycho-spiritual models and approaches.

Earlier when we spoke about channels and breathwork, I showed you both the process-aspects of any breathing process as well as showing you pre-established practices which demonstrated the range of what can be achieved with the breath. This mirrors two kinds of knowledge and corresponding ways of working: process-orientated and content-orientated.

A process orientated approach covers the range of things you would need to know to support the life process regardless of what the topic or aim of the process is about. As we have rendered it, this means learning the dimensions of the life process, the different modes, and the aspects of these modes that are involved in a process developing itself.

For example, this knowledge would consist of understanding that the life process exists in different channels at certain times, that breathe is one channel of the process, and that the site of breathing, intonation, rhythm and so on are all process aspects of this channel.

This kind of approach is essentially bottom up, with the aims, theory, practice and so on being emergent from the process itself. Process models are there to improve the quality of any implied life process occurring, rather than focusing on any specific results they want the life process to achieve that are deemed important. As such, since process can occur in such diverse forms, you need a high degree of understanding of this diversity to facilitate the whole spectrum of flexibility.

If you just know how to facilitate process without attempting to push for any specific aims, agendas or practices, you’ll find most the forms and aims of psycho-spiritual practice are invented freshly by the process as a means to forward itself in some situation. The benefit of this is that working with things in a process-orientated manner means the right thing always happens at the right time. The person is the practice. There is a constant flow of process towards moving a situation onwards as the process generates the exact things that will move it forward towards aims and via means that it actually is in a position to formulate and pursue.

Another crucial benefit is that a process can generate in situ the theory that best captures its internal logic. No theory can account for the specific complex interrelations and mutations of someone’s inner life entirely, and this becomes more and more true the more successful the theory is in adding insight and complexity to the life process. Just like with a practice, if you teach someone a theory and they fully understand its implications and embed this into how their life process structures and understands itself, then they are in the position of developing even more precise, intelligent and novel forms of living in the world on the basis of this platform of understanding and attunement. The evidence for this is clear in the history of thought. As one practitioners contribution is taken in and applied, reality eventually speaks back at an even more precise level to adjust it and new developments or new traditions form from this interplay.

So if we are working with someone and learning theory becomes implied – which occurs in the relational position entertaining ideas or information – a process-orientated approach ensures the theories we share not do not dominate another person, but are actively becoming more intricate for us in every instance of their use. The process is invited to use them and precision them rather than being expected to operate within them. Once they land, they always flesh themselves out, move beyond themselves into more intricacy which perhaps requires better formulations of the terms we came in with.

Now the issue with an exclusive process-orientated is that this invention of new, intricate and bespoke next steps can only go as fast as the life process can go. Much of what is invented – although bespoke to the situation – are often re-inventions of things that could have been brought in earlier and saved time. If the process was trained already in understanding the spectrum of its capabilities, even more bespoke, novel, and powerful things may be able to be achieved, things benefitting from lifetimes of experience. So too by introducing powerful ideas and theory to that expand the capacity for greater perspective and attunement.

So yes the process can invent all the forms of transformation and theory as you go on, but there’s no need burden it with reinventing all of human history!

In contrast to a process approach, a content model or “pre-established aims, methods and theory model”, usually begins from experiences by their founders that certain ways of working with oneself or another have the possibility to produce specific desirable results. Theorist practitioners have decided that these methods and the results they produce are the ones they want, and they will work within this range of methods in order to produce these results. They usually also like a certain terminology of describing what is happening, so too it contains pre-established terminology that becomes the way in which things can be spoken about in the space.

On the basis of Freuds early experiences, psychoanalysts for example ended up working with the relational position “projective screen”, “being worked on” and “organ of perception” in the verbal and imaginal channels whilst switching between first person reasoning through insights and zero person free association. Every form of therapy that limits their methods and aims in this way and set the framework in which everything that occurs in the space is understood, need to account for their choice of focus. This is because the life process is much more diverse than any limitation you can place on it if you only work with pre-established aims, methods and content. Continuing the psychoanalysis example, originally, the client was referred to as resistant and being defensive if their process was not carried forward by what was happening in the session. The psychoanalysts put the limitations of their model to facilitate process onto the client. In a moment of resistance to an interpretation, a process-orientated approach could check to see if this misinterpretation has actually made the real implying sharper even if it was incorrect, or explored and processed any phase 2 implyings that needed to happen before something could sink in. This isn’t able to happen in a content orientated approach. Rather, there are just many pre-established ad hoc troubleshooting solutions rather than being able to tune into exactly how the process wants to move forward in that moment.

Later in its history, psychoanalysis had to concede that pursuing the aims and objectives they had using their methods had to change, as their specific relational positions – all enacted without a clear understanding by the client why these were occurring – were not even working for their own aims, as well as clearly creating friction with the client process. Thus, we have a relational turn in psychoanalysis and empathic listening and attachment become key aspects of the life-process they realise they need to work with. The story of CBT and its waves share a similar thread, as practitioners slowly have to bring in more capacity to account for and be able to work with more of the whole person and achieve their aims and objectives. CBT has to take in more verbal-cognitive involvement in second wave and then third person mindfulness for example in its third wave. This all takes time and lots of internal conflict and debate in the group, the general structure of which is well described by Thomas Kuhn in his book the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Now, other content-orientated forms of transformational work may actually be aware of the other dimensions of the person that they are not catering for. Their approach may be “sorry, that’s not what we do here” and are thus honest about it. This is the only way not to place the burden of the limitations of the method to always work on client. It doesn’t put the client in a position where they don’t know about other dimensions of themselves and thus be totally dominated the framework you have set up. Without this, clients and practitioners usually only have the option to evangelise the practice or struggle against themselves in vain or to find new solutions elsewhere eventually or believe they simply cannot be helped. This can waste years.

It definitely can be very useful to limit someone to work with a certain method, theory and aims to produce certain results. One gains focus and gets to see how far you can push one way of working to its limits. Dependent on individuals and how flexible their life process is or the preferences it has, this may be actually able to go quite far. But it cant be assumed for any given person that this will be the case. So those are the limits of a content-orientated approach.

As mentioned, the real benefit of a pre-established content model is that they can set up practices that create precise results that can demonstrate to the life process the range of things it can produce. By teaching it the various forms of breathwork from wim hoff to holotropic to alternate nostril breathing, the life process has the broadest range of understanding its own capacities that it can then use again or create genuinely new and bespoke practices from for the needs of a moment. You can also introduce incredible levels of precision in parsing and attuning to reality using theory that is the product of lifetimes of focused work in people attuning to and formulating an understanding of an aspect of existence. These are the benefits of a content approach.

You can have your cake and eat it apply all this theory and practice in a process-orientated way. You can do this by for example setting methods, theory, aims and asking the person to work through in a process-orientated way everything that would stop them entertaining these things to see their worth. Or, after a practice, you can also see what would be required in the moment to integrate the precise results achieved. There are many other ways. In any case, the combination of process-and content orientation means combining the active intelligence of the whole person to mix with the furthest we have currently formulated in expanding our range of tuning into and living with existence. This means you are allowing the full force of someone’s process to be creating at and beyond the edge of everything we know and can do. exciting times.

The Tuning in Training Course Structure explained

As you may have gathered from that discussion, the training course intends to teach process and content orientated knowledge to put people in this exact position in relation to their understanding of the dimensions of their life process. In other words, it allows them to be in perpetual process in working with themselves and others. Perpetual process is a term we can go into further in lecture 8 at the end of this series. Again, im explaining this structure not to just peddle my own wares, but in some ways also the opposite. I want to give you a framework in which you can be thinking about independently moving forward with exploring and working with the model right away.

The training is structured in 3 bands consisting of modules and lectures. Band 1, which we are in now, is essentially all the process orientated knowledge and skills you forneed perpetual process to get started.

Band 2 concerns accelerating the life process in working as broadly and dynamically in these dimensions as possible. This means introducing pre-established content that the life process is invited to take in and play with. This includes all common cultural or individual inhibitions that are ingrained to stop working as diversely as a human is. It also means knowing how to transform the weave of culture to embed at a basic level a context that supports continual openness to those dimensions being welcome into everyday life. Finally, it involves learning specific methods and practices that have been time and research tested to produce exciting and powerful results in what we are and can achieve via our powers and capacities.

To see this in concrete terms, lets take the example of the band 2 imaginal channel module. After recapping the band 1 process aspects of working with dreams, we look into how dreams as a mode of the life-process is and isn’t given space within life to actually emerge and be a successful means of carrying forward process. One observation regarding is that due to its neglect as a meaningful aspect of oneself, it’s often rare for many people to even remember their dreams, many people claiming that they don’t actually dream. When people have dreams they remember, they often feel a need to share them. But sharing a dream in modern life can be one of the most deflating experiences you can have. There is both a shared feeling that there is perhaps some deeper intrigue in a dream, but no one ultimately has anything to say about it. It often is treated as an odd ultimately inane triviality that is passed over as no one has any idea what to do about it. Regarding nightmares especially, people are more likely to simply offer support regarding recovering from their effects, rather than anyone treating these effects as intentional or useful in anyway. Following from this, we think together about ways of embedding in our selves, our friendships, partnerships, families and communities the process skills and understanding we have so that the telling of a dream can open up a new interactive space and be meaningful. We finally would look at accelerating the life process’s range in working with dreams using pre-established content from the history of human self transformation. For lucid dreaming this is by learning to lucid dream and in that state finding and healing deep parts of ourselves, enacting the process of dying, of transporting ourselves into the inner experience of animals or nature processes, of clearing all content and experiencing pure emptiness.

Band 3 of the training focuses on how to apply the process-powerhouse the person now is to tackle and apply itself to many contexts of existence. This first applies to oneself and the task of enlightenment and developing purpose. Then into group spaces such as therapy, creative spaces, families, romantic relationships, community living and so on. This is to effectively introduce the whole person into existence in a way in a constant carrying forward of the growing edge of what we can be, and thus the best case scenario for this life.

The training course is intended to be process-orientated as possible so those learning it have the clear option for it to make sense to them on their own terms and to revolutionise the model if they can.

When I choose specific methods to either teach awareness of a dimension of process or it’s range, I will initially state the method in functional terms ie in terms of the aim. This means that I am being transparent that I have made a choice based on my own experience of the method I am using, but others may achieve the same aim. For example there may be many ways of allowing someone to deeply abide in first person, but I have my preferences. However, if a person following the program can find a practice emergent from their process or an existing one elsewhere that produces the result in a better way, then I am more than happy for them to use it. There are parts of the training in which a person is actively invited to see if they can formulate better theoretical terms for whats happening across the course of the training. This embeds a process-orientation into the course itself.

It is hoped that these efforts both invite the diversity of all that has been formulated or that can be formulated and useful to each individual, and stave off the temptation to become fixated in phase 1 or 2 and overly attached or aggressive in defending a certain formulation of the model. It also helps correct one deeply ingrained metaphor which I find quite damaging for thinking about self transformational models. This is the possible metaphor of these process aspects and practices as tools and the collection of what we learn as a tool box. This metaphor mostly make sense from pre-established content orientated approaches. As they don’t tune in and allow the process to emergently generate the next steps, they have to identify situations when a practice would be appropriate and then apply techniques or instructions from the outside. I’ve found this introduces a subtle alienation from own being as things that the process can do, live and be are treated as outside tools or contrived actions, outside of what we are. It also limits the novelty the process can generate once it has learned a certain pre-established precise methods and results. By simply stating an aim, the process can get creative in how it gets there, and maybe even develop the aim in situ. As such, we are in a position to expand ourselves and expand our limits in the way we think and live out this what we do.

Now we have been through the basic structure and framing of the training, we can move onto how to introduce the work to clients.