contemplations in words & images

MARTIN CHALLIS

Author: martin (Page 16 of 31)

The Art of Noticing – Using Feelings as a Source Code

March 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The Observation

I’d been watching a student rehearse his monologue for several minutes when it suddenly struck me how disengaged I’d become. I’ll call this student Tim. I placed my attention on what I was feeling. My eyes were tired and it was a struggle to focus, I had a dull ache at the back of my head, my mind was wandering and I couldn’t connect with anything he was saying. Was this disconnection about where I was at or was it to do with the way he was working or was it a combination of both?

I checked in: no I’d worked with a student in the previous session and had felt focused and effective so I put that to one side for the time being. I decided to ask Tim some self-reflective questions to see if I could deepen my understanding of what it was I was feeling and what indeed he might be feeling.

The Conversation

M. Tim, how were you feeling as you worked just then?
T. I guess I felt a little nervous and tense and I suppose right now I’m feeling a little frustrated and dissatisfied with my monologue, I’m not really in it at the moment.
M. You say you’re feeling tense. What is the source of the tension?
T. I think I’m feeling tense because I worry if I’m making the right choices and whether or not you think it’s any good.
M. What’s a “right choice”?
T. Something that works. Something that gets me in the zone. A choice that I know you’ll like.
M. What do you mean by something that works?
T. It’s when I feel strong and connected and inside what I’m doing, fighting for my objective and not worrying about my acting.
M. And why is it important to you that I like it?
T. I guess because if you like it I’ll feel like I am doing a good job and that other people might like it too.
M. OK I understand that, so let me ask you this: when you’re doing your piece, how much of your attention is on the work itself and how much of your attention is focused on watching yourself as you work? Let’s call the first part, the actor part of you and let’s call the other part of you, your watcher.
T. Putting that way I reckon about 30% is actor and 70% is watcher.
M. OK good, so how does it feel to be 30/70 split when you’re working?
T. It feels a little frustrating, incomplete and I guess dissatisfying.
M. Do you feel that the state of tension you mentioned earlier is connected to worrying about getting it right and if I like your work, and that this is related to the 30/70 split?
T. Yes I think it is.
M. Yes I think it is too. OK so what do you want to feel when you’re working? How much of the actor/watcher split do you want to have?
T. That’s simple I want to feel secure in my choices and I want to be 100% actor.
M. OK so is it possible that the energy you’re using to watch yourself is a form of self-protection, guarding against you feeling insecure? And that this energy is actually holding you back and contributing to the dissatisfaction?
T. I can see that this is possible.
M. As I understand what is happening it’s the habitual mind interpreting the situation as an occasion where you need to be protected because you may be setting yourself up for criticism. The habitual mind says that because you’re being observed you need to be more watchful and outwardly aware, like a soldier on guard at a campsite. The dissatisfaction comes because there is another part of you that deeply desires to get into the piece you’re doing and connect and commit to the action of the character, and it’s not getting that satisfaction. As you said you want to really be ‘in it’ but it ain’t happening.

Earlier you said you wanted to feel secure, engaged and deeply satisfied in your work, lets say you want to be immersed, you want an immersive experience that gets you closer to the 100% you want to feel. What do you think you need to do to achieve this? What do you need to let go and what do you need to find?

T. From what you’ve explained already I probably need to let go the need to please you and the feeling that I have to get it right all the time.
M. Yes this would be a good idea. Is it possible for you to do this?
T. Yes I suppose it is.
M. Then let’s call this a process of acknowledging something in order to be able to let it go and then naming the things you want to find. Let’s make up an exercise where you can freely go about the room expressing your thoughts and feelings spontaneously. Name out loud the things you want to let go and state your desires in finding the things you need.
T. OK. I’m letting go of my need to get it right. I’m letting go of the need to please Martin. I’m letting go of the pressure I put on myself. I’m letting go of watching myself work. I’m letting go of being so protective. Hey I feel lighter already.
M. Keep going.
T. I’m letting go of censoring myself. I’m letting go of caution. I’m letting go of listening to my words when I speak.
M. And what do you want to find? What is it you want?
T. I want to be free. I want to make strong choices. I want to feel secure, to engage, to connect to others, to see my images. I want to experience the monologue. I want to fight for what I want. I want to be immersed in the experience. Hey it feels so great to say all this out loud.
M. Good. How are you feeling?
T. Lighter. Freer. Less serious about this acting stuff.
M. Good. Now we need to go back to the monologue you’re doing. As an actor you want to feel secure when you’re working, but the character you’re playing doesn’t feel secure at all. What do you imagine the character is going through?
T. My character is afraid and desperate. He is terrified of being caught for a crime he committed and is appealing to his friend for help.
M. Is it possible for you to imagine yourself in this situation, pleading for help from a friend of yours? Can you see your friend sitting in front of you? Can you work to experience the fear of getting caught, the regret for doing a crime? Can you involve yourself ‘as if’ this were true for you right now?
T. Yes I can.
M. Are you able to work from a secure place as an actor in order to experience some of the discomfort and insecurity of the character?
T. Yes I am confident I can.

The Rehearsal

Tim proceeded to explore the monologue with different choices. He involved himself deeply in the person he saw in front of him. He did not work to get anything ‘right’ or please me in any way. He fought hard as his character to get his friend to agree to help him avoid prosecution. Tim began to explore the monologue experientially. He immersed himself in the struggle ‘as if’ he were fighting for his own life. He proceeded to make discoveries about his character and about the relationship he had with his friend. He found deeper tangible links to the situation even though he had never committed a crime. He made deep human connections to the situation and the need.

The Realisation

Suddenly I realised my eyes were no longer sore. The headache had gone. I was completely caught up in the story. Could this be the same piece Tim had been working on a few minutes earlier? His involvement and commitment to the piece had me completely engaged. I had started to care about the characters and was interested to know what happened next. And I realised we had both used our feelings scientifically. We had used them in such a way to determine what felt more and less satisfying. We had used our feelings as a source code to determine what needed to be de-programmed and what needed to be re-programmed.

The Follow-Up

M. How do you feel after exploring your piece with greater freedom?
T. Fantastic. I felt really connected like it was personal. I really needed his help. I saw him struggling when I confessed the crime. I saw how conflicted he was and I experienced deeper conflict myself. I made discoveries about my character. I found out things I never thought about before. I discovered how uncertain and uncomfortable he is. How he truly feels he can get away with it if only he can convince his friend to help him.
M. Yes I am very happy for you and very happy that you experienced so much freedom to immerse yourself in the piece and on top of that make deeper discoveries about situation, relationship and character. That is a real testament for going to that deeper, experiential place. I must thank you for confirming for me the value of such an organic process. One we undertake without the constraints of rightness and correctness. It is such a beautiful irony that we achieve security and engagement in our work when we trust the experience of the immersive state over the tentativeness of the protective state of watchfulness and guardedness. We make bold choices, when we personalise the need and when we engage our audience through immersion.
T. Thank you for deepening my understanding, Martin.
M. And thank you Tim for deepening mine.

Martin Challis © 2006/2015

The Illusion

March 2, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Like you perhaps I am the heathen who sifts through the
hazes of a blood soul sentence. One that is forged in an emptiness that cannot fill or find space between remembering or forgetting past entrenchments.

With the shackles and shapings of exemplary upbringings, coupled with history’s ancestral machining hands I am defined by, predictable to and quintessentially fixed in most certain consciousness.

My thoughts are parabolas of yearning sent in all directions to past and past participial futures. As each return without geometric certainty they are repeatedly sent again – missives to unknown or perhaps unfriendly oracles: what is known is that all go unanswered.

Perhaps endemic to each lived experience is the perfect folly of presumption that it is possible to rewrite the past. The angel’s kindest mercy being to reveal the conundrum for which a state of equilibrium can only be reached by one anointed practice; which is, to accept that transcendence is quite possibly, in and of itself, almost certainly, an illusion.

MChallis @ 2015

Ten Commendments

February 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

One

The body is a song
Beat after beat the drummer keeping time
Saves one beat for you and one for the heart of the world

Two

When humans care for orphaned gorillas
They are human beings – being human
The gorillas
Witness to an endangered species.

Three

Three wise men arrive in Las Vegas. They’re confused. The city of stars accepts their gifts in return for chips and exchanges their camels for Pontiacs.
Eventually the three men run out of goodwill and are asked to leave the star-city.
Now each of then wears self-correcting sunglasses, far more cautious when following the brightness of artificial light.

Four

The world is a box with clear sides
Through this we see the sky dark and the sky light
We see four directions on all horizons
And the constellations that rise and fall
If you shut your eyes and listen carefully
You can hear the lid open every time one of us enters
And one of us leaves.

Five

The lad in the schoolyard solves a problem with the same
Mathematical precision of his father
He counts on his five fingers and divides them
Into one tight fist
With this math he gets a perfect score and
None argue with the result.

Six

When all the world clocks stop ticking.
They will each tell of a different time: during rush hour, before the interview, at the moment of martyrdom, just after take off, when war is declared, the date and time of your birth.
On any given day each one will tell the truth – at least twice.

Seven

Seven sons were seven suns a’shine on everyday
Yet seven suns one day went dark to shine another way
Seven dwarves in darkening hue imminently benign
No longer to bright any sky and none would see the sign

Eight

Eight accounts of starving populations
Eight charity organisations seeking aid
Eight million raised per quarter
Quartered by eight reasons to extract a share
Before the rest is shared to the rest
Who continue to starve.

Nine

Nine millimetre cannon kills you with a slightly larger calibre than eight millimetre cannon. Makes a slightly larger hole, travels slightly quicker, has a slightly longer trajectory, provides a slightly louder thud or thwuk when it hits the target.
This knowledge may not prevent you from coming to harm; but at least if killed by nine millimetre cannon, you’ll die well informed.

Ten

How many cynics does it take to change a light bulb?
As many as it takes to be satisfied with this as an ending.

this is not a poem

February 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

crash the barriers
test the waters
ask the curious question
make a list of to-do’s
include
– put the weapon down:
abuse
glock
razor
fire-cage
gelignite?
whatever
just put them down – if not
how should you proceed?
terror rises in the east
fear rises in the west
does each
respond in kind?
curious word, kind
no kindness in retaliation,
do solutions exist?
crash the barriers
test the waters
grieve the stricken
forgive the horror
whatever ways you decide
remember
this is not a poem.

MChallis © 2015

The Disprovers

January 31, 2015 / / 0 Comments

“In a spiral galaxy, the ratio of dark-to-light matter is about a factor of ten. That’s probably a good number for the ratio of our ignorance-to-knowledge. We’re out of kindergarten, but only in about third grade.”
Vera Rubin

In questioning existence
It’s purpose and
Our place in the universe
The disprover looks for evidence from the Galaxy.

No matter how extraordinary the measurements
Such as the size of the sun and it’s distance from the earth
The ratio of dark to light matter
The number of atoms in each molecule of carbon
The countless number of solar systems
The disprovers find no evidence of purpose or cause.

I wonder if they
might be looking
In the wrong place!

 

MChallis @ 2015

Why Wait for a Crisis

January 31, 2015 / / 1 Comment

My father lay dying. It was 5am in the morning. I leant down and kissed his forehead. I love you dad, I whispered not sure if he registered. I walked over to my mother who had been standing a little away from his bed and held her in my arms for a good while. The taxi would arrive any minute. The plane back to Brisbane departing at 6 am. Whatever happens you’ve done your best mom, I told her. I could see she wasn’t convinced. She had loved this man for over sixty years. A dutiful devoted wife. He is my life she told me. With that I kissed her on the cheek and left her tending to her waning paramour. My mother had nursed him for almost 5 weeks single-handed and as his health declined over that time so had hers. She looked tired and frail. She was afraid.

Before leaving I had counselled her to call for medical assistance. Because of her faith she had not yet done so. Ultimately it was her call as Dad was by now incoherent. As much as I disagreed with her position I respected it was her decision.

Returning to Brisbane that afternoon, I received a phone call from a family friend. He informed me that my mother had finally conceded she was no longer able to care for my father at home by herself. She also conceded that it was time to seek medical assistance. She had called a doctor to the house and he had acted immediately calling an ambulance, which rushed my father to hospital. My friend told me the doctor took one look at him and said; call an ambulance.

Five weeks earlier it turned out, he had experienced kidney failure and that had been the main reason for his demise. He was saved at the last minute by miraculous medical intervention and ultimately recovered in hospital, albeit with some complications. For a man in his mid eighties he did very well and as I  heard, gave the nurses plenty of cheek whenever he got the chance.

Why did my mother and father take so long to call for medical assistance? The reason is that they are practicing Christian Scientists. Part of their faith is that they use the power of prayer for healing. They do not believe in medicine.

Please know that I am not going to get into any derisive commentary about their faith or the way they practice it. I am also not going to attempt to fully explain their convictions or the current practices of this religion. What I do want to discuss is the paradigm of what I perceive to be: a closed mind or a fixed belief causing harm. As you can imagine there has been a lot of soul searching in my family around all this. You can probably imagine the conversations. The polarity occurring between the belief at one end and the non-belief at the other. So much so that for some including my mother there is extreme guilt for calling in medical assistance. At the other end there is extreme anger for her not doing so.  Another polarity is that once medical assistance has been called then all prayer through Christian Science must cease. One excludes the other. I do not understand this and I have to ask, why?

What I do understand is that our thoughts are a powerful source of energy. In a sense, we are what we think. Thoughts can change the world. One has only to attend an Anthony Robbins seminar, listen to Esther Hicks or read the ideas supporting Quantum Physics to appreciate this. One has only to practice it oneself to realise it. I do understand the reasoning behind attending to good thoughts, to working to keep positive attention and in the case of Christian Scientists to read the bible and the Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker-Eddy to affirm and deepen scriptural knowledge.

What I don’t understand is why a practice or faith has to become non-inclusive of other practices or faiths. Especially when in the case of Christian Science, holding exclusively to a belief, clearly had detrimental consequences.

It is certainly a human trait to lock into mindsets and beliefs, which is most likely an attempt to create security in what is perceived as a world of insecurity where anything can happen and usually does. Somehow it seems that we believe that our fixed beliefs will keep us safe. How often does it happen that we hold a fixed idea about something only to have it wrenched from us at the point of crisis? Why wait for crisis?

Some would say this is an ego state that attaches to fixed beliefs in the vain hope crisis will be averted through the enforcement of certainty and control. Controlling beliefs.

To the fixed state it appears that even when the flow of life is interrupted the indication that something is calling for our attention is not regarded as a signal for inquiry or change.

If a more open state of mind is developed to foster sensitivity to the interruption of ‘flow’, might it be possible to also keep ideas about life in a more fluid state? Perhaps it might be possible to move from controlling beliefs to ‘operating beliefs’? Beliefs that represent our values and yet are sensitive to change, to new dynamics, to interruption.

This is not to imply that we should dissolve all morals and ethics, rather, to see that when disorder and disease arise it most likely is a sure-fire sign that something needs our attention.

What I want to say to Christian Scientists is that—is it not possible for a faith that was born around 200 years ago to evolve? Is it not possible that the practice of Christian Science and medicine, be it eastern or western, can become mutually inclusive? Of course there needs to be respect and consideration for different needs. However what I have always experienced as a young man growing up around Christian Science is that medicine and matters to do with the material world became a source of fear. Not to be talked about. Not to be discussed. In my experience the very act of wanting to talk about or discuss this conundrum was shunned. Avoidance won the day.

I realise I am not going to resolve all the issues around dogma and fixed beliefs in one short reflection. I do want to share my experience around this and trust my family will respect the discussion. What ever happens from here I do know this: there has to be a basis of mutual respect and love when dealing with different faiths and beliefs. If my parents had decided not to call for medical help and my father had passed away I would have been very sad of course but ultimately would respect this as, their way. I do not agree with it and would urge anyone in this situation to encourage an alternate course of action.

In my heart I see that it is not about faith-to-faith or intra-faith exclusion, where one practice cannot work with another. I see that the flow of life is inclusive and inter-connected. Perhaps we will all know this one day soon enough. Perhaps even this last statement might constitute an ‘operating belief’.

 

MChallis © 2015

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