Practices From Week 1 Phone Call

1. Here Nowing
There are three realms in which you can notice anything. There is the realm of whats outside of
you -- the external realm that includes everything you can sense with your sense organs. Theres
the internal realm -- everything that you can feel inside of your own physical body. And then
theres the real of your thoughts. So if you imagine three intersecting circles, those are the realms
in which you can be aware.
Here's a demonstration of what it's like to move through those realms without a specific plan or
direction: I see the heater vent in front of me. I notice a little nervousness in my chest. I can feel
my feet in my shoes. It felt good to just pause and take a breath. I notice my breath right now is a
little shallow. I feel the phone in my hand with the light reflecting and shadows on the wall. Im
feeling energized."
The key thing to recognize is that youre not supposed to move in any particular order or
proportion through the realms of the internal, the external, and thoughts. Youre just supposed to
go wherever your consciousness takes you. So you could be in just one of those realms for a
whole minute -- the suggested length of this practice -- or you might find yourself circulating
through two or all three of them. Theres no way to do it wrong. Youre just letting it unfold and
reporting it.
Some people who have a very easy time turning their experience into words, either silently
within or when practicing with a partner. They might say to me, Well, I can actually do that, but
if I have to talk about it, then I lose the flow. So please note that you dont have to speak in full
sentences. I could have said, Thinking, breathing and that would have been enough. So use
words only to the extent that it allows you to follow the flow in this exercise, and let them go if
they're going to cause you to tighten up and lose the freedom of your flowing consciousness.
One more thing to note: In the middle of this practice and you might say something like,
Thinking, feeling self-conscious. Nothing is really happening. This feels uncomfortable. I feel
stupid. I cant stand this. Now, if you got to a place like that, what I want you to do is Here Now
that as well so that it just becomes another thing thats happening and if you speak that, Feeling
self-conscious, wanting this to end, bookshelf suddenly youre right back into the flow of
your experience.
If you do this practice with a partner, that person is meant to be a fully-open vessel. He or she
takes in your experience with a big, Yes, I hear you, but absolutely in silence, with no words
necessary. After a minute is up, you and your partner switch roles and repeat.

2. What I Resist The Most

This optional practice is meant to be done with three people. There's an easy part and a hard part
to this practice. The easy part is that youre just going to be talking to the other two people about
things you tend to resist the most. It could be traffic, a family conflict, something with your
health, the environment, politic, but all youre really doing is having a free-flowing conversation
just as if you were in a coffee house talking to two friends.
And youre just going to make sure that everybody gets a chance to share one. So youll start up
by saying, What I resist the most is and then youll listen, go to the next person, then go to
the third person. And after everyone has shared one thing, let the sharing become natural and
unforced.
The hard part: When you are listening to the other people in your group, see if you can widen the
circle of awareness to include what youre feeling in your internal real. So maybe if a person is
talking about traffic and you have real commute issues, you notice your hands are sweating a
little bit or youre breathing a little more shallow. But you might not actually be having any
response connected to what a person is saying. Maybe youre just hungry or tired.
So youre not noticing just what is arising in response, but rather whatever is actually present.
You could even just realize your knee itches and that would be perfect. Youre just widening
your circle of awareness to include that and youre not talking about that with the other people in
the group. Youre doing that silently. And then also, when youre speaking, you want to
concentrate as usual on getting out the words like you do ordinarily, but also widen your circle of
awareness to see if you can include whats going on.
Are you a little nervous to share? Are you feeling that in your chest or in your stomach? Maybe
what youre talking about brings up some emotion, or maybe you just have some residual tension
from the day in your shoulder. So theres nothing youre looking for. You cant do it wrong.
Youre just noticing with special awareness by widening the circle of what youre paying
attention to as youre in this conversation to whats going on in the internal realm.
If possible, set a timer to go off every minute over ten minutes. Let the chime call you back to
your body, because once you start talking, its so easy to forget the second part of the exercise.
-------------In Week 1 weve been focusing a lot on resistance. It turns out that theres only one thing we
resist, and that is our emotion.
Think about it. The reason that we dont like or dont want something, we get into a prolonged
contraction about it is because of the way it makes us feel. If it made us feel good in any way,
thered be no reason to resist it. So what we resist are difficult or challenging emotions. Thats
what the core of all of our resistance. So since we want to learn how to recognize and release our
resistance, really were working with emotions. And that of course, connects to vulnerability as
well see more and more over the weeks ahead.

Here's a working definition of what I mean by "emotion."

An emotion is a message from your mind delivered to your physical body as a sensation.
Notice that I didnt write "a message from your brain." That's because while the message could
come from your brain, the whole of our mind is distributed throughout the body -- heart, gut, etc.
-- and the messages of emotions can come from any many places. Another thing to notice is that
emotions are physical. The only place that you will ever notice the arising, the moving, shifting,
and dissipating and departing of an emotion is in your physical body.
So if you want to be in tune with your emotions so that you can be more present and vulnerable
to yourself and then also by extension to other people, you need to, as someone once said, take
the elevator downstairs.
And thats what were going to be doing a lot of in the rest of the Vulnerability Project. When
the process is working well, you receive the message thats delivered as a sensation. And to be
clear, "the message" isnt meaning or interpretation. The message is just the actual physical
sensation, the swirling in your stomach or the welling of tears or the tightness in your throat.
And when you receive that message by feeling it fully, then your system knows...message sent...
message received. Therefore, there is no more need for that emotion to be present in your body,
in your system, and so it dissipates. And when it dissipates, it leads you in an expanded state
present, alive, and connected. Now, that doesnt always mean that the emotion is going to be all
gone, but even if its till resonating within you or ebbing and flowing, just by connecting to it in
that way, you expand into fullness of presence. Even though this is a goalless process, thats
where we want to get to.
Were not trying to receive the message to get rid of the emotion because then we would be in
more resistance. We want to get the message of the emotion in our bodies so we can become
more fully expanded and present. Thats how its supposed to work. And a lot of our exploration
is going to be about what happens when it doesnt work that way so that we can really reverse
that and get to a smoother, more consistent experience of it working that way.
When youre in resistance to an emotion, your life is run by that resistance. You make choices
that arent in your highest good, but you make choices that are about not feeling that emotion
which I would say is the opposite of freedom. Freedom is knowing that you can and will feel any
emotion that moves through you and comes to your awareness, and therefore, youre able from a
place of expansion and presence to make choices and responses to your environment, to whats
happening that are in your highest good and the highest good of others.
So it turns out that recognizing and releasing your resistance to emotions is what creates for you
your ultimate freedom to be who you are, to connect to yourself, and also to connect to others
and the world around you.
That is easy for some emotions and excruciatingly difficult for others. So Id like to ask you to
just consider this question. What is one emotion that is particularly difficult for you to feel? This

could be an emotion that when it arises, you really instantly contract, pull away, resist, deny,
suppress because its too painful, or destruct as well; or it could be one that you dont even have
that experience about because you go to great lengths to not put yourself in a position where you
would even have to have that experience.
So for example, for me, Ive recognized that humiliation is one of the key emotions that I have
trouble feeling. So for instance, if I make a little mistake and I can make a joke about it, we can
all understand, Thats funny. Were all human. And then I kind of get back on top, thats fine.
But if I make some kind of mistake in which everyone knows it, sees it fully, and I can't make it
better, I get a wormy feeling inside of my belly which is one of the hardest things for me to feel.
Some of the most commonly difficult emotions to feel are: unworthiness-shame-not good
enough; anger-frustration; hurt-rejection-abandonment; failure-humiliation; fear; and loss.
Finally, there's also love. This may seem strange, since we all want and need to experience love.
But often there are people who had love come with other really much more difficult experiences.
For them love was messy, love was mixed.
3. Accepting Self Assessment
At this point you might have a persistent thought that you're not going to be able to do the course
right. The truth is, there's no way to do it wrong. But we all have a part of our brain that is
constantly assessing how were doing, and that is convinced there's a flaw to find.
If we let that assessing part of our brain glue itself to us, then well always be tense and not able
to relax fully into presence. So whenever that "I cant do it right" thought comes up, try
responding like this: Okaythere is that thought. Let me include it, allow it to be just one part
of this experience. I dont have to either agree with it, disagree with it, or fight against it in any
way."
Even though this self-assessment is hard-wired into our brains, it softens when you get proficient
at meeting it this way. Please don't take my word for it, but rather see for yourself. Give it about
a hundred tries or so, and then notice if any shift has taken place.