An outcome you cannot argue with

Death & Life by Darius twin


A wide range of psychotherapeutic, spiritual, and extreme sports traditions all have one thing in common. In fact we all have this in common, and no it is not skin, or taxes. It is death.

In our culture death is a strange subject. We are all going to die, but it is not something many of us like to think about very much. Naturally we get reminded fairly regularly as people we know come to the ends of their lives.

We also get to see plenty of death in the media, usually at an abstractly comfortable distance. It could be in the news, or in a TV series where the bad guys are little more than targets for the hero.

Now I have no idea what happens when we die, though I have met plenty of people who have beliefs in this area. Given this uncertainty about our only certainty, living people use death in a number of ways.

Obviously death gets used as a threat, which works less well if you believe that you get some kind of celestial five star service on the other side.

Others use death as a leveler - it links Presidents and beggars, it is something we share, a common facet of our humanity. It can bring us together.

The extreme sports people use the imminent possibility of death to add spice to life. People nearing the ends of their lives often talk of the extraordinary delight they have in the most ordinary things that they encounter.

We can also use death as a way to examine our priorities and values. As Buddhists put it 'the only certainty in life is death, and the time of our death is uncertain. Knowing that, what shall I do now?'

As a recent training came to a close, I used a meditation on death to mark its ending. It is something that I learned from the fool while we were training people in a petrochemical company. I don't know where he learned it, he may have simply made it up.

Some of the students asked if I could record some the meditations that we use, because they find it easier to follow this way. It seems a little perverse that the first one I record should be on death, but as Stephen Covey puts it, begin with the end in mind. Also I recognize that it is something that I could benefit from doing more often.



You can listen online, or download and share, as you will.

An exercise to increase Physical Intelligence

I recently started doing this in a quiet moment. It is very simple exercise I've put together and decided to call Kinesthetic streaming. It is similar to a number of other techniques. In doing it the first time I gained some interesting insights into how I think about and use my body.

But first what do I mean by physical intelligence? Well I’m talking about awareness of the structures in the body, bones, muscles, tendons, and visceral organs. Parallel to this is an awareness of emotions, energy and metaphors within the body. Finally there is a linking between awareness of these structures and the ability to move and therefore act, in the world.

I’ll describe the exercise, then write a little about some experiences I associate with it and then about some techniques that are similar.

So now the exercise…

1. Close your eyes
2. Describe to your self your physical sensations, in as much detail and as rapidly as you can. Carry on for from 5-10 minutes.
3. Notice if there are parts of your body that you simply did not notice? Notice any other patterns.
4. Deliberately begin to include those parts of you that are normally outside of your awareness.
5. Re-orient to the outside world.

In doing this you may find you are aware of more than pure feeling. Images, memories, metaphors, synesthesias may well all be woven in. The important thing is that you find yourself discovering more about how you represent your body to yourself, you update your map of your body, you gain faster deeper access to sensation.

The use of words in this exercise act like a bridge between different parts of your mind. They are a focus that helps keep you in the exercise rather than drifting into a daydream. Another consequence is an increase your ability to use words to describe the realm of interior physical space.

For variety you can do this exercise in different postures (sitting, standing, cross legged and whatever else you might want to try). Observe how the postures affect your attention and sensation.

You can also experiment with longer, or shorter periods of practise. The shorter ones could just be a way of checking in with your state in the midst of daily activity.


Some experiences sources and parallels

When I think of this exercise I remember a conversation I once had with the fool. He explained how he would meet various Yogis and martial artists, and they would talk about qi, or prana or use other names for subtle energy. He often didn’t find these people either grounded or practical, and challenged them.

‘So you can feel your subtle energy. Mmmmm, now tell me, what is the sensation on the inside edge of the third toe on your left foot. If you can’t tell me that, if you not aware of your physical body how can you talk about your subtle body?’

I agree. In martial arts we can talk about qi, but in the beginning it's more helpful to think about, time and measure, angles, momentum and vectors. Once these are clear it's time to get into 'energy'. If you focus on qi without getting past some basic physical training then anyone with a half decent straight left will be quite capable of dishing out a revolutionary experience for you!

Another person I associate with this exercise is a man who I met on an NLP training. The trainers (not me in this case) referred often to paying attention to somatic information - feelings. This man had been trained from an early age in the Cartesian tradition in which somatic information was of no use, an animal illusion.

It is not that he did not have feelings. He just had lost his ability to notice them, or value them. However his thinking mind was still able to notice that the apparently intelligent people around him did have feelings, did value them, and could use them in ways which intrigued, but escaped him.

During a break he confided to me

‘These feelings they are talking about, I don't know what they mean. I think that feelings are accessible to women, but not to men.’

I nearly choked on my tea. I’ve spent years immersed in physical awareness, swimming in kinesthetic as one person described the experience. It has taken me a some time to balance that strong kinesthetic with other ways of thinking and acting in the world. I am a man and I am aware of feelings – who was he to imply that was impossible, dammnit!

I didn't choke on my tea because I recognised that under his blanket statement was a yearning. He recognised somehow that much of his energy was caught up in keeping out the perceived chaos of the body. That meant keeping out much of life at the same time. He chose me to talk to because he recognised me as an exception to his rule, and thus a way into a different set of possibilities. I can't remember what I said, and I did not have this exercise to offer then. It will be a regular part of my training from now on.

Kinesthetic streaming is quite similar to self hypnosis exercises where you make statements describing sensory reality, interspersed with suggestions to go into a trance state. One difference is that typically in trance exercises is the rhythm, which is linked with the breath and tends to slow down. In this exercise the idea is to maintain a rapid pace, and no suggestions are involved.

It is also a very similar to Win Wenger’s image streaming exercise – in which internal imagery is described as rapidly as possible. Win claims that daily practise of image streaming permanently raise the IQ.

It's too early to say for sure, but I think that regular practise of this exercise may permanently change the way you relate to your body. Since our bodies are the medium through which we experience the world, and through which we act on the world that could mean a lot.

This is a new exercise. I'm interested in how people can use this and develop it. If you decide to try this out I'll be very happy to read about your experiences.

So if you close your eyes now, what do you feel?

the fool in the laboratory

Several years ago I was in a small park in Paris talking to the fool. The sun was shining on an ancient acacia, while undercover police were sneaking around to leap on a couple of lads smoking something more fragrant than a cigarette. A large group of teenage tourists from Portugal were joking around with each other.

Before I carry on I should introduce the fool. He got his name through an accident of birth. His life is a series of radical experiments, financed by the large fees he charges some of the world’s multinational companies for his coaching and consulting services. Funnily enough it’s the effects of his bizarre experiments that make him desirable to his employers.

He once stated proudly to me that he had been fired by all his major clients because he was committed to speaking the unutterable, and was willing to make a mess that employees of the companies were unwilling to do, if he thought that it was of service to do so. All of them had rehired him later on once they had realised the value of what he had said. All of them except one – a major department of the US government. They changed their minds and asked him back a couple of years after he told me that story. I suppose government bureaucracies often react more slowly than multinationals.

Though not a Buddhist, he is not afraid to talk about the roles wisdom and compassion to chief executives. He can do this partly because he is not afraid of being fired. Also because at the levels of management he works, his clients are very intelligent, very experienced and recognise linear thinking often doesn’t create the results they’d like. They appreciate that to look outside their usual sources of understanding and decision making is essential to keep progressing, and the fool lives far outside their frame of references, but can also speak in their language.

So we were in the park and the fool was recovering from an experiment which had exploded. Emotionally, it had had left him a little bit like a cartoon mad scientist staggering out from the smoking remains of his laboratory, clutching a test tube and with frazzled hair sticking in all directions.

After a period of silence he said wistfully "Ed, you know if there is one thing I’d like to have understood earlier, it’s how the way you are from moment to moment, over a period of years, creates your life."

I nodded. I was trying to work out where the fool lived. He had stuff in storage i
on a number of continents, I wasn’t sure if he had an apartment somewhere, or several, or who was living in them. To some extent he finances other peoples radical life experiments too.

"But I didn’t realise back then, and now I’m living with the consequences of years of the accumulated habits of thought and their results."

I nodded again and gestured to the young Portugese tourists ‘Do you think if we told them about this they’d listen? Unlike you," I teased, "it’s not too late for them."

The fool shook his head sadly.

"But what if we told them that if they paid attention to their moment to moment state of being they’d get laid more. Perhaps that would get their interest?" I don’t always raise the tone of the conversation, but to the fool, sex, death, business and spirituality are all so intimately linked that I can leap from any subject to any other and I know he’ll follow the thread.

He perked up for a moment "Well that has a better chance of getting their attention. I know a spiritual teacher who talks about sex for just that reason." After that he told me how he had an escapist habit of reading ancient Greek philosophers and proceeded to discuss the cosmological mode of a particularly obscure one with me.

I understand what he means about the moment to moment way of being. On the one hand it’s obvious. Spend four hours an evening watching TV and you probably won’t have much time left over for developing skills, doing sports, building your business or keeping up with your friends.

But on a shorter timescale our states and habits of thought also affect us. How do you track something as ephemeral, and as seductively involving, as a thought?

Well there’s a very old answer to that question, meditation. Taking some time daily to bring the attention back to a simple part of physical awareness like the breath can create a distance, a perspective that allows you to observe the act of thinking. It has some great measurable physiological benefits as well (lower blood pressure, and a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s disease among others, click here for a more comprehensive overview).

Of course meditation is not strictly speaking part of NLP, but the two are related in some ways. NLP has been defined as ‘the study of the structure of subjective experience’ and meditation is all about the observation (and possibly transcendence) of subjective experience. I certainly consider the two complimentary.

So while meditation is a great exercise to create distance between thought and awareness, NLP has great tools for acting on thought itself. The original language pattern of NLP, the meta-model, is all about teasing out the ways in which thoughts channel our attention. The meta-model provides an intelligent system of questioning to open the thinking, so attention can be paid to what’s more important.

It’s an interesting exercise to spend some time writing down or recording yourself talking about some set of issues in your life. The writing, or recording gives some distance, rather like meditation. Then you can look through to see the patterns of meta model violations in your language, and begin to ask questions, open up the fields of your awareness.

The fool may have wished that he had realised the importance of how his way of being from moment to moment created his life when he was younger. The aliveness and the intensity of the realisation he shared that day was the result of years of work, observation and experiment. I understood what he said, but I suspect the fool understood at another level to me. We can continually get to deeper, or higher levels of awareness and apply them to daily reality.

Perhaps in twenty years time we’ll be in park in Portugal watching a group of middle aged French tourists and after a period of silence he’ll say "Ed, you know if there’s one thing I wished I realised when I was younger…"

In the laboratories of our lives the experiment has already started for all of us. What results are you getting? Is it time to change the nature of how you are experimenting?