IS: Growth as Object
Upcoming open events:
- Saturday, Apr 13: Exploratory Series session #1 — Growth as Object with James Baker
- Friday, Apr 19: Open-to-all Office Hours
all start @ 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). Core Calls on Sundays for members run every week through June 23.
Exploratory Series full lineup:
- April 13 — Growth as Object with James Baker
- April 27 — Dialogos with Romeck van Zeijl
- May 11 — Alexander Technique with Michael Ashcroft
- May 25 — Feldenkrais Method - Awareness through Movement with Seth Dellinger
- June 8 — Metta Meditation with Tasshin Fogleman
- June 22 — Gendlin Focusing with Jessica Fan
Yes that's my name on April 13th. Not what I planned originally, but I've embraced two challenges as opportunity: avoiding the false-humility "I shouldn't" regarding what I have to offer, and then trusting that the essence of it will find adequate expression as I attempt to draw it out.
We're fortunate to have five lovely guest teachers approaching, who will be teaching us well-known (at least in these parts) practices we know we're eager to learn. "Growth as Object" isn't like that — it's a finger, a pointer, to something developmental, meta-level, and subtle. I'm trying to point to the pattern of seeing-and-growing that emerges across many practices and sessions. I don't have it turned into a pithy practice itself - all I know to do with it is storytelling about concrete examples, visualization of a "zooming" mental motion, and hoping that the x-ray vision insight of seeing-the-pattern makes itself visible.
A good alternate title would be "seeing (and befriending) the patterns in transformative personal development." Aha, but why is "seeing the pattern" such a good thing? Because generalize/abstract-and-then-reapply is a powerful technique of domain masters! A master pianist is not a virtuoso merely because their fingers hit the right keys so quickly, but because they can play the soul of the music. The same phenomenon applies everywhere: to truly master a truth/insight, one must learn the deep structure, the essence, the form underlying the surface details. It's what makes these different-looking things similar, and how we can then spot the similar opportunities where others might not see anything.
The "as Object" part refers to Adult Development lingo (Kegan? I think Kegan), the subject-to-object shift that names the state transition from "being subject to [a thing]" to "taking/having as object [a thing]" — confusingly, IMHO, because the grammar itself shifts from being-acted-on to being-the-actor. Anyway, whatever the label, the concept is definitely sazen people who know it can go "oh yeah, that thingamajig!" while no words seem to do it for those that don't see it.
Yes, I'm coming back around to validating the two things I know to try, this Saturday, to kick off an "Exploratory" series with an active co-sensing exploration: Bringing our examples to light, and lining them up next to each other. We've all lived growth, we've grown up and transformed our sense-&-meaning-making-frame, we've done it and have access to our experience of it. And together, together we can triangulate on our experiences, bring ourselves into the abstract/structural layer of sensing, and refine our seeing. There are signals, signs everywhere, embedded in our senses, if we have eyes capable of perceiving.
Join me on Saturday to explore together?
Cheers,
James