Someone wrote to me recently to say they had finished the intellectual content of my subscription curriculum and were now, finally, turning to the embodiment work. Recorded practices that prime the body and the emotions.
I used to look down on this order. I want people to just learn to use the body as a wand. To take in the lessons with a nervous system that’s fully online. But I have come to understand it as often necessary. People need a large amount of logical mindset shifting to get into my work. When you have lived your entire life thinking one way you need a moment to catch up.
They noted, almost as an aside, that they recognized the embodiment work was probably the most important part. Which is a real win for the curriculum in my book. I spent so many years thinking this work couldn’t be self-study and now I have people validating it all the time as possible.
The risk of self-study though is allowing people to intellectualize my content. To believe they understand it without taking them into living it in coaching.
There is a way of approaching self-actualization that looks exactly like pursuing it. You read the books. You do the coursework. You “open up” in talk therapy. You identify what you want, map the obstacles (starting with your poor mom), develop a framework for evaluating your options.
It feels like progress.
In most areas of life, it is progress. The mind is a remarkable instrument and it has solved a great many problems.
Real human desire is not one of them.
I know this from my own life, from the years I spent treating myself as a problem to be worked on. If I could just understand the pattern, I thought. If I could just get clear on what I was really after. I brought real rigor to this. I read carefully and reflected earnestly and came to what felt like conclusions. And then I would find myself exactly where I started, only now with better language for describing why I was stuck.
