What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Concepts and Experiences
April 19 2011
When something is explained in words, it’s a concept. The mind takes it in and understands it conceptually and intellectually.
There’s a big difference between understanding something conceptually and experiencing it.
Think of riding a bicycle. Imagine that the most expert bike-rider in the world has explained how to ride a bike to you. You believe you understand.
If you’ve never ridden a bicycle, it doesn’t matter how much expert advice you’ve understood intellectually. You’re going to struggle to keep your balance the first few times you get on the bike.
That’s because all that expert advice was conceptual. How to ride a bike isn’t yet a being-level understanding for you. The only way for you to understand at the being level is to experience it for yourself. Before you can really get it, you have to feel the difference between balance and imbalance, discover how slow you can actually go before you need to put a foot down, and learn what it means to take a turn at high speed.
And you have to experience for yourself what these things mean for you. Your best friend may have a greater tolerance for risk than you do. So she loves taking turns at top speed, even though she knows the wheels may skid out from under her. You, on the other hand, may prefer a slower pace.
Because of her physical configuration, she may find it comfortable to ride bent over the handlebars — whereas your body shape might feel better in a more upright position.
So each of you has the shared experience called “riding a bicycle” and you have the personal experience of what riding a bicycle feels like for you, and how it works best for you.
Concepts can’t replace experience
Concepts can be useful in helping you arrive at your own experiential understanding more quickly, since you don’t have to start from scratch and figure it all out for yourself. (Imagine looking at a bicycle if you’d never seen anyone ride it or had anyone explain it to you! How would you make sense out of what it is and what to do with it?)
But all the conceptual understanding in the world can never take the place of actual experience.
And all the explanations in the world can never create your experience in someone else’s deepest understanding. Your friend may nod and say she understands why you ride upright ... but in the end, it is, and can only be, an intellectual, logical understanding, not a being-level understanding.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with any of this. It’s part of the wonderful, miraculous nature of our world that experience is so marvellously unique.
What have you experienced?
My point is, you can read these articles and think you understand what I’m saying. You can think you know what I mean. And you can think that my suggestions will — or won’t — or might — work for your specific situation.
You might have taken a suggestion and tried it out. Perhaps it didn’t feel the way you expected, or maybe it didn’t work out exactly the way I described it (or the way you understood my description). If so, you might feel like my suggestion wasn’t right for you — or that you somehow “did it wrong.”
Or there may have been any number of reasons why you decided not to try a suggestion. It could be that it simply wasn’t pertinent for you — I write about a wide variety of circumstances, and of course not every one of them will resonate for every one of my readers! On the other hand, it might have been so pertinent for your situation that it felt too close to home and even too scary to try out.
Or you may have been working with some of these ideas — and you may have found new perspectives and openings into new experiences of yourself and your life.
Take it deeper
Whatever experiences you’ve had and choices you’ve made in reading these articles and exploring the suggestions, I want to encourage you to take another step, to go a little deeper.
What would happen if you selected one suggestion from one article that was especially meaningful to you, and devoted a week — or even a month — to working towards a deeper experience of that suggestion?
Work to make it your personal experience, rather than your conceptual understanding of my description. Bring it into a felt sense instead of an intellectual or logical concept. Adapt it to be uniquely yours, so that it works for who you are and how you feel.
“Sometimes I think I know what you mean when you ask me a question or suggest that I try a different perspective,” a client said. “And then I work with the practice you’ve suggested, or I allow myself to really inhabit an experience or take some time to live with a question you’ve posed. And something shifts — something happens at the gut level, in a deep, internal place, and I realize that I’d had no real understanding at all.”
As she describes, the difference between thinking you understand something, and actually living it — working with it, experiencing it, feeling it in your heart and gut — is very different.
It’s the difference between holding a concept — and having an experience.
“You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.” Albert Camus (1913-1960), French Algerian author, philosopher, and journalist.
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