Tools For Working With Intensity

I so enjoyed sharing some of The Work this week with participants at Transforming the Way We Gather and Lead. My primary teacher on with The Work is Caitlin Frost. I often hear her voice when I’m planning this teach. She really gifted.

A few headlines:

• I introduced this as a tool for working with intensity. There’s just a lot of reacting going on in society, that then by default, seems to amplify in intensity. Emotions. Provocations. Defense mechanisms. Globally, it seams to be so much about showing a bigger stick and weapon. But this kind of stuff happens at the most minute layers personally and interpersonally all of the time. Intensity underlays all of it.
• Judgements and stresses happen for all of us, and in a nanosecond. Super fast. Without thinking. Even for very thoughtful and aware humans. Catching the default thinking of our brains and emotions is like trying to see one flap of a hummingbird’s wings without aid of high tech cameras.
• The Work of Byron Katie is so often to me about a kind of neurological decolonization. That’s the fancy way of saying it. Our minds get pretty tracked into the nanosecond reality. A more simple way of saying it is that The Work gives us a tool to slow that down and to notice that what seems like only one choice of movie playing within us is actually a megaplex with many movies and choices of movies playing equally true, but contradictory shows.

I’m grateful to have friends and colleagues who are plain smart. I’m grateful to be in learning with others about how to nuance such helpful tools to be responsive to both the inner and outer world in times such as these.