Staying Engaged

Sometimes all that is required to resolve an issue is genuine curiosity, some amusement, and a willingness to stay engaged.  I went into the kitchen last week to grab a snack and to let people know I had arranged a dance lesson for the folks in our house from a couple of noted teachers in our community.  Once there, though, it seemed apparent there was tension brewing.  I asked one of my housemates in the kitchen if anything was wrong.  She said she wanted to talk to me.  So I told her I would be sitting in the dining room eating my snack if she wanted to find me there.

She came and sat down, and within minutes a second woman also joined us with her dinner plate.  As it turns out, the thing that was upsetting the first woman was an interaction she had had a couple hours earlier with the second woman.  I could see that they both had a lot of charge so I asked them to tell me what happened, just the facts.  The first one began and before long the second one was correcting her with her version of the incident.  The emotional charge began leaking out all over the place.

Normally, I would connect with the charge and add to it with my own frustration about needing to fix it and mostly feeling inept.  This time I experimented with just staying with the facts, which allowed for a state of equanimity and a natural curiosity.  As the story unfolded, it began to emerge that there were several people involved as the incident centered around preparing a meal for the house.  Several of those people happened to wander through and added their own angle on the incident.  Each additional perspective added not only a new piece of information, thus filling out the story, they also added a richness to the story in the experience of retelling.  As each new piece was added, I would jokingly exclaim, “Ah, the plot thickens!”

With each new revelation, the charge was dissipating as our impromptu game of Clue became far more entertaining.  Finally a voice came from the other side of the wall, an adjacent room where another housemate was reading and listening.  He exclaimed, “I wasn’t even there and now it’s my fault?!”  At this point, we all just had to laugh.

After the laughter subsided, many of us recognized that [1] that everyone had done their part to have things be the way they were and no one had acted with bad intentions. At worst, some one(s) had acted thoughtlessly.; and [2] almost everyone’s actions were motivated by care.  We came to that realization by using a technique we picked up from Cindy which involved tracking down frame after frame of the “crime scene” and dissipating a whole bunch of charge along the way.  We got curious, we stayed engaged, and in the end we found more love than had been there before.

Intimacy in Group Living – Living Out Loud

“It’s much safer to have the goal of intimacy than to actually pursue it.” George

This statement rang true for me, as I’m sure it does for many. I like having lofty goals – “more love in my life” “more intimacy”. I get to feel like I’m a good student, a better person. To actually do it, to even begin to take steps to achieve it, is far less glamorous. Mostly it has felt like practicing a foreign language this pursuit of intimacy. To actually say out loud what I am thinking with little or no editing has often felt awkward and/or scary. It began, though, as an experiment. A few months ago, I decided to increase the amount of intimacy I experience in my relationships.

In a earlier post I identified trust as a key component of intimacy. Truly, I don’t recommend such an experiment with just anyone. Choose someone with whom you have built up a good deal of trust and solid communication. I often say someone with whom you have a lot of M&M’s in the jar. I chose someone who I know loves me undeniably and has withstood the test of time to participate with me in my experiment. That person was George. I was also motivated by a desire for increased intimacy with him which I had seen most often lead to more affinity.

I notice that I tend to avoid uncomfortable interactions by simply withholding communication. I have no doubt that I am communicating in other ways, ways which tend to garner less reaction which often suits me. I really dislike confrontation. To overtly express irritation or pain or embarrassment. for instance, was quite new and rather awkward, so having someone with a track record of acceptance was vital.

I was pleased with my initial forays into my experiment. At moments when there were long silences, I would simply start saying out loud the thoughts I was thinking anyway. To my surprise, I started having juicy conversations that I was having with another person instead of the same old conversations I was having with myself. There were many instances when I worried that George’s reaction would be negative, like when I would talk about someone to whom I was attracted or a concern about a purchase I had made. Mostly though his reactions were of varying levels of interest. Sometimes he would even thank me for telling him something I thought he already knew like how much I appreciated something he did. Then there were a couple of times he asked me to stop talking on a particular topic because it was more information than he wanted.

Cindy said this would happen. I mentioned to her in the last Darshan that I was concerned that I might reveal more than my friends wanted to hear. She said I should trust them that they would let me know.

In general my experiment has resulted in an easy closeness between George and I that has increased our confidence in the context of the relationship. I am less concerned with how I am coming off when I am expressing myself to him. My attention has even shifted away from myself a bit and more on to him. Because I am not expending as much energy in editing myself to look good, I have more available to consider him and how my communication is affecting him. The level of trust between us has increased both in terms of being seen and accepted, and also in the amount of congruent reality we are creating between us within our relationship. Another benefit I am seeing is that I am being even more authentic with my friends and housemates.

My habitual behavior remains. More often than not, I continue to edit and present a good front, which is useful in some circumstances. Yet I am also encouraged by the instances where I remember my goal for more intimacy and love, and so employ my practice of revealing my thoughts.

Intimacy in Group Living: Truth and Trust

How do you get closer to people in your life? Safety or Risk?

This was the really good question one of my friends and member of our extended community posed on facebook a couple weeks ago.  I weighed in among the many useful responses with “ Tell the truth.”  Another good friend living in our community for over 30 years added, “Know who you trust and tell them the truth.”  Trust and truth are key elements of intimacy in my experience.

Telling the truth can be a daring move.  It means putting all your cards on the table. Telling the truth almost always means revealing something about yourself, even if the truth you are expressing is about the other person.  You are still exposing a thought or an opinion that is something of yourself.  Last night one of my housemates gave another some feedback about how a communication she made hurt his feelings.  In telling her the truth about how her communication landed, he exposed a sensitive part of himself.  He didn’t have to say anything at all to her.  I had witnessed the conversation he was talking about and it was indeed civil, but a little rough.  It’s the kind of thing I typically chalk it up to “that’s just how she is”.  That is an attitude of resignation.  It doesn’t allow us to be closer.  In fact it creates distance as it becomes another slightly charged piece of communication I have withheld and is added to the pile of other withheld communications between us. Instead, he chose to be closer by exposing his hurt in a fairly neutral manner, and diffusing and the charge that could have grown between them.  That’s one way to get closer.  Pure and simple. Tell the truth.

A significant piece of this story, though, is trust.  I know this man.  He does not give unsolicited feedback very often.  I also know he really enjoys this woman, his friend, and would genuinely like to be closer to her.  Over the years, they have built a track record with one another that began with small bits of communication and later feedback that resulted in more interactions that felt increasingly comfortable. They built a certain level of trust.  They had a pretty good idea how the other was going to respond.  Moreover, they knew they had the same goal.  The same goal shared by almost all of us who live here, which is to have fun and have increasingly pleasurable relationships with ourselves and each other.

You do not have to live in a group to have relationships where trust is present. However, what I have experienced is that I have more relationships in which there is a bedrock of trust strong enough for me to risk exposing myself, telling the truth and being willing to hear it.  In-to-me-you-see.  Cliché, I know, but relevant none-the-less.

Not For Everyone

Community is on the rise. Google “intentional community” and you’ll get a bunch of co-housing sites. I explored co-housing myself over 10 years ago. After trying and failing a couple of times to put together group houses, I still thought surely co-housing is the way to go. It didn’t keep my interest because the focus seemed to be on limiting the potential bad, and there wasn’t much actual relating. Nonetheless it could be a safe option for many people. You don’t have to get too close to anyone and you can maintain a semblance of the American dream in the form of real estate ownership. On-the-other-hand, a bunch of people living in one house, now that’s a real challenge.

On our block there are at least four other houses in which rooms are being rented to multiple unrelated individuals. It cuts down on the cost of housing and you have additional social opportunities. Over the years, I’ve talked to dozens of people who have spent time in such arrangements. Almost nobody talks about how much money they saved. Mostly they talk about how easy it was for relationships to break down and how hard it was to recover them. I’m usually the persoon nodding her head in agreement. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. I have a vivid memory of seven people sitting in a circle in a gorgeous redwood paneled living room while a young woman sniffles about one of the other women not liking her. The other five people coming from a variety of backgrounds and personal growth vehichles are groping for something useful to say or do. The very next month, we gave notice on the rental and we all scattered, most of us to the solace of individual apts and cottages.

Around here we like to say with a wry chuckle that living in a Morehouse is not for everyone. More than once over the past couple of years, I have stared at the ceiling above my bed and said to myself, “I’m not going to make it.” My friends on facebook will confirm this. I think of myself as sensitive, easily hurt, and mostly a wuss. I abhor conflict and confrontation. I often forget that conflict is going to happen when your rub up against so many people in close proximity.

That’s what I love about living in a Morehouse, specifically, the Oakland Morehouse. We place a premium on communication and civility. A variety of forms are valued from gossip to withholds*. We talk about what we’re going to talk about. Beyond being effective in landing our communications with one another, we also have the goal of it being sweeter between us.

In addition, we really do believe everyone is 100% responsible for their lives and whatever shows up in it. It’s not that easy finding a buyer for your victim story – how someone did you wrong – in a Morehouse. Most likely you will get some acknowledgement for your angst, but then it will be quickly followed by a conversation about how everyone is perfect, what did you do to create the current circumstance given that you are the master creator of your universe, and what could you say or do differently to get your goal.

The great thing about living in an intentional community that has been around for over 40 years is that you have a variety of viewpoints available to you from people who have been wherever you find yourself. Moreover, Morehousers love sharing their viewpoints on most anything. We consider it form of entertainment, like a good TV show, watching our friends stumble and recover. We call this bouncing. We know everyone falls down from time to time, what’s compelling is how fast you get back up, reaching for the next most fun thing or something good. That’s the bounce.

To live in a Morehouse, you got to be willing to set aside your angst and get back on the on the field of pursuing fun.

* a withhold is the extent to which you have a thought or feeling that you decide to withhold because of positive or negative charge.

Best Job I’ve Ever Had

Almost everyday I catch myself smiling or giggling to myself that this is my job. All the fun stuff I was doing before – working on the website, mulling over the business, going to Mark groups, doing Effect for courses, throwing parties, conspiring with my girlfriends for fun, investigating my life and reporting, organizing people, gossiping, being absurdly happy – all this is my job now. This is without a doubt the best gig I have ever had, and I have had some really cool positions from corporate organizational development in the era of the “learning organizations” to editor of a metaphysical magazine. The Housemother position allows me to apply what I enjoyed the most in previous careers: exploring how groups work best and playing with energy. Moreover, I get to do it in a context where everything and everyone is already perfect and now we’re just having fun.

Many days it feels like I just won the lottery, Some of my best adventures have happened in this place. First Vic, and now Cindy have had enough attention on me to serve up my dreams on silver platter. I hope I’m in a position to do that for someone someday, or maybe I already am.

Perfection in the Context of Group Living

Perfection, the idea that we are all right, beings, has been on my mind lately. It is the cornerstone of the Morehouse philosophy. There is a private course anyone can take in which teachers from Lafayette Morehouse argue for your perfection while you spew all the reasons you have stashed in your head about why you are not perfect all the time, or before . . . or back when . . . or if . . . . It’s called a Presentation. I’ve had this course. I proudly wear the pendant you get when you complete the course around my neck.

Lately what I have been contemplating is other people’s perfection. As House mother, I have a great excuse to hold the most loving view point in the house. To me this means remembering that everyone in the house is perfect and right the way that they are, including me. If someone in our house does something offensive, like not keeping their agreements they’ve made with their housemates, the knee-jerk response would be to think that person is wrong and bad person for not considering the impact of their actions on their fellow housemates. There are other alternatives.

It seems an important element of the concept of perfection is that we are not our actions. Perfect people do and say things that are not in agreement with their stated goals or earlier agreements. I have observed that everyone I live with is basically employing their best strategy for navigating any given situation in any given moment. They are doing or saying what has worked for them in the past. If the strategy didn’t work for them on some level, they wouldn’t use it. If I find their strategy offensive, hurtful, or silly; it doesn’t mean something is wrong with them. They are perfectly reasonable people doing what seems to them to be their best move at the time.

If I have them has being a right person, I have more options for responses available to me. For instance, I could get curious. Why would my friend choose that behavior which appears to be in opposition to their stated goal of wanting to be closer to the people in the house? Maybe I could have a sense of humor about it and tease them, “You little rebel you.” I could also consider their behavior a cry for help.

Moreover, these other responses take me off the hook of being angry or upset. These are emotional responses that I have chosen to a set of actions. I could choose an emotional response that feels good to me. In some circumstances, it’s really hard to choose a response other than the one that is familiar to me. I go unconscious and find myself heading down a road in which dark clouds are forming and my friend is an asshole. In those cases, I have found it helpful to start with finding myself right, the situation is perfect because I created it. From there, I can create it differently, maybe choose another response based on the fact that I and my friend are perfect and right. Perfection includes the potential for change. Perhaps we can conspire and find a more pleasurable direction to go.

How I Came to Live in a Morehouse

In 2001, I was at the top of my career game in corporate human resources, single, and living in Marin, CA. Like a lot of people in Marin, I was on a sensual quest and researching being in a conscious relationship. A friend who was staying with me on her way to HI observed the men I was dating and told me that I needed to go to a Mark group. That was the only place to get a “trained guy”, she said, someone who knew how to please a woman on several levels.

I went to my first Mark group at Curt and Ruth’s home just after the New Year. It was all very civilized, except for this guy Tom, who would ask the most outrageous questions. I was terrified and intrigued all at once. In March in Lafayette, I took my first Basic Sensuality course with Jack, Ilana, and Kassy. I loved it, especially the communal living information. I was always interested in communal living and had failed in previous attempts. I thought these people seemed to really have it down in such a way that they are actually having fun. These people really know how to live, really live, is what occurred to me. I wanted to know everything, and I definitely wanted to meet this Vic guy that everyone was talking about.

To this day, what impressed me the most was how the community responded to the desire of a woman, to give her everything she wanted and more, in this case it was me. They delivered courses and experiences as fast as I could consume them. In one memorable week in May, I took three 2-day courses. People would say, “You’re going so fast!”, which occasionally caused me to second-guess myself, but then I would remember my goal, which was to meet Vic.

In July, just after my 39th birthday, I finally got to the center of the tornado I had made of my life. For four days, I sat with Vic and Cindy and the gang, and had the ride of my life, which was so small looking back at it from my current vantage point. I went up and down and up again so fast; they actually had to bring in a bucket for me to vomit into. So many things I remember . . .. What really blew my mind was how exposed I felt. Vic was speaking the thoughts I had not even dared to utter to myself. One of them was that what I really wanted was a man who could fill me up with everything I wanted, happily, and be man enough not to take all that silly bullshit I liked to dish out. “YES! That, I want that! How do I get one of those?!” I exclaimed. I can see him like it was yesterday, taking a drag off his cigarette and telling me to go stand at the exit door of the “man-factory” aka Lafayette Morehouse.

And that’s precisely what I did . . .. and that’s another story. . ..

Thank you, Vic. Because of you I have more real love than I ever imagined I would have, and I’m living, really living at the Oakland Morehouse.

An Introduction

Becoming the Housemother of the Oakland Morehouse with my partner George has changed the way I look at group living. Over the years, I have played from many different spots: from newbie to out to in to supporter to control-problem to non-confronter. I’ve enjoyed them all. Each spot offers a different vantage point from which to see yourself and others. Certainly, it’s true you can win from any spot.

Now I find myself in the leader spot. This is the most expansive vantage point I’ve had yet. I suspect you can have this expansive view in a couple of the other spots as well, I just never chose to go there until now.

In this blog, I will be exploring various aspects of group or communal living as they come up for me in my life here in the Oakland Morehouse. Specifically, I will be looking at the application of the More philosophy in the context of being a student and a house member in a very unique experimental community.