bjarvis | Wrapping up the Personal Insight Workshop

Yesterday's session was nearly as long as the prior day's: 11 hours. There was lots of new material but so much that a lot didn't sink it. It didn't help that there was occasional quackery mixed in the lot, but I'll get to that in a moment.

I've always considered myself trustworthy, but the workshop probed the nature of trust more thoroughly than I had seen previously. In this particular model, trust a combination of four aspects: reliability, acceptance, openness and consistency. I give myself extremely high grades for reliability and consistency although I'm not that great at acceptance and especially openness. Noted. I'm not sure at the moment if I should attempt to shore up my weak points or fine-tune my strong ones... more time and self-reflection is required here.

We did an exercise on "withholds," those times when we hold regrets, resentment or grudges by refusing forgiveness for ourselves or others. This is one exercise I just couldn't honestly participate. While I have a stack of withholds, perhaps more than most mortals, I don't find them as debilitating or draining as the facilitators believed they were, and I find they are very useful & powerful reminders of past betrayals. I know there is a difference between forgiving and forgetting and that this exercise was in the former rather than the latter, but I find forgiving makes the forgetting --and therefore repeating errors in trusting the untrustworthy-- vastly easier. I'm really not into repeating past errors. Withholds aren't a drain on my energy: they're an investment in my self-protection.

We also worked on thinking about things we retain from our childhood and thing which we have rejected. This module was largely forgettable.

The meditation portion --Dynamic Mind Practice (Anna Wise)-- was interesting but I already had some practice at this so it wasn't as valuable to me as others. Indeed, there was a portion which annoyed me, the aforementioned quackery.

I am easily annoyed by people who confuse models of reality with reality itself. In this particular meditation methodology, one relaxes to a point where we hit some sort of stress blockage which then unravels, releasing energy and brings us slightly back out of a restful state until it is resolved and then we sink lower into meditation. Lather, rinse, repeat. OK, I accept this as a model to demonstrate the concepts but our facilitators were talking about this in terms of actual energy (presumably chemical) and stress as tangible blockages. Nuts to them on this: good model, bad implementation.

Another bit which annoyed me had to do with Jungian psychology --of which I'm already skeptical-- but it may merely be a bad translation. We grow by having new and novel experiences; in Jung's synchronicity theory, we have an unconscious need to transform & grow. The quote, however, is as follows: "We attract experiences to us which allow us to become conscious of any limited or restricted parts of ourselves in order to transform." I have problems with the word 'attract.'

I could accept that we unconsciously seek out such experiences or that we become sensitized to such situations which occur randomly in our lives because they help us grow. I cannot accept that somehow we magically attract such situations. When someone blindsides me in a meeting, I'm not "attracting" the unpleasant surprise: it either just happens or, at worst, I unconsciously set myself up for it by ignoring preceding signals. Not having Jung's original German text in hand, I may be reading too much into a sloppy translation. Or Jung was just as spectacularly wrong as Freud was on so many topics.

The entire workshop wrapped up with everyone pairing off to co-mentor each other on setting a personal and professional commitment, then following up in the near future to ensure we work towards our goals. I'm going to personally work harder on my square dance calling, being willing to take more risks on the microphone with challenging choreo when appropriate; professionally, I'm going to raise my profile within my division by badgering my manager for more projects. If my manager doesn't comply, I'll be badgering other managers and directors until I'm unleashed onto something new and challenging.

There's still much self-reflection to work on. I hope to make some additional time very soon to continue reading through the materials & notes while the workshop is still fresh in memory.