Bioconversation: the purpose of communication.

Bioconversation: how to create the purpose of life. 

I’ve always been fascinated by how and why people have become involved in the work they do. Complementary therapists are a case in point. I don’t think any of them are in it for the profit. I wouldn’t generalise about their reasons and purposes, but I’d like to point out a very valuable tool to which they have free access, unlike most other professions. 

When you visit your dentist, conversation is extremely restricted for obvious reasons: although your mouth is open almost all the time, you can’t talk. And even if you could, what would you speak about? 

Those in the legal profession don’t waste much time with pleasantries. When you’re wanting to be paid by the minute for the minute, and the purpose is more about extending the problem than reaching a solution, fear is the key. 

My opinion of talk therapies is that they’re limited not by but to their formal identities. CBT, Jungian, Gestalt and every other talk therapy has its own code the stamp of which proves its case, patient by patient. 

The coaching industry, on the other hand, goes in the opposite direction, achieving the only and excellent master class, niche by niche. Whatever works for you works for me. 

We assume that conversation is about talking, but it’s so much more than that: it’s communication or the lack of it at every possible level. When I began researching for this article, I was taken to the work of Judith E. Glaser. She had put in a nutshell exactly what I was trying to establish: you can’t separate language or conversation from biology, physiology and science. “Kotodama”, the Japanese notion of a word having energy or power is also relevant in this context. To return to Judith Glaser, her observations of hormonal patterns and effects as the result of different kinds of conversations led directly to an improved grasp of how healthy or toxic organisations can be as the consequence of how people talk to each other within the organisation. Very specifically, a brief verbal message changes so much of an individual’s motivation, purpose and sense of meaning and satisfaction: a heartfelt “Have a good day!” has virtually cosmic possibilities in how far it can reach. 

To describe this in greater detail, think not only of the words, but of the tone in which they’re spoken, the amount of consideration behind the utterance, the practised reasonability, heart-awareness, general purposefulness and the real intentionality of the one who speaks. If you have the good fortune to experience these things you should know that the conversation started long before you entered it. Just as you can’t separate a plant from light from photosynthesis, you can’t separate human conversation from human interaction from human purpose, either pleasant or painful. I find the physiological connectedness really interesting: we thought we were using words, but here we are, brainwaves mimicking and resonating with each other, hormonal tides washing each others’ shores, hearts finding or not finding mutual congruence (check HeartMath) : our bodies really seem not to end at skin boundaries but to engage in what has become known as the biofield, the science of which has become undeniable. If you want to read up, Shamini Jain’s “Healing Ourselves” is a good place to start. She bases her work on psychoneuroimmunology, if you’re into long words. When I taught literature, both students and colleagues were surprised when I found it necessary to include a module on psychoneurotransmission, but there you are. The cosmos has more than one face, and the freedom to read more than one kind of writing leads one everywhere. 

Bioconversation is my word for the kind of conversation that seeks, deliberately, growth. I’m not sure how or if life grows, but to be sure, people do, and in due time, you’ll see a course on Bioconversation for your attention for complementary therapists in particular and then for more groups, depending on how the Bioconversation forms. 

Bioconversation is distinct to social media chat, political recruitment, preaching of any kind, advertising, propaganda and empty yet formal education. 

It’s a quick slogan, but you’ll get the idea: “You know when you grow”. Whereas chats on social media or in parties and pubs are fun, this is a different feeling. It has interest, purpose, movement, meaning, direction, desire and above all, the clear hope of a better destination that you can’t achieve on your own. If you’re interested, please let ThinkTree know. We’re better off as a tree than as individual leaves. Think of autumn and spring. And how fortunate we are to be part of the biggest conversation of all. 

Why your story is important.

 

The brain, heart and guts work closely and quickly to create myriads of stories that you tell yourself about everything. It's a magical ability. None of these stories are ultimately truthful: you've got the power to decide which ones are for you. That's a difficult daily process, And no-one is really going to help you to simplify or make sense of what and how to choose. I came up with The Story Clinic because I feel it's really important for everyone to grasp that they have an advocate for authenticity. 

That means that testing your story by getting it out into conscious expression is a significant step: just about everything in contemporary society strongly suggests that we repress what's in the heart. Economic, cultural, social and educational requirements stifle your real voice. 

The body can't work like that, it needs to breathe. If you stifle what needs to be said, denial leads to disease. 

So what is your story that really wants to be said? 

You'll find it probably doesn't need too much digging: there's something you want to say to a listening ear and an understanding heart. 

And as you speak, your guts will be testing for authenticity, your brain for coherence, and your heart for clarity. 

You can't bullshit yourself unless you want to, and therein lies a straightforward simplicity for the test of truth. 

Your story is important in many ways, and one of these  is that it dovetails with your body's health. I'm sorry that I've come across people who actually do prefer to bullshit themselves. 

Then again, there are others who are so confused, they can't get enough coherence together to feel a sense of purpose. 

Be assured: you have three good friends under your skin: heart, brain and guts. Together, they are your strong story advocate, and your mission is to allow them to speak your voice. They know what's important, what's missing, what's required and how to get it. Yes, you do need supportive friends, and maybe a wider mirror of compassion, but your advocate is smart, quick, wise and wonderful. If you want to pay more attention to this, communicate via www.story-clinic.com     

The cosmic unconscious

 

Jung posited individuation, individual consciousness, the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious. Without doing much careful explanation, I'd like to suggest the addition of the cosmic unconscious. Here's a rough idea of what I'm saying: 

There's no end to approaches to human consciousness and mindfulness, so I'll skip past that and go to the individual unconscious. To simplify this as far as I'm able, I'd say that doing your own shadow-work is unavoidable. What I was taught within the context of fundamental Christian evangelicalism is, from my perspective, spiritual bypassing, which is not a term anyone would have known about in those days. No-one is going to save you from your own storms, hidden or evident, past, present or future, and that's a useful truth to accept. You have to face your fears, sort your family constellations, get acquainted with all your selves and do the research your experience asks for and treat your brain with at least as much disinterested intelligence as it treats you. Doing the shadow-work is hard going, but you're not going anywhere without it. And if you meet someone along the way who refuses to be challenged, chances are they haven't done their shadow-work, and that's why they don't like the feeling of humility which is closely related to the feeling of kindness. So the shortcut to approaching the individual unconscious is doing the homework of shadow-work. 

I've an equally easy recipe to approach the collective unconscious: cultural criticism, not of some-one else's culture, but all of your own. Take a good, hard, uncompromising look at all your group identities and see what emerges when you dare to do that. It's not easy. Humans are weird about being leaders and following leaders. If you can speak for the collective, you own the collective, and if that's what the collective wants, it won't have a time-frame for how long it's gong to be hungry. The longer political lives are, the less likely the collective is in charge. The more vehement religious voices are, the less likely is collective coherence. Notice how cultural art forms are capable of escaping the time-trap. They are more likely to express the collective unconscious. 

Quickly to the cosmic unconsciousness and the approach I'd suggest here: get out of time. 

Here's the thinking: since time is a human construct, let's consider what happens when you take it away. Time implies irreversibility, like being born, having life-changing experiences and dying. Time and irrevocable change influence each other, as emotions declare, and expressing such profound emotions has produced endless philosophy, good music, drunk singing, and wordlessly gazing beyond the horizon. By definition, strange things happen when time disappears, or at least, becomes less relevant. The corollary of what I'm saying is that the more conscious one is of time, the more conscious one is. In Switzerland trains are time. That's a lot of infrastructure. Sometimes I wonder if tourists of the paranormal want more consciousness or more unconsciousness. The intrigue with with life after death, psychokinesis, channeling and clearing chakras doesn't really know what it wants except more. Perhaps dissatisfied consciousness needs to go the other way and become more mineral, more rock-like. More inanimate. Or if that's not so appealing, then perhaps try to be as unconscious as a waterfall. There are many options suggested by the Romantic poets. To tease out the idea of the cosmic unconsciousness, I'd point out that organic chemistry can't escape the basis of inorganic chemistry: the table of elements is about as neutral as Switzerland could ever be, and has no interest in being either the fire of a distant star or your beloved cat. The language of quantum physics is baffling: all that there is exists and does not exist at the same time, it's just a Mexican wave of unreality that passes the here and now infrequently. If I and my pet rock are one, in the sense of belonging to the same table of elements, which is the only given I can think of, then once and for all, let's allow that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, potassium, sodium and traces of more elements than these work together to allow their voices to upgrade - maybe downgrade? - to human voice. Language is a mere code which has unfortunately tended more towards real folly than artificial intelligence, but nonetheless does have the ability to reach for felt aspirations. What we feel is about as real as we can get, but these feelings are so quick, that more often than not the heart is more truthful than the brain. How quick is that? 

Well, it's not in time. As I write, breathe, think, feel and fumble my way, oxygen and hydrogen are doing what they do, and are part and parcel of the consciousness I pretend at. The KNa pump, that rather ridiculous way of describing the amazing dynamics of neurons, sits at the very ability of whatever my ego believes it's directing. In this sense, the living body can be said to be out of time. And if we take the mathematical subway out of quantum physics, who knows what language would point us to which platform? And if death is a point of departure, perhaps so is life? 

It's been said that we've reached the stage where science and spirituality should be holding hands. My opinion is that they always have done so, all 118 of them, sub-microscopic miracles we don't notice and take for granted while they stand and knock on the door of our inner skin of sensitivities requiring to be worded in ways we have yet to discover. 

Learning to read the moment.

 

Literacy isn't what they said it is. Sure enough, the alphabet is really key to know, words, vocabulary and sentences relevant to recognise, and text, context, author, purpose and place all necessary to determine what's meant in any communication. 

Ask anyone what it felt like to learn to read, and you'll have a point of contact to know what it's like to read the moment. 

In the moment, anything is happening. The miracle is, your brain is capable of grasping the moment. The pity is, it seldom does. 

The open door of each moment is usually slammed shut as it opens. 

That's not natural, that's human-inspired. 

The heavy-handedness, intellectual clumsiness and emotional stuntedness of humanity are not good teachers. 

Be comforted: there's a perpetual, really good teacher within: a natural, cosmic voice and presence that defies description. 

It offers you your own language of truth, an imperative of kindness that's all about the moment. 

Do you kill spiders spontaneously? Consider for a moment: does that make you a bad Buddhist or a normal survivalist? 

You can see where this is going: in the moment, there's, data, desire, choice, decision and action. Also totally, really totally unconscious neural activity, which is the actual basis for the action in the moment, conscious or unconscious. You can't escape biology. 

There's a process and a story to this: the moment is a bridge between the decipherable and the indecipherable, and consciousness is key. 

Unfortunately, there are no hard rules to this literacy. The art is more than the discipline. 

But how do you read your own consciousness which is the bridge, key and cargo?

Here are the steps:

notice, articulate and know your subtle emotions

allow your obvious and immediate attitudes

test the range of your choices

decide on the personal acceptability of possible actions

scale your influence of acting

reflect on each step you take. 

Reading the moment has become a literacy of real importance, with not many knowing how to do this. Hence the plethora of coaches, most of whom are learning their own self-literacy, and not so sure how to pass this on without a well-founded sense of humility well-disguised by words and attitudes that don't quite cut it. Leadership? Don't make me laugh. You got there randomly. 

The moment is yours. 

It's a quiet, tall, immense moment, quite cruel, really, unless you sense presence greater than your own. 

How is it to be read? 

So the learning is the actual process and purpose of the moment. And the core aspect of that organism you recognise as yourself. 

I'd offer these new ABC's of reading the moment: 

quietness

observation

reflection

truthful communication

closure. 

Closure is important. The timing and honouring have to be right. That's a whole literacy in itself. 

The moment is fluid. 

You have to be quicker than that. 

Leaving the country.

 The four words are really inadequate: I've left the country. 

But I have. 

The Covid 19 was the main cause, wiping out our hospitality business, yet the Covid canal, like the Suez and Panama, can experience ships going sideways rather than forwards. So there are more reasons to leave the country. 

Take a thief, a scoundrel and a stupid person like Zuma, protected by the ANC. 

Take a hollow, expensive suit, like Ramaphosa, protecting the ANC. 

Take the electorate, the subservient, uneducated, impoverished, unprotected, ill-advised supporters of the ANC. 

And then take into account the crumbling national infrastructure: electricity, education, water, municipal delivery, post office, deeds office, and each national office you can think of. 

The formal, legalised national-speak has changed from my growing up years to the present. If I had published this blog in the seventies or eighties I would have been arrested before blogging off. 

Not now. The ANC and its leaders really don't care, so long as their pockets are kept full. Their reputation and honour mean nothing other than internal party political manipulation for the sake of power-survival. It used to be called petty cash, and it was possible to steal this, in petty ways.  But the national cash cow is  the main target, and it will be eaten alive. No bull. 

That's my swan-song in connection with the political rubbish. The NP leaders were bullies, the ANC leaders are supremely greedy and the next lot, no matter the party, will be ruthless. 

But that's not about leaving the country. That's about the country leaving itself. 

I will remember running along Cape Town streets, train journeys to Johannesburg, learning to learn in what used to be schools and universities, which is what I've loved most, apart form the steaks, Cabernet Sauvignons and my old Volksie, the city and its styles, the sky-scapes, mountain-scapes, and my solitary walks on Kommetjie beach, in the sun and in storms, coming back to the warmth of whiskey and a cigar.

I will remember all of this and so much more. 

My homes, the wind, rain and wishful thinking, and the mountains: Table Mountain, Twelve Apostles, the Amatola and the Cederberg. 

And Devil's Peak. 

And how love, conversations, scrutiny and care have followed me in my path in that country, thanks to so many, many people. 

I have left the country, yes, and am amazed to find out how much has not left me. 

I understand very little about love, but its stickiness, like honey, is difficult to wash off. 

Where does my story start?

 I grew up with the given idea that biology explains everything. You start at conception, you do whatever you can to live a healthy and well-lived life, if something goes wrong, the doctor will fix it, and eventually the body fails because of something organically malfunctioning, and then you die. 

You have a beginning, a middle, and an ending, as stories are supposed to. 

There's a lot to be said about this, but let's pay attention to the start, the beginning of your story. 

By way of a preamble, your body and your being is more like a story than anything else.

Some pointers before we begin: emotional imprint, genealogical predisposition, historical context, natural communication. "Natural communication" means that neurons behave as neurons in spite  of anything else. 

If you're able to grasp that you're part of a cosmic process rather than an individual person, you're more than halfway to knowing that your story has no discernible beginning. To make it easier I could say "as well as an individual person" but this individuality is more of a hindrance than a help. 

Sure, your body was conceived, gestated, born, grew up, and here you are. 

It didn't do that in any individual way. Bodies look individual because they can move about on their own, but that's as far as it goes. Not even thinking is really individual. 

The emotional imprints from mother to foetus, historical context to formation of attitude, and genetic predisposition to physiological conditions, and the way your neurons get set up, all add up to the mystery we call consciousness. 

So you can decide where your story begins. 

Mine is cosmic, but I would advise a smaller nest than that. It's better to know your mind than to get lost in it. 

In Story Clinic we suggest that you begin spontaneously. Don't start formally with "I was born....etc, etc."

Attention is crucially important, probably the most valuable attribute of humanity, in focusing cosmic capability. So we would ask, what does your attention seek right now? Let's slow down out of the normal stuff of dailiness, and allow your body to speak and attend to what's being communicated or required to communicate now. 

"I'm hungry."

"I'm tired."

"I'm angry with..."

"I'm frustrated with..."

"I'm enjoying..."

"I'm thankful for..."

Or we could allow for some moments of imaginative reflection, and begin with a spontaneous memory. This is a fruitful kind of beginning. The neurons are good at doing it for themselves. 

So your birthday is a milestone, not a definitive beginning, and the Akashic records are a library, not a book. 

And the Alpha of the alphabet was an invention, not a discovery. So even the language that you use to decipher yourself is not a totally adequate tool, although helpful. 

Your story starts where attention engages. Where it engages is up to two things, as I perceive it, what your imagination presents, and what you choose to do about it. For Tolkien, it involved a ring, for C.S. Lewis a lamp in a snowy world where animals spoke, and for Emily Bronte, a rattling at the window, and a haunting dream. 

If you give your imagination that same gift of attention, a unique, strange, strong and valuable beginning is very likely to emerge. 

The Waterman Practice and Story Clinic.

Everything is a story, so here's the connection between The Waterman  Practice and Story Clinic. I thought hard about what I'd like the rest of my life  to mean, and I took the things I've built: qualifications and experience in homeopathic medicine;  qualifications, training and experience in energy medicine; a doctorate and a lifetime of dealing with stories, what they are, what they mean, how to listen to them and tell them and understand them; and qualification and practice in poetry therapy. 

I've spent sixty-five years living and being both patient and impatient, and now, quite frankly, impatience wins. 

For now, let's look at The Waterman Practice umbrella and Story Clinic. The Story Clinic is older. 

Stories gripped my entire being before I could read or speak. I grew up in the Christian meta-story, and my soul recognised the currents of reality that the close people couldn't articulate. People need to believe stories to work out their practical ways through life. The vast majorities of these stories aren't true, just vague approximations of journeying. 

The work of the Story Clinic is about the balance between respecting and challenging deeply held stories. From gender to ethnic to faith to scientistic stories, people hold to what they think they can tell themselves, because they feel they can't go further. 

Of course they can. And one's health is more dependent on this than you realise. 

The Waterman Practice is about approaching healing, health and wholeness through contact, connection, communication,  clarity and comprehension. 

These are more like feelings than concepts, and the feelings that your stories articulate reflect an underlying reality rather than the superficial chatter.

We seldom give ourselves the time and space to examine this. 

There are many, many approaches and stories out there to grip your attention because you have a need for better health in one way or another. They all clamour for attention. 

The Waterman Practice is different because it pays attention to your attention. That's challenging because that's the very thing that's baffling. You want attention because you don't feel well with your own attention? 

But I don't want to get complicated. 

The Story Clinic is about listening to your own language, telling your stories, realising your limits, chosen and unchosen. 

If you want borders, you'll stop there. If you need passports, they can be obtained. And if you require new languages, that's possible. 

Awareness of your evolving story is a magical thing. 

So The Waterman Practice shows you how to move from being an unconscious author to a purposeful narrator. Your voice, biological and metaphoric at the same time, is able to say much and in many ways. This is just one of the basic tools of the Story Clinic. 

There's a lot to put to good use in The Waterman Practice.