Focusing, biofocusing and bureacracy

You get bureacracy and bureaucracy. I've had to stand in really long queues with horrible service when I got to the front, and I've sung through some usually difficult processes like renewing my passport or driver's licence. I've contended with various educational bureacracies, and I have come to think that bureacracies are formal clothing. You can't think of a naked body as formal. It is what it is, usually better off clothed. But if the clothing doesn't fit, is inappropriate to the weather, or otherwise unsuitable, it becomes obvious. But tell this to the wearer? Mention to the emporer that he's actually naked? Dare to suggest that Zuma's fly is open? The desk, the pen, the file, the glass window, the "no abuse will be tolerated" are all there to intimidate the meek public. A bureacracy that's intent on service is one thing (and I've had the benefit of this experience) and a self-serving bureacracy is another.

If your focus is on doing business, be sure that bureacracy is there as the teeth to take a bite out of your turnover. States have never had any capital of their own, and yours is a natural target. If you focus on a profession as a prime love, you will soon become proficient at finding the way into relevant registrations and certifications.  Bureacracies have various purposes, the main one being taxation in creative forms by regulation.

However, the heart cannot be regulated. It remains wild and will never be tamed. It's the quickest, sharpest, toughest human core that we are. There's a sign on our front door that says "When the heart speaks take good note". It's also the most impassioned, tender and dynamic centre of awareness and consciousness. People of my generation were taught to focus on politeness and decency, often not saying or doing what should have been said or done because of good manners and deference. Cleanliness and good manners were next to Godliness.

There's a whole lot more freedom now. Since no-one has any socially sanctioned obligation to pay attention to God, where's the ultimate regulator?

I would say, take a step closer to the living heart, your vivid core of the present, experienced and realised moment, and feel and see that which ultimately can't be verbalised in a bureaucratcially driven atmosphere but is most certainly more relevant to you than any law.

Your heart is in no defined time and place, yet is has the ultimate authority to address whatever's happening in your time and space. Standing up to bureaucracy that is designed not to be stood up to is a battle I tend to omit. Discretion is the better part of valour.

But don't get me going on educational bureacracy. This is a hideous matter in South Africa, because what they're saying is that if all the admin boxes are ticked, we have a functioning education system. So somehow, those boxes get ticked even if the people who are required to tick them haven't got pens. Or even if the boxes are printed upside-down on the wrong paper, supplied after the deadline for submission has passed. Heaven knows what stories will emerge from under the piles of dumped textbooks in Popoland.

As I said, don't get me going.

Biofocusing, that is, with and on the heart, takes you to a different destiny. I liked the cartoon of Steve Jobs looking at Saint Peter paging through the big book at the pearly gates, telling him "I've got an app for that!". 

Guard the heart, especially from bureaucracy. The emporer wants your money and doesn't care about any coziness except his own. Does he have a heart? This is a good question, and food for another blog.

Biofocusing, educational coaching, mainstream and individual light.

Mainstream, norms, averages, bell-curves, objectives and curricula are not words I would easily associate with educational coaching. Although the idea of educational coaching applied to groups makes some sense to me, individual growth and excellence remain the prime focus.

I have never yet found the main stream in the ocean of education. Strong political and economic currents, yes, philosophical tendencies, check, cultural imperatives, certainly, even strong school traditions and social unity at local level.

At the coal-face, you have faces, eyes, body language, personal stories, nanno patterns of belief and expectation, and rarely do these fit into any box of premeditated purpose. Just yesterday I bumped into a student of almost two decades ago. We were both buying chocolate. He recognised me. I remembered his name and where he sat. He had become an engineer. When I think back to the immense bureacratic machine which processed him, I can't think that it had any lasting effect on him. The machine itself has plenty of new operators, and is unrecognisable. He's found his way, has done pretty well, it seems. They'll have a baby sometime soon.

How long does it take to become an expert? Ten thousand hours, if I remember correctly, as explained by Malcolm Gladwell. Find what you want to do, do it for ten thousand hours, and you're the expert. Hope you enjoy, because what else is there?

I've been an individual for more than ten thousand hours, and there's much that I enjoy, and much that makes me viciously impatient. My light is imperfect. I've always wanted to be part of more wattage and voltage, but somehow my details have escaped the mainstream.

There's a light in every individual. I have never been an advocate of cosiness - life's a surfboard until you fall off and have to swim - yet this many-light-studded humanisphere (I think I've just coined a term?) gleams like a dashboard of daringness, because that's what humans are. Not a mainstream, because how can you have a mainstream of daringness?

I listen to Mike and the Mechanics. A Time and Place? Is that the title? "You have to step outside the line..."

Many do, even if clumsily, and that has to be honoured and recognised, otherwise the movement dies.

Formal education doesn't step outside the line because it's paid for within the line. Jonathan Jansen intrigues me because he's trying to speak from within formal education, yet he wants to say real things.

Here in South Africa, the educands have a hard task: they have to look for a way to connect to something bigger, without being given a vision of something bigger.

A goat's pupil is horizontal in its eye, and expands to become a block, I'm told. I haven't looked intoa goat's eye to see for myself. Focusing left to itself, which is a significant part of biofocusing, will always elucidate, at least.

I'm thinking of what experience has shown me: teaching English to Nama adolescents, who sang songs to me in exchange for goodwill, teaching life to poor white kids who taught me about humility and compassion, teaching intellectual muscle to boys in a prestigious school the focus of which was rugby, teaching poetry, postmodernism and common sense to university students who were baffled by the requirements of intellectual prostitution: I'm free to teach and learn whatever I want, and so is everyone else. So the mainstream of premeditated purpose disappears, and the landscape of requirement (thanks Ridley Beeton) becomes apparent.

The point is, freedom to learn has never been greater. That's an amazing blessing at this stage of human history.

Connecting, reconnecting, focusing, biofocusing

The sense of connecting and the sense of focusing are connected.

I have a problem with language: When you try to use it to explain something real, it's a bit like a snake with its tail in its mouth. Try again.

This reminds me of a once upon a time very senior colleague who stammered. He was addressing senate and his tongue began to lose what he was saying. He simply stopped, and said, in Afrikaans, "probeer weer'" which means "try again". I remembered that because it was such a simple, thoroughly effective, admirable strategy.

But how often, in experience, when the issue is critical, do you get to try again?

I think of pilots. surgeons, dentists, chefs, and  so many other professionals who will never get another try if they fluff what's in front of them.

Quite frankly, I think of every moment of awareness, and the consequences of somehow missing something crucial. This is compulsive behaviour, and I don't recommend. Yet, through all of human history, why have we failed to move ourselves to anywhere that's an effective team, group, movement, kingdom, nation, empire, decisively and irreversibly changing human awareness for the better?

Historical gleams have never revealed lasting treasure. Empires, nations and movements have come and gone. Look at the solitary individual, staring into the fire, regarding the connecting strands between finitude and infinitude.

It comes to you. This is a merciful, generous, beautiful, friendly universe. In charge of it, there's an action that demands the foregoing, and there's the rub.

If you don't go with the better embrace, you create a really stupid anti-stream, a pathetic movement that might swirl with conviction, and die with corruption. Gatsby's dream taught me about this: the dream isn't about the dream, and Shakespeare taught me about  the aftermath: love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

Connection seeks. Reconnection knows. Focusing recognises. Biofocusing realises.

There's a lot of work to do...but how do we know what to do?

Planning your growth: the focusing in biofocusing

Sorry, it can't be done. You can choose to grow, but you can't control the experience. When you open the window when the wind's blowing, air you will get, but you can't select the air molecules. You may get smoke in your eyes. Freud postulated the ego, Jung wrote about the undiscovered self, more theories about how awareness and consciousness are structured abound.

Certainly, you can turn your head, look forwards, backwards, sideways, select to watch the clock, the TV, the window, listen for the kids, stroke the cat, yet you can't control what's around you, or the scope of what your eyes might see. If you're in New York, you'll have to see Johannesburg in your imagination.

NLP refers to beliefs as permissions. I find this very useful, but I still want to know more about fruitfully decisive action, in the subtlest sense. I can control my physiology to a very limited extent, I was forced to learn how to control emotions to a much greater extent (this topic will pop up later in the context of educational coaching), and I learned how to act on the basis of commitment which was fundamentally based, but could turn on a tickey. By this seeming contradiction, what I mean is that you may be committed to practising medicine, but at a moment's notice, you drop a lucrative private practice, and head off to Bongoland to do what you must because you know you have to. Perhaps Eric Pearl can tell us something about this.

The focusing of biofocusing is difficult to explain, and easier to do live when I have another living being with me. It's less about controlling the details, and more about finding or creating the motivating energy, which you don't contemplate but do.

Focusing on your soul? Focusing on your living? Do the details come to you, or do you come to the details? And what is this "you" but a construct of which "you" are a construct yourself?

I gave up words for a while, but now that I've returned to them, I know that they have to be dealt with summarily and descisively. One of the worst bits of academia I have come across is lit. theory. Let the critics come.

So you want to grow? Open your mind and open your heart and accept what comes. Try your best to bypass language, but chances are, silence is not for you.

Biofocusing, health coaching and the heart.

When I first started putting the concept of biofocusing together, I was influenced by a number of things I had learnt about: I had studied and qualified in homeopathic medicine, I had gone through the training offered by Quantum Touch, an energy medicine approach, I had read widely in connection with CAM, motivational and inspirational leaders, and had the background of an education in humanities.

I was impatient to get to the heart of the matter, by an Hegelian movement, the ultimate overview, which was beyond me.

The starfish strategy, the one-at-a-time approach began to appeal: one concept, just one, as a point of entry to growth and health that anyone could use.

My own heart, as I had learnt, was an energetic structure throughout the body, requiring continuous charging and balancing advanced by natural influences, greatly assisted by my mindful co-operation.

I had more or less given up on words, which is a serious thing for a registered poetry therapist to do. Having discovered how wordless meditation and prayer produce powerful shifts of realization, the best advice, succintly, to anyone, would be to go pray and meditate. But such brisk and brusque advice is too quick to be noticed let alone taken.

Once I had the concept of biofocusing clear, I began to word it.

The background to the efficacy of homepathy is well documented by Lynne McTaggart in The Field. Recently the Swiss goverment has produced an report on homeopathy which I haven't read yet (I learnt of its existence a couple of hours ago: check Bornhoft and Matthiessen 2011, the name of the book wasn't given). The schism between medical science and CAM ought not to exist, in my opinion. It seems to be driven by two forces: pseudo-orthodoxy and economic interest. The health and the wholeness of the patient are one and the same thing, and both are affected by endogenous and exogenous factors, a good few of which have not yet been discovered.

The heart of health coaching, as I understand it, is to be found in individual case and context, thus linking singular consciousness and behaviour to social awareness and practice. Plenty of info out there: check www.wddty.com 

As for my heart, the one made of muscle tissue, it could stop beating in two days or twenty years. There's nothing wrong with it, but as one gets older there are no guarrantees. I have no doubt that my living will go on after that - the continuing bio of biofocusing. Bodies die, people don't. I understand grief to be our most salient symptom of knowing unknowingness, the exact opposite of where scientific methodology has attempted to bring us. As for the focusing of biofocusing, we're all free to choose on what, with what and the style of our focus. All the time. This is a demanding responsibilty, one that deserves a good night's rest every night so that body and mind can regroup and touch up the paintwork of daily experience.


From one perspective, this:

from another, this:

yet, for both, the continuing heart is the same.

Educational coaching, biofocusing, truth and language

Let's assume that education, that is, the spontaneous formation of consciousness facilitated by various agencies, doesn't happen efficienly and fruitfully in formal contexts. The big thing is, you have to want to be formed, and you have to know as precisely as possible how and why you want to be formed. If you want something as urgently as this, the when usually means right now.

I was once summoned by a guru in Taipei. I was at a conference and chatting to a colleague who, as the evening wore on, excused himself as he had a meeting with his guru. Ten o' clock at night seemed an odd time for a meeting with a guru, but that wan't my business. Next morning at the conference, the colleague rushed over to me, looking quite dishevelled and said that he had been thoroughly blasted by his guru for wasting time; the guru had been expecting me, and I should attend without delay. This seemed most interesting, so I agreed to go along with him, that afternoon, accompanied by an interpreter to find out why the guru wanted to see me. The meeting lasted for all of eight hours, so I have to condense. Was I attending the conference solely for academic puposes, asked the guru, through the interpreter. No. Was I interested in learning the truth? Yes. Had I been interested in learning the truth for a long, long time? Yes, indeed. With a gleam in his eye, the guru proceeded to attempt to teach me the truth. I was a bad student. The guru said truth is the most important thing. No, I said, love is. We argued about this for a couple of hours, assisted by many cups of tea. Yet, step by step, he led me towards  non-conceptual truth, while I spoke up for inconceivable love. At one stage we stopped for a review, and he asked, through the interpreter, what I had learned, so far, about the truth, and whether I had yet grasped that truth was more important than love. "To learn the truth," I replied, "you must love it." He heaved a big sigh, and said we would take a short break.

Fast forward to the end of the meeting. Fortunately I was fairly well read in Zen Buddhism and Taoism to have some idea of where the guru was leading me, so when we got to the crunch, I thought I would try to communicate with him at his level.
"The guru wants to know if you have now learned the truth," said the interpreter.
"Tell the guru I have learned the truth," I said.
"You have?" asked the interpreter.
"Yes."
The interpreter spoke to the guru. The guru leaned forward, sensing something coming.
"Tell the guru I can show him the truth," I said.
"You can?" asked the interpreter.
"I can."
He spoke to the guru once more, and now the guru sat on the edge of the chair, regarding me intently out of eyes and a face full of attention.
With as much attention as I had, or would ever have, I picked up a pencil lying on the table and looking into his eyes, passed the pencil into the guru's hands.
I have never forgotten his expression. Perhaps if I try really hard, I can word it, but I don't think I want to.
He sat back, and began to clap.
The interpreter needed to go to the toilet. My colleague was sound asleep.

Change the story: many years ago, I think it was 1982, I was browsing through UCT's library, in a place which has surely been demolished and rebuilt, when I came across a book called The Yin and Yang of Langauge. This idea of language has been immensely helpful to me. Language doesn't mean too much unless it embraces that which embraces it. When you language something, thoughts need to be felt, and emotions should be thoroughly engaged. In other words, as much attention as you can muster - not merely cogitation but also motivation, as well as the tension between fixation and fluidity in the moment - permeates the activity of utterance to make meaning tangible and fruitful.

Enough about language. If you do the tautology of attending to attention (mainly by meditation) and become increasingly aware of being alive, your consciousness changes and grows and connects. It's always amazed me that this is not wanted by everybody. Apparently it's not a comfortable feeling for some: better for them to select parts rather than be whole.

That's okay: what I like about coaching is that it's entirely voluntary. Nothing more fruitless than unwilling kids in a classroom or students who want the degree but don't care much for the subject. Another thing I like about coaching is that it's non-judgemental. Biofocusing thrives on being alive, not on having the security of being right.

When you come to your tired limits for conceptualizng, when you pass your feared boundaries of intense feeling, when the crossroad parts into far too many ways, what do you do as you take the next step?

You clear everything in yourself, it doesn't matter what you think or feel and the decision has been made by your metaphorical feet and another new wholeness you hadn't expected is upon you.

And it won't be the last time.

Biofocusing and educational coaching in South Africa

The definition of educational coaching hasn't yet been nailed down to any one statement, and the applications thereof are varied, ranging from leveling the playing fields in education for the disadvantaged and disabled to assisting instructional interaction in institutionalised ways.

These are very useful activities and they assume that formal education in a given context works.

Here in South Africa formal education has long lost any ability to create a coherent national consciousness.
"Education has always been a handmaiden for the politicians," said the Scottish school inspector, sitting on the table, swinging his legs, during a seminar I attended in Cape Town in 1983. So perhaps one shouldn't be too hard on Zuma's folly, Angie "textbook" Motshega or any of the other political leaders. Instead of disparaging the politicians, one might look for strong educational leadership. Not commentators, just, but those who are actually in the lecture-halls, classrooms or institutional management offices. And definitely not the departmental minions who are more interested in self-serving reputation than reality.

Every forty minutes I face another group of thirty-five human phenomena. They come and go in cycles of eight periods over eight days. We talk, we open a few books, we write. We actually achieve very little other than a shaky relationship the evidence of which is that typical handwave when we pass in town. That's the formal outcome.The non-formal (better word than informal) dynamic goes further: I put just enough weight on the trap-doors of their alarmed awareness, so that when the anticipated intensity of alarm occurs and the door plunges helplessly down, the words and ideas that will help will be remembered and used to regain a stable place to stand, and try again. This, maybe in thirty years when one of them picks the final fight with the spouse. Perhaps in twenty-eight years, for another, when the child doesn't come home, ever.

But for now, they wait for their time lines to bring them, urgently, to social events, break-time, cell-phone time, and the king of them all, rugby-time. This is reality. If I stood on my head and sang to them, it would hardly be worth a passing glance.

What I'm saying is that with one foot in the world of the university, another foot in senior school, and yet another foot in coaching, the best place to put a foot is in entrepreneurship, here in South Africa. Meaningful work, personal energy and money don't separate easily in my understanding. These things don't come together in schools. They come together in a world where survival is not a given unless you're working for real.

So what does it mean to work for real? First, you have to sort your mind, so that you know what a real platform for your work is, then you join (or create) that platform, then you make sure the platform and your work make economic sense, especially in the short term, and definitely in the long term, although you will probably have to change platforms, and probably even stations, to keep up with the pace of change. To do all this you will need to train your emotions, thinking patterns and decisive strengths to realize your purposes. If you're any good at leading yourself, you may soon find yourself leading others. And this isn't just for young people, it's for people of any age. Burt Goldman who sends me emails encouraging me to do quantum jumping claims he's at his best, now, in his eighties. I'm still checking quantum jumping, but I think he's right about not stopping, ever.

When I coach in respect of education, using the motivating force of biofocusing, the first simple message is "take charge of your own life, all of it". If you ask "how do I do that?", I don't think I can help you. But if your first question is "okay, check, now what do I learn?" you're well on the way.