Defensive Learning and Expansive Learning

When I was 19 years old, I encountered a quote that sums up one of the biggest inhibiting forces for discovery and learning. It goes like this:

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a [person] in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” — Herbert Spencer

Although the word ‘contempt’ usually implies a kind of charged hatred or dislike, in this case, I take it as something subtler and more neutral along the lines of dismissal. If you have already dismissed something prior to investigating it, why investigate at all? And if you dismiss something and then try to investigate it, your investigation is so tainted by dismissal that there is no chance for discovery or newness to emerge. The journey is concluded before it’s begun. Do you know what I am talking about?

When I came across the map of Defensive Learning Versus Expansive Learning several years later in an Expand the Box Training, new clarity and possibilities emerged about the learning-discovery-exploration process.

Defensive Learning is an approach to learning that allows a person to only learn things they already know about. In order for new discoveries to even register on the radar of a person practicing Defensive Learning, these discoveries must fit into the context and knowledge that the person already has. In a transformational training, a Defended Learner might say things like: “This is just like holotropic breathing” or “What you are talking about is called ‘Atman’ in the ancient vedic texts” or “According to Bessel Van Der Kolk, the shaking that is happening in your body in this process is a trauma response that all animals do, but as human beings, we are conditioned out of it” or “Oh, yep, I have done this before.”

These comments might seem like innocuous contributions. The peril of such comments, and the Defensive Learning approach from which they spring, is that they prevent a person from entering unknown territory and actually learning or discovering something new. Since every new piece of information has to be contorted to fit in with the old clump of the known, anything that fails to fit (anything truly new) becomes unobservable or invisible, and is discarded. If you learn that purple is the only color, then everything is just a shade of purple, and every un-purple nuance gets washed down the drain (a drain which is also purple…).

Discovering completely new territory means starting the learning journey from scratch, without reference. This can be a difficult task, especially at first. Modern schooling, which is based on the principle of Defensive Learning, trains people to automatically categorize information and experience into areas already explored, and then to build on these known territories. An alternative to Defensive Learning is Expansive Learning. In Expansive Learning, you willingly submit yourself to the unknown. You toss aside the habits of Defensive Learning and treat new experiences and domains as completely separate knowledge continents, untouched lands where discovery can happen unconstrained by influence or previous experience. But how to do this? Here are a few hints:

• Stop comparing your current experience to previous experiences. Regard it (and guard it) as a unique experience.
• Lose interest in categorization.
• Drop phrases like “I know” or “I already did this” from your verbal repertoire.
• Replace these phrases with “They say there is nothing new under the sun. I want to find out for myself.”
• Draw no immediate conclusions.
• Draw no un-immediate conclusions.
• In fact, toss conclusions out the window. Have they really been so useful, afterall?
• Practice noticing the world with something other than your Mental Body.

Catharsis and Modern Culture Thoughtware

Rage Club is not the only transformational space on the planet where people yell, shake, scream, and rage. Sometimes, people who have been to Rage Rooms and Smash Rooms, Primal Therapy, Osho’s Dynamic Meditation, et cetera, will come to Rage Club. If these people are used to Defensive Learning, when they enter Rage Club, there is a risk that they will show up thinking, “Uh huh, I have done this before. It is the same as XYZ. This is the part where we yell and we get it all out. This is when I move and release all the energy. This is where I shake it off and free my body of blockages.” What these people are familiar with — what they are seeing Rage Club through the lens of — is Catharsis.

It can be shocking to discover that most Catharsis practices actually start with the same old Modern Culture Thoughtware about feelings, namely that feelings are bad and should be done away with. The majority of Modern Culture does away with feelings by suppressing and numbing them to the point where people are completely cut off from their hearts. Evidence of this is everywhere. Just walk down the street. Whose face is not flat, or automatically smiling? Who is feeling something (really feeling something) other than a kind of pale and vacant joy? Can you find even one person alive in their feelings, other than a homeless jabberer or a few weird souls putting on a street theater piece or hangers-on yelling in a parade or lit up with booze or drugs?

In Catharsis spaces, instead of getting rid of feelings by numbing or suppressing them, the practice is to get rid of feelings by expressing them loudly and intensely until they are all out, all used up, all shaken off, and a person experiences themselves as reborn. Although Catharsis might be satisfying in the same way that scratching an itch is satisfying, Catharsis spaces are mostly not transformational. I say “mostly not transformational” because for people who grew up in a culture where the only thing to do with feelings is to repress, deny, and medicalize them, allowing yourself to feel the feelings as big and as loud as they actually are is, in itself, transformational. It upgrades your thoughtware from “feelings should be repressed” to “it is ok to express my feelings,” which is a shift toward more possibility, even if both pieces of thoughtware ladder up to the same chunk of thoughtware that feelings are bad and you should get rid of them.

The transformation in a Catharsis space ends when a person has successfully shifted from “feelings should be repressed” to “I can express my feelings, fully, loudly, and clearly” (i.e., “I can yell, laugh, scream, or cry”). After a person’s thoughtware has been upgraded to “I can express my feelings,” each new experience of Catharsis simply gets rid of the energy of the feelings or emotions — energy that could be used for creation and transformation — while ignoring the information that comes along with those feelings and emotions — information that is also needed for creation and transformation.

Catharsis is not bad. Catharsis is not wrong. Catharsis is Catharsis, and at a certain point (sooner than you might think), Catharsis stops yielding transformation.

Rage Club is Cathexis, Not Catharsis

To Catharters, Rage Club might initially look like Catharsis. But Rage Club is not Catharsis. Rage Club is Cathexis.

“Catharsis,” comes from a Greek word meaning “to purge, to expel.” Cathexis, on the other hand, means “to hold, to hold onto.” In Catharsis spaces, the idea is to get rid of all the intense energy and feelings by making it big and washing it out, like the spider and the water spout.

The Cathexis space of Rage Club starts with the thoughtware that anger is not a problem or design error, but a source of energy, clarity, and power you can use for your life. You do not need to get rid of it. Instead, you keep your anger, and learn to use its energy and the wisdom of its information for living and creating. How you use the anger depends on whether the anger is a feeling or an emotion.

A feeling of anger is an experience of anger that arises right here and right now, and is about this moment. It lasts no more than three minutes, and it goes away after the energy and information have been used. For instance, if you feel angry because the door is ajar, you can use the energy of the feeling (anger) and the information from the feeling (“I feel angry because the door is ajar”) to stand up and shut the door. As soon as you have stood up and shut the door, the feeling is complete, and the anger goes away.

Feelings (including the feeling of anger) are for handling things happening right now.

The emotion of anger often feels identical to the feeling of anger. However, instead of being about right now, emotions are about the past, and they last longer than 3 minutes. No matter how much you use the energy and information of an emotion to handle things happening right now, the emotion remains, because the emotion actually has nothing to do with what is happening now, even if it seems to. For instance, maybe you feel angry because the door is ajar, but your anger is an emotion, not a feeling. You stand up, close the door, and an hour later find yourself still grumbling, “I cannot believe he left the door open when he walked out — again! He never pays attention to anything. He is so inconsiderate.” Sound familiar? The emotion might subside eventually, but even then, it is only going back into hiding until the next time he leaves the door ajar…

Emotions (including the emotion of anger) are not for handling things happening right now. Emotions are for healing incomplete feelings from the past.

If you allow your anger about the door to grow and follow it back in an Emotional Healing Process, you might soon discover that the real origin of the anger is not about right now, but is instead about all the times your father left your door open when you were a child, how he did not take care of your privacy, how you were left exposed, and how you were not allowed to be angry about that without your father retaliating or ignoring you. No matter how much you use the energy and information of your emotional anger now to make requests from your partner or to take care of shutting the door yourself, the emotional anger remains and repeats itself because it is energy and information from your past, and its use is to heal things in your past. As the Emotional Healing Process goes along, you might discover that the anger can be used to change your mind about allowing yourself to be exposed, or to clear out your father’s energy from your energetic body, or to use your Voice Blaster to shoot voices that say “You shouldn’t need privacy,” or any other type of healing that is necessary. When you have used the emotion for healing, and the healing has been thorough, the emotion of anger about the door will be healed and will not return. It will be swept down the river of time, giving you more freedom of movement and more right-here-right-now presence the next time someone leaves the door ajar.

Hints About Suppression, Catharsis, and Cathexis

How can you tell when you are suppressing, catharting, or cathecting? How can you tell when your clients or the people you are holding space for are suppressing, catharting, or cathecting? Below is an inexhaustive list of hints. (HINTS, I tell you, NOT rules.)

Suppressing

1. Biting or pursing lips.
2. Analyzing the feelings or emotions instead of feeling.
3. Thinking about feelings or emotions instead of feeling.
4. Not allowing the sounds to come.
5. Feeling just a bit, and then coming back to the mind to talk about it.
6. Clenching the jaw.
7. Using anger to tighten the body and not experience the fear or sadness underneath.
8. Using any “less bad” feeling or emotion to cover a “more bad” or more scary feeling or emotion.
9. Swallowing down the feeling or emotion.

Catharting

1. Blowing the feelings or emotions out the mouth in heavy exhales.
2. Hyperventilating.
3. Feeling big, but without any words.
4. Saying, “I just need to get it all out. I just need to express.”
5. Shaking hands, wrists, arms, legs, head, et cetera, after feeling big to get rid of the energy.
6. Raking the energy of the feeling or emotion off of the body after expressing it big.
7. Forcing the feeling or emotion to become big even if you are not authentically feeling the feeling.
8. Letting the feeling get big in order to get rid of it.

Cathecting

1. Letting the feeling or emotion get big, and allowing the feeling or emotion to speak.
2. Using the information from feelings to handle things.
3. Using the information from emotions to heal things.
4. Allowing the energy of the feeling to circulate through the bodies after expressing it big, often breathing deliberately through the nose rather than hyperventilating through the mouth.

Rage Club is Not Catharsis. Rage Club is Cathexis. was originally published in NEXT CULTURE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To my chagrin, no website yet exists for Esperanza, the Archan Permaculture project currently under nurturing cultivation by the villagers of the InlaKesh Archiarchy Invention Center. It may be a project on my bench to build some such website…

Esperanza is the 65-hectare wonderland purchased by InlaKesh a few years ago. Situated near the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas, Mexico, Esperanza is a home of syntropic experimentation, land regeneration, Archiarchal exploration and innovation, and, in days, years, and decades to come, will be one of the few places on the planet where visitors can come for trainings in permaculturing, Technopenuriaphobia, and villaging within an Archiarchal context.

Below is a poem I wrote during my first visit to the stirring Esperanza. It is called, “Touch Nothing,” and is mostly true.

Love,
Devin

Touch Nothing

The sound of life is quiet here
Where the pueblos end
And the roads are sand
And even there, the plants
Would take the tire tracks in a week
If tires did not pass them over
Twice a day.

The cacophony is different here,
Loud, varied, urgent with mating,
Or water moving, or wind that shuttlecocks
Through trees, up hills, along the muddy river,
Easing the flight of birds, thwarting that of flies,
Paternal wind, so deft with seed, wind at your back, wind in your face, delicate wind across bare sweating skin in the hot day.

I am at home here. I am not at home.
I am at ease here. I am not at ease.
I am nurtured here. I am starving.
I am enlivened, and yet I see death, stalking in the forest, gelatin white fungus, black wall spider, the dog’s infected ear, fur and print from big cat, the deadliest killers too small to see.

A hole as big as a hand, black as space, widens in the old paddock.
Toss a stone in, the stone disappears.
Pour water, and no sound of it touching ground.

I hear a tale of some who seek to know the blackness of such holes,
For there is a world down there,
A life, a wish for consciousness.
And so at night, they drink liquid from a blue bark that makes their bodies baby-small.
They walk the pasture to the hole,
And into that place where no light casts,
Place one foot, then another,
And hoist and drop themselves,
Reaching out two hands
To touch nothing.

It begins with a plain acknowledgement. “We have tried our best. We keep creating misery for each other. We keep trying. We keep creating misery. We cannot do anything different.” Bam.

And though the acknowledgement might be new, the clarity itself is not, is it? You have sensed it there for some time, your consciousness drifting occasionally beneath the day-noise or the noise of your own insistence, dropping down to look suddenly upon your clarity, and then just as suddenly rushing away from it. A rubber ball making quick contact with a hard surface.

Have you not known for months? Have you not known for years? That the time has come?

You have pushed away your clarity. You have sheltered yourself in fantasy. You have committed to denial. Why be committed to denial? What kind of person commits themselves to denial? How could you — YOU of all people — make yourself so very blind? Everybody knows the answers to these questions.

Yet, your clarity has been there, the rock in your shoe, plain as day, revealing over and over that 2+2=4 and that 3+1=4, that 4 itself equals 4, but that nothing you ever do will make 4 into 5. Your clarity is not new, but your acknowledgement is. Your acknowledgement is a penny-dropping alchemical act that starts to bring you into integrity with reality. Your acknowledgement (especially done aloud where others may bear witness) places you outside the swaddling, blinding, narcotizing effects of denial. Even as the words exit your mouth, forces beyond your control are set in motion. The first job of these forces: Upend all you’ve tried desperately to hold together.

There is a reason you’ve been avoiding acknowledging your clarity. It is this: There is no putting the cat back in the bag. There is no uncrossing the Rubicon.

You cannot uncross the Rubicon. You cannot. Still, you might try. Because as the pain in your heart grows, as the fissure broadens and blackens and the oceanic ache pins you to the world, like an arrow pinning the wing of a bird to a tree, explanations are in order. What happened? What went wrong? What did I do?

What happened? (Something.) What went wrong? (Something.) What did I do? (Something.)

But who do these answers satisfy? Certainly not the ache. So the ache persists, and new answers come. If you had been different, you could have salvaged the love, perhaps. If you had done different, things would be different now. You failed love. Yes, you failed love! How? When? Where? In all ways at all times in every place. At no time did you love thoroughly or patiently enough. At no time could you be the promise you made when you said, “I want you to unfold. I want to be that into which you unfold.” You seek redemption somewhere. You reach out your hand. You touch nothing. You reach out again. Again, you touch nothing. You reach a third time, but by now, the smack smack smack of how it is, how it shall be, how you chose for it to be, comes to you. “Let it die,” you speak. “All the way.”

You could call her. What would you say? “I love you. I miss you. Thank you. I am sorry.” Yes, you could say that. And what good would it do, really?

At 3am, you wake from the dream, the dream when she is still here somewhere, down the hallway, waiting for you to walk to her, knock, embrace her, tell her about some nightmare-life you’d dreamed up when she was no longer there, when you could no longer walk down the hall to touch her and tell her that you love her.

At 3am, you wake, sunk and alone. You stand from bed. You walk from the room. You wonder where she is. You force yourself to stop wondering. Sometimes, this forcing works. Sometimes, not. Out of the room, the stars, whose lives parenthesize your own by billions of years and by billions of years, become relevant as a temporary witness to your life, your pain, the uncommon scene of you, awake here and now, outside, looking at them. “My little human pain,” you try dismissively. But neither the cliche nor the dismissal do a thing to ease or lessen the lance on which you find yourself impaled.

Speak to them now. “How do I bear this gracefully?” Silence. The stars say nothing immediately. Or they do speak, speak ceaselessly, but in a language too subtle and precious for your busted, demanding hearing. You stare for some time, then turn away from the big sky and relieve yourself in the grass. The grass is soft and mostly dark, with parts greyly visible by moonlight. No unnatural lights invade this part of the world.

As you relieve yourself in the moist grass, you notice that the moist grass clutches your naked foot. A swaddling, a merciful and damp shoe, the grass grips you, and now come the words of the stars, up and into you through this grassy shoe. “You do not,” say the stars. What was your question? “How do I bear this gracefully?” You do not. And you begin to weep. Because you have been trying to bear it gracefully. You’ve been trying to walk the world as one sane and put together, impervious to that shattering you undertook when you placed one foot and then another into the reality you’d been denying. So here it comes. There is no grace in grief. There is only dying, dying, dying, and the ongoing mercies of a world desperate to touch you in your dying. Have you not seen them? Have you let them slide on by? What about the butterfly that landed on your neck? Or the sudden sense in the woods that you had been invited there, that you had unwittingly responded yes to this invitation, that your feet had known the path, and here you were, there and then, welcomed in that grand floral atrium of green and yellow light, the cherished guest in mourning? And what about the fact that every time you needed to breakdown, each time you just had to speak the sadness in your lungs, a friend was there, or sometimes even a stranger, exactly the person you needed to move this sadness along from your chest out into the open where its vapors fed the world?

The grass grips your foot. The stars meet your extended hand. They offer you their light. They touch you. Routine star business. Tonight, they say no more.

Regret comes. Do not let it hang for long. Regret is wishing you had been different, and also believing that you somehow could have been different. Regret is a torture chamber. Regret is a hell you visit instead of living. Regret offers no path forward.

Remorse comes. Let it come. Remorse is wishing that you could have been different, and acknowledging that, given who you were (and perhaps given who you still are), you could not have been different. You could not do anything else.

Remorse is disillusionment, thorough and annihilating. Remorse takes no prisoners. You go through it, and you let it take you to your knees with “this is how it is” and “this is how it was.” You let remorse burn you up. You let remorse make plain what you’ve obscured with delusion and “it cannot be.” It can be. It can, in fact, be no other way. Remorse pins you to the rock, like fists upon your shoulders at the bottom of the well, submerging you in reality’s cold water. This is no baptism. This is a drowning. Because something in you must die. Something must become so, so clear. You were how you were. You could do no different. If you could have done different, you would have done different. This is how it was.

Remorse is your new lease on life.

What will you do with it?

You can fantasize about the future. “Maybe one day.” Yes, maybe. But not now. So, breathe. Let it knock into you again, this sudden encounter with reality. And then shamelessly go tell someone, “I am fantasizing, again,” ask them for a hug, and let the fantasy dissipate in cinders.

You can fantasize about the past. “That one moment on that one day, such love flowed between us.” And it did. But don’t be fooled. Grab someone, and tell about the bookends. Tell about the misery before that one moment on that one day. Tell about the misery after that one moment on that one day. Get real out loud. Let the horror of how things really were knock into you again, scalpelling away that pretense. Come back to reality. Let the tears come. Ask them to hug you. Do it all shamelessly. Keep coming back to moving forward.

From time to time, your heart detachedly wishes something. What does it wish? It wishes her well. You have spent so much time turning away from her. It has been so needed, to turn away from her. You are not done turning away from her. But then, from time to time, for no reason at all, your heart detachedly wishes her well. This is the love that remains. “What will I do with all this love I have for you?” you asked her once. Here’s an answer: In these temporary moments, smile upon her, detachedly. Let yourself form the words, words that gently and with care send her on her way to her next works and next loves, knowing they will not be with you. Do this with ease. Do this with abandon for about 60 seconds. “Will the love reach her?” you wonder. It will. Trust the highways, byways, and skyways. Trust channels known and unknown to get the message to her, bearing hardly a trace of your signature, but with all of your yes. What have you got to lose? And the moment any longing starts, close the faucet. Don’t go back into any fantasy. Afterall, you have a life to live. You have people to serve. You have next works and next loves, wild, and ecstatic. You have people to delight, people to kiss, trees to plant, questions to ask. You have a world to interact with, one that’s been dying to interact with you. Turn toward that, now. Turn toward that, always. It needs you. It wants you. Go.

Have you ever seen a pigeon in the city? What do they eat?

After more than three and a half decades of living in and around cities, I have observed that the diet of city pigeons consists almost entirely of food scraps from human beings. I have seen pigeons pecking at used diapers, feeding on yesterday’s bread, eating rotten produce, and fighting one another over all of these items. I have yet to see a city pigeon eating worms, bugs, berries, or in some other way living off natural, unprocessed bounty.

I am going to state an opinion about these birds: They have no dignity. Beyond their parasitic status in urban settings, they are an invasive species and well known disease vector whose contribution to the places they occupy is mostly just excrement. Sometimes, they are referred to as ‘flying rats.’ It’s not hard to see why.

The ‘city pigeon’ (aka, ‘feral pigeon’) was not always a scavenger. For nearly 3,500 years, these birds were prized for their uncanny ability to navigate ‘home’ across great distances. Also known as homing or carrier pigeons, they were domesticated and trained as precursors to modern postal services. They were used in cultures as diverse as Ancient Egypt, China, Greece, Rome, and more recently, Auckland, New Zealand. They delivered daily post in peacetime, top-secret post in wartime, and were the disseminators of the Olympic results throughout the Hellenic world from 776 BC onward. In ancient times, domesticated carrier pigeons could travel up to 160 kilometers (100 miles) per day. That means that you could get a letter from Lisbon to Kiev in just 3 weeks using a carrier pigeon.

This is the noble, dignified potential of the birds we now refer to as city pigeons. To me, this is what it really means to be a Pigeon.

With the advent of telegraphy, trains, automobiles, airplanes, and other technologies that accelerated the speed of communication, carrier pigeons became obsolete. People who owned these birds released them into the wild, but because they had been domesticated for so long, they flocked to familiar cities to roost and reside.

Nowadays, human beings have mostly forgotten the potential of Pigeons. Pigeons also seem to have forgotten the potential of Pigeons. And so the potential sleeps, dormant, as they scour the bricks for crumbs and shit on the monuments humans build.

If you grew up in Modern Culture — and almost everyone reading this article did — then it means that since childhood, you have been spoonfed thoughtware (thoughts are what you think, thoughtware is the maps, distinctions, etc., that you use to think with) — you have been spoonfed thoughtware about the limits of human potential. It means that you likely run your life only semi-consciously based on old decisions and memetics such as:

• The greatest value I have to offer the world is my material value — what I know, what I went to school for, what I have a certificate in, what I own, what money I can contribute, etc.
• “Destiny,” life purpose, or Non-Material Value are silly / “cute” concepts for people who haven’t accepted that adulthood is about shouldering the burden.
• The most important things I know I learned in school.
• Feelings are bad, wrong, immature, impolite, etc. The best thing to do with them is learn to control them and always be polite and civil.
• There is a thing called an ‘angry person,’ and I am not an ‘angry person.’
• There is a thing called a ‘good person,’ and it is very important to be a ‘good person.’
• Life’s a bitch, and then you die.
• Never rock the boat or upset the apple cart — just try to fit in.
• I am only one person. I cannot make a difference in the world.
• Some people are extraordinary. Not me.

If you read this list slowly, maybe you can sense how each of these statements is designed to place limits on what is possible. Or perhaps as you read the list, you think, “This list doesn’t place limits on anything. It just describes how life is. And life is limited.” In a way, that kind of response makes sense. A fish in water never thinks, “I am in water, but outside of water, there is another place called ‘air,’ and another place called, ‘land.’” To a fish, water is all there is. And at the same time, because water is all there is, a fish does not see, sense, or suspect the water in which it swims. Thoughtware is a bit like water for a fish. It is mostly invisible to the user, and when it is made visible, the thoughtware can just seem like…reality, all there is.

Another way you might respond to this list is that when you read it, you think, “Well, yeah, I have all of these stories and beliefs, but that’s my personality! It’s just who I am.”

To this, I say “Maybe…but also, maybe not.” Maybe you are not your thoughtware at all. Maybe these limits that seem so accurate or true or even personal are hardly a flake of the flaming potential that you are. Maybe you said “yes” to this thoughtware a very long time ago — earlier than you can consciously recall — because it was the only thoughtware your parents, your teachers, your government, your school, or your culture knew to be available. Maybe you even suspected that there was other thoughtware out there, or that there was so much more potential in you and other people than you were being told. Maybe it was obvious to you even as a child that you were a witch or a wizard, that people who pretended to be waiters or waitresses were actually healers and creators, that your mother and father, who slaved away at companies that were destroying the planet were secretly kings and queens. And, because you were a child who needed to survive in the world, maybe you adapted to the “reality” modern culture proposed. Maybe you are a pigeon who has forgotten what it really means to be a Pigeon.

When you clip a bird’s wings, it removes the faculty of flight. What a thing to do to a bird. When a culture fills a child with limiting thoughtware, it crumples the child’s potential. What a thing to do to a child.

But just as clipped wings grow back with a new molt, human potential can still unfold even after it has been flattened and suppressed. Unlike clipped wings, though, human potential does not just unfold on its own. There are too many forces in place to prevent it. Something else is required.

Where on earth can a person go to learn to step into their authority about who they are? To stand for what they care about? To stop giving their days and years to jobs or relationships that have nothing to do with what or who they could be? Where on earth can a person reclaim the dignity of being a human in alignment with their potential?

One such place is Rage Club.

The standard modern culture thoughtware about anger is that it is bad (rude, evil, pointless, cruel, immature, violent, dangerous, etc.). Anger is viewed as a design error, a mistake on the part of God. If you live with this thoughtware, then your only option is to do whatever you can not to experience your anger.

In Rage Club, participants come together to research and practically experience completely new thoughtware about anger. The thoughtware about anger in Rage Club begins with a simple premise:

“Anger is neutral energy and information — a vital resource you can use for living an extraordinary life.”

From here, a new world opens up. The next step is that participants must learn to consciously feel their anger. After a lifetime in modern culture, just about everyone who walks through the doors of Rage Club is highly competent at numbing their anger. Even people who routinely explode with rage in their day-to-day lives have no experience of consciously choosing to navigate into their anger. By “consciously choosing,” what I mean is that a person deliberately chooses to start experiencing their anger throughout their body (muscles tensing, heart rate pumping, voice yelling, etc.), and then deliberately chooses to stop experiencing that anger. It may sound insane to someone who has never consciously felt their anger that such a thing could be possible. It is possible. It takes practice. Participants discover this themselves in Rage Club after just a few minutes of work with a Rage Towel, and they are ECSTATIC and GLOWING!

But Rage Club is not about just “getting the feelings out” or “catharting” so that you never feel angry again (an impossible task, anyway). Rage Club is about gaining access to the energy, power, and clarity of anger so you can use it to heal old wounds and to serve your projects and relationships, here and now. After participants learn to feel their anger, a skilled Rage Club Spaceholder guides them through initiations, experiments, and practices so they can experience how to use their anger to:

• Set clear boundaries.
• Make clear distinctions.
• Discover what they really want, even at the subtlest level, and say ‘YES’ to it.
• Discover what they do not want, even at the subtlest level, and say ‘NO’ to it.
• Discover what they are tolerating in their lives, and stop tolerating it.
• Make extraordinary and alive proposals with friends, partners, and colleagues.
• Say what they care about, even if they never said it before.
• Take a stand for what they care about, even if they don’t think they can.
• Take a stand for something bigger than themselves.
• Keep their word no matter what.
• Become disciplined.
• Stop doing anything that harms their integrity.
• Walk tall and proud with authentic, simple, human dignity.
• Empower the Shine in others to shine brighter.
• Hold space for others to experience their anger.

Rage Club is at once one of the safest spaces on the planet, and also one of the most dangerous. The safety comes from the reality that you as a participant can experience your rage at any level of intensity, and the Rage Club Spaceholder will hold a space for you to do this that is free of judgment, criticism, rebuke, or blame. In fact, the only words you are likely to hear as you rage are, ‘YES!’ and ‘GO!’ and ‘FABULOUS!’

The dangerousness of Rage Club actually emerges from its safety. You are finally safe enough to let the old protections crumble, to let the thoughtware die, to put a crack in your city pigeon identity so that the thing that hides beneath it can finally come out. Rage Club is dangerous for your survival strategies, because when you authentically rage, some of those survival strategies will not survive.

In the end, Rage Club is a space of celebration. Why? Because celebration is the appropriate response to witnessing the miracle of human potential unfolding.

To see a Woman raging in her radiant, dignified power will make you stand taller. To see a Man raging himself into aliveness and authenticity will take your breath away. And if you rage, your shape will change. You may not be able to pretend you’re small anymore. You may not be able to tolerate mediocrity anymore. You might decide to commit yourself to something completely different than what you’ve done before. You might need to leave your job, leave your partner, sell what you own, and go adventuring. And isn’t it time, anyway? Isn’t it time for you to finally live?

There are no Rage Clubs for pigeons yet. There are hundreds of Rage Clubs for people happening every year online and in-person around the world in multiple languages. You can find them here. Or you can reach out to me directly at devingleeson4@gmail.com. Maybe it would be too crazy to reach out to me personally. Then again, it’s a good day to try something crazy, isn’t it?

I hope to see you raging soon.

There is an Underworld territory that exists in most — possibly all — human beings, called the Swamp. As its name implies, the Swamp is a stinking, belching, life-killing quagmire. It can come on as suddenly as an aggressive flu, sucking the sunlight out of people who otherwise shine with life and radiance, or it can seep in more slowly, like a black tea darkening the water in a cup.

Some people rarely ever spend more than a few minutes, or at most a few days, in the Swamp. They enter, they say hello, they exit. Others are ruled by it. They live there. Even in their best moments, they maintain a foot in Swampland, unconsciously stirring the ooze, savoring the pain, like an opiate addict fingering the stash in her pocket. Such people have in fact become addicted to the hellscape of the Swamp. Even if they weep, protest, moan, or bewail, the truth is that for them, the Swamp is planet home, the main channel, the first position, the comfy marshmallow zone at the center of the Box. Sometimes these people also have a larger core survival strategy of a Loser Box (see the description of Box 11 under the 18 Standard Box Designs).

The Swamp goes by different names, some of which might be more or less familiar to you. These include self-hatred, self-censure, self-rebuke, self-flagellation, self-cannibalism, self-abuse, shame spiral, self-doubt, etc. On their own, none of these terms quite captures the full range and texture of the Swamp, though each describes a facet.

Swamp symptoms vary, but some common denominators are misery, voices (Parent Ego State), trigger sentences (Demon Ego State), unhealed childhood emotions (Child Ego State), unhealable Gremlin emotions (Gremlin Ego State), mixed emotions (e.g., isolation and despair from mixed fear and sadness), disempowering identities, expectations about how you or life should be, unconscious decisions about yourself or the world, low energy, and nightmares.

For addicts, the Swamp is no trivial matter. It is likely that a significant portion of people who commit suicide are Swamp addicts who never learned to own and navigate this portion of their Underworld. But suicide comes in many forms, and it is far more common to see people with a Swamp addiction who never finish projects, never manage to hold space for their soul work, and never let their shine expand and touch the world at the breadth and depth that it could.

In April, 2023, I authentically discovered and admitted that I am a Swamp addict. I say “authentically” because, in a way, it is something I had known for a long time. But it was during the process of working Steps 4 and 5 in the Violence Anonymous (VA) 12-Step Program that the widespread cost of this addiction revealed itself.

Steps 4 and 5 are about identifying destructive, unconscious habits and patterns, and then sharing them with a fellow VA member, usually a sponsor. When my sponsor and I came to the end of my 5th Step, he reflected something back to me that I did not expect. He said, “If you only focus on processing your Swamp (he did not use the word ‘Swamp’) for a while, many of your other patterns will clear up. This one is at the bottom of almost everything.”

In the month following this discovery, I got ample evidence of its accuracy. I was apprenticing in four back-to-back Possibility Management trainings in Guatemala and California. From day one, hour one of the first training, I was already in the Swamp. I tried to fight it, but my efforts had little impact. I was, afterall, still addicted to the Swamp and had almost no practice navigating it. What I did have was consciousness, just enough to be aware of how powerless I seemed to be. So I watched as I sank deeper into misery, unable to give myself fully to my work in the trainings, unable to be present and make contact with the Beings there, unable to lovingly, supportively, or imaginatively create any intimacy with my partner that did not revolve around blame, suffering, or self-pity. The toll of the Swamp is high.

Over time, I have embraced many practices in an effort to alter my relationship with the Swamp. Some of the practices have been completely ineffective, some have been helpful, and a few have been transformative.

The article below is a trail of breadcrumbs. It starts with the thing I found most fundamental for transformation — the shift from Swamp Victim to Swamp Researcher. It continues with practices supporting this shift, as well as hints, distinctions, and considerations

There are many discoveries beyond this article. My hope is that it provides a highly valuable starting point for those wanting to shift their relationship with the Swamp.

Becoming A Researcher

Although the below is languaged specifically in reference to the Swamp, it is relevant and applicable to a wide range of Underworld work.

Victim of the Swamp

Who are you in relation to your Swamp? What identity do you step into when your Swamp is active?

For most people, the answer to this question is Victim. When the Swamp comes on, they are deep inside it, deeply identified with it. They cannot help but believe the life-negating stories flying around their heads. They sink helplessly into the churning sump that swirls in their hearts and energetic bodies. A Victim seeks a Rescuer, and a Victim in the Swamp either finds someone who will listen to their complaints while comforting and reassuring them, or rescues themselves by anesthetizing the pain of the Swamp with food, Netflix, sex, endless hot showers, or other numbing strategies.

Even if a person has enough clarity to say, “I am in the Swamp,” if they still relate to the Swamp as a Victim swimming in disempowerment, then they are at war with themselves. The Swamp is the enemy, their curse, the most hated of things, and any strategy or practice they deploy will be aimed at killing it.

Unfortunately, this does not work. The Swamp cannot be hated, shamed, maimed, or even loved, for that matter, out of existence (I have tried; maybe you have too). Even when dormant, it exists in the Underworld as potential, available at any moment. What can happen, though, is that you can radically transform your relationship to the Swamp. You can discover how you unconsciously open the door to go there. You can learn how you keep yourself there. You can even find out how you secretly benefit from living life in the Swamp. And you can reclaim your Agency so that you no longer unconsciously choose to go there anymore.

But you cannot do any of these things as a Victim. If you want to change your relationship with the Swamp, you need a new identity. A good place to start is with the Researcher.

Researcher of the Swamp

What are the attributes of a Researcher? What are her qualities? What are her tools?

A Researcher is genuinely interested in her subject. If she is studying the Swamp, she really wants to know about it. Her interest in the Swamp isn’t neurotic or obsessive like the Victim, nor is it fueled by an agenda to dispose of the Swamp or a timeline by which this disposal must be complete. If you asked her, “Why are you interested in the Swamp?” her answer might be, “Because I really want to discover what it is about.”

The Researcher uses the faculty of attention to research the Swamp. Unlike the Victim, whose attention is clouded by stories like, “The Swamp is bad,” “The Swamp is evil,” “I must get rid of the Swamp,” the Researcher’s attention is neutral. ‘Bad’ and ‘evil’ do not come into the picture. What she scans for is reality — clear, unevaluated, unstoried reality.

‘Neutral’ does not mean ‘numb.’ Numb is unfeeling and insensitive. With neutral attention, the Researcher of the Swamp may, and likely will, feel a great deal. As she encounters the Swamp without judgment, discovering just how great a price she has paid in time, energy, love, relationships, and purpose, her heart will break. This heartbreak is not the same as the Swamp sadness that emerges from someone beating themselves up about having a Swamp. Swamp sadness is not transformative. The sadness of heartbreak is deeply transformative.

In addition to neutral attention, one of the key tools of the Researcher is questions. Questions can also emerge from victimhood. For instance, “Why won’t the Swamp go away?” “Why does God hate me?” “Why am I so broken?” The types of questions the Researcher has come from her baseline attitude toward the Swamp: “I want to discover what this is about.” Here are some examples:

• How long does my Swamp last?
• What triggers my Swamp, specifically?
• What do I experience in my Mental Body? (E.g., thoughts, stories, conclusions, beliefs, loops, voices, trigger sentences, etc.)
• What do I experience in my Emotional Body? (E.g., emotional anger, sadness, joy, fear, Mixed Emotions like despair, isolation, nostalgia, depression, hysteria, shame, envy, guilt, unhealable Gremlin Emotions, etc.)
• What do I experience in my Physical Body? (E.g., tension, strain, difficulty breathing, low heart rate, itchiness, etc.)
• What do I experience in my Energetic Body? (E.g., lack of ‘shine,’ closure, body-covering slime, grayness, sourness, etc.)
• How identified am I with my Swamp right now, on a scale of 1–10?
• What is the noble Survival purpose of my Swamp?
• What is the Gremlin benefit and purpose of my Swamp?
• What impulses arise when I am in the Swamp? What do I think I ‘should’ do?
• Etc.

The answers to these questions are not meant to be clinically dry nor to occur only in the mind. For these questions to yield transformational results, the answers must be experienced clearly, observationally, neutrally, agendalessly, often multiple times, the contour of the information becoming more known and familiar.

Just as an electron cannot be observed without being affected by that which observes it, the Swamp begins to shift the moment it’s touched by neutral attention. This is part of the magic of the Researcher Identity. The Researcher’s attention functions like rain water passing down a dirt road. Over time, the water softens the dirt, clearing the dust, unearthing and loosening the rocks beneath, clarifying what is actually there, and making the ground malleable. This type of malleability is critical for beginning to authentically navigate in and around the Swamp.

So, how does one practically shift into a Researcher? Before that, a comment about the Experimenter.

The Experimenter

You may have noticed that the Researcher questions above are all aimed at discovering ‘what is.’ There is another class of question, one that usually starts with something like, “What would happen if…?” or “What if I try…?” These questions are about adding in new practices and experiments to work with an existing behavior, like the Swamp, and they are questions of the Experimenter, an identity closely connected to the Researcher.

It may be tempting to skip the step of the Researcher Identity and jump straight to Experimenter, because that’s where all the action and real results are… There is a danger in doing this. If you have lived your life as a Victim in relation to the Swamp, then your attitude toward it will be, “I must get rid of this thing.” The impulse to skip the Researcher step and head straight into ‘real’ experiments is almost always contaminated by the Victim’s hatred and urgency to make the thing go away. The fruits of experimenting in this way match the seed and soil from which they spring.

The message is simple: Do the groundwork of becoming a Researcher. Enjoy it. Do it until the benefits of the practice are obvious. Then, let your experimenting emerge from enthusiasm rather than restless urgency.

The Shift to Researcher

We pick up where we left off: How do you practically make the shift from Victim to Researcher? If you are serious about discovering how to make this shift, you will find your own way over time. For now, here is a guide to practice with:

1. DECLARE YOU ARE IN THE SWAMP: The moment you notice you are in the Swamp, declare it out loud. Say: “I am in the Swamp.” You can say this to someone else, you can say it to yourself if you are alone, or you can even write it down. The important thing is that you acknowledge and name what is happening. This declaration acts like a wedge, opening the gap between ‘You’ and the Swamp.
2. ENTER FIRST POSITION: Enter First Position of a Possibility Manager. That means becoming Centered, Grounded, and Bubbled. If the processes of Centering, Grounding, and Bubbling have become empty automatisms for you, it is time to start over. In order for these practices to be effective, they require deliberateness and consciousness. Even if that means declaring and undeclaring your Grounding Cord five times because you keep falling asleep, do it. It is worth it.
3. DECLARE YOURSELF A RESEARCHER OF THE SWAMP: Again, you can say this aloud to someone else, to yourself, or you can write it down. It may seem formal, but this declaration shifts the entire basis upon which you are engaging with the Swamp. If you need a reminder of this, you can reread the ‘Map of Victim and Researcher,’ above.

These are the basic instructions for making the identity shift into Researcher. You might elaborate this process over time. For instance, you might decide on the outfit your Researcher wears, the energetic tools he or she carries, or the specific qualities he or she embodies. My Researcher identity wears a white lab coat and sits, stands, and walks in a posture of dignity and poise. Because the Swamp is such a dignity-less place, this posture of poise and dignity is very important for me.

You will never be perfect at making this identity shift, and in the beginning, you might only be able to shift 5% of yourself from Victim to Researcher. 5% is more than sufficient to begin. You do not have to let your lack of neutrality, your slippery attention, or your Underworld commitment to remaining a Victim prevent you from practicing and getting better at shifting identity day by day, moment by moment, Swamp by Swamp.

As you enter this practice of shifting from Victim to Researcher, it can help to take on a strong, solid commitment, something along the lines of:

“For the next 15 days, no matter where I am, no matter what I am doing, I will stop myself the moment I notice I am in the Swamp, and take 5 minutes to shift from Victim to Researcher. I will do this every single time.”

Practices for the Researcher

On the right side of the ‘Map of Victim and Researcher,’ there is a list of qualities and attitudes that the Researcher inhabits. Further above, there is a list of questions the Researcher carries. In order to give these qualities, attitudes, and questions mass and substance, you must practice. Below are some practices for building your Researcher identity, all of which are only to be done after you have made the deliberate shift from Victim to Researcher.

FREEWRITE ALL OF THE VOICES, TRIGGER SENTENCES, AND OTHER GREMLIN CHATTER.

This and the next practice come from a correspondence with Gabriel Millinger, who was researching the Swamp at the same time as I and whose efforts inspired some of my own.

For this practice, get a pen and paper and freewrite for 10–15 minutes all of the insane, violent, destructive voices, trigger sentences, beliefs, stories, and other Gremlin chatter going through your head while you are in the Swamp. Do not try to make things nice, polite, reasonable, or rational. Don’t tone down the violence. If you hear a voice inside saying, “I just want to bash my head against a log until I’m dead,” WRITE IT DOWN.

As you write, let yourself feel, and notice what you feel. You might shake with fear, weep with sadness, grip the table in rage, or experience sadistic and masochistic joy. You do not have to do anything about these emotions (they will mostly be emotions, not feelings), although you may want to write them somewhere on the side of the paper for future processes (e.g., “I feel angry because I just can’t ever get anything right”).

The purpose of this practice is not to “get it all out.” There is no “getting it all out.” The Swamp is a part of your Underworld. Even when it’s dormant, it remains an option, ever available. The purpose of this exercise is to allow what has perhaps up to this point been happening only semi-consciously in your head to happen outside of your head in a place where you can more clearly view it. This begins to shift the Swamp from an invisible, unconscious process to a visible process.

This process can also work with one person holding a listening space and the other letting the words and emotions rip.

A WARNING: When you are in the Swamp, you may be tempted to take destructive actions, like sending a message that harms a relationship, or any number of other self-sabotaging moves. This exercise can stir up and aggravate those impulses. If you begin to seriously entertain such actions, you can be certain that you have exited the Researcher identity. DO NOT PLAY WITH FIRE. Stop the exercise right away, put it on the shelf for later, and Center, Ground, and Bubble yourself back in the Researcher identity.

WRITE SYSTEMATICALLY AND SCIENTIFICALLY.

In this writing practice, you systematically take stock of the Swamp using the questions of the Researcher above or other similar inquiries. You do not have to use all of the questions, and in fact it may be useful to just stick with a few at first, like:

• When did the Swamp begin? Something happened, and then I opened the door to the Swamp. What was it specifically, and what was behind me using this moment to open the door to the Swamp?
• What is happening in my mental body?
• What is happening in my emotional body?
• What is happening in my energetic body?

The purpose of this exercise is to build the muscle of ‘being interested’ and to thoroughly observe the terrain of the Swamp. You have probably visited the Swamp thousands of times in your life, but how well do you really know it? How clearly can you really see it without being identified with it and without fighting it? Now is your chance.

Remember, this is not a mental exercise. You do this exercise in all of your bodies. When you write about your energetic body, do not write from what you think is happening in your energetic body. Instead, close your eyes, bring your attention into your energetic body, and begin to sense. When you notice something, only then write it down. Do not imagine things. Don’t make stuff up. Similarly, when you scan your emotional body, actually allow the emotions to be there. Feel them. Being a neutral Researcher is not the same as being a numb, bystanding observer. Being a neutral Researcher means clearly connecting with what is happening without fighting it and without evaluating it. This is the foundation of a new relationship with your Swamp.

SPEAK TO YOURSELF SYSTEMATICALLY AND SCIENTIFICALLY.

You will not always be able to stop your life, grab a pen and paper, and write for a chunk of minutes. Sometimes, the Swamp will strike when you are walking through a coffee jungle in remote Chiapas, or making breakfast for a group, or regrouping after breaking up a dog fight, or… you get the point. Do not let this stop you from shifting identity and resuming your inquiry. You can do this by choosing a few questions and either speaking your noticings aloud to yourself or saying them silently but deliberately in your head. Some of your most important discoveries may come from your commitment to keep researching, one way or another, regardless of the limiting factors in your circumstances.

IDENTIFY YOUR DIFFERENT SWAMPS AND GIVE THEM NAMES.

When I first encountered the Swamp, it was in the ‘Map of Pressure Rapid Learning.’ Also known as the Feedback Swamp, this Swamp occurs when someone gives you a Beep! about something you are doing that is not working. Instead of taking the Beep!, making the Shift, and continuing to Go!, you detour straight into the Feedback Swamp. Here, two sets of voices swirl. One set of voices is about your deficiencies, e.g., “I’m an idiot,” “What the hell is wrong with me?” “I’ll never get it,” “I just can’t learn,” “I’m broken,” etc. The other set of voices is about their deficiencies: “Fuck them!” “What do they know anyway?” “Why would I take feedback from a man with a ponytail?” “Eh, shut up.”

As you engage with your Researcher practices, you will start to notice patterns. For example, you might notice that you actually have distinct Feedback Swamps. You might notice that you experience Swamps that do not originate from external feedback at all, but from inner processes. You might notice that each of these Swamps has its own set of stories, sensations, beliefs, and other qualities that, while similar to other Swamps, are in fact distinct. You might also notice that you do not have an infinite number of distinct Swamps, but that there are actually just a handful you repeatedly visit.

When this level of noticing occurs, it is time to give each Swamp a name, a shorthand, so that when you are in that Swamp, you can say, “Ah, I am in the No One Loves Me Swamp again.”

When I started researching my different Swamps, I noticed that each Swamp had a central theme connected with it. These themes live in me already, and have for years. When I hear a piece of feedback or experience an inner process that acts as evidence that the story behind the theme is true, accurate, etc., the Swamp and all its attendant qualities (voices, emotions, trigger sentences, etc.) emerge acutely.

Here are some examples of different Swamps with their names and central themes:

• MEN HATE ME Swamp: I am weak, pathetic, and incompetent in manly things, and men see that and hate me for it.
• WOMEN HATE ME Swamp: I am incompetent in things that are useful for holding the village, like cooking, cleaning, noticing what needs to be done, being with the children, etc., and women hate me for it.
• I’M REGRESSING Swamp: The evolutionary path, healing, practicing, experimenting — none of it works for me, and I am not transforming, it is my fault, and maybe I’m broken.
• DESTINY Swamp: I do not know what my work is in the world, I will never know, and it is my fault for not being better, clearer, and working harder to sort all of this out.
• MEMORY SHOCK Swamp: This occurs when a memory suddenly erupts into consciousness of a specific moment from weeks or even decades ago when you did something or said something that you are now ashamed about, and the memory shocks your nervous system.

For Those with a Loser Box…

When it comes to Swamp research, people with Loser Boxes are a special case, because even when the Swamp is not acute, it is still there, hiding in plain sight, part and parcel of the fundament that forms the basis of their core survival strategy.

A life practice for people with the Loser Box is to check with themselves frequently, many times a day, and maybe even every hour on the hour for some days or weeks, “Am I in the Swamp now?” or “Where am I in the Swamp now?” and to record what emerges from these questions.

Other Practices and Distinctions

Child Emotions, Gremlin Emotions, Emotional Healing Processes, Their Limits, and a Two-Month Practice

As you go through the practices above, you will uncover emotions. Some of these will be unhealed child emotions from the past and some will be unhealable Gremlin emotions. If you are just beginning the process of working with your Swamp and have not done many Emotional Healing Processes (EHPs), do not worry about figuring out whether your emotions are child or Gremlin emotions. Trying to do so will just confuse you. Instead, go through the processes, one emotion at a time. Feel consciously what you have avoided feeling for so long. Rediscover old decisions and vows. Make new decisions that empower you. Clean up and heal as much of your Swamp as you can.

If you do this persistently, a day may come when you go into a process with some by-now-very-familiar emotions, and these by-now-very-familiar emotions bring you back to a moment or set of moments that you have been to many times before in EHPs. When you scan this moment from the past, you see that you could go into the high intensity feelings again, but you have already done that in multiple processes, and already experienced the healing that comes with it. At this point, you might be at a loss: What do you do from here?

A possibility is that you have encountered a Gremlin emotion — a single emotion, mixed emotion, or 5-body state to which your Gremlin has become addicted. Gremlin emotions include, for example, endless despair (fear+sadness) about the way the world is, endless sadness about having been abandoned or excluded, endless anger at a parent for not loving you the way you needed to be loved, endless regret (sadness+anger+fear) about the past, etc. The keys to distinguishing these as Gremlin emotions are:

1. You have been through healing processes about the emotions, and these healing processes actually worked, meaning they were thorough and authentic.
2. Even after many (5–10) healing processes about the same emotion, it returns and grips you with the same intensity as it always has.

Gremlin emotions are not healable. You could go through 50 EHPs about a single Gremlin emotion and still see little difference around that emotion in your daily life. The reason Gremlin emotions are not healable is that at the subterranean level of your Underworld, your Gremlin is actually choosing to experience these emotions over and over again. Because this choice is unconscious, it’s unlikely that you are even aware exactly how it happens. Thus, discovering how it happens is a critical step in acquiring authentic Agency about whether or not you decide to open the door on the Gremlin emotion.

So, how do you discover how the Gremlin emotion happens? I think there are many ways, but one course of action is this:

Commit two months of your life to mastering the shift from Victim to Researcher, and practice every day tracking your Swamp. When you discover emotions, go through the EHPs. Do a minimum of one EHP per week during this period, but more may be better. You are taking a strong stand to deeply shift your relationship with your Underworld, so hold nothing back for these two months. As the two months come to a close, notice which emotion or emotions just didn’t seem to change that much, despite thorough EHPs. Which brought you to the same memory over and over and over again? Which, despite healing that you sensed in the moment was real and effective, just kept coming back? When you have identified these emotions, reach out to an experienced spaceholder and tell them, “I have discovered a Gremlin emotion. Will you hold space for me to discover how I unconsciously choose to experience this emotion over and over again even after I have done healing about it?”

You may need to go through this process more than once before you really get what is going on. When you do get what is going on, it will change your life. You will see clearly how and when your Gremlin chooses to cross the bridge into the part of your Underworld where the Swamp and the associated Gremlin emotions live. You will see the landscape of this part of your Underworld vividly. You will see the path behind you, the one that leads over the bridge and out of the Underworld, back into Life. You will be able to walk that path and cross that bridge, perhaps for the first time in your life consciously choosing to leave the Swamp. You might even put up barbed wire and a sign at the entrance of the bridge that reads: “BEWARE: SWAMP AHEAD.” When you have done all this, you will have conscious, authentic choice — the ability to choose whether you go to the Swamp or not, and if you do go there, how long you stay. (I thank Christine Duerschner for her clear, gentle spaceholding and navigating as she brought me through a big layer of this process.)

Voices, Trigger Sentences, The Voice Blaster, and Spark 135

Two distinct, though similar, attributes of the Swamp are voices and trigger sentences. Voices are stories you tell yourself that actually come from an external authority figure. These stories can be things like, “I’m too fat,” “I should work out more,” “I need to know the answer,” “No one likes an angry woman,” etc. You might have initially heard these stories from parents, the government, school, commercials, billboards, or similar sources, and over time, you integrated these stories into your Box as Voices.

Trigger sentences, on the other hand, are stories you tell yourself but that you did not hear from an authority figure or anyone else, for that matter. These can be things like, “I’m worthless,” “I’m washed up,” “I can’t…,” “I hate myself,” “I should kill myself,” etc. The origin of trigger sentences is unclear, though during one Possibility Team held by Vera Luísa Franco, a theory emerged that they actually come from inner Low Drama going round and round. Whatever the source is, trigger sentences seem to open a person up to being energetically feasted on by scavenger entities. This is one explanation for why people who constantly repeat trigger sentences to themselves regularly experience low energy or even weeks of otherwise unaccounted for bedrest.

The Voice Blaster is a tool for getting rid of voices. For more information on the Voice Blaster, check out the hyperlink, but the general instruction is that when you hear a voice, you say it aloud audibly (not a whisper), and then say ‘BANG,’ pulling the trigger on your Voice Blaster and leaving the voice a smoldering pile of smithereens.

To handle Trigger Sentences, there is a subtle but powerful process outlined in Spark 135.

I have tried both the Voice Blaster and Spark 135 multiple times. I went to extremes, walking around blasting voices in public, blasting them on planes, collecting nearly 100 trigger sentences, shifting identity into a Trigger Hunter and doing daily sword and rage practice for weeks to close and reclose the Entity Cafe that I seemed to transform myself into each morning anew. I can say that these processes and practices were helpful, and yet… they were missing something for me. For my personal process, I have needed to get closer to the voices and trigger sentences, watching them, getting to know how they work and what their effects are, before voice blasting or trigger hunting were really effective.

Positive Self-Talk and Other Unhelpful Practices

Self-hatred, self-berating, self-cannibalism, and self-abuse are major attributes of the Swamp. It’s logical to think that you can counteract these forces by practicing their opposites. You try things like telling yourself three times a day what you appreciate about yourself. You say aloud in front of the mirror, “I am grateful for how caring you are. I am grateful for what a big heart you have. I love you, I love you, I love. Thank you.” You whisper affirmations like, “I am whole, I am loved, I am cared for,” or “I feel good, I feel great, I feel wonderful,” a la What About Bob?, attempting to override the internal voices that assert the contrary. You even ask friends and colleagues to answer questions like, “What do you value about me? What is the special thing that I bring to the world? What Bright Principles do you see working through me? What do you appreciate about me?” After weeks or months of doing this, does your Swamp go away? Does it come less frequently? Is it less intense?

The answer for me to all of these questions was ‘No.’ I have spoken with others who say the same thing. These practices may have provided temporary relief, but they did not meaningfully accrue into a permanent shift.

How can it be that practices of self-love, etc., don’t work to transform or nullify the Swamp? Here is one answer: If you are a Swamp addict, then at a level far deeper than conscious thought, you (or rather, your Gremlin) are 99.99% committed to keeping the Swamp going. That means that for every one positive affirmation, you unconsciously fire off 9,999 counteracting processes. It’s like dropping a dot of red dye into the ocean hoping that the water will change color. Every once in a while, you might catch one of these unconscious processes, such as noticing that whenever someone appreciates you, you dismiss the appreciation by telling yourself they do not really know what they are talking about, but otherwise, the unconscious commitment to staying in the Swamp remains invisible.

There may be a place for affirmations, positive self-talk, etc., in working with the Swamp, but I do not sense that these things are effective in causing deep, long-term transformation.

Final Words

The terrain of Swamp research is big. If you are making headway with the Swamp or Swamp addiction research, please share your discoveries far and wide.

A few days ago, I attended a Zoom gathering which putatively concerned itself with global emergencies, not the least of which was climate change. As I entered the Zoom room, I was amazed to see there were more than 200 people calling from all over the world. I even recognized a few of the names from projects I had visited. I was excited. What might be happening here tonight? What might we face into together?

As things began, the moderator asked that anyone who was not one of the 4 panel speakers (Dougald Hine, Bayo Akomolafe, Stephen Jenkinson, and Vanessa Andreotti) turn off their cameras. 196 faces disappeared, and soon, I was looking at a screen with just 4. I felt sad and angry about this. Somehow, from the get go, the massive togetherness of the gathering was dead. Then, the moderator asked the first question, and the conversation began.

I do not know what I was expecting. I know that I was quickly horrified. When asked about the world ending, Bayo Akomolafe mused academically about the distinction between death and dying. As I watched him speak, he looked away from the camera, looked up most of the time, smiling incongruously, unfolding philosophical BS in inscrutable language, while the other panelists nodded, as though what he was saying was very interesting. Throughout, Dougald Hine spoke beautifully, but seemed unwilling to answer any question with his own thoughts, instead ongoingly referencing in detail the works of other authors. When probed about the role of artists and makers in the world to come, he responded with a report on Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World. He reminded me of the Learn’d Astronomer.

The conversation continued like this for 90 painful minutes. I could not make sense of it. Where was the feeling? Where was the heart? Where was the fear and grief and anger? How could it be that these thought leaders, these experts, were only able to speak about climate change from the mind, as if it were some film or some poem that needed to be analyzed and critiqued? Or as if it were something happening far away, over there, in another world, not in our world, not in our skies, not in our oceans, not to our coasts, not to the rainforests and deserts and flora and fauna and humans with which we share this planet?

As I listened, I boiled, and I reflected. A few years ago, a younger version of myself might have found all of this intellectualizing very compelling. I might have attempted to model my thinking and speaking on the thoughts and speech of the panelists. I might have written down the books they referenced, then gone out and read them, believing that I would be qualified and justified in having an opinion once I’d made my way through the same bibliographies they had.

I no longer think like that. And, though my anger is still directed in some ways at the panelists and the handling of the gathering, I realize that what I actually want is to have a different kind of conversation — one that emerges from the heart (not the mind), comes through direct contact with reality, and does not further sever our relationship with the Earth by objectifying or pretending that we are not a part of Her, right here and right now.

A conversation less civil, less polite, more sane.

Of all things, I have been thinking lately about ExxonMobil. In particular, I have been wondering what a series of meetings might have been like in the secret offices of the ExxonMobil headquarters (then just called Exxon) in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

During the late ’70s, long before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, Exxon was conducting groundbreaking research into the connection between the burning of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and its role in global warming. The company’s research was cutting-edge, and appeared in peer-reviewed journals of the time. One of the company’s projects involved exploring the open question about the rate of CO2 absorption in oceans. For this, the company used its own tanker to take water measurements in a journey from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf. In another project, Exxon scientists worked with outside scientists to build stunningly accurate models for predicting climate change scenarios.

On one hand, Exxon’s research was motivated by bottom-line questions about the viability of remaining a fossil fuel company during a future when government sanctions on fossil fuels might limit profitability. On the other hand, there seemed to be (at least in some quarters of the company) an attitude and atmosphere of vision — the possibility that Exxon might play a positive role in shepherding the future. As one manager in Exxon Research put it: “This may be the kind of opportunity we are looking for to have Exxon technology, management and leadership resources put into the context of a project aimed at benefiting mankind.”

I sit here imagining a timeline that never came to be wherein Exxon poured more of its resources into research. In this timeline, the then- management and CEO and CFO and COO of Exxon agreed to take a stand, to set a new and radical precedent for energy companies to become forces of possibility, research, and stewardship for the impending climate crisis. For the first time in history, an enterprise and its shareholders acknowledged the hollowness of the bottom line and instead turned their attention toward the unfolding of renewable, non-Earth-killing energies. Exxon employees who once concerned themselves solely with the efficient extraction of fossil fuels from the ground and oceans came to spend their days educating the public and holding space for individuals and groups to become reconnected to the Earth that they had somehow come to regard as an ever-stocked pantry built for consumption.

All of this is, of course, a total fantasy — one that could not emerge in the 1970s, ’80s, or ’90s, and one that seems unlikely to emerge today.

Recently, I walked into a store at the Findhorn Ecovillage and saw a sign with a quote attributed to the Cree Indians:

“Only when the last tree has died,
Only when the last river has been poisoned,
Only when the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you realize you cannot eat money.”

I question the attribution of this quote to the Cree. I do not question its accuracy.

The 1970s ended, and research at Exxon continued into the 1980s. Then, as the 1980s came to a close, Exxon changed its position abruptly. From its role as a research leader, Exxon shifted to become a purveyor of doubt within the climate science community, emphasizing the uncertainties and the unknowns. Among other things, this about-face included attempted meddling and attacks on the UN’s newly convened International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); the establishment of the Global Climate Coalition, a now-defunct lobbyist group that promoted climate change denial; and the funding of at least 39 organizations whose websites included text that negated, denied, and misrepresented climate science. In the same way that Exxon had once been positioned (and lauded) as a leader in climate science research, it now became a key player in the dissemination of climate science uncertainty, a stance which it’s maintained for 30+ years.

I think we can all easily imagine what happened:

The psychopaths won.

Greed won.

Willful ignorance won.

The bottom line won.

“It’s just business,” won.

Still, I find myself wondering about the meetings that must’ve taken place at Exxon in the early ’90s. Did no one roar in anger when the marketing people offered up the idea of exploiting climate uncertainty? Did no one say, in no uncertain terms, “What we are considering is evil”? Did no one think of their children’s children and their children’s children’s children — the world they would be leaving for them? Did no one allow compunction to move them to action? Did no one endure sleepless nights?

How polite were these conversations?

How civil?

(You can read the full story of Exxon and climate change research in this 6-part, 2015 exposé from Inside Climate News.)

Civil, polite discourse in the face of anthropogenic climate catastrophe is insane.

Civil, polite discourse emerges from a culture in which it is not ok to feel.

If it is not ok to feel your anger about climate change or anything else, then you cannot take a meaningful stand that moves you and the world around you into action. You cannot say, “fuck you,” to the marketing department that wants to green wash your company’s carbon footprint with empty and inflated corporate social responsibility initiatives. What you can do is have a lively debate where thoughts are exchanged, but no one is moved and nothing changes.

If it is not ok to feel your sadness about the fact that there was once a forest here, and now what remains is a scorched hillside and charred stumps from drought-induced forest fires, then you cannot source the poetry that will move a stranger’s heart to break. You cannot surrender yourself to Gaia and allow her voice to move through you. You cannot be the Lorax and speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues. What you can do is wax superficially poetic about the differences between death and dying.

If it is not ok to feel your fear about bleached coral, sea-level rise, desertification, mass extinction, famine, drought, melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, new high- and low-temperature records every year, stalling and empty-worded politicians making massive investments in solutions that probably will not work, more frequent and intense storms, malnutrition crises, and proliferation of disease, then you cannot look at these things squarely. You cannot make direct, sincere contact with What Is. What you can do is stick your head in the sand. What you can do is whistle in the dark, playing badminton with fascinating ideas. What you can do is barricade yourself in a chamber of books and information, as though books and information will somehow shield you from the consequences of reality.

If it is not ok to feel your anger, sadness, and fear, you will not be able to feel your joy either. In fact, if you are deeply steeped in modern culture, the one feeling you will be able to feel is ‘good,’ which actually means numb. When you are numb enough, when your heart is disconnected enough, when you are well-enough-equipped with tools for maintaining your numbness, like alcohol, like tv, like peaceful meditation, like obsessive exercise, like overeating or undereating, like breathwork for regulating your nervous system so you do not feel what is happening inside you, like video games, like antidepressants, like anxiolytics, like a 24-hour news cycle that inures you to horror — when you are numb enough, you can keep going to your job, keep not rocking the boat, keep being civil, polite, and tame, even as a voice inside you whispers from time to time, “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark,” and a longing grows in you to live your life differently.

A conversation less civil, less polite, less tame. That is what I want. A conversation more sane, because there is no more pretending that things are fine, no more pretending that the tech bros are going to unite to invent a product that saves us all.

In that conversation, people might yell in rage at how things were, how things are, how things will be, and how things may have been. They might pound their fists. They might raise their voices and ask, “How could we have allowed this to happen?”

People might quake and scream in fear, standing on the nothing-ground of uncertainty, standing in the no-place of the unknown, acknowledging the strange reality that no man, no woman, no institution, no organization, no NGO, no government, no treaty, no protocol, no nothing is a guarantee for anything anymore. No one is coming to save us.

Through howls of sadness, people might bewail what has already been lost. People might bemoan the decimation of plant and animal life across the globe. People might lament the fact that long before the first casualties of the anthropocene extinction, the world had mostly already severed its connection to Gaia.

With joyful smiles and laughter, people might celebrate that in all of this that is happening, somehow human beings can still come together, can still hold spaces for one another, can still hug and hold hands and feel and heal and be real.

And then, when all of this is open and on the table, perhaps we can start discussing ideas.

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I offer this distinction as a possibility. It could change your life. It has changed mine.

When I first got into the work of personal transformation and healing, I wrestled with the question of what it was all for.

Was I doing this work just so I could feel better? Were all the groups, processes, and initiations just so I could improve my life?

I did feel better, and I was experiencing a better life. At the same time, I wanted it to be for something more.

At my first Expand the Box Training (ETB) in Seattle 7 years ago, I encountered the possibility that personal healing / transformation work could be about liberating me from the constraints of childhood wounds and the ossified preferences, worldviews, rules, shoulds, and conditions I carried, SO THAT I could deliver into the world the work that my soul was longing to deliver.

In the 7 years following this initial experience in ETB, the purpose of my personal work shifted from me feeling better to me growing into the Man who is capable of walking and creating as LOVE, TRANSFORMATION, CLARITY, DIGNITY, EMPOWERMENT, and POSSIBILITY — my personal set of Bright Principles — wherever I go, whatever spaces I hold. This purpose continues to unfold in the form of increasingly bigger projects.

One thing I have noticed is that when people working on personal transformation / healing stay with questions like, “How do I feel better? How do I make my life better?,” their focus tends to be on deficiencies, on what is wrong with them, on their own woundedness and brokenness. There seems to be an idea that once they have healed their woundedness and brokenness, then they can start working on delivering their projects to the world. Unfortunately, you can easily make a career out of healing your woundedness / brokenness, since woundedness / brokenness are stories for which anyone who sincerely wishes to can always find ample evidence no matter how much healing they have done…

When people decide to change the purpose of their healing / transformation journey from being about feeling better to being about becoming that which is capable of delivering their destiny projects into the world, things get reversed. It is no longer, “Once I am healed, I will do the project.” Instead, it becomes, “I must do this project / deliver this service, and in order to do that, I’ve got to heal / transform every trigger, trauma, voice, construct, ineffective relating pattern, underworld behavior, etc., that emerges naturally along the way to becoming the the person who can deliver this project / service.”

The boring questions of brokenness lose all validity.

The thrilling questions of competence and how to soar take their place.

Words on Falling Apart.

1.

Do it in someone’s arms.

If no one’s available available, go to a tree.

If there is no tree, get supine on the ground and face the sky.

And if the ground is asphalt everywhere, then you must dig a hole. So spit fire, shred it with tooth and with nail, burrowing deep to where the natural soil blackens your fingertips. If the asphalt bleeds you and bares your bones, well, let it. Your bones are for something, after all.

2.

It goes in this way:

You were something. And you were used to being that something. Like a dress or old suit, you wore your something-ness effortlessly.

Then, it happened: A faint clicking somewhere in the universe, a grave misstep. You were snatched by a loose thread. Unstitched, the old pants, the withering hem, the falling buttons, the faded cotton weave.

You were used to effortlessly being something. Now, no effort can make you something again.

You could, of course, try becoming nothing. This is an old spiritual trick — a strategy that works once or twice per lifetime. In every other case, nothingness is only on the other side of the fire.

3.

The world is full of immediacy. Look here. No, here. This way. That way. Now.

A useful tip: Carry a reminder in your pocket that says, “I have made myself an apprentice to a different kind of immediacy.” Then, live that way.

Not many people will pay you for it. But a few will take your hand.

A new sadness club, The Transformative Power of Sadness, begins on August 4th. To register or find out more, send me a message at devingleeson4@gmail.com.

What do you do when the bottom falls out?

When the future is opaque?

When the passing fragments of what once seemed so certain dissolve at your touch?

I ask these questions as large chunks of my own life rapidly disintegrate.

I do not like the disintegration. I watch myself resist it in all sorts of ways. I watch as I try to deny what is happening. I watch my feeble attempts to escape the heartache, and my feebler striving to ignore the void of uncertainty that opens before me.

Have you had a period like this?

I go to the field to write a psalm, but quickly discover that I have come to listen. I hear wind, crickets. At my back, I sense something like a hand. I weep quietly, then louder. Later, a man holds me, and I cry. I notice that the crying does not abate the pain, but does allow it to be felt more acutely. For a moment, I surrender into the aliveness of the experience, glad for a brother to hold me.

When the bottom falls out, I cut and run. This does not work, and I do not make it far. Soon, I turn around. I look back at the void of heartache and terror. The village surrounds me, deeper and more loving and complex than I knew. How did I miss it? I look back at the void. I take one step into it and stand, getting used to the temperature. Then, I take another.

What do you do when the bottom falls out?

Most of our sadness is unconscious. That is, most of the time when we experience sadness, we do not consciously acknowledge it for what it is. Instead, we escape into the busyness of our lives, knowing that if we ignore it long enough, whatever that painful thing is that we are feeling in our throat and chest will go away.

But what if instead of abandoning our sadness, we learned to turn toward it, embracing its energy and information like we might allow ourselves to be embraced by the places we call home? If we did that, we would be entering the territory of Conscious Sadness, where the uses of this precious feeling reveal themselves to us.

Although there are many more than what I have listed below, here are 7 uses of Conscious Sadness.

1. To be where you are.

Right here, right now, and nowhere else. No nostalgic yearning. No more fantasy. It is what’s left of you when the show collapses and the lipstick fades. Have you avoided this nakedness? What a relief to no longer pretend. What dignity is there.

2. To connect.

Did you know that sadness melts walls? I did not. Not until one day when a friend showed me how. Together, we wore down the walls that blocked my heart from his and his from mine. A space opened between us as we did this, and love came through. Oneness. Our means of dissolution? Tears.

3. To say ‘goodbye.’

Sadness melts walls. It also dissolves bonds. It is for grieving and letting go. How many times did you swallow hard and smile when it was time to say farewell? How many times did you hold on for hours, days, or months past closing time? That lump in your throat is not a cold coming on. It is the tender clarity of your sadness.

4. To be with.

You cannot relate to the particulars of her suffering. Nor have you ever been where he has been. You want to understand, to solve, to fix. Relax those impulses, and maybe, just maybe, your sadness will move you to that place of non-urgency that lies just beyond seeking to understand and fix. Those who know it call that place ‘being with.’

5. To forgive.

What he did to you, what she did to you, what you did to them. The grudge does not crumble because you smile, and it does not crumble because you say, “It’s fine.” But let mercy lead you, carried on the wind of sadness, and watch forgiveness come on its own.

6. To summon the Muse…

…and let her whisper to you here, beneath the stripped cork tree in southern Portugal, where the dead heat and ants assail its cracked, naked trunk. Who are the men who strip these trees? How can they do this? Listen to her, and write down what she says. Let her couplets break the world’s heart.

7. To let your ache become your offering.

Because your ache is not just for you. It is for the world. This becomes obvious when you let your sadness rend you in two, opening you from toe to tooth. Pick up the tears from the floor. Mix them with the soil here, and mold them into shape with your fingers. When the creation is complete, give it away to someone who needs it. Then, begin again.

A new sadness club, The Transformative Power of Sadness, begins on August 4th. To register or find out more, send me a message at devingleeson4@gmail.com.