To: Lee's Mailing List
From: Lee
A certain individual from my Dorf group wrote:
>If I would do it again, I would start with the last night where I
>organised a tantric gathering in the blue saloon with a few people but
>this time, I would invite everyone of the group to participate.
>Imagine connecting with each other in a tactile sensual way with music
>candles, wine and chocolate...no words necessary, it is so easy to love
>everyone that way....then the forum would have been a piece of cake
>after that, no more struggling with what to say, how to say it and what
>people are going to think...after being naked all together somehow the
>dynamic is flowing much better...(or is it only my personnal view)
>experience.
Well, now I'm definitely planning to go back again next year!
And, actually, I'm now working out the details to be at Harbin Hot Springs in California at the end of September (i.e. in about a month) to do Level 4 of the LIS workshop (LIS = Love, Intimacy, Sex), which has certain elements in common with the Blue Saloon party described above, although at LIS people usually work in groups of two or four rather than twenty. (And no wine and no chocolate, and lots more structure. <Frown>) (Seriously, guys, especially zegg-mates, it's very worthwhile. If you don't know about it, look at the HAI web page.)
And aside from that.....
I think that at this point some of you, especially my non-zegg-mates, have definitely learned more about me than you care to know. I hope that you have also learned some interesting things about Zegg. I somewhat suspect that if I had a way of taking a poll, I'd find that more than 50% of you (excluding the members of my Zegg Dorf group) are thinking, "That's certainly a place I would never go."
Well, I guess that's the reason I'm the one writing these messages to you guys and you're only the ones reading them.
When I left, I wasn't sure whether I would ever want to come back again or not, but as soon as I got home I knew that I did want to go back and would go back (to summercamp, not to Zegg during some other part of the year) immediately if it were possible.
But I would go back next time with a different attitude, different expectations. I would go back with the attitude that my purpose in being there was to learn things.
One of my NLP teachers frequently liked to say, "Disappointment requires adequate planning." In other words, you can only be disappointed if you've set yourself up by having expectations.
And oh, I tried very hard not to have expectations. But the way Zegg had been described to me was something I wanted so much that I just couldn't keep myself from believing that it might be that way. But these very expectations acted as a filter which.... Well, I said that in my last message. These expectations determined the way I looked at people and the sort of interactions with people that were possible for me.
It was indeed discouraging to find that I am still capable of returning to a dark space within myself that I thought I had learned never to go to again. But the encouraging thing was that I went into that space and then came back out of it again fairly quickly, which is a major improvement over my experiences in similar situations in the past.
I intend to back to summer camp at Zegg because there are things about it that I liked. Because I think there are things there for me to learn. And because ....
Because I think that in a way it was a wake-up call for me.
I've told you about the Forum and mirrors. But in a way, the whole Forum was a mirror. Or that's the way I see it now, anyway. Because for one thing, there in the Forum one talks about those things that people don't usually discuss about themselves in polite adult society. Once one reaches a certain age, one has learned to be cool. One has life handled. One is not still hung up on the same sort of stupid problems that one had so much trouble with in high school.
Or rather, one is not cool. Not actually. But one has learned to fake it, to hide one's secret shame, which is that one is in fact still hung up on certain stupid problems that most "normal" people get past a few years after high school. Its seems pretty obvious that nobody in the rest of the world is still hung up on these sorts of problems. So if one doesn't want to be a total weirdo, one had better learn to conceal one's own inadequacies.
Thoreau was the one who said, "Most people lead lives of quiet desperation." But not, certainly, people I know. No, no, certainly not. the people I know have it all handled. I don't see any signs of quiet desperation. I don't see any such signs.
(I once wanted to write a science fiction story featuring The Church of Quiet Desperation. Well, there, I've given my idea away. That's okay, it's not the sort of thing I write ay more.)
Then, the Forum (and in a somewhat different way one also gets this sort of things during NLP trainings), people are given a chance to say something about some Problem that's a major issue in their life. And the most amazing things come out. One suddenly discovers (I suddenly discover) that people around me who seem to be totally cool, who seem to have it all handled... that some of these people have problems which are just as stupid, and just as horrible, as my own.
So this is one way in which the Forum is a mirror. And the other way.... One listens to someone who has stepped out into The Middle and is talking about his life, and one wonders (I wonder), "Why does this person go on living the life he has, when it is obviously so unsatisfactory to him?"
Another of my NLP teachers, Leslie Cameron Bandler, liked to ask questions of the form, "How is it possible...?"
And so I ask myself, "How is it possible that a man who enjoys the company of women so much, and in many ways is so good at interacting with them.... How is it possible that this man lives all by himself and has so few women in his life?"
Or, "How is it possible that a man who really values stepping outside the normal boundaries, a man who at various times in his life has made a point of doing things that are fairly adventurous, sometimes even shocking (a few of you know about some of these things, most of you don't).... How is it possible that most of the time this man seldom ventures more than two miles from his apartment?"
Seven years ago.... (God, what an enormously long time!)
Seven years ago, I arranged for a woman I knew to take me through a series of very intense and quite shocking experiences. These were very emotional for me, to the point that for a few months afterwards I was not very stable. I was ready to give up my whole life (i.e. give up all the things I have) in order to be with her at that point. A friend of mine thought at this point that The Blue Angel, Marlena Dietrich's first film, might be a good cautionary tale for me. Well, I'd seen the Blue Angel (not to be confused with the Blue Saloon!) several times, and I've seen it again since she recommended it to me. And my take on it is a little different from hers. I've included my comments in my review of another film.
Anyway, the point is that whether or not I chose to emulate the professor (actually a high school teacher) in the Blue Angel, seven years ago I knew that it no longer made any sense for me to have the life I had.
And yet here I am still.
I won't say that the past seven years have been a waste. I've learned a whole lot during this time that I would not give up, although a lot of it is stuff that most people would not think valuable. I know a lot more about cinema, about Shakespeare, about literature in general than I did seven years ago, and I would not want to give up any of that. I think I have a much better understanding about how novels work (during the past year I wrote detailed outlines for a dozen novels by various authors), although I am still not quite managing to write one of my own.
Oh dear, I'm getting a long ways away from Zegg. But the point I wanted to make, in bringing up the Blue Angel and so on, is that people say to me (or more often, I say to myself): "Think of all you have to lose." And I think to myself, "If I could have for one year the sort of life I really want, and then the rest of my life would be a complete disaster, wouldn't it be worth it?"
Well, this is not the stuff that I promised you I would write about in this fourth installment. So let me move on to telling you some excellent advice that I never seem to be able to follow myself.
First of all, something I have noticed about myself and my own way of interacting with women is that whenever I find myself having a hard time in my relationship with a woman (however brief and superficial and preliminary that relationship may be, as most of my relationships are), it's because I have let my attention be focussed on myself and what I want from this woman. Whereas to the extent that I get along really well with women, it's when I am very in tune with what the woman wants and is concerned about.
In my NLP training, we used the term First Position, corresponding to the grammatical first person (i.e. "ich"), and Second Position, corresponding to the grammatical second person: "you, Du." And one of the skills I have always had is being able to put myself into second position. Not merely putting myself into the other person's shoes, but understanding what it's like to be that other person. This is what makes me, in general, a very empathetic person.
The problem I have had with this strategy, though, is that I wind up having wonderful relationships with women who are needy and self-centered and who think of themselves as victims. I am just the friend they have always looked for. But these relationships are based completely on satisfying the woman's needs, and when I try to bring up the subject of my own needs, it turns out that these women all have Issues, and these Issues are so overwhelming large that these women tell me that I should not even consider asking them to make any compromises that would involve them giving attention to my own needs. (I think in particular of one women who sat on my living room couch and told me that she had had sex with 140 men in her life, so surely I could understand that after that, she couldn't possibly consider having sex with me. I have to say that I didn't quite follow her logic, but I didn't argue with her. In my experience, it never makes sense to argue. It never gets me anywhere.) (A few days later, she met a total scuzzball at a club and had sex with him.)
(I see here that perhaps I myself am allowing myself to take on the victim role. Well, it's my party and I'll be a victim if I want to.)
There's a bit of very ancient, and very good, wisdom which relates to this strategy of focussing on the other person's needs. Namely, if one is feeling lonely and left out in a group, then the thing to do is to look for someone who is even more lonely and left out than oneself. I've found that this doesn't always work, and that sometimes the women I see as lonely are resentful at being approached by me, since they are hoping for rescue from someone much more in line with their own concept of attractiveness. And sometimes she and I wind up forming a group of two which is still excluded from the rest. But on the whole it's a useful approach.
However I have to admit that towards the end of summercamp, I did make contact with a woman who seemed more lonely than myself, and after a few initial interactions I realized that someone even more isolated and introspective than me was just not what I wanted. But maybe under other circumstances things would have worked out.
Now incidentally, aside from First Position and Second Position, there's another point of view, which can be extremely useful, which is Third Position, or Observer Position. Here one looks at oneself and the other people involved in an interaction as if one were a neutral observer. It's very good for those times when one gets totally emotionally caught up in a situation, and going to Third Position is something I don't remember to do nearly often enough.
Now focussing on the other person also relates to the question of shyness and self-consciousness. Being self-conscious means, almost as a matter of definition, being focussed on oneself: being in First Position, thinking things like, "How am I coming across, what do I look like, am I being stupid?" As soon as one shifts into second position and starts thinking about the other person and what they are concerned with and what their needs are, then it is no longer possible to be self-conscious.
There's actually an article about this, a rather harsh Mirror that I gave to some guy on usenet, in fact, in my archive of NLP articles: (Most of the things I write are not this harsh, but the guy seemed to need shock treatment.)
Which makes it all the more embarrassing when I forget to use the same strategy for myself.
But there's more to it than that. More to my "Problem," to the riddle of why it is, when I am generally so good at interacting with women once I know them, and so good at flirting with them and teasing them in a way that makes them laugh and makes them feel good.... Why it is that I am so completely inept in making initial contact in the first place?
I've never been any good in a singles-bar situation, which was what Zegg was, for me anyway, a lot of the time.
There was a book many years ago which claimed that people's judgement of others is completely based on the first impression, and that first impression is competely determined in the first four minutes of meeting someone. And then later there were other people who claimed that the time limit was in fact even shorter, one author claiming that one only had fifteen seconds to make the crucial first impression.
Well, I really think that I'm capable of learning most skills, once I set about doing it in a systematic way. But making contact in four minutes is a skill that has so far left me baffled.
Instead, let me tell you about the strategy that, in my experience, seems to be most successful for me. It takes a lot longer than four minutes. It takes days. (I am not claiming that this is the ideal strategy. I notice other men that seem to be successful with a very different one. I'm just saying that it works for me better than any I've been able to find so far.)
Women are sometimes annoyed when I say this, but for me the same strategy works best with women, with children, and with dogs. Namely: not to approach. Best of all is not to pay any attention to them at all, and even wish they'd just go away. Give them a chance to observe me without being observed themselves.
With dogs, this usually requires at most five or ten minutes. With children, I'd guess it take about an hour or so. With women, it can take several days. But finally, after they've had a chance to watch me long enough, they are likely to decide they like me. (Often saying, "I like you because you're quiet," or "I like you because you're shy.")
I think of the case (somehow it never got included among my Snapshots) of a woman named Charlotte, who really fell into the category of a woman who, when I first met her, I wished would just disappear and leave us alone. And then, on the last day of my visit to the house in California where she and my girl friend were living, Charlotte and I were standing in the kitchen and she said, "I've been trying to make up my mind whether I want to get laid or not." And I asked, "By anyone in particular?" And she said, "You know. You know." But whatever response it was I made to this, it wasn't the one she wanted. And it didn't help that my girlfriend, in her bedroom, could hear every word we were saying. (But if Debbie was jealous, why had she made such a point of saying to me several times in the past few days, "Charlotte really likes you.")
Well, anyway. The drawback of this strategy is that I wind up getting involved with lots of shy women, often with lots of inhibitions, who are not at all the sort I am really drawn to.
The question I posed the day I first stepped into the middle of the Forum was, "How can I do better at letting people know who I am?" And somehow this question got sidetracked into the question of why I'm not more aggressive in approaching women, which is certainly also an important one.
I'm pretty sure that it's not fear of rejection that stops me, which is the reason that everyone always assumes, because during my first NLP training I had a very effective and every emotional piece of work done on my that pretty much cured me of fear of rejection. And it's not.... Well, it's not any of the answers that I hear other men give.
But it's my original question that I really feel the need to figure out. How can I go about letting people know who I am? Certainly the Forum worked well in that respect. But in our Dorf group in the first week, we have only five women, and four of these were Brits, and everybody knows about the British and sex! (Actually, that's unfair, since several of them did wind up having sexual encounters during summercamp. But the point remains: I had no strategy for letting people outside my Dorf group find out who I was.)
When I first discovered that it would be possible to have a web page, I thought that that might be the answer. My web site might tell people who I really am and answer all those questions which I always have such a hard time answering in person.
But it turns out that almost nobody who knows me is actually willing to look at my web site. Instead, I get email from people halfway around the world (or at least halfway around the country) who have discovered it by accident.
Dancing can sometimes work well in letting women know who I am. At the tanzlust (Joy of Dance) at Zegg I wound up finally with one partner, during the "chaos" phase of the Five Rhythms, as I remember. And I was doing a sort of scat singing, not even that, really, just yelling various nonsense syllables, and she seemed to like that a lot. Then a day or two later she made a point of coming up to me and saying hello. But I didn't know how to follow up on that, especially since I didn't recognize her and she had to remind me of who she was. Ah, what a missed opportunity! She was really fun when we were dancing together.
So the point is that for me, anyway, just walking up to a woman and starting a conversation ("Hi! Nice tits, want to fuck?" or whatever) is something I'm seldom any good at. What seems to work for me is being involved in some common activity so that the woman has a chance to observe me and see whether she likes me.
Well. Those of you on my mailing list have discovered a little bit of who I am. Maybe more than you wanted to know.
Love & kisses,
--Lee