Integrated Preparation for the New Year

by Sitaram Das | Dec 31, 2018 | Coaching

Integrated Preparation for the New Year

New Years (winter solstice) is my favorite holiday. As a long time yin yoga teacher and student of all things ‘yin’, I’m enamored with darkness, mystery, turning inward, quiet reflection, gentle subterranean preparation, etc. I actually find these things necessary for my survival and proper functioning. So, to set my year up right, I like to do some self inventory, some intention setting, and maybe even give myself some exercises and some field work. Perhaps we could call it Integrated Preparation.

This year, I really wanted to do some work with my teacher’s newest book, Presence Based Leadership. His name is Doug Silsbee, and he passed earlier this year, which makes this book all the more special to me. I’ve been working with the concepts in the book since he introduced them to us in late 2017, and think that this new years is a perfect excuse for a deep dive. In particular, I’m interested in his dynamic, nested systems of the self; context, identity, and soma. It’s possible we’ve also worked with these ideas together. But I simply love the clarity and perspective that they offer. They give me the resource to look at myself in ways I wouldn’t ordinarily.

Here is a diagram of the nested systems: https://presencebasedcoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/Download/9-Panes-Practice-Lab/cis.pdf
Here is an excerpt from the book, detailing the systems: https://presencebasedcoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/Books/chapter-4-pbl.pdf

This model seems particularly useful for those of us who are batting around the term ‘Integration’. 2018 has been quite a trip, and bringing the lessons we’ve learned into a wiser, kinder 2019 is no small feat.

So my question for myself, and for you, is how do we want to shift these three areas of our life in this new year?

You’re welcome to use these as journaling prompts….

Context:
What situations am I currently in, and how do I feel about them?
How have I been contributing to them, for better or worse?
How would I like to see these situations shift in this upcoming year?
In a perfect world how are those situations presenting themselves in my life as we begin the new year?

Identity:
Who have I been being in the past year?
What are some of my primary pieces of negative self talk?
What have I been attempting to present to the world over the past 12 months?
What parts of my identity have I been protecting or hiding?
What parts of my identity do people miss about me?
Who do I want to be in new year, in the various aspects of my life as described in the ‘context’ section.
What parts of me would change if my situation changed?

Soma:
How have I been holding tension?
What have I been doing to not feel that tension?
How is that tension is response to the negative self talk described above in the ‘identity’ section?
How is the tension in response to some part of my context?
How does the person I identify with sit, stand, and move in the world?
How would the person I want to be sit, stand, and move in the world?

I could go on and on with these. I’ll give you a brief example from my own life, nothing too extreme, and probably relatable:

When I am in a situation that is difficult for me, or at what I believe is the edge of my ability, (context)
I get into negative self talk about my worthiness, and my ability to solve problems elegantly. I start to believe I’m more of a blunt instrument, that has to solve things by brute force. (identity)
My upper chest and arms get tense, i lean forward as if to go into attack mode, my jaw tenses and my fingers tense up as if to try to grab and control. (soma)

Of course these things usually happen on a subtle level, but through a kind of meditative attention, I can start to get a fuller picture of what is happening with me in the moment.

What to do?
I don’t want to stop having challenging situations. I want to continue to work at an edge that keeps me growing. I just want to handle them better (hopefully this is also relatable for you!)
The person I want to be is more secure about their ability to generate elegant, sophisticated, and lovely solutions to life’s problems. He is increasingly soft, flexible, and pliant through his tissues. He sits in his center, not rushing forward to control, allowing things to flow.

Of course that takes practice
This is going to be a big part of my personal practice this year. I’ll be focusing on it though my meditation and physical practices, so that I have a greater chance of living this way in my daily life. I won’t bore you wit the details.

Suggestions for you to facilitate Integrated Preparation.
I truly hope you’ll try to answer some of these questions, and to look at yourself using these lenses. I’d like to suggest two things:

First, that you especially look at the way you’ve been talking to yourself, and see if there are places that you’d like to make a shift there. Make some new mantras, with some more positive and uplifting language.
Second, Take some time with your body language. Sit, stand, walk as the person you hope to be in 2019.

Good Luck, and please let me know these integrated preparation practices goes. If you’re interested in working with me on some of these ideas, of course I’m here for you.

Best wishes for the new year! Daniel

Smiile! – Intelligence Increase

by sitar | Mar 14, 2018 | Book Club, Coaching

My 25 year old copy

High on the top of my list of things I’m grateful for is my exposure to amazing teachers and teachings. There is a world of fraud out there, unhelpful teachings, ego maniacal charlatans, and simply ridiculous nonsense. I’ll consider it grace that I’ve been continued to have really high quality teachings dropped in my lap, while being guided away from the shallow and just plain wrong. I was 18 when I had Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Prometheus Rising’ pressed into my hand. I devoured it. I read his other books. They terrified me, and offended me, and I couldn’t stop reading them. They weren’t like the 1970s yoga books I had seen, and they weren’t like my dad’s books on magic and witchcraft, which were more like anthropology meets ghost stories. Wilson’s book practical tools for changing your consciousness, taking control of your nervous system. Intelligence Increase. Who knew? And while I never got to meet Wilson, I still consider him a major influence.

One of the lessons I’ve gleaned from RAW, that I’ve really taken to heart, is his definition of Intelligence. It’s helped me to increase mine, and to value it. I’ve taught it in teacher training. I want students to think about it. I want teachers to think about it.

“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.” – Robert Anton Wilson

Simple. Three simple steps. Input, Process, Output. Increase your ability to do those three things, and you increase your intelligence. The same process can be applied to all kinds of things. How do we give, integrate, and receive love, for example?

For years I thought this was an obscure idea, relegated to the underground and the counter culture.

The New Book

Fast Forward 20 years, I’m doing my lifelong learning thing, working with another brilliant teacher, Doug Silsbee. He’s teaching me to coach, how to use mindfulness practices to create clarity of vision, resilience of being, and results that matter. If we’ve talked in the few years, we’ve discussed it. If we haven’t, give me a shout and we can.

Turns out that Doug has been teaching this same idea. He labels them ‘sensing, being, and acting’. I’m not sure where he picked up the ideas, I’ll have to ask him the next time we talk. He just published a book on the topic. It’s called ‘Presence Based Leadership‘. I’m really digging on it. It offers a beautiful and coherent framework for bringing self awareness to the complex lives of complex people doing complex things. The tools are simple, at at the same time very effective, including things like:

Sensing

Observing the system around us
Recognizing our identitiy
Attending to our experience

Being

Regulating the inner state
Decouple state from context
Embodying what matters

Acting

Scale awareness
Extend leadership presence
Tune the instrument

The teachings of his new book has already worked its way into my coaching practice. If you’re curious about working with this, please feel free to reach out to me, I’d be happy to share a sample session with you.

And please, do yourself a favor and pick up these two books.

Presence Based Leadership

Prometheus Rising

Doug Silsbee, Sitaram Das, and Rodney Allen

Letting go of what doesn’t serve us, but, like for real

by Sitaram Das | Jan 2, 2018 | buddhism, Coaching, yoga

I’ve seen a hundred social media posts asking me what I want to let go of in 2017. and part of me thinks these memes are goofy, but at the same time, I do think about these things.

We all have problems that have been problems for years. I certainly do. If you know me, you could probably share a list of them with me, and you would know exactly what I need to know about them. We’re good like that. Spotting other people’s problems. (also, don’t send that list)

But our meditation practice is about Svadyaya, Self study, not the study of others. Self study is where the wisdom comes

It reminds me of the old saying, ‘insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results.’

I get the same certain results.
I keep doing the same certain things.
I keep thinking the same certain thoughts.
I keep looking at life the same certain way.

What I’m trying to say, is that I’m very certain. We all have these places where we’re very certain, resist introspection, and lash out at feedback.

WE GOTTA STOP DOING THIS

I know it’s hard to root out the beliefs and the perceptions. They can be subtle and evasive, be design. I like to work backwards. What’s the situation? What’s the open sore of an unwanted manifestation?

Like we mentioned above, often it seems like other people or external situations are at the root of our unhappiness. If only such and such were different.

It’s not a bad place to start, but it’s no kind of place to finish. We’ve got to refocus on ourselves. We’ve got to be less certain that we’re right, that we’re justified, that we’ve got it all figured out.

What can we be less certain about? What thoughts are we holding onto so tightly they cause our jaw to clench and our forehead to furrow?

I don’t know what to do…
I don’t know if my ideas about this are actually in line with my highest truth…
I want to do better, I don’t know how…

This is a great place to start, admitting that what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, and that we don’t necessarily know any other way. It’s a mysterious place to be and full of possibilities.

This is our work.

And this is all for this email, for now. I’ll have more in a day or two. In the mean time, I hope your new year is full of questions, and mysteries, and possibility.