When I write an article, when I give instructions, when I teach, what people do is as diverse as if I told them all different things… even though I said exactly the same thing. It could be my intonation: they were on the call at the same time, or read the same article, and yet.
You listen approximately, hear more of your commentary and interpretation than what is actually said, and then you follow your commentary, not what was said. And, to boot, you never actually take the time to understand what the words really mean. Your vocabulary is approximate… and you may not even know it.
I have been telling my Playground student to retell their life incidents in movie mode, so they can see what actually happened, without their feelings, without their interpretation, without their meaning, without the drama, without they remember… just the facts… on a movie.
Not one person understood what the instructions meant. Then I explained again… same thing. Third time: same thing.
The accuracy of your vocabulary and your effectiveness in life are connected, intimately.
There is a new vocabulary I need my students to learn… and it is harder than the movie telling of their story… much harder. Even I am having a hard time really getting it.
You want to have a life where you find virtually no resistance, right? No frustration, no anger… just a life where you are like a heated knife going into butter? Hell, yeah…
You ask your son to get dressed… and he does. You tell your wife “we are leaving in five minutes” and she is ready to go. You tell your boss you don’t have time to talk now, and they say: Oh, OK… talk to you later.
Impossible, you say? Maybe, maybe not… I’ll share with you some of what I am finding out.
I have been challenged. Much like you could be challenged in a 20-day learning challenge: I am learning new things.
How to DO new things.
It seems that every new thing needs a new vocabulary… or you are learning only your approximate interpretation of what there is to learn.
The old and approximate vocabulary will take you astray.
It started with the eating style for me… My eating style is separator. Or at least that was the name when I first learned about eating styles. Now it is called alternating…
What does that mean?
Before you can learn to DO things, you need to SEE clearly what the words mean.
Many of my clients have an issue with the word appetite… Hunger, they know. Craving, they know. But how would you know if you have appetite?
And now, that I am introducing the Human Design types come some more new words… Respond. How do you know if you are responding or reacting. And what if you have good ideas? Are you not allowed to follow your own ideas? Is acting on them responding, reacting, or what?
I have had a recurring nightmare for decades. I enroll in a university curriculum, but for some reason I don’t want to, or I don’t have time to, or I don’t understand that there are classes. I have dreamed this nightmare so many times, I don’t even remember if it has any roots in reality.
Here is how the dream goes: it is a Friday and i realize I haven’t gone to any of my classes, but on Friday there is a class that sounds interesting… but I can’t find the class… I wonder about in the huge university building, and I am completely lost… And am afraid. Afraid of missing, afraid of being found out, afraid… terrified. Yeah, it is a nightmare.
Armed with my newfound word: “respond”, the strategy of a Manifesting Generator, I now see that was supposed to take all the classes… I was invited. But I had a good idea to only do what I wanted to do… thus the nightmare.
Learning what it is like, how it looks, how to cause being “invited” so I can respond has been largely missing for me and I suspect has been a cause for a lot of grief and frustration in my life.
Given my soul correction, huge ego, I want to do everything when I want to do it, not when I am asked, or suggested, or when it is needed by others… And surprisingly, responding needs to tame my ego… so I can live a “heated knife in butter” kind of life…
So this is the challenge I have taken on: clearly defining these words, respond and inform, the strategies of a Generator and of a Manifestor, for myself, so I can teach them.
I am looking in nature for some answers.
I am watching myself as well. In certain areas of life I have been successfully fought off the urge to be impulsive, and now I don’t do anything until I am invited. I put lines in the water, and when there is a fish that nibbles on my bait. 90% of my bait is not nibbled on.
This is what sellers of goods call TESTING. I have heard that my experience of 90% duds is not unique, in fact it is more the rule than the exception. And yet newbie marketers always fail because they don’t test: their idea must be a winner because it is so good, or whatever…
Once you can tell if you are impulsively acting on your idea… or responding to an invitation, you must examine if you are reacting to an urge. There is a different feeling to an urge and an invitation. An urge is a jerking feeling… one could say, unpleasant, painful, and within you… An invitation is always from the outside… outside of your Self… and is gentle.
Because I can tell if it is my spirit/soul is calling, or Source, or my own low TLB… I more often choose to respond to spirit or Source, than to urges to eliminate discomfort.
In my observation, my students are doing the exact opposite… they ignore the invitation, and go for eliminating the discomfort. The unanswered invitation, because it is unanswered, causes the discomfort. Feeling tired, feeling out of sorts, feeling hungry, feeling tense…
And your life is like a roller coaster, you are being jerked left and then right… while nothing useful ever gets done.
People respond to what they want, not what they need. From their vantage point most of what I am offering is not interesting: they don’t want it. They may know that they need it, but who cares… they don’t want it.
I remember pondering the difference between wanting and needing something during my first winter living in the United States. I didn’t have much money, but I had some, and I had some choice about how I spend it… and the wants were winning hands off…
I think that there is a switch inside, that you can get acquainted with, that switches back and forth between…
Desire, greed, and fear will keep that switch stuck on the “want” setting, where you are out of sync with life, where you are forcing life to do your bidding, and of course life doesn’t do it. It’s a lot like sex… invitation wins, forcing results in something like sex… but no fun. It’s like dancing… it is only fun when the other wants to dance with you too. Life is like that woman… doesn’t like to be forced.
Or we could say that you need to learn to hear and follow the small voice within, instead of reacting to the loud screaming in your head, or to a sales letter, or to “sales” signs, or to strong tastes, to urges, to the phone ringing, to the sound of text message arriving.
Being jerked is the current state of humanity.
I observe as my students, in the Playground partner calls, are beginning to pay attention, get more intimate with themselves. Start to see how they do things, how they make decisions, sometimes decision that destroy the rest of their lives, their aliveness, destroy it all.
You may know the word, you can say it, but you have no idea what it really means.
This is the difficulty of learning new things, the vocabulary.
As my students go through the months of learning about themselves, about life, about why they do what they do, why they feel the way they feel, they learn the meaning of many words.
If you are like me… you should start with something that comes up a hundred times a day.
Learn to tell the difference between wanting and needing.
The want can be about doing something, eating something, buying stuff, about money, about success, about lashing out, about getting acknowledgment, about anything… including rest, results, winning, being right, dominating, or avoiding responsibility.
It will be tough. Tough is good.
The more tough things you take on the faster you’ll grow, and the easier life will get.
PS: In your “design”, you are designed to make decisions in a certain way. Our environment, of course, trains us to be like everyone else. But, of course, their way won’t work for you, and you have a life of frustration, anger, rejection, failure.
So it is very important to you to learn to live, act, make decisions according to your design… if you want to enjoy the smooth life, the success, the acceptance I indicated at the beginning of this article… the question that you said yes to.
But in order to be able to do that, you want to start to ask the question to distinguish for yourself: how does it feel different when I want something and when I need it. Which one is faster. Which one is louder. Which one jerks, which one is almost silent?
I suspect in the beginning 99% of what you’ll feel will be wants. Desires. Urges. Strong, fast, violent.
But eventually, if you really pay attention, you’ll start feeling the needs…
Without this step, you cannot graduate to knowing if something is a trigger or an invitation… It’s an advanced concept. You need to do first things first… you cannot run if you haven’t learned crawling yet.
Without that you won’t be able to see whether you are responding, or reacting. Whether you are responding or pushing your good ideas. And without that the good, smooth, heated knife going into butter kind of life will not be yours.
Start today.
The Playground is a good place to do it… because you are “spotted” every step of the way.
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