So, lately I haven't been terribly active around here other than really basic admin type stuff, largely because I've been swamped with work. It's a good thing - cause it means I'm becoming 'successful' as a business owner, which is awesome - but also means that I get bogged down and have so little time for other pursuits. But, I've managed to eke out a few hours here and there and incorporated some new experiences into my practice as well. Among the various things I have acquired recently, one in particular I think is something that could be of value to others if I can manage to explain it properly. So much of this particular experience is outside the typical bounds of my language, but I think I have made the proper analogies that should identify it to anyone who has had a similar experience.

It has to do with the shape of experiences. I'll explain.

It may or may not be common knowledge, but I have been a martial artist on and off (if you're ever really 'off' of it) for about 13 years. I've studied Aikido, Tae Kwon Do, Kyuki-do, Judo, Jujitsu, and 'Shaolin-do' (which we recently learned wasn't kung fu at all , but it was still a good workout and assuming you already know your basic body mechanics it's a servicable martial art... I digress).

I've always had an aptitude for it, and for most physical skills, if I see it done at least once I can reliably repeat it and by the third or so iteration I can execute a technique at speed without stumbling. I credit years of 'ninja training' with my little brother (surprise attacks, wrestling matches, beating one another to a pulp, devising 'training' exercises based on the kung fu and ninja movies we were watching growing up). Recently I have been focused entirely on Aikido. It suits me, I enjoy it, and our style is adapted from a student of Ueshiba-sama who had a background in Judo first, so our art incorporates a bit more close quarters throws and grappling techniques. Good fun. Over time, I've had to pay more attention to how I learn in order to take those steps towards making the art my own rather than learning and regurgitating skills. I noticed something.

I learn by watching the 'shape' of the experience. It's the movements, the interaction between the two people, the progression of those two things through time, the physics at work to drive the operation, and other subtle things i have less ease at expressing - the tension and it's expression and release, is possibly a good way to explain it. But I don't experience these things in sequence or separately; the shape of the experience is those things all together. When I have this shape, it's like having a template for a puzzle - instead of disparate pieces with no directions on what they are meant to look or feel like when they are completed, I just kind of step into the shape and the experience becomes something I can 'ride'. It is an intuitive process and doesn't require me to do anything - so I don't have to intellectualize this process and when I learn a new technique I don't have to think it all through. I just see it, and then put myself in a certain mindset, and then I can do it. Thinking about it hinders the process, as with so many other intuitive tasks.

Well, I considered this for some time and tried to apply it in other ways but found that of course thinking about it gummed up the process. However, I was able to get the chance to observe some wood work at a recent fair at which there was a gentleman making chairs. It was neat stuff, and I tried this same process and attempted to reproduce it at home. My chair was not structurally sound, but I had managed to harness the actual carving technique fairly well. I have plans to continue trying but little time to carve as it is a tedious process and I need to have soft hands for my work.

Now, recently I have also been learning to program, Java primarily but I'm also learning c# and c++ as well. It's working out good so far, I don't lack for intellectual strengths, but I have approached areas where my lack of purely academic education is showing itself, so I have been experimenting just for the heck of it to try and apply what I'm learning in ways that will teach me, ideally, what these elements can and cannot or will not do. In short it's tough, which is somewhat novel for me, most things are relatively easy when only intellectual effort is required.

A few days ago, this process and my current project intersected with another intuitive technique that I use during my massage and reiki sessions, as well as to some degree consultations. I have a way of locating, energetically, structures which represent a kind of anchor for the issues at hand (hah, pun). Sometimes this is simple, like a muscle in spasm, and sometimes it is more complex, like an old emotional issue. I follow energetic cues as I work and eventually find the places where things seem to be twisted up, for lack of a better term. I work the area physically and energetically until I feel that tension dissipate and sometimes the results are very sudden and obvious, while other times it can take a few hours to become obvious. The experience isn't comparable to much of anything else I can think of at the moment... maybe a bit like running your fingers through loose strings until you find knots, in the dark (I don't really 'see' energy, for me it's hardly visual at all.) Or waving your hand through fog trying to feel the areas that are more moist/cold than the others. In any case...

I was working with a semi-regular client who will be moving soon, and we were talking about what has prompted the move and he explains that he is a software engineer, and is going to be part of a start up company in another state. We start talking about programming and it turns out his primary language is Java, though he started with C++ years ago. The conversation dies out after a while as he starts to drift into that space everyone goes to during a massage, and I have the idea that he has, in his energetic anatomy, in his collection of experiences, the 'shape' of Java programming. Like myself and other purely intellectual skills, there must be a structure in there somewhere that is the expression of that cumulative experience.

The ethics might be a bit gray, and keep in mind that I'm not suggesting a kind of telepathy in the sense that I was able to read his mind, as in know what his thoughts contained, but I found a shape that resonated with what I was seeking. And again, when i say 'shape' I'm not talking about a shape you could draw or model, shape is just the best word to describe it, maybe call it a 4 dimensional shape. In any case, I was able to gain the same sense with this shape that I am able to gain during martial arts. A sense of taking on a shape, if you will, but on a purely creative/intuitive level rather than in a physical sense as with a new throw or submission technique.

I had about an hour free afterwards, so I cracked the laptop and revisited the most recent work I had abandoned under the 'learn more about Java' heap of things to get back to when I know more. It was similar in principle to the way it feels during an Aikido class - the missing bits were clear - that is, I knew where the problems were in my code. I'm developing a software for our office to do the things that several other software options provide, but not as a total package; each option only has some but not all of our desired functionality. So I am develpping each function independently as I learn and then appending them into the larger project as they start to work out, and will later refine the whole thing several times over before we can use it reliably. In any case, there are several of these things that exceed my current experience with the language, which have been major problems for me because I know enough to get part of a particular function working, but lack the complete picture to make it functional in a practical way. I also lack the time to devote as much attention as I would like on a daily basis to get up to speed. However, having touched on the shape of this client's experience and gaining a kind of experiential template, the process has become far easier, and what I learn seems to simply fall into place - and I 'know what I don't know' if that makes sense. For instance, getting one particular function, which allows clients to schedule their appointment serverside in real time with our client-side calendar requires both the server/client communication, but because there could be sensitive data also requires that this connection take place over a secured socket. I knew this was something I didn't know enough to implement yet so I had to shelve that function until I did. But when i went back over it - I didn't so much know what needed to be done, as I intuitively knew the 'shape' of what I needed and how to find it.

If it sound confusing, it's because it kind of is, but in practice I think it is not as confusing; it's trying to pack it into limited words that makes it seem complex. The process itself is very fluid and intuitive.

So here is a technique 'mock up' - that is, something to work as hopefully a starting point which your own experiences can fill in a bit when the language fails to make it entirely clear.

If you have a relaxation technique, it's preferable to use it and get into the properly relaxed frame of mind - calm mind, few thoughts, a degree of simple clarity. I do not find myself in a wildly altered state of consciousness during this process, but then my 'normal' consciousness is more and more altered over time so I might have a poor grasp at this point of 'normal' from which to express that concept. I am not one with the universe, in any case, during the work itself.

From this state, you need to become aware of the person as a living being, rather than as an object. By this I mean, that in common perspective most of us experience the world around us as 'scenery' which is interactive to some degree. It's the nature of our natural awareness. To be aware of someone else as a living being is not a complex shift, but requires a certain kind of attention, and a certain kind of acknowledgement of the presence of their life before you. We make judgements and often assume people are simpler than they are, even though we often cannot even fathom the complexity we ourselves represent. But a person is a story, sometimes decades of experiences, history, perspectives, changes, good deeds and bad, selfishness and selflessness, and all the gradients between these things. A life is no less than the universe in motion; raw matter arranged into a self-sustaining pattern with self-awareness, feelings, opinions, etc. Living beings are an anomaly of the mechanistic universe. You have to direct your attention to this perspective, to the mystery of the living being, such that you gain a sense of 'depth perception'. An echo, if you will, from a direction that is not length/width/height, but from past and potential. It's a bit like looking at a flat square, and then stepping a bit to the left and realizing it's actually a cube, right? It has more dimensions than you initially perceived.

Inside the 'echo' this person now has, you have to find the part that resonates with what you are looking for. So let us say you are trying this with a friend who has a skill you want to develop. Even better if you both have mutually desirable skills. You must have a starting point, an inkling as it were, of the skill itself. Otherwise you have nothing to resonate with. Grasp the breadth of the shape of your own experience, get a sense of the presence it represents, and try to sense the corresponding presence in the other person. If they have more experience than you, it will seem similar but more vast, like a scaled up version of your own. Hard to describe and everyone is going to perceive this a bit differently I think, but for me, for instance, it has a kind of sound-that-is-not-a-sound, like the echo of a person. It's the difference between a hi-hat and a base drum, one has a brevity, the other has a deep pulsing vibration. But how you recognize it will be different. What it produces, however, is a sense of greater skill; it's the feeling you get when you are trying to accomplish something and you finally succeed, the sense of accomplishment, excitement and confidence that blossoms up from the knowledge that "I did this!" There is an echo of this when you touch on that shape because something in your recognizes the nature of that experience and that it is greater than your own. As though for a moment the mind doesn't realize that this sudden expansion of experience is not from accomplishment, but from the presence of someone else's accomplishment. Hopefully you've all had that sense before. I realized that I get a weak version of this when I see a new technique, some part of me correlates seeing it done, seeing the shape of it, with having already accomplished it.

After this recognition occurs, you need to inhabit the shape of it. It's a kind of empathy, as though you can imagine being the person, or specifically, that the shape of your experience is the same as theirs, and that you are inhabiting that shape of your own. I do this through a little mental deception, in which I convince myself I have already accomplished it. It is sort of like that, really, but I think you may understand if you try it yourself. But in principal, it is like telling myself "Ah, of course, I just forgot that I had all this experience, I already know how to program Java." (in the aforementioned example of my own experience, obviously, substitute 'programming java' for whatever else....). After that, you simply go about learning the skill like normal. But whereas before you had an experience which was slowly building in a direction 'blindly' as you go, it seems to flow more easily into the new shape. Like you are re-learning the skill, rather than learning it fresh. I haven't discovered yet, or discerned from the previous times I have done this unconsciously, whether this process means that you will develop a similar style as well... that is a potential concern, as it is easier to develop new and creative approaches to a skill that you are fresh to, than it is to do so with a skill that you have had for a long time and have a set way of applying. I wonder if I inherit with that shape that approach to application as well.

Writing it out makes it seem like there is a process involved, like a vulcan mind-meld, but it is not so involved as this. My acquisition of this expanded experiential template while working on my client took maybe 3-5 minutes all together while I was working on his neck and scalp (so, I don't know, maybe hand to head contact is advisable; but I doubt it. It could certainly put you in the right mood if you are working with a friend, I suppose.) As I am learning Java with my partner, I am going to try to explain this process to him, and work on transmitting this 'shape' intentionally. I think if the other party knows what you are doing, they can focus on their own experience as well, making the connection perhaps easier to make. I am also intending to make a mercury talisman for the purpose of supporting this process; I imagine that if you are working with someone else actively you could do well to invoke mercury and/or air to assist actively.

If anyone is in a position where it is possible to try this, or if you have had the same experience and have a different way of explaining it for yourself, I would be very interested to hear.

peace