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Ed’s Check-In 

Incline Village Tribe

April 1, 2004

As part of my check-in this evening, I’d like to record it and transcribe it and post it on the web, to continue to honor my commitment to document this work - into some kind of a book and to make this work available to a much wider audience.

One thing I’d like to talk about is my experience of visiting the [Name] Tribe meeting last week – they have four very enthusiastic members. 

The meeting starts at seven o’clock, and goes on until 1:30 AM – since they have lots and lots of questions for me about how I conduct meetings - and all five of us take our turn on the Hot Seat. 

I just sit back for about a half hour and watch and listen – I notice some of the methods they use and eventually I suggest some ways they can change their methods to get better results. 

They derive the methods they are using from material on the web-site and from other tribes – and one of the very noticeable things they do - is they keep asking the sender “how do you feel.”

That has a result of making Hot Seat keep de-briefing his experience to the group – he has to keep going back into his head (CM – Conscious Mind) in order to inform all the other members – so he never really gets very deep into his experience. 

After just watching for about a half hour, I decide to suggest, “Don’t do that anymore.  Just notice when the sender is feeling something and just encourage him somehow, without doing anything to distract him.  You can tell by his expression, his posture, his voice, that he’s into something - so just encourage him to go for it.  Just cheer him on.”

So they try that and when they see something come across the sender’s face, they just cheer him on - it is much more effective – the sender can get much deeper into his issue – the receivers support a much deeper experience by just encouraging him and not demanding that he give them a progress readout.

For example, one of the members is on the Hot Seat and his issue is about having trouble marketing his system.

As he talks about it, he starts idly tapping his fingertips on the end of the arm on his chair. We pick up on that and encourage him to tap more, to tap harder, to get into the experience of tapping – all without asking him anything about what he is doing or feeling.

He tries to crank up the tapping for a moment and then stops.  I ask him if he is willing to experience the tapping and he says, “No. Not really.”

I take the “no” as just a normal part of the process – just some or another judge who is judging the tapping – and I want to help him experience that judge.  So I ask him if he is willing to experience the “no” – to experience whatever feeling is telling him he does not want to experience the tapping.

He says, “OK,” and locates the judge. It's a feeling on the back of his wrists – so we naturally encourage him to just go ahead experience the feeling on the back of his wrists.

So he does that for while and then stops – he is not willing to experience that judge either.  So we are now looking for the next judge in the stack of judges – we are looking for the feeling that tells him he is unwilling to experience the judge on the back of his wrists.

This judge lives in his chest. This is very typical - people generally carry a stack of judges. This time, he is very willing to experience the chest judge so it disappears pretty quickly.  Then, since that judge is gone, he is willing to experience the back of the wrists, and then the tapping.

So we finally get all these things out. And they pretty much disappear – although there is still some residual hesitation – and so we track that for a while and find there is a kind of generic feeling of “I don't want to do it.”  This feeling seems to include saying the phrase, “I don’t want to do it,” as well as some other tensions in his body – so we encourage him to say the phrase over and over as part of experiencing the feeling.

 “I don’t want to do it,” seems to come alive, with a life of it’s own so we keep encouraging him to get into it.

As you get used to TTP, you find out you almost always come around to “I don’t want to do it.”  The nature of stuck feelings is that the feelings that run your life are the feelings you don’t want to feel. So the path to freedom almost always passes through the feeling of “I don’t want to do it.”

At this place, the unwillingness point, you just encourage Hot Seat to feel it anyway.  With experience, he knows this is how the process works and a reminder is all he needs to steel up for it and go though to completion.  With enough experience he knows that the rewards are so enormous that he develops a strong taste for the work.  Still, when you are in the Hot Seat and up against the feeling you are so used to avoiding, the work is just plain hard, even with skilled receivers.

The essential process, the heart of TTP is converting the “I don’t want to do it,” wherever it is, into an ally, by jumping into it and being willing to feel it.  In the process, the feeling turns from an adversary into an ally and both the sender and receiver gain enormous freedom and power.

The feelings that we don’t want to experience run us, and what we do in TTP is to help each other to experience feelings that we don’t want feel. 

So we are always doing something we don’t want to do. Experiencing “I don’t want to do it” is the essential work. 

In the moment of now, in TTP, experiencing the stuck feeling is always a choice. On the one hand, the stuck feeling is just another feeling, and the goal is to experience it, to disappear it, and to grow.  On the other hand, the feeling is, literally, “I don’t want to do it,” and may lead the drama of abandoning the process.

In TTP we do whatever we can to invite and encourage the sender to experience his feeling of “I don’t want to do it.”  Ultimately, if he is stuck, we can present him with the essential choice. You can do the work or you can sell out to the feeling. 

It makes all the difference in the world.  In trading, you can stay with your position and just experience your feelings, or you can sell out to your resistance and lose your position.  It all depends on your level of commitment.  If you really commit to your system, you stick with it and just handle your feelings.  It’s the same with TTP. If you really commit to it, you just move through your feelings, and never quit.

If you have enough commitment to stay in a position and honor method, no matter what the market does, then you can do OK in the long run.  Once you start selling out to your resistance to feelings, you are in chaos, running your trading by the feelings you are unwilling to feel.

The choice is always there, and if you have commitment, you simply chose to stay with the process and work on your feelings.  TTP helps a lot in this way, since it is great technology to help you get through your feelings.

In our Tribe (Incline Village) our members know that the more we help Hot Seat, the stronger and clearer he gets, and the more he can help us the next time around.

So, back to the story, Hot Seat eventually comes around and says he is, after all, really willing to go with his feeling of “I don’t want to do it,” and he jumps into it and his face starts to get tense and he in right into the battle.

As he experiences this, his hands start up again with the tapping on the ends of the arms of his chair.  We cheer him on and he intensifies the tapping and then the anger starts to come out.  The hands clench up and form fists and start to pound the arms of the chair.  We encourage him to keep going for it and he starts punching the air in front of him, as if someone were in front of him. As he continues experiencing the feeling, it dissipates and disappears and he seems to let it go. 

He starts to get in touch with something very real that associates with the feelings – he has a trading system and he just can’t market it – he does not want to be a salesman and he does not want to market it - and it turns out he recalls his Uncle telling him that he cannot break into the investment world and can’t get an investor interested in opening an account.

He recalls that his uncle is not a very good sales man and not a very good businessman, and not someone he wants to carry around in his subconscious as an advisor.

He recalls carrying his uncle around for years - and not being able to make a defiant fist (due to the wrist judge) and unable to experience the anger – so all these feelings and his uncle get locked up inside him as a (k)not of stuck feelings. 

When he finally experiences all this, it all disappears and what’s left over is a totally different guy – he is all excited to get on the road with his sales stuff and present it to all kinds of people.  He is not worried about being accepted or not – he says he sees some people liking his method and some not liking it and it doesn’t really matter that much – he sees himself hooking up with the right people.  All his fear and hesitation about sales are gone.

The turning point in his process is to experience “I don’t want to do it.”  This is always the case in TTP.  This is a big difference between TTP and other forms of “therapy” such as NLP and talk therapy.  These methods intend to “fix” the feeling, or change it, or work around it. Instead of trying to fix, avoid or change our feelings, in TTP we just jump into them and experience them. 

Hot seat's whole organizing principle is right here in the now, right there in his chest, as a feeling of “I don’t want to do it.”

We don’t try to fix the feeling or make it go away or figure ways to work around it or suppress it.  We realize the feeling is something we really do want to experience. We want to re-awaken our ability to experience it, to re-frame it from an adversary into an ally. 

This is the essential difference between this work and traditional medicine.  We hold that the symptom is actually the cure, crying out to be free.

There is no way to do this work on your own.  You simply cannot do this by yourself.  You have a lifetime of deeply knowing that you do not like to experience your stuck feelings.  Your whole life revolves around avoiding a few key feelings and so trying to jump into TTP all by yourself is to jump into the middle of your strongest resistance.  It takes a Tribe to hold the line and to provide enough encouragement to get to through to the other side.

The service we provide for each other is a hold the line and to encourage, no matter what comes up – and to develop willingness to experience our feelings, in the now. That’s the route to freedom, the real path out of the matrix.

Another thing that I recall from the [Name] Tribe is that one of the people in the group asks me to sign a twenty-dollar bill.  One side has signatures on it.  The other side has a statement, something like, “Since I like $20 bills,  I’m going to accumulate a million of these by [certain date].”

I ask him what that means and he says it is the Hardball Process so I give the $20 a pretty close look.  I notice some things about it that don’t really fit in with the official Hardball Process.

First, his goal is ambiguous; that is, it is not clear that he actually wants a stack of one million $20 bills – it might be that he wants $20,000,000.  It is just not clear.  It is also not clear what contract the people who sign the bill agree to honor.

Second, there is no “snapshot.”  A snapshot is a clear image that does not move.  It is sharp and vivid enough that people know what it is right away, without any further explanation.  And it is now. His “I’m going to accumulate …” is a process, somewhere off in the future, not a snapshot, in the now.  In the TT Workshop, we typically take about three hours to develop snapshots to a degree of clarity sufficient to support the rest of the Hardball Process.

Third, the Hardball Process is an inter-weaving process in which people support each other in removing obstacles between them and their snapshots.

So my experience of the [Name] Tribe is that they are all very enthusiastic and committed to the work and are trying to pick up how to do it from the web and by talking to others from other Tribes. They report very good results from what they are already doing and they seem to think that some of the techniques I share with them make the work much more efficient and deeper.

I also recall hearing about meetings they have in restaurants, with waiters and waitresses milling around.  I am amazed.  There just seems to be no way Hot Seat could really let go emotionally in a public place, without having to keep a lid on things, or risk alarming the restaurant staff.

The real service we provide for each other it to help set each other free. As we develop willingness to experience our feelings, we convert our stuck feelings from adversaries to allies, and as we get on the path of right livelihood we realize our potential as unique human beings.

So that’s my check-in for tonight – and another step for me along the path of keeping my commitment to get this work out to a wider audience.

Note:  About one second after this check in, various Tribe Members point out that my check-in is almost entirely absent any of my own personal feelings.  I receive lots of  “hmmm’s and ahem’s” and other forms of approbation for my clever way of avoiding talking about my own real experience during check-in.  In a flash, they are all over me, like bees on honey, with, “OK, maybe you’d like to try your check-in again, this time with some feeling in it.”