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Realities Digital Edition
Adobe Acrobat Reader required | free Excerpt | Giving Ourselves Fully Contents Reviews Golabuk guides surely and gently. . .and his honest, compassionate voice, so clearly issuing from his own experience, delivers his hopeful message in a compelling way. - Harper & Row There's no grand scheme anymore, no prevailing zeitgeist against which to paint a large canvas. What's true has to be distilled from the accumulated droplets of lived experience. Golabuk does this most beautifully. - Thomas Hanna, Somatics pioneer What other author quotes Persian mystic poets, the Tao Teh Ching, Hume, G.K. Chesterton, Lewis Carroll, Yeats, St. Augustine, Jesus, Shakespeare, and Hegel? - Harper’s Bazaar Thorns and Roses
Adobe Acrobat Reader required | free Excerpt | Preface Now, I tell you this not to make a play for your sympathy early in the game, nor to cast blame on my erstwhile publishers, but to share with you the peculiar tenacity of this work, a tenacity that surprised no one more than me. Over the five years following the formal demise of Recovering, I continued to get calls and letters from readers, fans, bookstore managers, support group members, even one fellow who reported that he was dying in a hospital when the book found its way to him, and that the thing had saved his life. In the most grassroots fashion, people were still wanting to lay their hands on copies of this text that had, in my mind, amounted essentially to two hundred pages of self-consolation spoken out loud—that is, I had put in it everything that I needed to hear and remember in coming to terms with the jagged reality of divorce. How was it, I wondered, that five years after the book was out of print, with few if any remaindered copies floating around, there was still an interest in the work, what to speak of a demand? At some point, in the face of numerous phone requests, chance meetings with people who remembered the book and asked me where they could pick up a copy, calls from bookstores on both coasts, and one encounter with a former philosophy student who broached the subject over a self-serve pump at the local gas station, I realized that life was elbowing me with some clear direction for a change, and decided that it was time to sit down and resurrect Recovering from a Broken Heart. Several challenges stepped forward like enlistees ready for action: First, in the years after I wrote Recovering, my angle of vision had shifted on matters of the human heart. Second—and this is the part that can give a writer nightmares if he is imprudent enough to risk dusting off and reviewing his early work—the book simply was not written in the voice my voice had become. My second book, The Sunset Grill Chronicles; third, Walls, Windows, and Doorways; and fourth, an experimental novel called Dreams of the Chameleon seemed much more my legitimate literary children, while the first one, that “how-to” thing, I still regarded as the bastard, even if a helpful little bastard. From a strictly stylistic point of view, my first book had taken on all the literary class of one of those buzzing afternoon talk shows, and I was secretly pleased that it had gone away, except that, as I have said, it never did entirely. Third, looking back from the slightly higher rise of five more years of living, the work seemed thin to me in many places, presumptive if not presumptuous, and guided more by a longing for certain things to be true than by any consistent experience that they were. All of these things are addressed in the revised version, as well as I could manage it, which has brought the book up to date, meaning that it is once again current with the best understanding of its author, at least for now. Through making my changes, I did my best to preserve the intuition and spirit of the original version of the book, while coaxing the voice across the evolutionary border that separates it from its later born siblings. Finally, I’ve expanded the material where life has taught me additional lessons that I feel are worth sharing, and broadened the focus from the earlier context of losing a lover to any sort of emotional dilemma in which the reader may feel stuck, a focus reflected in the work's new title. Here, let me repeat a parenthetical note on style: I’ve opted to avoid the cumbersome “he or she” and “himself or herself” constructions, as I agree with Fowler that the considerateness of such phrases rarely justifies their awkwardness. Therefore, and since this work is the account of my own, incidentally male journey, I’ve simply used he except where he or she added clarity or impact. My readers have, however, confirmed that when we get out of our politics and into our hearts, the gender issue recedes. I hope that what I have to say in Thorns and Roses transcends the divisions that we use to keep from facing the simple truth that probably alone will save us: that we are far more alike in the things that truly matter than we are different. The preface of the original work ends with a few paragraphs that offer an essential caveat, and a statement of intent. Because they take on a new relevance in light of the revision of the material, iterate my concern about presumption, and carry the tone of an intimate correspondence, I include them here: “I would encourage you to approach this book in a spirit of receptive investigation, to take it to heart, use what is useful, and leave the rest. After all, any such work is to its author’s life, what a bookmark is to a book: It points, for the time being, to the place he was when he stopped writing and records, for anyone who is interested, how things have gone thus far. Any author, especially one who writes from the heart of his most personal experiences, is susceptible to holding onto his work too long: He does not want to let it go lest he learn something wonderful a day later. But there is a time to let things go. There is always more to learn, more to live, more to love, more to say. And since each life is unique, anything of value you find in these pages is best taken as a point of departure for your own continued recovery and growth. “If there were one message I could send you at this moment, it would be simply that your suffering is not pointless. Within it is the opportunity for transformation to the higher, perhaps unimagined strength and integrity of a new way of being. An experimental faith in the possibility of this new way of being is needed in the beginning, precisely because it is new, but there is little to lose in making the proverbial leap into this faith when the alternative is staying stuck in heartache. As hard as it may be to believe at this time, you can recover from the great injury of a broken heart and wake up glad to be alive again. “With this possibility as a beginning, perhaps we will be open to going beyond the sometimes terribly convincing feeling in the moment of our great loss, that we have also lost ourselves, our ability to go on living. Such openness helps a little, and where nothing seems to help much, a little is a lot. In this spirit, all that follows is offered.” Contents Walls, WIndows, and Doorways
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Excerpt | Preface: On Walls A few lifetimes ago, I taught philosophy to prison inmates as part of a special college outreach program. The readings for the course included the three dialogues of Plato sometimes called The Last Days of Socrates. In the second of these, Socrates’s old friend Crito offers him a chance to escape, and Socrates turns it down, reasoning that it’s better for him to suffer an unjust execution than to betray his freely accepted duty to obey the laws of the state. My captive audience reacted to this with boos and hisses, and more passion and involvement in the issues than anything I’d ever seen in a college or university classroom, where the imprisoning walls are less apparent. Most of all, they were impressed by the idea that even while doing time on death row, waiting to toss back the nefarious hemlock cocktail, Socrates remained free enough in himself to stay true to what he believed and valued. Robert Frost could have written his famous something-that-doesn’t-love-a-wall line about prisoners, in and out of the slammer. Or international affairs. Or as a psychological commentary on love at the end of the twentieth century, a subject that grabbed my lapels two decades ago and hasn’t let loose yet. Think of the husband and wife who sit on either side of a newspaper or a wall of numb resignation, the teenager who can’t talk to parents who love her but don’t know how to reach her, the old woman in a nursing home who’s jailed each day in loneliness and a life that’s become purposeless in the hour of its richest accumulations. Despite all that we call progress, we haven’t done much to bring down the psychic and political walls that keep us trapped in pain, prejudice, fear, isolation, greed, exploitation, and other blunders of the psyche that never worked and still don’t and never will, no matter how much our politicians gift-wrap them in campaign rhetoric, no matter how much spin their verbal hit men put on the language. Walls have been symbolic of an old world order more rightly described as a disorder. No doubt this is why the human race went dancing on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Evolutionarily speaking, it was a growth spurt. The uniting of East and West Germany struck us as a powerful metaphor, a harbinger of deeper healings and reunions and possibilities, globally and individually. Soon after the razing of the Wall and the democratic reforms that swept across Europe and South Africa came the war in the Persian Gulf, assuring another body count for the twentieth century and reminding us that, despite the pontificating about a so-called new order, despite the real political changes that had taken place, some walls hadn’t even begun to come down; they were just being given a new coat of blood. Then, in December, 1991, the walls securing the now erstwhile Soviet Union crumbled, and with it, Lenin’s utopian experiment. Before the end of the century, there likely will be a few more surprises, as walls that we have taken for granted continue to topple. Perhaps while the Western democracies are basking in the ideological victory of these whirlwinds of change, mistaking Eastern failure for Western success, we would be wise to turn our attention to the condition of our own walls. In the following pages, we’re going to traipse around in some of the most fascinating and convoluted terrain to be found in the landscape of the psyche, and take a close look at the walls that awareness sets up as it undertakes the adventure of moving toward clear, unobstructed, creative self-expression. We’ll run smack up against walls of unexamined habit, misplaced trust, repression, projection, self-judgment, the fear of risk, role-playing, the calculating mind, a silent God, death, rage, and others. We will check out paradoxes and contradictions and anomalies, returning again and again to this great bit of irony—that the other side of the wall is always right here, right now, and that when we get there, all we find is more of ourselves, more of who we have always been in this moment. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding:
The explorer’s journey has its own heartbeat, measured by expansions and contractions of the inner wall throughout life, but excessive expansion can lead to self-abandonment, while excessive contraction makes the world a lonely or stuffy place, and either way, one is driven to extremes. We need to learn to work consciously on both securing and expanding the inner wall, because only in the balance of these two can we reclaim our best identity, a sense of place, and our taste for the adventure of it all. That said, grab your rope and gloves, and wear something black. Ready or not, we’re going over the wall tonight. Purchase the Digital Editions Bundle and save 33%! All three titles
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Realities Digital Edition is a compilation of Field training essays, meditations, and stories designed to serve as a beautiful supplement to Course study, or as a standalone text for those who simply want to learn more about Field training. This generous collection provides in-depth insight and understanding into the many subtleties of Field theory, and includes dozens of practical pointers that you can apply immediately to various problems and situations even if you haven't taken the Course.
First published in 1989 by then Harper and Row (now HarperCollins) under the title, Recovering From a Broken Heart, this book eventually was published in translation overseas. Originally written for those undergoing the anguish of having been left by a lover, it has been revised in its digital form to be directly applicable to any situation in which one feels stuck in suffering, While Thorns and Roses does not present Field training principles as such (the book predates the birth of the Field Center by five years), it clearly anticipated the central concepts and practices that became Field training. The material presented in this book has received glowing reviews and helped thousands of people regain their balance and return to a sense that being alive is a gift, and far "better than healing."
This entertaining and edifying collection of essays examines the metaphors of "walls, windows, and doorways," in their various roles in human experience—to keep out and let in, to constrain, to protect, to shelter, to provide a way out and a way in.