Luan Hassett

Enlightenment In Everyday Life

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  • Notes On Welcoming Fear

    I signed up for Art of Accomplishment’s Groundbreakers retreat, and then realised I probably didn’t have enough money.

    Already on the verge of burnout, paying north of 10 grand would mean reneging on my promise to take the next month and a half off work which I had made to myself. The decision to pay or not to pay is cutting to the core of an identity question: am I going to change my priorities and start doing normal people things like saving for a deposit on a house? Or am I going to continue pursuing this off-piste spiritual journey which I seem to have designed in such a way that no one around me has the necessary context to be able to tell me that it is a bad idea?

    A lot of fear has come up. AoA (Art of Accomplishment) make a big thing of welcoming fear, since it’s a signpost to authenticity. It’s a sign that a part of your identity is under threat, which they say is a good thing because identity is what blocks out your more expansive, evolving, essential self.

    I’ve been wondering about what part of me is being faced with annihilation. The part of me that says “hell yeah I’m going to pay loads of money, why wouldn’t I, with all the pain I’ve been through?” The part of me that is such a good customer whose praises all the coaches gather around after hours to sing, and deserves to be seen as a sincere seeker (wait til I leave them scrambling to fill the space when I drop out…) The part of me that thinks he knows what’s going on, thinks his judgement is better than other people’s and he’s really on to something with this AoA stuff, which everyone will look back and recognise in wonder, 10 years hence.

    There is something self-disparaging in how I’m characterising the identity that might be departing me. This itself is probably the identity of The Self Aware Person. Fear bursting through all of this. The thing about genuine fear, I’ve come to believe, is that if I know it’s healthy then I’m only on the edge of it. If I know it’s going to lead to something better, ultimately, then there are layers left for me to feel.

    I need to be held in my fear, and I don’t know how to reach out for that.

  • Is All Thinking Management?

    Is all thought management? (But then what about poetry, what about revolutionary philosophies)?

    How would you know it; what would it mean?

    It would be a delay, a dysrhythmia.
    It would cause a contraction in awareness, like “wait, what was I saying again?” as you expand back outwards.

    Even epiphanies in their final form have been fixed in a formulated phrase. Their sparks are preverbal. Life on the outside is for them soon to become the canned goods of the intellectuals. A lower fractal of management is cooing at apercus like this one.

  • The Art of Circling

    The whole world is looking for a test
    Craving it, in fact.

    Because people crave the truth.
    Truth is not what you have been told it is.
    It is something far, far, far
    more
    delicate.

    Golden snitches
    Whispers of insight
    Grasp too tight and you lose it.

    People crave it.
    The whispering changes that tell you
    who you are
    in relation to this strain

    These are the whispers that guide the expansion.
    Humans jolt to get away from them
    seconds after contact with desire.

    Between the craving & the leaving falls the shadow.
    The shadow that thwarts us
    even while
    The flat wafer fails to nourish.
    The flat fact sequence doesn’t enliven.
    Rubber estranged from road.

    And so we come to Circling. 

    The present, the capacity for presence, deepened.
    Non-striving tempted into… therein lies the
    discovery.

    Can the coming to rest sustain itself in the midst of the inducement to workfulness?
    It is good to have purpose, good to aim, good
    to set goals.

    But like all things human
    where the concept is laid down on paper
    it must rise again & be integrated

    into the evolutionary unfolding of selfhood—
    the silent space after the finished chapter.

  • A Wish List for Psychiatry

    This is a list of things I wish were different about psychiatry. I am following the spiritual principle of owning my experience, which means that I am not stating these as necessary improvements. I am not implying blame of anyone. I am simply expressing wishes, not opinions.

    • I want to be able to choose who I hire and fire. I want to be able to assess their character. How much energy do they bring to their work? How much creativity? Capacity for effective conflict resolution?
    • I want personal development opportunities instead of research obligations. I wish the experiments we were expected to run were ones whose results we could feel for ourselves.
    • I want better financial incentives for doing the job well.
    • I want to be able to write more colourful character descriptions in the patient’s files, free from legal imputations of malice or malpractice.
    • I want to work with people who are committed to their own emotional evolution. It would be cool to develop training programs for this, and watch the expansion of consciousness permeate all levels of the organisation, through to the patients. This is what the book ‘Reinventing Organizations’ explores.
    • I want weekly teaching sessions to be way more dynamic. See above for ideas on how to achieve this. They’re not always bad, but without compulsory attendance they would amount to little more than a failed book club. Enjoyment is one of the best signs of efficiency. Obligation is an error signal.

    For balance, here are some of the things that Psychiatry is currently doing really well:

    • Having done a fair amount of therapeutic and spiritual exploration over the last three years, it is clear that Psychiatry is where the most profound personal transformation occurs, given the starting point.
    • By the end of their training, most Psychiatrists have a very high level of competency at running a complex system.
    • There is a deep care and attunement that most Psychiatrists extend to their patients.
    • There is a strong emphasis on data. Coming from someone who loves intuition, this is a good thing.

  • On All the Myriad Healing Modalities

    How many thousands of personal development modalities do you reckon there are? Modalities for exploring trauma, releasing tension, expanding awareness, reframing limiting beliefs

    Therapists have a term called ‘purple hat’ practices. These are newer forms of therapy that are only effective because they incorporate older therapies. I recently spoke to the Clinical Psychologist I work with, who said that when she trained in EMDR the trainer used elements of at least five other modalities in order to deliver his presentation.

    It is difficult not to be cynical about the latest copyrighted practices that come with warning labels to seek sessions with a certified practitioner before trying on one’s own. Or in which to become certified if one seeks to go deeper. If I am starving, I want the steak. If food has been in short supply, I don’t care about whether it’s topped with garlic butter or pepper sauce.

    But wait. I notice I don’t feel like carrying this skepticism any further. A sentence is coming back to me, imperfectly remembered, from Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig’s ‘Power In the Helping Professions’: the shadow of the therapist and the shadow of the client constellate together. Observing a flash of charlatanry, my apathy comes out to meet it. The part of me that resists change has its perfect excuse. The reality is that if you shut down claims to novelty you will have impaired your excitement, a crucial force in the early stages of transformation. Whatever the truth about whether there is anything new under the sun, there certainly is to you.

    The danger is that you mistake the novelty for the transformation, so that when the new becomes the familiar you think that nothing really changed. This is why I think it’s important to not collapse onto what a modality can do for you. There are deeper matters of character that must be considered. How badly do you want it? How clear are you on what “it” is? What would be a sufficient test of whether you have it? And to clarify your relationship with these tools – what are you, essentially?

    I will finish with a take home message. If you are in the fight you are in the resistance. There are gimmicks out there that you don’t blink twice about indulging. There is some brand of coffee or type of house plant that isn’t fundamentally much different from the others, but you needed caffeine or a spruced-up living room and so you went ahead and bought it, no questions asked. No aspersions cast about the business owner. Of course it is a little different in the case of personal development. You need to trust the practitioner at a deeper level. So the question becomes, how do you resolve the matter of trust such that you can entirely focus on the work?

  • Freedom Is an Embodied State

    There is no opposition between freedom on the one hand and success and material wealth on the other.

    The opposition is between freedom and any conditioned idea. Whether that be success, or romance or a steady income.

    A conditioned idea is a circumstantial one. If it were not for a specific set of good or bad feelings associated with an idea, you would not believe it. Whereas truth is enduring, and does not depend on belonging to a given time or culture in which an idea is hitched to some inner pleasure (the pleasure of being right, moral, important or ‘in the know’). Truth is also intricate, innocent and recognizes non-linearity. A conditioned belief keeps firing whenever the original stimulus is repeated.

    Even though the listener is not the same man, and it is not the same stimulus.

    People’s confusion lies in the fact that they see freedom as a concept. A concept is fungible: just like two 100 dollar bills, freedom for a 20 year old man in Somalia is seen as having the same properties as for a 78 year old woman in the US. In each case, freedom is supposed to be a removal from whatever (also fungible) idea the person has of worldly success.

    But freedom is not a concept. The word ‘freedom,’ as opposed to the state, merely allows for a reminder to shift position and look in that direction. Freedom is an embodied state. To me, it is a pervasive absence of tension in the body. Since an absence of tension attests to getting beyond conditioning, and beyond the need to manage the movement of emotion, this makes it very useful for earning money and making friends.