Desire & Expectations

In matters of desire or the heart, it’s often more faithful to your own self-respect and your care for the others' feelings to depart from reality rather than your imagined expectations. If you build an image of what your partner or the dynamic ought to be, not only will it interfere with the natural development of the friendship, but it will also set you on a downhill hike from the peak of your expectations to the bottom of your disappointment in the real situation not meeting them. A dear friend Romy once told me that “expectations are just pre-meditated resentments”, and while there is a minimum expected bar of respect and care for the other person’s dignity, any instrumental expectations on the experience of our partner of the partner themselves will set us up for an active resistatnce to what the friendship is naturally progressing into. The alternative is also cool, if you start with an empty mind and an empty heart, every moment is an opportunity for wonder and love.

Matter & Force

A useful distinction is between emotional matter and emotional force, creative matter and creative force. In a way quite similar to how physical matter differs from physical forces. Matter is what is moved, force is the thing that moves. Emotional matter is the current or historical content of your emotional life, how you were socialized, the environmental, biological and cognitive dispositions of your psyche. Emotional force is the actual and immediate experience of emotional drive, the willed or allowed emotional response to internal or external stimuli. Your emotional force can be used to charge physical or mental motion, it coats motion with its particular expression of force. Creative matter is what we feed our mind before it embarks on its trains of thought. The information we digest, the preparation we undertake, much life a fighter that spends years elevating and practicing their craft before entering the ring. Practice is an analytical process of refining our techniques, of absorbing information and enriching our tool sets, when it comes to the actual fight however, there’s no long room or time to think, we must feel with the living force that surrounds us, feel our spring partner, and remain presently responsive to the moment of execution.

humility

Humility isn’t authentic unless we have a sober and honest acceptance of who and what we are. If we shrink our humility is accidental, if we inflate our humility is performed, if we’re grateful for exactly where we stand, humility is genuine.