And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack.
And you may find yourself in another part of the world.
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself
Well
How did I get here?
--Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime"
In his piece on Tuesday, Jerry brought our work here full circle, returning to the topic of how we would work with Tiger Woods. Jerry acknowledged that Tiger has forgotten more about how to play golf than we will ever know, but said that this doesn't matter. We'd start with Tiger the same way we start with everybody: with centering and the breath.
While working with top athletes is a dream we hope to see come true, the main constituency we expect to work with is non-famous people like ourselves who seek to maximize their potential. We've assumed that because our methods bring deep feeling to the body and, with that, a concomitant feeling of vulnerability, certain groups of people won't be amenable to this work.
But in the past couple of weeks I have watched with something like wonder as I've had conversation after conversation with members of exactly the group that we've considered least likely to be our audience, which you might find kind of funny when I tell you who they are. (Sometimes we fail to see what's right in front of our faces.)
These conversations have been with men, my age or a bit younger, who find themselves in situations not unlike where I found myself a couple of years ago. They seem to be looking around and saying something like this to themselves:
"I thought I was living skillfully. I thought I would be more at this point in my life. But when I look at my life, I see a lack of purpose, a lack of solidity. I lack the fullness of my own integrity, and I don't know how to make it better."
As the song says: "How did I get here?"
Once these conversations started to happen, I realized that of course there are men just like me out there who could, as I did, use a little help. And of course I am being called to help them. The universe tends to send us exactly what we need in order to learn and grow.
What they're experiencing: I have been there. Hell, I am still there. I do not live in the fullness of my own integrity, and I suffer in that lack. But I am trying, goddammit. Though I may have miles to go on this journey toward solidity of self, I also know just how far I've come since I started this process. And what was the first step in beginning the process of change? It's exactly what Jerry said on Tuesday: it started with centering and the breath.