fishing for fallen light | Podcast in RSS.com

fishing for fallen light

fishing for fallen light

di Jeff Mallory

Miglioramento personale

01-01_20240827 radical tenderness meditation - Fred Jealous

radical tenderness A short, warm hug of a meditation from Fred's October 2012 FBT2M9 meeting.

Stagione 1

Fred Jealous Workshop Introduction evening, June 2015, part 1 of 4

01-02 20241021 post Fred Jealous Introduction to Fred's Workshop evening Seaside, CA June 2015 pt 1 of 4 Fred absolutely loved giving the Workshop Intro talks and meeting and talking with men curious about what he had to offer in his program. His deep love and clear mastery of men's work shone through passionately, eloquently and fearlessly in every one of his Intros. The next four weekly posts will be in-order chunks of a June 2015 Intro talk Fred gave at the Seaside location (which I believe was the last Intro he gave before retiring at the end of 2015). Fred covered everything about his Workshop in his Intro talks: his personal history and how it led to creating the workshop program; the theory and history of, and contributors to, his development and evolution of the workshop; the workshop meetings schedule and meeting structure; content review; workshop fees; post-workshop opportunities; and the very-hard-to-believe, life-reforming benefits men say they got from taking on this lengthy, deep-dive commitment to learning about themselves. It was a solid hour of a LOT to take in! And, of course, in his wise and wily way, Fred included a short session of pairs work at the end of the presentation to give the men the scary chance to actually try this stuff out: to meet a new man and, face-to-face, decompress a bit and share their feelings with each other about all they had just heard . Working on this Intro was a powerful reminder for me of how completely skeptical I was of all so-called men's work "crap". Until I heard Fred talk about it. His warmly welcoming, in-person presence and scarily precise talk about all this guy stuff blew my mind and my doubts (but not my fears...) about participating. I was the lone gay guy in a bunch of straight men talking intimately about me, them, relationships and... sex???? For seven months? Whoa baby! Yes, I was! Turns out, nothing could have been more powerful for me or my straight classmates than our participation together on the workshop journey. I would not be alive today if I had not gone through Fred's Workshop. Listen on repeat and take notes. #FredWorkshop #FredTalks #FredIntro #fredjealous #WorkshopIntro

Fred Jealous Workshop Introduction evening, June 2015, part 2 of 4

01-03 202451104 02 Workshop Intro Fred Jealous Seaside, CA June 2015 pt 2 of 4 The search for a new home after Carmel was challenging but blessedly successful and well resourced with an army of move volunteers within the community. The enduring geographic and financial stability of Fred's Workshop at the Carmel center enabled a sustained and vital evolution of Fred's program, truly golden years.> ---------- Heading back to Fred's June 2015 Intro, here's part 2. In this chunk Fred talks about: description of typical meeting format and timing a fully detailed walk-through of the format and schedule of a hypothetical Workshop meeting about self-worth: -welcome/grounding and quieting, -pairs check-in, -review of meeting's topics, -topic lecture, -break/snacks, -demo, -instructions, -small groups, -closing. Fred weaves in real Workshop lessons on self worth throughout this whole Intro, it's awesome. The Workshop materials and class work intentionally support different learning styles, basically: you hear it, you see it, you do it. lecture, demo, small groups Out-of-class empowerment exercises support continued engagement with the material and lessons in between the weekly class meetings. Fred's Workshop vision: we are interested in real change in the quality of men's lives that lets men be more effective in the home, at work and in the community. That's the purpose of these Workshop skills. That's why we're teaching them to you. ==================== subjects threaded throughout the topics above: the Workshop's 20 life tools: we learn them and put them into practice self-esteem doesn't have anything to do with how you're feeling. you're good enough no matter how you feel. self esteem vs feelings/pressure to perform. thinking well of yourself strengthens your sense of self-worth and lessens your insecurity about your self-worth. the more you respect yourself, the less you let people take advantage of you. it's a challenge to put something new in an old, unworking habitual space and experiment with it so we practice and we support each other so we can incorporate these practices and lessen the power of our insecurities. self empowerment recovers self worth and tons more in this section of Fred's lecture. #FredTalks #WorkshopPractices #WorkshopIntroNight #fredjealous

Fred Jealous Workshop Introduction evening, June 2015, part 3 of 4

01-04 20241112 03 Workshop Intro Fred Jealous Seaside, CA June 2015 pt 3 of 4 This chunk of Fred's Intro is largely short, specific discussions about some of the 20 Workshop life tools and how they collectively and interactively create the heart of the Workshop framework. - Safety - trusting that we're safe in the Workshop community. Confidentiality is essential and must be comfortably trusted as being true. -Sharing our successes as well as our struggles, a too-vulnerable shame bind for many men. A boyhood loaded with shaming means that for every success, I'm scared I'll be found out as an imposter of that success. -Creating opportunities to express our truth in an environment that's accepting of us as opposed to judgemental. Judgementalism is the enemy within and without. -Mastering the art of listening to myself and others without having to judge and fix. -Working on our value! - how am I using my brain to think about me? My brain is what I use to create my life: what I use it for really matters. -Improving our communication skills in all areas - how do I get comfortable enough with another human to tell the truth? -Respect is the minimum standard for all of our relationships, with ourselves and with others. if respect is out of the picture, the door is open for violence, internally and externally. -Moderation is really important because that's where love happens: when there's room for two people at the table. Intimacy can't happen without moderation. -Learning how to be intimate: being intimate is sharing your reality in moderation with another human. Having sex is just one of 10,000 ways to express intimacy. -Men have feelings but too often they avoid the vulnerability of expressing feelings & leap to making up judgments and opinions instead. Feelings can all be said in single words. If it's more than one word, it's an opinion, judgement or old story loop. -Understanding what adult/caregivers behaviors helped and hurt us as children. Reclaiming the truth about our life, getting our story straight. Remembering and recovering from boyhood hurts we weren't allowed to recover from. -The excessive shaming and terrorizing of boys, as they grow up, is normal in this culture."We can't have you being weak!" We shame our boys out of needing to recover from hurts. "I'll give you something to hurt about!" -As a boy, there was no place for our pain to be heard, our pain stayed bottled up, denied healing and recovery. Our patterns of unhealed hurts submerged us so deeply in confusion, in desperation, we could only make sad sense of the hurts by taking up insidious false beliefs about our worthlessness, self-respect, incompetence, untrustworthiness and unlovability, and the vileness of our love and presence. Now I knew why I was hurt... because I deserved it... that's who I am... The shame and buried emotional friction of being locked into false beliefs that we know, deep down, aren't true about us, supercharge our adapted boy's intense fears, anxieties, uncertainties, terror, shame, grief, fixation on dread of the past, need for control and extreme reactions. Our brain floods with that deluge of doubt, exhausting us and leaving little brain left for dealing with other parts of our lives. Is it any wonder that we act so weird before we start examining what we believe about ourselves? A searching and fearless exploration of our false beliefs, with support, is the key to exploring, hearing and healing our adapted boy's feelings and behavior and increasing our capacity for more moderation, self-worthiness and serenity in our Adult/Self. "We have to go after these lies that we have about our own value and we go right at the heart of the lie about your value. We go after it in the Workshop section we call False Beliefs."

Fred Jealous Workshop Introduction evening, June 2015, part 4 of 4

01-05 20241121 04 Workshop Intro Fred Jealous Seaside, CA June 2015 pt 4 of 4 Fred wraps up his Intro talking about what we've all been waiting for: love, intimacy and sex. In the male box, we're confused about the difference between intimacy, love and sex. The relationship part of the workshop is what Fred has spent the most time on developing. Our culture treats sexual obsession like it's normal. No obsession is normal, it's pathological. Sexual obsession is directly linked to the convoluted behaviors we developed from not recovering from our pain and hurts as young boys. Fred's Workshop gives you opportunities and invitations to safely try on some new ideas about sex and obsession and see how they free your brain from obsessions' endlessly consuming tyranny. At the end of the Intro, Fred has the participants try out pairs work by asking them to pair up with someone they don't know and, in the pairs, each man takes a turn talking for 3 minutes, without interruptions, about what caught their attention in the talks: was there anything in their childhood that they think still has a grip on them and have they discovered anything in the workshop that might be useful. Fred also covers some reasons for postponing taking the workshop: -you already know from the schedule that you'll miss the all day or weekend meetings, -you already know that you'll miss three or more meetings because every meeting is crucial and builds on previous meetings' material and experiences. -you're overusing drugs or alcohol. You need brain clarity and subtlety to participate and to truly feel and explore your feelings. We know that this program works but it does mean taking on the challenge of leaving behind a lot of behaviors and attitudes that we're very attached to and that we've used for a long time... and that don't work. It will take courage and support to go into those too-familiar-but-always-unsuccessful patterns to try out and adopt some new attitudes and behaviors about ourselves and our relationship to others. Addictions are love substitutes. It's the endless cycle of re-triggering old, difficult thoughts and dark feelings about ourselves that leave us lost and lonely and that force us to find addictions to give us some fleeting relief from not loving ourselves.Until the next onslaught of darkness slams us down once more and we again head for that deceptive, inadequate relief... It's an exhausting and devastating way to live. New attitudes and behaviors are an uphill climb that bring up scary and tough feelings that you'd rather not remember. In Fred's Workshop you're not alone climbing the recovery mountain, you've got classmates to reach out to and that makes all the difference in the world. With support, it's now a growth experience not a disaster. You've got to learn to love yourself enough to sincerely do the work in the program. The more time and effort you put into the Workshop, inside and outside of the classroom, the more you will get out of the program. We don't give you things that don't work. And for those men who are parents, we guarantee 150% that you will be better parents after the workshop. Your kids are waiting for you to be the love that you can be. #fredintro #FredJealous #WorkshopPractices #Workshophistory #FredWorkshop #WorkshopIntroNight