Life is a Risk Machine - or the trouble with Coaching

For almost as long as I have been doing magic have I been working in a context that relies heavily on personal coaching. Therefore my thoughts on magic and coaching often heavily intertwine... Unfortunately that doesn't help to keep my approach to magick 'pure' in a traditional sense. The good thing, however, is that I don't care too much wether my magic comes pure, on ice, shaken or stirred - as long as it works.

So here are some thoughts on the middle ground between magic and coaching.

::

For anyone having drunken the coaching-cool-aid of the late 90s the following snippet will probably sound familiar:  So you want to praise an employee and you are concerend it might cause envy with others? Why do you think that might be? If your boss praised your peer instead of yourself, for what reasons might you become envious? Or think of yourself as that envious employee - what thoughts would you have? What would you think about yourself and about your boss? Great. Now that we know what caused the envy, how can you address these causes in an appropriate way? On a scale from 0-10 (10 being best) how trusted is your relationship with the potentially envious employee today? Good, what makes it a four? In the future, what observations would tell you that your relationship improved to a seven? And what is the first small step you can take toward this future today?

Let me point out that I love coaching. It’s a wonderful and incredibly powerful tool. It was that one thing since the dawn of industrialization that accomplished to create space again for people and their real people’s problems within corporate organisation. But - all praise aside - sometimes coaching just isn’t the way to get things done. Sometimes it’s just a way to look more at yourself rather than the world; sometimes it makes life hugely complex and not plain simple. I guess you can say this happens if it is done badly? Yet, reality is that in the world I am living in coaching often is done badly - including by myself.

From a magical point of view trying to solve problems with a coaching attitude is like walking your magical path with a dagger in your hand only. Having forgotten about the power of the cup, the wand and the pentacle. In order to balance and create true magic we need all four weapons with us: the wand being the fire pillar in the middle of ourselves, the cup being the deep waters of our hearts, the pentacle being the earth we are walking on and the dagger being the blinding forces of our mind.

  

If we achieve to merge the intent of our heart, mind and hands in a single act, this is what I call authenticity. The world around us strives on authenticity. Authenticity is the one seed that you bring out on the fields to harvest true relationships a season later. It is what brings the power of our pentacles to life.

But here is the challenge with authenticity: It springs to life easily, like a stream that finds its way through the rocks of a mountain, it cannot be held back, if we are truly present in any given moment. Coaching on the other hand requires time and reflection - it requires a time out of engagement - before we chose to re-engage. Once we are ready to re-engage, however, the moment might be gone? Coaching by its very nature disconnects from experience in the present moment. Coaching by its very nature is a safety zone that strives to reduce ambiguity and the requirement to take unprepared risks.

An alchemist's way of
creating a risk machine...

Unfortunately - and I hate to say this - life is all about taking risks (and magic even more so)! Life is a risk machine: You put in risk at the top and it spills out more risk at the bottom. In-between, however, while one risk is transformed into another, that’s where life takes place. That’s were love and fear and anger and pleasure and lust are all coiled together in one wonderful body of a machine. Alchemists call this machine an Athanor. 

Remember the recent posts on Salutogenesis? The same principle applies here: Life simply isn't about what you put in at the top and get out at the bottom. Life is not a P&L. Life is what happens in-between. Salutogenesis tells us that we are always sick and healthy at the same time, our actions are always right and wrong at the same time - but to different degrees.

I have spent quite a lot of years trying to put ‘the right actions’ into the top of the life-machine and waiting for it to spill out 'the right results' at the bottom. You got it - I wasted an awful lot of time. Because while I was standing next to the machine, waiting for it to tell me if my actions where ‘okay’, life was taking place right inside the machine. This is what happens if we don't engage! Real things happen without us being involved... All this time while I was standing next to the machine real emotions were felt inside, people aged, people died, people were born, the world was turning, stars sending their influences down, the sun blowing it’s wind into darkness, new life emerging from the density of the Abyss, old life passing through the gates of death - all happening in this huge risk-machine.

Here is my take away from all the years I spent waiting: Life is not about the outcome, it is about the experience. You got to jump into the risk machine - turn into a risk yourself - in order to be part of the world.

Finally, becoming part of the risk machine allowed me shaking off this little fellow: the demon of objectivity. The best way to put yourself next to the risk machine, is to adopt the scientific principle of objectivity for your own life. To confine yourself into a square little cage, to think of yourself as a laboratory rat looking for that one red switch that will deliver happiness in form of more food (i.e. 'right actions'). At any moment we can chose to understand: Life begins when we accept that our encounters will always remain subjective. They will be wrong in the eyes of some and right in the eyes of others, they will be painful for some and joyful to others, they will be meaningless for some and significant to others, they will be forgotten by many and remembered by a few.

My manager last week paused in our conversation. She paused and said: ‘You know, just too many of our conversations end up with you criticizing yourself about something that you did. You call this learning, but I call it criticizing. When you and I interact it is not about whether something was right or wrong. It is not about praise or correcting. It simply is about reflecting together on what happened and what we want to happen next. It is about learning from what we observed without judging.’ And then she said the magic words: ‘Work needs to be terribly joyful. Life is too short for it to be different.’

In a world where there is no right and wrong, where the life machine swallows some and spills out more risk, where the serpent bites its tail, what can we use as a guiding principle for our choices?

  

To lead a terribly joyful life sounds like a great start... Once I am halfway there I'll try to help others do the same.

Salutogenesis - one more thought

Here is a brief addition to my experience with the concept of Salutogenesis. It accompanied me like a friend in the back of my mind over recent weeks. What I found is that this friend makes great company in most situations: Salutogenesis seems to be a concept that shouldn't only be applied to health and magic, but amply in life in general! 

Just as we are never only healthy or sick but always both at the same time to different degrees, in the same way our actions, thoughts or ideas are equally wrong and right at the same time to different degrees... Once I brought this simple principle down to the actual decisions I was required to take each day, I discovered an amazing impact.

Let me share a few examples:

• Every stupid idea and action can be considered 'right' in so far as they are an authentic expression of emotions at that point in time. Brad Blanton explains this in his wonderful book that I continue to praise - suppressing emotions that are unjust or unfair doesn't make them go away. It just increases their power over us.
• We all know the saying 'a hammer can be a tool or a weapon'. I guess in a similar way most actions and ideas are just 'hammers'. It's our reactions to them as well as our intentions when we express them that make them weapons or tools.
• Antibiotics are life savers. At the same time they disrupt and weaken our immune system in no insignificant way. It's our choice to use them or not - to leverage their positive effect against bacteria and accept that they will kill the healthy ones as well.

I observed myself at work these days. What I found is that the principle of Salutogenesis applied to every single of my action - they are all right and wrong at the same time: Do I give this employee praise for what they did - or will it create envy of others? Do I send this email to my boss - or do I wait for the topic to come up organically? Do I bring an agenda for this meeting or do I allow open space and the important points to come forward in their own time?  

And then something strange happened: Since I stopped trying to do 'the right thing' I gained back a lot time to think about what I actually wanted to achieve? Once I stopped the daily quest for silver bullets of decision making, I regained so much time to engage with people around me... 

Martin Buber once said in his introduction to the wisdom of the Chassids: 'Don't look at yourself, look at the world.' Maybe this is what he meant? If we stop measuring, evaluating, assessing and judging the actions and ideas of ourselves or others - our whole field of vision can change.

The only thing it takes to get there, is trust. And this is where magic can help.

Salutogenesis - or Magic is Medicine

When I first came across the concept of Salutogenesis (en/de) it immediately hit a spark, yet I didn't figure it's significance for magic right away. Over the recent weeks I continued to ponder about it on airplanes and late night taxi rides... Here is what I learned.

The basic idea of Salutogenesis is that we are never 'ill' or 'healthy' but always both at the same time. Being healthy thus becomes a constant adjustment process to the changing context we are living in - rather than a solid state of being that gets temporarily intruded by diseases. Our mental-physical condition therefore is always somewhere on the dimension of health and disease, continuously shifting and adapting to our inner and outer experiences. The difference to the traditional concept of Pathogenesis - i.e. the concept of recovery from a temporarily state of illness and return to an intact state of healthiness - might sound like a subtlety only. However, with this new approach Anton Atonovsky, the inventor of Salutogenesis turned medicine upside down - instead of asking what caused a certain disease, he inquired what sustained health even under difficult circumstances. In taking such an innovative approach he found a revolutionary new perspective on what leads actually to stress and diseases among humans...

Before we move on to explore this new perspective in more depth, let's take a moment to capture the fundamental difference in approach of Salutogenesis and Pathogenesis:

Pathogenesis views diseases as intruders into a natural state of health. Assuming that diseases are always based on an unnatural or at least avoidable root cause, the central question of Pathogenesis is 'What causes diseases?'

Salutogenesis views health and diseases as two ends of one dimension, the dimension of being. Our state of being is continuously shifting and adjusting according to the current environment and subjective experience. The central question of Salutogenesis is "What sustains health?" 

This comparison helps us understand the fundamental difference between the two concepts: Pathogenesis strives to understand the objective root causes of diseases, whereas Salutogenesis focusses on the subjective experiences and resources of the individual. The former places the individual into an interplay of objective forces assuming the role of a concerned and mostly passive spectator. The latter understands the individual as an active co-creator of reality, enabled to influence and guide the interplay of forces he participates in.

So what are the resources that allow us to take an active role and become a co-creator of our state of being?

In his theory, whether a stress factor will be pathogenic, neutral, or salutary depends on what he called generalized resistance resources (GRRs). Antonovsky's formulation was that the GRRs enabled individuals to make sense of and manage events. He argued that over time, in response to positive experiences provided by successful use of different GRRs, an individual would develop an attitude that was "in itself the essential tool for coping". 

(source Wikipedia)

I guess as a medical doctor in the 70s this was quite something - singlehandedly building such a solid bridge between our inner experiences and their direct correlation to our mental and physical health. Moreover, Atonovsky assumed that no factor is predetermined in its effect on us - it can be beneficial, neutral or negative depending on what he called the 'generalized resistance resources' of the perceiver.

The real revolutionary aspect of his approach, however, is the fact Antonovsky identified one's subjective ability to 'make sense of events' as the fundamental precondition and common denominator of all available resistance resources. If we wanted to look at it the other way around: If things don't make sense to us, we don't know how to handle them. Our mind - just like a computer software - runs over the line of faulty code over and over again and tries to read it out, i.e. make sense. Ultimately it gets hung up, wastes huge amount of energy and blocks the rest of the program because of an element that proves to be inconsistent with its implicit rules and assumptions about reality (i.e. how code should be written). Thus - it's our ability to make sense of what happens to us and people around us, that determines the resources we have to deal with it.

Let's start to merge the medical and magical perspective here - and bring in some wisdom from the founder of Adonism, Dr. Musallam aka Franz Sättler (1884-c.1942). In his correspondence course on magic (The Adept), he explains an essential component that determines the effectiveness of any magical approach:

"Human will is a living force. (...) And just like with every other type of force we distinguish three factors that determine its impact: direction, magnitude and contact point. Should it lack on any of these three the impact will either be incomplete, non-existant or even unaligned to the intended impact."

(Dr.Musallam, Der Adept, p.101 - translated by Fr.Acher)

Well, I guess the components of direction and magnitude are quite straight forward and self-explanatory. Yet, the idea of the contact point as a determining factor strikes me as new? The contact point is nothing but the particular point we chose to get a handle on things. Only if we understand the nature of the challenge or obstacle we encounter, can we chose the right handle. To make it even more plain: we can only fix what we understand.

Now, Antonovsky suggested exactly the same thing: it's our ability to make sense of events that determines our ability to cope with stress that might cause diseases otherwise. The more we are able to create a consistent perspective from new experiences, to create coherence from chaos, the higher are our resources to sustain health under adverse circumstances.

And here is what I learned about magic from Salutogenesis: Magic is the strongest medicine. 

Since the times of the ancient Chaldean's and Egyptian's magic has been the major tool to deal with situations of crisis, to initiate and integrate changes, to bring within us and around us in tune and to re-balance the forces of live. From the Shaman's mesa to the Tree of Life of the Kabbalists, magic is a synonym for creating coherence, for finding one's place in the seeming chaos of everyday life.

Magicians are the most powerful creators as they unite the forces of faith and will. Magicians know how to find the secret contact points, where things change by a breeze and a spark. Magicians are sense-makers where the world seems lost in the mazes of life. Magicians are healers, for they know how to heal the broken subjective experience... of being caught in the meaningless riddles of stress and diseases, of power and divulgement.

Magicians know how to lead a life like a story and not like a disconnected word each day.

Reading the story not just the words.