the verk!
Tuesday 30 November 2004 | I like a cookie
In the absence of broadband I downloaded The Verksheet (gleep!) and am now also an avowed disciple. I mean, Ms. Katie’s married to Stephen Mitchell and he’s not exactly an unsharp knife now is he?! So for all its New Age trappings (the Store! the CD-print boxed sets!) I staunchly maintain the intellectual validity of The Work. How I desperately wish I could hear/read the relationships/couples chapter excerpt. Instead I must listen to Eve Ensler reading her unabridged book (one and a half hours of it) about Fat.
I did get sucked so deeply into the site that I noticed Ms. K. will offer a Weekend Intensive here in Santa Fe in February. Should I go? It’s $250 but hey, what price liberation. And she offers one in Hounslow in June. (No communication between M. and me since the day I spent three hours telling him I was “seeing” N. Is he alive and well? Is he alive?)
Alas, as neither Katie nor her Work was available to me last night in the throes of Relationship, instead I turned to Marshall Rosenberg and NVC—almost equally revelatory. Of course Marshall has mediated successfully between hostile warring gang members, Palestinians and Israelis, inner-city high school students and their school administrators, and all manner of people most oppositionally defiant to one another. His book always inspires me to stop blaming someone else for not meeting my needs and start trying to identify them and request them. So when “You should be more financially responsible because then I would feel less anxious” is expressed less violently, it becomes
1) Observation: Right now, you don’t have a full-time job (already different from the judgment contained within “you aren’t responsible”);
2) Feeling: I have felt anxious the last few days (which may not have everything to do with your financial situation);
3) Need: I’m really needing to feel more secure financially; and finally,
4) Request: Get a fucking job! (okay, still need to work on this part).
Actually, Rosenberg suggests an initial request like “Would you be willing to say back to me what you just heard?” in case what the person just heard was, “You loser, I’m leaving you”; or, “Would you be willing to tell me how you’re feeling about the situation?” We had talked in circles around this for hours and within a few minutes N. weeping, saying how scared he was that he would disappoint me and I’d leave him; and then we were suddenly fine.
And now I must grad school, must Eve Ensler, must try not to think about the fact that I never Be with Dying (the book ms anyway). Must write the seven referees clustered blankly in my Drafts folder and must steel myself for conversations with the Arts Editor and the dimwitted Former Film Critic (dimwitted if he thinks I would even so much as pee on him, were he ablaze).
This is what I must do. Yes.
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