Risking Being Alive - Wisdom of NOW

Risking Being Alive is a collection of ideas, experiments and readings which introduce psychological tools that can be used to increase the sharpness with which you see and relate to the world. Used properly they will enable you to enrich your life and become master of your fate.

Risks

To laugh is to risk appearing th fool
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental
To reach out for another is to risk involvement
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self

To place your ideas, your dreams, before a crowd
Is to risk their loss
To love is to risk not being loved in return

To live is to risk dying
To hope is to risk despair
To try is to risk failure

But risks must be taken, because the greatest
hazard in life is to risk nothing
The person who risks nothing, does nothing,
Has nothing and is nothing
The may avoid suffering and sorrow, but they
Cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love or live
Chained by their attitudes, they are a slave
The have forfeited their freedom
Only a person who risks is free


Excerpt:
Page 30:

What we feel, in the emotional sense, is manifest in what we experience in a physical sense inside our body. With every emotion there is associated a set of body feelings. We become "flushed with rage", "rigid with fear", "trembling with excitement". These reactions are part of the heritage of our animal evolution and they are always a true indicator of our feelings. If we are to understand our emotions (and thus ourselves) we must learn to listen to these signals.

If we are to perceive our emotional world, we must take time to focus our attention of our body sensations. We have to allow another succeeding figure to emerge from the background. The process is a natural one; we do not have to do anything consciously except pay attention to the continuous evolution of this process. In fact difficulties most usually arise when we actively interfere with this process by mis-using our middle zone to distort the signals from our bodies and thereby confuse ourselves.

For example, a person who has a stiff neck whenever he talks to his boss may ignore the stiff neck, or put it down to arthritis. If he is unaware of feeling resentment or anger toward his boss, he may never make the connection that it is his boss who gives him a 'pain in the neck'. To undo this defense he must pay attention to the stiffness; he may then suddenly flash onto an old memory of a time when he was angry or resentful but, for one reason or another, did not allow himself to express it. The anger or resentment was pushed down literally, by tightening his neck muscles. By handling all subsequent resentments to authority figures in this way, he represses the old feelings as well as the new. Eventually, the physical displacement of these feelings becomes habit and he becomes unaware of the way in which he is constantly holding himself in. In this over-simplified example, it is fairly evident that this person is physically denying himself by his chronic unwillingness to express his anger. Further, his is his body, in a very real sense. Gestalt therapists believe that the chronic and unaware blocking of any enormous amounts of energy used to successfully suppress unwanted emotion can, if released, be used in much more creative and health-promoting ways.

End Excerpt