Stifling of creativity

This is an opportunity for men, not only because they've always wished their wives would initiate sex more, but also because they can use their wives' arousal as a source of excitement. When partners operate as an intimate team in this way, they can throw off constraining ideas about sex and collaborate on what pleases them. The spirit of collaboration extends to using a variety of arousal methods, and not treating one method as better than another. In partner sex, people generally get aroused in three ways: partner interaction, self-entrancement, and role enactment. Partner interaction is what we consider the usual way, namely becoming aroused by one's partner's looks, feel, and behavior. Self-entrancement is focusing on one's own body sensations and accepting touch. Role enactment is becoming aroused in your private imagination (fantasy), or through role-playing or props. When sex becomes boring, it's often because couples limit themselves to partner interaction as a source of arousal. The antidote is to vary arousal styles. That leave it to the experts attitude with a car is bad enough; with your life it can be devastating. But with all these drawbacks, there is one distinct advantage, one reason why humans keep dreaming experts into business. If the car runs lousy, it's not your fault. You didn't have anything to do with it. It's those jerks at the shop. When people create experts they have somebody to blame when things go wrong. That shrink screwed me up. If you don't stop to ask yourself, Is my life going where I want? don't be surprised if you don't like your destination. But Alan, who had spent his entire career building jet airplanes, had an aeronautical engineer's faith in structure and process.

To get talented people working together, he paid attention to details, all the way down to the granular level. He began each BPR session in the same way: My name is Alan Mulally and I'm the CEO of Ford Motor Company. Then he'd review the company's plan, status, forecast, and areas that needed special attention, using a green-yellow-red scoring system for good-concerned-poor. He asked his top sixteen executives to do the same, using the same introductory language and color scheme. In effect, he was using the same type of structure that I recommend in my coaching process and applying it to the entire corporation. He was introducing structure to his new team. And he did not deviate, either in content or wording. He always identified himself, always listed his five priorities, always graded his performance for the previous week. He never went off-message, and he expected the executives to follow suit. unlike the priest, he never lectures, never imposes penances no matter how mild. Freud had this alliance in mind when he noted that the analyst should begin to reveal his patient's deeper secrets only after the analysand has formed a solid transference, `a regular rapport,' with him. I realize it only now, with the perspective of many decades: John gave me complete permission--even encouragement--to explore the sorrow that seemed during that first year of our friendship to be somehow at the very core of my being. I had altogether forgotten, until my conversations with John in the first years of our friendship, that as a kid I read the obituaries first--a curious fact that I have already mentioned in these articles. I had forgotten the extent to which I had been fascinated with death, loss, and grief. I'd forgotten that I had been transfixed by and drawn to funerals and their majesty, and the opportunities they gave me to cry. Indeed, I was well known among my sibs and cousins for losing it at funerals and sad movies (There he goes again). This is one of my own most real and vivid memories of childhood. As it turns out, I had been creatively drawn to the right opportunity, but altogether without knowing why. Okay, but still: What was the source--at this particular moment in my life--of all this grief abounding? Treating the current era of their sexual life as something they could figure out together tempered Elsa's tendency toward complaint and Mitch's tendency toward disengagement.

Then, as if visited by the goddesses of twenty-first-century middle-aged womanhood, Elsa's recently divorced sister persuaded her to add yoga to her exercise regimen. Elsa thus joined the 14 million yoga practitioners over the age of fifty, and her practice became the seed of the sense of community that she had been yearning for. Elsa tended to be frenetic and reactive in daily life and felt at sea and agitated when alone. In class, the quiet, the mood, the music, and the gentle voice of her instructor, all helped to settle her nerves. Yoga also helped fill the growing empty space she felt in her family life. It gave her an avenue to the sacred and a deeper sense of self-compassion. Finding bottom-up awareness and appreciation for how she felt in the moment; balancing effort and ease; uncovering layers of physical tension--these were a huge boon to her daily well-being and an antidote to stress. It is your life, you know; like it or not, you're both the consumer and the complaint department. As a society people are in love with the notion of experts. They create grand, wise ones who can predict the future, tell them how to live and make pronouncements on any imaginable subject. And, as consumers of this expertise people get such a deal! They listen to what the experts say, then agree, disagree, talk about it, make jokes about it (where would TV talk shows be without a visiting expert? ) and then, best of all, smugly sit back relieved of any burden of thinking things out for themselves. Why bother thinking at all when you can get it from the experts? Why bother with the hard work of building your own way by trial and error, when you can copy it ready-made from somebody else? Life is too complex and specialized for stupid consumers to understand, they need to be spoon-fed. At first a few executives thought Alan must be joking.

No adult running a giant corporation could possibly believe in this seemingly simple disciplined routine, repeated week after week. But Alan was serious. Structure was imperative at a thriving organization, even more so at a struggling one. What better way to get his team communicating properly than by showing them step by step how great teams communicate? Most executives quickly signed on. But a couple rebelled. Alan patiently explained that this was the way he'd chosen to run the meeting. He wasn't forcing the rebellious ones to follow his lead. If you don't want to, he told them, that's your choice. My response to Uncle Bill's death was clearly overdetermined. That is to say, determined by hidden, unconscious factors--implicit memories. What did the insistence of this grief point to? What was it really about? What hidden city did we need to uncover in order to understand it all? In truth, I have to tell you that it's taken decades to unwind this mystery. In the safe space of All Saints in Dorchester, and with the help of John Purnell, I began what would become a long process of excavation. My story is now much more coherent than the autobiographical narrative John heard from me during that first year of our friendship. My narrative now integrates much more of the truth of my early attachment history. John was my first experience of clear mirroring, and he became an exemplar of what I could create throughout my life. Along with its many other benefits, yoga became a bridge back into sensuality.

It helped Elsa approach physical affection with renewed confidence and calm. The trappings also had their charms. Her yoga clothes made her feel cute and sexy. Websites such as girlsinyogapants. com and the widespread semifetishization of women in workout clothes helped her feel in the game. And it didn't hurt to have a shirtless twenty-eight-year-old yoga instructor at her Tuesday-morning class, who took his job of adjusting women's pelvises very seriously indeed. But most of all, the actual practice helped her feel more centered, and the breathing made a huge difference in her state of mind and body. It's all about the breath, she informed us, and I was glad to see her new yogic wisdom replacing the blaming tone that had characterized her previous bids for Mitch's attention. Yoga is helping me be a better partner, Elsa said one day, because I'm more willing to be patient and listen. That's the lie so many believe. Once again, another generation grows up secretly despising the experts but still letting them run the show. Priests, scientists, politicians - each area has its own people in the know. BEWARE OF EXPERTS! Beware of the addiction to believing in what they say. Listen and choose carefully - don't flatly reject, don't swallow whole. Experts are people too. Just more human noodles floundering around in the same soup. Consider the experts. Listen carefully - the mechanic says you've got engine problems. It doesn't make you a bad person.