A conversation from the Sustained Action Mailing List
Table of contents
featuring thoughts, suggestions and personal experiences from Gina Celiko, Daniel Lawton, Jeremy Donovan, Bern, Joan Grout, Theonna, Melissa Ward and Pio Barone
Gina Celiko
You can’t generalize and say that recapitulation didn’t work for everyone. (BTW I hate the term recapitulation.)
It certainly works for me. Maybe not exactly as they told us to do. I learned to do a version of recapitulation even before Carlos which probably is the only thing which enables me to go through life since I seem to be an extremely emotional being.
Around here [Northern California Bay Area], it is called “rewriting the past, reliving the event, releasing the charge, discharging the energy, cleansing oneself, coming clean, emotional discharge, emotional release, cleansing breathe etc.” Most everyone who lives around here knows about these terms.
Recapitulation is nothing more than remembering the scene that you seem to carry a charge on. What do you think happens when a psychotherapist asks you to remember something and you remember and tell it and you burst into tears for example?
Or you tell an event that affected you deeply over and over to all your friends?
It is a very well known therapy method for example when kids go through some kind of trauma, to have them tell what they saw over and over, with as much detail as they can remember, no matter how painful it seems for the child, until all the emotional charge disappears. When that happens, the trauma becomes only a story with words and finally child becomes clean of emotional charge. One can tell from the voice and the way child relates the story.
I myself had a lot of experience with children who faced major trauma and was a part of a voluntary team in applying this rehab technique for these children. It was so easy to see where they started, how they started and at the end, the remarkable difference after the release of the emotions when finally they shared their story.(maybe 20 times)
Recapitulation is nothing more than releasing the charge you have over an event. It is as simple as that.
One can do that by breathing through it, by talking about it, by writing about it, by singing or playing music, dancing or running while feeling the energy of the event.
It works beautifully when one masters it and understands the essence of what needs to happen.. I don’t know about true believers, but in Marin County where I live, I know tons of people who practice and live by it.
Recapitulation is just a Castaneda term and I don’t like to use it.
Dan Lawton
Remember what recapitulation did in the books? Now look at what it does, it’s just a psychological release. I was hoping to end up in the second attention on a windy mountaintop with my twin, or to die and be sent back by the eagle. Bait and switch.
I put an obsessive amount of effort into recapitulation. No bragging intended. To summarize, I had a list 30 to 50 computer pages long, spent about 3 years at ½ to 6 hours per day. I stayed with each topic until I absolutely couldn’t remember anything else. I was careful to keep a smooth head movement, tried to fan the events with a sweeping motion, etc. I paid attention to every detail I knew, carefully.
When I was done with my list I retraced my life, everywhere I’d been I visited, looking for things I forgot. After that I started visiting stores and looking at the items on the shelf to find new memories. As I drove in my car I scanned every object on the road, no matter how small, to find more to recapitulate. Even bubble gum stains and loose bolts from engines.
After that I got a small dictionary and proceeded to use each word to find more memories. I must admit I had to stop that, the dictionary was just too big. So I did a second recapitulation with a random order.
I doubt anyone else did it more completely. Here’s what I predict people will discover. Any emotional release you got will fade away with time. The effect is temporary. Check it out. You’ll recapitulate something, and you’ll definitely notice it doesn’t bother you as much. But wait a couple of years. It’ll come back to haunt you, maybe even more strongly.
So it’s bait and switch again. For you Europeans, “bait and switch” means a store advertises one product, but when you get there they have a more expensive and less useful product and they sell you that instead.
Originally a complete recapitulation was supposed to set you free. True, there was some hint you couldn’t do a complete one the first time around. But it was supposed to produce a transformation, and bring out the second attention.
Then, since it really doesn’t work, the witches and Carlos changed the rules. You have to keep it up forever. Naturally, because the effect is only temporary. And probably psychological. You feel better for the same reason people in a cult feel better. Because you are following rules, making an effort, and telling yourself this is improving you. Probably learning to hop on one leg all the time would have just as good of an effect, if you really believed it was releasing things.
I’m exaggerating about it not working, but only a little.
Look, having hang ups and things that bother you could also be considered “experience.” Something makes you feel bad, so you don’t do that again. It’s part of the mindset of being a seeker (which I have) to believe we ought to go around in a peaceful state all the time, like someone who’s been tranqualized. What if it turns out that it’s better to go around sometimes mad, sometimes scared, sometimes anxious, etc. Why is it better to feel nothing? The only egoless people I know are dead ones.
Gina Celiko
Of course you can’t go and recapitulate your whole life. That’s nonsense. That will never work. That’s where they bullshitted and didn’t even understand the basic workings of a human psychology.
You are right. If we become totally empty, theoretically speaking, we wouldn’t need to be in this earth. Of course, we wouldn’t know where we would be or what we would want, because I don’t know how it feels to become totally empty.
But, life doesn’t work that way. That’s where those idiots screwed up. Recapitulation of one’s life is a stinking idea and one that tells me that these people didn’t even understand anything about emotional energy.
The things that I have released successfully break a pattern. They don’t reoccur in my life. They don’t come back. I become free of it.
And of course in no way I am perfect. It doesn’t mean that. As a matter of fact, I have very strong likes and dislikes. But, I am very comfortable with being that way. But, what happens with emotional release that it doesn’t matter that you aren’t perfect. You just don’t carry a charge over it. You don’t care anymore that you aren’t perfect or it happens again, you are perfectly comfortable with it and your buttons don’t get pushed.
So, it has been my experience that, no, it doesn’t come back. And I have been doing this kind of work for the last 10 years now. (Not talking about recapitulating one’s life, I haven’t done that even with Castaneda, never even believed that when he told us.)
Daniel Lawton
You just don’t carry a charge over it. You don’t care anymore that you aren’t perfect or it happens again, you are perfectly comfortable with it and your buttons don’t get pushed.
That part totally worked. It’s still working to this day. I’d add that if you recapitulate like mad, your whole life is before you at any time, like a matrix you can palpably feel. That’s almost magical, and I can see how that might produce dreaming experiences. But that part is really hard to keep up. The matrix fades away as soon as you stop recapitulating.
What I’m wondering is whether worrying about things like this is really better? It takes away time from other things you could do which would be just as fulfilling, and it also exposes some questionable things on which the social world is based. But seeing those holes might not be better. Like eating a drug and realizing all humans are involved in folly. It doesn’t make you live a better life, maybe it worsens it. People who smoke marijuana get to see the folly of social behavior over and over again, but look at how their lives usually sink into stagnation.
One of the reasons people get married and raise a family is because of images in their heads that have been put there by socialization. If you left it up to men, they’d probably fuck and leave pretty soon to find another. But they often stick around. Now as a man, would you lose that socially charged feeling that you have obligations? I did. As a result, I don’t get involved with women anymore because I’m not willing to do the things that go along with the mating.
I see what it leads to, and I’m no longer willing to accept responsibility for all that’s required. The result is I won’t end up with grandchildren, which seems to be the bliss of all the old people I know. Old people are sometimes the wisest and happiest people you could imagine, contrary to what Carlos said. I recently attended my mother’s 70th birthday. She was surrounded by 4 very successful (financially and artistically) sons, a daughter with a doctor’s degree in biology who heads the California wine industry defenses, and 4 incredibly beautiful grandchildren. The grandchildren are like beautiful dolls you’d buy in an instant if they were for sale, but she doesn’t have to deal with the hard work of raising them. She was showered with gifts, pictures from the 1900s of her ancestors were displayed, stories were told about her father (who’s now gone), and she seemed to have a deep connection to a successful and stable family line. Later on she commented it was the happiest day of her life, and I could see why.
Better off to break those bonds? Maybe not. When you’re young and either don’t realize where you’re really headed, or someone’s convinced you you’re going somewhere else, you don’t think about the consequences. Just as younger people think they’re invulnerable. Cleargreen has a superstitious belief that if anyone mentions trouble, no matter how inevitable, they’re intending it, and that by not mentioning it or considering it you can escape it. A very juvenile point of view.
I’m not putting down doing anything at all when it comes to self-improvement. We have no choice anyway. We were born to be seekers.
My latest idea is that maybe we’re programmed genetically to do that. It’s been shown that in a given society some people will only eat the same foods, and some are programmed to seek out new foods. The theory is that it’s safer for a culture to stick to the same thing, but it’s also good to have some which will try new things, at their own risk. Maybe they try mushrooms and die, maybe they discover a new food source. So when a famine comes around for the old foods, the experimental person comes to the rescue, if he’s still alive. It’s good for the tribe to have a tiny portion of dissatisfied people, but not good to have too many.
Maybe likewise some are programmed to leave the tribe, to seek out new leaders, in order to mix genes. Maybe we’re the unhappy one’s programmed to fall for the first new leader that comes along with a teaching that tickles our fancy. In that case we’d certainly feel it was a superior way of behaving, just as we sometimes feel during sex that we’re doing something deep and fulfilling. But it’s just chemicals programmed in our brain to motivate us. We’re the ones designed to seek out and find new things, or be destroyed doing it.
Just a theory. My idea is that part of being a seeker is feeling it’s better to be that way, but in reality it isn’t. All the seekers I know reek of the belief that they’re superior for being a seeker, and pity people they consider “blind” to self-improvement. And they pretend they’re not that way, but you only have to hang around with them and watch them continuously judging everyone to see the truth.
So, it has been my experience that, no, it doesn’t come back.
My experience is that the little stuff, for instance remembering something stupid you did that used to make you feel remorse, does come back. For instance, I’ll suddenly remember saying something really stupid at 5 years old, and it will bother me again. After I recapitulated that event it didn’t bother me. But now it bothers me even more because the memory is very vivid in my mind.
But the big stuff, like being willing to get into a long term situation that you now see clearly, doesn’t come back because you have a clear realization of all the events surrounding the other times you did that, instead of the muddled and narrow view most people hold. Maybe ignorance is bliss.
David Worrell
I’ve definitely had the experience of major emotional release while utilizing techniques of reexperiencing life events. However, I have also come to feel that the method is not at all the panacea it has occasionally been made out to be. I’d say it has definite limits.
I know that techniques of reviewing the past are often quite beneficial regarding the experiences of childhood, for the simple reason that often there is some cognitive misunderstanding involved which causes major pain or suffering to a child. Simply reviewing the events in question from an adult perspective can bring obvious insights that immediately release a lot of suffering. I was reminded of this just yesterday, while reading–of all things–a jokes web page. I don’t know what this was doing on a jokes page, for it was more a moving story than a humorous one. I will reproduce it approximately:
A little boy, after a terrible bout, survives a rare disease which is often fatal, developing the appropriate antibodies to defeat it. A few years later, his sister contracts the same disease, and the doctor asks the boy if he will give his blood to his sister, to save her life. The boy thinks for a minute, then says that he will do it. They set everything up for the transfusion, and a few minutes into the procedure, the boy looks up and fearfully asks the doctor if he will begin to die right away? After additional questioning, it comes out that the boy believed he was being asked to give his sister all of his blood.
Things turned out okay there, but this story illustrates how a childhood cognitive misunderstanding which is not properly explained (and often it isn’t) can easily result in some heavy psychological suffering that may be cleared up by reviewing the events — perhaps buried for years — from an adult perspective.
Now for the reservations. My own experiences, if I am completely honest about it, lead me to believe that recovery from extended life experiences which are genuinely painful or traumatic … is only partial. And what I’ve learned about the human brain makes this observation seem somewhat logical.
As we “learn” and/or experience life, our brains are literally “rewiring” themselves, all the time, making and breaking millions of neuronal connections. And what it seems like to me is that truly painful series of events practically burn themselves into the brain or something, due to the sheer intensity. The recap, while it may approach the intensity of the original experience, is never quite as intense, simply because you know … it’s a recap. And what I’ve noticed is that I can recap a painful series of events until much emotional release has been obtained, and yet … if subsequently I am once again placed in a similar situation, I am still quite vulnerable and sensitive, almost as if it has been burned into my mind to expect the likelihood of an unfortunate result in such a situation. Thus I have begun to wonder if really intense experiences cause millions of neurons (or whatever) to be “set” in ways that simply are not completely reversible. In fact, intuitively I feel this scenario to be probable. It is like … once certain things have happened in a life, a person just never really fully “gets over it” (hence the irritating nature of the phrase: “get over it” 🙂 ). I’d love to be convinced otherwise.
This train of thought leads me to consider the possibility that there might even be such a thing as a simple, natural, “brain-based morality”: Thou shalt not brand the fuck out of thy neighbor’s neuronal networks. Or perhaps, thou shalt not trash thy neighbor’s limbic system. Something like that…
See, I am wondering, if major events in the brain are not fully reversible, does it not follow directly from that alone that our conduct in each moment has real and significant moral connotations?
The other major reservation I have about the process of recapitulating I have expressed here before, but will reiterate. Even under the best of circumstances, recapitulation seems to bring a person back psychologically to what might be called “ground zero”, where one may no longer be suffering direct negative effects from past events and patterns which were crippling before. But … ground zero is at best … ground zero, and thus will not in and of itself change anything in one’s life. Again, you may no longer be suffering from what happened before, and yet, you still know what happened before, and may because of that avoid similar situations. So perhaps even ground zero is really often more like … “ground zero minus one.” The point is that in order to truly change, it is not enough just to get back to ground zero. Because it is really “ground zero minus one”, one has to go beyond that point and overcome the “minus one” by acting positively to get something good out of life where perhaps things were bad before.
In other words, you could sit around and recap forever and it might not really change your life for the better at all. You could keep saying to yourself: “until I feel like I’m done recapping and things get better, I won’t go out and do x,y,z again” or something like that, and … if you do, things might not ever get better. Unless you go beyond “ground zero minus one” by acting positively and actively creating some good life situations, you could very well sit stuck (perhaps in relative comfort) in “minus one” mode in many life areas … until it’s too damned late and the opportunities of life have passed you by. And in fact, to be honest, that’s exactly what I find myself and others doing, a lot of the time. 🙁
The final point I’d like to make concerns the possibility of what might be called “over-recapping”. The best way to make this point may be just to point out the criticism that the cognitive school of psychology often levels at the psychoanalytic school. The cognitive school holds, basically, that by monitoring one’s thoughts and utterly refusing to allow oneself to dwell on negative or self-defeating thought patterns, one can direct the experiences of one’s life toward more positive outcomes. From that point of view, about the worst thing you could be doing to your cognitive state is to be continually immersing yourself in every difficult situation you can dredge up from your past. From the cognitive point of view, to recap events of loss or failure all the time is simply to risk continually reprogramming your cognitive state by over-emphasizing whatever self-defeating thoughts were common to those experiences, instead of doing what you should be doing: focusing on creating positive and fulfilling experiences in the present. A possibility to consider…
Gina Celiko
Hey Jeremy, I agree with you on a lot of things.
First of all ground zero is a very good state. At least for me. That means I can now build something new, something positive. But, I can’t do it before I reach that ground zero, because whatever the energy stuck in my subconscious will effect the way I can create what I want until I reach that zero state. But, once I reach there, and there is no longer that crippling, negative belief, I can build indeed a positive experience, which usually what happens to me. So, I agree with you there.
I don’t sit around recap all day believe me. As a matter of fact i have never followed Castaneda’s recap map.
What I do is this:
As soon as I feel a strong emotion, I stay with it. No matter where I am. I become very capable of staying with the emotion, not conversing with it, but staying completely aware of it in my body. I breathe gently as the emotion is in my body, breathe in inner silence, while watching it. As I breathe (very important not to hurry to push it out, inhale exhale deeply and hurriedly, instead savor the emotion as it is the best feeling in the world), the emotion becomes pure energy.
My first step is to notice where it is hitting me. Some emotions will hit me in my heart (unwantedness, sadness), anger in my solar plexus, some others in my womb (helplessness). As I breathe gently, I feel that energy very deeply. It feels like I am so deeply immersed in it that I will never be able to get out. I feel I am going to die of it or suffocate from it. But, I keep going in my breathing still ever so gently. I must continue to breathe. That’s very important and I must not converse with the emotion at any point. Instead I must concentrate on feeling my body, being very aware of my body and where the energy is going.
Energy starts moving from the point where I first felt it, outwards slowly. I watch it literally like a wave of water, or like a cloud, pass through every point of my body. This is an exquisite feeling. The feeling when the energy starts moving throughout the body and finally takes over the whole body. The final feeling is one of relief, joy, utmost love and literally radiance. The energy feels like it has become my friend, it has moved through me. All my cells, every organ, every blood vessel have come to know this energy most intimately. At this point my body doesn’t contract, but is free and expansive.
This energy now can come and go through my body whenever it wants. Every part of me knows and lets the energy in, therefore energy moves in and out, and I don’t feel any emotion anymore when it does so..
I used to remember scenes from my past whenever I would get hit with certain emotion when I get to the energy part of the emotion. I used to say, “Hmm, where did I feel this way before.” And there it would be, not one but many scenes, where the energy would show up in this form of emotion. But, I realized that I didn’t have to recapitulate the scenes, because the emotion or the energy was the same, common factor. So, I stopped delving into a scene, but rather just walk through the energy now as I mentioned above, or I let the energy walk through me.
Of course, there are some scenes that won’t leave me. Like the night my mother died. I have relived that night so many times. And each time I did, so many different energies were present. I could only work with one at time. I finally completed this most tragic event of my life. Now, I can see the room she died in, while she was in my arms in all detail. But, everything has been handled in the room. I feel a sense of happiness and yes joy when I remember her death. I literally see her radiance as she died and her love of me and my love of her. Right now, all there is left in that room she died is our love which we felt for each other, her nurturing sweetness, the sense of freedom and adventure, and certain radiance which I never experienced before. Yes, I go back to that room a lot, still, but only to find her looking at me with that wonderful smile and loving eyes of hers. All that, I did with my reliving-the-past therapy.
I totally believe in living life as well. That’s why their idea of recap won’t work. We have to be out there, living, doing, interfacing and letting the energy find us. Only then can we walk through the energy or let it walk through us. Otherwise, this life capitulation becomes a mental exercise. One which is just a mental, intellectual look at your past. And mental doesn’t work with energy–it just doesn’t.
Joan Grout
Regarding recapitulation, I speak as an elder. (Because I AM elder 🙂 ) When you spring chickens get to be my age, you’ll see that recapitulating in the manner Carlos dictated is just plain ridiculous. At this age, I would have to spend more time RE-living than I have left to actually LIVE. What an incredible waste. What a ridiculous sacrifice–with the exception, of course, of dealing with any traumas than may deter growth. In situations of blockages some type of intervention is necessary and desirable and some form of ‘recapping’ might be beneficial (like Gina described).
But the world Carlos Castaneda created–mostly for his personal satisfaction and gain but also due to his own personal incapacities, was a world for the young. About him, that says, in my opinion, that he had a monumental fear of growing old, and was also afraid to have meaningful in-depth long-term relationships. So he glorified youth and kept trying to relive his youth by smammering from here to there and back again… By perpetuating that fear, and spreading it to his followers, he’s contributed to a whole generation of Castanedian beings who are afraid to grow old, afraid to die, afraid to fully live! That’s a tragedy.
Dan, there’s something to be said for growing old with someone you feel close to. Sure the glow of newly exploded passion fades. But, it can change to something with unfathomable depth. You miss that if you don’t take the risk of growing old and all that “old” implies and is.
Joan who is old–been there, done that, and it doesn’t hurt 🙂
Bern
Jeremy wrote:
The recap, while it may approach the intensity of the original experience, is never quite as intense, simply because you know …it’s a recap. And what I’ve noticed is that I can recap a painful series of events until much emotional release has been obtained, and yet … if subsequently I am once again placed in a similar situation, I am still quite vulnerable and sensitive, almost as if it has been burned into my mind to expect the likelihood of an unfortunate result in such a situation. Thus I have begun to wonder if really intense experiences cause millions of neurons (or whatever) to be “set” in ways that simply are not completely reversible. In fact, intuitively I feel this scenario to be probable. It is like … once certain things have happened in a life, a person just never really fully “gets over it” (hence the irritating nature of the phrase: “get over it” 🙂 ). I’d love to be convinced otherwise.
I must, unfortunately, confirm your theory. After having done extensive recapitulation, I trapped myself recently feeling the same intense fear I had experienced in my childhood at situations I couldn’t master. Forty years after, the very same fear aroused, the same feeling of entrapment and my mind running wild. The detachment was only in the safe haven of the recapitulation. Obviously this re-living of the fear and why it arouses does help me now somehow, but there is no warranty whatsoever it will not be back again. One can say I am programmed to feel intense fear at certain situations.
So it seems that we actually can release certain experiences, but others just not. And I never got to the point where that pattern Carlos talked about was visible to me. Unless he was speaking about that programming, was he?
Gina Celiko
That is the reason I do not do recap like Carlos talked about.
Because, lets say that you got to the bottom of the event, you are watching it, you are reliving it, there are many charged emotions on the scene. My experience first of all, as I said before has been that, whatever energy I came into viewing the event with is the energy I projected into that scene. This happened every single time. So, as I said before, I bypass trying to remember the scene.
Of course if a scene won’t leave your space, then you must go into it. For example, there is sometimes a look in someone’s eyes as they interact with you that you need to remember. What did that look mean to you? That’s the only thing worth remembering out of that scene. Now that you got that, you have to work with that look and have that look tell you what it wants to tell you. It is that look which is charged with energy. Let yourself feel the energy of the look while breathing and aware, and let it pass through you. You will know if you are resisting, and chances are you are resisting if the scene won’t leave your mind.
So, it is the basic feeling, the energy of the feeling one has to cleanse. In an emotionally charged scene, there are many feelings, not one. The feeling of being confronted, abandonment, inadequacy, low self esteem, not being wanted, not being loved, not being good enough, guilt etc. All those things can exist all in the same scene. That’s why when it is charged like that and you are hooked to the scene, yes indeed you go back and work with it each time with a different emotion.
But, as I said, my experience has been to grab an emotion from the scene and work with that emotion until I completely clean that scene of any emotions which might still exist.
It has been my experience now that I don’t even remember stuff that used to affect me deeply anymore once the charge is gone. And some of the stuff I remembered as most tragic strikes me really funny when I remember the scene. Because for the first time I can see other people as they really are, and see what they really meant, and how we mistook each other, etc. There is a refreshing excitement when an energy is cleared and we no longer let the fear of that energy lead our lives, one can actually just hear another person saying what they actually mean and not give it any other meaning , other than what is meant, and the world becomes a delightful place..
That’s the moment one feels safe, not at war with everything, not defending oneself all the time that someone will say something to offend him/her. It is exquisite.
David Worrell
Bern wrote:
So it seems that we actually can release certain experiences, but >others just not. And never got to the point where that pattern Carlos talked about was visible to me. Unless he was speaking about that programming, was he?
You seem to know what I was talking about. Yes, I believe CC was talking about our early programming, and no, he didn’t invent this idea–again, almost any decent psychologist is aware of the powerful effect of patterns established in our early years. Yes, I have found major “patterns” in my life experiences. Two in particular stand out, and yes, one traceable to mommy and one to daddy. Because they began so early, and lasted so long, and helped give rise in one way or another to “devastating” experiences over the years, it is my opinion that no matter how clearly I may recall the events, and no matter how “at peace” I may come to feel with the related past events, under heavy pressure those patterns will still affect my behavior. There are other long-term series of events in my life which I believe have had a similarly uneradicable effect. As a movie I recently saw emphasized, it really is true (in a variety of ways) that “the past is not done with the future”.
(What is mysterious is the way these patterns fulfill themselves, and seem to “attract” what appear to be weird things into one’s life. I still shake my head when I look back at the way certain things happened for me. It’s almost too perfect, and even after you know the patterns it still almost seems like “fate” or something just how perfectly horrible it works out. 🙂 The most deeply ingrained patterns tend to cause you to create or attract the very situations that you would never consciously seek out in a million years.)
I’m not so bad off compared to a lot of people I see. I believe it is true, though, that most people are walking around with parts of themselves which are … to some extent … broken and cannot be fixed. So one does the best one can with what one has and is. Sorry if this seems overly depressing to anyone. You really DO have to focus on: do the best you can with what you have and are. I was always too much of an optimist to believe or say this kind of thing before (I always fiercely wanted to believe that anything can be fixed), but I’m coming around to where I’d almost advise watching out for people claiming to have some way to return you to “pristine” condition, because for many, perhaps most, paraphrasing the most cyncial remark of the hero in “Ihe Princess Bride” (speaking to the “princess”) : “life is pain, highness, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something”.
Of course, that’s just focusing on one aspect. Life is also great pleasure and delight, even for those who are … broken. If you want to make a perfect being, better start with a baby, and find some way to carefully control all human interactions with it until it is at least 5 years old, to maximize the baby’s potential. Oh, and control it’s genetics. 🙂
-Dr. Frankenstein
P.S. – Interesting accounts of your own methods, Gina.
Theonna
We all have certain patterns that we built as kids trying to deal with different situations, as adults we act out this patterns over and over, unless we become aware of them and try to change our actions according to our will, rather than the habit.
As a tool, recapitulation is nothing new, tibbetan buddhists have a meditation on compassion to every being, which is supposed to start with your mother and include everybody you know and then every sentient being, which is supposed to be accompanied by certain breath. Releasing emotional charge was already mentioned, as well as shrinks:), to add to this techniques used by dianetics, holy confession, and we have something known for ages.
Melissa Ward
Regarding recapitulation and if it works, it is different for each person. The approach, technique and application are subjective and each person will get a different reaction, just as doing yoga or any other discipline. It reminded me a lot of the work we did in Arica. It was helpful to me as I was able to focus on one aspect of my life and revisit and restructure the past (under the strict rules imposed on me at the time by Castaneda of sobriety and celibacy). It was a sobering and important process. I did finally receive the “View from the Bridge” that CC promised. That didn’t stop my inclination to continue such self-destructive patterns, but gave me such a strong impression in conscious terms of the pattern that I can no longer go unconscious and continue this behavior as an automaton. I know, and it is in the forefront of my consciousness, so that I must acknowledge the consequences, etc., when I choose to follow through. A good therapist can also help one achieve this type of conscious knowing and responsible awareness.
Pio Barone
For me, it worked in another way. In ’88 I started to recapitulate regularly but progress was too slow. I understood then that I should recapitulate my sex–lovewithwomen–experiences.
That decision accelerated my recap and after 2.5 years I finished with that part of my life.
I felt that I had gained a lot of buoyancy & lightness.
That accomplishment, together with other factors, encouraged me to change work in ’90, to start an analysis with a shrink in ’92, to separate from my wife in ’95.
I continued to recapitulate until May ’99, mostly unwinding the day. Interesting but slow and superficial, only small gains. Very small but more significant progress came from the therapeutic work: Why had I a controlling attitude? Why was I a provider? And a husband? And a father? And a motherfucker?…
Struggling, very slowly, I inched trough depression and shame gaining, sometimes, only an infinitesimal amount of new awareness…
In ’96 I moved to LA. In ’97 I started to work with a Jungian -Gestalt woman shrink. I hid psychotherapy from my fellow warriors fearing rejection. On the other hand progress was small & incremental. Little by little I have come to the realization that my good dreaming performances were the result of denying life. For two years my focus has shifted towards rebuilding an ego. (Yes!)
And making my life beautiful & learning to love myself & trying to listen to the voices of the little child, of the man, of the woman, of the old man, of the old woman, of the animal… & integrating them in the happening.
Only with a never ending struggle & the caring & professional support of a woman therapist, I am now able to identify the monsters of my childhood.
There is one element that I feel is still too marginal in our discussion: love.
If I recall correctly the first one that pointed to a possible relationship between CC’s liver cancer & his lack of self-love was our little John. I have replaced my old advisor, death, with a new one, love & my life is happier, more vibrant, and bountiful.
Here are a couple of passages on the subject of love that have inspired me, from Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled:
“Love Is Disciplined
[T]he energy for the work of self-discipline derives from love, which is a form of will. It follows, then that not only self-discipline is usually love translated into action, but also that any genuine lover behaves with self-discipline and any genuinely loving relationship is a disciplined relationship. If I truly love another, I will obviously order my behavior in such a way as to contribute the utmost to his or her spiritual growth.
…When I genuinely love I am extending myself, and when I am extending
myself I am growing. The more I love, the longer I love, the larger I become. Genuine love is self-replenishing. The more I nurture the spiritual growth of others, the more my own spiritual growth is nurtured…. And as I grow through love, so grows my joy, ever more present, ever more constant.
… Love Is Separateness
The genuine lover always perceives the beloved as someone who has a totally separate identity. Moreover, the genuine lover always respects and even encourages this separateness and the unique individuality of the beloved. Failure to perceive and respect this separateness is extremely common, however, and the cause of much mental illness and unnecessary suffering. In its most extreme form the failure to perceive the separateness of the other is called narcissism.
…It is these milder but nonetheless destructive common forms of parental narcissism that Kahil Gibran addresses:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bow from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrow may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”
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