Thread by @maybegray

live tweeting Doug’s talk for QC

So @DougTataryn is an obviously lovely presence, you can just feel him in the room like a warmth. He is excited that we are all here to improve even though improving is hard work 🥰

he’s giving us a lil autobiography but the gist is he’s like smart yo

(can I sit funny here? Imma sit funny here)

“when you’re looking for mastery of movement you’re looking for more time in the moment”

he told a story about falling in and out of love with academia, psychology in particular, and that is hella relatable

“why do enlightened beings still do dumb things?”

this is the question we are exploring, examples come to mind for me (Osho?) and lots of people in the audience raised their hands when asked about firsthand experience of gurus being goofs

It looks like in answering this we are gonna explore the relationship with spiritual and psychological development- ex. lots of his clinical clients had spontaneous spiritual experiences even back when he kept those practices very separate.

in his own experience and interests in both psychology and meditative practice he noticed that releasing emotion and conditioning seemed to lessen his own mind chatter in and out of meditations

oh this part excites me actually, he says as the mind chatter became less continuous, he was able to notice that when mind chatter did arise it revolved around something that had some sort of unresolved affective component

Doug: “how many of you are familiar with integral theory?”

me: .... is that,, math?

whatever it is (I don’t think it’s math, more like ex Graves’ Spiral Dynamics) it led him to develop four “pillars” of his own understanding of spiritual development

for him, “Enlightenment” isn’t just about waking up, it’s also about growing up, cleaning up and looking around- these are Doug’s four facets and intuitively I feel good about this! this feels fuller in my body than the “just waking up” Westerny understanding of spiritual dev

just wanna mention that this whole audience is so beautiful, especially, everyone is having an amazing hair day, what cuties we all are

“you’re going to do dumb things and you’re going to get the feedback you need to develop and eventually experience breakthroughs and enjoy liberation”

omg when Doug chuckles it’s like a happy puppy

as kids we are at least less identified w stuff if not undifferentiated, unidentified, even w things like the body, emotions, etc. kids are all the way in then all the way out, they’re like teflon, stuff just don’t stick

mmmmmmm there’s this game where you try to be absorbed in your breath and when you hear a clap you name the first thought you have and after a few rounds after the clap there’s no thought! what the fuck!!!! freaks people out!

I saw @SarahAMcManus laugh at this story and her laugh is so beautiful and melodic! Hi Sarah 🥰

“if you’re not going to be your thoughts who are you going to be?”

s p a c e

Waking Up is about solitude, but the rest- Cleaning Up, Growing Up and Looking Around- all this happens in the world, in relationships with the world and this again feels v good for me, much fuller than how I’m used to feeling about this whole thang

Cleaning Up is referring to clearing all this tension in the body- Doug could really quite accurately infer clients’ conditions from the patterns of tension in their bodies but his boss guys were like “cut that out that’s some woo shit”

highlights from a lil Q period
-you can be really good at one of these four areas and be mistaken for a real woke dude but you will be find out bc you will be frail in the areas you don’t work on
-@Malcolm_Ocean said things re: how sometimes navigating the world is messy, v smart

now we are all admitting to having said very regrettable things in our adult lives

so if you’ve been there, so has this entire room of sweet lil nerds, you’re not alone and you’re doing great 👍🏻

we are talking about Big Ideas, they’re really interesting and they connect to so many different things ex. cultural impacts, the diff b/w causal/gross/subtle, the way as we grow we shift into different social circles, the difficulty of pursuing happiness in a post-modern world

omg you guys are so funny, we are definitely gonna save the world, it’s funny bc it’s true

Doug feels conflicted about hitting mosquitoes ain’t he just the cutest

Growing Up takes doing new things, following interests, making changes in your life on physical, emotional, & relational levels.

QC DOUG IS MAD YOU ARE NOT HERE TO TALK ABOUT BEING OBLIVIOUS TO FLIRTING I AM DEAD 😂😂😂😂💀💀💀💀

there are Bardos between lives but there are BARDOS BETWEEN PERSONALITIES 🤯 love this image

“how many of you have deeply experienced the fight or flight response?”
me: *nods head violently*

“how many of you have deeply experienced the relaxation response?”
me: *shakes head violently*

“.... I don’t know how to represent the transpersonal, is it in here, is it somewhere else, I don’t know”

a fuckn fascinating lil aside here

this is a smart fucking crowd, Doug is being asked really great questions, I feel like I’m in my Meditation and Mind seminar, I love you nerds!!!!!!!

Looking around relates a lot to non-reactivity, clarity etc and you really have to assess yourself on your own around those sorts of things but what Doug points out is it’s less about knowing how far you’ve progressed and more about knowing how you grind up against the world.

for me, this question is “where are you REALLY working?”

Ideally, waking up looks like “get really excited about the unfolding of your own mind” but it’s easy to become identified with or fixed on your progress in a way that precludes this sort of sentiment and get in your own way

this crowd does some drugs.
these are my people.
how many of you can I take home with me on Monday?

“the self is a four quadrant affair”

for Doug, those pillars map onto these quadrants, from Waking Up and Growing Up as an individual to Cleaning Up cultural baggage and conditioning and Looking Around at the world that you’re in

Doug mentions that he was so used to being alone he for a long time just didn’t even notice that he didn’t interact with people in his daily life and this hits me so hard. I didn’t really *get* this about myself until my clown mom asked me about it

“Do you prefer to play alone?”

Until she asked I didn’t realize it was a choice I was making that I could experiment with making differently. I thought loneliness was my lot in life not something I self-inflicted BUT here we are

the challenge of waking up is to understand what’s you and what’s not, growing up takes developing complexity, cleaning up takes emotional and intellectual deconditioning and looking around demands that you cultivate sensitivity

tomorrow we are gonna CLEAN OUR ROOMS, BUCKO