My first attempt at authenticity, I was 19 and in the car with my dad. I had just started experimenting with LSD and I had an epiphany I wanted to share with him. I said, “I think we’re relating to each other based on who we used to be but I think we could just start right now from scratch and relate to each other right now.”
His response was,
“The divorce was your fault.”
I spent the next two weeks dissociated until a few friends put me back together and explained to me that I had a choice of who I wanted to let in my life. (My father and I are best friends now, 25 years later.)
The Cult
At 23 years old I joined a cult of Christian Mystics that was run by Jungian Analysts. They had a lot of cool things going for them. Women could be priests. Priests could get married. Mary was equal to Jesus as the divine feminine. Everybody had a teacher, except for the masters. Their teacher was Jesus (so it sorta counts).
Mysticism is the journey to meet God in the center of ourselves (behind and below the heart). One way of looking at this is to look out at the world and think, “I’m projecting right now. This is actually my own soul I’m looking at.”
I loved it and dove in and started training to eventually become a priest. I left home and moved into an “order house” where we took one-year vows of celibacy and obedience. Living with a priest trained by a Jungian analyst… let’s just say I talked about my dreams and cried a lot. It was here that I started my shadow work, began to learn about love, and definitely learned how to learn.
I learned that we learn with the body and by being impacted. “Understanding” is what we do when we make sense of what we learned, but there’s no getting around absorbing impact and letting it change us. I learned that any impulse to do anything was usually my impulse and I could grow and learn faster if I went toward what was interesting.
At a certain point, 2.5 years in, things started to go sour in the cult. Little cracks started showing and it got impossible to ignore the reasons to leave. It was very traumatic to walk away and I spent the next 8 years slowly putting myself back together. The biggest issue was them telling me to “trust your experience.” Energetically there was definitely a bit of bossiness from them and some “well, trust your experience but if you don’t do what I say then you’re on the outs.” They also didn’t believe people were gay. They told me that I wasn’t gay, I was just mad at my dad.
I actually couldn’t tell. I *was* mad at my dad. But I figured, if I spend my whole life trying to heal something I might be 80 when I get over whatever I’ve not gotten over and then… will my dick still work? So… I chose to be gay.
And then I realized I just was gay and it was good.
Post-Cult, Music, Authentic Relating
The tricky thing about leaving something and trusting my experience was that my experiences had all occurred in a Christian frame. All the visions and experiences I had doing mysticism needed to be trusted even after my frames started changing.
I was walking down the street in Houston and, on impulse, I said, “There is no God.”
My mind is usually filled with colorful cartoons. When I said those words, all the
cartoons changed to black and white. (I was able to switch it back later.) I bumped into a writer, Robert Anton Wilson, who said that beliefs are like languages that we need to be able to speak in order to access the further reaches of our minds.
So there I was, in between all the frames, and pretty fluent in atheism and Christianity. I perused other religions and those seemed like different angles on Christianity. I was decidedly in between frames.
I formed a band that played for about six years. I was the singer and loved writing meaningful lyrics. It was somehow important to share what wisdom I had gained, and music was a good medium. Plus I like to dance and be silly.
I was at a house party when I ran into some “ecstatic dancers.” I had just seen the Jim Carrey movie Yes Man, where he’s hypnotized into saying “yes” any time anyone asks him for something.
Me: Who the hell are you guys?
Ecstatic Dancers: We’re ecstatic dancers (one man laying across the laps of three women).
Me: What the heck is that?
Ecstatic Dancers: Instead of going to church on Sundays, we dance for hours. It’s wonderful. You should come (and he had a slight sneer like he was sure I wouldn’t).
Me: Ok. See you tomorrow.
And I went. And I loved it. And it was there that I bumped into Authentic Relating. That was the start of the current large Authentic Relating movement in the US, started by Sara Ness and Brian Burrell.
The friend who invited me to the house party said, “You should come to Games Night.”
And then I didn’t go. I thought, “I’m not playing Monopoly on a Sunday.” (I’m realizing that I broke my Jim Carrey rule.) And then he came back to me a month later and insisted I go, so I went.
My first game was noticing and my first noticing was, “I feel happy.” My partner looked at me with a scowl and I amended to, “I feel fear.” That moment felt equal to the experiences I had in the cult. We weren’t on drugs. We were just telling the truth.
And from that point I decided to say how I was feeling emotionally a lot more. For the first few months I would put a feeling in front of almost every sentence. I took a facilitator training and started leading thematic AR events. It was amazing. I was a year in when the people who started AR in Texas went for their first Circling training. When they got back, I was in two of their practice groups. I was hooked. My first impression of doing a birthday circle was it being like a tarot reading, and I, being a person in the circle, just had to be the card that I was, in connection to the person getting the reading. (I still like that metaphor.)
This was all a big cascade and I dove in head first. I did the Berkeley Circling training and then took the SAS in NYC. I was living with Jordan Allen in Austin and we were leading every week and I was circling every day. I went back to grad school to get a degree in Industrial Psychology because I wanted to quit my day job and be a coach.
And so I did.
I could tell a much longer story but the thing that strikes me now is this:
The relational arts are a kind of mysticism. That’s why it appealed to me. They are a mysticism that focuses on people instead of beliefs or gods. But it all easily ties back to religion in the end.
Jesus said, “When any two are gathered in my name, I am there.”
I think that’s what we’re doing when we sit down and make eye contact, commit to connection, or believe in love with actual people. We’re coming together for a larger purpose and that’s where the magic is generated. “Jesus” is at least a name for the intelligence of the larger purpose.(I have a side deal with Jesus in my mind that goes something like:
Jesus: I don’t care if you believe whether I was real.
Mike: Sweet. That feels like some kind of mental trap.
Jesus: Just don’t put your life before the truth or love and I’ll totally give you an A+ when you die.
Mike: Nice. Thanks. That’s who I want to be.)
I’m most interested in teaching facilitation and leading immersions now. It’s my natural environment. Relatefulness is the zone of togetherness. Martin Buber said, “When two people look at each other with not-knowing but wanting to know, therein we catch the tail of God.” This zone is the manifold that can include all perspectives, beliefs, and above all the humanity of being together.
We need each other. Everything is includable and everybody who teaches relational arts is standing on the shoulders of a bunch of people who made stuff up. It’s really important to me that everyone I teach knows that I want and welcome them to make up new stuff.
