David Whyte Interview

hi everybody this is Bob Schwartz from Aesop and I am doing an audio interview a telephone interview with David White who will be presenting at the conference David how are you today very good thank you in the rainy Northwest yeah well we have I have a few questions for your Davis doing a keynote address and a pre-conference seminar and one of the questions I have for you has to do with questions which is you raised the issue of asking a beautiful question so my question is what are the qualities of a beautiful question and are those qualities actually in the question or are they in the person asking the question how can we bring this into our into a therapy or coaching space yes well I inherited I inherited the question about the beautiful question in a sense from a colleague and friend of mine John O'Donoghue Arthur wrote extensively on on his inherited theology both in in mystic Catholicism and from the Irish tradition and after he passed away I inherited a workshop of his which people asked me to come in and lead because everything was in place except John and and the workshop was on on creating a beautiful mind and I thought it was a really wonderful title actually because he really was looking at the way a human being can actually practice having a more beautiful mind just as you can practice the violin or the or the piano or dancing and and as I brought my own thoughts to bear on it to make it my own I realized I asked myself well how do you practice having a having a more beautiful mind and and and I realized quite quickly that it had to do with asking the ability to ask beautiful questions and to program to practice the asking a beautiful questions on a daily basis and I might say actually that a beautiful question is usually quite a disturbing question at the same time none that slightly subverts the identity of the person who is asking the question in the first place partly because one of the Diagnostics of the beautiful question is that it always enlarges the context in which you're living it broadens the horizon and deepens the horizon and takes you out of yourself and into yourself at the same time and when I talk about horizon in a human life I think of the horizon outside of us the goals we set ourselves in our outer life but in all of our great contemplative traditions there's been an understanding of this inner horizon this this level which is this deep level foundational level inside a human being which is also a kind of symmetrical journey to this outside journey and and deepening that horizon is part of the ability to ask these beautiful questions and I often think that a beautiful question shapes your identity as much by asking it as by having it answered than that and that's one of my personal definitions of a are they of a dutiful question it it deepens your sense of yourself so there was a there was an Elizabethan actually Jacquie being a Christian mystic poet called and we born in in England in the 1600s and he wrote a very famous line about about this interior horizon in a way we call this a deep but dazzling gardener and it's deep because it's foundational this dazzling because it it reflects your own persona in a way that actually makes it difficult to get below the surface so part of asking the beautiful question is letting go of of a smaller identity that might ask the question in the wrong way and allow the world to speak back to you in its own in its own terms in a way so so the beautiful question is the one that in a way asked the question it's it's asking the question from the other side of the boundary that you've refused to cross it's it's enlarging your language they can stand the great philosopher said you can't enter any any territory for which you haven't you have not learned the language so part of asking the beautiful question is giving up your small language your mechanistic language the language by which the strategic part of your mind is constantly trying to keep things under control and start to have a language that actually appears out of more of a frontier identity the place where you and the horizon start to become one in this place of course especially in the interior foundation is the place where we from which we write poetry and it's why poetry or so it's so powerful I think has a lens for for psychologists of any stripe because it's really a poetry is the discipline of a book of poetry is the discipline of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew about your world the deeper imagination I'd already the deeper part of you actually was already living in this place at the center of the pattern he just hasn't learned how to speak yet and you could say that poetry as the is the practice of speaking and asking these beautiful questions from this deep interior which you wish you're just learning to live in for maybe I won't notice I mean I'm noticing what it's there right because it's sort of shared and you have to catch them when they as they go by before they disappear well it's more i I see it rather than going by but is this place of origin one of the difficult phenomena of poetry which is familiar to all right at all everyone who has ever tried to write good poetry it's very easy to write bad poetry but to write good poetry you find that that you find that you're you have to go to a deep part of the physical body or the psyche that that is hardly spoken yet and so strangely enough the part of you which you're trying to train into this beautiful form of articulation and questioning has no vocabulary as yet yeah your strategic surface mind I'll has all the vocabulary and all the excuses as to why you shouldn't go down the steps so there's this very strange inversion this very strange irony this very strange kind of unilateral disarmament of giving up your surface language in order to enter what one great Christian mystic called the Cloud of Unknowing and if this unknowing is is is the other side of the veil that you haven't crossed use the larger emancipation of your identity it's the next step and and you're in a sense allowing that part of you to speak and to ask these beautiful questions and to invite you over to join us at the same time and under in in many ways it's a more mature part than the part of you that walks around every day but the more time we spend with the blank page or our laptop screen however the port right today o or whether you're a port or not just with the attempt to articulate from this unknown place the more you start to actually build build a vocabulary the language I'm hearing you talk as my mind goes to many places as usual but I'm wondering like so a beautiful question I imagine there are sort of levels if you will to as a beginner unbeautiful there's a beginning level beautiful question and medium and more advanced for the people listening is there you know part of me wants to know what are the top 10 beautiful questions David white is answer now but I don't think it's next going to happen no I didn't think so yeah but but only because the view the beautiful question is is your question I mean I think one of the difficulties of modern and postmodern psychology is the way is we we learn there one learns this particular language that gets you through all the examinations and your certification and it too often gets projected on the person who sat with you you know in the in the therapists office and the beautiful question is your question the place both the question that you carry just because of the way you're made you know you your life is a question that is being asked in the way no one else's life is being no one else's question is being asked and then you've also got the particular threshold of maturity or or immaturity that you're on at the moment you know whether you're an adolescent or in your twenties or in your fifties or in your seventies their each epoch in our life has a beautiful question attached to it and part of going to move to shift to the to shift to the analogy of the pilgrim part of the pilgrim journey through life part of the necessity of the pilgrim is to learn another language and so I think the therapist has to learn the particular lineaments of the language that the person uses that they're working with that is their own language here and yeah whenever sense they're their questions so yeah the person in the office is not just living in the gravitational field of the therapists inherited academic or trained language does that make sense it does and what I'm hearing like a lot of times with clients it's like I want to listen like they're living like their mothers or their fathers or somebody else's language and part of my job is to listen for the beginnings or the nascent aspects of their own language that they don't even recognize exactly I'm celebrity and yeah and so and you it's not like you can go there it is exactly but you sort of feel it you have to sort of yeah your eyeballs peeled for it or you send out in your body something changes something and your eyes you pick you perk up you go what was that yeah or something yes and there's a wonderful corollary there's a kind of inversion around what is not yet being said yet so you can you can have one beautiful question of someone is is what is what is the question you're refusing to ask you could say what is the beautiful question refusing to ask but what is the question you're refusing to ask and this has a gorgeous kind of gravitational call to it and perhaps the person should be disallowed from answering it right away you you need you might need a week to get off with it and ask yourself and I can think of a of I have a line in the poem that says play the other side which actually describes this looking down into a holy while in the West of Ireland you know and it's a question from it's it's something speaking from the other side of the question you have refused to ask in looking down into the reflection as well the other side of the question you've refused to ask and I can think of a kind of an elementary hilarious representation of this in that a good friend of mine within the therapists office with her therapist and the therapist said to her now how are you with criticism and my friend immediately said oh I'm great with criticism whenever I see anyone doing anything I don't like I tell them right away which of course was not I was a therapist was asking you in fact she caught herself a new you know she was she was busted halfway through the sentencing so almost always we're we're asking the question in a way that's quite protective and self-justifying so just the ability to actually look back at ourselves which all of our great tradition says happening all the time anyway the world is looking looking back at you I have a piece called everything is waiting for you about the way we're we're standing in the middle of this extraordinary creation many elements of which are our allies and you know and yet we're not in a real crew a real conversation we're not in a real conversation with the color blue in the sky or green especially the way we've retreated into our into our tiny screams and away from away from the outer horizon which also calls us just like this internal horizon calls us and there's a lot of the way that we're caught in this limbo land especially the Internet's become a astonishing excuse for this this neutral zone where other people's arguments other people's questions other people's images are imprisoning us in in a kind of insulated protectiveness where we don't have to ask those questions ourselves yeah so so part of my brain wants to see if I can get you came up with one really great question that now I can't even repeat about what's the question that you you don't dare ask of yourself which is a wonderful I wonder if you have one or two others that folks can begin to model off of in that vein that they can kind of play with before they come to the conference and hear more yeah and come to mind yes well yes I have another one coming out of a piece I wrote called sometimes and the poem goes like this it says sometimes and it takes this image in a child's book I had a Native American teaching stories and it's an elder teaching a child how to cross a priesthood piece of broken ground without making a found which is a classic enticing story that most children come across at one time or another and then try themselves out in the woods no and I was no exception and many years later I I wrote this piece looking back at why why that that practice of crossing broke a broken ground without making a sound is is so compelling for a human being so this is this is called sometimes sometimes if you move carefully through the forest sometimes if you move carefully through the forest breathing like the ones in the old stories sometimes if you move carefully through the forest breathing like the ones in the old stories who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests conceived out of nowhere but in this place beginning to lead everywhere requests to stop what you are doing right now and to stop what you are becoming while you do it questions that can make or unmake a life questions that are patiently waited for you questions that have no right to go away questions that have no right to go away so that was a that was a beautiful arrangement at the end because they it's always a beautiful question in individual life what is the question that has no right to go away and my life right now I can turn my legs away from it but when I turn it back in till there in fact when I turn my face away my life goes into neutral and this is too true for a race relationship to every marriage or relationship has a question that has no right to go away and the maturation and emancipation of the relationship depends on that question being addressed and not necessarily solved which is a lovely relief but just the as we know you know just the act of a couple turning their faces back to this central question makes the relationship more real again I'll put it creates that outer horizon which every relationship needs when the future horizon dies in a relationship the president dies also and so the ability to actually there's the ability to actually turn eyes in a relationship together towards a shared horizon is absolutely necessary and it's literally why a good holiday for a couple is is so nourishing because often it's out in the natural world or it's by the ocean in weather as this other this other horizon it's a kind of unconscious understanding that we need to drop our everyday business and get back to something that that was very precious that we shared at the beginning that's beyond us both thank you that's great well I'm sure uh if people don't know your work and they heard this they're going to be enticed to come and suppose that no your work will live them please and I want to thank you so much for your time I look forward to seeing you at in San Antonio I look forward to that very much and to to the crowd that you're you're bringing together there so yes Oh we'll try and ask some of those beautiful questions together some of those and we're going to kill them to pass and it'll all be it'll all be good so people can get a nice girl to this alright well thank you so much take care all right thank you very much yes

Channel: Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP)

Views: 8,968

Rating: 4.9285712 out of 5

Keywords: energy psychology, eft, tapping, tft, tat, thought field therapy, tapas acupressure technique, energy healing, mind body spirit, energy medicine, mindsight, emotional freedom, emotional acupressure, integrative healing, integrative psychotherapy, chakra therapy, biofield intervention, psychotherapy, psychotherapist, integrative psychiatry, mindfulness, coaching, social work, counseling

Id: h302qcAz0KM

Length: 19min 49sec (1189 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2017