Verbal Dancing

Verbal Dancing

By Michiel Kroon

Verbal Dancing

Copyright 2018 Michiel Kroon

First edition June 2014

Second edition August 2014

Third revised edition August 2016

Fourth edition December 2016

Fifth edition August 2017

Sixth Edition 2018

Full copyright/legal Notice: see last page

Please seek appropriate help if you are suffering from trauma or serious disease. Verbal dancing doesn't offer a solution for such a circumstance. Verbal dancing can be used as a complementary aid for some people, to help them to listen to their authenticity and their body.

Self-Published by Michiel Kroon; written with love.

www.verbaldancing.com

www.michielkroon.com

Many Thanks to Richard Miller for his inspired actions

Table of Contents

Foreword by Richard Miller

Introduction

The Zone, Where We Tap into Our Potential

Boxes: Good and Bad

What does a Verbal Dance look like?

The Multidimensional

The Angels in the Presentation

Guru's, Teachings and your own Wisdom

Seeing through Beliefs about Public Speaking

Familiar Landing Spots

Our Inner Dance-floor

Expressions as Bubbles

Shift Points

Chapter 1, The Basics of Verbal Dancing

The cause of all Ailments

Verbal Pathways

Qualities of Light

The 1-2-3 of The Basic Rhythm

1) Expanding through Questioning Old Boxes

2) Taking a Breath and Letting Go of Old Boxes

3) Stepping into your Unique Expression

Acknowledging and Our Shifts

Meditations: Expanding and Expressing

Seeing Our Potential

Chapter 2, Spiritual Experience

Susan's Meditation

Acceptance

Withdrawal

Dividers

Non-Duality

Discipline

Strategic Wisdom

Meditations: Spiritual Experience

The Health of Our Resistance

Chapter 3, Dancing Together

The Colors we wear on our Inner Dance-floor

Our Unique Expression

Relying on Other People's Expressions

Our Shared Expression

Co-creation

Relationship Ties and Liberation

Clearing from other people’s expressions

Practical points for Conversation

Chapter 4, The Multidimensional

Review of the story of Susan

Between Thought

Access Points to the Multidimensional

Our toolbox

Expansive Experiences

Multidimensional Guidance

Chapter 5, Connecting to our Feelings

Feeling The Basic Rhythm

Investigating Feelings

Allowing Perceptions to Shift

Pretense

Feeling our True Self

How to Connect to our Feelings

Connectedness Meditations

Chapter 6, Navigating through Life

Following our Inner Guidance

Expanding out of Survival

Finding more Compassionate Pathways

Navigating the Dividers

Creator dancing

Chapter 7, Seduction

Clearing old Pathways

Taking Back your Power

The Child on the Inner Dance-floor

The Beach

Opening to Love

Literature

Glossary

List of Meditations

Illustration Index

About the Author

Foreword by Richard Miller

Verbal Dancing is an adept use of language that is very effective for meeting the challenges and opportunities of life. So talking about language might be a good preamble for this book. Consider the power of language overlaid upon the mystery of language. Outwardly we think that language is something that our parents taught us and then we learned further in school. These are the mental manipulations and storage of abstract sounds and symbols that correspond to our world. But language is buried deeper than that. For it is completely correlated to our recognition of all the items that we encounter. If that is a mental process, then it is buried in deep layers of automatic functioning.

Encountering a new item, process or happening without having a corresponding language symbol creates a strong bodily feeling to which we attach an emotion. Often it’s fear. That same feeling component is also a bodily contraction, so that it resides in our musculature and after a while it resides in the way in which we physically hold our body. We can say that there is an overwhelming urge to create a language component, or to make up, or adopt somebody else’s explanation for every experience. No matter how we like or dislike the outlook that the explanation gives us, we can still notice that it immediately relieves the tension of the presumed unknowing. If we look at how we operate we might also notice that our chosen explanations usually justify our current life situations, especially if we feel stuck in them. Then these explanations are also justifying our feelings, our bodily contraction level, our physical form and our resultant actions and inactions. To prove that presumed unknowing creates a tension, or that any of this linkage is true is not necessary for proceeding very effectively with Verbal Dancing. We can get a lot of results just by accepting these interconnections as some of the mysteries of language.

Our cultural heritage, both the part that we are aware of and that which we are blind to reside in language, again along with the feeling components and contraction level engendered by these explanations. This time it’s hardly our mental process, since we did not have a chance to contemplate these cultural norms nor decide to put them into our memory. Some call it a collective memory, or a further mystery.

So far we have proposed various interrelated effects of thought, belief, feeling, emotion, bodily contraction, posture, health and our habitual (repetitive) actions and inactions that so often seem correct in the light of the forgoing elements. Of course repetitive actions give repetitive results, which we call our life path. Is there a clear causal chain in this linkage? Or is each item both a cause and an effect in its own right, as in a matrix?

If the latter is the case which I’ll now assume, then where is the best handle to grasp hold of this linkage, and try to bring it into some order that might correspond to our goals in life?

Some can easily notice their feelings, but it is somewhat difficult to just declare, now I am going to feel in the opposite way.

If our strategy for managing the irritations of these linkages is to over-work, divert ourselves, to numb out or to drug ourselves, then we can’t even notice our feelings.

Likewise it seems difficult to flip anger into contentment by mere willpower.

We can notice our bodily tightness and go get a massage. We feel better for a while, but then the tightness comes back.

We can do yoga, stretching, meditate and listen to relaxation music, and that can help. Part of that help could come from taking the pause necessary to do these activities. But previous tensions usually reconstruct.

We can watch our thoughts, even though they so often run in the background by themselves.

We can examine our beliefs which often masquerade as truths.

If we are convinced that they are truths, we cannot readily change them without believing that we are just fooling ourselves.

What is really true?

Let’s propose that something is really happening outside of us or within us as a potential truth, and then we interpret it. We react to some combination of that pure something that happened, and our explanation about it. What is the percentage ratio of the objective truth component, and of our subjective interpretation component? Perhaps we can never know much about this percentage because our interpretations are so completely conflated with our beliefs, our thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, bodily tensions and our repetitive life situation, or presumed life path.

We can gain a lot of ground when trying to understand ourselves if we inject some doubt into anything that we hold to be true. In Verbal Dancing we call that doubt The Zone. This doubt allows alternative thoughts to be contemplated. Do you always have to be in doubt? No, just be agile enough so that you can easily go to the Zone when you want to consider other possibilities.

With this agility developed, the best handle to grasp the linkages of life certainly seem to be your thoughts, or your present verbal dance. In that sense verbal dancing is not new to you. But managing your inner dance floor so that it doesn’t keep giving you what you don’t want is completely new.

Everyone’s life is changing, if only slowly through aging. Other’s lives may be changing too quickly, if you’re suddenly diagnosed with a terminal illness or if you are a refugee seeking asylum. The trick of contentment is to get your life to change at a rate that is comfortable for you. It isn’t too slow where you think that you are stuck in the mud. And it isn’t too fast where you think that all chaos has broken loose. It’s best if you feel that you have your hand on the throttle, at least to some degree.

Verbal Dancing is that throttle. It also acts as a steering wheel. Perhaps you can never go exactly where your flight of imagination lands. But you will begin to see different options from which you can choose. Some of them will clearly be preferable to what you are choosing today. And tomorrow they will likely be even better.

Introduction

Are you aware of your Inner Dance-floor? The way you play with language is decisive for your actions. You create everything through your Verbal Dance.

This book is about realizing the impact that our words have on our personal and collective evolution. Words can be used to manipulate and control people, or to set them free. They have been used in both of these ways throughout history. The words of Verbal Dancing are tools that can set you free.

The Basic Elements of Verbal Dancing are expressions that have the power to change lives. Our reality is created by expressing thoughts and feelings. We can create life-changing expressions, or we can recreate what we already have by repeating old expressions that we once learned from others.

There are four main ways by which we, often unintentionally, go into a vicious cycle of an older verbal paradigm:

In the traditional upbringing, we learn through imitation more than through Creativity. This means that we didn't learn how to create an authentic shift in our well-being or in the well-being of others.

We can use words without fully grasping their meanings and implications by going into abstractions. To base our perception of reality on things other than living experience is what I call being ungrounded. People who are ungrounded are easy to manipulate.

Repetition has been a characteristic feature of traditional education and religion. But does repeating something make it true? When a lot of people find themselves adhering to the same religion, this creates a system with a common perception. These religious followers can affirm a set of words collectively, but that doesn't mean they fully understand the effect of repetitive expression. In a religious context, the shared experience is confined to that which can be expressed using only the words that the religion approves of.

There are a lot of buzzwords thrown around in modern self-development. It is quite common to use words not to bring about more clarity, but to convey a certain feeling. We are often borrowing thoughts and feelings that sound great because other people experienced them. These borrowed expressions can leave things up in the air, leave them unclear and unfocused.

Verbal Dancing brings us back to our power. It allows us to leave behind these false powers that others imparted to us. We are creating the Verbal Dance that continually gives us freedom to create expressions from the heart.

Did you ever meet a friend or teacher, attend a presentation where the energy is great but the words just don't make sense?

There are a lot of leaders and teachers, supposedly enlightened or not, who transmit a great peace and love but their Verbal Dance just didn't catch up with their inner state yet. Their discoveries didn't release them from their old beliefs because they transcended those beliefs without making the shifts.

Many who try to progress by simply transcending all beliefs end up greatly neglecting their physical life. Only a few succeed on the path of transcendence and for the rest, a great amount of people, it works to their detriment. Yet the efforts of these masses of students are confirmed and supported by the outdated beliefs from the ones who did 'make it'.

These stale Beliefs from the teachings have a number of things in common. They are based on imitating (1st point from the list above) the jargon from the teaching, which often shows the way to an abstract (2) space such as a state of awareness or detachment. This state is then cultivated through an inner repetition (3) of the teaching, sometimes enhanced with certain buzzwords (4).

Even though these old paradigm teachings are obviously dogmatic, and we can see obvious outwards effects of stagnation, the aspirant might be blind to it. The rewards outdo the effects to the aspirant because they are ready to do anything (even go through hell) to get enlightened. The rewards might be embodied by a teacher, who might play along in this good old game of showing the promise of eternal bliss. But to get there you have to follow his or her rules...

It is time to approach our words and feelings in a new way on the path of increasing our well-being. Instead of following ancient rules, we need to start accessing our creativity. We need to rely on our own truth, not on the words from others. Instead of repetition we can find constant renewal, and instead of inauthentic buzzwords we can