What's Actually Happening: APHS Frame & Field Podcast

This is What's Actually Happening, the APHS Frame and Field Podcast.

I'm Jim Zboran, and each week we look at how human systems actually organize themselves through meaning, through frames, through the interpretation that's already running before effort begins.

Today, we're joined once again with Chantelle Neufeld, and Chantelle is a first-time reader of paper number three in book one, so paper 01-03, Field Orientation and Application.

Welcome Chantelle.

How are you today?

I'm great.

Excellent.

I'm happy to be here.

Very nice.

Excited to talk about this.

Excellent.

I always get the, I get it to read like the day before, and I just jot down a few questions or quotes and then see where it goes.

Absolutely.

This is a first-time reader experience.

Chantelle, you are sitting in for all the listeners who are approaching this work for the first time or perhaps already are familiar with it and are getting a beginner's mind to it.

And so you're serving a very important role in being a beginner because you're helping people who will become beginners to get oriented.

You're helping people who are now beginners get oriented, and you are helping people who have been around for a little while to become oriented even better.

So thank you very much, Chantelle.

I appreciate it.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

About myself?

Well, I guess saying I'm a beginner is a really good way to describe me.

Well, you're not a beginner in life.

I know that.

No, but I feel like trial and error is kind of my thing, and I roll with it, and I have fun with it, and I love to learn, and I feel like I learn more by, you know, standing in this ambiguity and talking about it than I do trying to, like, put things in boxes.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That fits in perfectly with my sleeves rolled up philosopher persona.

I believe in thinking, and I love thinking, and I love thinking about ideas, and I love exploring ideas, but I like the kind where they're actually from experience, and we can actually do something with them.

It's not so much knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but it's knowledge to be able to navigate life better.

So thank you.

Yeah, with some meaning.

What's that?

Knowledge with meaning.

Yeah, it's knowledge with meaning, and it's knowledge that makes a difference, and it may just be that it only makes a difference in my life, but other people respond, so I can tell it's making a difference in their life, too.

But the trick is, they're making their own meaning with it, just as I make my own meaning with it, and that's the beauty of, I think, applied philosophy, human systems.

It really is not at all trying to dictate a set of beliefs or a set of rules or methods that one must follow to actually be APHS.

So it's really up to the person, because I think that's how life unfolds.

I think that, really, the way we end up seeing things is really very much up to us.

The problem is, we really don't usually know that, and we definitely don't know it early on.

It takes some time to discover it, and even if somebody tells us that, we don't really understand what that means, and so we just have to let it unfold for ourselves.

But we can really do a lot with our mind.

I once had a client, and we're talking, and the shifts were just coming.

At a certain point, I no longer did formal hypnosis.

I was hypnotizing people in and out as we spoke, and so he wasn't really aware what was going on.

He was there to get what I was doing, so he knew it wasn't a secret, but it was not anything where he could put his finger on it at the moment.

And so a lot of clean language, a lot of very light trances, and I was just working to expand his field of vision or his orientation so that he could see the solutions to his own problems, or what he considered to be a problem.

That's why I was there, his own things that he was working on.

And he was shifting as we were talking, and we just got a string of shifts, and at one point he says, huh, you do all this by talking, huh?

And I pointed out that he was the one doing the changing.

I had the easy job, because I just had to sit there and talk.

Yeah, the one with the questions, right?

Exactly.

And I think that's really a key thing that I learned as I was a student of Ericksonian hypnosis that really, one thing I really admire about Dr. Milton Erickson's perspective or his orientation was that everybody has the solutions to their problems within them.

And so really, once we understand that, it becomes very easy to help people.

The trick is learning how to help them figure out how to find their own problem, and that's the real thing.

Yeah.

So you know how I think in pictures, so what I'm seeing right now is like kind of taking the metaphorical hand of the client, going into the cave of the subconscious with a flashlight and showing them where to look.

Once they see clearly with that flashlight, illuminating what was once in the dark, then the solution becomes clear to them and the solution did not come from the therapist.

No, yeah, exactly.

That's a great metaphor.

And I think we could point out too that in shining the light is the only thing.

It's not even telling them what they should see or shouldn't see or helping them to see it.

They will see it themselves because we are self-organizing systems and we are organizing towards what our beliefs or our frames or our perspectives are.

And once we get some orientation to what those are, they begin to change because we are now seeing them with new eyes.

We are seeing them with our eyes from where we're thinking now, not our eyes from where they were when we started adopting those in another than conscious way.

And so, yeah, walking into that cave, taking them by the hand and the metaphors is exactly the way I do it.

It's exactly a great way to do it because our thinking is really at base metaphors.

And we hold these, these, these metaphors are really groups of symbols and those groups of symbols are related to one another.

That's how they become a metaphor.

And there's a certain relationship between all these things.

And then they work in little ecosystems of relationships of symbols.

And once you see what the, and then we can, we can verbalize it as a metaphor.

But once we see what that metaphor is, it can begin to shift.

And once it shifts, the change is at a very deep level.

And so metaphors are really, you know, my go-to method, not so much at a, at a conscious level, a cognitive level, although they are very useful there.

But really it's, it's working to help people to, to discover what they are and to kind of mirror them back so they can see what their own metaphors are.

And that's when it becomes very powerful because, you know, their metaphor is what they're operating from at a, at a very deep level.

And so when they see the change and when they shift that change, when they're in that cave with you and you're just shining lights and they're seeing what they need to see, how they need to see it, when they need to see it, what it means to them, why it's significant to them.

Wow.

There, there's some transformational change that takes place, right?

I love how fast it happens too and how the therapist doesn't really have to know the detail and the client doesn't have to go into detail of their trauma.

They just see certain things like, you know, sometimes they'll see a color or, and that particular color has an energy to it, which contains thousands of symbols that of course I wouldn't understand, but their subconscious understands and rearranges on, you know, on their own.

And it's just fascinating to see the, the results afterwards.

And you're just like, I can't take credit for that.

Yay, subconscious mind.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's very powerful.

And that's, that's what makes it a passion of mine is because it is very powerful.

And fast and efficient.

Yes, and efficient.

Exactly.

Yes, exactly.

And so really it brings us to the paper that we're looking at today, the field orientation and application.

When you start learning, you start learning from the pieces and you don't really necessarily have the big picture.

I certainly didn't here.

And as I went, I started collecting pieces that fit and discarding other pieces and kind of shaping some pieces so they would fit better.

And, and over time I had this really cool ability to do some really cool things.

And it was a whole mixture of techniques and understandings and perceptions based on experience with those techniques.

But it was kind of like all mixed up.

It was all like a big mishmash of, of things that were foundational and things that were more applicational.

And at the time I really didn't recognize what was what I didn't even really realize there was a distinction.

And yet a lot of times I see people like trying to pull in all kinds of techniques and all they do is keep trying to get more and more techniques, more and more techniques, more and more techniques, which in itself is not a bad thing.

It's good to learn and to grow.

But what happens is I think, in my opinion, they miss the patterns because they keep getting distracted by a new wrapper and they miss what that wrapper is, the patterns that that wrapper is bringing to them.

For some reason, I'm seeing this electric screwdriver and the tools being those like little, little screw, you know, the different kinds that you put in there, but they're just collecting all those without getting like the battery or understanding how, how the screwdriver works.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The little bits that you put in there and.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, they get.

Like, what's that going to help you if you just have the bits?

They get this whole beautiful.

If you don't understand how it works.

Exactly.

They get this whole beautiful collection and then they buy books on how to make them use them even better and books on projects they can do with them.

And they never really get down to use them.

And that's not and that's not a judgment.

That's I've certainly done that.

But there's a deeper way of doing things that's that's really more of a technician level type of an approach.

And the problem is that for some people, always learning is really what they're doing.

They're really not applying it, which is they just don't know that yet.

And that's OK.

I certainly was there myself.

It's just a stage of growth for people.

But I think what we really want to do, what I found necessary is as I started really intuitively, as I studied a lot of things, I started intuitively seeing what was working and I couldn't necessarily voice it, but I could see what was working because when I would go learn something new, I would see that same thing in a different rapper.

And that's when life really got exciting.

And I could then go to learn a technique and I can learn the technique really fast simply because I just need to learn the rapper.

I already knew what was really working.

I remember one time in a martial arts class a long time ago, we were learning some joint locks and, you know, I'm not a big fan of that, but that was what we were learning.

And so we were learning joint locks and the, you know, the instructor shows the moves with the hands and and I see and I understand it.

OK, cool.

And so now we're practicing it with partners and I could not make it work at all.

And the instructor, of course, is going around the room and helping different people.

And so he gets around to me and he shows me, you know, just because here, put your wrist right on this bone here.

And then it worked.

And it's like it's it's the the little details.

You needed that key to bring it all together.

Exactly.

And that's what that's what these papers are about, is that key.

Exactly.

These papers are a key.

They don't show you what lock to open.

They don't tell you why you should open a lock.

They are just a key.

And that's a great way to put it.

That's another great metaphor.

And so.

What this paper attempts to do is it's attempts to take the wrapper off the candy.

And put words to something that's a challenge to put words to.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And so that's what happened for me.

It was it was a mishmash and I started developing my own methods, my own frameworks.

And they were great.

They worked fine.

But I was really mixing wrappers in with candy of a new framework.

And I wasn't realizing it was like, you know, you run wrapped this caramel and or whatever and a taffy type thing.

And it's it's like melted into the wrapper and the wrapper is ripped off now.

And it's like, OK, well, I'm just going to eat this.

And so you're eating, you're like chewing on paper, too.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's kind of what I was doing.

So I got it.

I got to figure out how to, you know, I got to separate, you know, which is which.

And I like that you're, you know, in these papers, you're always saying, you know, this is what it's not and this is what it is.

And that repetition in different ways, it really drives the message home.

Exactly.

That's that's that's a little bit of hypnosis.

Hocus pocus, right?

No, but it's the way we learn.

And that's that's really important.

But that's exactly it.

It's it's the what's really going on.

And then once we know what's really going on or have an idea and we don't even have to technically what's really going on, we have to have a model of what's going on.

Then we can start making these wrappers, these applications that will be more effective because we recognize this is application and this is the field we're making the application to work in.

And it really that that clearness of what the field is allows one to begin to really see what's working in other things they're doing.

Or if they want to build applications for change work, they can they can get a kind of a model that will help them to, you know, design applications for their own use in their own context with their own clients very cleanly.

And the beauty is that it's just a model and the model, if something doesn't work in the model, it can be discarded.

And so a lot of times people will read this stuff and it'll like resonate with them because they see it.

That's because it's in real life and it's it's something that they recognize there.

So what what in there, Chantelle, what what really struck you about this paper now that we have context of what it's trying to do?

Well, the picture coming to my mind of what you were just talking about, I was thinking about, OK, so let's say that you told someone to design a video game just out of nothing.

You know, and then you you had someone like create a Minecraft world.

And so like a Minecraft, you have that perspective from the top or you can have you can take different perspectives within Minecraft.

But usually, you know, like you start with sort of like a blank canvas, but you have sort of like patterns or tools or like and then you can go on and create your unique, you know, journey or house or whatever you want to make.

Yeah, there you go.

So that's what I was thinking about when you were you were just talking.

Exactly.

This is like Minecraft world and a Minecraft world is not a real world.

It's just a model.

But there are you you get to learn what what to do and what you can do in it.

And you start exploring and you start playing with it and you start developing your own patterns on what's possible in that world.

And so APHS, Applied Philosophy of Human Systems, is really an attempt to articulate or put words into what's being observed in life, and in particular in change work is my motivation for it.

And so it really is designed to give give a world in which somebody can then begin building their own house, their own garden.

Whatever they're building, they can build their own.

And I don't know that unless and really, I don't know necessarily that that I really, you know, I didn't I don't think I really intended that.

What I intended was I could have that for myself.

So I did it myself.

And once I started going, I realized, hey, this is really good stuff.

And so I thought, well, this is this is a lot of fun to talk about.

I'll start publishing some papers and create some conversations.

And that's really what these are.

These are conversations.

And a big part of the conversation when you bring other voices in is it's helpful to really be clear what it's not and what it is.

And so that's why you see a lot of times what it's not, because that contrast is very helpful to us to narrow in or zoom in on what something actually is when we can carve away what it's not.

Yeah, I definitely with this particular paper, the subconscious mind, I don't think the words, the subconscious mind was in it.

But that's what kept coming to my mind continually, you know, with the things that you were talking about.

I was just like, you're bringing the words to describe those patterns and how kind of the subconscious mind works, not not the things that are in each individual's subconscious, but it's just like what you've noticed.

Exactly.

And so, yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And I don't really use the word subconscious much anymore, unless I'm using it in a very in a more in a more technical sense.

I will now use other than conscious because if you if you pick up my paper, let's say it's paper five, because paper four is where I talk about how you don't have to know the truth to have a working model that ultimately, you know, it's it's it does the model work is really more helpful than knowing how it works.

So I have a fun metaphor in there, a really fun metaphor.

I love that one.

And but then and that that's the lead up to paper five, which is Theory of Mind, which is an awesome, which is a lot of fun to write.

It's really an awesome, in my opinion, because I'm laying out how I think the mind is working, but as a model, not as a technical thing.

So it's really important to so that's how, you know, the more you develop these things, the more you can go back and say, OK, well, your subconscious is is is useful.

It's a useful label.

But for me, it's a label of one thing that's going on.

It's not even like a label of one part of something.

It's a label for one thing that's going on within this mind, which has many aspects all happening at the same time and all interacting with one another.

And, you know, we can shift, you know, from place to place, our focus within that mind working.

And so so in hypnosis, we're we're, you know, usually going more for the subconscious mind.

Right.

But so that's that's yeah, I don't use that word other than conscious.

It's interesting.

You should have noticed that.

Well, that's just what came up.

I don't know if this was a quote that you used or just a note that I wrote down, but I wrote down, you don't follow a field.

You find yourself oriented in it.

Yeah, that's that's very close to what I wrote.

It's like the gist of it.

Exactly.

You know, it's it's we're in an environment culturally when we start figuring out some things, how it works.

We now have to make it a system or an algorithm and then we have to sell the algorithm and then we have to fight and defend the algorithm.

And that's all good and well for an application.

But we're we're really here separating out the field that the applications are being built in.

We're in that field.

It really is helpful to to not get, you know, not get locked in or collapse into an algorithm or or a method.

We really want to we really want to live in it.

It becomes our world.

And we already do.

Here's the thing we already do.

I didn't invent this.

I articulated.

I just said what's there because it is there.

And I'm just articulating in the way that that makes sense to me at this time.

It will be more advanced or maybe not, but it'll be different in 10 years.

But yeah, go ahead.

What I love about these papers and like what you articulated is that it's values based, very ethical, very like, you know, choice and agency and all of those things are like the core values of this, you know.

Yeah, and that's really actually a reflection of me.

It doesn't necessarily have to be that way.

Somebody could use it for dark purposes, I'm sure, just like they can use anything else.

But for me, that's really a reflection of me because that is like a cardinal rule of mine is not changing anybody, not fixing anybody, not imposing my own views or my own agency onto somebody else.

And so the field developed that way because that is a cardinal rule of mine.

And I think it's a valuable one because then it protects the field itself.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's really important.

And I think that's the power of it.

Because once we start having to manipulate and control other people's agency, we no longer have this field.

We now have an application and it's application that really leads to bad things, I think.

Well, it doesn't lead to the most helpful outcome for the individual.

No, it does not.

And in fact, it can become very terrible.

I think NLP is a field.

It was a field.

This is Neurolinguistic Program Volume 1, the Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience.

And in here, the author says it's a field.

Nice.

It's a field.

And what has happened is it collapsed into methods.

Unfortunately, in part, not entirely, I'm sure.

But what happened is it became the methods.

And sometimes the methods are not useful.

They're not used in good ways.

They're used in manipulative ways.

And that doesn't mean that NLP is.

And it doesn't mean that NLP techniques or applications are.

Many of the applications are super valuable.

I learned a lot from NLP applications.

I learned a lot.

Just the language of the subconscious or whatever word you want to use for the subconscious.

I've learned so much from it.

But it's a model.

And it's an articulation of a field.

And then really useful stuff came out of that field.

These are awesome books for hypnotists.

These were John Grinder and Richard Bandler interviewed Milton Erickson and put out two volumes of what he was actually doing.

And he, in the foreword, he said he didn't even know what he was doing.

Wow.

And so, you know.

He figured it out on the way.

Well, it came intuitively because he organized in a way where he had to do that because he had a very difficult childhood and health wise.

And the, you know, the field of NLP helped to unlock amazing things because the field was designed to look at excellence.

And, but look at it from a way where people can reproduce it very easily.

Because it's at a level of perceptions, right?

And it also started out looking for patterns and then trying to put the words to it.

Just like you did with your paper.

Yes, yes.

But the problem, and I know this is just my opinion and it's not a judgment at all on it.

But I suspect what may have happened, at least in part, is that people started collapsing applications into the field.

And then the field collapsed into the application to the point where, you know.

To me, it's kind of ridiculous the way some people do things with it.

And then there's the, and it's really unethical what other people are doing with it.

And it's sold completely, you know, so people really have no understanding of what's going on with it.

You know, in a general public kind of way.

And they become afraid of it, if they know about it at all, because they're terrible.

Well, people are afraid of what they don't understand.

Exactly.

But also like tools, it's really your perception.

If you have a knife, like, are you going to butter your bread?

Or are you going to stab someone?

Like, you know, it's your perception of what that tool is going to do.

Exactly, exactly.

And that's why I don't know if I've mentioned in this paper, I don't recall.

I probably did.

It's all over the place.

I'm really not going to offer certifications in it.

I'm not going to really, you know, do anything where it can be called a technique or an application.

I'm protecting its trademark.

And so I'm protecting it so I can preserve that, you know, not so I can sell certifications and trainings in it and have a canonical thing.

APHS, Applied Philosophy of Human Systems, are my trademarks.

And my website and my papers are the canonical APHS.

But I'm not teaching people how to do it.

I'm just putting it out there and let people make their own applications.

But so some protection has to be done.

Like with NLP, I think they could have protected it maybe a little bit better.

But these are just my opinions.

I really don't know.

They're just my impressions as I observe, you know, over a couple decades now, you know, different practitioners of it and different, you know, having read a lot of their works and seeing how it's talked about.

You know, it's, you know, and, you know, I've bought things about, you know, marketing with NLP and those are applications.

But, you know, and they're applications of something they've studied from somebody who did something excellent.

But so NLP is an awesome field.

But my whole point is that I think that there's a difference between fields and applications.

And I saw in NLP, possibly a mixing of the candy and the wrapper in ways that, you know, sometimes leave you like you're chewing like a lot of toilet paper.

Yeah.

One of my favorite quotes that I read from your paper that you sent yesterday is the separation that you made of like what it is, what it isn't, is not indifference, it is respect.

And it reminded me of a quote from Brene Brown, who was defining boundaries.

And she said, you know, boundaries, this is not division, it's respect, you know, like, and I feel like that is the most valuable thing about these papers is that you're protecting the integrity of what it is and what it isn't so that people can use it in a useful way.

And then there was another quote you put in there.

If this is useful, there must be a way to use it.

And there is.

Orientation.

Exactly.

Exactly.

That's yeah, that's so true.

You know, it's like, you know, if you have to have some way of using it, that is the way to do it.

But I'm not going to tell you how to do that.

But I have applications that do it for you.

But when you buy into an application of mine, you're really buying into my wrapper.

But it's, you know, the wrapper is delivering all that great stuff from the field.

But it is specific to the wrapper.

OK.

And so, yeah, that's what I love about the field.

It's like, yeah, there's so much you can do with it.

And you just do it at what you what you want to do with it.

Do what we do, what your creativity brings to it.

You know, I made the first 10 papers are available on the APHSfield.com website.

And those those really give the shape to the field.

There's 21 collected papers are the founding papers.

And those are the remaining ones after the 10.

The next 11 are really taking some things a little deeper and stuff.

But a person can really literally find useful use for the field in their own way with just by reading the free papers.

They don't really need the others.

And then, of course, I publish them for people who want a hard copy.

And I publish collected works of them for people who, you know, want to work with the entire founding set, you know, in a physical form.

And so there are options to buy them, but a person can read the first 10 papers.

And it really is about respecting boundaries and other people.

And, you know, it's really not a system where I have to like market it and sell it.

It's more this is what I'm using.

This is what I'm doing.

You know, these are the patterns I've noticed in my extensive career.

Exactly.

Are very valuable.

Yes, exactly.

And the beautiful thing is I get other people's insights like yours, and I get other perspectives and perceptions.

And so really, that's the payoff for me.

The excitement of the conversation and getting new insights and learning new things.

So we really, you know, you know, that's another thing where I think one of the boundaries is not trying to create something that's marketable.

Or, you know, like I said, I protected, you know, their trademarks of mine, but I'm protecting it so I can keep the integrity of this version.

Somebody else can do their own thing, and I don't care.

And that's part of the boundaries.

I'm not imposing it on other things.

And I'm not judging other people and other things.

It can evolve as it wants.

But what you made is what you made.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So what I'm protecting is what I made.

But it's not the last word by any means.

I hope it's the beginning word for some people.

It's information, not limitation, as you said in the paper.

Exactly, exactly.

So it's really a lot of fun.

It's an experimental thing in a way, isn't it?

Yes, very much so.

And that's what's so exciting about it.

Because when you can work with that, you know, anything could happen.

Like when you live in that possibility moment, then way more solutions are available to you than when you're trying to fit yourself in a box of some kind or trying to copy someone else's way how they did it.

Because like everyone orients differently.

Oh, absolutely.

This is one of the things we're coaching like in terms of business.

Marketing typically is really where I spent a lot of money on coaches.

And, you know, like to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

And really, honestly, it was useless by and large.

But it wasn't because the people were bad people.

And it wasn't because they weren't really good at what they did.

I looked for people really good at what they did.

But the problem was, it wasn't what I was doing.

It was and they were selling systems.

And for some people, that works great because they, you know, they need a system.

They get a system and they just do the system.

That's really not the way I operate, you know, and so.

Not every tool works for every person.

Exactly.

And their tools were not working for me because really, in my opinion, it results in limited results for people, I think.

Limited and also it creates resistance a lot of the time.

Yes.

You know, you're sitting there, you're trying to figure out, you know, you get something you have to apply and you're trying to figure it out.

And, you know, your body's resisting it in part because, you know, probably for me, a lot of times that wasn't the thing I needed to be figuring out at that moment.

And there were other things I needed to figure out before I could figure that out.

And I really need to be looking somewhere else.

And then I could go back to that.

And that's what I love about, like, hypnosis and the subconscious mind is that when you are in that state of trance and you ask your subconscious a question, the first thing that comes up is the most important, like, is the path.

And like, there's no way any book could tell you what that path was.

Exactly.

Unfortunately, even that is weaponized against people.

I had one of the people, I was paying like 10, I think it was like 12, $14,000 a year on this coaching.

And my coach was, I actually started coaching my coach a little bit because I was a certified hypnotherapist and she was not.

And so she was asking me, you know, some things about hypnosis and somebody who's a hypnotist was insisting that she say the first thing that come to her mind.

And she couldn't, nothing came to her mind.

And this hypnotist was insisting that something would come to mind and she was blocking it.

And it's like, okay, the poor woman, you know, just relax.

Your subconscious mind doesn't want to let you know anything.

It will let you know.

And it just letting her relaxed to know that, you know, that system of forcing the subconscious to produce, you know, on demand from the conscious mind, that's not a good thing.

Or that could be a part doing a protective job that wants to have a conversation.

Exactly.

I didn't use those words, but that was kind of my point.

You know, there's something about the person, in your words, the part doesn't want it known.

So insisting and demanding is only going to make it give you something, you know, it's either going to make it build a wall or it's going to make it lie to you.

Yeah, exactly.

But that is a very powerful thing about hypnosis is, and that is, you know, really something to look for is what comes up to mind first.

And that can take a lot of, I've used that line to those, that idea and verbalize that in lines to people.

Because people aren't used to working with possibility or not having a clear, right answer.

You know, sometimes they're so anxious about having this clear, right answer that they don't want to go into trance.

And I'm like, it doesn't matter.

You can't do it wrong.

Like, just make it up on the spot.

It's improv.

It's pretend, just pretend, you know.

Exactly.

And that's all it takes.

So it is very useful for people to know that.

So it takes the pressure off of having to think of something.

But the problem is it can go the other way and then become a pressure in itself to have something random pop up and nothing's random.

And they're like probably thinking of things.

And so, well, I thought about that.

So that must not be a random thing.

I must be, I must be.

Yeah.

Like there's no way to prepare for every scenario that could possibly come up.

But when you have this, you know, APHS and the orientation idea in the back of your mind, it's just a helpful thing to go back to so that you can ask, you know, questions like I wrote down here from your paper, when someone shifts from asking, what should I do to where am I standing?

The quality of their response changes.

So it's like a different kind of question than, you know.

It's a very different question.

It's really a, it's really an orienting question.

That's really what this is about.

You know, APHS is really a lot about orienting and that's an orienting question.

Where am I standing?

Where am I looking at this from?

How am I holding this, you know, in my body, you know, at an unconscious level?

How am I holding this in my subconscious?

How am I holding this?

Yeah.

And the mark of a good therapist is being curious instead of imposing your methods and tools.

Absolutely.

And really, you know, when you're curious, you have to go into your subconscious.

And so a good therapist is really hypnotizing themselves while they're doing good therapy.

Even though it's not a formal trance, necessarily.

Yeah.

Because like the questions just kind of flow.

I mean, you know, you didn't plan that.

You didn't have it written down.

It's exactly, exactly.

That's like really key.

You know, a lot of beginning hypnotists, I certainly saw them in doing a practice with many, they tend to get jammed up on what to say because they're so worried about the techniques and they don't really just know that they already know everything perfectly to say if they would just go by their intuition.

Yeah.

Both therapist and client have the resources they need to generate the change or a change.

Absolutely.

The therapist or the hypnotist, whoever has the resources too for what they need.

And I just have to go into that.

And that belief is very powerful because you can transfer that belief as a, as the guide, you know, then I feel like it's the only way is if the guide goes first.

Yes, exactly.

In fact, I actually do.

I do actually go in hypnosis when I work with clients.

I had, at one point I had a physical office and a receptionist assistant type person.

And I had to have her tap on the door because the sessions would probably go for hours if she didn't.

Well, the thing is like you're orienting yourself before they can orient themselves.

Exactly.

And you know, there are, that's, there's so many levels that works at it.

Part of it is the mirror neurons.

They're, they're mimicking me.

And so when I go first, I show them what to do.

You know, they're, they're really just...

Works way better than telling them.

Exactly, exactly.

So this is...

It's automatic, like you said.

Exactly.

It's automatic.

You know, and...

One of your quotes is just really stunning which we know it says, most people don't choose their orientation any more than they choose their posture while walking.

Both function automatically shaped by habit, context and prior adaption.

Yes, exactly.

And there's a hidden message in there too.

And the hidden message is we can consciously look at our posture sometimes to improve it.

So I wonder, can we improve the way we're looking at things?

Yes, we can.

But it's still going to be an unconscious process.

And we can't force it because otherwise we'll be like walking like a robot.

Well, you can only focus on like seven plus or minus two things at a time.

And your posture isn't always one of those seven.

Exactly.

But the beautiful thing is we're self-organizing systems.

And so once we get what we want into our reticular activating system, into our targeting system, it then becomes automatic and we don't have to think about it.

But we have to recognize when the opportunities come up and when the blocks come up, when it says, no, this is not going to fit that.

Or yes, this is going to fit that.

And that's a subconscious thing too.

And so we can get very good at navigating those things when we become more intuitive about things.

And once again, we have to inhabit that.

We can't study it and know it.

We can get it in here by doing some study, but we really don't know it until we start inhabiting it.

But once we start inhabiting it, it becomes very intuitive, very natural.

And that orientation just becomes a part of the way we're looking at things.

Yeah, like manifesting or co-creating with the universe, you know, like you're writing down your goal and all of a sudden you're seeing opportunities show up left and right.

And like you can choose if you prefer to say yes or no, but like those opportunities, would you have seen them if you hadn't placed your order kind of a thing?

No, you would not.

You wouldn't recognize it.

You wouldn't be on your radar.

That's right.

And that's what the reticular activating system is.

It's our radar.

And it's pinging us on what we want to see.

And so that is, you know, it's an amazing thing what we can co-create with the world as self-organizing systems in the world, as a self-organizing system.

It's very responsive, but we have to participate.

And that participation begins in an immaterial way in the mind of, in the other than conscious mind, imagination, play, experimentation, ideas.

But then we have to begin to, you know, we're equipped with these physical bodies to do things in a physical world.

We have to begin to do some kind of action.

And usually what happens is people take all the wrong actions because they think they have to do it.

Well, yeah, they think they have to have the how, but they don't have to have the how.

No, culturally speaking, that's like an amazing, amazingly radical idea.

But nobody lives knowing all the hows to begin with.

Yeah.

It's an illusion of safety, I guess.

I remember working with one client and, you know, this is a typical of a strategy I've used often with people, but he says, I just, I just have to know, you know, I just have to know things.

I have to know why something is like it.

And then I said, OK, you know, so what you're telling me is that, you know, when you get up and you get the toothpaste, you have to know how it's made and you have to know where it was made at.

And you have to know how it was packaged and you have to know how it was marketed.

And then when you go and eat your breakfast, you have to know where it came from, how it was made, you know, what the processing is, who's the marketing behind it.

And he's like last, he goes, well, no, not those things.

And I said, well, how do you choose which things you have to know how?

Because that was a limiting thing for him.

And he left and that was the thing.

You know, we're conditioned to think that we have to know how or why when we'd go through life almost completely not knowing how or why.

Yeah.

Like you go through life being like, this is the direction, you know, this is where I've set my GPS and I'm open to how, you know, like how it shows up.

It's not like I'm attached to a certain, like, this is how it's going to play out.

And that's where people limit themselves.

That's how to put the brakes on.

Exactly.

We have that GPS so that we don't have to know.

We can look at what's unfolding in a dynamic unfolding environment that's unfolding at the moment.

And we have the ability to navigate that because of that GPS.

I feel like a really key thing, too, is the deserving of it and the feeling worthy of it.

It makes the energy work instead of pulling back your request from the universe.

Yeah, it does.

Well, so you mentioned, you know, driving with the brakes on.

Well, most people are driving with the brakes on looking in the rearview mirror.

And the rearview mirror is telling them, you don't deserve this because this thing happened.

Well, that thing never happened.

It's not even there anymore.

It's, you know, my primary application of all this is something I call timeline surfing.

And that is like that is the key of timeline surfing is understanding that there is no past, there are infinite futures, but there's one now.

And that's where life happens.

And that's where things happen.

And the past is not even existent anymore.

And the only usefulness of it is that it can inform you, but you don't even really think about it because you've learned the lessons you need to know.

So there's no past and there's infinite futures.

You can, anything can open.

You can go anywhere.

You don't know how it's unfolding.

So, you know, you've got to participate.

People think that they can look at history and be like, oh, history is repeating itself.

But like, how many more inventions do we have now?

How many more possibilities are there now?

How much more evolved are we?

You know, history doesn't have to repeat itself.

We can do it differently this time.

All we have to believe is that we're enough and that there is enough, literally.

In a sense, we don't even have to believe that.

We just have to not be held back by the belief that that matters.

When we did things or when we got things, we were getting experience because we didn't know or we were practicing things we had learned and we were getting experience at how those worked.

And in that process, all kinds of mistakes are going to happen.

And all kinds of learning lessons will, which is only feedback.

And it's all valuable.

It's all valuable.

It's all like propelling you forward.

Exactly, exactly.

It's all useful.

Exactly.

That's one of my upcoming books is, I don't really have a title for yet, but we always win.

We always win.

The key is we have to know where to pick up the prize.

And so, you know, if we don't get the outcome we were going for, we still got an outcome and there's a prize in that outcome.

We just have to look for the gold.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's more than just like a reframe, like a cognitive reframe or trying to help yourself feel better.

Literally, there is something better because I'm doing it as a timeline surfer.

And so these things are the waves of my timeline that I'm surfing.

And so for me, it's like natural to see that.

But most people don't.

It's not that natural, but I'm not talking about faking yourself out.

I'm talking about where you can inhabit that, where you actually see it.

And because you actually see it, just like the surfer on a wave.

When one wave is going down and another wave is coming up, you can see that if you're good at it.

And you don't have to ride the wave and crash into the ocean.

You can pick up the next wave or you can slow down, but you don't have to sink.

You know, it gets to the point.

I think you need like those glasses, though, that particular lens of personal responsibility instead of victimhood in order to even see it.

Of course, of course.

Otherwise, you'd just be blaming yourself for the others and like, what's the point?

Exactly.

And that's another that's another frame that is unhelpful.

And it's really not even accurate on the past.

The past is simply something that happened that does not exist anywhere else other than in your brain and in your memory.

And your record of it is not even accurate.

Your record is based on your interpretations at that time.

And I can't tell you how many people, Chantel, I've taken back and I've had them look at an event that they interpreted one way.

I had them look at it with their eyes today, and they always see it different.

Always.

Because they only see they only remembered the way they saw it at a time when they weren't as evolved and they weren't as mature and advanced as they are now.

Well, we can live that way.

We can live every day realizing that, hey, you know, I'm more advanced now.

I don't know what the interpretation of I had an interpretation when it happened.

I adjusted and I don't think about it anymore.

It's gone.

It's like it feels so empowering to have that mindset of I get to choose what meaning I make of this, whether it's now or, you know, something that came up, a memory, a trauma, whatever it is, I get to choose now that it means this.

Yes.

And like that is that is creation, right?

It is.

And here's how it wraps into APHS, because we do get to choose and it's all a matter of our orientations and we can choose our orientation, but not directly like in this.

We're operating from them.

So we have to see the evidence of what our orientation must be so that we can get a clue where we want to reorient.

But we don't have to know what the bad orientation is.

We just have to say, well, I want something different, but we can choose.

And because we are because we are self-organizing not only on beliefs, but on meanings.

And so what things mean to us, we're organizing ourself around and we're becoming that.

And so when we free ourselves, when we understand we can choose what meaning and therefore choose who we are, it is definitely an act of creation, an act of co-creation with all everything that's there.

You know, it's an amazingly freeing thing.

And when you really begin to approach life with that mindset, it's amazing what opens up and what you can do.

But that once again is an application.

But it goes back to the field in that, you know, we are self-organizing around meaning and beliefs are creating those meanings.

And so understanding that field is like everything.

Well, exactly.

Just being oriented to that way.

I don't know that I understand like the mechanics of how it works.

I don't understand the biology of how it works.

I have a lot.

You don't.

Do you know how a compass works?

Do you know how to use it?

Exactly.

There is a reason why it's working.

I may or may not know it now.

There may be other people who know.

And does it matter?

But I can use it today while I learn it.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah, well, I think that I told you all of the quotes that I wrote down.

Oh, I had a question mark here, something I didn't quite understand.

I know you wanted me to bring up those kinds of things.

I don't know if I have enough context, but I just wrote it.

I wrote here when they understand continuity as distinct from momentum, perceived stuckness dissolves.

So I guess define continuity because it's one of those big words that I've heard, but I don't quite like what's continuity?

Well, continuity is we are persistent in who we are and we are.

But what is making us who we are is not persistent as much as we think it is.

We get momentum in being certain ways and that carries it, but we aren't required to go on that route to keep continuity with that path.

We can move a different path regardless of the momentum.

Momentum will carry us.

And when it's going in the direction we want to go in, it can carry the continuity of us continuing in that way.

But it can work against us if we don't want to keep going in that way.

But once we're aware of what's going on, we can change the momentum by simply changing the direction that we're oriented towards.

And then we start building, there's still continuity, but we've directed it a different way and we're not being carried by momentum.

I'm seeing a river with a current and then it forks and one side has a beaver dam and it was going to go over to the beaver dam side, but instead, is that what you're saying?

Well, close.

Now picture that beaver dam, that river with the forks, and now picture it's actually like so complicated of waterways that it's like blood vessels and it's like capillaries and it's branching everywhere in every direction in a three-dimensional way.

And we're flowing in this river and it branches all over the place.

And we are, based on our meaning and what we see ourselves as, so therefore our strengths and our limitations that we're imposing upon ourself to maintain our identity or our ego, the I, we are making choices that look like that's the only choice when actually we chose that way to keep continuity of who we are.

And we did that by, we're following a momentum of that, but we don't have to follow momentum.

We can branch off to any...

You can pivot anytime you please.

Anytime.

And then we can get momentum in the direction we choose to go in.

And that's purely our choice.

Even if it's the smallest pivot, with that momentum, it will make a huge difference.

It is always the smallest pivot.

It is always the smallest pivot.

This is a hard thing for people to kind of...

Wrap their heads around.

The true to feel of it is all you have to do, you don't have to...

All you have to do is like if you're in a river, to use your metaphor, and you're going in the direction of the river, well, you can turn...

You don't go in a different direction by going 10 miles in the other direction.

You don't go in the other direction by going 10 miles, five miles in the other direction or one mile in the other direction.

You go in the other direction by turning the boat around.

And then you are going in that direction.

And how long it takes doesn't matter.

What tributaries you go off from there doesn't matter.

Because you're headed in the direction that you decided to go into.

And then you can get momentum.

The current in a river helps.

The metaphor kind of breaks down there.

But we create our own momentum and that's by our own emotions and our excitement and our enthusiasm for it.

But not in an outward way, in a way where it's very organically us, because it's our motivations.

It's our...

Our why.

Yeah, it's our life and the meaning we're making in our life.

And so I don't remember specifically without the context, but that's probably...

What you meant, yes.

No, it makes perfect sense now.

Yeah, just more involving things from later papers too is probably what happened.

But yeah, it's not really a matter of knowing everything.

It's a matter of turning in the right direction and you will find what you need to find.

And the trust, you know, like...

You have to trust yourself.

Like letting go of that control, which is a core value of your papers, I've noticed.

Exactly.

But it's not letting go of control to nothingness.

It's letting the control of things that are not really controlling if we don't let them be controlling.

Yeah, exactly.

Because like Timeline Surfing, it has an arc of two...

It's a collection of 12 books that describe the entire method.

And the pivotal books in the collection are books five and six.

And that pivot there is between getting on the board of your life, so to speak.

And then it pivots the sixth book getting good on the board.

But the first four books, before we get to that fifth book, are all about cutting back what's holding somebody back from being able to do it.

And it really takes half the collection almost to do that.

And then the rest of the books after book six and starting with book six are about building up the skills on how to actually surf.

But you can't surf until you get on the board.

And so it's clearing those things that are holding us back.

And that's a big part of life, is clearing the things that are holding us back.

But they're self-imposed.

We just have to figure that out.

We have to learn that.

And then we have to get good at getting past them.

But when we turned our boat in that direction, we're as good as doing it.

And everything else is just unfolding.

We're already doing it when we turn the boat.

So we are already building...

And the continuity, here's where the continuity comes in.

There's all kinds of branches in life that can go all day long, all different branches.

And all those branches lead to all kinds of different branches.

But we don't see that.

What we see is we see...

What's really happening is we're looking at the branches we took.

And really what most people do is they just look at it like a straight line.

They don't even realize they had choices along the way.

So people will look at their past as a trajectory when it was not.

It was never a trajectory.

It's only a trajectory when you're trying to impose an order to it to look at it.

But it wasn't a trajectory in the sense that it had to go that way.

But people will look at that past and they think that, okay, they're trying to maintain continuity so they understand how they operate in the world and other people can operate with them.

But it's not fixed.

And the past does not fix that.

In fact, the past was learning as we go.

And we had the choice from there.

But the momentum is good.

So it's not so much letting go, like learning what's holding us to the past, but it's getting good at going forward, right?

That's kind of pulling a bunch of things together.

But it's really amazing what people can do.

Yeah, for sure.

And even just saying what you just said can bring up individual things.

For me, I'm putting it through all the filters of what I'm currently going through.

And then it's just a universal thing.

It could help anybody because the metaphor is so powerful.

Exactly.

And so people can, just from a good metaphor, they already have their applications of what that metaphor means to them.

And what that means to them is, other than consciousness, is interpreting it based on what's meaningful to it.

And I used to have this thing.

I'm an abstract artist.

And so I have all kinds of abstract paintings and mixed media paintings.

And what I would do is I would take a set of nine of them with clients.

And I would show them a group of three.

And I'd say, pick one.

And they would pick one.

And then the second group, they pick one.

Then the third group, they pick one.

They say, OK, now we have these three pictures.

Now pick one.

And they would pick one.

And I should set up.

Before that, we've been talking about something they wanted to know.

So usually what I'll say is, what is it that you're trying to solve?

What issues are you trying to solve?

Then I would just change the subject to art.

And I would have them pick one, pick one, pick one.

And then they pick one of the last three.

And then I'd say, OK, three things are going to pop out at you about this picture.

What do you see here?

Not like what it is.

Not interpretive, but like you're looking at clouds.

And you're seeing shapes.

And it would suggest something to you.

And they would pick out three things.

And it may be a metaphorical thing.

It may be a literal thing about what was on the paper, whatever.

And then I would say, OK, now your subconscious picked those out as part of a solution to what you were looking at, what you're trying to solve.

And how might those three things give you an answer to what you're trying to solve?

And then they would invariably come up with kind of a cool solution.

Whether it worked or not, who knows?

But it got them unstuck.

But it wouldn't have existed otherwise.

Yeah, exactly.

And so their subconscious was looking for meaning.

Because the question was from them, and because it was something of some importance to them, the subconscious is already looking everywhere for answers.

And then when I brought it into the context, they're in the context of me trying to help them.

And then all of a sudden, I'm talking about something different.

And it's kind of like random.

But the subconscious is still trying to see if the answer is in what I'm doing.

And then it starts, you know, it's picking out pictures.

It knows the solutions or can recognize what will lead to a solution.

And it's now starting to metaphorize marks I made on a paper, which had nothing to do with their problem.

But the thing is, they were creating the meaning.

And they were able to see it.

So we are always looking at everything in our life.

And we are figuring out the meaning of it at a very other than conscious level.

And we are seeing solutions based on that.

And when we can free ourselves from having to interpret things in certain ways, and we can allow our other than conscious to connect dots for us, and then act on it in real time, life is amazing.

I agree 100%.

Chantelle, thank you so much for today.

We're up on an hour now.

Already?

Oh, my goodness.

Yes, I know.

Our time flies when you're having fun.

Yeah, absolutely.

I love your questions.

I love your quotes.

I love your metaphors.

And I really appreciate you and the audience appreciates you being with us and helping us to explore the work, not as a body of knowledge to study, but rather as a conversation that can lead all kinds of different places, but always reveals interesting things.

And even if it doesn't, our subconscious will find what's interesting to us, right?

So thank you very much.

And thank you, audience.

Thanks for listening to What's Actually Happening.

These are the founding papers of Applied Philosophy of Human Systems, and they're available at APHSfield, F-I-E-L-D dot com.

And they include everything we discussed today.

Today was more of an application and an interpretation of them, but everything is there.

I look forward to continuing the conversation here with the podcast, and we'll do that next week.

And until then, see what you notice.