How apt to have arrived back from a weekend in Amsterdam at a Radical Honesty workshop with the fab duo Pete Jordan and Tuulia Syvänen, to launch straight into the next stage of my Gene Keys Venus Sequence course, where we are now focussing on "The Pathway of Intelligence".
This is the line that connects our IQ (mental defence patterns + gifts) with our EQ (emotional defence patterns + gifts) and is directly connected to our capacity to communicate with transparency and awareness.
The following words from Gene Keys creator Richard Rudd on this topic really resonate:
"In our relationships the gauge of our awakening is our ability to communicate clearly, openly and with respect."
Rudd goes on to describe "The Eden Loop" - the mutual triggering of one another's lower frequency behaviours, rooted in childhood wounding, whereby one person's mental defences triggers the other's emotional defences. And, unless interrupted, create a negative feedback cycle.
In the Venus Sequence, we are invited to deeply contemplate our particular patterns of behaviour, so as to gently transmute shadow to light. At the Radical Honesty workshop, we learned ways of noticing and communicating from the truth of our embodied experience, which I find to be a beautiful complement to such contemplation.
Here's an example from my own experience at the weekend's workshop. In a sharing with another participant, I noticed her look away and around the room while I was speaking.
Now obviously I cannot know why this was.
Though I could imagine this might have been an unconscious defence pattern to avoid too much intensity or intimacy.
What I'm certain of though is what happened for me. I got triggered. And I know this trigger well. If I feel or see a person's attention wander when I'm talking with them, I can feel irritated and/or abandoned.
I imagine this trigger in me stems from not feeling I had the love and attention of either of my parents as a teenager. I rarely felt seen or heard. So that younger part of me craves what she didn't get.
At the same time, my adult woman self naturally opens and orientates herself towards presence and away from chaotic energy and distraction.
If I went into emotional defence around this, I may shut down, stop talking and disconnect energetically from the other, whilst nursing beliefs like "you're not listening to me. I don't matter to you. I'm boring you. You don't love me." and judgements like "you're so distracted/self-centred/lacking in presence!"
What I did in this exercise at the workshop, though, was verbalise my trigger immediately by saying "I resent you for looking away when I'm sharing with you and I imagine you're not interested in what I have to say."
It wasn't a heavy or serious moment. I was smiling. The energy was light. But I felt better for not withholding my irritation and that communication brought us straight back into connection.
Of course this was just a practice. It wasn't a heavy or serious issue with someone I'm attracted to or emotionally invested in. But it was great to try out a more honest, direct response.
Even though I've spent years cultivating self-awareness and studying authentic relating, changing these learned behaviours takes time. And I continue to find new layers of "dishonesty" that most obviously surface when I'm attracted to/attached to a man or in social situations where I feel unsafe.
It's not dishonesty in the sense of deliberate lying. But, as I see it, whenever I act unconsciously from the false or conditioned self: she who learned certain ways of being out of fear, shame and the desire to be loved.
I'm so grateful to Pete & Tuulia for the past weekend. Loving stepping back into the Venus Sequence. And looking forward to more opportunities to put all this learning into practice ! 🙏<3