Question: Does your state practice sometimes become dry and does it seem to no longer work like it used to?

Topic: How do you design state practices that fit with your developmental level?

I have a number of topics I want to share in my blog, and the first one responds to the question, “How do we know what kind of state practice will work for the level of development we are in? I hope to have an exploration of this topic related to the STAGES model. We can explore together a number of areas on this topic but I would like to first explore these four areas of states related to stages.

1. Receptive experiences and what kinds of state openings tend to occur at different stages?
2. Active practices: what stages might they work best for?
3. Reciprocal practices and which stages might respond best to this kind of practice.
4. Interpenetrative practices: Where do these state practices fit with stages?

Receptive Experiences

We have all had experiences when we are struck, without invitation and without prior knowledge, of a state that stuns us, provides insight, and takes our breath away.

Active Practices

Once we have these deep state experiences, usually there is an urge to get back to it, so we either find or design a practice that will give us the opportunity to experience the state again. We are in an active “practice” for this purpose.

Reciprocal Practices

This kind of practice involves beginning to bring our active practice out into the world, where the state experiences can begin to inculcate themselves into our every day lives; a reciprocity begins between our state practice and our regular developmental level such that our developmental level is influenced by the state practices being brought out into our life. But this process is incomplete—we can’t hold this in our regular walking around life and toggle back and forth between state and states that have become ordinary

Interpenetrative Practices

This kind of practice involves bringing the state into such ordinariness that it is no longer a state in our daily life, but we walk around with it as part of who we are—it becomes part of the structure of our developmental view.

As we all know all of these practices can work anywhere, but there may be a sweet spot for each of these classes of practices. I hope to begin exploring these areas in this blog series.

Smiles on Your Moments
Terri