Step 3: Mobilization of Energy

What is the Mobilization Stage?

• If we think of the Gestalt Awareness Cycle as a graph, we’ve been focusing on the X-axis, the horizontal progression, from Sensation to Awareness to Mobilization to Action, then Contact, Satiety, and Withdrawal.

• What we have not yet zeroed in on was the Y-Axis. This vertical dimension represents our level of energy throughout the cycle of need awareness and satisfaction.

• We are energetic machines. The Mobilization Stage is the part of the cycle when energy, enthusiasm, and interest build, so we can get up off of our sweet, dreamy Awareness asses, and go out and grab for the gusto.

• As such, Mobilization is how we go from Sensation and Awareness, which are passive and receptive, to Action & Contact, which are mostly active and aggressive (note: “Aggression” here means “forward-moving, active energy” not hostility or violence).

• When we are functioning at the front-edge of our Menschitude, our experience of need, hatched in Sensation and Awareness, kindles excitement, and that excitement takes the form of higher body energy, and mental planning that leads to Action and Contact.

• We Mobilize well when we care, and when we stay in touch with our energetic sensations and feelings, and allow our feelings to move us in our bodies, to prepare for Action.

• Think about a kid fascinated by the new world of sensations that they meet each day. As they develop the ability to be Aware of what these sensations add up to, they get energized to get what they need. In young kids, this energy is wildly-uninhibited and clumsily-acted-out. So, the kid acts in impulsive, direct ways to get their needs met.

• Most of us older kids have long lost the ability to move so fluidly and directly from need to action. We learned that when we go for what we want, we will slam up against a bunch of hurdles and blocks. These barriers can be restrictions imposed on us by others, frustrations of our needs by imperfect parents who are not able to be at our childish beck-and-call, and by our own physical limitations. Eventually, we internalize these barriers and then block ourselves with them. We get in our own way.

• Or, conversely, we get so good at building energy and plans to get our needs met, that we are over-energized and under-focused, birthing lots of ideas and plans that we cannot ever possibly carry-out successfully.

Some Mobilization Stucknesses:

Over-deliberation vs. Impulsivity:

“The man with one wristwatch always knows what time it is. The man with two is never quite sure.”

--Segal’s Law

When we are stuck in our heads, we may not be able to mobilize the energy to get up and do what needs doing to get our needs met. Our Big, Giant Brains may be developing all kinds of awarenesses of what we need, but our bodies may remain in a state of total disuse and low energy.

Conversely, we may have never developed the ability to sit still and reflect enough to think through how to execute actions, and may behave impulsively with no good plan of attack.

Introjects: Master of the Universe vs. Scared Rabbit:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

― Theodore Roosevelt

Better stop short than fill to the brim.

Oversharpen the blade, and the edge will soon blunt.

Amass a store of gold and jade, and no one can protect it.

Claim wealth and titles and disaster will follow.

--Tao Te Ching

America is a nation of contradictions. We are a culture that has been nourished on stories of Can-Do success. We are raised on Horatio Alger yarns about people who came from nothing, but who let nothing stand between themselves and great success. On the other hand, we are also subject to the legacy of Christian notions of people as inherently sinful, guilty of the sin of pride, children of those willful, ungrateful outcasts from Eden.

These two polarities, Grandiosity and Self-Abasement, are differently-encouraged when we’re growing up. If our parents tell us we are little princesses and princes, we might strive to Be Best, or we might retreat in shame or unworthiness in the face of this unreachable ideal. If our parents treat us like we’re unimportant or incompetent, we may absorb this image into our self-esteem and become scared rabbits, or we may develop a grandiose, narcissistic self-image to compensate.

Our tendencies on these polarities will affect how we go about Mobilizing energy to get our needs met. If we tend to the narcissistic, we may develop unrealistically-grandiose plans for getting our needs me. If we tend towards the self-abasement, we may overestimate the obstacles in our way and plan too meekly.

When mobilizing energy, notice whether you get yourself overcharged with plans and aspirations, only to deflate when reality meets your idealized ambitions. Or, on the other hand, notice how you stop yourself from excitement, allowing fear of failure to back you off from, as Roosevelt said, “daring greatly”.

Mobilization's Deeper Meanings

Embodiment:

In Sensation and Awareness work, our sensations, perceptions, and felt-awarenesses become more-vivid and rich as we turn attention to the bodily felt-senses.

The Mobilization Stage, with its focus on energy intensification, muscularity, and movement, continues this shift towards integrating mind and body. Ken Wilber calls this integration the Centauric Self.

The Centauric Self uses the metaphor of the mythologic Centaur to describe the shift in identity from being a mind atop a physical body, to a merging, a reclamation of the wholeness of mind and body. Hence, the half-human, half-horse of the Centaur. And, truly, there is a quality, in Mobilization work, of reclaiming our animal self.

We have incorporated the Shadow in Awareness, and this opens us to the dark animal energies of the body. Much of our body awareness, movement, and energy are repressed. This may have its roots in the repression of the animal body by our religious traditions, as they sought Higher Self, which they associated with mind, psyche, or spirit.

In most of the religious traditions still with us, the body was associated with the worldly self, fallen and profane. Our sexuality, our aggression, our hungers and lusts, all are part of Centaur energy. Mobilization work helps us to liberate these energies and to re-knit them to the rest of us.

When we do this kind of work, we also learn about what Wilhelm Reich called “body or character armor”. Reich and his descendants created a catalog of the ways we freeze, constrict, manipulate, or deaden parts of our bodies in order to prevent emotional awareness.

Reichian-inspired body therapies help us discover these blocks and to melt the armor, so we can feel and move these parts of us again. We become less over-emphasizing of our rational minds, as we learn to process and to act with whole-body awareness.

Fascination:

Gestalt therapist Erving Polster wrote a book in 1987 entitled, “Every Person’s Life Is Worth A Novel.”, the title a phrase borrowed from French novelist Gustave Flaubert. Polster wrote about the everyday drama in all of our lives, and how we muffle or inflate this drama.

Polster wrote about the importance of fascination in waking ourselves up to the inspiring, growth-facilitating energy of life.

We can use this concept to increase our Menschiness, to Mobilize the energy of fascination to explore the dramatic polarities within us. The focus we practiced in Sensation and Awareness becomes, with fascination, trained on our energy, conflicts, excitement, and anxiety. As we become engrossed in this fascination, our energy grows, as we engage the lively hunt for deep understanding, for rich adventure, and for satisfying contact.

So, when working with Mobilization, we are ever on the lookout for curiosity and fascination. We walk the tightrope between neutral, open awareness and deeply-focused entrancement. When we tap into the mainline of fascination, we realize that our lives are worth a novel. And, as in any good novel, the drama will be full of Action, the subject of the next stage in the cycle.

Caring Vs. Detachment:

“...there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working on, then one can be said to “care” about what he’s doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing.””

--- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.

--- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The task of Mobilizing of Energy could be approached simply from the standpoint of how to build and manage energy, and how to stay focused enough with that energy to move it into productive action. That would be in keeping with a dispassionate approach to working on ourselves.

However, as Robert Pirsig taught so well in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the pursuit of Quality, or Goodness, is enhanced by learning to care about what we dp, rather than approaching tasks from a merely technological, mechanical, or intellectually-objective way.

In the Deep Dive of Mobilization, we are challenged to find the balance between Caring passionately and Detaching, such that our best energy goes towards those issues that matter to us, but also so that we don’t burn ourselves out unwisely.

All of us live in the worldly world of meaning, of joys, sorrows, justice and injustice, birth and death, relationships and families, technology and ecology, all of the this-world drama. And, we also live in the ultimate world of emptiness, formlessness, and meaninglessness.

It is most-helpful to be able to traverse the polarity of Caring Vs. Detachment, so that we can put our shoulders to the wheels that matter to us, but also step away and be free to replenish ourselves at the well of peaceful emptiness.

This means that we have to learn to love our passionate caring, but also love our dispassionate detachment, and hold the tension of opposites. That way, we can give the improvement of the world our all, without wasting ourselves tilting at too many windmills.

Mensches, by definition, are channels of ethical, humane love. But, our ethical Menschitude is expended in proper measure when we can also step back, let go, not be too preachy, insistent, dogmatic, or desperately-demanding that the world change right now. An ethical Mensch is also a humble Mensch, one who knows that our aspirations far outstrip our capacity to manifest them perfectly or the world’s capacity to improve on our timetables.

So, stay vigilant for the flow of caring vs. detachment, pouring out your energy when it crackles with enthusiasm, and dropping back into rest, diversion, or peace when your energy has flagged.

This balance will be invaluable in the Action Stage, helping us to calibrate our goal-directed movement gracefully, and in the Satiation and Withdrawal Stages, helping us to let go and be contented with accomplishment without demanding too much of ourselves or others.