“People come to us, asking for orientation. But Buddhism is the religion of disorientation!”
- Dzogchen teaching couple
Stemless is a dance of ironies.
Any trick you’re using right now to continue believing in some fixed frame of the world… can be granted relief in its hypocrisy. Your contracted constructions of your self and the rules you have to follow, the exhaustingness of constantly reaching and grasping, the attempts to lean on some source of reliability or achievement or establishedness… all await glorious self-defeat. Dissolution, in inherent irony.
The ironies are endless, unwinding every moment. You want to be loved, so you try to keep yourself from being seen. You are one day seen, and then learn you were already whole. You are whole, so now you are open to discovering connection through dependence. You surrender to the network of inter-dependence, and arrive in self-driven leadership. You lead into healing and growth, without making the mistake of rescuing. When you can let everyone and everything be without needing to change them, your offering of direction and advice can also be permitted.
Such successive reversals don’t only manifest as protracted developmental stages of life. This is every moment. In fact, in the moment you are not zooming out to further fractal ironies, you are not being present. You have gone dead. You have arrived at some established reality, and there you refuse to budge.
Stemless, centrally, plays with ironies. This is obvious (and exhilarating) when you do it; we learn about your internal reality when you are generous enough to project onto the “external” world.
seen
But this play is not so unusual, not unique to this practice. All relational activities that lean sufficiently into truth and coherence appear to shift into ironies, “hypocrisy”. Take circling, for example, which looks completely wrong and backwards from the outside:
One of my favorite parts of watching facilitators introduce circling is the dance of crossing this impossible gap of relevance, for those who are new to the practice.
Both parties struggle beautifully. Sometimes they play, in polite desperation, with an implicit teacher-student dynamic.
A person new to the practice will suddenly speak up, with amazing courage, inspired by the vulnerability that is palpable in the circle. They are ready to share something vulnerable for them. They open up about their mother’s extreme boundary issues and how it still affects them to this day. They seem to get engagement but not much acknowledgement, so they talk longer.
The “teacher”, also with courage, might delicately suggest interest in the “student’s” feelings as they arise now. The student is quick and happy to receive this — they are on the same team, of course! They notice the group's silence and receptivity. Clearly the group is stuck in an awkward phase from the interruption, but we’ll get this problem solved in no time with another vulnerable, heartfelt share. The student proceeds to heroically rouse the attention of this lost group by talking at length about how they have been trying to get their best friend into confronting their anger and how much it has helped them over the past year. Once the whole group is engaged about this meaty topic, the student thinks, we can finally talk about our difficult emotions and heal the ills of this world.
The teacher (and other experienced circlers), meanwhile, conspire to: model presence; draw attention to the body; move the attention to someone present; interrupt with presence questions; engage with the topic but draw out the here-and-now component; … etc. And on and on it goes.
The student, of course, is not doing anything wrong with respect to facts of their experience. They aren’t lying, for instance. They aren’t even taking up more space than the group wants them to. The student can likely sense that something is off, a conspiracy afoot, but none of the scary propositions in their head about being wrong and excluded are accurate. They are wrong, in fact, on a much deeper level: they are wrong about what matters.
It is unthinkable to them, at this point, that their preciousness does not derive from working hard to say and do the right thing. It takes some continued, uncompromising seeing for inherent perfection to be reflected back to them
This is what makes it so hard to cross into this new relevance. Many things appear, as in the above table, antithetical to what they imagined.
seen through
Stemless takes the ironies further. Instead of slowly unfurling connection from seeing and knowing each other, stemless invites us to open up to subtlety, to instantaneous nondual glimpsing, to seeing through each other to pre-existing non-separation. There is no need to “figure out” or gradually “make sense” of one another.
You may be used to circling or other forms of carefully owned non-violent expression. You may have taken great joy in foregrounding the implicit truths and including it in the connection rather than letting it hang implicitly in the air.
We reverse all of that.
And this means being wrong again — in a way you might not have been for years — about what matters ( ...to this particular practice container, relax.)
It's worth going row-by-row in the table below to get a little taste of this, confusing as it may be:
Doesn’t going backwards twice get you to the same place? Isn’t this regress? Won’t we just be mean to each other?
I can’t tell you the answer. Verbal answers are not what matters here. What matters in this practice is living the fundamental question of stemless: what does it really take, to own your experience?Is it really ownership language or the lack of it that makes the difference? Or is it the tone? Or the intention? Or the energy behind it?
Don’t form an answer to this question. Instead, lean into irony. Every aspect is connected to its opposite. If someone complains “people aren’t paying attention to what matters”, how is the speaker themself offering their inability to stay attentive without support? If someone states “we don’t care about what you think”, how is that a noticing of exclusion, and therefore a tender invitation to connection? How can the background of meaning become more perceptible than the foregrounded words?
Once we as a container can sustain this attention to the background, we open a much higher bandwidth channel: background, “implicit” goings-on can become a method of expression in itself. Recognizing that the speaker is the pot calling the kettle black is no longer a gotcha, no longer hypocritical. Apparent “hypocrisy” is how people display ownership of their experience!
Once the container is firm, everything is backwards, the background is our canvas, and reality is empty… irony becomes the way of expression. Irony is all that decorates empty reality.
Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate, and spring. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles
Don’t try to understand, don’t try to settle. In that moment, you have stopped listening, stopped connecting, stopped owning your experience, initiated violence. This is the only thing stemless needs from you: relax completely.
Relax so deeply, that there is only constant disorientation. Relax so deeply that there is no need for foregrounding, no need for affirmation or proof of seeing and being seen. Relax so deeply, that there is no practice to be had. Relax so deeply, that you can finally afford to live your anxieties. Relax so deeply, that you can begin to practice for the first time, ever deeper into ever subtler ever richer background
Not just zoomed out, but zooming out. To pause at some frame is to fall for that frame, some shared reality, that accommodates only that which has happened till now, rather than accommodating now. Finally live and let die this very dream surrounding these very words into connection that requires constructing no common words no common frames no common attention…
I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now for the first time, seem I to know any thing rightly. The simplest words, — we do not know what they mean
This practice of going huh?!, in this moment, at everything hoarded or established — that is the only path to establishing the company of sharing in reality for good; without hypocrisy, without contradiction, with not a single self-defeating irony at all.
Practice with us online this Sunday, 21st July at 7pm UK.
Shoot us an email to join :) contact@stemless.org