Caught in the quicksand’s of conflict with other people? Unable to realize your hopes or quiet your fears?
Here are thirty-four stories of everyday conflict situations presented so that readers may ask themselves, “How do I handle, in a new way, the differences between myself and others that have become antagonisms?” Will Stillwell and Jere Mooman offer potential transformations: comments, proverbs, questions, even cartoons that are intended to halt suction and create new possibilities.
“Under the sway of either ambition or fear I hone in on only my own narrow set of needs. And as I try to control the outcomes, other people’s lives can seem to get in my way, or can seem irrelevant.” “I want to forgive myself if I blow it. I want to grow in my appreciation of the way of comedy in dealing with conflict.
Our human origin is at moments of doubt, mystery, and fear. That we may be granted freedom from our doubts, mysteries and fears, we have nurtured and grown our understanding, our conscious living.
Will Stillwell contends that in the West we understand through three major logic’s (or ways of caring for world’s life). His work addresses these ways of conscious knowledge, their differences, their successes and failures. And Old Man Dreams also whispers for our living that flows along in in completing ways—our living that we do not understand, that is fantastic, not caged by our thought.
How do these absurd bedfellows—our marvelous conscious “existence” and fathomless non-conscious “insi-stance”—lie together in human living?
The meditations here are Will Stillwell’s attempt to think about and bring forward an experiencing of unconditional positive regard, congruence, and empathy.
“In psychotherapy as in music, too much technique is never the problem. The problem is non-integrated technique where the technique shows itself as raw will.”
“The psychotherapist then, is a person who re-tells the client’s story so the client can hear it and find its truth as a unique and powerful story; to find its truth as a way (a life) full of wonder.”
Carl Rogers’ way of being in working with people has inspired many in the generations that he taught. Will Stillwell’s discussions of the ‘core conditions’ in dialogues with Ernest Meadows, Maria Bowen, and Bob Lee are meetings with three people carrying on this tradition: deepening to their own visions, centering to their own-persons.
Most of my time I distract, tangled into self-assigned tasks an’ things whose thrill at accomplishment is less, less than that instinct instant our pulse is fingered, blood courses semen, flesh, eggs, and stones, smiling perfect realization that can never hold still
Every thing rises from intimacy sticky candy on our fingertips.
