Look. I’m going to be straight with you. I don’t want you to believe a word that’s in this book. Not until you try it out for yourself.

And you know what? I’m not going to give you any reasons or justifications for believing anything I tell you. Again, I want you to use your own direct experience as your reference point. Because that’s all you need. Everything else is a distraction.

Now I have to be blunt. Science has achieved some amazing things in the past hundred years. But when it comes to psychology and the brain, we’ve been led down the proverbial garden path. We are missing some very important and fundamental truths about human nature, and the way of the mind. And because we’re missing them, we are struggling far more than is necessary.

One very personal result of this misguided direction is that 20-plus years ago, I was diagnosed with something called bipolar disorder. This “disorder” was considered a disease I had, responsive only to medication. Without the meds, the prognosis was grim, with a high percentage of suicides, and a near certainty of progressive deterioration in quality of life. If anything, this approach is even more entrenched today, and has crept insidiously even into the diagnosis and “treatment” of very young children.

I can vouch for the grim life-on-the-edge of this pattern with the label of bipolar disorder. But I decided that the medicalized explanation was suspect. Which made the meds suspect. I went off my lithium after only ten days and committed myself to examining this thing from the inside out.

The result? Seven years later I unlocked the chains that bound me, and stepped completely free of the “disease.” It took me one very long day of applying some very unique and innovative techniques which I will share with you here. (That’s all – less than 24 hours!!) And it led to my constructing from scratch (over the subsequent 14 years) a full-blown theory of the mind and a methodology for working with it.

I’m going to give you that theory and methodology here, in as succinct a form as I can manage. I know you have a lot on your plate, and too much information to digest. So I’m going to keep it simple.
I won’t be tying this work in with recent MRI studies or cognitive research. I won’t be cramming it full of anthropological tie-ins or pop culture references. I won’t be citing articles or books or websites. Although I could do all of that.

Instead, I want to tell you this: What you are about to read could have been discovered and applied five thousand years ago, without the benefit of any of our advanced knowledge. This is low-tech. You can teach it to a child, or to someone with no education. All it requires is the capacity to turn your attention inward and to notice what you experience there. It requires reflection, introspection, self-examination.

Now introspection has a bad rap in the field of psychology. It was abandoned as a legitimate investigative tool about a hundred years ago when John Watson trumpeted the supremacy of behaviorism. He was right – to do science, you need to have a reproducible way to observe and report and compare observations. And introspection as it was practiced then (and still is today) was appallingly loose and unreliable to do the duty.

The discoveries I share in this book are the product of a highly structured form of observation that eliminates the slack and makes for a highly reliable tool. Structured introspection, leading to the introspection of structure. I will introduce the term here which I would like to propose to those who might be motivated to create an academic science out of this: phenomenological psychotopology. Those with that interest and aptitude will find this term fits the work very well.

But back to you, my average reader. The only thing you need to establish the veracity of this work is your own consciousness. It is all available to you. To anyone. This is universal human truth.

So all I ask is that you give it a try. Discover for yourself whether what I say works for you too. One caveat: some of the psychiatric medications in use today, particularly those prescribed for bipolar disorder, knock out functions of the brain necessary for the conscious experience of feeling necessary to do this work.

All I can say is, find professional help in getting free of the meds if at all possible. And start as soon as you can to begin to retrain your awareness to notice the structure of your own being, and to take charge of it in the company of your peers.

Hello. I'm going to keep this simple; just something to get started. I'm sure you'll have questions. If so, use the contact link on the navigation bar above, or call me at 206-407-3296.

Being-With^TM is a set of practices I've developed over the past 15 years.

• One practice, Being-With/Feeling, focuses attention inward on the actual, felt experience of feeling states. The practice channels feeling awareness into tangible imagery. Through that imagery, the practice enables a core release of long-standing patterns of mood, reactivity, judgment, addiction, and other dysfunctions. This practice is highly structured, intensive, and typically facilitated by someone trained in the practice.
• A second practice is a more casual dialog between peers. This practice, Being-With/Dialog, involves a conversation, trading attention and focus back and forth between partners. Each takes turns focusing on their current inner experience while the other asks simple questions to direct attention away from belief and thought and toward the felt experience of being. The result is a profound intimacy and moments of self-discovery and release.
• Other practices involve more creative applications of the focused awareness found in the first two. Being-With/Story engages with metaphor and story, interacting creatively with scenarios and symbolic images. Being-With/Presence enhances awareness and control of personal presence for more powerful performing arts and public speaking performances. More practices are yet to be developed.

All of The Being-With Practices follow the three principles of evolutionary transformation I discovered in my groundbreaking work with feeling.

1. Embrace what is.
2. Invite what wants to be.
3. Affirm what's next.

These three simple rules represent a sea change in the way of western civilization. Over the past few millenia, we have become accustomed to partioning the world into good and not-good. Those things we deem not-good, no matter whether they are inside our own hearts or in a faraway land, we set ourselves up to oppose. In our "being-against," we seek to control, manipulate, repress, obliterate, or isolate the enemy.

The time for this paradigm has come to an end. The new paradigm, "Being-With," affirms the goodness inside every portion of the universe. This Being-With philosophy holds that suffering is an illusion born of limited consciousness. In being-with that which has been rejected as not-good, we discover that it is an integral part of the whole. In reclaiming its relationship with all that is, this banished part is re-integrated, and our awareness expands to include more of the wholeness that surrounds and includes us.

I'll have much more to say about all of this...