CAUTION: NEEDINESS AHEAD

where your wants might be hidden - Nov '24 NEWSLETTER

Nov 30, 2024

Of all the NO-GO zones of human behavior, neediness must be somewhere in the top 3.

It is absolutely prohibited to be needy. You would never want to put that kind of burden on others. You could not make yourself look so weak and desperate. Your reputation depends on your ability to make it happen on your own. If you don’t accomplish something by your own doing, it doesn’t count. Nobody can learn something for you.

You might have nodded your head to one or some or all of the reasons listed above. These reasons are real to you because they make up the fabric of a certain culture that values qualities linked to individuality and success. This culture is expressed by sayings such as “just do it”, “hustle hard” and “put your head down and keep pushing”. In this culture you are expected to grind all day every day, except on those few days labeled ‘holidays’ or ‘vacation days’. And when you’re grinding you better not be troubling others because they are also on their own needing to find their way to success.

Making sure not to trouble anyone is the way of the good boy (or nice girl). It is a strategy for cultural success. You twist and manipulate yourself in all sorts of ways to keep your reputation favorable and growing, as people tell others the stories about how great you are.

It works just as well for your career now as it did when you were a baby learning to win the favor of your parents. Most parents don’t want to deal with a child who demands what he or she wants - who cries and screams when they are not attended to. After all, the parents are working towards their success and they need to keep hustling. They don’t have time for this nonsense. If you were needy, they threw their hands in the air in a tantrum as if to deny any admission of their own incompetence at raising a human, and instead they blamed it on you.

How painful it is to be a baby and be blamed by your caregivers for wanting what you wanted and needing what you needed.

So, you decided that there would be no more of that.. ever again.

The baby decides to smile and nod in agreement to whatever their caregivers say. That way, all will be right in the world. The adults will never need to feeI incompetent because in that culture being an adult means never being incompetent at (or needy about) anything.

Success = no incompetence, no neediness = no being in the here and now with what is.

In the here and now, you are incompetent at anything you have not practiced for many, many hours. If you never raised a child, how could you possibly be competent at it? But you’d try your hardest to look good at it because.. yes, you must be competent. There is no room for anything else.

You pass that on to your children as it was passed to you by your parents.

A group of Men have been gathering each week for many months, within a context of possibility, to discover how to break through their good boy strategies. Instead of talking about it, we decided that we’d practice things. The practice that was uncovered is called “let the needy little boy speak”. For 7-10mins each man goes, one at a time, letting the desperation grow in their body with all of the movements and sounds. As the energy builds it takes them back to the place where the neediness got stuck.

When a Man tries to go behind his good boy strategies the first layer is often a lot of anger about what he did not get. He will yell and point fingers at whoever neglected him.

Then, he will feel fear about asking for anything different because it is not OK to be needy. It is the last layer of defense.

Right behind that fear is the real desperation, the needy, pleading, begging little boy who wanted to say “PLEASEEE, just hold me! Love me! Feed me! Play with me! Don’t go!”. We have found that the word “PLEASE” is a powerful doorway into the needy little boy.

What’s hidden inside the treasure chest of the needy little boy is the mature Man who can connect to what he WANTS and ask for it, vulnerably. It turns out that all the learning to ask for you want, to even connect to what you want, was hidden behind your inability to be needy.

One of the Men who frequently attends, Leonhard Geupel, shared that,

“there are two kinds of needs:
1) unmet childhood needs that cannot be fulfilled in the present moment anymore by anyone except your adult self
2) needs that can actually be fulfilled by someone when you dare to ask for it
no matter which kind of need it is, by vulnerably going into the practice, you learn either to fulfill your unmet childhood needs by yourself (by learning what it really is what you need) or by expressing your needs and thereby letting go of them more and more, you unblock yourself from actually receiving the things that you so desperately desired to be fulfilled from others. Sometimes you do not even need to ask for it. People want to provide that stuff for you when you are not needy anymore. It is like magic.”

It makes sense that if you never let yourself be needy, after shutting down that part when you were very young, you could not possibly practice connecting to what you want. You would avoid reliving the pain of being rejected in your neediness.

These findings have been distilled through practices with only Men. Leonhard also shared that, “it is meeting Men where they are most vulnerable, and this is an incredible, even archetypal, way of feeding Men’s hearts with each other, independently from women.”

In the few practices with Women, there have been differences in the layers that lead into the needy child, but the result of getting closer to what they want, and being able to ask for it, have been similar. If you go for this practice with Women, please share what you find!

So, you can get a group together and try this out for yourself. The doorways into where people get stuck in asking for what they want are incredibly abundant. If you look back in the last 24hrs, you’ll find one. Use that as the beginning of your process. Let the intensity of the sensations in your body grow and grow with movement and sounds. For me, a lot of the movement starts in the vigorous, desperate, almost uncontrollable shaking in my hands. It will probably be different for you, maybe it’s a back-and-forth rocking motion or scratching your head and pulling at your hair.

There is only one rule: do not hurt yourself or anyone else.

When the time is up, take deep breaths in and out through the nose and let this needy child integrate back into your bodies. Breath him or her into your cells. Hold their hand and give them the affirmation that what just happened is OK. We have found that it’s important to take some time after each person goes to share what they discovered and what the other people noticed that might be doorways for their next practice.