A New
Groove
Even if you
don’t have children or grandchildren, even if you’ve already
seen it, see it again: “The Emperor’s New Groove.” In this
movie, Emperor Kuzco wants to maintain his groove, his groove
being all about him. This is akin to your idealized
Enneagram self wanting what it wants (Kuzco represents all of us
at our most entranced). He’s decided to give himself the
birthday present of a water park on a beautiful mountain top,
which happens to be occupied by one of the villages in his
kingdom. No matter. Let the villagers find another home!
There’s a
slight wrinkle in Kuzco’s plan, however. His recently fired
administrator, Yzma
–
in a botched
assassination attempt by her man Kronk
–
turns the
Emperor into a llama. As you watch the movie, let your right
brain associate with the primal (llama) nature of change and
notice how Kuzco gradually develops a new groove, one that
returns him to his previous self but in a more fully human form.
In Kuzco’s association with the village chief and llama herder,
Pacha, you’ll see the evidence for what ancient yogis knew:
Insight is
relatively ineffective in deconstructing habitual behavior… The
very way we breathe holds our patterns in place, “a kind of
habitual, automatic, mechanized process… these ruts in the road…
can only be effectively disrupted by… direct physiological
retraining. First, simply call attention to the process –
without judgment of any kind… second, engage in activities that
intentionally disrupt the pattern….” (Stephen Cope,
The Wisdom of
Yoga)
Those of you
who’ve read our book and
newsletters will
recognize a familiar theme. Your clients change habitual
behavior when you help them experience old patterns in new ways
– not by ignoring or trying to overcome the ways they don’t want
to be, but by embracing, moving with, learning from, and
thus releasing the patterns that have held them captive.
“The genius
of the yogic strategy is the understanding that resistance and
reactivity to patterns just create more problems: the Tar Baby
Effect,” writes Stephen Cope. Remember the Uncle Remus stories?
The more Bre’r Rabbit tried to get free of the doll made of tar
and turpentine, the more stuck he got. Emperor Kuzco runs into
the same problem – the more imperiously and selfishly he acts
(even as a llama!) – the more stuck he gets.
In Chapter 7
of James Zull’s
The Art of
Changing the Brain,
Zull offers a revealing story about the power of right-brain
learning:
“Science
hadn’t been Mary’s thing up to then. My course was a venture in
a new direction, and even though she was bright, she soon hit a
roadblock. The topic was protein folding. Esoteric as it sounds,
it is almost impossible to understand biochemistry without a
grasp of this subject, and Mary really struggled.
Then one day she came into
class more agitated than usual. ‘I figured it out,’ she said, ‘I
finally found the right connection!’
"I laughed out loud when
she explained, ‘Yesterday I saw a duck in the pond by my dorm.
All at once, I remembered when I was a kid on our farm. My
brothers would put a duck in a tub of water that had a cup of
detergent dissolved in it. The duck would begin to swim around,
and then it would sink to the bottom, quacking in terror! It was
gross!’ ‘Don’t you see, Dr. Zull?’ she exclaimed. ‘The duck sank
because the detergent dissolved away the oil on its feathers.
That’s how a duck floats. The oil on its feathers keeps it on
top of the water! That is exactly what happens with protein
folding. The oily parts float away from the water!’
"She was right. Exactly
right! And from that time on, Mary began to excel in
biochemistry. In fact it became her career. That connection
between a duck and biochemistry changed her life!”
I hasten to add, no ducks
were sacrificed for this story. So, fire up your neurons. Go
watch a movie. Groove!
