Wow!  It’s been a really challenging week of posts.  Thank you all so much for your reflections and your courage to practice.  Thank you as well for your insights and your perspectives.

I chose to remain silent as part of my practice this week.  It was very difficult to read the replies and not respond but I feel too often I leap into a response just for the sake of saying something rather than as a considered act.  I also wanted to see what would happen if I practiced exactly what was in each post.  So I sat and held all your words in the frame of bearing witness – to your experiences and to my own.  The latter revealed (again) all my driveness to add to, reflect, correct, challenge, and even rescue.    (Back channel, I did reply to one post and to Kate from The Power of TED just to let her know I had referred to the Empowerment Dynamic in an earlier post.)  It was amazing to experience the anxiety that arose in not responding.

Now that we’ve covered the whole danged Triangle, let me throw in a couple of comments:

Barry, I loved your response to the week and am proud I successfully resisted defending myself – or reassuring your second post.   I agree that the flow of a relationship is hard to capture in a categorical model – and that is exactly the problem I have with the Drama Triangle.  I also don’t think Buddhist philosophy has the market cornered in replacing therapy – transactional or otherwise.  I’ve said it in sangha often that meditaiton is not therapy and meditation without dealing with the pragmatic issues of things like being in an abusive relationship can lead to spiritual bypassing.

Chong Go Sunim, Leslie: thank you for the comments on the shodo.  Yes, it is on white paper but I can’t seem to make it come out white unless it’s backed.  I didn’t have any particular emotional awareness at the time; these are still part of the 108buddhas project.  I was hoping for a buddha script that reflected rescuing in some way; I did have an ah-hah moment when I put the two ‘wings’ above the lines.

All of you who shared your experiences with aspects of the Drama Triangle and your practice of the 3 Tenets, a deep bow for your willingness to leap into the void and be liberated!

Thank you for practising,

Genju