about Kye

Over the past year, I’ve been helping:

• the head of a private school bring his organization safely through the economic meltdown…
• a nonprofit director find what was most important to her and her organization, in the blizzard of work that was overwhelming her…
• a philosopher get clear week by week on the next key points he’s reaching for…
• a corporate employee shift step by step towards a new job in the nonprofit world…
• a songwriter get hold of the bones of a new song, and the bones of a life that has room for writing songs consistently.

What’s the common ground here?

I work in the gap between what is, and what could be. Here lie hopes, dreams, possibility, yearning, fear, resistance, not knowing what to do, insight, freedom, decision, action, and the growth of wisdom. It’s the realm of change. It’s where new things come into the world, that never were before. It’s where things can be better. It’s where beauty is created.

The Chinese have a saying: “may you live in interesting times.” Of course we want to live in interesting times instead of being bored by the same-old-same-old. But at the same time, often in interesting times we don’t know what to do, or if we know what we don’t know how. And sometimes our lives depend on figuring it out. It can be terrifying.

Thirty years ago, I was learning the ins and outs of programming, painting, and printmaking. I had no idea at the time, that underneath those seemingly night-and-day pursuits, there was a deep commonality. I was learning how you work in the gap.

As a programmer, I was learning about debugging. I was learning how to pursue a form that hasn’t quite formed yet. I was learning how to think logically and to see the nearly-invisible but critical, and how to invite inspiration.

At the same time, as an artist I was learning how to reach toward beauty and create it, how to recover from accidents, and about resistance, the bedfellow of anyone who lives in the gap.

I spent the first seven years of my working life as a computer consultant. I was a troubleshooter–my clients would call at their wits’ end because things had broken down and they were dead in the water. My job was to figure out why, and then fix the problem.

I was good at it: but I hated it. When I delved into why, I discovered that fixing machines was like solving a jigsaw puzzle. It didn’t feel very meaningful, in a world which had much bigger problems than an accounting program that wouldn’t work.

So, nearly twenty years ago now, I shifted my focus. I started working with people, instead of machines. And I loved it. Because a machine isn’t creative; a machine isn’t free; a machine doesn’t yearn towards a vision of what might be. A machine dosn’t know about beauty. A machine can’t see ugliness, either.

But people can.

It is our humanity that opens the gap, and bridges it. It is our capacity to experience, and to work skillfully with our experience. It is our capacity to feel, and to actively care.

Many of my clients are practical visionaries: highly imaginative & creative, competent, ethical, passionate, usually deeply spiritual. They have an innate respect for the beauty and dignity of human beings.

Often, their work in the world is an outgrowth of a desire to change something so that people (and life in general) can flourish a little more. Such work is inherently very challenging and can seem impossible at times. I help them see new possibilities and perspectives, ways forward with both practical integrity and soulfulness.

I help my clients keep finding the answer to the question, ‘How does one live so that this moment is part of a life which is meaningful as a whole? How does one live with integrity here, and now, as exactly this person? How does one go about staying innocent, heart open and uncompartmentalized, when life becomes overwhelming in its demands, apparently contradictory, or unbearably painful?’

I’m also a Certifying Coordinator for The Focusing Institute. I’ve taught in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Europe, and Japan. Between 1998 and 2004 I collaborated in the development of Thinking At the Edge (TAE–a method of forming concepts grounded in what you know implicitly from working in a particular field) with Eugene Gendlin, the University of Chicago philosopher and psychologist who originated the concept of the felt sense. We continue to work together closely.

I’ve been meditating since the late 1960’s and have been studying Daoism since the mid-1970’s. I’ve studied taiji, qigong and other means of exploring the body’s capacity for elemental movement–the way that movement wells up just so, and if unblocked, arcs out along this exact line.

I continue to teach Focusing–especially as an aid in bridging the gap between what is and what can be, and also the gap many people feel between spiritual practice and daily life. And I teach deep listening as a contemplative practice in its own right.

…and I continue to draw, and to paint in egg tempera. My goal as a painter is to capture and share those luminous ephemeral moments which I find so ravishing–and also the feeling of the big space which is so close at such times.

I have two grown sons.