Background (by James Lawley)
The following notes were taken between 23rd and 26th of April 2002 by a participant on a workshop with by David Grove at Long Close Farm in the English Lake District. Long Close Farm was a retreat centre run by Georgina Evers where David Grove held workshops and retreats for over 10 years.
Because David Grove was a ‘serial innovator’ and was always coming up with new ideas, the following information needs to be set in the historical context of the development of his ideas and practice.
At the time these notes were taken, David was beginning his exploration of having people physically move in space. At the same time he was working with the notion of “cosmologies” – general worldviews that we inhabit for periods of our life. These cosmologies had some overlap with David’s earlier Intergenerational Healing process (see Problem Resolution through Metaphor Therapy – Quadrant IV). The following notes show David experimenting with combining these two processes of clients’ physically moving in space to identify and explor their history of worldviews.
In time, David’s exploration of space became formulated and well documented as Clean Space. Cosmologies and the boundaries between them began to morph into Clean Worlds, but to my knowledge, these were never fully codified.
Within a couple of years after these notes were taken, David had moved on to develop a raft of algorithms he called Emergent Knowledge.
Editorial notes
Although we were not present at this workshop, Penny Tompkins and I attended several of David’s other workshops around this time.
I have edited these notes lightly, aiming to keep as much of the original wording that represents David’s discursive style. I have added words where I felt they were absolutely necessary to convey the meaning of a sentence. My words are contained in square brackets. I have italicised the names of key ideas.
There are several words (marked by an * asterisk) in the notes that I believe David made up in an attempt to label his ideas. To my knowledge they were soon abandoned.
We have published these notes, not so much as a teaching tool, but more as part of the historical record of the 25-year evolution of David’s ideas.
Important
It’s vital to see the following as partial notes of an experimental workshop, not a fully worked out process to be copied or applied.
For example, several of David’s experimental questions do not meet my criteria of ‘clean’. David would create a question and then refine it, workshop by workshop, making it cleaner and cleaner. These notes are a snapshot of that process.
Also, David was very aware that when he ‘pulled back time’, as he was doing in this workshop, neither he nor the client could know where a question would take them. Sometimes the client would go though some tough stuff before they got to a redemptive metaphor.
After 20 years of working with clients who had traumatic backgrounds, David was exquisite at calibrating a client’s reactions and having sensitive ways through the tough stuff. We strongly recommend you only work with such clients when you have sufficient experience and supervision.
James Lawley, 16 August 2024
The Long Close Farm workshop April 2002
The advent of space [requires] a unique and particular kind of language. Space is different to the linguistic form. If you ask too many questions it goes into a linguistic form.
Macrogmanics*
Macro – large – large spatial structures [that are] more than a person’s personal space (such as “get out of my face” etc.). Space that doesn’t pertain to a person’s history is a cosmological space [that holds] their cosmological conceptional perception of the world. Universal cosmological structures are outside of a biographical experience.
Recosmologise*
When there is a big defining moment and your whole life changes, where does the old life go? Maybe this has to do with what we are looking for when we have lost a cosmology and feel incomplete.
Within the large domain there can be many smaller domains at different ages and stages of life. And often you have to give up parts of you that were current in a pervious cosmology.
Rogmanics*
The big view – matter to matter – out on the edge of a persons cosmology. [From there they can] break outside of it to get shifts in knowing and knowledge. [This is] what we are looking for in the spaces. It’s found implicit in the space in relation to the cosmology and their place within it.
A meta position [on a client’s cosmological space is like] hanging out at a restaurant at the edge of the universe.
Its hard to get to the boundaries [of] knowledge. [There are] no references. [Rather than] navigation it’s like bumping into the edges of the different cosmologies. Once outside the world that binds a person, they can change many of the characteristics that kept them stuck in their life.
A life can be like a fragile egg and [what’s inside can be] too frightened to come out. And so there are egg-type problems that look for egg-type solutions: its cold so put it in the sun, and then its too hot so put in the shade, and then predators could get it etc. One of the ways to get outside [of the problem] is to pull back [time]: Where did the egg come from before it was an egg? A chicken. [This is] a change in cosmology. The chicken has chicken solutions not egg ones. And the chicken solutions [can be carried across] to egg-type problems.
Cosmologies are like life cycles. If a butterfly is born in the autumn the circumstances are wrong [for it] to exist. Many people that struggle have come here untimely. They have been untimely born. They come out-of-phase. So pull the butterfly back and you find it’s come from a chrysalis which has a great logic and great metaphorical properties that can handle autumn and winter.
Some of the complementary cosmologies have great properties and knowledge and can change the nature of a person’s being.
The way of the noun is the only way to get to the cosmological views. The noun establishes the person’s way of being, their ‘I am ness’:
I feel I am bad.
And what kind of you were you before you were bad?
I was a kid.
The noun will go back and give an ontological development.
The ancestral way is the way of the adjective. If you take the adjective:
And where did that bad come from?
From my dad.
This gives epistemology.
There is an interesting play [between] epistemological space and ontological space. And you have to be in the right space at the right time to know.
It’s different from a healing experience. This shakes up your whole world of who you are. And the consequences, the logic of how your life is, changes. A lot of the problems get worked out with a great deal of ease, without doing interventions.
‘What do you know from there?’ and ‘What do you know from that space?’, are the two questions asked most often. You are in service to the space and not the client. It’s not client-centred. The information does not lie in the centre of the ego or in the oneness but in the area outside. What you pay attention to when working with the syntax of space is very different to a client-centred approach.
The space gives [rise to] not at all what the client originally wants.
There is always amnesia for the different cosmologies and the space releases this.
[Demonstration]
[To the client:]
Find a space where you can look at a mission statement on the wall, about yourself and your life or something about your life connected to the space that you have chosen. [This is ‘Position 1’.]
[The client writes something on a piece of paper and attaches it to a wall.]
Where is that [indicating the mission statement] from where you are now?
How far away?
What do you know about that [indicating the mission statement] from there?
Anything else you know from there?
[To the group:] From that space he is engaged with it already.
[To the client:]
So what else do you know?
Is there another space that you can observe that from?
Get up and walk around.
[When the client stops:]
What else do you know from there?
If you work with the client in the same place then you will get an amount of information and that has a boundary. In Position 1 the client would be very amnesiac and he would not be able to access different information without moving into different spaces. By changing his position then the information is boundless.
Walk around and find another space.
When a person moves position, the previous space holds the [previous] information. The information is anchored in Position 1. So he will look for [another] view and this Position [2 will] come up with more information.
Anything else you notice?
This question only addressed ‘him’ [and not the space] and so it got different information. We don’t want to know what he knows, we want to know what the ‘there’ knows.
So what do you know from there?
The spaces have an agreement with other spaces to allow information to be given freely [but] this will not happen until the space is ready.
Here the client may have information about some things and not about others and so you need to invite them to move again to find information about the bit that’s missing.
Have another walk around the room and find another space that lets you know about ‘……’ [client content]?
So what do you know from there about ‘……’ that was ‘……’ over there [one of the other spaces]?
And you do know ‘……’ and you don’t know about ‘……’ So can you find another space where you do know about what you don’t know?
Sometimes you get a sweet spot where the space has its own intelligence and wisdom and gives up a beautiful amount of information without any induction or words from the therapist.
When we disassociate the information goes from us to the landscape to be kept for later investigation or not, depending on whether we move the client around or not.
Information is stored in different places and different spaces and so we can only obtain this different information by moving the client. He has a limited view in traditional therapy [because it] keeps the client in the same spot.
Leaving the client in the same space limits the wisdom that they have on their life and their struggles. The spaces are more reliable than the client as far as the information is concerned.
Leaving them in one spot will only give a very limited view of their world. The information has to be ‘nailed’ to the spot and then their life cosmology can be laid out in space and in the room. A bit like a re-birth and re-association.
Re-association means that you go to it – the client is picked up and carried across [rather than the information].
It’s like visiting places you have been to in the past. Each time a client re-visits a position it will have evolved a little and the space will give up different information to the information previously known. And [it] may suggest in words another position that has agreed to concur.
Exposition – Out of each position the client expounds knowledge and the words/space speak to his life.
When each position has given up information then get the client to map from each space and get a written statement from each space.
Then move back to Position 1 and ask:
So what do you now know from there?
The observer, the observed and the space in between
In this work the space can hold ambiguity so the client does not have to be split between this and that. The client can walk away from the split parts and leave them in the space.
If a client talks about the other positions from Position 1 he will be unreliable, i.e. he cannot know enough information from that place. He will have to move into the [other] space to be able to give a true and reliable statement.
Clients adapt their space to the size of the room, so it is not necessary to have a warehouse to do this work. The work adapts to whatever space is available.
The [client’s] maps show the perspective and will be scaled to the room and the space.
The information and the space may be very young and so the therapist must be patient and wait to be a good midwife. The space when it’s young can be very protective over its information and can get easily hurt, so respect and time is so very important. It may be useful to get an age on some of the positions.
When we are young we can go into fairy stories, smoke and mirrors, and [we] can trick ourselves and these kind of strategies can take a lot to undo.
Sometimes the client can’t follow their own stuff but by going around the spaces they unravel really knotty surreal landscapes, which had not been possible before. It doesn’t matter that we don’t understand the information presented because the space will hold the information.
The content of the statement is irrelevant because it is only probably relevant from Position 1. You can check back with the mission statement to find out if anything has changed.
Often the biggest cosmology change can be the birth of a sibling, which changes the cosmology instantly. Another change can be moving house and starting junior school.
Sometimes when a client gets to the edge of a cosmology and you bump up [against something] its often bumping up against a different cosmology that belongs to a storybook or a film.
Get a client to map past and present and future, and to map significant events until [they are] born. Or you could simply ask the question ‘Where were you born?’ and ask the client to find a space [for this event]. This sets out a client’s life and allows the therapist to see a whole history laid out in the room and also helps to nail the information to the space.
If you find a client is facing their past then they will have got turned around at some point, maybe through trauma.
Disassociation is more than ‘a plane of bisection’, a person loses their whole cosmology.
[I realised] how much information was missing if a person had their eyes closed [since] the information was in thin air. So to work out a way to keep people present was more important than to pop them into trance.
I worked out how it was more important to go back rather than forward and so the ancestral work was born and that too came out of thin air/space and with the eyes open. It comes out of the crack in between what you know and what you don’t know.
A modern term for hieroglyphics is what we write on our mission statements. And by staring at the text information comes out, and the letters have meaning, and the way we write the letter has meaning, and the omissions and the extra [bits] have meaning. When interrogated these modern hieroglyphics have so much information to give which leads to a journey and the resulting healing.
[The pristine and being untimely born]
When working with these different cosmologies we find that when we disassociate or leave we ‘go back to where we came from’ – and sometimes [that aspect] gets stuck outside [of our body], – in the trees [for example]. So if you cannot be who you needed to be, who you are in this world? Because of trauma there is a part that attempts to go back to where you came from.
So if you come into this world and have experience of the pristine (where you are at one with the world and the world is pristine with you) and if you lose that pristine the world is no longer pristine with you – and this can be trauma.
There can be no pristine when you are untimely born and there is always a feeling that you don’t fit and maybe not wanted. [However,] if you know you are unwanted then you must know what it is to be wanted or you couldn’t know [it was missing].
When you are untimely born there are sometimes occasions when people arrive before they want to and they needed more preparation time before they were born here. They can be wounded in time or in space. They can be born into the wrong family or on the wrong side of the street. So the place which you come into and even the angle that you came in could have been wrong. Space is all about geometry and so the angle of birth can be very important – you can be out of step or out of phase with your family. There can be such profound healing by coming into the world a different way which gives a different cosmology. So [we need] to pull back to the original source where all things are known prior to their coming into this life.
So they present in front of you in your office and maybe they sit and expound or you could get them to put out a mission statement.
From where you are today you probably only know about 20% of you and your history and genealogy. So all you can know from Position 1 is Position 2. When they start to lay out their years then there could be gaps missing that can’t be found from Position 1 and they might have to walk around to find the missing years/events.
Or it may be that the space is not ready to give up the information – something else will have to happen before she is ‘allowed’ to remember.
You could get them to turn around (like the Janus position). When the client leaves a position, he leaves some of himself there, it’s like a reference point. Position 2 is anything known from Position 1 – it could be a movement of a foot, a sigh or a hand movement which will take them into another Position 2.
Then you can pull them back (if they are not sure) and then this again is another position. So if someone says “I’m confused” and their eyes go to the ceiling, then ask if there is another position/space that can know about that confused up there.
Position 3 – pull back linguistically to find the pristine
T–3 [T minus three] is the pristine where there were resources. [To get to them] the therapist has to pull back [time]. Whoever sits in Position 1 does not have access to the pristine . If the client says:
I am not sure
And when you’re ‘not sure’ … (pause) what kind of ‘I’ were you … before you’re ‘not sure’?
Well, I am not sure.
So what kind of you … could you be … when you are ‘well’ … and before you are ‘not sure’?
Position 4
Position 4 is where you were born (although your birth can also be a Position 2). Between this place and Position 1 will be all the clients other ages at Position 2’s. And some Position 2’s could be observational positions.
If a client is facing the way they were born then [you can ask]:
So how did you get from where you were born to there when you are facing this way?
Remember that the you that’s you is a different you before you were born.
And what kind of you were you before you were born?
You might get a ‘phew’ and then you can go back on the sound:
And what kind of ‘phew’ [was that before you were born]?
So if you are here now, where were you born? – behind you, in front of you, underneath you, above you? It must be located in space – in the room outside the room?
It could be ‘a long long way away’ – so then,
What’s the first ‘long’ and what’s the second ‘way’?
So there could be ‘a long way’ and then ‘a long long way’ and then ‘a long long way away’. Separate them out and ask questions about each part:
And how old [could] ‘……’ [be]?
And if that doesn’t go then ask:
What do you know about ‘long way’?
And what kind of ‘long long away’… could that ‘long long away’ be … when it’s a ‘long long away’?
By separating them and moving into each separate space then they will be able to find out, or just the separateness could be enough.
And so there are two ways of doing this ‘nounarising’* it and doing it linguistically or by ‘adjectiving’* and separating and mapping.
Position 5
Position 5 is outside of the world that’s known, before you were born. It may also be pristine, a place of belonging, especially if [you] were untimely born or adopted.
So when you come from Position 5 and you come in at the wrong angle or into difficult circumstances you could lose the pristine. If you come into the world from a moor with a beautiful light and something blocks out the light and provides [or exposes] the fatal flaw.
Don’t refer to ‘you’ [when the client is in spaces] before [they were] born.
Position 6
So there will always be a complimentary position – a Position 6. So if you come in from the light side and it’s flawed then there will also be a dark side. So [if I] take you back and bring you in from the dark side then you come in in darkness and [if] something tries to overshadow you then it can’t.
Position 6 will change the person and the ground [in] their present cosmology.
So coming in from the opposite side, the dark side [in this example] can be redemptive and your life can change.
So [when they] go back to the source and [find] another way in, that [will] give a different way of being.
To look back on ones life from before birth can be very profound.
Short term memory is bound with adrenaline. Long term memory is bound with polypeptides. [After a session these] can change overnight in theta/delta states.
High speed changes don’t [produce] the profound changes that take time – [these need] changes in long-chain polypeptides. If you go to sleep and you do sleep, then changes occur.
Organs can hold memories. [They can] be an alternative memory [since a] mind can’t take everything in [when] overloaded. And then [people] can’t function in a normal way [since] they are already carrying somatic memories. Sensitising events trigger somatic symptoms. Unpacking [these experiences] in space allows the body to function normally.
The space can unpack the symptoms from the body as a psychosomatic symptom which resides within the body. These can be released into the space for the space to redeem them.
The space holds the ambiguity.
When you are split the space lets you drop the stuff. Nothing has to be really real or divided. Then the person can walk away without the split and ambiguity and find another space where they can view them from – without holding them within.
When [they] get [to] a certain spot you can either request [them to] turn around and do the Janus thing. [Or] they may move just very slightly or [you can] pull them back linguistically.
Whenever there is a trauma at a certain age, say 4, there are almost always two different 4’s
So what kind of you were you before ‘trapdoor’ and before that happened?
And when you were ‘……’ where were you?
And is it behind you, in front of you [or to the side]?
So what kind of direction would you have had if this had not happened?
When a client gives a little more information, get them to map it and add to what they have already.
A complimentary cosmology will have different qualities. A Position 6 has different qualities to Position 5. A complimentary cosmology to a movie could be a book that would have the answers to a film’s problems and issues.
When a person dies it’s a grieving about losing both the person and a cosmology. If the person’s cosmology is strong they will be a lot less affected by the death.
It’s important to get all the life history laid out, then when you find a Position 6 there are places where it can go [to]. When you get a Position 6 that’s right and redemptive then it goes quickly on its own rather than ‘yes it could’.
It’s a sacred art and we have no right to think its easy.
Evening [demonstration]
[Follow on session with a client]
Is there a space where you can know about ‘three’ and a space that does not have to hear that sound.
The space gives up linguistic clues for us to hear and be able to move the client on. When there is a lot of detail and a relentless quest then touch each place lightly and move on.
[Sample questions:]
And what else can that space know as you turn around?
And what else could/can that space know/
And as you stand in that space what could that space know?
And what would the space like you to do next?
And what would the space like to have happen?
And is there another space that that space would like you to go to?
Find another space that knows more about ‘……’ than that space.
Find another space that allows you to know about it.
And is there another space that knows something else about ‘……’ or knows something else in a different way?
And is there anything else in this space?
What else would that space like to have happen?
What does that space know?
