The Direction of Intention

91.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others.

Remember, it goes like this: empowered people empower others. How powerful must you be to free yourself of the need to diminish others? What if your worth was no longer in question? Why wouldn’t you choose to be power-full? What if power was not something you strive to achieve but something you allow to be seen.

It is like peeling back the layers of time to reveal a forgotten city. It has always been there. What’s the resistance to being seen?

From C. Otto Scharmer: “Resistance is the force that keeps our current state distant and separate from our highest future potential. Resistance comes from within. Resistance has many faces and tends to show up where the weakness is greatest.”

Of course, the weakness to which he refers is fear. Think about it. Resistance is a force driven by fear. What keeps your “current state” separate from your “highest potential?” Where is your highest potential located if not already inside of you? Is it somewhere out there in the distant future? Is it a thing to possess (as our language implies)? Or is it a process, a way of being in the world? What would you need to be able to reveal your highest potential right now?

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90.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

When Brother Joseph was a young man he saw a woman die. She was a wealthy woman, dressed in a fine dress, hair impeccable, her fingers encrusted with diamonds and gold. He watched the life leave her body. He watched all of her investments in her status and image and story slip away. He imagined that when she started her day that morning she had a full list of very important things to achieve and plans for the next day, too. She closed her eyes and none of it mattered. He said that her jewelry seemed so empty as to be silly. Her death had a profound impact on his life.

He was no longer confused by what matters and what does not matter. He chose a life of service.

I was young when he told me the story of the woman dying. I was too young to fully grasp that I would die someday. That is no longer true. On days that I am angry, dark, drowning in self-pity or otherwise invested in the Drama of my story, I think about this woman dying and I wonder if my heart stopped beating would this storm inside of me matter? Is this how I want to spend even a single moment of my life?

There are cultures on earth (now mostly disappearing) that know the importance of looking at your own death. The ritual passage from adolescence to adulthood is meant to make young people journey into their source place and face their mortality so that they can be of service to the community and not consumed by self-interest. One is not considered an adult until initiated into the greater story.

The idea that empowered people empower others is not so strange in traditions that understand the need for initiation, in the mind that recognizes service to others not as self-denial but as life’s fulfillment. The idea that empowered people empower others is not so strange when you are clear on what matters and what is merely passing.

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89.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

My mother pulled me aside and whispered to me, “you might want to keep your ideas to yourself,” she pulled me closer saying, “you could get hurt here.” I thought she was kidding until I looked up and saw her eyes. She was genuinely concerned! I was in Olathe, Kansas for my nephew’s wedding and most of the wedding party and guests were conservative and fundamentalist Christian; I am neither of those.

At my home in Seattle I am surrounded by people who love to debate ideas. In fact, a disagreement of opinion is, to my friends, seen as a good thing, a necessary thing. Multiple perspectives are valued because ideas are seen as fluid and not fixed, truth is relative and so a healthy, hearty debate is essential. When I leave my community, I am slow to remember that there might be a different set of expectations; one in which concurrence is the glue that binds and speaking an opposing point of view is not welcome.

My mother’s caution took me by surprise. I looked around the room and saw my family, people I love though have rarely agreed (I have always been more liberal than my clan), I saw joy and laughter and celebration. I was invited to attend and did not perceive the danger that she did. Was I welcome as long as I kept my perspective to myself? This was her danger story, not mine.

This was a wedding, a ritual bigger than politics or points-of-view. A time when a community gathers to give witness and support to those they love at the beginning of their passage into a new identity of togetherness.

It is so easy to be in the bubble of agreement. We surround ourselves with people that are similar – my community is in agreement about the need for multiple perspectives – that is the agreement that binds us. We have conversations within a community of like minds. It is easy to agree when surrounded by others who share your belief. My mother’s caution was my cue to ask questions, to remind myself not to assume that I know what anyone thinks or believes. I don’t know but I am curious to ask.

More and more I want to shout, “Step out!” “Ask!” What keeps us in this game of tug-of-war and out of creating a new identity together? Diverge a little bit. Challenging your assumptions may help you see some things anew.

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88.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

The story is always yours to tell and you can tell it in any way that you want. It can be a tragic tale, a tale of woe, or it can be a story of opportunity and deeper truth. It can be embarrassing, a story of shame or defeat or it can be a story of learning.

The path of mastery is always a path of learning. A path of mastery has no true arrivals because the focus and expectation is invested in the quality of the walk not the place of arrival.

In relationship, there is an equation between boundaries and the capacity to story a path of mastery. The path of mastery begins when personal boundaries are established and clear. If you are invested in fulfilling the need of another – or trying to fulfill your needs through the eyes of another, you are dancing for an outcome, a reaction or response. You are confusing your needs with the needs of the other. That is enabling, a bargain that will eventually lead to collapse. Ana-the-wise calls this “vampiring.”

Clear boundaries will shift your focus from what you get from someone to what you bring to the relationship. When your focus is on what you bring you are walking a path of mastery. Only then are you capable of telling a story of growth and learning.

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87.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“The mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work unless it’s open.”

Sometimes I think we are living in one big episode of Survivor. Nothing is what it seems; everything is a performance intended to drive ratings. As Tom once asked, “What are we pretending to not know?”

Maybe we no longer know we are pretending.

Lora watched a news opinion show and a pundit played multiple examples of political and business leaders using the word “socialism” as a label meant to scare people or brand an opponent. What became clear was that the politicians flinging the phrase around had no idea what socialism is and what it is not. The meaning of the word was irrelevant as long as fear and loathing was the result.

Language is powerful and we play with it like a child who just found the key to daddy’s gun closet.

A few years ago JP was on a chef competition show and was outraged that the producers tried to pit the contestants against each other. “It was ugly,” he said, “they did everything they could to make us hate each other.” “What did you expect?” I asked. “I thought we were there to cook!” he shouted. “Did you think you had to go on television to cook?”

We watch the car race for the crashes, not to see who first crosses the line.

When language is not recognized to have any power it is easy to confuse news with entertainment, substance with diversion. We confuse those things within ourselves, too; what you bring to life gets lost in the pursuit of what you can get. You reasons for doing things get muddled.

In fact, we are witness to what happens: conflict is common in our narrative; entertainment trumps the essential because we have trouble sorting which is which. Conversations happen within communities of thought, not between them. And then we wonder why we are so polarized, so incapable of dealing with the challenges of our time. Take a look inside yourself – are you as divided within yourself as the Democrats and the Republicans? Doesn’t your inner judge sound as rigid as the tea party?

Blame is easy and always makes for good ratings but not much else.

This culture is not happening to us. We create it again and again everyday. I often wonder if the national dialogue drives the internal monologue or vice versa?” We are not as separate as we’d like to believe nor are we as impotent as we like to pretend.

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86.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

When I was young I waited until the sun went down to paint. I waited for my parents to sleep, my brothers and my sister to settle and then I would get up and begin to work. My muse lived at night in the quiet spaces. I came alive when the rest of the world slept.

I had a wall in my bedroom that I painted with images from magazines or from my imagination. I worked in black and gray and white. I loved the limitations and the extremes of such a limited palette. I painted Charlie Chaplin and a Turkish marauder. I painted over them with a log cabin, my imaginary sanctuary in my imaginary woods. I told myself stories of living there as I painted and repainted the same scene. I loved the night and what I was able to do and feel.

The daylight always came like an assault. I could not focus with all of the movement and sound, my mind was pulled this way and back again like a game of crack-the-whip. To survive, I developed the skill of being able to disappear into drawings. I could contain the chaos in the movement of my pencil and channel it into an image emerging in front of me; sometimes I felt like I controlled the image but most times I knew it was coming through me; I was like the pencil, useful for the revelation of image and story though not the source. I didn’t think about it.

I had the eyes to see magic until I started to compare and to invest in what others saw. I had not yet learned that what they saw had nothing to do with what I created. They were creating something entirely different because their eyes were not my eyes. Despite years of evidence to the contrary, despite my love of the night and the feeling of revelation, despite knowing how to disappear and reappear, I began to think about it and so I doubted my capacity and assigned it a label: not good enough.

Not good enough always leads to a second label: fraud. Fraud is like a heavy older brother that sits on your chest until you can’t breathe. Fraud leaves you alone if it thinks you really are going to die – when your face turns read from too much doubt and lack of breathing, Fraud let’s up on you a little bit.

Fraud gets off of you when you stop trying to see through other people’s eyes. Just like an older brother, Fraud will let go when you stop fighting. Fraud has no fun unless you are resisting. This is what I learned: everyone has the eyes to see magic and your magic seeing eyes will return when you peel off the labels, let go the investments and breathe for awhile. The sanctuary doesn’t go away, you do. Choose to come back.

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85.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“Criticizing is easy, art is difficult.” Anonymous

What holds you back? What is the wall you bump into that reminds you that, “You are not fulfilling it?” Whatever “it” is. Is it something that holds you back or something you can’t quite reach? The verb is important. Is it the idea that lives just beyond your fingertips, like the word you want to use but can’t quite call up? The play you want to write but you hold only fragments in your hands; the character who wants to speak through you but like a wild animal lurks just beyond the trees. You know it is there but cannot coax it out. Its eyes stare back at you and though you cannot see them you know they are there. You feel it.

You catch a glimpse of ‘it’ every so often, enough to tease you forward, enough to keep you reaching for it or pressing against it or listening for it to call your name. The verb, remember the verb.

Before I go through security for my flight home Patti gives me Just Kids, the book by Patti Smith about her early years in New York and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. All the while reading it I feel “it.” I “feel” it and it makes me uncomfortable and delighted and enticed to open to “it.” Enticed. Open. Delighted. Uncomfortable. I feel it. I am re-minded.

I am reminded that to complain about life is easy. To blame is as easy a falling down. To live it, to act on it, to act in it, to act as it, to dance with it and trip with it; to love it, that is more difficult. It requires standing up. It asks you to choose. To choose it. To participate. That is art. And, if you are present to it, it will always be just beyond your capacity to grasp it. That’s what keeps you moving.

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84.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.” George Santayana

Memory is a construct. It is a story that changes in the re-membering. It is not fixed in time. It is not truth. It can be contradictory as what once seemed so difficult now is storied as the most potent learning experience of your life. What once seemed so important in the retelling is insignificant. The smallest gesture can leave the greatest mark. The sequence of events is malleable. Just as eyewitness testimony is proving to be untrustworthy, your eyewitness testimony about your past is equally unreliable. You create your past again and again and again.

Even so, we root our limitations deep in experiences from the past, experiences that we claim to be true. Some of the limitations we impose on ourselves are useful as locators: we know who we are by the rules we maintain and the boundaries we embrace. Some of the limitations are unnecessary, shackles we embrace none-the-less. We invest in our pain and argue for our confinement.

Memory is necessarily a paradox.

Change happens when you can change your story, when you can change your relationship to the story you claim as your past. Growth is not possible when you hold onto the story as you’ve always named it. Growth happens when you can open your hand and let go of the story that says, “you can’t…” or “you’ll never be….”

What if the story you tell yourself is neither true nor false? What if it is simply a story with multiple interpretations and you get to choose which version you claim? What would it take for you to open your hand and let go of the old story?

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83.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Rualdo was born in Guatemala and as a young man had to flee his country for giving voice to his political ideas. He would have disappeared like so many of his friends and colleagues had he stayed.

Recently, Rualdo and I were taking a walk and he asked me why Americans were so silent. From his point of view, when the governor of a state (Michigan) attempts to suspend the collective bargaining rights of the people, it is a dangerous precedent and all of the people of the United States need to stand up and support the working people of Michigan. He is troubled by the national haranguing teachers are subject to when there is no political will to actually address the system. His list of examples of complacency in the face of corruption and abuse was long and disheartening.

“Why don’t Americans stand up for themselves?” he asked. “Why are you so silent?”

I had two responses. I told Rualdo what my dear friend Roger once said: Americans will be complacent as long as our televisions and dvd players worked. We will defend to the death our right for distraction. And second, we are too busy fighting amongst ourselves to fight for ourselves. The Giddy Masses is woven into the national fabric.

More importantly, Rualdo’s question brought me to consider something that has a deeper resonance for me: resistance to “what is” is not very useful unless it opens your eyes to what you want to create; creation is movement toward something, resistance is movement away from something. I told Rualdo that I believe we are silent because we don’t know what we want to create. We are inert because we don’t have the experience of “we.” A common narrative binds communities and our narrative is one of division.

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82.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Generally people withhold their voice for two reasons: because of what their thoughts will reveal about them or because with giving voice comes responsibility.

I do not underestimate the difficulty in reclaiming your voice once you’ve silenced yourself; vulnerability and ownership of perspective are easy to talk about but difficult to live. Patterns of silence and suppression are wicked to address until you realize that your actions in the world are a kind of voice, a form of practice. Silence and inaction are clear statements of belief. You are giving voice all of the time by what you choose to do.

One of the major stories most of us walk into is the story that we have to be this or that for others. For some reason, meeting the expectations of others is more important than meeting our own expectations. It is safer to be silent until the silence suffocates you. I suspect at the base of it all is a variation of the “I’m not good enough” story. I remember swearing to myself, after one particularly shame filled slap, that I would never give voice to my thoughts again. I mistook the slap for a statement of no-value. It took me a long time to recognize that the slap came because what I said was honest; I said what others were thinking and could not say. The only true shame from the experience was in my silencing of myself.

Voice-less-ness comes from practice. Keeping your thoughts to yourself is a learned skill. The opposite can also be true: what would happen in your life if you began the practice of sharing your thoughts? What would you need to change to feel safe enough to make strong offers regardless of how other people perceived your thoughts and ideas?

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