The Direction of Intention

74.

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.

Sometimes it is good to go back to the beginning and reconnect with your original idea, your reasons why. I went back to school when I was pushing 40 because my understanding and experiences as an artist had little resonance or relevance to my community. I was puzzled at how important and transformational the work was to the artists (myself included) but not so much for the greater community. I’d worked in many theatre companies, I had shown many paintings, and the work, no matter how good, had only a fleeting impact on the audience.

Artists have long, meaningful conversations about the importance of their work – raising awareness of issues or making statements about current events. Audiences come, enjoy and very much appreciate the work, and then go home, the deeper relevance of the piece having bounced off and disappeared. The people that stick around to engage in the deeper conversation are other artists.

Artists are like missionaries – they so believe in their offer to the world that they work endless hours usually for no or little money, they walk into the dark corners of society to see what is there and maybe shine a little light. They make terrific sacrifices, are eternally hopeful, often angry and frustrated, they celebrate each other and inflate each other with importance because the community has no real way of valuing them or their offer. Artists believe they are helping to create a better more conscious community.

I went back to school because, one day while painting I listened to a taped lecture by Joseph Campbell and he said, “…our mythology is dead. You just have to read the newspaper to see it….” I knew he was right and had no idea what he meant. So I went looking for some answers.

This is part of what I found: artists are the keepers of the common narrative. Artists are the keepers of the community identity – they are not inventors of the new, they express what is. When a community breaks down it loses its narrative. Without a cohesive narrative it doesn’t know what to do with its artists so it abstracts them from the center and moves them to the margins. It assigns a new purpose – like making profit – and if the art can’t fulfill the new purpose, it relegates the artists to the charity line (literally, non-profit status). And, without a center, the community cannot hold together and begins to do violence to itself. Joseph Campbell was right.

The artists continue to strive for a cohesive common narrative without regard to how the community identifies itself or the artist’s work.

It is not without reason that I believe that artists – and we are all artists when we know how to see – are truly powerful people capable of inspiring true power in others.

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73.

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

[continued from 72]

When rooted in fear the mind will try to control the body’s experiences. That is akin to trying to reverse the flow of a river.

Actually, as I understand it, in a fear-story the mind confuses the body’s needs with its own. The body is not concerned with hiding or masking or changing itself. Mind will create outlandish arguments for control, lots of rules, and tales of lack and shame and need. It will tell you to eat even if you are not hungry (it will tell you not to eat even if you are starving!). It will convince you that fulfillment will be yours if you buy one more pair of shoes. It will wrap stories of good or bad around the most natural of impulses. It will have you rejecting yourself, ashamed of yourself and have you snarled in a collision of justifications, comparisons and judgments. All of those stories are about mind’s need not bodies experience.

A mind rooted in fear needs constriction and the illusion of control to preempt an impulse and predetermine an experience. My friend Roger is a great studier of people and he once told me that denial is among the most powerful human characteristics. Denial of what you feel, denial of what you see, denial of what you need,…. Robert Fritz writes that identifying a goal is the easy part, the tough part is identifying with any reality where you are in relation to where you want to be because we deny so much of our experience. We seem incapable or unwilling to see, “what is….”

How can you possibly know where you are if you are denying what you feel, what you see, what you need? How can you possibly create fulfillment in the future if you are unwilling to stand fully in the present? How can you support the fulfillment of others if you are denying yourself the fullness of your experience?

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72.

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

[continued from 71]

When the mind is searching for an answer it needs a focal point – it needs to attach to something. It needs to make a story. It buys self-help books. It looks for answers in experts and gurus and teachers and preachers and therapists and astrologers and the I-Ching. It seeks answers in the eyes of its lover and its friends. It will turn over every stone, try every diet, chant every affirmation, make every accusation, and grasp onto anything that hints at an answer only to find the answer empty, to think it caught the prize only to discover air in its hands. Slowly the story changes.

A mind seeking answers is usually a mind rooted in a fear story. Fear is like a drug; once the mind attaches to it the mind needs it – fear makes for an easy story because a mind on fear will always play the Victim in the story. It eats it up! Victim is a juicy role and easy to play.

The problem/opportunity with a fear story, like all other drugs, is that fear eats what attaches to it. Consume fear and it will consume you. When the price of the Victim story becomes too high to pay, the story changes.

Eventually the mind recognizes that the answer it seeks is not out there but in here and the focal point becomes the mind itself. A mind focusing on itself enters a warrior phase (when the mind goes to war with itself). Eventually recognizing that there is no answer, no one need be right or wrong, no one need lose or win, the mind relaxes. All of that seeking only to find that all roads return to your Self! There is surrender all the way around, the weapons of comparison and perfection are placed in museums. It is at this place that the focal point of the mind returns to the body/experience. No interpretation necessary! The story fog dissipates; the mind releases the zany notion that it can control, and seeing returns.

The Victim. The Warrior. The Seer. All are necessary roles. Most of us are playing Victims or at war with ourselves. Where you place your focus will determine the play you are performing. What is your play?

[to be continued]

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71.

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

Today my mind, body and I stand at the confluence of 4 rivers of thought: Krishnamurti, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Campbell and Don Miguel Ruiz. Each thought stream runs together into a big thought-ocean that goes something like this (put on your waders):

The mind must attach to something – it must have a focal point, it must make a story because the mind needs “to know.” The mind’s need is to know. Knowing is locating (who I am, why I am here, what is mine to do). Without ‘knowing’ the mind does not feel safe. The idea of safety is a byproduct of knowing.

Note: writing this is a great example of the mind’s need to know.

The body has a different set of needs that require no explanation. The body needs no focal point because the body is a focal point. The body does not need to know, it needs to experience, to feel.

Initially, the body/experience comes first and the interpretation is second. Later, after expectations are constructed and words are acquired, the patterns of expectation and interpretation can trump even the most potent experience. There is a clear warning sign that you are no longer experiencing life: it is moment you think your life is routine.

It is a trick of language that these aspects, body and mind, are identified as separate, distinct. They are not. They are one action: the body responds to the thought, the mind responds to the impulse. Ignore the body’s impulse (or judge it) and the mind will go crazy with debate. We create endless challenges for ourselves by entertaining the idea that mind is somehow separate from body, that body can be separate from mind.

People in business like to claim that they can compartmentalize their feelings, which simply means they have deluded themselves into thinking that their feelings and emotions have no impact on their thinking; it is pretense to claim that any aspect of human interaction is objective. Everything, even the most concrete data, requires interpretation, context and point-of-view.

It would be more appropriate if our words for body and mind were verbs. It would be more appropriate if there was one verb for both body and mind or perhaps hundreds of nuance verbs, like the multitude of Eskimo words for snow. There is nothing static in either body or mind. We are processes. We are relationships. We are fluid and not fixed.

Since we are convinced that they are distinct why not declare, “What a perfect team!” A dynamic body rich in experiences together with an expansive mind that needs a focal point in order to perpetually create a story of wonder!

[to be continued]

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70.

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

I was rereading the text of Amy’s thesis research and was taken (again) by this thought: there is no correlation between belief in your abilities and creative output. There are countless world-class artists and performers that do not believe in their talents, they have no faith in their capacity to create, they become violently ill every night prior to taking the stage. But, what they do have is a potent moment of “Aha!” They have a star that they must follow and they will follow it through the swamps of doubt and the deserts of despair. All that is required is to act and to keep acting on the “aha.” No belief required!

At what point does experience become belief? How many times do you need to get up on the stage and perform to great applause before you believe in your capacity to perform? How many experiences do you need to catalogue before you change your construct?

The short answer is, “none.”  In asking the question I recognize that experience has nothing to do with it. How you story the experience is what matters. It is more relevant to flip the question and ask, “At what point does belief become experience?”

If your point of view is built upon the idea that you are incapable, then you will see success as a fluke. If your point of view is that you are broken, then you will find fragments no matter how beautiful the day. If you have embraced the point of view that you are fat, then you are very capable of starving yourself to death; you will always see what you believe.

For most of us, the moment of “aha” is the notion that we can be whole. And, so we follow that idea through doubt and despair and fleeting moments of fulfillment. What matters is that we act on the “aha.” And keep acting on it. Practice the “aha.” And then one day, if we are lucky, we see that wholeness is not something we find, it is not something we give, no amount of experiences will prove it or contradict it. Wholeness is a birthright. Wholeness is.

No belief required.

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69.

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

Whether he knows it or not, Alan Seale has taught me to pay attention to the energy, the feeling in my body, and not the story. It is the flip of how most of us engage with life. Take a look around (or pay attention to your self) and you’ll notice that your thinking gets all of the attention and the feeling – if noticed at all – is demeaned, diminished, discounted or denied.

It is a very useful practice to pay attention and work with how you feel before you attach to what you think. In fact, when stressed or stepping into the dark side, thinking is generally nothing more than a big dog barking in your head. Attaching to what you think almost always leads to some form of internal debate – and inner debate is a sure sign that you’ve split yourself. What could be less interesting than spending your time attending an inner debate?

On the other hand, if you pay attention to the energy – which is neither good nor bad – you can change the direction from a downward spiral into darkness and contraction to something more expansive and easy. You can ground it, you can slow it down, stir it up or add color; you can even it out. You can trace it back to the trigger and see clearly the story you tell every time you are uncomfortable or afraid. And then, if the old story is worn out, you can make a new story.

Energy first, story second. It is how your brain works: you have experiences (you feel) and then you story the experiences. The story part of the equation is your choice.

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68.

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

I call it the story-you-tell-yourself-about-yourself,

The Toltec call it the dream,

In some ancient stories it is represented by dense fog,

Recently a friend called it the smokescreen,

And then – and this is my favorite – she called it the garbage layer.

You are looking at the world through your garbage layer. I am looking at the world through my garbage layer. You will project your garbage onto me as I will project mine on to you. If I invest in blaming or indulge in the idea that you are responsible for how I feel, I am peering through the thick clutter of my garbage layer. What I see has nothing to do with you.

The garbage layer is the part of us that requires cleaning. It is the cleaning that leads to awakening or greater awareness or presence, but first you must recognize that you have a garbage layer and that you are interpreting what you see through your garbage.

There is a powerful transformation possible when someone recognizes that they are not their garbage, they are merely seeing through it. Distinguishing between “the-one-who-sees” and garbage layer is a big first step. “The-one-who-sees” has the capacity to let the garbage go.

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67.

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

“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”

James Joyce

The nurse was prepping Lora for surgery. Somehow their conversation strayed from the logistics of surgery to memories of childhood and what it was like to grow up in a time when people did not lock their front doors. They reminisced about riding their bikes all day, floating inner tubes down arroyos after rainstorms, how their parents encouraged them to run, to explore, to be free and play. Their laughter stalled when they acknowledged that those days are long gone.

“Where did all of this fear come from?” Lora asked.

“I could never let my daughters run free like I did.” The nurse acknowledged.

As if on cue they both said, “I hate this culture of fear.”

Once, on an airplane, I sat next to a man who told me how dangerous the world was. He was absolute: the world was unsafe! He told me that he never let his children play outside without his direct supervision. I questioned his perception and he acknowledged that he’d never experienced violence, he’d never seen in person a violent act, and he didn’t know anyone who had experienced violence. He knew, liked and trusted his neighbors. Where did he develop his view of the world? His answer: “I see it on the news every night.”

Fear sells.

Earthquakes happen to us. Stories are of our creation. Cultures of fear begin and are perpetuated in individual people; we’ve made an agreement that the world is fearful. So it is. We live the stories that we tell because we actively create ourselves through the stories we tell. If we want to change our story, we have to tell a different story.

Stories do not happen to us, we tell them. The good news: there are truly powerful people everywhere and they are telling a different story.

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66.

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

This story fragment is worth repeating. The speaker stood in front of a large crowd packed into the pews of a church. He talked about the word, “spell,” and told us that, to people in the USA, this word “spell” implied voodoo and magic. He was from another country and he had an entirely different understanding of the word. He said, “tell a little girl she is fat and you will have spelled her forever.”

I almost fell out of my pew.

Language is powerful. To speak beautifully is powerful – it is to weave a spell of beauty. To speak violently is powerful – it is to weave a spell of violence.

There is an important concept that connects to “spells:” when someone attempts to spell you, when they tell you that you are fat or ugly or stupid, you have to agree to take their violence into your body. Children do not know that they have a choice to agree or to let the violence pass through so they take the spells into their bodies. They incorporate the spell into their identity; they incorporate the spell into their story.

Becoming aware is to recognize that what others say, the spells that they cast, are not something you need to take it into your body. You have a choice: agree with the spell and it will stick in your body. Or, know that their perception has nothing to do with you and the spell they cast will pass through and disappear (it will only live in their body).

Simply do not agree to participate in the violence.

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65.

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

Brother William was the director of the media center at The College of Santa Fe and I was among his many work-study students. This was in the days before personal computers and magic things like Photoshop; we used rulers and x-acto knives, magic markers and graphic tape to make brochures and publications.

Each day at 3:00, Brother Bill would roll from his office a cart draped in white linen carrying an urn of hot water, tea bags, sugar, milk and a sweet – cookies or strawberries. We would stop work and for 20 minutes or so, we would drink tea and laugh and gossip and talk about art or dreams or good books or fine food. We would slow down and be with each other.

I’m not sure how the word got out but soon, everyday at about 5 minutes to 3:00, people would begin showing up in the media center. They would pretend to have a delivery or to be checking on a job but we all knew they’d come for Brother Bill’s high tea. It felt good to be there and there was always enough to go around. Sometimes our guests brought sweets to share.

This simple ritual created more community than almost anything I’ve since experienced. It was during tea that we stopped moving long enough to see each other. It was during tea that we listened beneath each other’s words and heard the essentials. High tea was not intended to create community; there was no other agenda than to slow down for a moment, to take a break and to do it with some attention.

I think about Brother Bill when I think about how great change happens in people or organizations or communities: it is through the simple things, not the grand plans. You’d be amazed at what might happen if you stopped for a few moments and offered those around you some tea.

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