The Direction of Intention

64.

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

“If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.” Don Herold

There is the story you tell. There is the action you take.

When life seems difficult I’ve found that the action is rarely tough; it is the story that I wrap around the action that makes it seem arduous. Distinguishing between the actions you take and the story you tell is essential in presence (seeing what is there and not what you think is there).

Listen to the story you tell yourself about the actions you take (or avoid) each day. If you could suspend the narrative would the actions be difficult? Would your choices seem so confusing? What dilemmas are you creating for yourself, what limits are you defending? How much of your day is invested in telling a story of trauma that never comes to pass? How much worry and angst do you invest in things that never happen?

How much weight do you carry that actually doesn’t exist? What would it take for you to put all of the weight down and only carry what is present with you in the moment. Is a lion really chasing you (why all the stress?)? Are there people around you just waiting to heap shame upon you? Do you really know what others think? What would it feel like to act without the story?

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63.

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

In a class the other day I found myself asking this question: why is it so easy for us to judge and so difficult for us to celebrate?

I work with a lot of groups and I coach many people; our explorations inevitably come to the Judge and the ease, speed, and dare I say the necessity of jumping headlong into judgment of self or other (in my experience it is the same thing). It happens in a nano-second and is brutal.

Yet to celebrate our self and our life is rare. We are slow to celebrate and sometimes it seems nearly impossible. It is among the most difficult things most of us will ever attempt. We offer it to others. We avoid it for ourselves. We rarely recognize the occasion for it.

Doesn’t that seem backward and upside-down?

Inner judges are meant to keep us contained – they beat us up to keep us in bounds. They wag their fingers at us to keep us from fully showing up.

To celebrate is to call attention to your self. It is to say I am here and alive and loving it! The inner judge surely sees celebration as dangerous.

That smacks of a challenge to me! How might you celebrate yourself today and everyday? Drive the Judge from his/her chambers by flipping the equation and find it almost impossible to judge and oh, so easy to make merry. What would your life look like if you were quick to celebrate and slow to judge?

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62.

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 empower others because they respect them.

Respect is most often found in stillness.

To respect is to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone is capable of sorting things out for themselves; you don’t have their answers. When you respect someone you have no need of trying to control him or her or save them or make them see your way. You respect their seeing. You respect their choices. You do not intervene when they are experiencing the effects of their choices.

This kind of respect for others is only possible after you first offer it to yourself. Stillness comes from self-love. To choose and to own your choices, to respect your point of view, your ideas, your gifts, and your thoughts enough not to hide or blunt them. To offer without inhibition your self because you are beyond the debate of whether you are good enough. You’ve surrendered the madness of ‘perfect.’

Disrespect is loud – inside your head and on the outside, too. Disrespect needs to be heard.

Truly powerful people empower others because they respect themselves. They know the power of stillness.

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61.

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

“Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.” Swedish proverb

I was just introduced to the work of Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky. He has spent his career studying stress and has more than a few eye-opening insights to his credit. Some have to do with the story you tell yourself about yourself.

For instance, in the animal kingdom, stress is a lifesaver: when you are a zebra and there is a lion on your tail, feeling stress can be a very good thing. And, as a zebra, when you avoid becoming lunch for the lion, you also completely release your stress. There is no story, no need to rush back to the herd and recount the trauma of being chased by a lion (thus perpetuating the stress). The stress served a purpose and is gone.

In people, what was once a life-saving mechanism has turned on and we can’t seem to turn it off. We treat traffic jams, difficult bosses, unpaid bills, bureaucratic knots, traffic tickets, the wrong kind of shampoo, what we think people will think about our clothes, etc., as a lion ready to devour us. It seems that we are afraid for our lives much of the time. In Sapolsky’s words, “We are constantly marinating in corrosive hormones triggered by the stress response.” Prolonged exposure to stress is deadly.

The lion chasing us is often a lion of our own making. There is no doubt that there are many aspects of contemporary life that are stressful. Are they the equivalent of being devoured by a lion? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The difference is in the story you tell. And tell, and tell, and tell.

The pertinent question is, “why does everything look like a hungry lion that never stops chasing me?” It seems that we have either lost our sense of scale or that we need to turn around and look at what is really there.

Who might you become if you stopped telling yourself the story of hungry lions?

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60.

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

“History is a fable agreed upon. So too is identity, which is a story not only arrived at by the individual but conferred by the group. There has to be both a public and private coherence to the story of our self.” John Lahr

I’m helping Amy with her graduate project. She is getting a master’s degree of science in Creative Studies. The science of creativity! Her project is a performance piece, a one-woman show that traces the choices that brought her to this incredible study and what she has so far found there.

One of the passages in her play explores how we dynamically draw a future toward us by the way we story ourselves in the present. And, how we very rarely live in the present because we are seeing and storying this moment through a category we created in the past. Do you see the dilemma? Marshall Mcluhan said it best,  “We drive into the future using only the rearview mirror.”

It is necessary to a point; you have to somehow locate yourself to know who you are, what you believe, and why you are here. What you imagine is what you create. What you imagine is defined by the categories you created in the past. What you are capable of doing or not doing, what you believe is possible or not possible, what you fear or think will fulfill you, what is your purpose? All of these questions are rooted in your experiences and how you interpret them.

Ellen Langer tells us that humans are really good at creating categories – it is necessary for language acquisition. And, one of the key to presence and the creation of a more expansive future is to consciously challenge the categories that you’ve constructed. The great gift of being natural category makers is that we can consciously create new ones.

To what categories from your past are you attached? Can you re-story your past (you are doing this anyway – a topic for another day) to create a new category called wholeness? Imagine the future you will unfold when you’ve created that category!

Imagine the future you will unfold when you can extend that category to everyone you meet.

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59.

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

“By making art a specially precious part of life, we have demoted it from being all of life.” Margaret Mead

My great aunt Dorothy and great uncle Del lived on a hillside above the mining town of Central City, Colorado in the time before it was converted into a casino pretending to be a town. On the hill above their house was an old abandoned mining operation and beyond that was a graveyard. Many of my ancestors are buried in that graveyard and as kid I spent many hours making rubbings of headstones wondering about the lives of the people buried there.

There is not much information on a headstone: a birth-date and a death-date; maybe a phrase like, “loving mother,” or “Civil war veteran.” A life reduced to the barest minimum.

Because the stones offered no details I would make up stories. I would imagine what a day in their lives must have been like before television and electricity, before central heat and motorcars. I imagine that their lives were like mine: filled with love and yearning and pain and striving and disappointment and revelation and drudgery and elation and regret… all of the colors of life.

Sometimes while looking at paintings in museums or talking to school administrators about art, I think about those headstones; a life elevated/reduced to one precious phrase when the truth of the life was in the experience of living it. Art is the same way: when made precious or thought as a luxury it is reduced to the barest of minimums. It becomes untouchable. The truth of art is in the doing, in the messy, chaotic, contradictory, full-spectrum experience of expressing a life.

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58.

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

Twice in my life, for a few short days, I experienced what it means to live within a narrative shared with my community; we were inside a common, single story, we were the story. The first was after the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles. The second was during the days after 9/11.

Once in my life I experienced a community that was always inside a common story, no tragedy was necessary for connectivity and shared experience. Their purpose in their life was to keep the story alive – consciously and intentionally, to live it everyday, to revivify it every year. Without the story there was no life.

Is there a story in your life that carries that much power? Are you in service to a story that matters that much?

All stories are ancient. And, at the same time, all stories are new. Right now, if you really listen to yourself, you’ll find that you are telling yourself a story, and it’s your story of being here – in this world, as you define yourself to be. It is a new story because it is yours. It is also an ancient story, because it is your version of the very same challenges, questions, passages, celebrations and disappointments that all the peoples have faced who have walked on this planet before you. It is your turn.

The story of an individual makes no sense unless it is plugged into a cohesive communal narrative. Where do you fit? Why do you and your actions matter?

Stories are like maps for navigating life. Because we are always story telling, every minute of every day, people quite naturally convey their deepest truths through their stories and their myths. These stories and myths – when alive – enable us to enter into a rich meaningful relationship with our circumstance, a dynamic conversation with the powers of the universe.

The story of a community makes no sense unless it is plugged into a cohesive universal narrative. Where do we fit? Why do we matter (I call this “deep story”)?

When stories are not alive we consume them. They serve a momentary identity function and then go back in the mail. Deep narrative requires delayed gratification. It is like a fine wine that opens slowly over time. The point is not in telling a new story but in the known, the oft told story, hearing it again and again and again it becomes like your heartbeat.

What does it mean, what does it feel like to live inside a greater common story, to tell a story that also ‘tells’ you? What stories do you repeat over and over again? Are they deep story? Communal story? Or, is it the story that only you experience? What story are you telling yourself again and again and again?

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57.

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

If I were a fish I’d be in a frying pan. That is how hard I bit the hook! I was included in a Facebook discussion with a group that is philosophical polar opposite of everything I believe. I am their nightmare participant so I can only imagine that someone added my name by mistake or perhaps I was the supposed to be the main course in a very ugly meal.

I generally do not engage in online discussions (I’m too busy and too scattered as it is) but on this day I saw a comment before I hit “delete” and stepped squarely into a moral dilemma. As my pal Horatio reflected, “Silence in the face of bigotry is a form of consent.” I saw the comment, my name was (somehow) associated with the group, I chose to step into the arena.

My dilemma was that I didn’t count to ten thousand before I responded (dare I say, “reacted”;-) and I jumped into this pool of extremism with a voice of extremism: I heard myself become the thing I detest.

Their extremism was a mirror of my extremism! That’s why the hook was so tasty!

I believe that all forms of fundamentalism or extremist belief are expressions of fear. Playing the Victim is the required role: extremism makes no sense unless you believe there is a wolf knocking on your door. Rigid doctrine is useful for providing absolute certainty: no thinking required (and that was my hook!). Absolute certainty feels good because the primary certainty provided is moral superiority. The other person, by default is less-than. All of those black and white answers relieve you from the bother of having to consider the validity of the other person’s point of view: they are less so you are more, they are evil because you are good.

And, what’s really going on is that there are things in the world that you don’t understand and you are not yet able to walk toward them. Everyone looks like a wolf until you remove the label. The need to be right, to be absolute is about control.

All of us have an inner extremist that usually comes out in some places and not in others (what hits your buttons? What makes you angry and reactive? What hooks are too tasty to ignore?). My first post was a self-righteous diatribe. I was absolutely invested in being right. And I saw my fear all the way to its root.

There is a sweet perfection to this story: it took a fundamentalist to expose my fundamentalism. In my subsequent posts I asked some questions along with making statements. I entered a dialogue with no need to blunt my point of view and, more importantly, no need to negate theirs. I put down my end of the rope.

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56.

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 people entertain the idea that they need to change something in their lives they generally sort to the radical. Change is an ominous word and it both excites the imagination and stokes the fires of fear. When organizations call Patti and me to facilitate change they always reject the notion that a small action (like saying, “Yes, and…”) will have more impact than a new strategic plan or a massive restructuring. “It can’t be that easy!” they protest.

Alter one word in your vocabulary and you will transform your life. Make one small choice – and choose it again and again everyday, and your life will begin to change (you are doing this anyway so why not do it consciously and with intention).

A complexity (like a human being) is never changed through applying another complexity. Complexities are changed through simplicities.

Here’s a key: change begins with a single new choice. That’s it. And, when you will make the new choice, the old story will rage at you. Each day, for many days, the old story will rage at you, you’ll hear all the reasons you can’t or shouldn’t or why this choice will alienate you from your friends, how it isn’t working, why bother, how hard it is, how ridiculous you look, etc.

There is a difference between the action and the story. Make the choice, detach from the story. See what is there versus what you think is there. The choice is rarely hard once the investment in the story is released. One small step each day: make the choice, release the story.

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55.

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 actions you take each day are the things you are practicing in your life – they are the things you are reinforcing. What is the difference between what you are practicing and what you want to practice?

A friend once told me that his definition of health was the difference between who you are (what you practice) and who you believe yourself to be (what you want to practice): the shorter the distance the healthier the person.

Most of us experience a gap between those two poles. This is really a question of what you are willing to reveal and what you think you need to hide or protect; sharing yourself is vulnerable stuff especially if you are invested in what others might or might not think.

The days leading up to my first solo art show were excruciating. I loved my paintings while they were in the studio and hated them the moment they were hung on the gallery walls. They transformed before my eyes. I wanted to rip them down, apologize for my incompetence; I drowned myself in the fear of being a fraud.  The prospect of other people seeing my work, of seeing it through eyes over which I had no control, was terrifying. It was easy to be the artist secluded in the studio. The artist who shares his work was another matter entirely!

Many people came to the opening. I practiced hiding behind a glass of wine. What I learned was that some people liked my work, some people were indifferent, some people didn’t care for it, some people pretended to understand it, some people contemplated, some people came for the food…and none of what they saw or did had anything to do with me. My paintings provided a common focus for multiple perspectives. My fear of being a fraud was my own to nurture (practice) or release.

I learned the growth is always found in the gap. What are you practicing?

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