The Direction of Intention

15.

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 inspire power in other people. It is like that great Beatles lyric: the love you take will be equal to the love you make.

You get what you give. Write it off as cliché or consider this: significant change always appears complex and is never achieved through a path of complexity. Great change happens in small steps. It is through simplicities that we transform and simplicities are not always apparent.

Here is a simplicity: We are mirrors for each other. If what I bring is truly powerful, what might you see in yourself? If what you allow me to see is your great power and presence, what might I discover within myself?

Verify it for yourself. Try it for a day.

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14.

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

Empowered people empower others. It is a simple notion and like most simple notions it is easy to discount.

Consider: if you insist upon seeing a dog-eat-dog world then you can only be a dog that eats or a dog that is eaten. Everyone will look like a hungry dog and, of course, no one wants to be eaten. One day when you are sufficiently tired of biting or of being bitten it might occur to you that the world is not filled with dogs eating dogs; you are merely seeing what you are dedicated to seeing.

You’ve heard the old saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” This adage is backwards, it is truer when flipped to read, “I see it because I believe it.”

Seeing is not passive, it is a creative act.

What happens if, instead of seeing dogs, you decide to see powerful people? What might they see in you?

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13.

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 inspire power in others because they engage with what is in front of them not what they think is there.

It sounds easy until you try it. Consider this: how much of your day will you give to replaying the past? How much of your day will you give to fearing the future? If you do, by chance, happen to find yourself aware in your present moment, what story will you impose on it (thereby taking yourself out of the present moment)? What happens if you don’t interpret it? What happens if you put down your label-maker?

Imagine suspending your story – just for a little while each day – and engaging with what or who is in front of you and not what or whom you think is there?

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12.

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 hold my breath. I don’t want Dava to know that I am watching her work. She is mixing something in a bowl – magic. She is singing. I’m not the only one peering through the window into the kitchen; there are five peepers poised to duck when she returns to the stove. Eleven more retreat-participants are hissing from across the room, “What’s she doing?” We wave them off!

We watch Dava in the kitchen because she loves what she does. She is doing more than making food for us; she is infusing love into the meal that she is preparing. That is not an exaggeration. It is a statement of fact. Ask anyone who has tasted her cooking! In our minds interrupting her would be a sacrilege, akin to bothering Michelangelo while he was sculpting.

We’ve come to this retreat to rejuvenate and renew. We are here to practice presence. As one of the facilitators of the retreat I’ve recognized that watching Dava is more useful than anything I can say or do. I bring abstract notions. Dava brings her Self – she is steady and even. She is presence. There is a spark in her heart and it makes us all want to be…. To Be.

What could be more powerful?

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11.

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.

It is helpful to think of it as a simple question of focus placement: where do you choose to place your focus: on the outcome or on the process.

Truly powerful people know that there is no place of arrival called “happiness” or “success;” they know an outcome-focus is an illusion, it requires trading this moment of life for an idea of life in the future. It is a trap.

A focus placed on process opens the door to the present moment. It is a choice to engage with the person, the idea, and the experience that you are having now. It is a choice to invest your self in the quality of the immediate engagement. It allows for subtlety, for vulnerability, it opens hearts to receive and to give. It affords you the opportunity to see what is there, not what you think is there.

Artistry is not an outcome it is a process. Mastery is not an outcome it is a relationship.

Where do you choose to place your focus? What might you see if being present in this moment was more important than “getting there” someday?

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10.

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

Daniel locates himself and negotiates the world through sound; he “clicks” and the returning sound helps him identify his surroundings. Daniel is blind. He is an avid cyclist, a world traveler, he hikes… and he does it all through echolocation; what he calls Flash Sonar. He founded World Access for the Blind, a non-profit organization dedicated to a “no limits” philosophy “which challenges blind children (and us) to challenge what we think we know.”

What do you assume about blindness?

Using echolocation Daniel Kish teaches blind children to step boldly into their world; using sound to discover what is around them, the same principle employed by bats; he inspires children to move beyond an identity based in limitation into a life of expansive possibility.

What are the limits you assume? How might your assumptions change if you allowed yourself to walk into your limits, to make mistakes, to learn from the things you bumped into?

Daniel lives it. He teaches it. Truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others.

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9.

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

Empowered people empower others to succeed – especially when success is understood as a way of being and not a place of arrival.

Conventional wisdom invests in the opposite idea: survival of the fittest, the exploitation of weakness, and supremacy of the few over the many. Survival is the organizing principle of conventional wisdom; community as understood through a lens of dominance: someone must lose.

Instead of organizing around ideas of win/lose, truly powerful people understand that they can only fulfill their potential through supporting the fulfillment of potential in others. Truly powerful people know that there is nothing conventional about life or yearning or dreams. Truly powerful people know that no one lives in a vacuum; individual achievement is a misnomer, growth in any form is a team effort.

What would your life look like if you were thriving?

What would your community look like if every member was thriving? What would your community look like if every member was thriving through the intention of every other member?

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8.

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

Although I am in my late 40’s I am among the youngest people on the ship. We are on a paddlewheel steamboat cruising toward Glacier Bay in Alaska. The majority of the passengers stand in a ring on the upper deck; whales were spotted. The captain has stopped the engines, 200 people stand in silence, scanning the water in reverent expectation. The late afternoon air is cool yet the sun is warm. The gulls hover above the passenger’s heads and like Protestants visiting a Catholic church, they maintain an uneasy silence, uncertain of the next steps in the human’s vigil.

Suddenly a whale breaches 100 feet off to the starboard side. And another. And another. It is an explosion of play as if the whales have decided to perform for us.

The portside passengers rush starboard; people are generous, making space for all to see. The assembly hums with veneration, witnesses to something holy.

In the midst of it all I am taken by the thought: why are we so capable of seeing the beauty and feeling awe for the whales and are so incapable of seeing the magnificence in each other? How would we be together in the world if we afforded ourselves the same reverence that we offer to the whales?

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7.

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. They can’t help it in the same way that they can’t help the beating of their heart.

It is a natural response.

Imagine the world you would create if you understood that your worth had nothing to do with your achievements, your actions, or your doing? What world would you create if you had nothing to prove?

Diminishing your self and others is learned behavior.

What world would you embody if your desire was not a response to personal lack but an impulse toward greater wholeness for everyone?

What would be your dedication? What story would you tell?

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6.

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 inspire power in others because they no longer covet power. Truly powerful people know that power is not something that can be given or taken away.

Dictators assume they have power because the people agree with their assumption. Dictators lose the assumption of power because the people no longer agree.

Internal dictators operate and are retired using the same principle. What are your agreements with your self?  To what would you agree if you understood that your power was not something to be taken or something to be given away?

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