Listen To The Symphony

Posted on June 14, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

817. 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 811, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]

Bali Journal Excerpt #7
Letting go is happening in degrees: a moment of tai chi in the pavilion with Stewart, a comment from Budhi, conversations with people in the market, allowing myself to ‘not know,’ laughter with Lora – this are opening me to be present, opening me to direct experience without judgment. It is allowing me to celebrate the symphony of serendipity playing all the time in my life. Engaging with people who are supportive and not fearful or needing to stake claims is teaching me to relax. It is teaching me to let go of my need to stake claims. When I first entered the temple I was wary of imposing in the people and their right to worship. I didn’t want to trespass. The Balinese people welcome me over and over again (not just me but all of us) with not thought of trespass. I had to allow myself to be welcome. I had to let go of my assumptions of imposition.

There are two phrases I adore in this excerpt: 1) A symphony of serendipity. I am in one of those vibrant phases in which the symphony of serendipity is playing loud and with great mischief. Serendipity is a’poppin’. 2) Allow myself to be welcome. The older I get the more I recognize that the vast majority of my limitations are self-imposed.

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Do You Know M.A.N?

Posted on June 13, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

816. 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 811, 12, 13, 14, 15]

Bali Journal Excerpt #6
At the Preventing Child Sex Tourism in Denpasar, I sat to lunch with a man named Rai. He was very educated and had a passion for the worlds religions. He was familiar with the holy writings of most major religions. He asked me about my religion. I answered that I had no religion. I told him that I had a spiritual life but had no particular attachment to a system of belief. He smiled and nodded.

We talked of tourism and its impact on Balinese culture, both positive and negative. He told me that in his village of Kuta that the people believed that the many changes in Kuta over the past few years was the result of Black Magic. He also told me that this event was predicted. He used a word for the era in which we are living but I can’t recall it – but said the English equivalent was something like ‘apocalypse.’ “In this time,” he explained, “people forget Atma.”

“What is Atma?” I asked.

He responded, “Do you Know M.A.N?” I didn’t. “M stand for Maya. All that is transitory is Maya: money, friends, status, power, and the body are all Maya. When people focus on things that are Maya, things that are transitory, they can only be unhappy. This is what is happening in Kuta. ‘A’ stands for Atma. Atma is your soul, your god-nature. You are god.” he said, touching his heart chakra. “When your mind is Atma, you are happy. Atma is eternal. Do you know Mahatma,” he asked? “Like Mahatma Gandhi? Mahatma means Atma,” he laughed. “Mahatma is the one with gleaming thoughts. When you are Atma your mind is not attached to the transitory. Detachment from all things leads to Moksa. Moksa and Nirvana are the same thing. ‘N’ is for Nirvana. Moksa is a state of being. When you are attached to nothing, living as Atma, you are said to have Moksa. M.A.N.”

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Invite The Soul

Posted on June 12, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

815. 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 811, 12, 13, 14]

Bali Journal Excerpt #5
Madeleine asked me if I would go with her to see the Balian. She wanted me to scribe for her – to take notes of her session with Jero Manchu. I’d written off my previous experience at Jero Manchu’s compound. I didn’t listen to the inner voice. I ignored the imperative to, “Ask the Balian what was missing.” Now, I sat with Madeleine before the Balian. The Balian sang, breathed incense, and was quiet for a moment or two. Then, she turned and began speaking to me. I’d not asked a question. I was there in support of Madeleine.

Jero said (through a translator): “The one in you wants to be purified at the beach. One is pulling you there; one is pulling you in another direction. This is why you feel at a crossroads. I suggest you pray to the one not committed to you. Pray at the beach before the sun is rising. Invite the soul – he is still in the water – invite him into your body. Ask him to be happy in you.”

I was stunned.

It seems, thirteen years later, my work in the world is to invite the soul. I did my ritual on the beach (it is a journal entry coming soon) and my soul eventually came out of the water and into my body. He is very happy and getting happier each year.

The lesson or action is universal to people, organizations, communities,…the internal tug of war reveals the split gate, the investment in being right. It reveals the place where we divide and pull in opposite directions. Power over or control are usually the drivers of the split. There is nothing worse than having two experts come to dinner. There’s nothing better than having two masters come to share a meal.

Heal the split by stepping into the space between. This is to invite the soul into the body. Heal the split by shifting the focus from the points to the vectors, from the fixed to the fluid, from the staid to the movement, from the particle to the wave. Invite the soul. Ask him or her to be happy in you, as you.

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Posted on June 9, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

812. 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 811]

Bali Journal Excerpt #2:
During the group’s visit to Jero Manchu [Jero was a Balian or shaman], I took pictures for Lora as she worked with the Balian. As I was aiming the camera, about ready to snap a photo, I heard my inner voice scream, “Ask the Balian what is missing!” Missing? And then again, “You need to know what is missing!” The voice railed at me for the duration of our visit to Jero’s compound. “Just ask!” my inner voice implored. I didn’t ask. I was too embarrassed and more than a little unhinged at the battle raging inside of me. I didn’t want to look stupid or display my vulnerabilities. I knew that, in fact, something was missing. I told myself that I didn’t want to impose my needs upon the group. I left the compound stuffing the question inside.

Reading this journal entry thirteen years later made me smile for 2 reasons: 1) I’ve since learned to listen and act immediately when my inner voice calls. I used to treat my inner voice as if it was an “other.” Now, it is not separate. It is my voice. It no longer needs to scream. 2) I assumed that speaking to my needs was an imposition on others. I had no evidence for that assumption. In truth, it was purely my justification for not showing up. It was my way of hiding.

I’m particularly fond of the timing of this excerpt. A few weeks ago my inner voice roared an imperative and I acted immediately. My world will never be the same because I listened and responded. There was no gap between the call and my action. There is no need for inner warfare. Additionally, today was the official launch party for my comic strip, FL!P (Skip has done an amazing job building this site – check it out). Lots of people came, drank wine, ate food, laughed, drew pictures, voted for their favorite strip and character. I loved every minute of it because I showed up. I recognized that I spent the entire day doing exactly what I wanted with no assumption about the impact on others. It is no longer my job to decide what other people need or think. There is so much in my life to celebrate!

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Listen To The Past

Posted on June 8, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Lora returned a sketchbook to me, drawings from our time in Bali. In the sketchbook I found tucked into the pages several excerpts from a journal I kept during my time there. The entries are typed, something done after the trip. After reading the passages I was amused at how similar they are to entries that I am making in my current journals. I’m writing a lot about helping hands. This winter has been extraordinary in the guidance that I feel, the nudges along the path, the deep sense of knowing, the mind-boggling serendipities,….

There are ten entries in the Bali journal. Over the next ten days I will post them.

Excerpt #1:
I’m giving myself over to the “helping hands.” That is what Bali is teaching me. They’ve [the helping hands] always been there but I was moving too fast to see them or I liked to call them “coincidence” or perhaps serendipity. From the moment I accepted the idea of coming to Bali (the helping hands left me little choice in the matter), I’ve been repeatedly reinforced to let go, relax, and let the helping hands help. It has been hard to accept and even harder to do. First, I had to discover that I wasn’t relaxed and that I was holding on very tight. I didn’t know that before. My story in Bali is about letting go so that I can feel the current and trust it to support me and take me where it will. Resisting has only made me tired.

So the lessons from 2000 that I am re-learning in 2013:
• Give yourself over to the helping hands.
• Move slow enough to see/feel them.
• Relax. Let go.
• Feel the current. Trust it. It will support you.

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Be In The Hallway

Posted on June 6, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

809. 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 morning Arnie made me laugh out loud. We hadn’t talked for some months and I was recounting the amazing pilgrimage I have been on throughout the winter. Doors have been closing, sometimes abruptly while other doors, previously locked, open easily. He reminded of a phrase his mother used to say: the universe doesn’t close doors without opening others – but it is hell waiting in the hallway!

Last August on the shores of a lake in New Hampshire, Donna emerged from the woods looking for me. She had some things that she needed to tell me. She knew that I was standing in the metaphoric hallway and that it was hell. All the doors were closed and I was feeling stuck. She told me to sit still. She reminded me that it does no good to pound on the doors when they are closed to you. It might feel good to rail against the doors but the effort is fruitless. Doors do not feel pain. The only shoulder I was breaking was my own. Donna is wise and told me great stories of the doors she’d pounded in her life and none of them ever opened again. Doors close for reasons that are never apparent at the closing. Doors close so you will look elsewhere. In time, a new door presents itself so, in Donna’s words, “You may as well enjoy the limbo.”

She offered me another notion that helped me sit still in the hallway. She said, “You are like me. In your life you have callings and there is always a space between the calls. You won’t hear the new call until you enter stillness.” So, I sat in the hallway. It was hell. And I was still. From this place, almost nine months after that day on the beach, I am now grateful that the old door closed because the new door is more amazing than anything I could have imagined. It is ripe with potential. I can’t believe I pounded on that old door for so long. I can’t imagine what life would be like now if that old door had not closed.

Sitting in the hallway is another way of saying, “Have faith.” Faith is not an abstraction when you are in the hallway. It is really easy to yammer on about faith when you are comfortable. Step into the hallway, sit in hell, and faith is a concrete experience – if you can get quiet. Enjoy the limbo and know that a door will open eventually. It always does when you stop pounding. As Donna implied, stop fighting for what no longer serves you. Let the door close and BE IN THE HALLWAY. There’s magic behind another door and it will open if you let it.

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Share A Meal With Jakorda

Posted on May 30, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Jakorda Rai sat behind me. His hands on either side of my head, he read my energy just as he’d read the other students who previously sat before him. Unlike the other students he did not progress to the second phase of diagnosis. Instead, he simply tapped me on my right shoulder and through a translator told me that nothing physically ailed me. My challenge was to open my story. As if to emphasize his diagnosis he tapped me again on the right shoulder and repeated his instruction. Open your story.

Later I would return to his house compound and participate in a ritual. He initiated me into his family temple. I became one of his family line. Only now am I understanding the import of that gesture, the gift that he gave me. The high priests brought me in to his temple and then Jakorda Rai sent me back into the world to open my story. Before I left his house compound he invited me to come back back. Through the translator he said, “Someday come back and share a meal with me.” I thought I’d be back within a few years. More than a decade has passed.

What does it mean to have an open story?

Artists – and by artists I mean all people who are conscious of their actions and choices – flourish when the emphasis in life is moved from “answer seeking” and placed on “question engagement” – the capacity to explore and engage, to sit solidly in uncertainty: that is the environment (and I think it is an internal environment) necessary for humans to flourish and fulfill their creative impulse.

I’ve posted these words before and decided to post them again. My dear friend Sam asked me to describe under what conditions an artist flourishes and this is what I wrote in response:

It is perhaps too simple but this is what I know and experience: the artist in me becomes present (it is all about presence; artistry is not something you do as much as something you are) – there is no past or future, just what is before me (and in me) in that moment and we are not separate: the poem or the painting or the story and I are one fluid thing. The world (my seeing) moves from nouns to verbs, from object focused to process focused. When I am present the environment, my seeing of my environment, comes “alive;” the colors are more intense, the sounds and textures of my space richer and clearer. I guess, in my artist self, there ceases to be a separation between me and my environment, I am not moving through a day, I am in the day. All concepts of “time” disappear. I am the creator, the creating, and the created.

This is what it means to have an open story. And now that I know, now that I am an open story, I remember that I am long over due to share a meal with Jakorda Rai.

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Keep Walking

Posted on May 21, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Last week, the night before the launch of my new business, 6 hours before I was to get on a plane and travel for a week, my computer died. There was not time between stops to get a fix. There was no way to put up a post. My string of consecutive posts ended at 794. After I stopped trying to figure it out and recognized that the gods of technology both grant and revoke access, I settled into a week with minimal technology. It was lovely. And a new era presented itself. Here are two short lessons that came during the week that my computer died (and have nothing to do with technology):

1) As it turns out, no challenge is insurmountable. Challenges only appear insurmountable when given too little time. They seem insurmountable when the choice is to stop. Stopping is a valid choice. In fact, stopping is to make the choice for a new challenge. Resting is a valid choice, too. I learned that I’ve been on a thirteen-year pilgrimage back to Bali. What I thought was a lost cause was really a long walk with a few rest breaks. A great teacher has been waiting for me. He asked me to return and break bread with him.

2) These past several months of wandering have been extraordinary in the invisible helping hands that have opened doors, lighted my path, and provided support, guidance and dear friendship. All of my life I thought that when the helping hands appeared, they illuminated a single path. It turns out that is not true at all. They help. They support. They guide. Within their guidance there are many choices to make. There are many possible paths. In this way, destiny or fate has many faces. It is both random and predetermined. Energy can take many forms. Choice is always available. As a wise person once wrote: there are many paths up the same mountain. What is important is to keep walking.

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Take A Big Step

Posted on May 11, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

A dear one from my past recently wrote to me to tell me that something big clicked for her involving language, metaphor and how we tell our story. I read her email and clapped my flippers!

Her insight was so clear and simple. It is something that I’ve taken for granted in writing about story and I could not articulate it as well as she already has. So I’m sharing her thoughts with you.

She wrote that she assumed “telling my story” meant to tell it to someone else. And the assumption that there must be an other gave too much power to the other. It gave too much power to others to interpret her story and misconstrue her words. She wrote, “others were required for there to even BE a ‘my story.’” It made her mad. It made her not want to have a story because it would always be defined by others.

And then she began challenging her assumption. Instead of needing an other to have a story she realized that her story is for her. “My story for me….” And here’s the real beauty in her revelation:”…part of my story,” she wrote, “can be a ‘no story.’” No story is necessary. And when she runs a story through her head, the language she uses, the words she chooses, creates her world. And she has great choice to consciously create her world. She can choose not to assign meaning. She can choose to give meaning where it makes sense to her.

This part took my breath away. She wrote, “…the language I use creates my world, whether it’s words or even the languages of music, film, art, pictures in my head. Silently or aloud, they are the tools I play with to create my world for myself. I guess that’s what it has always been, but this realization and active decision to consciously live this way is a big step for me.”

It’s a big step for all of us. Yes. Here’s to living this way every day.

Filed under: Awakening, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: | 3 Comments »

Come Home

Posted on May 9, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

790. 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 generally tell stories about others and lately my pals have been asking me to turn the story mirror around and have a crack at myself. I am aloof. Tom once told me in frustration that I was the only person on the planet more aloof that he was. I wanted to deny it but couldn’t so my only recourse was to laugh and accept that I am often a balloon floating just out of reach. If you knew Tom this would be a profound statement because no one in the history of humanity was as aloof as Tom. That is, until me. I chose my mentor wisely. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about his accusation. I am not naturally aloof. No one is naturally aloof. We are pack animals. One of our strongest impulses is to belong. Perhaps “aloof” my way of belonging.

I sit comfortably at the edge of the village. I watch. I translate between worlds. I bridge without knowing it. I have deep diving conversations at the most casual dinner party. People I do not know betray their deepest secrets to me and wonder why. Balloons that hover just out of reach are safe. We balloons are conduits to the spirit world. We are transformers. Someone recently told me that I am a magnet to the island of misfit toys. And aren’t we – all of us – misfit toys?

During these past several months two words have repeatedly thundered down upon my head: 1) receive and 2) availability. These are big words especially when, like me, all established patterns come together in the word “aloof.” With so much thunder the message for me is clear: to grow, to fulfill this big voice, I must walk to the center of the village. I must sit and receive. I must open and become available to the community. This one-way communication is nice but two way communication is relationship and to thrive I must open the two way channel. I will always know how to do aloof. I will always be a transformer. Now I must learn to be accessible, too.

In Holland Chris guided us through a constellations exercise. The entire community gathered in a circle and I remained aloof. When I was beckoned and joined the circle, I quivered and quaked with conflicting desires: to belong and to run. To step in and step out. I have wandered my whole life. I am on a pilgrimage that, until recently, had no destination. And today, like a light turning on in my heart, I understand that “receive” and “availability” will be obtainable only after I finally arrive home. Home is the end of my pilgrimage. Home is a person. It is a place. It is a place inside me and outside me. I can see it from here. So, to my pals, I am soon to sit in the center of the village. Come join me there. I’m ready to come home. I have lots of stories to tell.

Filed under: Awakening, Edges, Metaphor, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

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