Step Toward The Pond

Posted on January 12, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

674. 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 is one of those days when I don’t have a thought in my head. It’s cold out and I have been writing all day. My thoughts generally float around at about 30,000 feet so to bring them down to ground level is often difficult for me. My inner archeologist complains about the altitude; he likes to brush dust off of small things and look at them with a magnifying glass. He gives me that look of disdain and I tell him I can’t help it. In truth, I would have done well in life as a hot air balloon. I could have carried Oz to far away lands and back again with no problem.

Recently in a class, after the opening meditation, one of the participants acknowledged that she’d come a long way in managing her out-of-control thinking. She said, ”I’m learning to manage my thought addiction. Sometimes I’m surprised at how quiet my mind can be.” I loved her phrase: thought addiction. I believe thought addiction is the road we take when we define our lives according to our problems. When we start to recognize the patterns of our thinking, then we can kick the habit and let go the addiction. Our personal stories reveal themselves through the patterns of our thought – not only the content of our thinking but the pace: is your thought a runaway freight train or a still pond or something in between. Most of us run between the poles of freight train and still pond; orienting according to the problems will bring on the freight train. Pay attention to the patterns and you’ll begin to move toward the pond.

I learned years ago that, as a hot air balloon, the only prayer I had for developing a still pond was to learn to ground myself. I needed a root. My route toward the still pond began when recognized I was free floating without a tether. Now that I have a good root my clue that I’ve let go of the tether is the return of the freight train. And, without fail, the train comes screaming down the rails of a problem that I think I have. Once I remember that I don’t have any problems, I have patterns, then it’s an easy reach to the root and a only a few short paces to the still pond.

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Take One Step

Posted on January 9, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

671. 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 watched the sun come up this morning. I was sitting in Alan’s sun room sipping coffee, marveling at the winter colors of the sky: salmon pinks, lavender, and ice blue. And then, beneath the tree line, in a specific spot, the branches began to shimmer. I expected Merlin to materialize. And then the shimmer warmed, became orange and round and instead of Merlin, the sun lifted above the horizon, streamed through the trees, and washed me with the warmth of a new day. Were I a plant my leaves would have opened and I would have taken a might drink of the light of the new day. As a human, I had coffee on the inside, sun on the outside – I was warmed through and through.

I do not know what this day brings. Alan and I will teach a class, that much I know. Then, I will dash to catch a plane and then if the timing is right I will catch a train. If not, there will be an entire day between the plane and the train. Planes and trains are sometimes on schedule and sometimes off schedule depending on Mother Nature and the nature of machines. Tonight I could be in one of 5 different cities. I recognized as the sun rose that I am in presence training. I am learning to trust. For the next several months there will be no daily pattern that repeats itself. I will be mostly on the move; my suitcase is my home. Sometimes I will be with loved ones, sometimes I will be in isolation, sometimes with new friends, sometimes in another country. I am throwing my work away, tossing the patterns of my life as I knew them and re-imagining things. I couldn’t be more alive and present to my moment. My inner gypsy stubbed out his cigarette and hissing smoke through his nose said, “It’s about time.”

It is about time. We count our days, our minutes, we measure our lives, check our lists, stay on our schedules. We count ourselves into desperation when we forget what we are counting. Each breath is life giving. Each breath is unique and never to happen again. I watched the sun rise again and it was no less a miracle today than it was yesterday. It was not the same. Another year just turned over (if you recognize the same calendar that I do) and I can look to the past and think, “This and this happened.” At least that is the story that I tell, none of it is true for anyone but me. I realized an amazing thing about personal edges and story this week. The scary edges are only visible if you are oriented to the past; anchored into and trying to maintain the known. Orient to the unknown, anchor into present and there are no edges, only experiences. I think that is what I mean by learning to trust – I am learning to orient according to what is with me right now as opposed to what has been, what should be, or what might have been. Those things are mental abstracts – as are scary edges….the edges certainly exist, the “scary” is a story I can tell. Here is presence school, I am taking one step at a time, something I have done since first learning to walk only now, as an experienced walker, I am paying attention to the steps as I take them.

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Go Up!

Posted on January 8, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

670. 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 airports, people are often racing to catch a plane. I have, more than once, sprinted through a concourse trying to catch my connecting flight before they closed the doors and captured me like a bug in the airport pickle jar: no way out. When I was in the Philadelphia airport, having more than enough time between flights, I found a nice perch and watched other less fortunate travellers race to their liberation. “That’s what I look like,” I thought as I spied a man wearing his too intense face, trying to reconcile his need to sprint through the crowd with his desire to not trample other people.

Coming from opposite directions, entering a knot of people, two wheelchair bound travelers, each late for a connection, spurred their airport attendee to go faster. It was like watching an old-time film clip of two trains roaring toward each other, unaware, an imminent head-on collision. They couldn’t see each other through the throng of people. The sea of travelers parted, the wheelchair riders caught sight of each other, eyeballs bulged, eyebrows raised, hands came to protect faces, and time – as it does in a spell or a moment of presence – came into a sharp, clear focus. At the last moment, in an impossible maneuver, the pushing attendees, as if choreographed, altered course. The chairs kissed, the spell was broken, and neither chair slowed down; grins of relief broke across the faces of all concerned. Mine, too. “That was well done!” one of the riders hooted to her wheelchair pusher as they sped off into the distance.

There are moments on the stage when an actor forgets their line and all pretenses fall. It’s called, “Going up.” Eyes bulge, eyebrows rise, their mind double clutches in panic, locks up, and for brief moment, without thought, they are intensely present, vitally alive. It feels like a mini-spell as time expands. And somehow, inexplicably, the words show up, moving the mouth without the assistance of the mind. The moment passes; the spell is broken, presence retreats behind the notion of control; waves of relief crash on the sandy shores of the actor. And yet, when the evening is over, the actor will tell you that moment was the most honest moment of the whole play. It was the most “alive” moment of their performance. It was the only moment that was not controlled, constrained, premeditated. It is what they attempt to master: presence on stage.

In watching the near wheelchair collision and remembering those brief moments of vitality on the stage, I couldn’t help but think that we (or I) have it backwards. The spell is not those moments of intense presence; the spell is a life that is rarely present. In those moments of near collision, when we lose control or are snapped into the immediate, the spell of the mundane is, for a moment broken, time no longer matters, nothing is measured or contained or controlled, and we enter life as we exit the predictable. I’m delighted that the wheelchairs did not collide and yet what a gift! Just like the rider I was left thinking, “For a moment, I was here and nowhere else. Well done.”

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Click, Click, Click

Posted on January 5, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

SeaTac airport. 5:30 am. I’m sitting in the atrium holding coffee with both hands, staring into the void waiting for consciousness to catch up with my body or at least to know that my heart is beating enough to sustain life. I am not alone in my stupor though my stupor is decidedly less active than the stupor practiced by others. There is a different dull hum of voices in the morning; luggage wheels click over tile at a slightly slower rate, setting a tempo for the morning rush.

There are more business folk than families at this obscene hour. If I were a farmer I’d fly at this time of day and I’d move through the airport as if it were one of my fields. Slow, respectful. Business travelers have forgotten their inner farmer and walk with a deliberate goal in mind: get “there.” Even at this early hour and in their pre-coffee diminished capacity, they move with a studied determination. Click, click, click. No time to waste. A plane to catch. A sale to close. A deal to make. Ten minute rest interval. A trip to the gym. A light meal. Most have heads down and are answering emails as they move with intention to their portal.

Don’t get me wrong. I love business people. I work with business people. They live in a different culture than I do. They play by a different set of rules; they hire me because my rules are different and so I can see what they cannot. For instance, I do not believe that “time is money;” were we living in the industrial age that might still be true but it was an antiquated notion before my parents were born. I’m certain that “relationship is money,” that the path to efficiency is to slow down and not speed up (I can prove it). From my vantage point the prerequisite for success is cooperation, not competition. Cooperation is an infinite game and competition is finite; competition can live within cooperation, but not the other way around. I’ve learned from famous consultants that the only real purpose of a business is to serve a customer – that is cold language until you realize that the verb is “to serve” and “customer” is an antiseptic word for “human being.” Do you want to succeed in business: serve a human being. Serve lots of them. Focus on what you bring to them and not what you can get from them.

As I contemplate another cup of coffee (oh, okay…if I have to…) I want to whisper to the morning sprinters, “Markets are made-up just as are economies; they are constructs and not forces of nature; we make the rules, we thrive or suffer according to the world we make up. Let’s play a different game. Let’s practice health. Slow down. Live today. Take a look around: you are surrounded by those you serve.

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Recognize The Adventure

Posted on January 1, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

663. 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 calendar tells me that this is the first day. And isn’t that always true. I have a friend that writes me everyday to report on her adventure of the day. This is a good day to start a good practice: decide and live each day as if it was the first day (because it is) and aim to have an adventure on every first day.

A hint: It will help if you do not resolve to do this because a resolution assumes that it has never previously been true; it assumes a change, something different that you must do. That misses the point entirely. All you need do is open your eyes, release the belief that your life is ordinary, and recognize the adventure. Instead of a New Year’s resolution allow yourself to have a New Year’s recognition.

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See The Elegance

Posted on December 28, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Bryan and I talked tonight about the elegance of design. He told me that many years ago he became interested in the Golden Mean, which led him to research the Fibonacci sequence, which led to an interest in eclipses. He became fascinated by the simple elegance and paradox of astronomer’s capacity to precisely determine when an eclipse would happen and the impossibility (due to weather) of predicting if we would be able to see it. The Golden Mean and the Fibonacci sequence are simple equations that, when replicated, maintain the integrity of design throughout very complex structures and calculations. They are fractals. Much of classic architecture is based solely on the Golden Mean. Much of what you will learn in contemporary art school about composition is based on the Golden Mean.

Our physical bodies are complex structures based on a simple cell design. We are at the same time miracles of complexity and simplicity; more space than solid, more water than mineral, reducible to a small pile of dust and yet expansive beyond all imagining. We are elegant in our design, as nature only designs elegant forms from the same simple notion and very simple (yet complex) building blocks.

Our thoughts run according to the same principle. I once read a statistic that showed that we think mostly the same thoughts each day, day after day (don’t ask me how you measure such a thing….). We build our thought on a few replicable principles and then go holographic with them. A few simple assumptions will lock you in prison or set you free. Check out the pattern of the story you tell yourself each day. Are you locking yourself in or opening the cage? I realized years ago that the epicenter of my coaching work – or any other form my whacky work takes – was really about story change. I often say this to groups: change your story and you will change your world. They mostly respond, “It can’t be that easy!” or “Pie in the sky!” I didn’t say it would be easy – we are after all deeply invested in our stories; we are great fighters for our limitations. The wrong assumption is that it need be complex. We are elegant in our design, even down to our repetitive thoughts. Change the simplicity and you will some day be capable of manifesting an entirely new soaring cathedral of thought.

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Open And Experience

Posted on December 27, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Walking through a driving rain in downtown Seattle, I had my hood up and eyes down and stepped into a flock of pigeons just as a bus passed spooking the entire pigeon squadron into taking flight – straight at me. I was suddenly and completely engulfed in a swoosh of wings and riot. I don’t know why but I closed my eyes, not for protection, but because I wanted to feel the experience of so many wings flapping around me. The sensation was as if being lifted, stirred and then returned to the ground. After having so many crow attacks I am generally skittish when birds fly at my face; my first reaction is to duck and cover. Not today. For some reason (that is beyond my capacity to reason), rather than close and protect, I opened and experienced. Lift, stir, gentle return to the ground. “The pigeons took me with them,” I thought as I opened my eyes and laughed.

I flipped back my hood and looked up into the rain. The pigeons vanished and I was getting soaked and awakened. It was as if I left this plane of reality for a moment and needed a cold splash of rain to bring me back. It was just a few days ago, upon Marilyn’s request, that I went outside to pick a fight with the crows and instead of having a good crow bout I ended up doing the same thing, hood back, looking into the sky as the rain soaked and cleansed me of my dark mood. This time, staring into a steel grey sky, rain running down my cheeks and off my forehead, I remembered a phrase that I read this morning from Thom Hartmann’s book, The Prophet’s Way: “You must behave as if your every act, even the smallest, impacted a thousand people for a hundred generations. Because it does.”

I stared into the sky surprised at my reaction to the birds and asked myself, “What ripple would I send through a hundred generations if my first response to any situation was to open and experience rather than close and protect myself?” And, an even better question followed, “How different would I be in the world if I lived open to any experience?” Isn’t that another way of saying, “be present to what is?” Flipping my hood back up I discovered in a chilly rush that my hood was filled with water that poured down my back so I took flight a second time, howling and dancing my own version of the pigeon launch, chanting, “open, open, open…!” Of this I am certain: a hundred generations from now they will most likely still be laughing!

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Think “I Can!”

Posted on December 26, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

657. 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 in the last few days of living in the apartment I have occupied for nearly a decade. And, because I see the move coming, I am aware of my patterns and rituals, the unconscious actions that have come to define my normal, my everyday. For instance, while unloading the dishwasher this afternoon, I was amused by my automatic movement, spoons, forks and knives into the drawer, pivot, dishes up above, cups one at a time to the hooks above the counter, straighten the rug. I have repeated these actions so many times that they are worn into me, paths through the woods of my life. I appreciate them today because I will soon be without them; I will soon be awkward in the creation of new patterns and intentional in creating new rituals of definition.

I realize that thoughts are like these rituals. Thoughts are patterns that define us. If you think, “I can,” then you certainly will. If you think, “I can’t” then you will wear that pattern, too. I see my impending step out of my patterns as an opportunity to create new patterns, especially new thought patterns. There are rituals of thinking that I am ready to release. A new friend recently told me of her solstice ritual: friends meet around a bonfire and write on slips of paper what they are ready to let go. Then, they commit the slips to the fire. My move is like a bonfire. My patterns are now written on a slip of paper and in a few days I will commit them to the fire on not-knowing. I will then be free to create new patterns of thinking, new rituals of belief.

It is the time of year for resolutions and, like most well intended resolutions they fall prey to the groove of old patterns. Everything begins with a thought; repetitive thought is a pattern, investment in the pattern is a ritual that defines the life you choose to live. If you are not living the life that you desire, if your patterns are thought-prisons or somehow keeping you small, join me in creating new rituals of definition. You need not leave your apartment or your mate; you need not lock the door and walk away from your life. You need only, one day at a time, one step at a time, create a new pattern. My bonfire friend is now saying to herself, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can,….” And, one small step at a time, one small thought at a time, she will. And, so will I.

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Do The Dishes

Posted on December 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

649. 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’m at 37,000 feet. The coffee has been served. The trash has been picked up. The man sitting next to me is asleep, as are the people across the aisle. I see the flicker of movies or games on ipads; a baby somewhere behind me is fussy. We are in an aluminum tube hurtling through space at several hundred miles an hour and I am typing. And, as I look around me, I’d say that most of my plane-mates believe that flying through space is usual, mundane.

A hundred years ago very few people had seen the earth from the sky. A few people in balloons made it into the clouds. Now, hundreds of thousands of us soar through the sky everyday. I was reminded in the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas that it has only been 45 years since a human being saw the earth from space. We have been on this planet for thousands of years and the miracle of the earth was something we imagined but had never seen. I am in the first generation of humans to see a photograph of the earth from space. I remember seeing it for the first time and I gasped. Now, we think it commonplace. Sure, from space there are no boundaries, sure it looks alive (it is), but I imagine most of my globe-mates think it is usual, mundane.

It is the center of every spiritual practice, it is the task of the artist: what does it take to truly SEE. How do we develop our capacity to see what is right in front of us instead of seeing what we think is there? To think is to interpret. To think is to abstract; it is a veil that can blunt the immensity of experience. How do we become present to the enormity of being alive and cease to reduce our lives to the mundane?

Travel to another country and you will see. Fall in love and you will see. Climb to the top of a mountain and you will see. Stand in the river with the water rushing around your ankles and you will see. You will see because you want to see; you will enter your moment having decided to be there and nowhere else. You will see because you let go of the fog of knowing and allow yourself to not know. You will see because you have re-entered discovery. Do the dishes for the thousandth time. Do nothing else but simply feel the water on your wrists, smell the soap, the muscles in your hand as you hold the sponge. Feel your heart beating and you will recognize that you have never lived this moment, you’ve never breathed this breath, you’ve never done these dishes and you will come alive quite suddenly and see the miracle of your life.

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Show Up In Stillness

Posted on December 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

It is the dark days of winter in Seattle. We are rolling toward the winter solstice and my inner bear wants to burrow beneath the blankets and hibernate. Is there anything better than a nap on Sunday? Isn’t it beautifully decadent to sleep in after a long stretch of early morning wake up calls? To stay in bed on a cold morning, read and drink coffee – my inner bear just groaned with pleasure at the thought; bears in my world love coffee almost as much as naps.

It is also during these dark days that I return to the necessity of stillness. It is easier for me to get quiet in this season. Persephone returns to the underworld and Demeter grieves so the world rests. We mortals bundle up and meditate on the year we’ve lived and the dreams we entertain. And when we wind down our reflection, we get quiet. This morning I stared out the window for a long time! Don’t ask me what I was thinking; I wasn’t thinking anything. It’s as if the cold and dark pulled the thought right out of me.

I associate inner quiet with health. To me, inner quiet is akin to the absence of war. I’ve exited the debate. I can be present to what is in front of me. I can see beyond the interpretation. In class a few weeks ago, someone said, “I want to foster stillness so it is the default mode.” Isn’t that lovely? What a gift to give yourself to foster stillness so that it is your state of being; inner noise as the anomaly. So much of our stress is a result of the story we tell; can you imagine your life if inner quiet was the norm? Another person in class said, “I have great choice in how I show up in the world. I think I will make it my choice to show up in stillness.”

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