Say What You Mean

Posted on December 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

One of Don Miguel Ruiz’s 4 Agreements is to be impeccable to your word: say what you mean and mean what you say. This, he writes, is an act of self-love. It is the greatest act of self-love.

I have been thinking much about this agreement particularly as I step through another threshold and leave behind all that I know. I find that am often NOT impeccable to my word. I am not so concerned with my honesty with others. I edit myself, I soften the impact of my words, and I manipulate my meanings; I am human. I’m not sure what it means to be honest with others because I am not sure that I am honest with myself. Impeccability with others is only possible if I am impeccable with myself.

Someone once told me that the best part about me was that I tell a great story and the worst part about me is that I tell a great story. I have exercised my capacity to see the light side to such a degree that I sometimes make light of the darkness. A friend once asked me, “Why is it okay that these things are happening to you? Where’s your rage?” It was a great question and, in fact, opened my eyes to my lack of impeccability with myself.

Say what you mean to yourself. Mean what you say to yourself. It is a double-edged sword. Like me, you are not impeccable when you call yourself names: are you truly an idiot? Neither am I. Do you mean to diminish yourself? Neither do I. Do you mean to diminish others? Do you need to push others down to elevate yourself? Neither do I. These are the easy misalignments to spot. Suspend your judgments and you will return, at least partially, to impeccability.

The more difficult stories to catch are the stories of, “It’s okay.” Is it truly okay for you to give up your needs to fulfill the needs of others? Is it okay for you to give away your voice? Are you sure it is not important if you let go of your dream? Are you certain that is doesn’t matter if the world steps all over you? Impeccability comes when we say, “That’s not okay.” Boundaries and impeccability go hand-in-hand. That’s why, to Don Miguel Ruiz, impeccability is an act of self-love.

Recently, a woman in class, who lost her house to Hurricane Sandy, said that she was “investing in her darkness.” She was telling herself the story of “everything is ruined.” Certainly the house was ruined. She realized that she was not ruined; she was alive. She needed to feel what she was feeling; she needed to grieve so she could move forward. So, rather than telling a story of ruin, she began to tell a story of grieving so she could reach the story of “what’s next.” She said, “ I realized that we need the light AND the dark. We need them both…it was all okay when I allowed that it wasn’t okay.”

Filed under: Awakening, Identity, Navel Gazing, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Value Your Growth

Posted on December 9, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

640. 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 we were 12 years old my cousin Randal and I ran away from home. We’d had it with the parental suppression and too many rules! We wanted adventure and revolution. One morning in a fit of discontent we took a can opener and 6 dollars and started walking. We didn’t know where we were walking. We’d not identified a direction or made a plan. Along the way we stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought some candy and Coke to fuel our discontent. We walked from Arvada to Golden, approximately twenty miles before we got tired and called home for a ride. Dinner and a soft bed suddenly seemed more important than freedom and adventure. I have always felt fortunate that our very angry mothers were willing to come fetch us from our adventure. Our walkabout revealed the benefits that come with rules; it also made apparent to me how comfort is often the roadblock to rebellion. My only regret was that we never got to use our can opener.

Discontent fuels movement. I remember thinking as we walked that we were walking for the sake of walking. We were walking because we needed to do something, but the something we chose to do was not action – it was reaction. We were not walking toward anything; we were walking away from our problems. We didn’t know what else to do. It seemed important and necessary when we started and confusing and ridiculous by the time we stopped. We’d defined our actions according to what we didn’t want, not according to the creation of what we imagined. Discontent fuels movement but does not give it direction.

When we got to our respective homes that night, the people that loved us yelled at us, grounded us, fed us really good food, hugged us, made sure we were clean and without injury and tucked us in. It was a full spectrum of loving acts! I slept really well that night. The next day I awoke a different person. I knew that running away wasn’t immediately useful and yet, it created movement within me. It was assertive. It helped me run into more than a few boundaries. It initiated conversations that I needed to have. It helped me recognize that love has many faces and that this business of being a human is messy. It helped me distinguish between action and action with purpose. It helped me recognize that Coke and candy are not good fuel for walking long distances. And, it helped me recognize that if I wanted to make significant change in my life or in the world, I needed to value my growth over my comfort. In fact, growth is always through a path of discomfort.

Lora once told me a story of a Buddhist teacher who took cold showers everyday. I shivered and replied that I couldn’t do it. I like hot showers too much. She smiled and said, “That’s exactly what I told him and you know what he said? ‘I’d rather be fully alive than comfortable.”

Filed under: Awakening, Edges, The Direction of Intention, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Change Your World (part 2)

Posted on December 4, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

635. 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 634]

One of the greatest dysfunctions in a power-over story comes with the emphasis on individual achievement. The dog-eat-dog story is only sensible to a community (I use the word “community” loosely) that suffers from the illusion that the members are distinct and separate…and consumable. Claw your way to the top, get your slice of the pie, and push others down to elevate yourself. Someone eats, someone starves. Isn’t it a mighty paradox that we individualists are rabidly eliminating cultural and ecological diversity from the face of the earth – the stuff of healthy life? We homogenize. We homogenize seeds to our great peril, shop from the same six stores, have proudly invented the cubicle, and embraced the standardized test as a measure of individual achievement. Power-over stories are riddled with insanity and isn’t it the hallmark of the insane that they can’t see their psychosis? Psychosis leads one to believe that they are all alone.

Picasso, arguably the most innovative western artist of the past century didn’t create anything that didn’t already exist. He is the artistic gold medal winner of the 20th century. Yet, when you understand what he was doing, you recognize that he played with forms from all over the world, combining and recombining. He knew that he did not create from a vacuum. He knew his roots, his artistic ancestors and his influences. He said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” He was a mighty thief. We place great emphasis on innovation in the arts – we want to make people see something anew – ours is an art of abstraction. A shift of perception is highly revered. Seeing differently, opening to a new perspective – noble stuff. And, to facilitate the new perspective our artists must stand outside of the society so that they might see it with some clarity. They must isolate, separate. Cubicles commenting on cubicles. In a power-with community the artists live at the center; they are the keepers of the story, they are the guardians of the communal identity. In a healthy power-with culture, the arts carry, nurture and maintain the identity of the community. Art is not meant to make you see differently; it is meant to help you know yourself in relationship to the community, and beyond.

No one creates in isolation. No athlete becomes a champion without a coach. We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, we owe a great debt to our teachers and mentors and cousins and friends. We eat because someone grew, picked and shipped the vegetable. The atmosphere we enjoy is not separate from the trees that exhale it or the ocean that churns it. Power-over storytellers have the insane notion that they can control it, the consumer is somehow distinct and impervious from toll of consumption. Individual merit, the inane notion of a chosen people, and the equally insane roll to Armageddon, are rooted in the same narrative. They (we) are outcome focused, forgetting that this magic life is nothing if not a continuing dynamic relationship. Separations are fantasy and outcomes are illusions.

A community celebrates individuals because of what the individual brings to the community. A power-over community is destined to collapse because its members understand themselves to be distinct and are oriented according to what they can get from the community. An individual is not a center; only a relationship can serve as the core; relationship is the gravity that holds. Every community is nested in a greater community. There is no greater imperative than to see the power-over story that we play and the misery it causes (us and others) and begin entertaining a narrative of power-with. It is simple to begin the shift: start by asking yourself, “What do I bring?”

Filed under: Art, Awakening, Power, Seeing, Story, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Stop Pushing

Posted on December 2, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

633. 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 love when lessons come in clusters. Sometimes it seems the week has a theme that will keep coming until I pay attention.

This morning, Saul-The-Chi-Lantern gave us an article from a magazine about yoga injuries. “It’s never good to push too far, to try and be a super person,” he said. He asked us to face the mirrors in the room and guided us though a series of minimal movement exercises. “Find the edge of your movement and learn that edge.” As we moved through the exercises he told stories of dancers and martial artists that left their center, that strained their bodies beyond what was natural and sustained career ending injuries. He told us of a doctor he once knew that treated joint and spinal injuries with the minimal movement exercises we were doing in class. “The edge moves. You gain flexibility by finding the edge, working with it, and not by forcing yourself past it.”

“Power comes from relaxation, not through resistance,” he said as he demonstrated a martial arts move. “If someone punches, I am most effective with the least amount of energy,” he said, showing a simple twist of his arm to deflect a blow. To meet the force with force will knock me off center. It will hurt!” he laughed. Power is not resistance. Power is relaxation.

Earlier this week I worked with a class of entrepreneur’s preparing for their investor pitches; they were working really hard to be memorable. They were tense, pushing. I told them that in a past life I used to audition actors, sometimes I’d see dozens of people in a single day. I told the class that I’d never remember the actors who worked hard, who tried to get me to remember them; the actors I remembered where simple, honest, centered, and clear. The actors I remembered were relaxed. Minimal effort. Easy. Powerful. The actors I remembered were honest.

Yesterday, Judy-Who-I-Revere, after listening to my tale of woe said, “You don’t need to work so hard. You already have everything you need. Relax; you can stop pushing.”

When Saul started his lesson this morning I smiled, thinking, “Alright already! I hear it! I’ll stop pushing. I will relax.” I am a slow study and sometimes it tickles me that I make the universe work so hard to teach me….

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

Leave Yourself Behind

Posted on November 26, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

My grandfather is 103 years old. Last time I saw him he said, “Heaven don’t want me and hell won’t have me.” He feels as if he is ready to go yet remains in an earthly limbo. He eats. He sleeps. He waits. He has outlived two of his four children, his wife and all of his peers. He still flirts with the ladies in the lunchroom though it is more out of habit than from ambition.

In every story cycle there is a place where “what once was” no longer exists and “what will be” is not yet come. It is in this in-between place where the old identity dissipates: you are no longer a child though not yet an adult; it is the time of first pregnancy, you are no longer singular and not yet a parent. In a story, the in-between is usually told through the metaphor of a journey; you must leave behind everything that you know to find what has always been within you. Frodo leaves the Shire as one being; he returns to the Shire as another being, having discovered his darkness and his capacity to persevere. Journeys are bitter sweet.

Rumi said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” It is ironic, isn’t it, to leave yourself behind so that you might find yourself? To think we will find love in another person only to discover that it is the love within ourselves that we seek.

I am not yet half of my grandfather’s age and yet I already know that heaven and hell are both here – not some other place – and we choose which we occupy. We are both the seeker and the gatekeeper. I am perfectly capable of dividing myself against myself and, therefore, occupying hell. I am also capable of knowing myself as whole, regardless of my circumstance, and that is the door to heaven. And, there is a third “place” that is neither heaven nor hell but the space of the journey; all life is movement after all. There are no arrivals; heaven and hell are rest stops, the occasional oasis along the way.

Filed under: Awakening, Identity, Metaphor, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Move Toward It

Posted on November 23, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

624. 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 laughed out loud and then, upon reflection, was overcome by sadness when Lora told me this story: she was listening to a travel show and the host was discussing with his guests how travel inherently opened your mind. Experiencing other ways of thinking, seeing and believing affords the opportunity to challenge and inform ones own thoughts and beliefs. The host used the word “liberal,” meaning broad minded. His first caller was a young woman who told the host and his guests that she’d been planning her first trip abroad but after listening to their conversation said she was going to cancel; if there were a danger of her becoming more liberal she’d rather stay at home.

When Wade Davis defines the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism (my apologies to my Buddhist friend for my general translation: we suffer, suffering is caused by ignorance, ignorance/suffering can be transcended, there is a way to transcend suffering), he is careful to define ignorance, not in terms of a negative, but as the notion or need to believe that anything in this universe is static or “fixed.” In other words, attach to the notion that your way is the right way and you will suffer because you are ignorant of the universe as it is: ever fluid, ever changing, ever in motion, completely interconnected, fundamentally and profoundly alive. Suffering is fixed mind; illumination is fluid mind. Suffering is blocked movement (engagement); illumination is movement (engagement) unhindered.

In a series on the brain produced by Charlie Rose, Daniel Wolpert from the University of Cambridge said that there is only one reason and one reason only that we have a brain (plenty of species on the planet do not have nor need brains) and that is to produce adaptable and complex movement. Cognition and sense processing are made meaningful only if they drive current action or future action. Movement (engagement) is the purpose of the brain.

Motion. Movement towards new forms, stepping toward questions not investing in answers, releasing any notion of an absolute; to flow, to move, to change, to process through the full arc of this long body, birth to death to birth. It is all motion and unknown, new and surprising. And, to step toward life, to move from narrow mind to broad mind is the only reason we have brains. And, oddly enough, it is the same path to illumination.

Filed under: Awakening, Body, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Build An Altar of Gratitude

Posted on November 22, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Each year on the day before Thanksgiving, I secretly build an altar of gratitude. Sometimes it is in a single location, a collection of cards and objects that remind me of the generosity of those who populate my life and the abundance I enjoy. Sometimes I scatter the altar across many locations. The day before this day of thanks giving, I leave tokens of appreciation and marks of gratitude all across the city. I think it is my attempt to create a sacred geography for myself; I want to see the world as a living, dynamic, holy place and since that was not my original orientation, I have to tend my vision. I cultivate a new relationship with this magic place because I want to; like working a muscle, I intend to grow strong in my reverence. I make offerings to something beyond my knowing but well recognized by my feelings. This earth is an old friend and my days here are nothing short of astonishing.

In my first systems class, the professor gave us an exercise useful for recognizing the immensity of our interdependence and, therefore, our opportunity for gratitude: imagine a goldfish in a goldfish bowl. Follow to the end the support system necessary to keep the goldfish healthy. I’ll give you a clue: you could spend days on this and never come to an end. Separations disappear. It has taken the entire planet and the history of human kind to sprinkle those few flakes of goldfish food into that bowl. Any end line you draw will be false, a construct.

And so it is with you and me. As you sit down to your traditional meal with your family and friends, take a moment and try to track the system of support necessary for you to enjoy your meal in your goldfish bowl. If you take it to heart what you find will astound you. Separations disappear and you might just find yourself in a sacred geography instead of living on the pile of rocks you thought you inhabited. Gratitude is potent thing when directed to a vibrant living relationship and not merely a world of consumables. The real question of this day is this: to what do we give our thanks?

Filed under: Awakening, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | 5 Comments »

Step Into The Dark Night

Posted on November 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Two quotes collided right in front of me and there resonance took my breath away. First, from a television series on culture, the amazing Wade Davis met with Gretel Ehrlich in Greenland. In the interview she said, “Despair is a sin against imagination.”

Saul Bellow wrote, “I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos – a stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”

I am never so quiet as when I paint. I am never so present as when I create. And I am certain that my culture no longer understands the power and role of its arts. It has confused art with distraction; it has relegated its primary mechanism for transformation to the basement of entertainment. Only the artists still recognize the door to the quiet holy.

Despair is noisy. It is urban and abstract. It is the chaos of an untethered mind, the heart gone dry. It is what happens when electric light blinds us to the stars.

Imagination is stillness. It is our most natural state, cousin to curiosity. My friend Carol once told me that, when going to Alaska, you reenter the food chain. If you think you suffer from a lack of imagination, step into the dark night and walk into woods. You will learn that it is not imagination that you lack but contact with anything that is real.

Filed under: Art, Awakening, Perspective, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Story Yourself Vast

Posted on November 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Horatio lovingly takes me to task on my use of the word story. I use it as a verb. I write, “You story yourself,” and Horatio rolls his eyes, telling me, “I wish you wouldn’t do that.” I can’t help it. I believe the story you tell yourself about yourself is a creative act; it is something that you do. It is an action, not a thing. I believe we story ourselves every moment of every day. It is one of the fundamental actions of our lives and whether we recognize it our not, it is an act of creation. We are fundamentally creative, creating ourselves with every story we tell, every experience we interpret, every yearning we assume, and every memory we re-play. At the inception of every action we take is the story we tell ourselves.

We cast ourselves in this story that we tell; we play many roles in the course of a day. Some of the roles we like to play, some we do not. Whether we like them or not we agree to play all of the roles. We have great choice in how we play our roles; we have the capacity to bring life to every circumstance in our play. We can play roles of resistance to life; we can play roles of investment in generating life. It all depends upon how we decide to story our moments, the narrative we choose to weave.

A month ago I was sitting on a pier watching the sunrise and I realized that the narrative dominating most of my life was a story of “figuring it out.” So much of the story I tell-myself-about-myself is driven by a narrative of “needing to know.” Knowing provides safety. Knowing provides location. I asked myself the question that has always lurked behind the curtain, a much better question for me: what if I never figure it out? What if I allow that it can’t be figured out; what if it is a mystery? What if I am a mystery not to be contained or figured out, but a vastness to be experienced? What if I accept that I am a mystery and instead of telling a story of “figuring it out,” tell the story that I know to be more true: I am as fluid and unknowable as is the rest of the universe. Why don’t I treat myself as a dynamic question instead of a static answer?

Why would I tell such a small story in such an immense experience?

Filed under: Awakening, Story, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

Diverge

Posted on November 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Earlier today I laughed when an artist friend said to me, “I felt like an alien when I was a kid. And then I grew up and my friends started taking drugs; they finally saw the world the way I saw it! It was great!” Being an artist can feel like living in a perpetual altered state.

Artists often have to walk far down the road of their lives before realizing that their greatest gift is their divergent point of view; it is not what they do, it is how they see. It is a great day in their lives when they realize that they need not bend their view to match “the norm,” they simply need to give themselves permission to see what they see. They need only grant themselves permission to want what they want and express what they perceive; they go so far as to let go of the notion of a norm. Until then they think they are aliens, deficient or are somehow broken; they travel through life thinking, “Either this place is insane or I am?” No matter how you toss that coin, you will not come up a winner.

The first phase of my graduate program was called divergence. We were encouraged to deviate from our path: to pursue something that either scared us or challenged our fundamental assumptions. It was a brilliant educational design and unusual for a university program. Throughout the process I pondered why intentional divergence wasn’t the organizing principle behind all levels of education. A student must diverge to converge; a student must not-know en route to knowing. Divergence requires stepping into unknown territory. Wandering beyond the boundaries is the only way to understand the usefulness or uselessness of the boundaries. Step into the bog, get lost, run from noises that may be nothing or just might be a tiger. How will you ever know if you will fly or fall until you leave the nest? Of this you can be certain, diverge and you will return to the nest knowing more than when you left or, more likely, you will know more than when you left AND have no need to return. No matter how you toss that coin, you will come up a winner.

Filed under: Art, Awakening, Creativity, Education, Emergence, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

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