The Direction of Intention

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Today Saul talked about moving through life with more than a dull force. It was an amazing clear image to me, a community of people who only know how to move through life using dull force. Not sharp force, not intense force: dull. I imagined the word ‘dull’ to mean a few things: 1) unconscious and 2) blunted from feeling; life as dull color.

Many years ago just prior to moving to Los Angeles my friend Dwight gave me a how-to-drive-in-LA lesson. He said, “It’s all about forcing traffic to do what you want it to do.” We laughed as my usually benign and peaceful friend Dwight morphed into a self-centered road demon forcing traffic to his will. His lesson was more than insightful, it was prescient: I found drivers in LA to be mostly aggressively unconscious of others and aggressively protected against feeling the impact of their hostility: accidents and a violent city was always the other person’s fault. It was, to me, the city of moving-through and very hard to be present-in. It was the image that hopped into my mind when Saul said, “dull force.” Rodney King, road rage and marshal law; I imagine the land upon which the city was built to be in shock with dull force; all of those orange groves paved over, the hills and blue-blue sky choked with the exhaust of automobiles driven by people trying to be some other place.

Saul bent over to demonstrate a point, pretending to tie his shoe, he said “If you allow there are options other than trying to force your way through your day, you might actually be in your day; you might see that there is no stress necessary to engage with the tasks before you. Rather than dull force you might actually participate within your day!” The idea tickled him and we laughed.

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383.
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I call them universal dope slaps. I do not mean a dope slap that applies equally to everyone. I’m talking about a dope slap delivered by the universe – a specific slap for a specific action. Sometimes they are gentle. Sometimes they are abrupt. I had two this week from opposite ends of the dope slap spectrum. In fact, I’ve had two in the past two days.

I’ve gone months without a single slap and suddenly two in a row. And, the gas-door-mystery-problem continues; something is up! Yesterday I took an early morning walk. Sometimes when I walk I fall into deep thought and I lose all track of place, space, and time. It is my version of Alice down the rabbit hole. I am like a little kid following all the shiny objects in my mind. When I came back to this world, I was on the walkway at Alki beach. There are wonderful barnacle encrusted concrete stairs that lead down to the beach. At high tide the lower steps are underwater. The birds are migrating and what brought me back was a noisy flock of black and white ducks, an entire squadron coming in for a landing just beyond the steps. I ran down to the lowest step and looked over the concrete wall to get a better glimpse just as a rogue wave hit the seawall. The wall of water that washed over me was prodigious. It filled my coffee cup to the brim. Water dripped from the tip of my nose. “Wake up!” said the universe as the duck squadron cluck-chuckled at my drenching.

This morning as I walked I was once again chasing shiny mind matter. This time I was deep, way beyond the Queen of Hearts, into unexplored Wonder-territory. It was the flutter of wings that brought me back. Gentle and quiet, I was being accompanied by the neighborhood pack of pigeons. They fluttered around me, forming a circle, and as I moved to the circle’s edge, they would lift off, and flutter into a new circle formation around me. I’m certain they thought I had snacks. They were with me for several hundred feet. I was enjoying our walk, fully engrossed in the pleasure of wings cleaning the space around me, eyes up, which is how I missed to the obvious trip-able branch stretching across my path. Charlie Chaplin would have appreciated my prat-fall; it was glorious, keystone cop-ish. “Wake up!” chuckled the universe as the pigeons chortled and took to the sky.
“I’m awake!” I announced to no one in particular. “So am I!” said the old woman sitting on the bench behind me. A double-dope-slap!

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367.
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“What walks you?”

I had a Bowenwork session with Scott and after a particularly powerful move he asked me to walk across the room to integrate the work. Watching how I walked after the adjustment, he asked this question, “What walks you?” At first I thought he misspoke or left a word out of his question. I thought he meant to ask, “What walks with you?”

He smiled at my look of puzzlement. Scott is 3 parts trickster, a joy monger with eyes that see behind the thickest mask; his questions pierce the sturdiest armor. This question was exact, a bolt from a crossbow. His grin blossomed to full Cheshire as my look of puzzlement slowly morphed into wide-eyed understanding.

Prior to the appointment I was feeling exhausted. I’ve been working hard, putting out lots of energy to create a new business and not yet seeing much return. I felt overwhelmed. This past year I have not had much room in my heart for play.

I carry within me the puritan story. My people are Iowa farmers and Colorado gold rush miners: work hard for little gain. Grind it out. Hard work makes honest people; little gain keeps people honest. However much I’ve tried to shed the narrative it is a story I have carried forward. Gain too much, live too easily and the story falls apart. Overwhelm is structural mechanism to keep the limiting story intact.

“Is it play that walks you? Anxiety? Is it ‘running late’ that walks you? Is it ‘do more’ that walks you? Is it fear?” He paused, eyes twinkling. “It’s just a story,” Scott said, reading my thoughts. “Is it what you want to walk you?”

You tell the story and in turn the story tell you. “Why not let play walk you?” he asked. “Why hold back what really wants to move you?”

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361.
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I just met Len. We were waiting in line at coffee house and I asked about the book he had tucked under his arm. I couldn’t see the title but the subtitle had the word “mindfulness” and that always pique’s my curiosity. He was at first timid to show me. He looked me over and when I didn’t present as dangerous he pulled the book from beneath his arm and showed me the title: Peace Is Every Step: The Path Of Mindfulness In Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hanh. He asked if I’d read any of Thich Nhat Hahh’s books. When I said I had, he relaxed and the hunger for conversation about this new and dangerous territory called mindfulness overtook him.

Len’s father died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago and Len was his caregiver through the process. He told me it opened his eyes. His experiences navigating hospitals and doctors made him sick. Literally. “There is nothing about health in our health care system,” he said. “It’s not the people, the doctors and nurses were amazing but the idea beneath it all is to get you on a pill. There’s a pill for everything but no one ever addressed what caused the disease in the first place. I started looking at my life and my diet and stress and started asking myself ‘What are you doing?’” And then he paused and said, “That’s what started me reading books like this. If I wanted to be healthy – really BE healthy – I knew it wasn’t enough to change the food I put in my body, change the way I exercise my body, I also had to change the way I feed and exercise my spirit and my mind.” And then he allowed some of his excitement to show through and added, “I am different, now.” Like a conspirator he leaned toward me and said, “We can do this! It’s possible.”

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350.
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The image is explicit. It is burned into my memory and is immediate, accessible, as if I had lived it earlier today and not over 30 years ago. It was the day I understood silence, the day I brushed against the mystery and glimpsed something bigger to life. It is not profound, an everyday moment, that changed how I understand life and my relationship to it.

It was autumn and I was 14 years old, walking through a Colorado forest, following far behind a group of boys. We were hiking toward a clearing that would become our campsite. I often lagged behind because I liked to hear the sounds of the forest. I liked the quiet that was generally lost beneath the banter of the boys. They were used to my detachment so no one expected me to be present or even within sight. They knew I’d come along eventually. I liked my aloofness because it granted me invisibility.

I felt the temperature dropping and soon the first gentle flakes of snow feathered from the sky. As often happens early in a snowstorm, it feels as if the belly of the clouds descend and like a blanket muffles all remaining sound; nature stopped and listened to the arrival of the snow. The breezes paused just as I emerged from the trees into a meadow and the stillness took my breath and me away. I stopped as nature had stopped to witness the snow’s appearance. Nothing moved within me or outside of me except the silent quiver of the falling snow. There was no separation.

In that instant I recognized how temporary and precious was my life; I was nothing more than a passing moment. My eyes would be open for a mere blink of time. I was standing in the silence from which I’d come and would return to this same silence; instead of being terrifying, it was magical. I was infinite as I was finite. And then the winds returned, the snows swirled and I was once again distinct, separate, a boy standing in the woods.

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot that closet where the monsters live. That place where we stuff the things we don’t want to feel.

It’s amazing to me how we can forget about the closet by pretending that it’s not there. It limits our view by half. A full 360° would bring the closet into full view so we restrict our range to 180°. Then, we restrict our emotional range; the whole point of the closet, after all, is to never again feel something like fear or shame. And then, we regulate what others can see – or we think we regulate it. Believing that we can actually control other people’s sight is a grand illusion necessary to make sense of how and why we restrict our availability to life. A mask works conceals AND reveals.

The strategies that we employ to keep the closet out of view are clever! Like Cerberus, the 3-headed hound that guards the underworld, we develop a barking inner critic to keep us from opening the closet door. “You are an idiot!” it shouts as we consider stepping beyond our comfort zone. “Loser!” it cries if we consider reaching for the closet door. “You don’t want to feel that!” it warns if we entertain the desire to be present, to say what we actually think, to show up as we are and not how we think we should be.

Everyone who has ever dared open the closet learns a secret: the monsters only seem big when you can’t see them. Fear makes things look bigger. They only wield power-over from inside the closet. Open the door and shed a little light on them and like the Wizard of Oz they lose their ferocity. The small person behind the curtain steps out and says, “What took you so long to open the door.”

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300.
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I used to be particularly gifted at catching other people’s anger. I’d say to myself, ‘I caught the bullet on that one.” I was not (well, not often) the genesis of the anger but I certainly knew how to stand up at the perfect moment to catch the bullet. Had I lived as a saloonkeeper in Dodge City, I would not have lived long.

I caught bullets because I thought it was mine to do. I was the middle child, the peacekeeper in the family. Stepping in front of warring parties came with the job description. It was the job description. And then, one day deep into adulthood, I asked a really good question: “What am I doing?” The bullets were not aimed at me, they were not meant for me, why was I taking them? Here’s a secret: bullets fill you with a false sense of worth. When I asked myself, “What am I doing?” I was also saying to myself, “You are worth more than this.” People stopped shooting when I stopped accepting bullets. Like all forms of enabling, bullet-taking is a bargain (I’ll take your bullet if you give me a sense of worth); the bargain diminishes the shooter and the bullet-taker.

Questions of worth are really questions of Ownership in disguise. No one can give you your worth. You can push it away, you can look for it in the eyes of others but at the end of the day, you are the one who knows if your work is good, if you are following your bliss, if you are doing your best, if you are bringing you game to the world. You are the one who knows. It is your standard that needs meeting. Own it. Meet it. Worth will become a non-issue.

I understand ownership (and worth) as a dynamic energy flow: practice owning your energy, practice not owning anyone elses energy. Own what is yours; refuse to own what is not yours. Ownership begins with boundaries and grows strong when you stop making assumptions about what would be best for others. I’ve learned that people will still shoot bullets but we choose whether to catch them, duck them, or let them pass through.

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