Follow Your Feet

Posted on March 23, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

744. 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 sun was out today. I took a break midafternoon, bought a coffee, found a sunny spot, and sat in it. I closed my eyes and sat facing the warmth, soaking it in. I was not alone. Periodically I opened my eyes and spied other sun sitters in their own special light pools. When I first moved to Seattle I made fun of sun sitters. I did not understand the people pouring out of the towers to find a warm wall or sunspot to occupy. Now I am one of them. I couldn’t get enough. There is not enough sun to slake my sun-thirst.

Earlier this morning as I walked down the hill, the sun was not yet up though the clouds were soft orange against a purple sky; the birds sang a spring song and I stopped to listen. They knew the sun was coming out to play. They knew the sun had one foot in spring and they needed to sing the other foot out of the winter circle. They sang with all of their might and invoked a gorgeous day. The sun finally committed: both feet are now firmly planted in the renewal.

After my date in the sunspot I walked, intending to go back to the studio but found my feet had no intention of leaving the sun. I told my feet that I had things to do, that I must be productive but they would have none of it. They pulled me to the sunny side of the street and followed every street I’d not yet trod. That seemed to be the criteria: 1) sun, and 2) unknown. As I gave in to the will of my rogue feet I decided that their criteria made much more sense than mine. Or, perhaps their criterion was a better match for my mine. I was certainly productive: I learned many new streets and my vitamin D quota escalated. I achieved a lot, too! My stress levels dropped significantly. I did not know they were up until they dropped. I cleared my mind as only a walk into the unknown can do. I talked to a woman preparing a neighborhood garden. I found a second sunspot and occupied it for an ample amount of time. Perhaps the birds invoked a bit of both-feet-in spring from me as well. As it turns out, my feet are very smart and the birds are very persuasive!

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Make A Nap

Posted on March 14, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Today is one of those post travel days. I’m exhausted. I avoid the mirror because my face feels like the face of a Basset Hound: droopy, blood shot eyes. My synapses are lethargic. Like half-hearted trapeze artists they leap but do not reach for the catcher. My thoughts fall to the safety net where they bob and refuse to get up. “This feels nice,” they say as they relax into the net, smacking their thought-lips while slipping into a nap. “I’ll be there in a minute,” they call to me from a sleep state, words slurred and intention clear (you are on your own without synapses so find something useful to do).

I used to call these “no-power-tools” days – as I appreciate my digits and I know better than to get near blades when my thoughts are asleep on the job. When I wear the mask of the Basset Hound I usually spend the day filing papers. I am an out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of guy so I have no expectation of finding anything once it is filed. Since I am on the road and away from my files and my paper stacks I had no truly safe activity to keep me busy.

I managed to take Bodhi the dog for a walk. I couldn’t find his leash so I used my belt, which sounded like a good idea until I realized that using my belt for a leash created a whole new set of problems. While Bodhi proudly wore my belt I struggled to keep my pants up. We looked like a clown and his dog. I have the same problem going through security at airports, especially now that they make you raise your hands in the full body scanner. Three seconds is an eternity when your pants are edging down. With this knowledge in my memory bank you’d think that I would have solved my leash problem another way.

With my belt safely restored to my pants I watched Bodhi settle in for a snooze on the floor. Although his face is Australian Shepherd and not Basset Hound, Bodhi has a legitimate dogface; he was in no way resisting his impulse to nap. He wasn’t resisting his need to sleep. As I watched the natural wisdom of this special dog I wondered why I needed an excuse to nap. Humans are funny animals; rather than follow the simple impulse, rather than do the thing our bodies are telling us to do we need to create a reason. Bodhi snored and I remembered a quote from Jarod Kintz. He wrote, “I made a nap this afternoon. I made it out of two pillows, a bed, a sheet, a blanket, and exhaustion.” Perfect.

You’ll never guess what I made this afternoon.

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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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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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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.

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Receive The Gift

Posted on November 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Push hands is a core practice in Tai-Chi. It is a done facing a partner, forearm-to-forearm, feet rooted to the floor, moving to sense the center of balance of the other person. If it were a game, the objective of push hands would be to knock the other person off balance.

I am a novice and am learning that the skill is to not assert force, which seems counterintuitive. In my western mind, if I am to knock my partner off balance, I need to push; I need to assert. It’s called push hands, after all! But that is not the case. As Saul-the Chi-Lantern says, push hands is a “listening energy.” Pushing with force knocks you off balance, not your partner. Listen. Feel. Stay rooted in your center. The skill is to feel my partner’s center and the moment they move off their center, I help them, no force necessary. I use my partner’s energy, helping them move further off center, moving them in the direction they are already going – off balance.

There are life metaphors a-go-go in push hands. Today there were two in particular: first, it is too easy for me, the novice, to focus on the moving hands and forget about the still center. The power is not in the moving hands, the power is maintained in the still center. A powerful person is not distracted by the moving pieces – we live in fast-river world with no end of rapidly moving pieces – it is easy to lose center with so much pulling at our attention. A variation on lesson one: a powerful person does not push with their arms (that is to assert force, thus throwing myself off center); a powerful person pays attention to and operates from their center. They sense. They feel. They listen. They move from their center, not from their extremities. The mind wants to assert, to force, to achieve; the mind is all about moving from the extremities. Power is in process. To force is an attempt to control; the moment I attempt to control, my partner supports my attempt and launches me across the room.

The second lesson was even more potent for me: power doesn’t feel powerful. It feels like helping. Push hands is a great exercise in creating power-with; there is no defeat, no winner and loser, there is a greater and greater capacity to listen, to embody a potent center, to support your partner in occupying their center. As Saul-the-Chi-Lantern often says, “Learn to receive the gift.” Translation: occupy your center; stop trying to make things happen; surrender your need to resist: Listen. Participate. Use what is right in front of you and amplify the energy. Help your partner stay in their center is the best way for you to learn to inhabit your own.

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Find Your Pivot Point

Posted on October 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

595. 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 594]

It is a full decade since I learned to dive with Terry. Until last week it had been 6 years since my last dive. Although I live on the Puget Sound, near one of the world’s great dive spots, the water is cold and I am skinny; I hate to shiver and all I need do is look at the divers preparing to enter the frigid waters outside my door and I start looking for a blanket.

A few weeks ago I flew to Belize for a dive vacation. Apparently I was ready for my second master and the next level of the lesson. And, lucky me, since it was time for the second master, I actually had two masters show up: the first was the dive master, named Luckie (note: I am considering a name change; how cool is it to be a dive master AND to be named Luckie). Luckie, above the water, is a trickster and filled with laughter; beneath the surface he is easy, clear, and neutral. He radiates trust. I would follow him anywhere. Luckie dives without any weight. Most divers need a small amount of weight to take them down and to assist with neutral buoyancy. This is too big of a metaphor for this small post but just consider the implications: how much weight do you need to carry to become neutral? Luckie needs none. He is neutral all the time and like Terry, that does not render him without personality, it does the exact opposite: Luckie is a riot of laughter and joy. He is a magnet for life. He is hungry to know and engage and experience. He is the embodiment of what it is to be neutral and efficient. Luckie has fire and he burns clean.

The second master is Luckie’s boss, Declan (okay, another cool name. Apparently you can only live in Belize if your have a cool name). He came with us on our second day of diving. The first time I saw Declan in the water I almost cried; I have never before seen a human being that easy and present. He was so…beautiful…in the water that I was stunned: the absence of struggle. I had to swim behind him. I wanted to know what he knows, I wanted to mimic what he did. And, remember, I know Terry. I was amazed and inspired by Luckie. Declan in the water becomes the water; he is not easy in it, he is it. He teaches a class in mastering your buoyancy and I will go back to Belize to take the class. Like Terry or Luckie, diving with Declan is not about diving; it is about how to be in the world; it is how to be the world.

I told him that I wanted to take his class and he said, “Oh, it’s easy! It’s not the same for any two people. It’s all about the right amount of weight and recognizing that balance comes from your hips. Find your pivot point, it’s in your center and feel your way into it and then practice. There’s no other way.”

So, crib notes from Belize: you can’t think your way into it. Neutral knows how to laugh. I now know what the absence of struggle looks like. Embodiment. Perfect balance. Practice, practice, practice. There’s no other way.

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Buy Terry A Beer

Posted on October 24, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Scuba diving is rife with life lessons. I learned to dive in Bali from an American ex-pat named Terry, a former surfer, drug runner, and underwater welder turned Buddhist. And, since I was the only person in the class, I had my own private life lesson delivered through the metaphor of diving. As Joyce would say, Terry was an old soul; he was comfortable anywhere in the world, above or below the water, in the west or the east; he’s one of the few people I’ve known who was truly at home in the world. I had to buy Terry a beer for every gaff I made on the way to ease in the water and I will go on record saying that there is not enough beer in the world to pay Terry what I owe him.

The primary skill for a diver to learn is neutral buoyancy. Regardless of depth, a diver wants to hover in the water, not sink or rise (unless he or she intends to change depth). Terry used to say, “Get neutral. Use the least amount of energy necessary. The skill is presence.” Re-reading that last sentence makes Terry sound old and wise and he was young and energetic, filled with crazy mischief and daring, so please insert your best brazen Hawaiian surfer gone rogue dialect into the previous sentence; my Yoda liked reggae and once said to me, “Let’s spin the ptomaine wheel!” as he strode into a smoky roadside eatery.

Neutral buoyancy is balance; it is the physical experience of perfect balance though you can’t achieve it without balancing your breathing as well, which balances your mind. When you become neutral, your breathing slows, you become efficient – and not the American puritan notion of efficient – as that implies work, sweat, hard pews and squeezing life out in a cubicle. This type of efficiency is the form that comes when you are most alive which means your mind is most quiet; there is no need to achieve or change or grow or do anything. Breathe, rest in balance, witness. No impulse to resist the present moment or to be elsewhere. In fact, when you relax into it, the colors suddenly heighten; there are amazing fish and creatures moving all around, and you can’t believe the shapes or the vibrancy of the world in which you find yourself. It is magic and you are magic (not separate from “it”). And, best of all, after a while it occurs to you that you don’t need to be underwater to practice being neutrally buoyant. It is a skill you can practice anytime, anywhere.

How much beer would you buy Terry to learn neutral buoyancy?

[to be continued]

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Join The Dance

Posted on September 3, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

543. 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 a love letter to movement. If you take the time, if you move slow enough, you begin to see and feel and sense the swirling of air, the dance of grass, flicker of light through leaves, the beat of your heart, the tide of the Sound, the woman walking her dog, the heron’s eyes looking for movement beneath the water’s surface.

Is there anything that is not in motion? The earth is turning on an axis as it rotates around the sun, not to mention the satellite moon tracing its orbit. They tell us that the universe is expanding until, someday in a distant future, it will contract. My hand opens and closes a thousand times each day. This afternoon I walked through a forest and saw pollens wafting in the beams of light streaming through the canopy; bees bobbed on ferns triggering an explosion of particles that caught an air current and whirled. Leaves, somehow knowing that the earth is turning, trade their viridian coats for ochre, scarlet, and brilliant yellow before releasing their branches for another kind of motion.

Sound is motion and I know that seems like an anemic revelation though I challenge you to go out into the world and feel the waves hit you. A few times in my life I have performed a story standing in front of an orchestra and I felt the tsunami of sound crash into and through me. The drums hit my belly and the violins pierced my heart. I told the conductor that his orchestra gave me the best massage I’ve ever had. “Moved to tears” is an incredibly apt expression.

I recognize that thought, too, is motion. I cannot lift a glass and take a drink without first instructing myself to do so. I suppose the thought is literally a squirt of chemicals moving through my brain that sets off a series of electrical impulses the cause my muscles to move, my fingers wrap around the glass. And, as a lover of paradox, I delight in the realization that to slow my mind I must first slow my body, to experience the miracle of motion in and around me, I must intend with my thought to slow my breath, to slow my gait, so that I might slow my thought. Only then am I capable of moving in the moment, not through it (both are forms of motion) and experiencing myself as a full participant in the dance.

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Sense The Season

Posted on August 28, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

537. 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 few days ago on my morning walk I sensed a hint of autumn in the air. There was the slightest breeze, cooler than the day before, and the subtle smell of leaves turning. I savored the moment as I do every year. I look forward with great relish to the day each year that I catch on the breeze the first hint of fall.

My grandfather lived his entire life in the same small area in Iowa. One day, as a boy, I was visiting, and we went to the park on a beautiful hot sunny day. He was looking for treasure with his metal detector and I followed with an old coffee can to hold the bounty and a screwdriver to poke into the dirt when treasure was detected. Suddenly he stopped, looked into the sky, closed his eyes – and “sensed” a change in the air. After a moment he said, “We better go home, it’s going to storm soon.” I was baffled. I could not sense anything. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky yet an hour later an intense storm blew through dumping buckets of rain. He had senses available to him that I did not; he had a specific relationship with a place and felt the rhythms and changes in his body. He was connected.

Brian McDonald opens his book, Invisible Ink, with this story: “An anthropologist was living among tribal people with little to no contact with the modern world. Wanting to share the marvels of technology with these isolated folks, the anthropologist took a photo of the chief and his wives. When the picture was processed and shown to the chief he was unable to recognize the blotches of black, white, and gray as an image of himself. He had never learned to translate two-dimensional images into recognizable three-dimensional shapes. That same chief, however, could look at a patch of grass and say what kind of animal had traversed it and how long ago with no more difficulty than you or I would have recognized ourselves in a photographic image.”

I look forward to that first hint of fall because I know it is a remnant of connection; it calls forward something in me, something deep and ancient. It is satisfying and evokes a kind of quiet affirmation that is rare in my urban indoor life. Catherine once told me that, “Nature yearns for us,” and I know that it is true. Often, when I am coaching or working with people and their creative blocks, deeply invested in their abstractions, I know that all they need do is go outside, recognize and reclaim their natural rhythm, and their capacity to sense the changes in the air. Just as nature yearns for us I know, like a long lost love, when we feel lost or blocked or void of meaning, we need only walk to shore, step into the woods, climb the ridge, close our eyes and receive the quiet touch that says, “Welcome home.”

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