Perspective | The Direction of Intention

Take Your Foot Off The Brakes

Posted on August 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

521. 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 an old theme revisited. The word of the day is “belief.” For the past few days I have been with Lora at her class reunion in Tucson and I’ve listened to many conversations about belief: belief in self, belief in fate, belief in fortune, belief in friendship, belief in future, belief in love. We give this word, “belief” a good workout and a lot of power!

Like all words, “belief” is an abstraction. Just as the word “tree” is not a tree – the word is an abstraction of something – the word “belief” is also an abstraction; it points to something that you decide/create with in you.

We play as if we need belief before we act. The notion that belief precedes committed action is a misunderstanding, an inversion. This misunderstanding is used as a reason to keep both feet on the brakes, “I can’t act before I believe….” Just watch a toddler explore the world! Curiosity is the name of the game, no belief required.

Belief in your self has nothing to do with fulfilling your dreams or bringing 100% of your self to your life. Curiosity is all that is required. The good news is that curiosity is natural to all human beings. Explore to explore. Act to see what happens. Color outside of the lines. The only thing necessary is to take your foot off the brakes.

[I’m be on the road and taking a break so I’m dipping into the archives and reworking and reposting some of your favorites. I’ll be back at it in the middle of August]

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Create The World

Posted on August 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Random thoughts on a morning walk: Without my eyes translating it into a story, the earth (the universe) is action, pure fluid motion without distinction. It is energy in motion.

The birds chase. The waves roll. The fog lifts. The sun breaks through. The jogger waves at me. The cop sits in his car, the engine idling, he reads the morning news. A break? Hooky? The osprey hunts. The gulls complain.

This is what the old masters and gurus mean when they say, “we create the world.” Without my eyes translating, there is no bird chasing, wave rolling, or fog lifting. There is a single motion. There is no bird separate from wave as distinct from fog. I give it coherence. I give it separation and story.

How does this help me? I am certain that I will continue to story everything I see. It happens in a nanosecond. I believe storying is what makes us human: we are storytelling animals. It helps when I see the extent to which I tell my own story. Then I see that I have infinite choice in the story I tell.

A person can walk in gratitude. They can walk with anxiety. They can lose themselves in thought and miss the day entirely. We can be mindful. Mindless. We can be late or just be taking our time. We can try to please or simply do our best. We can try to change the world or recognize that world is motion, pure fluid energy.

Maybe, just maybe, the world is fine without my story. Maybe what needs changing is how I story what I see.

[I’m be on the road and taking a break so I’m dipping into the archives and reworking and reposting some of your favorites. I’ll be back at it in the middle of August]

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Wink At Your Bully

Posted on August 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

519. 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 a mistake to assume that you will someday shed yourself of inner resistance. The voice of resistance is there for the long haul. It will be barking at you all the way to the dirt nap. Trying to eliminate it will only make it stronger; resisting resistance reinforces resistance – say that six times fast.

Resistance is like the bully in elementary school; it says it wants your lunch money but what it really wants is to see you cower. It wants you to stay in your place because that makes it feel powerful and in control. The bully’s game is control. The bully fears who you might become if you show up in a big way.

A step toward your dream is often a step into the unknown; it requires vulnerability and a release of control. This will bring out the bully every time. The inner bully is handled in the same way as the outer bully: Laugh at it or love it, but do not listen to its trash talk. Name it and keep walking. A bully only has power if you cower – it only has power if you believe its threats. It will call you all kinds of vile things and all you need do is hang onto your lunch money and take another step into the unknown. You empower it if you take the threats seriously; it dissipates if you smile and say, “really?”

Resistance is a sign that you are taking a step. It jumps up because you are daring to fulfill a dream. You can cower and run back into the cave or you can step through it and see what is on the other side.

[I’m be on the road and taking a break so I’m dipping into the archives and reworking and reposting some of your favorites. I’ll be back at it in the middle of August]

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Create It Now

Posted on July 31, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Clients often say to me, “I don’t know what I want?”

This question, “What do I want?” is hard for most people to answer. It is hard because we assume that the answer is an outcome, a thing (a noun). We assume it is achievable; somewhere down the road is a place called happiness and if only we knew what it looked like we might be able to get “there.”

What if we are making it harder than it really is? What if we have the wrong premise? What if the assumption beneath the question is actually a verb? What if what we want to create is a better life, a better relationship with ourselves, a quality process of living? Then the question is easily answered.

If what we want to create is a better life it is useful to recognize that life is not something we will “get” or achieve by tomorrow or the next day or the next. Life is not something we create later. Life is the process that is happening now while we are fretting over the thing we think is missing.

What if we are not separate from what we want? What if a full experience of life is actually the intention? There is no better time or place to begin a full experience of life than the present.

[I’m be on the road and taking a break so I’m dipping into the archives and reworking and reposting some of your favorites. I’ll be back at it in the middle of August]

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Gather On The Beach

Posted on July 26, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Once, I saw Rex Ziak build a map of the earth with post-it notes as he told the history of exploration and mapping of the world. It was an odd sensation as I was delighted to see the continents slowly take shape – I got to discover the world – but I also had a feeling of tremendous loss – as if the earth was being gobbled.

A few weeks ago the pirates landed on Alki beach like they do every year. It is a ritual invasion that marks the beginning of Sea Fair festivities. Hundreds of people packed the beach. Canons were fired. Parrots sat on shoulders, families cheered. There were vendors of every shape and size hawking pirate patches, plastic swords, t-shirts, pirate flags, lemonade, ice cream, bike rides, boat rides, airplanes pulled advertisements overhead…everything was for sale.

Last night Todd, Lora and I were walking. It was early evening and I’d just finished teaching a class; I often walk to clear my mind. As we approached Alki beach we saw several tribal canoes paddling in a line toward the shore. Each year the tribes of the northwest coast gather, a ritual remembrance and celebration of the time they would come together and trade. Before landing, each canoe glided close to shore, guided by songs of welcome and someone in the canoe ritually asked permission to land from the local elder, “We are tired and hungry and ask that you might welcome us to rest…” The elder, standing at water’s edge replied, “We welcome you to share in our bounty….” Dozens of canoes approached, each asking the blessing, each ritually welcomed. There were no vendors, no helicopters, no fanfare, nothing was being sold; it was simple. It was about people coming together to share their bounty.

The final post-it notes completing Rex Ziak’s map defined the northwest coast of the United States of America. It was the final unexplored/unmapped territory and was completed after the Corp of Discovery expedition of Lewis and Clark. The maps were complete, the trade routes were known, the resources identified, the pie cut into slices. I finally understood why Rex’s beautiful map brought such a conflicted feeling to me: the people that gathered on Alki beach for the pirate landing were there to get something, that is the ritual way of people-of-the-map. The people that came in their canoes gathered to bring something to each other, that is the ritual way of people-of- potlatch. Rex mapped in post-it notes their inevitable collision.

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Consider Your Neighbor

Posted on July 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

At the beginning of class, Saul-the-chi-lantern asked a couple to speak of their recent experiences studying with the master. They’d just returned from a trip to New York. The woman (I can’t remember her name) said, “There was a quote that really struck me: What good is your chi if it does not consider your neighbor.” Given yesterday’s post, I smiled. Interconnectivity seems to be the theme this week.

Last night I watched a potent and unsettling interview Bill Moyers conducted with journalist and activist Chris Hedges. Hedges has written a new book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, about the impact of capitalism on the world. He roots his examination in 4 devastated and exhausted communities in the United States; places where the poverty is shocking and the system is wittingly or unwittingly maintaining the cycle. There is a cost in lives of our consumer economy that we shield ourselves from seeing – even within our borders. There is also an ecological cost that we pretend is not our doing.

Chris Hedges used a term, “moral fragmentation” to describe us, a society that has thoroughly confused money with morality, whose value set has eroded and been replaced with, as he named it, “Wall Street values.” He said of the financial players, they know the impact of what they do and think that being a good father is enough or absolves them (us) of their actions. This is what Joseph Campbell meant when he said, “Our mythology is dead.” In the absence of a cohesive narrative, a greater story, we eat each other; we justify the virtues of the 1% at the expense of the 99%. “We’re good people. We are justified. Our way is the right way.”

As within, so without; and the reverse I also true. When we forget that we are a community, we cannot participate as a global community; the motives are consumptive, the collapse is internal and inevitable. To off shore the jobs and expect economic recovery is madness. To put corporate wealth ahead of societal good is suicide. A society driven by bottom line motives is already bankrupt; it is only a matter of time before the exterior of the social body shows the internal rot. It is a cancer.

It is no small sentiment – and there was a good reason the quote stayed with my classmate: “What good is your chi if it does not consider your neighbor.”

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Bring Back The Boon

Posted on July 24, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

502. 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 the things I most appreciate about stories is this: all stories are about transformation and usually the transformation is about the change in the inner life of an individual. But, individual transformation is hollow until the boon is brought back to the community. It only seems that we live for our own betterment. None of us lives in a vacuum. All of us need to contribute or we wither. This was Scrooge’s recognition. Frodo returned the ring to the fire to save the Shire. He was changed in the journey and so the Shire was also changed.

Greater self-knowledge impacts the lives of everyone in the community. Personal growth, deeper self-knowledge, sends a ripple through the society. We rarely see or understand the full impact of our lives on others because the ripple does not stop. My mentor, Tom, had a mentor, Demarcus, who had a mentor…. Understanding the impact of a single life on the world, across time, is one of the purposes of story. Who might you become if you recognized that you mattered, that fulfilling your potential serves the fulfillment of potential in others far beyond your capacity to see. Blunting yourself serves only to blunt others, too; we all lose.

When we step toward our fear and face our bear, we face it for ourselves and for everybody we know. And our stories of facing the bear serves to help others face their bear when their time comes. And their story helps others face their bear…

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Think Twice Before Parking

Posted on July 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Years ago I consulted with some financial guys. They wanted to know about story. They wanted to know how to tell a better story. Before I could teach them about story I needed to know the story they were currently telling. My friends call me a “circular” thinker so I imagine outside eyes would have seen a brilliant comedy routine: several “linear” financial thinkers trying to squeeze my circular mind through their two-dimensional picture. I knit my brows so many times they were bruised. When I am older I will have deep furrows cut in the field of my forehead from that difficult day.
Although I had to squeeze my thoughts across the chasm I was able to finally grasp their story. Here’s what I learned: Money needs to move to grow. Our entire system is designed to entice the average Joe to “park” their money in a bank or a 401k or an insurance product. Most of us still imagine that our money goes into an impenetrable vault; the money goes into the vault and is safe, secure and the nice banker/broker will pay us a tiny percentage to keep our money parked in their vault. That image is a carefully crafted illusion to make us feel secure and grateful for the return on our parking job.

Their job is to make the money move. And they make it move a lot. There isn’t a vault, there is no parking lot; there’s a racetrack. They make the money make lots and lots of money because it never sits still. They will make your money grow 7 to 10 times larger than the amount you parked in their lot-illusion. But wait, there’s more: even it they lose the money they have a fail-safe built into the program; it’s not their money being lost, it’s yours. They were very serious when they said to me, “You never work with your own money.”

Here’s the core of their story, the story beneath the story. It is finance 101: their job is to keep you and me on one side of the debt line (we pay the interest) with them on the other side of the debt line (they receive the interest). They need to create debt for us to pay (think credit card, mortgage, student loan). As they said, “Debt is not a bad thing, it just depends upon which side of the debt you are standing.” That’s why crashes like the 2008 disaster made money, lots and lots of money for some well positioned financial guys: They created lots of good debt and it wasn’t their life savings that they gambled away. They play a game in which they win either way and, in the story they told me, are careful not to consider the consequences for others.

I was not much help that day. I couldn’t get over the notion that it was not a better story that they needed but a better intention, perhaps a bigger conscience, or maybe even a better understanding of the word community.

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Pop The Bubble

Posted on July 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

489. 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 years ago I asked Carol what was the one thing I needed to know before going to Alaska. Her answer took me by surprise. She said, “Oh, that’s easy. When you go to Alaska you re-enter the food chain.” She was right. I had the same impression: a walk in the woods is never just a walk in the woods. Being lunch for a bear is not an abstraction. It is amazing how your priorities shift when you recognize that your position atop the food chain is an illusion. It is amazing how you come alive.

Sean told me that we are always in the food chain but society acts as a kind of bubble; it buffers us from the nature of things. Besides, within the bubble with our natures buffered we are highly efficient at killing each other and ourselves (with stress, cigarettes, etc.). A buffered nature spawns unnatural acts. A buffered nature – or a “culture of comfort” as Martín Prechtel would call it – distorts our story to the point that we forget we are part of and not on top of nature. The “on top” idea is lethal. It is the mother lode of comedy. It is not bears we need fear but the neighborhood watch, the rival gang, the other political team, the police, the banks, and those who are supposed to be governing and protecting our interests. I think I prefer the bears; they are upfront in their intentions.

I suspect the point of having a bubble is to feel safe within it. A city is nothing if not one big campfire. We are supposed to be safer together than alone so why does our bubble, our mega campfire, engender so much alienation and loneliness; all these individual bubbles walking around within the larger bubble? How many times have I met with groups in urban settings who want to “create community?” Too many – apparently proximity to millions of other humans does not a community make. Life within the bubble, buffered from nature, alienates us from…our nature and each other. Bubbles create smaller bubbles.

Outside the bubble, when I was aware that I looked like coleslaw to big furry animals, I wanted other people around. I wanted a lot of other people around. I like my big Seattle campfire – and I wonder what it might be like inside the bubble if we put down the ridiculous notion that we are separate from the natural order of things and stopped pretending that we were somehow above it all.

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Where Are You Standing?

Posted on July 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

488. 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 First Thursday, the night that artists across Seattle open their studios. To pass the time as we await the crowd, PaTan, the artist across the hall, shared with me a Life magazine from 1994. It has four articles that, read together, have my head spinning.

The first is entitled, “Saving The Endangered 100;” it is a photographic list of 100 species of plants and animals in America that are, by now, most likely gone. The second article is about the young boy who was identified as the reincarnation of Ling Rinpoche, tutor of the Dalai Lama. This boy will be the teacher of the next Dalai Lama. The third is an overview of Ken Burn’s Baseball documentary series. The fourth is a photo essay called “Eyewitness to Rwanda.”

Genocide, baseball, extinction, and among highest forms of spiritual tradition – all wrapped in a glossy cover under the umbrella name, “Life.” The magazine reads like a spectrum of human capabilities; the greatest horror to the heights of poetry. It is shocking, inspiring, troubling, breathtaking, overwhelming,…. It is life. At least it is life as we report it; it is life as we story it.

I long ago stopped asking why we do what we do. Asking the “why” question almost always brought a fixation on the horrors and injustice so that I’d miss entirely the other end of the spectrum. Asking “why” assumed the existence of “an answer.” What possible answer can there be for mass murder? What possible explanation is worthy of the reincarnation of a great teacher? There are beliefs, assumptions and justifications. There are stories. We destroy and we create; depending upon where you stand sometimes my creation brings your destruction; Oppenheimer learned this all too clearly. Is it right? Is it wrong? I no longer believe anything is clean enough for such small absolutes. Life is messy.

There are better questions and they usually come in pairs. For instance, “Where are you standing?” is a great question. Locate yourself but don’t stop there! Before justifying your actions consider asking, “I wonder what might this look like if I stood over there with you?”

Filed under: Perspective, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: Why | 2 Comments »

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