The Direction of Intention

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In Bali you often pass through a “split gate” when you enter home compounds or temples. They are beautiful, ever present symbols. Two opposing towers that look like a single structure cleaved in two to form a gate. The halves are symbolic of the polarities, an architectural yin and yang reminding the Balinese of the polarities of our existence and the importance of balance in all things.

Budi took me to a split gate and said, “The half on the left is the masculine, the half on the right is the feminine.” He asked me to pass through the gate and to turn and look back at him. Once I was on the other side he asked, “Now which is left and which is right? What was left in now right, what was right is now left!” He threw his head back and laughed; Budi has a great mischievous laugh, a broad Cheshire grin. He said, “What is important is that you remember that you must pass between!” He was teaching me about balance, about the middle way. This symbol for balance, this split gate is the metaphor for a life transformed, for how it is to be done.

Polarity is not opposition; it is about relativity. It is about awareness. You only know the light because of the existence of dark. There is no light without the dark. There is no learning without mistakes. And there are infinite points between the poles. To walk the middle way it to embrace all the colors and textures in your story, to get out of the business of splitting yourself, to let go the notion of absolutes. It is to allow the full range of possibilities in your life.

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In his chapter on Taoism, Eric Weiner writes about Wu-wei: “Wu-wei is actually ‘effortless action.’ It’s the difference between making things happen and letting them happen.” I read the chapter this morning and recognized a theme for me in early 2012. Wu-wei is popping up everywhere!

Scott and I recently talked about the difference between soulful action and willful action. Soulful action is Wu-wei.

When I paint, I know I am in the “zone” when the painting comes through me, when I am merely the conduit. I am not trying to make anything happen. It is almost as if I follow; there is no thought, no pushing, no sorting, no composing. Flow is Wu-wei.

In coaching classes for the past few weeks we’ve been discussing the difference between acting according to “what wants to happen,” and trying to force things to happen.

In Tai chi class, we practice letting the energy move us instead of trying to move the energy. Tai Chi is the practice of Wu-wei.

I suspect Wu-wei means to step out of the story of struggle. Today, I was late meeting a friend for lunch. If I hit a red light I’d tell myself a story of being blocked. If I hit a green light, I’d tell myself a story of good fortune! “What great luck!” I’d think. Being “late” was a story (in fact, I got the restaurant before my friend). Being “blocked” by a red light was a story. “Good fortune” in a green light was a story. All was willful action, pushing to make something happen. None of it mattered outside of my mind.

Here’s the paradox: effortless action is something I strive for. Funny, yes? I am most alive when I am stillness in action. I am learning not to strive but to allow.

Eric Weiner continues his thought: “Wu-wei means approaching life less like warfare and more like navigation.” Who doesn’t want to bury the sword, call a truce between the factions in the inner warfare and instead pick up a compass? Woo Wee!

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You’d be surprised by how much in common training an actor has with coaching an executive. Clarity of intention, specificity of target, honesty of relationship, and ability to honor the greater integrity of the story are just a few of the similarities. The forms are different but the path is the same. Here’s the map:

Know what you can control and what you can’t. It is impossible to clearly see choices if you are trying to control the things that can’t be controlled (like other people’s thoughts and feelings).

Once you’ve let go of what you cannot control, choices become very clear. Where you put your energy shifts from manipulation to creation. In shorthand, you begin to control what you can control: your choices, your opinion of your self, what you want to create.

Intention is a fuzzy thing until choices become clear (and owned). Your relationship with control clarifies your relationship with choice – not the other way around. Your relationship with choice, once clarified, opens the route to a specific actionable intention.

It’s dominoes: a proper relationship with control reveals choice and a proper relationship with choice reveals intention. For the actor, there is nothing more powerful than a clear choice in service to a specific intention. The same is true of an executive. And, intention is pointless if not in service to a greater relationship. In business or on the stage, this is the map to transformation (if you are business type and shudder at the “T” word, insert the word “Innovation” for increased palatability). Art is business. Business is art. The language may be different but the path to mastery is the same.

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My studio is in an old INS building (immigration and naturalization service). It is the place where people were detained before being admitted into the country or sent back to their home country. Before it was converted to artist’s studios, there was a cellblock, dorms for men and women, dorms for children. On the second floor there are two open-air courtyards, places where the detainees were allowed some time in the sun. On the brick walls of the courtyard, written in black tar, are the names and home countries of the generations of people who were detained here. They were not allowed to have pens or pencils so on warm days when the sealing tar got sticky in the hot sun, the people would dip sticks (or their fingers) into the tar and write their names. In this liminal space, a place that is neither here or there, in the hours and days of detention and boredom and uncertainty, these people left a record of their passage. There are hundreds of names. I was here.

Sometimes I sit in the courtyard and read the names. Some days it is hopeful, as if each name represents a dream in process. Some days I find it depressing, as if each name represents a dream dashed. Some days I don’t see the names at all but a Jackson Pollack wall, a painting that caught the movement of the artists that left their mark. Some days it is like a cave painting, a sacred space like the belly of the whale, a place where people met their monster and were transformed by the trial. Some days I am compelled to add my name to the wall; I was here, too.

Once, I watched a brilliant art teacher work with beginning students (they were teachers) and he had them on oversized paper write their names as big as possible. He asked them to do it again and again, to play with their signature, to write full body signatures until the motion was a dance, layering new signatures on top of old until they realized that to write their signature was the same as drawing. He said to them, “To write your name is to draw yourself into existence. It is to say, ‘This is who I am.’”

Sometimes I think this is what we do everyday, whether we are scratching our names in tar on the wall of detention or dancing our names again and again on oversized lives, we are drawing ourselves into existence. Through our choices and actions we say, “This is who I am and I was here, too.”

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Lora was on a ship that late one night ran aground in the Icy Straits of Alaska. They had to abandon ship. With several other passengers she was taken onto a fishing vessel. One of the passengers had a cell phone that had service so she left me a message (I was on the east coast sleeping in a comfy bed while she was having her adventure) telling me that she was fine, that all of the passengers where safe and that she’d call me when she was able. She wanted to call because she knew the news channels would tell a story of disaster instead of the story of safe competent response to an unfortunate accident.

Indeed, the next morning after receiving her message I turned on the news and saw the ship run aground. All around it were life bright orange rafts – in cold climates the life rafts are like tents – the news choppers couldn’t see inside so they were reporting that people were freezing in the rafts and that almost certainly there would be casualties. The rafts were deployed but no one was in them. All the passengers were transported to an Alaska State Ferry boat; while the news reported a tragedy the passengers were enjoying a warm breakfast and a good nap after a night of high adventure.

I remembered this experience today as I listened to the stories being told around the tragedy in Italy. People died. The captain most certainly abandoned his ship. And, within two hours, the crew safely evacuated over 4,000 people despite the limited ability to launch their lifeboats – a listing ship renders the boats dangerous to deploy. Someone did something right. And, it was certainly messy and panic-filled.

Yesterday I listened to economist Tyler Cowen’s TED talk in which he implored us to doubt our facility for story. I think he got it wrong – we are storytelling beings and our facility for story is what makes us human. It is the glue that binds community; it is how we make sense of the world. What we need to doubt is the intention behind the stories that we tell (and are told). We are in too much of a hurry to assign blame, too interested in whipping up disaster. Affixing blame also limits our capacity to see, to think, to act, it is easy, feels good (because we are not to blame), and makes victims of us all.

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Horatio gave me two great gifts last night (well, in truth, there were more than two but I’d make his head swell were I to admit it).

First, he told me he was going to hold my head in the toilet, drown me in the porcelain pool, until I told more stories within these posts. “I want examples from real life!” he exclaimed. “Practice what you preach!” He is, of course, right. He is also quite a bit taller than I am and fully capable of making good on his threat. I love a good story and sometimes tell them. Lora would caution you to remember that I am given to exaggerating details – I call that good story telling, and she once threw a frozen leg of lamb at me feet. I danced like she was shooting at my boots. No toes were broken and she made me eat the leg of lamb later that night. Imagine my trauma.

Second, in the bar after the Pinter film, Horatio cautioned me to pay attention to my language (he took a play from my playbook!) and helped me see that I too often set up oppositions: for instance, I regularly assert that process is better than outcome. It’s not. It is more accurate to say that I believe outcome nests within process as a finite game nests within and infinite game. We need both. I believe that if you pay attention to the process, the quality of your relationships in the moment, the outcomes will take care of themselves. If you focus on the outcomes to the exclusion of the process (i.e. standardized tests, bottom lines, the ends justify the means, weighing our interests against our values), you will end up asking yourself, “What’s it all about?” You will end up justifying and defending your actions.

Everyone deserves a friend like Horatio. I mean it. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not saying it just to keep my head out of the commode. Really.

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Just outside my bedroom window, attached to the upper right frame of the window, a spider has spun a web. She’s been there for months. At first she was a passing fancy, something I noticed or not; now, she is part of my morning ritual. When I wake up, the first thing I do is look to the corner to see if she is still there.

I live on the 4th floor in a building that sits on a peninsula. The winds that come off the Puget Sound can be ferocious and my building is on the front line; there is nothing to break the wind between my apartment and the Sound. I have watched with amazement how my spider is buffeted by the winds and yet seems unaffected. Her web pulses and violently vibrates with the wind and she seems to be napping. I have been in more than a few earthquakes and my spider’s ride with the wind is longer and more fierce than any quake that I’ve experienced. She rides the power of nature (so far); there is no resistance to it. There is no point in resisting it and she knows this far better than I.

Now that I’m invested in her life I am busy wrapping stories around her experiences. My window does not seem to be a great place to build a web either for food or protection. I wonder about her choices and how did she get so high in the first place? I wonder if the wave motion of her web makes her seasick as it surely would make me queasy (and attaining sea legs for a spider is either less or more complex than it is for me and my two points of contact). Not only that, but she lives in a vertical plane and I wonder if she experiences gravity like I do. And, if she doesn’t, what does she experience?

I know one day I will wake up and she will be gone and I will wonder if she left by choice or was carried away. Perhaps she just let go. In any case, she has been a great teacher and has inspired some wonderful questions and more than one inner reflection (How do I live with such ease and ride the winds with as much grace? What is it to construct your world to flex and adapt to the changes and forces of life?). I imagine that, were she human, she’d tell me not to fret so much. “Spin your web,” she’d say, “you have no control over the winds or how many bugs fly your way. Do your part, the rest is out of your hands.”

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Here’s one from Viv. She doesn’t know it but it is also the resolution to a challenge. For years I’ve been teaching about split intentions and although it seems to me like an easy concept to grasp (to me), it is a slippery concept. A split intention is to try and serve two masters at the same time. It is to try and listen to the devil seated on your right shoulder while also heeding the angel on your left. This ridiculous yet pervasive notion called multitasking is a study in split intentions. Driving while texting is a split intention: studies tell us that it’s the equivalent of driving drunk – really drunk. That is also true of most split intentions: the split leads you to believe that you can do anything – it is especially useful in giving you the illusion of efficiency but when you’re drunk it is easy to believe you can sing, or dance, or fly, too. You’re not more efficient, it just feels that way because you’re moving too fast and are stressed out of your mind.

Most artistic blocks are rooted in a split intention. In fact, most business challenges, hurdles in education, political stalemates, and stress-related health problems can be traced back to a split intention. And, wouldn’t it be nice, I said to myself just yesterday, to have a nice metaphor, proverb, or catchy lyric to encapsulate the concept of a split intention. Then, Viv flew in today and dropped this Chinese proverb on me via a Twitter egg:

If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.

I have nothing more to add. Case closed…except for this: do you know when you are chasing two rabbits? Do you know what the rabbits are and why you are chasing them? Just checking (Thanks, Viv!).

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

Ana-the-wise and I talked this morning about the return of the light. Literally and metaphorically. The return of the light used to be the meaning-of-the-season! The sun’s march into the darkest day, the winter solstice, was a sacred time. The disappearance of the sun, the life-giver; what could be more profound? And then, instead of disappearing, the sun returns! What could be more worthy of celebrating?

In archetypal terms the return of the sun is understood as the birth of the inner child. In metaphor, the birth of the child is the birth of your consciousness. I suppose, technically, it is the rebirth of the consciousness since it happens in a cycle, again and again and again. Each year we have the opportunity to celebrate the expansion of consciousness – the return of the sun, the birth of the inner child – and in some places on the planet the expansion of consciousness is still understood as having a spiritual life. Everyone is living a spiritual life.

The return of the sun happens outside of you; the return of the sun happens inside of you. Imagine what you might be doing if you still felt a deep connection to the sun, as if what you did actually had some influence over the sun’s return! And then consider this: people worship the literal return of the sun because it mirrors the inner return; they feel connected: no separation. With no separation between inner sun and outer sun it is the birth of the inner child, the expansion of consciousness that they see in the sun’s return.

It turns out that what you do and what you think actually does matter! It turns out that you have an enormous impact on the return of the sun (whether you know it or not…and isn’t the point for you to recognize it).

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