The Direction of Intention

Step Toward Your Dream

Posted on September 24, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

564. 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 opportunity comes when the artist is ready. Horatio made a single pitch to fund his next film and the money came roaring in. “Oh God!” he wrote. “Green light! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear….” Tamara will perform her first public gig. She is an extraordinary musician, prolific, and as she stepped toward her dream, the pesky dream stepped toward her. “Oh!” she wrote, “I know I can do it, but….”

Step toward your dreams and your dreams will step toward you. And when you touch, for the first time, the thrill of contact, like meeting your true love, will always evoke trepidation and doubt. You will shake and say to your self, “I can’t believe it.”

Once, just after I signed a lease for a studio, a friend said, “Uh-oh, now you have to show up!” My great directing mentor, Jim, surprised me when he confessed that before every new rehearsal process, prior to the first read through, he would get sick to his stomach. He told me each time he was certain that he had nothing offer, that he had no idea how to direct a play. Jim directed hundreds of plays and each time was certain he knew nothing.

What impresses me most about artists and seekers of dreams is that they feel this fear and do not turn and run. They feel it and keep walking. Their dream opens its arms and despite their certainty that they will be a disappointing lover, they step into the embrace and offer the world their gifts. We fling around the word “transformation” like we used to toss about the word “paradigm;” it has come to mean something generic. Mark, and Tamara and transforming; they are feeling it, the dream, the step, the doubt, the embrace. Consequently, neither they, nor their dream, will ever be the same.

Filed under: Art, Awakening, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: dreams, transformation | 1 Comment »

Where Is Your Fire?

Posted on September 23, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

563. 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 was awake very early, way before sunrise. I sat on my balcony and watched the sky progress from ultramarine through several shades of purple before resting in turquoise. The clouds were fiery balls of cotton. The fires burning on the eastern slope are facilitating extraordinary colors in the sky. The sun rose magenta. Through the smoky filter I could look at it directly for almost an hour. Sun and I had a staring contest. I lost.

This will go in the books as the summer of fire. I was in Colorado when fires burned across the entire state. Now, there are fires everywhere in Washington State. In May, Alan asked me a question that would give rise to the summer’s theme: he asked, “Where is your fire? Where is your rage?” I am too nice, apparently. Later, while in Colorado, I reminded him of his question and he said, “You are taking this a bit too far, don’t you think?” So, my meditation these many months has been on fire. Where is my fire.

All of the elements are transformational; they work at different speeds. Nothing beats erosion for leveling a mountain. Have you seen what wind and rain created in Bryce, Zion, and the Grande Canyons? If you do not understand the word “sacred,” go to Bryce, get out of your car – in fact, get far away from your car – be quiet, and after a few moments you will understand. The world is in constant motion.

Once, a few years ago, I stood on the lava fields, newly cooled, and watched the bright orange lava pour into the ocean, steam hissing a welcome. Lora said, “This is an island being born.” Later, as the sun set, a storm thundered down the mountain like an invading horde; I was drenched in an instant, laughing as we ran to the car, pummeled by rain. I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed with the power I felt all around me: the lava, the ocean, and the rain.

And then there is the earth. While living in Los Angeles I rode through a few earthquakes but none so impressive as the Northridge quake. It came in the wee hours of the morning and is the only time I’ve awakened in mid-flight. My dog was flying next to me and I will never forget the look on his face. I can only imagine the look that he saw on mine. I thought I might be dreaming until I hit the wall. It is awesome to consider the transformational power of the quaking earth. In addition to the destruction it opened symmetrical paths of beauty. Neighbors talked. People helped other people. The city rebuilt itself in record time.

I thought about all of these experiences as I stared at the sun, magenta through the smoke and haze and asked, as I have asked every morning this summer, “Where is my fire? Where is my rage?” The sun stared back, silent, grinning a knowing grin, like a good teacher, refusing to offer an easy answer.

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

Follow Your Gut

Posted on September 22, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Scott and I ate lunch on the patio of Revel, a restaurant that is not to be missed if you are ever in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. It was an unbelievably beautiful autumn afternoon so we sat in the sun, ate dumplings in a decadent sauce, duck noodles, drank coffee and celebrated Scott’s birthday with root beer tapioca topped with vanilla ice cream and cola pop rocks. Oh. My. God.

Our conversation ranged across a wide geography but kept returning to intuition. We are prejudiced to favor the rational mind, though, as Alan might say, the rational mind is nested with in the intuitive. The rational mind likes to think it runs the show (thus our dedication to testing and measurement) but it all falls apart if we include the full canon of human experience, things like love, desire, dreams, and impulse. It is not reason that propels an athlete to spend hours and hours of their lives training for a competition. Einstein’s dream-life opened his rational mind to relativity. How many times have you said to yourself, “I just knew….”

Madeleine L’Engle wrote, “Don’t try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.” To use your intuition, you must look inward. You must trust what you find there. Much of the western mythos is built upon the notion that nature is corrupt which can only mean that your nature is corrupt. This sad notion serves as an organizing principle that would have you believe that your inner voice – your intuition – is not to be trusted. It cuts you off from your self and your greatest guide: your inner wisdom (also known as your intuition). Einstein said it best:

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. We will not solve the problems of the world from the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. More than anything else, this new century demands new thinking: We must change our materially based analyses of the world around us to include broader, more multidimensional perspectives.”

It’s not a bad idea to listen to your gut and your heart in addition to your head. Your head will tell you anything (and does), your gut is incapable of lying – it doesn’t have the vocabulary. My gut told me Revel was the place to meet Scott. Root beer tapioca topped with vanilla ice cream and pop rocks…I just knew; somehow I knew.

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

Once Upon A Time

Posted on September 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

For the past several days I have watched Lora pull out old photo albums, unpack boxes and old suitcases searching for photographs of her mother, Margaret. She is assembling a slide show for Margaret’s memorial celebration. Her intention was simple: to gather photographs documenting Margaret’s life but as she looked for images she found something far richer.

Photographs tell a story. There are photos of the infant Margaret, the little girl with grandparents, a rowdy teenager on a motorcycle, giving a friend a boost up a tree. There is the moment, as a young woman that she held a string of fish and laughed at her father’s antics, and the shot taken in a club of a gorgeous sophisticated lady surrounded by soldiers on leave from the war. Then, there was a photo arm and arm with the one soldier, a pilot, wedding photo’s, a happy couple in a home of their own, a new mom and her baby. The frozen moments continued through surprise parties, Christmas days, a second marriage, becoming a grandmother, cruises with her daughter, widowhood and the years of Alzheimer’s, becoming a fragile little bird.

Lora’s search for photos became a family history treasure hunt. Puzzle pieces fell into place. Love letters gave a two dimensional memory its third dimension. Curious stories resolved and the veil lifted from mysterious characters. Not only has Lora documented her mother’s life, she has enriched her own life, she located herself in a narrative with more color and passion and dreaming than she realized. In weaving Margaret into the fabric of ancestry she has woven herself into a greater connection to the story line. She belongs.

Today as I walked I was aware of the many, many photographs I saw people take. I live near a beach so the opportunities are plentiful. We live in an age where the photograph is easy to take, easy to erase, easy to store, easy to forget, easy to lose as the technology evolves. As I watched people pose for their moment I couldn’t help but imagine each photograph, someday, marking the arc of the long body, how this photo might tell the story of this particular life once this particular life story has been told – and who might find a deeper experience of belonging when they dig through old files and discover this special moment once upon a time when their loved one posed for a camera on a beautiful day at the beach.

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String The Bow

Posted on September 20, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Robert Fritz writes that between “What is” and “What you want” is a tension and this tension is the energy necessary to propel you toward your vision. This tension is not manufactured, it is not imaginary; it is specific, dynamic, and real. The common mistake we make is to try and relieve the tension by telling a story of “not so bad” or “this is good enough” or “I’m not ready yet.” The arrow cannot fly if there is no tension in the string. The arrow will never reach the target if there is weak tension in the string.

This does not mean that “what is” needs to be miserable. If you are alive you are on a quest; human beings are seekers. We are always engaged with what might be. We are creators. A yearning heart is an alive heart; desire is the spice of living.

In one of the versions of the Prometheus saga, Zeus created people so he’d have someone to worship him. Apparently, gods need us as much as we need them. Zeus assigned the task of human creation to Prometheus and gave him explicit instructions: make these humans crude and ugly and stupid. Zeus didn’t want people to be god-like. He wanted worshippers, not competition. Prometheus sculpted his human couple beneath a tree so Zeus couldn’t see them. Prometheus, like us, couldn’t bear to minimize his creation: he started with lumps of clay (what is) and sculpted beautiful beings (what he imagined might be). He knew Zeus would never approve so he stole the fire of life to ignite the hearts of his humans. Zeus could have squashed the new creatures but instead decided to punish Prometheus by infusing his creation (us) with doubt and contradiction; he gave us the capacity to make music and war.

Our hearts are alive with gods fire. We are more like Prometheus than Zeus. If our lives are our greatest creations we can, like Zeus, aim for ugly or follow the example of Prometheus and make something threatening in it’s beauty. String the bow, use the tension and let fly a whole quiver of possibilities!

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

Choose Love

Posted on September 19, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

In a recent coaching forum call, Alan said, “Choose love. No need to ask how or fret about it. Just choose it.” We were doing an imagination exercise, working with taking radical steps. The possibility of choosing love without a qualifier was revolutionary for many people on the call. No need to modify or justify your choice. Just choose it. Choosing love, as it turned out, was a radical step.

To many people on the call, choosing love as the organizing principle, as the baseline for all other action seemed so far out of reach as to be impossible. Choosing love was an abstraction, like walking on the moon is an abstraction, something that is imaginable but certainly not doable.

What is love? Is it an achievement? Like a moon shot, does it take complex mathematics and the latest technology? Is it something we find? Is it something we manufacture? There are entire industries built upon the search for love and the inevitable disappointment. Hearts are opened and hearts are broken so the choice of love must always come with strings attached, right? The strings are certainly untenable. Is this love?

Think about the implications in the lyric, “Looking for love in all the wrong places….” Yikes! Love cannot be something you choose if you believe it is something you seek. To choose it, you must already have it. How can it be that we imagine ourselves separate and distant from love?

As Ana-the-Wise tells me, “Love is neutral.” Making bargains is not love; trading pieces of yourself in exchange for attention or affection is not love. If you are giving a part of yourself away, suppressing yourself, editing yourself you are engaged in something but it is definitely not love.

Here’s my theory: to choose love is to choose yourself. This choice will move you to the top of the list. It will require you to be seen, to embrace your greatness, to stop minimizing yourself, and most importantly to drop the illusion that anyone can fill you up or tell you how it is to be done. You must love yourself to choose love and that choice has no back door; to love yourself means you give up all escape fantasies and must own your power. Can you imagine it?

Filed under: Love, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: choice | Leave a comment »

Put Ego Against The Wall

Posted on September 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

558. 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 had a conversation this morning about ego. We were talking about a wide range of things: “cleaning house,” ridding ourselves of limiting patterns, when people think they are operating out of love but in reality are reinforcing limits (co-dependence), when she spoke this terrific phrase, she said, “That’s the moment you put the ego against the wall!” I loved the image: my ego with his back against the wall; my ego having to face the truth of the moment instead of the horrible fear story.

I asked her to talk more about that. She said, “Ego likes to make things look bigger than they are. For instance, if your ego can convince you that approaching a gallery to sell your paintings is very scary, you will delay the action. Ego likes to make things look too big so you will avoid taking action.” It’s so simple. How many times have I talked myself out of doing something because I feared the response or assumed I knew the answer; a recent client said it best when she said, “I fear the “no.”

When I coach people I often ask questions like, “What do you get if you don’t act?” The answer is inevitably something like “safety” or “comfort” or “I get to be invisible.” This is what Ana is talking about. Ego will have you create stagnation and call it safety. Ego will have you bar the door against non-existent wolves. Ego will keep your light safely under the bushel; after all, who are you to shine? Don’t you know that your light hurts other people’s eyes; tone it down! Keep your voice to yourself. Sit in your desk and raise your hand; don’t you know how to stand in line? And so on.

Often the mountain we need to climb is never as steep as it seems. I’ve found that when I put down my ego-fear-story (…is my work really not good enough, do I really not deserve it, etc.?) there is no mountain, just me stepping toward what I want.

Filed under: Awakening, Edges, Truly Powerful People | 4 Comments »

Put Down Your Book

Posted on September 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

557. 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 Johnny stood on the edge of his life and made a very brave choice. He’d spent years pouring through self-help books trying to correct what was broken, adjust what needed to be fixed, find the piece that was missing (insert the analogy that applies to you). Standing in the middle of his nest of books he had a revelation: each time he read a new self-help book he was reinforcing the idea that he needed help. He poured his life energy into fixing himself instead of pursuing his dream. He decided, in that moment, to place his focus on what he wanted to create.

This may not sound like a bold choice. This may seem like a very easy thing to do but consider for a moment all that you need to surrender when you are no longer willing to tell yourself the story that you are broken and need to be fixed. Who do you become when no one else on the entire planet has your answer or is responsible for your happiness? Consider for a moment all that you need to embrace when you decide to operate from an understanding of wholeness.

Johnny said, “I could wallow in a pool of self-help books forever. They’re kind of addictive; they keep your eyes off of what scares you the most. I decided, instead of reading about action, I might as well take action. I might as well make a practice of walking toward what scares me and no book can tell me how to do that.”

Because of his brave choice and new focus placement, Johnny creates each day the life he desires. When you make it your practice to walk toward life because it scares you, monsters and gremlins lose their potency; close up they’re never as big as they seem.

Filed under: Education, Emergence, Perspective, The Direction of Intention, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Who Would You Like To Be?

Posted on September 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Declan Donnellan wrote an amazing book, The Actor and the Target, intended for actors but I return to it again and again as the lessons are as applicable to life as they are to the stage. Here’s the bit I read today:

“’Who am I?’ is often the first question asked in creating a character but it can be unhelpful. Trying to answer ‘Who am I?’ is a lifetime’s work for an individual, and indeed the more we discover ourselves, the more we realize that we don’t know ourselves at all. If, then, we cannot properly answer the question about ourselves, how can we possibly answer it about someone else? ‘Who am I?’ is an Everest of a question….”

He continues:

“’Who would I like to be?’ is more useful because it is implies an answer that moves. ‘Who would I like to be?’ is even more useful when asked with a near opposite such as: ‘Who am I afraid I might be?’”

The question, “Who am I?” implies that you are singular, that you are one containable, knowable being. It reduces you to an outcome; static and immovable. I love Declan Donnellan’s insight into the better question: “Who would I like to be?” He writes that it’s more useful because it moves. It is an exploration, a question. It assumes a creation, a fluid changeable dynamic process of discovery. There is no outcome. Nothing is absolute.

When feeling lost, we say, “I don’t know who I am.” Yes. Exactly. How powerful might we become if we assumed that life was not about defining ourselves as fixed, as this or that, but discovering each day the infinite fluid possibilities of an unknowable being. The next time you feel lost, instead of trying to be found, engage in the playful creation of “Who would I like to be today?”

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

Dance With “What if?”

Posted on September 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

David just started his new job. He is now a professor of acting and directing at a university. He just finished his first week of classes after moving to a new city a few short weeks ago; he’s the new member of an old faculty; everything is strange. He has no comfortable patterns yet, the grocery store is unknown, the walk to and from work is more a discovery than a ritual. Creating a new life is never easy precisely because of the unknowns. And, what I most love about David is that he is the consummate teacher, a gifted artist that uses his experiences as fodder for class; he studies his life and uses what he finds as material for his work.

Our conversation was about his students, about how dreadfully reinforced they are in the notion that they must “know” before they commit to an action. He laughed and told me, “I was the same way! I had to work through this debilitating idea that I needed to know what I was doing before I made a choice. Consequently, I had a hard time making choices!”

I’ve yet to meet a dynamic, potent artist or businessperson who really knows what they are doing. Artists become potent when they stop thinking that they need to know. What they need do is try, experiment, offer, wreck, scribble, tear, sculpt; play. They need to make a strong choice and follow it. They dance in the fields of “what if…?” By the way, this is also known as good scientific method: state a hypothesis and test it. Dance with the unknown.

As David and I discussed, needing to “know what you are doing” is a certain sign of feeling like a fraud. All of us have at one time or another ducked behind a mask of certainty to hide our fear of inauthenticity – and we felt inauthentic because we invested in the tragic notion that we needed to know before we acted. Putting down your need to know is a passage ritual, it is the threshold to vitality and self-actualization.

Life is never found in the knowing. It is always found in the questioning. It is made vital by the freedom to experience without masking or hiding behind the castle wall of knowing. The sweet secret to bold artistry is the same sweet secret to vital living; whisper it to yourself as it seems to be a dirty little secret: nobody knows what they are doing regardless of what they pretend. So, dance.

Filed under: Awakening, Education, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

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