The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (381)

Posted on March 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

381.
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 see him coming as I pull up to the crosswalk. He doesn’t look well. He is a tall man, thin, maybe 70 years old. I know he is going to cross the street so I stop well in front of the walkway. He looks tortured. He is in pain and I wonder what ails him. I think of Parcival sitting on the couch with the Fisher King, wanting to ask, “What ails you?” but social convention keeps his question unasked. I honor my urban social convention and keep my window rolled up. His clothes are curious, an odd assembly of worn blue jeans, high top sneakers, a rumpled misbuttoned shirt covered by a black pin striped suit jacket. He has a pink baseball cap tipped slightly to the back of his head.

As he continues across the street I am taken aback by the writing on the back of his jacket. In white paint, big bold lettering he has written: Rapture by Death in Progress.
“Easter must be nigh,” I think to myself. And, then, “What does that mean, really? Rapture by Death in Progress?” Several years ago I lived on the central coast of California and one chilly Easter Sunday as I walked on Pismo Beach I saw a man, dressed in a loincloth and a turban, crawling across the beach. Dragging behind from a length of rough rope he’d fastened around his waist was a large cross. He was in agony. He had a similar sign strapped across his shoulders though I can’t recall the exact wording. Something about his suffering setting him free. I learned that this crawling man tortures himself in the same manner every Easter.

Rapture (noun): 1. Overwhelming happiness. 2. Mystical transportation. Since there is no apparent happiness, overwhelming or otherwise I have to assume that both men’s desire is for mystical transformation. I wonder if the death that is in progress is intentional and imminent or the type that awaits us all. Either way I have no doubt that death, by definition is transformative; on the list of mysteries it holds the number one position so it is almost certainly mystical, too.

Suffering or exhaustion is common in the ritual practices of mystic transportation in many traditions. There are many routes available to go beyond the threshold where your rational mind is willing to go. I understand the desire to see what is on the other side of that portal. Yet, I know enough to know that the initiate or priestess has to be ready for the experience, mature. The vision is certainly personal but the point of a mystical experience is to benefit the community. If they are going across the boundary for personal gain alone, or to demonstrate their capacity, they are dangers to themselves and the community. The impulse to put a sign on your back announcing your pain is a warning that you are not ready. The journey is self-abuse for self-aggrandizement and should not be taken.

I pulled through the intersection and down the road I passed a man at a bus stop, plugged into his earphones and dancing ecstatically. “Ah,” I thought, “Rapture by Life in Progress.” I knew what it was even without a sign.

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

Truly Powerful People (380)

Posted on March 24, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

380.
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 of being neutral. She tells me that love is neutral. When I think of being neutral I think of scuba diving. The first and last lesson in diving is how to be neutrally buoyant. When you are neutrally buoyant, there is no resistance, you quite literally hover, neither sinking nor rising; movement in balance with the element, as the element. Your breathing slows, your awareness opens, you are present within the ocean of your life.

Both Ana and I are soon walking into potentially charged situations and that is why we were talking of neutrality. We spoke of not investing in the story or the circumstance; we talked of not investing in the fear or the angst. Being neutral is a practice. In Tai Chi, the master often asks, “How are your feet placed on the floor?” If your feet are properly on the floor, all the other relationships take care of themselves. Proper placement of your feet brings neutrality, balance, and alignment.

It is not detachment as much as non-attachment. There’s a big difference! Ana said, “When I think I need to change someone or make them see my way or help them see their opportunities, then I get hooked.” To be hooked is to attach to the story, to invest in being right. It’s a tiger trap that all of us step into: every right needs a wrong or else it has no way of knowing who/what it is. Can you define yourself from what you are as opposed to finding definition from what you are not? Can you define yourself from what you are instead of from what you assume others want? Detachment is to push away, to stop the flow. Non-attachment is to be in the flow without damming the river.

I’ve decided that presence is a quality of relationship – as flow is a quality of movement. We become fully present when we are neutrally buoyant in the world and not grasping or resisting, pushing or chasing. It’s a paradox: when you are present, separations drop away so to what are you in relationship? I imagine Ana would smile and say, “Exactly. That is love.”

Filed under: Love, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Truly Powerful People (379)

Posted on March 23, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

379.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Andrew Stanton said, “Every story begins with a promise.” The promise is that this story will lead someplace that is worth our time if we engage with it. The word “engage” is not an accident. We, the listeners, don’t want to be told the story; we want to be involved. We want to be engaged, challenged, tricked, led, dumped, and surprised. We want to see ourselves in it; all stories are our stories when well told.

Every life begins with a promise. Every school year, every relationship, every day begins with the same promise: this will lead someplace that is worth our time if we engage with it. We don’t want to be told about the day or the relationship or our life story; we want to engage in it. We want to be challenged, tricked, led, dumped and surprised. We want to solve the problems and explore the unknown.

We do not like to be bored. So, it is a constant surprise to me when people (and organizations) believe that they must know before they act. The must have a plan and follow the plan and live the plan and be careful not to waiver from the plan and test the plan and gather data about the plan and then wonder where is the meaning of their lives. As Simon Sinek said, “Martin Luther King did not say, ‘I have a plan.’ He said, ‘I have a dream.’” To step into a dream is to step into the unknown. Following dreams makes for good life stories. The plan should serve the dream and not the other way around.

The promise of good education should be the same: this story will lead someplace that is worth our time if we engage with it. Andrew Stanton also said, “A good story is inevitable not predictable.” What a great rule of thumb! Good education should be inevitable and not predictable. We don’t want to be told about history or science or language, we want to engage, explore, challenge, question, discover, baffle, destruct, construct so that we are never asking, “Why are we doing this?” The plan should serve the dream and not the other way around.

Filed under: Education, Story, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Truly Powerful People (378)

Posted on March 22, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

378.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Ideas cycle in and cycle out. I might chew on something for months, an idea might be central to my mind-noodling and then, one day, with little or no notice, it rotates out and a new concept occupies the inner locus. Thus, I feel as if I move deeper and deeper into not-knowing. I imagine myself surrounded by a rabble of idea butterflies; some lite on my head and others flutter about me so that I am looking everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Lovely chaos.

The concept of “locating” has again settled on my head. How we locate ourselves physically in space, how we locate in our lives through the roles we play, the actions we choose, the story we tell: all of these are processes of locating. It is powerful when we recognize how we tell a story as a means of locating ourselves and we simultaneously locate ourselves within the story. When I ask, “What is the story you tell yourself about yourself,” I’m really asking two questions.

Recently in a class I led an imagination experience. I asked the group to remember a challenge from their past, a challenge that is already resolved. They re-membered what they felt when they were in the middle of the challenge; they re-located themselves in the past and gathered all the information available to them. Then, they relocated in the present. What once seemed a big deal or insurmountable challenge was now easy: no big deal. So, I asked them to identify a current challenge, to locate themselves within it, gather thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. And then, they imagined a time in the future after the challenged was resolved. After they gathered thoughts, feelings, and beliefs they relocated to the present. Here’s what they realized: the current challenge was only a big deal because they made it so. Separate from the story, the necessary actions are not difficult. The challenge is in wanting to be beyond the challenge. The difficulty is in resisting the present. It’s the story of pushing and forcing and resisting and grasping that makes the tribulation.

How do you locate yourself in your life?

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

Truly Powerful People (377)

Posted on March 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

377.
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 day is fiercely cold. The wind is howling out of the north. “Gusts of up to 55 miles an hour!” warned the weather woman. I was amused imagining her to be Chicken Little, squawking at the camera “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” I wear multiple layers of clothes and coats to keep me warm.

I live on a peninsula and I walk the point almost everyday. The difference in temperature can be dramatic from the north to the south side. As I round the point I wonder whether I should have mocked the weather woman; the wind has no respect for my multiple layers and I begin to shiver. I bet that she is inside her bunker nice and warm.

And then I see the divers. Wading into the already cold waters of The Puget Sound a hearty school of newbie divers join together in neck deep water and await the instructions from their dive master. The water is choppy with the wind and beats the divers like a schoolyard bully. They stand together against the thrumming and on a cue I do not see, disappear beneath the surface.

I am thunderstruck at the marvel of the human impulse “to know.” I am a diver and I remember my first dive (in the very warm tropical waters of the Indian Ocean). What is under the water? What does it feel like to dive? What is over the next hill? What will happen if I try this spice with that vegetable? How many people threw themselves over a cliff to test their flying machine before Orville and Wilbur found an answer to their question? And, although we occupy a good deal of our thought space with stories of obstacles, we wade into the cold water on a freezing day anyway. Just because we want to know.

Yesterday in a workshop, one of the professors re-imagining education asked, “How can we motivate students to learn?” I thought to myself, “How could we stop them if we learned to get out of the way?”

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

Truly Powerful People (376)

Posted on March 20, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

376.
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 often say to people, “We are living in extraordinary times.” I said it again today as if for the first time. I spent the day with a group of amazing university educators. They are asking themselves enormous questions like, “How do we reinvent the university for the 21st century?” or “What is the role of the university in the 21st century?” The internet is changing everything. What is the function of a degree if most of us will have 7 careers before we retire? What is the role of a teacher? A campus? What does it mean to learn? What is our responsibility as educators in a political climate that is dedicated to stifling learning tamping down systems change?

I heard terms like “social learning” and “collaborative learning” and we oldsters shared a laugh when we recognized that in our college years sharing your work was considered cheating. I heard deep yearning; despite the recent blame-game assault on teachers you will not find people more dedicated and passionate. They want their students to follow their bliss and fulfill their potential. Teachers deal in possibility and revelation. Teachers deal in challenge, reaching beyond the known, discovery in the geography of thought. They want their students to be intrinsically motivated and not driven by abstractions (like tests).

All around the room we taped images to large 4 x 8 pieces of paper. Our images were our conversation. We diverged into “What if….” We dreamed and let go our attachments and assumptions. We pried open our fingers and released our notions of “what should be” so that “what might be” had space to breathe and show itself. And what might be was breathtaking in its scope.

This conversation has been bubbling under ground for years. The pain is finally too great and the bubbles are at last finding their way through the resistant surface. The new narrative showed its face today and I stand in awe of the amazing, gifted, dreamers who brought me to utter, “We are living in extraordinary times.” And we are living it with extraordinary people. Just take a look around.

Filed under: Education, Truly Powerful People | 3 Comments »

Truly Powerful People (375)

Posted on March 19, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

375.
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 Bisbee, Arizona the library board holds a fundraiser on the Saturday before Valentines Day. It is an event that could have been designed just for me and I am still stunned at my good fortune to 1) have been in Bisbee, Arizona on the exact date of the fundraiser and 2) have a life partner (Lora) that arranged in advance for tickets. My knees went week when she told me what was in store for me in Bisbee.

Here’s how it works: Many of the town’s residents make their favorite chocolate concoction: chocolate nut clusters, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate coconut crunch monster bars, chocolate fudge, Mexican chocolate pudding, chocolate cakes and breads, chocolate truffles, chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate; dozens of choices. In the old library they set up long tables with chocolate choices; there is one station upstairs and one downstairs. $10 gets you in the door and six tickets; each ticket is traded for one selection of chocolate. You have to choose six! Out of the hundreds of possibilities, the amazing chocolate opportunities, you have to choose! No hording, no mouth and pocket stuffing, no tipping the tables contents into your pie hole. Delicious torture of the paths not taken with local granny’s to keep everyone on good behavior.

There are pots of coffee and tea strategically located near sitting areas. It is a commons, a place for people to meet and share their choices and discuss strategy. One older man with a miner forty-niner beard used his tickets as a divining rod; he let the tickets tell him what where the best choices. The lovely chatter was a high note dancing over the baseline of groans and moans of satisfaction, “What did you get? Oh, where did that come from! I didn’t see that one! Please, just a taste!”

In chocolate, everyone is a local. All are included in the community bonded in chocolate lust and the stories it invokes. I’m in some serious training to get ready for next year; I hit saturation far too soon and had to save some of my choices for later. Bisbee, 2013. I’ll meet you there.

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

Truly Powerful People (374)

Posted on March 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

374.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Judy asked, “Where is the faith? Where does belief fit in to it all?” My favorite part about her question was that she did not expect a single answer. She was not looking for an absolute or a doctrine. She did not seek something she lacked. She was looking for a story.

Judy has spent a good deal of her life in nature. Her orthodoxy lives in the tide pools; her canon is told in the buds that are issuing forth from the trees. When Judy asks about faith she is more likely to seek an insight from the vibrations in her harp (she plays beautifully) or in the crayon drawing of her seven year old neighbor, Poppy than in a book – unless, of course, the book is poetry.

We talked story all afternoon and occasionally she would clap her hands and say, “There it is! That’s where faith comes in!”

Judy met me at the ferry terminal. It was raining and she was in her car playing with the color app on her phone. Her first words to me in greeting: “I’ve just created the most extraordinary color!” And then she hugged me as if I had something to do with it.

That’s where the faith comes in. That is life creating itself. “I have so many questions!” Judy laughed in mid hug. “I’ve named my color ‘farm’ though it’s not quite right yet.” Who needs belief in the face of such enormity?

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

Truly Powerful People (373)

Posted on March 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

373.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Carlos sat in my office. He sat with his mother and kept his eyes glued to the floor. He’d just been released from prison and his mother was doing all the talking. He wiggled the leg that sported an ankle bracelet. His mother told me that he was a good kid and that he only needed to learn a little respect.

Respect is one of those words that are misused as a bargain: I’ll respect you if you respect me. Bargains like these too often become cockfights. Respect in a power-over world requires a police force and a court of law. It becomes very complicated with lines of respect being drawn, reinforced and redrawn. Gangs everywhere kill each other each day in the name of respect. Carlos belonged to that world.

Carlos and I had many conversations after that day. He talked a lot about respect. To gain respect from his peers, he needed to be dead or in prison by age 20. To gain the respect of his rivals he had to vanquish them. To be dead seemed to be a goal and the highest achievement in his culture. I wondered how many generations of lost boys were required to create such a warped aspiration. Lacking purpose, belonging or any real respect from the community, the picture twists.

We talked about other ideas of respect, respect that was not a form of dominance hiding behind a party mask. He could not imagine respecting someone and having no need to control them. For him, respect meant to make them see your way. He understood the paradox: you want them to respect what you see but you refuse to respect what they see.

We talked of how true respect is most often found in stillness and he’d never known any inner stillness. We talked of how stillness – and true respect for others is only possible after you first offer it to yourself. Stillness comes from self-love. He hated me for that because he cried. “Imagine,” I said, “to respect and to own your point of view, your ideas, your gifts, and your thoughts enough not to hide them or force them or have to shoot to prove to anyone that you have worth.”

“I can’t imagine it,” he said.

Disrespect is loud – inside your head and on the outside, too. Disrespect needs to be heard. Power-over has confused disrespect with respect. Respect is not available upon demand. Respect has little to do with territory or possessions. Imagination is among the first casualties when there is so much noise.

Filed under: Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Truly Powerful People (372)

Posted on March 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

372.
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 writing the workbook for my next class – a class I’m calling the Open Story. It is the sequel to the first class: The Ground Truth. Together they constitute what I’m calling the Bring Power To Life series. The Ground Truth is concerned with drawing distinctions within six relationships – for instance learning to draw a line between what you can control and what you can’t control defines your relationship with Control. The relationship with control is a baseline to relationships with things like Choice and Intention. There are six relationships and six distinctions to draw. If the Ground Truth is about inner gazing and pattern breaking, the Open Story is about outer looking and pattern making; it is an invitation to six related aspects like Creativity, Opportunity and Ease. Today I’m noodling through the chapter on Flow. Here’s the beginning:

What is the quality of movement in your life? Many years ago I trained to be a massage therapist and I learned that health in the body’s systems was the result of unimpeded flow: anywhere there is blockage there is disease. When I began doing organizational work I learned the same lesson: a healthy corporate body is the result of unimpeded flow of communication; where there is blockage there is dis-ease. Working with artists was where I first encountered the lesson: dynamic art in all its forms is the unimpeded flow of expression; where there is blockage there is disconnect and dis-ease. Kink the garden hose and pressure builds. Block the artery and heart will seize. Stilt the communication and dysfunction and power games will bloom. Inhibit your expression and you become just like the garden hose: pressure builds and your inner life jams. Vitality in life is unimpeded flow.

The phrase “Open Story” comes from a Balian, a man many years ago who told me there was nothing physically wrong with me. What ailed me was, in his words, my story was closed. He tapped me on the right shoulder and said, “Open your story.” He didn’t offer any hints as to how I was to open my story but I understood that I already had within me the capacity to figure it out. I also understood that there was no end to the process of opening a story. It can always open more. And, of course, an open story is a story of flow; the long body, a story both distinct and universal, intimately connected to the flow of life.

Filed under: Power, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »