The Direction of Intention

281.
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’m wiling away an hour in the Muse Coffee house. The place is mostly deserted so the barista and I are having a sporadic chat between customers. He looks tired and I told him so. He smiled a knowing smile and told me that he was a new father and there wasn’t much sleeping going on in his house. I closed my computer and he came from behind the counter and sat with me at my table.

I asked him what it felt like to be a dad and he said, “You know.” I told him that, actually I don’t know. I don’t have any children. I am a sometime uncle – I rarely see my nieces and nephews as they are spread out across the country. He sat back in his chair and stared at me for a moment and said, “I thought so many other things were important. Really important. And then I became a father and nothing else matters. Nothing. Not even sleep.” We laughed. His eyes beamed and filled with tears; this young man that I did not know until 20 minutes ago, a man I’d never seen prior to walking into Muse, allowed himself a vulnerability that he probably hasn’t allowed himself in years. He said, “Life is an amazing thing,” he said, wiping his eyes.

Yes. It is.

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279.
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’ve not touched a canvas or a brush in 5 months. In fact, I’ve rarely been to my studio in the second half of 2011. I’m in the studio for the first time in over six weeks and it feels odd. I’m not here to paint. I’m here because I a have two meetings downtown and an open hour in between. So, in the open hour I came to my studio to stand, and look, and ponder. There have been times in the past when I saw my work and didn’t recognize it – someone else painted these paintings. Someone else was interested in this visual pursuit. I remember that guy and am no longer that guy.

As luck or fortune or serendipity would have it, my phone rang as I was standing here. It was a call from a friend that I have not seen or talked with in more than 20 years. In addition to catching up, feeling like it was only last week that we last talked (how nice!), we offered each other the crib notes version of the past 20 years, a bread crumb trail that led us to this moment in time; he , like me, is standing in his life saying, “I recognize the person I was and am not sure who I am now.” And, here’s the gift of age: at 30 that was a reason to panic; at 50 it is an opportunity to create. We laughed at the wealth of opportunities swirling around us – opportunities that we can sense but do not yet see.

So, the theme of the day is made clear: stand still. Review and revel. This is the burning point of life, the place where past meets future. The place where anything is possible.

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276.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Motivation is an impulse. It is a force. In story form it is the need that drives the quest. Intention is that force given a direction. Intention is the quest. Hamlet’s quest is to discern whether the ghost of his father is a spirit from heaven or a demon from hell. He cannot act until he knows. His impulse, the force that drives him is to restore balance to the world. In the play there are many words for the concept of balance: justice, clarity, right action, order. He is to be a king and his role, if he is to serve his people, is to provide order and justice. It is what drives him. The play Hamlet is a detective story: he must know from where the ghost comes. Why must he know? Right action, justice depends upon the answer. If the ghost is from hell it is trying to trick him to unjustly kill his uncle. If the ghost is his father’s spirit from heaven he needs to kill his uncle for revenge and justice.

In your story, the story that you tell yourself about yourself, have you given a name to the force that drives you? I call this your Root Story. Alan Seale calls it your Soul Mission. Many traditions identify it as a Calling. You might understand it as your Role. Have you given a name to what is yours to do?

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274.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Our lives are busy. Especially this time of year.

We move through life but rarely live in the present moment. When caught in this fast moving river we rarely allow ourselves the spaciousness necessary to see why we do what we do and why we think what we think. We belief that our thoughts – our narrative – define who we are and our thoughts are most often out of control. We don’t recognize the story we live as the story we choose to live. We are moving too fast to see the patterns and habits and are too used to seeking our answers in others. We convince ourselves that something “out there” will fill the gap we fill inside.

When we begin paying attention to the story we tell ourselves, when we begin to see how we locate ourselves, the roles we play, the ways in which we negate our selves and others, we have the capacity to tell a different story; we create the opportunity to unblock our impulses and become present in our lives. We place our focus on the cultivation of relationship in the present moment and it is in the relationships that we rediscover the essential meaning of our lives. We begin to tell a different story.

We have the capacity to harness the force of our attention and focus it on our participation – on what we bring to the immediate moment. We have the capacity to become present and attentive. We have the opportunity to know ourselves as distinct from our circumstance and to release what is holding us back, which is most often our own stories about ourselves, stories we – and only we – have the capacity to change. We have the opportunity to step out of the river and breathe.

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272.
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’m writing the workbook chapter for my class and today I’m working on The Relationship with Intention. I revisited and brewed together two older posts: they’re intimately related and belong together: The Hero/Anti-Hero with Split Intentions. Here’s an excerpt from the workbook:

Harald told me that he’d spent much of his life trying to rid himself of his inner Anti Hero. It had consumed much of his life, this powerful inner voice of self-criticism and judgment. It plagued him and the more he resisted the Anti-Hero the stronger it became. One day, exhausted by his inner turmoil he had an epiphany. He realized that the way to rid himself of this Anti-Hero was to stop expecting himself to be a Hero. In fact, his expectation of being a savior, being perfect, being everything to everybody was the very thing that fueled the Anti-Hero. Letting go of the Hero dissipated the power of the Anti-Hero and what was left was…human. Beautiful, flawed, funny and messy, Harald was a human no longer at war with himself.

Internal warfare was the result of a split intention. As Harald discovered, trying to be the Hero in the eyes of everyone else split him into two pieces: the unreal expectation (Hero) and an ever-vigilant judge (Anti-Hero). Harald was attempting to control what he could not control: the expectations and responses of other people. His happiness was contingent upon the happy responses of others so he was constantly measuring his actions for success: The actor and the measurer. The internal warfare was inevitable, the expectation untenable.

The mistake of the young actor on the stage is rooted in trying to control what he or she cannot control; trying to control the wrong thing will split you every time. The work of controlling what you can control begins with rooting out the victim stories and owning your choices. The next step is healing the splits so you can call a truce in the internal warfare.

There is a dynamic between control and power. Power with others becomes available when you surrender the need to attempt to control others – which is to attempt to have power over them. The role of Hero is in practice an attempt to control others: in order to feel powerful heroes need someone to save. To surrender the Hero you have to surrender your need to control the thoughts, feelings, and expectations of others. You will be capable of dropping your internal measuring stick when you set aside your unrealistic expectations and allow yourself to be fully human.

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