The Direction of Intention

158.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Self-love is still on the front burner of my mind.

My last post brought a memory and a poem: a winter weekend retreat in Lake Tahoe, a gathering of special people investigating ways that we might bring our gifts together in some form or another: to offer workshops or retreats or…. Early on our conversations strayed from the form of what we might offer to who we were and what we believed and desired to do in the world. As I look back now I see how dissatisfied we all were with the work we were doing; we’d each compromised something essential in our selves and were looking for ways to get back to the center.

Early one morning Sam emerged from his room and offered a poem that he’d just penned:

Beloved by Sam Magill

First waking in rumpled hair
having not adorned myself
for public viewing
or put on my beauty masks –
will I allow myself to be
called Beloved?

This is a poem about self-love. Without my public mask, my wall of respect and my list of achievements, will I allow myself to be called Beloved? In the private space of my life, when no one is looking and I am not performing myself for others, will I allow myself to be called Beloved?

It is a given when you first enter this earth – there is no separation. At what point did being the Beloved become dependent shoe size, other’s ideas of you, university acceptance, bank account, and car choice? What would need to change for you to re-recognize your self as unique in the universe?

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157.
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I am still meditating on how achievement and self-love are connected in our culture – and how central this idea is to every client I have ever worked with (individuals and organizations). It is certainly a Puritan notion. Self-love is also anathema to the Puritan notion; you get to heaven through a lifetime of hard work and self-denial not self-love. Hard pews and stiff collars seem counterproductive. It’s always been an oddly self-destructive concept to me.

I’ve understood since I was little that negating myself can only lead to negating others. When I look on the world as filled with either angels or devils (dualities) and they are having a tug-o-war over my soul, then I am fundamentally creating a split consciousness. If angels and devils are the context through which I see (the circumstance of the story I tell), I will see dualities and splits everywhere. Temptation is the name of the self-denial game and I will be suspect of myself and therefore suspect of everyone I meet. I reinforce the split and not the unity. Why would I do that? Why would I create through the eyes of separation? Why would I reinforce within myself a split consciousness?

So what does this have to do with achievement and self-love? We identify ourselves through our doing. Every client I have is asking questions about the quality and value of their doing: comparisons, expectations, perfectionism, investments in stories of validity, questions about being enough, questions about doing the right life’s work; questions about voice, about creativity,… are questions of doing. All of the judgments and self-criticism are about doing enough or doing “what I was meant to do.” We are asking questions of doing and missing the questions of being. What about the quality of your being? This is akin to asking the question “How?” before asking the question, “Why?”

And so I ask myself, am I capable of loving myself if I never again paint another picture, teach another class, write another story, or achieve another thing? Yes. I believe the self-love comes first; achievement is only useful if it serves a greater community and service is only useful if it begins from a source of love.

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156.
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The owner of the boat dropped anchor at night just off the beach at Alki. He didn’t know that the water is shallow and the tides this time of year are extreme. He awoke to find his boat sitting on a sand bar.

Today, I feel like that boat. I dropped anchor in waters that were a bit too shallow. I wasn’t paying attention. When I woke up this morning everything was slightly askew. I opened my eyes and looked out into the world and found myself…stranded. There was no particular reason for my stranded condition, nothing that I could point to.

So, you can imagine how fortunate I felt when on my usual early morning walk and I came upon the boat on the sand bar. The owner and I exchanged smiles and shrugs. “Nothing to be done until the tide comes back,” he called and smirked. “I think I’ll make some breakfast.”

Sage advice. Sometimes when you find yourself stranded on a sand bar, real or metaphoric, there is nothing to be done but enjoy the place where you are stranded. The tide will come back, real and metaphoric, make breakfast and soon you’ll be on our way.

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155.
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I met Emma today. She is two years old. Her picture is in the dictionary next to the word Cherub. It is also next to the words Cute, Adorable, and Sprite. She taught me how to do nose kisses and reminded me what full-body joy can do to a collection of weathered adults: her joy-explosions sent us over the edge into delight.

Here’s the picture: Her 5-year old brother Noah and I were playing hide and seek (I also learned to count to ten. Noah wanted to make sure I was qualified to play. We rehearsed counting for several minutes until I got it right. I am a slow study and Noah was a patient teacher). Emma wanted to play, too, and at two years old anything goes. I count (correctly). Noah hides with Emma hot on his heels. The moment I count ten and say, “Ready or not, here I come!” Emma leaps from her hiding spot and bounds to the center of the room and presents herself as if she just won a car on The Price Is Right. She finds me and is found and what could be more thrilling! It is, after all, the point of hiding, isn’t it?

What part of you are you hiding? What part needs to be found? Emma reminded me that hiding is just the first part of the game; in life the real joy comes when you bound to the center of the room and say, “Here I am! And, there you are.”

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154.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“Please don’t ever let your mind stop you from having a good time.” Jason Mraz

This is the way Joe introduced me to the concept of high dream/low dream: suppose you are meeting your lover after work for a walk on the beach. While you are waiting to meet, you imagine how great the walk will be. You imagine how loving your partner will be, how excited he will be to see you. In your mind’s eye there is a magical sunset, perfect breezes, perhaps a whale swims by and you take this as a sign that everything is perfect in the world. This is the high dream.

When your lover arrives he is quiet. He is sullen and doesn’t want to talk. He walks a few feet away from you and is lost in thought. You dive head first into your fear. You think he doesn’t like you anymore. He wants to leave you. He’s had an affair. You did something wrong. This is the low dream.

Both the high dream and the low dream are…dreams. Anticipation of what may or may not happen, fear of what might or might not be happening, expectations and assumptions and…stories. Both get in the way of what is really there.

One of the most potent Circle Project practices is to have the experience first, and then make meaning out of it. High dream/low dream is an attempt to make meaning of the future before it actually arrives. Have the experience first; it’s a practice that will open your eyes to what is in front of you and not what you think is there.

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153.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

True power is an expression of vision. At the center of true power is a value: to empower.

Power for power’s sake becomes a drug. Power without vision can only serve to oppress. Power for power’s sake intoxicates the mind and erodes the body – this is as true for nations as it is for individuals. The goal of power for power’s sake is to feed the habit. Like all addicts power will destroy itself to feed its addiction so in the purest sense it is self-destructive.

Power over others serves nothing and confuses its lack of service for conservatism – for holding on to what it has. Like all addicts, it will cheat, steal, and lie to get what it needs (more power). It confuses ethics and morality with the maintenance of power – it needs to justify its abuses as necessary and principled. You will hear stories about how “the ends justified the means.” You will hear phrases like, “we have to weigh our interests against our values.” You will hear, “business is business.”

Power for power’s sake will necessarily express in cultures of control. Education becomes dangerous because educated people ask questions and are capable of complex thinking: educated people will inevitably ask the question, “Why are we doing this?” People who ask, “why?” are more difficult to control – within this question “why?” is the seed of empowerment. Power for power’s sake fears this question because it always has something to hide – namely, that there is no answer other than, “to feed the power addiction.” A standardized test is a great way of providing a standardized answer and is necessary to keep a population from asking itself the question, “why?”

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152.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others because they recognize that power is a not something that exists within a single person. No one is powerful alone.

True power is never power over others. It is a signature of weakness to diminish others in order to elevate your self. A drowning person will climb atop the heads of others. In the end, both die.

True power is a relationship dynamic; power finds increase in the space between people. True power is not found in the person looking for what they can get from life. True power is found in the person who brings power to life.

Power is brought to life in the giving, not in the taking.

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151.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Today I began cataloguing these posts and revisited post #1. It starts with these two phrases:

Truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others.

It goes like this: empowered people empower others.

The other day when I was visiting Judy on Bainbridge Island we had a conversation about perception. I told Judy that I’ve recently been thinking that notions like “survival of the fittest” are concepts that only make sense to a culture devoted to the individual. Survival of the fittest is a construct of a human mind, like time, and not a “reality” describing how nature works. From another set of eyes I could describe nature as collaboration or cooperation, an exercise in balance. We see everything as a competition because our mythologies are filled with warriors, heroes and angry gods fighting for power and control over this pie that has a limited number of slices.

In her book, Wild, Jay Griffiths wrote that most indigenous cultures have no word for or concept of “wild.” When nature is not seen as something to be tamed, everything is collaboration. Nothing is wild; there is no separation between nature and not nature (civilization?). No fences needed. This applies particularly and most importantly to inner nature. Your inner nature is just fine without all the control you impose; it needs no compartmentalization. You require no taming if you believe you are part of nature and not the master of it.

Empowered people have no use for power over others. Empowered people have no use for taming their inner nature; they desire to know themselves not control themselves. Empowered people empower others because they are collaborating, participating, and not so dreadfully invested in putting up fences.

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149.
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’s an odd image but go with me. Lately I’ve been looking at people as if they were empty cups that fill themselves according to the story that they tell. For instance, yesterday I watched a man fill himself with angst and frustration. He stood in front of a photograph muttering, “I could never do that,” and I watched as his body began filling with frustrations; it began to rise from his toes, filling his legs and his belly, seeping up into his heart, clogging his voice and drowning his brain in a thick liquid, “I can’t.” His story thwarted completely his desire to be a photographer. What liquid story might have filled his cup had his story been, “Cool! I’m going to learn how to do that?”

According to the research 90% of what runs through your mind is the same stuff that ran through it yesterday. The story you tell yourself is on a loop. The story you tell yourself comes from a specific point of view. I don’t need the research to know that I tell myself the same story loop each day from the same point of view. Consider, for instance, if you assume the universe is against you, your cup will fill with a story of resistance, hard luck, and victimization; no matter what you do, the universe is against you. Every traffic jam, every paper cut will reinforce your story and keep your cup filled with liquid negativity. And, you will fill every relationship, every choice and opportunity, with the negative liquid in your cup because that is what you bring to the party.

I don’t know about you but if 90% of what runs through my mind is the same stuff then I might as well make that 90% a story of opportunity, choice, and support. I’m seeing others as story-cups because I feel within myself how easily I can fill up with anger or blame. “Look how I just filled myself,” has become an awareness tool, a mantra as I literally fill myself with a story of poison or a story of pleasure. Either way, it is my choice and that is the point. I have choice about the story I tell. I have choice about the point of view from which I tell the story. I have choice about where I place my focus (what I choose to see, to emphasize, how I choose to interpret every experience).

How are you filling your cup?

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