Letting things unfold

What if I didn’t try so hard to make things happen but let them happen instead? Would more get done?

I’m thinking it would.

Recently I bought some trees from Ken Taylor, a marvelously relaxed man, completely confident in the ability of the trees to do what they had to do to survive. There was no anxiety that things wouldn’t turn out for the best. Basically it was a matter of doing what had to be done, what needed to be done, and trusting the process. We didn’t have to discuss what his “philosophy” of horticulture was; he was demonstrating it constantly with his competence and knowledge of the way trees worked.

Trees unfold. This is so true. The last couple of days Lynn and I planted three Asian pears, one apple tree, three heartnuts, two Haskaps, one mulberry tree, black raspberries, blackberries, and grapes. Oh, and a plum tree. Within hours – literally – of planting some the the little guys (they were just a couple of feet tall, if that) were visibly more sprouted. They had their roots into pretty acceptable soil, lots of water, and some mulch on top to prevent them from drying out.

Working on them, working with them, was a complete pleasure. There was flow so that work wasn’t any kind of a struggle.

Usually work does seem like struggle to me. Trying to figure out the world so that I can control it somehow. Trying to figure out how to have my own way. I’m a man with an agenda and to the extent that I have an agenda I’m not having much fun. I’m already busy thank you very much.

But I could just let things unfold the way they want to by seeing what wants to happen here.

Maybe whatever happens has its own inner direction like a tree does, it’s own inner code.

Maybe I have a direction built in and I’ll go there automatically.

What is “Focusing”?

Focusing is the name of a process for invoking direct access to bodily knowing. It’s been an enormous help to me in finding my own way. It’s focusing in the sense of paying attention to, not creating some kind of laser awareness; in fact Focusing pays attention to something inside that is new and fresh and isn’t formed yet – how it actually is for us inside at the moment.

I’ve been working with Focusing off and on, making it my own, going off and coming back since the late 1980s. Nothing else I’ve done has brought me back so radically and consistently to myself. I’ve been a Focusing trainer since 1995.

There’s no dogma or belief system, just a way of paying attention to yourself. Rather than relying on concepts or notions, you connect with what’s actually, bodily true for you inside.

Here’s Focusing’s originator, Gene Gendlin, doing a short intro. This won’t be enough to start you Focusing on your own, but I’ll put more stuff on how to do that here, and you can learn a pile more at www.focusing.org.

Focusing is supported by a long series of operational research studies conducted first at the University of Chicago and now internationally.

If you’re in Ottawa, be sure to get in touch with me. My hope is to have an ongoing community of Focusers here, with ongoing support opportunities.

I will live as you

I Will Live as You

A few years ago, after a prompting from my friend Skye Faris, I took some time with what was precious to me. I did that by writing and a phrase came as I was writing to myself.

I will live as you.

So I spent some time writing to this part of me.And this is what came the first day.

———————–
I will live as you
and this means I will not look for “more” to come,
or different.

I will live as you and I will live as I.
I will ask for what I want.

This moment is enough
because it is your moment.
This path I walk, going where fate would have me,
is a good path because it’s your path
All my doubts were only wondering
if it was OK to walk as you.

This day is a good day
because you’re in it.
The struggle I have is good
because it’s a struggle for you
and I honour it.

The self that you are is the self
I love that you are.

This moment is a place for you
whatever has happened.
I will live as you
as an ongoing revelation.
I am settled as you
secure in no need to do anything
forced or wicked.

Is it OK to just be me?

Yes, it’s OK.
As if I could add to my height
as if I could figure out this world
as if my opinions needed to be important to anybody else
as if I didn’t know better
as if salvation wasn’t in the present
as if it wasn’t spring or gonna be.

I will live as you

This moment is important
because it is your moment.
This moment is holy
because it’s yours.
This not reaching works for me
because it is your effortless expansion.
This uncertainty
is a good place to experience the world.
This movement is perfect
though no one sees.
The depths have always spoken
their quiet joy into the silence.
Always they say,
how beautiful.
I will live as you and
there will be peace
and everything will be the first time

I will live as you including the dark shadow
and the dungeons.
I will live as you not knowing what comes next.
I will live in you without a project.

Just for your own sake, without one plea
I shall live as you.

This is enough.

It is peace to live as you,
wanting nothing but this moment,
knowing this moment is your gift.

Often I overlook myself

Focusing, meditating just now, I notice yet again the surprising thing: that I’ve been overlook the heart of myself in my day. It takes me a while sitting quietly to notice it. Then I notice that slightly off to one side, a bit aloof, feeling alone character that I’ve been ignoring. I immediately recognize he’s “me” and feel relieved in seeing that. He’s overshadowed by the busybody-me who goes around trying to get things organized or done.

I’ve lost touch with this character so many times, going along with a memory of him, an impression of what I should do.  Is it like he has no right to be here? Or else why does he quickly become a memory even after being vibrantly experienced?

Yet when he’s here I immediately see that he’s the important one. He’s the one I love. He’s the presence or the one who feels the Presence; he isn’t separate from it.

When I’m not in touch with him I still know about him but that’s not the same as being him, living him.  I even have a name for him sometimes, the little guy. But other times I realize he is the presence, the Presence, the heart.

And another thing: when I notice this presence, even though it sounds self-ish, I’m relatively self-less; I’m present to who and what’s around me as not being different than me. When I don’t notice it, I’m subtly trying to get attention from others. Although it’s out of awareness I’m wishing I had that attention, all the time.

The fear of going it alone

When I meditate I find myself casting around for a formula, some way to do it right, to organize those milling thoughts, to find awareness of a higher harmony or the road to it.

Then after a while I check with myself, or do Focusing. Today, I noticed a sort of pressure in the middle of my back, a tightness, and bit of a hunched over sense in the shoulders too. Trying to protect myself. And as I sensed into who this self was that I was trying to protect, I felt the fear of going it alone.

It’s not that this self I try to protect doesn’t know what’s right for it, doesn’t know who he is, or rather, isn’t already who he is beyond needing to justify it. It’s that to be him is to be really on my own, so I often hang out in the conventional world of received opinion. I spend time with the legions of doubters and our self-justifications that pass for wisdom or at least how-to-get-by.

And all along there’s this part of me that can do it, that is beyond my need for safety. It’s the desire for safety that makes me pull back and hedge my bets. The truth is more simple. The truth is way out there, right in front, but hard to raise my eyes to and admit. It’s too shockingly obvious, too naked, too beautiful, and what will become of my made-up life if I get with all that. Goodness!

I have to smile and good-humoured truth is probably smiling too.

Review – Revolutionary Road

From the first scene I felt I was in good hands watching Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes’ first film since American Beauty. The storytelling is swift and elegant, drawing us into the heart of a marriage. Like American Beauty, Revolutionary Road also takes on the big theme of conformity and risk to become who we really are.  More than an individual fable it’s about awakening to a larger possibility in our collective lives and even how to embrace a new possibility. With it’s timing, it could be an emblematic standard bearer for the Obama revolution, though Obama would hate that!

Frank (Leo DiCaprio) Wheeler is trapped in a soulless job in 50s New York while April (Kate Winslett) is a failed actress, at home with the kids.  They’re both unhappy, she more than him, and he’s just started an affair when April suggests they up and move to Paris and live a grander life based on self-realization. The movie sets up this wonderful possibility for them and for a while all is bliss and optimism for the Wheelers. But circumstances intervene in the form of a pregnancy and they renege on their dream; he takes a bigger job and April starts to seriously fall apart. They fall down a very long way.

The movie explores what happens when we compromise or give up on our dreams.  The really interesting question, and the one the movie seemed to be asking early on, is what does it take for two bright young people (well, sort of young) to really step out and follow their hearts and live a life that only they can. How do they make a life their own way?

I thought the movie was going to a brave new future exploring this question, but it showed the failure to go there instead. For me the movie gave up on itself, on its richer possibility, by not showing them walking the revolutionary road and doing what it takes to really change. Revolutionary Road suffers from the same ailment that the Wheelers do: it shrinks without really walking the walk.

But I do have to say, the actors are brilliant, the scenes from a failing  marriage are wrenching and merciless and the writing and storytelling is always intelligent and deft.

Frank and April start off down a Revolutionary Road but they don’t get a long way. No film revolution here, but there coulda been.

Co-creation

We don’t really create our own way by ourselves. We need the other to do it right. What is is relational. We’re embedded in it, not independent actors who write it and it stays writ. We push and the world pushes back. Or our partners or projects or deadlines do. They have a life of their own.

Even though we don’t selfauthor in an independent way, selfauthoring still requires our full participation, our maximal alertness and presence to happen. My friend is here with me, and what I’m doing includes her (and I would have “more freedom” – less constraints – to create without her), I’d just get less creating and living done. The relational calls something out of me.

It’s like my friend B. who is an amazing performer. He says that without the other around to provide a context for his speaking, a presence to speak into (my words), he doesn’t have access to what he wants to say. Maybe he’s lonely.

Then there’s collective intelligence, wherein a group has access to greater smarts than the members would individually. It’s so clear that this happens, and I often feel that the collective intelligence is just what’s needed now, to get us through this transition.

Choose a future and it happens right away

The future you choose will be the present you live!

The future doesn’t happen down the road; it starts immediately when I make up my mind about what’s going to happen. I start to live in that future right away.

An example is the way I hold my future vis a vis the economy. Option A is I feel I’ve got to hold on tight to the big institutions and government, that Obama has to save me / us. Immediately I’m in a losing game, afraid of going down.

But if I choose Option B, an unknown future with that’s filled with creative possibilities I co-create with others, that I have to realize myself, right away I’m in an exciting field of adventure, having fun. Right now, in this moment, things are good.

Things literally couldn’t be better in fact, because this is the moment that is.

When I choose either future it starts to happen right away.  I love that!

Making choices when even change is changing

Things are changing fast and and even change isn’t what it used to be!

Consider these factoids from a youtube video called Did you know? 2008.

• China will soon be the country with the most English speakers.
• The 25% with the highest IQs are greater than the number of North Americans
• The top 10 in demand jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004
• New technical info doubles every two years. By the end of year three of a four year technical course, half of what you learned in year one  isirrelevant
• Kids in school are looking at a job that doesn’t yet exist, that will use technologies that don’t yet exist to solve problems no one recognizes yet as problems
• Nintendo invested over $140 million in Research and Innovation in 2002; the US Dept of Education spent less than half that
• A weeks worth of the NY Times contains more information than a person in the 18th century would have been exposed to in a lifetime
• If MySpace was a country it would be the world’s 11th largest, between Japan and Mexico
• The average myspace page is visited 30 times a day
• There are 2.7 billion google searches monthly
• More text messages are sent daily than there are people on the planet
• Three thousand new books are published daily
• More unique new info will be produced this year than was in last five thousand years
• Radio took 38 years to reach a market audience of 50 million; Facebook took only two

But the biggest change isn’t one they mentioned and it’s this one: while the cyber world is exploding, the physical world is depleting.

This one stands out for me like a streaking meteor in a night sky. In the opinion of the best minds we have and the best studies, our current way of life is not unsustainable. We’re using resources more quickly than they’re being replaced. Unsustainable means that they will fail on the present track.

How do we become masters of our future, or at least responsible to it, under these conditions?

Do we try and make the old way work (after all it’s worked before), or do we prepare for radical change and our part in it?

I’m all for the change myself, as best as I can.

Here are some general tendencies that the choice for change when even change is changing – subject to revision of course!

• Stay small and local. A community of friends will do you better than a fortress. 30 friends will do you better than 30 guns.
• Don’t spend your time creating things that people can steal; rather share things and have less that others want.
• Make your life be more about flow than about grow.
• Don’t flaunt wealth or live for it.
• Have a useful skill or two or three. Know how to make local power, pickles, wine or beer, grow something, or sharpen saws. Have a value in the new economy. Realize that education doesn’t necessarily come in university but in new and unknown ways.

And the big one behind all that: do what you can in the form of personal practice to to step up to this challenge, to enjoy it and make it work for you.

We’re living in one of the most dynamic changes in history; it’s  already an amazing ride!

Everyone’s an original

What I notice about my own inner life is it seems to have an ornery streak in it. I’ve studied many religious traditions and means, but some part of me doesn’t feel satisfied with them. Is this the “prince with the pea under the mattresses” syndrome, the never happy guy?

Maybe partly. But this inside person, who I’ll shorthand as “the little  guy,” is often happy. Super sensitive, yes, but happy often. He knows what he likes and he definitely likes it.

The little guy is an original. He thinks, “I am me and no one else can ever see it or know it in the same way.  I’m unique. “

One of his thoughts is that everyone is an original. Aren’t they? Deep down below the conditioning and the pretending and the . . . oh, I don’t know, down there, one of a kind. “Me dammit, “  they’re saying. “This is so important here. What William Carlos Williams called ‘the importance of a red wheelbarrow,’ which is to say, everything.”

I (as opposed to the little guy) am often not original but that’s because I’m often trying to cover up the little guy and pretend that I’m normal. I’m trying to pass. No, I ‘m pretty sure everyone’s an original. I know that many have no interest in it the way that I do, and that they will likely stay covered over (tho I know people’s timing is original too and they may get naked when I least expect it, or when they do).

So I’m claiming the little guy’s way, his vision and perception, as good and valuable and beautiful, as smart and savvy and cool. I like him. I’m with him all the way. He can make up his own religion if he wants.

I think he’s an original. An ordinary original like everyone.

I’m not going to let him go.