Category: Life

  • Run and Cry

    Have you ever been in a situation – such as visiting with relatives (or dealing with collaborators, or etc) – where your head is ready to explode?

    I’m sure you have.

    Here’s the thing: It’s nothing wrong with them. They are who they are. You are who you are. Nobody is going to fundamentally change.

    This is true even when they’re good people who are well intentioned (as the relatives I’m currently visiting are). This is true when they are not so good and not so well intentioned.

    It is universal. It has nothing to do with the rightness or the wrongness of anyone involved. Yet so often we tend to make it about that. “They’re wrong and I’m right.” It makes your ego feel good but never solves the situation. Yes, I tried that for many years. Nothing changed.

    In this conflict between “who they are” and “who you are,” generally what ends up happening is one of two things:

    1. You “suck it up” and try to adapt. That strategy is one I’ve been familiar with many times in the past. All too many times I would subsume who I am and what I want for myself to the needs of others. Relatives, family, collaborators, kids. While I’m a strong personality, I also have a very strong streak of wanting to please others. When those came into conflict, the “wanting to please others” would often (usually) win.
    2. You make them “wrong.” I’ve done this too, usually when I reached my breaking point in any situation. I would just get to a point where I couldn’t handle “playing the good girl” anymore, and so I would decide that “they” (whoever they happened to be at the moment) were “wrong.” Once I brought that attitude into the relationship, things went downhill…. fast. Worse, it’s easy to feel guilty after doing this, and then make yourself “wrong.” So you end up with a whole buttload of “making people wrong” and nobody wins.

    There is another way.

    In my work with Core Analysis – i.e. using intuitive methods to get to the bottom of who we are at our Core – I found out that I’m highly “internal.” (It wasn’t a surprise). What this means is that my relationship with myself is  the most important relationship. I need lots of alone time to think, to process, and to work on where I’m at.

    For external people, this is bizarre. External people benefit greatly from being in relationship to other people, and not as much from “going inside.”

    I can be by myself for days in a row – and be VERY happy with it! Someone who’s external (like one of my daughters) would not do well with that.

    The conflict mounts

    When I go visit relatives with my family, it’s full-on. It’s round the clock people, people, and more people. It doesn’t matter whether they’re the nicest people in the world – being an internal person, I get burnt out. I get exhausted. I get frustrated.

    The point here is that each of us is somewhere on that internal-external spectrum (and similarly, there are a number of other spectrums) – and quite often when we’re in a situation – not just with relatives, but in any human situation – attempting the “suck it up” solution in the name of getting along – we end up exhausted. That often leads to the next phase, which is the making them wrong phase. Like I said, it’s all downhill.

    The pressure release

    This morning I was just about at my breaking point. I was going to snap at somebody or start the downhill trend. So I decided to go out for a run. Despite the cloudy day, I wore my sunglasses. I could feel tears coming on.

    In the past, I wouldn’t have let myself cry in public (even with sunglasses!). I would have still been in the “suck it up” mode, trying to adapt to a societal norm that says it’s weird to be out in public, running along a suburban street, with tears running down your face. Well screw that!

    So here I was, running down the tree-lined streets in gray, windy Madison, Wisconsin, letting the tears of angst and frustration flow. After I got over the first minute or so of “feeling like a freak” (a feeling that’s quite normal for me by now), I felt an incredible release.

    I ran faster. I let more tears flow. I ran up a hill at a speed faster than I have in over a year. And by now, the frustration was spent. There were no more tears.

    Why don’t we take care of ourselves?

    Social norms.

    Most of us are so caught up in “fitting in” that we subsume our health, our mental well being, and even our spiritual well being for the sake of avoiding negative judgements or conflict. (Or, alternatively, just cynically avoiding all such situations where we might be exposed to this kind of challenge).

    It’s c-r-a-z-y.

    Why do we do that? I for one am sick of doing that. I won’t do it anymore.

    That’s why I found myself running down that street with tears flowing – and ending up feeling better than I have in weeks!

    That one emotional release that I allowed for myself – in public – was better than meditating every day (which I do), journaling (which I do), regular exercise (which I do).

    Nobody should try to “fit in”

    The bottom line is that we are all hardwired – at our deepest Core – for certain tendencies. Most of us end up quite often very far out of alignment with that, and it’s usually in situations with other people. When we end up chronically out of alignment, it results in health problems. It results in relationship problems. It results in anxiety and bitterness. It ends up in unhealthy anger and blame (or worse, victimization). Some people spend their whole lives in these states. What a waste!

    We are not here having this human experience to try to “meld ourselves to fit in.” No, we are not.

    We are here to live our lives authentically self-expressed. We are here to align with who we are and look at the magic that happens when we do that.

    It’s a shame that society often gives us just the opposite message: suck it up, fit in, do your homework, work hard, be nice, get good grades, and all that bullshit.

    It really is bullshit, and I for one won’t do it anymore. My goal is to be able to have relationships with people where I don’t go down the route of “fitting in” and/or “making them wrong” – but instead, simply be myself – even if that ends up with me running on a public street with tears running down my face, looking like a madwoman.

    I am shedding the notion that fitting in is useful or healthy. (It’s not).

    My challenge to you

    My challenge to you is to join me. I challenge you to look at your life, identifying areas where you subsume your personality in order to “fit in” or “avoid conflict.”

    Then ask yourself this question: “what is the cost to me of continuing to do that?”

    Once you realize the true costs, I think you may decide that you want to stop doing that. Because for most of us, those true costs are simply too great.

    Let me know how it goes!

  • Lighten up, Life is an experiment

    Lighten up, Life is an experiment

    This is a first. I’ve not been very open in the past about my own spiritual path over the past few years – one that has led me from a very atheist point of view to now believing that there is much more to our universe than the material “stuff” that we see.

    It is not a journey that I undertook readily or with enthusiasm. I grew up to think of many religious people as a bit “nuts,” and by association, any form of spirituality was suspect.

    Yet my own path, my own questions, forced me to ultimately face up to this idea: we are far more than just the flesh-and-bones in these bodies, and we are more than just a random, meaningless lump of flesh in the universe.

    This is not about religion, it is about spirit. It is about finding meaning in an often difficult world, and finding a path that leads to peace, fun, love, and enjoyment of life. It is a very practical path indeed, and yet one that I – like many others – often resist due to our own biases and beliefs from the seemingly never-ending debate between religion and science.

    When you are willing to step aside from that debate, and go on an open-minded exploration of what our reality is really about, amazing things open up for you. One of those things for me has been that I have found I can get very quiet and still, and “tune into” some deeper voice, some deeper consciousness, that has a “knowing” that seems to go far beyond what I in this body could know about things. It has been incredible for me to start asking that voice questions about my life and our world, and to get some amazing answers back.

    Here I share one of those with you, that was spawned by a debate I saw a friend involved in about a rape that had happened, and whether the victim had somehow “attracted” that into her life or not. The flamethrowers came out… and it was not pretty. I wanted a deeper insight into what this was all about, so I asked the question, and here is what I got.

    Q: What about people who suffer severe traumas?

    A: Life is an experiment. Each event is one of a series of never-ending, eternal experiments, trials-and-errors, that happen to a soul over its eternal trajectory.

    For each “bad” thing that happens there is always a comparable “good” thing that happens, though not always in the same lifetime or in a way that is obvious to the person from their perspective at the time.

    You humans could do to lighten up, to chill out, to have fun with this ride you call Life. It is not much different than a play with actors, taking on different roles and trying different perspectives.

    A soul cannot reach it’s full potential if it never experiences pain, or what it is like to be a victim. Nor can it reach full potential without experiencing the opposite, being an oppressor or victimizer. These each lead to expansion and clarity of what is not wanted, which leads to more of what is wanted.

    All paths ultimately lead to Love and to Source (or what some of you may call God). And yet if the path was just a straight line, it would be boring. There would be no point, and certainly no fun.

    The only true thing that is “wrong” is the perspective you humans adopt into the “bad” (or “good”) things that happen. Rather than just letting those things be the past, you bring them into your present by focusing on them and recapitulating them over and over again. You like to think about them, memorialize them, teach history lessons about them, debate about them, stew over them, seek therapy to revisit them….

    And each time you re-live these so-called “bad” things, you bring more things like them to you. That which is like unto itself is drawn.

    So instead of experiencing relatively isolated incidents (or single lifetimes) of “bad,” you often experience a long-term perpetuation of the “bad.”

    We use that in quotes, because in the end, all of this is just an experiment. It’s an experiment that you agreed to participate in, joyously and willingly. How will it go? Will you as a species destroy the Earth? Or will you figure out a way to “make it work?”

    Either way there will be learning and growth and expansion. Neither way is a “dead end” in an infinite, evolving universe of possibility. There are other, countless, realities in which different scenarios play out, and it is never “done.” So if things go “bad” here, things will go “well” elsewhere.

    It is your choice. You do not need to fret or worry over what happens to others. Your job is to learn joy, love, and ultimately, your connection to source – to see as though through the eyes of your Source or your God. To see with love, connection, beauty, and truth, all things, all places, all occurrences.

    This does not, it cannot happen in one lifetime. This is a very grand undertaking, and again, one that leads to your soul’s expansion.

    This is not a “serious” game as so many would have you believe. The whole point of this is, shall we say, a step aside from “boredom.” Imagine an original state where there is nothing but perfection. Imagine that lasting forever. Imagine that perfection never changing. Imagine being a consciousness trapped in that state, aware, and yet trapped. Imagine the agony of that.

    How does one escape? By engaging in creation. Creation involves duality. You cannot create if there is not the thing you call contrast.

    Good/bad. Up/down. Right/wrong. Black/white. Male/Female. There are many, many contrasts that arise, and they are all part of the richness and complexity of this experiment you call “reality.” You cannot have the good without the bad, though some think that you can. The “good” is just as dead and lifeless as the “bad” without the other.

    Contrast leads to more contrast. For each refinement, there are further steps of refinement enabled. For each “BAD” there is new “GOOD” that arises. For each “GOOD” there is new “BAD” that becomes possible.

    It is a game. Kids know this, until you talk them out of knowing it, then they forget it and turn into “serious” adults like you.

    Kids know how to play, to imagine, to relax, to be in the moment, to have fun.

    You could learn from your kids (collectively) a lot about what life really is, but most of you are too busy “teaching” them what you know about life, much of which is bogus.

    You teach them the details of “how the world works” and yet the world changes at an ever-increasing rate, due to the expansion of consciousness that is occurring. How the world worked 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago when you were growing up is different than how the world works now.

    They are wise, they can learn how the world works through play, through presence, through their own exploration of the “good” and the “bad” – unless you get in their way.

    Find the good in every bad. Find the bad in every good. Know that they are just two sides of the same coin, and that they are neither good nor bad, they just “are.” Your judgements are the only thing that make them so. And your judgements are never made from the higher perspective of your soul, because you cannot, in your daily life, see its whole, eternal, trajectory.

    So here you are, in daily life, judging and deciding, and each time you decide and judge, you separate yourself, you slow yourself down from that alignment with Soul that you seek. It is not a problem, because your soul is eternal – it will far outlast this universe you see around you. And yet, you could have so much more of a fun life if you weren’t slowing it down.

    Why waste your life that way? It’s certainly up to you if you want to. You can throw away many lives in that way, and there will be no problem, except for that in each of those lives you “threw away” in worry and doubt and fear and being a victim or whatever, you are not experiencing anywhere near the fullness that you could in that life. It is a choice and there is no right or wrong in it.

    When you see those “bad” things happening to others, do not judge them. Do not judge the people doing the “bad” things, either. This is not to say that someone who violates the rules by which you’ve agreed to play here on this Earth should just be able to do whatever they want.

    But there is a difference between saying: “you’ve broken the rules and there are consequences” versus saying “you hurt this person and you are therefore bad/evil/wrong.” The first is a simple matter of finding a consequence that is appropriate for the rule-breach, and carrying out that consequence, and letting the perpetrator’s soul grow in the way that it is here to grow from that.

    When you get into the judgement about bad/evil/wrong, however, you then involve yourself in those energies. To think about those things, you bring those energies into your system. You attract more challenges with those things that you are giving those labels to. Is that what you want?

    Let’s take the example of the rape that was discussed recently. Both the victim and the perpetrator’s soul have grown from this incident. Was there another way to produce the same growth? Many of you seem to act as if you think there is. And yet if you, the reader, thinks about all the times of major growth in your life, was it not *always* on the heels of a major challenge you overcame? Is that not what every good story, movie, tv show, or book is based upon?

    It is a silly, utopian notion to think that souls can truly expand without challenges like this.

    Now, you may be thinking, “but I don’t want that in my life!” You don’t have to have that. Your soul has a trajectory here, but that trajectory evolves through the power of your choice.

    From an external perspective, often those “bad” things seem so random, so strange, so unfortunate, and so different from the “perfect” person you observe who had that happen.

    Yet you are not a mind reader. You do not see what is happening inside of the person’s conscious mind, nor at the soul level.

    People in your world have become very good at putting on acts. Acts as if everything is wonderful – when inside – there is turmoil, worry, fear, and other things you might call “karmic baggage.”

    So when someone has something you consider “bad” happen for “no good reason” – you are judging that from a very ignorant point of view, without nearly all the “facts”.

    The best that you can do in your life is to focus on your own soul’s trajectory in this body, finding ways to maximize that, and letting other souls do the same. If you do that in joy, in fun, in love, you can have a very expansive, clarifying, wonderful life experience.

    Either way, whether you choose to do that or not, your soul grows.

  • I GIVE IN!!!

    It’s time I come clean, put my BS aside and take responsibility for my truest, most raw BEING.
    Why?
    To serve & honour myself…YES! And just as important, to lead by example.
    To inspire & facilitate your most extraordinary evolution through my deeds NOT JUST THROUGH MY WORDS.
    And to bestow on you, what you are worthy of….choice.
    See…
    For years I’ve been focused on bringing you things like grant writing and productivity because that’s what my ego thought you wanted.
    Did you ever notice that your ego creates many illusions? Mine certainly does.
    One of the illusions it created is this: “my story isn’t important.” I had a false sense of modesty, thinking that “I’m not interesting, let’s not talk about me…”
    And yet…
    Every time I’ve told my story of transformation (several of them!) and of ultimately “finding myself” I’ve had far more requests for help than at any other time. It has inspired people to grow and change, because my story shows that it’s possible despite great obstacles.
    So I finally had a “duh” moment the other day. People have been craving this for a reason:
    Our society is set up from day one to program us to NOT be ourselves, but to live for other people’s impressions of us.
    Our ego gets addicted to the positive feedback that others give us when we do things that are pleasing to THEM, and we un-learn how to just be ourselves.
    Yet being ourselves is THE platform for truly inspired creativity. Lots of people claim “I’m not creative” which is total BS. The lack of creativity is simply a lack of being tuned into “being oneself.” This goes on to impact all other areas of life, limiting career progress and satisfaction.
    Being disconnected from who you are, and living from ego gratification, presents challenges to deep, satisfying relationships. It presents challenges to being truly healthy. 
    Who you are is a wonderful, loving, beautiful, fun, unique being.
    Who you’ve been programmed to act as is quite likely competitive, skeptical, reserved… constantly having to “prove yourself” to others around you in order to feel worthy.
    This way of being leads to things like the “impostor syndrome.” If you’re not being you – but operating out of your ego’s notion of what you think others want from you – you’re going to feel like an impostor! Operating from this false platform will never lead to truly good things in life.
    People who’ve achieved so-called success in that way always end up self-sabotaging at some point. Like the guy I just heard about from a friend who was wealthy, until a particular self-sabotaging behavior (coming from Ego) sunk the whole ship, and now he’s destitute.
    Yep, that was me, for many years of my life. And it continued even after I had the sex change. One surgery didn’t suddenly resolve this disconnection I had from myself. (Oh I wish it were that easy!!) It took far more work than that.
    I had PLENTY of self-sabotage going on, despite my apparent successes that my ego has been able to brag about (like the track record of grant funding and business growth).
    So anyway….
    I give in! I give up on my own illusions that my story is unimportant and uninspiring. I give up on the notion that people need help with grants and productivity and creativity… when if I’d been listening, I would have heard the message loud and clear:
    “Morgan, help us learn how to powerfully express who we truly are in the world, with no illusions, games, or false fronts!”
    And in doing that, I strongly suspect that the “troubles” with grants, with sales, with relationships, with health, with employees, with feeling like an impostor… those things will start resolving themselves. (EVERY big breakthrough in these areas I’ve had has been directly correlated with work I’ve done on aligning with core.)
    Honestly, it’s a bit weird to do this. It seems too “easy” – but that’s only because I’ve spent years and some major ups and downs learning how to do just that. Learning how to finally be myself! So I’ll see how it goes….
    And, if you’re ready to go to work on this – to remove those layers of falsity that keep you from expressing who you are in the world – then reach out to me. I can help.
    Morgan

  • What Lies in Stone….

    When speaking of his historically famous Statue of David, Michelangelo said this, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” He made similar comments throughout his lifetime about his artistic abilities and how he did not carve stone to look like figures, he simply released the figures from the stone. What a genius perspective to have. Michelangelo recognized that there was beauty within a block of stone and it was only up to him to reveal it. The same can be said for us and our authentic selves. I love talking about creating and how much better it can make every aspect of our lives, but when it comes to our core, its not about creating at all. It’s about what’s revealing whats already there.

    Who we are at our core is who we we were always meant to be. As we grow and experience life that connection to inner self can become foggy, and then layer upon layer we cover up that magnificent being and become who we think society, our families, our spouses, or our bosses want us to be.

    It is time to chip away at the layers surrounding our core. It is time to let go and release false beliefs and false judgements about ourselves.

    Just like Michelangelo’s beloved David, your authentic self is there, waiting in the stone to be uncovered.Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 9.10.41 PM

  • Victimhood vs Vulnerability

    Being authentic in vulnerability vs. the hidden agenda of victimhood.

     

  • "Panic Culture" and Ebola

    Airborne

    I had the “pleasure” – if you can call it that – of traveling through one of America’s busiest airports today. On my way through, there were headlines and TV’s blaring: “EBOLA!!!” 

    Scare. Fear. Worry. Doubt.

    “It could strike you at any time, so be AWARE, be CAREFUL, be SAFE.”

    Now, look. I have done a lot of computer modeling using fancy-sounding things like “Agent-based modeling.” I’ve played with the simulations of disease spread. It used to strike fear in me.

    If you believe like I did that something like Ebola can strike you down at any random time, then you are screwed. If not this virus, then the next, or the one after that. Or heart attack. Or cancer. Or meteor. Or war. Or murder. You’ll find a way.

    There are MANY ways to die, and a lot of people spend their entire lives, not LIVING, but AVOIDING DEATH. That’s so silly, because you can’t avoid the inevitable.

    No Regrets

    And yes, I’m going to die someday. Maybe soon, maybe later. Would I prefer the “later” scenario? Sure – but only because I feel like I have unfinished business, like raising kids and getting some more positive messages out into the world through the work that I do. I also want to explore some places I haven’t seen before. Yet, if it happens today, or tomorrow, I feel that I’ve lived life FULLY so far. I’ve done in one lifetime what few people do – experiencing life as a student, a teacher, a scientist, an entrepreneur, an explorer, an author, a man, a woman.

    And IF it happens soon, I don’t give any credence to the idea that it’s just “random.” If that happens, it means that I’ve accomplished what I came into this body and this life to accomplish, and it’s time to move on. There is nothing WRONG or SCARY about that.

    Led by Fear or Leading by CORE

    One of the principles of our universe – and our lives – is that you get what you focus on.

    So, if you’re constantly tuned into the news that is screaming EBOLA or disaster – you’re constantly tuned into fear. Since you get what you focus on, you’re going to get more FEAR in your life – i.e. an ever-accumulating pile of things in life to worry over, all adding up to the BIG ONE, the FINAL thing that you worried about but couldn’t ever fully prepare for (because you were so afraid to think that you might be snubbed out so handily by “circumstances” that you pretended you weren’t thinking about it – but you were).

    I’m not talking about sticking your head in the sand. You can be aware of your goals (such as “I’ve got more to do here”) and act in accordance with those goals (such as “I should wash my hands and avoid dangerous situations where possible.”) But it’s easy to go over the top with this, and lose connection with your CORE – your intuitive guidance system that can HELP you accomplish your goals. If your goal is to live longer, that guidance system is far more powerful than any screaming alert sirens or flashing headlines. It will help you line up with the people, places, and things that help you accomplish your goals.

    Auto-pilot vs Taking the Controls

    What screws most of us up in that is that we get lost in doubt, worry, and fear. Those things disconnect us from that very guidance system – much like an airliner that has just been flipped off of autopilot into manual flight mode. Manual flight is ok, but has a few challenges: it is tiring because it requires constant vigilance – and it requires VERY good instruments. Especially in our extremely complex world, operating on “manual” will tie you in logical knots about what is right, safe, and correct versus what is wrong and unsafe. Our “rational” minds cannot deal with a complex future, so we end up making these “rational” decisions with heuristics – i.e. shortcuts.  One of the most common heuristics is: “everyone is doing it, so that must be the way to do it.” Talk about a dangerous way to run your life. It’s like an airiner on manual pilot flying through fog. There are many illusions and without very good instruments, an “incident” is quite likely. Good instruments are like your CORE guidance system – yet most of us ignore those.

    An intuitive signal from the CORE is powerful. A heuristic is weak. They are NOT the same. Listening to heuristics leads to those random bad things (and some good things, too). Listening to the CORE helps you stay on track to what you want – as long as you’re clear about it and you don’t contradict it with the worry, doubt, and fear.

    Do not succumb to the fear mongers. Yes – be aware – but more important is to stay in tune with what you want out of life – your positive vision – and keep moving towards that.  And by God, if you’re not living life FULLY right here and now, start doing it. Ebola or not, one day you WILL be dead. It happens to the best of us 🙂

    Morgan

  • Accepting What You Deserve: YOU Deserve it ALL!!

    Dear One,

    Deservingness. You’ve been told a lie and you’ve told a lie.

    The lie that you don’t deserve it.

    It doesn’t matter what “it” is.

    But you find yourself always making excuses for why you have to do X, Y, and Z BEFORE you can deserve it.

    A better life. Improved health. More happiness. A better relationship. Better  work. Better clients. More money.

    We find all the excuses in the world for not allowing these into our lives…

    Because, we say, “I don’t deserve that!!”

    Or worse, guilt and shame. “I feel guilty because if I get that, I’m taking from someone else.”

    It’s a lie. Who knows where it started. That does not matter here. What matters here is only one simple thing. 

    Did you believe it? Do you believe it?

    Because at its core, most believe it to be true. At some level, good things only come from really hard work. They only come from suffering. They only come from lots of guilt.

    Yet that’s not EVER how good things come. No good thing has ever come via the pathway of shame or guilt. Not a single one. Those are negative attractors that only bring more of the same to themselves.

    You cannot believe that these things are the pathway to “success” in what’s important to you and ever achieve success in that thing.

    The avenue is different. The avenue is from something more fundamental, more basic.

    The avenue comes from eliminating the lie and getting to the truth!

    You didn’t come into the magnificent body to hold success and well being away from yourself – at least not for long.

    Yes, you want challenge. You want growth. But because we internalize this lie of non-deservingness, we go way beyond the healthy aspects of challenge and growth, into a perpetuation of states that hold us back. They keep us from embracing the growth that we could have had so simply – if we had only felt we deserved simplicity and ease.

    If you are overwhelmed, it is for one reason alone. It is because you do not believe at your CORE that you deserve your success to come to you easily and without struggle.

    Perpetual struggle is not a “natural” state for any being except modern humans. All other creatures may have brief struggles, but they quickly move on. They understand that struggle is not from love, not from flow.

    We do not. We have accepted the illusion that in struggle is glory – and so struggle we do. Always. We turn it from something that may happen once or twice into a state of being.

    That is a state of being which says: I do not deserve joy, I do not deserve flow, I do not deserve ease. It says: if I overcome one hurdle, I have to immediately find another one to embrace, or else I will not have value.

    Yet you DO have value. Intrinsically. Who you are is valuable. But if you have forgotten that, then you start associating your value with what you do, and with how people react to you.

    Do you see how fickle that is? Those people you are depending upon for your sense of worth, deservingness, and value may or may not give it to you. And so you stake your fate on external factors that you will NEVER control.

    Human babies do not do this. They feel their value. They feel worthy of the attention they receive. Of the love they receive. Then, as they grow up, they start learning that worth comes from pleasing others, and from “hard work” or accomplishment!

    Yet there is never enough hard work or accomplishment or pleasing of others to fill the void! Those are incredibly weak factors. They are transitory. The void never gets filled.

    You are deserving. That deserving does not come from outside, it comes from the inside. Inside of you is a loving, deserving being. But in your attention to these outside factors, you forgot to look inside for that which you seek. You’ve buried it, much like a treasure lost at the bottom of the ocean – and now it’s so far down beneath the water, that you can’t even see where it is.

    IT IS THERE! It may take some effort to find. But if you TRUST, and BELIEVE that it is there, and persist in your search, find it you will. You will find the greatest treasure that any human being could have: a sense of worthiness, well beingness, and deservingness. 

    Once you find those things, and truly FEEL them, LIVE them, you can have any external thing you want. Yet those external things will not matter so much to you, because they will pale in comparison to the treasure you have found INSIDE of you.

    Seek your treasure. Seek your own inner worth and value. Learn to feel deserving again. It is the most important adventure and challenge you could ever embark upon. So go in haste, my worthy, wonderful human being! Now is the time.

    -Morgan

  • Morgan's über-fantasy world (how about rewriting YOUR story?)

    Morgan's über-fantasy world (how about rewriting YOUR story?)

    This is a blog post about my fantasy world.  Before you click away into the nether lands of cyberspace, let me tell you why this might be important to you.

    We all live in a fantasy world.

    From the most brilliant scientists to the most fundamentalist religionists, our fantasies define who we are.

    In this second decade of the third millennium, we like to pretend that we’re “data driven” – that we are smart and savvy – supported by the latest info-overload purporting to tell us who we are and where we come from.

    It doesn’t matter whose data you use or where it came from. Data are neutral. Data have no meaning apart from the meaning we give them. In science, we tell stories about the data based on our hypotheses and theories. Some of those are some pretty darn smart sounding stories. So smart sounding that we often confuse them for the “TRUTH,” so help you God.

    In other areas of our corner of the vast Universe, people tell very different stories about their world. They look at different data, or they choose to tell a different story about the same data. Or both. This results in sometimes very different stories about who we are and how we came to be.

    You grew up telling yourself a story, and so did I. Everyone does. That story defines everything about how we show up in the world.

    There’s no problem with having a story. It’s how we make meaning out of the vast reams of data that we are exposed to in every moment. The problem occurs later on, after the story gets fixed – cemented like Krazy Glue – into our psyche. Not to be rooted out or changed, we cling to our story as if it were the TRUTH, never again allowing any information to come to us that doesn’t fit with that story.

    Then it often goes South. Many of these stories we glue into our minds impose upon us self-inflicted misery, disconnection, judgement of others, lack of self love, and worse. Despite those problems they cause, we cling to the stories as if they were some kind of “unchangeable TRUTH.” We cling to our stories, and we cling to our misery, lack of self love, judgement, and disconnection.

    I got sick of that and decided to change my story.

    It wasn’t a conscious decision. It would have been a much faster transformation if I had recognized my story for what it was, and intentionally rooted it out. Alas, I was not that lucky. (I was going to write “smart” there, but smart people are just as prone to telling themselves stories as the not-as-smart. Telling stories is an equal opportunity habit).

    So, my story began with growing up in a scientific household. My father was a famous chemist and my brother is a well known physicist. In our household, there was the truth as laid out by “science”, and there was all that “bogus crap that other people believe.”

    Little did I know that there were people all over the world looking at us scientists, and lumping our stories into the category of “bogus stuff that other people believe.” I suppose that it dawned on me at some point in mid-childhood that ours wasn’t the only story out there. But it didn’t matter, because our story was RIGHT and theirs were obviously WRONG.

    I was so wrapped up being RIGHT that I paid no attention to whether my story was bringing me any joy, love, fun, or peace. According to my story, emotional stuff like that was just a bunch of side effects of biochemistry that weren’t all that important.

    What was important was SCIENCE. What was important was Figuring It All Out (TM). What was important was being smarter than those ignoramuses who hadn’t yet Figured It All Out.

    My Ego was bloated with facts and figures to PROVE my case, a bit like one of those dead cows I’ve seen floating in the Colorado River. Yeah, it was that gross.

    And what did I figure out with my high-minded story?

    It’s a Random Universe and We Are Meaningless Players

    In that so-called scientific story I’d adopted, the universe started out for some unknown reason, and since then, everything that happened has been a product of randomness.

    My story about our random universe was based on ideas about what happened a very very long time ago. That was long before any humans were around to measure things with our fancy instruments. There were no weather vanes on Saturn to tell which way the wind was blowing… So to call it “scientific” is assuming that we know far more than we actually do about what was going on back then.

    Anyway… in that story, you and I and everyone else came from something a bit like green pond scum. Chance pond scum turned into chance human beings. By chance we were the fittest in a brutal, harsh, dog-eat-dog world. We out gunned and outsmarted the other species to ascend to the top.

    And the prize? A sort of clinging, tenuous survival on this planet, where at any moment we could be wiped out by war, meteorite, or other disaster… and then the cockroaches will ascend to replace us.

    Worse, because we wiped out so many other species (and later, races) on our clinging way to the top… guilt for our sins is mandatory. We are just selfish, brutish beings… not much more than a blight on the planet. It would all soon come to an end, a just dessert. When I was 13, I dreamed that my dog Bear and I were going to go live in a cabin in Alaska to wait it all out. Bear was the perfect companion for my plan, a stout St. Bernard – German Shepherd mix who could probably outlive me in that kind of scenario. He just needed a keg on his neck to carry our food and drink for the apocalypse.

    My daughter recently came to me and said: “I think it would be nice if we could just have a big reset and start it all over with far fewer humans.” WOW.  Now she’s carrying around a similar story, even though I didn’t consciously pass it on to her. That particular story of humans-as-blight is a prevalent one, especially in liberal/progressive circles**.

    (** I’m only picking on this story because it’s the one I’d adopted. There are plenty of other just-as-dysfunctional stories that people tell themselves, like the one that says we were all perfect until some rib-cum-woman came along, got hypnotized by a snake to bite into an apple, and that perfection was permanently ruined by this heinous act. Implicit in this particular story is the sin and temptation inherent in humans – especially women).

    That story led down a dark path for me. The more I reinforced it as I pursued my professor job as a bigwig scientist, the more it translated into dysfunction in my relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. “Things could collapse at any time” – I lived in constant fear due to this story. I perused the economic and environmental websites daily to reconfirm just how bad things were becoming. That focus on collapse became a personal reality for me. In 2010 UNC pulled the rug out from under a big project without notice, and that led to my angry resignation. According to my story – as just one more sign of how bad things were, they’d screwed me over for space for years, and things were just getting worse and worse.

    That story led to a lot of personal turmoil. It led to turmoil with my family. It led to bouts of depression. It was unfun and unhealthy, and I’m still recovering from it all.

    And it gets worse…

    My story also said I am unlovable. My story said that since I grew up with a peculiar birth defect, “I’m not going to be accepted.” It came from a childhood where my mom walked out the door…never to return. Whenever I saw something I didn’t like, I projected onto it a sense that “it is personal, against me…” instead of realizing that most people are just living each in their own world. My mom didn’t leave because of me, she left because of her own issues. Yet my story for all those years had been telling me that I somehow caused that.

    This story didn’t allow me to believe in LOVE. I mean, I believed in the concept of a biochemically-derived love, but it was just a function of neurotransmitters, and nothing more than that. Loving myself wasn’t on my radar, because it seems pretty odd to love oneself when love is just a bunch of chemicals in the first place. And….I was suicidal at times. It was bad.

    Why share so much? I do it to illustrate just how a story can paint you into a corner, like that story did for me.

    Then something happened and I got a new story

    Over the past six years, I adopted a completely new story. I took the same “facts” that I did before, and I chose to interpret them in a whole new way. I chose to tell a new story, one that has led to a profound change in my life.

    For a long time, I was afraid to share this with anyone. My new story very different than the previous “scientific” story I carried around. I felt like I would be laughed at for sharing it.

    But it is Just A Story

    Then one day it dawned on me. This is just a story. No more, no less. It is not a matter of who is right or who is wrong. That is a totally unimportant ego distraction that I had been caught up in  (as are many, many other people). I’d been so caught up in the Ego of my story, perhaps because I was a non-Mormon who grew up in Mormon Utah. I felt like I needed to defend my particular view against the very strong views of the nearly all-pervasive church influence around me.

    Yet it’s not just me. Nearly all of us adopt these stories, and then we go out into the world with a sort of missionary zeal for defending our story. We ttry to constantly prove to others that it is right, and we make judgements of those who’ve chosen a different story.

    All the while, we separate ourselves from what’s really important: finding and holding the best story that works for our joy, our peace, our prosperity, our love.

    So, I’m going to tell you my new story – a fantasy I created

    I make no claim about its “rightness.” I make no judgements about the very different stories that others hold. It may offend both some of the hardcore materialist scientists and many of the religious. That doesn’t matter.

    What matters is that you use my story transformation as an example, an illustration of how you can examine your story. You can figure out whether YOUR story is serving you, or whether it’s holding you back from a deeper sense of joy, love, and fun in your life.

    Since I spent my whole life around a scientific worldview, my new story is based on the best I can make of the evidence (not just the mainstream). You may not need as much evidence or data or “logic” for your story, and that’s ok. Those are things I need to justify my story due to my curious upbringing.

    It goes like this:

    In the beginning there was consciousness. It was aware of itself, and of possibility, but there was no medium in which to express itself. It was like a painter without a canvas. It was frustrated and forlorn, until it figured out a way to create a canvas out of itself.

    The canvas (our universe) is part of that awareness, and yet the universe, its canvas, has its own independent existence and progression. It is free to evolve by its own course – and yet all the while is supported through LOVE by that which created it.

    Within that canvas is a vast universe of universes, and there are also a vast series of “intelligences” – only a small fraction of which inhabit physical bodies like ours.

    Our own being came through a process that resembles the Evolution written about by Darwin, but with one difference*. It is not entirely random. Rather, it is driven by a creative process, expressing itself on the tableau of DNA as its canvas. It is driven by a process that has LOVE for its creations – all of its creations – at its core.

    It is not an old white guy with a beard planning out the “perfect scenario.” Far from it. No, it is an awareness that constantly grows and expands, and is joyous at each new development. It paints on the canvas through each evolutionary development. It paints on the canvas through each human idea. It paints on the canvas with each new star system that explodes into being. Sometimes those new developments don’t work, and can’t be sustained. Sometimes they work too well, and take over – squeezing out others.

    *note: remember, this is my own fantasy. If you want to get into a debate about evolution vs whatever (creationism, intelligent design, etc), I won’t join you. That is not the point here. It’s finding a story that makes us happy.

    With each new advancement, it opens up even more new opportunities for further developments. There is no “good” vs “evil” in all of this. The artist loves all of its creation. Evil is only a human creation, a product of people who’ve become disconnected from the love, the creativity, and the joy.

    The artist loves all

    The artist who created the canvas loves all of its creations, even though many of them have become so disconnected from it that they think they evolved randomly from pond slime. Even though they think that the artist doesn’t exist. Even though these creations have forgotten that they are love, and that they should start by loving themselves.

    A conscious being who does not love itself cannot give deep love to another. One cannot giveth of that whicheth one doth not have.

    We came here to explore and to create. We came here to build upon others’ creations. We came here as artists, much like the original artist, to see what great things we can do with the canvas of our life. It’s the canvas we’ve been given, yet many of us devalue it, minimize it, and feel unworthy of it.

    Sadly, like me with my former story, many of us have forgotten. We’ve become lost in a story that says we have to work really really hard to succeed, and if we don’t, we are not worthy and we’ll be left behind in the dust. We’ve become lost in a story that says we are insignificant, unexceptional, and unimportant in this vast (and cold) universe. Many of us get lost in a story that says we are here only to serve others, rather than to live our life to its creative fullest – while serving others through living our lives to their fullest.

    We have the free will to build upon creation with joy and love, or to unplug from it and destroy small parts of it with our hate and our fear. Though a lot of humans have chosen the course of hate and fear, our world is a resilient place. It will take a lot of hate to truly destroy it. Meanwhile, there are more and more of us who are waking up and embracing our true purpose here. We are gaining momentum to displace the hate and the fear. We are likely to triumph, as long as we embrace a better story.

    I like my new fantasy much better.

    It has begun healing my psyche and my relationships, without psychotherapy or pharmaceuticals. It has led me out of depressive episodes, and out of withdrawal from other human beings. I’m not 100% of the way there yet. The painting is by no means complete. We are never done. But I’m making great progress, because of the new story I’ve chosen to tell myself.

    So now it’s your turn. What story are you telling yourself? Is that story helping you be a happier, more connected human being? Or does it have you lost in despair, dysfunction, overwhelm?

    If it’s not serving you, perhaps it’s time to start rewriting that old story into something new. If you need help with that, reach out.

     

     

  • Trading batteries… until you kick the bucket

    Balanced rock

    Here I go, off on a tirade to offend some people again. I’m sure you’re used to that by now.

    I’m going to be particularly offensive to those people who tell you the only way to succeed is by working all the time, clawing and climbing your way up the ladder. It works well for those people who benefit from you doing that. However, it doesn’t work for the person doing the clawing and climbing and working (YOU)… nor does it work for your families, friends, and coworkers.

    Let me explain why this makes me shake my head. In the past two weeks I’ve had not one, not two, but FOUR conversations with people who have chosen to make a deadly tradeoff.

    They’ve chosen to “succeed” by working really really really hard. For years and decades. This means missed sleep, missing their kids growing up, and missing out on LIFE apart from work.

    All for some illusory goal like a promotion, more dollars in the account, or recognition. It’s BS.

    Because once you get to “there” there’s no real there there. I felt like that after getting tenure. (If you’re not an academic, tenure meant I was essentially guaranteed a job… for life… after a Hunger-Games like trial lasting seven years to “prove myself”). So what that I proved myself… ? It was hollow. I still had all the same challenges after as I’d had before.

    It wasn’t like I was suddenly this mythical, tenured creature who now walked on clouds of velvet and no longer had to use the bathroom like the rest of the human race. Nope, I was exactly the same person, who’d had maybe three days of happiness and feeling of accomplishment, and then went back to facing exactly the same challenges as before (and maybe some new ones).

    Trading batteries

    Each of us has a set of batteries, one per major life area:

    • Career/Business success (and the money/security that comes from it)
    • Health
    • Mental/spiritual well being
    • Family

    At any point in our life different batteries have different charge levels, representing our overall energy level in that area.

    Our focus and attention is like a generator (or alternator) that charges a battery up – but the generator can only be attached to one battery at a time. And when it’s not attached, the batteries lose charge and run down. If you get a dead battery, that means that area of your life is going to have a major interruption. It will need a jump start.

    So, for those people who’ve chosen work success above all else, it’s like your generator is always hooked to that one battery of career/business. Occasionally, when the other batteries get critically low, you might attach some jumper cables for a quick top-off, but then it’s back to focusing on the career and business battery.

    Our batteries are much like real batteries in another way: when you let it deplete, next time you charge it up, it is permanently damaged and won’t hold a charge as readily. Pretty soon, after it gets drained one too many times, it can’t be charged anymore. That’s when you need a new battery.

    If you deplete your mental/spiritual battery, that’s when you have to end up on drugs (prescribed or otherwise), or in counseling… or worse. I knew several people who committed suicide at that stage.

    If you deplete your family battery, that’s when divorces and child custody battles happen. That’s when kids running away and even shooting up schools happens.

    If you deplete your health battery… well, that should be obvious, but maybe it’s not since so many people do it. That’s where cancer, heart disease, and so many of the other “Modern” ailments start plaguing you.

    My father depeleted his health battery

    I think we knew something bad was coming… my father was a well-recognized, successful professor who put almost all of his focus on the career battery. He got a lot of awards and recognition for that focus. That battery was very full. Sadly, his family and health batteries, not as much. He’d been on a stint of VERY hard work for a few years when he got the diagnosis of a terminal cancer. His health battery had been too damaged by that point, and there was no recharging it. He was dead after a challenging struggle…two years later.

    The irony of “disease care”

    I find it so funny that people think we’ll find cures for cancer, heart disease, and all those maladies, without fixing the real problem. The real problem is that with our health batteries mostly depleted, our bodies are incapable of healing themselves. We have a system focused on trying to stave off disease, rather than on creating health.

    We’re focused on the wrong thing. We have run amok with our own lives.

    If you are a person who’s like those I’ve had conversations with recently, i.e. you think that it’s okay to sacrifice all your other batteries in the name of career and business success, then I have an exercise for you.

    Write a letter to your future self, 20 years from now.

    In that letter, write something like this (with appropriate facts for your situation):

    I’m really sorry [your name]. I know I’ve let you down, by stealing away your life, health, and well being in trade for my need to prove myself in my career and chasing the notion of “security”. I am sorry about that collapse that landed you in the hospital. I’m sorry about that divorce and the custody battle that gave you a life of isolation and nearly bankrupted us. I’m sorry about the cancer that you’re struggling with and may not recover from now that it’s metastasized. I’m sorry that you never got to know your son, who became alienated and estranged because I didn’t have any time for him. I’m sorry about forcing you into ten years of counseling and anti depressives because I’ve treated your precious mind so poorly, with heavy drinking to cover up the malaise, and not nearly enough sleep.

    But I’ll tell you this, I think it’s all totally worth it because those accolades and security I’m generating are going to really really help you a lot as you struggle with this mess. At least you’ll finish life knowing that you got promoted, well paid (until we lost it in the divorce and cancer treatments), and lots of people congratulating us on our wins. I’m sure those congratulations will help you feel much better as you lie there in your (very expensive) hospital bed.

    I hope you will understand why I made the choices that I did, and forgive me.

    If writing that letter to yourself doesn’t give you a moment of thought, then I have nothing else to say that can help you.

    Dr. Morgan Giddings

     

     

     

    Morgan

    ps – in case you think that I am perfect about this, I am not. I made many battery-tradeoffs in getting to where I am. Some of them might have been worth it, but many were not. I would certainly do it differently with what I know now, and I do practice more and more of this balance that I’m talking about. And the irony is that as I do so, my work goes better than ever before.

  • The Mint-Bacon Cake

    This is an excerpt from my upcoming, nearly completed book Creating or Dying.

    You may wonder, “Am I really in charge of my beliefs?”

    Most people never even ask that question. They don’t even realize that they have a set of beliefs that are affecting their entire experience of reality, and that those beliefs can change.

    Instead, they let the news, their preachers, their parents, and their friends form their beliefs into some random mix.

    It’s like baking a cake blindfolded. You feel your way to the cupboard, randomly picking out oil, flour, oregano, salt, bacon, sugar, and mint flavoring. You end up with some horrible concoction that nobody wants to eat. And then you say, “Well, that’s what we got, I guess we just have to live with it.”

    In the world of baking, nobody would put up with that. They’d throw the mint-bacon cake in the trash and start over.

    Yet in the world of our mental belief systems, which are just as important to our existence as those ingredients are to the existence of that cake, we rarely question them. We don’t go through the mix, throwing out the ones that aren’t working, and creating new ones that work better.

    So, we end up with a random selection of beliefs. They may conflict with each other, and cause conflict with other people in our lives. They may cause monetary or even spiritual poverty. They cause kids to be brought up with all the wrong priorities. They even cause wars and other large-scale disasters.

    Ultimately, the random selection of beliefs that most of us end up with, then never really question, lead to random results from our lives. Ask: what beliefs benefit me, and which ones harm me?

    By asking that question, you can take charge of creating a set of beliefs that’s more beneficial.