Category: Other

  • For the New Year: Two Doors, One Choice

    For the New Year: Two Doors, One Choice

    Yesterday I wrote about reconciling with the past, before charging into the future.

    Today I want to present two very different ways of thinking about the future.

    Door 1: Continuing the past into the future, with small mods, tweaks, and adjustments. This is the default mode for nearly everyone in most years. This was me, for 50+ years of life.

    Door 2: Building a foundation for something better, starting now. Understanding that, like a kitchen remodeling, the “tear down” phase is messy and uncomfortable. We’ve been in tear down phase, collectively, for a while now. Sometime it will end.

    A New Year is a chance to reflect on what we will choose.

    There is nothing special about it except for that chance to reflect. We can make a different choice in any moment, so this is not a “pressure” situation.

    Door 1 above comes from a long-held acceptance that “this is the way things are, and so how they must be.” It is an adaptation, though not a healthy one.

    I remember my younger years, growing up in a world that often didn’t make sense.

    My childhood friend Chris, who loved to throw snowballs – and sometimes rocks, dirt, or even metal bolts – at passing cars, was so confident in who he was. Despite the toxic things he did, I looked to him because I was lost, deeply un-confident, because nothing made sense. And here he was, clear about who he was. So for a time, I thought he had it figured out, even though I was hesitant to join him in destructive actions (and only rarely did).

    I’ve done that kind of looking up to “authorities” many times, with many people, because I never felt I had it figured out.

    It didn’t and doesn’t make sense.

    I wondered, and still do: Why would people war with each other? Why do people manipulate each other? Why do religions that espouse being for “Good” and “God” often spew so much hate towards anyone who is different than their ideal? Why does science often act like a religion, and perform required worship at the altar of concepts like randomness, meaninglessness, and sometimes hopelessness?

    Why did the magic of life that I experienced when younger seem like something that had to be hidden away in a chest under the floorboards in the darkest closet, in the name of “growing up” and “becoming an adult?”

    Why do institutionalized sciences often suppress anomalies that don’t fit existing models? Why do so many religions disavow and actively suppress any hint of “magic”?

    For those who doubt this pattern, notice how little serious attention is given—within mainstream scientific or media channels—to the many unresolved oddities of the interstellar visitor 3I/Atlas. Anomalies that resist existing frameworks are not explored neutrally; they are minimized, ridiculed, or quietly ignored.

    This is not a failure of intelligence. It is the defining behavior of authority-preserving belief systems.

    What is the trouble that religions have with any hint of magic in the air?

    Though I don’t know answers to many things, I have come upon a developing answer to this question.

    The answer is: control.

    By “magic,” I don’t mean metaphor or fantasy. I mean real forces, capacities, and modes of creation that exceed what our current rational frameworks can explain. These are limits of explanation, not limits of reality.

    Religions are control-optimized institutions. If they convince you that your magic does not exist, they can control you. If you discover that your magic and your power do exist and are real, you no longer need them.

    By doing this, step by step, I no longer need the Chris’s of the world to “show me the way.” Learning to tap into inner magic, inner clarity, and inner truth makes them unnecessary. I can tell what is aligned and what is misaligned. I know who I am, and what I stand for.

    This leads back to the choice of the two doors. The first door is one of acceptance of the way things are.

    Much of that “way things are” – the systems we rely on – have been built or corrupted by people operating without an internal compass, incentivized by systems that reward extraction. These are people who would throw rocks or bolts at a passing vehicle, just for fun. People who will take, and take more, and then take more on top of that, just because it’s amusing to do.

    They are people who have no compass, except for the ones pointing them to more money, more power, more deception, and more suffering for others. This isn’t a moral judgment; it’s a structural outcome of feedback loops that reward these behaviors within the systems we’ve built.

    Such people exist on all sides of politics, and they exist in many religions of God and in the religion of Science. They exist in academia, finance, banks, education, healthcare, and many more places.

    For those of us who never “got it,” who never understood this approach, this callous disregard for the heart, for compassion, for caring for humans and the creatures of this planet, we make a choice, each and every moment.

    Do we continue to “play along” with it? Do we continue to “accept the truth of it?” Do we implicitly support it by going along in resignation?

    Or do we finally choose door number two, the door where we say “ENOUGH ALREADY”. This is the door where we let the old systems crumble of their own weight, a process well underway.

    We don’t have to do all that much to help them along. Systems built on greed, deception, false authority, supremacy are always bound to self-destruct.

    It is inevitable, and it is happening now.

    Choice number 2 is like the choice when you’re driving down the busy freeway at a high speed in traffic, and you see a big crash on the other side. You can turn your head and focus in on the crash, putting yourself at risk of getting in your own crash in the process – or you can focus on where you’re going.

    Door 2 is about focusing on where we are going. What will we put into place, after the crash on the other side is complete?

    Don’t be fooled. This is not about a single political party. It goes so much deeper than that.

    It is for example, our economic system – the very way that money gets created in the US and many other countries, is designed to make us into debt slaves, favoring almost always the holder of assets over the person who works for a living.

    Since money is debt, and debt is created by banks who decide who is worthy of debt and when, we live as literal slaves to these banks.

    What do we do when the banks fall?

    I bring this up, not to go on a sidetrack, as it is worthy of much more writing than is room for here. I bring it up to show that if we are to truly choose door number 2, we can’t only think that electing some different people will fix things.

    The rot in the foundation is too deep for a surface level fix like that.

    This may sound like a dire piece.

    If I was still convinced in the lack of magic, if I hadn’t spurned most of that brainwashing, I would feel like it’s dire. I did feel that, for many years.

    Yet I have come back to again believe in magic. It is a magic of people, who come together to envision and build something better. It is the magic of intuition and inner knowing of what is right and true, and what is not. It is in the perseverance of the many oppressed peoples throughout history, many of whom are still standing up despite many costs of doing so.

    It is also deeper than just a metaphor. We live in a magical world, a magical universe, and each of us has power. Power to do good, and power to do bad. Power to create, power to destroy. Power to imagine, and power to reason away our imagination.

    The latter is the worst manipulation of all: convincing us that imagination is just meaningless kids play. Imagination is where all the true magic we hold begins.

    We have been told we don’t have power, or that if we do, all power is bad. In being thusly convinced, that power remains hidden to most of us. This has been done so the people who understand their power, can continue to lord over us. That is what option one entails.

    I for one am ready for door number two.

    It has taken me great inner turmoil and outer turmoil to get there.

    Yet I know that, individually we are powerful, and together we are unstoppable.

    If we decide to build a new and better foundation, we can do so. We can let the good, the true, the compassionate win out.

    We can envision and build better systems to support that, because without better systems, we will simply fall back into the old patterns.

    This is how new futures are built: one clear choice, made repeatedly, inside better architecture.

  • Reconciling with the past before launching into the New Year

    Reconciling with the past before launching into the New Year

    We humans do not like reconciling with the past, unless we’re forced to. Pain often lies there, in making a true reconciliation with wounds, traumas, and the stories we carry about them.

    Yet that reconciliation is what is so needed. Reconciliation means simply that it is no longer carried along with you. It is no longer a weight on everything that you plan and everything that you do as you move forward.

    It is easy to just run forward into the future. “The future is brighter,” or so they have often told us. Yet if we look around today, is the future bright?

    It can look dark because there is darkness and heaviness in the things that are unreconciled. They are like little anchors, weighing the boat down more and more.

    This is true individually, and true collectively.

    We have not reconciled with how we got here, which makes going somewhere better impossible.

    It is not surprising, then, that New Year’s resolutions are a losing proposition. A new resolution to lose 30 pounds, or to eat better, or to be kinder to others is already burdened by the weight of past resolutions left unmet.

    This is no call to live in the past. The action of life is always in the present.

    Yet if that present is filtered and limited by a mind and body unable to be fully here—because of hidden emotional anchors to the past—then the present cannot be as full, alive, and powerful as it could be.

    New Year’s Eve is a time to reflect on the year, and more. To reconcile with questions like: Where did I feel hurt? Where did I hurt others? Where did I let myself down? Where did I let others down? Did I give my power away by seeing myself as a victim—or did I stay connected to it?

    Reconciliation is not blame.

    It is not self-punishment.

    Reconciliation happens when you stop letting your inner state be tied to your history. It happens when the wound, the pain, or the trauma is released.

    You take responsibility for what you carry. Not because it was your fault, but because you are the one carrying it, and only you can put it down.

    Only when the weight of the past is released does forward motion stop repeating that past in new costumes.

    Only then does the future stop being a promise, and start becoming real.

  • Is money evil?

    Conversations with the Muse

    In this discussion with the Muse, I pondered the question of whether money is “evil.” It came from a discussion I had with an old friend recently, where my friend mentioned the idea that, essentially, money is the root of all evil, that money is to blame for the situation developing in the US, and that we’d be better off with a system that does not operate on money. I found the take from The Muse quite interesting, especially when it pointed out that the real source of “evil” is our human idea that we often strive for some kind of “heaven-like” perfect situation, and in the process of trying to create that, create Hell instead. It makes the point that money is not the real problem; it is our distorted beliefs around money, and our allowance as a society for money to be so gamed and manipulated, that are the true sources of problems.

    Morgan: Is money evil? An old friend that I spoke to recently was taking this point of view: that money is the true source of our woes as a society. That essentially, money is “evil.” It is hard to ignore this point of view, given that it seems like the billionaires are in charge right now, leaving everyone else to struggle.

    Yet I don’t see a good alternative to money. It seems like a kind of “necessary evil.” Is there a different way of looking at this?

    The Muse: You collectively see money as something “hard and fast” in your lives, yet it is nothing but a concept representing an energetic exchange between people. For as long as people exist, you will never be rid of the need for “energetic exchange” and some way to represent that more flexibly than direct exchange of goods and services.

    This energetic exchange is a good thing – it is so much of what leads to growth, development, quality of life, the building of anything great, and more.

    If that is so, you may wonder, why do things seem so off the rails because of it?

    It’s because you’ve collectively allowed the system to be “gamed” far too much. By “gamed” it means allowing things to happen that are far beyond just an exchange for the purpose of building or creating or providing services.

    Those things include gambling in all its forms, and other monetary manipulations where people receive “something for nothing.” In the United States, this has become your national zeitgeist – the idea that you can and should get as much money as you can for as little investment of your energy, time, and attention as possible.

    This is unsustainable.

    There has developed a collective psyche of “I deserve it just because I’m X” where X can be replaced by all sorts of justifications for why you should get money in return for nothing but being part of some special category or group.

    The combination of this entitlement plus all the games that go on with money have distorted its core purpose almost beyond recognition. The present mess you perceive is a result of that. It is an opportunity to “reset” your relationship, at least to some degree, to get back to making money represent real exchanges of value between people or groups of people, not just something to be gamed, manipulated, and taken advantage of in asymmetrical ways.

    There is an inherent trend towards balance in all things, and your system of money is presently very unbalanced towards those who’ve become very good at gaming it. This unbalanced situation cannot be maintained forever; it will collapse under its own weight – it’s just a matter of time.

    Morgan: What about social security and programs like that, which are “entitlements?” If as you say entitlement is an unbalancing factor, then do we need to get rid of things like that?

    The Muse: No. There is a difference between claimed entitlements where there is no social contract, versus those where there has been developed a mass, agreed-upon social contract. In the case of Social Security or similar, this is where collectively enough of you have agreed that it is part of your contract with one another; it is not the same as the kind of entitlement that causes problems.

    It is more fundamental and less obvious. One of the big sources of this is the entitlement thinking that many people take on of “I worked hard therefore I deserve lots of remuneration.” There is an entitlement thinking that “hard work” is equal to “created value for other people.” It is just not the case.

    For example, you could go out in your yard right now, and dig a deep hole with a shovel. Then you could fill it back in. That would be hard work. Yet you would have created zero value for anyone. If you expected pay in return for that work, you would be expecting something for nothing – the nothing being the value created for someone else in doing the work.

    The example may seem far out, yet there are millions who take this attitude every day.

    It is inherent in the career ladder climbing mentality, which is ultimately about “I want more status and money because I have done my hard work gaming the system,” as opposed to “I want more status and money because I created more positive value for other human beings.”

    Not all career ladder improvement represents this kind of thinking – there are many situations where through maturity and skills development, you do create more value for others, which would naturally equate to more money flow in a system where things aren’t so often distorted.

    But when you have a society where you have psychologically detached your “work” from “creating value,” things are bound to get very out of balance, the effects of which you are seeing.

    Morgan: What about my friend’s statement that this always happens with money?

    The Muse: This is a sort of statement that could be said about any human endeavor, i.e., that “such and such tragedy always ends up happening.” The statement is tautological, due to the cyclical nature of humanity. Each new generation – and each individual human – must face their own challenges.

    There is this very false, imagined state of perfection that could be achieved, a sort of finished, heavenly state where everyone is wonderful and everything is great. Worse, it is imagined that once this is achieved, it will persist.

    It is just not so. Imagine a forest: at all times, trees are growing then dying. Animals are being born and dying. Nothing static is going on. Fires may sweep through and eliminate most of the trees. Seeds then sprout, to rebuild the forest. Each generation of trees faces its own “challenges” and there is no “heavenly state” of perfection.

    Your human idea that such a state can — or should — be achieved is one of the big lies you’ve bought into. It is the source of more Evil — as you’d call it — than monetary exchange is. That’s because, in trying to achieve this perfect state, this ridiculous nonsensical ideal (whatever that may be), people will justify all sorts of malfeasance in its name.

    That is happening at this very moment in the US.

    Because of your skewed, manipulated monetary system, a large number of people have ended up feeling “left behind.” This produces anger, which energy is then translated into an ideal of a new kind of “heaven on earth” where all the supposed causes of their misery are wiped away.

    The problem is, any time humans have attempted to create such a “heaven,” they have just created a hell. They end up creating something that is antithetical to the very nature of the reality you live in: something static, fixed, and “perfect.”

    Money exists as a flow of exchange; it is not a static entity.

    So when you try to create static situations with it or about it, you are working against yourself. You are working against reality.

    The problem is not the money (exchange); the problem is the set of skewed beliefs that distort your relationship with it, making it seem that “money is bad.” When you buy into that, you weaken your ability to participate in money’s true purpose, which is to facilitate effective energetic exchange between people.

    To “fix” the problem, you, collectively, will have to shift your attitude towards what money is. And even if you manage to do so, you have to realize that any such fix is in the here and now, and will not last for all people everywhere. It will not be a perfect solution for all time. It will only be a fix for that time, place, and people.

     

    **This article was hand-written, with light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.

  • Waking up from war and violence into our true nature

    Conversations with The Muse

    In this thought-provoking dialogue, Morgan and The Muse explore the idea that all experiences, even the most painful and destructive ones, serve a greater purpose in human evolution. Using historical examples like World War I, The Muse explains how societal learning is often non-linear, shaped by cycles of violence and change, due in part to a lack of deep, experiential memory. The conversation delves into the challenges of societal stagnation, resistance to change, and the dangers of clinging to material power and possessions. Ultimately, The Muse suggests that humanity is being called to “wake up” to its true nature—beyond physical attachments—through self-inquiry, contemplation, and conscious awareness, as the only path to true safety and transformation. (AI Summary)

     

    Morgan: I get the idea that all learning is optimal, i.e. that we are all presented with the ideal opportunity for our advancement, but boy, it sure can be tough. One example comes from the movie 1917 that I watched recently. It depicted the brutality of World War I, in which millions were killed. It was often a “no holds barred,” vicious war. It seems so pointless, and led to so many deaths. How can that be for learning and growth to have millions die in a war like that?

    Muse: Sometimes the “learning” is a societal one, leading to an overall bigger picture advancement necessary for the species’ survival, so that others can come here in the future for their learning, growth, and evolution. Evolution is sometimes not pretty. If you think of the idea of the lizard jumping from tree to tree who is evolving towards wings, there will be many fatal falls along the way. The same is true of your societies – there are bouts of violence, with that example you mentioned being one of the brutal ones.

    And indeed, it is those brutal bouts of violence that help you as a species slowly move away from it – though it is never a linear progression. Nothing is as linear as your rational brains would like to make it out to be. Yet in that specific case, that war was so bad, that it did modify the approach towards war to some degree. It was unfortunately not enough to prevent the next war, but, after that second World War, it did cement in all the generations alive that that scale of war was to be avoided in their lifetimes.

    Now, the challenge is that you do not yet have sufficient societal memory, nor do you have sufficient outlets for that kind of destructive energy, so you do run the risk that large scale violence can happen again. It becomes more of a risk as those previous generations that vowed to not do that again fade away. That does not make it inevitable, but as the societal memory fades, it is not impossible either.

    Morgan: What do you mean we don’t have sufficient societal memory?

    Muse: There are several aspects to that. The first is that you teach people “history” in terms of data and facts, rather than in any way experientially. The closest you come to experiential is with a movie like the one you watched. Yet even that does not convey it at a deep enough level for most to really get it. It is too easy for someone to watch a movie like that, and dismiss it as a sort of past that wouldn’t happen again. It is often seen as “entertainment,” not something to be concerned over “how did that happen and could it happen again?”

    In biological evolution, there is a strong memory of past experience — and the responses to that experience — carried in the DNA. In that way, once a past problem is overcome, it is generally not revisited by a species. You do not have enough of a similar “hard coding” of memory into your society. Therefore, each generation that has not experienced such atrocity is at an increased risk of repeating it.

    You will need to evolve further – likely from additional experiences of some kind of violence (it does not have to be as brutal as it was in WWI/WWII), in order to decide that you need to create some kind of deeper societal memory system. It would involve a deeply experiential way of new generations learning what tendencies to hate and aggression can lead to, even if held or allowed in only a portion of the population.

    You will have to develop new structures that, while allowing your natural freedoms of expression, do make sure that such tendencies are redirected.

    Morgan: Is that what you mean by “not having sufficient outlets?”

    Muse: Yes. In times like you are in, there is a slowly brewing anger and frustration at the system on the part of some people who envision and want something very different than what it is. That, combined with general malaise on the part of most people about the system as it was constructed before almost anyone alive was born, leads to a sort of “tipping point” where the anger and frustration can take hold and spread.

    One of the great mistakes that cause this to be worse, is that when you build systems of government and society, there often sets in a very “preservationist” approach to governance and operation. Once a system – a bureaucracy – gets created, it is nearly impossible for you to un-create it, even if it grows old, inefficient, and dysfunctional. In the business world this happens more readily. Businesses that no longer serve efficiently, shut down – unless protected by some kind of political action. But in the world of government and academics, it is much more difficult to remove layers of bureaucracy, rules, laws, and administration. As these persist, the resentment grows.

    It is not just the administrative structures that persist, it is the distribution of power that persists. Those groups who gain power become extremely reticent to give any of it up when their time has passed. They cling to past structures that maintain their power, well beyond the natural lifespan of the power, or of the structures. This breeds widespread discontent – not only among people who are outsiders to that power, but even amongst insiders. The insiders become increasingly locked into struggles over how the power is divvied up — and the outsiders are just resentful of that they don’t have the power. Nobody likes it, and this discontent grows. At the level of consciousness — it is going to lead to forced changes.

    Your societies do not have any “constructive” ways of allowing this to happen, so it typically happens with some kind of violence. By violence, we mean it is uncontrolled and can hurt people, but it is not always physical violence, as you are seeing so far in the current bout of destruction.

    Morgan: Where does individual consciousness come into this – and societal consciousness?

    Muse: That is the where the real core of the issue is. Because most of your world has become so entranced, so hypnotized by the persistent illusion of physicality, you have come to ignore consciousness as the primary source from which all physical experience arises.

    So you all cling to physical things. You get great Ego based attachments to the way things are – whether it’s to the environment being a certain way, the buildings being preserved, to the stuff that you own and enjoy, or to the power (including money) that you have had.

    While Ego in its innate form can be mildly inflexible, the way you train and raise people, it leads to a thickening and “stubbornizing” of the Ego. While this has broken down in some segments of your society, with people now who don’t so strongly associate their Ego with a “job for life,” there is still far too much deep seated attachment to “things” over “meaning,” and “quality of experience.” That is the real source of all the troubles.

    This is the real thing that is going on in your present time. You are being faced, as a species, with the consequences of your overly physical focus — one that is mostly ignorant of consciousness — so that you can potentially shift into more awareness.

    Experientially, what this could mean is that much of what you take for granted physically will end up being stripped away, so you are confronted with the raw, real truth: you are not primarily physical beings, you are primarily beings of consciousness, who are present in physical bodies.

     

    Morgan: Honestly, that’s disturbing. “Stripped away” sounds like a parent grounding a child for misbehavior, and taking away their access to their toys. Is it really so?

    Muse: No. This comes from another misunderstanding, often promulgated by some religions, that such acts are of a paternalistic nature. In other words, it is a great distortion that there is some other entity watching over you who will do things to you, “for your own good.” No, you do this to yourselves. But you do it at a level that your Ego is presently unaware of, and because it is so unaware, it seems like “someone else” is doing this to you. It is never someone else, it is YOU, the deeper, eternal (from your perspective), part of you, who chooses, always, evolution and growth over stagnation. That consciousness is alive, vital, and ready to learn.

    This sets up a natural conflict with the way your Egos are trained in your current world, a way that is relatively fixed, unchanging, linear, and completely ignorant of the consciousness part of you. While the Ego can prevail for a time, it never “wins” the seeming battle, because consciousness is primary.

    So in terms of “things being stripped away” – that is not a punishment, that is a deeper part of yourself saying to your Ego: “wake up! you are not just your body and your possessions! you are so much more!” The core of you does not want you to suffer through the loss of things and people you hold dear, but it recognizes that you have already lost a much more precious thing, which is your sense of who you truly are. This is true for many individuals, and largely true in a societal sense.

    Until you regain that sense, you will be adrift, clinging to physical things, to physical/monetary/political power, and at odds with the deeper core consciousness within yourself. If some or all of the things you cling to must be stripped away for you to “wake up,” then that is the likely outcome. You can prevent it at an individual level by “waking up” to the truth, then it is no longer necessary. Ironically, when you do “wake up” – the physical clinging becomes much less necessary for you. You realize that it is all ephemeral and illusory, so you can relax and enjoy it, rather than cling to it.

    Morgan: Wow, I have so much more to ask, but this is already getting quite long. So let’s end this session with a Q & A – what can a person do now to “wake up?”

    Muse: It is simple: begin the inquiry over who you really are, or if you’ve already begun that, continue to make forward progress in that. It is only when you remain ignorant to it, or in a case like yours (Morgan’s), your progress stalls out, that it causes an increasing friction between Ego and your inner core self, and it is that friction that causes external manifestations of problems.

    You do not need to go take psychedelic drugs or go on a spiritual journey to “wake up,” though there are cases where those can help. But it can also happen in much more mundane ways, through meditation, prayer, silent contemplation, journaling, extreme physical experiences, wilderness experiences, stargazing, and many more activities.

    However you do it, waking up to who you really are is the call of the time. It is the one and only way you can be truly “safe.”

    Morgan: Thank you, that was amazing. We will do more.

    **This article was hand-written, with summary and light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.

  • Anxiety about what’s going on, and a turnaround…

    Anxiety about what’s going on, and a turnaround…

    Woke up today, another day of feeling anxiety and working to tame it. It would be easy to say I’ve succumbed to exactly what “they” — meaning the haters, the authoritarians, the shortsighted — want.

    Yesterday I read yet another opinion piece, by a salty male making the same now tired claim that “men can’t be women.” In a prominent newspaper. That gets read worldwide. They use easy logic, like “you can’t just wish yourself to be a cat, so why do you think you can wish yourself to be a woman?”

    It is tempting to argue with that, because it is so easy to poke holes in the stupidity of the logic. To demonstrate all the faulty assumptions that go into it. That time isn’t now.

    Now is time to say: if you hurt because of what’s going on in the world, if you grieve for the loss of seeming progress, for the ugly backsliding that seems to be going on, you’re not alone.

    I’ve done 14+ years of intensive personal development. It might be tempting to think that would somehow make me immune, almost superhuman or something. I am not. I am the same flawed human as we all are, with worry, anxiety, guilt, anger, and more.

    I am grieving. Grieving for the loss of a dream that I had of all this extremely hard work and sacrifice I’ve put into building a business pay off into an “easy” retirement. I see my elders — parents and friends, traveling around the world in their retirement, enjoying the fruits of their working years — and ask “what hope do I have of experiencing that?”

    I knew all along that the hope was thin. Not because of any deficiency on my part, but on the general unsustainability of it all. Yet despite that, I worked hard and stayed optimistic. Now, that specific optimism is dying. I’m grieving for it.

    I’m sure that is how every generation of people who faces a changing world, who wakes up to the new collective reality thrust upon them, feels. I now truly know what that’s like. And that’s where all that work may be paying off. While it doesn’t remove the pain, it does allow me to recognize the pain, recognize the cause, and work to release it.

    It helps me to accept reality as it is, rather than continuing to fight it, deny it, wish it away. Those were energy draining. It allows me to slowly build a new form of optimism. It’s a tiny seedling as of yet. It’s a form of optimism that says: this is a time where I can shine. Where others can shine. People who care, people who will strive and even fight if necessary, to build something better.

    Not shining due to luxury vacations or fancy cars or any of that stuff that the older generations sold us as the be all and end all of life. Shining because I have something to contribute. Something of value to give, in the hopes that eventually “this too shall pass,” that on the other side of it we can build something better.

    Because that’s the way it always is. As horrendous as many past upheavals in human society have been, once they are done, most have led to eventual improvements in things on the other side. It may take far longer than I want to get there. I may not be there to see it, yet I hope the next generation, my kids, my friends, my team and clients are.

    I know it is worth doing. I know that, if I decided to hide, to withdraw, to just cling to the old dream that things will make a magical return to normal — whatever that means — that I would forever feel diminished. A life of getting by, of diminishment, even if longer, is not worth it. It’s not real. I played that game far too long already, and it diminished me. I am done with that game.

    And maybe that’s another payoff of all that hard self work. It is in having the ability to face collective reality on its own terms, without an unnecessary, energy draining fight. By avoiding that fight, it saves my energy for the true fight, which is to envision something better for myself, my kids, this world, in spite of what is happening in the reality around us.

    The true fight is to hold that image, of a world more positive, and to act on it whenever or wherever possible, despite cyclonic headwinds pushing back.

    I am human. You are human. We are strong, but only when we face reality and decide, deep down and with conviction, to do something to make it better.

  • Beachtime

    Beachtime

  • The Unexpected Lesson

    This is a guest post by Allie Smith-Hobbs.

    I was recently copied on an email that said, “I hoped you learned something, even if it was not what you intended” and I’ve been ruminating on this all week.

    What am I learning that I didn’t intend to learn? Unintentional lessons happen to us all the time, we just need to stop and realize that’s what it is. You know, those “growth experiences” that we’d like to avoid most of the time.

    It’s true that we learn from life’s hard experiences, but I’d wager that we’ll learn the most if we’re able to stop, take a step back and see the bigger picture of what we’re truly learning. In many ways, I feel like I’ve graduated from the school of hard knocks, (perhaps even an honorary PhD from the University of Doing it the Hard Way), but life seems to keep repeating situations until we learn the lessons.

    Now if I’m paying for a course and want to learn the technical skills of grant writing, I hope I learn the technical skills of grant writing. But if I also learn something about my mindset in that I tend to be an information gatherer rather than an implementer, that’s just as valuable (if not more so!). (Unfortunately, as much as I’ve tried, learning and making real change in my life does not occur through diffusion of helpful books on my nightstand. I have to implement it.)

    We experience these unintentional learning situations every day – at work, at home, in the car between the two.

    I’m no zen master and it might take a level of maturity currently out of my grasp to sort through every sucky situation to tease out the lessons.

    Sometimes that may take a few deep breaths behind a locked office door (or, ahem, digging into my secret stash of chocolate), but that’s okay. What did I learn?

    What I learned might simply be that I get defensive and reactive when approached in a certain way or about certain topics. My first reaction is, “Yeah, when XYZ happens, I learned that you’re a jerk…” But if I can take it as my responsibility and reframe it as, “When XYZ happens, I get defensive and reactive. So how can I operate proactively even if XYZ doesn’t change?”

    Framing is a powerful technique that Morgan teaches in grant writing, but it applies everywhere in life. I can take charge of my own response through my personal framing. My challenge to myself it to take the unintentional lesson and turn it into an intentional frame.

    What about you? No zen mastery required, but did you learn unintended something throughout your day today that you can reframe?

    Allie Smith-Hobbs has a background in administration with a M.S. in Instructional and Performance Technology and a passion for literature and writing. She combines adventure, administrative support and cool technology in supporting Dr. Morgan Giddings and her clients.

  • Security versus joy and inspiration: which wins?

    Security versus joy and inspiration: which wins?

    For the past week, I’ve been processing some of the experiences from Bali.

    One of them was this. I went to Bali for a mastermind retreat. I had only met the leader, and was very excited to get to know the other members, most of whom are from New Zealand and Australia.

    Most mastermind meetings involve talking to the others, and, well, masterminding.

    So it was to my great surprise that when we started, it was announced to be a SILENT retreat.

    ARGH! I was angry! I came all the way there to be in silence? I do that at home a lot already!

    Processing that anger during 3 days of silent retreat was a big learning experience for me. I also got to know the others far more than I thought I would, through a combination of silent activities such as cleaning up the grounds, and also through a few times when we came together and the silence was temporarily broken.

    The big tension for me was this: I felt that if I’d known it was going to be a silent retreat, I could have “mentally prepared” for it. I wouldn’t have been so mad.

    Yet it is the very need for that kind of “security” – i.e. knowing in advance to be “prepared” – that is at the heart of some of the challenges I’m currently working on in my own development.

    I’ve often placed “seeking security” above “seeking my own personal truth and alignment.” That led me to some dark corners of life where despair and depression rule. It has been a long, slow climb out of those pits and back into alignment with my highest path where joy, fun, and inspiration rule. In dropping the need for security, it opens up a whole new world of joy.

    So at the end of it all, it was worthwhile, though difficult. It reminded of those river adventures I’ve done in the past where we start out thinking it’s going to be just a pleasant little jaunt, and it ends up being an excruciating hell of finding ourselves in over our heads, then eventaully climbing up a muddy embankment in the dark only to find miles of dense raspberry bushes between us and food/water/safety.

    By living to tell the tale, we grow and develop tremendously as humans, even if at the time we want to get the hell out.

  • Travel Anxieties and… embracing the unknown!

    Travel Anxieties and… embracing the unknown!

    When you travel, does it bring up anxiety for you? It does for me. And it’s always weird little stuff that gets me.

    For example: I just rode for about 30 hours in airplanes over the world’s largest ocean, and I had almost no conscious anxiety about that. I wasn’t fretting about the airplane breaking in two and falling into the ocean – or worse, just disappearing forever. (They’ve been known to do that from time to time in this part of the world, you know….)

    No. It was the small things. Like whether I would have the correct change to pay for my Bali travel visa. See, they charge all arriving tourists $35 us dollars for a 30 day visa. Oddly enough, you can only pay this in USD, not in Australian dollars or even the local currency. I figure they make about $10,000 USD per plane load of arriving…

    So there I sat on the plane wondering. Are there going to be hassles because I don’t have exact change for $35? Yeah, really!

    That, plus the flight attendants mentioned something I didn’t quite hear about how they have strict policies about bringing food into the country. You know how those rushed and garbled announcements happen that interrupt your in flight entertainment for the 100th time so you’re only halfway listening? (and, halfway asleep from all the time changes and jet lag?)

    It was one of those. And it gave me another thing to fret about.

    Will I get in trouble because I brought some snacks – nuts, Larabars, vega protein mix? When they passed out the immigration forms, I felt like an evil villain having to check the “are you bringing any food” box as Yes. I am compulsively honest. The form warned me that I had to go to the “red” line to be inspected because I checked yes. So I wondered: am I going to go through some kind of grueling inspection where they tear all my luggage apart to find forbidden food sewn into the lining?

    These are the things that my mind found to worry about. Yes, I have an overactive mind. I’m sure you can relate!

    At least I’ve gotten pretty good at redirecting thought loops like this to more fruitful avenues. For example, with the food thing I figured the worst that would happen is that I have to throw it all away and get a scolding. With the visa, I figured the worst would be that I give them $40 and lose $5. These helped me redirect the anxiety, and yet it’s weird how my mind kept coming back over and over to these things, and I kept having to redirect it.

    Really, I think this is just a reflection of a deeper anxiety of the unknown. Almost all of us have it, but it just expresses itself in different ways. I’d never been to Bali before, and I’m traveling alone, so this was fertile ground for anxieties over what was going to happen.

    Nothing bad happened. For the food, I pulled it out of my bag before going to the red line (I was the only one who walked to the RED LINE…). I showed it to the bored looking guy tending the “red line,” and he took one glance at it and waved me back over to the green line. Apparently my little bag of snacks wasn’t enough to trigger a national security crisis. For the $35 visa, I handed them $40 and the guy handed me $5 back.

    I got through that quickly, found my pre-arranged ride, and headed to the hotel through throngs of motorcycles the likes of which I’ve only seen in Bejing and Shanghai before. It really is amazing that with them buzzing about on narrow roads like this that there aren’t people getting splattered all over the pavement once every minute or two.

    ——-

    What anxiety about the unknown do you have? How is it holding you back in your work/life/business?

    See, I’m sitting here on the balcony overlooking this fantastic view of the ocean, enjoying the smoky and salty smell of the Balinese air. In hindsight I can see that none of my anxieties about the unknown travel were “real.” In fact, the only “bad” thing that happened was my embarrassment after I tipped the guy who got me to my ride with 2,000 rp, thinking that sounded like a lot of money. The look on his face was a bit disappointed and so I wondered: did I short him? Once I realized that I had given him the equivalent of about $.30, I felt spears of embarrassment about shorting the guy. I made sure to tip the driver well to assuage my guilty conscience (100,000 rp, closer to $8).

    So the actual “bad stuff” that happened was totally different than what I had worried about. Isn’t it always that way?

    Why do our minds do this? I know that my own is a product of being trained for years and years to try to plan, to make sure everything is predictable and rational, and to never get myself in a situation that could have been avoided by better planning. Yet life does not ever unfold linearly “as planned.” It can end up being a stifling noose to experience to try to anticipate all possible scenarios and plan for them.

    It reminds me of the movie Wild with Reese Witherspoon – it was one of the four I watched during my trans-oceanic flights. She was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, alone, and at one point she encountered a guy who did an inventory of her massive, heavy pack. It turned out that she only needed about 2/3 of the stuff she’d brought. She’d weighed herself down and made her journey far more difficult with that weight. I think many of us do that in our lives.

    So here’s my motto from now on: screw that. Life is unpredictable – especially when you are doing creative work (or traveling!). You never know what’s going to happen, and yet so many of us crave the predictable result – because that’s what we’ve been programmed to do. That is exactly the thing that keeps us forever two steps away from getting that big “breakthrough” we so often crave. Because big breakthroughs in life are never predictable.

    Embrace the unknown. Enjoy it!

  • Schizophrenia and air travel

    I have schizophrenia. I think this is common amongst modern air travelers. It’s a schizophrenia of alternating love and hate.

    I’m in the air on my way to Bali. It’ll be my first time there, and I’m excited to experience a new place. I’ve heard that it is beautiful and the people are kind.

    One side of me says: this is amazing that I can do this. It is incredible that in under two days I can go from the mountains of Idaho to the pacific Isle of Bali, part of Indonesia. Imagine attempting this journey 50 years ago. Or 100. It would be a complete ordeal, and the likelihood of making it safely was lower the longer ago you roll back the calendar.

    That part of me definitely appreciates my freedom, the abundance, the miracles of this modern way of traveling across the world.

    And yet another part of me rejects this. It’s that weaker part of me, that after over 30 hours of traveling and only 4 hours of sleep, feels worn out. That part of me – we can call her Morgan 2 – is not ready for navigating a brand new culture and country with her reserves depleted.

    Morgan 2 heard that there’s going to be an onslaught of people that will greet her at the airport with arms waving and voices crowing about services they offer. Morgan 2 pictures people crowding in, pushing her to take advantage of their services, with eyes averted and lots of head shaking in an unspoken “no.”

    Morgan 2 is experiencing claustrophobia after being packed into coach for 30 hours (3 long flights).

    Do you ever feel like there are competing parts of you like this? I think all of us experience the different aspects of ourselves from time to time. The light side and the dark side. The optimistic and the pessimistic.

    I think that a big part of life is just choosing which side we let dominate on a day to day basis. This is far more of a conscious choice than most of us like to admit.

    Morgan 2 resents that I went against the advice from a mentor:  upgrade to first class… treat yourself like royalty! Morgan 2 thinks that it’s a pain that I got myself stuck here in coach, where I can barely fit my elbows in to type this as I feel the overly large thighs of the woman next to me rubbing against my side.

    Yet Morgan 1 knows that I chose to ride in coach because a big goal right now is to build savings and wealth. You can’t do that when you’re spending every penny you earn. Morgan 1 knows that there’s a longer-term plan at work here, and that long-term financial freedom is more important than the short-term pleasure of riding up front with “the royalty.”

    Morgan 1 knows I’m sick of carrying debt, some of which is from years ago due to the bike shop we closed in 2011. Treating myself like a queen is not just about riding in first class, it’s about getting to a position of total financial freedom.

    So here I am in coach, packed into a small tube with 130 strangers, watching the battle of the two versions of Morgan play out in my head. Fortunately they don’t have mind readers yet, or I may just get locked up for being so schizophrenic. Though if they had mind readers, I’ll bet I wouldn’t be the only one fitted with the little white suit and the bearded dude staring at me through spectacles as he “analyzes” what’s wrong with me….

    Morgan 2 comes out less and less for me these days, but she still pops up when I get tired. She also got a big boost from a travel experience in 2010. I was traveling through Paris, jet lagged, and I had my brand new iPad stolen out of my hands on a train, right before the guy proceeded to hop off at a station stop and run away. Morgan 2 said: “see, I told you so… bad stuff happens!”

    Morgan 1 wants to love air travel. She wants to appreciate it for the amazing opportunities it brings. She just wishes that the airlines would make it easier to do.  They pack us in here, and we, willing victims, agree to being sardines in a tube.  Morgan 2 has a lot she could complain about.

    But I choose. I choose to let Morgan 1 dominate this conversation. Appreciation always feels better, and brings better things in life back to us. Morgan 1 is the version of me responsible for all the big leaps forward in life, the big breakthroughs. Without her, I’d be in rough shape.

    So today, like many of my days, is for Morgan 1. I will sit in appreciation for the amazingness that is this fast, convenient, and inexpensive form of traveling all the way across the world. I will sit in appreciation for my good fortune to be able to visit so many parts of the world in my life. I will enjoy this experience, and I will let the voice of Morgan 1 – the fearful voice – fade into the background.

    How about you? How do you relate to travel and long trips? Do you love them, or hate them, or do you have a love/hate thing going on like your schizophrenic author?