Archive for April, 2010
4-Week Class (Aug 10-Aug 31): Creating from the Passionate Pros instead of the Cons, with Michele McHall
This four-week class (Tuesdays from 1–2.30pm PST || 4–5.30pm EST) awakens your awareness of the distinctions between living as a Life Artist, someone who is committed to living a more authentic and vibrant life, and being at the mercy of the Con Artist, the aspect of yourself that dims your light. You’ll learn to address limiting beliefs and frustrating circumstances in your life by becoming familiar with the Life Artist Color Palette, which consists of the nine colors Willingness, Courage, Curiosity, Inspiration, Vulnerability, Learning, Dreaming, Gratitude, and Remembering.
Each of these colors (or contexts) are access points that activate your creative potential by supporting you to grow your Life Artist’s awareness of the natural resources available to you in your Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences, or your Whole IQ. Without this awareness of your built-in natural resources, your Con Artist is likely to misuse or negate them and compromise the meaning and passion of your life. For instance, a Life Artist will use the color of Courage to live in the energy that most naturally uplifts and fulfills them, while under the influence of the Con Artist, a person might use Courage for the sake of pushing and proving something because they feel like they’re never good enough.
In addition to leading you through an exploration of the Life Artist Palette, Michele McHall will show you simple ways to break free of the reactive nature of the Con Artist and illuminate the natural flow of your creative potential.
Week 1. Primary Colors: Connecting to the Creative Flow within Your Self
Week 2. Colors of Trust: Creating Trust with Your Self and Others
Week 3. Colors of Faith: Collaborating with the Creative Flow of Universal Intelligence
Week 4. Embodying Your Life Artistry: Manifesting Forms that Inspire Your Passion
4-Week Class (June 15-July 6): Creating from the Passionate Pros instead of the Cons, with Michele McHall
This four-week class (Tuesdays from 5–6.30pm PST || 8–9.30pm EST) awakens your awareness of the distinctions between living as a Life Artist, someone who is committed to living a more authentic and vibrant life, and being at the mercy of the Con Artist, the aspect of yourself that dims your light. You’ll learn to address limiting beliefs and frustrating circumstances in your life by becoming familiar with the Life Artist Color Palette, which consists of the nine colors Willingness, Courage, Curiosity, Inspiration, Vulnerability, Learning, Dreaming, Gratitude, and Remembering.
Each of these colors (or contexts) are access points that activate your creative potential by supporting you to grow your Life Artist’s awareness of the natural resources available to you in your Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences, or your Whole IQ. Without this awareness of your built-in natural resources, your Con Artist is likely to misuse or negate them and compromise the meaning and passion of your life. For instance, a Life Artist will use the color of Courage to live in the energy that most naturally uplifts and fulfills them, while under the influence of the Con Artist, a person might use Courage for the sake of pushing and proving something because they feel like they’re never good enough.
In addition to leading you through an exploration of the Life Artist Palette, Michele McHall will show you simple ways to break free of the reactive nature of the Con Artist and illuminate the natural flow of your creative potential.
Week 1. Primary Colors: Connecting to the Creative Flow within Your Self
Week 2. Colors of Trust: Creating Trust with Your Self and Others
Week 3. Colors of Faith: Collaborating with the Creative Flow of Universal Intelligence
Week 4. Embodying Your Life Artistry: Manifesting Forms that Inspire Your Passion
Life Artist vs. Con Artist
Over the last several weeks I’ve been writing about the Life Artist Color Palette and how using its nine contexts (colors) creates an opportunity to generate creativity rather than reactivity in our lives.
As Life Artists we are also continually facing our creative nemesis, the Con Artist. We typically experience the reactivity of the Con Artist as negative self-talk, fears, limitations, or the voice of “reason”—and all these ways in which the Con Artist shows up hold us back from realizing ourselves and our potential in a more vital way.
In learning to use the Life Artist colors to awaken your Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences, you begin to see the Con Artist’s messages casting a shadow over your light. As you learn how to use these contexts in your everyday life, you will be better able to address what is being blocked within you.
Take a moment to turn your attention to your Con Artist and ask yourself how its messages influence your ability to access the energy, feelings, thoughts, and forms that express your authentic self.
Writing a Poem Is Heroic
Just as every poem is a hero’s journey, every moment of your life is so much the same. No matter how inconsequential it may seem, a poem requires great attention and bravery and humility to come into being. Like the hero, it must leave home, its safe and familiar mooring, to embark on a quest of discovery. Like the hero, the poem must face hardship, battle daunting foes both real and imagined, and like the hero, the poem must come home, redefining home and self in the process.
So you enact the very same journey in your life’s course, and this is why poems are woven into the cells of your heart, brain, and body. Coming into woman-or-manhood, you take your leave, you go adventuring, and you return home with the news of all that you learned along the way.
That is the poem at completion, and that is your perfect life, lived and savored and, as that marvelous mystic Shakespeare put it, rounded with a sleep.
Singing the Same Question
For a poet whose fidelity has been to the timeless voice of that underground stream in which all that is wiser than us sings, speaking of God has produced an interesting echo throughout the years: like singing the same question in different weather; first into the wind, then into a crowd, and now before and after the crash of ancient waves. All the while, critics have been reflexive in their reactions: leaning in, backing away, looking puzzled, getting angry.
Yet all along, speaking of God has simply been a vocation of question and praise: bearing witness to what is and inquiring into the intangible flow of being that lines everything. As Abraham Heschel says, “Poetry is to religion what analysis is to science… (and) Philosophy, enticed by the promise of the known, has often surrendered the treasures of higher incomprehension to poets and mystics.” Let me quickly say that there are fine scientists and ministers who are working poets of this higher incomprehension, who share the vocation of keeping what is essential useable and in view.
Nonetheless, we still have scientists and ministers and poets interested in power who push and pull at the Divine as if the secret of immortality is in one chalice that each feels sworn to protect but never use. All the while, the presence of the Divine remains plain and abundant. Like those before us, our minds harden and get in the way until our suffering breaks the ice of what we’ve been taught. Then, if blessed, our direct apprehension of life is restored, and we simply hold each other in the storm.
So God, the infinite bottled in the ten thousand things, is a restorative waiting to be released in small felt moments. This is why throughout the years I have said the word God in my poems less and less. Not because I believe in God less, but because I experience that totality we call God more. I started like a young fisherman singing of the ocean and its majesty from shore. But life has drawn me and thrown me into the vast deep and now, like a fish immersed in the sea, I’m the least able to see the water I live in; though it pumps nameless through my gills, keeping me alive.
It becomes ever more clear that, like a scientist of the mystical, the poet’s task is to detail life more than name it. The poet as healer is always called to find what is possible in the cracks of what is and offer it back to those who feel broken.
As evidence of how much we need each other, it’s often impossible to do this for oneself. So we squeeze the light from our wounds the way sap is squeezed from a tree and feed it to each other. This is another way to understand poetry: as the sap of truth and love squeezed from the bark of God’s tree. Though the human family only turns to this when all other forms of drink fail. Humbly, I wake today not very far from where I began more than half a century ago: worn to wonder and a quiet song.
100 miles in 100 days for 100 legs
Today I want to invite all of you to help make an inspiring goal a reality.
Colleen Haggerty, who lost her leg in an accident when she was 18 years old, is challenging herself today, thirty-plus years later, to walk one mile a day for 100 days to raise enough money to enough money for the Prosthetic Outreach Foundation to fund 100 legs for amputees in developing countries.
I personally know that this goal, as much as it’s about helping others, is also about reaching for the sky. It’s about one person making a profound declaration to do something that matters to her on a soul level. Colleen’s Wednesday post talks about what a good deal $300 is for a leg, how critically it can change someone’s life, how her own prosthetic cost a hefty $50,000—covered by insurance. Colleen has been an amputee for more than half her life, and her insight and openness about her goal, as well as her struggle and challenges, is moving.
This personal commitment is not something she can wholly tackle on her own. She will walk, but we need to give. Colleen is currently at just 2% of her goal. I know there are a million things that pull for our attention every day, hundreds of important causes. I won’t post often about worthy causes, but I do hope we at Three Intentions can contribute a little bit—even $10 or $20 can go such a long way in bringing Colleen closer to her goal, and to helping people who couldn’t otherwise afford it have a new lease on life.
The Creative Lifecycle
It’s a glorious spring day and I’m once again reminded of the beauty in the natural order of life blooming in its right time. As I watch nature effortlessly being true to itself and animals living by their instincts, I look to the Life Artist color palette to remind me of nature’s creative ease within me.
When we honor our Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences like seasons, we glean the wisdom that each one offers the whole. When we use the nine colors in the flow of the creative lifecycle, we are accessing Spirit’s colors of willingness, inspiration, and dreaming to encourage us to plant the seeds of our energy desires. We then follow with Heart’s colors of courage, vulnerability, and gratitude to nourish the seeds of our energy desires with deeper emotional meaning. As we deepen our emotional roots to our energy desires and nourish these roots through our emotional connection, our Minds are better able to direct our thoughts with its colors of curiosity, learning, and remembering.
When you look to nourish the seeds of your energy desires first rather than strategize or push for certain outcomes, you are working with your true nature to allow the creative lifecycle to guide you to your instinctive knowing. With that the outcomes of your life bloom from the rich soil of your Whole IQ.
For the Journey
I offer this poem for all of us who are frightened, unsure, confused, sorry, and sad, for all who lay awake in the middle of the night awash in anxiety, for anyone who is lonely and fearful. We are not in Chaos. We’re in the birth canal, and we’re moving, moving, moving in the direction of birth, toward something new and shining with possibility. It’s something worthy of our rising up and meeting it with love, compassion, and joy.
God’s Star House
You were right to worry about the journey
Becoming your raison d’etre. It was
For a time, for as long as it took you
To lose your possessions and pride,
Your smug self-confidence and that slick
So slithery way you had of blaming someone else.
It should have occurred to you long before now
That something was up when every time you
Spotted God’s star house and bee-lined up
The celestial drive, S/He was gone. Why
Would God play such games with you?
Are you so terrifying that God would run from you?
Congratulations! Every single thing you believed
Is wrong. Believed? I should have said suspected.
Yes, that’s you, ever fearful, always uneasy,
Demands disguised as inquiry. Well, take a breather.
Lean against the bogus God box at the gaping mouth
Of the gravel drive and take a good look around.
Are you No-Bo-Where under the essence of a gigantic tear?
Now you’re face to face with something worthy of fear
Or indescribable joy. This much should be clear. When
You find God’s house, no metaphor you know will do.
The Waterbird Way
In speaking about the non-dependence of the mind, Dōgen says, “Coming, going, the waterbirds don’t leave a trace, don’t follow a path.” There are many ways to understand. Driven by our need to be seen, the mind can understand in the manner that a plow cuts the earth, overturning everything it encounters; leaving nothing as it was found. Or as Dōgen suggests, in our need to see, the mind can understand in the manner that a waterbird enters and leaves water; with no trace, no path. Both ways of understanding have an intense history and lineage.
But why does he call the waterbird way a non-dependent way? Perhaps because in our dependence on being seen, heard, approved, and recognized, we insert our presence over being present. We build roads to get from here to there and quickly make the road and its path the totality of our life over the life the road moves through. We do the same with dreams and ambitions. We create goals like roads to attain and achieve and quickly substitute the path-hacking effort through life for the life our effort opens us to.
Does spirituality need a definition?
I think I know what spirituality is, but I also think its definition varies from person to person. Some people are religious and spiritual. Others are non-believers but still spiritual. Religion and spirituality are not mutually exclusive, but they’re also not the same.
I find that a lot of people who are spiritually oriented struggle with what being spiritual means. In part, that’s because spirituality is too broad. It has all sorts of different meanings and associations for people. Some people feel embarrassed about their spirituality because of the New Age movement of the 80s and 90s, while others feel like they can’t own it because they’re not Zen enough, or they don’t meditate on a regular basis, or they’re not hippies. I’ve heard all kinds of self-doubts.
In creating Three Intentions, I’ve thought a lot about spirituality, since it’s at the core of what we’re doing here. I read this article about spirituality being arbitrary and losing meaning, in which the author calls for a definition, saying that he proposes “we either give the buzzword a concrete definition or stop using it.” This guy is a senior in college, so part of me thinks he has a lot of life experiences before him and that he might be wrenched out of his rigidity at some point down the road, but I think this opinion is widely held.
As I read and realized that I disagreed with the idea that spirituality must be defined, it brought with it some relief. Professing that you’re spiritual can be burdensome, bringing with it a whole host of supposed-to’s: you’re supposed to be enlightened, not cuss, be in tune with nature, you name it. But spirituality is a feeling, it’s a connection with something bigger than us. It’s a way to be religious for many of us who have felt failed by religion, or for whom religion has simply not been able to provide the answers or be the support that we need—for whatever reason.
Having grown up in a Christian household, I find my current experience with spirituality is not so different from my childhood relationship with God. It’s a feeling. It’s a support. It gives me ground. And it doesn’t have to be the same as anyone else’s. How about you? What does spirituality look like, feel like to you? Do you have your own definition for what it means to you?
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