Inner180

A friend recently posed this question to me:  if I had to live on a deserted island for one year with no possibility of escape or rescue, what five things, other than basic survival things like food, water, and shelter would I want to have with me.

Here’s my list:

The Tao te Ching (unless there is electricity, then my Kindle, but that seems like cheating)
Paper
Pens
A watercolor kit with paint and brushes
A camera—I know, the electricity thing again, but we won’t be super-strict with the rules.

As I thought about this, I realized I could have fun and stay really absorbed.  And that alone is a happy thought.  I’d keep a journal, of course, and then write all the things I never get around to, teach myself to paint, and take lots of interesting pictures.  My island, as I imagine it, has interesting shells and rocks and birds and plants and driftwood for creative inspiration.

Through it all, I’d read the Tao to keep inspired.  Maybe I’d understand it better at the end of the year.

After doing this little exercise, these questions came to mind:

What possessions really add to our happiness?
What do we really need for entertainment, for inner growth, for self-expression?
What would we be willing to give up if resources were really limited?

What would you bring along with you?  And how would it be to be alone with yourself?  Post your answers in the comments section.

Sometimes good fortune arrives in our lives so effortlessly that we can’t believe it.  We hesitate and hold back.  Surely it can’t be this easy, we tell ourselves.  Our smaller, more painful interpretation of life is so much more familiar so it seems safer and more real.  We shrink from the beauty and magic unfolding before us.

Rumi urges us to seize life fearlessly, to let go and merge with it, and to embrace with ease the joy and opportunity as it comes to us:

The Seed Market

Can you find another market like this?
Where,
with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
Where
For one seed
you get a whole wilderness?
For one weak breath,
the divine wind?
You have been fearful
of being absorbed in the ground,
or drawn up by the air.
Now, your waterbead lets go
and drops into the ocean,
where it came from.
It no longer has the form it had,
but it’s still water.
The essence is the same.
This giving up is not a repenting.
It’s a deep honoring of yourself.
When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at once, quickly,
for God’s sake!
Don’t postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching
will find this.
A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
and become yours.

Has a perfect falcon landed on your shoulder?  What do you want to do with it?  Do you welcome it wholeheartedly?  Will you honor yourself, believe it, and allow it into your life?

Or are you thinking “this can’t be real if it comes so easily”?  Or “this can’t be valuable if it has come so easily”?  Are you believing that struggle is a necessary component of your life?

Where can you be more open to the rose gardens, the divine breezes, and the magnificent oceans which come to you?

There’s an ancient mango tree next to my cottage; it’s magnificent, with a thick, gnarled brown trunk and long glossy leaves.  How many hurricanes it’s withstood is anybody’s guess.  It’s been barren for at least 35 years, which is how long I’ve had this place.  This year, inexplicably, it flowered, and then, magically, massive clusters of fruit appeared.

A few weeks ago, its mangoes began falling.  I sampled one, but it was tasteless.  The fruit drops day and night, thudding on the roof and plopping to the ground, but I’ve ignored it, except to gather it up from time to time and bury it, to keep it from attracting insects.  I have two other trees providing fruit, so I gave it no further thought, except at midnight whenever a hard, green mango smacks onto the roof and rolls to the ground.

As I cleaned up the fruit this morning, I spotted a couple of really pretty, golden specimens.  Curious, I took them in to sample, and they were an extraordinary surprise–sweet, tender, and delicious.

I think the tree is telling me that we can always regenerate,  sweeten, and offer the best of ourselves to the world.  And that sometimes, our assumptions may not be true, even when we think we’ve investigated them.

Aren’t those messages we can always take to heart?  No matter how many times we’ve told ourselves we couldn’t do something, no matter how many times our creative mind seemed barren, no matter how many times we’ve failed to seize the opportunities that come to us, we can always regenerate and bloom and sweeten.  And even when we’ve told ourselves the same old story, over and over, we can look inside again, and find liberating new truth.

The mango tree is just outside my bedroom window, and late at night, as I’m drifting off to sleep, I hear it out there, releasing it’s sweet golden offerings.  I hear them rustling through the palm fronds as they descend, then landing in the thick jungle of vines below.  Each time I hear it, I remember all of the regeneration and opportunity and sweetness and truth in the world.  And that whether I pay attention or not, they’re there–delicious surprises,  just waiting for me to notice.

1.  It’s fun.

2.  Creativity is associated with positive emotions such as happiness, joy, and love. Contrary to popular myth, the negative emotions of fear, sadness, and anxiety stifle creativity.  Don’t believe it?  Read this.

3.  It’s useful.  When you need to solve a problem, you have more options to choose from if you can access creative solutions.

4.  It helps you access all of you. Creativity uses both right brain, wholisitc and image based brain processes as well as left brain, logical, verbal, sequential thinking.

5.  It requires you to take risks, which develops courage and confidence, and courage and confidence are handy things to have.

6.  It develops efficiency.  When you are comfortable thinking outside the box, you can get to new solutions more easily.

7.  It encourages you to experience “flow,” where you are so fully immersed in what you are doing, that you effortlessly lose your sense of time.

8.  It relieves boredom.

9.  It makes life way more interesting.

10.  Because you are creative.

A study at Harvard Medical School released in December found that happiness spreads through social networks in amazing ways.  One happy person can trigger a happy reaction in a friend who can trigger a happy reaction in another friend, who can trigger another happy reaction in another friend, who (you guessed it) can trigger another happy reaction in yet another friend. In all, this chain reaction can spread three degrees away from the original happy person.

The influence is not only on friends.  Family members and even neighbors catch it, too.  And what’s even more amazing is that this joyous effect can last up to one whole year!

Here’s another finding of the study:  unhappiness is not as powerful as happiness.  Sad feelings do not spread as efficiently as joyful ones.

The study analyzed data from nearly 5,000 people and found that friends, families, and even neighbors can influence each other in ways that spread to indirect relationships-your happiness can influence your neighbor and her friends, her friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends.

What are some practical implications for those of us who seek to maximize our happiness?  That’s right, hang out with happy people and their friends.  And be aware that your mood can influence others far removed from you.

We may be separated by six degrees, but we are connected by our happiness through three degrees!

Last night, I attended Art Basel Miami Beach, a yearly international contemporary art exhibition that takes place at the Miami Beach Convention Center and other shows all over town.  I wandered among a huge crowd, inches from thousands of original works by Picasso, Miro, Chagall, Matisse, Hockney, Rothko, Calder, Kandinsky.

But this isn’t an art museum.  This stuff is for sale.  And people are buying.  I eavesdropped on a conversation about price:  “300,000?  Hmmm.”

I began doing nothing in the presence of the crowd: young New York hipsters in amazing, creative outfits, Cuban couples holding hands, women with straight red hair cut in angular shapes.  Everyone looked so beautiful through eyes looking out with joy.

I stopped at a photograph by a favorite, Sally Mann.  It was her daughter, probably about twelve, holding a candy cigarette as if it were real, the insolent, defiant face of a young teenager stopped in time and on full display.  I’ve seen the shot in a book I own, but there, full-sized, it was even more powerful.

I saw that same look on my daughter’s face so many times during that stage of half-adult, half-child.  A look of I love you but I’m going my own way now and I’m going to experiment and break rules and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.

I stood before the photo, happy to see it and even more happy that I don’t live with a thirteen year old girl right now.  A small crowd began to join me.  I turned to the woman next to me.  She was smiling lovingly too.  And everyone who had stopped was looking at this child in the photo with the same loving eyes.

We began to chat and laugh about the photograph. One woman said  she used to love candy cigarettes too.  And I remembered the fun of pretending to “smoke” them.  Someone else said they were living with that face at home right now—their own fourteen year old.  We all laughed together, in our collective adult wisdom.

I’ve never had this kind of experience at an art exhibit before.  Who knew there was such overwhelming joy in the presence of a defiant teenager?

In a comment to yesterday’s post, Jenny writes: It seems almost effortless to cultivate joy and acceptance when I am away from my normal life and routine. As soon as I return, I fall into the old patterns so easily.  Do you have any ideas for allowing the joy and acceptance to flow into your daily routine as easily as they do when you are away?

Here’s what I’m wondering: what if the statement, “It is easier to be joyful when I am away from my daily routine” is itself a painful story?  What if “when I am in my normal routine,  joy eludes me” is simply another version of it?   What would happen if you exposed those statements to our Truth questions:

What am I feeling?
What hurts?
What is the painful story I am telling myself?
Can I be sure this painful story is true?
Is my painful story working?
Can I think of another story that might work better?

What might you discover?

Although I don’t practice law any more, I’m still an attorney, so I joined a team of volunteer lawyers helping at the polls today.  I stood for hours and my feet hurt and my back ached, but at least I could walk and move around and find shade.  The voters stood in line in the blazing sun for at least five hours. Many people had small children in tow.

Witnessing this was one of the most moving experiences of my life.  Black and white, young and old, Republicans and Democrats, all patiently and politely waiting together. People stood side-by-side chatting, even though they wore buttons from opposing candidates.  I didn’t see one complaint, one rude remark, or one argument.  No matter how this election turns out, this aspect of it has been phenomenal.

There was a group of five lawyers advising the hundreds of waiting voters.  In the past, I would have sought direction from one of the ones who had been there all week, since I was the newbie.   Being on the joy diet though, I decided to find my own niche, with my heart, not my head.  Now this may not seem like a really big deal to you, but I was there as a lawyer, and trust me, lawyers don’t typically work this way.

As I scanned the lines, I noticed that there were elderly, disabled, and ill folks waiting in line.  Apparently a security guard, who, to be sure, was trying to do his job, was turning these folks back to wait in line with everyone else.

I escorted two blind voters to the entrance.  The guard stood to block the door.  I gently told him that they were disabled and that I was taking them inside to find a place to wait.  He glanced at my ball cap emblazoned with the words “Florida Voting Rights Attorney,” and stepped aside.  They would still have to wait, but it would be in chairs, in the air-conditioning.

So that’s how I spent my day.  Several hours after I’d helped a severely disabled woman with lupus who was dragging a heavy wooden folding chair with her, I saw her exiting the polls.  When she saw me, she lit up.  “I voted honey. I made it.  Thank you so much,” she cried out as she hugged me.  And that was pure joy.

My yoga teacher, Natalie Morales, said this in class yesterday, “Let go of your struggles for now.”  Isn’t that what we do with our Joy Diet practices?  We let go of our struggles while we do Nothing, as we seek the Truth, as we connect with our Desires, as we express our Creativity.

As we let our struggles go, we discover they are optional.  We learn that we can create struggles, and that we can let them go, for a few moments, for the length of a yoga class, and in many instances, for as long as we choose.

My creative exploration continues.  My list contains Barcelona, Ischia, Italy, the Scottish Highlands, Jamaica, South Africa.  Why?  Barcelona for the beauty of the Gaudi architecture, Ischia to discover my great-grandmother’s home, the Highlands to connect with my mother’s forebears, Jamaica to be of service, Paris because its there.

Then I realized I could probably take my coaching practice to Paris or Barcelona, and stay there for an extended time.  I know a writing coach who is in Paris for six months, and is still working with her US clients.  She speaks with them on Skype, which is a free service.  I could get an apartment in Europe, and stay as long as I wanted. Now that’s an idea that is really exciting.  It seems really far-fetched and scary, too, until I realize that what makes it far-fetched and scary is the way I’m thinking about it.

The writing coach in Paris righ now obviously didn’t think it was such a crazy idea. For now, I’ll take Natalie’s advice, and let go of my struggles.  I’ll just enjoy the excitement of this idea.

Here’s another stillness method, this one from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.  Simply sit and smile for a few minutes a day.  That’s it.  I tried it today, and want to report that it is a gem for building joy, as well as a great stillness exercise.  Give it a try!

I examined my desire about wanting to get all of the wisdom of my books into me, without spending the time to read them. This idea didn’t inspire or excite me.  In fact, it exhausted me.  It was based on a (false) story that I don’t know enough, so I need to read more, train more, take more classes, etc. It feels good to scratch this one off my desire list.

Next, I explored my yearning to spend more time on artistic, creative endeavors. When I imagine sitting with a brush in my hand, totally absorbed in the colors of paint going onto paper, I feel excited, joyful, alive.  I’m onto something with this one!

In fact, the more I imagine myself painting, with a brush full of vibrant, jewel-toned colors, the more certain I am that I want this in my life, and that it is going to happen for me.  I’ll open to possibilities, messages, and straightforward as well as unusual methods of having more artistic expression into my life.  This feels good, and I am smiling as I write this.

So give it a try.  Sit (or walk) and smile for a while. Notice how the simple act of smiling makes you feel.  Do you feel a shift inside?  Now find something from your list of desires that makes you smile even more.  What is it?