Last night, to leave my thoughts behind, I took a small walk, but not so far that I worried about becoming bear food. Away from the lights of the cabins, I flipped my flashlight off. Overhead, billions of stars peeked through scattered clouds. The only sounds were those of intermittent specks of rain falling on nearby leaves.
Thoughts let go almost effortlessly, perhaps for the first time ever. As I left to return to our cabin, words from “the most poetic lyric” John Lennon said he ever wrote, popped into my head: “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup they slither while pass, they slip their way across the universe.”
I also love this line: thoughts “meander like a restless wind inside a letter box.”
This year, for its fiftieth anniversary, NASA beamed this song into deep space, towards the star Polaris, 431 light years from earth. This was the very first time a song has ever been transmitted into deep space. Was I hearing those words last night from way up there, across the universe?
The internet is everywhere, including the main office at this lovely off the grid hot springs I’m visiting this weekend. Somewhere in the San Luis Valley in south central Colorado, I walked on a mountain trail late last night. As I practiced letting go of thought, I realized that I was perhaps too far from the small enclave of tents and cabins to be heard if a bear or a mountain lion wanted a midnight snack. Already challenged from the altitude and the steep walk, my heart thundered with colorful visions of my dramatic demise.
I remembered Byron Katie’s words when she talked about being robbed at gunpoint. Are you going to live your last few moments on earth in fear, or are you going to enjoy them? Exhilarated, I decided that, since I so rarely have the opportunity to be in such darkness, such quiet, such isolation, that I would not spend this time afraid. If I am going to be eaten tonight, I’ll enjoy every step until then.
Today the waterfall technique soothed me. My thoughts about my son’s traffic ticket are challenging my peace. I walked today, using the waterfall, and the rhythm of my steps reminded me of how, as a teenager, I loved to use my sewing machine. Something about the soft, rhythmical clacking was soothing in those tumultuous times.
I am off for a last minute weekend with a friend, at a rustic hot springs deep in the Colorado Mountains. I have no idea if the internet exists there. I will post if I can, otherwise, you’ll get three posts on Monday.
How do we stay in a place of joy when it seems as if circumstances or people around us are falling apart?
Pam Slim, master coach and blogger extraordinaire, has posted a beautiful quote about staying in our center, in our place of joy and calm, when the people or the circumstances around us are in turmoil. It’s from The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell, the brilliant and gentle scholar of mythology and religion who wrote so movingly about the archetypal stories that connect us throughout cultures, nations, time, religions, indeed all of humanity. You can read it here.
Campbell said famously, “Follow your bliss.” To learn more about him, click here or here.
The Joy Diet class for Martha Beck is starting Tuesday, and I’m thinking a lot about the joy practices we’ll explore. Truthfully, what I’m thinking most about is the stillness practice we’ll do. Lots of us are challenged by the notion of doing nothing. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of it. Or, the why bother of it.
Last night, after watching the presidential debates, I caught an ad for Microsoft Windows. The ad, a flashing series of testimonials by celebs and ordinary mortals, glamorizes Microsoft as modern and hip, like iPhones and Macs. You can see it here.
The superstar of the commercial is Deepak Chopra, who sits in a handsome office lined with rich woods, books, objets d’art, and of course, his PC. In a seriously sly voice, he deliciously intones, “I am a PC and I am a human being. Not a human doing. Not a human thinking. A human being.”
With that, I think I began to get it. Right there, in the most ludicrously unlikely place, a silly, flashy TV commercial, I began to understand stillness.
I am not a human thinking. Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle have taught me that I am not my thoughts. I’m most certainly not those funny and frequently pesky things. I’m way more than my thoughts.
I’m not a human doing, either. I am not my roles or my activities—coach, mother, writer, yoga class attendee, former lawyer, procrastinator. I’m way more than those things too.
A human “BEing.” Is that what the mystery of stillness is all about? The me apart from my thinking or doing? Not a human thinking, feeling, doing, buying, eating, suffering, talking on the phone, or playing sudoko. I am a human being, a wondrous be-ing, who has that simple truth to come back to, over and over, especially when the going gets tough.
Thanks, Deepak. I’m getting it. But I’m still sticking with my Mac.
Unless you’re a bazillionairre, if you live in New York City, you ride the subway. Suzanne, New Yorker I coach, absolutely despised her commute. She complained bitterly about the griminess, the overcrowding, the behavior of the other riders. It was absolutely intolerable, she told me.
Her commute took 45 minutes each way. That’s more than 32 hours every month, a long stretch of misery in a life. She considered moving closer to work, even changing jobs, but couldn’t come up with a practical solution to the problem.
I had an idea. “Begin looking for beauty on the subway,” I suggested. Suzanne laughed cynically and patiently explained to me—a non-New Yorker—what was patently obvious to anyone with two eyes, a nose, and a brain: the New York subway is a human cesspool during weekday rush hour. It was impossible to appreciate anything about it, and there was certainly no beauty to be found there, she assured me.
But I insisted. “Send me an email every day, telling me of the glorious, beautiful, amazing things you find on the subway.” Suzanne left our session muttering that I’d given her an impossible assignment.
But she gamely began looking. With Suzanne’s permission, here are some of the things she found in the next few days:
“We went over the Manhattan Bridge, over the East River. Out in the distance, beyond the Brooklyn Bridge, three aircraft were buzzing around each other in the air. They were blimps, and they looked like giant honeybees drunk on pollen, bobbling to and fro over the water.”
“A kid had a little glass jar between his feet. It was strangely shaped, like it had contained an exotic food item purchased at an ethnic market in Brooklyn. It was filled with beautiful, thick, cloudy pink juice. Guava? Papaya-passion fruit?”
“The woman across the train had enormous boobs and beautiful deep black skin. The whites of her eyes were so bright in comparison to her skin they looked like keyholes of light in the door of a dark room.”
“This morning I couldn’t count the people wearing shades on the train! I guess when you’re cool you’ve always got the sun in your face.”
“A garish McDonald’s ad greets me and encourages me to ‘Think Good Thoughts….’”
“Ikea’s yellow flags wave in the distance on the waterfront. I bought a carpet there on Saturday night, and the water this morning is the exact same color of that carpet, gorgeous peacock blue.”
“There is a comfy, casual feeling on the train this morning… many wearing their Friday office attire. One woman looks so comfortable in her outfit I want her to take it off and let me put it on!”
“The faces of buildings and all of the bridges, walls, boats, water, cable lines, roads, signs are layered upon each other like a box of toys thrown around a room during a child’s tantrum.”
“Without anyone speaking, I know I am in the midst of various exotic tongues; Spanish, Polish, Korean, Russian, Israeli, Vietnamese, Czech, Yiddish, Mandarin, Hebrew.…”
“What a gift to be able to look at humanity up close and personal, to look at all of our differences, beauty, ethnicities, blemishes, scars… where else would I be able to notice the super-fine quality of a stranger’s hair follicles, the way his hair grows out of his head in the same direction, the tone of the skin on his scalp, eight inches from my face on this packed train?”
Within two weeks, the subway had transformed. Suzanne no longer rides in a cesspool teeming with the worst examples of humanity. Her last email about the subway ended with these words, “Everywhere I turn, there is opportunity for joy.”
As Marcel Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.”
How about you? Is there anything ugly, disgusting, intolerable in your life? Can you see it with new eyes?
This morning, I was coaching very smart client. She’s an academic at a renowned university, and feeling a little sheepish about the possibility that she could actually be happy. She has a brilliant, highly-trained mind, and like so many in academia, tends to be suspicious of mooshy concepts like joy and happiness. Especially her personal joy and happiness.
Another client, a genius with two PhDs, spent years as an academic. For a while, he resisted some of the more imaginative exercises I gave him. Even when they helped him stop procrastinating, the issue he’d been paralyzed by and sought coaching for, he feared that, without empirical proof that the techniques worked, he was somehow being stupid for relying on them. It seemed better to hang onto his dysfunction than to risk doing something that was potentially hocus-pocus. Better to be a brilliant procrastinator than a productive dupe, I guess.
I’ve done my own time in academia, as a law professor, which carries not only the general fear of academia (the worst fate in life is that others will find out I’m not smart), but also the pessimism of legal thinking (if something can go wrong, it probably will, so I have to be prepared for every possible negative contingency). I spent a long time rejecting the possibility that I could be happy, even when I began to feel happy. I felt sheepish about it. It seemed so, well, unlikely and foolish.
Ultimately, I got over it. With practice and a bit of self-compassion my client can, too.
With The Joy Diet Group Dieting Adventure telecourse coming up, I’m thinking a lot about happiness and our resistance to it. Isn’t is crazy? A smart person can justify staying miserable or dysfunctional, because if others find out we’re happy, they might think we’re not so smart. Sometimes the smartest people do the silliest things, in the name of intelligence.
After years of weight-loss dieting, I’ve discovered a huge secret–what goes inside my head is much more important than what goes into my mouth. The whole point of being thin is to be happy, right? Why not skip the middleman and go straight for happiness? Whether or not I ever fit into my skinniest pair of jeans, I intend to be ecstatically, deliriously, divinely, serenely happy.
There’s actually good science behind this idea. Research shows that we’re born with a happiness “set point,” which is in our genetic makeup. But this only controls about half of our happiness. Scientists in the field of positive psychology, the study of “what goes right with the human psyche,” have discovered that intentional practices to lift our spirits can increase our happiness significantly. As much as forty percent of our overall happiness is within our control, and we can boost it with our thoughts and actions. That’s a humongous bunch of happy.
So, I’m going for my forty percent upgrade. I’m going to follow a daily joy program for ten weeks, based on Martha Beck’s bestseller, The Joy Diet. If you don’t know Martha, pick up an O magazine—where she writes a monthly column, or one of her New York Times bestsellers. Her writing is inspiring, intelligent, and hilarious, just like she is.
My joy project is actually part of an eleven week telecourse I’m teaching for Martha, exploring the ten essential ingredients of joy she writes about in The Joy Diet. And you are invited to participate. We’ll have a one hour class each week, beginning Tuesday, September 30. Each class, we’ll talk about one ingredient of joy, and then we’ll practice it for a few minutes a day for a week. The next week we’ll add another component.
The class will have the power of the group behind it, too. Just like some weight-loss diets take advantage of group support, this joy diet will be have the same kind of group support, where we’ll talk about our progress in class, and I’ll write about it here, on this blog. We’ll be able to inspire and motivate each other as we incorporate an intentional practice of joy into our lives.
The most successful approaches to reach goals, whether it’s weight-loss, success, relationships, or anthing else, always begin with bringing you to the feeling of satisfaction and happiness that the accomplishment of the goal would bring. If you want to be skinny, feel the joy of skinniness right now. If you want a relationship, walk around in love right now. If you want success in something, whether it’s a sport or a business, imagine the joy of success and live in it right now. So no matter what your goal is, this diet can help you get there.
I hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be a blast!
The Joy Diet Group Diet Adventure
Eleven Tuesday mornings, September 30 – December 16, 2008 (except Thanksgiving week)
8 am Pacific, 9 am Mountain, 10 am Central, 11 am Eastern
Can’t make that time? No problem. All class will be recorded and a downloadable mp3 will be emailed to you the same day as class (if the internet fairies cooperate.) You can listen at your convenience, on your ipod or your computer, and still participate with the group.
Karen was ecstatic. She was tired of being single and sent an email to an old boyfriend. He immediately returned the email and told her he was single, too. He wanted to see her. They spoke and made a date for the following weekend.
She was elated on our coaching call. “This might be it!” she told me breathlessly. “I wasn’t ready for him before, but this time I am. I’m so excited.”
I asked her to describe her excitement. “It’s the feeling of being loved,” she told me.
“Where did that feeling come from?” I asked.
“From his call,” she said.
“Oh, did he tell you he loves you on the phone call?” I asked.
“No.”
“So, where did the feeling of being loved come from?” I asked.
“From the possibility of this working out,” she said. “I’ve always been so bad at relationships before. Now I’m ready. He sounds really interested in me. This could be it!”
“So, really let that feeling you got from the phone call, of being loved intensify,” I suggested. “Where is it in your body?”
“It’s in my heart,” she said.
“So where is the feeling coming from?” I asked her.
“Oh my gosh, it’s coming from inside me!” she exclaimed.
“Yes it is. And what changed to create that feeling?”
Just then, she got it. “My thoughts. My thoughts about myself changed.”
Yep. That’s it. That’s the secret formula. When Karen thought the possibility of being in a loving relationship was on the horizon, she felt good inside. She became happy and excited. Before that, life was ho-hum. She hadn’t seen this guy in years, and all that had happened was one phone call. The old boyfriend didn’t do that. Karen did–she transformed the way she felt about herself.
So, as Karen discovered, being excited and feeling loved can be generated inside of us. Once we “get” this we can create it for ourselves, over and over, every day of our lives. We can just skip the middleman (in this case, the old boyfriend) and create the feeling of being loved and the excitement of looking forward to life within ourselves.
So next time you are feeling fabulous, really explore it. Get to know this place. What do you feel? Where do you feel it in your body? Describe it. Write it down. What thoughts are you having about yourself? Write them down. Memorize everything you can about this experience.
We don’t have to wait to find the right relationship or the right anything else to feel fabulous. And, as a bonus, when we’re excited to be alive, we can attract exactly what we want–like a great relationship!
