Inner180

Londolozi, South Africa

Each dawn we bundle up and sleepily climb into an open Range Rover.  We pull thick wool blankets across our laps, gratefully tuck our hands around the hot water bottle nestled inside, and head out across a network of dirt trails traversing gently rolling hills and grassy fields.

We pass leafless tree-skeletons

and quiet ponds ringed with vibrant green marshes.

It looks very much like the open lands in the Colorado foothills, with one very significant exception.  Londolozi teems with an incredibly diverse array of animals and birds not found in the wild in North America.  Nyala, kudu, duiker, impala, hare, vulture, eagle, bat, heron, mongoose, monkey, warthog, baboon, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, elephant, water buffalo, hippopotamus, lion, leopard, rhinoceros, hyena, crocodile, duck, stork, lizard, guinea fowl, lilac-breasted roller–the list is endless and in short time, we see them all.

And it’s up close and personal. . . .

We sit motionless, spellbound by the antics of lion cubs pouncing on their macho but indulgent father.

We’re awed by the sublime

And the ridiculous

We’re even charged by this grumpy, one-tusked bull elephant.  Our adrenaline was running so high, I missed the photo op.

He’s probably responsible for snapping the tree limb here, so luckily he only wanted to chase us off.  We happily indulged him.

The full moon is shinier and fuller and more beautiful than ever before when sitting atop a termite mound.

And just as we were getting used to the idea that we really were in Africa, that we really were seeing the African land, the African moon, and that the animals really hadn’t escaped from the zoo, it was time to leave.

Toward the end of the week, a couple of folks in our group voiced their dread of returning to “the real world.”  Which raises a fascinating question—which one is the real world anyway?  Is it the one at home, with careers, relationships, fashion, television, mortgages, the internet, and animals who eat from cans?  Or is it here, in the African bush?

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.

I once met a woman who won the lottery.  Even though she’d already won about $500,000, she still bought lottery tickets regularly.  She told me it is very common among lottery winners to continue to play the lottery.  She absolutely knew she was lucky, and actually intended to win a second time.

My friend Kathy says she has great parking space luck.  Every time we go somewhere we park right by the front door of wherever we’re going.  She says this always happens.

I no longer think that this is random or coincidental or weird.  I think we create our luck.  We choose to allow it into our lives.  So how can we create more luck in our lives?  Try these suggestions:

Notice the luck you already have. Remember how you found that amazing jacket that fits perfectly, the last one in the store, the one that was on sale?  And how all of the traffic lights were lined up green as you drove downtown?  And how you sat next to someone at a luncheon who became your best client?  You are lucky already, aren’t you?   Now, just notice it more.

Believe that life happens for you, not to you. Even when circumstances are tough—you are laid off from work or your teenager is picked up by the police for violating your town’s curfew—know that this opens a doorway to something positive, something better for you.  Maybe it will be a more satisfying job or a chance to connect more deeply with your teen.  Whatever happens, allow it to be an opportunity to move forward, to allow something better, to grow.

Think like a lucky person. Our thoughts determine our feelings and from there we act in ways that bring us the results we get in life.  Lucky people think they are lucky, and act in ways that confirm it.

My friend Kathy has good-parking karma because she begins and ends her search with the best parking spaces in the lot.  She does this because she expects an opening there.  If she searched for a space in the back row, that’s where she’d find one, and that’s where she’d park.  And she would never think she was lucky.

Because they think they are lucky, lucky people feel lucky and act like they are lucky.  In other words, they make their luck.

So what would happen in your life if you thought you were lucky?  What if you expected life to be filled with wonder and magic and luck and great parking spots?  What thoughts would you think?  How would you feel if you believed that wonderful things would come your way, all day long?  Would you act differently?  Would you look for the best parking spaces in the lot?  Try it.  Then just notice what happens.

What’s bugging you?  Is there anything going on in your life that you think shouldn’t have happened, shouldn’t be happening?  Here are some tough yet amazingly compelling questions to ask yourself.

How is this situation right?

How is this situation perfect?

What difference is there between the two questions?  What is the difference in the answers you got?

This is a powerful way to get honest and to see reality from another perspective.  For me, it cuts right through all of the noise and clatter of self-righteousness and victimhood and blame and excuses.

I find that when I do this, I get all of my icky judgmental thoughts exposed to the light.  What’s left is honesty.  Sometimes that honesty still hurts.  But it’s a very different, clean hurt that I can allow myself to feel and move through.

The shift can be amazing.  Try it.  See for yourself what happens.

A full week of doing nothing every single day.  I look forward to it now–a respite from a busy life.  Today, after hours of talking and listening, silence was delicious.  I’ve discovered that I like doing nothing best when walking.

Yesterday, I referred to the John Lennon song, “Across the Universe.”  Today, I realized the main line of the song, repeated a dozen times, is this:  “Nothing’s gonna change my world.”

My thoughts were easily released today with the ticker tape, and I wasn’t as absorbed in creative naming.  Afterward, I turned on my electronic appointment calendar and discovered that I had accidentally wiped out all of my future appointments while trying to back it up last night.

My stomach began to burn.  At some point I emailed my clients, asking for help.  My teaching schedule and my airline ticket could be retrieved from saved emails.  Everything else must not be too important.

The crisis was over, but my stomach still ached. I observed myself looking for someone else to blame. (The tech support people at the Apple Store?)  Then, I remembered the guiding principle of my childhood: “I cannot make a mistake.”  Still around.

It took about 30 minutes today to recover. I was able to observe myself in the process of thinking of who I could blame.  About six months ago, I was mostly unconscious of this process within me.  Here’s how it went last spring:

When a colleague asked a question about something I’d done on a group coaching call,  it felt like criticism.  The question, or at least what I made of it in my mind, pushed a big, hot button in me.  I paced in little circles, muttering “I can’t believe her nerve.”

I couldn’t forget about it.  Psychologists call this attentional hijacking, and my attention for anything else was nowhere to be found.

Donning my imaginary power suit and stilettos, I called forth my inner trial lawyer.  I gathered supporting evidence, consulted potential allies, and crafted my arguments. In the process, my judgments about my colleague got very creative, for example: “I bet she was intentionally trying to make me look bad.”

At some point, I came to my senses enough to call a coaching buddy for a session. I began to understand that my old childhood belief, “I cannot ever make a mistake,” was alive and well. I began to breathe more easily, and my attention returned.

And guess what?  No less than an hour after the storm was over, someone else questioned something I said.  I’d love to report that this time, I saw through myself.  Nope, out came the power suit and stilettos.  It felt just as overwhelming as the first round had.  I defended myself with a swift montage of thoughts: “She didn’t understand.  She wasn’t listening,  She set me up for that.”

I called my coaching buddy again.  I wrote in my journal.  Soon, my internal gyroscope righted me, and my attention came back.

And guess what?  The next day, I posted a short note on a coaching forum. I thought it was particularly insightful and eagerly awaited the opinions of the other coaches.  The first comment that was posted noted that I used a comma where I should have used a semi-colon, and quoted the rule of semi-colon usage for my convenience.

And guess what?  Yep.  Again, I rushed to my defense, and compiled a short, funny, but firm response, explaining that as  journalism major, and a former lawyer who made a living for years through writing, ha ha, I certainly knew the rules of semi-colon usage, and ….

It clobbered me over the head, and I began laughing and crying at once. Old images swirled up–missing a question on a second-grade reading test, forgetting to return a library book, being scolded for talking in class. My childhood strategy–performance beyond criticism, straight A’s in every aspect of life–was looking pretty silly.  My biggest, most heartless critic was an eight-year-old-me.  I saw how messily human I am, and how that’s both hilarious and profound.

So maybe next time, I’ll smile wisely.  If not, if I reach for my legal pad and stilettos, compiling my defense of blame and evasion, and the process can unfold again.  Again and again until I get it.

Yesterday, I chose The Ticker Tape method of Doing Nothing.  As my thoughts arose I visualized them moving across a mental screen, and named them.

Since they were tame, I nick-named them instead of naming the emotion.  I had the I’m-hungry thought, some to-do-tomorrow thoughts, the I-want-chocolate-instead-of-dinner thought, the whoops-I’m-in-someone-else’s-business thought, and the whoops-I’m-thinking-again-thought.

Then, I had the my-son-didn’t-call-me-like-he-was-supposed-to-so-I-could-fax-him-the-information-to-pay-his-traffic-ticket-and-I-forgot-about-it-until-now thought.  I laughed as I named it the I-forgot-to-worry-about-this-until-now thought.  And was hilarious to realize how worrying is so optional.

By bestowing each thought cluster with a name, I easily wiggled free from them, especially from the one about my son not calling, which had the potential to get me going.  But by naming it, it floated by, just another thought in a marching thought parade.

When my 15 minutes of doing nothing was up, I chose not to react to my son’s inaction. His ticket.  His business. The best way to handle it, of course.

The name-that-thought process was fun, like a game.  As I said in class, creativity is one of my signature strengths on the Values in Action Inventory, and here I had an opportunity to be creative, right in the middle of doing nothing.  How cool is that!

So what do you think?  Is it okay to be creative and have fun as we are on our way?

I began my fifteen minutes of Nothing today by walking.  I walked on a wide dirt trail near my house.  I trained my eyes downward, let go of thought, and heard the swish of my jacket sleeves as they rubbed against my sides.  I had never heard this sound before, despite many walks here wearing this same jacket.

I got excited.  “I can write about this swishing sound,”  I thought.  “Cool!  I can write about something so obvious that I never noticed before.   This noise is really loud.  Wow!  With all the thoughts I usually have, I never noticed it.  I can’t believe I never heard it before.  Hey! The swishing sound has a rhythm.  It’s not even.  One side of me swings differently than the other.  How could that happen?  Maybe my body is twisted.  Maybe I should try to walk straighter.”

I realized that I was thinking.  “Cheating!” came the next thought, “you’re thinking.”  Then, “telling yourself that you are cheating is not exactly compassionate.  Just let go of the thought.  Write about it later.”

And this is how it went on day one of my Joy Diet.  Thinking, then realizing I was thinking, sometimes  judging, then letting it all go.  Over and over.