Inner180

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cost:  $199.  Here’s a link to register.

For questions or more information, email me at  terry.demeo at gmail.com.

When you’re disappointed, does your mood plunge downward like it’s on a roller coaster?  Yesterday, my new client, let’s call her Susan, had plummeted like she was on the Coney Island Cyclone. She’d sought coaching after a string of business failures.  She suspected she might be doing something to attract this pattern into her life.

In a voice awash with misery and despair, she told me how she’d been incredibly happy this morning at the prospect of landing a fat new contract for her business, but a half-hour before our appointment, she received an email that the deal had fallen through. She was crushed and depressed.

“So what changed the way you feel?” I asked.

“The company changed its mind,” she stated dully.

“How would you feel right this minute if the email had gotten lost in the internet’s parallel universe, and you didn’t know about it?” I asked her.

“I’d feel great,” she said glumly, “at least until I found out.”

“So what really changed?” I asked.

With some coaching, Susan realized that her thoughts about herself had changed. When she believed she had the contract, she thought she was smart and competent and valued and felt energetic and excited about life. When she got the email, she told herself the company had rejected her and she was incompetent and useless. She became listless and empty.

As Susan discovered first-hand this morning, if we attach our happiness and self-worth to external circumstances, like a big contract, a promotion, or our children’s grades, we climb aboard life’s roller coaster. When circumstances are favorable, we are high, excited, exhilarated; when things change, we nose-dive to the bottom.

We hop on a roller coaster to take this ride when we lose touch with our true nature, what Martha Beck calls our essential self. Our essential self knows that we are always sparkling jewels, treasures of infinite value and worth. This has nothing to do with success in any external form–contracts or promotions or our kids’ grades or any other person or circumstance outside of us.

When we lose touch with that part of us, that all-knowing, peaceful, secure place deep in our hearts, we are at the mercy of life’s roller coaster. Our essential self gets buried by an avalanche of neediness and insatiable hunger for positive attention and rewards from others.

People change their minds, contracts fall through, kids fail courses, and others get selected for promotions and awards. That is the nature of life—change and unexpected circumstances are the only constants we can count on.

When we are in deep touch with our value, our worth, and the joy that lives deep inside us, we survive setbacks and challenges with peace and security. A contract can fall through, and we can put it into perspective. We remain positive and hopeful, and don’t slide into abusive or self-defeating thought patterns.

Sure, it feels good to land a big contract. But when we are in deep contact with our essential self, we never lose touch with our worth and our value, and we remain energized and hopeful. We understand that the loss of the contract could, in some as yet unfathomable way, be in our best interests. We save the roller coaster ride for fun and games at an amusement park. And, we realize that the next gift from life may be just an email away.

Questions to Ask Yourself When You’re on the Roller Coaster

1. Are you having any negative thoughts about yourself?

2. Is this an honest, factual assessment of this situation?

3. What happens to you when you hold on to these negative thoughts?

4. Imagine being in the present situation without the negative thoughts and judgments. Does anything shift for you?

5. Is there a stress-free reason to keep the negative thoughts about yourself?

6. What is an honest assessment of the situation that doesn’t include any negative or abusive thoughts about yourself or others?

7. Does this change the way you feel?