Creative What-ifs

Last week my sister-in-law told me about a shop that might consign my bracelets and so yesterday I went to the store. It is a wonderful store that sells a combination of flowers and art: Arcadia Flower and Art Market in the strip mall at 40th Street and Indian School. Newly opened and overflowing with the joy and vision of people who have jumped head first into living their dream, I was enchanted by the store and the people. I was even more enchanted when they took my entire inventory which means that I can concentrate on my writing and enjoy making the bracelets without the stress of figuring out how to sell them.

While I was showing my bracelets one of the employees looked at them and said "you actually have the patience to do that?" "Do what ?" "Sort those buttons and then sew them into bracelets." "Oh, yes" I said, "I love buttons and I love being able to create with them."

Actually, when he asked me the question I was reminded that a friend I had not seen in at least a decade came to one of my shows and she looked at the bracelets and then looked at me and said "I just can't picture the Mary I knew years ago as being someone who would make these. I just never pictured you doing something like this."

Actually, the Mary from years ago would not have been able to create the bracelets I now make. What I am aware of is that the Mary of fifteen years ago contained the creativity and ability to make the bracelets but she had not yet learned how to expand her boundaries of self to include a much larger idea of the unknown. I believe most of us spend so much time worrying about the unknowns of living that we keep the 'unknowns' of self firmly tamped down; I mean who wants to be blindsided by their own self when it requires so much psychic energy to be alert to the unknowns of living! As I wrote about in The Unexploded Shell, much of our life we keep our true self tightly clutched deeply inside against the 'what ifs' of living. Unfortunately, although this unconscious behavior may allow us to feel safe, it also keeps us from truly living. But there is a way to use what-ifs to expand our living and make new and wonderful discoveries. You can actually 'trick' your mind into creatively using what-if.

First of all, your mind likes 'what-ifs' because your mind insists upon organizing reality. This ability of the mind to organize elements of reality, that is to 'sort' possibilities of what is or could happen, is a mental function that allows us to participate in living as it directs our behavior. And here's the trick of this natural function: you can either take control of it or just let it organize your life according to it's very limited view. If you let your 'mind' just do what it wants while you remain a bystander to your own life {i.e., unconscious} then your 'mind', understanding that survival is the base-line or first goal of living, will simply sort the possibilities of life into 'safe' and 'not safe' which is how it views life when left to it's own devices. But it doesn't stop there! Since most of us live lives that the great majority of the time have very limited true {that is based in the reality of right now} survival needs and since just surviving is kind of boring, a mind that is unconsciously operating on a 'survival' setting, then orients itself to pleasure.

If a person is unconsciously simply going through the mechanics of living: engaging tasks, responsibilities and chores of living because they have to, then the mind operates from the perspective that it is simply 'surviving' and as an antidote to this kind of boredom points in the direction of survival's polar opposite: pleasure. When pleasure is desired as the antidote to surviving then the achievement or experience of pleasure is not terribly satisfying. Pleasure indicates something 'pleasant' so why wouldn't the experience of pleasure in this instance to satisfying? Because pleasure that is simply the other side of surviving the day, is based only my own needs: I want to feel good; I want approval; I want to be cared for; I want someone to pay attention to me; I want, I want, I want .....

When we find ourselves bouncing between the boredom of survival and then gratifying ourselves with fleeting pleasures: drinking, shopping, gambling, eating, emotionally disconnected sex, or vegetating without purpose in front of the TV or game or movie videos or the computer we have, without realizing it, oriented ourselves to a 'fixed point' of self-centered loneliness. This 'fixed point' is actually the vision we have unconsciously created about the purpose of living.

Remember how I said that the mind instinctively organizes reality? Well, even though we may be unconscious of the hows and whys of sorting methods, the mind is not doing all this sorting in a completely random manner, nor is it operating without your input. We actually give it hints all the time of how it is to organize reality. The hints of how the mind should sort elements of living into piles comes from our thoughts. Our thoughts crystallize into attitudes: this is the nature of thinking, to become a form or structure to operate from and that structure with regard to our self, is called an attitude.

Our thoughts are not like a bunch of gnats that just fly around and annoy us, they are actually much more like honeybees that fly with purpose and function from highly organized hives. If our mind did not organize thoughts into attitudes then we would be overwhelmed by the sheer chaotic magnitude of what our mind, left to it's own devices, does: all day long it buzzes along churning out thoughts. And so, if we get stuck in thoughts of an 'I want ... I want ... I want' self, then our thoughts tend to be mostly about me and how people, places and things are treating me and the resulting attitude that frames our vision of living tends to be one of self pity. Self pity, then depending upon our personality, then either emits an attitude of either self pity or resentment (hostility) both of which just generate more thoughts of I want .... I want ... I want ... and the focusing attitude gets stuck.

It is the job of attitudes to frame life so we have a reference point which is what I called earlier, our fixed point or our 'vision' of what living is all about. This vision is what is called our perception of reality. Perception simply refers to the 'lens' that we see life through. We create our lens for viewing life by what we tell ourselves, in other words, by our thoughts. You see, it's all just a big circle: thoughts become attitudes; attitudes create the frame or structure of the perception of reality; perception creates the lens we see life through.

If it is your thoughts that create your vision of life, why not manage your thoughts so the framework that is created is one that establishes a sense of 'I am' that is creative? Because that 'fixed point' or vision that I referred to is actually your sense of 'I am' and the creation of 'I am' is the big, really BIG choice we are able to make in life. And, if you do not consciously make a choice of the vision you want for your 'I am', then your survival mind will make it for you. And one way to consciously create your own vision is with the creative use of 'what if'.

Creatively using what your mind wants to mess around with anyway, the what-ifs of life, is a short-cut in many ways to managing your thoughts and simultaneously expanding the boundaries of the idea of your self. I call this the 'what if I believed ...' tactic and if I'm having a problem, instead of focusing on the problem, I look for the other side of the problem and focus on the solution by asking myself what if I believed .... and insert, the answer to the problem.

This tactic of creatively using 'what if' in my life was actually first put into play thirty some years ago without my understanding what was happening. When I entered a recovery program based on living one day at a time, the creative 'what if' was: if I admit that I am alcoholic and powerless over alcohol THEN what if I believe a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity one day at a time. The program doesn't use the phrase 'what if' but that is exactly what is occurring: a change of perception of myself from someone who is completely out of control with regard to drinking to a person who could not drink just for today because a power greater than myself is restoring me.

The concept of just for today works very powerfully with using what-if in a creative manner because it expands the boundaries of the self safely. The issue of 'safety' is always going to be primary with our survival-ego-self and life is much, much simpler if we are able to just accept that and deal with it's reality. The problem that most of us run into when we wish to change a habit that we have come to understand is causing us pain in life is that we want to jump from the realization to recovery in about 24 hours. Won't work. The word 'habit' indicates a way of behaving or thinking that we are really, really good at: we're habituated.

Our mind has no 'morals' about being habituated in that it does not care if our thoughts or attitudes are good for us or not: if we keep doing them then that's 'who we are' as far as our mind is concerned. And to be honest, as long as we remain unconscious, that's as far as the concern of our mind will go. This is a common mistake of perception that virtually all of us have which is that if we have habituated a thought or action then it must be good because it is mine. When put that attitude on paper in words it's easy to see the fallacy of the belief but when we're feeling them, our eight-year-old is in charge and the attitude of the eight-year-old is 'my way or the highway.'

[Actually where I learned to 'see' what I believe or more accurately, what that eight-year-old inside me believes, was by journaling. The 'magic' of putting our thoughts on paper is that we actually 'see' with some objectivity rather than just 'feeling' what is occurring in our lives. When journaling is done regularly it is possible to begin to see the structure or vision of living that our thoughts create.]

So, you might be asking about now, what does all of this have to do with buttons becoming bracelets? The creation of the bracelets came about because I had lived using creative what-ifs for long enough so that is how I tend to orient myself to life. First of all, I deliberately choose each day the "I am' I intend to live from. For over a year now I have lit a candle each morning with the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "I am the organ through which the Spirit executes it's will and creative power."

I made a deliberate decision a little more than a year ago that those words would be my 'fixed point' - the vision of belief for my life. By choosing a deliberate "I am" I'm giving my thoughts and mind an intention to focus it's sorting of the elements of reality: I am choosing the 'what if' that I will sort from. I deliberately 'yield' to the goodness when I light the candle. I believe that the purpose of each person's life is creative power: the creation of new life through a being that has never existed before: you and I. I light the candle and go into the day with the focus 'what if' the creative power of Life is moving through me, then what do I see - what is my 'lens' for life today? My intention is that my life is one of creative living - which is what I am if I am the organ through which the Creative Power of Life is executed - and that is a sharing of the best of myself with life. Creativity is the giving of your best self to life. And as long as one day at a time, I deliberately focus my 'lens' on this intention then my thoughts revolve around this idea.

When my fixed point, my vision of self is as an organ of creative power then all the elements of life are simply the 'what ifs' of creativity: what happens if I combine this with that? What happens if I choose this thought? What happens if I consider using my grandmother's buttons to make bracelets for my sisters? What happens if instead of brushing that thought away with the habituated attitude: I don't sew, I stay with it and add that idea to the belief that the creative power of the Spirit if flowing through me. Maybe I'll just add those two ideas together and let them sit. And so I let them sit and the next idea comes: 'you could use that bracelet as a template, just get some ribbon and thread.' And so creatively I say, what-if I sew the buttons onto ribbon? What happens is that my concept of self expanded past it's self imposed boundaries of "can't, do not have, never have, tried once before & didn't work."

And I did sew the buttons onto ribbon, and I figured out how to back it and create clasps and in the last eight months I have gotten better and better at creating button bracelets and people actually pay money for them! But even more importantly by saying yes to a creative what-if, I discovered a whole part of myself that had been sleeping for about fifty years. All it took to wake that part of self up was to change a habituated thought 'I'm not creative in that way' with the deliberate choice to say each day {actually several times a day} "I am the organ through which the Spirit executes its will and creative power." And by golly, one day at a time, I am in fact the organ through which the Spirit executes its will and creative power!

An unexploded shell

A couple years ago I was leafing through one of my favorite gift buying catalogs and I saw a paperweight with the engraving What would you do if you knew you could not fail? What would I do with my life if I knew there was no failure involved, I thought.

Possibly many of you have had the experience of reading something and a little grouping of words; maybe a sentence or maybe just a phrase, seems to suddenly be lit in neon and flashing at your eyes saying pay attention! This message is for you! So it happened to me with the words on that paperweight - I didn't even need to purchase it to remember the message for it was etched in the back of my mind. The 'back of my mind' however is where the words had landed and so it wasn't as though I was thinking about the words all the time however, on a regular basis I would be reminded of the message I had received and would ponder what it meant to me.

I think one reason the words caught my attention was because the idea of 'what would you do if ....?' is rarely attached to a personal restriction that we ourselves have complete control over changing. Often the question we play around with regarding unmet dreams is 'what would you do if you were suddenly gifted with a million dollars?" Attaching a large sum of money to the question does two things to our thinking when we play with the answer. First of all, very few of us have much chance of suddenly being gifted with a million dollars and so right away, we know as we play with spending the money that this is a fantasy diversion and we will never actually have to follow through with any action. The second aspect of the question when attached to some outlandish amount of money is the idea that we will spend the money by buying or purchasing stuff: new house, new car, vacation house, trip to where ever or we will buy ourselves security by carefully investing the bulk of our play money. The closest we usually get in answering the 'what would you do if ..." question and perhaps exploring unmet dreams is sort of attached to the idea that if I had a million dollars then I would have freedom to ..... - again, fill in the blank.

However the question on the paperweight wasn't attached to a sum of money that would enable me to do what I dreamed of having or owning, instead, the words asked me to explore my fear of failing. The truth of life is that it is absolutely, 100 percent impossible to follow a dream without some aspect of failing. How can I make such an assertion with a '100 percent' value attached to being correct? Because a 'dream' or a 'vision' of what might be possible with your life is a very, very big concept when preceded by a question posing 'doing' that is taking action and the 'doings' of following a vision will always involve lots and lots of new learning.

New learning always involves doing and thinking in ways that are not yet known and so the great majority of us, personally I think that majority is 'all', are going to have some failures while we learn. This is also why the great majority of people I run into in my life really haven't tried learning something big enough to fail at in a very, very long time but rather just keep adding 'bits' of vaguely new onto what they are already familiar with doing.

This fear of doing something so big that I might fail is why I chose the the image for today: a tight, as yet unfurled, bloom. When I saw the picture it reminded me of the day I was working with the dictionary and looked up the word 'live' as in 'to exist' and came across another definition of the word that applies when the 'i' in the word is pronounced differently and that word means an unexploded shell. Since what I had in mind when I was reading the definition of live was how we persons go about living, when I read 'an unexploded shell' I thought: so many of our lives are just unexploded shells.

By 'unexploded shells' I mean that our personal dreams are generally tight like the bud on the tree: we clutch ourselves, holding deeply inside the 'dream' of what our life might be if only we had been willing to risk failure. By the time I looked up the definition of live, I had been living a life that risked failure on about 19 different levels and in many ways I give that picture of the paperweight in the catalog credit for shaking loose some of my own fear because the message I read had me mulling not only what I might 'do' but also what failure was for me.

Being afraid of failing when the definition is limited to non-risky activities is not really a bid deal because all of us (yes, a full 100 percent) have made mistakes and failed at trying to do something. Oddly, what always pops into my mind when I am on that topic is failing my driving test 3 times because I absolutely could not get the hang of parallel parking which I found immensely frustrating and embarrassing and to my mind was a 'big' failure because it took 3 separate tries to succeed. Clearly I was as yet young to think that was a big failure for what I discovered as I got older was the real trick to succeeding after failing to learn something new was knowing that what I really needed to change was my perception of what I was doing: new learning almost always requires new perceptions and new thinking. Both new perception and new thinking is often difficult as we get older because of the real definition of failure.

There are two definitions of failure and the first is one we are all familiar with not succeeding in what was attempted, it is the second definition that I learned as I mulled on the message what would you do if you knew you would not fail? because I realized it was what kept me clutched tightly in a bud. The second definition of failure is to be shown as lacking. If emotionally we respond to 'being shown as lacking' as simply what it means: we lack an ability or skill or information, then failing at what we are trying is not a big deal because we receive the message that we need to go and get something else: knowledge, skill or ability in order to succeed.

However, 'being shown as lacking' when attached to our ego needs: our social status, our career image, our life role image as partner, spouse or parent and/or our social successfulness; what we own and who we associate with, involves true risk. A great many of us are unwilling to risk the possibility of loosing, that is failing - being shown as lacking - in any arenas of living that involve deliberately sacrificing our ego needs. And yet, there is almost no way possible in life to live a dream or follow a vision without having to sacrifice something the ego values.

The very idea of sacrificing a value held in esteem by our ego generally clutches at our gut. In fact our 'gut reaction' to the idea of sacrificing an ego-value is generally so swift and sure that our whole being contracts against the very notion with a very emphatic 'no' and then we usually follow up our no with a whole bunch of rationalizations. This 'gut reaction' is so swift and sure when responding to the possibility of giving up an ego-value because we have practiced this response endlessly, or from childhood anyway, and so we are awfully dog-gone good at our gut reaction of 'no way Jose' - no way will I look silly, foolish, ignorant or ...'

We have this well practiced gut-response to the notion of 'being shown as lacking' because our gut is attached to the ego whose job it has been to rigorously defend us against being 'wrong' or more accurately, 'appearing' wrong since we became aware of the world's reaction to 'being or appearing wrong.' The phrase 'the world's reaction' actually just refers to the authority figures of our life and so our ego that defends us against appearing to be deficit or lacking in any way responds anytime our personal criteria for appearing to lack what is needed is awakened. For the great majority of us who formed our ego defenses during childhood this generally applies to situations where 'being wrong' meant 'losing face' and experiencing shame with an authority figure.

Shame is an awesomely powerful feeling. I use the word awesomely because generally shame works so well that it needs to only be applied once to a situation to keep us from repeating the actions of that situation. Shame is guilt on steroids: guilt tells us that we made a mistake and did something wrong but shame takes guilt to the nth degree and tells us that 'our being' is wrong.

Shame therefore always touches into pure survival instinct since our 'being' involves our right to exist and so our sense of "I" is emotionally at risk. I'm going to make a broad generalization in the next statement yet the words are based in my own experience of living as well as years of working with people and their fears: most people will not deliberately put their sense of "I am" at risk.

Most people will not put their sense of I am at risk: I am competent, I am caring, I am successful, I am unselfish, I am intelligent, I am hard-working, I am 'the best', simply because most people are only vaguely aware that those "I ams" are not the true you. But they are very, very powerful 'faces' we present to the world and since my 'face' is me, the 'faces' you see in how I interact, must also be me. Well, not exactly. Not unless you have managed to come to grips with the interactions of your ego's survival needs and how those impact the 'faces' you wear and as a result, how true your faces are with your essential self. The tasks I just described is one I talked about in Nesting Selves and Two Kinds of Ego personally, I began round 3 or 4 of those tasks as I mulled on the question on the paperweight: what would I do if I knew I would not fail.

The answer I came up with after mulling on the paperweight question was: I would write my book. The longer I mulled on this I realized that the true answer was: I would write a book and have it published. The reason I knew the second answer was the correct answer was 'published' revealed my fear of showing I was 'lacking' in some way because writing a book to be published meant not only risking the possibility of being rejected and not published, (rejected = lacking) it also meant that the fear of 'what if' it were published and didn't sell (not selling = lacking.) That fear, led directly to the next fear which was 'what if the book were published and people thought it was dumb? (ridicule=rejection) Which led to the next fear; 'what if I published my book and people didn't like me anymore because of what I said in the book? (personal rejection=lacking)

Now I knew exactly what I would do if there was no fear of failure - being SEEN very publicly as lacking.

After exploring those ideas I asked myself another question: so having looked at these fears, what would true failure be for you? The answer was: to not write and be published. Which then led to the next question: WHY would that be a failure for you? And the answer to that question was: because now that I have awareness of what I believe I am supposed to do and I am aware that the biggest problem is my ego-fears, not doing it would be cowardly.

Truthfully, I'm willing to be all kinds of things but cowardly is not on the list. I have learned by living a few decades that overcoming cowardly simply requires a willingness to move forward one little, but deliberately brave little step, at a time. Fortunately, thirty some years ago I was gifted with a Program for Living that taught me that the first and only step needed to move out of fear was a 'willingness to be willing.' See those lovely two words 'to be': I didn't even need to be willing I only needed to be willing to be willing. Which is actually a wonderful mind-game because being willing to be willing only happens if you are willing each day and so being willing to be willing, if done deliberately, creates an attitude and habit of willingness. Sounds convoluted but absolutely works if you hold an specific intention before you and say that you ARE willing to be willing and ask only for the strength and courage needed for that day. That's all you have to do to change the fear that is clutching the tree bud so tightly.

The Spirit of Life is really quite gracious in my experience for rarely do we need to do anything more than by taking one step at a time. I'll admit there was quite a bit of time between the initial reading of the question on the paperweight and my first book that was sent back as 'not meeting their needs at the moment.' I took many, many baby steps to get to the place of sending my children's book out into the world, but guess what? When it was returned, I did not feel 'lacking' and I did not feel rejected. Know why? I did not feel like a failure because by the time it was returned, the Universe had blessed me so graciously and magnificently with manifestations of support for what I was doing, my response was gratitude for the opportunity to try again. Doesn't mean that I don't get scared doing what could mean failure of some sort; ego's do not ever completely give up, but a lot of the old fears are gone.

The biggest change is that I have discovered while living a life that 'risks' losing face quite regularly is that 'losing face' is not terminal. Besides, writing something new several times a week means facing the fear of the blank computer screen and that's scary. But I do it anyway. I've also discovered that that old wives tale about the Universe being supportive of our dreams when we are willing to risk our ego in order to follow them is true and Goethe was right: whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin. For there is genius, power and magic in beginning.

Enough

Amidst the rock and mortar there just happened to be enough soil to catch a seed. And, within that bit of soil there just happened to be enough nutrients to nourish the seedling when its tendril snaked out of the cracked seed. And, apparently on that tiny ledge of rock just enough sunlight and rain were bestowed so the seedling grew and thrived.

I love this image for it reminds me that truly, despite how I might feel in a given moment,there is enough of what I need to grow and thrive. How do I know there is enough of what I need to grow and thrive? Well, it has taken a lot of living to be able to answer that question simply enough to be able to live from the answer but what I live from is the knowing that I was chosen to come to earth with gifts and abilities to offer the world. I believe that living from these gifts and abilities is the purpose for my life. I then believe that if I am here to live from my gifts and abilities, then it seems to follow naturally that if my intention each day is to offer these gifts to the world, then what I need in order to thrive will be given to me.

Given the above paragraph what I believe is that there is enough today for me to thrive in living. This was not an easy belief to come to live out of. My head understood the concept but my emotions;those feeling reactions to thoughts my ego throws at me, told me I should be concerned about a long list of what ifs: what if there is no money next month, what if you should break your hand and not be able to write or type, what if something happens that you weren't prepared for, what if your car dies, what if .....

See how I ended the sentence above with 3 dots? That's because the thing about 'what ifs' is that there is no stopping place because 'what ifs' are always about the future and the future stretches into infinity. Once my emotions engage: become involved with or entangled with concern over unknown possibilities in the future there can never be enough of anything: not enough money, not enough food, not enough stuff and certainly not enough love. How can there be 'enough' when worrying about possibilities occurring in the future requires that I try to fill myself and my life with what cannot yet exist?

Before I go any further, let me say that I understand both the concepts of responsible living: being productive enough to cover basic living costs and the concept of planning for future events. I spent all day yesterday in the final planning meeting of the committee responsible for planning the summer camp program at Chapel Rock. I've been working with this committee since February and the first camp will take place in late June so clearly, the planning and preparation occurred 'in the future' as far as camp was concerned. The planning and preparation projects included writing the program, working on the activities of the program, planning the daily schedule, assigning responsibilities for the scheduled activities and buying a ridiculous amount of stuff to make all of it work. Lots and lots of time, energy, gifts and abilities of many people were devoted to planning for the future. Despite all we have planned and prepared to make a great camp experience for the kids, what will actually happen during the camps is a huge 'unknown'.

Now, I could fill up the 'unknown' possibilities with all kinds of worry and hand-wringing: what if one of the counselors backs out; what if an adult staff member can't make their commitment; what if I get sick and can't do the weeks I committed? If I put any emotional energy whatsoever into those questions I would make myself crazy because there is not a darn thing I can do today to deal with those problems. And yet, many people do make themselves at least feel crazy because they invest energy in engaging the worry of unknown possibilities.

Notice how the worries I listed above were all about a possible crises? Concerns about the future almost always entail the fear of losing or not getting. Concerns about the future virtually never center in 'having' because you can only 'have' in the present. But in order to enjoy what you 'have' and understand that for the majority of us, it is most likely 'enough' you have to actually be present to the present.

If that little seed in the image at the top of this page were like the average human being, it never would have thrived and bloomed by nestling into the bit of soil in the crevice of a rock that it landed in because it would have fussed about not having been blown into a garden. If that little seed were a person it could have whined about not having a garden with lots and lots of soil and a drip system of guaranteed water and maybe even a gardener who cooed and praised it for growing and gently pulled out any weeds that were rude enough to try and share its space! And IF that little seed had fussed and whined about where it had landed guess what would have happened? Nothing. That's right; no seedling snaking it's way between the cracks of the stone because if the seed was unwilling to crack open where it was it could not have thrived and become a plant.

Seeds must crack open in order for the tendrils of the future plant to snake out into the soil and then work their way into the light. As persons we also must be willing to 'crack open' in order to thrive in living. What I have learned about this 'cracking open' process of living is that I cannot be clinging to worries that make me fearful about the future and simultaneously be open to what is here in the present. Trust me, if it were possible to do both I would have learned how because I spent a ridiculous amount of my life trying to live in that manner and truthfully, all that happens is a lot of frustration. What I have slowly learned as I struggled with this concept of 'enough' was that by deliberately yielding: softening and therefore neither resisting nor struggling but instead simply being where I was, life became calm enough to live in. When I yielded to the present then the bit of soil I discovered myself to be inhabiting was enough to thrive in.

I like the word thrive as a description of the process of living because thrive means to flourish, advance and develop. To thrive indicates vigorous growth, progress in development and the idea of becoming fuller so the image that is developing becomes visible. And the great thing about that definition of living is that a woman who watched her babies grow into young adults and seeds grow into flowers and strawberries, I know that when life is looked at as a progress of development it can only happen one day at a time. Each day lived with intention creates the energy of flourishing.

When I mothered my boys I knew exactly what I wanted for them in the long term: for each to find their Spirit and honor it. And so what I knew was that if this was my goal then it was my job as a mother to each day look and see each of their spirits and honor it so they could thrive. And day by day through difficult phases and easy phases, through confusion and delight, through tough times and flourishing times and times that scary in what I did not know, I discovered that if I focused on my goal: honoring their spirit so they could fly into the world with an inkling of who they were created to be, then somehow there was always 'enough' present in the day to meet that one goal. There was not always enough money, nor time, nor energy for me to do everything I wanted but there was always enough one day at a time to meet that primary goal of my life as a mother. And that was enough apparently for they are each rather wonderful in their uniqueness and what they offer life - I realize I am not at all objective and they have much - very much - living to do yet, but I know they thrived enough to fly from the tree.

Actually it was by almost losing my sanity trying to be a 'good' mother when the boys were very young that I learned about the concept of enough. I am not a normal 'over achiever' by cultural definitions in that once I figured out that I could not get all A's in school, I really wasn't all that interested in what grade I got (unless I loved the subject or the teacher.) That one statement lets you know that what I am by nature is an 'all or nothing' person: if I am committed or I love I dive head first as deeply as a straight body and pointed toes will take me! Maybe it was the severe sleep deprivation or maybe it was the simple reality that that is a crazy idea to take into mothering, most especially if you have three so closely together. At any rate I was losing my mind which in my lexicon of life means that I felt like a complete and utter failure: my children for one thing did not sleep and they apparently had never read Dr. Spock because they did not behave as 'perfect children' (perfect children slept) so clearly I was not a perfect mother. In my despair - I have always found reading my first line of defense against despair - I picked up a great book by Judith Viorst titled Necessary Losses. I reread this book about five years ago and it is one of my most highly recommended books about all that stuff you need to know about living and no one ever tells you. Anyway Judith talked about the 'good enough mother' and what this idea meant and how if a mother was 'good enough' not only did she have a decent chance of attaining that goal but the kids were also free to be 'good enough.' Her point was that 'good enough' was a win-win situation that benefited everyone.

To me however, the idea of being 'good enough' was appalling: it sounded not good but like a failure! All my life I had been directed my doing toward being 'the best at.' The problem with being the 'best at' is that it is incredibly limiting: I can only be the best at a few things. It's that word 'at' which indicates that if I try or do something I can only succeed if I do the best which in the world of growing up meant 'bettering' everyone else. This attitude will either create a narcissist, an ego-maniac or leave you with a grand inferiority complex. Like most people with the injunction to be 'better than' I was a curious mixture of all three complexes with the inferiority complex having the capacity to fill me with anxiety and hostility which is not a pleasant antidote to either ego mania or narcissism. The combination of those three complexes led to some major problems and in a recovery program I finally learned that I had to give up the idea of 'bettering' everyone in my activities.

What I discovered from working with the concept of being 'good enough' was that it means to simply give my best. That's it just give your best. This is not always an easy attitude to adopt because being human our pride tends to get in the way, and so it is often difficult to give our very best and not need to be better than. But as I learned from working with the concept of 'good enough', when I am willing to begin with the attitude of 'giving my best' then I am am to yield to the present and I am not filled with the anxiety of what everyone else thinks or feels about what I do: I gave my best and that is good enough.

When I am able to truly give my best to a task or intention I naturally yield to living because by giving, the actions I take stop being just about me and my emotional needs and becomes about who, what, or where I am giving best to. When I read about being a 'good enough mother' what was suggested was that I boil the whole 'mothering' thing down to my intention in mothering and give my best to that. Give my best to the motivating intention and let all the other pieces fall into their own order.

I worked with that concept until I knew that what I wanted as a goal of being a mother was to see and honor the spirit within each of my boys so they knew they were loved for the individual they were. And to that single intention I gave my best for that day and all the other pieces came after that intention. It was not always easy to live out of that intention because like most people I would have preferred to 'look' perfect rather than 'good enough' and yet, life was okay because as long as I remembered my intention and gave my best to it that day, no matter how above or below average I was at any of the other tasks and responsibilities, actually I was 'good enough.'

Enough is actually plenty. In our culture of super-sizing, advertising that induces discontent with what is and an entertainment based media telling us that there is always something better waiting for us, enough sounds puny and perhaps lazy. But if you look up the word enough it means sufficient to satisfy and the synonyms are ample, plenty and adequate. So, the attitude of enough for today would simply indicate that I have ample and plenty for what I need and the words 'ample, plenty and adequate' would seem to indicate that I could even thrive on enough. It is possible to thrive, flourish, prosper and grow on enough if you know your intention for living this day.

I can only live today. If knowing this truth, I make the decision to deliberately give the best of my self to living today, then there is enough. If I live with the intention of directing my actions and attitude of this day toward giving my best in order for my gifts and abilities to thrive and be given to the world then eventually my intention will develop and 'become visible' in the world.

At this point in my life, my purpose; what I am giving the best of me to, is writing this book. When I first conceived this intention I was tied up in knots worrying about how I would get it done and if it would get published and how would I live while doing it and would I succeed or fail and should I ... and what if and ...... and finally I just made it my intention and yielded to my decision. Yielding meant giving my life over to my intention. Yielding to my decision meant rearranging my priorities and my expenses and my desires; yielding meant learning a whole bunch of new skills and a new ways of thinking in order to begin; yielding meant opening myself as widely as I was able to each day to the energy of willingness; yielding meant surrendering to love without any idea of what would happen. Yielding meant learning to ask rather than always being the one who did.

Yielding meant believing that there was enough in this day if I gave my best to it. Yielding meant knowing that if I gave my best I would flourish and thrive one day at a time. And you know what? One day at a time: some days really, really, well and some days not nearly as well, I am now close to being finished and however it turns out it will be good enough because I gave my best to what I believe is the intention of my life, one day at a time. Which is all life ever asks of any one of us.

The pit bull & the scarecrow

We all have an ego. Actually it is possible to think of our self as having two egos: one is the defended ego and arises from survival or defense mechanisms and the other ego is a healthy ego that we use to protect our vulnerable essential self while operating in the world. These two images do a pretty decent job of showing the difference between the two egos: the pit bull is the snarling animal intent upon defending it's territory, that's the defended ego. The scarecrow is the healthy ego that is watching over the growing plants and warding off the crows saying: back off I'm growing something here.

One problem with the concept of ego is that it is improperly used a great deal of the time. In popular language, 'ego' is often used to indicated vanity or an overindulgence of oneself at the expense of other people. In fact, ego simply refers to a psychological mechanism that protects the vulnerable self.

{Please note that this is a very, very simplified explanation of ego. Lots has been written about ego in great depth but for our purposes here we are only exploring how the ego can be viewed in the light of coming to terms with how it affects our perceptions of life which create our behavior.}

It is precisely because the ego is a protective mechanism for the self that we end up with both kinds of ego: defended and healthy, running around in our psyche. In the last article I described the self as likened to a set of Russian nesting dolls: persona, personality, defended ego, the child and the essential self. The outermost doll is the persona and this is the 'me' that the majority of us are very familiar with as this is the self functioning in the positions we assume in the world. The 'persona' self is seen very clearly in how we do our jobs, how we react to authority and pressure,how we take on responsibility, how we define our expectations in doing those things and is much the 'outer shell' we present to the world in life roles like commitments and parenting.

Personality is the next doll and this is the 'me' describing my personal temperament and nature as well as my 'natural' inclinations for interacting with life. Temperament and nature refer to our natural inclinations toward interaction whether those interactions are social, relational or educational. Our inclinations tend to push us in directions such as introvert or extrovert, detail oriented or conceptual, observer or take-controller, impulsive or cautious - and probably literally dozens and dozens more categories that when mixed together can describe 'personality.' Another mistake we often make is to confuse our personality with 'me' as personality is generally simply the 'clothing' my 'me' wears. And the persona is the 'vehicle' the fully dressed me drives in the world.

If you were playing with a set of nesting dolls while we talked, the two largest dolls would now be out with (in a normal set of 5 dolls) another doll in your hand that contains two smaller dolls. I think of this doll that is your hand as the ego for it's job is to protect the two that are inside: the next smaller one which I think of as the child: the unspoiled natural you that engages the world with wonder and creativity. Inside of this doll is the tiny complete (nothing else is in it) doll that I think of as the 'essential' self: the self that was sent here on earth to carry the love of Creation into the world using the wonderful blend of gifts, abilities, temperament, nature and personality that is you. A totally unique, never been created before, wonderful you. I believe that every person sent to earth contains this tiny, complete absolutely wonderful, totally unique self.

It is also my belief that the 'work' of mid-life is to retrain our ego so that the two inner, truer selves may be released to be a gift to the world. Now, why do I say that I think this is the work of mid-life? Why don't we just live out of the truest selves all the time? In an ideal world, we probably would live out of our truest selves all the time and maybe in the Garden of Eden we did. However, not only do we not live in an ideal world - and in terms of developing true personhood our contemporary culture is probably less ideal in this way than at almost any time in history - but the 'child' in us must grow up and it's that growing up process that tends to really 'seal' our defended ego.

What is unfortunate is we tend to have this idea that once we are on our own with a good job and some reasonable life acquisitions: maybe a house and kids, maybe a career that is highly successful, maybe an advanced educational degree, maybe a marriage or two or long-term committed relationship that we are now all grown up. No, you've just completed phase one and if you are at mid-life: around age 40 or so, now it's time to begin the next phase of growing up. Oh, and near as I can tell from my friends, at age 60 or 65 you get to begin a whole other phase - possibly the final one - of growing up.

We don't just get 'grown up' and that's it: accomplished that, now I'll just coast along. Maybe when people died at around age 40, that was the way it worked, but that structure no longer applies to our living. Here's the great news: you now live long enough so that you are able to begin to leave behind some of the 'cocoons' of ego that you developed. You see, as each of us take on major life roles and grows into those roles we tend to solidify the defensive ego needs that we feel are required for doing that job or role in life. As the intensity of those roles change we must let go of certain ego definitions: I've been a mother for almost 30 years now and I will always be a mother, however, the way I am a mother and the how of being a mother has changed considerably and most especially in the past couple years. Seems obvious that I would change my perceptions of self as my major life role changed but it's not as easy as it seems.because 'mother' took up so much of who I was that letting go of it did not feel pleasant at all - I was dissolving like that caterpillar. Changing a definition of self is very difficult interior work but if it is not done, your ability to grow in new ways as you age will be severely compromised.

The reason that it is difficult to change a definition of self is because of the defended ego that is well, defending the self. The ego does not want to change. It does not matter that all the kids are grown and are on their own, the mother -ego - the self that poured it's energy and sacrificed pieces of life that were important in order to be a mother, and was a mother for a very long time (usually a couple decades) wants to retain the perks of the definition. The ego is afraid that if it lets go of the perks, then it - and I - will be worthless.

The fear of not being worthy and the fear of not being acceptable - just for being me - is the core of the defended ego. This is one reason that the word 'ego' is thought of as referring to vanity for at the core of the fear of worthlessness and unacceptability is the narcissism of a child - all children are narcissists - for all children are at heart survivors. Survival narcissism - which is the posture toward life of a child - is the attitude of 'looking out for number one.' If, a person is truly, truly stuck in their childhood defense mechanisms then when we interact with them we tend to think of them as narcissistic or self-centered. Because that is how people stuck in those mechanisms tend to interact with life: survival makes a person naturally self-centered or they don't survive.

The sort of obvious question is, how do we as adults get stuck in childhood survival defenses? Why is it that we don't seem to notice that we really do not need them any more now that we are adults?

Terrific questions and the two short, very short answers are: we get stuck because most of us cannot accurately remember what we decided to believe about ourselves in relation to life when we were around 8 years old. The next answer is that most of us beginning in our mid to late twenties and continuing until our mid to late forties are very, very, very busy just learning and surviving. Those two middle decades are when most people take on about three major life roles: career, committed life partnership and parenthood. Major life roles take a lot of learning, it's just that we don't really think about all that we're learning because we are so dog-gone busy doing! And then there's the little caveat about life roles that no one ever really explains, that just about the time you figure out what you're doing, some role (or during particularly difficult times) two or three of those roles, switch to a new phase and you need to learn - and do - that new phase!

This is why it is my personal opinion that for most people the decade of their forties is when they either find the courage to begin to really explore life or they give up and remain a 'stage one grown up.' The problem is that if a person lives into their seventies or eighties stuck in the ego defenses of stage one adulthood, they will never truly be happy or satisfied with life. And the reason that it is so easy to remain stuck in stage one of being a grown up is that the more a person 'sacrifices' in order to achieve what they have, the more the ego will defend their right to cling to what they have. It is very, very difficult to face the possibility of 'losing' what has been gained in order to be open to a very unknown future. And to add to the difficulty of making changes at mid-life, that pit bull of a snarling defended ego will do all it can to keep things as they are. Why would it do this? Because 'things as they are': position, social standing, material goods, security and comfort have been achieved at a price and it is the job of the defended ego to protect what has been accumulated.

Protecting what has been accumulated during those decades of defining our position in life with our life roles is the job of the defended ego because we have often, quite mistakenly, pinned our definitions of self-worth and self-acceptance on what we have worked to accumulate. And, it is the job of the defended ego to protect the territories of self we claimed as the definitions of worth. And this is the part of the defended ego that is often traced back to around age eight and this is why it is so difficult to remember what we trained this defended ego to do. Remembering and then retraining the ego so it becomes healthy is the work of the mid-life adult. (The good news about life is that if you were really busy or had an 'extreme' experience that prevented the decade of your forties for moving onto stage two of grown-up, you'll get another chance. It's just a matter of being willing to recognize what is occuring and agreeing to the process)

Remember the third doll that has been revealed when the first two were removed? The third doll is the one I call the defended ego and inside of this doll are the unspoiled child doll and the essential self. The job of the defended ego is to do exactly what it is doing: carry the other two and protect them. The problem here is that this 'defended ego' doll gets this job at around 8 years of age and makes an awfully lot of powerful decisions for an eight year old: who can be trusted, what behaviors are expected of me in order to feel I belong, who I must please in order to feel chosen, what parts of myself I must enhance and use in order to feel worthy of being chosen and what parts of myself should I 'tuck away' because living from those usually has me feeling 'unsafe' in some way. Wow!!! Huge decisions that define how I will perceive life and therefore how I will act in life. Why would anyone give this kind of responsibility to an eight year old?

It's really just a quirk of developmental psychology that sort of sets us up for life. This quirk of 'fate' tends to happen to each of us somewhere around seven to ten years of age (depending upon the individual) where developmentally the awareness of being a single unit - an individual - happens, kind of out of nowhere. Until this moment of awareness, a child experiences life as being part of or attached to even when they are alone: me + mom, me+dad, me+siblings and/or me+significant others (aunts, uncles, grandparents). This experience of life as a me + another provides security and security provides safety. Both security and safety are essential in order for the massive amount of physical, mental, emotional and social growth which occur between birth and about age seven or so. But at some point the 'crack' in the picture is revealed and the child experiences 'aloneness' - that mystical sensation of awareness that it is just me in a very, very big world. Now, let me say that quite obviously this is a simplified explanation of this and reading Carl Jung would give you a much more in-depth explanation but this is all I have room for and Carl does a much better job so I would heartily recommend his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections for some expanded knowledge. But, and this is important, once the 'crack' in the psyche has been created by the awareness of being a single unit, it will only widen and gradually move us into the phase of life called 'individuation.' The good news is that for most of us this is a very gradual process of awakening.

Here's what people do when they discover that they are in fact a single unit in the world: they - quite unconsciously, we are after all only around seven or eight years old - discover how to make themselves feel safe and secure. And the way we make ourselves safe and secure when we are very little and have absolutely no real external power, we use the power we do have: our internal power of perceiving and therefore defining life. This is the beginning of our ego.

Ego is a statement of fact in that we all have an ego if we are functioning in the world. The amount of defended ego and the amount of healthy ego will vary greatly from person to person based primarily upon life experiences and the amount of consciousness the person brings to living. When you are very young and first handed this pit bull puppy, you actually have very little consciousness (consciousness is not related to intelligence) for making the decisions you are about to embark on because most people at that age are primarily conscious of where they belong in life, who they belong to and how best to feel chosen, worthy and acceptable by the people with authority over them. We figure out very early in life that it is people who have authority over us that can make life pleasant or miserable and this is why 'issues with authority' remain a problem well into mid-life: most of us just don't get around to dealing with this until then or maybe never.

So, here's the really short course in this: if you grew up knowing absolutely that you were worthy and acceptable just for being you and not because you made someone else happy (or unhappy) you probably had the opportunity to develop who you are as a person fairly well before resorting to defense mechanisms. If however, in order to feel worthy and that you had the right to belong and that it was essential for you to please others in order to be acceptable, then you would have begun to train your newly acquired pit bull puppy fairly quickly in how to guard the real you and keep it safe. Unfortunately, keeping the real you safe generally means, unseen and away. When we grow up in this situation (and the majority of us to one extent or another do) then we begin to live from our defense mechanisms.

Defense mechanisms are those ways of perceiving and acting in life that I use to make myself feel worthwhile and what is confusing about defense mechanisms is that generally they are reasonable or decent attitudes gone awry by using them for the wrong reasons. For example, I grew up as the oldest child in a family of ten children and so I learned how to be responsible, how to work hard and how to be competent at a very young age. I also learned how to do all of those things very, very well. And, competence, responsibility and a good work ethic are very good traits. But even good traits taken to an extreme are not healthy traits (although it is often difficult to convince those of us who have them of the truth of that - oh, yeah, that's because of my pit bull defended ego!) Suffice to say that even good traits when lived from in order to feel worthwhile and acceptable become crippling.

What makes good traits crippling? The fear of doing anything that does not engender the praise and approval of being competent, responsible and hard working will eventually 'cripple' the person living from those needs, out of fear of not living up to the expectations of someone who has authority over them. The funny thing about 'authority figures' is that being dead does not necessarily make them dead to us emotionally and there's the strange reality that we allow all kinds of people to have authority over us even when they do not: living up to the expectations of others is a very difficult habit to break!

None of us ever has a completely undefended ego, well, except maybe Jesus or Buddha. The goal in dealing with the concept of defended ego is simply th idea that by exploring your defenses and retraining the pit bull, you might find life more satisfying. That's the next column; learning to make friends with your guard dog so you are able to train it to guard adult territory and let go of the training of the eight year old - which means your ego will eventually be as reasonable much of the time (never all) as the delightful image of the scarecrow.

Nested selves

When I wrote about the experience of the cocoon state that occurs as a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, I likened it to the human experience of moving out of and into different stages of living. Since the experience of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly is truly one of transformation, the in between state of 'becoming' requires drastic actions. In the case of the caterpillar, it


literally dissolves into a gooey ooze. Within the
ooze are imagnal cells which reconfigure and create the blueprint of butterfly. I think of humans as having cocoons also, but generally we carry ours around most of the time and we refer to the cocoon as 'me.' For most of us however, the true 'me' is hidden deeply within my life.

Pictured on the left are Russian nesting dolls which are generally composed of five (sometimes more) identical dolls each of which is slightly smaller and enclosed within a larger doll. Twist the first doll and the head pops off revealing a smaller doll within, keep repeating the action and eventually a tiny intact doll is revealed nestled deep within the dolls. The idea of my self being similar to nesting dolls popped into my head about a year ago when I was mulling on ideas of how to present in a workshop the concepts of persona, personality, defended ego, the true 'child' self and the authentic or essential self. Each of the components just listed are aspects of a self. When I had the idea of the nesting dolls, the concept I was attempting to explain was that although each doll is in fact 'real', the outermost dolls actually 'enclose' the true self and they may or may not honestly support the authentic self.


When our outer 'selves' do not honestly support our authentic self, we experience conflict in our inner life which may be experienced as generalized anxiety or simply feeling out-of-sorts much of the time or perhaps on a general happiness scale of 1 to 10 we would grade ourselves around 4 or 5 even though nothing appears 'wrong' with our life. If we are unable to 'change' our sense of dissatisfaction then we may discover we respond with irritation and defensiveness inappropriately or, and this is always the litmus test for my life, we want 'to run away from home': find a new job, a new state, a new partner - please, something 'new' that will make me feel good!


Sometimes our 'outer' self no longer supports our authentic self because we have outgrown the shell of the role. This outgrowing of our shell happens with 'life roles' such as parenting when the children become older and the definition of 'being a parent' changes and in marriages where both changing life circumstances and changes within the persons involved may no longer fit the old definition of the relationship. Sometimes the shell surrounding our job or career-persona no longer fits because we have outgrown the needs we once had in the definition of the job. All of these 'out growing' of shells are completely natural and terribly uncomfortable and often terrifying. Why would an experience described as 'natural' engender a word like 'terrifying.' The answer to that is very simple and the process of understanding the answer and responding to it is very, very complex.


The simple part of the answer is that although I compared the self to a nesting doll with five separate selves, we do not tend to think of ourselves in this way. We may think of our 'self' having five roles: job person, relationship person, parenting person, friend person, sibling person and then the private self, but those are more like rooms in a house that we wander in and out of. And in terms of the nesting doll concept, generally those roles would be the persona doll and the personality doll and if you are very lucky, you have a person or place where you share the 'child' self which is the one we tend to call our 'private' self but sadly, a great many adults never share from the 'child' self with anyone on a regular basis (although this is the reason that therapists generally have a never-ending supply of clients: therapists are paid to listen without judgement to the child-self)


The complex part of the answer lies in the fact that by mid-life, which I tend to think of as beginning at around age forty, most of us have lived so completely from our persona-selves that we think of our persona and it's roles as "me". Because many people are unaware that the self they think of as 'me' is actually mostly roles and 'persona', when a part of this persona experiences a major change as with either 'difficult' situations: death, divorce, being fired or laid off or even from 'pleasant' situations such as marriage later in life, all the children leaving home or grandchildren it may be experienced deep inside with a sensation akin to dying or in the caterpillar terminology, dissolving.


The problem inherent in accurately responding to the inner sensation of 'dying' is that in our contemporary culture, successful people are bright, shiny, all-knowing and tidy, and so we really don't talk about a personal sensation of 'dissolving.' For one thing, dissolving sounds really incompetent. Actually dissolving sounds incompetent and messy. Actually dissolving sounds incompetent, messy and possibly life-threatening. Very few people have someone they are able to be both intimate and honest enough with to admit to feeling like they are dissolving and therefore might at the moment be feeling a bit incompetent and messy. In this culture, we do not dissolve: we fix the problem: we buy a new house, we buy a new car, we buy a vacation house, we work for a promotion, we get promoted or we get an even better job: in this culture we prove that we are tough and stronger than any problem by accumulating more and better of what we have.


However, if the shell of your persona-self no longer fits you for whatever reason, then the little dolls on the inside are asking for less and not more. The little dolls desire for less and not more means that our cultural 'fix' for the problem: new, better or more, isn't going to work over the long term. When I say 'less' rather than more, what I am indicating is that your true self may feel as though it is dying because your life, your persona-roles, has gotten too far away from your true self and the little dolls on the inside would like you to have less persona and all of it's perks: success, material acquisitions, careers that take all your time and energy and more time and energy devoted to inquiring into truth.


Inquiring into truth sounds so philosophical, so other-worldly, so la-de-da, and who has time for la-de-da? Well, actually, if a person desires to be alive with a sense of purpose rather than to simply live, inquiring into truth is a requisite for such a life. But, I'll be honest with you, if you have not been engaging on a regular basis, the practices and actions that support an honest and searching inquiry about living, when you very first attempt the practices, your defended ego will react as though it is a pit bull assigned to guard your life.


Which is exactly what your defended ego is: a pit bull guard dog which firmly believes that growling, snarling and biting strangers who wander into it's territory is it's job. We all have one of these snarling guard dogs and truth be told, we're the person who trained the dog and gave it its orders. It is also true that most of us got this snarling dog when both it and the self were quite young. In fact, we were so young when it arrived that we've forgotten exactly what we trained it to do. And, it's been with us for so long and we are so used to it's behavior, we aren't particularly surprised when another 'new friend or idea' is run off: 'oh well,' we think, 'I don't need to be friends with anyone my dog doesn't like.' And with that decision made, often we simply return to life as it has been with maybe a new acquisition that is so similar to the old life and so tame, the guard dog paid no attention to its arrival. But despite that decision, the shell of persona-life is still too tight and the inner dolls are still clamoring and so, the cycle of relief and then uncomfortableness and then discontent will continue. How does one change this cycle?


First of all, it is easier to contemplate 'change' if the beginning place is a change of 'cycle' rather than a change of self. Your true and authentic self does not need to change. For most of us who at some point in life, found ourselves maybe drinking too much, or working way too much, or contemplating an affair too easily, or shopping too much or exercising too much or eating too much: and none of the 'too much' really added to life as pleasurable, the problem was that the true self was hidden. Hidden and rarely interacted with regularly and meaningfully.


It is impossible to truly be content and happy with life unless a person is regularly interacting with and from their authentic self. For most of us this is a confusing thought because having confused our persona-self: jobs, responsibilities, life-roles and the 'perks' of those things: social approval, money, material acquisitions and discretionary freedoms; shopping, vacations and extra houses, cars or whatevers) as "me", then, possibly I am unsure if I would even recognize my authentic self.! This is not only a confusing thought, it is a lonely thought and a very scary thought. Yet, as lonely and scary as the idea of having 'hidden away' the true self is for many of us, we can also recognize the truth of it because we are aware of some kind of yearning: a deep longing for something we can't quite name, that is with us if we allow our self to be still and unoccupied for any length of time . Truthfully, it is because of that deep yearning; a kind of undefined loneliness, that we generally learn to not allow ourselves to be still and unoccupied too often and certainly not regularly.


Learning to be 'still and unoccupied' is the first practice to be acquired if a person is willing to set out on the adventure of inquiring into truth and excavating some layers of shell in order to find the authentic self. The second practice is actually not so much a 'practice' as it is just acquiring knowledge and one important piece of knowledge is a thorough understanding of the pit bull called the defended ego. Knowledge about the defended ego is essential because in order to avoid being bitten: yes, your defended ego can even turn on you, you will need some practical information on how to approach the defended ego and then how to make friends with it so you may retrain the ego. Yes, retrain the ego. Ego's are required for living in the world but what is nice is an ego that is able to do the bidding of the adult rather than an ego that still lives out of survival defenses. You trained the one you have right now, you are perfectly capable of retraining it.


Why is learning to be still and unoccupied for a short period of time each day necessary in order to inquire into truth? Because truth is often quite shy and initially whispers very, very softly and so is rarely heard over the shouting of the world and our guard-dog ego. I know, this sounds boring: set your alarm for 20 minutes earlier than normal, get up, grab your coffee or tea or whatever and sit quietly for 15 minutes. That's all as a start: 15 minutes of quiet sitting; optimal if you are outdoors, the next best is being able to see the outdoors. If you are indoors and the 'quiet' makes you antsy find some instrumental, classical is best, music and put it on softly. Do not use ear-phones because putting in earphones is a 'message' that tells the self that the intent of the time is to listen to music and that is not the intention. The intention is to simply be present to 15 minutes of life without a plan. I'll be honest, this is one reason being outdoors is optimal: when you are out in nature all your senses are engaged: by the air, birds, trees, sky and whatever form of nature can be seen and so it is much easier to enjoy 'doing nothing' if you are not used to taking this kind of 'nothing' time.


That is the beginning step: making a commitment to doing this action a minimum of 4 times a week for one month. Oh, yes, the reason for doing this in the morning is twofold. One, the action of setting an alarm in order to take the time signals to you that you are making a specific intentional action on your own behalf: this kind of action is referred to as a practice. The second reason for doing this upon waking is that you will begin your quiet time with a fresh, unused mind and this is virtually impossible to achieve as the day goes on.


Next topic is the guard dog defended ego. I have a great image for the column and it's a fascinating topic.