Sunday Story…You Can’t Always Get What You Want…

But sometimes you get what you need.

The problem is what you want and what you need are not necessarily related and rarely are they the same. And what you think you want is not what you need. If the universe is always handing us challenges and lessons to learn, those are the things we need.

I don’t always like the things I need. The things I get are often uncomfortable, messy and hard to digest. I sometimes want to reject them and give them back. But there they are anyway.

I want what I want. As I get older what I want becomes a little more complex and complicated. And our strategies for getting what we want become more complex, complicated and convoluted. When we were very young, our primary way of getting what we want is simple: yell, scream, cry and throw a fit. It is undistinguishable from the strategy we use to get what we need. A baby is hungry and it cries, when wet he cries. His way of getting his needs met is simple…cry. His way of getting his wants fulfilled is also simple…cry.

When we get a little older our strategies shift. We have all seen small children in the checkout line at the grocery store screaming and throwing a fit over the denial of some small treat. I want what I want and what I want is that piece of candy. And I am going to throw a fit until I get it. In so many ways this is basic bullying behavior. If I get what I want in this way I will continue this strategy until it stops working.

As adults we sometimes engage in a very similar behavior. Sometimes it is a little more subtle, we don’t often see grownups stomping their feet, screaming and crying to get what they want. But we do see them yelling, giving each other hand signals, swearing and threatening to get what they want. Again this is the heart of the bully…to try to impose their will on someone else to get what they want. Not negotiating, not conversing, not trying to get needs met, just I want what I want and I don’t care what it is going to take to get it…even if I have to steam roll you to get it. The Eternal Adolescent…self centered, selfish, and unable, unwilling to consider any other viewpoint.

This disease… the Eternal Adolescent…pervades our society. I don’t want to save for a new TV, so I charge it. I don’t want to stop at the red light so I run it. I don’t want to be responsible for my life so I blame my parents, my upbringing, my economic status, the fact I didn’t get a new BMW for my 16th birthday…so now I’m 40 and I ‘m going to do what I want and the rest of the world will just have to like it. We are seeing the repercussions of this attitude right now in the economic meltdown we are in the middle of. Buy more house than you can afford, the market will bail you out. Borrow against your house and buy disposable goods, go on vacations, eat drink and be merry. This, my friends, is the hangover of our adolescent behavior. Like waking up and wondering how you got home, what you did, what you said, our self indulgent behavior has put us in a pickle. And now we pick up the pieces. We get to grow up, not just grow old.

We are getting what we need. Right now. We need to reap this harvest, and a bountiful harvest it is. Unfortunately it isn’t the harvest I thought I planted. We thought we were going to harvest easy money, lots of things on our shelves, and a life where we never had to plan and save for the future. Instead this harvest is going to bring in responsibility, an abundance of actions and consequences matching up, and an inspired notion of what is really important. My new BMW, 50” plasma TV and Mc Mansion is not going to warm my soul on a cold Sunday morning. My connection to the divine, my friends and family who don’t care about my car and the idea that I may be enough in and of myself is what is going to carry me through this dark time.

You get to decide what enough is. What success is. What will serve you on your mission to serve the world. Bill Gates is doing a pretty good job with his cornucopia of dollars. Mother Theresa did a pretty good job with her abundance of compassion. We are being forced to grow up. We can kick and scream and act like a spoiled child resisting the inevitable OR we can embrace the new paradigm. The new paradigm that requires us to accept what we need and quit whining about what we want. A paradigm of responsibility and accountability. One where what we need and what we want might someday match up…IF we can ever realize that what we need is to grow our soul to harvest true satisfaction. I think I’m going to get me some of that (satisfaction).

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”

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Sunday Story...Dance Little Sister Dance

Sunday Story…Dance Little Sister Dance

I have a confession: I love to dance. In dance I find the divinity that lives inside of me. I often dance alone, by myself in the house or the studio. Some music will be playing and I will get up and start moving. And I have had transcendental experiences while dancing. The kind where you are no longer connected to your body and you are just moving the way the music and the energy pushes you. It was not always this way. For many years I lost that connection. I lost the cord that connected me to the divine and showed up through dance.

The connection started to break in High School. I was the crazy dancer. No one wanted to dance with me and I wasn’t aware that I could dance alone in public. People made fun of me. It got a little better as I got older but then, in my twenties, I stopped dancing. It was like a light went out. I still moved on the dance floor but the spark wasn’t there. The connection was broken, the line was down.

There was any number of reasons this happened. Part of me thought I had to “grow up” and be an “adult”. No one else was dancing like me…I had no way to know that the presence that moved me to movement was not human. But the primary reason it happened had nothing to do with the dancing itself.

You see, dance was just how the divine showed up in me. I had lost that connection. The connection to the flow, the chi, the life force that runs through the earth, the heavens, and each of us. I was no longer connected to the well of life. I was just going through the motions, doing what I thought was expected of me, raising my children, making a living, drinking too much, watching too much TV and eating food that barely nourished my body. I allowed some pre-conceived notions of what life should look like to dictate how I moved in the world.

When I started Martial Arts training the connection started to rebuild. It took years and years to rebuild the connection to my real self. The one that got buried by career, relationships, children and money. Inside every one of us is our true self. Our original face, the one we should be wearing. The one covered up by all the masks we have put on over the years. The process of taking off our masks is painful and dirty. It requires us to tear down some of the identities we have built up, to strip off layers of our skin. This is a painful process. And there is no easy way that I know of to do it. The alternative is much easier…go to the Doc, get some Paxil or Prozac or something and spend the next few years numbed out until you die, wondering why and what happened.
Once you get clear on who you are and who you are not it is much easier to rekindle the connection to the divine spark. Small children are automatically connected to the divine...they can do anything, be anyone. They still hear the voices that came before birth, the connections to soul. Ripping off our humanly imposed limitations allows the channels to get clear again. And then we can hear the voices as well.

The connection to the divine lives in each of us. And it shows up differently in each of us. Some of us write, dance, sculpt, paint, and dance. Look where you are creating things. Maybe in your garden? Maybe in your decorating? Look at where you find joy just in the doing in the creating, not necessarily in the accomplishing. Look at where you feel you are playing. The divine creates joy in the creation, in the being of the thing. When we are connected to this source we can begin to find it more and more often. The Tao, the path, the flow of the universe moves constantly. When we connect to the flow our being becomes harmonious with what we are doing. In other words, our doing becomes our being and our being becomes what we are doing. The difference between work and play disappears…I am doing precisely what I should be doing at any moment because I am being exactly who I am supposed to be.

When I finally found my original face I began to move again. Freely without concern for the opinions and approbation of others. A few years ago I began to write again. What you are reading right now is my original face…the spark of the divine burning within and shining outward. This face will continue to get brighter and brighter the more I stay in touch with it.

What does your original face look like? Have you seen it lately? Ever? Would you like too? Are you willing to do what it takes to rebuild your connection with the flow of the universe? For me the price of dis-connection was too high. The price of not dancing was the theft of my soul. I stole it from the world, from the divine and stashed it behind all my masks. Now, I dance because I must. I write because I must. For me. For the divine. For the world.

Care to dance?

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”

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Sunday Story...I Fought the Law

And the law won. The law always wins. Why? Because it is the law. There is no getting around certain things. I can deny the law of gravity all I want but when I drop something it still falls. Natural laws can not be bent or broken. Every once in a while our understanding of one of those laws can shift but the law itself never wavers. Unlike the laws of man, where something can be legal and bad for you, Natural law is immutable, it just is. Let’s talk about the laws of karma and one of its corollaries…the law of unintended consequences.

I hear a lot of ramblings from people about the law of karma. “Karma will get him.” Or…”that’s his karma.” As if we could possibly know what some else’s karma could be. Or how they came to such a place. Karma, in a sentence, is the law of moral causation. If I do harm, the result will be harm back to me. Pretty simple, really. So, how do we explain good things happening to bad people? How does a dictator who steals millions from the treasury, orders the death of thousands, and creates a reign of terror among the populace end up living in the lap of luxury and has all the apparent trappings of success, comfort and ease? Or why do children end up with cancer?

Karma is a funny little law. We each create our own heaven. Or we create our own hell. And they might be waiting for us after we leave this particular existence. And maybe this existence is the heaven or hell for acts gone before. We really don’t know. What we can rely on is that the law of karma is in effect. We just don’t know the time frame that it is running on. Perhaps if it was immediate…like putting your hand on a hot stove…we would all be a little more aware of our thoughts, words, and deeds. If you eat the wrong kind of mushrooms you will die in very short order. If you say something with bad intent you may not pay for it for a long time. Karma affords us a particular sort of freedom. The freedom to experience the results we create. Our current experience is the result of our thoughts, words, and deeds that we have already done. This is not arbitrary or capricious. If you don’t like the results you are having, make different decisions. The key to using the law of karma, the law of cause and effect, is becoming aware of the choices we make in each moment. When we are more conscious and present, we can choose actions and thoughts that will nurture rather than hurt us. When we have a decision to make, it’s useful to ask ourselves, “Which action is most likely to bring happiness and fulfillment to me and everyone affected by my choice?”

Unintended consequences are outcomes not limited to the results originally intended by the original action. Again this is pretty simple. We see this operating in the drug world…side effects are unintended consequences, adverse reactions are unintended consequences. The drug works on the disease, might even cure the disease only to leave you ravaged by the cure. In many ways chemotherapy is like this. It kills the cancer and makes the patient very sick. You will recover from this sickness; you might not recover from the cancer if you don’t do it. We often do things with an expected result. And we get that result. BUT we also get a lot of other things we really didn’t expect, things we did not foresee happening.


The laws of karma and the law of unintended consequences are closely linked. Our words, thoughts and actions have consequences. We do not always know the entire import of those actions. If I knew that I would get cancer and die 6 months after my first cigarette, would I smoke it? What if it was 60 years later? What if it was in my next lifetime? Of course this works in a positive way as well. We often call it a windfall or a serendipitous effect. When we get some benefit we did not realize would come to us from some action. Unintended and intended consequences are what come to us from our actions. They are part of the karmic process. Our karma and the results of our actions are part of the imprints we have received over our lifetimes. Those imprints may have more to do with the unintended consequences than we think. Perhaps those unintended consequences are in fact the consequences we are calling forward due to our previous actions.

I do not know all the things that will happen from any given action I may take. I do not know the “butterfly “effect my actions may have across the energetic pond of the world. So, shall I just sit around on a mountain top and meditate? Not really “do” anything? I think not. What I am going to do is operate inside the law. I am going to maintain my present moment awareness…I am going to keep my intention to bring happiness and fulfillment to myself and the people around me…I am going accept the present as it is---the sum of my previous actions---and I am going to manifest the future by the actions I am taking today. In other words I am not going to fight the law…I am going to be one with the law so I am ensure a future built by design not chance. Care to join me?

Namaste

John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
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Sunday Story…Living your Legacy



I am dying. So are you.

Every day I get a little closer to the end of my life. Each of us does. This is the inevitable end of the road for each of us. We are going to leave this physical body behind and the existence we know currently will be no more.

There are several ways to look at this in my mind. One is to look at it with utter defeat and live life like nothing matters. Eat whatever you want, drink, smoke, don’t exercise and generally live life like it doesn’t matter. At the other end of the spectrum is living in utter fear of germs and anything that might shorten the days we have left. Then there is the middle ground. Taking care of your physical body, keeping your mind elastic by being a constant learner, and being connected to the divine source while living in a way that is both harmonious and easeful.

There are so many ways we live past our physical bodies. Both good and not so good. Our children and our children’s children will provide a legacy that will continue for generations in the future. Will that legacy will one of providing service and value to others? Will your progeny value education and ethics?

What are you building that will be standing when you are gone? Are you working on famous or infamous? A Taj Mahal? The Great American Novel? The next Microsoft?

Maybe the question is really: how will we remember you? How will you remember me? Will you be remembered? Why? We remember too many people for their excesses. For their early departures. For their infamous behavior and their outrageous conduct. And, sadly we don’t remember all too many people. The ones that failed to find their purpose. The ones that didn’t even bother looking for a purpose, or denied who and what hat purpose may have been. Those scared, cowering souls afraid to step out of the shadow of the status quo and into the light of transformation.

I don’t need to be famous. I don’t want to be Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates (I do admire all of them for various reasons though). I do not have an overriding need to be trotting about on the international stage. I do have a need to evolve into the very best human being I can be. To live with purpose and with passion and a zeal for life. I want to be remembered. I want to leave a legacy.

And to leave a legacy I need to live a legacy life. You can’t live a legacy perched in front of the television popping an edible cheese-like non-food product. You have to work at it. Today. Tomorrow. The next day. Until the days are gone. If I live a legacy I will leave a legacy.
Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.
Frances Moore Lappe, O Magazine, May 2004

Another quote I have heard and can’t remember goes something like this…when I die I don’t want to go out into some sedate well preserved state. No, when I go I want to slide in to the grave in a cloud of dust and a trail of deeds yet be told of, completely used up and screaming woohoo, what a ride!

Here is an exercise for you, one you may have done before…Write your obituary. Write it as if you died tomorrow. Make it a long one…you know, the kind you see in the paper when someone really important dies. Because you are important. Then write another one. Only this time write it like you died 10 years from now. What else will you have accomplished between now and then? What goals will you have reached? What projects will you have created and finished, what legacy will you leave? What deeds are you going to do that we can tell stories about. What mountains are you going to climb, children are you going to teach, lives are you going to reach, hearts are you going to touch? It’s all there for you to pluck if you just get up and start moving. Give up the expectations and start dreaming and start putting those dreams into the real world. If not you then who?

Now stop worrying about leaving a legacy and start living your legacy. Now. As in Right Now!

Namaste

John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
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