Many people have visceral reactions to the word God. Fear, discomfort, aversion. But the definition of God is changing. Old ideas of God come from the top-down hierarchical paradigm. God is being understood once again as bottom-up.

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Creating true joy and lasting happiness in your life requires your active participation in your life at all levels.

We are taught to be passive.

In school, we sit and absorb, and then we take tests. Schools were originally created to train workers. Obedience is inherent in the system. First obedience to the teacher, then obedience to the boss. At home, you may also have been taught to be obedient to your parents.

Obedience rests on a few simple rules:

1. Don’t feel.
2. Don’t do what you want.
3. Do what we want.

These rules are supported by other rules that you may recognize more directly like:

1. Don’t cry. (Hide your feelings or suppress them.)
2. Don’t rock the boat. (Your creativity is not welcome.)
3. Don’t speak out of turn. (Self-expression is less important than obedience.)
4. Don’t show off. (Your aliveness hurts others.)
5. Don’t be weird. (Your inherent uniqueness makes you wrong.)

Not Feeling Means Not Knowing What You Want

Let’s examine the first one: “Don’t feel”. Don’t cry. Don’t be angry. Don’t be sad. Don’t express your feelings or talk about them. Don’t be so sensitive. We internalize this so that we end up unaware of what our feelings are at all.

Translated, this is a message that says: disconnect to what is alive in you.

Why does this matter?

Feelings are Roadmaps to Happiness.

Our feelings are the only things that tell us what we need and want, moment by moment.

Without the informational guideposts of our feelings, we have no idea what we, as organisms, as living beings, need, to make our systems run smoothly, and what would most deeply satisfy us.

Our culture has this myth that runs through it that says “Oh, happiness, it’s such a mystery.” We see happiness as luck. Or as temperament - something inborn that can’t be changed.

I call bullshit. Happiness is not luck. It is something you can learn to create.

We have been systematically trained to not be aware of the very things that tell us whether we are happy or not, and in what way, and what we might do about it. This is the function of feelings.

Feelings are a complex system of internal feedback. They are complicated. Not mysterious. Not impossible to understand. They can be sussed out. The idea that emotions are inexplicable or too complex to understand is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It takes time and energy, but most of that is spent unlearning and peeling off the layers of falsehood that we’ve learned about ourselves, and the understandable layers of anger, resignation, frustration, and fatigue that have resulted.

Obedience Rests on Disconnection From Feelings

The second and third rules of our training are to be obedient. This is much easier once you are disconnected from what is alive in you. Living, feeling people get uppity when they are forced to do things. But people who are bewildered about who they truly are will be obedient much more easily.

Without an internal compass, anybody else’s compass seems like a good idea.

We all have needs for purpose and meaning. If we are socialized out of looking inside to what those are for ourselves, we will latch onto things outside ourselves. Then an interesting thing happens.

1. We internalize it.
2. We identify with it.
3. We seek it.
4. We defend it.
5. We socialize others in the same way.

So while you are uncovering your programming, you will likely notice you have been programming other people. Welcome to planet Earth.

Notice when you are socializing other people to obey or not feel or not be where they are at, see if you can shift to acceptance and allowing instead. Do the same thing internally. I guarantee it will lead to more happiness.

Decolonizing Your Brain

Dig around in there, and let go of anything that is not essential and real and meaningful to you. Disregard your programming. Question anything that doesn’t feel like it will lead you to joyful aliveness. Decolonize and reclaim your own mind and heart. Question the assumptions you have about your feelings, your history, your beliefs, the Universe, God, your life, who you are and who you can be. It’s all up for grabs because most of it was fed to you by someone. So it’s yours now. You can do with it what you want to. All of it is up to you.

When you come across a spot where your aliveness was squashed repeatedly in the past, you may need to grieve. Grieving is a process of deeply feeling, breathing, crying, and letting go. It is an organic process and it may take a while to work itself out. Grief feels uncomfortable for most of us, but the results of it are that all the energy wrapped up in trying to keep you from feeling the trauma gets released and is available to you for creating a life you truly enjoy.

When doing this work, I recommend not villianizing your “oppressors”. Don’t bother. They (probably) didn’t realize what they were doing. Feel angry, feel everything. Really! Honor your pain by feeling it. Then get on with changing your mind and your life. Making someone else wrong doesn’t help you create something new. The juicy stuff is in connecting with your own needs, and sometimes stories about what should or shouldn’t have happened keep us from feeling those needs. They protect us from the feelings of grief and loss. But our energy is tied up in those feelings, and dropping from the story into those feelings frees up those energies.

It’s Not All Black and White

For most of us, we got some mix of encouragement to connect to ourselves and being socialized for obedience. We end up with a mishmash of things we do for ourselves and that we really enjoy and things we do because we think it will make us a “good person” or make people like us–a riddled complex of conflicting thoughts and feelings trying to surface. That’s OK. We are all somewhere in that spectrum. What I want to promote is not a new program to create a perfect life. Rather I want to promote an ongoing investigation into the source of our own happiness and inspire a cheery willingness to go to the messy places in ourselves to discover what is really there. And I also want to promote a culture that is aware of these dynamics and supports each other to be our natural, free, authentic selves with each other, whatever that looks like in the moment. Can we allow and support each other to feel, to be real, to be messy and creative and confused and exuberant and alive? That’s the kind of world I want to live in.

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At the Beer and Blog yesterday, Marshall Kirkpatrick talked about how to make your corporate blog more popular. One strategy he suggested was to follow Techmeme and write posts relevant to popular items and thus join the conversation. The theory is that by responding to popular waves of interest in the online conversation in your chosen industry, you get to be part of the conversation while it’s hot.

So here is my experiment and the results, not in terms of traction (I got none so far), but in terms of my internal experience of joyfulness as a result of trying this method of marketing. See, as a joy ninja, I don’t want to just be popular, I want to be happy. I want to do activities that come from authentic aliveness and intrinsic motivation. Including the ways I promote my ideas.

The conversation I responded to was the hubbub around Jason Calacanis’s post about how to save money as a startup by firing people who weren’t workaholics. I read and commented on a few blogs with posts about the conversation, and wrote a post myself.

Then I asked myself the question I often do “Am I happier now than I was before I did this activity?”

The answer came back as “NO”. I feel kind of cheap, like I just contrived interest in something, so I could get the result I wanted.

Then I asked myself “Would I be happier if I had gotten some traction, if my post was up on Techmeme like this guy’s?“

When I checked in with myself, the answer still came back “NO”.

I probably would have felt excited, for a bit, patted myself on the back, maybe squealed a little and twittered “Look at me!”. But happiness? Aliveness? I don’t really think so.

I have blogged before about intrinsic motivation. It’s when you do something because you want to, not because of the result you get. I wrote that post out of extrinsic motivation. The only intrinsic part was the experimental nature of it: ooh, can I really manipulate myself into being on the top of the conversation? The actual piece of writing was more contrived than not. Which is why I think it didn’t bring happiness to write it.

Now I’m not the kind of person who generalizes these discoveries into “Marketing is evil”. I think marketing is fascinating and useful, but what I also think is that when people get attached to the potential extrinsic rewards of marketing they lose touch with the intrinsic rewards of having a conversation they enjoy. They become less happy, their writing becomes more contrived and less alive, and everybody loses. Blogs get filled with “me too” posts and comments, people spend their time and energy trying to get famous instead of trying to understand what is interesting about themselves and the world, and the whole point of life is missed.

So I think it’s important that the world has Marshall Kirkpatrick because I imagine he enjoys this kind of marketing work intrinsically. And it’s important for those of us who might not be motivated thusly to connect to our own motivation and act from that. The result, I posit, will be a net increase of joy on the planet, not to mention a higher signal-to-noise ratio on the web.

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I’m reading Jason Calacanis’s follow-up post correcting that when he advised would-be start-ups to “Fire people who are not workaholics”, what he really meant was “Fire people who don’t love their work”. His second post sounds better, but if you look at his original list of money-saving ideas, many of them seem specifically focused around “facilitating” his people putting in more time.

What is Missing From His Start-up Culture

There seems to be a clear preference for people who are high-energy, high-output, long-hours types - and who enjoy that. So far that’s fine with me–I think people should choose environments where they thrive and if people are happy doing it then all to the good. However, I’m wondering a few things:

a) Is Calacanis is missing people who actually do love their work - and could contribute to the company in ways he doesn’t realize–because they don’t show up as people who are gung-ho “workaholics” and wouldn’t fit into that culture? My basic thought here is that a monoculture is not the best way to get the creative output.

b) Creativity demands periods of integration - “doing nothing” - breaks in output. If he takes those all out of his workers day, will they end up less creative, probably without realizing it?

c) Is the long-term health of the company going to suffer because these kinds of cultures are simply not healthy systems? They lead to role-engulfment (when someone accepts a role as a primary definition of their self) which leads to burn-out, which leads to turnover, which translates to loss of productivity and morale.

Is it Workaholism or is it Passion?

Contrast Calacanis’s list with 37signals workplace experiments, and their direct response to Calacanis’s post, Fire the workaholics. Their response is that workaholics don’t actually make good workers: they work harder not smarter, they burn out, they have skewed values which lead to poor judgment calls. I think that’s true.

However, I don’t think Calacanis is a workaholic. He is saying that he loves what he does, and I believe him because he says that it’s a game to him. Play. Workaholics do not find work to be play. They use work as a way to avoid feeling pain, and they do not get joy from it, only relief/escape from dealing with their problems. They work compulsively, not joyfully. Calacanis is saying he thrives in his work environment. Workaholics do not thrive by working, they cope by working.

So Calacanis is working because he loves it, but are his employees? And if they are, does he really need to encourage them to spend more time at work? I’m wondering if he really connected to how much he loves what he does, and carefully interviewed people to make sure they would be happy and thrive in that kind of environment, then wouldn’t he trust that they would show up and do more because they want to, because they love to, not because they are being “encouraged” to? That’s where his list comes across less clearly to me. I’m not sure if he fully trusts what he writes in his second post–because it seems like in the first post, he is not thinking of his employees quite like “game-mates” but rather like “production hands”.

Choice and Feedback

My interest, of course, is in how can everybody be happy. For people who want to be in a high-intensity environment, I want them to have that. For people who enjoy a more laid back environment, I want them to have that too. I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all culture. It’s OK for people to be different, want different kinds of cultures, find what works for themselves and help other people find their own place of play.

People have options. Calacanis says that he is doing people a favor by firing them if they are unhappy and/or not fitting in, and I tend to agree. What I’m left wondering is if Calanasis is doing himself a favor by firing them. Some may be legitimately not interested in a high-intensity workplace, but some may be responding to some fundamental un-healthiness in his corporate culture.

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This weekend I did Naka Ima. I really enjoyed it. I got a clarity about attachments and the mechanics of releasing them that I didn’t have before.

It basically goes like this:

1. If you feel tension or nervousness or anger or other strong and persistent emotions, this often indicates an attachment.
2. Identify the attachment. What are you wanting or not wanting? Get a clear sense of that and say it out loud. For instance one of mine was “I want my father to be happy”. Note: when I said this I felt a charge, an emotional attachment to this, not just a preference for it. This is what indicates an attachment. I felt a tension in my gut and I also had a story that went “If my father is happy, then I will get the love I want from him”.
3. Ask yourself if you are willing to let go of the attachment in this moment.
4. Breathe. Focus on pushing your exhale out while you mentally relax your grip on the outcome you want. Breathe through any emotions that come up around it.

In Naka-Ima, you do this while being witnessed by others, maintaining eye contact with them. I’m not sure if this is essential, but it helps. It especially helps break denial, because you are being seen. It brings emotions to the surface so you can breathe through them.

Letting go itself is a non-linear process. You can’t predict exactly when it will happen or how. The breathing is an essential part of it, which indicates to me that letting go is a decision that arises from a deeper place than the conscious mind. The mind can influence it, but not force it to happen.

Letting Go is a Muscle You Can Develop

You will know you have let go because you will feel as if you have stepped through a veil and are in another place. Then, once you have experienced that the first time, you will know what it feels like and when the attachment comes up again, you will be able to choose to release it again. The more times you release it, the easier it gets, and the more used to letting go you will become. It’s like a muscle that you learn to exercise.

Surrender vs. Letting Go

I’d experienced surrender before around attachments, but still remained attached. That was more a sense of “Ok, I let go of trying to fight or get rid of the attachment.”. I resigned myself to the attachment being there and gave up trying to change it. This did provide a great sense of relief, and gave me space from the obsession, but it did not release the attachment itself. Perhaps surrender is a stage of coming out of denial and being willing to be with what is. With big hairy core attachments, perhaps this is a necessary stage?

Related Skills

These are things I am guessing make it easier to learn how to let go:

• An intellectual understanding and that letting go does indeed make life more wonderful. If your mind does not agree that letting go is a strategy worth pursuing, you won’t do it. For instance, if you really believe that “I need you to survive”, then you won’t let go of your attachment to that person. Thus sometimes what helps is correcting distorted thinking and getting clarity that letting go is actually a worthwhile strategy. What helps with this? Byron Katie’s work.
• Clarity between “attachments” and “preferences”. There are things we like better than other things, and this is fine. We are only attached when we suffer in conjunction with the things we want or don’t want. Letting go does not remove the preference, only the attachment–which in most cases makes it much easier to meet the preference! For instance if your preference is to be loved, an attachment to being loved makes it harder to feel the love that you are already receiving.
• An awareness of the sensations in your body and being able to name what is alive in you in the moment. What helps with this? Hakomi (body-centered psychotherapy), any kind of body conscicousness practice like Authentic Movement or Ecstatic Dance.

Better Living Through Letting Go

The most striking difference I feel is an inner sense of calm. Before this weekend, I was carrying a constant feeling of annoyance that lived just under the surface. There was so much about the world that bugged me. Now I feel an inner OKness with life that I just didn’t have before. I think I vacillated between excitement about a new strategy that I thought would change everything and make my world better, and annoyance that the strategy didn’t actually transform everything. I was missing a sense of calmness and acceptance of the world as it is.

I’m curious how this transformation will affect me in the days and weeks to come. Will my warrior-ness dissipate? Who would I be without my ninja conviction? I got a glimpse this weekend: curious, friendly, relaxed, calm, present, but most of all: open.

I noticed this weekend I felt happiest not when I got a great insight, but when I was present with someone and felt wide open and inviting. I felt like I was providing a big warm space for them to exist in, and I loved that. I felt delighted to offer that.

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So I’m reading issue #33 of What is Enlightenment, (it’s not the newest one), and Andrew Cohen says:

…unless the individual is willing to own their own shadow, they are going to continue acting out of all those repressed impulses and continue creating karma, which means acting out of ignorance and unconsciousness in ways that cause suffering to others. And the whole definition of enlightenment is that, at least ideally, we are supposed to become so conscious, so awake, that we don’t create karma anymore.”

I agree, except I see one little piece missing. The sentence “cause suffering to others” I would add “and the self”. This is so key to me, because I believe what turns people off, at least in our culture, to spiritual learning and whatnot, is that the emphasis is on “doing good”. We’ve all been bored to death with do-gooding. The selfless Jesus-cross-martyr spirituality is over, it’s done, and it’s just not ever going to be hip again. This is where NVC comes in with its brilliant premise of being radically selfish. By pointing out very clearly (not theoretically, but practically), how when you get your needs met at anothers expense you end up paying for it later (with their resentment, anger, and unwillingness to cooperate), it shows a way to care about others while being totally about your own needs. You end up being about others needs because you get that there’s no way around that if you really want to be happy and have your own needs completely fulfilled.

I’d like to shift the discussion of karma from always centering on “what you do to others” to “what you do to yourself”. The same principles apply no matter where the harm lies. If you suppress your own needs, neglect them, meet some needs at the cost of other of your needs, you are creating more karma for yourself. (I hope as a side effect that this idea helps pop you out of the karma-is-punishment mindset.)

If you have a conditioned pattern of reacting to emotional stress by overworking (for instance), each time you do it you re-enact it, thus ensuring that the next time the situation comes around again you are going to feel that same urge to react in the same way. Just as in the quote above, by not facing your shadow (your repressed feelings, thoughts, and ultimately, needs), you are acting out of unconsciousness in ways that cause you to suffer.

The bottom line is that no matter whose needs don’t get met - yours or someone elses - any unconscious pattern you haven’t dissolved is going to come up again until you can stay conscious of it and make a choice in the face of it, rather than react.

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Sometimes I observe a sense of confounded inexplicability behind the questions asked about school shootings. “How could they possibly do this?” etc. I want to offer two things: some ideas on what could be up for these kids, and also a clear conviction that the problem is not mysterious or unsolvable. This distinction is important to me because a problem is never solved until people believe it is solvable. Before that, they cry and throw up their hands but don’t get down to work. A willingness to change things generally comes after a certainty that things can in fact be changed, and the change will be better than the current situation.

So. Why would a kid shoot his classmates?

I would guess they have unmet needs for meaning, hope, belonging, acceptance, connection to something greater, choice, contribution, and connection.

Many of these kids have all their “sustenance” needs met – but not the real life-giving needs named above. I think “basic needs” for human go beyond food and shelter – we need a lot of emotional needs met to feel OK. I think studies have shown that emotional abuse can be worse than physical abuse – emotional neglect is worse than physical neglect.

I don’t see these incidents as isolated or strange. I see them as symptoms of these needs not being met by our culture in general. Kids, especially teenagers, don’t have much of a context to deal with the pain of all those human needs not getting met, and yet they feel that pain keenly. Our culture doesn’t encourage admitting that these needs aren’t met – and talking about them openly–and brainstorming solutions that would meet them. If you’re a teenager, and don’t know any of those needs will ever get met – let alone even have a consciousness that those need are there – and are just swirling in the pain and confusion of them not being met – that is a very desperate place to be.

That’s why I am a fan of NVC, because it can really change our culture to be one where everyone’s needs are met in profound ways – and the first step is learning to have a consciousness around needs in general – that they exist, that pain and violence are a result of them not being met, and that by talking about them, two of our deepest needs can be met: connection/empathy and contribution to each other’s wellbeing.

This clarity about the cause of suffering is essential. Without understanding the cause of something, it is very difficult to remedy it.

I also value NVC for humanizing “otherness” – seeing these kids as human, as kids in a great deal of pain, not inexplicable, but rather extreme expressions of the desperation any of us might feel in a similar situation. If we can own their expressions of pain as echoes of our own, then we can start to understand each others’ pain, and from that understanding, create healing and new ways to address these needs.

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I’ve been part of a conversation about authenticity and transparency over the last week with Sarah Dopp which has led to a very spot-on Venn diagram of transparency vs authenticity - the overlap is choice.

I’m excited about the clarity this provides. I think it also points to a more general Venn:

When we can all let each other make our own choices about how we get our needs met, whether the need is for authenticity or privacy or something else, then we’ll stop arguing about the “proper” or “right” way to be doing things, and we’ll all get along better.

This is why I love NVC: you see someone’s strategy, and if it bothers you, you then become curious and guess what need they are meeting. Something like this, “OH, so when you choose to not be transparent, you are meeting your need for privacy?”. Then you get to have a conversation where you are curious about where the other person is at and why they are doing what they are doing. Bingo, authentic connection.

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Many people are motivated either by the carrot or the stick: reward or punishment. Reward and punishment is embedded in our education system, our justice system, our economic system, and many parenting models. It starts with wanting to get good grades and gold stars. Or avoid disappointing our parents.

I believe to be truly creative and free (not to mention happy) it’s essential to root out the extrinsic motivating factors from our brain and do what is in our hearts. True motivation is “What is alive in me today? What makes my heart sing? What am I passionate and excited about doing?”.

Some definitions

Intrinsic motivation = when you do something because you want to.

Extrinsic motivation = when you do something because of the result it will get you - generally, either avoiding punishment or receiving a reward.

Our culture runs on extrinsic motivation. Schools, parenting, the justice system, our economic system - they are all focused on rewarding certain behaviors and punishing other behaviors.

There is research showing that rewarding people damages their intrinsic motivation to do a task, even when they previously enjoyed doing it. Once you get hooked on the reward, you lose touch with your internal motivation. But neither punishment or reward work as long term motivators.

Extrinsic motivation is bad for your mental health

In our culture, a mid-life crisis is expected. Why? Why do we end up with people who are 30, 40, 50 and wondering what they are living for anyway?

I think this phenomenon and the high percentages of depression in industrialized countries is related to our focus on what an activitity will get us rather than finding and doing the activities we enjoy for their own sake.

You know what it’s called when you enjoy what you are doing? Play. We have a special word for doing activity we enjoy, because so much of the time we are doing things we think we ‘have’ to do but don’t want to. What is up with that? These are our lives we are talking about.

Many people give up on living lives that are truly enjoyable every day. They believe this myth of “there are just some things you’ve gotta do” or “that’s just the way it is”. Well I think that is B.S. There are lots of choices in life, and the major one we all have is whether or not to give up on what we truly want, or keep being creative and persistent until we make it happen.

Protecting what is precious

I’ll tell you what gives you that kind of energy: being devoted to protecting and following your heart.

There are lots of things in the world that will sap your energy, if you let them. Watching the TV news, for instance, will just about do me in. So I stopped. For 10 years I haven’t gone near the major news channels. Because I could see that it would destroy something inside me: my faith in the world, in humanity.

It’s up to you to protect what is fragile and precious in yourself: your true desires, your dreams, your faith in yourself, your belief that you can create a life for yourself that is what you want. Not to mention your faith in your fellow humans, that we are all doing the best we can, and we will get there someday–to the world we all can enjoy.

We can change the world, but to do that we have to believe it can be changed. There is so much out there that is negative. I’m not saying live in a cave or in denial. I’m saying do what you need to do to protect what can be so easily damaged. That still small voice in yourself can get drowned out by despair pretty easily. It’s up to you to fight for it, in a world that can be very harsh.

Pay yourself first

When you catch a vision of who you are, of what you want to do, that comes straight from your heart–say yes to it. Whatever it is, put it first. Before your job, before what you “have to do”. Take the financial concept of “pay yourself first” and apply it to your dreams. Pay your energy, your passion, to yourself first.

It takes dedication. It takes being willing to go against the grain of pessimism and cynicism. But it is the birthplace of joy. Nothing feels better than knowing who you are and that you are going for what you truly believe in: that you are giving yourself to your path, your purpose, your heart’s longing.

To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else— means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

~ e.e. cummings

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This is the birthplace of joy: radical self-approval. Approve of your dreams, and say yes to them. Let yourself know that who you are matters. Couple that with radical self-acceptance and self-forgiveness and you will have all the energy that you need to accomplish what you want.

It’s important that we all shine in our individual ways. Comparisons are over. What is important is not that we be better than the person next to us, but that we find what is uniquely ours to share. The only thing we are going to be uniquely excellent at is being fully ourselves. We must be replete with our own magic. One of my teachers once said something like, “Your brilliant magnificence is so obvious that you are unaware of it”. The Buddha said, “If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change”. Dan Millman wrote “There are no ordinary moments”.

Spiritual awareness is about un-habituating ourselves.

For instance, notice all the times in a day when you criticize yourself, or wonder in fear if you are really good enough. Stop letting those moments go by. Stop them, and change them. Make a different moment.

Then notice all the beauty of the world you have become habituated to.

Love yourself first. Before you worry about the outcome, the presentation, the work, the results - love yourself. Forgive yourself. Don’t let your mind be a buzzkill and you will be high for life.

If you still believe you need to punish yourself to get results, that if you stopped you would no longer grow or get things done, think about this: if you yell at a flower does it grow faster? If you punish a tree does it grow taller? No. If anything it grows crooked. We are all becoming who we are anyway. The best gift you can give yourself is light and nourishment and radical permission to be the magnificence that you already are.

Have your own back

The secret to happiness is to be your own best friend. You do that for yourself, and you get happy.

You’ve got to have your own back. If you want to get something done in the world, you’ve got to stop sapping your own energy with self-criticism, or self-denial, or self-hatred.

You’ve also got to know how to go for what you want, and keep promises to yourself. You’ve got to say yes to your deepest longings, and believe in them, because when you don’t, you break your own heart. And you’ll never trust yourself if you do that. Loving yourself starts with being able to trust yourself, that you won’t sell yourself out. You can love someone you don’t trust, but you can’t really be close to them. And you want to be close to yourself. You want to whole. You want to be undivided.

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