Note: I have three blogs because I want to have spaces for the different types of thinking and exploring I like to do. This blog is about ideas, consciousness, happiness, and God. So I’m bringing over this discussion that started in the comments of a post on Tao of Prosperity, because that blog is really about business and ease and creativity and God. (Yes, everything I do is about God somehow LOL.)

To recap, Angela referenced the idea of “being used by the Universe” toward some good purpose.

Does this happen? Yes and no. I see it differently.

I think people are like cells in the body of the Universe/God.

Does a body use a cell? Or does the cell use the body? Or does the question make no sense, because neither would be able to exist without the other?

It probably goes without saying that I vote for the latter. It makes no sense. God doesn’t use me or “work through me” exactly.

That implies God is out there, distinct from me, and he/she/it (see, we are getting into pronouns already, that is an indicator of a problem!), this God entity is pushing me around to make good stuff happen, or pushing good stuff out through me.

I think the idea of being “used by God” is an artifact of thinking of oneself separate from God. It’s a product of having bodies that walk around as seemingly autonomous units, and minds that think “I’m separate, yes I am!”.

Let’s think of cells in a body. If you were a red blood cell, and you thought of your body as “using” you to deliver oxygen to the rest of the body - that seems kinda makes sense. Except the body also uses all the rest of the cells to deliver nutrients to you. And there’s not really a distinct “body”, separate from you as a cell, that is in charge of it all. In fact, each cell is encoded with the instructions to do what it does.

So yes, I think we are “used by God” in a certain sense, but only in ways that we are already built for, for things that are inherent in our unique awesomeness.

Right now in our culture we have 5000 years of habitual belief that God is outside us, apart from us, like a galactic CEO or overlord. But that whole thought arose out of disconnection from God. It’s a tragic idea, which got codified and ossified and glorified and written down. It’s gotten lots of play but it’s bogus.

You are a cell in the body of God. You know what to do. You know how to be you. You always have and you always will. It’s written in your bones.

The best thing you can do, to be most “useful” to the rest of God, i.e. your nearby cells and the whole body of God, your community and your planet, is to be as true as possible to your own personal mission in the world. To understand it, to nurture it, to listen carefully to its instructions, to follow its whisper in your soul.

Your soul is connected to the larger body of God.

You, your mind, your ego/small self, is not always aware of this connection. It thinks it is separate and it tries to protect that separateness, because it thinks it needs to for survival.

And it does, to some extent - cells need cell membranes or cell walls and whatnot (I’m dredging up some high school biology here). But a membrane doesn’t make the cell separate from the body. It still belongs to and is inherent to the body.

The ego isn’t so bright about this distinction.

That’s why you’ve got to go inside and listen. Clear away the cruft in the way of hearing that pure, sweet voice of “this is how I was meant to love the world”.

You will never be able to connect to that feeling of being part of the body of God except through doing what you were meant to do. Then you become useful to the body of God, and you start feeling that sense of being part of all that glorious goodness that works together in a magical mysterious way.

Oh geez, writing about this stuff makes me all high and happy. =)

Immanence vs Transcendence

To be fair to the other half of spirituality, you can also listen to the whisper of the body of God telling you what your function is, guiding you where you need to go, through messages from other cells or by flushing you into some other, more suitable area of the body. (OK, I’m possibly beating this metaphor to death.)

The point is that you can open yourself up to listen to something outside of you, larger than you, as well as listening inside. This is the difference between immanent and transcendent spirituality. Transcendent spirituality emphasizes listening outside, and that’s the beauty and gift that is at the heart of the big religions and “God as a big dude in the sky” kind of thinking.

Immanent tends to makes more sense to me, as I have such a strong sense of internal mission, but they are both important.

What I mourn is that people have forgotten how to listen inwardly, because the outward has been so emphasized for so long. They think they need to go find an expert or read a book or “believe” something to find God. Nope.

You just need to do what your DNA tells you is yours to do, and open up those cell walls a bit and let all the other parts of God remind you that you are part of this body too and we need you, the real true you.

So if you feel lost, try both. Try listening inwardly, and try listening outwardly. Just don’t ignore the inward, OK? =)

This post is taken partly from my comments on Mark’s post about the bail-out.

Mark expresses a common sentiment along the lines of “I don’t know if our civilization will survive”.

Here’s my take on this, and I apply it both to our US culture and to our global situation:

I tend to take a very long view on our countries economy and structures, and our world’s struggle with environmental pollution.

I think of our country/culture/society, and the world at large in which we have a huge influence, as being in its adolescence. We are growing up…which means learning from our mistakes…which means we will make more, I’m sure.

I see them as part of a much longer/broader cycle. Our country as a whole is struggling to move from anger/blame/finding fault to responsibility and cooperation. So every “crisis” is an opportunity for us to grow, and I have faith that this is happening.

Civilizations mature over long periods of time. So I don’t worry so much about it on a day to day level. I focus more on my own maturity, and developing my own consciousness in order to help and teach etc, to move things along in whatever spheres I have influence in.

Like “Think globally, act locally”, I like to “Think long-term, act day to day”.

Will we survive?

I just have this faith that we will. I act as if we will.

I figure, if we don’t then we don’t, but wondering about it makes me spend energy in worry and hope/doubt, and that creates ineffectiveness.

I have a strong sense of faith that we’ll make it. And a sense that if we don’t commit to making it, if we stay hovering in fear/doubt–that this is part of the problem somehow.

I believe that the very act of having faith in ourselves and humanity given the current situation is a radical act that will help create the future where we do survive, and thrive. Because it seems to me that vision precedes action: you have to believe in something before you act toward it. So I feel that faith in ourselves is, in itself, important to have.

I almost see it as an aspect of growing up and developing maturity and responsibility: you see yourself as capable of taking on the things in your path, as being equal to your life. I see us as equal to our situation. It’s dire, but we can meet it, we will meet it, we are meeting it. Progress is slow in some areas, but it is fast in others, and it will crystallize soon. I have a solid sense in my body that this is true.

And I want to get off the fence with it, come out of the “intellectual skepticism” closet and commit. I think it’s important. I believe in us.

I want to help heal our culture and help it mature; I think one of the key aspects of a healer is that they can see the person they are helping as whole long before the person sees themselves that way. Through the healers eyes, the person begins to be able to see themselves in a new way, and then starts to believe that new things are possible.

They start to believe in themselves because they are believed in. From believing in themselves, they start acting in ways that support their own healing. Vision precedes action.

So what I see is that our culture has all the inner resources and wisdom it needs to heal (just like a person does). And it has the support of its community and the Universe, if it reaches out and asks (just like a person does). And, it has some roadblocks to realizing this (just like a person does). But it still has that potential and I want to have faith in it (like I would a person).

So when I look around, I don’t see signs of doom and reasons to be hopeless. I see a young culture struggling to grow up.  The US was founded on a very strong need to individuate and go our own way. We are still maturing into realizing that now we need to play well with others and what it takes to do that.

I see lots of people in our culture trying to learn just that. I see all the folks looking to the East and other cultures for spiritual understanding. That is happening. And it’s because as the people of our country mature, they realize that there is stuff out there that is wiser than our “rugged individualism” and our love of the marketplace above all else, and they seek it out.

This affects our culture. We are our culture. We are the cells that make up the body of our country, and we are healing ourselves from the inside out, and that will heal our country from the inside out. The idea that culture is created by someone else is bogus. I claim my culture-creating abilities and exercise them. I am blogging, I am creating community, creating art, creating life. So are millions of others.

Our culture is growing and maturing. And I have faith in it.

1. It sucks because we need real leaders and there are none to be found.
2. It sucks because people are apathetic and don’t vote.
3. It sucks because the system is corrupt (money buys power).

What I see is that at some point we will have a paradigm shift in government. The apathy of voters is an important indicator of the core problem.

Our entire paradigm of government is based on a “Government as Parent” model. We protect people from themselves, punish people who are bad, take care of the weak, etc.

One problem is that it’s a bad parenting model. Good parenting is about setting boundaries, but functional ones. Having consequences, but ones that help the kid grow and learn, not be randomly punished.

But a more fundamental problem is that adults don’t need parenting. What we really have is a failure of our culture and society as a whole to support people to develop into mature adults. Government is part of this problem, but not the whole of it. All of our institutional systems encourage and enable dependency, most notably to me, our education system. We are not encouraged and supported to grow and develop into autonomous beings capable of critical thinking and self-government.

Now don’t start thinking I’m a Libertarian. I think there are many solutions, but kicking people to the curb isn’t one of them.

I don’t believe that the government can solve this problem, or any other institution. They come out of a paradigm that is flawed. The #1 flawed assumption is that people are unable to govern themselves. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you treat people as incapable, many of them will start to believe it and act it out.

I also don’t think a single Savior-type leader is the solution. We don’t need a leader, we all need to become leaders - our own leaders. No government or forced education system is going to get us there, because growth and development is by definition a self-directed process. The good news is that it is a natural and organic process, so it’s just a matter of learning how to allow and support it for everyone.

This isn’t something that makes sense in the context of a political process as we know it because our current political and governmental processes are fundamentally dis-empowering. There is a reason nobody votes, and the answer is not more voter drives. It’s a problem that can’t be solved at the level of development that created our government. It has to be solved by the next level of evolution. that next level will envision “government as facilitator of the creative human endeavor”, not “government as parent punishing errant children, run by other children who aren’t mature enough for the job anyway”.

I agree somewhat with the idea of “The system is broken and it’s not worth fixing”. I do think at some point we will have a critical mass of folks who are operating from the next paradigm and we can start using the infrastructure of the government and industrial complex to facilitate creative self-empowerment and social evolution. There are a lot of resources there which would be dumb to ignore. But until that point, I think it makes more sense to focus energy on developing our understanding of how to evolve and liberate ourselves and support others to do the same, until that critical mass is reached.

My NVC teacher once said that we feel good when our needs are met, and also when we anticipate that our needs are about to be met.

For much of my life, I’ve used this (without realizing it) to take refuge in the future. My main means of surviving my childhood was to believe that someday, things would be better. This wasn’t an abstract conviction–I would literally imagine my needs being met in a future scenario. Over and over. Until I began to live more in the future than in the present. And that habit is still with me. It’s been a source of strength and it’s trained me to be creative, imaginative, strategic, and determined. It has also kept me from feeling satisfied, because I’m always looking ahead, and desperately searching for a better moment in time.

So I’ve been looking for ways back into the present. They go something like this:

• Forget expectations. Expectations are when I compare the present to an idea I had about the present, before it happened. It’s an attachment to a different version of events that isn’t real. Release the fantasy and then see what is in front of me.
• Forget the needs I thought I would have in the situation I imagined would happen. Learn to feel the real needs and feelings I have right now in this moment.
• Forget the idea that time can be stopped. In my future fantasies, it was generally one moment replayed over and over. In that one moment, I was ecstatically happy. So I’ve been looking for that moment I can stop in. But those moments have come and gone, leaving me disillusioned with whatever the circumstances were in which they arose. But it’s natural for intense happiness to come and go. In grasping to keep it, I prevent it from happening again by getting trapped in a state of disgruntled animosity toward the present.
• See time as a river that I happen to be swimming in. Stop trying to influence the current and let it carry me. That means, day to day, not worrying so much about what the next day will bring, and attending to the day in front of me.
• See my emotions as a river that I’m swimming in. Instead of looking for grand plans that will change my entire emotional landscape, attend to the moment in front of me.
• Forget the idea that I can always change my current mood to one of happiness. Sometimes I will be unhappy, and I won’t know why, and it won’t matter that much because the happiness will come back again.
• If unhappiness persists I can ask myself, “What am I telling myself right now?” to look at the contents of my thoughts.
• I can also ask myself, “What was I imagining this moment would feel like?”. That lets me see what my hidden expectations are so I can let them go.
• Sometimes I just need to curl up on the couch for a bit and feel sad.
• Remember that some days will be fast days and other days will be slow days. Some days will be happy days and other days will be sad days. Some days I’ll make brilliant art and some days I’ll make nothing at all, or nothing that comes together. Some days I will feel close to people and some days I will want to be alone. Equanimity in the face of everyday change creates a habit of peace and contentment.
• I can soothe myself by being at peace with the present moment. I don’t need anybody else to be different, and I don’t need the present to be different. This is empowerment.

I am, in general, a fan of the LOA, but sometimes people use it as a “spiritual bypass” - an attempt to avoid necessary psychological work by escaping into a false spiritualism.

If you have a history of childhood trauma, your brain learned to adapt and cope by finding some mechanism by which to avoid feeling all the feelings that occurred during the trauma - so your little self could survive. It could be one or several of many things - denial, addiction, fantasy, obsession, workaholism, perfectionism, co-dependence, etc.

So it occurs to me that for folks like us, The Secret and the Law of Attraction stuff can be another means of escape. By promising this superwonderland if you just focus hard enough on what you want, and avoid thinking about “negative stuff”, it encourages a tendency that is already ingrained, and unhealthy. It’s exactly the opposite of what is needed for healing. Healing requires the confronting, accepting, re-experiencing, and integrating of the painful “negative” emotions that were repressed - and it will never happen if you are trying to avoid “negative” feelings. They will still be there - and they will run you until you process and heal them.

I think “positive thinking” is helpful - depending on the spirit in which it is done. Affirming ourselves as whole and capable and that we can create healthy and vibrant lives for ourselves is good. It creates positive pathways/habits in our brain to replace the dysfunctional ones. But if I use “positive thinking” to run from or avoid the negative, I won’t heal. Instead, I think what is needed is to create a safe, healthy container within which to embrace and heal the past hurt - and that work will finally heal the wounds and create the lasting wholeness, happiness, and freedom that everyone seeks.

The message of never feel bad again or get everything you want encourages running away - or it can easily be interpreted that way by a brain that wants to or has trained itself to.

Which is not to say that the Law of Attraction isn’t true, or isn’t helpful. Just that the way it is sometimes portrayed won’t really bring happiness if healing is required. First you heal, then you transcend. You can’t transcend what you haven’t healed - it just doesn’t work that way. (And believe me, I’ve tried). Having gone through that merry-go-round a few times, I have developed an appreciation and humility about the power of healing and the lessons that can are learned by walking through the darkness - not trying to run from it, even if you are running towards the light. The darkness will still be there until you face it and integrate the shadow side - i.e. “come to terms with it”.

Good/bad, positive/negative - these are dualistic poles. True peace emerges - naturally - after you have experienced and accepted both as part of life. And you don’t have to work night and day at it - it is the peaceful confidence that only comes from having confronted the “negative” that is inside you. You’ve walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and you’ve survived - and thrived. It didn’t kill you - in fact, you found a piece of yourself in that valley. You brought it back home with you. You now know that you exist everywhere - in the dark and in the light. This is the true spiritual homecoming that the Law of Attraction work is talking about (I think).

I don’t think it’s possible to experience this without having experienced and accepted your shadow in a “dark night of the soul” type of experience of some kind - walking through the underworld and emerging into the daylight. And I haven’t seen a book or article (yet) about the Law of Attraction that acknowledges this journey, or the need for healing and acceptance before a “negative” experience or emotion will truly be released - rather than just repressed.

Besides the one-sided nature of the LOA, there is also the issue of effectiveness. Repressed psychological “stuff” has a lot of energy that counteracts  “think positive” efforts. To be effective with the LOA, you need to dig a little deeper. I think our core beliefs have a lot more to do with what we attract than our surface emotions.

This is how I look at it: the Universe is abundant. To be able to receive and transmit Divine love/creative energy/the good stuff, I just need to clear out whatever is in the way of receiving it - whatever is in the way of connecting and living in the present moment. And that’s what spiritual traditions have been teaching throughout time. It’s not a secret!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.