Arjuna Ardagh2013-05-19T22:57:49-04:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=arjuna-ardaghCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Arjuna ArdaghGood old fashioned elbow grease.Approval Is Highly Overratedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10985592011-11-18T14:02:02-05:002012-01-18T05:12:01-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
Another is to recognize and liberate blocks in consciousness -- the things that we resist. In an ironic way, the things that we most push away become the things that dominate our lives.
But the thing that becomes the most important focus for almost every client is the recognition and empowerment of their unique gift. This doesn't necessarily mean what they "do" in the world, what their job is, but that unique flavor which flows through this person more than anybody else. It's surprising how rarely people really tap into and bring forth the gift they were born to give. When it happens, it becomes a Steve Jobs, or an Isabel Allende, or a Leonard Cohen. The biggest reason I have found why people don't dare to bring forth their unique gift, to sing their song loudly to the world, is our addiction to approval. Or to put it another way, our deadly fear of disapproval.
I thought I knew all about disapproval. I went to a British boy's boarding school in the 1970s. The only equivalent we really have to this kind of environment in the United States is a federal prison. Put a bunch of testosterone-driven young men together, and they don't always bring out the best in each other. Bullying, back stabbing, character assassination -- these are just the things that happen before breakfast. You learn not to stick your neck out too far in any direction, unless you want to risk it being locked in the stocks, as the focus of rotten fruit and taunts.
I got my full-on initiation in moving beyond fear of disapproval, however, earlier this year. When Dr. Gay Hendricks and I put together our little movie called "Dear Woman," we expected it to go the way of most YouTube videos. A few hundred hits perhaps, or if it's really extraordinary, a few thousand. As you probably know by now, we made the movie with almost no money, we just gathered together a few friends here and there. Even those who appreciate the movie have to admit that it's kind of cheesy, even if it's a gesture appreciated by some.
I had no way to anticipate the barrage of hatred that movie would unleash. We received thousands and thousands of hateful email from men who felt violently disgusted by the tone of the film. Every insulting epithet you've ever heard of was hurled at us through the YouTube comments. "F**g**t," "mangina," "beta male"... it went on and on and on. For a while, one of our team was checking the comments and approving them (many were just way too vile to be printable), but after a few weeks he started to suffer from suicidal tendencies, so we had to take him off the job. So every now and then I have to go and do it myself, rather like cleaning up the vomit off the rug when our cat has a bad stomach. Going through hundreds and hundreds of personal attacks can't be anyone's idea of fun, but it's brought me to a great and valuable insight that I want to share with you today:
Being hated by large numbers of people is not nearly as bad as you might think.
So many of us walk around on tiptoes trying to do and say the right thing and gain everyone's approval, but when you end up making a viral video that wakes up the collective hatred of hundreds of thousands of men, well, you learn to get over it. As the months have gone by, I find myself less and less affected by reading the comments when I have to. Something like walking near a beautiful lake where there's a lot of mosquitoes; you brush them aside and enjoy the view.
I am making another film now, probably even more controversial than the one that we already put out. I even find myself looking forward to stirring up more disapproval.
So I would love to hear from you. What are the things that you hold back from doing, saying or creating, for fear of being disapproved of? If you too could have the opportunity to have thousands of angry men insulting you week after week on YouTube, until it became like a background hum, what outrageous, bigger than life, crazy message would you unleash on the world, no longer caring if they like it or not?
I am excited to hear what wild and unique gift sits inside of you, held back only by our shared addiction to approval.]]>What Is the Spiritual Meaning Behind Occupy Wall Street?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10811662011-11-11T09:08:00-05:002012-01-11T05:12:01-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
Still, I keep getting email asking me, "So what's your take on it, Arjuna?"
Ok, they asked. So here it is.
My first response is "Yeah!"
I can follow that up with, "Yeeeehaw!"
And if you still want more, I'd say, "About time."
Many years ago (visualize me stroking my gray beard as say those words) when I was a young man at Cambridge University, all my friends were becoming Marxists. Demonstrations, protests, sit-ins and strikes were the thing to do if you wanted to be cool (and get laid). Back then, I took a slightly different route. All my friends were focusing on the enormous injustice that a huge percentage of the world's wealth is controlled by a tiny percentage of the world's population. How can anyone argue? Of course there's something wrong with that picture, when a few people have access to the absolute best of anything, more than they can possibly enjoy, and there are children dying from lack of food and clean water.
The question that nagged at me all those years ago was, "What is it that creates this situation?"
It would never happen, for example, in your family. Imagine sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner where you and your closest ones get the best of everything, and the distant cousins at the end of the table eat dry bread and contaminated water. Couldn't happen, right? When you're with your family, you share because you feel close, you feel connected. The sense of "us" is greater than the sense of a "you" and a "me" as separate.
I've always had the sense that the fundamental ailment in our world is not just economic or political, but to do with this underlying feeling of separation.
When I was living in Bali many years ago, I got to hear about a Japanese company clear cutting large areas of old growth teak forest. The trees were loaded onto boats, supposedly headed for Japan. It seemed like a shame, as these were very old trees, but the real shocker came when I heard that the boats weren't actually taking the trees all the way to Japan. Halfway there, in the middle of nowhere, they were getting dumped off into the ocean. The motive? By buying up old-growth teak in Indonesia and keeping it off the market, the company was able to maintain their high price for the rare teak already available in Japan.
When you hear a story like that (and of course we could supply an endless number of similar stories today of senseless greed), you've got to ask yourself, "What causes someone to make a decision like that?" Some people might call it a savvy business decision, but what is the state of consciousness underneath it? How do you have to feel about yourself, and about life, to make such a decision? I'd say it is all coming from a feeling of being separate: separate from the earth, separate from other people, separate even from your children, who are later going to have to deal with the messes we are creating today. So early on, I developed a keen interest in discovering what creates this feeling of separation, and what, if anything, can cause it to dissolve.
Whenever any localized society has created the kind of imbalance of wealth we have today, it has eventually resulted in destabilization and revolution. The Roman Empire collapsed as the rich and powerful in Rome never ran out of greed for dominating the less fortunate. The French revolution, the Russian revolution, right up to the fall of Colonel Gaddafi a few weeks ago: People will only tolerate greed and abusive power for so long.
There has always been a problem, however. Revolutions change the balance of power, but generally don't get rid of the feeling of separation which created the imbalance. Under the Czar in Russia, for example, working people were starving while the aristocracy lived in palaces. But the Bolshevik regime that took over simply replaced one form of elitism with another. When Yeltsin and Gorbachev ended Communism in 1991, again, it just rearranged the players on the board. The dynamic of separation, greed and corruption remained just as strong.
So here are some things that I love about the Occupy movement, and which inspire me to repeat that passionate "Yeehaw!" and to raise my glass that this might be an upgrade to revolution-as-usual.
It doesn't orient around any particular leader, dogma or ideology. This is brilliant. When a movement is not centrally organized in this way, it's appealing to basic common sense and human decency more than allegiance to dogma.
There are no specific demands or calls to action. Political analysts say that this is a weakness, but I disagree. It would be a weakness if this was a new political movement, but by avoiding a particular action plan, it calls upon all of us to recognize that opposing corruption and hoarding by a few wealthy people is not something you need to take any position on. Like the sexual abuse of children, you don't have to think or align yourself with an ideology to know its not okay.
The movement is, for the most part, peaceful and even humorous. Putting Rome and Tottenham aside, the demonstrations elsewhere all around the world have been well-behaved. The reports of violence (pepper spray in New York, rubber bullets in Oakland) were initiated by the police rather than by the demonstrators.
This is not the same old aging baby boomers beating their dusty battered drums again. This is mainly the generation we sometimes thought was too wedded to XBox, texting and iPods to even care or notice. They do care, they are kicking b*tt, and they are doing it with more care and compassion that their predecessors in the '70s.
My hope and prayer is that this could be a different kind of a revolution. A revolution in the way we have revolutions. In other words, not just the same old, "You guys are greedy and rich and you stink, and we're going to take you down, yaaahh! Here's a bottle in your windshield, you b**stard." We can be, and we are being, more revolutionary than that, by moving beyond separation. This is a bold step. To ask ourselves, "What's the state of consciousness that causes someone to behave the way they do?" "What would somebody have to be feeling (or unable to feel) to have an insatiable lust to have more of everything, and to not care about other people's needs?"
When we sit with these questions, we realize that we are actually ALL victims of the economic system that is now collapsing around us. The factory worker who just lost their job, who is paying 28 percent percent in credit card interest, who is in foreclosure on their house, is an obvious victim. It takes a leap to see that the banker in his private jet, mansions on every continent, and the best of everything, is, in a more obscure way, also a victim. Whoa, Whaaaaat? Yes, think about it. You ever hung out with someone living this way? Selfishness and isolation is not a fun way to be. It's often accompanied by rampant substance abuse, broken marriages, an inability to feel gratitude, to feel good about yourself or that you've made any real contribution.
The way that the Occupy movement can be a revolutionary revolution instead of a run-of-the-mill ordinary revolution is if we start with ourselves. We can start by dropping our attention deeper than thoughts, rigid beliefs, reactive emotions and prejudice. We can start by discovering the dimension within each of us, not so far away, which is limitless and free, which needs nothing, but offers everything. Then you become a spiritual activist, an empowered mystic. You take a stand not against something or someone, but for something. You take a stand for life, for celebration, for generosity, for values that make everybody stronger.
So for those of you who asked, that's my answer. I thoroughly support occupying everything in sight, and lets start with yourselves.
Occupy the limitless space, free and open like the sky, which is your true nature.
Occupy the unclaimed love which you always knew was there, waiting to be owned.
Occupy your capacity to forgive, to find common ground.
Occupy the place where you move beyond blame and differences, and find empathy.
Occupy Yourself, Occupy your true nature, and then whatever else you choose occupy will naturally become a better place for everyone to be.
To me, that's revolutionary revolution.
So there's the story of why, instead of becoming a social activist, or a film maker, or a political commentator like many of my friends back then, I have developed the Awakening Coaching Training. Today I train coaches to become facilitators of awakening, to guide people to move beyond separation, and to start with themselves. We need a good political or social revolution from time to time, and I believe that there first needs to be a Translucent Revolution within.
I'm going to be hosting a free tele-seminar about Awakening Coaching this Friday, November 11th at 10am PST. Feel free to join us. It will last 75 minutes, and so will include the magical moment, never to be repeated, of 11:11 on 11-11-11.
Register Here, for the live call, or to listen to the replay. ]]>Live From Greecetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8892612011-07-07T14:11:00-04:002011-09-06T05:12:01-04:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
Every few days we've been getting concerned messages from friends and family. "You are in Greece? Maybe you should leave early? Are you going to be alright?" Every now and then we open up Google news, and discover that we are, apparently, sitting right in the middle of the fatal crack in civilization. "Why Greece may take us all down," read one headline. According to the news, we are trapped in the epicenter of a devastating financial and political disaster.
I write this to you from a café in capital city of Kerkyra. As I look around me, I can see, unfolding before my very eyes, a picture of global civilization coming undone. It is a Sunday night, and the streets are packed with people. These are not the usual tourists, but local residents, out in droves on this warm evening to express themselves with passion. Let me see if I can paint you a more vivid picture.
Couples are walking arm-in-arm down the cobbled streets, exchanging kisses and sweet nothings. Entire families are out together, children running ahead into the crowd and back again. The cafés are packed to overflowing with local people drinking oozo, eating baclava or ice cream. The air is filled with the familiar sound of impending social collapse: laughter. If this is the end of the world, it looks like people are really quite enjoying it.
We have been staying on the northern part of the island, in a small, traditional fishing village called Arillas. We walk each day from our apartment through the Olive Groves, past the small, whitewashed houses, often with goats and chickens in the garden, to the small harbor. I've been teaching Chi Kung on the beach, and then spending leisurely hours at the Ammos cafe, owned by Leo and Barbara, a local couple. Most mornings the power goes out for about an hour, as a result of rolling national strikes. They laugh and tell me that the cappuccino machine does not work, asking whether I like Greek coffee instead, which they can heat up on the gas stove. "Politicians," laughs Leo. "I don't trust any of them at all. Always making trouble." I asked him how he had been affected by the economic crisis that threatens to sweep the entire world. He looks at me with a grin.
Of course, Greece's economic woes have some reality. They recently were demoted to a CCC rating by the IMF, and serious austerity measures will be needed to secure fresh loans and to prevent defaulting on them. And of course there is passionate opposition to such measures, and to the politicians who mismanaged the economy. The riots you read about on the news are real but entirely confined to one square kilometer around the parliament building in Athens.
We can learn some lessons from the Greeks, you and I, just as Basil had lessons to learn from Zorba in Nikos Kazantzakis' novel. The United States has a similar predicament brewing, on a much larger scale, in fact: massive national debt and an economy that is not sustainable. We also face the need for austerity measures: increased taxation and reduced spending, and we also don't like it. The lessons we can learn here are not from Greek politicians or economists, but how you and I can learn to fully enjoy our lives in the midst of the messes created by them.
Kostas runs the local scooter rental in Arillas. His business is down this year, with less tourism. He sits in a small office, about six square feet. He has no computer, so he writes his rental contracts by hand and records return dates in a little book. He drives one of his own scooters to and from the small house he lives in, with his wife of 18 years and their younger daughter. "Pfah, I dont care so much about money," he tells me, in an accent that makes him sound exactly like Zorba in the movie. "I live a great life. I love my family, l love my life, I love people. I love you, my friend! " He embraces me. His office adjoins the place where we eat, so we hear his laughter throughout the day, as he finds more new people to fall in love with.
We have met a lot of people like Kostas here, and they have a lesson for all of us. While the elaborate man-made world is falling apart around you, learn to enjoy the small things in your day. Learn to fall in love with strangers. ]]>Anthony Weiner: Just Like Metag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8778912011-06-16T15:05:00-04:002011-08-16T05:12:02-04:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
Here is my proposed dictionary entry for the next Merriam Webster:
other |ˈəðər|
verb
1. To attribute qualities onto another person, often a celebrity in the news, so as to avoid acknowledging these same qualities within oneself:
[as verb. ] Hey, don't other Clinton, most married men have done stuff like that | I went to a meeting with the Dalai Lama. It was great but people tend to other him by putting him above them.
For the last 10 days, our latest "otherfest" has focused on Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose name made him a larger-than-life-disney-cartoon disaster waiting to happen. Republicans are having a field day, of course, and even the members of his own party are calling for his resignation. Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not advocating sending snaps of your private parts to women you hardly know. I don't condone lying, or emotionally abandoning your recently pregnant wife. Probably everyone, including Rep. Weiner himself, agrees that these actions were stupid, immature, and hurtful to other people.
We can learn from this and many other current events, however, by shifting our attention from "what that terrible, despicable, lying rotten good-for-nothing over there did," to "why are we getting so upset about this and giving it so much attention?"
Why do we use the news so frequently for collective "othering?" One important reason is that there are weaknesses from which we all suffer: you, me and everyone we know. For example, pretty much every married man suffers from a case, be it mild or strong, of the wandering eye. His attention is caught by a pretty face, or a shapely curve, before he even has time to think about it. He might sometimes gaze at the thousands of naked women available on the web. He might even go all out and have an affair. Generally, he feels bad about all of the above, he frequently lies about it, hoping no one finds out about neither his actions, nor his secret thoughts and dreams. He knows that all this distracts him from true intimacy with his wife, and she knows it too. Yet he doesn't know what to do about it. It is a dangerous weakness we all have. If we act on these impulses and get caught, they can destroy our marriage or career. So when a man conveniently called Weiner makes the mistake of following the impulses of his weiner, it is not just his issue. It is every man's secret nightmare, and let it be noted, his wife's as well.
Similarly, every mother I have ever known, however devoted, loving and patient, at some time or other has felt overwhelmed. She needs a break. She may sometimes lose it with the kids, or wish she had not become a mother so young. She might even, in her most private moments of deep despair, wish she could go back to the carefree life she lived before they were born. But she catches herself and blocks such thoughts from her mind. She dreads being branded as a bad mother for even thinking such things. If questioned, she would never, ever, ever, admit to resenting her own kids. On that note, it should come as no wonder that the Casey Anthony trial does not pass in obscurity in a remote Florida court house, instead making it to the top international news headlines day after day. Every small and sordid detail is guzzled up in real time by millions of people, as if it were their own family member in the dock. Why? Because it is our own secret nightmare on display for everyone to see.
The simple antidote for othering which turns every news story into an opportunity for evolution and maturity are three simple words: just like me. What did Weiner do? His attention wandered, and he acted on it. Most men, at least the honest ones, could easily say, "just like me." (and yes, things that happened in college do count.) Then he lied, for a week, before fessing up. C'mon guys, we can also offer another "just like me."
In order for "just like me" to work, you've got to let go of the facts a little bit and tune into the energy underneath. Most men have not twitted pics of their package to virtual strangers. They may not even have flirted. And certainly most women have never actually harmed their own children. The question is whether you can locate and be honest about the same impulses in the locked basement of your own thoughts. You may not have acted on them, but the important question is, have you ever taken such a wild ride in your mind?
Two or three months ago, Dr. Gay Hendricks and I released a YouTube video called ""Dear Woman."" With a ramshackle assortment of buddies, we created a chorus of "just like me," about how we could all 'fess up to weaknesses in our own masculine psyche. Men from all over the world were outraged that we would voice a collective apology for things that we, and they, didn't do.
People object to letting go of "othering" because they think that by acknowledging those same traits in themselves, it is creating guilt and shame. They are also concerned that they may be abandoning their moral compass all together, reducing themselves to a left coast mush where everything is ok.
I suggest that you can maintain a well-tuned sense right and wrong, without having to project the "wrong" onto political figures, and claim the "right" things for yourself. Releasing "othering" doesn't make you a bad person. It just makes you a more honest, deeper and compassionate one.
What are the benefits of integrating "just like me" into your life?
You can instantaneously replace heavy feelings of separation and judgment with compassion and empathy, thereby improving your health.
You can bring undesirable qualities out of the shadow, own them, and become a more engaging and multidimensional person.
When checking in to Google News every day, instead of getting depressed, it can become an endless, fascinating journey of self-discovery "wow, we did that too?"
You can use "just like me" not only on things that you condemn as bad, but also on qualities you admire, and wish to emulate, "The Dalai Lama is so wise and calm.. just like me." "Mark Wahlberg is so smart, just like me." "Barack Obama is so eloquent. He has such a knack with words... just like me."
Want to know more about "just like me" and other similar tools? Go register at thedeeperlove.com, and we'll send you a useful practice every few days.
If you totally loved this post, clap loudly. If you hated it and think the author is an idiot, the comment box below is provided for othering.
]]>Do Collective Apologies Heal or Harm?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8483682011-04-14T03:33:00-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/owned black people in 23 states. Slavery ended with the surrender of General Lee in 1865. Chief Justice Roger Taney, on behalf of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote in 1857 that black people were "so far inferior ... that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Do you think that Taney could have imagined, in his wildest dreams, that we would elect an African-American president in 2008?
Today, people with different colored skins have more or less the same opportunities and rights in this country. Does that mean that racism has been completely eradicated? I don't think so.
In the same way, back in the 1920s, women protested for their right to vote. It was a struggle, but they succeeded. In the 70s, women demanded their right to participate in a social and economic system that had been mostly created by the male mind. Women became judges, police, politicians, religious ministers, all roles that had been previously reserved for men.
And now, in the last few years, we've seen women step up again, not to participate in structures created by men, but with their own expression of feminine wisdom. Countless books have been written now on feminine leadership, feminine ecology, feminine approaches to education and art, and perhaps most important, the emergence of feminine spirituality. Does that mean that repression or even disrespect of feminine energy by men is gone? I don't think so.
Last summer, Dr. Gay Hendricks and I put together a document called "A Manifesto for Conscious Men" as a Facebook page. We've been friends for a long time, and we've both discovered a reverence for feminine energy through being married to extraordinary, deep, creative and powerful women. We've put this document together with the help of other men who want to express their welcome and celebration for the return of feminine wisdom on our planet, to balance the gifts of the masculine. It also acknowledges and apologizes for the imbalance of thousands of years.
Obviously this is a compelling subject for many people. Our Facebook page drew about 8,000 "likes" over many months and initiated an online community of people who are interested in discussing the balance of masculine and feminine energy, in every way.
This Christmas, the Hendrickses had their annual party. We grabbed a few men and asked them if they'd like to read parts of the manifesto into a camera, not quite sure where the project would go. Later when I got back to my sleepy little town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, I got the guys in my men's group to do the same, and then asked a few other friends.
We put together a movie of our manifesto called "Dear Woman." We put it up on YouTube, thinking that the members of our Facebook group would enjoy it. We announced it to them on April 2.
We had no way to anticipate what was going to happen next.
In the intervening 10 days, that amateur little movie has been viewed by over 350,000 people. Some women obviously appreciated the gesture and were forgiving of the slightly happy-go-lucky style of our film. Some women were offended, saying that they found it patronizing or insincere. Some men (the minority, mind you) resonated with the message, but the overwhelming majority of the men who saw the video were completely enraged. A civil war has been occurring on that YouTube page ever since, with the majority of comments in total-war attack mode. We even received three death threats.
The major offensive came with people assuming that Dr. Hendricks and I are a gay couple, and every kind of debasing slur has been hurled at us. I never knew what it was like to be the victim of gay hatred, being a heterosexual man, but now I know. It ain't pretty. Those comments were deleted, out of respect for men who are actually gay and take enough flack already.
Ironically, the second offensive came with people assuming that this was a cunning strategy to "get laid."
"This is the only way that those two old guys could possibly get any," one rioter lobbed at us. Again, this is ironic because we are both in marriages that are off-the-charts fulfilling in every way.
But the more serious objections came from those who questioned if it's sane, valid, necessary or even "allowed" to offer an apology for things you did not personally do. Many of the men who posted were outraged that we would have the audacity to speak on behalf of other people, most of whom are no longer alive.
This is actually a really interesting question.
I have a friend who was in born in Israel but moved to the United States before he was old enough to enter the army. He wound up becoming the roommate of a Palestinian boy in his freshman year of university. There they were, the first day, in the same room. My young Israeli friend had never done anything to harm any Palestinians, but he felt moved that first day to say, "Listen. I know what my people have done to yours, and I'm really sorry." The Palestinian reciprocated the apology, and they quickly became friends.
Was that conversation sane, necessary and allowed? Can white people apologize on behalf of their ancestors for what was done to Native Americans a long, long time ago? Could a young German express deep regret for what his forefathers did to the Jews?
Can collective apologies initiate healing where it would otherwise not have occurred, or do they simply create guilt and shame in people who have done nothing wrong?
Dr. Hendricks and I will be addressing the many comments that have been made about this video on a tele-seminar this Thursday, April 14, at 6 p.m. PST. You're welcome to attend. You can register here. If you miss the live event, you can register anyway to listen to the replay. ]]>Who Gets to Chat with God?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8443992011-04-06T09:00:00-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
My grandmother was my very favorite relative, complete with a friendly dog and a friendly cat, closets which smelled of mothball, and an endless supply of wonderful desserts. She went to church every Sunday and prayed, and she taught me to do the same. I picked it up pretty easy.
"God, this is Nicholas here." (That was my name when I was a kid, Nicholas.) "God, thank you very, very much for making me captain of the cricket team. That was very nice of you. And thank you for the B grade in English. I was wondering if you could help me out with Biology, and maybe get me a B in that too? Oh and by the way, you know that girl with the blond pigtails, Molly Smithers? Well God, I'd really like to kiss her. God..? God..? Are you there, God..? Hello..?"
I was quite conscientious about my praying back then, but I was never quite sure if anyone was listening. Seemed there was a lot of static on the line, and I wasn't quite sure if my mail was getting read or if my phone calls were being listened to.
When I got to be a teenager, my relationship with God became way more confusing, mainly because of what felt to me to like mixed messages about masturbation. "Ah, young Ardagh, come in. Sit down, my boy. Don't be shy, for I am a good and kind God, if you obey me. I've seen that you've become a young man now. You may have noticed some interesting changes in your body in the last year or so. Young Ardagh, I want you to listen to me very carefully. You may have noticed that I've given you an organ of immense pleasure. If you touch this organ, it will make you feel very, very good. But, young man, you must NOT touch this organ. Do you understand me? If you do, I will throw you into internal damnation. Good! All understood? Now go forth and worship me."
Perhaps it's understandable that by the end of my teenage years, I was shopping around for a focus of divinity whom I could understand a little better. Back in the early 70s, everything was available. The Hare Krishnas were chanting on Oxford Street, and every kind of guru was setting up shop all over town. Shiva, Krishna, ascended masters, Elvis, it was all there. And then there was Buddhism, where it was all about emptiness: Nirvana, snuffing out the candle. Buddhists claim to have no personalized deity at all, but then they sneak one in the back door by offering flowers to a Buddha statue, or Quan Yin.
Finally, I met a great man in India called H.W.L. Poonja, a direct student of Ramana Maharshi. He was a fierce man, with a knack of intimidating people into awakening. As an ex-army officer from the British days, this was the boot camp approach to enlightenment. I lived with him on and off for seven years. He introduced me to a view where there is no separation anywhere. Relax deeply into your own nature, and there is only spacious consciousness. Look out into the world, and it is only the same spacious consciousness dancing.
Many, many, many people today have dropped into tasting this dimension of "awakening," at least in snapshots. This epidemic of sanity was the subject of my 2005 book, The Translucent Revolution. As you hang out longer in this view, you discover that you are not a fixed thing, but more of a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum is solidity. You have thoughts and beliefs, an identity and a past and you appear to be very real. At the other end of the spectrum, there are no limits, only a spacious consciousness in which you and God and everything else are all one. Between the two limits dances the story of your life.
When the wave in the ocean looks out and sees other waves, it recognizes itself to be separate, with a beginning and ending in time. It might be faster than some waves and slower than others, bigger than some and smaller than others. When the wave looks into itself, gets curious about its deeper nature, it sees the ocean. In that moment, the wave doesn't experience, "I am part of the ocean." It looks into itself and sees "I am the ocean." At that moment, it recognizes that all of the waves are expressions of the ocean.
We can call the dialogue between wave and ocean prayer. It's the delicious dynamic where you neither feel separate enough to be cut off from God, but you're just separate enough to feel a relationship with the divine. That's when we experience benevolence in our lives. Small miracles happen. Prayers get answered. You find yourself showing up in the right place at the right time with the right people, not necessarily to get the pleasure you want, but so that you can move freely in the dance you were born to live.
OK, so who gets to hang out and chat with God?
Many of us were taught to believe that this was only possible for the special few: a pope or an avatar or a saint. Most of us grew up believing that we needed an intermediary. And for those of us, like me, who rejected the religion of their early years and dabbled in alternative imports from the east, we often replicated that same relationship. Now the intermediary had an Indian accent, long robes and beads.
Today there is a growing number of people who are becoming deeply spiritual without necessarily being religious. They realize that divinity is to be found wherever you direct a gaze of open-hearted reverence. You may find that divinity in your own heart, or in the person you're married to or in your own children. Every moment and every interaction can become a possibility to hang out and have a good chat with God.
Perhaps the person who's kicked up the most dust on this subject in the last couple decades is Neale Donald Walsch, who not only had innumerable cozy chats with God, but went on to publish many books as a result. I'm going to be in dialog with Neale this Thursday, April 7, at 6 p.m. PST.
You can register here for the call.]]>The Best Reason to Meditatetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8411912011-03-30T13:43:00-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
One day I was walking beside Canterbury Cathedral (The King's School, Canterbury is the oldest school in England and lives within the cathedral precincts) when I spotted a man sitting cross-legged on the ground, chanting. He was a Hare Krishna monk. This was 1972, only a few years after The Beatles hooked up with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and then later George Harrison joined up with the Hare Krishna movement. I was intrigued. I waited timidly until he stopped chanting, and approached hesitantly.
"Excuse me, sir," I squeaked in my pre-pubescent English voice. "Do you speak any English?" I imagined he must be from Tibet, or a temple in Varunasi, India.
"Yeah, mate, sit down. I'll tell ya all about it." He was an ex-gang-member from the East End of London. I was fascinated. He talked about Krishna and reincarnation and enlightenment and all kinds of other things that were as exotic to my thoroughbred English mind as they were alluring to my longing heart.
That night, I popped some money into the phone box to call my mother. I proudly announced to her that I'd decided to become a Hare Krishna monk. She threatened to commit suicide, so we had to make a compromise. I learned to meditate instead.
Back then, learning to meditate came with some pretty lofty expectations. Ardent practitioners were all very confident that daily practice would lead to a state, within a few years, where all psychological suffering would end. This sounded like a great deal to me, and I meditated enthusiastically through my entire teenage years.
I never found that particular pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and in fact, to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever did. The idea of a place of final arrival beyond all suffering proved to be a carrot on the end of a stick, peddled by Indian gentlemen with more charisma than integrity. Most of the children of the '60s that I know have given up on the idea of enlightenment as a goal now.
Meditation has also been promoted as a way to increase your capacity to manifest more and better stuff. Advocates of the law of attraction tell you that if you learn how to use your mind consciously, there's no limit to the amount of shiny new gizmos it can bring into your life. Beside the ecological ethics of encouraging this kind of consumerism, it blatantly doesn't work.
And as it was for me when I was 14, meditation is also attractive to people with deep-rooted psychological problems. Trying to use meditation as a way to heal emotional pain is sometimes known as "spiritual bypassing," and more often leads to a place of frozen denial than any real healing.
You might be thinking by now that I've gotten cynical about meditation over the years, but quite the opposite is the case. I spend at least a couple hours a day in meditation every day. My motivation is one that needs no scientific studies or lofty claims.
I meditate because I love it.
If you're out and about in the town and someone texts you to go to a movie, you might want to read the reviews to see if it's worth spending the time. You need a reason to watch a film. If someone invites you out to dinner, you also have to consider, "What kind of food?" "Can I afford it?" and "Do I like the people that invited me?" The same would be true for almost any other kind of activity that involves going out somewhere. But you don't need justification for eventually going home. Home is where you live. Home is where it's comfortable. Home is where it's familiar. Home is where you find peace. Home is where you rejuvenate. And so it is, for me and most of the people I know, one by one every external reason for meditation has dropped away, and you're just left with meditation itself.
***
My friend Sally Kempton has been meditating regularly for more than 40 years. She's probably one of the most knowledgeable and experienced meditation teachers in the world, and her students include people like Elizabeth Gilbert, author of "Eat, Pray, Love." I read Sally's latest book, "Meditation for the Love of It," over the Christmas vacation, and it's probably the best guide to meditation that I've ever read. It's suitable for the novice as well as the seasoned, hard-core veteran. It guides you through the entire landscape: what to do with thoughts, how to be with boredom, how to bring intention or prayer into meditation, even down to what kind of pillow to use and what kind of relationship to build with it. I'm going to interview Sally Kempton on Thursday, March 31 at 6 p.m. PST on a free tele-seminar. She's a wonderful woman, and I hope you'll join us. If you can't make the live call, register anyway and there will be a replay available. Register for the free tele-seminar here.]]>Unconditional Love 101tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8071102011-01-19T09:08:00-05:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
But most important, and quite brilliantly highlighted in the president's speech on Wednesday, the Arizona shootings can also become an opportunity to ask ourselves some even bigger questions: why are we here, what makes our lives well lived and marinated in a deeper sense of meaning and purpose? How might Jared Lee Loughner's personal deeply disturbed psyche be a litmus test on how we all live with each other, a reminder of how we have drifted from our deepest shared values?
More than forty years ago, on "Our World," the first live global television link, the Beatles performed "All you Need is Love" to an audience of 400 million people in 26 countries. The BBC wanted a song with a simple message that could be understood by all nationalities. It went on to become the #1 single in the UK for three straight weeks. Today everyone can sing the lyrics, everyone knows the tune, it has become a unifying anthem the world over. Why? Because everyone loves love.
Thirty six years later, the Black Eyed Peas performed their first single "Where is the Love?" at the Grammy's in 2004, earning themselves two awards on the night. That song is the 25th bestselling single of the entire decade in the UK.
People killin', people dyin'
Children hurt and you hear them cryin'
Can you practice what you preach
And would you turn the other cheek?
Father, Father, Father help us
Send us some guidance from above
'Cause people got me, got me questionin'
Where is the love?
These two songs are not only about romantic love, or the personal love we feel for our children, or our parents, or even our country. They are about love, the Big Love, the love that we all intuit, and admire, and sometimes even deify. They are songs about what our hearts tell us is true, tell us is our real potential, even if that intuition is trampled under foot each and every day by disappointment, cynicism and disorientation.
Wait, what's that sound? Yep, I can already hear first clicks of the HuffPost comment writers' keys, calling out in despair and disgust, "No, No, please, not another left coast blog post about optimism and feeling good for no reason, and 'lurv.' For God's sake, Arianna, spare us the lurv' junkies!"
But you and I and everyone we know, under our decades of getting hurt, of feeling rejected, of losing our vision time and time again, deep down we all love to love. We may disagree about Sarah or Barack, we may have different tastes in Bach or Eminem, and some may love Polanski more than Judd Apatow, but it's hard to find anyone anywhere who does not give love the thumbs up. It's about as universally popular among human beings as oxygen or getting enough sleep. The only reason anyone might have for second thoughts about love is that we don't always know how to live it in an effortless and easy way.
Over the holidays I read Marci Shimoff's latest book, "Love for No Reason." It got my unconditional love mojo going again, with dozens of compelling reasons to live as love now, regardless of circumstance, relationship status, the shape of your body, or any of the other reasons we give ourselves to postpone throwing the gates of the fortress wide open and declaring Open House.
Here's a passage I highlighted, which has stuck with me the last days, as we have all asked ourselves what bigger lessons the shootings might contain:
When you experience Love for No Reason, you no longer need to look outside yourself to get love. You stop being a love beggar and become a love philanthropist, dispensing love, kindness, and goodwill wherever you go.
This simple but profound shift will create remarkable changes in every area of your life. It will improve your health, your relationships, and your success and satisfaction at work. Instead of feeling a little hungry all the time -- for love, security, more stuff, more recognition, more everything -- you'll feel full and complete. It will affect how you show up in every moment. In fact, though your life might not depend on making this shift, the quality of your life does.
There have always been people, throughout history in every tradition, who have discovered a dimension of universal or unconditional love, and they have always come to more or less the same three central insights:
Love is actually who we are, not just a feeling we feel. We easily forget this simple truth, and get addicted to a mentality of "more for me."
Love is why we are here. The initiation into causeless love has frequently been a near death experience, where, on the verge of snuffing it, the initiate looks back on their life and sees that so much was in vain, except, that is, for the exploration of love.
The Heart is a portal to feeling more love. We all have an antenna in our bodies, located in the middle of our chest, radiating out into two limbs, the same ones which hug and touch and caress, and that is the place where we connect with love in a visceral way.
Shimoff's generous book offered me the fruits of 150 interviews she conducted with contemporary people, including prisoners, priests, business leaders and school teachers whom she calls "Love Luminaries," about the factors that make the biggest difference to living this kind of resilient love. Some are well-known writers and celebrities, like Marianne Williamson, Melissa Etheridge and Geneen Roth. But my favorite was the story of Johnny Barnes, a native of Bermuda, who in the 1940's was working as an electrician on the railway. The impulse came to him, out of the blue, to start waving to people, calling out "I love you." He liked it so much, he started to do this every day during his lunch hour. Now Johnny is 84 years old. He gets up at 3:30 am every day to stand on the Crow Lane roundabout in busy downtown Hamilton till 10 am, calling out "Good Morning, Have a Good Day, God Bless you!" Says Johnny:
God gives us all something to do. If you can bring joy and happiness to others, you keep on doing it. People seem to like my staying power. I just keep showing up day after day, and year after year -- they kind of count on it now. In fact, not long ago the city actually put up a statue of me, wide-brimmed hat and all, doing my two-handed wave! I never thought I'd see a statue of myself. Never. But there it is -- a life-sized bronze sculpture that stands on the opposite side of the roundabout from me. It keeps on spreading love after I go home.
So these became the two bookends of my experience of humanity in the first week of 2011. At one extreme is Jared Lee Loughner, who, in his isolated suffering, went to great trouble and preparation to bring death, injury and terror to hundreds of people he did not know. At the other end is this retired electrician in Bermuda, getting out of bed long before the sun to blow kisses and send waves of well-wishing to people he also did not know.
Where would you and I, in the way we live this very day today, like to position ourselves in this spectrum? Shall we choose to fuel the fires of division, or shall we dip a timid toe into the untested waters of irrational love?
We live in pivotal times. So many people today are feeling Pain for No Reason -- Emptiness, Heartache and Loneliness for No Reason. Shimoff feels, from observing her own life as well as everyone else's she knows, that it is this kind of causeless love that we are missing. When we are stuck in addiction, or conflict in relationship, or a mysterious sickness in the body that dampens our energy, she says it all boils down to needing to experience love. When that love is present, she says, we give up trying to control outer things for our own ends, and become instead a source of blessing in our lives. She is willing to put herself on the line to offer us very simple things we can all do to become love itself, right away. There's more about all this on her site, thelovebook.com
I was reminded of her book when the President of the United States was willing to put himself on the line in the same way on Wednesday, with these words:
We may ask ourselves if we've shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we're doing right by our children, or our community, whether our priorities are in order. We recognize our own mortality, and we are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame -- but rather, how well we have loved and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better.
Armed with the Obama's questions, and Shimoff's recipes, I am ready to make 2011 my year of loving dangerously. How about you?
]]>WikiLeaks, You and Me: How We Can Adopt a Full-Disclosure Policy in Our Personal Livestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7919172010-12-09T03:49:00-05:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/WikiLeaks.org (now wikileaks.ch) have to do with you, me and the rest of us?
Nothing, you might say.
And everything, you might also say.
The State Department's response has been inevitable and predictable. The same questions get asked every time embarrassing information is leaked. Who divulged this information? How can we stop it being spread any further? How can we prevent this from ever happening again? They don't ask how to prevent the two-faced lying and encouragement for diplomats to train in espionage. No, that's ok. All that matters is preventing themselves from getting caught next time.
You may have already had a chance to watch a great movie that was released recently called "The Inside Job," directed by Charles Ferguson. The movie documents the behind-the-scenes activity that led to the financial breakdown in the fall of 2008, and the collapse of AIG, Lehman Brothers and many other institutions. There is a fantastic scene in the movie that highlights exactly the same response to the exposure of corruption and secrecy. In a televised hearing, Senator Carl Levin asks a former executive at Goldman Sachs, "What do you think about selling securities which your own people think are 'crap'?" Levin is referring to confidential internal e-mail, now subpoenaed for this hearing. There is a disoriented pause. The pinstripe suited exec looks around himself in panic. Finally comes his response, as frightening as it is hilarious: "I think it is very unfortunate that anyone would state that opinion in an e-mail." The question is not, "Are we being ethical?" or even, "Are we doing good business?" but, "How did we get caught?"
But this post is not just about those bad guys out there, and how to punish them and replace them with someone else. If we're honest with ourselves, we can find exactly the same tendencies in our own lives.
I had a coaching client recently who was experiencing unusually high levels of stress: sleeping badly, making errors at work, and taking more than an occasional tipple from the bottle. He wanted support in managing those stress levels in order to be more productive in his business life. So he came to me as an awakening coach. I always meet my clients as whole people, considering that what they eat and how much they play with their kids and how much they exercise is relevant to every other aspect of their lives. As we dove a little deeper together, he told me that he was having an occasional affair with a co-worker and keeping it a secret from his wife.
I asked him what would happen if he told his wife the truth. "You must be crazy," he snapped back. "If I told my wife that I was having an affair, it would end our marriage." In fact, his marriage was anyway already on the rocks. "Maybe," I suggested to him, "It is not telling your wife the truth that might end your marriage. 'Fessing up might induce a temporary period of intense discomfort, but might also open up a whole new level of intimacy and understanding."
Believe it or not, he took the risk. He did as I suggested, in this case without the help of Julian Assange or any other whistleblower. And just as I had suspected, they went through a horribly rough few days, but they came out the other side. Now he's sleeping better, he's stopped drinking and he feels more creative with his work. He stopped having his affair and is discovering new depths with his wife at home.
Every time I switch on the news, every time I meet with my clients or teach trainings for coaches, every time we have dinner with our friends, I feel that I hear the same thing. When I show up for a meeting of one of the two mens' groups that I'm involved in, or just hang with my wife and children, I hear it more deeply. The game is up on secrets and lies. Put your ear to the ground and listen. There's a a shift in the collective, which has been contributed to by many factors.
For example, Mari Smith, the author of several recent books on social media, points out that the explosion of Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and online forums in the last years has made big advertising campaigns decreasingly effective. A new product or service has to be of real value in order to be spread virally through social media buzz. You can't fake it anymore. The collapse of Enron, AIG, Lehman Brothers and countless politicians was not only about financial, political or sexual malpractice. It was about the cover-up. We are, all of us, tolerating lying and withholding less every day.
Getting real is becoming hip.
I've noticed that we have a choice, you and I, about how to participate in this shift in the collective. We all have accumulated secrets and lies, the things that we haven't told the people close to us because we "don't want to hurt their feelings." And we've all paid the price. We all have our personal Julian Assange, as a family member, friend, employee or client who will, eventually, blow the whistle on us when our time is up. So why not surf this wave of getting the skeletons out of the closet and start practicing radical honesty today?
What are the things you have said to John about Mary but forgot to tell Mary directly? What are the relevant facts in your intimate relationship that you have withheld? What are the resentments, as well as the appreciations, that you have not said?
We can all start riding this wave of full disclosure, authenticity and honesty today. It feels good.
Here's my suggestion: make a practice of telling one person something today, and then every day, that you have been withholding or lying about, and where you have hoped to avoid getting caught. Stay present in the room while they digest what you've said; don't practice drive-by honesty. Avoid entering into a discussion about it or explaining or justifying why it is so. Just 'fess up and feel your burden lifting.
Imagine what the world would be like if telling each other the truth became the accepted norm. What If diplomats came clean with leaders of other countries and confessed to them their withheld judgments, before needing Julian to help out? What if large corporations told you exactly what to expect from their products and encouraged public forums with customer reactions? What if politicians came clean about their weaknesses from the get-go so that we felt inspired to elect them for their courage to be authentic rather than the rhetoric of empty promises? What if religious leaders were as lyrical about their doubts as they are about their faith? And what if you and I and everyone we know put being real as a higher priority than looking good?
Now Julian Assange is wanted by Interpol for an alleged rape that took place in Sweden. The arrest warrant includes the request that he be sequestered without contact with an attorney, friends or relatives. Gimme a break, here! These charges had already been dismissed while he was still in Sweden, and he made himself fully available for an interview at that time. The two women involved had already agreed that it was consensual sex. You, I and everyone knows why Interpol has been instructed to lock him up in a prison cell without contact with the media. And you, I and everyone else knows why this suddenly seems so important when it didn't a few weeks ago.
On Friday Assange answered questions on The Guardian's website. One of the questions was what would happen if he gets "taken out." Assange answers, "The Cable Gate archive has been spread, along with significant material from the U.S. and other countries, to over 100,000 people in encrypted form. If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically. Further, the Cable Gate archives is in the hands of multiple news organizations. History will win. The world will be elevated to a better place. Will we survive? That depends on you."
But it is not only these specific secret cables that are being unearthed here. It is a much more widespread atmosphere of deception that we have all participated in, one way or another. You can find it deeply ingrained in banking, politics, religion and at home in our own backyards. History can win at all of those levels, and the elevation of the world to a better place that Assange talks about has everything to do with you, me and everyone we know.
You can start to practice radical honesty today. It's fun, it's energizing, it's refreshing and it leaves you feeling more creative, more open and years younger.
***
Excited to to taste this for yourself? I am hosting a free tele-seminar about radical honesty today, Thursday, Dec. 9 at 6 p.m. PST (9 p.m. EST). You can register here. My special guest will be Brad Blanton, the author of "Radical Honesty" and several other books. Our awakening coaches are trained to lead a process we call "Dissolving Separation." It gives you a taste of radical honesty within yourself, before you start practicing with someone else. When you join the call, you can also set up a time for a free mini-session with one of them. Register here.]]>The Art of Worshiping Womentag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7727262010-11-05T08:41:00-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/Modern Man's Response to the Emergence of the Goddess
Back in July, I published a piece here on The Huffington Post called "Why It is Wise to Worship a Woman?" That article emerged in a very personal and spontaneous way. I'd been out for a walk with Chameli, my wife, one evening. Overwhelmed with the feeling that it just couldn't get any better than this, I popped a little update on Facebook in celebration of the goddess I'm married to. Surprisingly, by the morning there were dozens of comments. A lot were appreciative comments from women, but many were also from men, either wondering where they could also have the good fortune to find a goddess similar to mine or, perhaps more important, wondering how they could discover the same spirit of deep appreciation of the feminine.
That article was my answer to that question. It reflected on the wisdom of being in worship of the feminine. Not just get along with, or tolerate, or befriend, or cooperate with. Yes, I said what I meant: to worship the feminine.
That article generated almost 1000 comments on my blog as well as here on The Huffington Post, with a variety of flavors. There were women who said, "Finally, you see me." There were women who said, "I don't want to be worshipped. Leave me alone." There were men who said, "Yes, I've discovered the same thing in my own life," and there were men who said, "You must be kidding. Women are all witches in disguise." There were men who said, "This sounds amazing. Show me how."
One of the people who read that post was my old friend Gay Hendricks, who, together with his wife Kathlyn, wrote the book "Conscious Loving" back in the '80s. It was my bible back then and taught me a great deal about the practices that create healthy relationship.
Every Meeting Is Happening in the Collective
Gay and I have been in continuous dialogue over the last several months about this topic. We recognize that whenever a man and a woman meet in any way, the meeting is happening within a context of a relationship between the genders that has a history of thousands of years. I'm sure you remember the play "Romeo and Juliet." The young lovers were smitten by Cupid. But this was not just boy-meets-girl in a bubble, because each was a member of a family that had been in a feud with each other for generations. This was not just Romeo meets Juliet; it was Montague meets Capulet. Whether they liked it or not, they were carrying the inheritance of a conflict that they had each done nothing personally to create.
The same thing would be true today if an Israeli fell in love with a Palestinian, or if a Tea Party member fell in love with a Muslim, or if a Roman Catholic from Dublin fell in love with a Protestant from Belfast.
None of these meetings happen in a bubble. They all sit within the context of conflicts that have been generated in the collective. This same is true whenever a man enters into relationship with a woman. Of course, the man himself has likely never raped anybody, or burned any woman as a witch, or denied anyone the right to vote, or forced a woman to hide her face, or barred her from religious or political office, or forced her to perform subservient chores. "No, no," such a man might say, "I'm a conscious man. I'm respectful of the feminine. I'm fully supportive that you do your thing." Whether he likes it or not, that man still carries within himself the echoes of the collective masculine and, like it or not, every woman is an incarnation of the collective feminine.
What Is the Conscious Man's Response?
The elephant is in the room. Now comes the question of what to do with it. One response to this situation, becoming less popular everyday but still prevalent nonetheless, is to carry on with business as usual, the same business of the last 5,000 years. The post from the summer evoked many such responses here on The Huffington Post. The man carries on cleaning his gun and watching football, waiting for his woman to bring his dinner and his beer. The woman, still locked into millennia of enforced subservience, acquiesces, but bitter all the time, and holding back the treasures of her real love.
The second possibility, which began to be popular in the '60s and '70s but still is in full force today, is dominated by shame and revenge. The man becomes meek and subservient. He may even grow his hair and his beard, play the guitar, and banish even the faintest whiff of his macho past far beyond the frontiers of consciousness. He distances himself as far as possible from the brutish behavior of his father and his ancestors and bows sheepishly to the newly emerged feminine power. The woman, now rebounding in resentment of how her mother and ancestors have been treated, becomes dominating. She becomes militant, unforgiving, and even castrating. The sad thing is, no one really enjoys this game either.
The third possibility started to emerge only in the last few years.
We discover that masculine and feminine are energies, not just biological genders. Every man has some masculine and some feminine energy and so does every woman. The balance we seek is not only between men and women but between the masculine and feminine energy, which are to be found everywhere in life. The feminine way is neither inferior (as we had deemed it for thousands of years) nor is it superior (as some have claimed in the last decades), but it is different. Through a synergy of masculine and feminine strengths, we find the emergence of a whole that is far, far, far greater and the sum of it to individual parts.
The restoration of dignity to the feminine has happened in three stages over the last century. The first took place less than 100 years ago with suffragettes demanding the right to vote. At that time men moved from denial and ridicule, to violent opposition, to acquiescence and finally to support.
The next wave came in the 1970s when women stepped forward to fully participate in the world man had created on his own terms. Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi became heads of state (both in a woman's body but doing things in a very masculine way). Women became judges and politicians and engineers and doctors and lawyers and ministers and construction workers, all roles that had previously been mainly reserved for men. Again, men's response began with ridicule in the '50s and shifted to acquiescence and then awkward support.
The third wave of the restoration of feminine dignity has really happened in the last few years. It is sometimes called "The Goddess Movement." We are, all of us, recognizing that there is a feminine way of doing things just as valid as the masculine. Women are realizing that they don't have to compete or even participate in the world that man has created on his terms. We realize that there is a feminine expression to spirituality, a feminine expression to ecology, a feminine expression to leadership, and each has a huge gift to offer.
And still most men stand awkwardly aside, like a shy teenager at the school dance, wanting to join in but not knowing how.
Three Shifts Men Can Make
As men in transition, Gay Hendricks and I recognize that there are several possible shifts that men are called upon to make today, in order to reboot and to enjoy a completely new adventure.
First, the elephant in the room must be recognized. Women have been disenfranchised for thousands of years. Feminine energy has been given very little respect, and we have all lost out as a result. Even if you've never disrespected the feminine yourself, the first step is still to say "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what we have done. I'm sorry for what my gender has done. And I come to you with a fresh start." This is not the stance of shame, but of honesty and self-respect. Please take our words for it, and that of thousands of our colleagues and students: women love to hear this being acknowledged.
The second shift that today's man can make is to fully experience and release the hurts that he has experienced in his relationship to women. It is those very hurts, both personally and collectively, that cause men to dishonor women, if they remain banished out of awareness.
The third shift is for man to recognize how much he really loves feminine energy: how much he loves her beauty, her capacity to love, her laughter, her freedom to feel and express emotion. In some senses, she brings vivid color to his world, which can easily become black and white.
Man can discover, and then learn to worship, the feminine face of the divine. People sometimes object when Gay and I use the word "worship." They hear the hierarchy of a subservient relationship. Worship has been like that in patriarchal religions because it was a one-way street. The devotee worships the deity, but the deity doesn't return the favor. We use the word "worship" in a completely different way, one we found in our dictionary as: "to pay extravagant respect and admiration." This kind of worship can easily be a two-way street. Gay and Kathlyn and Chameli and I endeavor to bring this quality of extreme respect and worship in both of our marriages, and it overflows into the rest of life.
***
If you feel engaged by this conversation, I want to invite you to do a couple of things today.
First of all, come read our "Manifesto for Conscious Men" on Facebook. If it resonates with you, please click the "like" button to add yourself the the growing number of men and women ready to start over. If you would be so kind, please "share" it also.
Secondly, I'd love to invite you to register to watch a free tele-seminar that Gay and Kathlyn and Chameli and I gave on Thursday, Oct. 28. Gay and I read our Manifesto live, and all of us joyfully addressed the most sticky points about this conversation, which can make it challenging as well as infinitely rewarding.]]>'Memory in the Cells': Exploring Cellular Memory Releasetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7352772010-09-23T14:20:17-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
To begin, I must confess that the way I am writing this foreword to Luis's Diaz's book involves a kind of cheating. Usually the foreword is written just on the merit of the book alone. In this case I have access to background information that gives me an unfair handicap. I have know the author quite well for many years. We have been in a mens' group together, we swim in the South Yuba river, we eat food together, we take walks here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
I've met so many people over the years who have written great books, with great methods, but the question always arises, "How much is what they are writing about reflected in the way they live?"
Someone could, for example, write a book about emotional freedom, but how do they actually respond when they are insulted by somebody? Somebody else could write a book about success and trust, but how much is that reflected in the way that they deal with life's little disappointments? That is always the question when it comes to a book. It all sounds good, but how much is it lived? And this is where my cheating can be helpful, to me and to you, the reader, as well, because this book is not just a theory of releasing memory from the cells. This book is written by somebody who is palpably living in a released way. Just in the way that he chooses to spend his time, or just how he is with a waitress in the restaurant, or with his kids, being with Luis you can feel that this is a book written not only from a theory, but it's written from a different way of perceiving life.
This an important thing, because we are often in the habit of turning to people for advice who do not necessarily have mastery in what we want to know about. About a year ago I went to a conference where a celibate nun from India was giving a lecture. A young woman at the event stood up to ask a question "I'd like to get some advice. I'm a new mother, I'd like your direction on how I can raise my daughter." The celibate nun then then gave a five minute lecture about raising children. I asked myself, "What's wrong with this picture?" If you want advice about raising children, the last person in the world to ask is a celibate nun from India. But this is what we do. We follow the words of a renunciate teacher about money; we follow the teachings of someone who's never been in a relationship about relationship. So easily we look for our answers in all the wrong places.
The beautiful thing about this book is that this is not just words, it is written by somebody who has actually passed through and come out the other side of the journey he is inviting you to, and still is practicing it.
There are several things I want to share with you that make this book worthy of your time and set it apart from similar works.
First, it offers freedom from the mind, rather than comfort within the mind. Over the last many decades, there has been a growing understanding that we are affected by our thoughts and our beliefs. This understanding started with Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich," and came to a crescendo of popularity with the movie "The Secret." Suddenly everybody understood that what you think creates your life, so if you change your thoughts, you can change your life. That seems very logical ~ it is obviously true, isn't it? If somebody thinks negative and depressed thoughts all the time, they generally don't have very good things happen to them. Somebody who's very happy and positive generally has good things happen to them. So we come to the predictable conclusion, "Okay, so I should have happy thoughts. If I have happy thoughts, then I'll have a happy life." This seems very logical, but there is also a limit to this way of thinking.
The Russian philosopher George Gurdeiff once said, "Human beings live in a prison cell of their own creation. And almost everybody is content to rearrange the furniture in their prison cell and to call it freedom." Almost every book, every approach, every teacher who speaks about limiting belief will tell you that you need to change your negative beliefs into positive beliefs to create a happy life. This is what Gurdieff calls rearranging the furniture in the prison cell. It has two primary limitations. First, if you are living primarily within the limits of the mind, of thinking, it means that you are cut off from a much, much greater source of creativity and power. And the second thing is that belief always works in polarity, so if you get very attached to positive beliefs, you've actually got a bungee chord attached to negative beliefs as well. The more you hang on to the idea "I am wealthy and loved and in perfect health," the more a charge, or fear, is reinforced in poverty, loneliness and disease.
This book is a rare example of an emerging breed of understanding, one which I call "translucent." The word translucent means, not completely opaque and not completely transparent. A piece of stained glass, for example, when you shine light on it, it seems to glow. It lets light pass though it, but it retains it's quality.
You could say that a human being or an approach becomes translucent when it allows light to pass through it. What Luis is guiding you to in this book is not how to change your beliefs, but how to actually get free of the realm in which belief arises. In this way, your life may in fact get better, you may get the results that you want. This does not happen by trying to change the negative to the positive. It happens by recognizing the vast ground of being in which all beliefs are arising.
Second, this book bridges the gap which has been very prevalent between material well being and spiritual awakening. We have tended to either work with techniques to make our life better, or to relax and let go into the mysterious, mystical ground of being that we call awakening. This little book will give you the practical tools to not only change the quality of your mind, but to be free of your mind at the same time. It bridges the schism between spirit and having a functional, happy life with flowing relationships, money, and health. When we start to practice the kind of work that Luis is teaching, we discover that the bridging of this gap between awakening and material functionality actually brings fulfillment to both sides of the gap. We discover that you can't actually have a real, functional life without being connected to the source of life, without awakening. And you can't really be connected to the source of life if your physical life is in a mess, because it's going to keep distracting you.
This book is an example of the emergence of a new kind of synthesis, a new kind of integration, which helps us to see that the gap we've made between spirit and the body, between awakening and material well being, between universal love and functional relationships has really been to our detriment. This book will give you the tools to actually bring all of that into one integrated opening.
Third, in a very practical way, this book focuses on what actually makes a difference. Luis likes to tell the story of a small town or village whose water supply has become contaminated by some kind of fungus. He suggests that two experts are called in to assess the situation. One recommends to pour more and more clean water into the reservoir, so as to drown out the contaminated water with fresh water. The other expert suggests to treat and eliminate the fungus, and that then clean water will be permanently restored.
With a mischievous twinkle in his eye, Luis likes to ask his students which approach sounds more effective. Of course, almost everyone prefers the second one. We all want to be happy, we want to have good relationships, we want to make money, we want good health. So we tend to focus on how to get those things. But all those things come naturally when we just pay attention to what is in the way. It is your birthright to have a loving relationship. It's your birthright to have a flow of enough, a feeling of satisfaction. Its your birthright to have good health. What is important is see and release what is in the way. Luis never looses sight of your full potential in this book, he offers you a way to see that it is the blocks in the way that need our attention, the rest will happen on its own. So this gives you a systematic, reliable way to experience and to dissolve the pain body without getting caught in the story of who did what to who and when and why.
Fourth, this book will restore your trust in the body's natural wisdom. Just as it is the body that has stored our pain, so it is also the body that has a natural intelligence. If you can tune into and trust that intelligence, the body will unravel it's own pain and come back into its natural state. This is an approach that finds that perfect balance in neither getting lost in the story (which is the trap of a lot of psychotherapy), nor denying the story (which is the trap of a lot of spiritual teachings), but actually trusting the intelligence of the body to be able to throw off what it no longer needs.
Luis will show you that the contractions in the body are all created by our unconscious belief systems. If we believe "I'm alone and nobody loves me," or "everything's difficult and I won't be able to make it," or "I'm lost," these are distortions of perception. When we distort things in this way, the life force contracts. These contractions become our suffering. This is an approach that integrates our experience in the mind, as beliefs, and in the body, as physical contractions. Luis recognizes that we are completely unconscious of some of these blocks because it is a pain that we have been given when we were very young or when we were embryos; it was passed to us in our DNA. We are so unconscious of them that we just replay them.
And lastly, this little book will help you to do something so brave and unusual and transformative that I can't imagine why I left it to the last. Luis will help you to make friends with your pain, and even to welcome pain as a friend and teacher. What did you say? Why on earth would I want to do that? All the great spiritual teachings have told us that "we are powerful, we are freedom, we are love." And one might legitimately reply, "Ok, that is fine, but what about all these contractions? I am full of contractions over here!" The contractions remain contracted until they are felt, welcomed, embraced. As soon as we turn to meet them with genuine embrace, they start to open up, and then the natural joy that we are, and the freedom and openness starts to flow through us again.
We are programmed to believe that pain is bad, that pain is wrong -- it is someones fault. If we can't find someone else to blame, we blame ourselves, we blame God, we blame life. Pain becomes the bad guy in the movie. When we don't know the hidden treasure it conceals, so we just run from it. Pain has a message for us, a gift for us, an initiation into something deeper. If you are willing to walk into the pain, it becomes a blessing.
I started this little foreword with a confession that it is cheating. But there is another level of cheating as well, that I have not yet confessed. Since the early 70s I have received and trained in many, many approaches to liberation, some have worked well and some have not. So there are very few things that I'm really willing to subject myself to these days. Not only have I taken walks with Luis, and eaten together, and watched movies late into the night, I have also asked him to guide me in his process of CMR (cellular memory release). I trust him. Luis has skillfully guided me back into pockets of pain that I had thought were long since left behind, and has midwifed a much deeper and more complete integration.
This approach is for real, it is effective and brilliant, and it comes to you from a man of unusual integrity and fullness of heart.
]]>The Gift You Were Born to Givetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7216702010-09-22T13:14:25-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
Whenever I start a new client with Awakening Coaching, it begins with four questions.
The first is, "What are your objectives of entering into this coaching relationship?" This means, "What do you want? What's important to you?"
The second question is, "What gets in the way? What are the the habits, beliefs and situations in your life that you're aware interfere with what you're most longing for?"
The third question is, "What can we count on you for? What are your strengths? What are the habits that you've already developed in your life, where you and everyone else can hold you accountable?" For some, it may be that they've cultivated the habit of transparency, of telling the truth. For someone else, it might be the daily practice of meditation or Chi Kung.
And the last question has to do with outcomes. "At the end of this eight week coaching series, how would you like to be different? What would you like to be different? How would you like things to look, in an objective, measurable way?
Through working with clients in this way and similar ways for more than 25 years, I've come to recognize the difference between "extrinsic" values and "intrinsic" values. Simply put, an extrinsic value is something that you've been taught to want. It's the means towards getting something else.
The most obvious example of this is money. Putting an extra hundred thousand dollars in your bank account is not intrinsically fulfilling. It actually makes no difference to the quality of your life at all. It's a means to get other things, like a vacation, or a different car, or being of greater service to more people.
There are so many things like this that we think we want, that we've been taught to want, but when we look more deeply into them we discover that they didn't arrive out of our innocent, original, unconditioned heart.
Another desire I've come to be cautious about in coaching as an "extrinsic" value is the desire of enlightenment, or some kind of spiritual goal. This may seem surprising, because many times we think of this as the ultimate intrinsic value. A small child never talks about enlightenment, nor do any of us when we speak freely, openly, from our innocence. It's another conditioned value that we've been taught to want by spiritual teachers and traditions.
So what are "intrinsic" values, then? What are the things which coaching clients say they want, and which actually bring them home to themselves, to real fulfillment? When we strip away what we've been taught to believe and desire, what remains is natural. There's no one simple answer to the question, of course. Words like "love" and "peace" and "connection" point in the right direction.
If we had find one simple sentence which most effectively taps into the motherlode, it would be, "To give the gift I was born to give." This means to give the love that's waiting to be given in my heart, to sing the song I was born to sing. Working with people all these years, I've come to discover a relaxed certainty that everyone has a gift to give. It may not be what they like doing, it may or may not be what makes them money, and it may not gain them worldly recognition. But whenever a human being taps into the gift they were born to give, they discover destiny. Life becomes a dance. They discover a wellspring of energy, commitment and passion that could never be manufactured through force. They discover a spontaneous dance of support from life.
I've come to learn a lot about what allows someone to give their true gift. I hosted a free teleseminar on September 16, in which I shared with listeners the secrets that I've learned. If you'd like to listen to the replay, register below, and you will be directed to the play/replay page.
]]>Getting Permission to Flowtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7201132010-09-16T16:47:00-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
Maria attended one of our retreats a few years ago. Now in her 50s, she has been practicing meditation, which she had learned from a well-known Indian guru, for more than 30 years. She had a very calm, empty, silent presence. She dressed in plain, very sensible clothes and her gray hair was cut in a short, boyish style. After some days, she told us that her greatest difficulty and disappointment was that she still had strong emotions. She felt herself overwhelmed by grief or anger from time to time, which both she and her husband agreed was a sign of weakness, a lack of depth in her meditation practice.
Everything changed one morning when my wife Chameli spoke to her. "Your feelings are beautiful, they are your gift to your husband and to all of us. They bring color and texture to man's world, which can so often be gray and burdensome. Over the next days, please show us all what you are feeling, not only with your words, but with the way you move, with your laughter and your tears." Maria was more than a little disoriented by this invitation, after so many years of practice and masculine discipline. But the transformation that followed was dramatic and inspiring. At first she experimented, a little clumsily, by expressing quite chaotic and painful feelings that had been locked in her body for decades under the mantle of masculine spirituality. But we all also witnessed her tears of joy and her immense tidal wave of love, which was big enough to drown the entire retreat many times over. On the last night we had a party. Everyone dressed up beautifully. One of the other women, a teacher of sacred Indian dance, helped Maria dress in flowing, colorful clothes. She was transformed.
To read more, purchase my book "The Translucent Revolution" HERE.]]>Stare Into the Open Skytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7112732010-09-10T11:04:00-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/Leap Before You Look. Lie down on your back
Under a cloudless sky.
Open yourself to the nature of infinity.
Let yourself move out infinitely in any direction
And be soberly present with the unavoidable fact
That as far as you travel,
You are still only halfway there.
There are no limits.
You cannot think about infinity.
It will blow your mind.
You can only become one with the infinite.
Look into the sky without blinking.
Let the sky enter you, so there is no inner and outer remaining.
Then close your eyes and stare into the inner limitless sky.
This simple practice, to look into the open, cloudless sky, has been used in every tradition in every age. I was introduced to it in the Tibetan refugee community of Bodh Nath in Katmandhu by the great Dzogchen teacher Choki Nyima Rimpoche. Once it is pointed out to you, it becomes so obvious--it was there all along. Many of us get involved in spiritual practices and teachings, searching for who we really are, and the answer is right there above our heads all along: you only have to look up into the vastness of the sky. This practice is great for modern humanity, as we have grown so used to a man-made world. Everything has been modified; everything has our fingerprints all over it, except the sky. The vastness of the sky cannot be touched, cannot be modified; it remains the last outpost of absolute innocence.
The sky is such a great teacher, a great mirror, because it is not a thing. It is a presence. It contains all things, but it cannot be contained. Things have a beginning and an end in time, things have limits in space. But the sky has no creation date, it can never be destroyed, and it has no physical limits. There is a word for it, but there is no thing to which the word points, only spaciousness.
The sky can teach you about your own true nature. Consciousness is also not a thing. It also contains all of your experience, although it is not an experience. It, too, was never created, and has no limits. You also have a name, but if you follow that name back to where it points, you will find nothing there.
Imagine a vast empty space, extending equally in all directions. Now imagine a door in that space, without any wall around it, just a door in a door frame. There is space on one side of the door, and there is space on the other side of the door. Step through the door, and you step out of space and into space. How many spaces are there; how many infinities?
Staring into the sky is just like that. Look up into the sky, and there is infinite space. Look back into yourself, and there is infinite space. That which you call "me" is just a door in infinity, with infinite space behind it and before it and all around it. The infinite space of the sky and the infinite space of who you truly are are not two. "Space" is a word for Oneness.
You can discover 72 practices like this in Leap Before You Look.
Buy it now from our online store.]]>How to Thrive Authentically in the New Economytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6918682010-09-02T07:00:00-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Arjuna Ardaghhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/arjuna-ardagh/
Sometimes it seems like all we hear these days is talk of the tough economy. I actually conducted a little sociological experiment this weekend, and counted up how many times I heard people refer to the economy in a negative way. I got 43 hits, even though I stayed home quite a bit.
There is, of course, some objective measurable truth to all of this depressing talk. If you own a house, it's probably worth considerably less than it was five years ago. If you own a business, you may be making less money than you were, and you may have even been faced with the difficult decision of laying off some of your employees. If you're an investor in the stock market, you may have seen your portfolio go down in value.
But not everybody these days is having a terrible time. I've conducted another little amateur sociological experiment over the last several weeks. I asked a lot of my colleagues -- writers, teachers, seminar leaders -- how they would evaluate their year so far, not just financially, but according to a broader spectrum of measurement. How are your relationships? How's your creativity? How's your health? How much are you living your deepest vision? I'm a member of two extraordinary mens' groups, one where I live in Nevada City, and another that I travel to in Marin County. I asked this question at the recent meeting of the Transformational Leadership Council. More than half the people I asked told me that 2010 was proving to be their best year ever, myself included.
I hear people ask a lot on the blogosphere and in the media, "How long is this recession going to last? When are we going to go back to where we were?" Well, here's a shocking question for you now. What if we never, ever, ever go back to where we were? What if the old game is now coming to an end, and a whole different way of relating with each other financially and energetically is emerging?
Let's cast our mind back for a moment to the early part of the twentieth century, and imagine that one of your ancestors was in the business of shoeing horses or making saddles. Looking at the increasing popularity of the motor car, your ancestor might have asked his friends and neighbors, "How long is this going to last? When will things go back to the way they were?" For someone completely immersed in anything to do with horses -- shoeing them, building saddles for them, operating stables for them, cleaning up their droppings from the road -- those years would have looked like a tough economy. For Henry Ford, it was boom time. You can extrapolate what I just said in many ways. The 80's were probably a terrible time for people involved in the gramophone record industry. The Great Depression in the 30's, which hit not only the United States but Europe as well, was a truly terrible time for most people but it was also the period when discount stores first got off the ground, and many other new things were born.
You get my point. Every area of decline is experienced by somebody as a period of growth, rebirth and opportunity. I got really interested to ask myself, and other people like me who are experiencing that this is their best year ever, what are the keys to thriving in this new economy?
From interviews and conversations with these "thrivers" I've been able to identify twelve primary qualities of thriving in the new economy, as well as as many as 20 other sub-qualities. A lot of these qualities are really easy to understand and assimilate, starting today.
Over the next weeks, I'll be offering a series of blog posts and free tele-seminars, with a series of expert guests, on how to thrive in the new economy. Here are the twelve primary themes that I'll be elaborating on in the series, starting in a few weeks.
1. Question your mind.
Pretty much everything you think you know about work and money has been conditioned by the old game, the one that is declining. Thrivers like Hale Dwoskin, the author of "The Sedona Method," realize that we become wise through letting go.
2. Discover your deeper nature.
Everyone I've spoken to who is thriving has found a way to tap into a dimension of themselves beyond the personality, beyond the mind, beyond the personal story. We can call that a moment of "awakening." Thrivers like Eckhart Tolle place awakening as the highest value.
3. Recognize your unique gift.
As we just begin to hover in the realm of awakening, a unique gift starts to emerge: your real reason for being here. Thrivers help others to discover their true gift.
4. Recognize and respond to opportunity.
People who thrive in the new economy work less with initiation, intention, and effort, and more with the relaxed ability to recognize and respond to the opportunities that come to them. Thrivers like Jack Canfield have learned the magic of "just say yes."
5. Excel at what you do.
A number of books written in the past few years point to the fact that greatness and success are often simply a function of just repeating the same skills over and over until you get good at them. Thrivers like Stewart Emery have studied the secret mechanics of greatness.
6. Wake up your intuition.
Thrivers have, for the most part, recognized that logically working things out, balancing the pros and cons, is a much less effective way of giving your gift than tapping into a dimension where you "just know." Thrivers like Sonia Choquette help people live from just knowing.
7. Be yourself.
It's an old platitude, but today it's more than just good advice, it's an undeniable foundation for thriving. The proliferation of social media has made authenticity more appealing than slick advertising. Thrivers like Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks realize that you don't need a rehearsal to be who you are.
8. Enough is enough.
Our interest in unlimited wealth, which made the topics of manifesting and the law of attraction so interesting just a few years ago, have now become oh-so-2005. Thrivers have come to enjoy the word enough: enough money, enough toys, enough of everything to be happy and give my gift. Thrivers like Lynn Twist expound the wisdom of sufficiency.
9. Be guided by greatness.
People who thrive in the new economy have discovered that learning is not just a phase you go through as a young person. It's a life-long attitude to thriving. To be able to remain a learner, you simply need to put yourself in dialog with people who can do things better than you can. Thrivers like John Assaraf realize that coaching and mentoring are the short-cuts to a life of meaning.
10. Fuel the fire.
Thrivers have learned not to push the body past where it wants to go. They've canceled their subscription to Red Bull, lunches on the run and working until late in the night. They know how to replenish their energy while it is being used. Thrivers like Stephen Josephs and Anat Baniel teach business owners how to stay energetically topped-up.
11. Experience the richness of giving.
The old economy was based on the mathematics of lack. "You can only cut a pie so many ways." Secrecy, campaigns launched with military precision and going into price war with the competition were the testosterone-driven ways. Thrivers like Ivan Misner, the founder Business Network International, have recognized that when your focus is on giving back more than you take, thriving is an inevitable byproduct.
12. Embrace the return of the Goddess.
You may have noticed that we are now witnessing a huge resurgence of feminine energy after thousands of years of the domination of the masculine. Thrivers like Marianne Williamson celebrate and welcome the return of the feminine.
As I've said, this is not an exhaustive list. We could come up with a dozen more "thriver's qualities" in a finger-snap.
I put on a great tele-seminar on August 26th. We went into each of these 12 primary qualities of thriving in more detail. You can register below for the replay.
If you register for this event, I'll let you know as soon as the twelve week series is scheduled to start.
