Justine Musk's Blog, page 10

this much i know for sure: life lessons for a 41st birthday

So I had a birthday. I turned 41.

You know those lists of lessons some bloggers will do to commemorate such an occasion? I thought I’d take a crack at it. I give you tidbits I have gleaned from my time on this planet. I’m not saying they are particularly original, pithy or wise. But hey. They’re what I know.

1. If you don’t have any sense of humor whatsoever, there’s probably no hope for you.

2. Self-esteem comes hand in hand with self-discovery.

3. You don’t know who you are until you know what you can do.

(Thank you Sir Ken Robinson.)

4. If you can’t change the situation, you should maybe change yourself.

5. Sometimes the only thing you can do with the house that Jack built is to burn it down and build your own. click to tweet

6. Inspiration requires the ability to shift perspective and see things from different vantage points.

7. We find what we look for. So be careful what you look for.

8. If it’s unusable, untimely, hypothetical or distracting, it is too much information and you should preserve that mental bandwidth for something else. (Thank you Shawn Anchor.)

9. Sunscreen is key.

10. Broccili tastes better with a little bit of lemon juice on it.

11. It’s possible to change other people, but only through creating a shared and positive reality that encourages them to flourish.

12. It’s not about the power of control. It’s about the power to inspire.

13. Information now belongs to the people. But the future belongs to those who provide insight, context and meaning. click to tweet

14. Rabbit fur sheds like a mofo.

15. You can remove a red wine stain by applying white wine to it, blotting it, then treating it with the carpet or fabric cleaner of your choice.

16. A successful relationship is one that gives both people room to flourish.

17. The decisions we make out of fear are usually the decisions we regret.

18. When you’re frustrated by a problem that involves complex thinking, you need to turn it over to your subconscious by thinking about something else.

19. A soulmate is a person who forces you to stretch and grow. This could be a romantic partner, a child, a close friend – or an adversary.

20. One of the first steps to taking back your power is to stop seeing yourself through the eyes of any person or group who treats you as less-than.

21. The same originality that caused kids to pick on you when you were a youngster, serves to your advantage when you’re an adult.

22. Being in crisis sucks, but it also gives you a valuable opportunity to reshape your life, in a way you never would have done when you were in your normal zone.

23. Whatever you want to grow in your life: identify it, put more of your attention on it, and find some way to log and measure whatever actions lead to more of it.

24. Less is more. But every once in a while, more is more.

25. If it hurts inside, if you are crying too much or too often? It isn’t love, no matter what your partner tells you.

26. Things that money can’t buy: Purpose. Empathy. Intimacy. Personal integrity.

Self-knowledge. Self-esteem. Gut instincts. Curiosity. Warmth. Taste. Mastery. Respect. Joie de vivre. Sexual, emotional and intellectual chemistry. Charisma. Compassion. Talent. Balls. Ladyballs. Vision. A great work ethic. Happiness. Love. Someone to do cardio for you.

27. Our bodies and minds, our bodyminds, were evolved to walk twenty miles a day across the savannahs. There’s a connection between heart health and brain health. Regular exercise lowers both the rate of cognitive decline and your chances of getting Alzheimer’s.

28. Two of the best things you can do to keep your brain sharp and fit as you get older: 1) Learn to read and play music. 2) Learn a new language.

29. When you think of the qualities you want in a life partner, make sure you put “supportive” very high on the list, especially if you’re a woman with creative or professional ambitions.

30. If you don’t want to get burdened with the lion’s share of housework and childcare, make sure your income is, and stays, equal to or higher than the income of your partner.

31. When someone calls you selfish, it’s often because you’re inconveniencing them in some way or refusing to fall along with their agenda. If maintaining healthy boundaries, honoring deep-seated needs and yearnings and looking out for your own interests makes you “selfish”, it might be time to rethink the word and the impact it has on you.

32. With certain kinds of people, it’s not a communication problem, it’s a personality problem (and they will only use “communication” to spin you deeper into their web). The best way to deal with them is to refuse to deal with them.

33. It is never too late to reinvent yourself, which is about becoming more of who you already are.

34. If you want to feel good about yourself and your life, setting an authentic and meaningful goal, and making steady progress toward it, beats a new pair of shoes any day of the week…

35. …although gorgeous footwear is still pretty awesome.

36. Pathfinders and visionaries are the explorers of culture: they go over the line, and down all the wrong roads, to bring back their hardwon wisdom for the rest of us. If you recognize yourself as one of them, wear your scars with pride, and don’t beat yourself up for your fuckups. They are the price of an interesting life.

this much i think i know: life lessons for a 41st birthday

So I had a birthday. I turned 41.

You know those lists of life lessons some bloggers will do to commemorate such an occasion? I thought I’d take a crack at it. I give unto you some tidbits I have gleaned from my time on this planet. I’m not saying they are particularly original, pithy or wise. But hey. They’re what I know.

1. If you don’t have any sense of humor whatsoever, there’s probably no hope for you.

2. Self-esteem comes hand in hand with self-discovery.

3. You don’t know who you are until you know what you can do.

(Thank you Sir Ken Robinson.)

4. If you can’t change the situation, you should maybe change yourself.

5. Sometimes the only thing you can do with the house that Jack built is to burn it down and build your own. click to tweet

6. Inspiration requires the ability to shift perspective and see things from different vantage points.

7. We find what we look for. So be careful what you look for.

8. If it’s unusable, untimely, hypothetical or distracting, it is too much information and you should preserve that mental bandwidth for something else. (Thank you Shawn Anchor.)

9. Sunscreen is key.

10. Broccili tastes better with a little bit of lemon juice on it.

11. It’s possible to change other people, but only through creating a shared and positive reality that encourages them to flourish.

12. It’s not about the power of control. It’s about the power to inspire.

13. Information now belongs to the people. But the future belongs to those who provide insight, context and meaning. click to tweet

14. Rabbit fur sheds like a mofo.

15. You can remove a red wine stain by applying white wine to it, blotting it, then treating it with the carpet or fabric cleaner of your choice.

16. A successful relationship is one that gives both people room to flourish.

17. The decisions we make out of fear are usually the decisions we regret.

18. When you’re frustrated by a problem that involves complex thinking, you need to turn it over to your subconscious by thinking about something else.

19. A soulmate is a person who forces you to stretch and grow. This could be a romantic partner, a child, a close friend – or an adversary.

20. One of the first steps to taking back your power is to stop seeing yourself through the eyes of any person or group who treats you as less-than.

21. The same originality that caused kids to pick on you when you were a youngster, serves to your advantage when you’re an adult.

22. Being in crisis sucks, but it also gives you a valuable opportunity to reshape your life, in a way you never would have done when you were in your normal zone.

23. Whatever you want to grow in your life: identify it, put more of your attention on it, and find some way to log and measure whatever actions lead to more of it.

24. Less is more. But every once in a while, more is more.

25. If it hurts inside, if you are crying too much or too often, then it isn’t love, no matter what your partner tells you.

26. Things that money can’t buy: Purpose. Empathy. Intimacy. Personal integrity.

Self-knowledge. Self-esteem. Gut instincts. Curiosity. Warmth. Taste. Mastery. Respect. Joie de vivre. Sexual, emotional and intellectual chemistry. Charisma. Compassion. Talent. Balls. Ladyballs. Vision. A great work ethic. Happiness. Love. Someone to work out for you.

27. Our bodies and minds, our bodyminds, were evolved to walk twenty miles a day across the savannahs. There’s a connection between heart health and brain health. Regular exercise lowers both the rate of cognitive decline and your chances of getting Alzheimer’s.

28. Two of the best things you can do to keep your brain sharp and fit as you get older: 1) Learn to read and play music. 2) Learn a new language.

29. When you think of the qualities you want in a life partner, make sure you put “supportive” very high on the list, especially if you’re a woman with creative or professional ambitions.

30. If you don’t want to get burdened with the lion’s share of housework and childcare, make sure your income is, and stays, equal to or higher than the income of your partner.

31. When someone calls you selfish, it’s often because you’re inconveniencing them in some way or refusing to fall along with their agenda. If maintaining healthy boundaries, honoring deep-seated needs and yearnings and looking out for your own interests makes you “selfish”, it might be time to rethink the word and the impact it has on you.

32. With certain kinds of people, it’s not a communication problem, it’s a personality problem (and they will only use “communication” to spin you deeper into their web). The best way to deal with them is to refuse to deal with them.

33. It is never too late to reinvent yourself, which is about becoming more of who you already are.

34. If you want to feel good about yourself and your life, setting an authentic and meaningful goal, and making steady progress toward it, beats a new pair of shoes any day of the week…

35. …although gorgeous footwear is still pretty awesome.

36. Pathfinders and visionaries are the explorers of culture: they go over the line, and down all the wrong roads, to bring back their hardwon wisdom to the rest of us. If you recognize yourself as one of them, wear your scars with pride, and don’t beat yourself up for your fuckups. They are the price of an interesting life.

I want to keep expanding this list, so if you have ideas or suggestions, let me know. We are all, always learning, which is half the fun.

is it scarcity complex, or a call to adventure?

If you tell someone with a bent toward the spiritual and/or self-help that you feel a sense of lack in your life, she might look at you with a faint hint of disapproval. She might tell you that what you put your attention on, grows, and we become what we think about most.

So don’t focus on the lack, she might tell you. Focus on abundance. Focus on enough. You have everything you need. You are exactly where you are supposed to be. This moment is perfect. You are perfect.

What if that lack isn’t the symptom of a scarcity complex, but something else?

What if it’s your call to adventure? The beginning of your hero’s journey?

What if it’s your way into a richer, deeper, more meaningful life?

According to mythologist Joseph Campbell and depth psychologist Jean Houston, inside all of us is a longing for more. This isn’t the voice of the void but the cry of your soul, driving you to wholeness. click to tweet

Houston explains in this interview that The Call might start off as bland and generic: I want to get married, or, I want a new career. The “usual things”. But at some point there’s what Houston terms a second genesis, when another level of possibility begins to crest and you realize there’s so much more to you than you ever suspected.

That’s when your life’s adventure begins.

And by the way, you are perfect. You are exactly where you are supposed to be – until life keeps whacking you with hints and reminders that it’s time to be on your way to somewhere else. (In storyteller’s parlance, this is known as ‘resisting the call’, and the hero will continue to stagnate, and life will keep poking and frustrating and disrupting her, until she’s willing to leave her ordinary world and strike out for the territories.)

Moving into your yearning is different from trying to fill the void through a hard or soft addiction. The latter leaves you worse off than before, wanting more but requiring ever more to achieve the same effect. What is addiction, in the end, but a spiritual quest pulled inside out?

To move into your yearning is to recognize and honor your needs. It is to move to the other side of lack, where you can start to remember who you are.

would you choose to be powerful or warm? ( + the secret of compelling people)

1

I posed the question to my Facebook peeps: would you rather be known for your power or your warmth?

It was inspired by the book COMPELLING PEOPLE by John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut.

They explain that when we first meet someone, we instinctively and intuitively decide whether they can help us or if they might hurt us. We pick up on subtle cues, hints and signals about whether someone is strong (ie: can make stuff happen, has power and impact) or warm (shares our feelings, interests and worldview).

Usually there’s a trade-off between the two. The more powerful we perceive a person to be, the less warm; the more warm we perceive a person to be, the less powerful.

There’s a biological basis for this. The key chemical agent of strength, of dominance and risk-taking, is testosterone. Testosterone acts to inhibit oxytocin, which expresses warmth and empathy. So the more you have of the one, the less you’re likely to have of the other. They are battling each other in your blood.

The ability to exude both strength and warmth – according to the authors – is so rare that the Greeks referred to it as “the divine gift”, also known as charisma. (We might call it “leadership potential”, “cool”, “the X factor”, or the magical “it”.)

2

We expect men to be strong and powerful.

We expect women to be warm and caring.

And we don’t like to have those expectations violated. We’ll even penalize the people who do it (a kind of anti-stereotype backlash). We’ll accuse a caring, empathic man of being a wuss, being pussywhipped. We’ll accuse a powerful woman of being a cold bitch, a ballbreaker, an unnatural freak (Hillary Clinton, anyone?).

Could this be why we women have such a complicated relationship with power and ambition?

I thought of this when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer appeared in VOGUE magazine. She is glammed up and sprawled upside down on a lounge chair. It’s a rather powerless position for such a powerful woman, and this would seem to be the point.

By “playing into stereotype”, as one female commenter on CNN’s Facebook page accused her of doing, Marissa is dialing up her likeability.

(Likeability is important to getting ahead. If people don’t like you, they won’t do business with you, mentor or support or promote you. Women are well aware of this, which is a major reason why they won’t ask or negotiate for raises the same way that men do. On some level they fear that their likeability will take a hit, and the damage to their career will outweigh the financial benefit.)

This might also be why Marissa made it a point to distance herself from feminism, even though the woman practically embodies what feminism stands for (equality, equality, equality!).

But according to Neffinger and Kohut, dimming your power is not the answer. What you should do, instead, is to turn up your warmth. One way is to use your power on behalf of a group. As Sheryl Sandberg – another formidable female — points out in her book LEAN IN, the culture will “allow” women to be ambitious and powerful so long as they are fighting for the rights of others and not just themselves.

But maybe that’s the way it should be – for men as well as for women.

One of my favorite quotes is from Martin Luther King. In COMPELLING PEOPLE, he is held up (along with Oprah) as an example of someone with “the divine gift” of charisma, who embodies both warmth and strength:

“One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites…What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

The world doesn’t just need love. It needs warriors for love. click to tweet

3

When I posed the question on my Facebook page, most of the women said they’d rather be known for their warmth. This didn’t surprise me. One woman considered the question to be “Machiavellian” (Machiavelli is famous for stating that you can be loved or feared, but not both).

The few women who chose power tended to speak from a place of disillusionment: “warmth only gets you so far,” said one.

Another woman said that her warmth had allowed people to take advantage of her.

When you’ve been on the receiving end of an abuse of power – as an individual or as part of a group – you’re more likely to have a certain distaste for it. “Personal power drives some mighty bad behavior in human beings,” pointed out a woman who chose warmth. Who could argue with this? After all, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And yet.

How can we, as women and the friends of women, change the world and elevate the global sisterhood, if we don’t have the power to do so?



What if we could redefine power?

What if we rejected power over other people — the kind of power that controls and dominates, that suppresses and oppresses — and embraced the power to create, collaborate, inspire, make change?

What if more women realized that by stepping into their personal power, they were also empowering other women through both their example and their ability to represent?

What if, instead of downplaying our power, we up-played our warmth? Our love?

“My warmth is my power,” declared both Danielle LaPorte and Rafael O. Quezada.

They make an excellent point.

It’s interesting to note that the earlier incarnations of the goddess Aphrodite were the goddesses Astarte and Ishtar, evolving as one civilization conquered another and reshaped that culture’s mythology. It’s interesting to note that these were the goddesses of love, fertility…and war. The feminine was regarded as receptive and loving, yes, but it was also formidable and fierce. It destroyed as well as created. It destroyed in order to create.

The world needs people who can fight for love, who are lover-warriors and total badasses, who recognize love as the ultimate power – because it alone has the power to heal.

We could all probably use some of that.

10 small things you could do today that just might change your life (or at least your state of mind)

1. Forgive someone. Create a little ritual around it (the symbolic life is very important to the subconscious mind, which thinks in images and metaphors). Write a letter to this person, pouring out your soul to them. Then burn it. Chant, “I forgive you,” 5 times. And go have a beer to celebrate.

2. Go for a walk in a cemetery. Sounds morbid, maybe, but thinking about death can connect us more deeply to life. Imagine your funeral: what would people say? What would you want them to say? Then go home and write down a list of things you want to have, be and do before you die.

3. When you disagree with someone, develop a habit of detaching and looking for the truth in the other person’s statements. Just assume that it’s there. (You might have to look hard. Really really hard.) Reflect that truth back to the other person and let the conversation go from there.

4. Write down 5 things you liked to do as a kid, for fun, when you didn’t have to do anything. Then go do at least one of those things. (If you feel a need to justify the time, think about this: Play relaxes the mind. A relaxed mind comes up with better, more inspired ideas. Jung dreamed up much of the best of his work when he was building sandcastles and little villages on the beach.)

5. Whatever big issue you are struggling with right now, make a vow to yourself that you’re going to learn from it, grow from it and find some way to resolve it – so you can help other people who are also going through it. Then go take one action, no matter how small, that moves you one (baby) step closer to improvement or resolution.

6. Throughout the day, look carefully at your environment and find ten details – a sign, a flower, a shadow falling across a cobblestone road, a vintage car parked outside your office building – that you find interesting or beautiful or amusing. Use your camera phone to document. Challenge someone else to the same exercise. Compare the details you notice and the details they notice — do they tell you anything new about this other person? Or yourself?

7. Assemble a list of famous (or infamous) quotes off the Web that provoke or inspire you or make you laugh (or some combination thereof). Post it on your social networks.

8. Give somebody a gift for no reason other than that you think they are (fill in the blank), and make the world better for being in it. Expect nothing in return.

9. You wear about twenty percent of your clothes. Go through your closet and get rid of some or most or all of the remaining eighty percent. Tell yourself you value clarity, space and calm over clutter and hoarding. Then think about other areas of your life, and find something in each area that you can subtract or eliminate. Go do that. Then see what those fresh empty spaces start to invite into your life.

10. Do this exercise with a friend, possibly over a bottle of wine. Tell your friend the story of your past. Then have your friend retell that story as if your life was a novel chosen for Oprah’s Book Club and you’re the plucky protagonist, overcoming adversity and acquiring wisdom along the way. Discuss the best possible ways for this story to end – how will the heroine triumph? What does she need to learn or do in order to triumph? How can you set her up for an amazing sequel? Then reverse positions.

and bonus

11. Rock out in your car. It’s good for you.

the so-called lies of lifestyle design ( + the secret truth about tim ferriss)

A good post came out called The 3 Lies of Lifestyle Design (Why Tim Ferriss Is Making You Hate Your Life).

Reading it made me think

a) this blogger is absolutely right, and I could add some more thoughts as to why

and

b) Tim Ferriss is misunderstood.

Lifestyle design seems a predominantly male phenomenon wherein young twentysomethings automate and delegate and online-entrepreneur their way into the ranks of the “new wealth”, which is less about having money and more about having the time and freedom and mobility to do what you want, where you want, when you want. The possibilities are staggering. Yet this vision of a personally designed, unconventional life starts looking pretty much the same from designer to designer. You travel the world. You hang out on beaches. You engage in activities that may or may not involve hurling yourself from great heights. You pursue your own idiosyncratic, whimsical goals and interests.

Sounds great, I know.

Except.

When you look at it a little closer, this is another recipe – like, say, going to law school – for bright talented go-getting people who don’t know what to do with the rest of their lives. It’s also a recipe for disconnection, distraction and aimlessness, all of which serve as primary sources for human unhappiness.

The blogger points out that Ferriss himself has designed a life that doesn’t look anything like this.

“…Morning meditation, meet with people he advises, exercise, a bunch of hours of work in the afternoon, long, multiple-hour dinner with a couple glasses of wine and tons of friends.

He didn’t say fly to Thailand, bungee jump, swim with sharks, and then bang a tranny.”

I’ll take Tim’s “day in the life” any day, and this is why: although it might seem comparatively unglamorous, routine and structured, it is rich with meaningful, opiate-generating activities.

I’ve posted before about the difference between dopamine and opiate hits in the brain. Dopamine is the buzz, the thrill of the chase, the addict’s high, the cotton candy ride that doesn’t nourish or sustain you but leaves you wanting more. The brain releases dopamine to keep us motivated and in pursuit of whatever it is that we think we want. It’s a valuable brain chemical that — as we are wont to do — we tend to abuse. We love the hunt. But once the hunt is over, we activate a different part of the brain that knows whether or not a deep-seated need has been satisfied. If we have identified that need and fulfilled it, we experience the deep, rich, full, rooted, connected feelings that dopamine promises but never delivers.

Those feelings are produced by opiates.

Opiate-generating activities tend to involve grit, discipline, self-knowledge and effort.

You have to get off the couch, dig in deep, learn your soul and what matters to you, be vulnerable with someone, work at that relationship, go to the gym, master a new skill (pushing past all those awkward phases where you’re sucking at it, bored and uncomfortable). You have to put yourself in service to something bigger than yourself.

You have to confront your life. You have to move more deeply into it.

And that shit is hard.

Previously I wrote about the survival dance and the sacred dance: ideas taken from a book by Bill Plotkin. Essentially: we are all on a quest to find and develop our true gifts in a way that serves the world so that the world will ultimately (note the emphasis on ‘ultimately’) pay us to do what we were born to do. By serving the world, we also serve ourselves, and vice-versa. We and the world become one. This is our true work, our soul work, our sacred dance. It takes years, or decades, or even the length of an entire first adulthood to find it.

In order to develop the skills, abilities, maturity and wisdom to master your sacred dance, you have to figure out the survival dance. This is the first task of adulthood: to find a way to survive in the world. It usually means a paying job, or a career that you probably don’t love. It could also mean creating a marriage and a family and a home, or withdrawing to a monastery somewhere, or finding various kinds of patronage for your art (ie: “selling out”) as you develop your own unique voice on the side.

Once you’ve got the survival dance locked down, your soul starts to rattle around in its cage. (This is often known as the midlife crisis.) Now it’s time to figure out what you really want to do, what fulfills you, and how to make money doing that so you can do that all the time. A key criterion for this kind of work is that you are willing to do it without pay. In fact, you’re often required to, as you develop skills and credibility. You navigate toward that sweetspot where the needs of the world line up with the gifts of your soul.

Tim showed people one way to lock down the survival dance faster and sooner than is commonly done. If you want to go to Thailand, you should definitely go to Thailand (although you might not want to risk AIDS or support sex trafficking). But it might help to be very clear on your new quest (and you do have one):

To find your sacred dance.

To find the work you would do for free – because now you’re in the perfect position to do that, with time and money and an absence of responsibility you’ll probably never have again in your life.

You know how to survive in the world. You’ve done that with aplomb. But do you know how to nurture and develop your soul? Do you know the unique story that is struggling to express itself through you, the contribution to the world that only you can make? As you start to identify your sacred dance – and understanding will come in bits and gleamings that weave together over time – you’ll realize that your whole life to date has been a ticket to the ballroom. Now you’re in, and the real game begins. It’s time to learn the steps, and master them so well that you start to embody them. You create a whole new beauty with the grace and choreography that no one else can pull off except you.

It won’t be easy.

It won’t be quick.

It will take you the rest of your life.

You wouldn’t have it any other way.

11 reasons why reading is sexy

‎Five years from now, you’re the same person except for the people you’ve met and the books you’ve read.- John Wooden

1. Desire begins in the mind (and so does reading). click to tweet

2. Reading is mind-to-mind, soul-to-soul contact.

3. Reading has the power to shake up, transport and transform you.

4. A book can make an excellent prop over which to peer coyly at your victim.

5. Books can be subversive and dangerous, filled with ballsy ideas that ride motorcycles too fast, in the rain, without a helmet.

6. A book can spirit you off to another realm at a moment’s notice.

7. A book is always ready and willing to go to bed with you…

8. …or to loll about in a park, or beside the fireplace, or in the tub.

9. Reading gives you material with which to reinvent yourself.

10. A book will charm and delight you but has a mind of its own (ie: a book is not your bitch).

11. Reading provides you with a secret double life in which you can make glorious mistakes and risk it all wherever, whenever, and without consequence.

And bonus:

12. Reading increases your knowledge. Knowledge is power. Power is sexy.

13. Reading fiction increases your empathy and social skills. That translates to confidence. Confidence is sexy.

how to grow a soul ( so you can find the work of your soul)

The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it. It’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift – your true self – is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs. — Bill Plotkin

The pull toward soul feels like an earthquake in the midst of your life. — Bill Plotkin

1

I posted a blog post titled You are not here to play it safe, which was a riff on all the crazy things your soul is here to do.

(“You are here to kamikaze at the sun!” Put that on your to-do list, boys and girls).

When I tossed it up on my Facebook page, someone said in the comments: Great. Now tell that to my bank and my landlord, thanks.

2

I use the word soul to refer to some essential evolving essence of you, the deep and coded line of poetry that pushes for expression in your life. (I also think of this as your creative intelligence.)

Whereas spirit refers to some great transcendent impersonal Om reality in the sky – the One we all merge into – soul takes you in the other direction.

It takes you down into the underground, into the deeply personal and highly individual depths of who you are: your gifts, your wounds, your unlived life, your mystery, your shadow.

(Soul is to spirit what gothic eyeliner is to angel glitter. People tend to go one way or the other.)

Soul is you in your body. It is lived through your body. It is your core, your mojo juice, your specific life purpose, and yours alone.

It is your unconscious drive for wholeness.

Your soul drives you – is trying to drive you – toward an unfolding vision of your best and deepest life. But it has to do this in a world that doesn’t give a damn about any of that, caring instead about bills and babysitters and home repairs and Twitter followers and parking spaces and those last five pounds and credit card debt and standing in line at Target.

3

I came across the concept of “the survival dance” vs “the sacred dance” – and how they’re not opposite forces at all, but one grows out of the other – in a book called SOULCRAFT by Bill Plotkin.

When we leave our childhoods and move out into the world, our first task is to create a survival dance: to find a way to support ourselves. Usually this means a paid job, but it could also mean creating a home and raising kids, or joining a spiritual commune, or finding a patron for your art, or living off the land.

Then, once you have that part established, you start the search for your sacred dance (in our soul-disconnected culture, this often manifests as an identity crisis of one kind or another). This is the work you were meant to do: the work of your soul. It’s your kamikaze at the sun.

Writes Plotkin, “Your sacred dance sparks your greatest fulfillment and extends your truest service to others.”

You know you’ve found the beginnings of it when you’re willing to do it without pay (and probably do).

This is the thing about soul: it exists in relationship to something bigger than itself. We are wired into each other; we search for meaning; we want to contribute and feel part of a bigger picture. To find your dharma, your personal Way, means to discover and develop your gifts but also to plug them in to the world in a way that serves the world. To rise in the mastery of your talent and respond to the call of your times.

Which is why Plotkin can write, perhaps wildly optimistically:

What your soul wants is what the world also wants (and needs). Your human community will say yes to your soul work…. Gradually your sacred dance becomes what you do and your former survival dance is no longer needed. Now you have only one dance as the world supports you to do what is most fulfilling for you.

Your sacred dance is the art you spend twenty years developing in the nooks and crannies of your everyday life. It’s the volunteer work that morphs into a career. It’s the little business you start on the side that grows into a personal empire.

But the way to get there, Plotkin points out, is to build the foundation for self-reliance,

a survival dance of integrity that allows you to be in the world in a good way….Cultivating right livelihood, as Buddhists call it, is essential training and foundation for your soul work; it’s not a step that can be skipped.

4

What I take from this:

It takes time, and a lot of conscious, ongoing effort:

To explore and learn yourself.

To uncover your gifts.

To develop and master those gifts.

To explore and learn the world.

To find that place in the world where you fit.

To find where the needs of the world and the gifts of your soul embrace like crazed lovers.

To help the world itself become aware of this.

5

The soul does not announce itself on your doorstep with a neon sign in its hands announcing your PURPOSE and your LIFE PASSION and HOW TO MONETIZE (at least not for most of us). You grow your soul through hardwon experience in the world, in the marketplace, in relationships, in solitude, in your own head. It’s a process. It takes many years: often the entire length of a first adulthood.

Which tends to fly in the face of a culture that promises Five Steps to This and Six Weeks to That and 10 Ways to Transform Your Life (the whole life-ends-at-30 attitude doesn’t help). And while psychologists and neuroscientists will tell you that transformation is very, very possible, it’s generally not painless and tends not to be quick. Just like that overnight success took twenty years to achieve, that moment of personal epiphany that changed everything took years of effort in the world — as well as in that personal, mythical space of the underground — to flash itself into being.

Finding a way to support yourself, and then the form of your creative work, and then a way to support yourself doing that creative work, is a quest. It’s a journey. And as any storyteller will tell you, it’s the journey that makes you into the person that you need to be in order to have what you need to have —

– which might be different from what you thought you wanted –

– but you should maybe just roll with it. You’ve got soulful forces at work. Underground.

how to fail at your relationships ( + the art of the beautiful mistake)

I was revising a scene in my novel after two characters deeply attracted to each other get to know each other in the Biblical sense

( — I just wanted to say that. Can you imagine working that phrase into daily conversation: “Yes, last night I knew Jake in the Biblical sense – and it was awesome – “ )

and in the morning realize that for various reasons they have no future together but decide to see out their relationship for however long it lasts.

He does it because he’s older and jaded but incredibly intrigued by this complex and unusual young woman.

She does it because she believes that people come together to learn from each other. Why, she wonders, is any relationship that doesn’t end in forever regarded as doomed or a failure or a mistake?

I don’t know if I would have thought this when I was her age (I’m pretty sure I thought nothing of the kind). But having come through a series of relationships, none of which ended in forever, it’s what I believe.

I believe that the goal of human life isn’t to be happy so much as to flourish, to find and fulfill our dharma, to self-actualize.

The Greeks have a word for this: eudaimonia. Religions and spiritual teachers are all about developing the disciplines to live good lives, to bring dark things to light, to bust through the walls of illusion, to move past duality and separateness and recognize our essential Oneness with the universe (can you give me an ‘om’, boys and girls?).

Human beings seem to have this deep, innate calling to be the best that we can be, to make dazzling artworks of our lives – even if we often have no idea how to go about this.

To grow towards self-actualization means just that: to grow. Which is where personal development starts shading into the spiritual: to achieve what you’ve never achieved requires you to do what you’ve never done, which requires that you change – and grow – as a person.

(And when I use the word ‘spiritual’ I’m referring to matters of the psyche, the soul, the intangible evolving essence of your personhood.)

Relationships are teachers.

Probably our best teachers.

We serve as (funhouse) mirrors to each other. We catch each other’s emotions. We lift each other up or throw each other down. We bring out facets of each other we didn’t know were there.

We are constantly projecting secret elements of ourselves onto others: the things we don’t like about ourselves and can’t admit to, we find, again and again, in those people who trigger us, who annoy the crap out of us.

Likewise, it’s the secret gold in us – — the latent talents, the squashed ambition, all those potentialities going unlived, unexpressed – that surface into view through the people we choose to admire or even idolize.

Intimacy is scary not only because there is no place to hide from the other person, there is no place to hide from yourself

(unless you’re willing to completely consume the other person, which is known as pathological narcissism).

Therapists will tell you that we attract into our lives the people and relationships on the same degree of mental and emotional health as we are (which is why a guy referring to his crazy ex-girlfriends is a big red flag for me). On an unconscious level we are scanning and choosing those who fit into our neuroses like – to quote from a famous poem by Margaret Atwood – “a fish into an eye/ a fishhook/an open eye.” (Ouch.)

We are driven to recreate dramas from our past in order to resolve them (known as repetition compulsion) or maybe just because the brain likes the groove of the familiar, figuring that if it hasn’t killed you, it’s not broken don’t fix it (known as setting an extremely low bar).

Therapy itself is premised on the idea of a corrective relationship between therapist and client that creates a new, healthy imprint in the client’s mind about how to connect….as well as the kind of accurate mirroring of who that client actually is that friends and family members, caught up in their own distortions, can’t provide.

We learn to love others through loving ourselves.

We learn to love ourselves through loving others.

As we nurture our personal/spiritual growth, we become capable of better relationships; as relationships move and change and shatter us, we grow into better people.

The idea behind reincarnation (my book deals with reincarnation, which is why I know this) is that each soul is on a quest to perfect itself; each lifetime is an incarnation of some particular lesson that the soul must learn in order to cycle closer to perfection. (Note how this suggests that the aim and purpose of human life is not to be happy, but to learn, evolve and grow, which tends to happen through struggle, loss and conflict. Lucky us.) If the soul refuses to learn, human life will just keep smacking it upside the head with the same lesson over and over until wisdom is extracted, insight realized, and the soul can move on.

That seems a good metaphor for relationships.

Repetition compulsion.

You are the soul. Each relationship is an incarnation of a particular lesson that you need to grow towards self-actualization – or, to get all spiritual-like, your union with the Divine.

And what is the Divine –

– but dazzling, white-hot and smokin’ Love with a capital L.

Love within. Love without. Love of others. Love of self. Boundaries dissolve. Everything connects. We are one.

Like that.

And maybe this sounds selfish and self-oriented, to say that the purpose behind every relationship is to absorb some lesson that will help you self-actualize, but that’s kind of my point. Relationship itself collapses the space between you and the other person. You nurture yourself by nurturing the relationship by nurturing the other person. They do the same with you.

And when that’s no longer working – when the nurturing is no longer happening, when somebody’s soul is dying slowly on the vine – when you’re gridlocked into stagnancy and can’t find your way forward — maybe it’s time to move on.

Maybe the point of this relationship was to prepare you for the next relationship, and if that was the case, how can it be considered a failure?

A mistake?

You might say you want forever, you want happily ever after, but are you truly capable of that (at this particular moment in time)?

Do you have the self-awareness to know your needs and the self-esteem to know that you are worthy of their satisfaction? Do you have healthy boundaries that take in the good and seal out the bad? Do you know how to truly see the other person through the fog of your own fantasies and projections?

Do you know how to give love? Do you know how to receive? (Receiving is also a skill and an art.)

I can tell you this:

I sure as hell didn’t.

Maybe I still don’t.

But I can also tell you this:

I am working on it.

you are not here to play it safe

You are not here to play it safe

You are here to rise up from cold ash

You are here to bellydance to the end of the line

You are here to groove off the beat

You are here to run naked through color fields

You are here to transmit the deep code of your soul

You are here to shoot tequila with the enemy

You are here to sign documents in blood

You are here to name the lost animals

You are here to be the flesh of an idea

You are here to build a disco in the underworld

You are here to throw dice with the queen of the dead

You are here to write spells on your lover’s body

You are here to look behind you in the dark

You are here to steal apples from the goddess

You are here to kamikaze at the sun