Justine Musk's Blog, page 12

a 16-point guide (sort of) to the art + mystery of charisma

You don’t learn how to be fascinating, you unlearn how to be boring. — Sally Hogshead

Danielle LaPorte, James Altucher and I got together online for a live conversation about charisma. Check out the recording here.

1. Charisma is contextual. Nobody is charismatic to all of the people all of the time. A person can be charismatic in one area of her life and not so much in others.

2. Charisma is a process. It flows in the spaces between people. It’s like the Force, or an awesome conversation. A charismatic person can turn it up, or down, or off. It’s not a static inborn trait planted in a person by nature or God/dess (or Yoda).

3. Charisma is authentic. It emerges from the inside-out. You can put on the right body language, you can fake it til you make it, but that’s kind of like copying the symptoms of a cold without actually having a cold. Your imitation comes off as contrived, and maybe hollow, and people are quick to sniff that out.

4. Charisma emerges when you are centered and comfortable in your skin, when you put your focus on the other person instead of yourself.

5. Charisma is born and made. Charismatic people invent themselves in a way that leans into their talents and strengths. Before Marilyn Monroe became who she was, she was the girl next door. But she was the sexy girl next door. When Hollywood rejected that girl, Marilyn saw that there was an opening for sex goddess, and who better to fill that position than herself?

6. Charisma creates a persona that is a distilled and heightened truth of the person behind it (see ‘charisma is authentic’, above). Charismatic people not only know who they are, they know how to perform themselves in the most compelling way possible. They are master communicators. They are always studying, learning, improving.

7. Charisma has a bold and compelling point of view that often polarizes people. Charisma gets beneath the skin of the culture in a way that inspires many – but provokes and disturbs others. If you’re going to be loved, you’re also going to have some haters. (Unless you’re Tom Hanks.)

8. Charisma is about being both fascinating and relevant. It’s not enough to hook a person’s attention, you have to have something to say that engages, inspires, lifts her to a higher emotional state.

9. Charisma is not just about having a message. It’s about embodying that message in some way. You walk your talk. You live your brand. You own an idea, because you are that idea. When people see you, they see what you stand for.

10. Charisma is about being tuned in: to other people, to yourself, to the soul of the culture, the call of the times, the mood of the room. Charisma knows how to read the signals and respond accordingly.

11. Charisma generates from an intuitive place deep inside. Charismatic leaders align themselves with the strong inner voice of their own psyche, which leads them to new and/or unexplored places. They trailblaze.

12. Charisma often says the things that other people won’t say, or can’t say, or don’t know how to say (see ‘bold and compelling point of view’, above). The truth is highly charismatic — which is why it’s dangerous, and has enemies.

13. Charisma is passion and confidence. That emerges naturally when you’re in your element: when you have discovered what you love to do and are a total badass at doing it. If you don’t know what that is yet, keep searching. Don’t ever quit.

14. Charisma doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with happiness. You can be highly charismatic and still want to kill yourself, or kill yourself slowly through various forms of self-abuse.

15. Charisma ultimately needs to be about something more than the self, because that can be lonely and isolating and just not very interesting for very long. Charisma is at its most dynamic when it serves a larger purpose.

16. Charisma can be used for evil. Evil people suck, no matter how charismatic.

photo: Dina Regine

soul on wings

He would have been 11. The night before his birthday my friend Joanna came to my door carrying a small antique Indian trunk with images of butterflies pressed against the lid. Inside were keepsakes, photographs, a journal with Nevada’s name embossed in soft blue leather, a letter to Nevada from my mother. Perhaps this is my first letter to him.

And it is a love letter, however struck through with grief. After a decade of learning to carry it, I have come to love this sadness created in a baby’s image when he died of what they termed “a SIDS-related incident” at ten weeks; it popped my heart like a balloon and when that happens, after the pain starts to fade and you’re no longer trying to claw it out of your chest, the world comes into you, the pain itself turns to something strangely beautiful, because it’s sacred. My firstborn son’s life was sacred, and his death, when he died in my arms after we took him off the machines, brought me to the edge of the god/dess realm, a god/dess I didn’t even think I believed in.

It’s hard to explain.

But he was blue-eyed and black-haired and a big, healthy boy. We named him Nevada because he was conceived at the Burning Man art and music festival held every year in Black Rock, Nevada, there amid the art cars and glowing lights and orange sand with that stark acrid scent that gets into everything.

My husband (now ex-husband) and I went to Burning Man again after Nevada’s death, and on our last day there his friend Adeo forced us both onto the desolate plain of the playa, trudging through the dust storm out past the camps and the sculptures to the Temple intricately fashioned from small pieces of wood.

Every year there is a Temple, and every year it’s the last thing to burn.

People roam the makeshift rooms and write on the walls: fragments and lyrics and self-declarations and messages to loved ones. That year I wrote NEVADA ALEXANDER MUSK: he was a good baby on the wall of the Temple in thick black ink and now every time I go to Burning Man I do this, I make the small precious pilgrimage across the sunhammered playa – walking the miles on foot, it seems like it should be done on foot – and I enter the Temple and I find some place to write his name, to feel the tender power of it. On the last night of the Festival they set the Temple blazing, the flames like dragon’s breath tearing through the dark, scattering sparks and plumes of smoke, and I feel lighter, and awed, as if I’ve brushed the veil and glimpsed the face of my baby behind it. I thanked Adeo for making me go out there the first time, when all I wanted to do was to curl up in the bed in the RV, keep sleeping.

It’s better to be awake.

I don’t know if I ever told this to Joanna. I know I told her about the butterflies, which is why she had an artist emboss them along the lid of the box, Nevada’s box, to hold his memory in a place I won’t have to travel into the desert to visit. Around the world, butterflies are seen as a symbol of the soul. I’ve come to love this symbol, so easy to trivialize and dismiss in a culture that rolls its eyes at the femininity of it. Butterflies are fierce. They migrate for thousands of miles through extreme weather patterns. Their beauty is a ferocious beauty, and it comes at the price of a life-and-death struggle through a tiny opening in the chrysalis. Some of them don’t make it; they suffocate inside the darkness of their own transformation. But the ones who manage to press through that narrow passageway, squeezing the fluid from their bodies so they can take their final form, find light, warmth and life.

So this is what I love, and how I love my missing child. This is what I found across the years of grief and tears: I found a soul on wings: my baby’s soul. My own.

photo credit: Ashley Steel via photopin cc

how reading can help you through your life crisis

Roughly five years ago, two things happened: my husband filed for divorce and I got my first Kindle.

I grew up in a small town where I never fit in: bullied, physically by boys and then later, once the boys changed their tune, psychologically by girls. I looked to books for guidance, wisdom and solace.

I read so ferociously that by the time an adult in my life tried to deliver some Life Lesson – ranging from menstruation and sex and first love to rape and the Holocaust and the HIV virus (I came of age during the AIDS epidemic) – I had already absorbed the information through my reading (and in some cases knew more than the adult, which no doubt totally endeared me).

It was books that opened up the world and demanded I explore it. So I struck off: as an exchange student, as a university student on scholarship, as an ESL teacher in Japan, and then as a writer and startup widow in California.

When my marriage fell apart, my overwhelming impulse (aside from protecting our kids from the immediate ugliness) was to read.

Converting from print to Kindle enabled me to read even more.

I was no longer reading for the deep, complicated pleasures of storytelling or to develop my craft as a writer.

I was looking for straight-up advice on how to live.

Fiction is one of the best educators you can ever have about how to live a meaningful life, how to relate to people, how to grow, how to find your place in the world.

In fiction, life kicks people into the ashes.

It’s part of a process. It forces you to cast off the strategies for being and living that no longer serve you, so that you can rise stronger than before.

I had written ten or so novels (three of them traditionally published), countless stories (a few of them anthologized). I was a writer of fiction as well as a great reader of it: and as much as it sucked to be in the ashes, to watch my old life burn down around me while my replacement stepped into the role I had vacated, I could recognize the pattern when I saw it. This was a time of transition and transformation. This was my phoenix point.

So I went on a reading binge for five years and, to be honest, am only starting to come out of it now. I was ready to admit that I had fucked up: even though, in this so-called post-feminist age, I had known better, I had allowed myself to be seduced by some fairytale, consumerist notion of the good life. You know that saying, Careful what you wish for, you just might get it? Forget that. I think it’s good to get what you want, especially when it teaches you to want other things.

The older and more experienced I become, the more disturbed I am by the messages this culture beams down to us. When you buy all the right stuff, then you’ll be happy. When you can pay off your debt for buying all that stuff, then you’ll be happy. When you get that lean body (or power and status), then you’ll be loved. When you’re loved, you’ll know it, and you’ll feel complete and whole.

I’ve been privileged enough to discover that none of this is true.

And women get these other messages, starting in princess fantasies and traveling up through television, movies, magazines, advice about relationships and dating: make yourself pretty and wait to be chosen. Don’t call him. Don’t be competitive or ambitious. Don’t be intimidating. Don’t be threatening. Don’t go for greatness, which isn’t possible anyway if you want to have kids (and if you don’t want kids, then what the hell is wrong with you?).

These messages slip into our subconscious and encourage the malignant growth of a rescue fantasy. If it’s not a man or woman that will magically whisk you away to some trouble-free paradise, then it’s a job offer or an inheritance or a winning lottery ticket or a phone call out of nowhere, it’s a validation from a parent or boss or partner or ex-partner even when you know on a rational level that such validation isn’t possible (and for reasons that have nothing to do with who you are or what you’ve accomplished).

Looking to external sources, to some fake authority we deem as higher for signs of our own deep worth, keeps us uncertain and smiling and trying to please, keeps us trapped in false notions of what it means to self-sacrifice, disconnects us from that soulvoice saying, This is bullshit. It makes you start to mistake the bullshit for truth.

All the reading I’ve done has a funny way of bringing me back to basics.

We have two missions in this world: to create and connect.

You discover who you are through what you make. You don’t know who you are until you know what you can do – and you can do so much more than you think, once you take yourself seriously, commit to the learning process, and push toward mastery.

And if you don’t know what it is you should be doing, pay attention to what attracts you. Decide to learn something. Anything. We think passion precedes a sense of mastery, or even a sense of competence, but that’s not always true. The beginning stage – once the honeymoon period wears off — is always a bitch. You have to push through the valley of despair (what Seth Godin terms “the gap”) to get to the cool part.

You discover joy, deep soul bliss, through your ability to connect. To your family. Your friends and community. Your work and activities. Your appreciation of beauty, history, nature and special places. Your pets. Your ideas, wisdom and rich inner life. Your tribes. Your greater truth, and the meaning you find in the pursuit of it. Your bigger picture.

To yourself.

To your ability to be who you are – to remember who you are – and find a place, a home, a family (however unconventional) allowing you to do that.

I know all this, I can hear some of you thinking. And of course you do. But is knowledge actually power of any kind, if we don’t do anything with it?

Which is my way of asking: if we know so much, why do we settle for so little?

the goal isn’t to conquer each other

As men and women, we are the same but different.

We are different but equal.

Let’s celebrate difference, between the genders and among the genders. Let’s meet difference with curiosity, not judgment. With tolerance, openness, and a sense of (fair) play.

The goal isn’t to conquer each other, but to find wholeness.

And joy.

Healing – and we all need it – comes through sharing our true stories in our true voices. It comes through bearing witness.

We need to learn our stories, know our stories, and tell them.

We also need to listen — truly listen — to each other. To set our defenses aside and search for the truth in what the other is saying. What we search for is what we tend to find.

We co-create each other.

We need to embrace both the masculine and feminine principles in ourselves. As a culture we are taught to scapegoat the feminine and cast it low: boys and men because it is weak, girls and women because it is bad. Jung associates soul with the feminine (and spirit with the masculine). Restore the feminine to a healthy place in the culture, and you bring back soul.

Soul is embodied in flesh and blood, in body. To meet with the truth of your soul is to accept and love your body, from the top of your imperfect head to the bottom of your imperfect feet.

To lean into the voice of your soul is to listen to the wisdom of your body. We used to dismiss this kind of knowing as women’s intuition. Now we know that neural intelligence exists in the heart and gut as well as the brain.

Hunches, gut feelings, images, symbols, dreams: this is the language of your nonverbal intelligence. This is the music of your soul.

Life doesn’t move in a straight line. It has a way of circling back, so you can pick up what you missed before. It is organic and makes itself up as it goes along. It is inherently creative. We are inherently creative.

When you lean into your soulvoice, you learn the expression that your soul needs to take. It compels you. Nurture it, honor it, and it will also compel others.

We are constantly creating ourselves: through every choice and decision, every small or large action, we carve out a life.

We stamp the planet with our collective soulprint.

The planet will go on, in some altered form, no matter what we do to it. We, however, might not.

Love or die: these are the options.

Love is better.

photo credit: ginnerobot via photopin cc

too hot to graduate?

“Sure I’m an asshole that loves to take advantage of women who are willing to bang me without me having to offer too much, but at the same time I am also a gentleman that knows how to treat a lady with respect and compassion just like any other true lady should be treated.” — A Typical Bloke

A friend sent me a link about an Orange County mom’s blog post in which she slut-shames the girls her sons go to school with (no doubt endearing herself to their parents in the process) by questioning the outfits they wore to graduation.

6 REASONS WHY I’M GLAD I DON’T HAVE DAUGHTERS, she wrote, and then posted photographs of the girls – subtracting their heads, so the emphasis is on their anonymous body parts – dressed in shorts, short skirts and heels. She provided the kind of saccharine commentary that makes someone, somewhere, want to punch a unicorn: “The little gal in the nude mini…won my award for the most inappropriate outfit of the night…..This girl, bless her heart, showed the entire audience her panties as she ascended the stairs to collect her award…”

And if someone was to point out to this blogger – bless her heart – that her blog post shows a stunning disrespect to these teenage women, I’m sure she would retaliate the way many people would: girls and women who dress inappropriately – read: sexy — don’t deserve respect, in a “they’re sending out all the wrong signals” kind of way.

It’s a strange culture. On the one hand it teaches girls that the only appropriate appearance is one that works the hotness, and a very particular kind of hotness at that. (Don’t hate the players. Hate the game….) On the other hand it teaches girls (and others) that hotness is the domain of the slut, the bimbo, the asking-for-it rape victim. The shorter the hemline, the lower the IQ.

Although in truth, it’s the heterosexual man’s IQ that tends to drop a few points in the presence of a sexy – and ‘distracting’ – woman. Behind all this concern that female high school students learn to dress appropriately – quit with the tank tops, the strapless dresses, the tight pants! – is concern with the comfort level of the poor innocent boys (and, later, the men) who are absolutely victimized by such incapacitating, disorganizing hotness. You, as the female of the species, must protect men from their discomfort with your sexuality by removing said sexuality from the equation.

Not everyone agrees with this. Jessica Valenti argues, while discussing New York’s Stuyvesant High School’s controversial dress code:

“In addition to the violation of female students’ rights, the thinking behind the code sends a dangerous message to young women – that they are responsible for the way in which society objectifies and sexualizes them.

Take this comment from Principal Stanley Teitel: “Many young ladies wear denim skirts which are very tight and are short to begin with, and when they sit down, they only rise up, because there’s nowhere else to go…. The bottom line is, some things are a distraction, and we don’t need to distract students from what is supposed to be going on here, which is learning.”

It’s not the responsibility of female students to mitigate the male gaze. You find female bodies “distracting”? That’s your problem, not women’s. Society teaches that women exist to be looked at, objectified and sexualized—it’s up to others to make sure that they don’t contribute to that injustice.

The students at Stuyvesant are some of the brightest out there—they want to learn and to engage with each other and the world around them. Whether or not they wear tank tops or shorts while they do so is irrelevant.”

Women are not just sexualized but female sexuality itself is villainized. Boys will be boys and men will be men, but girls and women will use their beauty and gender to exploit men. A truly good woman is a pure woman; a truly pure woman is a woman who hasn’t had sex.

This underlying story about women – going all the way back to the one about a girl, a boy, an apple, and the fall of humankind – is what makes slut-shaming possible. What you’re really telling someone when you call them a slut isn’t necessarily that they’re sexually promiscuous (which may or may not be true and is none of your damn business). Girls and women get called — and will call each other — sluts and whores for reasons that often have nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the urge to hurt, isolate, or punish someone for being the wrong class, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong kind of feminine or just the wrong kind of female.

What you’re really telling them is that they are worthless, they are vile, they are garbage. They don’t deserve to live.

In her snappily entitled ‘Female Purity is Bullshit’, Lindy West references a speech by kidnapping and rape survivor Elizabeth Smart:

Speaking at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, Smart explained why she didn’t try to run from her captors, or even cry for help when they took her out in public:

Smart said she “felt so dirty and so filthy” after she was raped by her captor, and she understands why someone wouldn’t run “because of that alone.”

Smart [said] she was raised in a religious household and recalled a school teacher who spoke once about abstinence and compared sex to chewing gum.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’ And that’s how easy it is to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value,” Smart said. “Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.”

(Which might be why this twelve year old girl hanged herself after cyberbullies harassed her by calling her a slut and a whore.)

As human beings, we’re going to have sexual reactions to each other. We’re hardwired to respond to hotness. We’re going to objectify some of the people some of the time and some of us will be objectified in return. But sensuality, especially female sensuality, is so much richer, more diverse and more complicated than the culture’s one-note presentation of it. How different would this world be if we actually respected the female body?

If we celebrated it?

What would that look like?

photo by Chris Goldberg

too hot to graduate

“Sure I’m an asshole that loves to take advantage of women who are willing to bang me without me having to offer too much, but at the same time I am also a gentleman that knows how to treat a lady with respect and compassion just like any other true lady should be treated.” — A Typical Bloke

A friend sent me a link about an Orange County mom’s blog post in which she slut-shames the girls her sons go to school with (no doubt endearing herself to their parents in the process) by questioning the outfits they wore to graduation.

6 REASONS WHY I’M GLAD I DON’T HAVE DAUGHTERS, she wrote, and then posted photographs of the girls – subtracting their heads, so the emphasis is on their anonymous body parts – dressed in shorts, short skirts and heels. She provided the kind of saccharine commentary that makes someone, somewhere, want to punch a unicorn: “The little gal in the nude mini…won my award for the most inappropriate outfit of the night…..This girl, bless her heart, showed the entire audience her panties as she ascended the stairs to collect her award…”

And if someone was to point out to this blogger – bless her heart – that her blog post shows a stunning disrespect to these teenage women, I’m sure she would retaliate the same way many people would: girls and women who dress inappropriately – read: sexy — don’t deserve respect, in a “they’re sending out all the wrong signals” kind of way.

It’s a strange culture. On the one hand it teaches girls that the only appropriate appearance is one that works the hotness, and a very particular kind of hotness at that. (Don’t hate the players. Hate the game….) On the other hand it teaches girls (and others) that hotness is the domain of the slut, the bimbo, the asking-for-it rape victim. The shorter the hemline, the lower the IQ.

Although in truth, it’s the heterosexual man’s IQ that tends to drop a few points in the presence of a sexy – and ‘distracting’ – woman. Behind all this concern that female high school students learn to dress appropriately – quit with the tank tops, the strapless dresses, the tight pants! – is concern with the comfort level of the poor innocent boys (and, later, the men) who are absolutely victimized by such incapacitating, disorganizing hotness. You, as the female of the species, must protect men from their discomfort with your sexuality by removing said sexuality from the equation.

Not everyone agrees with this. Jessica Valenti argues, while discussing New York’s Stuyvesant High School’s controversial dress code:

“In addition to the violation of female students’ rights, the thinking behind the code sends a dangerous message to young women – that they are responsible for the way in which society objectifies and sexualizes them.

Take this comment from Principal Stanley Teitel: “Many young ladies wear denim skirts which are very tight and are short to begin with, and when they sit down, they only rise up, because there’s nowhere else to go…. The bottom line is, some things are a distraction, and we don’t need to distract students from what is supposed to be going on here, which is learning.”

It’s not the responsibility of female students to mitigate the male gaze. You find female bodies “distracting”? That’s your problem, not women’s. Society teaches that women exist to be looked at, objectified and sexualized—it’s up to others to make sure that they don’t contribute to that injustice.

The students at Stuyvesant are some of the brightest out there—they want to learn and to engage with each other and the world around them. Whether or not they wear tank tops or shorts while they do so is irrelevant.”

Women are not just sexualized but female sexuality itself is villainized. Boys will be boys and men will be men, but girls and women will use their beauty and gender to exploit men. A truly good woman is a pure woman; a truly pure woman is a woman who hasn’t had sex.

This underlying story about women – going all the way back to the one about a girl, a boy, an apple, and the fall of humankind – is what makes slut-shaming possible. What you’re really telling someone when you call them a slut isn’t necessarily that they’re sexually promiscuous (which may or may not be true and is none of your damn business). Girls and women get called — and will call each other — sluts and whores for reasons that often have nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the urge to hurt, isolate, or punish someone for being the wrong class, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong kind of feminine or just the wrong kind of female.

What you’re really telling them is that they are worthless, they are vile, they are garbage. They don’t deserve to live.

In her snappily entitled ‘Female Purity is Bullshit’, Lindy West references a speech by kidnapping and rape survivor Elizabeth Smart:

Speaking at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, Smart explained why she didn’t try to run from her captors, or even cry for help when they took her out in public:

Smart said she “felt so dirty and so filthy” after she was raped by her captor, and she understands why someone wouldn’t run “because of that alone.”

Smart [said] she was raised in a religious household and recalled a school teacher who spoke once about abstinence and compared sex to chewing gum.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’ And that’s how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value,” Smart said. “Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.”

(Which might be why this twelve year old girl hanged herself after cyberbullies harassed her by calling her a slut and a whore.)

As human beings, we’re going to have sexual reactions to each other. We’re hardwired to respond to hotness. We’re going to objectify some of the people some of the time and some of us will be objectified in return. But sensuality, especially female sensuality, is so much richer, diverse and more complicated than the culture’s one-note presentation of it. How different would this world be if we actually respected the female body?

If we celebrated it?

What would that look like?

the bullsh*t of permission + the power principle

I went to hear Sir Ken Robinson give a talk at UCLA.

One of the things he mentions in his talk and new book (FINDING YOUR ELEMENT) is that

“the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020 depression will be the second leading cause of death in the world, affecting thirty percent of all adults….By some estimates, ‘clinical depression is ten times more likely to torment us than it did a century ago.’”

The antidote to this, according to Sir Ken? Find that sweetspot where your passion and talent come together and create real value in the world.

We have so many different words for it. Your purpose. Your Element. Your dharma. Your raison d’etre. Your soulprint. Your north star. Your voice. Your onlyness. It is, I think, variations on the same thing: an organizing principle for your life that gives it shape, energy and direction. It draws from the multiple levels of your personality, expresses itself through your gifts and hooks you up to a much bigger picture.

Being in your Element brings you joy, which Peggy Tabor Millin points out

“….is not an emotion but a physical sensation of wholeness.”

Instead of looking for a person to complete us – a dubious proposition at best – we should be hunting high and low for our Element. click to tweet

Most of us, according to Sir Ken, give up too soon. We sell ourselves short. We settle for too little. We live in a consumer culture that trains us to look for happiness in all the wrong places: a perfect body, a big white wedding, a midnight-blue Porsche and a house in the hills.

But I also blame the Power Principle.

The Power Principle is what writer and Jungian analyst Marion Woodman renamed patriarchy after too many people assumed that patriarchy automatically means men. It does not. Patriarchy refers to a system – supported and perpetuated by people of both genders – based on a power hierarchy that privileges so-called masculine values and attitudes over feminine values and attitudes. In order for someone to be in the up position, someone else has to be in the down position.

This means we’re constantly comparing ourselves to others.

This means we’re relying on external sources of validation to guide us.

There’s a lot of talk in the personal development world about asking for permission. In order for a woman – the person is usually understood to be a woman – to fulfill her destiny and reach for her potential, she has to give herself permission. Or understand that the universe has already given her permission. Or just quit waiting for permission in the first place.

Maybe what she – or he – really has to do is to reject the whole idea that permission exists.

When I was a teenager I fell in love with the fantasy movie LABYRINTH, starring David Bowie (Jareth) and a young Jennifer Connelly (Sarah). I was disappointed when Sarah spurns Jareth, the Goblin King, at the end of the movie. This was partly because Bowie injected the character with a wistful, yearning quality that I found romantic and hot. I was also caught up in my own version of the fairy-tale fantasy that Sarah learns to call out as bullshit.

In the final confrontation between them, Jareth tries to seduce Sarah into staying with him as his Queen. “Look, Sarah,” he tells her, “look what I’m offering. Your dreams!”

He goes on:

“….I ask for so little. Just let me rule you, and you can have everything that you want. Just fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.”

But Sarah recognizes that, like any master narcissist, Jareth is working with smoke and mirrors. What he’s offering isn’t love. He’ll make her Queen (“you can have everything that you want”) for the price of her freedom (“do as I say”).

She would constantly have to ask for permission.

Instead, she realizes, You have no power over me, with a note of wonder in her voice. The reality that Jareth has created comes apart like a house of cards.

Watching this movie as an adult, I realized how the fairy-tale fantasy that still permeates this culture is not just about some rich dude on a white Mercedes galloping in to sweep you off your feet, whisk you away to a castle (in the hills, with a pool and a view) and love you happily ever after (once you’ve signed the prenup). It’s about the unspoken agreement that so many of us make with the Power Principle without even realizing we’re doing it. If we’re good, and perfect, and hot, and productive, and pleasing, if we fulfill the criteria set out for our gender (“do as you’re told”), then patriarchy will reward us with our dreams. We’ll get the relationship, the shiny career, the adorable kids who never misbehave in restaurants, the flat abs and fabulous shoes and lifelong security. Bad things will happen to other people – and we’ll feel sorry for them and tell them how strong they are – but not to us.

In return, all we have to do is keep checking in for permission, approval, validation; for all the signs that we’re playing the game exactly right.

Until, of course, something goes wrong, and the illusions are shown up for what they are. And we realize we no longer know who we are, or where our passions lie, or what we love. We traded our soul for an elaborate card trick.

But if we can say from the beginning, You have no power over me…..

Finding your Element requires you to tune out the worldly chorus and listen, instead, for the voice of your deep self, that nonverbal intelligence constantly communicating through dreams, images, physical symptoms and gut feelings.

It’s the voice of artists, rebels, lovers and visionaries.

Finding your Element is like falling in love, and love has a way of cutting across boundaries, ignoring taboos and challenging authority. Speak with that voice, and the world might suddenly be asking you for permission.

photo credit: orkomedix via photopin cc

on the art of mastery and soul-making

“I play a Gibson Les Paul through a 65amp half-stack. Love that amp. It’s so huge-sounding. I’m all about big, nasty, sleazy dirty riffs, and that amp with the Les Paul make my sound. I also play around with some pedals. One of my favorites that I used on the record is a Death By Audio pedal called the Supersonic Fuzz Gun. It’s so messed up and dirty sounding. I love it.” — Siouxsie Medley

The other night I went to see a band in downtown LA.

My friend Marc and I developed a fascination with the guitarist.

The band played hard rock, thrashing and soulful, and she was this waif in a sweatshirt torn off one shoulder and long brown hair whipping around as if the music was punishing it (in a good way) and she stalked her end of the stage, body rocking and rocking it out, hands a blur in every photograph I took, and let me tell you boys and girls she owned that instrument. She was ruling it and working it, which let the music work magic through her.

She didn’t look like she was that many years out of high school. She must have found her way to guitar in her teens if not sooner. Holed in her room, the bite of steel in her fingers, as she leveled up from suck to nonsuck to halfway decent to decently average to hey, that’s not so bad to hey, that’s pretty good to damn, girl, play that shit again.

My guess was that she didn’t have many friends. To log all those hours of solitary practice, she must have been some kind of geek. One reason why geeks are the way they are is because of how obsession defines them. They’d rather spend time deepening their knowledge and acquiring mad skills instead of, say, social savvy. (Which isn’t to say that social skills don’t eventually come, at least to some of us.)

The world outside that obsession? Often bores them. It isn’t as rich or vivid or visceral, it doesn’t get them where they live in quite the same way. The obsession is always in the background, waiting, and some part of them waits to return to it.

It’s kind of a cliché now to evoke Malcolm Gladwell’s Ten Thousand Hour Rule (it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become excellent at whatever it is that you’re practicing) so I’m hesitant to do it (even though I just did). Also, Gladwell’s rule is only part of the picture. It’s not enough that those hours have to number ten thousand (at least, and more often fifteen or twenty) but they have to be a specific kind of practice.

It’s called deliberate practice, and it keeps you at your ragged edge, attempting a specific task that you keep failing at and failing at until finally you get it and your teacher moves you on to something new that you keep failing at and failing at and on and on it goes. Continue like this long enough – for years – and eventually you arrive at a point where, as Stephen Cope explains

“….The capacity to know a certain domain of the world in such depth appears to us ordinary mortals as a kind of supernormal power. It seems like magic. It is not magic at all, of course, but simply the inevitable result of sustained concentration on an object of intense interest.”

As points out in his book THE CLICK MOMENT, racking up ten thousand hours of sustained concentration on a particular interest is necessary to excel in some fields – but not so much in others. Some areas are so new and/or volatile and/or rapidly changing that excellence relies not on skill so much as a deep game-changing creative insight. Meanwhile Tim Ferriss and Josh Kaufman have come out with books (THE 4-HOUR CHEF and THE FIRST 20 HOURS, respectively) that show how you can hack the process of mastery by approaching your study in specific, strategic ways.

But here’s the thing. Ferriss and Kaufman are assuming that the end point of this process is the product itself: the skill you’ve acquired, the cool thing you can now do for your own enjoyment or to impress your friends and lover(s).

Which is awesome.

But I think this is overlooking a central aspect of what mastery is – and it’s something that might not naturally occur to us Westerners, who want what we want when we want it because we’re very busy and it’s time to go home and watch MAD MEN.

Mastery is about learning something right down through the bones of it. click to tweet

Cope describes mastery as “heightened pattern recognition” and explains how

“The process.. continues to deepen throughout the career of a master, until the more obvious surface patterns dissolve to reveal even more subtle patterns underneath….The pleasures of mastery are not what we usually assume them to be. They do not center around the control of one’s particular domain…They center, rather, around knowing. It is the profound pleasure in knowing the world more deeply that creates authentic fulfillment.”

A true master, Cope says, isn’t motivated by extrinsic factors like money and fame but the pleasure of following her dharma, her path, her way of being in the world that serves the world through the expression of her deepest gifts. This enables

“…a much, much deeper pleasure: the pleasure in knowing the world.”

So perhaps the larger point of a practice has to do with the practice itself, and the result it throws off is almost a happy byproduct. You need all those hours not just for the learning but for how that learning transforms you. You take it first into your mind and then into your body, where it lives on such a cellular level that skills you once struggled to perform become second nature. You can perform them on autopilot. But more importantly, you can go beyond them to find what’s deeper, what’s greater, and where that can take you.

“Practice isn’t about making something perfect; it’s about making something possible.”

As writer and writing teacher Peggy Tabor Millin explains:

“Practice – of sport, writing, art-making, meditation, music – has no goal but revelation. Practice discovers, uncovers, reveals, surprises, astonishes, and awes. Practice provides the road through new terrain, tests our resolve, and develops our skill. We take the attitude of the adventurer, not rushing but moving slowly enough to notice details. The unexpected occurs.”

Not everything we do has to be in pursuit of mastery. There are things we can learn to do well, and leave it at that. That’s fine. That’s what hobbies are for: to relax, not to push and prod you to new heights of selfhood through some deep mystical knowing of the world.

Cope equates true mastery with dharma: the great work of your life that brings your soul alive.

When you’re in the presence of mastery, you know it. It’s a shock-and-awe kind of feeling. It resonates in your body as well as your mind. It inspires you to pursue some shock-and-awe of your own. The skill itself might fade – the athlete gets too old, the pianist injures a hand – but that way of knowing lives on, and the kind of person it made you can never be taken away from you. And if this sounds a bit woo, I can only suggest that they don’t call a spiritual practice a spiritual practice for nothing. So there might be some soul-making involved.

“A yoga practice,” my yoga teacher told me, after she’d been keeping me on my ragged edge for an hour and I was entertaining murderous thoughts toward her, “is the practice of showing up. No matter how you’re feeling or whatever else is on your plate, you show up on the mat, day after day after day.” You learn a lot about your moods, your thoughts, your body that way. You learn a lot about yourself – in that same deepening way through which you also learn the world, via coding or writing or photography or gymnastics or entrepreneurialism or carpentry or Balinese puppet-making or whatever.

When my yoga teacher told me that, something clicked. There are mornings now when I am tempted to cancel my session, and I realize that part of my practice is to practice showing up. I might be edgy from an argument or seriously sleep-deprived or suffering from too much wine the night before (or all of the above), I might be worrying about one of my kids, but somehow it’s enough to let her know, and then let go of it. “I’m showing up,” I tell her, and we take it from there.

you do hereby swear to engage in acts of creative rebellion

“Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.” — Osho

I [state your name] hereby declare that I am a Creative Rebel, also known as a Creative Badass, and that I am either Female or a great friend of the Female or in touch with my inner Feminine, my Soul. As such, I believe the following:

My creative ambition, however it chooses to express itself, is my birthright. It is central to who I am. It involves the need to play, to experiment, to make a mess, to embrace the great beauty of imperfection, to understand that there are no mistakes. It requires that I wander and dream and expose myself to interesting things and follow up on what catches my fancy.

Thus, it might not always seem that I am quote-unquote “being productive”, but I shall trust that deep forces are at work, even when it appears said forces have gone to Tahiti.

Creativity moves through me and happens in the spaces between myself and others, myself and my materials. It is my job as a Creative Rebel to find those persons and materials that light me up, and to steadily extract myself from relationships and situations that are eating away at my soul. I have only one soul, and I do not wish to lose it, trade it in or misplace it.

Putting a dent in the universe is all very well, assuming the universe is some steely mechanism, but I am not into swinging a sledgehammer. I wish to track my deepest nature and be a point of light in the web that connects us all. I will help keep the darkness at bay.

I reserve the right to excellent footwear, and fine chocolate when necessary.

I recognize that I have both a Soulvoice and a Worldly Chorus. My Soulvoice would have me reveal my innate genius by becoming exactly who I am. It guides me to my unique and sacred purpose. The Worldly Chorus would have me slice off pieces of myself to fit someone else’s agenda. My challenge is to listen to the one and navigate the other, preferably with wit and savvy and the occasional shot of tequila.

I acknowledge that my creative life is the shifting accumulation of the choices I make about how I use my time and energy and engage, or fail to engage, in the radical acts of self-care. Each decision leads me away from or toward what I want, even if what I want is a better understanding of just what the hell I want.

I shall henceforth feed my head all sorts of wondrous and inspiring images on a daily or near-daily basis.

I understand that for all my attempts to plan, predict and control things, I live and work against a backdrop of mystery. Our actions ripple out along the invisible lines that connect us: our friends and our friends’ friends and our friends’ friends’ friends. By saving myself, I can also save others.

I understand that the universe keeps secrets much bigger than I am. I shall find my work, and do my work, and let go of the fruits of my labor. The universe knows what to do with them. I shall move on, turn the page, begin again.

I acknowledge that the influence a Creative Person sends into the world isn’t measured by how famous she is or the wealth she accumulates or the amount of wild sex she is having. People become icons when they embody some aspect of the zeitgeist; their very identity tells a story that the rest of us need to hear, that eases some anxiety inside us. Some people have a flair for this. It’s their gift. I might have different gifts. My story is also worth telling.

I acknowledge that failure is a part of all great stories. In order to overcome something, I have to have something to overcome. The meaning is in the struggle: how it forces me to change and deepen and grow in the ashes. The old self must die, so the new self can rise and turn pain to power, wounds to light, however much this may suck at the time.

And now, because it is time to end this thing and go have the Coffee, I [state your name] do hereby swear to Own It.

And also to Bring It.

Signed:

on being original + fierce

I was exchanging emails with a writer of a novel I admired, when he asked me how my own work was going.

It goes in fits + starts, I wrote, partly I think because I didn’t have enough distance from the real-life things that inspired it. I lacked clarity. Also, afraid to write some of it, which I take as a good + promising sign.

He agreed that it was a good and promising sign, because that meant “the stakes are what they ought to be.”

I loved that response, and told him so, and he came back with an anecdote about a well-respected writer he knew who was judging a literary contest and reading through the novels that had been nominated and finding them well-written, yes, very much so, but…uninteresting…because there’s nothing in the way for the writer. There’s no obstacle. Nothing real is at stake.

All of which I think is another way of saying, The writer failed to go there.

Going there is about working along the nerve, slicing open your inner life. click to tweet Whether it’s tapping into confession, fantasy, or simply what you really think, this kind of writing isn’t safe. You’re stepping forward with a bold point of view, allowing yourself to move along the lines of your instincts instead of the wellworn grooves of what’s already out there.

When you go there, you know it. You’ve got real soulskin in the game.

Origin means the point at which something comes into existence: the source. To write in an original voice means to write from your source. Every story in the world has been told a million times…except when filtered through the prism of your perspective, your experiences and talent and worldview, grounded in the details of your private landscape. To write this way, original and fierce, means to show yourself, and not the glossy and practiced persona but the creature who lives behind that.

It means to throw down.