Justine Musk's Blog, page 9

western women will save the world ( + the fight to end sex trafficking)

At the Vancouver Peace Summit a few Septembers ago, the Dalai Lama shocked some and delighted others when he said: “The world will be saved by the Western woman.”*

He might have been agreeing with Bishop Desmond Tutu, who wrote:

“Our earth home and all forms of life in it are at grave risk. We men have had our turn and made a proper mess of things. We need women to save us.”

(I like to interpret his use of “women” as “women and the friends of women.”)

I don’t believe that either man is suggesting a move to matriarchy, which is just patriarchy turned upside down: one gender declared as superior to the other, hence naturally entitled to rule.

But imagine a world where all people had the ability and opportunity to be who they are without harm, to express themselves, to fully use their gifts and talents to contribute to the world, to be educated without fear of harassment or worse, to participate in the global economy, to engage deeply in a warm diverse web of relationships. To change the world. And maybe, just maybe, to save it.

Where the values of compassion, care and empathy were promoted alongside competition and conquest.

Where men and women quit “the battle of the sexes” in order to honor the other’s perspective, to listen, to bring a diversity of voice and insight to the problem-solving table.

I agree with Jean Shinoda Bolen when she writes that

“Full equality between men and women is one of the most important prerequisites for peace. Without full equality, there is injustice and the promotion of harmful attitudes in boys and men which is carried from the schoolyard and family to the workplace, to political life, and ultimately to international relations. Without full equality, qualities associated with women are suppressed in boys and men.”

Those involved in microfinance will tell you that women pose a low credit risk. More importantly, as study after study shows, women tend to reinvest their profits in family and community. When a woman rises, she takes others with her.

Yet girls and women continue to be devalued, oppressed, disempowered and abused in so many parts of the world.

All that talent and potential: untapped.

All those voices: lost.

All those families and communities: mired in poverty.

As Western women (and the friends of women), we have made great strides toward equality. We don’t have the stark, often-violent cultural oppression that women in other countries must still find ways to navigate, and we are no longer bound to rigid gender roles. Our economic, reproductive and social freedoms give us the freedom to act.

The question is: what will we do with that freedom?

Will we focus just on ourselves and our families? Or will we realize that the forces chaining one woman ripple out, in subtle ways and variations, to chain all women? That in this age of interconnectedness, on this threatened planet, our family is the global family, and our home is the world?

That’s why I’m so pleased to report how one Western woman (and my friend), Erin Giles, set out to raise $25,000 in thirty days to help the tens of millions of people caught in the worldwide nightmare of human trafficking.

Abroad — and also in America — children as young as seven are sold for sex.

A trafficked child has an expected lifespan of about seven years. She is dead within seven years. She is beaten to death or shot. She falls sick and is not treated. She is sold to a buyer to act out a deadly fantasy. She is, like this survivor, dumped into a trash can and left to die.

Erin will divide the money among five nonprofits that are fighting for awareness, prevention, and the rescue and rehabilitation of the enslaved. Although technically she’s already met her goal (yay Erin!), she tells me that any contributions made from now until midnight go toward fees and shipping. That way, the nonprofits can receive “every penny of that five thousand”.

So I ask you to please contribute. You have until midnight tonight.

As Chris Brogan put it, it will cost you the price of maybe two lattes and the time it takes to watch a cat video.

It might seem hard to believe that ten dollars can mean so much, or go so far – but it can. When we act with intention, we walk in power. When we walk in power – together — we have a voice that can change the world. click to tweet

Let’s use it.

Go here.

* Some have taken offense to this, thinking that he meant white women. My interpretation is that he was referring to all women living with Western freedoms and possibilities (although some are obviously more free — and privileged — than others).

unlabel yourself

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” - Walt Whitman

1

A friend posted a picture on her Facebook page that grabbed my attention and made me laugh out loud.

A sleek male yoga instructor strikes a warrior pose in his yoga studio….while lighting a cigarette. The copy reads: KALE AND CIGARETTES. BE A CONTRADICTION.

(I immediately found and Liked Kirk Hensler’s Facebook page, where he encourages you to “meditate on that shit.”)

Something happens when you mash opposites together – not to shock (or just to shock) but to express something authentic about who you think you are.

It gets our attention. It fascinates us.

We are hardwired to respond to novelty. Part of us is always scanning for the unsafe. When something new and different wanders into the landscape, that primitive part of our brain elbows the rest of ourselves to attention. Different poses the possibility of disruption, of challenge, of threat (or possible mating potential, which is more or less the same thing). Until we can label and categorize it, it will remain, on some level, a little dangerous. So we keep keep watching.

The thing about contradiction is that it makes something impossible to categorize. (Unless the category is things that can’t be categorized.) Contradiction creates ambiguity, which Robert Greene recognizes as one of the potent factors of seduction (swaying someone from their path and getting them onto yours, whether it involves sex or marketing or a creative project.) Greene writes:

What is obvious and striking may attract….attention at first, but that attention is often short-lived…A mix of qualities suggests depth, which fascinates even as it confuses. An elusive, enigmatic aura will make people want to know more, drawing them into your circle.

Ambiguity also opens up a space for people to read different meanings into you – which means they are more likely to find something in you that reflects them, that resonates.

2

Part of the act of creating yourself – of truly creating the authentic, original identity that shines through in your work and your communications with the world, and by which the world shall know you – is, as Marc Ecko puts it, to unlabel yourself:

Not ‘un’ as in the nihilist or negative sense of the prefix, but in the ‘refuse’ sense of the meaning. Refuse to be labeled.

Fight their labels.

Peel off their labels.

Create your label.

Unlabel.

…..challenge yourself to shake free of the herd, find your own unique voice…

This, Ecko points out, enables you to “be an artist without being a starving artist” because you can “sell without selling out”. You create something that

transcends the gatekeepers (the critics, the haters) and gets right to the goalkeepers (the ones who vote, the folks with the shopping carts.) The goalkeepers are the only judges who matter.



Contradiction and ambiguity not only force other people to look at us with fresh eyes, free of the usual prejudices and biases – what exactly is that thing? – but it makes sure that we don’t fall into the same easy assumptions about who we are, and what we think we can or cannot do.

3

One reason why we have to fight ‘their’ labels is because, growing up, as young and powerless individuals who depended on the people around us for our very survival, we learned to shape ourselves around their labels. We were conforming to them or rebelling against them. We developed strategies to get our needs met the best ways we knew how.

We played up the parts of ourselves that seemed to work, and cut ourselves off from the parts of ourselves that seemed to not-work. We took those working parts and used them to create our lit-up box of personal identity. We took the not-working parts and cast them into the unconscious darkness beyond the box, creating what Jung termed our Shadow.

We can learn about our Shadow through noticing and reclaiming our projections: the qualities, traits, dreams and fantasies we project onto others that are actually the unlived, undeveloped, hiding parts of ourselves.

Whenever someone triggers you in a positive or negative way, you’ve met up with part of your Shadow. We are what attracts us. (We are also what annoys the hell out of us.) We long to do or be that, but at the same time think, I could never….because that idea doesn’t fit inside our box.

It conflicts with our preconceived notions of who we are.

We come face to face with our own contradictions.

They challenge us to kick apart that box, expand ourselves, bring some light to the dark places. But when we do that, we prove that we, too, contain multitudes.

this story has bigger plans for you

You were born into a story of culture, time and place. You were born with another story inside you; the question is if you will tell it.

(Or if it will tell you.)

What is it that drives you? What is the spine that your life will flesh itself around? Maybe you need to create beauty. Maybe you need to seek truth. Maybe you need to find the beloved. Maybe you need to please your father, even after you’ve scattered his ashes from a California pier.

You begin in your ordinary world. Life is routine. But then something happens. There’s a stirring inside you, like a hand at the small of your soul nudging you onward. You resist it for as long as you can, until you realize that to stay is to die.

You come into intention. You say: I want. You embody a goal. The shape of the story forms around you as you step into your protagonist role.

(Unless you give it up — and give it over to someone else’s I want — even if that want is you.)

By refusing to maintain the status quo, you’re already starting to change it.

(This is why stories are dangerous.) click to tweet

Complications ensue. This stuff is harder than it looks. The world gives you what you need to see your weakness, to start to see clear. The word ‘problem’ comes from the word ‘proballein’, which means ‘to throw or lay before.’ Problems now lay themselves along your path, stepping stones to a higher version of you.

It’s no longer a question of what you want, but who you must become.

The journey takes you and shapes you.

Some of your backstory rises. Your sacred wound: the story within the story. All your hurt leads down to this essential scar. Stories like to rip it off so that you can bleed afresh.

You have to lie down. Maybe you’re knocked down. It’s your taste of mortality. You die to what you can no longer be. You cast off the thinking that no longer serves you. You start to ask different questions. You release whatever it is that you thought you wanted.

The story has bigger plans for you. click to tweet

You surrender yourself to it.

This makes victory possible.

Maybe there’s wild rejoicing, or the quiet satisfaction of a job well done. You’ve slain the dragon and conquered yourself. You are mistress of a new world.

The new world slowly turns ordinary.

You begin in your ordinary world. Life is routine. But then something happens. There’s a stirring inside you…

a story of you

You were born into a story of culture, time and place. You were born with another story inside you; the question is if you will tell it.

(Or if it will tell you.)

What is it that drives you? What is the spine that your life will flesh itself around? Maybe you need to create beauty. Maybe you need to seek truth. Maybe you need to find the beloved. Maybe you need to please your father, even after you’ve scattered his ashes from a California pier.

You begin in your ordinary world. Life is routine. But then something happens. There’s a stirring inside you, like a hand at the small of your soul nudging you onward. You resist it for as long as you can, until you realize that to stay is to die.

You come into intention. You say: I want. You embody a goal. The shape of the story forms around you as you step into your protagonist role.

(Unless you give it up — and give it over to someone else’s I want — even if that want is you.)

By refusing to maintain the status quo, you’re already starting to change it.

(This is why stories are dangerous.) click to tweet

Complications ensue. This stuff is harder than it looks. The world gives you what you need to see your weakness, to start to see clear. The word ‘problem’ comes from the word ‘proballein’, which means ‘to throw or lay before.’ Problems now lay themselves along your path, stepping stones to a higher version of you.

It’s no longer a question of what you want, but who you must become.

The journey takes you and shapes you.

Some of your backstory rises. Your sacred wound: the story within the story. All your hurt leads down to this essential scar. Stories like to rip it off so that you can bleed afresh.

You have to lie down. Maybe you’re knocked down. It’s your taste of mortality. You die to what you can no longer be. You cast off the thinking that no longer serves you. You start to ask different questions. You release whatever it is that you thought you wanted.

The story has bigger plans for you. click to tweet

You surrender yourself to it.

This makes victory possible.

Maybe there’s wild rejoicing, or the quiet satisfaction of a job well done. You’ve slain the dragon and conquered yourself. You are mistress of a new world.

The new world slowly turns ordinary.

You begin in your ordinary world. Life is routine. But then something happens. There’s a stirring inside you…

we are made of stories

The heroine’s journey is a journey of descent.

It’s a journey into the underground.

(Your underground.)

I first came to it through the story of Persephone. When I was at a dark low point a few years ago, my friend J. and I went to a workshop on goddess archetypes. I was very wary of anything I considered to be new age woo-woo bullshit, and this seemed dangerously close. I was going only because the woman leading the workshop, Agapi, is a friend (and a deeply charming person).

Then J. and I sat down and leafed through the handout. There was a description of each of the seven goddess archetypes. Right away, J. and I recognized which archetype — which innately patterned groove of human behavior — was currently predominant in each of us:

“You’re Artemis,” I said.

“You’re Persephone,” she said.

Over the next hour I reacquainted myself with the Persephone myth. Naïve and careless young maiden goes frolicking in the field, when the earth opens and Hades shows up in his chariot and supposedly drags her down into the underworld.

(Earlier versions of the myth have Persephone going willingly.)

Persephone becomes Hade’s captive. Eventually her mother, Demeter, tracks her down and secures her release. But about five minutes before she leaves, Persephone suddenly decides to eat part of a pomegranate. Once you eat or drink in the underworld, you belong to it forever. So Persephone spends part of the year aboveground, and part of the year below, where she rules as Queen of the Underworld, makes peace with Hades, and helps lost souls find their way.

That evening, at Agapi’s workshop, I decided that Persephone was my girl. (Much later, I would even buy two gilded fake pomegranates to keep in a lotus-leaf-shaped bowl on my coffee table.) I understood on a visceral level that this story is about trauma, and working through trauma in order not to escape the darkness, but to integrate it.

Trauma becomes a portal to insight and creative development.

Persephone matures from a child and victim into a queen who can rule a kingdom and be of service to others. She doesn’t conquer Hades or run away from him; she comes to terms with him, and learns to co-exist. The myth spoke to me on some nonverbal, right-brain level: it felt right. By mapping it onto my own life, I could find my way out and through what I was experiencing; I could set up my story in a way that would guide me to triumph.

We often talk about going there as a writer, an artist, a creative. It’s a phrase you don’t need to explain. People have this instinctive understanding of what it means, and what it means is descent. It means to go beneath the glossy social surfaces of our lives, down through the layers of self, to where the shame is, the secrets, the vulnerability, the soul.

It means to tell the truth, and not just the average everyday kind, but the deep kind that strips you naked.

We are made of stories. click to tweet

We define ourselves by the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we think we are. One of my favorite definitions of trauma refers to it as the material that gets left out of the story. We have no place for it. We split it off. It overwhelms us, or threatens us in some way, so we send it underground.

Healing happens when we can descend and reclaim that exiled material. We find a way to weave it into our lifestory so that it makes us stronger for the broken places.

We gather up our fragments, unite them into a storyline, and in the tellings of that story we make ourselves whole. Our world, and our sense of self, expands. We don’t escape the trauma, but deepen and grow into what it has given us. Because we’ve healed ourselves, we’re then able to help and guide others. We become, like Penelope, capable in both light and darkness: the mistress of two worlds.

That’s how we turn our lives into myth.

the future belongs to the misfits

I wrote the following for self-proclaimed ‘corporate misfit’ Srinivas Rao’s new book The Art of Being Unmistakable: A Collection of Essays About Making a Dent in the Universe, released today. Check it out.

The future belongs to the misfits.

Perhaps it always has.

It seems fitting that I’m writing this at Burning Man, a strange and alternative pop-up city that had to venture into the middle of nowhere – an ancient lakebed in the Nevada desert, known as the playa – to bring itself into being near the end of every August.

Each time I come here, to this world of portapotties, alkaline dust storms, sweltering days, freezing nights, and no Starbucks – I swear to myself, this is the last freaking time. And yet there’s a point when something in me shifts over and I know I will return. How could I not?

This is where your inner misfit can come out to play.

This morning, walking to Center Camp, I watched a guy ride around in an art car built to resemble a giant roast chicken. I like to imagine him waking up one morning (in his ordinary life, in the ordinary world) brushing his teeth, checking the weather and the traffic report, bracing himself for another day at his San Francisco startup, and realizing: I must build an art car that resembles a giant roast chicken.



It wouldn’t have been his carefully polished, expensively educated, khaki-pants-and-buttondown persona that decided this. He probably didn’t see it as a way to get women into bed (“Hi. I’m building a giant chicken. Want to have sex?”) His colleagues at work, his drinking buddies, his best friend, the cute but shy waitress at his favorite diner who has been crushing on him for six months, probably never looked at him and thought, Within that man there lurks a giant-roast-chicken-rider, bursting to be unleashed upon the world. >The Art of Being Unmistakeable: A Collection of Essays About Making a Dent in the Universe, released today. Check it out.

The future belongs to the misfits.

Perhaps it always has.

It seems fitting that I’m writing this at Burning Man, a strange and alternative pop-up city that had to venture into the middle of nowhere – an ancient lakebed in the Nevada desert, known as the playa – to bring itself into being near the end of every August.

Each time I come here, to this world of portapotties, alkaline dust storms, sweltering days, freezing nights, and no Starbucks – I swear to myself, this is the last freaking time. And yet there’s a point when something in me shifts over and I know I will return. How could I not?

This is where your inner misfit can come out to play.

This morning, walking to Center Camp, I watched a guy ride around in an art car built to resemble a giant roast chicken. I like to imagine him waking up one morning (in his ordinary life, in the ordinary world) brushing his teeth, checking the weather and the traffic report, bracing himself for another day at his San Francisco startup, and realizing: I must build an art car that resembles a giant roast chicken.



It wouldn’t have been his carefully polished, expensively educated, khaki-pants-and-buttondown persona that decided this. He probably didn’t see it as a way to get women into bed (“Hi. I’m building a giant chicken. Want to have sex?”) His colleagues at work, his drinking buddies, his best friend, the cute but shy waitress at his favorite diner who has been crushing on him for six months, probably never looked at him and thought, Within that man there lurks a giant-roast-chicken-rider, bursting to be unleashed upon the world.

But he knew there was something deep inside him, weird and whimsical and apart from the structures of everyday life, that needed to play. It might not have made sense in any “rational” way, but not everything does, or is meant to; it just is what it is, and what it must be.

It’s your inner misfit.

This is all very well, you might be thinking to yourself, and maybe even slightly amusing, but what the hell do tales of roast-chicken-riders have to do with my plans to dominate the world?

Earlier today a thirtysomething entrepreneur (decked out in Mad Max gear) was in my RV, telling me about his business, which has something to do with shipping readymade bags of supplies to people about to climb Mount Everest. Soon, he told me, all the delivery trucks will be automated; they will glide to your door, text your cell to announce their arrival, discharge packages at your feet. This elimination of the human will cut costs for many and increase profits for a few – and put two to three million people out of work.

What he didn’t say – and didn’t need to – was how the same story will play itself out across industries.

In his book A WHOLE NEW MIND, Daniel Pink describes how the forces of automation, outsourcing, and an overabundance of products are ushering in a new era. Call it the Conceptual Age, or the Creative Age. The important thing, Pink writes, is that if you want to survive (much less thrive) you need to ask yourself three questions about whatever it is that you do:

Can a computer do it for you?

Can someone overseas do it cheaper?

Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?

The only job security, to the extent that it exists, will reside in your ability to be “high concept high touch”: to come up with inspired and innovative ideas, and connect with people on an emotional level through empathy, story or design. To do what computers can’t, or that dude in China or India for only so many dollars an hour. To create experiences that people didn’t know they wanted or needed but soon can’t live without.

To turn your work – and perhaps life itself – into art, in a way that is unique to you and relevant to others.

It probably won’t look like a giant roast chicken. Burning Man is not the so-called real world. But the real world is changing faster and faster, and the same creativity that’s been pushed to the edges – that seemed to belong only to artists in some mysterious Bohemia, or individuals in strange careers requiring them to wear black turtlenecks – must now find its way into everyday life.

I’m reminded of Albert Einstein’s quote: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

When you look at the problems that threaten not just our livelihood as individuals but our future as a species, it’s pretty clear that we need a new consciousness.

We need new voices, new stories, new solutions, new truths…to revise the old ones and replace the broken ones, to lead us through this shifting, quicksand present and create a future that doesn’t end up a repeat of the past but is truly created.

One day at a time.

One individual at a time.

You start to do this by tuning in to the still small voice that lives within us all, and allowing it to guide your choices and decisions.

I think of this voice as a soul-voice: the deep, coded line of poetry that is the essence of you, pushing to find expression in the world. The more successful we are at manifesting it, the more authentic we consider our lives to be. Instead of living out a secondhand narrative, we create a fresh one of our own.

We can’t just tell our truth.

We have to live it. We have to embody it.

Creativity, then, is more than just a modern business advantage. It is a state of mind and a way of life. It also doesn’t leave us any hiding places. We are what we make. Our creations show the truth of who we are. They also shape how — or if — the world remembers us when we’re gone.

This is the sacred dance. It demands nothing less than everything you’ve got to give it. Creativity builds on itself, and so does creative living. As Srini notes, things have a way of revealing themselves only once you’re in pursuit of them. This generally means that you have to start running on faith.

Most people are afraid.

Most people get comfortable in a life that seems tolerable enough. They don’t have the time, they complain, and may actually believe it (even as they spend hours watching TV, playing video games, surfing the Internet, at the mall). The price is that moment near the end when you realize that your life never belonged to you.

You never stepped up. You never owned it.

You never showed us who you really are.

And I started to wonder, Srini writes, what would happen if we left our heart on stage every time we created anything.

It’s a bust your ass to shine, honest to a fault, no bullshit, zero apology performance. If you look at the work of some of the most successful people in the world you’ll see it as the undertone. It isn’t just something they do, it’s who they are. It’s the kind of performance where your heart and soul bleed.

I like that a lot.

We learn early and repeatedly that we can be hurt. We figure out ways, growing up, to shelter and protect our inner misfit. Our tender vulnerable soul-voice.

Our task, now, is to destroy all those old structures, out in the world and deep within us. To shrug off the armor, strip away the bullshit, open ourselves up and out with the tenderness and vulnerability of the children we no longer are – so we can take our power as adults and nurture a new kind of life, an authentic life, that sets our inner misfits to play in a world that doesn’t yet realize how badly it needs them.

Somewhere between what your soul knows and what the world wants you to know, is your choice about what kind of story you will live and how you will live it.

Our inner misfits are wiser than we are, and whispering to us all the time.

The only question is: are we listening?

Justine Musk

Black Rock City, Nevada

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against perfection ( + the art of being whole)

I was in the middle of a private yoga session and I was in a bad mood. It was one of those moments when you just want to tell off the poses as if they were offensive party guests: Get away from me, downward dog. You, triangle, go screw yourself. And you, headstand, have we learned nothing from our problematic encounter three days ago?

Finally I confessed to the teacher, “I’m annoyed with myself because my weight crept up, and I’m having trouble letting it go.”

She asked quite reasonably, “How much did it creep up?”

“About a pound,” I said. Saying it out loud enabled me to hear how ridiculous it was to be trapped in this loop of thinking. It was as if by speaking it, I was also releasing it and could focus again on the moment. “It triggered this wave of self-loathing, like I’m a total personal failure and will never achieve my goals.”

My instructor, who is also a therapist, said, “Control.”

“What?”

“It’s about control.”

And yet, I’m not a control freak (just ask my ex-husband, who found my house management skills fairly traumatizing). I have never struggled with my weight or battled an eating disorder. My relationship with food is only mildly dysfunctional. I work out because I like to work out – and exercise, like writing, helps even out the mood swings that run through my family.

“If women took all the intellect and mental energy we put into obsessing over our bodies or our romantic interests (or lack thereof),” a woman said to me, and I have been guilty on both counts, “and redirected it into other areas, think of all the problems we could solve, how much we could accomplish as a gender.”

But we don’t.

I’m not exactly blaming us (how could I? I think we’re fabulous). We grow up amid a social and historical legacy that still teaches girls, in a myriad of ways, that being a successful female is all about curbing your appetite – for food, yes, but also for sex (or else you’re a slut), or money (or else you’re a golddigger), or power (or else you’re power-hungry), or ambition (or else you’re selfish) or knowledge (or else you’ll seem smarter than boys and they won’t want to date you) or professional accomplishment (or else you’re intimidating). If we show too much emotion, we are crazy and hysterical. If we’re too honest, we’ll offend someone or hurt someone’s feelings. If we show any anger at all, we’ll get labeled as out of control.

You know how it goes.

Be successful…but not so successful that you’re too big for your britches. Speak up…but not too loud, or too often. Lift weights if you want…but not so much that you’re a freak.

From early childhood on, the unsaid, underlying threat is the same: or else nobody will like you, want you, love you. And since the ancient, primal brain equates social exile with death – which, once upon a time, it certainly was – on some unconscious level we perceive that our very lives are at stake.

We learn to put an upper limit on ourselves.

We learn that we’re not supposed to go for greatness.

We’re supposed to be perfect.

I’m a huge fan of Chris Guillebeau and I attend the World Domination Summit. I love the messages there: You don’t have to live your life the way other people tell you to. Go big! Follow your passion! Trust your instincts! Believe in yourself!

There’s nothing particularly new about these messages, which doesn’t make them any less valuable (and the way Chris presents and executes is inspiring in and of itself). What I’ve noticed, though, is that once you shift from the WDS crowd of men and women, to a crowd composed solely of women, the conversation changes.

Suddenly it’s about having it all (as in: we probably can’t, so better not to try). It’s about finding balance. It’s about making it a point to lean in, in the first place.

When I went to a mostly-male conference that Tim Ferriss held in Napa Valley a few years ago, the level of ambition and confidence was through the roof. (In fact, at one point someone in the audience practically accused Tim of not being ambitious enough [because he doesn’t make information products for his audience.])

When I went to an all-female event for aspiring solopreneurs a few weeks later, the leader spent the first hour discussing the meaning of profit motive. The underlying message was: Money is okay, and it’s okay to want to make it!

Don’t get me wrong. These are good and important conversations to have. But where is the conversation about female greatness – what it is, or might look like, how it might follow a timetable that differs from the men,’s how it fits into the world (and could reshape it)?

I think of personal greatness as the happy outcome of a full and meaningful expression, over time, of your dharma: the identification and development of your natural gifts, the pursuit of mastery, the application of those gifts in the real world to solve meaningful problems and create value, meaning and beauty. This is not only good and healthy for the world, it’s good for us: dudes like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle inform us through their teachings that in order to find happiness, you have to live at your highest potential, and not just once in a while but moment to moment. The greater the gap between what we’re capable of doing/being, and what we’re actually doing/being, the greater our depression, our sense of anxiety, our feelings of disconnection from life, light and love.

Of course, no one can give you a blueprint as to how to self-actualize. You have to listen for your vocation – which, as Parker J Palmer points out, is Latin for ‘voice’, as in, the voice of your life. Your life does not speak from any external source. It speaks through you, and from within you: it is your intuition, your creative or nonverbal intelligence, your higher self, your soul, driving you to wholeness. Wholeness includes not just work, but relationships – and, often, children. When you deny someone the right to both – when you tell them they must choose one or the other – you distort their very soul.

The pursuit of perfection isn’t about following the voice of your soul. It’s about the pursuit of outside validation, and the shame that accumulates when you don’t get it. It’s about seeing yourself not through your own eyes, but the eyes of some audience, real or imagined, who will condemn you for ‘allowing’ your weight to creep up by a single pound.

The soul-voice is about growth, exploration, risk, adventure. The soul-voice takes you out of your comfort zone to the places where mistakes are made, you often fall on your face, and life gets challenging and messy. The soul-voice fills you up. It expands you. It enables you to take ownership of your life, even (or especially) when it drives you to do the things that scare the crap out of you.

When we pursue perfection, we have to shut this voice down, or carve it out entirely. This leaves a ragged void that we try to fill with our attempts at perfection, and when those efforts aren’t enough we insist that our loved ones meet the same impossible standards in order to fill that void for us.

This rarely leads anywhere good.

I sometimes wonder if so many of us are as tired, discouraged and as burned-out as we are – not because we’re trying to have it all – but because we’re trying to have it all perfectly. The perfect careers, the perfect bodies, the perfect families, the perfect relationships, the perfect homes. It’s exhausting, and not least because the quest for all this perfection turns us inward – to focus on ourselves and our families, and to shoulder all the blame for when it doesn’t happen.

A quest for greatness, however, turns us outward. It doesn’t just force us to ask ourselves who we are and what we do – but also who we are meant to serve and how we’re meant to serve them, what that audience wants and needs and how their interaction with us ultimately transforms them. Greatness doesn’t close out relationship, but depends on it; greatness doesn’t happen inside us, but in the spaces between us and other people, us and the world, us and the call of our times. Those are wild spaces, unpredictable spaces, that will not be controlled. Releasing the need for perfection allows you to step more fully into them. Releasing the need for perfection allows you to know what you want – what your soul-voice wants – and just as importantly, what you can afford to let go.

After all, you don’t have to live your life the way that others tell you.

Maybe it’s great to be perfect.

But it’s better to be whole.

mea culpa

In a recent post titled the so-called lies of lifestyle design (+ the secret truth about tim ferriss), I included a quote from another blogger that used the word ‘tranny’.

I would like to do now what I failed to do then, which is to say –

This is an ignorant and unacceptable way to refer to transgender people.

And I apologize.

how to be the last girl standing ( + the other meaning of virginity)

1

Maybe you’re familiar with the idea of The Final Girl.

She’s a recurring character in those slasher films that were so popular before 1990 (and the rise of torture porn).

She’s that girl who watches all her friends get killed, one by one by one, by a maniac in a hockey mask or a scarred boogeyman who reaches out for them in dreams made fatally real.

She’s that girl who fights the monster at the end – and gets away – or kills him dead (at least temporarily, before he rises again for the sequel).

(And then the sequel to the sequel.)

She’s that last girl standing.

The Final Girl is a virgin. Her friends – the ones who get slaughtered – are not. They drink, they have sex, they make merry, they work alone late at night, they flirt with strangers on the telephone, they die in a grotesque variety of ways.

The slasher film can be read as a backlash to the rising power that women were experiencing in the ‘70s and ‘80s: Look what all this autonomy and sexual freedom will get you! You’ll get beheaded!

(Or impaled. Or whatever.)

The only way to survive is to be a virgin, thus morally ‘pure’ and unpunished.

Or maybe there’s another way to look at it.

When you read about the ancient Greek goddesses, you learn that some of them (Athena, Artemis, Hestia) fall into a class known as virgin goddesses.

The word virgin didn’t always refer to the total absence of sexual activity (and the presence of a hymen). Virgin meant a woman free of attachment. No spouse, no kids. She was complete unto herself: whole, autonomous and self-sufficient. This is in sharp contrast to what Jean Shinoda Bolen refers to as the vulnerable goddesses (Hera, Demeter, Persephone), who are defined through their relationships and subject to exploitation, heartache and abuse.

So whatever the intention of slasher films (conscious or otherwise), whatever cultural anxieties gave them shape and allowed them to rise, maybe it’s this ancient virgin-goddess archetype that manages to find expression in the Final Girl. Maybe that’s a reason why these movies were so popular: because this character has mythic resonance, because on a deeper level she was communicating that the key to survival, unlocking your hidden strength to navigate violence and terror and find ultimate triumph, is a wholeness of self.

When you’re whole, you don’t need another person to complete you. You stand on your own two feet. You fight your own battles.

And when the credits start to roll, you’re free.

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Easy to say, but what the hell does it mean to be ‘whole’?

I don’t believe that it’s an either/or situation: either you have relationships, or you have wholeness. We discover who we are, we confront both our unexpected brightness and our smaller, darker selves, we grow, through relationship.

In a recent conversation I had with bestselling author Jennifer Louden for her Shero’s School for Revolutionaries (which premieres Monday, by the way), I talk about the need for a feminine call to greatness. I don’t think this culture delivers it. I define greatness as self-actualization, the identification and cultivation of your gifts and the ability to put them to use in the world. Your dharma. Your Way.

Your vocation.

What I didn’t know at the time – because I literally just learned it – is that vocation stems from the Latin word for voice. We think of vocation as something outside of us that we must willfully pursue, the goal that must be reached – or else we risk being losers. But as Parker J Palmer explains in LETTING YOUR LIFE SPEAK, vocation is not the voice you impose upon your life (I should do this, I should be that). Vocation is the voice that struggles to speak through your life. The only question is whether you let it:

“True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding our lives in check until we honor its truth.

…I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about – quite apart from what I would like it to be about – or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions. ”

What you’re born to do flows naturally out of who you are, your strengths and limitations (since your limitations are the flipside of your strengths). Your vocation = self + service. click to tweet

Athena had a vocation. She was a warrior.

Artemis had a vocation. She was a hunter.

Hestia had a vocation. She was a seer.

When you find your vocation, you find your true self and your place in the world. click to tweet

You can then bring all this richness, this wholeness, into your relationships.

So often what we’re trained to do works the other way round: we search for our greatness in our relationships, which so often translates into living vicariously through other people. It’s not the relationships that render us vulnerable but the way we give away our power (or allow the other person to take that power from us). Life, however, has a way of throwing us into crisis. It probably doesn’t come in the form of a serial killer. But it forces us to dig deep, recover ourselves, and listen to the voices of our lives instead of the voices of others.

It’s never too late to be that last girl standing.

this much i know: 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.