D.M. Kenyon's Blog, page 2
May 7, 2012
Today’s Karmic Workout – The Virtue Of Skillfulness
Today’s Exercise: The Virtue Of Skillfulness
[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008. As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture. I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures. When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues on this site. The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other. If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it. This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm. Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case. We run organizations understand this. The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all. Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.
What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically. The employees of my company are extraordinary. We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family. We have some unusual practices at Habitata. Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family. The selection must be unanimous. If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for. They must be worth taking a stand for.
Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues. We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job. We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee. In 2011, after already having to lay off 15% of our employees, we had to make another cut. This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees. Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom. Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.
The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other. Absenteeism is nearly non-existent. It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over. We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries. They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds. As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."
For these next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format. I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life. The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.
You may want to print out the post about the Virtue of Skillfulness and keep it with you during this exercise. It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]
Find a quiet place to read and contemplate. Turn off your cellphone. (Come on, actually turn it off. No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an intentional act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes. Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length. Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the fourth virtue, skillfulness, out of The Book of Seven Virtues post (see link above) or you can read just about skillfulness by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Skillfulness, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day. This will require that you pay attention to what you are actually doing and thinking all day. This will be much harder than you think. We spend a considerable portion of our day steeped in self-concern. Skillfulness requires that you pay attention to how you do things with an eye to improving them. This includes developing your techniques for all manner of things including something simple like chopping lettuce for salad as you prepare dinner.
For the rest of the day, we want to focus our attention on the efficiency and effectiveness of everything you do. We want to be looking for opportunities to improve your ability to do almost anything. Do not wander off. If you do, pull yourself back into your concern for evolving your skills.
To get you started, here is a short instructional video on how to tie your shoes. The odds are you are doing it wrong. Click here.hr]
Training Note:
By now you might have noticed that all of the Seven Virtues are actually different ways to be aware of your world. Usefulness requires that we pay attention to the results of our actions to make sure that they are always providing benefit and, hence, good karma for ourselves and for others. Mindfulness requires that we remain aware of what we are actually doing instead of day-dreaming and creating the opportunity for mishap or misunderstanding. Compassion has us paying attention to the condition of others so that we might be able to provide benefit to them and so that we can tune ourselves to the well-being of all. That brings us to skillfulness. Like usefulness, skillfulness focuses on how we do things. Unlike usefulness, we are not simply looking to provide benefit, but rather, we are seeking to refine effectiveness.
You can do useful things without much skill, but it is skill that helps us refine our technique to maximize potential benefit. It is a wonderful thing to give a person in need a dollar. It is an even better thing to fund a homeless shelter by rallying a community. Skill, like the other virtues, is a path to a certain kind of personal power. The real limitations that we face, however, do not arise from learning how to do things well, but knowing that there is a away to improve everything that we do even when we do not ordinarily associate them with skill. For instance, the practice of mindfulness seems simple and straight forward, but it actually takes considerable practice to develop skill in it. Being skillful at mindfulness actually causes a significant paradigm shift in consciousness that,over time, can have a profound effect on one’s life experience. Likewise, one does not usually consider compassion to be something that requires skill, but quite the opposite is true.
There are only two ways to develop skill: instruction and practice. Skill requires intention. That may explain why people have less and less of it as we wander off into the Information Age.
Karmic Benefits:
Skill Is The Difference Between Medical Voodoo And Brain Surgery: in the ancient times, if you were sick with a brain tumor, a shaman might shake a bone rattle in your direction and insist that you be healed. Today, we have brain surgery. While the rattle technique was relatively quick to learn, it was ineffective. Brain surgery takes a long time to learn, but works very well. This is a fundamental truth about skill. first it is the study of something in its complexity. Later, it is the reduction of this complexity to simple, intuitive practice. It takes time to work through the critical thinking of a skill and then sharpen your technique. Concert pianists are constantly refining their skills even though they all start out playing “Chopsticks”.
Everything You Do Can Be Done Better: there is no human activity on the planet that cannot be done better with some critical thinking and practice. This includes things like parenting, listening, meditating and even sleeping. We spend much of our time in mental oblivion which deprives us of the opportunity to develop virtuosity in even the simplest things. Samurai could shoot arrows through rice paper and hit small targets that they intuitively located through clear mindedness. They usually also were accomplished in a wide variety of arts in their quest to evolve a refined and gracious life experience. Skill does not come by accident. It can only be honed with intention.
Awareness Of Critical Distinctions Is The Key To Mastery: regardless of the skill, the difference between a novice and a master is a matter of being aware of increasingly complex distinctions. A novice baseball player knows about a bat and a ball and swats at pitches as they streak by. A master, however, knows about nuances of stance and swing and may have trained his eyes to become cognizant of all twelve pictures per second that the human eye takes rather than the six or eight that the normal person might notice. To the novice, a fastball looks like a streak of white; to a master, he can see the individual threads of the ball even at 90 miles per hour.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB’s Daily Karmic Workout:
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May 3, 2012
Today’s Karmic Workout – The Virtue Of Compassion
Today’s Exercise: The Virtue Of Compassion
[Photograph by Damir Sagolj]
[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008. As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture. I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures. When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues on this site. The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other. If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it. This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm. Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case. We run organizations understand this. The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all. Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.
What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically. The employees of my company are extraordinary. We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family. We have some unusual practices at Habitata. Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family. The selection must be unanimous. If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for. They must be worth taking a stand for.
Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues. We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job. We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee. In 2011, after already having to lay off 15% of our employees, we had to make another cut. This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees. Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom. Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.
The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other. Absenteeism is nearly non-existent. It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over. We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries. They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds. As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."
For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format. I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life. The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.
You may want to print out the post about the Virtue of Compassion and keep it with you during this exercise. It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]
Find a quiet place to read and contemplate. Turn off your cellphone. (Come on, actually turn it off. No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes. Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length. Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the second virtue, mindfulness, out of The Book of Seven Virtues post (see link above) or you can read just about compassion by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Compassion, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day. This will require that you pay attention to what you are actually doing and thinking all day. This will be much harder than you think. We spend a considerable portion of our day steeped in self-concern. Compassion requires that we spend our day tuned into the condition of others.
For the rest of the day, we want to focus our attention on the condition of the people around us. We want to be listening for their well-being. Do not wander off. If you do, pull yourself back into your concern for others. Keep bringing your mind back to those around you. Compassion is a type of mindfulness, but with a prejudice – it is all about those around us and not ourselves.hr]
Training Note:
Compassion is a word that is often poorly understood. It is often confused for empathy and while empathy can arise out of compassion, they are not same thing. Compassion does not require that you empathize. One does not need to know what it is to be in the shoes of another to have concern for the well being of others. Likewise, compassion should be distinguished from love or what Buddhists call “loving kindness”. Love is an aspiration for the well being of another in the future. Compassion is a concern for what has already happened to another leading to that person’s present condition. In other words, compassion happens in the now and takes into account the past.
Like all of the Seven Virtues, compassion is, in reality, an awareness. Like mindfulness, it is an awareness of conditions outside of our perpetual self-concern. We have compassion for beings outside of ourselves and it is this awareness of their condition that triggers in us the desire to help and be useful to them. Compassion is an intensely powerful state of mind. It is one of the essential elements of leadership. It is the glue that binds families and communities together. Most importantly, compassion is the fundamental awareness that has us take action to aid one another thereby forming collaborations. This coming together through compassion multiplies our effectiveness and range of influence by forming a common intention among a group of people even if it is a group of two. When people come together through compassion their power to cause benefit grows exponentially.
Compassion, unlike fear, is intensely motivational. Human beings actually possess much more intention and enthusiasm when they are motivated by the desire to protect others. Fear and self-concern are motivating, but lack the potential to bind people together in tribes to face a common difficulty. Fear creates an army of one; compassion creates an army of nearly limitless human union.
Notice that distraction, fear, selfishness all destroy our ability to exist in the consciousness of compassion. In a media saturated society, one of the devastating by-products of constant stress from the barrage of news is that we give up the power of compassion to retreat into a shell of self.
Karmic Benefits:
The Power Of Giving A Damn: self-concern can only harness the power of a single person. But when we are compassionate, we focus our intentions outward for the benefit of others and in so doing create alignment and bring allies toward our cause. In the world of things, a person might try to protect a self, but compassion exists in the world of being and in the world of being, one is not limited to the container of “me”. Beings can combine like drops of water into a wave though they are generated from individual bodies.
Why We Can Move Mountains For Others: the power of compassion is a matter of simple logic. When we focus inward, we are looking into a finite and limited space. When we focus our attention outward, we are looking toward infinite possibility. A person who takes up the cause of another automatically, and by definition, is now functioning in an alliance. Two are always stronger than one. Furthermore, the love of others is a naturally stronger instinct than the concern for self. This is part of our instinctive programming as social creatures. Consider parents. Most parents would through themselves in front of a bus out of sheer instinct to save their child. This is no learned behavior. It is part of our basic design as human beings.
The Root Of All Goodness: it is axiomatic that “evil” in most cultures is defined as self-concern at the expense of others while virtue is frequently, but not always, associated with causing a benefit for others. Compassion, however, does not have a moral connotation. It is simply the awareness and concern for the condition of others. Having said that, this awareness sparks, more often than not, action that brings benefit to others and is, therefore, seen as the root of goodness in the human race.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB’s Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
April 30, 2012
Today’s Karmic Workout – The Virtue Of Mindfulness
Today’s Exercise: The Virtue Of Mindfulness
[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008. As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture. I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures. When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues on this site. The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other. If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it. This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm. Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case. We run organizations understand this. The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all. Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.
What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically. The employees of my company are extraordinary. We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family. We have some unusual practices at Habitata. Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family. The selection must be unanimous. If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for. They must be worth taking a stand for.
Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues. We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job. We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee. In 2011, after already having to lay off 15% of our employees, we had to make another cut. This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees. Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom. Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.
The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other. Absenteeism is nearly non-existent. It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over. We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries. They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds. As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."
For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format. I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life. The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.
You may want to print out the post about the Virtue Mindfulness and keep it with you during this exercise. It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]
Find a quiet place to read and contemplate. Turn off your cellphone. (Come on, actually turn it off. No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes. Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length. Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the second virtue, mindfulness, out of The Book of Seven Virtues post (see link above) or you can read just about mindfulness by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Mindfulness, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day. This will require that you pay attention to what you are actually doing and thinking all day. This will be much harder than you think. Most of us are pretty oblivious much of the time. Daydreaming or thinking about what we are going to have for lunch is not mindfulness.
For the rest of the day, try to be aware of what you are actually doing and thinking. Do not wander off. If you do, pull yourself back into your actual experience rather than the mind cartoons that we normally watch most of the day. Keep bringing your mind back to your real-time experience as you work through your entire day including when you finally go to bed.hr]
Training Note:
In principle, the Virtue of Mindfulness is a simple thing. All there is too it is to pay attention to what you are doing and thinking in real time. If you are walking down the street, then your thought should be “I am walking down the street”. If you are eating an apple, then your thought should be “I am eating an apple”. What it is not is thinking “I wonder if I should buy a new television” while you are sitting traffic. Mindfulness is the awareness of what is going on right now. What you will notice as you wrestle with this exercise is that out of any given day, you are hardly actually engaged with it all. We meet a friend and instead of simply being with the experience of seeing her, we start having thoughts about what she is wearing, where she got that blouse, then leap to a random thought about whether or not our credit card can handle a shopping spree to buy a new shirt.
The point is that most of human consciousness in the Information Age is lived in abstraction. Even when we eat, we are thinking about something else. Even as you read this, you are being sucked into the abstraction of what is written here and not thinking “I a reading Karmic Workout”. Mindfulness is the discipline of paying attention to what is actually happening around you. If you do have a thought about something intangible, you actually think to yourself “I am thinking about shopping”. This accurately describes your experience and alerts you to the need to return to real life. With practice, you can be present in the moment almost continuously and this has a profound impact on your ability to interact with real people and real situations. For starters, you stop living in the clouds.
Karmic Benefits:
These Days, Everyone Has Attention Deficit Disorder: the human mind has a hard time staying focused as it is. We are creatures prone to distraction. There is the song that you heard in the grocery store that, despite disliking it, you cannot get out of your head. When we are under stress, we pay even less attention as we mull over in our mind our day dreams of telling our boss off even though we will most likely sit there and cop out – again. The point is that the drama between our ears is not what is playing out in real life. What would happen if you did not live in a fantasy world, but were tuned into what was really happening. Try it, you will like it.
Life Happens In The World, Not In Your Mind: the Latin name for human being is homo sapien sapien. This means “man that is aware that he is aware”. Well, sometimes. Human beings have a unique ability to watch their own thinking. They also have the ability to think abstractly, to speculate and fantasize. Abstract thinking is extremely useful, but not when you child is trying to talk to you. Being present to what is happening if far more important, especially when you are driving. And yet, most of us have had the experience of driving for miles without remembering a minute of the trip. This is not only dangerous, but separates you from the experience of actually living.
It Is Not Clairvoyance, It Is Called “Paying Attention”: when we tune into what is going on around us,it is like we have magical powers. We begin to notice the details of our world. We do not have accidents. We know where we put our car keys. We are in tune with the emotional state of the people around us because we actually took the time to notice. We also become aware of what goes through our mind and how or mind really works. This is the access point of clarity and a consciousness by design instead by accident.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB’s Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
April 26, 2012
Today’s Karmic Workout – The Art of Usefulness
Today’s Exercise: The Art Of Usefulness
[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008. As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture. I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures. When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues on this site. The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other. If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it. This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm. Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case. We run organizations understand this. The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all. Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.
What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically. The employees of my company are extraordinary. We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family. We have some unusual practices at Habitata. Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family. The selection must be unanimous. If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for. They must be worth taking a stand for.
Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues. We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job. We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee. In 2011, after already having to lay off 15% of our employees, we had to make another cut. This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees. Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom. Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.
The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other. Absenteeism is nearly non-existent. It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over. We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries. They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds. As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."
For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format. I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life. The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.
You may want to print out the post about the Virtue Usefulness and keep it with you during this exercise. It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]
Find a quiet place to read and contemplate. Turn off your cellphone. (Come on, actually turn it off. No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes. Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length. Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the first virtue, usefulness, out of The Book of Seven Virtues post (see link above) or you can read just about usefulness by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Usefulness, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day. This will mean avoiding unuseful things. This will be much harder than you think. Most of us are pretty oblivious as to why we do what we do during the day.
For the rest of the day, try to make everything you do useful to someone including yourself. Think about the usefulness of what you do all day. Keep bringing usefulness to mind as you work through your entire day including when you finally go to bed. Sleep is very useful.
Training Note:
There are two aspects of practicing the Virtue of Usefulness. First, there is learning to see the utility in all that you do. This helps you become mindful of the consequences of your actions and the karma that you are creating. Nearly everything you do has some use to it, but are you aware of that usefulness? By thinking about usefulness we see how what we do fans out in our reality and it trains our minds to be aware of what we think and do actually does in the world. Second there is the mental discipline of actually staying focused on usefulness. This is much harder than it looks. To do anything throughout an entire day without wandering off track is quite challenging. Do not worry if you forget for a while, but do not undertake something without taking a second to think about what your actions are doing for you and the world. What is the purpose of each action and thought? This is a huge question that can take a lifetime to answer. You will be surprised, however, to notice that there are new dimensions you can add to your consciousness when you spend a day (or a lifetime) contemplating the usefulness of what you are doing while you are doing it.
Karmic Benefits:
What The Heck Do You Think You Are Doing? It seems like a simple question, but we spend an enormous part of our day utterly oblivious of why we are doing what we are doing. It is not that we spend our days doing useless things, though sometimes that happens, but it is that we do things like robots without appreciating how it interconnects with the world. You will find that when you tune into usefulness, your work becomes meaningful and your life fulfilling.
If You Cannot See The Usefulness In A Task, Then Why Are You Doing It? Rarely do we do perfectly useless things. But when we are not focused on usefulness, we lose our ability to perfectly tune what we are doing to its intended purpose. We get sloppy and wander off to watch mind cartoons rather than appreciate that we are in a moment that actually serves a purpose. If you can’t see the usefulness in what you are doing, perhaps you should find something else to do.
Usefulness Is The Consciousness Of Intention and Purpose: Being mindful of the Virtue of Usefulness connects us mentally to our purpose. Even when we do tedious tasks, it often is inside the greater design of a significant purpose. Understanding that licking envelopes to send invoices to customers so that your company can collect money and pay you is an opportunity to be aware of how all activity fits into the whole of great enterprises, great communities and great lives.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
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April 24, 2012
Today’s Karmic Workout – Expose Your Inner Wimp
Today’s Exercise: Expose Your Inner Wimp
[Preparatory Note: everyone has something (and usually many things) that they should do, but cannot find the will power to make happen. For some of us, it is losing weight or quitting smoking. When we stop to take a look at how we really live our lives what we find is that we are creatures that feed off of low-hanging fruit. If we had to climb a tree to feed, we might very well starve to death. This is to say that in most things, we take the easiest way out and often find that we do not have the mental strength to overcome even the lamest emotional barriers.
In recent times, the efficiencies of global economy has made most everyone's life physically easier. We live in a world of time saving devices. In the United States, even our homeless people sometimes have cellphones. Our devices have made life easy for us, perhaps too easy, and, without really realizing it, we have developed an expectation of comfort and ease. Several generations ago, your great grandmother may very well have spent a day baking bread every week. This was not her response to having seen an interesting recipe on a cooking show, this was part of her ordinary routine to provide for the family. The thought of taking five minutes, let alone a whole day to prepare food in modern times raises our blood pressure. It gives us emotional stress because it cuts into our texting and internet surfing time. We live in a gotta-have-it-now culture and when we have to wait for something it makes us mad. This used to be called "being spoiled rotten", but is now referred to as "righteous indignation".
One of the side effects of the Comfort Culture is that we have become emotionally uncomfortable when we do not experience the level of ease and pleasant stimulation that we believe we are entitled to. We see this emotional discomfort everywhere in our lives. We can go out of our minds with rage when someone accidently cuts us off in traffic. This gives us an adrenaline rush over and above the energy drink we just spilled on ourselves and we get suddenly very uncomfortable. It is the surge of fear that makes us so upset, not the event itself. The truth of the Comfort Culture is that we will go out of our way to avoid uncomfortable emotions because we expect to feel good continuously. But we are not designed anesthetized living. We are designed to adapt to every situation and actually need this mental diversity to be effective. When we tell ourselves that we will not eat sweets and then see a doughnut in the office, we can actually get upset that we can't have one. Our inner wimp begins to whine like spoiled child and we begin to feel emotionally uncomfortable. Ultimately, after we have eaten our second doughnut had the inner wimp now has a stomach ache, we wonder why it was so hard to control the doughnut. The doughnut, however, had nothing to do with it. It was all about the wimp.
You will not quit smoking by doing this exercise. In fact, the purpose of this exercise is not to alter behavior, but simply to notice how our emotions and expose our sense of the entitlement to comfort that undermines our resolve. As we become increasingly affluent and self-indulgent, our ability to hold our ground on any decision that is unpopular with our emotional state becomes weaker. Living at the whim of random emotions is turning us into idiots. It is actually killing us.]
Make a short list of things that you do, but know that you should not do or things that you do not do that you know that you should do. You will only need one of these, so do not torture yourself with a full confession here, but you do need to select at least 3 to 5.
Find a quiet place to contemplate and turn off your cellphone.
Establish meditative breathing with long inhales and equally long exhales.
Review your list and pick the worst example of your lack of will power. It might be food. It might be that you don’t clean up your living space. Note that it might not be on your list. We tend to protect areas of particular weakness like cigarette smoking because we simply do not want to confront it. Pick your worst weakness even if you skipped it on your list in the beginning.
On a piece of paper write your weakness at the top and put two columns underneath it. In the left-hand column, make a list of the negative things that arise out of the behavior that you have listed. If there are health consequences, list them. If there is mental agony, list that. Take at least 3 minutes to fully consider the cost of the behavior.
In the right-hand column, list what you get out of the behavior. It most likely be something like “it tastes sooooo good” or “smoking calms me down and makes me peaceful” or “it makes me feel happy”. It also might be something that is expressed in the negative like “I avoid feeling stressed out” or “I avoid sadness”.
Take a full minute to clear you mind and think of nothing.
Read the two lists. Notice that the column on the left, the “costs” column, the items are largely rational and logical. Notice that the second list, the ”perceived benefits” on the right, is largely emotional. Notice that these emotions are actually arise for the purpose of avoiding something. In other words, the perceived benefit of the behavior is that you get to avoid a specific feeling.
Now make a third column. In this column, list as precisely as you can, the emotion that you are avoiding by seeking out the emotion in your perceived benefits list. Notice that you are not really seeking to avoid doing something or trying to have something, your are really trying to avoid feeling a certain way. This is the true source of your inner wimp.
Notice that what is happening here is that we are using the object of our lack of will power to try to convert one emotion into another. If you picked an object of craving for this exercise, notice that the object simply triggers the need to feel good by feeling satisfied. But what triggered the need to feel good or the need to avoid cleaning your room? Under the craving or the desire to avoid doing something is a point of stress and anxiety. The real conversation is all about your emotional state and has nothing to do with the doughnut you can’t resist. You could just suck you thumb.
Training Note:
We do not experience reality objectively in the least. When we know we should pay our bills, but don’t do it, it may very well be because we do not want the stress that arises when we consider our financial situation. In fact, it is not unusual for people to go out and shop when they want to avoid thinking about how broke they are. This is absolutely destructive behavior, but it is justified by a sense of entitlement to comfort and an avoidance of discomfort. When we fail to maintain our discipline, when our inner wimp gets the best of us, we usually begin to feel bad about ourselves. We start to know ourselves as weak and pathetic. Eventually, we will simply give in and assume the identity of weak and pathetic and give up any attempt at self-discipline. Other times we get angry at the object of our weakness. We hate the cigarette or the doughnut, but the fact of the matter is that those things are not causing the behavior. They are actually quite neutral.
What is killing us is our inability to cope with the negative emotions that are triggered when circumstances or objects in our environment spark the cognition that unlocks the emotion. You may not even be hungry when you walk by the doughnuts in the office, but simply seeing them sparks the idea that eating one would make you happy. You are going for the happiness, not the food. This is the basic mechanics of addictive behavior. The object that triggers our behavior launches thought that we have interpreted in such a way that it ignites a specific emotion. When some people see a spider they are propelled to their childhood and become irrationally afraid. When some people see jelly beans immediately follow the pre-programmed identity that they attached to it as a child on Easter was euphoric about an Easter basket. These emotions when liked to our fundamental identification of an object are like land mines. They blow up before we know what hit us.
Many people take drugs not necessarily to feel euphoric, but so as to not feel anxiety. It never occurs to them to confront the anxiety and change their relationship to it. They simply follow the bliss into addiction. Every human being does this at one level or another.
The secret is to expose the emotion driving the behavior and see how it is linked to the trigger. While this may sound like advanced psychotherapy it is actually a process called “mindfulness” that has been used by meditators for centuries. Studying how your mind actually works often alters behavior simply by being cognizant of the emotions that you are actually having even if they are not readily obvious. In most cases, what motivates us to unwanted behavior is not the happiness of eating the doughnut, but a latent anxiety that makes us think we need comfort. When we see the doughnut we do not notice the anxiety that comes up because our craving arises almost simultaneously and fills our mind with want in exchange for fear. This may be tricky to figure out. For some of us, when we were children, we developed anxiety when we saw our favorite foods or candy and were not allowed to have them. We developed the habit of feeling anxious around foods because we were afraid that our desire for them would be thwarted. This type of childish anxiety can inform adult behavior that has us want doughnuts even if we were not hungry. Fighting the craving does little to alter the behavior. Recognizing and coping with the stress or anxiety that triggers the craving can be a simple and effective way to defeat additive behavior.
This is a very common problem among drug users. Drugs make us feel better, but why are we feeling bad in the first place? As a person uses drugs more and more, their coping skills diminish. This actually causes a person to experience even more anxiety or other negative emotions because instead of using normal coping skills to alleviate stress, we are feeding a second emotion over the top of it. Drug use, over time, actually gives a person more anxiety, not less. Like an unused muscle, coping skills atrophy leaving the drug user even worse off than before. Freedom from drug use does not arise so much from the battle over the dependence on the drug or the euphoria as it does developing the skill to cope with the stress that provoked the desire for escape in the first place.
Even if you are not a drug user or chocoholic, do not think yourself immune from this type of thought process. The key to mental freedom is to watch you mind and notice how it acts and reacts to various cognitive events. When we notice that overeating is actually caused by a very specific stress and not the allure of taste, then we see a doughnut for what it is.
Karmic Benefits:
Coping Skills, Like Muscles, Only Grow When They Are Being Used: if you are not confronting your life, but hiding behind comfort to avoid it, you become mentally flabby and incapable of self-discipline. Eventually, no amount of comfort will make you happy. This explains while people who challenge themselves and face their lives tend to be much happier. They are stronger and more versatile. They have greater power and freedom because they face fear, stress and anxiety rather than seek to avoid these feelings.
No Amount Of Self-Indulgence Will Overcome An Unaddressed Anxiety: most destructive avoidance behavior like addictions and laziness are only made worse as we continue to avoid the underlying anxiety that provokes them. This starts a cascade of damage to our being. First, we begin to get angry with ourselves for being so weak-minded. This destroys our self-esteem and begins to erode our lives in other areas. Until we recognize the basic emotional impulse that is triggering the emotional undermining of our choices, we will always be looking in the wrong place.
Like Any Other Skill, Coping Is Best Developed Over Time And In The Long Run: sometimes we get frustrated with ourselves and try to alter our behavior “cold turkey”. This becomes a brutal battle between our emotions and our will. A few minutes of meditation a day focused on the actual root emotion that we are trying to manage can cause us to become aware of the true source of the behavior. Often the behavior will disappear on its own soon after we see the true cause.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
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April 20, 2012
Today’s Karmic Workout – Confront An Unknowable Universe
Today’s Exercise: Confront An Unknowable Universe
[Preparatory Note: we live in a world that increases in complexity exponentially every decade. Our technology, economy and natural sciences are redefining the universe as we know it, and we didn't know it all that well to begin with. For the average person this can be overwhelming. We hear news reports about "god particles", artificial consciousness, cloning and other discoveries that are radically changing they way that human beings have understood the world to be. Human culture has not had enough time to digest this rapid change and integrate it into a social understanding that accommodates human needs and scientific advances simultaneously. We have recently undergone a global recession that none of the experts saw coming and still do not fully understand. There are terrorists coming into high tech weapons that could wipe out entire cities. We are being watched nearly everywhere we go, computers monitor our cellphone calls and emails and intenet companies assemble detailed data profiles on us so as to make it nearly impossible for us to search for the widget that we want because we are being bombarded by "search results" presenting the widgets that someone else wants us to buy.
Nearly everyone in our massive global society is nervous. We are confronted with a world that is so complex and moving so fast that we feel like a squirrel trying to cross a freeway. As our anxiety builds, we engage with certain behaviors that are not necessary good for us or the human race. For example, one trend in our society is to live alone and not create families. In 1950, only about 7% of American adults lived alone. Now it is 28%. We spend less time with community groups. We spend enormous amounts of time in the cocoons of our own reality trying to find a "happy place" amidst the chaos. As we disengage from society and each other, we are growing intolerant of others and are beginning to live in a consciousness that is characterized by threatening sense of "them" and very little "we".
As human beings, we have always been afraid of what we do not understand. This fear practically defines human consciousness. One common response to the anxiety that we feel when we confront complexity or the unknown is to create simplistic explanations or mythologies and then relate to these speculative narratives as fact. If you sailed westward from Europe in 1400, everyone knew that you would sail off the edge of the earth. The proof of this was that sailors did not come back. This was not a matter of faith, this was a logical assumption based on the known facts at the time. 600 years later, as archaeologists have found evidence of Roman ship wrecks off the coast of Brazil and Nordic relics along the coast of Eastern Canada and even further south, we now know that some of those missing sailors found an new world before anyone knew that there was a new world to be found. At the time, however, there was belief that the world was a plane with an edge and an end. There were speculations of great sea monsters and ethereal beings that haunted the sea that were yet to be charted. The truth was that no one knew what was at the end of the water, but it did not stop them from make up stories about it.
We would rather live in a myth than live with the unknown. Myths make us feel like we can at least create a relationship with a complex world. The fact of the matter is that myths contain wisdom and are useful, but they are also dangerous. Some myths can lead to more fear and even hysteria. It is amazing the number of people who have given away all of their belongings thinking that the end of the word was scheduled for last Tuesday.
The purpose of this exercise is not to challenge belief. It is to challenge fear. In this exercise we are going to confront the unknown as the unknown and let it be as scary as it wants to be, or not, but we are going to take a moment to suspend our frantic rational obsessions and embrace not knowing.]
Find a quiet place to contemplate and turn of your cellphone.
Establish meditative breathing with long slow inhales and equally long exhales.
Begin to think about your body. Think about the fact that each cell has DNA and that those molecules, unfolded, are six fee long. They give off low frequency radio waves. Scientists only know what about 20% of this molecule does. Your DNA is very similar to all other animals and even similar to plants suggesting that you have a common genetic ancestry with all living things. But nobody on this planet can tell you what that is.
Think about the universe. Physicists have discovered that atoms are made up of particles that actually may have not substance to them. As the search for the Higgs Boson has scientists all over the world smashing atoms, we are starting to understand that all there really is in existence is energy and that it is not made up of anything. This can be mostly proven by mathematics that you are not likely to understand.
Think about the guts of your cellphone. Odds are you have no idea how it really works.
Think about the global economy. The best minds from hundreds of universities have no idea exactly how it works and it can launch us into global depression and, ultimately, war if a small group of computers make a mistake. It is complex, poorly understood and can wipe out whole sections of the human population.
We know that large astral bodies have struck our planet in the past and even caused massive extinction events. With all of our technology, there are objects in space that are so big that we could do nothing about it should one of them strike our planet.
You are creatures that are more monkey than enlightened being and if you stop and think about it, you really have no idea what the heck is going on in the universe. This, of course, has not stopped you from having an opinion about it.
Sit and meditate on the fact that you have no idea who you are, what you are or even if you are. You have no idea what your experiences mean. You have no idea whether you will even survive through tomorrow. You are vulnerable and impermanent.
In your mind, embrace the enormity of what you do not know. Allow yourself to sit exposed to an indifferent universe knowing that you could be, nearly at any time, crushed like an ant. Do not try to console yourself. Sit quietly, ant-like and vulnerable.
Training Note:
This exercise takes enormous concentration because our rational minds, when stoked with a threat, start calculating and speculating to the exclusion of all thought. Many of us cling to our existence to the point that we might not be able to even take this exercise seriously. Some of us will rationally conclude that this excercise is absurd.
The fact is that you are a very interruptable event. This is no big deal. Everything is an interruptable event. What we are trying to do here is to observe our mind as it tries to justify and console itself rather than accept chaos, the complexity and the unknown. For centuries, human beings have bent over backwards to confront the discomfort that they feel because the don’t know what is really going on around them and they don’t really know who or what they are. We have invented elaborate mythologies to explain the world and our place in it only to watch those mythologies be disproved and dispelled centuries later. We will accept almost any thought that validates ourselves and alleviates the anxiety that we experience when we recognize that we live each day an inch away from being wiped out.
But what is the karmic consequence of all this rational denial, self-delusion and anxiety? We fight wars over ideology. We hate our neighbors because they do not share our religion. We distract ourselves so as to not think about death and impermanence. We stay busy to avoid the possibility that our lives are meaninglessness. The unknown and our fear of it is the source of an enormous amount of consciousness that is highly delusional and yet acts as a type of anesthesia. This makes it very hard to simply be in the moment. By taking a look at the mental processes that we use to avoid complexity and the unknown we can begin to develop the skill of simply being.
Notice that when you do not know, you create opinions and use them as fact. Notice that when you do not know, mythology takes on the dimension of possibility and reality. Why do you need to know in the first place?
Karmic Benefits:
Get To Know Your Inner Nervous Monkey: nervous flight response is not just for rabbits and squirrels. While we may be the top of the food chain, in the cosmic sense, we would not even make a splat on the surface of comet. Our will to survive has us watching and conceptualizing our world, but what is all that interpretive thinking doing to our being? If our self-concerned thinking leads us to create dark fantasies as a proxy for an unknowable reality, isn’t it like following a mirage to an oasis that does not exist? How often does this thinking take us on a wild goose chase?
Consider That Knowing Has Nothing To Do With Being: knowing is a way to inform being, but being does not really need knowing. Being is a creative state that is caused by choice and is not inherently dependent on circumstances. Being may arise as a reaction to a thought or belief, but it is not required. Being can actually alter karma and the chain of cause and effect that dominates the mundane world. We can cause compassion in our being without any reason whatsoever. We can sit and be one with a sun rise without being able to name the gases or the chemical processes that make it warm. Whether we see the sun as a thermonuclear reaction or a god, the explanation of it only matters if it alters our being. At the end of the day, these interpretive thoughts become simply a narrative that we invent to justify our being. Perhaps simply feeling the warmth of the sun is the most useful experience and we do not need to know why it warms us. It suffices to know that it does. Despite complexity and the stories and myths that arise from it, live is really a far more simple matter. We can simply choose to be and choose to cause the experience that we intend. If we have an intention to cause kindness, we do not need to wait for a sunny day. We can cause kindness in our being without a reason.
Consider That You Do Not Learn About Life, You Create It In Real Time: we think that we “discover” life or “figure ourselves out”. Is this really true? Or is it that our being is simply at the whim of the interpretive narrative that we create. Believing that our opinions and speculations are real forms a kind of a trap. We become stuck in a world of our own making, but we did not always choose to make it the way it turned out. This is because we did not know we had the power to do that. Sometimes our narratives can be useful, but often it turns us into a dog holding his own leash and not realizing that he is free to move about the world. Does the thought of DNA in the cells of your body grant you being? Does it matter whether to your experience of life that it even exists? Quite possibly, science, a century or two from now will say that DNA is simply a pattern of energy or something equally ethereal. The point is that we live in a world of experience and we have much greater control over that experience once we break free of our fear of the unknown and our obsession to know. Rationality, while extremely useful as a practical matter, is actually a kind of limitation. Rationality simply provides us with an explanation and a way to manipulate the physical world. But it has very little implication in the world of being. Being needs no explanation. It just is.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB’s Daily Karmic Workout:
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April 18, 2012
Today’s Karmic Workout – Question Dogma
Today’s Exercise: Question Dogma
[Preparatory Note: there are several useful definitions of "dogma", however, it is the custom at TLB to use the one that is broadest. Therefore, for the purpose of this exercise, the term "dogma" is defined as "prescribed doctrine proclaimed as unquestionably true by a particular group". Notice that we have taken religion-specific meaning out of this definition. Dogma can be found anywhere there are groups. It is the established pattern of ideas and belief that becomes "the way it is" for the organization. It is a statement asserted as truth, but is actually a point of view.
Dogma is actually quite useful to an organization because it establishes a structure of thinking that often defines the group itself. Dogma often contains considerable understanding and logic that has been reduced down to a set of operating principles that are imposed upon a group in order to shape the behavior of its members. It is a tool that lies at the heart of most organizations that attempt to coordinate human effort in a single direction when organization members have varying degrees of understanding and skill. The organization creates a "doctrine" or method around which it expects members to shape behavior whether they understand the doctrine or not. This is an organizational necessity in most groups. Dogma is a time honored way to encapsulate insights that originate with experienced leaders of an organization so as to pass them on to necessary, but less experienced, members in order to cause cooperation and collaboration.
You could say that dogma is pre-fabricated thinking. The problem for those who are not part of the design of the dogma is that there can be many complex reasons for why a certain method is preferable over another, but this understanding may not be expressed in the doctrines that make up the dogma. Hence, members of lesser understanding are asked to simply follow or obey the doctrine without understanding. For the designer of dogma, it represents the reduction of wisdom to a method. For the follower of a dogma, it is pretty much superstition.
The purpose of this exercise is not to abandon dogma, but to question what was the designer of the dogma trying to achieve. We are looking to unconceal the actual thinking behind the method so that we can relate to the method as real thinking. To do this exercise, you can select any dogmatic doctrine from religion, society, business or other sources. The dogmatic doctrine has to express "how it is done", meaning that it has to have a sense of righteousness to it. It has to be spoken in a group with the expectation that it is the "law" of the organization or a rule that is not to be broken or questioned thereby giving it the weight of a behavioral mandate.]
Find quiet place to contemplate and turn off your cellphone.
Establish meditative breathing by taking long inhales and equally long exhales.
Think about the dogmatic doctrine that you have selected. Consider the behavior that it is trying to encourage. Think about the behavior that it is trying to thwart.
Rather than look at what the doctrine is, consider carefully what it does. What is the anticipated outcome of the doctrine and why is it important to the group?
What other doctrines is your chosen dogmatic doctrine related to? How do they work together to shape the organization.
Does the doctrine create cohesiveness in the group? Does it help leadership assert command and control more effectively over the organization?
What benefit is the doctrine intended to provide for the individual members of the organization?
Training Note:
Dogma has a very bad reputation in modern usage. It has become synonymous with “mindless rules.” Human beings, especially in these times have come to really hate rules. Some of the dislike for dogma comes from a culture that is so “me” oriented that it has a difficult time establishing cooperative effort in nearly any kind of organization.
The truth is that dogma is merely the established tenets of an organization that is set out for those of lesser experience. And yet it is precisely these less-knowledgeable minds that have the greatest trouble with established methodology. This is a problem that plagues every human organization. The more complex an organization is, the more it needs to reduce its operational principles to dogmatic doctrine so that those who cannot comprehend the complexity of the organization can still support the group. The Taoists have a saying: “altars are for the weak, but is all the more reason for a strong man to have one.” For masters of an organization, dogma serves a different purpose beyond method. It serves to keep leaders focused on core values of the group.
As you do this exercise, you want to notice your own relationship to dogma. The higher the comprehension you have for the complexities of an organization, the more likely you are to accept established dogma. Take a look at your own relationship to the dogma you have selected for this exercise? What does it say about your skillfulness in the method that the dogma is trying to advance?
Karmic Benefits:
For the Newbie, Dogma Is A Way to Create Participation: following the methodology of a group is a way to get new members to quickly take their place in the collaboration of an organization. Newcomers do not have the knowledge or skill to be able to comprehend or participate in an organization until they gain experience. How do you make rookies useful to the cause? Start them off on a diet of dogma.
For the Master, Dogma Is A Point of Focus: for experts in the methodology of a group, dogma can seem boring and even overly simplistic. It is, after all, largely for the benefit of those with less skill. And yet, dogma is a reminder of core values and can be used as point of focus. Dogma for masters can be an autopilot, however, that leads to less thinking rather than more.
Dogma, Like Any Defined Method, Can Kill Innovation: dogma ultimately is encapsulated thinking that is of little use to the fully initiated member of an organization beyond generating cohesiveness. For the master, dogma presents the risk of killing off creativity and innovation by restraining leadership to ground that has already been covered. The karma of organizations that fail to innovate and evolve is decline and extinction.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB’s Daily Karmic Workout:
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April 15, 2012
Christian Wiman: The Poet And Accidental Evangelist
Christian Wiman is well known in the poetry world for a variety of things, most of which wreak of integrity. He is the editor of Poetry Magazine, one of the nation’s foremost literary publication. As editor it has been noted that his poems have never appeared in Poetry Magazine even though he has developed quite an international following. The fact that he refrains from using his position to promote himself would rank high among his many virtues. In recent years, Mr. Wiman underwent an excruciatingly painful bone morrow transplant procedure to treat a rare form of cancer. It is one thing to take an ordinary consciousness to the brink of extinction, but something much more thoughtful and inspiring comes out of the mind a person like Christian Wiman when he steps to the edge of his own life and existence.
His poetry is the stuff of the greatest thinking that poetry has ever offered. Poetry has always had the advantage over prose in that it can transcend mere verbal communication to embody an expression of human intuitive thinking. This has always allowed poetry as a vehicle to tap and convey a far greater bandwidth of awareness than other genres of writing. In Wiman’s hands, this is a necessity for what he has to say is so much bigger than mere narration could possibly encapsulate. His thoughts on being, faith, divinity and theology are rich and well studied. He cannot but open his mouth without the scholar becoming omnipresent in his speaking. But because he is a poet, because he thinks and speaks in expressions that take such great advantage of his insightful cognitive tools, his ideas can be heard with at least some semblance of their depth.
Raised in Texas in a Baptist family, Winman was part of a religious conversation that he seems to have outgrown at a fairly early age. He claims to have spent his early adulthood looking at the world from a compassionate, yet agnostic point of view. In recent years, this point of view has changed as cancer forced a close inspection self, being and divinity into his life with stark abruptness. Being a man of stunning intellectual capacity, he did what all great thinkers do – he engaged the best ideas available to him as he considered in the midst of a potentially fatal illness how life, being, self and soul all interrelate through the lens of his knowledge, but more importantly, his experience.
What emerges is one of the most thoughtful and compassionate perspectives of divinity in the context of Christian theology that has been spoken in recent decades amidst the the often violent dogmatic confrontations that mark our times. There is an subtle optimism in his writing that refuses to fully yield to the constraints of mortality. Wiman sees a new theology emerging that takes what humanity has learned from science and the multitude of religions and makes sense of them in a way that resonates for thinking people of all faiths. His personal faith is ever present, but it is the absence of dogma that is so breathtaking. He is a Christian of no religion, which makes his ideas on faith and divinity all the more accessible and useful to anyone regardless of religious background. While his ideas are fresh they are built on a foundation of poets and theologians who have come before him. One cannot help but notice a similarity to some of the great spiritual thinkers of the past century including Thomas Merton, to name just one.
Like many human beings before him, Christian Wiman has had the abstraction of death stripped away from him and has had to stare it in the face. When a truly great mind comes to such a moment, the sparks of consciousness fly and illuminate the great existential conundrum with a fury that benefits all with its illumination. But in the process, this man, this wide-awake man, speaks from the edge of personal oblivion verses that lead to the very evolution of human consciousness. While it may not have been his intention to be an evangelist of a new covenant with a greater glory of being, he just may be making one anyway.
To learn more about Christian Wiman check out the following resources:
Krista Tippett‘s excellent aired on April 15, 2012 as part of her On Being Public Radio broadcast.
Bill Moyer’s interview with Christian Wiman in February, 2012.
Christian Wiman’s poem Every Riven Thing.
Christian Wiman’s poem Hammer Is The Prayer.
And this, the author’s personal favorite: And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud.
[Author's Note: It is my deepest personal prayer that this great mind, this being of wonder, be well and healthy for we all need so very badly to hear what he will say next.]
April 12, 2012
Today’s Karmic Workout – Embrace Your Inner Moron
Today’s Exercise: Embrace Your Inner Moron
[Preparatory Note: we all do foolish things from time to time. We can be incredibly thoughtless, rude or irresponsible. Sometimes all at once. When we look back at our lives, especially to our youth, we often come face to face with mistakes that so painful that it is difficult for us to even acknowledge them. We can see clearly in hindsight the great harm that we have done that was indiscernible to us in the moment. This can often immerse us in remorse and sorrow. We sometimes feel guilt and other self-deprecating thoughts that act as a form of self-punishment. It should be noted, however, the the purpose of punishment is not torture or retribution, it is a training method that is designed to provoke behavioral change. Simply beating up on yourself is good for nothing.
In this exercise we are going to pick a moment wherein we utterly failed to be the person we hoped to be. For some of us, this moment is very hard to be with and can be a challenge to even bring to mind because of our desire pretend that it never happened at all. If you have a moment like that, this is the place to train. What we are going to do is change our relationship to a moment of personal failure by acknowledging it as a moment wherein we accumulated precious wisdom. Rather than run from this moment, we are going to embrace it as the moment that a fool gave up his existence as a fool to become possessed of some measure of wisdom.]
Find a quiet place to think and turn off your cellphone.
Establish meditative breathing with long and slow inhales followed by equally long exhales. Clear you mind.
Take 2 minutes to contemplate one of the worst mistakes you every made. You want one that did harm to others and embarrasses you.
See yourself in your mind as you were when you made the mistake. Notice that you look different in your mind’s eye than you do today.
Now spend at least a minute recognizing that you are not that being anymore. Literally and physically you are not that person. That person has transformed into someone else though is very much part of a single evolutionary thread.
Now spend at least 2 minutes seeing that former self as someone outside of your present being. Treat that former self as third person with compassion and forgiveness.
Consider that you never have to be that person ever again.
Take 2 minutes to thank your former self for allowing you to learn from the mistake. Thank your inner moron for showing you the way to illumination.
Take another 2 minutes to conduct a personal inventory of what you have learned and how it has changed the way you behave. Notice that your behavior now and in the future is a redemption of your mistake, but might not have come to mind if you had not made the mistake.
Notice that the karmic consequence of the mistake is a new way of life that hopefully brings benefit to yourself and others because you have learned from the mistake. The implication of this is that the mistake itself was an essential part of the evolution of wisdom and wisdom could not have been had without the mistake.
Promise out loud that you will honor the wisdom born of the mistake to cause benefit. This is the transformation of a mistake into benefit and unleashes incredible power in the world of being.
Training Note:
Hiding from your mistakes is not only cowardly, but wastes a perfectly good mistake on self-conceit. Mistakes are powerful opportunities to learn and grow. Why waste them? You most likely have already paid dearly for the mistake, so why not get some value out of it? Like the lotus blossom that needs the muck for nourishment so that it may grow to the surface of the swamp and blossom in the sunlight, mistakes nourish our judgment. They give us experience, albeit often painful experience, that helps us evolve into better people. Too often, we persecute mistakes. We vent our anger over mistakes in the form of blame. We can turn some mistakes into entire identities that bind the person who made the mistake forever into an impotent, blameworthy person incapable of every earning our respect or esteem. This is a foolish waste of a learning opportunity that usually comes at a pretty high cost. If you are going to pay they high tuition assessed by a spectacular mistake, you should at least get the credit hours.
Karmic Benefits:
Make Every Moment, Even Your Darkest Ones, Useful: we should never avoid responsibility for our mistakes, but by the same token, we should never simply punish ourselves for them either because that produces nothing but emotional damage. Truly being responsible for a mistake means transforming it into wisdom that can benefit all. Thousands of people died in the process of developing automobiles and airplanes. Each death taught us how to make these things safer. We do great harm until we gather the experience necessary to transform harm into benefit. Transformation does not get us off the hook for the damage that we do, but it at least makes mistakes useful.
Waste Not, Want Not: it is great foolishness to run away from a mistake and not learn from it. When we run away from a mistake, we are usually not running way from the mistake itself, but rather, the embarrassment or negative self-assessment that arises when we consider the consequences of our actions. This is egotistically motivated and not useful. Never waste a perfectly good mistake. Get over yourself and turn it into knowledge and useful experience.
When Mistakes Become Opportunities, Wisdom Is Everywhere: with practice we can turn our essential relationship to mistakes into a consciousness that perpetually spots opportunities to gain wisdom. Wisdom does not come from reading books or reading, but and not doing Karmic Workouts. Wisdom comes from experience. When we remove our egotistical concerns from our consideration of mistakes, we create the opportunity to have them become failed experiments that inform us as to how life really works. Mistakes become valuable sources of insight. When we embrace our inner moron, we have ready access to this insight without being blinded by guilt and remorse. Taking responsibility for a mistake may lead us to compassion for those whom we have harmed, but we must include ourselves, to some extent, in the list of those damaged by poorly made decisions and ill-conceived action. A word of caution is appropriate here: there is a risk that we will forgive ourselves and then forget. It is better to forgive and remember forever what we have learned.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB’s Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
Today's Karmic Workout – Embrace Your Inner Moron
Today's Exercise: Embrace Your Inner Moron
[Preparatory Note: we all do foolish things from time to time. We can be incredibly thoughtless, rude or irresponsible. Sometimes all at once. When we look back at our lives, especially to our youth, we often come face to face with mistakes that so painful that it is difficult for us to even acknowledge them. We can see clearly in hindsight the great harm that we have done that was indiscernible to us in the moment. This can often immerse us in remorse and sorrow. We sometimes feel guilt and other self-deprecating thoughts that act as a form of self-punishment. It should be noted, however, the the purpose of punishment is not torture or retribution, it is a training method that is designed to provoke behavioral change. Simply beating up on yourself is good for nothing.
In this exercise we are going to pick a moment wherein we utterly failed to be the person we hoped to be. For some of us, this moment is very hard to be with and can be a challenge to even bring to mind because of our desire pretend that it never happened at all. If you have a moment like that, this is the place to train. What we are going to do is change our relationship to a moment of personal failure by acknowledging it as a moment wherein we accumulated precious wisdom. Rather than run from this moment, we are going to embrace it as the moment that a fool gave up his existence as a fool to become possessed of some measure of wisdom.]
Find a quiet place to think and turn off your cellphone.
Establish meditative breathing with long and slow inhales followed by equally long exhales. Clear you mind.
Take 2 minutes to contemplate one of the worst mistakes you every made. You want one that did harm to others and embarrasses you.
See yourself in your mind as you were when you made the mistake. Notice that you look different in your mind's eye than you do today.
Now spend at least a minute recognizing that you are not that being anymore. Literally and physically you are not that person. That person has transformed into someone else though is very much part of a single evolutionary thread.
Now spend at least 2 minutes seeing that former self as someone outside of your present being. Treat that former self as third person with compassion and forgiveness.
Consider that you never have to be that person ever again.
Take 2 minutes to thank your former self for allowing you to learn from the mistake. Thank your inner moron for showing you the way to illumination.
Take another 2 minutes to conduct a personal inventory of what you have learned and how it has changed the way you behave. Notice that your behavior now and in the future is a redemption of your mistake, but might not have come to mind if you had not made the mistake.
Notice that the karmic consequence of the mistake is a new way of life that hopefully brings benefit to yourself and others because you have learned from the mistake. The implication of this is that the mistake itself was an essential part of the evolution of wisdom and wisdom could not have been had without the mistake.
Promise out loud that you will honor the wisdom born of the mistake to cause benefit. This is the transformation of a mistake into benefit and unleashes incredible power in the world of being.
Training Note:
Hiding from your mistakes is not only cowardly, but wastes a perfectly good mistake on self-conceit. Mistakes are powerful opportunities to learn and grow. Why waste them? You most likely have already paid dearly for the mistake, so why not get some value out of it? Like the lotus blossom that needs the muck for nourishment so that it may grow to the surface of the swamp and blossom in the sunlight, mistakes nourish our judgment. They give us experience, albeit often painful experience, that helps us evolve into better people. Too often, we persecute mistakes. We vent our anger over mistakes in the form of blame. We can turn some mistakes into entire identities that bind the person who made the mistake forever into an impotent, blameworthy person incapable of every earning our respect or esteem. This is a foolish waste of a learning opportunity that usually comes at a pretty high cost. If you are going to pay they high tuition assessed by a spectacular mistake, you should at least get the credit hours.
Karmic Benefits:
Make Every Moment, Even Your Darkest Ones, Useful: we should never avoid responsibility for our mistakes, but by the same token, we should never simply punish ourselves for them either because that produces nothing but emotional damage. Truly being responsible for a mistake means transforming it into wisdom that can benefit all. Thousands of people died in the process of developing automobiles and airplanes. Each death taught us how to make these things safer. We do great harm until we gather the experience necessary to transform harm into benefit. Transformation does not get us off the hook for the damage that we do, but it at least makes mistakes useful.
Waste Not, Want Not: it is great foolishness to run away from a mistake and not learn from it. When we run away from a mistake, we are usually not running way from the mistake itself, but rather, the embarrassment or negative self-assessment that arises when we consider the consequences of our actions. This is egotistically motivated and not useful. Never waste a perfectly good mistake. Get over yourself and turn it into knowledge and useful experience.
When Mistakes Become Opportunities, Wisdom Is Everywhere: with practice we can turn our essential relationship to mistakes into a consciousness that perpetually spots opportunities to gain wisdom. Wisdom does not come from reading books or reading, but and not doing Karmic Workouts. Wisdom comes from experience. When we remove our egotistical concerns from our consideration of mistakes, we create the opportunity to have them become failed experiments that inform us as to how life really works. Mistakes become valuable sources of insight. When we embrace our inner moron, we have ready access to this insight without being blinded by guilt and remorse. Taking responsibility for a mistake may lead us to compassion for those whom we have harmed, but we must include ourselves, to some extent, in the list of those damaged by poorly made decisions and ill-conceived action. A word of caution is appropriate here: there is a risk that we will forgive ourselves and then forget. It is better to forgive and remember forever what we have learned.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB's Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
