How Would You Love to Show Up?

A client came to me with a problem. He's a performer, and a colleague of his has been distracting him in his work. My client was feeling frustrated.

Such a simple-sounding problem, right? But there were actually (at least) three issues underlying my client’s challenge:

1. His discomfort in engaging with his colleague about it.

2. His attempts to bypass the issue by dealing with it solely internally.

3. His lack of clarity about his intentions and what he really wanted.

So where did we start? That doesn’t matter. Here’s where we got:

At some point in the conversation, I asked him, “How would you love to show up when this happens again?”

(Write that question down. It's a good one.)

And he was quiet for almost a minute. Then, “I don't know,” he said.

We mostly live our lives in reaction to our circumstances and situations. This isn’t it, and we focus on that. But if This isn’t it, what is?

Many of us, each day, write out our TO DO lists. But what about that most important list of all, our TO BE list?

I am having a final coaching conversation tonight with a client of over 3 years. In that time together, he has created extraordinary results in his experience of life and in his effectiveness as a father, husband, friend, and colleague.

One call, years ago, he shared with me how tough it was to get up and handle his responsibilities. It began with his dog waking him up, and him really feeling like he didn’t want to deal with that.

Through the magic we do in our conversations, he opened to insight and inspiration and created for himself, “I awake each day with joy and gratitude.”

He trained himself so that the first thought he had upon waking up was that: "I awake each day with joy and gratitude." Then his mind got to work finding things to be grateful for, opening up to the joy of being alive. 

That was the beginning of his TO BE list! What better way to start our day than to intentionally remind ourselves - and create within ourselves and in our actions - how we're committed to showing up?

Since then, this client has created an extraordinary TO BE list of about 30 intentional, grounded, and powerful declarations. He has an alarm that goes off every hour to remind him to recite his list and ground himself in it. He looks for ways to express those ways of being in his life. He says them out loud to his kids. And he reflects upon his day in the context of that list.

How would you love to show up in life?! Not “what needs to change for me to be problem-free.”

How would you love to show up? With that person or that other person? In that task or that job? In your morning, your lunch break, your evening?

Answer that question in all areas of life that are important to you. Start there. Then, all there is to do is live with integrity, in alignment with what you’re committed to, not what your mind judges in the moment. 

Yes, access to authentically creating powerful self-declaration statements often requires reflection, healing, integration, and guidance. We’re each born with the capacity to access these truths about ourselves. And each of our statements fades without practice, like a muscle that atrophies from a lack of use.

So do that work. The most important work of our lives.

Much Love, and thank you for reading my work. ❤️

(100% human-made)

The Grace of Release

The master stands before the students and says, “Enlightenment is a happy accident.”

After the talk, a student walks up to the master and says, “But master, if enlightenment is a happy accident, why do we sit for hours, sweep and wash dishes mindfully in silence, and meditate every day?”

The master replies, “To become accident prone.”

That’s what practice does - it makes us accident-prone.

Last week I had a powerful, piercing experience of fear and despair. It was the most intense I’ve felt those two emotions in quite a while.

Of course I wanted them to go away. Of course I wanted to be free from them. Of course I had a problem with them.

And then, about an hour into the feeling, a miracle happened: I pulled my face out of my thinking about them and I was able to be with them - gently, compassionately, curiously.

I continued to make room for the emotions, and I continued to turn my attention toward my felt experience of the feelings and away from the stories my mind was incessantly creating about them.

My mind was trying to help, but it wasn't. I thanked it. I let it know that it wasn't being very helpful, but that I appreciated its effort and it could keep going if it would like to.

And I turned my attention back to the feelings. What did they actually feel like?

It's so easy to write off our challenging experiences without ever really being with them.

It was by a gift of Grace that I was released so quickly (2-8 hours) and so easily (with a lot of intentionality) by those emotions and the energized, cyclical thinking related to them.

Through the experience, though, I was able to be with the emotions in a gentle, compassionate, and curious way, while also gently extracting my attention, my focus, my awareness from the downward spiral of my thinking. 

I felt the feelings. I relaxed my thinking. I spoke kindly to myself throughout the process.

Despite wanting to, I didn’t distract myself with Netflix, music, or books. 

That Grace of release was a happy accident - it was there for me last week, and sometimes it’s not. With daily practice, I become more and more accident-prone.

And so do you.

What are you practicing daily to cultivate a being more aligned with who you really are than it is aligned with what you’ve been conditioned to think about yourself, others, life, and the world?

Practice intentionally, my friend - in your thinking, in your acting, in your being. 🙏

God's Sculpture Garden

I went for a lunchtime walk through a museum sculpture garden last week. It was a gorgeous day. 

(Aren’t all days gorgeous? I used to not be fond of rainy days and hot days. When I moved to Portland, Oregon, awhile back, I decided that I needed to fall in love with all weather. 

A reader of mine said to me a couple years back: “Mick, I really like your emails. A lot of it goes over my head, but I think I get the main point: be kind and compassionate to others and yourself.” I love that description. 

Shall we include all weather in our endeavor to be kind and compassionate? Yes.)

Back to the sculpture garden:

I looked at the first sculpture for a moment, then I turned my gaze to continue moving. I noticed leaf-shaped shadows on the stone path. I looked up and observed the large tree casting those shadows. I saw and heard kids talking during lunch a few steps up.

In literally every direction I looked and listened, I witnessed the beauty of the universe.

In every leaf. In every shadow. In every plant. In every sound. In the dust motes illuminated by the sun. In the sun’s light itself.

And the thought came to me, that while I walked that moment in the garden of sculptures made by humans, each moment of my life I’ve walked in God’s sculpture garden - the universe itself.

The deep beauty of humanity: our inner cares, our natural innocence, and the mean and cruel things we do to ourselves and others. Hunger for power, control, security, admiration, and wealth? They’re not only for the bad guys in stories. We each harbor them within our own hearts and actions.

Integrity, beauty, goodness, and holiness is the path of kindness, of compassion, of simplicity, of honesty, of gratitude. 

How am I cultivating kindness and compassion in my own life right now (outwardly and inwardly)? Perhaps there’s no other question I need ask, no other task as important.

Aren't children so quick to learn this lesson when we teach it to them? (“Truly I say to you, unless you change and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus in Matthew 18:3)

We walk, you and I, each moment of our lives through God’s sculpture garden. The spiritual life, as far as I've been able to discern so far, is the practice of being present to this truth.

The trees, birds, squirrels, grass, and clouds. The adults, children, strangers, friends, and family. No one is worthy of our judgment, resentment, and contempt, and everyone is worthy of our respect, compassion, and understanding. 

“Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?” (Jesus in Mark 8:18.)

Much Love. ❤️