My Learning Edges

Since I am still alive, I am still in school, learning and growing while also striving to fully enjoy recess and afternoon milk and cookie breaks (even if my adult body now demands soy milk and salads). My curriculum has sure changed a lot in the past few years, though! What follows are five of the biggest classes I apparently enrolled in for this current term, along with the frequent pop quizzes I am trying to learn to accept and embrace. My hope is that if I get good enough grades this term, I can sign up next for Soul Mates 101.

Service vs. Significance

In the past, most of my actions were motivated out of the need to feel important, successful, and significant. Now, I am striving to live and act from a place of service consciousness, in both my personal and professional lives. This is one of my largest and most important current learning opportunities.

As is true for many people, high school was not, shall we say, the easiest of times for me. Now, I'm all for teaching kids independence and personal responsibility, but there is no way my parents should have let me out of the house in some of the color-blind outfits I chose to wear! With my utter inability to even match my clothes together, I was a marketing case study, all by myself, for the crying need for Granimals for adults — and I still shudder at photos of those huge, lopsided, brown, plastic coke-bottle lenses I stumbled around in. Defining the term "late-bloomer", I didn't have my first kiss until I was a sophomore in college, and so I really got the lesson that I needed to make at least a few minor changes in my life if I was to be worthy of love, and the Hollywood romance I so craved.

Now, one thing I have never been short on is raw, stubborn, pig-headed, brute-force, break-the-brick-wall-down-with-my-forehead determination, and so with a blowtorch intensity that could melt steel, I set to work. What I desperately wanted was to be loved and accepted by my peers — particularly the beautiful young women whose romantic affections I felt so unworthy of — and in order to get that, I laid down a massive concrete foundation for my adult personality, which defined my identity as equal to my achievements and accomplishments. "How can I be better, how can I be better, how can I be better?!?" became my constant, driving, unconscious mantra. The good news is that I built up a tremendous level of self-confidence, and a truly remarkable set of skills for manifesting things in this world—gifts which I treasure, and am extremely grateful for today. The challenge was that it left me with a hot air balloon of an ego that was dependent, as so many of us seemingly-confident, alpha-male, strutting peacocks are, on ever-increasing successes and external validations. Mind you, it was also very vulnerable to rapid deflation at the hands of any woman with a sharp needle. What I craved was love. Yet, what I became addicted to was significance.

Even as I got on to my path of intense personal and spiritual growth, these patterns remained — it was not enough that I was experiencing radical transformation, love, and increased consciousness — there was a piece of me that had to be the fastest evolving student, the best at surrendering to Spirit, the most superior person at loving others. Ha! Luckily, the irony was not lost on me, and in a highly amusing feat of psychological ju-jitsu, I set my "must be better" hounds to the task of developing the experiential awareness that I am already perfect just the way I am. Remarkably, it largely seems to have worked, mostly because while my mind couldn't outsmart itself (though I remain awed by its labyrinthine attempts to do so) it was able to "bring my body to the room", and put me in to transformational processes and spiritual communities which were far more powerful that any of the tail-chasing games I was attempting to do on my own.

I am highly grateful for my significance phase. As M. Scott Peck says "if you give up winning before you have won, you are exactly what you started out as ... a loser." We have to build up an ego before letting go of it — and I have plenty of ego to still let go of. Particularly when I feel insecure, or I encounter a lot of success and praise, I become acutely aware of my old, seductive patterns, singing their siren song. Spiritual pride and masking my significance needs behind a service veneer are tricky traps, like tar pits lining the twisty turns of my path. Stepping in to power and leadership dramatically magnifies these challenges, and so I am confident that I will have plenty more learning opportunities ahead of me in this key area.

The thing is, living and acting from a place of service, where I am focused on giving love and simply providing value to others, rather than receiving praise (while also making sure I take care of myself first so I can help take care of others), feels so incredibly good! When I was young, I was taught that I "should" serve others — and yet felt little desire to do so, given where I was at then. Now, it is my bliss! What a concept, that doing what is good for me and for others can feel so spectacular!

Soul Centered Leadership

Once we buy our ticket to ride, our universe provides STRONG incentives for us to keep learning and growing until the ride stops. In order to help us do so, the sound system powering this symphony we are part of has four great "learning opportunity amplifier knobs" built in: relationships, power, pain, and death. Since I have come to the astounding conclusion that I prefer to learn through mechanisms other than death and pain, and because I believe that I am either growing or dying, I am choosing to work with the knobs marked power and relationships. For me, the power knob is coming in to play as I step forward in to soul centered leadership.

I'm still a little scared of this knob, because the last time I played with it, coming right out of grad school, I ended up as the unqualified captain of a drunken rocket ship of a start-up company — while feeling strapped to the outside of the hull. I managed to compress a few lifetimes worth of experience in to eight short years of the Internet boom and bust, through some very "interesting times" such as physical burn-out (my adrenal glands stopped functioning for a while after four years of 90-hour weeks), colossal failures, major breaches of my personal integrity, and repeatedly making and losing millions. The painful learning opportunities were challenging enough, but what really got me were the successes.

As one of my dear teachers explained — after the fact! — the two biggest spiritual dangers of business leadership are pride and greed. In my standard all-or-nothing fashion, I fully experienced both. While I can see now that this was for the best, because it helped precipitate my intense personal and spiritual crisis — and subsequent desperate breakthroughs — I'm still MUCH more tentative as I reach towards the knob again. Pride does not come in spite of leadership — it is offered up by our best friends, on a silver tray called success, and is as addictive as the little white powders they might try to push on us as well. When I walked away from the ego-addictions of my career, not sure if I would ever return, I described the first three months as being the closest thing I hope I ever have to experience to heroin withdrawal.

Like an alcoholic stepping back in to his favorite pub, I don't yet fully trust myself to step back in to leadership without getting addicted to significance, pride, and superiority again. However, I am also awed and humbled by the gifts I have been given in this lifetime, and am crystal clear that my calling and life purpose is to be a teacher and a leader. Plus, I can't get my father's voice out of my head, telling me that "where much is given, much is required." This time though, I aspire to be a servant leader, teaching by example, and placing much more value on the consciousness with which I lead rather than the worldly success that comes from it.

So, I am starting to turn the knob back up again, recognizing that this is just another learning edge, just another opportunity for courage and love, and just another test of my commitment to what matters most.

Direction vs. Destination

One of the most fundamental distinctions between Spirit and Ego seems to be in the nature of pursuing goals. When I was in my hyper-achievement phase, frantically building fortresses around my heart with my blowtorch fueled willpower, I set goals. I pulled out my map to happy-land, picked out a city where I hoped to find love, and then started "traveling over the river and through the woods", even if that meant swimming through shark infested waters and hacking through the underbrush with a dull, rusty machete. Again, this is an extremely important phase of personal and spiritual growth, for which I am very grateful. Like the times when I was a teenager and took my motorcycle up to a stomach-churning 120 mph, I appreciate the experience, and really appreciate the fact that I somehow survived some of my "less mature" choices.

On the other hand, my experience of Spirit's guidance is more like playing the "hot or cold" game with my flock of fledgling nieces and nephews. Instead of plotting my path with a GPS map, I find I simply have to "become as little children", try out different directions, and then listen for feedback from my universe. Instead of measuring my progress and self-worth against some arbitrary, fantasy notions of perfection, I find I simply have to feel for the warmth of sunlight on my face, and do my best each day to walk more towards the light than away from it. Instead of worrying about how I can become worthy of love in the future, I find I simply have to look for ways I can share even more love and joy right now.

Learning this new way of being and living my life, of dancing in harmony with what IS, is another one of my major current learning edges.

Being Impeccable With My Word

In the book "The Four Agreements", the first of the four keys to life it offers is "be impeccable with your word." For much of my life, I thought I had ADD. I was notoriously bad with detail management, using utility disconnections as my reminder that it was time to pay my bills, and sending out my Christmas cards in March. Rather that remembering my family's birthdays, I found it much easier (and more efficient!) to just give everyone a gift when I saw them in the summer. Like a mad scientist, but without the white curly hair, I had the capacity for laser, almost manic focus on some topics, and NO focus on others.

A few key changes have been allowing me to radically change this. The first was my deep realization in an Insight I seminar that the essence of self-confidence is self-trust, and that the essence of self-trust comes from keeping my word to myself and others. Until then, I didn't yet realize that there is a green-visored accountant hiding behind closed doors in my mind, keeping track of each agreement I make, no matter how large or small, and whether or not I have kept it — or how much my self-trust, self-confidence, self-love, and personal freedom are dependent on this tally. I think these armies of unconscious elves may be where Santa gets his info from. I didn't realize that to this piece of my consciousness, it didn't matter whether or not I thought the details were small or unimportant, it would still follow the letter of the law, and apply the painful consequences for each breach of integrity.

A second key change was around my understanding of discipline. I used to have discipline associated with punishment, guilt, and pain. Any time I thought of doing something that required self-discipline, such as paying my bills, I felt pain, and so would put it off until the external pain I felt was greater than the internal pain I had associated with the task — at which time a switch would flip inside my brain, I would drop in to hyper-drive, and I would finish the task as quickly as possible so that the pain would go away. Now, I am learning that self-discipline, when exercised from a place of loving choice rather than unconscious self-judgments, is the key to freedom. Freedom means the power to choose, and my being driven by unconscious patterns of pain left me precious little real choice. Using my powers of choice to create habits of self-nurturing and self-discipline gives me the freedom to do what I want, and more importantly, to experience what I want — love, joy, peace, excitement, creativity, and more.

The third key change involved the immense amount of negativity I had stored inside. I spent my entire adult life addicted to achievements not just as a way of overcoming my self-judgments and insecurities, but also to hide from an immense amount of childhood trauma I had repressed. As I lovingly accepted, brought forward, and healed this grief (as well as the other two poisons — my self-judgments and fears), I found I was able, for the first time ever, to sit peacefully at my center. I had been caught up in a ferocious storm of reactivity, fear, unworthiness, and pain for so long that it felt normal to be spinning around the edge of an internal hurricane at 200 mph (and I wondered why I couldn't stay in a relationship for more than three months at a time!). By healing and releasing the poisons stored inside my consciousness, I was able to find the "I" at the center of the storm, where I was able to be truly present and peaceful. From this place, detail management and being present with others was a MUCH easier task. Now, to the extent I still have a storm blowing through my mind, outside triggers can easily yank me back out in to the storm. As the poisons dissolve, so does the storm, as well as the biggest challenges to keeping my word.

Now that I seem to have released most of the major unconscious blocks that kept getting me thrown out of this particular class, I am studying diligently, with a particular focus on learning accounting skills (consciously tracking my agreements) worthy of being awarded my own personal green visor.

Integration of Opposites

Light and dark, masculine and feminine, chaos and order, time-based and timeless, physical and spiritual, I and we, positive and negative, pleasure and pain, giving and receiving, internal and external — these are a few of the root dualities which create this twisting, churning, evolving, kaleidoscopic dance of shifting patterns of figure and ground, which we call life. Each duality-pair is like the two terminals of a car battery, providing immense energy to anything which taps in to both at once. One of my most fundamental tendencies is to judge one or the other as bad, and to try and start this vehicle of mine with one of the terminals disconnected. I can't tell you the number of times I have sat in my spiritual driveway judging that some aspect of me (such as my sexual, aggressive, ego, or financial freedom drives) is too dangerous to touch, and so deciding not to hook up that side of my battery. Then, I sit there cursing like a sailor (only inwardly, of course — it wouldn't be seemly to do so where someone else could hear!) as I frantically turn the key in the ignition, but stay stuck in exactly the same place.

The electrical, passionate, aching tension between opposites IS Spirit by another name, creating all that is, and inexorably guiding creation in its path of spiritual evolution and awakening. Yet, Spirit is also the place where dualities dissolve in love, where giving love is to receive it back, where I am both one and fused with my lover, where I am a wild animal struggling with my last breath for survival and totally at peace that I can never die. Human history, science and philosophy is a record of our collective minds' struggles to eliminate the tensions of these paradoxes we cannot rationally understand. The most important quest in physics today, we are told, is to unify the "impossible" paradox between quantum mechanics and general relativity — the two most important and fundamental discoveries of modern science, which work perfectly — except with each other, where all predictions result in irresolvable paradoxes. What if, just like all of the great spiritual truths, the deepest levels of physics can not be comprehended by our analytical minds? OH BOY, do our over-confident, reductionist, western minds naturally dislike that idea!

Until they don't.

We talk incessantly about leading "balanced" lives, where the tension finally goes away, all of the competing demands on our selves are resolved, and we can rest in peace. However, depending on what theology you subscribe to, we may not even be able to rest in peace when we die!

There is only one place where we can truly be at peace, and that is in our spiritual core, where the dualities fall away, where we are able to "believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast", where our minds finally surrender, and where Zen monks play.

Now, power can create and it can also destroy. While this may all be the same when seen through the eyes of love, with my physical eyes I still prefer not to stare directly at the sun. I can only grasp the ends of so many batteries at once, and still use the power productively.

This is a long winded introduction to what I believe is among the most fundamental and long lasting of my learning edges — learning to reconcile and simultaneously embrace seeming opposites, by living in my spiritual heart, and seeing the world through the eyes of love.

How can I use anger lovingly? How can I serve others by taking care of myself first? How can I, in a place of full integrity, embrace and act out both my physical and spiritual desires? How can I see all of us as perfect and already "saved", while doing everything I can to help us liberate ourselves and eliminate suffering? How can I be completely committed to walking my path and also fully surrender to Spirit? How can I practice full involvement without being attached to the outcome?

THAT is the dance of co-creation, at which I aspire to continue to practice for the rest of my life.

While my purpose and values define my direction, and my learning edges define the obstacles in my path, my beliefs define the map I use to navigate by.