A Little Indulgence

A few weeks ago a friend called and asked if she could do laundry at my house since her washer was broken, and I said sure. So she was at my house doing laundry, reading email, and doing the things she needed to do. I was preparing some dinner and asked my friend if she wanted something to drink or some Kefir, which is a fermented milk drink similar to yogurt. She said yes – so in trying to be a little mischievous and unconventional, I poured some Kefir in a wine glass and gave her that.

It turns out I was the one who was surprised because she said nothing about the wine glass, as if that was the most natural way to drink Kefir.

The moment stuck in my mind and over the past couple weeks when I want something to drink, whether it’s water, or a root beer, or Kefir, I often reach for a wine glass.

For most people, the wine glasses only come out when we have guests, or a special meal, or just for wine. It often signifies something different or something special is happening.

Really though why not offer ourselves the opportunity to feel special, to be special more often. It can be with our own family, or even by ourselves. I’m sure the French have some sense of this as wine is such a normal and special part of a day and a meal.

And really we don’t have to limit this to wine glasses – maybe we have fine china, or a special tablecloth, or shoes we only wear on special occasions. Why not celebrate more often?

So here’s a toast, with my wine glass full of water, to more celebration!

An Unshakeable Peace

I’ve wanted to write about this idea for a while, but never had a good title or way to describe it. I want to thank Kirsten Warner for another wonderful yoga class this evening and for the final bit of inspiration to write this, and for the title.

Kirsten began the class talking about a recent retreat she was one where for most of the retreat she felt completely inspired and in one peak experience or another for most of the retreat. She was curious about how to hold that peak experience once she returned home. The teacher spoke of staying open and being present as keys to remaining in and experiencing each moment as a peak experience.

At the end of class, Kirsten offered a blessing – may we all have an unshakeable peace to live from. I don’t know if I have the blessing in full, but the words an unshakeable peace struck a chord with me. That is what I feel and what I’ve wanted to write about. I also just love the way it sounds as I say it and what goes through my body as I let it resonate.

An unshakeable peace is a knowing, in a bodily sense, of a deeper stillness or peace or resonance that is undisturbed by life, by emotions, or anything that happens during the day. There may be other words as well – silence, harmony, awareness, grace, beingness, vastness, aliveness, serenity. Some might call it God, or Source, or our Buddha nature. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, it is always there.

The first step is to start to be able to feel that peace.  Yoga is one of that perfect opportunities to begin to experience this if we can stay present in the asanas (poses) or prana (breath) or any of the eight limbs of yoga. Meditation is another frequent means of discovering that deeper stillness. There are many other ways as well – sports is one, perhaps it’s cooking and preparing a meal, or doing pottery.

Once you’ve started to notice and experience that peace, then it’s a continued practice to stay with it for 5 minutes, then 10 minutes, then an entire yoga class. Then it’s time to take it everywhere – when you’re grocery shopping, or driving, or eating. Even more challenging it to feel it when you’re angry or upset or feeling grief. In real, practical terms this actually means a multi-attention – paying attention to the stillness while you do a yoga pose or feeling the ground of stillness while you have an argument with a loved one.

I don’t know when I first started to actually feel that deeper peace – it’s been several years at least, but I had no words or concepts to put with it. Just something I felt. As I read more and listened to more people I came to understand exactly what Kirsten was talking about. There’s a saying – the mind, or at least the left-brain/logical brain, is always the last to know. My body knew way before my mind understood anything. Now for me it’s fairly constant. Sometime it’s stronger than others, I’ve had goosebumps for days on end from feeling this unshakeable peace and other times it’s only a few moments. I don’t always have the awareness of staying with it, but I know it’s there and I know how to feel it at any time.

The truth is that peace is always unshakeable, it’s always there. The practice is truly how to feel that unshakeable peace while living a human life.

May you all find and know your unshakeable peace.

Emotions as Exquisite Music

In my last post I wrote about feelings. I wrote both about coming to be able to knowing what we’re feeling and understanding that more than likely we are often feeling more than one thing at once.

Here I’m going to use an extended analogy of emotions and music. In particular I’m going to use the image of a piano with 88 keys, with a sustain pedal and a mute pedal. On a piano, a musician can play one note at a time, or many notes all at the same time. The pianist can use the sustain pedal to let a note sing out for an extended period of time slowly fading away, or use the practice pedal to mute and cut short a note.  The artist can hit a key with soft tenderness, or a sharp staccato, or a great emanating sound – they are endless ways to hit a key on a piano.

Music also has chords and keys. Keys represent a series of notes that correspond to a particular pattern of sounds, and chords of ways of using they sounds together. Some chords like 1,3,5,8 are quite in harmony, others like a second or fourth can sound dissonant. And then there is a piece of music which takes into account all of this – the key, the chords, ways of playing notes, using the pedals, and invoking a style or genre of music.

Now imagine emotions as a note on a piano. Each emotion can be played or felt with different textures, intensities, durations, and so on, just like a note on a piano. Emotions can be in harmonious chords that go together  - joy, happiness, and satisfaction. Or emotions can be felt in unusual combinations, like bittersweet.

Our lives are like a symphony of emotions played across our body. They come and go, felt and then released and fading away for the next emotion to come in.

What symphony, or rock band, or rhythm of music and emotions is playing in your body?

To extend this a little further from the last post, for those that are new to music, they go through ear training. They learn how to recognize any given note on a piano. They play a note and then say what note it is, or they play a particular note to learn it and recognize it. This is just like learning emotions – asking what emotion is there and discerning what’s being felt.

Then musicians go through additional training to learn and recognize chords and different intervals of notes – thirds, fourths, fifths, and so on. This can be like learning and recognizing combinations of emotions.

Then musicians learn how to play. Starting with simple pieces with single notes one at a time with few chords, learning how to add texture and pedals and loudness or softness. It takes practice to train the hands and arms to be sensitive to a keyboard and an instrument. It’s the same with emotions as we learn how to feel textures and differences, for example a giddy happy versus a satiated happy. Or a boiling rage versus a simmering anger.

Just like it’s time a musician time to learn how to play an instrument, it can take time to learn our emotions. When you learn, it’s a joy to hear what we play and how we play.

What am I feeling?

For many the question of ‘what am I feeling?’ is full of uncertainty and often a blank expression. Discovering a feeling or emotion can be challenging if we’ve hidden out so long that we aren’t even sure anymore. At one point, for me it wasn’t all that easy for me to answer that question as well. Over time through listening and being patient that has changed.

At first the experience for me was like going through a checklist. Do I feel happy? Do I feel angry? Do I feel sad? Am I frustrated? Am I lonely? Even a checklist was difficult because in some cases I wasn’t even sure what the feeling actually felt like. I even changed the questions to be more like does this feel like loneliness, or does this feel like frustration? It was also difficult because it was usually someone else asking the question and normally a response is expected fairly quickly. Since I didn’t know and I was using a checklist it could be 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds before I’m come to an answer. Fortunately most people were quite patient with me while I went through this process.

Identifying a single emotion or feeling within a few seconds became a major achievement. The checklist went quicker or I would use a shorter checklist of a category or grouping of feeling starting from a vague idea of what I might be feeling. Still it wasn’t automatic process.

Over time it did become smooth and easy. Over time I would ask myself the question in my head just as practice. Over time I knew what different feelings felt like. Over time I could identify more feelings and more textures of feelings as well.

Then I came to a confusing point where when someone would ask me what I was feeling, multiple feelings came up all at once and I didn’t know what to answer again. For a while it felt like I had gone backwards and suddenly I was back to taking 10 seconds to answer ‘what am I feeling?’ The confusion came because the normal expected answer is one feeling. I realized that I was going through the list and putting numbers to each feeling to find the most dominant one and assuming one feeling was what was wanted. It took a while to put this all together and understand what was happening. Truly I was feeling many things at once and that the answer to ‘what am I feeling’ could really have multiple answers.

Multiple feelings at once may seem like an unusual idea, but I’m pretty sure it’s normal. Consider bittersweet – a combination of feeling a fond memory and knowing it’s no longer there. Funerals and weddings are full of mixed feelings. Funerals have that same bittersweet quality but even more so. They can be full of love for the departed and love among the friends and family, and great sadness that they are no longer here. At a wedding there is such happiness from the parents as they see their beautiful children grown up, while also feeling some loss that their children are no longer little ones, but grown up.

 What are you feeling right now? All of them!

Intention

For a long time I’ve struggled with the idea of intention. Something seemed amiss and incomplete.

I’ve several books about intention and manifestation, including ‘The Secret’, and each time felt like there was something missing. I’ve come back to intention many times with the idea of discovering what intention is, how it works, what it means, what it means to me, and how to use it.

I finally found a concise version that makes perfect sense to me. It comes from the book ‘Calling in the One’ by Katherine Woodward Thomas. Here are the four parts:

1)      ‘a thought and/or belief in a particular possibility.’ You must know what you want and belief that it’s possible.

2)      ‘speak your intention out loud.’ Words have power and speaking them to others holds us accountable to what we really believe and want.

3)      ‘take actions that support the manifestation of your intention, and abstain from those that sabotage it.’ We must be willing to do something to get what we desire.

4)      ‘We must remain completely unattached to the outcomes that we are committed to creating.’

The fourth part is particularly powerful, and even paradoxical. We must live in a way that honors what we desire. We can be the captain of our ship and in command, but ultimately we can’t force anything on life, just as a sailor can’t pick the direction of the wind.

An intention is somewhat different from a goal which has definite ending and one we more often have control of. There is a similarity though – they must be realistic. We can have an intention or goal of running a marathon in 3 hours, but if we simply don’t have the physical makeup for that, no amount of faith or action will help. It’s okay to stretch as well to push yourself a little, and it still has to be realistic.

This simple pattern can be applied to anything from finding the perfect house to grilling the perfect salmon to meditation to driving. Time is irrelevant – living with integrity is not.

I summarized it in a poem

Intention is grounded in faith

    Spoken as truth

        Manifested through desire, power, and action.

Then released to the winds of time

    while we sail the vessel of our form with integrity.

The Roar of the Crowd

On September 10, 1972, Frank Shorter won the gold medal at the London Olympic games. That win was seen my millions on live tv here in the US and helped to start to running boom that continues to this day. A few days ago was the 40^th anniversary of that win and in the past week I’ve heard many great stories about Frank.

The one I want to share is about his finish of the Olympic marathon. A few minutes before Frank would run into the stadium, one of the workers came running out of the tunnel waving his arms pretending to be the winner. When Frank entered the stadium he didn’t see the imposter, but he heard the boos that were now coming from the crowd at the imposter. Frank was asked how he felt about having his thunder stolen in one of his greatest victories. His response was that he raced for himself, he didn’t care about the roar of the crowd.

Here’s a quote from Jeff Brown with a similar tone though this one is definitely more about a personal journey:

“Most of the greatest achievements on the planet are unknown to others- privately held overcomings, silent attempts at belief, re-opening an armoured heart. ... "”

I am one of those for whom both Frank’s comments and Jeff’s quote resonant. I am who thrives in an inner domain where athletics or work are quite personal and also quite satisfying. For me, this is also true in the realm of personal growth. Frank, Jeff, and I are all men so perhaps this is a more masculine feeling in general.

In talking with a women friend recently we were talking about this very topic. Specifically we were talking about the fact that I rarely share the adventures I head off on. For example, when I raced Race Across America, I didn’t even tell my boss at work until about a month before the race – and this is a race I’d spent 8 years dreaming about and 15 months preparing for. The woman I was talking with and I are good friends and even with her I sometimes don’t share the big adventures.

But she said several very wise things. First was about sharing and connecting – that if we are to be connected as friends we have to share even the crazy stuff and the personal stuff. The more that is shared, the closer we become, and this is even truer when it’s so meaningful. Connection is the stuff and life, but we can only truly connect if we share who we are with another.

The other thing she said was about giving and receiving, gifting and being gifted. Sharing an adventure or personal story is a gift given to a friend. By sharing you are honoring the other person and the bond between the two of you. In turn you have honored yourself and given back to yourself. It’s a complete win and deepening into life and connection.

While many of us may not care about the roar of the crowd, whether its athletics or arts or a personal struggle, we shouldn’t be the ones to decide if the crowd gets to roar or not. We can share who we are and we can do it humbly and honestly and with grace. The crowd or our friends can have their experience and make their own choice about whether they roar, or not. The great thing for the one on the adventure is discovering who it is that roars for you, who your fans really are. Those are the people you want around anyway, but if we never give people the chance to roar, we’ll never know what there is to life.

Microsoft Rocks

I’ve played (worked J) for Microsoft for 15 of the past 21 years starting back in 1991 just after Windows 3.1 came out. At the time there were less than 5000 employees and Microsoft was not by any means a household name. When I was asked where I worked, few people recognized the name Microsoft. Since then Microsoft has had incredible success and incredible swings.

Despite all that I love about Microsoft, I honestly never thought I’d hear myself say Microsoft Rocks when referring to its technology and products. But it truly does!

Today though was the annual company meeting and I’ve seen almost all while I’ve been employed. Each one has its own flavor and I’ve been impressed by many, and was always awed at the thunderous standing ovation Bill Gates would receive.

This year though – this was the most amazing meeting I’ve ever seen by far!

Microsoft may not have the coolest looking products, or a cool name. It may come to the party late sometimes, miss opportunities, and be called a copy-cat. It may be considered a brute and still the 800-pound Gorilla.

I admire what other tech companies have done and their enthusiasm, dedication, and innovation and their people.

But …

No company on the planet has the depth and breadth of products that Microsoft has. You’d have to combine Apple, Google, Oracle, and VMWare and you still wouldn’t have what Microsoft has. Microsoft is striking out on its direction like never before, creating a new paradigm and array of connection like never before. The suite of technology, products, and services are astonishing, not just for what they are, but the people and ideas behind them. Skype, Xbox, Xbox Live, Windows 8, Surface, Outlook.com, Windows Phone, Office, Xbox games and that doesn’t even begin to talk about Enterprise Services and software. It’s all there and it’s all working together like never before. The long awaited seamless transition from tv to computer to laptop to phone to tablet and more is close at hand.

At heart I’m not a tech guy, but I love the people I play with and I love what I do. I am proud to work for Microsoft.

Microsoft Rocks!