Recipe for Deciding

No Dichotomy

I can modestly say I'm pretty good at Flying By Seat O' Pants. But sometimes it seems like a little decisive foresight might do a world of good for the home team. In the game of life, it can help to pick a card, any card, and go from there, without back-talk. 

Consequently....

Here is one of my fave current mind toys:

Ingredients: paper, pen. 

1. Make a list of "Things I might want to do" related to the decision-needing topic.

• Drop any concern with How? or Why?
• Abstain from But... and Because...
• Include the silly, improbable and fun.
• Include variations on themes, different configurations of possibilities.
• Don't pre-qualify. Go for speed and quantity.

2. Do something else for a little while. 

• Take a 10 minute Field Trip.
• Or: hum a tune 
• Get a little snack
• Take a walk
• Pat a resident pet.   

3. Recall a recent satisfying decision, big or little. How did it feel?

• Confident? Playful? Light and energetic?
• Did the decision seem to make itself without resistance or second-guessing?
• Did you sense this would be a fine move for all concerned? 
• Did you feel like if it didn't work out, you'd just try something else?

4. From the feeling-state of happy deciding you just recalled, read each item on your list, listening to your heart and gut.

• Cross out, ruthlessly, anything that makes your energy sag. Be a warrior: the pen is your sword. 
• Circle anything that has a lift, a whiff of enthusiasm, a Yes. 
• If you truly Don't Know yet, write DK next to the option. 
• Let yourself be surprised.
• Move quickly. Don't linger or cogitate.

5. Acknowledge:

• No=Yes. No is yes to you, to your truth right now.
• Don't Know=Yes also. Are you willing to whole-heartedly Not-Know about this option for now? 
• Don't Know is a place to stand and step on from, just like No and Yes are.

Voila! You have made decisions. To continue....

 

"If it's not a Hell, YES! it's a No."--Marie Forleo 

 

6. Pick a circled option, a Yes–preferably a 'Hell, YES!'

• Make a list of small, clearly-defined actions you could take to move towards it.
• Clearly-defined means you can tell when you've done it, and it's within your power to do on a day of average wattage, not genius. Time limits often work well for defining actions. 
• Do something else for a little while. Mental sorbet: clear the palate.
• Come back and circle and cross out those actions, yessing the ones with a lift....
• and do one of the Yes's

Repeat as needed. ;-)

Difficulty at the Beginning

Want a reading, based on the wisdom of the I Ching Book of Changes, about a difficult beginning in your life or work?  

• Jot down the topic you're curious about. 
• Pick a number between 1 and 6. 

Read the post, +/or scroll down to see the advice that corresponds with your number....
 

 

Intersection (markers) Jude Spacks 2011

After the sluggishness of a creative mud season, what a relief to get a fresh start! Bright, sparkly, new ideas jostle for attention. The mind zips around like a crazed puppy, trying to sniff everything at once.

In this phase of beginning anything, so much is in flux. We may feel scattered and breathless at the variety of all that wants to zing into being. The strands of different possibilities intersect and tangle with each other, making it hard to see which comes before what, and who's next.

When you're blessed with a springtime of creative growth like this, how can you skillfully handle the confusion and chaos that may roll in with it?

The I Ching suggests we "arrange and organize the inchoate profusion of such times of beginning, just as one sorts out silk threads from a knotted tangle."(Wilhem/Baynes). We need persistence, patience, and a delicate, sensitive touch to help things sort themselves out. Sometimes the best way forward is to hold back from seeking quick results.

"Restless action interferes with the creative process unfolding. If we can persevere in non-action and disengagement, the Creative will resolve everything correctly."
--A Guide to the I Ching, (Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning) by Carol Anthony

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Want a reading about a beginning in your life or work?  

• Think of a topic you're curious about
• Pick a number between 1 and 6
• Read the advice below corresponding to the number you picked.
• Keeping an open mind, can you see how this might apply to your situation?

1. If you meet a hindrance, don't act just for the sake of action. Dissolve inner obstacles within your beliefs and attitudes. Without abandoning your goal, pause, take thought, and don't be too proud to ask for help.

2. In the midst of challenges, something unexpected happens. You truly can't tell if it's a windfall or a set-back. Be cautious about premature solutions. Don't give in to pressure to make a deal that might compromise your integrity and independence.

3. You will not be able to find your way without more perspective. This isn't a time to try to wing it or slide by. For now, stop seeking resolution, ask for spiritual guidance, and wait for clarity.

4. Relax pride and take the risk of being the first to reach out for a connection. You need help in order to make real progress; there's no shame in this. Collaborate. All goes well.

5. Your good intentions are being misunderstood; explaining them won't help. For now, continue in the background without making a big deal out of it. Take one small step at a time, until the situation gradually clears up and the way opens to proceeding on a larger scale.

6. It seems like you're not getting anywhere and the difficulties are too great. You're understandably discouraged. It's natural that sometimes things just don't work out. But do not indulge in an attitude of resignation and defeat. Rid yourself of the effort to shore up any self-image. You have nothing to prove.

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"Times of growth are beset with difficulties....But these difficulties arise from the very profusion of all that is struggling to attain form. Everything is in motion: therefore if one perseveres there is a prospect of great success, in spite of the existing danger."
--I Ching Book of Changes (Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning) Wilhelm/Baynes trans

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Could you use some help with further untangling your mind about something? 

See if Truth and Dare Coaching might assist.

Entering Retreat

Self Portrait, markers, Jude Spacks 2012
(See younger self-portraits and reflections on arting about less-than-sunny stuff here).

This year for my birthday I gave myself a big present: a 10 day creative retreat at home.

I've taken other open-calendar periods like this in the last few years, and I'm starting to get the hang of what kind of structure supports me in risking unpremeditated new work (or just a humble return to any art practice when rusty).

This time, as my own private retreat leader, I wanted to take more conscious care with entry and exit practices.

I remembered a moving story from The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander. At a competitive university, students in a music performance class were given only one requirement to get an 'A'. They had to write a letter at the beginning of the course, pretending to look back on the experience from the perspective of themselves at the end of the class, explaining why they deserved their excellent grade.

Something about that appealed to me. The students' letters are full of authentic discovery of their own passionate commitment to their craft. But my own commitment, my own edge, has to do with retreating from the incessant habit of anxious self-evaluation which asks, "Am I doing the right thing? In the right way? How about now?" So projecting why I might "deserve" any evaluation, even a positive one, at the end of the retreat seemed a little off.

On the first day I brainstormed a list of things I might want to work on, and decided on a very attainable minimum to ask of myself daily. Then I found myself writing a love letter to my embarking self as if from myself on the final day. It felt like a great way to get oriented. It surprised me. Here's what came out:

Dearest JudeNow StartingRetreat

Thank you for being so honest about what you want. Thank you for your courage to take a retreat without really knowing what it would be about. Thank you for risking that I would be somehow disappointed or feel let down by you and do the sigh of Not Enough.

I'm so sorry for all the times I've done that. Of course it makes it so confusing how much to "take charge" and how to find the privacy of really resting into I Don't Know.

I am so grateful for this time we had together, Precious. It was so grace-filled, so full, so beyond enough! I love your willingness to keep experimenting with what structure helps us know freedom, and when resisting can be bondage.

I love how spacious this time was. I love how refreshed and sparkly-alive I feel. Thank you for this gift, Beloved!

Love,
FutureJude of Post-Retreat

It all came true!

Today, post-retreat, I wrote this report:

Was SO happy with the Conditions of Enoughness (Jen Louden's term) I'd set up for retreat. As so often, the main challenge was to wholeheartedly agree to the 'enough' part. And even partial-heartedly cooperating was actually enough in itself, too.

I don't need "Not Enough!" to vanish quicker or never appear again. I just want to hypnotize myself less often into identifying with it. As long as I don't turn that crank, the NotEnough pattern is harmless (actually, it's an artifact of early adaptation that is simply a form of love). I am not a victim of this habit of anxious attention. I am not the long-suffering roommate of inner havoc-wreakers and meanies. I'm the space, honest to god. Just the space, the alive holy space of it all....
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What would be in your love letter from a future to a current self on the borders of beginning and ending something?

Ten Minutes

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The Ten Minute Field Trip is a simple but surprisingly potent practice for clearing creative blocks, such as the belief, "I don't have enough time." You set a timer for 10 minutes (surprise!) and make something non-representational and purposeless–a doodle, a mess-around, a warm-up. That's basically it.

Why it works: ten minutes actually is enough time to enter The Zone, the eternal Now of creative flow, the Field out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing that Rumi speaks of, where creativity originates. 

And ten minutes is also a short enough period that GottaGotta Head, who always has SO MUCH TO DO, is not seriously threatened by it.

Plus, the number ten carries ritual significance: decade birthdays matter to us; ten is the highest number available in playing and tarot cards; ten is as high as we can count on our fingers. Ten means a lot, a full cycle. So ten minutes acts well as a bridge between mundane and timeless realities.

Once I gave my Creativity 101 class the assignment of spending ten minutes making a non-permanent work of art in a public place. I did the assignment too, of course. 

This was in Florida. I took a rake down to the beach and spent ten minutes (approximately--I didn't have a watch) smoothing a circle in the sand and making groove designs in it. Very satisfying. When I was almost finished, the rake snagged on a watch buried in the sand. The brand name was Eternity. It was ticking. Good sign! It's still my only watch.

For a few days, I've been feeling a familiar pattern gathering, like a headache or a thunderstorm. It's the story that I never get enough time to do "my own work"--meaning art just for me, that doesn't have to be "good"--art that isn't focused towards an outcome.

I have inquired into this before, and I can see that it is a bogus belief. It's just not true that anything I do is taking me away from something I'd rather be doing. If I weren't doing all that I in fact love doing and do willingly--working on a commission, meeting with clients, even laundry--I really can't be sure I'd be in any white heat of creativity anyway. I have had the experience of clearing calendar and studio table and then promptly shutting down into the blahs, with Ms. Oh-So-Creative out on strike and not negotiating.

Another little thing that's been bothering me, somehow related to these grumbles about not getting to "my-own" free work, is that I have been incapable of following through on the simple desire to clean my desk. I had taken drastic measures, including lugging a big heavy filing cabinet up the attic stairs, taking apart an elaborate wall of found-boards and milk crate shelves and all their dusty contents, and even compressed all the photos and slides into the bottom of the cabinet, before inspiration and energy utterly deserted the scene, for weeks.

Since then, I have earnestly endeavored to follow a straightforward suggestion from Marvelous Mentor Molly (Molly Gordon, Coach to Accidental Entrepreneurs) viz: take 30 minutes a day to clear and organize any random pest hole that is dragging on forward motion in business or life. But this has simply not happened. My desk, completely covered in bills and god-knows-what-all, sits undisturbed, as I pass by averting my eyes.

Late last night, after a long day, which included an inspiring speech to a client about the benefits of the Ten Minute Field Trip while assigning her Ten-for-Ten (doing the exercise for ten days running) I caught myself slumping towards bed, past the dread desk, with a discouraged internal snarl. I stopped. I looked at the clock. 11:40. I could take just ten minutes....

There were folded up strips of cardstock that I'd used as shims to even out those shelves, some snips of ribbon from wrapping presents, a blue tag cut off a tee shirt, earplugs in a busted baggie, paper trimmings, crumpled receipts, cellophane bits, a stamp book with two stamps left from three postage-rates back. Ten minutes, no, more like twenty minutes later, there was a dragonish junk sculpture guarding the mail, now all in one big, neat stack.

I slept well and woke cheerful. The mess on the desk was gone! It looks fine over there. I have a temporary new pet, and all is well.

Done any doodling lately?

Beginning

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New moon starts a cycle. We see a new moon near the horizon close to sunset: the beginning of a lunar month comes at the close of the cycle of a day. Anywhere in the middle, of a project, or a conversation, or your life, beginnings and endings are dancing in perfect sync. The middle is probably where you are, so begin from there. Where does a circle start, anyway?

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"There is a beginning. There is not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something"
--the Taoist Chuang-Tzu (369?-286? B.C.E.) in Stephen Mitchell's The Enlightened Mind

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One of my clients wondered how a good writer knows at the beginning how everything will come out at the end, having seen all the interesting twists and turns along the way ahead of time. She was certain that they do, which disqualified her as a writer, since, though she is great at delivering punch lines for jokes, she can't foresee the ends of stories. Not surprisingly, she was having trouble even getting started again on her own writing. After doing The Work on the thought "Writers see the whole piece before they start," she was able to jump right into writing exercises, and voila': instant costume change from non-writer to writer.

For me, The Work (four simple questions and a way of turning thoughts around) is the very best place to start. It clears the mind, like a new moon does.

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Getting Started

.Girl Power, 5ft square, fabric collage, '98? (available--inquire at judespacks@gmail.com)

I'd get bed spins when I'd lay down after working on her all day.

She has a lot of The Little Stinker in her. The Little Stinker liked to play with sticks, too. Played Knights: whirled around dodging bullets, triumphing with only a sword. Whacked the legs of the swing set into a lumpy mess.

She's the Two of Wands (reversed): "....someone jumping directly into new experience. When we leave behind safe situations and past success to enter the unknown, we liberate so much emotion and energy that we cannot avoid either the wonder and enchantment or the fear that goes with it..." Rachel Pollack, Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom.

The unknown=this blog thing. I got so excited at the idea, I boinked my head on the ceiling of my little safe situation, just thinking about going out to play in such a big world. Got a migraine complete with throwing up!

The inspiration for this piece was a photo taken by my friend Kate Zephyr. Kate remembered the girl's first name, Darcy, and the town she was in, but nothing else. When I finished, I went to that little town and asked in the general store if they knew a Darcy who was a real wild child. They gave me directions to a house where a child named Darcy lived, but they said she was very quiet. It WAS the same girl, and she was reserved and shy--maybe partly because I was peering at her a little too intensely after spending 6 months looking into the fierce face that she had made in just that one little moment.



I've been quite reserved and shy myself. Gotta hold some of that Little Stinker in reserve. Here's a portrait of me when I was 4--see? Quiet, a little scared. The new moon is for beginning. More about beginning, later. Thanks for visiting MY BLOG!!!