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?

Get Out!

This time of year, the SoMuchToDOOOO voice can amp up to screech. A frizz of hectic rush skitters on top of the vast quiet of the Northern Hemisphere's dark time. Can you feel both at once? Just below the surface, the unmeasurable stillness of this moment in the wheel of the year?

I had been inside for I don't know how many cold rainy days, my head in the screen, pushing to get something done. It felt like I couldn't quit until I reached an end point.

Suddenly, I'd had it. Before even deciding to, I'd popped out the door for a wet walk. You can, too. That end point? It's now if you say so.














MysteryMind Course in Creating is open for enrollment! We'll have six months to meet the beginnings, middles and endings of the creative process while you bring what you're called to make now into form.

A Walk

(A version of this post appeared in Jen Louden's Savor and Serve Cafe program).

Jen Louden wrote this wonderful post asking us to walk with her in considering, "with lightness and love and curiosity," our own use of resources, bearing in mind the potent statistic that if everyone alive consumed at the rate of Americans, we'd need 8 more planets. Along with more than 100 others, I commented; Jen asked me to write a guest post expanding on what I'd said.

I got abashed and tongue-tied. I boinked my head, hard, against my tedious old writer's blocks. I so wanted to say something positive and real, something from the unified Field "out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing" that Rumi talks about.

But all that came was a brain tangle about brain tangles. The writing floundered like an oil-slicked bird with a plastic 6-pack ring round its neck. I wasn't much feeling the lightness, love and curiosity.

The Best Thing I Could Do At The Time

So I decided to go for a literal walk, to do a practice I call The Oracle of You.

Here's how it goes: You start with a question that you're willing to stop seeking answers to. Then look around and find some thing or scene that attracts your attention. You might ask this thing that tugged on your awareness your question, and listen. Or you can interpret what you saw like dream imagery, by identifying with different aspects of it and exploring personal definitions and associations about what you noticed.

My question was about how to write the piece. I let go of trying to solve it.

Do it Right and the Listener

I walked around the park, where there were many sights to see. Soon I'd forgotten all about The Oracle and my question.

Passing the basketball court, I heard a middle-aged man jeering at a teenaged boy with shoulders bunched up around a short neck. The older guy was probably a father or uncle, had a similar body type. He seemed to feel he was doing a great job of mentoring the sullen kid. He crowed, "I am now going to prove to you that you just don't have it!" as he rushed in for a basket.

Nearby, I saw a graceful younger boy sitting poised on a basketball, listening alertly to a man speaking to him from the driver's seat of an idling car through the open passenger-side window.

As I passed, I heard the man saying, "…so she just took off. That was the best thing she could do at the time…"

Around the curve of the path I could still hear the man on the court, repeating loudly to the teen, now attempting a free-throw, "Not like that! Do it like you did the other time! More control! More control! NO!"

Bright Being

Further along, a small boy appeared, sitting on a ball, smack dab in the middle of the path, with a happy, boisterous family playing nearby.

Wait. There had been another boy sitting on a ball earlier! This must be part of my answer, I thought, remembering the Oracle, which had come up with this second boy-on-a-ball as a nudge.

He saw me seeing him, as if he recognized and shyly welcomed me. I was no longer an invisible observer, a non-participant passing through.

When I got near, he picked his feet up off the ground and tried to balance on the ball for a second, his eyes twinkling. As he tipped and caught himself with the toe of one sneaker, he gave hint of a quirky smile, smaller and more filled with delight than Mona Lisa's. It transmitted a bursting happiness.

As I walked around him, I said in a gooey adult voice, "That's a neat trick!" His face fell just a little, and immediately I was sorry. I felt keenly how the reflex of praising him had interrupted a moment of communion full of acute joy with this little guru.

Out of habit, I had pretended he was showing off, seeking my approval. But really he had just invited me to join in an ordinary instant of love meeting itself--as we balance and tip, or sit in stillness, on this amazing ball of a planet together.

Waking Dream Interpretation

It was easy to see myself, with a wince, in the mirror of the Do It Right guy heckling the kid he was trying to teach. When I'm pushing myself with criticism to do the "right" thing--about what I consume or what I write about that--the motive is something about seeking "More control!" --especially over how I see myself. And I usually wind up proving to myself that I "just don't have it!"

I'm likely then to take off, to find some way to escape from the whole overwhelming mess. But I'm also that Quiet Listener--the first boy-on-a-ball--so centered, taking in the compassion of acceptance and forgiveness in "that was the best thing she could do at the time."

Seeing myself in the mirror of the second balancing boy was harder somehow. That sparkle in his eyes felt blindingly bright to fall into. It shows me a closeness, an open tenderness within myself that I fear even as I long for it.

What the Oracle Said

I took some notes about what I heard from the Oracle:

Listen very alertly to the kind voice that tells you about the best thing you could do at the time, even though you're in earshot of a voice pushing you to do better by having more control.

Trust the little complicit smile of the child balancing on the ball and enjoying falling off center. Give up on finding a formula for balance. We are always falling, always failing, and that's the play, the practice.

Don't interrupt the delight of communion and recognition by evaluating performance and offering praise, much less blame. Praise and blame are the same coin of separation.

(Am I doing this right or wrong? Well or badly? Am I doing/being enough? These questions don't serve me.)

You can accept this welcome to be here, exactly as you are. You can brave opening to full union now, being this intimate with your own beloved Self, with your whole round Planet, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.

What do you really want?

There's an ever-renewing resource of creative intelligence found, through practice, or grace, in the Field of our own innocent wholeness. It leads us beside still waters and restores us to sanity.

This intelligence moves us into fresh, useful action with the power of unresisted aliveness. It leads us into the exact next steps that harmonize our individual part in the great dance.

The old ways, of DoItRight, of individual ego blame and praise, can they meet the need we see all around us for a rapid, creative, evolutionary change of consciousness and the action that follows from it?

Let's meet ourselves in this Field, now, where the world is so full, and walk along considering together from here.

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The Oracle of You is one of the potent practices for reconnecting with creative wisdom that we'll explore in the next MysteryMind Course in Creating program.People on my Insightments mailing list will be the first to hear when enrollment opens! (Top of right column to sign up).

Patriotic Peace-Monger

Here's a button to wear in your 4th of July parade--if you have a button machine, feel free to print and use this design!

Who's the Doer?

Just Asking

This is the second of a series on making friends (!)
with the snarky voice that demands to know
"Who Do You Think You Are?"
when you're reaching for a larger scope in your work and life.
(You can read the first article HERE.)


The Doer Image

The idea of being the Doer is built in
to a WhoDoYouThinkYouAre? snark attack.

I can't doubt my capacity or worthiness
to pull off some audacious plan
without already believing that I'm the one
who's going to do it (or be unable to).

If I imagine myself doing it badly:
shame on me--I get a worsened self-image.
If I think I did well: Gold star! Better self-idea.

That's the carrot/stick deal I've signed up for.

Either way, I get to identify more strongly
as a mental evaluation, a self-image
of being the one little ego-me who did it
(or didn't) all by myself.

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"The feeling "I work" is the hindrance.
Ask yourself, "Who works?"
Remember who you are.
Then the work will not bind you,
it will go on automatically."

--Ramana Maharhsi

Detail from fabric portrait of Ramana Maharshi by Jude Spacks

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No One Here

Have you experienced times of working at peak capacity
when you became one with the work itself
which went on automatically?

In the heat of creative inspiration we're
so present and enlivened,
so absorbed in the unbounded work,
that we lose the effortful habit of thinking-who-we-are.

There's no little-ego-me idea right then
busy taking credit or blame for the doing
which is simply happening in the moment.

Times like that, you feel complete,
like you're moving from your truest self.
And yet right then, there's no story of who that self is.

Only an open channel for the mysterious
gift of the work to flow through.

Later, a self-image might return,
along with the familiar human notion
of claiming and evaluating the doing.

But while there's no idea of the Doer,
we are that unnamable Mystery
where inspiration originates.

Then no self-idea separates us from
being and acting as universal genius
creating through our particular life-form.

-------------------
"The most beautiful thing 
we can experience
is the mysterious.

It is the source of all true art and science."

--Albert Einstein 
-------------------

Albert Einstein, pictured in 1953.
Photograph: Ruth Orkin/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Fear of Space

Yet, as much as we may long to experience
that mysterious, alive, undefined, creative spaciousness,

still, we so often clutch for a role to inhabit instead--
squeezing ourselves into an identity
which we can then compare with
who we imagine others to be.

We think our shifting theater of identifications
will help us gain a sense of control and power,
or the comfort (even the discomfort)
of the known and familiar.

So we struggle to improve these self-images
to manipulate ourselves into feeling better.

This can be so habitual that we don't realize how stressful it is.

We don't even notice that
we've tricked ourselves into believing
we are the mask we're wearing.

Miz Goody Two

No Big Deal

The work which goes on automatically
coming from no idea of Doership
may be very ordinary.

As ordinary as the work of rain
or sunlight, as sure as a leaf unfurling.

What just moved your eyes along this line of type?
Did 'you' do that? How utterly brilliant!

The endless showering of gifts from Mystery
goes on even when we're very confused,
craving more validation and approval
from other people for what we did.

Miss Understood

The Restlessness of Doership

As long as we're ego-identified as the Doer
we have to keep doing, doing our own selves,
prodding and renovating without rest.

It's fine to make self-improvements. Why not?
But can you find a peace, an at-homeness,
that's already here before you do
anything to tidy up the place?

-------------------

You might think,'Now I am going to meditate
so I can experience pure peace.'
But who said that pure peace
should be the next thing you experience?
Do you see the arrogance in this kind of thinking?
 
You will find yourself interfering,
manipulating yourself, splitting yourself.
 
Since we know this is going to happen,
we practice with it. We see it, we let it be
and we don't do anything to it.

If you don't do anything, you might begin
to feel kindness in response to
the suffering involved in the meddling.

--A.H. Almaas, edited from The Unfolding Now

-------------------

Just for a moment: Don't do anything

My snarky WhoDoYouThinkYouAre? voice
calls me out for arrogance.

It's got a point.

(But not because I shouldn't aspire to big
audacious doings that it fears are beyond my scope.
If those aspirations are here, who am I to deny them?)

When I'm believing who I am
is an anxious imaginary Doer
who has to single-handedly manage everything just right
so as to earn an adequate self-concept--
I have lost touch with an essential humility.

Humility grounds me in the reality that:
I don't have to know what I don't know,
I don't have to do what I can't do (of my own little ego-self),
In fact, I don't have to do anything.

And I don't have to pretend to be defined by any image.

What could be kinder than to remind me of that?

-------------------

"Humility is the celebration
of my God-given excellence"
--Bitsa Turner

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Who Do You Think You Are?

When you set intentions, or worse,

start making actual tangible moves
towards taking on a creative challenge,

do you risk hearing
SnarkVoices jeering:

"Who Do You Think You Are?"

Voices digital self-portrait

Talking Back

Along with WhoDoYouThinkYouAre?
my SnarkVoice likes to point out
that I'm Too Big For My Britches.

(Where does it find these quaint expressions?)

"So?" I say defiantly, "I'll get britches that fit!"

(with an elastic waist, appropriate to
my queenly middle-aged middle).

You Will Never Amount To A Hill Of Beans, it retorts.

Queen digital self-portrait

No Way Out

But even if I score a point now and then,
it's stressful to defend against a
snark attack like WhoDoYouThinkYouAre.

(Maybe not as stressful as buying into its
shaming viewpoint, but stressful nonetheless).

When I try to make it shut up and go away,
I'm fighting against a part of myself. 
So I tense up with inner conflict.

I'm trying to force myself feel to better while
I'm actually feeling divided, scared and small.

Uh-Oh digital self portrait

Shut-down

From that position of defensiveness,
it's harder to evolve, harder to access
originality, openness, and creative expansion.

Fighting snark makes it harder to live large and feel free.

So in the moment that I push away WhoDoYouThinkYouAre,
I actually experience even more belittlement--
just the kind of feeling I was trying to escape.

So what to do? How to respond?

"As long as our orientation is toward perfection
or success, we will never learn about
unconditional friendship with ourselves,
nor will we find compassion."

—Pema Chödrön

Bright Idea digital self-portrait

Why not just answer the question?

It's a good question, a spiritual classic, even.
Try it in a tone of real curiosity: Who DO you think you are?
(Right now?)

And are you who you think up?

Can you really be defined by the ever-changing
flickering of thoughts through your head?
 

If we're living from the standpoint of
a self-image of who we think we are
we can have a good or bad self-image,
one that feels better or worse.

As long as we're taking ourselves
to be an image in our minds,
even if the image is positive,
we don't feel completely authentic.

However you define yourself, if you see
it's just an image, it's just an idea,
and you peer underneath it,
what you find is no image, no idea of yourself.
 Not a better image, not a worse image,
but no image.

Are you willing to enter that space,
that casts no image, no idea?

Are you really willing and ready
to be that free and that open?

-- Adyashanti(condensed from Falling into Grace pgs.22-24)

It is audacious to pause,
to stop fighting snark attacks

like WhoDoYouThinkYouAre.

Without defiance or the assault 
of our therapeutic fix-it arsenal,
we're afraid that the humiliating 
mind-pattern will swamp us.

But if you do pause to consider, curiously,
the question Who do you think you are?
you might find the snark 
carries a gift, hidden in plain sight:
An open invitation to the humble freedom
of recognizing the real you beyond any image,
untouchable by any success or failure.

Continue to Part Two:
Who's the Doer?

Nobody digital self-portrait

Two High Priests were sitting on a bench.
Suddenly, one had a flash of enlightenment.
He fell to his knees, crying out,
"I just realized I'm Nobody! I'm Nobody!"

A few minutes later, the same thing
happened to the other priest.
"I finally see! I'm Nobody! What a relief!"

Then, a Lowly Streetsweeper
who'd been working nearby
dropped his broom, and shouted,
"I'm Nobody, Halleluia, I'm Nobody!"

One High Priest elbowed the other and snorted,
"Now look who thinks he's Nobody!"

--adapted from story told by Eckhart Tolle