Not Just in Aging that the World Surrenders to a Silent Mind

It was on a flight from Las Vegas to San Francisco, a flight I had made countless times over the years, when I had a deja vu moment about aging. As I glanced over to the woman to my right, I suddenly remembered all the times I had watched the older women in my life as a child and felt as far removed from them then as I do now from a 15 year old male skateboarder from Detroit. 

On that flight, a surreal feeling swept over me...as if I was her or could have been a dear friend of hers in a previous life. The moment was short lived but vibrant and incredibly real, and it made me incessantly aware of aging and this precious thing called human life.

She was probably 70 or so, the woman was a petit, short Asian woman with beautiful silver hair, strands of black scattered throughout as the only remnants left of her middle age life. Her skin was glowing despite her obvious fatigue and you could tell she was once a stunner in that way you can about some people; there's a certainty, a quiet sauciness, and a knowing smile that suggests a life fully lived. She was wearing faded jeans, classy gold earrings with just a touch of ruby red and a Victorian blue button up top with a crocheted back that barely covered her neck, just enough to add a sweet balance of feminine energy to her other otherwise masuline aura despite her small frame.

Her face was weathered, not terribly so, but like her glow, certainty and smile, her face and hands exuded a lifetime of stories, over decades of experiences, far far beyond Las Vegas or San Francisco.

My deja vu moment came moments after a visit to the airplane lou where I observed my own weathered skin from years of sun exposure including the most recent trip in an open convertible where the hot desert sun beat on my skin, adding more aging spots which will someday tell a long story, or a series of them, just like the silver-haired neighbor to my right.

Although I was more than 30 years her junior, I felt as if this woman, whose coiled sleeping body next to me, was a kindred spirit somehow, despite the fact that we had yet to exchange a word.

Part of the desert trip included exploring rock ruins, flora and engravings, the latter of which told some of our ancestor's stories during a time that not only knew no computer, but knew no pen, paper or even a primitive chalkboard. I couldn't get enough of the hot Utah sun largely because the sun had become such a foreign oddity as I had somehow become more accustomised to hanging out with words on a screen as Google's Chrome churns them out tab after tab.

Despite the fact that I had "inked" my face up with pure white zink from Australia, the sun took its toll, not just on my face but on every inch of my body except for the six inches which were covered by scarves and shawls.

In the mirror that afternoon, seeing the weathered results of miles of sun and wind, brought back a memory of my South African host sister and I basking in the African sun as teenagers one hot summer afternoon in Durban. We were coated with baby oil as were our neighbors and their neighbors and so on. My host mother would bring out iced tea (roibos) with mint on the hour to make sure we were hydrated and their rotweiler would bark every time she opened the door. White as snow, she came out glaring through the sun to find us spread out on the grass in her 1950s-style apron with printed pansies in oranges and reds. She would shudder as my grandfather would at the amount of time we spent unprotected under the far too close to the equator sky. Like our neighbors, and their neighbors and so on.

As the memories flooded my head, I looked back at my silver-haired friend, who opened one eye on this occasion, just enough to add a small but tired smile as a way to acknowledge my gaze. At the end of the flight, we exchanged one short sentence as we all queued up like cattle waiting our turn to exit the plane. 

I felt so connected to this woman I knew nothing about for some reason and yet......an older short, silver-haired Asian woman with gold earrings next to an American auburn haired, blue eyed woman nearly half her age and yet the almost silent exchange was as if.....as if, we had met before in a far away place, in a previous life, at a time when time had no meaning.

When time has no meaning, aging has no meaning. Later, I read an excerpt called Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz that went something like this:

 

One after another my former lives were departing, 
like ships, together with their sorrow. 

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas 
assigned to my brush came closer, 
ready now to be described better than they were before. 

 

It made me think of her, the woman whose name I never learned, nor whose origin I will ever know. Yet when time has no meaning and aging has no meaning, I understand how things in an aging mind might just be ready to describe things better than they were before, and as the brush does in fact come closer, we also appreciate the preciousness of the journey we're on, have more gratitude for what we are becoming and who we encounter along the way.

 

We also become okay with the silence that blesses us along the way. Just when we think the silence is a "negative" as it reminds us that we are in fact getting older, we realize that it is in fact a gift, the biggest gift we'll ever receive in our lifetimes, for when we live our lives from this place, we are more open, more vulnerable, more authentic and more pure. How appropriate to end with one of my favorite quotes: "The whole world surrenders to a quiet mind."

TEDx Silicon Valley: Anderson, Hogg, Meier and Stein: #tedxsv

Chris Anderson kicked off TEDxSilicon Valley last Saturday, May 14, 2011 at Stanford University's new Knight Management Center.

Anderson asserts that a data feedback loop can improve behavior as you see real-time stats on the consequences of your actions, whether its from a device or a non-intrustive wearable monitor. Simply by being aware of how your body is affected by your actions, you can improve your performance and lead a healthier life - emotionally and physically.

Feedback loops was a popular theme of many of the speakers, who focused on the growth of sensors which track your patterns and behavior. Bpttom line: once we see value in the feedback we receive from sensors, which continue to come down in price, we can measure everything we do. "Measurement," says Anderson, "quantifies what matters most and through that feedback loop, we can make smarter decisions."

Gamification -- on and offline -- can also be effective and is growing in popularity. Whether its points or rewards we give a child who remembers to brush his or her teeth or badges and coupons to buy things online if we cut out that donut and coffee for five days in a row, the feedback we receive through gamification is validation that we're doing something right or wrong.

Imagine a future where you're measuring nearly everything you do? Tomorrow, your thermometer can let you know when is the most efficient time to run the dishwasher, shaving money off your bill month after month. Today, you can already do quite a bit with measuring devices, right down to measuring stress levels in real time based on who you're talking to. (be prepared bosses, mother-in-laws, accountants, dentists and lawyers - stress meter readings may not be all that pretty).

Chris Hogg reinforced Anderson's message about the importance of data and measurement, particularly as it relates to better health and well being. 

He pointed to his 67 year old step father who regularly drinks foul tasting tea and can see a correlation between drinking it and improved health, all of which he tracks on his iPhone.

Patrick Meier gave us a demo of something he referred to as Check-Ins with Purpose. 

Country after country, he showed us a mapped location of how check-ins and smart location mapping has helped humanitarian efforts.

Starting with Haiti and an initiative they called Mission 4636, they were able to measure and track people, resulting in hundreds of lives being saved during the recent crisis. 

Forward wind to the Japanese Tsunami. They created a "crisis map" to help locate missing people, which the Japanese government and other organizations who were providing relief, could access.

The other example he used was Libya, where they created a "social media map" to improve their humanitarian efforts on the ground. Take a look at Libya Crisis Map.net.

The Libya Crisis Map platform was activated by the request of the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to the Standby Task Force (SBTF). The platform continues to be supported by volunteers.   

 We can be more effective at helping people than we ever have been able to do in the past with rich geo-location based services and social media tools at our fingertips. We can use Facebook to schedule and post notices, Twitter to coordinate and get the word out and YouTube to share the story in more depth. "These live maps," he says, "are like having helicopters above you so you can see exactly where people are and therefore find them that much faster."

Lara Stein shared with us story after story of the countless number of TEDx events that are sprouting up around the world. She asks: "A movement or a tribe?"

One of the things she has learned from going through the process is to keep your ear to the ground....in other words, listen to voices from the local community. She calls the phenomena they have created, a "global tribe."

Says Lara, "My goals have migrated from how do you create systems and back ends on the ground TO how to we paint the story of this massively global and passionate tribe? The latest stats are staggering: 1,783 past events, 1,002 future events, 101 cities and 46 countries.

A handful of guidelines she has learned include the following: plan for the predictable, be prepared to invent as you learn, don’t get in the way, pave the way of your real time feedback loop, ignore the chorus, be prepared to fail (another theme of speakers), don’t think of it as a part time job, listen to the community on the ground, and follow your moral compass. She adds, "our focus is inspiration and action, not education." 

She quoted an attendee who attended a TEDx in a remote area:  "I was sitting on the end of the world, huge oil fields surrounded by massive dunes and nothing else, I was surrounded by really smart kids and nothing else." Indeed. That feeling is most definitely is a TED-like moment.

Long Live the OLD & Traditional Adirondack Chair

One of my favorite memories (period) is sitting in an Adirondack chair with my grandfather in the Adirondack mountains where I grew up, talking about Indian arrow heads while overlooking a peaceful Caroga Lake at the end of a sunny August day.

The weather was perfect with only a slight breeze and the waterskiiers were coming out for their late afternoon ski when the lake once again turned into a glassy glaze as the wind settled down. I was often one of those afternoon skiiers as a teenager, around the time I had started to ban early mornings. As a kid however, I'd scurry out at dawn ready to take a dozen or so cuts on the not yet touched water we all loved about early mornings on the lake.

We had both just gathered some twigs and dry wood for the fire pit where we'd often cook burgers and kielbasa on an old small grill that my grandad would throw over the pit.

Equally magical to gazing out over the lake in our Adirondack chairs was reading a novel on an Adirondack hammock overlooking the same lake, but that's for another blog post.

Alas, the Adirondack chair. When I was really young, we had about four of 'em, all made of wood, all rustic, some with splinters from wear and tear and years of rain. We painted a couple over the years, always dark green, since that was the traditional Adirondack color (same goes for the hammocks), and as they would fade and the paint would wear away, we often wouldn't touch them up right away since the half painted, half natural wood look and feel of the chairs often told the story of our lives at the camp.

In other words, it was outdoor living: life wasn't perfect, it most certainly wasn't modern, we didn't have central heating, the water tank for the showers was small, the plumbing was outdated, our small TV set rarely got a channel, Internet didn't work and until we sold the place, it had an old fashioned rotary phone. (the one we had since the early 1970s).

The Adirondacks are not modern and to try to throw a modern title, label, or experience on top of "Adirondack" anything feels just plain wrong, at least for someone who grew up there. You can imagine my horror when I received this subject line in my inbox: The Classic Adirondack Lounge goes Eco-Modern. The Eco of course is there to make you feel good about buying it. Take a look at their visual:

All I can say is UUGGLYYY. It feels like Walmart plastered blandness on top of authentic Adirondack wholesomeness. Gotta love the tacky plastic looking orange circular thing with the pretzels next to them to add to all that modernity.

It's not as if I don't love modern things. Sure, my house has more antiques and woods than it does modern pieces, but its a mix. And while I have some classic pieces of art, there are some abstracts (photography and oil paintings), as well as some Salvador Dali-like pottery and toy-ish etchings scattered along my walls.

This felt more like a classic American marketing decision: take something that was and is great and cheapen it, while throwing some fabulous persuasive language (and of course sustainable messaging since "green and eco" are important adds right now) on top of it to make it appear that you're going to purchase something of substance.

The materials may be solid - that's not what I'm arguing here. And, I'm all for environmentally friendly materials. But, let's call a spade a spade and let it have its deserved glory. A little history is in order.

The Adirondack chair (also called the Muskoka chair) is used in rural, outdoor settings. The precursor was designed by Thomas Lee in 1903 when he was on vacation in Westport, New York, in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains, and needed outdoor chairs for his summer home.  

After arriving at a final design for the then called "Westport plank chair," Lee offered it to a Westport-based carpenter Harry Bunnell, who manufactured these chairs for the next twenty years.

The original Adirondack chair was made with eleven pieces of wood, cut from a single board. It had a straight back and seat, which were set at a slant to sit better on the steep mountain inclines of the area. It also featured wide armrests, which became a hallmark of the Adirondack chair. In searching for a chair that was closer to what I grew up with, I came up with the following image on the web although even this one isn't quite right....ours tended to lean back a bit more but those I found with stronger slants, were painted in shiny colors or their original design was altered.

In the yards, patios and on the docks of all the camps we used to hang out at including our own, the chairs were rustic and wooden, often made by locals.  Sadly, more of the modern Adirondack chairs are made out of plastic lumber or engineered wood instead of wood.

There have been so many replicas and variations of Adirondack chairs, that its original design is getting muddled, I guess you could call it a furniture mashup. Take a look at the variations from a Google image search:

 

Remember that I live my life in the modern technology world where mashups happen in my circles every day. In fact, I may be at an event where a mashup of an old technology and the creation of a new one may occur within the hour and a new way of creating, curating or organizing the web is born before my very eyes. I think mashups are great as long as the original "piece" whatever that is, is honored in some way for what it stood for.

In the case of Adirondack chairs, they are all about life in rustic rural environments and frankly, experiencing the Adirondacks on any lake in a modern home with tons of bells and whistles isn't the same, including the furniture.  Of course, the designer of this new modern eco chair Mark Daniel will likely not be impressed by my opinion.

While the sustainable, FSC-certified solid eucalyptus wood with a grey stain which is made in China btw (how ironic for an all American piece of design), may be a fit for some, it doesn't preserve what the Adirondacks is all about.....in my  humble local opinion that is.

Long live the old and traditional Adirondack chair for sitting in anything other than an original is like experiencing China in Orlando's Disneyland instead of China itself.

 

Tom McCarthy's WIN WIN Includes One of My Favorites: Paul Giamatti

I attended the Red Carpet Press Event on March 14, 2011, for the opening premiere of WIN WIN at Austin's Paramount Theatre during the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW).

We had to arrive an hour and a half before the producer, actors and director arrived. During that time, the film publicists checked you in and lined you up in a particular location at the edge of the red carpet, which was set up in an L shape that led into the theatre.

The cast included talent Paul Giamatti, most known for his stunning and humorous performance in Sideways (aka I don't drink Merlot), Amy Ryan and new to the stage Alex Schaffer who was a young boxer who tried out for a part for the first time. Tom McCarthy was the film's Director/Writer. 

Below is a live broadcast interview they did the day before the premiere which I attended as an observer. 

Should you see the film? Absolutely! Here's the storyline: disheartened attorney Mike Flaherty (Giamatti), who moonlights as a high school wrestling coach, stumbles across a star athlete through some questionable business dealings while trying to support his family. Just as it looks like he will get a double payday, the boy's mother shows up fresh from rehab and flat broke, threatening to derail everything. As always Giamatti brings you in for more of his quirky and funny personality regardless of what role he plays. 

Here's a handful of snapshots I took at the Red Carpet Event:

Amy Ryan: warm, engaging, charming and playful 

Paul Giamatti: funny, direct, warm, engaging....wish I had more time

Tom McCarthy: smart, honest, sincere, soive, reflective (also wish I had more time: we seem to have similar roots)

Alex Schaffer: youthful, shy, adorable....shocked to discover that it was his first time in a film role

Below is the video footage I took of the cast and director getting interviewed along the Red Carpet while I largely shot stills:

Here's a review by the Christian Science Monitor. One other note: Tom McCarthy's latest film (The Station Agent & The Visitor) was also a big fan favorite at Sundance. I had a chance to talk to him briefly and in my brief exchange, all I can say is thumbs up.

Miranda July's THE FUTURE: Living in 2 Terrifyingly Vacant & Different Realities

I'd recommend seeing The Future, a film which previewed at the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) last week. The film tells the story of a thirty-something couple who, on deciding to adopt a stray cat, change their perspective on life, literally altering the course of time and testing their faith in each other and themselves. Characters Sophie and Jason are strange the way all couples are strange when they’re alone. They live in a small LA apartment, have jobs they hate, and in one month they’ll adopt a stray cat named Paw Paw.

Like a newborn baby, he’ll need around-the-clock care – he may die in six months, or it may take five years. Despite their good intentions, Sophie and Jason are terrified of their looming loss of freedom. So with just one month left, they quit their jobs, and the Internet, to pursue their dreams – Sophie wants to create a dance, Jason wants simply to be guided by fate. But as the month slips away, Sophie becomes increasingly, humiliatingly paralyzed.

In a moment of desperation, she calls a stranger, Marshall – a square, fifty-year-old man who lives in the Valley. In his suburban world she doesn’t have to be herself; as long as she stays there, she’ll never have to try (and fail) again. Living in two terrifyingly vacant and different realities, Sophie and Jason must reunite with time, space and their own souls in order to come home.

Says Director Miranda July: "when I was a kid, I had a folder labeled “ways to go back in time/enter other worlds.” I never actually put anything in it, but I still have the folder, and the feeling that there might be a way. And, meanwhile, moving forward through time, minute by minute, day by day, has turned out to be its own challenge – no less science fictional, and in moments, almost as impossible. This movie is about that. 

It seemed to me, a woman in her thirties, that time had suddenly become the protagonist of my life; I was stunned by a new awareness of mortality, of life being finite. I suppose this marks the beginning of adulthood. Or, if you are not quite ready for adulthood, it marks the beginning of a problem. 

She adds, "and, even if you flee your life, I think you still end up in the same place in the end. You still have to be you, you still have to make the dance. It’s just much harder, and some important things are lost along the way. So this story is also told from the point of view of what was lost – a cat, who tells the truth simply and is completely exposed, like someone just born or someone very old. He was the only way I could describe the bittersweet vertigo of true love.......which is the thing that got me thinking about mortality in the first place.

The Internet and the way it affects human relationships are major themes in both of her films. When asked how she deals with the struggle of “constant connectedness” faced by Sophie and Jason in The Future, Miranda with this answer: "Remembering that I can exist at all without being online is a daily challenge. It’s interesting to me because it’s so new. How often is there a brand new daily challenge shared by almost every person you know? But as an artist who has always tried to find new ways to feel intimacy with the audience, it also seems useful.

Part of me will always be the twenty-year-old who tried to create revolutions through fanzines and VHS tapes and the US postal service. So that girl is pretty wowed by the fact that she can write a tweet and get instant responses. And yet (and this is the thing that really dates me) I hate to do anything that might make it even harder to have long thoughts that take a long time to unravel. So I use Twitter, Facebook, and my website in my own slow way, which is not all that effective, from a networking standpoint.

A lot of online culture is about being watched and reacted to, which is something I think women and girls have a special relationship to. Teenage girls often discover their power through being looked at. If you have the usual “mom/dad didn’t really see me” issues, then it’s easy to get pretty caught up in being seen. (Type “me dancing in my room” into a YouTube search and you’ll see what I mean.) Being watched kind of takes away the burden of living; you almost don’t have to exist while you’re being watched.

In the movie I kind of reverse-engineer this aspect of the Internet, bring it back to its origins. Sophie wants to make a YouTube dance before becoming responsible – essentially it is her last chance to be watched like a child. So when she can’t do it, when she’s paralyzed, this is a real crisis. She has to find another way to be watched, and she does. Only when she’s faced with a real child in need does she give up, and giving up allows her to transform into a grown up, through the shirt dance. Did I know all this when I was writing it? Uh, no. But I write from the unconscious, and these were a lot of the issues I was wrestling with after my last movie.

Miranda is a filmmaker, artist, and writer and her videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in two Whitney Biennials. July wrote, directed and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Caméra d'Or. Here's a link to a write-up in the Indie Wire.

Defining Public Relations: From Your Heart or From Your Head?

A week ago, I was asked for my definition of public relations by Heidi Cohen who was working on a blog post about what it is, as is how people define it. Here's her blog post in its entirety here which includes 31 definitions including her own.

What's interesting is how I 'felt' when I got the email....meaning I had a physical reaction to being asked for a definition as if there couldn't be a definition to something that was all about human emotions, connections and relationships. Somehow it was like being asked to define love as ridiculous as that sounds. I thought about the last time I had to write or give a definition of public relations and it was when I was in college in London many (many) moons ago.

She writes: "traditionally, public relations referred to the art of getting mentions of a person, company or other organization placed in the media, namely print, radio and television."

Here's an observation I had in reading that statement: where I studied public relations in the UK, it was primarily not about the media, but about a number of very broad constituencies and the media was just one of them. This could be because the UK was a tad more old school about the way they viewed public relations. It could also be that one of my mentors was a professor who was a master at in-person relationships where coffee, tea, scotch, wine, a meal, golf or croquet were part of nearly every conversation. Lobbying was often part of the process too depending on what the end-goal was, but the media was always just one integral part of the strategy, not everything.

When I moved back to the states, the media was a much larger part of the 'game,' although given that I worked at one of the top crisis communications firms at the time (Cone), we managed everything from roundtables, speaker series, thought leadership boards, crisis communications plans, events and guerilla marketing. And, media, of course, was a part of each plan.

It wasn't until I moved into the world of technology (much more niche back then than it is today), that our teams were primarily focused on media relations and not a whole lot else. This isn't to say that we didn't have a strategy in place, but the focus was much more tactical than it had been in the UK and at Cone. The same applied later on in my life when I did a stint in South Africa where it was 80% strategic and 20% tactical for obvious reasons. (South Africa in the early nineties: you can only imagine)

So, early on, I was 'conditioned' to think about a large number of audiences outside traditional media and perhaps that's why when I was 'forced' into an all media relations role, it became easier to execute. It wasn't long before it became increasingly crowded and the PR industry started losing credibility because so many junior folks were thrown on the phones before they really understood the product or service they were pitching, or more importantly, 'cared about it.'

When I hired agencies, the first thing I would do, was throw the team into the product. If I didn't sense they could live and breathe what they were repping, I asked for another exec to replace them. Seriously, why work on something if you don't love it and really believe in it?

When you're coming from a place of passion, it really isn't pitching at all is it? It becomes 'having a conversation' about something you care about and in the process, you get to magically build a relationship with that person. Imagine that? Isn't that exactly what social media (et hem, I mean public relations) is? Engaging with people?

I sent poor Heidi a rather long definition so she obviously had to edit it down, but here's my original submission. BTW, its long because I had such a hard time 'definining it.'  

"Public Relations in its true sense is about human connections and the art of mastering human connections at a deep level. In the early days of the PR "playbook", it was about relationships with not just the press but communities in various forms - the difference was that these audiences were not online. While some argue that the value of public relations has diminished in the world of social media where everyone can be an author and content creator, I would argue that someone who not only knows how to master human connections and relationships, but thrives on it, is more vital than ever. True mastery of anything comes from a passion to serve in some way shape or form. The publicists who will matter in the 'new' world of exploding content will be the ones who thrive on communicating via countless channels not because they have to, but because more than anything else in life, they love engaging with people. From this place, authenticity is guaranteed to come through which can only help the products and services within their social sphere shine.

When public relations thrives, its because those who are 'gifted' with this skill are at the helm. When played from a place of passion and purpose, public relations in the new world will not only take social media, branding and marketing to the next level, but will elevate the people and products that are changing the world." - Renee Blodgett, Magic Sauce Media

As for the other 30, they're all pretty interesting and because each of us were asked for a definition because that was the exercise (I had to admit, it was cool exercise btw), nearly every submission reads like a definition. There was of course this very amusing one below that reminds me of Mad Man and how in many ways, a lot really hasn't changed; its just that the packaging and perception has. 

"Advertising: I walk into a bar and tell the first hot girl I see how amazing I am in bed. The hot girl doesn’t go home with me.  PR: I walk into a bar and a friend of the hot girl sees me and tells her friend how great I am in bed.  The hot girl goes home with me.  Peter Shankman"

It also reminded me of my days at Saatchi & Saatchi in London during a year that will inevitably tell my age, so I'll leave that part out. :-)

Definitions aside, how about this one which came to my head only a few seconds ago as I thought about a close to this post:

"Public Relations is the art of truly connecting with people. When the public relations master truly connects, they are sharing a 'gift.' Being a master of public relations means that you love people and building relationships so much that every exchange is seamless, authentic, honest, gracious and empathetic. And, over the course of a thousand seamless conversations, the journey becomes a joyous one of learning and deeper understanding, not just of the people you're pitching to and for, but the products and services in your web. Then, my friends, the public relations 'artist' is nothing other than a storyteller who conveys a series of beautiful and compelling stories over a lifetime, ones that inevitably have a tremendous impact on people and help change the world." - Renee Blodgett, Magic Sauce Media

Ah yes, the story. I prefer my new definition, one that came to me within seconds. I prefer it because it came from the heart and when asked for a definition, it came from the head. Living through the heart is the only way to live our lives regardless of industry.

This is how I think about my life anyway and I've been doing this for uhhh, 20 years.

Photo Credit: contentfactory.

Do You Know What's in Your Vibration?

Whatever you are giving your attention to is already vibrating. And when you give your attention to it, if you maintain your focus for as little as 17 seconds, you begin to include its vibration, whatever it is, in your vibration. When you see something you want, and you give it your attention, and you say yes to it, you are including whatever its vibration is in your vibration.

When you see something you do not want, and you shout no at it, you are including whatever its vibration is in your vibration. In this vibrational world, which is everything, you are far more vibrational beings than you are verbal beings. You are communicating with everyone far more on a vibrational basis, than you are on a verbal basis.

Thanks Abraham 

 

Shore Slocum: Step Through Me & Your Life Will Transform

Shore Slocum was the final speaker at TEDxBerkeley last weekend. Most known for training, coaching and speaking on personal and professional development, he has worked with some of the world's top thought leaders, such as Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer and others. His real gift, however, is his ability to put storytelling, heart and soul into everything he does in a way that not only inspires but transforms people on his path.

Imagine a social network the size of Facebook, but one that is focused on the soul?

That is what Shore and his partners are building with a site called SoulNeeds, that will not only be the most relevant content from the world's top wisdom providers, but an online community and conscious social networking platform that will help people connect, share and grow in their spiritual and personal development.

It was from this place combined with his 20+ years of experience that he spoke of meaning, consciousness and purpose. Shore walked the audience through four stages of spiritual awakening and consciousness: 

To Me: This is the first stage and often the 'victim stage,' where you feel that life is happening to you and you cast blame for your current situation on others....and often yourself too. In other words, the world and everything and everyone wrong with it is happening to me.

By Me is the next stage which is where the majority of the personal development world lives. Here, people learn that they change something specific or think about an aspect of their lives differently and get a brand new result, something which brings their life experiences to a more positive place.  This is empowering for most but often not sustainable which is one of the reasons why so many people who are in this stage remain here. The 'fixing of problems and issues repeats itself, yielding short term results and rewards.

This is also the phase where 'learning happens and where you can easily get addicted to results by making a change. When you're living your life 'by me,' there's still a lot of effort happening since it centers around achievement and as most of us Type A results-oriented people know, its easy to get burned out in this place.

Through Me is an transformative phase. It's almost as if you become the conduit and you're plugged into another realm. When you find yourself plugged in, you somehow seem to get the message you're supposed to get and all the things in your life suddenly show up.

When you're not planning or willing it to happen, the people you need show up, the things you need show up, the money you need shows up, the talent you need shows up. In this phase, you merely need to trust the 'signal' you receive and step through it and once you do, your life is transformed and not quite ever the same again. 

When you get to a point where you think: "this is too good to be true and you stop trusting it," you cut off the flow. Many of us have experienced this at various stages in our lives - there's a voice and a nudge that says Step Through Me is scary which is a scary 'message' because you often don't know what is on the other side.  

If you follow that path.....the 'through me' path, you will not end up where you set your goals, or where you envisioned your life to be, but you will end up far better than you ever imagined because you're being led in the direction of your higher purpose, your most awake state. So, when that door opens, step through.

As Me is a magical place to live your life. Living your life 'through me,' still has some ego. When you move into as me, you feel no separation, and suddenly there is no difference between your brother, your sister and everything around you. Everything and everyone is one. We are all connected.  

Moving Through the Stages to Get to Higher Levels of Consciousness:

In order to move from To Me to By Me, you clearly need to give up blame.

In order to move from By Me to Through Me, you clearly need to give up control.

So, if you have to give up blame and control to move through the first couple of phases, what do you need to give up to move from Through Me to As Me? Says Shore, "any sense of separation from anyone or anything." In other words, a belief and acceptance that we are all one.

Can you imagine what we can accomplish as a society if we all left our ego states at home behind a closed locked door? Can you imagine what we can do for the world if we all lived into an As Me place, where there was no separation and we were all one. Imagine in a quiet reflective room where thought and doubt have no way to get in?

Shore ended with his favorite line, one from Gandhi:

Become the Change You Wish to See in the World.

I'll end this post with my favorite line of all time:

The World Surrenders to a Silent Mind.

Marti Spiegelman on Consciousness, Awareness & Perception

Founder of Shaman's Light, Marti Spiegelman was a pure delight to meet, learn from and listen to on the TEDxBerkeley stage this weekend.

She has inspiring and humble views about the growth of global consciousness and why its so important to bring together complimentary opposites in order to accelerate that consciousness.

We're at a time when we need to create things to create more consciousness than we've ever even imagined in our lifetime.

I loved how she prepared the audience for her 18 minutes of wisdom. Marti asked the audience to FEEL what we are going to talk about and learn rather than THINK about it. FEEL IT she repeated.

On the path to human consciousness and awakening, she referred to the wisdom she has learned from indigenous elders around the world, starting with Mexico and their view of perception. Their philosophy is that the core of our being is perception and the magic of our being is awareness.

Perception is to be aware of everything around us.

"There's an intelligence that moves those forces, that intelligence is what human beings have only known as consciousness," says Marti. She asserts that if we're intelligent and half awake, it will speak us into BEING.

The real question to what happens when conciousness finds you is "now what?" 

Her informal and witty style brings you into her dialogue, whether its as an audience partipant watching her from afar or sitting across from her over a cup of tea. Marti is also funny. She says, "I used to think I was like a bug on a hot stove by jumping all around, but now I see that consciousness was forming me so that we could be here today."

She shared with us some of the seeds of what she learned from indigenous elders she studied with as well as from others on her journey. More humor comes out as she pointed to science as a way to make sense of the world. "In science we have an experience, then we try to prove that we had it," she reflects.

Consciousness taught her that we could learn about the speed of light, about all the possibilities in life without one piece of data.

In graphic design or art or in my case, photography, we learn how to make information technology and objects visible. In the world of technology, we can make something beautiful through coding or altering the original object. What's cool in my own personal experience of this is that you code or edit or use a graphics tool and create your own world of beauty, and then someone else can take it, modify it, and add to it.

Then, that piece of beauty you created changes, morphs and becomes a different kind of beauty. In other words, the beauty grows. That's exactly what happens with nature.

Says Marti, "we are just the portal - consciousness speaks through all of us." For those of us who have been a recipient or the portal, you KNOW this to be true. I've been a portal and in that unique beautiful moment when it happens, nothing is more important than being present with where you are and open. Then, whatever is supposed to happen, whatever is supposed to be 'said' just gets said through you without you controlling it. It's almost as if you don't have a choice, because a bigger force outside of yourself takes over.

When you are the recipient, which I have also been, it's an incredibly life-changing experience. If you've gone through this, you know exactly what I'm talking about. There's no force and no control -- you know you're there for 'it' whatever that 'it' is (message, moment, miracle, exchange of love) and you just go with it and absorb. There's an acute awareness when this happens.......the attention is OFF yourself and the other person and ON/IN the creation of beauty, love, peace, harmony and sometimes, the hardest ones: self love and forgiveness.

This my friends is what this magical thing called Global Consciousness is about. 

She also addressed consciousness and business, a world she came from and it appeared 80% of the audience (minus the Berkeley students) spend their time in today -- "performing". I chose the word performing because its precisely what life is fixated on when measurement of success is based on performance rather than on 'gifting to the world' through business.

Says Marti, "business is nothing more than the center of exchange of value. The only thing that is valuable is that what supports thriving." The indigeneous elders once said to her, "all that stuff you've been learning is a technology. There is a technology to consciousness."

Here's the other thing about global consciousness. It's limitless and once you've experienced it, you know that it can keep going or rather flowing....only of course, if we don't put a plug in that flow. (i.e., fear does that).

What happens to many of us, (it has certainly happened to me) is that we experience the gift of human consciousness because we evolve into it through an unspoken door of trust and then when things feel too joyful (in other words, do I really deserve ALL of this? ahhh, that muddled complicated word deserve which requires its own blog post), we somehow sabotage the door that leads us to more miracles. Yes, miracles...miracles that come from being consciously aware, miracles that come from walking through the door of consciousness and never turning back.

The bottom line is that we all want to be thriving and deep down when we're living from a place of love, not fear, we all want everything and everyone else to be thriving too. Once fear takes over, survival instict takes over, you know, that lizard brain that Seth Godin talks about in Linchpins, and we remain in the ego state, the one that doesn't serve anyone including ourselves.

Another principle she talked about was repriocity, which is one expression of human consciousness.....a deeper expression. She uses the example of two magnets to demonstrate how we seek sameness and push away difference.

Welcome to the western world is all I could think when she said the world sameness. I'm not suggesting that sameness doesn't show up in the East or other parts of the world, but in living in 11 countries, I'm always shocked by how much sameness we support and embrace in the U.S. compared to other societies in the world.

I would go so far as saying that I think we're killing inspiration, art and creation in humanity because of the growth of sameness, most noticeable in the western world. My mind wandered and spiraled as she said that word because of how many visuals I had of the joy I have experienced over the years whenever diversity showed up, which it did in so many marvelous ways.

I have thought and said this often - how on earth can we create a life full of magic and joy with so much sameness around us? People so often embrace sameness more than they do diversity.

Well done Marti and thanks for throwing that awkward word out there for us to reflect on, perhaps so much so that we can perhaps discard the coward claws of 'sameness', the ones that keep us inside a world of reaction rather than creation. When we live our lives from a place of creation and diversity, we can learn, grow and yes, thrive from that which is not the same as ourselves and our understanding of the world.

Indigeneous people are able to move things because they embrace the differences. Imagine that you could sit in awareness and acknowledge in consciousness that this is just this and nothing else and that is just that and nothing else, rather than try to figure out what this and that is supposed to mean. Forget the meaning for a moment and when you do, you'll find yourself moving into that beautiful state of being.

I remember being on a walk on an island in Fiji many years ago and a quiet man with a very peaceful face emerged from the woods. He asked me before I said a word, "why are you trying to fight with God my child?" By God, I learned that he didn't mean the God we think of in the west, he meant the greater force in the universe (perhaps embraced by purpose)....the one outside ourselves that we can't control nor can we always understand.

It was at a time when I was on a seminar not long after my grandfather died and I was trying to make sense of the whys, the pains and the emotional hardships my own family faced for so many years. Still, without me saying a word, he said, "stop trying to figure it out, stop trying to come up with a solution or analyze it. Stop. Just be with whatever is gripping you and strangling your soul. Just be. Don't control it, just embrace it and be with it."

Then he was gone. I saw him again two more times before I left and twice more, he left me with words of wisdom as if he saw through me, could read me, perhaps for a moment or two, was me. He was the portal and I was the recipient: human consciousness, love and awareness in action.

Imagine if we could experience that every day? Where would the pain go? Wouldn't it be cool if we could stop trying to figure out where it would go or what life would be like if that what was familiar even if painful just disippated into air?

Marti ended with an important reminder: "All of the other principles will fall into place if we focus on the first principle: "Be here now, outside the constraints of time." Thank you for your free flowing "I'm just here and now" presentation, your ongoing seeds of wisdom and commitment to sharing it with the world.

Mother Earth is No Longer Accurate or Helpful

Below is a reflection and summary from Stewart Brand of the last Long Now talk by Bateson, who in reflecting on parenthood, proposed that the metaphor of "Mother Earth" is no longer accurate or helpful.  Human impact on nature is now so complete and irreversible that we're better off thinking of the planet as if it were our first child.  It will be here after us.  Its future is unknown and uncontrollable.  We are forced to plan ahead for it.  Our first obligation is to keep it from harm.  We are learning from it how to be decent parents.

More than with any other animal, human childhood dependency is enormously prolonged.  That's a burden on parents and the species, but that long childhood is what makes us so adaptive, so capable of hope and love, so able to think ahead.  It makes us the time-binding species.

Lately there's been a new development in the human lifecycle---extended adulthood.  In the twentieth century human lifespan got thirty years longer.  "Increased longevity," Bateson proposed, "may make a difference for the human species as momentous as our long dependent childhood."  A whole new stage of life has emerged---what Bateson calls Adulthood II.

In the old days a child would be lucky to have one living grandparent.  These days kids have seven or eight grandparents of various sorts, and their laps are not available because the oldsters have gone back to school, or eloped with somebody, or started new careers, or are off cruising the world.

So our elders will be active, but will they be wise?  It's not a given.  "Experience is the best teacher only if you do your homework, which is reflection," Bateson said.  Adulthood II offers most people the time to reflect for the first time in their lives.  That reflection, and the actions that are taken based on it, is the payoff for humanity of extended adulthood.