The Practice
The Practice is, of course, about what to do. There are two parts to the questions we ask:
- What should I/we be doing?
- How should I/we go about being successful at it?
The answers to both questions come from engaging in the practice. You see, knowing how the world works (the model) doesn’t tell you what your role is to be in all of this. And though having the right stance helps you to be ready to do the right thing (and may ultimately be all you need to do), most often, we are going to be making decisions about how to best go about our work. So understanding the basis of a creative relationship to our work gives us the right tools to pick up as we move through the process. It can also help us to teach, diagnose, and realign any creative process.
Ultimately the practice brings us to a state of full engagement with our work by reorienting us to the truth about our relationship to the world. We find that what we think of as control does not exist, and that, even so, we are never disenfranchised. We are always a part of the creative team that generates the future. And we discover another exciting truth—that our lives are an adventure just waiting for our full participation. The goal of the practice is to give us an active, adventuresome approach to life and all of our “projects”—to put all creative efforts on the same level as planning our greatest adventure.
Why This Practice Is Valuable
There are many methods taught for moving through a creative or development process, and most of them help us to improve our odds. This practice is a little different in that it derives from a very specific philosophical base. But it also is the same, in that it is attempting to guide us into a more effective and powerful relationship to our work. Many components are consistent across various practices: strong visions, appropriate action, sensible planning.
Here are a few elements of this practice that are unique to its orientation. Though we’ll go over the details later, it has a strong focus on:
- Our awareness of the environment in which we are working and the whole array of possibilities (known as the arising potential)
- Paying attention to all levels and sources of action
- Leveraging existing potential to create your goals instead of thinking we have to (or can) create it all ourselves
- Maintaining the most powerful relationship to the process (the stance)
- Maneuvering quickly and efficiently; and knowing how to discover what maneuver is appropriate
- Enabling the emergence of natural organization and management structures.
There are three keys to understanding Updrafting as a way of life:
- The Practice
- The Stance
- The Arising World Model
We can work with the keys in any order and we can apply the principles separately depending on our interests. Most people are more interested in what to do next than they are in a philosophical view of the world. So we can skim or skip the philosophy part knowing we can apply the stance or the practice without it. Some of us know precisely what our next project is and want to apply the practice to something specific—so diving into the step-by-step aspects of the practice is one good way to start. But the keys do arise from the same source and understanding all of them will enhance our application of each of them, maximizing our ability to make effective choices and actions.
The Practice
The Practice is the answer to:
- What should I be doing?
- How do I become most effective?
- How do I get it done?
It describes the creative process and illustrates it in a way that makes it practical to apply to everyday activities. It incorporates the expansiveness of the Arising World Model and the personal experience of a perfect stance into a set of relationships to the creative processes, which are expressed in practices and tactics that 
help us choose the next action. We like to call them maneuvers because they are actions engaged in the moving arising potential and when we use a new word (maneuver, in this case) we can incorporate the new sense of ourselves and the world.
For many of our activities, goals, and actions, we do not need to break down the creative process into steps and modes of behavior. We just do it! But, if we need to understand our creative process more completely, if we want to enhance our capacities, and if we want to create with others, it can be helpful to understand the subtle underpinnings of creative action.
The Stance
The optimal stance is the answer to “How should I live?” or “How should I relate to the world?”
When we choose and act in the world, we do it from some basic assumptions of who we are and what we are capable of doing. This includes positive assumptions and negative assumptions, positive views and negative views. Perfecting a stance is both understanding how the outside world works and understanding how your internal perspective affects all of your choices and actions.
We will see that the optimal stance comes in two variations:
- The Engaged Stance- when we are lucky enough to find the perfect quality of engagement with (or submersion in) the arising creative potential. It feels less like a stance than a way of being.
- The Conscious Stance – when we don’t find the Engaged Stance, but are able through our conscious awareness to choose and maneuver appropriately.
From the outside, the two stances look the same. From the inside, they feel quite different. We all have times of perfect engagement, when we are going with the flow, and times where we have to make conscious choices. For the conscious stance we help ourselves with guidelines, practices, tactics, and rules. The engaged stance doesn’t require any rules, for it arises perfectly in the moment, transcending any requirements to think about the tactics to keep us on track (we still make decisions and maneuver).
We can look at this from a simple perspective and ask, “How should I behave?” But the question is bigger than that. It is truly about who we need to be at the deepest level to engage with the world at the deepest level. In the same way we learn an optimal stance for surfing a wave, we can learn to surf our lives from a powerful stance as the world arises dynamically into our experience.
The Ar
ising World Model
The Arising World Model (AWM) is a philosophical model for how the world comes into being and what our role is in that process. It is a little challenging to learn, partly because it is broken down into such detail that it seems a bit simplistic, and because some of its deeper underlying principles are fairly foreign to us. Once we understand it, AWM becomes a whole new way of relating to the world that is fascinating, practical, and inspiring.
Very simply, every moment we make choices that generate actions, which create our lives and the things in our lives. This is a process called creativity. There is a tendency in our culture to treat the creative process as a big mystery. It’s not a mystery. It’s a practical and predictable practice. But we don’t control it the way we try to control a bowling ball. It’s a different kind of maneuver and takes a more sophisticated and subtle approach.
The myths:
- It’s all mysterious and uncontrollable.
- Only special people are creative. I’m not creative.
- If you are “lucky”, it happens, and if you aren’t lucky, then it will never happen.
- It’s unpredictable and scary.
- It’s just a mechanical, though complicated, process—make the right set of actions and you will get the result.
The truth:
- Everyone is creating all the time. No exceptions.
- It seems mysterious but it is really a subtle maneuver of consciousness that we can learn to manage.
- There is much of the usual work to be done.
- You ‘engage’ with the arising idea and together you and it evolve the future.
- It’s somewhat unpredictable and therefore an exciting adventure.
- There is nothing to be afraid of.
Let’s Talk Surfing
Surfing, sailing, skydiving, and gliding are all good analogies for Updrafting.
In each of these activities, a current and force (the wave or the updraft) is moving through a medium (the water or the air) and the participant uses their knowledge and skill to choose actions that leverage the moving force to create their experience—the great ride they envision. In a sense, the actor and the arising force are one—the interaction of the surfer and the wave become an expression of the intent.
The ocean waves are moving toward the shore. The resulting wave that hits the shore (and its nature, speed, size, and force) is a result of all the actions that have affected the arising (or you might say arriving) state of the ocean. The wave itself is a momentary expression of all of the actions and motions that have affected the ocean in past moments including wind, currents, earthquakes, swimming dolphins, shifting sands, and crawling worms. These actors and actions each have various capacities to create results, which are changes in the nature of the movement of the ocean. But they all contribute to the end result.
The surfer chooses her interaction with the ocean and uses the power and motion in the ocean to create her experience. To actually surf, she needs to learn the proper stance that incorporates what she knows about the water and its movement, her skill, her balance, and her senses. In the midst of surfing, she has to pay close attention to what is actually happening in the wave. It is a process of inquiry. She is inquiring into the nature of what is happening at a deep and subtle level. She must react moment by moment to what is actually happening with subtle maneuvers of her body and attention. She can’t have a fixed idea of how to stand on the wave or make assumptions about what will happen for the wave is changing in every moment.
Life is precisely like this. The nature of life arising into your experience is fluid and dynamic. We must learn to be fluidly aware while engaging with its arising potential—to catch the updraft or to catch a wave. Then we discover, like a surfer, that our engagement with the potential is exactly what our life is. Life IS the fluid engagement with what happens and the courageous attempt to create something wild, beautiful, and free with our every choice.
creativity/
Samuel has an inspiration to travel down the Yangtze River to see the country and experience life there. So he sets his boat into the river with his equipment, skills, and
knowledge. Now his general direction is set for, most of the time, he will choose to go downstream. The river will carry him right through the experience that he set out to have. There is an underlying momentum and direction that is generated by his original choice. The river is what happens, what is.
But, moment-to-moment, he gets to choose where on the river to maneuver. Where to stop. Whether to go back upstream and buck the current. Where to take a run over the waterfall. He can choose to run the entire river, or to stop and stay in an intriguing place. He will meet others along the river and will make decisions on how to interact with them. The combination of his original choice and his moment-to-moment choices are the combined momentum and direction of his travels.
Life.
