Catching the Updraft! ~ The Blog

Intro to AWM Part 4: What are we?

We are not separate from this arising world? So what are we individually in this big picture? And, more importantly, how do we participate?

We embody two important things:

1. We are the expression of everything that has gone before, what you might call a result;
2. And we are (really “are” and not “have”) the potential for choice and action to generate the potential for what will come next.

Everything is perfect (as in an accurate result) as the expression of every creative (potential generating) act that has every happened; and in the same moment there is a wealth of new things to try, new structures, forms, and capacities to create. Nothing is “wrong” and everything is up for improvement.

Most of us live in our worlds as a result; that is, instead of knowing our bodies, our minds, and our lives as an ever changing potential, we think of ourselves as something that happened, something that is stuck and has a problem. It is possible to learn to focus on ourselves as the choosing and acting dynamism in the universe. As we do that, we understand that we can live at the level of causality knowing that we are part of the causal component of our world.

You are Your Arising Potential

The model tells us that you are a portion of the arising potential of the universe embodying the creation of something new. You are that. It is not your “reason”; it is your being. Reason implies to us that you can choose what or why. But in reality you can engage with your potential arising or you can resist what is coming into being through you. You can try to choose something else, only to fight against the current.

Imagine a musician who is brilliant, dedicated, a magical performer, and a generous performing partner. This musician has dedicated his entire life to becoming a creative expression. As such, he is a clear embodiment of a creative force, totally and completely engaged in the realization of creative power. He is a generative being in a volatile state bringing something wild and surprising into being in the world.

In the most practical way, he IS this musical expression arising. He is the music itself. You can sense it in the performance and in his entire life, which is one of exemplary engagement; he is fully engaged the arising potential that is exploding into expression through him. His experience is that he just “has” to make music and the more he engages with it the more it arisies. We can view musicians as the embodiment required for music to arise into the univers and our experience. And the music is the embodiment of a greater expression of the experience of being human and one particular expression of our possibilities.

We each have some engagement with life that is arising with us, a role to play, a gift to give. Not all of them as dramatic as being famous musician, but all critical to the unfolding of the universe. We are the confluence of possibilities arising as a creation, which can perceive, choose, and act. This is the unique capacity of a human being, and a powerful role in the expressive nature of our world. Optimally, we don’t dedicate ourselves to something outside of us; we choose to powerfully engage with who or what we are, whatever it may be.

Our musician is a more overt creative expression in which his consciousness is totally engaged with the arising potential, enhancing and reinforcing it with his creative choices, enabling the whole thing to arise like a blaze into being. Some of us are more visibly a creative expression, but all of us, with whatever expression arises, are in support of the arising whole.

This is what an engaged purpose is—a human fully expressing the arising potential that is moving through them.

Note: One of my inspirations is the musician Mark O’Connor. When you watch him perform and read about his work and life, you come to realize that here is someone who is maximizing his potential and creating something wondrous in the world. Here is the link to his My Space page and some of his wonderful music.

AWM: Two Key Concepts

The universe is really one continuity in the process of becoming, but we perceive things, people, organizations

The truth is that it is all continuous—that it is one universe arising into being as itself. But it appears in the Actuality as an infinite number of separate entities.

The understanding that we are separate is an illusion of the creative process. Individual expression and action function in the universe the same way multiple colors are used by an artist to create a single image. Each object that we identify as separate is just a focus of activity (locus of information), which is functioning as a seemingly separate as part of the dance. It has its own arising potential and persistence, and its own ability to act. But they are only seemingly separate from the whole.

So an entity, an object, a person or an organization is the expression of information about its current state of being, its potential (possible future states), and a localized ability to choose and to act. The potential of an entity is arising into being as the entity and its environment. It is a flow of becoming that has complex structures of change and persistence. That is what we mean by updraft. A group of entities (a family, a business, a bus full of travelers) comprise a confluence of their individual potentials creating more complexity and expanded abilities to choose and to act.

The Concept of Persistence
Some things have a great potential for persistence, that is, they stay around in fairly static states. Other entities (both objects and people) express wide variability in their patterns of persistence, sometimes chaotic. Water can be water for a very long time, but the form it takes on is a chaotic structure.

The world of objects embodies a vast range in the qualities of persistence, though we can see with careful observation that nothing is perfectly persistent. The Himalaya mountain range, while seemingly a fixture for time immemorial, is changing every day as tectonic plates shift and surfaces crumble. The planets shifts, the sun burns, the waters flow. Everything is changing and the variety of changeability is core to the fabric of the world. Humans also embody this variability in persistence and changeability.

So what is persistence? It is the preponderance of likelihood that something will stay the same. A rock is more persistently a rock than a flower is a flower. And the opposite truth is that something that is ephemeral, fleeting, amorphous has the likelihood and ability to change. It is easier to change your thought than to change the color of your eyes; the thought has a smaller preponderance of persisting. Something that is very persistent has a lot of potential to remain the same, and therefore it requires a lot of accurately generated potential to change it. Something with little potential to remain the same does not require the same effort.

What is most persistent about a person? Which parts of a human being express stability? Is it:

• Bones? Muscles? Teeth? Brain?
• Personality? Emotions? Knowledge?
• Ideas? Beliefs? Intents? Thoughts?

These attributes represent a great deal of variability in persistence, but none of these are the most persistent attribute of a person. The most persistent element of a person is the process that causes the person to come into being—the ongoing becoming that creates a focus of activity, which we call a person. Each of us is the arising result of a process of becoming. And everything about us has more or less persistence. Our bones are more persistence than our hair. Our beliefs are more persistent than our thoughts. My location on the planet is more persistent than my emotions. We are a complex mixture of elements that express a wide variety of stability. This particular complexity is what defines us a human. And freedom in the elements that are highly ephemeral—the ease of potentiating change—are where the possibility of evolution is most available.

Moderate persistence is required for creative expression and the ability to evolve. A tree needs to maintain its existence as a tree in the midst of growing. A person has to maintain his existence as a person to evolve his capacities. There must be enough stability to perceive, choose and act; but enough dynamism to evolve. If we are too rigid, we cannot learn. If humans were so chaotic that we had no persistent pattern, we could not express what we might have learned. Evolution is the process of changing our relationship to the world in a way as to express a moderately persistent way of being in the world that, over time, continually shifts into a greater capacity for engagement and understanding.

We live on an edge between chaos and static order—this is where creative choices have meaning and evolution can proceed.

Intro to AWM: How Stuff Happens – Part 2, The Model Itself

The Model Itself
This model describes a functional structure with a set of simple principles (axioms) and relationships between those principles. Some of the axioms represent things (the existential axioms: state, moment, entities); some of them represent movement (the operational axioms: becoming, action, choice). To make the basic axioms easier to apply to real life, we have developed derivative axioms from the synthesis of the existential and operational axioms, which helps us understand the ordinary world.

Things that Are: Actualities and Potentials
At the deepest level, the model shows us that there are two main elements of the creative universe.

1. There is the stuff of the world that is—that which we normally perceive. We call it the Actuality or Actualities. It includes what most of us would perceive as the actual stuff of the world. (Ambiguities about what is real stuff and what is potential stuff are interesting, but not really pertinent to the application of the model. Thank goodness, for the line is hard to draw.)
2. There is the Potential, the information about the future world into which the Actuality will transform. This information includes patterns of persistence, arrays of possibilities, likelihoods—all of the pending possibilities that have been previously generated. We understand a lot of the information that resides in the Potential, but not all of it. (We can predict the movement of a golf ball, but not the shifting of an earthquake, or the thought process of an Einstein.) Some of it is too vast or complex for us to be able to predict what is actually going to happen, though our capacity to understand is expanding all the time.

We call the combination of the Actuality and the Potential the State of the universe. State is an infinite informational state space—that is, everything in the world has, in each moment, some state or condition which is changing to some degree all the time. Its momentary actual state, its potential states, and the process of change itself determine how it changes—what it will become—what happens next.

In each moment, the potential becomes the actual—the world arising into being.

How the World Operates – Becoming
Becoming is the core of the universe’s existence. Everything is changing in every moment. The universe is a process of change and evolution even more than it is a set of things.

The rules for the process of becoming are in large part what we try to learn in life. These rules determine the creation of the actual world from the potential of what could be. We understand a lot of the rules of becoming. We can explain why a plane flies, or why balls fall, or how the surfboard catches the wave. We know why the baby is hungry. But there are many other underlying patterns and rules that we do not yet understand, though our evolution, exploration, and investigations are driven in large part by our desire to uncover them and to understand more accurately how the world works. Each individual has a different level of understanding and, in large part, that is what individual growth and development is—the expansion of our ability to understand all the ways of the world and to work creatively with them.

An Introduction to AWM: How Stuff Happens – Part 1

Why a new model of how the universe works?

Well, if we want to be more successful we may need a new way of looking at things, a way that corrects our misunderstandings and give us a stronger basis from which to choose—and choosing every moment is everything. The Arising World Model (AWM) also gives us a firm foundation for understanding our creative practices—what will work for us and what will never work.

The reality is that the world is just what it is regardless of whether we understand it or whether we have a good working model for our engagement. But if we can improve our understanding, we also change what we are doing which is the key step in evolving our own creative potential.

So, What Don’t We Know That We Need To Know?

There are several key reasons why a new way of thinking may be useful to correct misunderstandings that are pervasive in our current worldview.

More Than Action Matters

First, most of us barely have a clear model of how the physical world works. So we do not have a complete or practical model that includes how our thoughts, intentions, and beliefs affect the world and each other. And it turns out, whether you believe you thoughts do or do not affect the world, you will be more effective if you work within a model that guides your choices of what you do and what you think and believe. We will be more successful if we believe that our thoughts are effectively actions and that we can and need to choose them explicitly. It is not logical to separate the body and its ability to act from the mind and its ability to think, for they are both simply facets of you and your potential coming into being in every moment.

In fact, the universe is one whole and we are all, bodies and minds, arising together (no matter how convincingly it seems as if we are a lot of separate bodies and minds). So a model that helps us work within these seeming dichotomies in a practical way allows us to engage more effectively.

It turns out that when we consider the results, what happens next, we need to think of the world as a vast continuous whole. But when we consider our choices and our actions, we need to remember that we hold some individual responsibility for what happens next in that whole.

We Are Not In Control, But Are Critical to What Happens Next

Second, most of us need a new model because we think that the world is just happening to us, that we are victims of everything and everyone else. In thinking this, we also believe that what we do or think doesn’t matter much in the big scheme of things. What this model helps us to visualize is that nothing just happens to us and that we are responsible for everything we do, everything we think, and everything we believe. And that our actions make a difference in what we experience in our lives and what everyone else experiences in their life.

We need to get over the belief that we can be ambiguous, half-hearted, or incongruous about our actions, thoughts, and beliefs. We need to become whole-hearted about everything we do if we want to leverage the true power of our creative ability. And this power will come from two aspects of the human experience: the state of our awareness and the nature of our actions.

Skillful Means – With Awareness of the Implications, Do the Right Thing

This explanation of the world is focused on the nature of actions and, by expanding the definition of right action, the state of awareness of the actor. To develop skillful means is to evolve our ability to know what the right choice is and to execute the optimal action. AWM is ultimately practical in that it shows us how to make the best choices and to execute effective maneuvers. But optimally, it requires that we have a comprehensive worldview from which to make the choices, so that we understand the true implications.

An Illustrated Walkthrough of Updrafting

In the simplest case, we simply do something. We bake a cake. We answer a question. We write a chapter. Sometimes we are in touch with our process to such a degree that no outside structure is required. The full-blown creative act arises spontaneously and implicitly. Many of our basic creations come into being in this way.

We call the processes represented in the diagram ovals the modes of the creative activity. A mode is a way of relating to the creative process with specific things to do that generate specific results. Let’s decompose this mode to learn more about the practice.

As we understand more about our own creative process, we may see many of the creative modes come into play internally even if we are not engaged with them explicitly. We may use the modes invisibly as they best fit our current activity.

The first level of decomposition of the simple act of creating something is to:

1. Choose what you are going to create
2. Take the actions that are necessary

We call this Taking Aim and Taking Action. Taking Aim includes all the ways in which we determine what we are creating and the development of our path to the goal. We call the path the trajectory. Think of it as aiming an arrow on the optimal trajectory to hit the target. Taking Action is doing what it takes to move us closer to our goal along the trajectory.

As our tasks get more complex, or we want a greater degree of control, or we want to create with a team, we may want to further break down our modes of engagement with the creative process.
Taking Aim breaks down into two sub-modes: Discovery and Design.

1. Discovery is learning about the creative environment:
• Looking outward to see what exists that could participate in or influence your creative endeavor
• Looking inward to see what ideas, intuitions, and potentials you have to inspire the ideas that are evolving.
2. Design is combining your knowledge and your inspirations into a broad vision and building the mental and physical components you need to do the work at hand.

Discovery decomposes into two modes: Survey and Sense & Engage.

1. To Survey we study what exists in the world that affects our creative process and feed what we learn back into the definition of what can be created.
2. To Sense & Engage is to discover your creative intuitions, the future possibilities, and the potentials that can define and refine your goal, while helping to leverage it into reality.

Design has three sub-modes:

1. Envision – Create an illuminated vision of the goal and its meaning
2. Align – Create alignment, or congruence in beliefs, intents, and actions
3. Embody – Create the capacity to physically and organizationally do the work required

Taking Action decomposes into two modes:

1. Map – Make plans
2. Maneuver – Execute your plans

The updrafting key here is that you define very specific planning horizons for your maneuvers and know that you will re-plan often to meet the new requirements of the evolving environment in which you are creating.

Now we can see the whole practice—moving through the modes as they are needed to create whatever your want. Remember, sometimes these things will be explicit; other times they will just happen naturally. But these shifts in awareness and engagement are always part of the process. Of course, there is a lot more detail to come in later discussions.

How Do You Actually Get Started?

So now you have a brief introduction to all the modes of the creative lifecycle, but how does an innovation cycle, or the process of a new creation actually begin?

The story goes something like this.

1. You (or someone on a creative team) gets an intuition or an idea of what might be possible. Some idea intrigues you and your mind begins to fiddle with it.
2. You use your intuition, and possibly the intuition of others on the team, to explore the possibilities.
3. In your mind, or on a doodle, you describe what it might look like.
4. You then survey the world for more information about the creation, its possibilities, and anything else that might affect the creative process.
5. And then intuition plays with it again; the process will loop around in a idea form until it develops enough momentum to come into the world as a creative project.

Awareness Counts!

(This post is still part of the introduction to the Practice. It discusses how attention and awareness are a critical part of success. When we discuss the practice of updrafting and its modes, we will address issues of awareness as they pertain to each mode. Alternately we could, and many teachings do, focus on the state of consciousness and the development awareness, allowing that to lead into new patterns of action. There are many angles from which we can disect and approach the discussion, but Updrafting usually begins with the things we do as the entry point.)

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Our awareness or our state of consciousness is a very important part of the effectiveness of our actions. In updrafting we call an ongoing, working state of awareness a stance. There are two key reasons why the stance is critical:

1. Our awareness and understanding mediates our understanding of the world. That is, it is what stands between what is real and true, and what we can perceive and know.
2. Our awareness and understanding guides and colors our decision making process and therefore all of our actions.

Both what comes to us and what comes from us is affected by our stance, our state of awareness.

There are four key facets of awareness to consider in the updrafting stance. The first two have to do with freedom—-freedom from internal constraints. (Otherwise known as bad habits.) The second two concern our ability to successfully engage with our potential.

The Practice of Freedom

1) Non-Clinging : Not constraining yourself or the world

The definition of the verb to cling from Apple’s Dictionary is the antithesis of updrafting:

cling |kli ng | verb

1. l) hold on tightly to : she clung to Joe’s arm | they clung together | figurative she clung onto life.
2. ( cling to) adhere or stick firmly or closely to; be hard to part or remove from : the smell of smoke clung to their clothes | the fabric clung to her smooth skin.
3. ( cling to) remain very close to : the fish cling to the line of the weed.
4. remain persistently or stubbornly faithful to something : she clung resolutely to her convictions.
5. be overly dependent on someone emotionally : you are clinging to him for security

Non-clinging defines a preferred relationship to the existing world that is not trying to make some thing, person, or reality stay put permanently. While we can enjoy or not enjoy what is currently happening we must acknowledge that it is always changing. We cannot stop that process. Clinging is an internal resistance to the creative flow of the world that disables our creative power. We we cannot hold on to anything, we can only continually create the potential for its persistence. This non-clinging relationship is emotionally and energetically another way of being than clinging to a reality. It is participating in an act of creation, manifesting no resistance to the ongoing flow of the world.

Clinging affects our ability to create in many ways.

• It distorts our ability to see what actually is.
• It distorts our ability to choose appropriate action.
• It reflects an ongoing concept that you need something to be a certain way, which is different emotionally and energetically from wanting to create it.

Non-clinging also pertains to ideas of what is possible, for many of our limitations arise from our belief in them. Having no fixed ideas of what’s possible leaves room in the universe for new things to arise, which may be grander than you could imagine. Clinging to a fixed idea will almost always limit your possibilities to those things you think of as possible or probable.

A final but critical point: we must not have a strong attachment to our results, which is another form of clinging in which we require the world to end up a particular way. We have goals and targets that guide our actions, but the results must be surrendered to the intelligence of the world as it is arising altogether. That is part of our adventure—to see what happens next.

2) Surrender/Acceptance-Freely engaging with whatever is happening

To surrender is an ongoing process of suspending judgment and fixed ideas, and willingly and completely engaging with what happens. It can become the perfect stance for engaging creatively with the universe. We still choose. We still act. But we never resist. We see everything that flows into our space as part and parcel of our life and as part of the medium of creation that we are working in. It is all an expression of what the world has become and the working potential with which we create the future.

After Freedom, Updrafting

Coherence

Coherence is the practice of finding alignment with an arising possibility. Each of us exists along with potential events, objects, and people with whom to engage. Sometimes these possibilities are right in front of us—like a bus. But sometimes we find our engagement with them through synchronicities or intuitions, and in this practice we work to develop our skills in maintaining awareness of all the potentials arising around us. Sometimes we resist these potentials (it’s one of our ongoing bad habits) like a child resists going to bed. But sometimes we find perfect engagement with these opportunities—and that is what we call coherence. We become coherent with the arising possibility and therefore can use the existing momentum of that potential to our best advantage.

Congruence.

Being congruent implies being consistent in our actions relative to a goal that we have determined. It is part of the practice to be completely aware of our actions and thoughts to the extent that we learn to maintain congruence at all times. This is counter to many of our behaviors in which:

• We act to create a goal which we secretly believe is impossible; or
• We only work half heartedly at something because we don’t believe we are worth it; or
• We do a task all the while believing it is stupid or impossible; or
• One part of an organization (or an individual) is working at cross purposes with another.

Being congruent is how we maximize the potential of all our actions align with our goals. The practice of Updrafting will develop an enhanced awareness that will mediate an engagement with the world that is richer and more dynamic. We will be able to pick up on things that we would have previously missed and accomplish things we would not have imagined.

What does the stance end up looking like?

• Ever present awareness and interest in what is, which includes all the potentials and possibilities
• Non-clinging acceptance of (or surrender to) what has become
• Passionate interest in what might be created
• Joyful engagement with the task of creating the future

After Note:

In this model we include ideas, intentions, and thoughts in the category of actions—actions that generate real potential. We will see that these internal constructs can be harmful in that we are often resistant, negative, and limiting in our thoughts and beliefs. These thought structures, which are sometimes collectively called the ego, are often erroneously believed to be our actual selves and we use them to both limit who we think we can be, but also what we expect the world to be. We will come to view these thoughts as negative actions, or unskillful actions, and we will learn to reduce or eliminate them from our acting awareness—another step in expanding our awareness of what is possible in the world.

Preface to Catching the Updraft

(Some of the ideas and language for CTU are arriving out of sequence; but the purpose of the blog is to write the book and my writing process is not linear. So here are some experimental words that came to me for a simple introduction to Updrafting.)
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Ever feel that everything is going your way, that things are easy, that life is exciting, and that you’ve got great things to do? Has it ever come to you, as you were engaged in some activity you have a passion for, that you haven’t been conscious of anything but that activity—that the rest of the world has dropped away? Ever laugh for no more reason than you were just happy to be alive?

That’s what we call Catching the Updraft. The current of an updraft is always around us but some times we really go with the flow of it; those are the joyous, creative moments when you are collaborating with the universe. Those are the moments when we are being all we can be and leveraging everything at our disposal.

The practice of Updrafting is all about maximizing those moments. It’s how we optimize our creativity, our enjoyment of what we do, and how productive and effective we are in our work and our everyday lives.

This simple approach is to be:

1. Really aware of and sensitive to what is actually going on around you.
2. Very interested in what you are doing and what you are creating. (And if you are not, stop doing it.)
3. Focused on what you want to accomplish—the big picture.
4. Relaxed and engaged creatively with whatever arrives in your life.

Of course, these things are not always easy to do. Though they seem like they ought to be easy. So the practice of Updrafting gives us some tools, techniques, practices, and tactics to help us evolve the way we live and work, to improve our odds of Catching the Updraft.

How to Change Your Life, Part 3: Something Happens

But then it happens. Of course, not suddenly. But it turns out that little bit by little bit something has happened.

I realized just this week that while I’m not quite raring to go out and do our 1 to 1.5 hour bike loop—I’m close to eager. There is almost no resistance (physical, mental, or emotional). That was a shock to me—that after 8 months of steady work during which it felt like I would never get beyond cranky, to find that the density of the resistance—which has really been a lack of freedom to do what I really wanted to do—has in large part dissolved. 8 months—I could never have imagined that it would take 8 months just to get to “emotional positivity” about something. But some things are persistant and we can sometimes be frail in the face of that persistance.

This is why we need to understand our role in changing those things we do not want, and why we need to understand consistency, congruency and alignment in our behaviors. It also reinforced for me that sometimes, with help, I can use the 4 “easy” steps to get passed a really big hurdle.

If you can’t do it all at least:

Do the right thing.
Then, when you can, say the right thing.
Then, when you can, think the right thing.
Then, when you can, feel the right thing.

Easy as pie!

Ever tried to be  really good at pie?

How To Change Your Life, Part 2: The Difficulty

It’s easy to see how difficult it is to create change in some areas of our lives. Just look for the “problems” you are always bumping up against. Some issues in our lives have a great deal of persistence and are not easily transformed.

In our culture, we sometimes get the sense that knowledge is the key to change, and sometimes it is. Knowledge can be instantly acquired and applied. This works in some arenas and not in others. There seem to be some kinds of behavior that are deeply persistance, that have support at all levels of the creative process, and to change these things is often a more profound and longer process than we can imagine at first blush.

For example.

Last fall we instigated, for critical reasons, a more rigorous exercise program and an even more stingent diet program.

Watching my progress over the months has been an education in the power of inertia to maintain the status quo and the density and power of the resistance we deal with every day. The existing patterns and potentials affect my ability to change at so many levels: of action (what I can do), of my speech (what I habitually say), my emotions (how I feel about things), and my beliefs. The density of the inertia is sobering as I realize how little progress is made each day or week or month, and how tenuous is the grasp on what progress has been made.

I made a decision early on to really try to do the right thing no matter what I thought or felt. This was made easier for me because I had a partner who is always stronger and more capable that I am. So I decided to pretty much agree to do whatever he suggested: ride this far, hike this hill, go out this often. So he would suggest a plan, and I would do my best to cheerfullly say yes and go. Already I knew that I couldn’t overcome my resistance to doing the work by myself. Without the outside nudge, I would not make it. In some ways, I surrendered my decision making to something outside of me as a way to instigate change. (This required two additional tactics: 1) I had to promise my partner that if things get bad, I WOULD stop. 2) I had to create a backup strategy in case I really couldn’t make it, e.g, carry a phone so I could call him if he gets ahead and I needed to stop; know how we would recover if I couldn’t finish. I needed a bail-out plan, otherwise, it would be hard to get past the resistance caused by the fear of failing.)

Inside I was afraid (of the stress or pain), but I would go without saying anything about what I was feeling. Never giving it any outside expression. And though the resistance, litttle by little, was softened, it was always there. I could always feel the urge to refuse, to sit, not to move.

The resistance, in this case, arose on all levels. My body was not really up to enjoying the task. My mind resisted the enforcement of discipline. My emotions never wanted to be subjected to the pain or pressure. On some level I had come to believe that this incapable lump was who I was. (Though I knew better.)

It took 8 full weeks of steady work before any noticeable or measureable differences were observable. 8 weeks—with no results. That’s a long time for me to keep my attention focused when everything inside of me is going the other way. I understand more than I ever have why it is so difficult to change some things. I never fully understood how deep and persistent so many qualities of our physical and emotional lives are. I guess that’s why the Buddhist teachings emphasize that it takes lifetimes for us to evolve. 8 weeks with no visible results; 9 months and there’s a little—a little progress, a little improvement.

But it doesn’t feel permanent at all. It feels tenuous, not a new me, but a hint of a new way of changing a little bit at a time. Whew! And I thought the bike rides were tough.

But Friday, out on a relatively short ride (just an hour) and nothing to prove, I found myself pushing myself over the hills, racing myself up and and down. Now that was something new, and a bit exciting to experience. (Though Saturday and Sunday did not go quite so well.)

How to Change Your Life, Part 1: 4 “Easy” Steps

(Okay, so this is fairly tongue in cheek, but this is really everything there is to do. Though it doesn’t rate the tasks by difficulty. That would be too heartbreaking.)

The overall gist of this set of tactics is as follows:

Change your relationship to everything from the outside in.

That is,

• Step One: Never DO the wrong thing; Do the right thing.
• Step Two: Never SAY the wrong thing; say the right thing.
• Step Three: Never THINK the wrong thing; think the right thing.
• Step Four: Never FEEL the wrong thing; feel the right thing.

No excuses.

That’s it. At first blush, our response is “Well, of course…I can do that. Just do the right thing.” But in practice we begin to realize how difficult it is to always do the right thing, how much potential and momentum we have that is often going the wrong way. How many decisions we make each day for which we merely follow habitual patterns and don’t even consider what the right thing is.

What gets in our way?

• Ignorance: Not knowing what the right thing is.
• Existing Potential: The momentum created by our life history and sometimes from doing the wrong thing habitually.
• Not Paying Attention: Not noticing when we are making decisions and acting on them.

The first element, ignorance, is the easiest to remedy. We can learn something new and use that to make better informed decisions. Maybe. I do find that information alone is often not enough for me to change my behavior. (I can immediately learn to say the right word in Spanish, but I cannot instantly learn to be non-judgemental.)

Of course, our actions, words, thoughts, and feeling are all tied up together—we often just DO an immediate reflection of what we feel. But we have to start somewhere. So we start with the most powerful and accessible creative action most of us have, external action, and we do the right thing.

This is where concentration, paying attention, and meditation can help—to slow down the transaction that takes us from an wrong-headed feeling directly into a wrongly-directed action. This requires knowledge—what is the right thing—and the ability to be congruent, approach the evolution of our capacities with our minds (with rules and guidance) AND our intuition (hoping to find the updraft and catch a ride.)

Is this easy? Well, no, not easy. But there are tactics that we can use to help us make better short term decisions and change our long term momentum.

Next time—applying a tactic to a constant challenge.