The Three Keys of Updrafting
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.
