Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

This came to me in meditation one morning: when in flow, the body knows first and the thought, the putting-it-into-words, follows.

We realize with the body first.

I continue to work on my piece about the Federer-Nadal Australian Open final. Yes, I know it’s no longer exactly topical, but the value in finishing the piece lies as much in process as product. Writing it has been a real challenge. At times during the drafting I’ve found myself believing that the piece isn’t working and getting pretty demoralized. But one night I found a little perspective and I realized that with this piece I’m at or beyond the very edge of my technique. To pull it off, I’m going to need to improve as a writer. That’s exciting, even if it is also frightening.

Then they could get this angle of adorableness on their own, instead of needing to hack my phone or hoover up all of my communications.

Observation 2: We’re past the point where this blockage can be ignored or worked around. We’re also past the point where this blockage can be easily fixed.

First, a couple of assertions: As a nation and as a species, we are facing some grave problems. These problems will take political will to solve–market-based approaches are pipe dreams.

“Political will” is an abstract term, but at its heart it means “a coming together of the people.” This is true everywhere. No matter how autocratic the government, nothing gets done without some acquiescence of the people. In the United States, this coming together is explicit in our system of governance. It’s significant that our Constitution begins with the words, “We the People.”

Can we ignore the energetic blockage at the heart of our political system? To successfully ignore the blockage in our political system would require a system that is actually functioning. But think of the last thing that Congress did that (a) seemed like a serious attempt at a solution to a serious problem and (b) featured both parties working together to find that solution. The last bipartisan success I can recall was when Congress retroactively legalized the bulk spying on the American people that Edward Snowden revealed. But “let’s cover our asses” in the face of government law breaking is not a sign of a functioning system but the opposite.

Can we work around the blockage? On this front, my observation might be wrong: working around the blockage may be possible. With Republicans having control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House, the only thing that should be preventing them from steamrolling their opposition is the Democrats ability to filibuster in the Senate. It’s furthermore possible that the Republicans could end the filibuster completely to get their agenda passed. So we could see a conservative agenda make a strong advance between now and the midterm elections.

But consider the evidence to the contrary: We are almost one month into Trump’s administration, and what we are seeing so far is not unity between the Legislative and Executive branches of our government working to advance some kind of consistent agenda. What we are seeing right now is utter chaos.

From an energetic perspective, this chaos makes perfect sense. Blocked systems do not flow. Blocked systems succumb to illness. I admit, it’s early yet and there’s plenty of time for things to change. Perhaps the Republicans will find a way to stumble or surge along. But the dynamics of flow of energy suggest otherwise.

Can the blockage be easily fixed?

Let’s define “easily fixed” to mean that it will fix itself–that the government’s dysfunction, which has been growing since (at least) the Gingrich revolution in 1994, will start to ease and reverse.

To discuss the possibility, let’s talk about the single most contentious policy of the Obama administration, the Affordable Care Act a.k.a Obamacare.

The Republicans have opposed the ACA furiously since it was passed. They saw validation of their approach in the election of 2010, which certainly served as a stunning rebuke of the Democrats. (Democrats lost six seats in the Senate, an astonishing 63 in the House, and six governorships.) As it was the ACA which had dominated the shouting class in the run-up to the election, the view that the American people hated the ACA cannot be dismissed. But I want to propose that ire towards the law had very little to do with the quality of the law itself, but was instead a proxy for a deeper anger, namely, a sense that the people had been betrayed by Wall Street in causing the financial crisis, and that the focus on health care instead of a serious look at reform of the excesses of the financial industry felt like a further betrayal. In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Democrats were not given an electoral mandate to put their energy elsewhere.

Since then, the Republicans have engaged in endless theater around the ACA. You can remember the infinite number of times House Republicans voted to defund the ACA, a tedious piece of political theater which never had the slightest chance of succeeding while Obama remained in office.

But now Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House (to the extent that anyone is currently in control of the White House). They have been promising to end “Obamacare” since it was passed and now they have the means to do so. And yet there’s been essentially no forward momentum to do so. Why is that?

It’s because the current situation is better than one in which the ACA is repealed without a replacement. The ACA is genuinely better than nothing at all, and the Republican have been forced to admit it via their actions (though obviously not their words). And so to make significant changes in the law without being totally harmful to the many millions who have benefited since the law went into place, and, let’s face it, harmful to the fortunes of Congresspeople who will have to answer to their constituents in a couple of years, puts Republicans in a tricky situation.

To deal effectively with what they’re trying to do would require them to challenge some of the beliefs that they have been shouting about for (at least) the past eight years. Maybe not all taxes are bad, and well-designed taxes levied for a specific purpose are worthwhile. Maybe a system that substantially increases access to health care, even if flawed, is better than a system that doesn’t allow that access. And maybe the initial problem was correctly diagnosed: that in a country as wealthy as ours, there is a something morally problematic with a system in which as substantial minority of people–many millions of them–lack access to even basic health care.

Given all of that, please consider this remarkable quote from Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, from a couple of days ago:

Something that Republicans need to be concerned about is that [if] we’re just going to replace Obamacare with Obamacare-lite, [it] begs the question, were we just against Obamacare because it was proposed by Democrats? And if that’s our position, then we’re very hypocritical. Then we really were just taking a political position, not a policy-based position. If we’re going to come back with something that does exactly the same thing as Obamacare, but change a couple of things and just call it Trumpcare or Ryancare, then what was our fight about for the last six years?

To fully understand this quote, you have to know that Rep. Labrador is a member of the Freedom Caucus, a group of the most conservative lawmakers in house, closely aligned with the Tea Party. Labrador is not following the evidence to the obvious conclusion–that the Republican position on the ACA was never anything more than a political position. He’s doing the necessary mental contortions to continue to hold on to his opinion that Obamacare is a travesty. In other words, his identity as a conservative trumps any evidence that he and his party might be wrong about the ACA.

To be able to utter sentences like this and then hold on to the opposite conclusion is exactly what I mean when I say that the blockage we’re seeing cannot be fixed by any normal means.

In short, the only way forward to a working system will have to derive from a profound shift in consciousness.

It’s an exciting time in my work. I am developing new techniques and watching their utility grow. I am exploring new ideas for organizing my ideas.

And behind it all I see a vision, once blurry, coming more and more into focus. One day (soon?), I will say to myself, “Ah yes, I see now: this is what I am doing. This is what I am doing and this is how I am going to explain it to people.”

So far I haven’t gotten there. It’s still vague, blurry, coming out of the mists on the trail ahead. But every day I take some steps forward, and its colors and its contours get clearer.

A couple of weeks ago I published my 500th piece on Free Refills. Pretty cool. Also cool: it happened and I didn’t even realize it. It was just one more piece until a few days later when I was looking at the whole list of published pieces and was like, “Hey, look at that.” So let’s pause a moment for high-fives. Great job, team!

So. A delightfully round number of published pieces to serve as an important milestone: check. Regular assertions that what I’m doing here is Not a Blog: check. And yet I continue to present my material in quintessentially blog-like reverse chronology, as though I actually believe that the reader’s relationship with the writing should be measured by a given piece’s proximity to the present day. (I do have a handful of categories in the categories menu, but I rarely do much with them.)

500 pieces. Instead of apologizing for any perceived failing or making any promises about what I’m going to do with what I’ve written, I’m going to note how much creative energy exists in 500 completed pieces. I’m going to imagine and expect that there is great energy to be found in the juxtaposition and exploration of those pieces. And I’m going to smile, and I’m going to take a full, centered breath, and in doing so I will further open myself to the energy that’s driven and continues to drive all that I’ve done and all that I’m doing.

It was the first Saturday of January and my first day teaching a multi-week kids’ class. I usually coach adults, and while I’ve taught kids before, I’ve never had a class with eight kids in it. Trying to figure out how to keep eight nine-year-olds safe on an extremely busy day on the mountain while simultaneously attempting to actually teach them something felt pretty overwhelming.

I was riding the chairlift with the three of the boys, and we were getting to know each other. The conversation veered as conversations do, especially with kids, and I was jarred from my anxiety by the following exchange:

“Some people think that pink is a girl’s color, but I don’t think so,” said the first boy.

“Yeah, I really like pink,” agreed the second boy.

“It’s not a girl’s color at all,” said the first boy.

“Purple too,” chimed in the third boy.

“Pink and purple are like my favorite colors,” said the first boy.

There are moments when kids reveal something of themselves and you suddenly see clearly an aspect of the adult they’ll someday become. A thread stretching forward into the future.

And there are moments, too, when there’s no such clarity to the revelation. You recognize the significance of the moment without being able to know what it signifies. In these moments, you witness uniqueness, potential, and the ever-moving-forward. The change that is inherent in all things.

Our society is struggling through challenging times, and as I got to know these kids I witnessed a sensitivity to the world they’re living in, far beyond their intellectual and emotional capacity to process. “Make America Great Again,” said the man on TV. These children are growing up in a world deeply in flux, surrounded on all sides by the deep fear that things are changing for the worse. (You should have seen how off-kilter the group was the weekend of the inauguration.)

So picture: three nine-year-old boys riding the chairlift together (in the presence of an adult authority figure, no less), all professing a love for pink and purple, an awareness of the broader social significance of that opinion, and a defiance of the norms they see imposed on them.

In that moment as they delight you with their very is-ness, how can you help but see a reason to hope and the potential for magic?

One of the key understandings that arises as you practice becoming more centered, grounded and energy aware is that our separation from the world around us, our sense of an existence discrete from our environment and each other, is an illusion. This is as observable a reality as that grass is green, the sky is blue, and water is wet. For some reason, one of the key traits of modernity is that we’ve suppressed our sensitivity to this reality. It’s no more something I can prove to you rhetorically than I can prove that fire is hot. But breathe and center: soon enough, this truth will reveal itself. You’ll find yourself stunned that you ever experienced things any other way.

Our political system has divided into two camps: Us, and Them. Consider: On Wednesday, Jeff Sessions was confirmed as Attorney General on a vote that saw exactly one senator, a Democrat, break from the party line. On Tuesday, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as Secretary of Education on a vote in which she was opposed by every Democrat and exactly two Republicans. Flip the party of the president around: During the Obama administration, on issue after issue, Republicans were unified in their opposition.

Does this strike you as natural? Or does it seem more likely that we’ve come to determine our beliefs not by thinking but by through our identities as Democrats or Republicans?

Imagine, instead, if we approached issues from a sense of flow, a sense of ground. I’m not suggesting that we’d all agree on everything–our differing backgrounds would still lead us to think in different ways. But by finding our way to our answers through our own bodies, we’d overcome this unthinking, unfeeling tribalism that passes for political awareness.

The symptoms of this tribalism are all too obvious. The mutual antipathy on display corrodes all discourse. Indeed, it has become the dominant feature of our current system.

And how well is our system actually working? Are we getting things done? No, we are not. We are not capable of doing anything productive, only destructive. Republicans spent the last seven-and-a-half years screaming about Obamacare, promising they’d repeal it right away–but you notice how little forward movement on that front they’ve actually managed, because, while Republicans are unified in their opposition, they have no creative ideas, no ideas for something better.

These are the manifestations of the energetic blockages at the core of our present political system.

Change the world is a side effect of any sufficiently good idea.

I look at the world and I see a lot of problems. You do as well, right? But I also look at the world and see everything we’ve accomplished as a species, despite pretty much just stumbling along, and I have to marvel at our power. We are capable of so much. I look at it all and I believe in my heart that there is little besides a stubborn unwillingness to change that keeps us from solving our problems.

A relatively recent development is the creation of a tool that makes it possible to communicate with almost anyone almost anywhere in the world for close to no cost. By all appearances, this tool is a game-changer. Perhaps you’re aware of it.

It’s a game-changer because the reach of a good idea has never been greater. The technological barriers that in the past would have prevented or at least slowed the rapid spread of a good idea are gone.

Because every good idea changes the world for the better, one of the missions of Free Refills is to encourage people to have good ideas and to communicate them. My purview is necessarily limited, because I am only one person. I, like everyone, am demarcated by my own interests and values. There are problems I don’t even realize are problems. But there are things you know about that I never will. So have ideas. Tell them to me, and to everyone.

It’s not my place to fix the world. It’s everyone’s place.

We can do this.

Regarding The Free Refills Mission, Revisited:

On further consideration, I’m not sure that the Free Refills mission was ever “change the world.” “Change the world” is just a side-effect.

Granted, “change the world” is a side-effect of any sufficiently good idea.

Moral of the story: Have good ideas. Pursue them.