Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

The goal for the next five weeks is to get all my publishing queued up for the rest of the year, while developing enough of a new system for readying my pieces for publication that I can really take advantage of the resulting buffer of time. I’m not going to give myself a five-week buffer just to get to the beginning of the year and have to do it all over again.

The other goal is to use the time that opens up for me to figure out how I can really leverage all the work that I’ve done, the 450 or so pieces in the bank, so that the thousands, nay, zillions of new readers, whose arrival to Free Refills has even now been put into motion, discover here a world full of magic and wonder, or at the very least find themselves sufficiently entertained to decide that they’ll keep coming back.

And for those of you who’ve been here from the start and are checking in every few days–I know there’s a few of you out there–well, we can spend a few weeks talking amongst ourselves about everything Free Refills has been, is and is becoming. We can talk about what we’ve seen and what we’ve learned and where we’d like Free Refills to go from here. We’ll have a nice productive discussion among all you early adopters before we let the riff-raff in. (Please don’t tell them I called them that.)

And can I just say, Early Adopters, what a handsome bunch you are?

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack.
And you may find yourself in another part of the world.
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself
Well
How did I get here?
–Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

In his piece on Tuesday, Jerry brought our work here full circle, returning to the topic of how we would work with Tiger Woods. Jerry acknowledged that Tiger has forgotten more about how to play golf than we will ever know, but said that this doesn’t matter. We’d start with Tiger the same way we start with everybody: with centering and the breath.

While working with top athletes is a dream we hope to see come true, the main constituency we expect to work with is non-famous people like ourselves who seek to maximize their potential. We’ve assumed that because our methods bring deep feeling to the body and, with that, a concomitant feeling of vulnerability, certain groups of people won’t be amenable to this work.

But in the past couple of weeks I have watched with something like wonder as I’ve had conversation after conversation with members of exactly the group that we’ve considered least likely to be our audience, which you might find kind of funny when I tell you who they are. (Sometimes we fail to see what’s right in front of our faces.)

These conversations have been with men, my age or a bit younger, who find themselves in situations not unlike where I found myself a couple of years ago. They seem to be looking around and saying something like this to themselves:

“I thought I was living skillfully. I thought I would be more at this point in my life. But when I look at my life, I see a lack of purpose, a lack of solidity. I lack the fullness of my own integrity, and I don’t know how to make it better.”

As the song says: “How did I get here?”

Once these conversations started to happen, I realized that of course there are men just like me out there who could, as I did, use a little help. And of course I am being called to help them. The universe tends to send us exactly what we need in order to learn and grow.

What they’re experiencing: I have been there. Hell, I am still there. I do not live in the fullness of my own integrity, and I suffer in that lack. But I am trying, goddammit. Though I may have miles to go on this journey toward solidity of self, I also know just how far I’ve come since I started this process. And what was the first step in beginning the process of change? It’s exactly what Jerry said on Tuesday: it started with centering and the breath.

What if I figure out all sorts of ways to present what I’ve done here outside of any kind of linearity?

Can I imagine someone running into Ima Radster for the first time and having a chuckle? Damn right I can.

In continuing to examine my pattern of self-abnegation through self-judgment, I thought to ask myself: What if I could change my mindset and begin to see much of what I’ve judged as mistakes not as bugs but as features?

Hmmm. Interesting. What does that mean?

Consider: so far I’ve posted more than 400 pieces on Free Refills. There’s no easy way to check my total word-count, but if I had to guess, I’d bet that I’ve published between one hundred fifty and two hundred thousand words. Anyone coming here for the first time will find more than they’re ever likely to read.

So it’s not perfect. I respond: there are buried mysteries. Isn’t that cool?

Continuing with what I wrote about yesterday:

That tendency toward self-excoriation is important in relation to Free Refills because I get down on myself for all sorts of perceived failures in my work here. Sometimes I struggle with drafting–it’ll be Saturday evening and I’ll find myself still needing to draft 2000 words to meet my quota. Sometimes I struggle with publishing–I won’t get a piece up until 11pm, or I’ll fight all week getting my pieces up. I’m hard on myself about quality–while in general I’m proud of what I publish here, not every piece is a gem.

I get down, too, because Free Refills doesn’t look all sexy-shiny; I haven’t yet figured out what the underlying code should look like. And I get down on myself because I only rarely promote the work I’m doing here.

Obviously I’m still fighting with my tendency toward perfectionism. I mean, I’ve clearly given myself some level of permission to be imperfect, or I never would have been able to keep myself publishing every weekday for all these months. But I think there’s a part of me that’s hiding nonetheless. “It’s safe to be imperfect, because as long as I float along and don’t tell anyone what I’m doing here, no one will ever know.”

If the goal is growth (and it is), this might not be the best approach.

At tennis on Saturday and soccer on Sunday, I put some of my attention toward watching my reactions to my performance, and I noticed that I am awfully hard on myself when I screw up, to the point that I usually err well on the side of staying safely in my comfort zone rather than even risk making a mistake.

Pushing against the limits of your abilities–and, yes, sometimes screwing up–is the path to improvement. Consequently, my pattern of harsh judgment toward myself keeps me from growing. And it’s not like it even helps that much. I screw up plenty anyway.

We began with the practice of centering (a practice accessible to all) and hypothesized that we could apply it in the service of meeting our highest potential.

We spent a year testing our hypothesis, and ultimately we deemed the experiment a success: through the application of centering, we discovered some of the blocks to our potential, and, through centering, we began to move beyond those blocks.

We make no claim that we’ve arrived at any destination, for there is no destination. The practice continues, and will continue, always.

But we believe now that with consciousness, we can achieve up to the very limits of our potential. With consciousness, all blocks to achievement can be overcome.

This is not theory. This is not an intellectual exercise. We are living this practice, and it is in harvesting the fruits of our practice that we dare make such bold assertions.

It is our observation that many people are stuck, embedded in patterns that no longer serve them. We’ve been stuck in such patterns ourselves, but through our practice, we have seen our patterns change.

Through our practice, we have seen our lives change for the better, and it is in service to that change that we are called to teach.

There’s so much a six-week lead time would change about how I work. Certainly it would expand my time to iterate over drafts. The path from zero draft to finished piece would look very different from the path I follow now.

The content would change too, I think. I could tell my story without paying any particular attention to what was going on in the world. Stepping completely away from topicality–how delicious that would feel!

I can barely imagine what having six weeks of pieces in the can would feel like. The most I’ve ever been ahead was two weeks, during last year’s winter-solstice sabbatical, and since I didn’t do any work during that sabbatical (it being a sabbatical, after all), I came back right into the mouth of a deadline.

I know this: Having two weeks of publications set up ahead of time felt great. I bet six weeks would feel more than three times as good.