Free Refills

Quite a few of the pieces I've put up here have been about writing. If the goal for this space is to publish things that are valuable to readers besides me (and it is), then what am I achieving when I write about writing?

Let's explore.

Trusting the Zero Drafts

A bunch of the zero drafts I wrote when I started actively playing with the What-if rules had to do with the process itself. In zero-drafting, it's axiomatic that you will write about what you need to write about. Honest zero-drafting is an exploration of the unknown.

Of course that doesn't mean that everything should be published. Sometimes you machete your way through the jungles of your mind only to plunge out onto a sidewalk in the most boring wonder-bread suburban housing development you've ever seen. "I'll go ahead and leave this one off the map," you think. And you dive back into the jungle.

But if you keep ending up in that same stupid housing development ("Jesus," you say. "Did they build these things out of friggin' cardboard?"), maybe you should take a closer look around. Maybe things aren't as boring as they seem. Maybe it's all "Invasion of the Pod People" around here or something.

Your intuition keeps leading you back here. Trust it. Find out why.

If the initial drafting is a study in welcoming imperfection, and the moment of publication an acknowledgment of it, how do I make the editing a bridge that maintains that spirit?

It came with a conscious choice, one that I admit I still struggle with every day. I wanted to make sure that the deepest spirit of the zero draft remained intact, so I began giving myself a piece of permission that both thrilled and scared me: not only would I allow the piece to not be perfect, I would allow it to be imperfect. (And yes, there's a difference.) Several times already since I started publishing on this blog, I've discovered something that wanted to be said, but I wasn't entirely happy with how I expressed it despite several attempts to smooth it out, so I'd just leave it in there. I've chosen to publish the struggle to not attach to the struggle. By freeing myself to let hard things be hard, I don't have to make them harder.

That last point is really important. This isn't meant to be facile. I'm not doing this out of some desperate cry for mercy. There are two connotation to "surrender" and I'm trying to practice the one that's connotatively positive. I'm not giving up. I'm just not fighting.

Which is actually another way of saying that in this practice, I am trying to push myself. I am doing this with the express intention of improving, both technically and energetically. I am seeking to cultivate the ease that comes when energy is flowing freely. I understand now that we are channels for energy, and so we are meant to circulate energy within and through ourselves, and I have learned, too, that there is such a thing as too little energy flow--which leads to stagnation and depression--and such a thing as too much--which leads to burnout and exhaustion and, often, injury. (Note that injury isn't always physical. There are mental/psychic/emotional injuries as well.) Jerry calls this space of not-too-hot-not-too-cold, "the zone of moderation," and so now I do too. In that space, it's not that you aren't pushing yourself. You are. Stay within the zone of moderation and improvement becomes constant, consistent, and daily. Go beyond and it stops being sustainable.

That piece about sustainability is critical as well. This may be "just a blog," but for me it's also a piece in a much larger puzzle. I'm here for the long haul. This is the real work, and I ain't stopping.

In mid-February I started making new rules for myself to play under. They got expressed as What-ifs: What if I zero-draft with the intention of publishing the piece right away? What if I decide ahead of time that I'll call the piece done once I get past 1,000 words?

So I zero-drafted a bunch of pieces under those rules, but I never did follow through with the intention of publishing right away. 1,000 words of unexpurgated prose? It seemed like a useful idea at first, but soon I recognized that the intention of publishing without an edit got in the way of the expansiveness that is the whole raison d'etre of the zero draft: to be able to use the writing itself to learn what needs to be said. The stumbling, the uncertainty, the space to be wrong: the zero draft welcomes them all. It's a fantastic tool for the writer, but unlikely to carry much value for the average reader.

If I am seeking most of all expansion, then the question of every operating What-if should be: Does this rule aid or detract from expansion?

From that perspective, the choice to not publish immediately was more expansive than its opposite. Knowing that I could and would go back and edit before publication made me a) take more chances in the initial drafting, because I could be as wrong as necessary; b) have more confidence in the ultimate value of the piece, because I knew I had seen it multiple times, had cut out or changed parts that hadn't worked, and so on. Well-earned confidence is inherently expansive.

What I didn't want to do, though, was contract myself through intended expansion. At what point does further editing become a negative? That is, when is a piece done? I've asked that question for years and years and my best answer is that at some point, after you've made all the really obvious improvements, you just decide it's done. What you don't do is wait for it to be perfect. Perfectionism is so fiercely insidious precisely because it so easily masquerades as generosity to the eventual reader: "Look!" it says. "I'm not putting anything out there until it's perfect! You can trust me!" But really perfectionism takes fear--not in itself a bad thing--and makes it into a tool for undermining your own self-trust. There's no perfect piece of writing. At some point you embrace the imperfection as representative of the the essential humanity requisite in the creative act.

Then you let the piece go out into the world, where perhaps it will touch another (also imperfect) human.

You can play the game such that it doesn't have to be hard, the rules have always been self-imposed, it was always like that and always will be, and the limit to your life is exactly the limit of your belief, your true belief, and you can just expand and expand and expand.

For most of us, though, that takes some practice.

Meet your day with expansion rather than contraction. Try it. You can do it, for realsies.

Try it. And then feel it. If you keep feeling you will come to understand where energy is flowing and where you aren't allowing it to flow, and you will also see that in its own way it is always flowing.

Breaking out of your previous limits doesn't always feel good. You will discover that you are holding within yourself reservoirs of unfelt pain, and sadness, and grief, and it seems the only way to drain them is to feel what you haven't allowed yourself to feel. I don't know why that's necessary. Maybe there's a reason for it. Maybe the day will come when I can explain it. For now, with contraction no longer an option, I'll just continue to work on expansion, and I will feel what needs to be felt.

When you begin to understand that the rules are self-imposed, and if you don't like the game then you can change them, you can play a different game, and you can do it again and again until you find the game that makes life into a joy again, then ...

If I now am able to feel the discomfort of writing and can allow myself to feel it and don't have to flee from it, does that mean that I have vanquished procrastination?

Ha ha ha, aren't you cute?

In a word: no.

But I have noticed what procrastination feels like.

And here's what procrastination feels like: nothing. Procrastination, I'm discovering, is a way of passing time without feeling anything. I can get wrapped up in web surfing or Game or whatever, and while I'm doing it, the experience happens in my head only. There is no associated feeling. Time simply passes. My attention is on what I'm doing. And I'm comfortable in that state.

Interestingly, until I really examined it, I would have said that procrastination feels awful, but that's not true. In procrastinating, I am choosing the anodyne comfort of numbness over the sometimes terrifying experience of actual moment-by-moment feeling. Upon real examination I saw that it's the recognition of procrastination that feels bad. And frequently the response to that recognition is to dive right back into procrastination. Ah, welcome numbness.

From that perspective, I began to wonder if procrastination is merely the name for a particular manifestation of not-feeling. Perhaps an essential numbness has been my practice for years, and procrastination is merely the form it takes when I think I should be working. Actual creative work always entails risk--risk and vulnerability being at the heart of every creative endeavor--and perhaps that level of risk means that there is no way to avoid the feelings of fear and the like that arise in that space. Numbness in that space obviates the work--it becomes simply impossible. And so maybe procrastination is what arises in the space of intention to work while (actively or passively) refusing to feel. Words simply won't come. Hello, Game.

If that's true, then what explains the however-many hundred-thousand or million words I've written over the years? How did I manage to write them if I was so numb?

Let me propose that unawareness of feeling is not the same thing as numbness. No matter how successful the practice of numbness/not-being-present, sometimes the will to create pushed me beyond it, and there the essential need to be present and vulnerable forced me to some degree to feel.

Energetically, it occurs to me that maybe this is what was going on: I was forced to feel--writing demands it--but the feelings were unpleasant: uncertainty and fear and the like. As such, I had two mechanisms for dealing with them: one was to fight to avoid feeling too acutely, to ignore the feelings or to push them away, which demanded a fairly substantial amount of energy. The other was to not feel them, to return to numbness, which is easier. One manifested as work that tended to burn me out, the other was long periods of procrastination.

I notice I procrastinate less now, but it still happens all the time. And it still feels comfortable and familiar and ... nothing. It has always felt like this.

But writing has not always felt like this.

If I had to summarize in briefest terms what Jerry teaches, I'd say he teaches the ability to feel what's actually present, which is less obvious and much deeper than it perhaps sounds. I'm finding most people avoid feeling most of the time.

This work has provided me with an unanticipated benefit in relation to my writing. When I really started writing again in earnest, I discovered that I could now feel the struggle of writing.

It hadn't occurred to me that it was ever otherwise, but quickly I could see that so much of my writing career, especially during the big gaps when I excused myself from writing at all, happened as a reaction to a feeling that I didn't let myself actually feel. The stress and fear of writing was something I simply avoided, without even realizing I was doing it.

But once I got better at feeling things--discovering them in the body, letting them be what they were, breathing through the sensations with as little judgment as possible--I could witness what felt unpleasant about writing but not stop writing. The unpleasant sensations were just unpleasant sensations. They had no real solidity, were just bodily manifestations of my conflicted emotions about writing. If I just let them be and kept writing, they might or might not go away, but I didn't have to stop writing to avoid them, or bother to avoid them at all.

How deeply I feel them now depends on the day. I've zero-drafted something like 75,000 words since the winter solstice, and some days it's easy to write to 1,000 words and beyond, and some days I can just get myself to 1,000, and some days it all hurts and some days it doesn't but in general I am showing up and getting my writing done, and I think by not stopping the writing, irrespective of the sensations that arise, fewer unpleasant sensations are arising.

In the initial drafting, anyway. I'm meeting a lot of uncertainty in the editing, and many days when I click that "Publish" button, I feel straight-up fear.

I'm sure you can write the punchline yourself: these feelings, too, simply arise and then pass away.

Jerry offers his spiritual teachings sneakily, through a hard-to-object-to back door: he teaches centering and grounding via basic breathing exercises, and then takes that technique into the gym and starts you working with lifting weights. If you pay attention and really work with his techniques, the results can be pretty literally mind-blowing.

Oh, and you'll get stronger, too.

You have to understand: I started lifting weights during my first semester of college. I am now 40 years old, so I have been weight-training for literally more than half my life.

I went to do my first workout after Jerry taught me his techniques and I entered that space as I normally did, by putting my earphones in and putting some music on. I tried to do a simple bench press, and discovered I couldn't do what he'd taught me to do that way. I had to stop the music to really concentrate. Imagine my surprise. In that moment, I discovered that despite having been benching for over twenty years, I didn't know what a bench press felt like, I only knew what it looked like. I had positioned my hands and determined the range of motion entirely by sight. When I tried to use the cues Jerry taught me--center my energy, inhale on the exertion phase, let the breath determine range of motion--I found that I had never felt a bench press, not ever. And feeling the exercise was a radically new experience.

Let's see if I can adequately articulate what a mind-fuck that was. Maybe a reasonable analogy would be this: imagine going through your whole life seeing only in black and white and shades of grey. Imagine having someone point out that if you just breathe a little differently and pay attention to the breath just so, things will be different. What the hell, you say. I could use some different. So you try it and all the sudden you start to perceive, dimly at first but more vividly as days go on: color. And it never, ever occurred to you before that it could have been any other way. Shit, you even thought you were good at perceiving hues.

Pay particular attention to that last bit, because that bit is about identity. Something once seen cannot be unseen. There's no stepping off the path once it is truly revealed. And suddenly you might find yourself having a new relationship with the questions, "Who am I?" and "What the fuck is happening?"

By the end of our first meetings, after an hour or two in the gym and an hour or two at the coffee shop discussing the writing, it was clear that while Jerry may be teaching in the gym via weight-training and fitness, that's not what he's teaching. I now had an understanding of why he said he didn't know of anyone else doing what he was doing, and why he was having trouble writing about it.

I asked him, Why this particular path?

"Fitness is easier to teach than spirituality," he said.

At this point I'd been lifting weights for more than half my life.

When the student is ready the teacher appears.

I met Jerry at Ed's weekly poker game. He was a nice enough guy, initially a bit of a nit at the table (but then so was I). At some point he committed to improving his game under Ed's tutelage (as did I), and his game got stronger. And for a long time those were the main things I knew about the guy. I mean, we shared details and stuff, but this was guy camaraderie at its finest: whiskey, sports talk and poker. Neither a complicated recipe, nor a complicated result.

So over the months I picked up that he was a fitness consultant, and he seemed to specialize in helping people recover from injury.

One night at the game, right around the time in early August that I hit bottom, he was talking in a bit more detail about his work, and how no one he knew of does exactly what he does, and he mentioned that he'd been working on a book for more than ten years, but he never seemed to be able to find the traction to get it completed.

Well, I know a few things about stuckness, and I told him, "I can help you with that."

Not long thereafter, Ed, Jerry and I met for brunch at Snooze here in Boulder. I remember the conversation as pleasant, enjoyable, and relatively far-reaching. I remember a beautiful summer morning. I remember where we were sitting, and that my friend Charity (who works there) sent us one of their special pancakes, gratis.

Beyond that, there's only one specific detail I recall: I was describing the difference between how I approach skiing and snowboarding. When I ski, it's like I'm trying to dominate the mountain. On my snowboard, I play more; my approach is more about flow, and I remember how I illustrated this: I held my hand out in front of me, oriented vertically, and moved it back and forth, not unlike a fish swimming through water. From that detail I surmise that we'd gotten talking about energy and flow.

I must have explained something about my writing techniques. Jerry thought perhaps I could be helpful. He told me I'd have to understand what it was that he did, and that to do so I'd have to come work with him at the gym because he couldn't really explain it simply in words (perhaps explaining somewhat his difficulties with the book). Seemed reasonable enough. I agreed.

Funny how sometimes the things that turn out to be most fateful don't seem all that remarkable at the time.

We started working together a bit more than two weeks later, on Friday, September 5th. We met in the gym for him to show me what he does, and then we went to a local coffeeshop to discuss the writing. By that point I was a month into making big changes in my life, and so I was primed, and what Jerry showed me turned out to be immediately and startlingly profound, and after that things started to move very quickly indeed.