The combined power of personal accountability and generosity of spirit

"All of the most significant battles in life are waged within the self."

-- Sheldon Koff

"First organize the inner, then organize the outer. First organize the great, then organize the small. First organize yourself, then organize others."

-- Zhuge Liang

"Give away your life; you'll find life given back, but not merely given back--given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity."

-- Luke 6:38

The couple who inspired this message yesterday told me that they only read my messages when they're brief and to the point (one screen full), so I'm going to keep this one as short and sweet as I can. The hardest work, and the work God calls us to do is primarily on the inside, in our ability to hear Him with appreciation and obedience, and to hear others with great generosity of spirit. It is in our being and our listening, not our doing and speaking. When we take care of this important inner work, the urgent external work organizes itself more easily and flows more naturally. We are free to empty ourselves into the world, knowing that it will circulate and flow back into us and replenish us. When we strive to control external circumstances to produce our own results without doing this inner work, we might fool ourselves for a short while, but it is not naturally sustainable. We'll find the outer work tedious and tiresome, and we'll feel drained and eventually empty. Yesterday, you very graciously participated with God to prove to me once again that this was true, in that my work on me - getting my own life and priorities organized - freed me to express my generosity and love for you and your extended family, and this love and generosity was "given back with bonus and blessing," and I'm so clear I did not "produce" that result. Yes, indeed, "generosity begets generosity." Thank you so much for co-creating and celebrating with me this wonderful example of God's abundance. I love you both very much.

Disciplined ambition as access to freedom

"Discipline is the difference between the dreamer and the doer. Many people can visualize a bold future and tell a good story about what they are going to do. Some even set out to put their good intentions into practice. But few are able to stick to their plans. ... Authenticity means 'being true to me.' And it's hard work. Getting real is tough. Staying real in relationship with others is even tougher. It's a lifelong struggle to keep peeling back the layers of my external actions to get to my inner self and then to express who I really am in the world in a way that makes a difference, for myself and others."

-- Jim Clemmer

This is the quote that started out on the cover page of the newest Life Plan I'm working on. And it really hit home with me, because I have been temporarily knocked out of kilter by recent events, as far as my discipline is concerned. Sleep will help. Remembering to stay real and to feel what I feel will help. Re-focusing on my own plan and holding myself accountable for my actions will help. Expressing who I really am will make a huge difference, both for myself and others. Thanks, T.H., for the conversations, for who you are, and for helping me find my way back to myself. And in getting there, you will notice that I have found a new quote for you, all about getting back to yourself. :-)

And finally, in sharing the above quote with my good friend, D.M., as he was driving to the airport with his family to a vacation in Disney World, he brought up the expression, "ambition of the heart," in response to hearing it - that he wanted to trust the ambition behind which he applies his discipline, so I offer him this "oldie but goodie" from Merlin in The Knight in Rusty Armor, by Robert Fisher:

"Ambition that comes from the mind can get you nice castles, and it can get you fine horses. However, only ambition that comes from the heart can also bring happiness."

"What's ambition from the heart?" questioned the knight.

"Ambition from the heart is pure. It competes with no one and harms no one. In fact, it serves one in such a way that it serves others at the same time."

"How?" asked the knight, trying hard to understand.

"Here's where we can learn from this apple tree. It has become handsome and fully mature, bearing fine fruit which it gives freely to all. The more apples people pick," said Merlin, "the more the tree grows and the more beautiful it becomes. This tree is doing exactly what apple trees are meant to do - fulfilling its potential to the benefit of all. It can be the same with people when they have ambition from the heart."

Love, the action verb

"Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being 'drawn toward' another. Love is active, effective, a matter of building reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationships. I think that partners, lovers, healthy families, and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds. For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, the world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called 'love.' Love is a conscious choice - not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity - a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh."

-- Carter Heyward, in Passion for Justice

"Other people, let's face it, confront us directly with the reality of love or hate that is in our hearts, in a way that all the beautiful sunsets in the world cannot do. It is as if every person we meet wore a strip of special litmus paper on their forehead, designed to reveal the presence of love or hate in us, and all the gradations in between. How shameful and embarrassing that would be! And yet it is precisely the situation we are in, and that is why everyone on earth bears a secret resentment toward everyone else, simply for being alive. We resent one another for revealing so accurately and so openly and so painfully the depth of our own lovelessness. It is a lovelessness that is not revealed in a starry sky, but only in the eyes of a fellow human being. ...

Others are mirrors in which we are constrained to see ourselves, not as we would like to be, but as we really are in the moment. Whenever we pull away, searching in one mirror after another for a more pleasing image, what we are really doing is avoiding the truth about ourselves. ...

If we love other people for their saintliness, then we do not love at all. Love is wasted on saints. It is meant for fellow sinners."

-- Mike Mason, in The Mystery of Marriage

I've worked with numerous people over the last few days where we find ourselves wrestling with the challenges we all face in "being loving" - in other words, in acting out of the love in our hearts - with people who we "claim" to love, or feel we're "supposed" to love, and we all came to the same conclusion together that real love is a much harder game than it appears on the surface. It is excrutiatingly difficult to assume the godly perspective we seek in the midst of our pain, and the romanticized version of love just wears out so quickly. Real human emotions and struggles that arise from the "flesh and blood"-ness of us keep getting in the way of our loftiest goals. There is a surrender required - a willingness to see ourselves clearly, naked before God, as perfect children of His design, yet fatally flawed in our own execution. In this surrender of ego, we find the possibility of true bliss in our deep connection with one another as equals and our shared love for our Creator.

Fearless love

"Perhaps love is the process of my gently leading you back to yourself."

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"There is no fear in love; perfect love casteth out fear."

-- I John 4:18

The first of these is a quote from the author of one of my 21-year-old son Mark's favorite books (a book that he recently gifted me entitled The Little Prince), and the second is from one of the most powerful books on love in the Bible. Together they define coaching and friendship and relationship at their very best - the "casting out of fear" while "gently leading someone back to themselves." What a sacred role to play in another's life - to stand firm in your faith in God's way, and in your respect for (and surrender of) yourself as God's agent and messenger, and in your compassion, empathy, and love for the other person while they struggle to wake up, shed their armor, and return to themselves.

Stages of awakening

"A higher reality transcends all mental sets. The challenge is to awaken to it from the illusions generated by our desperate attachment to the thin physical crust of human reality. ... Perhaps the most consistently harmful and debilitating tendency in man has been to overestimate his spiritual accomplishments and awareness, and to underestimate his spiritual potential. The tragic consequences of this double heresy, in my view, are to be found in our present condition of incipient oblivion and in our almost total confusion concerning the reasons for our personal predicaments and the possibilities for personal and world transformation."

-- T.Kun

"Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where else to go."

-- Georges Gurdjieff

"As you awaken,
You go beyond
the need to accumulate
and perform and achieve.
When you go beyond it,
You begin to develop
an increased susceptibility
to the love extended by others
as well as the uncontrollable
urge to extend it.
Love becomes what you are."

~ Wayne Dyer

"Those who are awake live in a state of constant amazement…"

~ Jack Kornfield

These quotes, like the set on caring two weeks ago, showed up over the weekend in a naturally flowing sequence. In fact, they occur as an endless loop, rather than a straight line progression. I first became aware of the idea of a "spiritual awakening" as a possible human experience about 20 years ago, but it was more as an intellectual "topic of interest" in the midst of some very personal turmoil at the time. Then I recall finding myself reeling in it and feeling lost in confusion and fear, wanting to "give it back," so to speak, because I didn't know what to do or how to be with it. Then I recall shedding many of my previous desires for material things and external validation, layer by layer, and instead caring more and more about God, my own well-being, and that of other people. Then I began to experience everything in the world with a renewed sense of awe and wonder. Along the way, there would be the occasional sense of arrogance that assumed that I must be "chosen" or "good" or something for having gone through this. After coming through the roughest parts intact, it became very easy to overestimate my "spiritual accomplishments and awareness," and when that would happen I would get rudely reminded of my continuing state of "incipient oblivion" (which is now something I am much more comfortable in accepting about me), bringing me full circle back to the beginning. I have now gone through numerous "cycles" of this phenomenon, and am fully prepared to continue to do so until I die. It reminds me of an infinite peeling of the layers of myself, and there's no need to rush it, now that I know there's no end to it. In that realization, the cycle actually accelerates, so much so that every day (in fact, every moment) is now a new opportunity to awaken, for that moments sake.

There is nothing wrong here.

"It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"God never made His work for man to mend."

-- John Dryden

"Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes."

-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

On days when I feel too busy, too important, too "needed," to the point of burden, it is good for me to remember this, "There is nothing wrong here - including with me." :-) Life, and this world we live in, are here to be loved and respected - revered, if one is taking care of himself, at peace, and seeing things clearly. If you've forgotten how to "take off your shoes" in reverence, just experience (or remember) the birth of a child, and surely it'll come back to you in a rush. For those of you interested in more photos from Heather's birth experience, Anne has put a whole new collection up on our website at: http://www.revolutionconsulting.com/heather.htm. Relax, take your shoes off, and cherish this day.