Getting to Here

Happily Ever After?

2012-02-26T08:57:00.000-08:00

In the online simulation game, The Sims, when an avatar accomplishes all of her lifetime aspirations, she achieves Permanent Platinum status, otherwise known as permanent happiness. Once Permanently Platinum, her mood bar cannot slip below a certain level and her environment no longer impacts her happiness. She is frozen in happiness.

Interestingly, when I spoke with players of the game, without exception, all felt that Permanent Platinum was a terrible fate. Once permanent happiness had been reached, they felt stuck and disconnected from their alter ego, with nothing left to live for. Their reason for acting, namely, to improve their mood bar, was removed. As a result, everything felt washed out and pointless. Most discontinued their permanently happy characters (aka killed them off) and created new avatars, who could experience discomfort and once again aim to achieve happiness.

Despite this permanent-happiness-related depression, we in the real world maintain a Sims-ilar relationship with happiness. We view happiness as, first and foremost, a state that comes as a result of something we accomplish, attain, achieve, or otherwise acquire. We add something to our self or our life and we get happiness as a prize. If we amass enough of the things we want in our life, we will be happy. On the other hand, if we fall below a certain level of things we want, we will be delivered into the dreaded… not happiness. Consequently, we are constantly searching for that one magic thing that will deliver us into Permanent Platinum status; the right home, relationship, job, haircut, whatever our personal carrot may be. It will be the thing that guarantees our everlasting happiness. And with any luck, after its attainment, we will no longer have to show up for our life. Like in the Sims game, once we acquire this thing called permanent happiness, we will be free to stop paying attention to the now, and at last will have permission to go to sleep in our life.

Lucky for us real people, there is no such thing as Permanent Platinum stauts. Happiness is not something that arrives in a finished package, and certainly not something that we can hold onto on a permanent basis. In real life, happiness is a temporary state. We enjoy it for a while and then we lose it, and then it shows up again and so on, eternally. Happiness comes and goes like every other emotional state. In real life, external objects only bring us happiness for a finite period of time at which point, they change or we change. Change is the only thing that is permanent. If it’s Zumba right now that is bringing us happiness, we might twist our ankle or the teacher we love might move away. Poof: happiness gone. Or, if the object itself does not go away, the feeling that it was offering will change. If it’s Magnolia cupcakes bringing us happiness, we might step on the scale after a few weeks of blissful red velvet happiness and poof: happiness is gone again. If it’s our new boyfriend who makes every step a dance on air, then the day arrives when the pavement appears beneath our feet once again. There is nothing wrong with any of this happening; it is in fact the natural evolution of life. Happiness is not a feeling that is sustained; it is not static. Happiness, when it comes from an external object (no matter what that object is) is always coming and going.

And yet, despite the fact that happiness is consistently inconsistent, permanently impermanent, we judge ourselves as failures when we cannot maintain perpetual happiness. People who are not happy are seen as failures; it is our fault that we cannot hold onto a permanent state of happiness. We are not trying hard enough, not living our life right. And after all, no one wants to be a around a Debbie Downer, you might catch what she has. Regardless of unceasing evidence to the contrary, we keep demanding and expecting that happiness be something that it isn’t—that life be something that it isn’t.

Happiness—as a goal in life—is the wrong goal. Rather than chasing happiness, steadfastly defending the belief that somewhere, somehow, if we find the right thing, we will indeed be able to hold onto happiness for good—we need to find a new goal for life. We need to uncover a state of well-being, deeper than happiness, a state that can survive the swings of happiness and unhappiness, of gaining and losing what we want, the feelings that make up every human life.

Well-being is an internal state, not dependent upon any external circumstances. It is a result of our attitude towards our feelings, not the nature of the feelings themselves and not the circumstances that are causing the feelings. It is the comfort that we bring ourselves when disappointment is the cloud in our sky, the gratitude that we invoke when joy floats through, the kindness that we offer whatever feelings pass into and out of our inner landscape, regardless of what they may be. So too, well-being is an ongoing process, not an object that we obtain. True well-being can only happen in the now and devolves into an intellectual concept when applied to the past or the future. There is never a moment when we can assume we simply have it; well-being is sustained by paying attention to the moments of our life, being present and noticing what’s here. The substance of well-being is our own compassionate presence—a compassion for what we are living now. The good news is that unlike happiness, the ingredients of well-being are entirely within us, and not reliant upon circumstances that are external, perpetually in flux and too often out of our control. At last, we can call off the search for something outside ourselves! Perhaps in the game of life, we can discover our own Platinum Well-Being Status, mindful that it is not a button that we press once and forget, but rather, a way of being that requires our attention in all of the nows that we get to live!

True Strength: Learning to Feel What Is

2012-02-19T06:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/experiencing sadness_b_1271422.html

Virtual Community: Can We Survive It?

2012-02-03T08:40:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/technology-dependence_b_1241578.html

Are Smartphones Replacing Human Memory?

2012-01-21T06:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/technology-dependence_b_1209184.html

The New App: How to 'Be'

2012-01-09T11:52:00.000-08:00

The other day a friend told me about a weekend conference taking place on women and technology. Since I am a woman investigating technology, I thought I should check it out. As I could not attend in person, I streamed in via the web. Unfortunately, the first video I encountered spooked me so deeply that I never made it back to see what else was happening. So I am sorry to say that I can only report on this first presentation, but perhaps there is enough here to work with. The video was from a mommy blogger/expert, dressed in a tan business suit and patterned scarf, who offered tools for mommies traveling to this or any conference and leaving their children with a caretaker. She offered the following three tips:

1. Mommies should make sure to arrange ahead of time when she will call to speak with her children. The times chosen should be hours when the children will be available to speak.

2. The mommies should make sure to alert the caretakers to any times in the day that might be particularly stressful for their children, as in instrument-practicing or homework time. (Insert emoticons for wink and smile here.)

3. Mommies should review, with the caretakers and children, any chores for which the children are responsible, making sure that everyone is on board with the children's tasks while the mommies are away.

These were her tools for traveling mothers. Now I may be old-fashioned but these tools, to me, sounded like what used to just fall under the heading, "being a parent," or perhaps just "being a human." I wondered, do we really need a PowerPoint presentation from a mommy expert to tell us to call our children when they are available to come to the phone? I was so frightened by the strangeness of these expert suggestions that I had to call a friend to come over and watch it with me, to make sure I wasn't alone in my alarm. My friend was less spooked but did find it humorous in an odd way, saying that it reminded her of an instructional video on how to slice a mango.

The Internet boom is creating a technological language around what used to just be part of basic human interaction and relatedness. Will we soon need to be advised to say hello when greeting another person, to hug our child when she cries, prevent her from falling out of a window? If we have a relationship with our children and our caretaker (which presumably we do if we are leaving our children in their care), do we really need tools for how to function? We are developing a science and an industry around what is just plain being connected, and congratulating ourselves on the packaging of our new expert findings. There is something eerily unnerving about a woman streaming into my home, appearing on my desk, and telling me that I should communicate and have a relationship with the person with whom I entrust my children.

What's the big deal you might ask? So what if we are repeating the obvious, as if it were something terrific and worth dialoguing about? The big deal or poisonous part of all this is that our focus is now on packaging life rather than living it. Creating instructional videos on what we previously considered living life is turning life into an object, and worse, a product. Life has become a something that we relate to through a strategy or marketing plan. We are experiencing life through a middle-woman, an expert, who is voicing over our own existence.

Of course it is important to spend time thinking about what our children need and what we need when we are away (and when we are home). And of course we must dialogue with all those in our life about how we can best take care of each other, but can't we do all this without turning it into a program, without aiming a laser pointer at it? In truth, we do not need instructional videos on how to be. We are human beings, after all. The new science and language around what is really just living as an interdependent human being is reinforcing the belief that being is something that we must be do, and usually for a fee. We are convincing ourselves that we need these new structures to know what we already know -- be who we already are.

While it may put a dent in several new industries, in fact, being human is an item that we can safely remove from our current "to do" list. We do not need a roll-out strategy or search engine optimization expert to teach us how to create what already is. What we need to do is throw out the manuals and all those who tell us that we need them in order to be who we already are. Thankfully, the majesty of our basic human being-ness, of life itself, is greater than anyone or any technology could ever create.

The New Epidemic: Chronic Boredom

2011-11-29T05:47:00.001-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/chronic-boredom-epidemic_b_1110898.html

Why Do I Have A SmartPhone If I Don't Want to Talk to Anybody?

2011-11-21T17:37:00.001-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/smartphones-and-relationships_b_1097027.html

Getting Off the Diet-Binge Hamster Wheel, For Good

2011-11-11T05:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/mindful-eating_b_1073486.html

Are We Tech-ing Our Way to Despair?

2011-11-11T05:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.dailyspark.com/blog.asp?post=the_wellness_beat

Is Your Smart Phone Stealing Your Life?

2011-11-01T07:25:00.000-07:00

See below...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/living-in-the-moment_b_1064626.html

At Last... Angry Bird All Day Every Day

2011-09-24T13:03:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid and rushing around with my head cut off, my mother would always ask me, "Where's the fire?" I often wish she were still on the planet to ask the same of what's happening in our world. Last week I was checking in for a flight and noticed an interesting development: there were no actual people at the check in stations for the airline. In place of humans however, were kiosks that allowed us to check in electronically. But what made me laugh was that the people who used to check us in were now helping passengers figure out the kiosks. So we successfully removed the humans and gave the job to a computer, in order to make the task faster and easier, but now we need humans to speed up the process of using the computers that either we cannot figure out or simply do not work. Fantastic, a brilliant innovation!
The companies that are making new technological advancements brag that the new toys can make things go faster, streamline our lives, and save us that most precious commodity: time. Teenagers interviewed report that that conversations in real time take too long, go too slow. Why waste the time? Friendship is faster and more to the point by text. Relationships are easier on line without the boring in-betweens and pauses that come with real conversations. Everybody is busily talking about saving time, as if time is something we can stockpile and cash in at a later date. If only we could save enough time to get something we really want. We are so delighted to be able to spend less time doing what we used to do. Who knows, perhaps soon there will be an app for making love without having to waste the time getting to know a partner, investing the time in dinner and a movie. Maybe there already is. But the question remains: where's the fire? Where are we all rushing to? What are we frantically saving time for, in order to spend on what?
Everything I have ever really enjoyed in my life took time... everything I am skilled at, took time to learn. every important relationship, took time to grow. Time is the vitamin of meaning, and well-being. To invest time in something is nourishing to our spirit. Real time reaps real benefits. So what's the rush to do away with spending time on anything?
Lastly, from a practical perspective, don't we have to do something when we wake up in the morning? Our body has to be somewhere, doesn't it? If we've completed everything we need to do by 8:15 AM, where are we supposed to go? It seems that we are busy saving time in order to free ourselves up to sit on the couch and play solitaire on our iphones. Well-being, this is not. Is this what we have created all of this innovation for? Is this the new purpose of life, to be thoroughly idle or distracted? It seems that we would be better off trying to make our tasks more satisfying and interesting rather than speeding them up so that we can get free to... At the rate we are going, there will soon be nothing left whatsoever for us humans to do. Then, with all the activities on which we used to spend our days ground down to a moment or two, we will at last be free to play angry bird from morning till night. Hallelujah, the Messiah has come!

Taking a Break from Technology: Wellness

2011-09-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

We want to be happy. Everyone, everywhere, is trying to find—and hold onto—happiness. We do everything we are supposed to do: diligently follow the instructions, practice the techniques, and still, more often than we should be (given the amount of effort we are putting in) we are unhappy. As a psychotherapist and interfaith minister, I have spent the last two decades watching people feed their addiction to happiness; they get their short term fix here and there, but end up back on the street searching for happiness yet again, even more desperate. In truth, we are all lost at sea when it comes to happiness. The thing we want most and spend the majority of our time trying to accomplish eludes us.

We human beings are remarkable creatures,. We can do anything we set out to do. So why not happiness? Why is there such a split between our desire for happiness and our ability to find it? After many years of listening to people talk about their failed attempts to hang onto a state of happiness, I began asking myself the following questions: What is this thing we call happiness? Is it achievable? Is it reliable? Is it sustainable? If it is, why are we not happy so much of the time?

As I studied the state of happiness, I became intensely aware of its fragility. When our life circumstances change and we lose the object that’s been making us happy…poof, our happiness is gone. When uncomfortable feelings appear within our state of happiness or our desires change and whatever was bringing us happiness before no longer works, happiness again disappears. We are constantly acquiring and losing happiness.

I began to see that it is not our efforts to create happiness that are flawed, but rather, our choice of happiness as a goal. Happiness is the wrong goal for this life. Happiness relies on our ability to control circumstances that, no matter how hard we try, we cannot control. Happiness relies on circumstances staying the same. Life always changes, uncomfortable feelings always arise, and what we want is always in flux. This is the nature of life. The choice of continual happiness as a pursuit is irreconcilably flawed.

Is there something larger, deeper, more lasting than happiness? Is there a state of wellbeing that can sustain itself in the midst of the changing circumstances and emotional shifts that life includes? Is there a way to feel grounded and well even when the contents of our life are not? If so, what shift must we make to create this state that is deeper and larger than happiness?

For a long time, I used my spiritual practice to try and achieve peace and happiness. And I did, in stretches. And yet, again and again, when life presented its toughest challenges, inevitably, the peace and happiness that I had achieved slipped away.

Somewhere along the path I got tired—luckily, tired of trying to get to peace and happiness, or rather, of getting there and watching it disintegrate. And with my weariness came an interesting development: I got curious about what was actually true. I stopped trying to do something with what I was experiencing, to change it in any way, and just let myself see what was there, to experience what I was experiencing.

No longer trying to get to somewhere else, my meditation practice, and consequently my life, could then be what it was, whatever that meant at any particular moment. It was through this shift that I began to glimpse a state of being that is radically different and amazingly okay, a state that is deeper and more eternal than happiness. Indeed, it was not until I stopped trying to create happiness—as a way out of now—and started investigating what is here—a way in—that I discovered a doorway to something far more blissful than happiness had ever offered.

Normal life is not easy for anyone. Why then do we expect ourselves to be happy all the time? This foolish expectation creates tremendous suffering. Rather than trying to hang onto something whose nature is transitory, we must discover a state of wellbeing that can withstand and flourish within the inherent volatility of a human life. We should be grateful for happiness when it is here, but as a goal for life, it is unwise.

We spend our lives trying to get to some imaginary there, where happiness awaits. What we don’t know how to do is to get to here, where we are. We discover wellness when we shift our focus toward this moment and what is actually here. The secret to wellness is counter-intuitive: allow whatever is happening inside you to happen. Don’t do anything with it. Feel what you are feeling, hear what you are thinking, experience what you are experiencing. Let what is moving though you move through without changing it, judging it, or identifying with its contents. When you let go of achieving a particular outcome with your experience and meet your experience, as it is, good or bad, you will be well. You will uncover the place that relies on nothing and no one, but is inherently and eternally yours.

I Tweet Therefore I Am?

2011-09-14T13:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/why-we-twitter_b_1126208.html

The new REAL. Can You See Me? Part One...

2011-09-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend I attended a performance by a variety of different young artists, singers, poets, comedians and such, a fundraiser for a new film. It was the last in a long series of such performances that I have attended over the last six months. The artists were all in their twenties and early thirties. I was struck by the experience of listening to these young artists, most of whom are at the budding stages of their careers, and how very different young artists are now from when I was in my twenties and thirties. It is not only the choice of material that has changed, but their very essence, and most troublingly, the kind of experience that they offer through their work. Naturally, since it is the "lens" through which I am looking just now, I could not help but think about how technology is contributing to the experience that I was having as I sat there watching this performance.
What I experienced is that these performers were not trying to say something with their words, to express something important with their art, but rather, desperately needing me to watch them, to notice that they were creating art, see their uniqueness, and in so doing, to make them and the whole thing we were doing at that night's performance into something real. As opposed to artists of an earlier day, who were seamlessly IN what they were doing, expressing it, and being it, like an image in sync with its frame, these young artists all shared a desperate element of self-consciousness, of being OUT of their experience while watching it and commenting on it. But it was more than that... these artists seemed to share a desperate need for us, the audience, not only to see them, but to join them in being outside of ourselves, watching ourselves, and simultaneously, watching the experience that we were creating together. All of it felt like a bizarre and unreal narcissistic adventure: them watching us watching them, and everybody celebrating the creation of some kind of new unreal real. I felt manipulated as they used me to make them feel like they existed, and worse, demanded that I join them in this hyper self conscious state, as if I needed that from them as well, needed their mirror of my mirror in order to feel real. It all felt a bit gross, and I have been pondering ever since, as I am inclined to do, what exactly is going on in this young generation of artists and how technology plays a part in all of it (which I am sure it does). What I knew at the time was that I did not want to be there. I had been unwittingly lured into something unseemly, and frightening, as if we the audience was seduced into collusion with the performers, I an accomplice in their phantom-hood, forced to participate in my own evaporation, recreating myself inside their life-by- proxy. By our watching each other, we were somehow trying to create something real. But the real real had slipped inside a matrix of the watching, the simulated real. What was real now was the experience of trying to create something real. I tried to reassure myself that it could all be explained by the fact that these were well-educated, sophisticated young people, (Columbia film school types), and so there was bound to be a certain self-conscious over-therapized nature to the whole thing, but something continued and still continues to haunt me about all of it. It was not just the ever-familiar, privileged, navel-gazing quality of the event that was disturbing, there was and is something else, something far more insidious, scary, and dare I say prophetic. More to come...

Chicken Salad, Hold the Chicken

2011-09-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to a restaurant and the entree menu listed a grilled chicken salad. I wanted an entree-sized house salad, exactly the same thing as the grilled chicken salad but without the chicken. When I asked the twenty-something waitress if they could make that for me she told me that she would have to find out, but she doubted it. "You have the lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers, right?" I asked. She nodded. "You have the bowl?" She nodded again. "But I can't order that," she said. "What's the problem?" I inquired in true Nicholsonian style. It was then that she informed me that there was no button on the computer for her to punch in the information and therefore I could not have the meal. She generously let me know however that I could pay for the grilled chicken salad and pick off the chicken, but that was the best the computer would allow. "So the computer will "allow" me to pay $18.95 for a simple green salad without any chicken, which would be the same price as if I had the full meal? And then, I will have to pick off the chicken as well?" "Precisely," she said smiling and moving away from the table. "let me know what you decide," she called back cheerfully. Technology has rendered us helpless idiots. The monkey has locked the scientist in the cage and we are all behaving as if all is well. What happened to our human ability to make a decision, to determine what we want to happen? What happened to self reliance? Emerson wrote his famous essay on self reliance in 1841. It may have been over 150 years ago, but all these years later, my goodness does it still apply. As Emerson wrote, "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true... that is genius. ..... A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. ... A conformist merely repeats the techniques discovered by earlier innovators, but a creator boldly claims that he can do something better than everyone else preceding him. A creator is essentially someone who doubts the alleged wisdom of the status quo and who has the courage to think matters through for himself." So where have all the creators gone? How did we become a society of conformists, blindly accepting the information provided by some invisible "they" hiding inside a computer. We have become a society of sheep, allowing the computer to dictate where we travel, what we can and can not do, no longer sourcing our own authority, our own genius. We have given up on the human mind as our leader. In the process, we are becoming a community of fools, passive jesters who have turned away from our own brilliance in favor of a little box of chips. Emerson goes on, "The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. ... His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit." How true this is for our day. Technology has turned us into a nation of sloths, proud of the opportunity to do nothing. We have become disabled by the softness of our chairs, and disappeared into the easiness that we worked so hard to create. We have made ourselves so comfortable as to no longer be able to get up and actually move. And finally, Emerson writes, "A foolish consistency is the hobglobin of little minds... With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. Speak what you think now in hard words , and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood." When we defer to our computers, our storehouses of already digested information, and turn away from our own intelligence, our own creativity, and most importantly the unknown and untapped, we are choosing consistency at the expense of greatness. We ask those who supposedly know instead of asking ourselves what is true, right now, even if it was not true a moment ago. What do those who already know know? I say nothing that we do not already, and nothing that we do. We are disappearing ourselves when we make information, the already known, the already decided, into the G-d of out time. To be misunderstood, to dig into the unknown, into our own wisdom, this is what it takes to keep growing, to improve and evolve as a species. We are losing this skill and even this desire to consult our own intelligence, as the consistency and ease of information becomes the commanding force in our lives. We are choosing what is dead over what is alive, and making ourselves dead in the process.
To be self-reliant is to know and trust that we have the answers for ourselves, that our own intuition, and intelligence is the source of our greatness, and that we can be trusted to guide our own destinies. It has always been the creation of new ideas, and thinking out of the box (pun intended) that has led us down the path of growth. To think for ourselves is not necessarily the path of ease, but the path of ease is, I am afraid, the path of death, and if not death then most certainly of torpor. Our willingness to turn our lives over to the computer and let this finite box stand in for our infinite wisdom is perhaps the most frightening of all the dangers that this technological age has brought. We must reclaim our own authority, remember that we (and not a bunch of wires and cables) can and should decide what is possible, what we want to be true. We must wrestle back sovereignty over our own destinies, over the rules of our lives, re-establish the importance of our own personal and human intelligence, and autonomy. I for one (and I imagine a bunch of chickens too) am not okay with a computer making the decision as to whether or not I can have a chicken salad without the chicken.

About the Dance but Without the Dancing

2011-08-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in the last post, over the next few months, I will be looking at the hidden dangers of our new technology and what all this information and technology is doing to our minds, our hearts and our spirit. Many people in my psychotherapy practice talk about not being truly in their lives, feeling that they are just a step outside of what is happening to them, as if they can't get inside their own experience. People in our society feel as if they are living through a narrator and can't break through the veil that separates them from their own life. The reasons for this pervasive feeling are manifold and yet there is a common theme that runs throughout. We are constantly trying to solidify our experience, to pin it down and make it lasting. We reject the truth that experience is forever in flux, that it comes and goes and lives and dies with each moment. Rather than living our experience while it is happening, we are busy narrating our experience to ourselves in order to be able to relay it later, to communicate it, to have it in some kind of structure. The moment is not lived so much as it is organized and described. The idea is that once our mind has pinned down our experience, it can and will be lived later (when it is not happening). In this system, it is our mind that is doing the living for us. Our mind enters each new moment with the objective to organize and put language around what is happening. As a result, we end up with a lot of descriptions of our life, but without a sense of having lived it. In short, we send in a reporter to report to us on our life, in place of our getting to walk through it ourselves. We hear about the dance but we don't actually get to dance. At the end of the day, there is some I that does not live. So... what does all this have to do with technology? Technology is strengthening our already prevalent tendency to live through the reporter, the mind, the organizer of our life and thus, to intensify the distance between us and our experience. When I attend my daughters' events: plays, dance recitals, concerts etc., more than half of the parents are watching/participating in the experience through their smart phones. They are recording the event so as to have it, to own it as something solid, to be enjoyed and experienced... later, not now. Technology is encouraging us to live through the veil of our internal reporter, to use the moment when life is happening to record it, possess it, make sure that we have it forever. But sadly, when experience is lived through the internal reporter, we never get to have it, to feel like it is ours, cellularly, because we never really lived it, not when it was alive. We weren't there for it, in it, and being in it is the prerequisite for feeling like we are living life. When we record our life through technology, we have a life technologically, but the felt sense is of not having a life. We show off our pictures but internally we feel hollow, as if we ourselves missed out on the the experience. So everyone else gets to enjoy it, but what about us? With internal ownership of our life, we may not get to display anything later to our friends, to show off our life, but who we are changes as a result of being there for our life as it is happening. When we live life through our technological reporter, we accept and even choose what is so much a lesser prize, the safe and unsatisfying route. We capture our experience for a kind of pseudo ownership, in form only. We have our life in our iphoto file, but we don't have it inside our own being. It's a paltry substitute, to have our life on file, as it can never wield the weight and meaning that comes from living it directly, actually feeling our life as it unfolds. So what are we most afraid of? I suppose at the bottom of all of it is the fear that if we show up for our life, we will be in it as it happens, and then what? What will happen when the experience is over, in the death of the experience? The fear is that we will have to move on, to let go of our experience, to give it up, as beautiful or terrible as it was. We will have to surrender to the ever changing stream that is life. Without our mind continually organizing and recording our life, in a sense--creating rocks to hold onto in the stream, we will have to let go and enter each new experience as it arises. This is the fear: to let life give birth and pass away, to keep changing without trying to stop it or make it stay still. We are not trained in this kind of living and so we keep trying to hold onto something, to solidify what not solid. What becomes fixed then is the reporter, the recorder, the method through which we are organizing our experience. This becomes our ground and our safe haven, but one that comes at a tremendous cost to our spirit and the experience of being human.
There is yet another frightening downside to technology becoming the filter through which our experience is experienced. These parents behind their smart phones are undoubtedly having an experience while they are filming their children: they are turning knobs, adjusting locations, playing with angles, hanging from rafters. It's just that the direct experience is with their technology and not with their child or themselves. The medium through which they are experiencing their life has changed their experience. The recorder has become the recorded. The technology that at first separated us from life has become our life. It is not appropriate any longer to say that we are so busy recording our lives that we have stopped living them. Ever more frighteningly, the fleeting memory of a life that was even worth recording (to say nothing of living) is disappearing rapidly. If the original problem was that we were becoming disconnected from our own experience of life, technology has pushed us so that we are now two steps away from the original problem. We are back into a direct experience of sorts, but it was not the direct experience that we so craved nor the one that in any way nourishes our spirit.

Information: Miracle or Monster?

2011-08-22T14:06:00.000-07:00

Over the next series of months I will be blogging about technology and the less obvious dangers of this age of infinite, immediate and unrelenting information. Recently i have been reading articles and blogs that sing the benefits of having so much information/technology at our hands. As one blogger confided, whenever you want it whatever you want, it's like being a crack addict in a crack den, but it's crack that's good for you. In one article about the wonder of the app store, the author, a father of three, talked about trying to build a campfire with his kids, and when the fire would not start, quickly finding an app that explained how to make the the flame catch (for which he was deemed wonder dad). On the same camping trip, he reported being impressed by his own ability to use technology to splice together pictures of himself as a boy doing the same activities that his own children were engaging in right in front of him (which he watched through his smart phone lens). In another blog about summertime, the author boasts how, on a rainy day, she quickly called up an app that delivered the top dozen creative games to play with kids when weather strikes. Yet another talked of being a hero to his daughter because he used his iphone to save the day when his daughter got stuck on her prized landyerd weaving. The list of miracles that the internet is credited with accomplishing is endless and includes more obvious ones as well, for example, being able to find out exactly what to do when you are in a new summer town, and luckily, to be able to complete all of it without having to do any of the exploring yourself.
While there is no question that it is helpful to know how to get beet juice out of a pair of pants before the stain takes hold, there is undoubtedly a huge downside to being able to access this glut of information at every moment. It does something to our brains and our consciousness as a whole when we can find out anything we need to know without having to think, imagine, remember or create. Before this boom in information technology, if we didn't know how to do something that we wanted to do, we figured something out. We found a way to light the fire. It might not have been Google or Wikipedia's way, but we made it work. The smores got eaten. Or, if we could not tackle the challenge, we came up with something else to do. Figuring it out or inventing a new plan--both are creative endeavors. Before we had all this information at our finger tips, we used our own minds. We thought, we imagined, we problem-solved, we invented. When we sat still and faced the fact that we didn't know something, we were effectively giving our mind the chance to work and thereby, to stretch and grow. The experience of not knowing is a powerful and deeply beneficial exercise for the mind--perhaps the most important for both children and adults. Being without information forces us to germinate in a kind of fertile ground, the ground of potential. The ground from which we grow and evolve. The ground from which new ideas are born. Day after day, stuffing ourselves with answers, we turn our minds into flabby, sedated slobs--bloated, depressed and inert, like handcuffing an Olympic athlete to the refrigerator. Sadly, in so doing, we are literally depriving our mind of its ability and its right to exercise, to do what it is designed to do, what it loves to do. To think! While it may be fun to be able to find out anything that we want at any time, it is not good for us, and not good for the evolution of our brains or our spirits. It makes things easier, but easier is not always better.

Why Bother?

2011-06-29T06:11:00.000-07:00

So many of us judge the worthiness of our activities based on the nature of the activity itself rather than the intention/opportunity for growth behind it. We decide that we want to study jewelry making, folk guitar, pottery, balloon-twisting, baking, or anything else. Soon after, we ask "What's the purpose of doing that?" "Aren't I silly for wanting to spend my time with something so juvenile, useless, wasteful. Imagine doing something just because I want to! What's that going to do for me?" When we talk to ourself like this, we put out our flame, our very life force. We are constantly categorizing our actions into worthwhile and not worthwhile categories. The determining feature of a worthwhile activity is usually if it will earn money or make us famous or lead to something or somewhere we deem as important. What we fail to acknowledge however, is that which an activity will offer us spiritually or the opportunity it will provide for us to grow. These elements should be the determining factors for whether an activity is worth our time. New activities force us to stretch, to live in the uncomfortableness of not knowing something (and still keep going), to push our edges, to focus, to learn, to be a beginner, to challenge our ego, to experience the small steps of starting from the beginning, and endless other wonderful skills. Is our growth of value? Is our spiritual nourishment of value? Is something that brings us enJOYment of value? Our organic drive to evolve, stretch, push ourselves, learn, re-awaken our curiosity, and all the rest of the best of us, these are what determine the worthiness of our activities. Our experience, our growth, our joy, in short, WE must always be what matters and not the contents of what we do.

Why not NOW?

2011-06-11T15:31:00.000-07:00

In my last blog, I spoke about one of the reasons that we have such a hard time being present in the NOW. In short, we cannot enter the NOW and must remain outside it, watching it, managing it, in order to protect our identity: how we will be seen as a result of our performance in the NOW. There is another reason we cannot join the moment fully, cannot let go of the manager who is always making sure that the moment goes a particular way. Oddly, the idea that I hear so often from clients is that if they were to BE in the moment, then that would mean that they would actually BE in their lives. And when I ask what is wrong with that, they tell me that if they were to really BE living their lives then that would mean that they were also really going die someday. It is as if by staying a step outside our lives, we imagine that we somehow control death. In the full stream of the NOW, fully in sync with what is happening as it unfolding, we are in danger of death sneaking up and grabbing us, unexpectedly. If, on the other hand, we are watching ourselves in the NOW, living from the sidelines, we will see death coming, be able to protect ourselves from it happening to the person who is living "as" us. Narrating and controlling the NOW is an attempt to postpone our real life from happening, and thus ending! Unfortunately, as we keep ourselves outside the direct experience of life, time passes at exactly the same rate. Our body uses up its NOWs whether we choose to be present in them or not. Nature is not interested in our availability to the moments it awards us. Death is coming whether life is lived directly or from a seat on the bench. What is different for those that refuse to join the NOW is not a staved-off death, but rather a staved-off life. Death will arrive on schedule and unfold in the same manner as did their life: without them.

Stop the Train and Let Me Into My Life!

2011-05-03T09:28:00.000-07:00

Stop the train, i want to get off! This is the refrain I hear all day in my office. The feeling is that life is whizzing by outside a window and needs to somehow stop so you can actually experience it. What is the cause of this? We are not experiencing our life because we are not in it. We are not present as our life is happening. Our attention to the individual moments of our life is what gives our life weight, and makes us feel that we are in the journey and not outside it. Why is it so difficult for us to be in our life as it is happening? What makes the moment so threatening to enter? The fact is, most people are not in the present moment but rather USING the moment to say something about who they are or are not. The moment is an opportunity to demonstrate their identity, to correct an unfair judgment or strengthen a positive version of themselves. When we have been judged by those who are supposed to support us, it is too dangerous to simply enter the moment, BE who we are without controlling what is seen. We have lost the trust that whoever and however we show up spontaneously will be enough. In order to keep our identity safe, we develop the defensive strategy of SHOWING who we are rather than BEING it. The tragedy of this however is that we are always just a little bit outside our life, watching it speed by without us. The truth is, life does not stop; we do, and we want to be in it before that happens. What makes life slow down is our own presence within it, not as the puppeteer pulling strings from behind the glass, but from our attention planted right here, NOW. To be in your life, YOU need to be in your life. There is no way around it. Your manager cannot fill in for you on this one. We get off the train when we get into our life. But is it safe? It is true that when we allow ourselves to enter the moment without controlling it to say something about who we are, we take a chance. We risk judgment. We risk being misunderstood. And yet, whatever story is written about us as a result of our BEING who we are, we will, at the very least, have gotten to live our life as it is happening. BEING who we are means giving ourself the chance to experience life as opposed using our existence as a PR campaign with our self as the client. It is a profoundly beneficial trade-off. Indeed, the NOW (with us inside it) rather than speeding by, becomes eternal. With our own presence, life slows down and grows rich and ripe with possibility. So stop playing a part in your life and start living it directly. Take a chance: fire your internal PR manager and simply BE who you are, right here, right now.

More reliable than happiness

2011-04-10T16:26:00.000-07:00

There is a state of being that is far more reliable than happiness. There is a place inside us that is okay regardless of whether the situation in our life is okay. I call this place wellness. We are well when we are no longer reliant upon our circumstances in order to feel grounded and good. We are well when we can relax with the franticness of our own mind, and can tolerate whatever is moving through our awareness. We are well when we can tolerate whatever is happening within our own premises, without leaving the now or disappearing into its contents. We are well when we are no longer identified with the contents of our own mind. Our minds are wild, fragmented animals, broken toys, computers with frayed wires. It is the nature of the mind to fire random bits of information at us every minute of the day and night. We uncover our inherent wellness when we find the I that is under the constant firing of the mind, the I that is in fact being bombarded by the endless internal noise. When we can experience the world and ourselves from this underneath I, we can maintain a state of wellness regardless of what is going on above in the continually changing fray of life circumstances. Our place of stillness, the still I, can experience all the movement (desired or undesired) while remaining consistently well. From our seat at the center of the storm, we are always well. More on how to uncover this still I in upcoming posts...

Out of Alignment

2011-03-30T19:21:00.000-07:00

I was told by several publishers that I would have to blog in order to strengthen my "platform" and get my book published by a major press. Sadly, all this technology, this business of getting a platform, is entirely in contradiction to the message of my book, namely, being well. The UN-Happiness Project: How to Be Well in a Happiness-Addicted World is about finding our inherent wellness, our place of silence amidst all the noise, living from our deeper knowing and not through the franticness of our minds. This unending technology and social media pulls us up into our heads and out of our hearts, away from the center where our Spirit is well. Promoting myself on the internet is an experience that creates UN-wellness. Ultimately the question shifts from "what will getting this book published DO for me (my ego self)?" to "how do I want to live the moments of my life, right now?" The truth is, I do not need anything FROM this book. The process of writing it was remarkable. Building the business of ME is out of alignment with my living as Spirit, and out of alignment with how I want to live. As such, I choose the experience of life, I choose living a life that is well instead of trying to sell/arrange myself into a life that will supposedly benefit my ego. I will blog as my heart is called to, because I want to and not because I should--telling myself that it will be good for ME. It is not good for the ME that is awareness. Knowing myself as awareness, consciousness, presence, I am moved to be still and listen, and to use words and technology only when they serve awareness and what is truly my growing edge. Ultimately, it comes down to whether we want to live as the narrator of our our lives, arranging a life that is "good" for us, or, if we want to live directly as who we are, trusting that this directness will lead us to well-being and to what is best for our true self. For me, I choose the latter.

And Another Thing

2011-03-30T19:20:00.001-07:00

It is quite clear to me as I go through this process of trying to get my book published that the business of creating a platform and selling myself is taking me as far away from the content of the work as humanly possible. The book is about creating a consistent state of well-being, a how to for living through our hearts and not our heads. I have spent the last 6 hours trying to figure out how to get hooked up with a thousand social media sites, 6 hours trapped in my head, so that someone will get to read about living from the heart. Selling the message in this technology requires that we spend our days trapped in our minds, staring into boxes on a screen, distracted, consumed, not present, tinkering with codes, passwords and the language of sales. All the tasks that publishing now requires: the social media, web design, pitch-writing, proposal-designing, self-promotion, the insane hours of work "about" the work, is preventing us from having any time to create, and ultimately, from making the world a better place. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but one could easily argue that forcing us to be "linked in" to this technological swirl is a good way to disempower us, and keep us from challenging the way things are. All this buzzing about, how we are going to sell nothing (because we have no time to create something), is in fact in the way of our actually saying something, or for that matter, changing the world. Gone are the days when the publishing houses and PR folks did their jobs. Now, as authors and artists, we are expected to do everyone's job. We cannot just be a writer or an expert in our own field, we must become a one-woman geek squad, webmaster, flash executive, marketing director, and a PR and advertising creative as well. We are to tell the agents how to sell our book, the publishers how to market our book, the promoters how to position us. What is "their" job exactly? But most importantly, what are we learning through all this technological/marketing expertise other than how to be technology and marketing experts? Where is the space to work on the content that this technology/marketing is supposed to be selling? Once again, the monkey has scampered off and locked the scientist left in the cage. What is the solution to all this? Can we opt out and start conducting real conversations of content ever again? How do we get out of this terrible trap that we are in? Is there a way to return to the practice of creating valuable material/contents that can help us evolve as a society? I am in the process of figuring it all out... Stay tuned.

The Beginning

2011-03-30T19:19:00.003-07:00

Today I am beginning my blog. Why? Because I have written a book that I am now shopping to agents and publishers. I am hearing the same thing back from each, "You do not have enough of a platform for us to get behind you. The material may be fabulous but if we don't know for sure that we can sell it to enough people (and we certainly are not going to be the first to believe in you), you are out of luck." I actually had a conversation with an editor this morning about building my planks so that my platform could be stronger. Great material, she agreed, but who will buy it? And so, reluctantly, I begin my journey out into the world of blogging. I am sick at my stomach as I feed the modern-day marketing machine that I so disagree with, bow to the monster, but here I sit writing a blog, building my planks. What happened to the days when content ruled decisions? What happened to standing behind our own experience, because we believe in what someone has to say? What happened to our faith in the people that read books, that they will read something that has not been presented to them by Oprah. What happened to publishing?