not so grounded

Trombone Player Wanted

I'm in San Antonio and besides the warm weather, riverwalk dining, prickly pear margaritas (the most luscious shade of bright pink), Lee Ann & I are teaching our annual management training.  End of today we showed the first two segments of Marcus Buckingham's Trombone Player Wanted, (download parts 1 & 2 free on iTunes).

It always makes me cry.  Not cause he's so adorably cute, dimpled chin, sky bright blue eyes and everything ... but 'cause he encourages, with passion unprecedented, that we all go with our strengths. Not our responsibilities.  Not what we've grown into.  Not even what we're good at.  But what we knew age 5 and 8 and intensely 14 those few things that carried the blood through our souls.

This clip doesn't do justice, but it's short enough to entice.  And ya get to see the dimple ...

Coming Clean

Tuesday night I attended our monthly Professional Women's Network meeting - a wonderful, eclectic group.  We've strayed from more traditional topics the last few meetings, wild conversations ranging from energy fields, to intention, to the significance behind the political battle between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.  And some wonderful questions that I'm happily pondering.

Here's the first question:  if we assume, as do many scholars, that Ronald Reagan's presidency initiated the huge shift in contemporary politics whereby facts were suddenly (and conveniently?) re-interpreted as ideology & political opinion and where profound cynicism first became a national epidemic ... then what ultimate gifts might that offer, as in "all is in divine order" kind of gifts ...?  I'm not sure yet (and suddenly faced with an emergency trip to Maryland so I can't ponder it right now ...)

Anyway, the whole conversation reminded me of another essay I published in All About Women so here it is for the archives.

Coming Clean

By Jeanne Supin

Ever been to meetings that seem civilized but feel dead?  People discuss things, share reasonable opinions, make rational decisions.  But everyone knows it’s a hoax.  Instant the meeting ends, the real conversation begins.  Folks cluster in the hallway or the parking lot, later gabbing on the phone or over drinks.  And suddenly the truth comes out.  People say what they really believe, grow lively and animated.  Then more intuitive, better answers soar.

This sort of sums up my life the last few years.  I have all these normal conversations … funny newlywed stories, tales of adolescent angst, how my house is a mess, I need more exercise, or I’m worried about the economy …

But thing is, although true, these conversations don’t tell my whole story. So I’m coming clean; I’m on-lining my off-line life.

I believe the world is changing … fast and huge and irrevocably.  Some of it’s like a parlor game.  I follow my “gut” instincts to slow down, and the hidden cop is revealed two bends down the road … I make a spontaneous marketing call that morphs into six lucrative contracts just when I need them … I email a friend out of the blue who said she had the exact same impulse … these serendipities are now so commonplace I barely register surprise.

Sometimes it’s bigger, and I can literally feel something rumble through every cell in my body.  I once had unexpected closure with a long-gone lover, and I subsequently felt every romantic abandonment drift permanently away.  I swear – it was like I re-did my past.  One moment I was simply thinking how nice the conversation was after so many years, and the next moment sensory images of one bad experience after another cascaded through me, each disappearing like vanishing debris from a defragged computer.  Absolutely gone, without a trace.  Leaving space for something brand new, which happened to be the first phone call – within seconds – from the man who would later become my husband.

I’ve seen occasional ethereal shapes move across my bedroom.  I’ve watched features in a painting change size and color.  Once in a famous Japanese Garden I actually felt miniature fairies and sensed the flowers so intensely it still makes me tremble years later.  I know people who routinely see energy swirls throughout a body with absolute clarity.  They can identify color, direction, and the type of physical or emotional congestion it blocks.  They can move those swirls, too -- whether they call them chakras, channels, meridians, auras, or energy flows – and lift away my back pain, sinus infection, or depression.

I also believe things are shifting far beyond my personal experience.  It is my understanding the world is merely tangible evidence of energy manifested:  e=mc² implies energy and matter are just different expressions of the same thing, and energy comes first.  Energetic frequencies shape matter – not the other way around.  Our world and our experiences are just functional representations of our collective imaginations, formed over millennia of human evolution.    And I believe our imaginations are changing, even if we don’t all consciously know it yet.

Here’s the condensed story best I can decipher it.  For evolutionary eons life was cool.  Then at some point we humans got scared, and we began to see everything as enemies – other species, other humans, and every “unseeable” chord nestled in nature and divinity.  So we started to fight, which led to more fighting, which caused destruction, hatred, and injustice.  Which sparked genocides and annihilation.  Our collective imaginations have trembled at that frequency, like some really rank note on a mangled tuning fork.  We created our world to match that vibration.  The horror sprang straight from our imagination.

But suddenly there’s a shift.  More people than in human history believe living out of fear (and its offshoots like anxiety, greed, or domination) is absolute madness.  Not everybody.  Not even a majority.  But enough.  Enough of us have imagined a different enough world to raise the earth’s vibration.  And so human-created garbage of lower vibrating frequency has to go.  Things like war, global warming and economic systems based on resource degradation.  Things like anger, worry and being mean to each other.  That doesn’t mean humans are destined to survive, mind you.  If we collectively don’t change our own thoughts and behavior, relentlessly jamming lower frequencies items -- like corporate greed or species superiority -- into the earth’s new vibration we’ll quickly obliterate ourselves.  But this shift in the earth’s vibration means the earth will survive regardless.  And if we get rid of our own crap, we can, in fact, live here in joy, peace, and love.

      Why a shift now?  There are a zillion proposed reasons, to name a few:

• The Mayan calendar mathematically foretold a cosmic shift in consciousness in 2012. 
• The earth’s magnetic poles are showing signs of repeating a long-ago reversal. 
• We’re moving from the Age of Pisces to Aquarius. 
• Humanity is demonstrating a natural immune response to the lethal destruction of its host, the earth. 
• Since the 1987 Harmonic Conversion new bands of light (i.e. frequency) have been able to penetrate and reconfigure the earth’s vibration and our DNA. 
• Crop circles depict consciousness-raising symbols. 
• Human’s own efforts to raise consciousness, like meditation or open-heart exercises, have created the right proportional critical mass to make the change.
• More conventional things, like the millions of people erasing poverty, oppression, and environmental disaster, have sparked the shift.
• God has said “Enough!”

      Maybe I sound crazy, but I no longer care.  I’m illuminating wide all those conversations I used to have in the darkened parking lot after those boring meetings.  And I’m not the only one.  I’m talking with people all over the place, in all professions and locations, people I never would’ve suspected to go “woo-woo.”  People looking for personal fulfillment who found enlightenment instead.  People recovering from cancer, alcoholism or a nasty divorce and quietly discovered cosmic love.  Artists searching for their muse who realized it was God.  Religious prayers that became spiritual conversations.  Parents who notice their children seem far more tapped in than mere intuition explains.  And over a million people from 139 countries watched Oprah’s online course with Eckhart Tolle.   We’re everywhere.  So I say forget the boring meetings.  Let’s move the conversations from the parking lot to the boardrooms, the classrooms, the living rooms, and make a difference.

Downstream Enough for Tonight

Darling Daughter is reading Lord of the Flies in English.  Instructed to read on their own toward the end of one class, one boy ("The other outcast like me," she says) was absently wrapping stuff around his hands while reading at his desk.  Two other boys started taunting him -- bored, mean & mean-spirited -- until the first kid, embarrassed, silently unwrapped his hands and hid them out of sight.  "I thought that stupid kids was gonna cry," one of the bullies later said to the other.  "Yeah, but I hope he doesn't go Columbine on us."  Darling Daughter, usually unfazed by most everything besides baggy jeans, was upset enough to tell me the whole thing over dinner.  

First thought, the teacher -- ignoring the whole scene -- missed a rare, perfect moment to bring 2008 high school relevance to a 1954 novel about young British boys who brutalize each other while stranded alone on an island.  But that said, I couldn't shake gut-wrenching painful empathy all night.  The poor guy -- already insecure just 'cause he's 16 forgodssake ... I actually felt all this humiliation and anger, especially for doing nothing but trying to keep from squirming in English class.  I got lost in the vast well of all 16-year old humiliations, bolstered by some fury at the bullies.

Definitely not my best downstream moment.  The Abraham folks distinguish between downstream and upstream, that furiously paddling against the current is probably not the best way to live (enjoy, contribute).  They say drop the oars entirely, of course.  But for those of us far more plodding, they suggesting we just find a slightly improved thought to redirect the boat a little.

Figurin' my pain piled onto humankind's history of humiliations wasn't particularly helpful, I tried other options:  The "We all have our own experiences to bear" and "Everything is in divine perfect order" felt totally bogus.  In the free-will/fate equation I'm definitely a Discipline Yourself to Make Conscious (ie kind & loving) Decisions type.  Besides kids should never be humiliated or treated cruelly.  By anyone, ever.  Even if they were G.W. or a serial rapists in a former life.  

I tried sympathy, too, but it was too easy to slip back into feeling (fueling) this overwhelming free-floating humiliation.  I tried to imagine the boy's stellar qualities, all the ways in which he excelled. But I don't even know the kid's name, let alone personal strengths to celebrate.  

Basically I had nothing.

So I tried Love.  Just sending the poor kid love.  I didn't even know what I was doing, frankly.  I just started thinking about my heart as I breathed, imagined opening its windows, love on the tails of each exhalation like the crayon scribbled scent of those old cartoon pies cooling beneath breezy curtains. And the more I breathed, the more I felt love grow.  I stopped doing dishes, leaned back against the quiet counter, and began to spread it around, more to the boy, then to the bullies, even some for the teacher.  Finally flew some to my daughter asleep upstairs, and suddenly felt the whole house relax.

And I felt better. The whole thing felt better.  Not the Better that comes with inevitable distances of time, new things to worry about, or Letting Go.  But this precise situation felt better right then.  As if the humiliating incident in 3 minutes near the end of English class that had worried me sick, finally took on the amount of importance it rightfully deserved -- virtually none.  Overrun with love, the yuchhy alternative just deflated, as if it recognized its puny size in comparison and vanished.  I knew my daughter and I would sleep better.  I'd like to believe the boy slept better, too, stirring slightly as the sting floated away.  But I don't know him, and I don't know how any of this really works.  But it seemed downstream enough for the night.