You Fucked Up? Be kind, then, re-commit.

The more work I do with folks one-on-one and in small groups around accountability - not to mention working with myself - the more I've found this distillates slogan to be the core needed approach.

Didn't work out when you said you would? Be kind, re-commit. Haven't been meditating as often as you'd like? Be kind. Re-commit. Spent the afternoon on Facebook instead of cleaning the house? Be kind then re-commit.

If you are nice with yourself but don't recommit, you won't have accountability. If you punish yourself, then re-commit, you won't want to do it (damned if you do or don't). So both parts are needed.

This is actually a macroscopic version of what we do in meditation. In meditation, if your attention has drifted off the breath and onto a passing thought, for instance, how you decide to come back is crucial. Are you cruel to yourself, beating yourself up for making a simple mistake? Getting distracted? Are you a jerk because you can't believe you did it again? Do you have the view that when you aren't following your breath, you aren't meditating?

The view can be like this: the whole thing is meditation.
The attitude can be like this: its human to get off the track.
Your approach can be like this: Ok, that happened, now let's do it again.

It's simple, but not easy.

That's where support comes in.

Setting Soft Goals

Most of us find setting goals a tricky project. Immediately, structure triggers the critic, who kicks in and cuts us off at the pass. Do any of these lines ring familiar?
"Why even start when you know you can't accomplish it?"
"If I can't do x amount then I won't do it at all."
"I've tried it before this way 100 times, but THIS TIME it will work!"

A few years ago, a meditation instructor reminded me that "Good enough is basically good" - needing to remind our perfectionist parts that the world won't end if we don't do it exactly as we had hoped/envisioned/planned/determined is a crucial part of planning ahead. 

And as we head towards the new years, a time when a lot of people traditionally set goals, check in, assess, and make resolutions, I want to encourage you to make soft goals instead of hard ones, soft targets instead of hard targets, and explore what it would be like to allow for change and re-conneciton/assessment, being flexible instead of rigid. How do we do that? I have spent a lot of time in coaching and teaching gathering tools, guidelines, and teachings to help support this subtle but significant difference.

New Year's Intention

Every December in the last few years, I have practiced an adaptation of a game/exercise/prompt that visiting friends did with us five years ago. At that time, they mentioned they had begun to set an intention word for the year - a word to explore, to replace "resolutions" and instead be curious. That first year, my partner and I both chose "consumption" and explored that relationship via food, money and more throughout the year with as little aggression and as much curiosity as we could.


The next year, I picked another task-y like word, but the last few years I've been picking more open words, verbs like 2013's "Play," or 2014's "Breathe." This year, in late November I started to feel the call of intention words, exploring candidates like "Balance" that came to me on their own accord. After being pretty sure for a couple of weeks that "Balance" was the winner, I stumbled into "Value" in writing one day and realized it had a lot more juice: challenge, fear, power - than "Balance." So my 2015 word is "Value."

Here's the prompt I used at the beginning of 2014 for my writing classes to find their intention word:

I want you to find a word:

an intention word/s, a sankalpa*, for this year.

Explore. Play. Find a word or words or

start writing and let the word or words find you.

Try to soften and let it happen.

This is not a resolution.

This is not expectation.

This is finding a word or words you can weave into all you do for the next year.

If you already have an intention word, use this time to break it open.

Experiment with future six word stories for 2015.

Let the word/s fall apart and show you what they have to really say.

In my New Year's Intention Retreat, the first weekend of the year (this year's is this upcoming weekend), we use a period of silent contemplation to invite the word to come to us, then contemplate all the associations/meanings that arise, then write. The key factor is to INVITE the word, rather than forcing it or searching for it. 

Many folks find that one "doesn't come" the first time around, that they find many or none. That's fine. Keep staying open to what words want to attach to you for the next span of time.

This year, I am adding in work based on Danielle LaPorte's Desire Map. The gist of her work, though getting the book is both useful and powerful, is to search for - or invite - three or more words that match how you want to FEEL in any/all of your activities, so you can use them as feedback to see if what you are doing matches how you want to be feeling. I will be offering some exercises in this direction this weekend as well. I find her approach - instead of affirmations or resolutions or goals, looking for a felt sense of result and aiming for that - quite useful and in compliment to setting New Year's Intentions.

Play. Explore. Invite. If you have ways you use to prepare for the New Year, leave them here.

What Awareness Is

Intersection, 2011

This piece was written by a student, J.S., for the first class of this year. The prompt is for students to find an "intention word" for the year. This was her response.

I deeply appreciate how she gets into the nitty gritty of how we can relate with the parts of ourselves we don't like with real compassion - simply by seeing how they are a part of our physical existence. Everyone in the class really appreciated the physical imagery - it helps pop open an understanding that otherwise stays conceptual.

Awareness sometimes sounds passive - or is conceptualized this way. This student really makes it clear that awareness is active, and something we need to practice - a lot! - with gentleness.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Awareness. Attunement.

I’d like to be more aware and awake this year. Less caught up in the stories I tell myself, the chronic parade of tiresome explanations, expectations, assumptions that probably stem from some past truth, a hurt, or disappointment, but that may or may not have any relevance to the immediate now.

Yet it’s so easy to make those assumptions relevant – to believe they’re true and act on them and then bring about a negative situation in the very real here and now.

I would like to step outside the accretion of all that conditioned thinking, those automatic feelings. I feel as if there is a part to my personality that I can’t seem to shake off, a part that can be small, petty, gritchy, bitchy, prone to anger and judgment. I’d like to gather all that up, collect it all like you’d pull up lint from a garment, to suck up and vacuum the dusty, dirty, debris-ridden portions of my psyche and then empty it out and be done. But it keeps being there, oozing and emanating from my character much like sweat and mucus and oil are just a part of what’s daily produced by our bodies.