Danny MacAskill Rides Boldly

What would it feel like if you believed you could do anything?  What would it feel like if you were willing to push yourself past comfort, saw failure as a teacher and you used experience to create more courage? How would you feel if you stepped outside the box of limits that you’ve placed yourself inside, or allowed others to put you in, and saw yourself stepping into that place where the magic happens?

Danny MacAskill demonstrates how brilliantly he has done this.  He rides his bike with joy and quite a bit of humor.  I am absolutely sure that he has learned by falling along the way, but he picked his bike and himself up and pressed on.  It’s truly a wonder to watch him.

Danny MacAskill – “Way Back Home” from Dave Sowerby on Vimeo.

Notice how you feel when you watch the video, do you feel impressed, excited, inspired?  Where are those feelings being held in your body?  Feel them, notice them. Then work on remembering those feelings in your body each day for 5 minutes for the entire week.  At the end of the week, tell me what you notice.  Have fun with this exercise!

 

images from BigStockPhoto: bicycles xuanhuongho

Live Boldly

 

There is a difference between being alive and Living!  Lyssa

Messy Love

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I am not sure exactly why this quote has so captured me.  Especially in the hindsight that Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s husband, Charles Lindbergh, had three other families (wives and kids) in Europe. It’s unclear if she knew this or not. I would find it a little hard to imagine such a smart woman being completely ignorant of who her husband was, and what he was capable of, even if she didn’t know the specifics. So, maybe she did know that he had affairs, and maybe she understood that love is complicated and messy. That often we are hurt, not by another’s actions, but rather by the idea that we have of who they are and how they should act, instead of loving them in spite of the fact that we feel failed by them, for not being what we want them to be.

There are boundaries that may be healthy for us, for me affairs cross a boundary in a marriage. Would I love my husband less if he had an affair? No, don’t think so, the love would remain. I’m not sure if I would stay in the relationship, certainly if I stayed it wouldn’t be in the same relationship that we had. I don’t know what the relationship would look like, but it would change as I changed my thoughts about myself, my husband and the new “now” of our marriage. Love can bind us to people and places, it can give us purpose to learn and to move through the fear of vulnerability, and if we let it, it teaches us to stay true to love that is just for love.

Change through time is true in all relationships, family, friends, and lovers, even without traumas and dramas. We are constantly shifting how we feel about other people.  How we think about ourselves and how we think about them, changes how we feel about them.  We do this all the time.  Think about the myriad of ways that we get angry or annoyed with people, even people we love, for much less concerning issues; the kids leave lights on everywhere they go, you ask nicely, you ask sharply, you ask and ask and ask, and still, no matter where in the house you walk, the lights are on. You scream, you rant, you threaten, and in these moments you don’t love in a loving way. Because your love has stories and expectations woven into the core of it. If you loved me, you would turn off the lights because you know and care what that means to me… Or, you would turn off the lights because it’s the responsible thing to do, or it saves money, whatever. Unspoken stories, I love you when you… do what I want?  The weft and weave as I sit in my justified nagging and yelling place, not showing love, because you didn’t meet my expectations. Is this conceivably true? Can I possibly be so self centered and demanding? Having unrealistic expectations of others and then wondering why the relationship feels distant or hurtful. This is the way of severing and ending relationships, this is not loving.

Just where is my responsibility for my needs, my feelings, and my expectations? Why don’t I turn off lights as I come to them instead of being unloving? Tell myself new stories that don’t connect my love for you, or your love for me, to my expectations? This simple shift is probably the hardest thing to do. The fine line between a healthy boundary and an unrealistic expectation. This shift takes courage, because like life, it’s fragile and filled with the longing of wanting to be loved in return, and we cannot control that. It takes the strength and flexibility of a dancer walking on a tightrope with no safety net and also dancing with a partner navigating the same dangerous ground.

Not many of us do this balance well. We may have areas where we sit in Buddha like calm over a topic while the world around us loses it’s collective mind. Yet, there are always chinks in our perceptions, places where we lose our own minds, often to issues or ideas that someone else has no problem with. It keeps us humble, we aren’t so perfect ourselves.  We are all creatures of light, but also of shadow. When we recognize our imperfection, do we then withhold love from ourselves?  Often the answer is “yes.” If this is true, how can you truly love another, with all their messy imperfections, if we can’t love our own self, with all of our messy imperfections? We hide and hate our shortcomings, we drown them and pretend they don’t exist, instead focusing on the shortcomings of others.  Isn’t the idea “to love others as we love ourself” at the core of all world religions? I think “yes.” My very purpose in this life is to recognize the places in myself that need to be challenged, tweaked and tuned, to learn to love myself through the process, and learn to love others in spite of my (mis)perceptions and (mis)expectations of them. Allowing for the ebb and flow, the here and now. Being present to the tide as it dances by my shore.

This is a repost from my other blog, which I closed down.

Challenge the Limits

We all have expectations. We have them of ourselves and of others.  I am not going to give a judgment on the rightness or wrongness of expectations, because clearly communicated expectations are useful.  Yet, it is important to develop awareness around the limiting power that they can hold, depending on how we apply them.  And, we have thousands of thoughts and ideas about how the world is supposed to work, how people are supposed to be, how they are supposed to act, what they are supposed to do, and even what they are capable of.  It’s endless.  Which is why it’s so important that we start to become aware of how we may be using expectations in limiting ways.

How to Become Batman – Invisibilia Podcast

I was recently listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Invisibilia, where hosts Alix and Lulu explore the limiting qualities of expectations.  The discuss a study about rats where a person’s belief in the rats ability affects how well the rat does in a test. In the study, labels of “smart” rat and “stupid” rat were put on the rats.  The rats were actually all very equal in intelligence and breeding.  Interestingly enough, the “smart” rats did far better on the tests than the “stupid” rats, again, not because of any real difference between the rats, but because of how the person doing the testing felt about the rat as a result of believing in the label.  Our belief in our labels affect how we interact, not just with animals but, with other people and with ourselves.  Our belief in the label creates a tangible outcome.  In an interesting film called, A Class Divided, we can see how labels effect kids.

The film explores how the kids see themselves, as better or worse, depending on the messages they get from others.  In this case the teacher.  Yet, you could insert, parent, friends, or society, into the situation and get something similar.  The film also explores how when the larger culture is telling us something we like, we buy into it without much thought.  Unfortunately, we also unconsciously buy into the cultural messages that limit us.  To figure out what messages help or hurt, requires awareness.

Back to Invisibilia, in the show, How to Become Batman, we are introduced to Daniel Kish, a man who lost both of his eyes to cancer when he was a child.  But, through his own form of echolocation, can now navigate the world and “see.” What is exceptional about his story is that Daniel was allowed to explore the world, like any sighted kid.  His mother didn’t place limits on him, but instead held her breath and allowed him to explore, run into things & try things that most “blind children” wouldn’t be encouraged to do.  And, as a result, he is a lovely example of someone who doesn’t fit into the traditional idea of what being blind means.  He just assumed he could do anything and then he went out and did it.

And, the point of my sharing these examples?

1. That we begin to “see” that negative labels create limiting expectations of others.  We are not experts on what other people are capable of, in fact, all we can have is an opinion.  Our limiting expectations aren’t passive, they have impact, they effect how we have relationships with people, how we define them, interact with them, what we expect from and for them, and even how they end up being in relationship with us.

and,

2.  That we recognize how we place similar negative labels on ourselves and these labels limit us just as equally.  Limiting labels are like little confining boxes, boxes that don’t allow us to grow, fail, try again and develop trust in our abilities.  When we limit ourselves, the danger is that we miss opportunities to be fully engaged in our life and learning to move through fear.  Experiencing life, facing challenges and forging ahead, changes how our brain makes connections.  Challenging experiences teach us what does and doesn’t work, it stretches our boundaries, helping us become smarter, braver and more connected to what we want for our life.  And, that’s a good thing, right?

Be Yourself

 

Quote for the Day!

Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.  Oscar Wilde

Truth Bombs

I often talk to people about being honest and truthful. I meet people who tell me what honest people they are and how they ‘tell it like it is.’ But, I don’t often meet honest people who also have good outcomes with their honesty. More often they explode a Truth Bomb.

There is often one of two things going on here. First, if we are ‘honest’ when we are upset about someone else’s actions, thoughts, or words,, we tend to tell them the “truth” from our perspective, even if it hurts them. We support ourselves with “Sometimes the truth hurts.” But, what we miss in this statement is that telling the truth doesn’t have to be done in a hurtful way. The second thing that may be going on is that we think we need to educate someone with what we think. So we drop our “Truth bomb” on them.

I think that both of these practices are a little self-serving. I know I have had moments when I felt the need to share my perspective and told a hard truth to someone. Here is what I have learned from my own Truth Bombs.

The problem with telling a “Truth Bomb” to someone else is not the truth part, but the bomb part of the delivery.  I can’t speak for you, but when people drop a truth bomb on me, I don’t hear them.

I taught Anger Management for the Air Force for 7 years and several of the responses I have gotten to this honesty issue have sounded like this:

“I am not going to sugar coat the truth!” or,

“I am a blunt person, just deal with it!” or

“Sorry if the truth hurts, but it’s the truth and that’s not my fault!” or

“I am not responsible if you don’t like the truth!”

Yet I have to ask, “Were you effective and did you get the outcome that you wanted with your method of truth telling?” Because where I have seen this go very badly is we told the real truth like it is man! with no fluff!, and we blew the other person out of the water, we sunk their battleship, and now they won’t or can’t hear us. We may have severed the relationship, or created ammo for them to use at us a later time in a future conversation. Basically, we did harm and our truth was not only useless, but may have been abusive. And, my guess is that probably wasn’t the intent behind the truth, but it might certainly be the impact.

When I was young someone told me, “If what you do with the truth is blow someone up, your point, your insight, your message, the value of the very truth your are attempting to share would be lost.”

The best way to help my truth be heard was to develop it around the ideas of True, Kind, and Necessary. These three values were the legs that stabilized the truth. These were the values that helped people hear the truth from me. This concept fits very neatly with “Socrates’ Triple Filter Test,” True, Good, Useful. It also is something you heard at least in part, in childhood, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I don’t subscribe to the last statement, because sometimes I have to say something difficult. But, my goal is to be heard by the other person. And, if I have something difficult to say and say it in a mean and hurtful way, I know I won’t be heard.

I see True, Kind, and Necessary as aspects or legs of a stool; without all three, you lose stability. I have heard people say to just use a 2/3 model, if it is two of the three, you can say it, but I believe you will get maximum impact with the power of all 3. This does mean we sometimes have to slow down our statements, think about our responses, gain insights into what we are really trying to say, so we can say it clearly and concisely. At the end of the day, if the conversation is so important you to have it, the statement and truth are so compelling your have to share it, then you actually owe it to your conversation to do it well. Like most bombs, this one is best left unexploded.

 

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Love is as infinite as the universe.  Our ability to love is only limited by our imagination.  Lyssa

Fearless Empathy

This is is a great TED talk, about the need to have both determination (spine) and empathy (heart).  Vanessa Inn talks about how fear divides these two aspects that make up each of us, and why finding balance between the two extremes helps us to manifest our gifts into the world.  She also tells a great story about her own process of moving through fear, and changing the story she had been telling herself.