Joyride! - The Adventure Matrix Blog
Adventure is the Destination
I had a blast playing the concert, and I am finalizing the date/time/place for my next concert. If you enjoy the video and are interested in knowing when the next one is scheduled, e-mail me (frances@adventurematrix.com) and I'll send you the information as soon as the concert is set.
One of the things that occurred to me as I was making this clip and thinking about sharing it on Facebook is how Facebook connects me to people from all different times in my life, and how they know different parts/versions of me. People who knew me growing up and in undergrad college won't be surprised at all, since playing piano was a huge part of my life then. My hanggliding friends, my Boston friends, and even some of my Albuquerque friends might be really surprised, since I basically didn't play music for about 15 years, and many of them have no idea that I play.
It feels great to come back to music and claim it in my own way. I enjoyed playing music before, but it never felt so much like home before I left it and came back to it in a whole new way. I grew up playing mostly classical music, then some of my own compositions. I enjoyed this somewhat, but nothing compares to the feeling of playing music in the way my heart and hands have longed for. It's my way - it's part of what I'm on this planet to do. And it feels so good to be back home with this part of myself.
Have you returned to some part of your past in a new way recently? How have you made it your own?
One of the flight attendants came on the intercom and gave us instructions. Things like: Remove sharp objects from our pockets. Take off high heels. Bend forward and wrap our arms around our knees before landing. These instructions made it clear that it was a real possibility that we might crash, and it was sobering.
There were several minutes of not knowing what was going to happen. Those minutes of not knowing if we were going to live or die were an extraordinary gift to me. They cut out all the chatter in my brain about my life, fear of failure, fear of what other people might think, fear of not knowing how to do something. All the noise in my head was reduced to a single question about what really matters: Is my life what I want it to be?
The answer was a feeling of contentment and peace. The answer was yes. I wouldn't change a thing. I had no regrets. I could die knowing that right now I am living life in a way that feels right for me. I had the feeling that this was truly enough - I didn't need to do anything other than be on my adventure of pursuing joy to be content. Yes, there are other adventures I very much want to live, but if my life ended here, I wouldn't regret the way I've lived the last year.
This yes was a quiet epiphany. There have been plenty of times this year when I wondered if I was on a wild goose chase on my adventure of following the flow in pursuit of joy and bliss. I sometimes wondered if I'd actually get what I was looking for by following the flow. That moment of not knowing whether I would live or die gave me the clarity to feel the contentment, the rightness of my life. To get confirmation that my adventure has indeed taken me into living a life that feels right. An extraordinary gift in an unexpected package.
I'm sure I'll have moments of wondering and doubt in the future - it's part of adventure. But there is for me now a greater trust of myself and the choices I make about how I live my life. I've been through the litmus test of facing potential death, and I found that this adventure of following the flow in pursuit of joy and bliss brings me contentment.
A few moments before landing, we leaned forward with our arms wrapped around our knees, waiting to see what would happen. I heard a very, very soft thunk that kind of felt like landing, but was so soft I didn't know if we had landed or not. Several seconds went by. Then another very soft thunk, and the vibration of wheels on ground rumbling up through our seats and feet. Gratitude and relief poured through me. The pilot came on and said, "We can all breathe now...we're okay...my heart is pounding...welcome to Albuquerque." We cheered, clapped, and cried.
I feel like I have been given a second chance at life. A chance to live, knowing with renewed clarity how precious life is. I feel a strong, clear recommitment to stay on my track of pursuing joy and bliss and following the flow. A recommitment to not be bogged down by distractions or fears. A recommitment to being fully, lovingly present with every human being I encounter and every experience I have.
Life is so precious...I really don't know when it's going to end. It could have ended yesterday at 2 pm. It could end tomorrow at 2 pm. Slogging through ten years or even ten days of doing what is not on my path of joy and bliss is a waste of my precious life. This is why I pursue joy and bliss, why I follow the flow, why I live adventurously. This is my precious life, and I am going to live it as fully as I can.
This is also why I'm a life coach: because each of our human lives is precious, is finite, and we don't know when it's going to end. Any moment could be our last. There are no minutes to waste. We may continue beyond this human life (and I think we do), but this life is a unique experience to be relished. As a life coach, I help people live so that their answer to the question, "Is my life what I want it to be?" is a resounding "Yes!"
If you were going to die five minutes from right now, and you were given the chance to change anything, would you? If yes, don't wait. Don't wait for your own personal potential plane crash. Change it now. Take the first small step today. Don't assume that you'll have another 50 years or 50 minutes, because you might not. If you want help taking that step and making that change, call me to set up your first two free sessions. I would love to support you as your life coach.
Coming Home - Play Music Adventure is a paradox.
It's about leaving home.
And it's also about coming home. Home is the place that we know, that feels comfortable and safe. It could be the job we have, our religion, our friends, a set of beliefs, a place, or something else. Living adventurously sometimes asks us to leave the comfort of our metaphorical home, and it can be really difficult. Leaving home is about stepping outside of our comfort zones, leaving what is familiar, going into the unfamiliar and taking risks. When we leave home, we often feel terrified, we lose parts of our lives we care about and grieve, and we feel disoriented. But it is worth it, because adventure is a paradox: it is about leaving home, but it is also about coming home - coming home to ourselves. The first time I left home was leaving my childhood spiritual home. I grew up in a very spiritually-centered Christian home. I embraced my parents' spirituality as my own, and my life was totally defined by my spiritual beliefs, which were rooted in a literal interpretation of the protestant Bible. My spirituality was interwoven everywhere in my life - what I did with my time, what I considered right and wrong, how I acted, how I made decisions, what I watched and listened to and said. Ironically enough, my religious beliefs really started unraveling when I took New Testament History in my last semester at Belmont University. Despite having read the Bible constantly throughout my life, it was the first time that I looked at passages in two of the gospels and realized that they both couldn't be literally true. If one of those passages couldn't be true, what else might not be true? That moment rocked me to my core. I went back to my dorm room, laid on my bed, and panicked. Two essential parts of me were colliding: the part of me that lived by the Bible as literal truth, and the part of me that followed the truth the best I knew. I stared into the abyss of possibly not being what I had been my whole life. I wanted so much to stay where I felt safe. I brushed aside my concerns about the literal discrepancy I had found in the Bible, but they kept coming back. I couldn't ignore the part of me that wanted to live by the truth. Once I started questioning, I couldn't stop. In the middle of this unraveling, my first big experience of loss and unexplainable pain came. My best friend's parents died within a year and a half of each other. Good, kind, people, who died protracted, painful, debilitating deaths. Two days before my friend's mom died, my dog Max died. Six months later, a friend of mine committed suicide, and a week after that, my dog Delilah died. The year of death. I felt driven into the ground by loss after loss. I was furious and heartbroken. How could the world be like this? I had been taught that if you were good, good things happened to you. Bad things only happened to bad people. If it was true that bad things could happen to good people, what else was true? It didn't make sense to me that there could be a loving presence in the universe and let this kind of stuff happen. It made more sense to me that there was no God, and everything was just an accident. That at least wasn't cruel. At the time, it was the best way I knew how to understand why bad things happened to good people. So I left my childhood spiritual home of Christianity. I didn't call it an adventure at the time, but it had all the hallmarks of adventure. I was leaving the familiar, comfortable, safe-feeling territory of my beliefs to venture out into the unknown, uncomfortable, very unsafe-feeling territory of not knowing what I believed anymore. It was terrifying to leave the home of my spiritual beliefs. I was terrified to not know what was true anymore, to feel so unmoored, so undirected. I was terrified to not be sure anymore that God was watching out for me. I was terrified to not know who I was anymore. I lost things I cared about deeply, and I grieved intensely. I lost a hugely important part of my connection with my parents. I also lost my identity. If you had asked me before age 21 what my most important defining characteristic was, I would have said ‘Christian'. That identity, gone. I had no idea who I was without being a Christian. I was also deeply disoriented. I had no idea how to take in and sort information. No longer could I just easily put my experiences through the ‘what does the Bible say' filter. No longer could I make decisions based on my understanding of God's will. Despite the profound terror, grief, and disorientation of this experience, it was also one of the best things that ever happened to me. In leaving my spiritual home, I was able to come home to myself in a deeper way than I ever had before. I began discovering what was really at my core, instead of what other people told me I should believe, or what I thought I should believe, or what felt safe to believe. In a long, challenging, dynamic process that continues, I found my own true orientation to the world. I healed from my losses. Eventually the terror dissipated and gave way to joy, love, and peace. I came home to myself. I came home to knowing that truth is really, really, important to me. I found that I love and trust myself enough to seek the truth for myself and live by it, even when it is really difficult. I came home to knowing that living a life caring about how I relate to myself, to other people, to the planet, to everything, is at my core. I came home to the meaning of my name, Frances, which is Freedom. Freedom from rules, from unquestioned assumptions, from history, from fear, from shoulds. Freedom to be myself, to be adventurous, to pursue bliss, to be unabashedly joyful, to love enormously. I came home to directly experiencing God in everyday life as joy-in flying a hangglider, laughing with friends, backpacking in the mountains, eating a great meal, and the process of wrestling with big questions. I came home to adventure. To a life of play and experimentation and daring and risk-taking, for the sake of experiencing the delicious variety, abundance, joy and bliss in the universe. Ironically enough, leaving my childhood spiritual home allowed me to come home to my true spiritual home. I came home to re-developing a personal relationship with the divine, on terms aligned with the truth the best I know it. It's a relationship that is spacious, dynamic, and loving. In this relationship, there is room for all of us, and we are all part of the same thing. There are many faces of God, and many ways to connect with the divine love that permeates and holds us all. It's a relationship about possibility and love, instead of rules and judgment. I have wondered why I spent all those years wandering without a conscious sense of connection with the divine. I think I needed that time away from rules and religious structures to be able to discover my true self - to get the essence of life as truth, love, joy, peace, freedom, and adventure. I had to leave home to come home. So this is the paradox of adventure: when we're willing to take the risk of leaving home, of leaving behind that which is known and familiar, in order to find and follow what our hearts know is true, we come home to ourselves. When we are willing to risk terror, grief, and disorientation, we are opening ourselves to a profound sense of peace, joy, and knowing who we are. About a year ago, I wrote a song for a friend's wedding called ‘Coming Home.' I wrote it to celebrate coming home to the love of your life. I also wrote it as a love song about coming home to myself. I invite you to close your eyes and listen to it, to connect with the longing and joy inside of you in the process of coming home to yourself. And I invite you to ask yourself these questions: What part of you are you longing for? What part of you are you coming home to? Coming Home - Play Music Here are the lyrics: Coming Home
Written By Frances Faith Clark
© 2007 Frances Faith Clark
Performed by Frances Clark (Vocals) and Janet Clark (Piano) I have traveled far and wide
Seen the wonders of the world
Longed for you here by my side
Now I'm coming home to you I'm coming home to you
I'm coming home to you
I'm coming home to you
Yes I'm coming home to you We will travel far and wide
Explore the mysteries of the world
Walk together, side by side
Now I'm coming home with you I'm coming home with you
I'm coming home with you
I'm coming home with you
Yes I'm coming home with you We will laugh and we will cry
We will mourn and celebrate
Hand in hand, and side by side
Now I'm coming home for you I'm coming home for you
I'm coming home for you
I'm coming home for you
Yes I'm coming home for you Though we don't know where we're going
And we don't know for how long
We know we'll be together
And I'm coming home to you I'm coming home to you
I'm coming home with you
I'm coming home for you
Yes I'm coming home to you I'm coming home to you
I'm coming home with you
I'm coming home for you
Yes I'm coming home to you I'm coming home to you
Fence of Pain - Play the Music My girlfriend, Maribeth, has two great dogs, Goldie and Suede. I often go on a morning hike with them and my two dogs, Keetna and Tilley. The moment when the four dogs first go bursting out of the house and down the hill in sheer delight is one of the most joyful moments of my day and theirs. They go running pell-mell down the hill until they get to the fence around the house. The fence is both physical and electric. If you don't know, here's how electric fences for dogs work: there is an electric wire around the perimeter of the fence. The dog wears a collar that senses when it gets close to the wire and beeps. If the dog keeps getting closer, at some point the collar gives her a mild shock to discourage her from crossing the wire. Most dogs learn quickly that this isn't any fun at all, and when they hear the beeping, they move away from the fence to avoid the shock. Goldie and Suede have decided that the fence is optional. There are many days when I drive into the driveway and find one or both of them outside the fence, happily wagging their tails to greet me. They've created at least three escape hatches through the physical fence. But they still have to endure the shock to cross over the wire's boundary. Apparently, they've decided it's worth it. When we get to the fence, Suede, Keetna, and Tilley easily cross it. But Goldie has considerable anxiety about crossing the fence, and has stopped several feet from it, eyeing it warily. I take off her shock collar, show her it's off, and open the gate in the fence for her. She still waits, obviously anxious about crossing. She thinks she is going to be shocked if she crosses the fence, even though her collar is off. She crosses the fence every day on her own, probably more than once, and she still is reluctant to experience the pain of the electric shock that she thinks is coming. Every day, I watch her gather her courage to run through the gate to the other side, to freedom. It takes a lot of encouragement from me, and a good 30-45 seconds to get her courage up. But she eventually does it. And when we get to the other side, I know why she's willing to endure the pain of crossing the electric fence, time after time. This dog was born to run, to explore, to adventure - this is her bliss. She runs around the woods with an exquisite, joyful abandon. When I watch Goldie and the other dogs exploring with such unabashed joy, I think, THAT is how I want my life to be. I want a life of adventure, galloping through wild places. Freedom to follow my nose instead of a pre-made path, stopping to explore whatever intrigues me. Liberty to run as hard and fast and long as my body yearns to, without constraint. Taking in such a glorious world of natural beauty with all of my senses. Running with exquisite, joyful abandon in my land of bliss. To have a life like that, I have to be willing to cross over my own metaphorical fence of pain that lies between me and my bliss. One of the fences that I am crossing right now is the fence of grief. I am about to move out of the house I've lived in for the past five years. I know that moving out allows me to follow my bliss, to live the particular adventures that are calling me right now. Yet moving out is sad for me - I'm leaving behind a place and a way of life that I have loved. In order for me to run in my land of bliss, I have to be willing to feel the grief of leaving this house I've loved. It's taken me awhile to be willing to feel this grief. Like Goldie, I've stood at the fence for quite sometime, not wanting to feel this pain. But my adventure is calling my name. That wild place, that bliss, that freedom is calling me, and it's pulling me across the fence. Like Goldie, even with the pull of bliss, it still takes immense courage for me to be willing to feel the pain of grief, of letting go of a place I love. I don't like to feel pain. I'm afraid of it sometimes, afraid it might kill me. Goldie reminds me that it's okay to be afraid, to take my time crossing the fence. Being afraid of the pain doesn't keep me from going to my place of bliss, if I don't let it. It's a place to Meet Myself in Love. I can feel the fear, take my time to gather my courage, and remember why I'm risking the pain-the joy of running in my land of bliss. Goldie has reminded me that the pain doesn't necessarily mean that I shouldn't or can't cross the fence. I might hurt some in the process of crossing, but the pain doesn't last forever, and my willingness to feel it opens up whole new territories of bliss to me. There are multiple fences in our lives - that place where there is a boundary of pain to pass through in order to live our bliss. Maybe it's the fear of disapproval. Maybe it's the fear of feeling unsafe. Maybe it's the fear of feeling grief. Whatever it is, the fear of pain that we feel doesn't have to keep us from crossing into the land of our bliss. If you put yourself in this story, where are you? What is your land of bliss? What is your fence? Are you standing at the fence, longing to cross, but afraid of feeling some pain? Are you crossing the fence, feeling the pain, and wondering if you should turn back? Are you running with joyful abandon in your land of bliss? The next time you find yourself afraid of feeling some pain in crossing to the land of your bliss, I hope that you will think of Goldie. I hope that you will be gentle with yourself and give yourself time to gather your courage. I hope you will Meet Yourself With Love. I hope that you will think about what it's like to be in your land of bliss, and allow your bliss to pull you across the fence. Playing improvisational piano is one of the ways I cross the fence. It allows me to feel the pain, to move through it. This piece is one that I recorded last week in processing the grief of moving out of my house. Fence of Pain - Play the Music
Eyes Closed, Hands and Ears Open - Play Music Do you ever get frustrated with trying to figure out what to do with your life? Do you ever get that feeling that your life just isn't in the groove, and you're not sure how to get in it? This ‘in the groove' feeling is one way to describe what the flow feels like. As I discussed in the Following the Flow blog, for me this year is about the adventure of learning how to listen to and follow the flow. Sometimes I'm not sure how to find the flow, even though I really want to. Last Friday while playing improv piano, I accidentally discovered a new way to get into the flow. I was trying hard to make it happen, to figure it out, to muscle my way into the flow. It wasn't happenning. I felt really frustrated - I wanted to be in the flow, but I wasn't there and didn't know how to get there. On an impulse, I decided to shake things up and play with my eyes closed. I wasn't sure what I'd get, but I expected a lot of aural chaos. Much to my surprise, when I closed my eyes and started playing, very quickly I got into the flow - that feeling that the music is flowing to and through me, and I'm co-creating beautiful, interesting music with the universe. There was definitely more unexpected sounds than usual, but if I really listened to them and followed them, they took me to fresh places that had the feeling of flow. Playing with my eyes closed bumped me out of the ‘trying to make it happen' mode and took me into the flow. When I closed my eyes, I took away my ability to direct what I played with my eyes, and this sharpened my ability to listen and explore with my hands and ears. Much to my delight, I found that my hands and ears had a sense of the flow without my eyes guiding them. I learned something important about following the flow in this experience. Getting into the flow has a huge element of listening to what wants to happen and letting it happen. Letting go of my typical means of controlling allowed me to listen to the flow. This doesn't mean that I'm just passive-far from it. It's like paddling in a river. If you want to maximize your experience in the river, not only do you have the know-how and muscles to paddle well, you also know how to read the river, how to sense where it is going and where it wants to move you. You still paddle - but it's a lot easier if you listen to where the river is moving and where it wants to move you. Temporarily closing my eyes allowed me to sense where the musical river wanted to go. And it's not that our eyes or active direction is bad. It's just that sometimes the active directing takes over and shuts out the listening part of us. Closing my eyes allowed me to open the listening part of me. After playing with my eyes closed awhile, I re-openned them. This didn't shut off the flow - I was still in it. But my experience was different - now I could integrate listening to what wanted to happen with actively creating what happenned, so that a co-creating happenned between me and the music. This discovery maps over to other parts of my life. When I find myself not being in the flow and trying really hard to find it, it's time to shake things up and try something different to get out of directing mode into listening mode. So how does this map over? How do you get out of directing mode into listening mode? The first step is to find out what you usually use to direct your life. It could be logic, someone else's opinion, your feelings, trying to ‘figure it out', a spreadsheet analysis (don't laugh, I've done this before), or some combination. The second step is to temporarily turn off this input. For example, if you use someone else's opinion to help direct your life, don't ask them for their opinion. If you use a thinking-oriented approach to direct your life, try turning off your thinking with meditation, hard exercise, music, dancing, or whatever works for you. Once you've turned off the normal directing input, open yourself to listen to the flow, the thing that wants to happen that has life in it. Listening for the flow has its own feeling - it is a feeling of openness, curiosity, spaciousness, receptivity, lack of clutter. The flow has its own feeling too -- for me it feels like a magnet pulling me. It may be a strong pull, or a subtle one, but it has that pulling feeling, the feeling of a force wanting me to do or be a particular thing. I invite you to try this for yourself the next time you find yourself feeling frustrated with finding the ‘right' thing to do. Do something different. As an experiment, temporarily tune out the input you usually use to actively direct yourself. Turn on your listening, and see what happens. Play around with finding ways of listening for the flow. Once you tune into it and have that feeling of being in the groove, turn back on the input you use for active participation and see what is different. The flow is always available to you, as information to help you move in the direction of health and growth for you and everything else. It's a great source to tap into when you feel like your life isn't in the groove. I'd love to hear what your equivalent of closing your eyes is - what helps you tune into the flow? I'd also love to hear what happens for you when you do. Here's the improvisation during which I made this discovery: Eyes Closed, Hands and Ears Open - Play Music
Deep Blue - Play Music I want to share with you something that's been rocking my world recently. On my adventure, the thing that I've found to be most likely to make it difficult for me to live adventurously is how I handle my feelings. The same is true for many of my clients - the #1 thing that holds them back is how they respond to their feelings. I am learning an incredibly powerful way of being with my feelings that is changing the effect they have on my life. Our culture offers ways for us to develop intellectually, physically, and spiritually, but not emotionally. We have no widely accepted cultural structure that teaches us how to be emotional creatures, how to handle the wide range of emotions we have, how to handle specific emotions. Emotions are enormously important - they are a crucial part of who we are and how we experience the world. When I started noticing this, I asked the universe to teach me about emotions and how I could experience them in a healthy way. How I could have them without them holding me back. And how I could help my clients to do the same thing. The universe answered. It sent me two teachers, my own coaches. Shanti Bannwart (http://www.cometcoaching.com) and Charles Zook (http://www.quantumteams.com) have taught me a lot about how to have a healthy relationship with my emotions, how to experience my emotions in a way that expands my adventure, and how to not be held back by them. I am deeply grateful to Shanti and Charles - their coaching on this subject has been one of the most profoundly transforming experiences of my life. I am sharing what I've learned through their coaching and my own experiences with you because I think it is one of the most important skills you can have for living, especially living adventurously. This most important skill for handling my feelings that I've learned is this: to meet myself with love, whatever the emotion and experience that I'm having. I am still in the process of learning what it means to do this, but this is far too important for me to wait until I've mastered it before I share it. So I'm sharing it with you now, while I'm still wrestling with it myself. I've had the opportunity this year to learn in very challenging experiences what it means to meet myself in love. In the last eight months, I have experienced massive personal change, including ending a marriage of 8 ¾ years, starting a new relationship, and changing the paradigm by which I live to Following the Flow. I've experienced a lot of feelings and states that I didn't particularly like, and sometimes really hated--things like sadness, grief, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and fear. Sometimes I felt like the feeling I was having would overwhelm me like a huge wave, shove me down to the bottom of the ocean, rip me into pieces and drown me. Sometimes I wanted to avoid doing things that I knew were on my adventure to avoid having those feelings. Fortunately, my coaches encouraged me to learn to meet myself in love, and it has made all the difference for me and what adventure I allow myself to live. For me, meeting myself with love means this: to feel compassion for myself in whatever situation I'm in; to feel what I'm feeling; to be curious about what I'm feeling, and what it's like for me to feel that particular feeling; and to accept what I'm feeling. It also means not judging myself, my experience or my feelings as bad; not trying to make feelings go away; and not trying to ‘fix' feelings. It means hanging out with the feeling, being curious about it, and giving myself love in that moment. This is often hard to do when it's a feeling I don't want to have, like fear, my personal Unfavorite. I don't want to feel it. I don't want to pay attention to it. I just want it to go away. I have often found myself thinking, "If only I could just stop feeling afraid, then I could...". But I tried this approach for years, the "Make it go away" approach, and it didn't work. Something magical happens when I am able to meet myself in love. Just being able to hang out with my feelings with love, curiosity and acceptance changes my experience of them and myself. I no longer feel like they are going to drown me. It opens up a bigger part of my heart for me to live in. I feel loved, because I'm loving myself enough to hang out with myself when it's hard. And inevitably the feeling changes when I meet it with love. Not because I'm trying to change it, but because I'm willing to let it just be, to not try to change it. Ironic, but true. This shift in my inner experience has a big impact on my adventure. It expands my willingness and ability to live adventurously. As I meet myself in love, I expand my ability to have uncomfortable feelings. This means that there are more experiences I am willing to have, and therefore more risks that I'm willing to take to pursue my bliss, to live my adventure. I'm more likely to take the next step on my adventure, because I know I can handle the feelings I'll have when I do. And I've expanded the range of possible steps I can take. As a life coach, if there were just one thing I could recommend to you to do, it would be to meet yourself with love. It is that powerfully transforming, life-expanding, adventure-deepening. It's an adventure in and of itself, to try this different way of relating to your feelings. So if you're up for the adventure, the next time you find yourself feeling something that you don't like, take 5-10 minutes to meet yourself with love, and see what happens for you. Here is a starting suggestion of how to do this -- tailor it so that it really feels like love to you. 1. Be curious about what you're feeling. Ask yourself: what am I feeling right now? 2. Hang out with your feelings. Listen and pay attention with curiosity, gentleness, tenderness. 3. Notice what your body feels. Notice how your emotions are connected to your body. 4. Acknowledge the challenge of your situation. 5. Acknowledge your feelings, the validity of them. 6. Acknowledge your courage for being willing to feel uncomfortable feelings. 7. Accept your feelings as valid and normal human experience. 8. Give yourself love, the way you'd give a crying baby love. Another possible way to meet yourself with love is to give yourself a creative place to feel and express your feelings. It might be music, art, dance, or something else. One of the ways that I meet myself with love is to play improv piano when I'm feeling something that's hard to feel. It's a place where it's easier for me to feel and express intense feelings. I've done a lot of grieving of my marriage through playing piano. This improv, Deep Blue, is a good example of this. I'm sharing it with you in the hopes that it might encourage you to meet yourself with love in a creative way. Allowing yourself to feel uncomfortable feelings and meeting yourself with love can be challenging. Whatever your experience with trying to do this, it is an opportunity to meet yourself with love. For example, if it's really hard for you to feel anger, and you allow yourself to feel anger for five seconds and then shut down, meet the shutting down with love. Be curious about the shutting down. You can ask yourself, "Wow, what's it like to feel anger? What's it like to shut down?" I hope that you'll allow yourself to experiment with meeting yourself with love. Doing so has the power to transform your life experience and to open up worlds of adventure to you. It has the power to transform your relationship with yourself and every other being on this planet. This is what it is doing for me, and I hope that it does so for you. As my coach Charles likes to say, Love is the most powerful force in the universe. If you're not sure how to meet yourself with love, or you find it difficult to do, give me a call and I'll gladly help you. I would love to hear what meeting yourself with love does for you - please share your comments with us on this blog about what you experience. Deep Blue - Play Music
Butterfly - Listen to the Music I grew up playing piano, taking lessons like so many kids do. And like so many kids, I spent a lot of time trying to get all the notes right. I was one of those kids who really, really liked to play the right notes, and was intensely frustrated when I didn't. I was fairly decent at it, but it was nearly impossible for me to play through a piece of music without one ‘mistake'. I liked music a lot, despite the frustration, so I decided to study it in college. The frustration of not being able to play all the right notes got worse for me. I was expected to be an expert at playing piano, and I spent hours of each day trying to become one, and felt like I failed miserably, because I couldn't get all the notes right. Years after college, I kept having this experience with playing piano. I'd sit down to play something, and could never quite get it all right. It got to where I rarely played the piano at all, and when I did play, I often quit playing out of frustration. I also had a recurring dream about playing piano. In this dream, I'd sit down at the piano, and without having any idea what I was going to play, my hands would just go to the keys, and beautiful, moving music would pour out. When I'd wake up from these dreams, I would long to play like this, and I felt an ache, a despair, because it seemed so impossible. A few years ago, something different happenned one day when I sat down at the piano. I felt really angry that there was such a thing as wrong notes. In that moment of anger, I decided I was going to throw away the assumption that it was possible to play wrong notes, and instead assume: There Are No Mistakes. That was the day that my relationship with playing the piano changed drastically. I started just sitting down on the bench, throwing my hands on the keys, listening to what it sounded like, and seeing what happenned next. I continued to just believe that There Are No Mistakes. When ‘weird' sounds came out of my hands, instead of judging them as wrong notes, I decided to assume they were the right notes wanting to go somewhere I hadn't planned on. I started listening to them without judging them, being curious about where the notes wanted to go. Sometimes I'd have an idea in my head about where they wanted to go, and sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I'd be able to play the idea in my head, and sometimes it would come out differently. No matter what, making this assumption - There Are No Mistakes - led to the magical gift of transforming my relationship with the piano. I now play improvisation piano on a regular basis, and I no longer feel frustrated about playing wrong notes, because there are none. Instead, that dream I used to have is coming true. I sit down at the piano, having no idea what I'm going to play, put my hands on the keys, and often beautiful, moving music pours out. I listen to the notes, to what they are, where they want to go, and marvel at the new places they take me. This truly feels like a miraculous transformation, to have my experience of playing the piano change from feeling frustrated and imperfect to feeling like a channel for creative music that I get to have fun playing and sharing. My experience is radically different, and the music that comes out of my hands and heart is radically different. And I play the piano much more than I did when I was trying to get the notes perfect, because I'm having such a good time. What happens when we make this same assumption in our lives? What if it were really true, that There Are No Mistakes? I've been playing with this assumption in the rest of my life, since applying it to the piano. It's not easy to do, in a culture that encourages us to put ‘right' and ‘wrong' tags on everything. But when I am able to live from this assumption, it shifts my life experience the same way it shifts my piano experience. It frees me from spending a lot of time worrying about finding the ‘one right thing' to be and do. It frees me from spending a lot of time feeling guilty about not doing what I thought I should have done. It opens me up to the possibilities of the present moment, what beautiful and moving thing could possibly emerge from this place I'm at right here, right now. It opens me up to be able to hear the flow of what wants to emerge, what will deepen and enliven my experience. What would it do for your life to assume There Are No Mistakes? What would it free you from? What would it open you up to? What if you listened to the notes that you play in your life, not to judge whether they were right or not, but to hear what they are and where they want to go? To follow the notes to wonderful, unexpected places? I challenge you to find out for yourself. Don't take my word for it - see what happens for you. Make the assumption for a week that There Are No Mistakes in your life, and see what happens. One of my friends asked me to make up a piece called ‘Butterfly', and this is what emerged. Here's what I like about butterflies: they don't fly in straight lines. They move in ways that are unpredictable to the Cartesian-trained human brain. Assuming There Are No Mistakes can lead to a path that looks unpredictable like a butterfly's path, and a flight as beautiful. Butterfly - Listen to the Music
Letting Go - Listen to the Music At the beginning of this year, I made an intention to learn how to listen to and follow the flow. Following this intention through the past 6 months has been one of the most profoundly changing experiences of my life. I want to share with you a little about my experience, and to invite you to participate in the adventure with me. Have you ever had a feeling in your gut that something was really supposed to happen? Maybe you weren't sure why you had that feeling, and maybe it didn't align with what logically made sense, but you had a clear feeling about the ‘rightness' of something happenning. That's the flow talking. It's the urge of the universe to go a certain way. I got curious about this phenomenon towards the end of last year. Were these urges, these intuitions, these gut feelings just occasional blips for the really important moments, or was it possible that there were more of them available to help guide my life in a good direction? How do I sense the flow? Where does it come from? What's it for? What happens if I live my life according to what the flow tells me to do? I had a gut feeling about these gut feelings - that there was a whole bunch more guidance available to me in the flow, and if I followed it, good things would happen. And I felt compelled to find out. So at the beginning of 2008, I committed to live the adventure of learning to listen for and follow the flow for a year. So that's what I've been doing, to the best of my ability, for the last six months-living the adventure of listening for and following the flow. Using the flow to guide all parts of my life, from the big picture to which exit to get off the highway from. And it's been quite the ride. Parts of it are really fun, and parts are really terrifying. The biggest challenge has been becoming more comfortable with living consciously in the unknown. My experience of the flow is that it often tells me things just as I need to know them, not before. It often tells me or brings me things that don't make sense in the moment, but make sense later. It often has me in a space of not knowing what is coming. This means I've spent a lot of time in the last six months living consciously in the state of "I don't know". The flow had me hanging out with "I don't know" in some big ways in the last six months - not knowing what direction my marriage was going to take, not knowing where I will live, not knowing what direction my business is going. It's been challenging to trust the flow to tell me what I need to know when I need to know it, and that it will be good for me. But I stuck with it, and I'm glad I did. It's one of the best things I've ever done for myself. It's gotten easier to follow, easier to trust the flow, as I've had experiences over the last six months that give me positive feedback for listening for and following the flow. It is still very much a learning adventure. The flow sometimes takes me really cool places, like Hawai'i, where I am now. And sometimes it does ‘weird' things like tell me to buy a plane ticket here, but not one back yet. I still haven't bought a return ticket, and I'm not sure when I'm supposed to, but I know that if I keep listening for the flow it will tell me when to buy one back, and I know that waiting to buy it is going to be good for me in some way that I can't know yet. I could and will talk a lot more about what I've learned in following the flow - how I hear it, what my major challenges have been, how I've handled them, what the benefits of following the flow are. For now, I'll just say that in a nutshell, following the flow can be hard, and it rocks. There are innumerable benefits to following the flow. There is a TON of wisdom in the flow to give all of us guidance for the good of the whole universe. And it's available to each of us. Following the flow changes the way I experience my life - I feel much more connected with the whole. I feel more free and safer at the same time. I experience more love, joy, and peace. I get way more out of my life because I spend a lot more time being present in the now, instead of worrying about the future. I'm excited enough about what has happenned for me to want to share it with others. I would like some company on this adventure. So I want to invite you to join me on the adventure of following the flow. Maybe you're already on it. If so, I'm curious about what your experiences have been with it. What have you learned? What have you experienced? If you're just beginning to consider this idea, I invite you to try an experiment for a week or two of really intentionally listening for the flow, and following it, and seeing what happens. Then write about it here, share what you experience, so we can all learn together. Some of the important things I've learned about the flow is that it's for all of us, for all of our good. The flow is the urge of the universe to unfold for the good of all. It's available to us all. And we co-create it together - it isn't just something that happens to us. Following the flow is an invitation to a really different way of living, a way of being consciously interconnected together, of being able to live dynamically as things in the universe change. I have an inkling that this could be one doorway into a different way of being together, as a species. I would love to have you step through the doorway with me. One of the ways I experience the flow is through playing and singing improvisational music. I sit down at the piano, not knowing what I'm going to play. I start messing around with putting my hands here or there. And then a song comes out. The flow has started asking me to share this music, so I've started recording some of it, and am sharing it on this website with you. This piece is one of the improvisational pieces that came through me recently. There are some background noises in it - dogs, another person in the room. I consider it part of the tapestry of the music. Also, I left in the beginning ‘messing around' part of the improv (the pianists out there will recognize a Debussy clip) - it doesn't sound finished the way we're used to hearing recorded music, but I want to share how music comes out of messing around. Life is that way too. So I encourage you to mess around with the adventure of following the flow, and see what comes out! Letting Go - Listen to the Music
Play the song: Voice of a Human So here I am in Hawai'i. This is a dream come true for me, one that I've carried in my heart for a long time. For 15 years, I imagined that when I got here, it would be a totally blissful experience, a deeply felt spiritual experience, an angelic experience, an other-worldly experience. I've been here for 10 days now, and for sure there are parts of being here that are blissful, other-worldly. And there are parts that are not. I am actually struggling in many moments, feeling homesick, overwhelmed. And I'm angry that I'm feeling this. I wanted a pure ‘spiritual' experience, a pure other-worldly experience. I wanted to sing with the angels and dance with dolphins and learn how to surf in 3 hours. Where's my spiritual experience?!? Last night I attended a meeting at a local spiritual center, and in the openning meditation the leader talked about letting go of the human fears and struggles and problems that ‘weren't really you' so that you could ‘go home to' the spiritual experience of being free of struggle and fear. I felt angry at this dualistic view of life, as if the human experience is separate from spiritual experience. And then it dawned on me: this is exactly what I have been doing to myself, wanting my experience in Hawaii to be free of those oh-so-human elements of struggle and fear. I have been defining these human elements as not-belonging to true spiritual experience. We long to sing with the voices of angels. We want to avoid the uncomfortable, painful, scary feelings and experiences, to live at the mountaintop. We search for the book, the workshop, the idea, the church, the paradigm that could give us the golden key to freedom from the pain. But the truth is, we are human, and feeling pain and fear are a part of being human. Yes, there are ways to change our relationship with the pain and fear so that our lived experience is dramatically different. But they are a given on this adventure of life. And they are an essential part of our spiritual experience. You cannot untangle the human experience from the spiritual experience - they are inextricably interwoven, and to try to untangle them and live them separately is impossible. The human experience is the spiritual experience, and the spiritual experience is the human experience. Our deepest spiritual experience lies not in eliminating fear and pain, but in what we choose to do with it. Our pain and fear is an invitation to us. An invitiation to meet ourselves with love. An invitaiton to look at who we are, who we want to be, what our hearts long for. It is an invitation to live and feel every part of our life fully, with deep presence, including the pain and fear. It is an invitation to sing with the voice of a human. In the last year, I've been playing and singing a lot of improvisational music. This song, Voice of a Human, is one of those improvisational pieces. It expresses this struggle, this longing to sing with the voice of an angel, this commitment to sing with the voice of a human. As you listen to it, I invite you to reflect on what parts of your life you tend to push away or deny as ‘not spiritual'. I invite you to choose to meet them with love, and embrace them as part of your full human/spiritual experience, and just see what happens. I'd love to hear what happens for you. To listen to the song, click on this link, then click on the play button for Voice of a Human: Play the song: Voice of a Human Here are the words: Voice of a Human If I could sing with the voice of an angel
I would sing into the heavens
If I could sing with the voice of an angel
I would sing into the sky
And I would fill it with the song of heaven But I am only human
I am only human
So I will sing the song of being human
With all its grief and questions
All its joy and despair
All its light and moments of bliss I will sing the song of being human
As long as I live
As long as I have breath
As long as I can
And I will sing it
I will sing it
With all my soul © 2008 Frances Faith Clark.
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