Faux Zen

For a change, let’s start with a bit of Rumi to get you in the mood. This one’s called The Guest House …

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honourably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

In essence, Rumi reminds us that if we really want to live an authentic life, we have to learn to embrace all the diverse parts of ourselves, no matter how unattractive they may seem. Real danger lies in the decision to repress the parts we don’t like – or that are not appreciated by others – and only embrace those we consider worthy. When we do this, we split away from our true self and create a persona of acceptable characteristics that is ultimately unsustainable. It takes an awful lot of energy to maintain that charade. Inevitably, at some point we will end up self-sabotaging, as those suppressed qualities rise up to the surface, creating havoc in our perfect world.

Nowhere is this dynamic more rampant than in the spiritual arena. It’s the home-from-home for people who want to latch on to the light and pretend the dark doesn’t exist. It’s a lot easier to delude yourself that you have no shadow when you’re focused on the light. Yet, the truth will out, and we have seen countless examples of spiritual leaders with feet of clay in recent years. But this isn’t just an issue for those in authority, it’s one for all of us as individuals.
Just recently I’ve seen this tendency in living colour again, watching someone with soi-disant spiritual leanings behaving in a manner that was anything but. It’s what I call faux zen – professing to be spiritual, giving lip-service to having an enlightened awareness, but acting in ways completely out of integrity with those beliefs. It’s so easy to talk the game of higher awareness these days, but so much more difficult to actually live it.

Being able to quote a few new age platitudes is not a sign of depth. Real spirituality shows itself in the way you treat yourself and others. It’s about kindness, integrity and a deep connection to life. Some people find it through organised religion and others carve out their own paths. A genuine sense of the spiritual is humble and all-embracing, allowing others the freedom to find their own way and honouring their choices with a profound respect. You know it when you see it because there’s a humility and vulnerability about people who have that connection – they’re secure in what they believe and above all they’re not trying to play God.

Life is so complex these days, it can come as a relief when we think we’ve found someone with all the answers. Yet unless what we’re seeing is someone who embodies humility, chances are we’ve just met another Wizard of Oz. A grounded person will encourage you to honour your own wisdom, not pull the superiority trick. It’s too easy to give our power away to those who we think have more knowledge or wisdom than we do, but that’s just another pothole on the path. Ultimately, it’s about gaining your own awareness, not parroting received wisdom from someone else.

This week, help yourself along the path to authenticity by embracing whatever comes up for you, however lousy that may feel. If you notice some sadness or a feeling you’d rather avoid, let it be OK. Don’t push it away. Just notice it, feel it and let it pass. Don’t hide from the characteristics in yourself that you find unattractive – if you do, you’ll only project them. Accept that there are times you behave in a less than perfect way. Look for signs of faux zen – where in your life are you pretending to be something you’re not? Do you have people in your life who act like authorities, but who don’t walk their talk in an authentic way? Where might you need to knock someone off their pedestal and take back your power?

Seek the real treasure that the darkness hides, as Debbie Ford addresses in her new book Why Good People Do Bad Things. She recounts “It was my own journey through darkness that helped me build an intimate relationship with my authentic nature. It was not my good self but my evil twin that lead me to heal my emotional wounds and ultimately launched my career … In fact, it was my inability to function well in the world that forced me to strengthen my spiritual connection and learn how to thrive, even after devastation. It is the very darkness that I didn’t want to be or experience that has driven me to become the woman I always longed to be.”

Viva vulnerability!

For the Coach Fabulous archives, go to www.coachfabulous.blogspot.com and for the I Am Fabulous archives, go to www.fabcentral.blogspot.com. You can email me at coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 17 Mar 08)

The Cocktail From Hell (And Other Stories)

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, when the megacomputer Deep Thought was programmed to find the meaning of life, the universe and everything, it worked on the problem for seven and a half million years and finally spewed out the answer “forty-two”. As this just happens to be the 42nd I Am Fabulous chronicle (and summer holiday high season), I do hope you’re not expecting a similar depth of enquiry, although you may get just as nonsensical an answer. Mind you, not everything about the Guide was silly – apparently it had the words Don’t Panic inscribed on its cover in large and friendly letters, which is really rather good advice, when you think about it.

While we’re on the subject of the absurd, I came across the most bizarre champagne cocktail the other day. My friend Charlotte and I were indulging in our preferred Saturday afternoon combo of a lazy lunch and a small amount of retail therapy followed by a glass of fizz at a local brasserie, when my eye was drawn to the sensual promise of a ‘love potion’ on the cocktail menu. Expecting something decidedly glam and girlie, imagine my surprise at being presented with what looked like a sample drawn from a water treatment works. It transpired that the brown sludge was pureed fig, but that didn’t make it look any more appetising. While it was apparent that the in-house mixologist was exceedingly proud of his concoction, he had clearly never bothered to look at it from a customer’s point of view.

That got me thinking – wierdly, I can find inspiration in anything, including cocktails – about the ways in which we may have the best of intentions, but very often end up with results that are far from our original vision. As the writer and coach, Debbie Ford, puts it “All of our suffering in life is from saying we want one thing and doing another.” When our actions are inconsistent with our intentions, we really are in for a rocky road, so being in integrity with our vision for ourselves really is the holy grail when it comes to living a fabulous life.

Before I give you some clues on that one, let’s just remember that human beings are notoriously complex characters, so getting all your ducks in a row isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do. This was driven home to me in the screenwriting workshop run by story expert Robert McKee, made famous in the film Adaptation. Just surviving a three-day workshop that ran ten to twelve hours a day was an achievement in itself. By the end of it we were all falling out of our seats with exhaustion or littered across the floor among the discarded crisp packets and the rest of the debris, so the atmosphere in the room felt rather like the last stages of a particularly debilitating long-haul flight. Despite being semi-conscious, we were still electrified by the wisdom of this extraordinary lecturer, who doesn’t just know writing – he knows people.

As McKee says in his book, Story, “The revelation of true character in contrast or contradiction to characterisation is fundamental to all fine storytelling. Life teaches us this grand principle: What seems is not what is. People are not what they appear to be. A hidden nature waits concealed behind a façade of traits.” He teaches that great writing and great acting show us the undercurrents that lie beneath the characters’ actions, because as humans we are so rarely without some form of inner contradiction.

If simply knowing what we should do was enough, there would be no need for a multi-billion pound diet industry or the millions that are spent every year on anti-smoking campaigns. We know what to do. We even intend to do it. We just don’t want to do it.

The key to getting your actions into integrity with your intentions is to engage your emotions. What you want to achieve has to be as emotionally powerful to you as the behaviour you want to change. To access that level of emotional engagement, your goal needs to feel as real to you and as enticing as what you’re currently experiencing, or it won’t be powerful enough to motivate you. You need to be able to feel what it would be like to be living your vision in full technicolour. The more energy you put into visualising your success with all the sights, sounds and senses you can throw into the mix, the more powerful a motivator it will be.

Holding your vision in your day-to-day awareness must become a regular habit. Unconscious behaviours will kick back in at the drop of a hat if you don’t keep your mind on the goal. Then, when you’re well on your way, you’ll need to check in to see if your actions are producing the desired results. If not, change tack or technique. Remember the vile cocktail – that barman obviously intended to bring to life a luscious love potion, but ended up so in love with his own creation that he couldn’t see its obvious downside … it looked like a glass of sewage (and didn’t smell much better). That’s where a little mental detachment comes in handy – when you think you’ve hit the finishing line, just stop for a minute to check if that’s what you were originally aiming for, and if not, refocus and choose again.

This week’s fabulous moment of reflection asks you to think about where you might be out of integrity with what you want to achieve for yourself. What have you said that you wanted to do, but haven’t actually taken any steps toward achieving it? Do you really want to do it at all? What’s stopping you taking even the tiniest action to propel yourself forward? No excuses now – what are you going to do about it today?

I leave you with the sage pronouncement of the shamanic writer, Carlos Castaneda, who said “We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.” What’s your choice going to be?

Coach Fabulous is updated every Thursday at http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. You can also use the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right. For alert emails on new postings, send a blank email to IAmFabulousCo@aol.com with 'Subscribe' in the title field. All material © 2006 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 14 Aug 06)