A World Of Inspiration

Although I’ve lived in Europe for over twenty years, I still associate the coming of September with the arrival of Spring - old habits clearly die hard in my house – but either way it is still one of the most beautiful months of the year, anywhere in the world. It’s my favourite time for a holiday, with balmy weather in the southern hemisphere and hopefully an Indian summer for those of us who hang out north of the equator. It’s also a great time to try out all the places that open up especially for the summer, but in complete peace after all the tourists have left. When I lived in southern Spain, it was a glorious month for enjoying the company of those who only visited off-season – generally a much more stylish crew – and taking full advantage of the beach bars and restaurants that would disappear by October as quickly and mysteriously as they’d arrived.

We may have a few days to go yet, but September is clearly already on my mind. If we’re not in vacation mode, then September can be a time when we tend to get a bit more serious about life as the playful mood of summer starts to fade. My crusade for this month is to remind you to keep things light – joyfulness is a state of mind that’s not just for holidays, it’s for life.

Like far too many of us, I have a dreadful tendency to be able to turn even the most joyful things into a burden. In case you hadn’t noticed, I love writing – absolutely nothing makes me happier or feel more on track – and yet somehow I will still manage to turn it into a chore and make it feel more like an obligation than an adventure. Take today, for example. Over time I’ve learned to trust that I’ll get the inspiration that I need and so I don’t plan what I’m going to write and generally just show up at the keyboard expecting the muses to do their work and give me something to write about. I’ve become pretty comfortable with this, but usually I have some kind of inkling about what the subject matter will be. Today, though, there was nothing - nothing when I woke and still nothing throughout the day, just a complete blank. As you can imagine, that was more than a little disconcerting and my mind was having a field day coming up with worst-case scenarios for what it might mean.

Then, as I was sitting outside enjoying some late afternoon sun, I got my first clue in the shape of a butterfly that flew right in front of my face and then settled on the tree on my terrace for a few short minutes. In the shamanic traditions, all animals hold associations for us and their appearance is a clue to the energy we need to embody. We especially need to pay attention to the messages they bring when they come into close contact with us physically or appear repeatedly in symbolic form or dreams.

Given that our own dreams are deeply fascinating, but hearing about anyone else’s is a fast-track trip to boredom central, you’ll be relieved that I won’t be sharing mine with you. Suffice to say that animal images seem to be popping up left, right and centre and the current theme seems to be expansion, growth and lightening up. Butterflies are associated with transformation, joy and lightness of being, so that brief visitation reminded me how I was turning writing into a chore, rather than an adventure, by focusing only on the goal and not the process. Not knowing what was coming could either be experienced as terrifying or as a creative challenge to be embraced and explored. The choice was entirely mine.

If you’re open to it, inspiration will strike in the strangest of ways. Some of us are more open to signs from the natural world and for others insights will come through the day-to-day channels of everyday living, like hearing exactly what you need to know through a chance TV or radio discussion or even overhearing a random conversation on the train. Plenty of people tell stories of going into a bookstore and literally having the book they need to read fall off the shelf in front of them. What’s required for this kind of ongoing inspiration to really kick in is to start paying attention. We tend to sleepwalk through life, sticking to the same routines and then wonder why life isn’t exciting or why we don’t feel in the flow. It’s a conscious choice, not a random occurrence. If you want to feel inspired, you need to expect it and to be open to however it comes. That was my lesson today, obviously. Of course, my mind would be an awful lot more comfortable with nailing everything down in advance, but it’s a lot more fun and far more of a creative stretch to open to endless possibility.

This week, fabulous people, the challenge is not to treat the Bank Holiday as the end of summer and thus the end of fun. If you normally get super-focused and serious as September unfolds, then think about how you can give yourself an Indian summer of the mind, carrying that sense of joy, relaxation and exploration into your daily life. Where can you lighten up and allow things to unfold, rather than forcing yourself to have it all planned out? How can you make sure that you enjoy the journey, not just arriving at the goal. Play around with how you get your inspiration too – what insights have you had in the past from random occurrences or encounters? Pay attention to the symbols that appear repeatedly in your life. If you keep coming across the same thing in your dreams or your daily life, then try to intuit what that might mean for you. If you need a little help, you can always get a bit more of a clue by looking up the symbolic meaning of whatever is appearing for you - there are plenty of web resources available for that. Above all, expect some inspiration. If you’re not looking for it, it just might pass you by.

As a parting note, should you be feeling a tad cynical about whether animals have anything to teach us, here’s some comedic wisdom from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.”

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 28 Aug 06)

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)