Jennie Marlow

Coaching for intelligent, aware people who want to live deeply fulfilling lives

Word Games with Hamlet

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HamletRelax into your being. The first time I heard this, my immediate response was incredulity. Relax? What’s that? As a work-a-holic doer, I must admit that being was something I tended to approach the way I might an arcane subject like the derivatives market or string theory.

Now that I am older and (presumably) wiser, it seems such a basic thing just to rest, rejuvenate and be in the now.

When I get stuck, Spotted Eagle loves to harangue me with this admonition: “It’s not about doing. It’s about being!” Sounds great! Now for the way I experience it, which sounds more like a grammar lesson than an existential moment: Being in a body. Being in my body. Being embodied. Being. Being authentic. Being honest. Being true to myself.

You’ll notice we don’t say, doing authentic or doing honest or doing true to oneself. However, we can truthfully speak about doing, as in doing our work or doing our taxes. And while I know we are capable of being our work, it is not something I would recommend, having been there and done that!

Life breaks into new territory. We don’t say doing life or being life. We do say being alive, or simply that we live. We live feels true. We die, doesn’t feel quite true, but regardless, we don’t say, her body died. We say, she died. Funny that.

Hamlet played with it. To be, or not to be. That really is the question, and after fiddling around with it, I finally came to the conclusion that, when we approach it from the perspective of inner work, to be or not be has nothing to do with living or dying. It has everything to do with being present to my now moment, or dying to my now moment. No more. No less.

And you’ll notice that we don’t say, be relax or do relax. We say simply, Relax! Now, there’s word to live by.

A Case Against the Future

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Napkin-AnalysisIt’s already February, so I’m scrambling to finish my plan for 2014. I can see my way clear through May or June, but after that, it starts to feel blurry and unreal. The brilliant woman I hired to help me with planning and project management barks, “What do you want to have happen? I need to see it mapped out for the year!” Okay. I used to do this for a living. Business plans used to run through my dreams and course through my veins.

Very well. I’ll make up something and have a stab at it. I’m well aware that I’m playing a dangerous game called The Future. At least I’m wise enough to know that what I envision is not what will actually happen. But why not?

Perhaps the problem lies is the way we “dream” about our futures. Possibilities imagined are not the same as potentials which can be actualized. It’s a very hard lesson to learn, especially for those of us who are recovering from the New Age. We were taught to create a clear picture of the desired result, and if we believe in it with all our might, it will be delivered to us as a “manifestation.” The uncomfortable truth is most of us are not successful if we try to create this way.

There are times when picturing a result can be quite useful. When we are making big changes, our success depends upon being able to imagine ourselves on the other side of it, that we can do this, in spite of our anxieties and insecurities. This is a universe apart from envisioning a Technicolor fantasy about how the future will turn out.

For most of us, the trap is attribution. A good thing happens, and we want more good things, so we try to figure out how the good thing came about. Or a bad thing happens, and we want to avoid more bad things. The mind analyzes its fractionalized jigsaw puzzle of what it thinks it knows, ignoring all the gaps and uncertainties, and then forms a belief which attributes the outcome to a set of causal factors. When these causal factors are imaginary, the result of a happy or morbid fantasy, the mind has a terrible time distinguishing the facts from what it makes up and believes in.

Believing in a vision for the outcome the future will take is, quite simply, a flawed strategy. Just like any plan or goal, it does not have the flexibility that being in present time demands of us. The truth is, I should have learned this long before I did.

Looking back on it now, there was one pivotal moment when I might have had this epiphany. I was sitting in a restaurant with one of the few people I know who can just “make it happen.” Many people would have called this guy a visionary. He would have scoffed at the notion.

This fellow was all business. He educated himself about the realities, and he was always well aware of the risks of failure. He never “believed” in his vision. He was far too practical and realistic for that.

On this particular day, we were discussing his business plan, and he was scribbling the financial forecast for his company’s future on a napkin. The figures seemed to flow from his pen like water from a fountain. Finally, I had to ask. “Where did you get these figures?”

He smiled and sat back. “I pulled them right out of my ass,” he said blithely. “The venture capitalists know that you can’t predict the future. They just want to see if you’ve done your homework.”

It wasn’t until very recently that I looked back on this moment and realized that this “visionary” really knew the score. He knew his predictions for the outcome were pure fantasy, and he didn’t take his vision a bit seriously beyond knowing that his next step was getting some venture capitalist to give him the money he wanted.

He got the money. He built the business. It was nothing like he had forecast. And it was wildly successful for a time, until the dot-com boom went dot-gone bust. It clearly didn’t get in his way. He went on to form other companies, and I hear about him in the business and tech sector news from time to time. I imagine he put many more forecasts on many other napkins, and none of them turned out the way he planned.

The difference being, he knew they wouldn’t. And that is why he was able to succeed.

Inspiration from an Outcast Ancestor

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Pistol-Packin-MamaExtraordinary people come in very unexpected packages, and my Great Aunt May was no exception. She was the notorious black sheep of the family, known for cussing, smoking cigarettes, drinking whiskey and living down by the railroad tracks that ran through the small Midwestern mining town of Madrid, Iowa.

A photographer who was passing through on his way to Des Moines once approached her to model for a poster for the soon-to-be hit song, “Pistol Packin’ Mama” by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. We’re told she gave him a face-full and threw him out of the restaurant where she worked as a waitress.

I never knew my Aunt May. What I know of her comes from the stories my mother’s family handed down. I have always found it so intriguing that, even though the ones who tell the story are very attached to their own conventionality, her name is always spoken with a kind of grudging respect, verging on awe.

May Sullivan was sassy, funny and had an explosive temper that would rain hell-fire on anyone who crossed her. According to the family mythology, she didn’t give a “Tinker’s damn” (as my grandmother used to say) about what people thought of her.

I always wondered if that were really true. It’s not rocket science to figure out what it cost her to rebel against small-town, religious and social norms. And while the stories are hilarious, there is something so painful about the unspoken truth, that her rebellion against society was purchased, in large measure, with alcohol.

Still, I love to hear the stories. About the photographer. About the way she gave everyone hell. About how much the children in the family loved her and looked up to her (while their parents couldn’t help themselves but look down on her). She had little dignity, but she had fire and that rare quality of courage that allows one to break the human contract to live in fear of judgment of the tribe. Even though I never knew her, there is something about her I truly miss.

I miss her when I feel I’ve been too frank. I miss her when I feel I am just too damned unorthodox for some people’s taste. I miss her when I swear haphazardly and offend. I miss her when I wish I didn’t give a damn what other people think of me, when in fact, I do. I even miss her when I’ve had one too many glasses of wine and wish I’d had more discipline. And I just miss her willingness to live her life, flying in the face of society’s rules and expectations. These qualities will live on in my borrowed memories of her as inspiration to not take life so seriously and to enjoy a life lived outside what is normal and seemly.

 

This post was originally published in 2010.

Are Your Feelings a Reliable Indicator of Your Truth?

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FeelingsLife is truly a feeling experience, and our quality of life depends utterly upon how we feel about it. But are our feeling states reliable indicators of what is objectively true? The short answer is, probably not.

We tend to fixate on the stimuli for our emotions and attribute our emotional response to the stimulus itself, but emotions are not nearly as straightforward as they might seem.  In the highs of bliss or the lows of despair, it is easy to forget that there is a lot going on in our brains that produces what we think of as our feelings.

Not all stimuli for our feelings are external or about the now-moment. If you want evidence of this, recall a bad memory and watch the impact it has on your feeling state. Now, consider how often the feeling states of past experience occur when you are interpreting new challenging experiences. If you catch yourself thinking, “I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember,” then it’s a good bet the feeling is not coming from your current circumstances, but rather from your memories and how you interpret them. This is a big red flag that your interpretation of the present is being seen through the lens of a distortion from your past.

In every moment, your brain is influencing the way you feel and respond to what is happening. It may surprise you to learn that when you recall something, your brain actually reproduces the neurochemicals that were secreted when the memory was created. This is a revelation, especially when you consider the fact that this process can occur even when you are not actually recalling the event consciously. This means your brain can recreate the feeling state from past experience and tie it to the present circumstances, without your direct awareness.

Memory has an enormous influence on the way you respond emotionally in the now-moment. A study conducted by Cornell University concluded that our memories of events change over time. They also proved that entirely false memories, introduced by the researchers during their experiments, were believed and trusted by subjects as if they had actually happened.

So the next time someone tells you to trust your feelings, you might want to consider this advice carefully before you take action on what you feel. Whatever you do, never confuse your feelings with your truth.

6 Ideas You Should Borrow From Hostage Negotiators

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HostageI often marvel at the way a gifted hostage negotiator can diffuse a crisis and bring it to a close, even when circumstances have reached the extreme. The techniques these negotiators use can be really helpful to us too, especially when an emotional upset sends us into orbit.

Most of the time—when we’re that upset—it is as if our awareness has been taken hostage. Who is the culprit? Our Stone Age brain.

Your brain evolved in a landscape full of threats to your physical safety, so evolution kindly gave your brain very reliable mechanisms for getting you out of harm’s way. Your Stone Age brain does this by shutting down anything that would cause you to stop and consider what you are doing. This works really well when you are evading hungry lions on the ancient savannah. It’s completely counterproductive when the threat is emotional.

When you are emotionally triggered, your brain can’t distinguish between a threat to your physical survival and an emotional upset. It responds to both in precisely the same way, as a matter of life or death. This triggers the fight-or-flight response. Your brain in full blown fight-or-flight believes that fleeing or fighting (some psychologists would add “freezing” to that list) are its only options.

When your negative emotions surge, you do have recourse. That recourse is to enter into a negotiation with the freaked out part of your brain by consciously activating the part of your brain that can evaluate what is happening to you.

The first step in any hostage negotiation is to try and establish communication with the hostage-taker. When it’s the primitive part of your brain you’re talking to, this communication is established by slowing down, listening to your mind’s uproar, and observing your body’s stress response.

You see, the part of your brain that can rationally assess the situation and consider what is in your long term best interest has the power to shut down your fight-or-flight response. Just the simple act of noticing you are in fight-or-flight has a very real physiological effect that actually starts to calm you down.

The next thing a good negotiator does is to establish rapport through compassion. Self-compassion has an incredibly powerful influence on the psyche by allowing your brain an opportunity to feel emotionally safe. Once your higher awareness has established rapport with your upset primitive brain, then your self-negotiation can enter the fourth phase, which is to introduce options other than fighting, fleeing or freezing.

When the mind launches into fear or outrage, its projection of a disastrous outcome is invariably overblown. When a negotiation enters the options phase, a hostage negotiator knows exactly how to frame the distinction between what is unattainable, possible but highly unlikely, or probable if the hostage taker doesn’t shift his demands. This allows the hostage-taker to enter a more rational state and begin to see that his original goal is not in his best interest.

If the negotiator has the time to get through all of the phases, the negotiation eventually shifts to emotional equilibrium and  the hostage-taker, more objective now, is able to surrender peacefully.

When you’re negotiating with your survival brain, remember that a successful negotiation takes time and patience. Quite honestly, most of our upsets can pass quietly if we take time to process our emotions and succeed in restraining our out-of-power words and actions until we achieve calm. So, next time you find yourself in emotional orbit, stop and observe what is happening, and then take a page from the hostage negotiator’s handbook.