Connected and Committed

The learning curve ll

Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Awareness. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame.  Awareness. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Awareness. Blame. Blame. Blame. Blame. Awareness. Blame. Blame. Blame. Shift.

The Shack attack

Several friends of mine recommended reading The Shack recently. I got a hold of a copy and have been enjoying the craft of a well-told story. When I read something that is based on or steeped in a particular spiritual belief, I take what makes sense to me and leave the rest. My Resistance Wrangler ears perked up around a few of the passages that I think are pertinent to the whole Resistance Toy idea:

~*~*~

"Tell me what you are afraid of, Mack."

"Well, let me see. What am I afraid of?" began Mack. "Well, I am afraid of looking like an idiot. I am afraid that you are making fun of me and that I will sink like a rock. I imagine that--"

"Exactly," Jesus interrupted. "You imagine. Such a powerful ability, the imagination! That power alone makes you so like us. But without wisdom, imagination is a cruel task-master. If I may prove my case, do you think humans are designed to live in the present or the past or the future?"

"Well," said Mack, hesitating, "I think the most obvious answer is that we were designed to live in the present. Is that wrong?"

Jesus chuckled. "Relax, Mack. This is not a test, it's a conversation. You are exactly correct, by the way. But now tell me, where do you spend most of your time in your mind, in your imagination: in the present, in the past, or in the future?"

Mack thought for a moment before answering. "I suppose I would have to say that I spend very little time in the present. I spend a big piece in the past, but most of the rest of the time I am trying to figure out the future."

"Not unlike most people. When I dwell with you, I do so in the present--I live in the present. Not the past, although much can be remembered and learned by looking back, but only for a visit, not an extended stay. And for sure, I do not dwell in the future you visualize or imagine...

"It is your desperate attempt to get some control over something you can't. It is impossible for you to take power over the future because it isn't even real, nor will it ever be real. You try to play God, imagining the evil that you fear becoming reality, and then you try to make plans and contingencies to avoid what you fear..."

~*~*~

This pretty much sums up the intention and the efficacy of a Resistance Toy--helping you to refocus your attention on the here and now, which is where all your power is, as opposed to revisiting the past and trying to populate the future from the lower registers of the emotional scale.

Humor and love--all great religions started here, and all great Resistance Toys are made from this place.

How's it going with yours? 

life run wild

Inside, outside, there's a conversation going on today that wasn't happening at all five years ago and hasn't been very much in evidence sine the Industrial Rveolution began. Now, spanning the planet via Internet and World Wide Web, this conversation is so vast, so multifaceted, that trying to figure out what it's about is futile. It's bout a billion years of pent-up hopes and fears and dreams coded in serpentine double helixes, the collective flashback deja vu of our strange perplexing species. Something ancient, elemental, scared, something very very funny that's broken loose in the pipes and wires of the twenty-first century.

There are millions of threads in this conversation, but at the beginning and end of each one is a human being. That this world is digital or electronic is not the point. What matters is that it exists in narrative space. The story has come unbound. The world of commerce became precipitously permeable while it wasn't looking and sprang a leak from a quarter least expected. The dangers of democracy pale before the danger of uncontained life. Life with the wraps off. Life run wild...

While this may sound spooky and mystical and terribly uncorporate, it isn't meant to put you Fortune 500 types off. When you get right down to it, human begins are spooky and mystical and terribly uncoroporate, and corporations--if you'd only let yourselves admit it--consist entirely of human beings. Sort of neat how that works out. So the bottom line is: you can play in the Internet headspace as well as anyone.

There are just three conditions: 1) you have to let your people play for you, since there's really nobody else at home; 2) you have to play, not something more serious and goal-oriented; and 3) related to the previous, you have to have at least some tenuous notion of what "headspace" might mean. It's not in the dictionary. But you can ask around. Get the general hang of the thing. If you figure it out, we'll think you're cool and consume mass quantities of all your wonderful products.

See how easy life can be when you loosen up a little?

You laugh, we laugh with you.

Either way, we live.

~~~~~~~~

~Internet Apocalypso, Christopher Locke

the learning curve

Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Awareness. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Awareness. Judge. Judge. Judge. Awareness. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Stop.

we're finding our internal biodiversity

Please welcome http://joyicity.blogspot.com/ to the cyberverse. Some of her more pithy lines: "We're finding our internal biodiversity." Good stuff here.

calling all Resistance Toy lovers

Dear Partner in Crime,

You are receiving this email because in the past you expressed interest in being notified of new developments at my website Reach.Dabble.Shine, my blog 28 Years Later, or more recently, blissmonger.com, the funky brainchildren of Deb Schanilec (that’s me, aka Blissmonger :-) ).

Some of you may remember taking part in a focus group for my weight-loss material a few years ago through Artella and received my Tenacious Tidbits.

Well, I’ve written a new e-course, and I’m looking for folks who are interested in providing feedback while having fun interacting with this new material.

*Have you ever declared in your mind that, starting tomorrow, you were going to be doing something differently, something that would be of great benefit but just hadn’t found its place on your “Accomplished” list yet?

*As you approached assimilating this new thing into your day-to-day life, did it happen easily and quickly?

*Or perhaps did you encounter a bit of discussion with yourself in your head about how difficult it was, how bad you were at sticking to the plan, and that it wasn’t ever going to happen the way you wanted it to happen?

That, my friends, is called Resistance. We’ve all experienced it, and we all know how crazy-making it can be when it shows up.

My new e-course is called Resistance Toys: Clever Distractions Designed to Change Your Mind One Neuropathway at a Time. In it I demonstrate how humor and creativity have helped me to dissolve the choke-hold Resistance often exerts, and how to use that power to succeed in whatever change you may be thinking about initiating into your life:

A) Eating habits
B) Exercising regularly
C) Finding a different/more suitable/better paying job
D) Making time for myself
E) Cut down or stop smoking
F) Getting more sleep
G) Feel better about myself
H) Improve a relationship(s)
I) Other_______________________________________

If you have some time to play during the next few weeks and you’d like to experiment stress-free with some arena of change in your life, you are invited to join this focus group experience!

The first installment of material is waiting for you at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Resistancetoysfocusgroup the Yahoo group. Click on the blue “Join This Group” button on the right-hand side to get started.

Should you have any problems with signing up, please let me know at resistance.toys at gmail.com, and we’ll figure it out.

After working on this project for quite some time, I am excited to send this material out into the world and watch what happens. Your participation would mean so much, and if you do decide to join, I appreciate the time you are taking out of your busy schedule to do so.

If it just isn’t for you right now however I understand. Pass it on to a friend who might enjoy it.

Either way, have fun, and may the bliss be with you~

Deb Schanilec
http://blissmonger.com/

carpolites

Who knew--my Mother's Day ceramic tabletop fountain came complete with not just rocks, but carpolites. I must say that the translation job on the instructions was nearly flawless til I came across this term. I even had to look it up, and the word processing dictionary I'm using right now doesn't recognize it, either. According to the mini article on Wikipedia on the subject of its synonym "road metal", the term is commonly used these days in New Zealand but nowhere else. I love these universes of knowledge that open up in all their glory where there was ignorance before. Thank you, The Joy of Gardening, for making this all possible.

74 years, 1 month, 14 days

Cruising through a graveyard isn't something I do every day, but there are usually feasts of contrast and texture to be found, like this one. It's interesting that people's lives used to be tallied to the day for their headstones. I wonder when that custom changed.

peaceful warrior

 

"A warrior is not about perfection or victory or invulnerability. He's about absolute vulnerability."

Finally saw Peaceful Warrior with Nick Nolte last night on dvd. I liken the experience to when I finally read Eat, Pray, Love. I think something about waiting to savor these two gems is what packed the punch both of them had. And perhaps there was some sort of energetic thing going on with waiting. Doesn't really matter, but I'm going to see if I can remember this and look for a trend.

The friend I watched the film with was busy writing down lines that resonated with him, which was most of the time, there were so many. But just now when I looked up quotes from the movie on google, nothing really resonates as much as it did last night. And that's fine. The resonating did its thing and I woke up in another frame of mind this morning.

While I was out on my 4.5 mile walk, I was thinking about some of the scenes, and at a certain point I thought I saw myself emerge from a ripple in the field, so to speak. Hard to explain, like so much of Dan's character's experience, and not transmuted easily to someone else. But that's part of the deal--focus and a disciplined mind that's thrown out as much of its garbage as possible is what it takes.

Blissmongering is my name for it.