You may recall I wrote a while back about my recurring “critic fantasy,” which involved a man getting up while I was giving a talk, and yelling that my book had nothing to offer. 

Well, last week, a man actually did approach me after a speaking engagement and tell me my work had nothing to offer!  Oops — perhaps I attracted this situation by “putting it out to the universe” on my blog!  (More on the law of attraction in a moment.)

I didn’t find myself freaked out by the odd synchronicity, although I did feel a mild irritation at being misunderstood.  This was because the man’s rant didn’t seem to deal with what I actually said, but instead with his preconceived notions of what people who talk about “spiritual” stuff say.

Roughly, his complaints went like “all this stuff about ‘making yourself happy’ and ‘creating a Rolls-Royce by thinking about it’ and so on is garbage.”  However, I didn’t talk about either of those.  First of all, I only teach about manifesting Lamborghinis — if you want a Rolls, you need a different guru.

No “Magical Manifesting Mastery” Here

Just kidding — I don’t talk about “manifesting” anything.  In fact, I later realized I was, in a (limited) way, thankful to the man for helping me clarify what my work is really about.  The work I do is about relating to the thoughts and sensations that are already there in our experience, not attracting or creating something to take their place.

One of my biggest inspirations in following this path has been the work of psychotherapist Robert Augustus Masters.  Some might say this inspiration borders on obsession — I even flew from California to Boulder, CO to take Robert’s workshop.  Robert, if you’re reading this, don’t worry — I don’t have your home address.

But here I am joking around, when I’m actually here to review Robert’s latest book, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters (not an affiliate link).

What Is Spiritual Bypassing?

Spiritual bypassing, to Masters, means “the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”  Basically, when we learn that getting the “right” job, relationship, car, or something else isn’t going to heal our pain, we turn to spiritual practices, hoping they’ll quell our “bad feelings” at last.

Often, unfortunately, we don’t find the relief we’re looking for.  For example, some people (as I used to do) think meditation is supposed to involve feeling peaceful and perhaps even blissful.

But if they get deeply into it, they discover that it isn’t like that at all — in fact, when we switch off all the noise we’re usually surrounded by, and sit quietly, the pain we’ve been shutting out often comes through loud and clear.  And that’s when we start griping that meditation “doesn’t work.”

Spiritual Sedation

On the other hand, some of us do find tranquility in meditation and similar practices, but then we start using those practices to shut out emotions and sensations we don’t want to be with – as Masters puts it, to “find a safety from the more brutal dimensions of life that we crave.”  If we feel angry, for instance, and we see anger as a “negative emotion” we “shouldn’t be having,” perhaps we’ll meditate to numb the feeling.

The trouble is that feeling angry can serve us at times in life.  If we need to protect ourselves against an attacker, or say a firm “no” to someone who’s demanding a lot of our time and energy, anger can fuel us to take decisive, effective action.  Thus, sedating our anger and other “bad feelings” with spirituality (or anything else) can be harmful.

What’s Spirituality Good For?

This isn’t to say that spiritual practice has no benefits.  In fact, says Masters, spiritual practice can serve us by helping us get more comfortable and familiar with our pain, rather than running from it.  “Contrary to what we tend to believe,” he writes, “the more intimate we are with our pain, the less we suffer.”

This kind of statement was hard for me to believe before I experienced the truth of it myself.  Like many people, when I began meditating, I felt really bored, and when the boredom got intense enough I’d simply stop.  Eventually, inspired by teachers like Robert, I focused my attention on the boredom and just allowed it to arise.

As I did this, the boredom became easier and easier to be with — and, as I often describe, this had practical benefits in my life, such as helping me focus on a project I was doing for a long period of time even if I felt bored.

And on that note, look at the word count!  Looks like I’d best put the rest of my review of this important book into a second post.  Stay tuned!

Do you ever notice yourself doing “spiritual bypassing”?  What feelings do you use spiritual practice to get away from?

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I’ve been doing a lot of speaking recently to groups of job-seeking professionals (one reason I’ve been MIA on the internet for two weeks), and predictably I tend to get questions about dealing with job interview anxiety.

But if I get the chance to explore the issue more deeply with people, I often find that they’re not really interested in reducing their anxiety.  Instead, they want to convince the interviewer they aren’t anxious.

I usually discover this when someone asks a question about interview anxiety, and I respond with some ideas from meditation and yoga, like bringing your attention into the body, noticing where you’re restricting your breathing, and so on.  They then give me a puzzled look, and say “but don’t you have any practical advice?”

When I ask what they mean by practical advice, they’ll reply “you know, things like how I should spin bad stuff on my resume, how long I should spend answering a question,” and so on.  In other words, what they really want to know is how to look like a confident, competent person.  Their own feelings aren’t important — only the interviewer’s view of them matters.

Image Obsession Creates Anxiety

I think this attitude is in keeping with the conventional wisdom in our culture.  For any situation in life involving “selling yourself” — marketing, interviewing for jobs, dating, or something else — most advice out there is about “making” people have the “right” thoughts and feelings about you.

The trouble is, in my experience, this attitude is actually a big source of anxiety.  The more deeply we’re concerned about our image, the more scary and exhausting relating with people becomes.

For example, suppose you went into a job interview having memorized ten questions you’re “supposed” to ask, five “confident body language” tips, seven “interview mistakes” to avoid, and so on.  Wouldn’t trying to remember and follow all these rules create stress for you?

But that’s not all — suppose you also went into the interview believing that “how I feel doesn’t matter — only this interviewer’s feelings about me are important.”  In other words, your sense of self-worth is riding on the interviewer’s opinion of you.  Don’t you think that might cause some freak-out as well?

What Do You Want?

So, if memorizing a lot of interviewing tips and obsessing over your image isn’t the key to overcoming interview anxiety, what is?  I think all the techniques I usually talk about regarding breathing, focusing your attention, and so on are wonderful, but here’s an even more basic starting point:  try focusing on what you feel and want.

That is, instead of going into the interview worrying about what the interviewer will think, see if you can get curious about questions like:  is this job in keeping with my career goals?  Does this seem like the kind of working environment I’d enjoy?  What would I need to know to feel comfortable taking this job?

If you’re in the job market, one thing I think you’ll immediately notice about this attitude is that it actually allows you to have an informative, and even enjoyable, dialogue with the interviewer.  Focusing on what you want out of the job helps you to ask questions you’re actually curious about, rather than parroting canned questions from some interviewing book that don’t really matter to you.

Although I’ve been talking about job interviewing, I think the attitude I’ve discussed is useful for any “selling yourself” situation.  I’ve found that focusing on our own wants and feelings, rather than getting caught up in strategies for manipulating others’ experience, can help make these situations easier to endure, and maybe even fun.

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In the last post in this series, we talked about how developing the ability to say “no,” and protect our time, is important for making the kind of progress we want in our creative work.

In this post, I’ll discuss how it can help our creativity to set another kind of boundary — to stop blaming ourselves for how others experience the world.

As I’m sure you’ve learned firsthand, when we let people see our creative work, we risk getting criticized.  But criticism by itself, I think, isn’t a problem.  It only becomes problematic when we take responsibility for the critic’s suffering and anger.

My Criticism Fantasy

I’ll give you an example from my own life.  While I was writing my book, I had a nagging tendency to imagine ways people might attack it.  A very specific “worst-case scenario” kept coming to mind.

The scenario involved me speaking at a bookstore.  During the question and answer period, a man stands up and launches into a tirade.  “This book doesn’t solve any real problems,” he shouts.  “I’ve got two kids, a wife and a mortgage, and no job — how does this book help me with that?”

I thought for a while about why I kept imagining this situation, and why it seemed troubling to me.  Eventually, I realized the problem was that I was taking responsibility for my fictitious critic’s suffering.

In other words, this man was basically blaming me for his situation and his emotional distress, and I was buying into his story.  But in “reality,” I didn’t create his financial problems, abuse him as a child, or do anything except tell him about my book.  When I recognized that, my body suddenly relaxed — tension I hadn’t noticed before melted away — and the fantasy no longer seemed so worrisome.

Releasing Your Responsibility

I’ve found that this kind of fantasizing is common among people who are having trouble putting their creative work “out there.”  Often, these are compassionate, empathic people.  They want to heal others’ suffering — not bring more into the world.

Unfortunately, people with this mentality (myself included, sometimes) also tend to have an exaggerated sense of responsibility for how others feel.  If someone else is hurt, they assume, I must have hurt them, and it’s my job to make it better.

The paradox is that this attitude actually prevents people from playing the healing role they desire.  Their fear of hurting others causes them to shrink away from giving their gifts to the world.  If they wrote that book or started that business, they think, somebody might get mad, and then the world would be worse off.

The key, I think, is to recognize that it’s possible to care about people without “merging” with them – without taking all of their hurt, suffering and fear upon ourselves.  Breathing deeply, and sensing the pressure of our feet against the ground, I think, is a helpful way to remember our separateness from others, and our solidity in the face of their upset and distress.

I know this was a liberating realization for me, and I hope it also helps you find the sense of ease and flow you may be seeking in your work.

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I hope you enjoy it and that you had a great weekend.

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Human beings exist on at least two levels, and I think we’re happiest and most fulfilled when we stay conscious of both of them.  The two levels I’m talking about are:

1.  Everything Matters.  On one level of reality, lots of things in life matter a lot.  You are a body that needs constant care and feeding.  It’s extremely important that you succeed in your career, relationships and so on.  You have a nearly infinite number of wants and needs.

2.  Nothing Matters.  At another level, nothing is important.  You are not simply a body, because the distinction between “you” and “the rest of the world” is arbitrary and artificial.  You are everything that is, and you are changeless and eternal.  The idea that you could “need” or “want” anything is meaningless.

Most of Us Live at Level 1

I suspect we’ve all experienced, at one point or another, these two levels of reality.  However, most of us feel uneasy acknowledging that Level 2 — where nothing matters — exists, so we shut it out.

After all, if we admitted there’s a sense in which nothing matters, what would that do to our work ethic?  Perhaps we’d kick back on the couch with a beer and the remote, and never get up again except to buy more beer.  Or maybe we’d take a more “spiritual” tack, and spend the rest of our lives handing out flowers in airports.

There certainly are people who live this way.  In many cultures, people who live entirely in the changeless, eternal realm, where nothing matters, are common and accepted.

If you travel in India, you’ll likely see saints who have freely chosen to give up their belongings and live as beggars.  Russia has a long tradition of “holy fools” in deep communion with God but incapable of basic daily tasks.  Unless you want this kind of existence, living entirely at Level 2 probably isn’t for you.

The Laments of Level 1 Living

On the other hand, going through life as if Level 2 doesn’t exist also has a cost.  Spending our whole lives feeling incomplete, constantly wanting this and needing that, keeps us exhausted and fearful.

The most painful part of this way of living is that, because there’s always more we can have, we’re never satisfied.  I’m reminded of some wealthy ex-neighbors whose house was under constant remodeling, and whose yard was eternally full of bulldozers and mounds of dirt — yet no amount of landscaping seemed to please them.

It’s All Good

I see my work as meant to help people stay conscious of both levels of reality as they walk through the world.  Because most people in the U.S., I think it’s safe to say, are wrapped up in the level where everything is a huge, stressful deal all the time, I tend to focus on helping people acknowledge the level where nothing’s that important.

For instance, if someone feels paralyzed with anxiety each time they sit down to work on an important project, I may invite them to do exercises to get back in touch with the level where nothing, including the project, is important.  Perhaps I’ll have them breathe deeply, and sense the pressure of their feet against the ground, and the feeling of stability that sensation can bring.

The paradox is that, when we keep ourselves aware of both levels, we actually function better in the day-to-day, humdrum, routine world.  If we see a project as a matter of life and death, it makes sense that working on it will be a scary experience.  But if we stay conscious that a mistake or setback in the project won’t destroy us, we find more ease and even joy in our work.

So, yes, there’s a way in which nothing really matters — and I think that’s a wonderful thing.

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New Bay Area Meetup

I’ve started a Meetup group in San Jose, California, which I’m using to offer free evening events on finding focus, motivation and peace in your work.  I’m excited about the next meeting, which will be on Monday, June 28, because yoga teacher Rosy Moon, who co-leads my full-day intensive workshop, will be joining me.

We’ll be talking about how yoga can help us accept and even embrace the tension, frustration, fatigue and so on we feel in our work — and, of course, doing some yoga with participants.  We’ll also demonstrate how the deep inner work we do in our workshop can help people let go of the blocks that have them avoid truly giving their gifts to the world.

If you’re in the Bay Area, I encourage you to drop by — you’ll definitely learn a lot and have fun!

Inner Productivity Intensive

I think I’m still digesting how powerful an experience the last Inner Productivity Intensive was.  My friends are like “okay, time to finish processing and feel happy about it already!”    Not only did Rosy and I have a blast, but we got some incredible feedback — here’s a sample:

“I wanted to let you both know how much I enjoyed the workshop.  It was a great experience – I learned a lot and actually enjoyed most of it!  It may be the best single day workshop I have attended in my professional career.”

- Aidan C., San Francisco, California

“The Inner Productivity Intensive Workshop was amazing, maybe even transformational.  I’ll use some of the practical techniques I learned pretty much every day for the rest of my life.  At the same time, I also gained deeper insights into myself and my relationships that were incredibly valuable.”

- B.P., San Francisco, California

Almost as soon as the last participant left, Rosy and I were talking about scheduling another one.  If I procrastinated about putting it together, that would make me a big hypocrite, and I didn’t want that.  So, I wasted no time in setting up the next workshop for August 15, 2010.

If you’re ready to get conscious, and let go, of patterns of thinking and behavior holding you back from giving your deepest gifts to the world, this is the workshop for you.  You can find out more about it and register here.

Some Great Recent Interviews

I had the privilege of appearing on two wonderful radio shows recently — both hosts had read and deeply appreciated the book, which led to discussions that were educational and fun.  I’ll post the links to them below.

* Welcome Changes Radio with Velma Gallant, June 2010

* Good Vibrations Radio with Solarzar and Kyralani, May 2010

I hope I get the chance to meet more of you in person, and I’m looking forward to more opportunities to help the world make working enjoyable and meaningful.

In gratitude,
Chris

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“I teach people how to use mindfulness practices, like meditation and yoga, to focus while they work.  I help them bring these practices into their in-the-moment experience of working — to go beyond just using them on the yoga mat or the meditation cushion.”

This is a correct description of what I do.  Unfortunately, it also tends to make people’s eyes roll and/or glaze over.

I know this all too well, because I delivered this “elevator pitch” many times.  What’s more, for many months, I kept describing what I do in this way, even though I knew it was boring and confusing people.

Why did I keep saying this to people, despite its obvious soporific effect?  The answer is that lots of resistance came up inside when I thought about changing it.  Because I found the resistance uncomfortable, I left my pitch unchanged so I wouldn’t have to feel it.

Welcoming My Resistance

I finally started getting traction around this issue when I decided to re-read my book and take my own medicine.  Rather than fleeing from the resistance, I chose to sit with it.  I got intimately familiar with its contours — where I felt it in my body, whether it manifested as a tingling, pulsing, tension, or something else, and so on.

As I’ve experienced so many times, putting my full attention on the tightness in my body actually dissolved it.  My solar plexus, where the most tension was, relaxed, and I sighed with relief.  And, as usual, with that relaxation came helpful insight.  What I saw was that I was clinging to this dull description of my services because, in my mind, it made me sound intelligent and unique.

After all, even if people didn’t buy my book or take my workshop, at least they wouldn’t see me as just another rah-rah jump-up-and-down-to-”Simply-The-Best” motivational speaker.  At least they’d know I don’t spout self-help cliches like “take action!  Think happy thoughts!  Like attracts like!”  You see, I use sophisticated words like “mindfulness,” and that makes me different!

In other words, I recognized through self-exploration that I was afraid of looking average — and, most importantly, that I was allowing that fear to control my business decisions.  I was letting concerns about my image get in the way of actually delivering value to people.

Allowing My Averageness

Getting conscious of this fear also helped to liberate me from it.  After all, I realized, what’s really going to happen if someone sees me as average?  Will I disintegrate or spontaneously combust or something?  Probably not.

What’s more, I recognized that, no matter what I accomplish, there are many ways in which I’m forever doomed to be average.  Studies have shown, for example, that I share approximately 99.999999% of my DNA not only with you, Dear Readers, but also with orangutans and mandrills.  Why go to such lengths to conceal my built-in averageness?

Armed with this new awareness, I came up with a much more clear and concise summary of what I do.  It goes a little something like this:

“I help people get focused and motivated at work.”

I’ve noticed that this produces a lot less nodding off, and a lot more purchasing of my stuff, among potential customers.

What about you, Dear Reader?  How are you letting image-consciousness get in the way of giving your gifts to the world?

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In the last post in this series (over at Urban Monk), I talked about some yoga asanas, or poses, that can help us restore our focus and motivation as we work — without even getting up from our desks.  In this article, I’ll speak more generally about how yoga helps us develop what I call Awareness and Allowing — two capacities that are key to giving us the efficiency and enjoyment we want in what we do.
 
1.  Awareness.  Almost immediately, when I started doing yoga, I became much more attuned to the sensations coming up in my body.  I noticed all this tension, tingling, heat and so on that I hadn’t been conscious of before.
 
Another thing I began to notice was that certain sensations would come up right before I’d find myself procrastinating or putting off a project.  I’d start getting this antsy, jittery feeling in my arms and legs, as if there were some danger I needed to run from, and then I’d find myself checking e-mail or pursuing some other distraction.
 
I eventually realized that I was putting off my work because I didn’t want to experience those antsy feelings.  Because I found those sensations disturbing and uncomfortable, I’d fallen into the habit of checking e-mail, surfing the Web or doing something else to distract myself from them.
 
Understanding that those jittery feelings were what I was trying to escape helped put my procrastination in perspective.  If discomfort in my body was really all I was running from, why was I running at all?  Wasn’t moving forward in my projects more important to me than avoiding those sensations?
 
Of course, yoga isn’t the only way to develop Awareness — you don’t need to learn to contort your body into a pretzel shape to be aware of the sensations you’re feeling.    A simpler approach, in my experience, is to pause whenever you find yourself about to put off a task, and just bring your awareness into your body and notice what’s coming up.
 
2.  Allowing.  If you’ve done yoga, I imagine you’ve had the experience of getting into a pose that involved a really deep stretch, and brought up intense sensations.  Perhaps you stayed in the pose, despite its intensity.  And when you did, you noticed the sensations becoming more comfortable and less threatening.
 
By Allowing, I mean just that — staying with an uncomfortable sensation that’s coming up, rather than resisting or fleeing from it.  This attitude of Allowing, I think, isn’t just for the time we spend on the yoga mat or the meditation cushion — it’s also very helpful in our working lives.
 
Suppose, for example, you’re working on a project and you start getting bored.  Most of us would react to that boredom by doing something to “take the edge off” — maybe playing a few hands of Solitaire on the computer, messing around on social media, and so on.
 
What if, instead, we chose to stay with that feeling — breathe, relax our bodies, and just allow the sensations to wash over us?  What if we decided, instead of pushing our boredom away, to get intimate and familiar with it?
 
The biggest benefit of learning to Allow the discomfort that comes up as we work is that it gives us control over our own schedules.  Most of us are like Pavlov’s Dogs, automatically turning away from our work whenever unpleasantness arises.  Developing the ability to drop our resistance to that unpleasantness, and keep moving forward, helps put us in charge of what and how much we get done.

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I admit it — I have moments when I doubt the value of everything I do in my life.  I doubt whether I’m really interested in my work.  I question whether the relationships in my life are worthwhile.  I seriously consider whether I’d prefer a life of solitary, cave-dwelling meditation.

I think doubt is wonderful.  If I’d never stopped to ask myself whether my path was taking me in the right direction, I wouldn’t have changed my career, written my book, or done many other rewarding things.

In my experience, doubt only becomes a problem if we either (1) give it complete control of our choices, or (2) try to deny that it’s there.

Letting Doubt Do The Driving

To illustrate the first of these, I know several people who are in the habit of revamping their lives every time doubt arises.  Each time they find themselves questioning whether they’re on the right path, they immediately find a new one.  They leave their job, their graduate program, or their partner.

Unfortunately, they never find a perfect, doubt-free situation, so they keep flailing around in frustration.  What they don’t see is that doubt is part of the human condition — it’s in our nature to question whether we’re on the right path, no matter how ideal our situation may look on the outside.

Thus, if we always flee our situation whenever doubts come up, we’ll spend our lives in a fruitless search.  I think we’re better off keeping our doubt in the backseat, if you will, and listening to what it has to say — not putting it in the driver’s seat of our lives and giving it the keys.

Denying Doubt

We also run into trouble, I think, when we pretend our doubt doesn’t exist.  Perhaps we don’t want the hassle of pondering whether what we’re doing is right for us, or we want others to think we’re confident and sure about where we’re headed.

I find, both in myself and in working with others, that repressing our doubts actually drains our energy, and takes away from what we can accomplish in our work.  Refusing to admit we’re uncertain about what we’re doing creates tension in the body, as if we have to physically push the doubt away.

But when we admit to ourselves we’re in doubt, we release that tension.  Many times, when I’ve been honest with myself about my uncertainty, I’ve found myself spontaneously relaxing my shoulders and sighing with relief.

Calling It Out

Interestingly, often the doubt itself falls away when I acknowledge it.  For instance, recently, I’ve been preparing to lead a full-day workshop.  At one point, while experiencing the usual frustrations that come with getting ready for an event, I realized — with a sinking feeling — that, in that moment, I didn’t want to put on the event at all.

However, things changed when I called out my doubt.  I said to myself aloud:  “I don’t want to lead this workshop.”  In that moment, my body relaxed, and suddenly my desire to hold the workshop and serve others with my work returned.  It’s like the uncertain part of me needed to be heard — but once I gave it a hearing, it fell silent.

I invite you to try this the next time doubt creeps in — you being human and all, it’s bound to happen.

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In an earlier post, I suggested that we can actually enjoy marketing when we’re able to tap into our natural compassion and concern for others.  As I said, I think this often requires us to let go of the ways we protect ourselves from getting hurt when we interact with another person.

For example, if we’re at a networking event, and we’re worried that others won’t take seriously what we have to offer, maybe we’ll loudly brag about our products and services, not letting anyone get a word in edgewise.  However, this tends to get us exactly what we don’t want — people we interact with feel annoyed and don’t want to buy from us.

It would be nice if we could simply drop all these self-protection strategies and “get real.”  Unfortunately, it isn’t usually that easy.  Many of us developed these strategies a long time ago, and have been relying on them for a long time to get through life.  Thus, they’ve become unconscious and habitual — we no longer even notice we’re using them.

How do we get conscious of the ways we’re sabotaging ourselves?  In this post, I want to offer an exercise I’ve found very helpful in creating this kind of awareness.  It’s simple, but it can be surprisingly intense and revealing.

You’ll need a partner to do this exercise.  Stand across from each other and make eye contact, remaining silent for a few minutes.  As you face the other person, silently ask yourself a few questions:

1.  Where am I tense?  Bring your awareness into your body, and notice any tight places.  For example, maybe your shoulders are tensing up, as if you’re about to be attacked and you’re preparing to defend yourself.  Perhaps you find your lips curling into a strained grin, as if you need to please the other person or convince them everything’s okay.

2.  What am I afraid they’ll do?  Are you worried that the other person will do something hurtful?  Maybe, for instance, they’ll turn their back and ignore you?  Yell at you and accuse you of screwing up?  Deceive you and take advantage of you in some way?

3.  How do I want them to see me?  What do you want the other person to think about you?  For example, perhaps you want them to think you’re totally calm about doing this exercise?  That you’re “nice” and not dangerous to them?  That you’re tough and you can protect yourself if need be?

4.  What do I want them to do?  Is there something you want (or maybe even need) from them right now?  Do you want them to smile at you?  Or maybe you just want them to go away and leave you alone?

Now, consider the possibility that you’re bringing exactly the same attitudes and desires into every interaction.  If you’re feeling afraid of the other person, for example, you’re probably feeling afraid of a lot of people you deal with in your daily life.

As you might imagine, this exercise is often uncomfortable.  If you don’t like “awkward silences” in conversations, you sure won’t enjoy this!  However, the awareness it can create is invaluable.  Often, just realizing the ways you’re tensing up, protecting yourself from the other person, trying to convince them of something, and so on is enough to help you let go of those strategies.

As Fritz Perls, the creator of Gestalt therapy, put it, awareness by itself is transformative.

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