Can context be cause?
This question doesn’t sound like it could make much sense, does it? But when you find out what it means, you’ll be thrilled to know that it is the panacea, the cure for most of what ails us.
The Second Phase Activators Course just finished on Sunday, and I am working on the next course. Making decisions, creating some new stuff. And a big change: I will not allow everyone to sign up, just because they want to be in it.
There are some current students who, because of their attitude, lag behind. This creates tension in the group: I spend more time trying to unstuck the unwilling or lazy ones than actually teaching stuff. (The main unwilling attitudes ‘it’s good enough for me the way it is,’ ‘why rock the boat,’ or belligerence or even hostility/resistance are the attitudes I have been experiencing and won’t tolerate in my next courses.
These people also don’t have a big enough desire to change or even to experiment, and change and experimenting are mandatory if you want to create a shift in your life to the better.)
I also needed to create changes in MY attitude to be able to believe that I can pick and choose who I want to teach. That is a long shot from where I started: accepting anyone who was willing.
The most important reason I was able to make this change in my attitude has been the “renaming exercise” I taught a month ago. In that exercise I renamed myself as the one for whom my mother made black currant preserves. You can read the article about that here… After all, if someone was so loved by their mother, they deserve to pick and choose who they want to work with.
It’s also taken me a lot of pondering what to teach next. I decided to teach a course, Brilliance at Will, where people can reliably access the wisdom of the “Beyond” and their innate intelligence to live a life of grace and ease. The renaming method is part of this course: and I am going to teach it in a pre-course webinar series. It will be free to attend. 1
Pulling off this new move “I will pick and chose who to teach” is tricky without going into arrogance. And if you remember, arrogance and superiority are my soul correction. To put myself in the position of “power” in my life is not comfortable: after all if it doesn’t work I have no one to blame but myself. Becoming fully cause in my own life… instead of leaving myself as effect, as victim, as passive participant is not comfortable. Sound familiar?
In the past two days I had two other instances of becoming cause.
1. You know that I participated with Landmark Education for 26 years. And I am getting a lot of phone calls to continue participating in courses and seminars. The calls, until yesterday went like this: “Do you want to do this seminar?” And I would answer: “No, thank you.” and they would thank me and hang up.
This left me with a feeling I was just a number, that they had a lot of calls to make and they just wanted some yeses to get the “job” done.
A woman called yesterday, and I asked her if it would be OK if I gave her feedback. She said “Of course” and I “trained” her to rekindle my original desire to participate, for me and for other past participants she called. She could not do it, but I started to come alive, nevertheless.
Possibility is a strange flower, much like some flowers that are really sensitive. Possibility flowr closes its petals once the attention is taken away from it. It hibernates. It is not dead, but it is not alive either.
The moment you stop paying attention to possibility, the moment you take it for granted, it is gone.
Today I got another call from Landmark Education. (The seminar is starting tomorrow, that is why they are calling.) This person was also about to hang up after I said I had gotten six calls for this seminar. But instead, I asked if she would be open to some coaching. She said yes, and I told her that what would serve me, as a customer best, if she asked me how come I didn’t want to participate.
So she asked: How come you don’t want to participate?
I have lots of reasons, some of them reasons I can’t overcome… among them the concern that as a veteran “Landmark Educationer” it only adds to my arrogance to be in a beginner seminar, and being in a beginner seminar, being an old-timer destroys my still weak humility.
Her voice changed. “Your voice changed, what happened?” She honestly answered: “I can’t make you say yes…”
What she doesn’t know is that while I was talking I revisited the glorious results I produced in this same exact seminar 25 years ago: my life would never be the same again. I felt a burning desire to somehow do the seminar, even if I can’t get to Ithaca to do it in person. I’d love to produce the same result or bigger again! The secret was to take on the excellence in an area, take it on as a challenge, something that you can cause.
She doesn’t know, because she only knows the number of yes’s she got, and mine was a no… but not really. I suddenly became an active customer again!
2. And this is when I realized that in some areas of my life I am not causing, I am an effect like most people.
I have a woman who drives me once a week to do errands. We talk the entire time, but I never asked her if she would like any of my products, the Energy Water® or the Heaven on Earth® to try out.
Today I asked and she said “no”.
I felt hurt. I felt so hurt that I was ready to say: “You know what, this arrangement is not working out.”
Then I realized that I am exactly like those Landmark Education People that assume that possibility is present, even if it is not present.
The move to presence for another their possibility is called, in Landmark Education, enrollment. A bad word, but it means good. It simply means talk and allow the other to talk until possibility is so present for them that they can taste it, it is tangible, not just words, and both of you feel like doing something with it, to make it even stronger.
I never had a conversation like that with this woman, or pretty much anyone else lately. I have been assuming that they get possibility from me talking… And I’ve been wrong.
I have been hurt, and angry, and that made me an effect.
It is time to become cause again. After all it is possibility that makes life wonderful to live. Possibility that is alive, present, and blossoming.
Interesting, even as the outside season and weather is moving into Fall, that inside of us, Spring is coming through the quickening action of possibility…