What you want is the force of creation trying to grow through you. Desire is the trajectory of the great unfolding.

The more free you become, the more the universe expands as you, through you. 

Freedom, thus, is the primary mode of all creation. Whatever you want will come into being, first and foremost, through freedom. 

There is so much you are not free from.

Most of that which limits your freedom is outside of your awareness. 

You don’t even know how unfree you are.

Finding this out is the beginning. 

Next is falling in love with your lack of freedom. 

As you come to love that you are not free, the prison you live in will begin to reveal itself to you.

A welcoming of being in prison is all it takes—a falling in love with the circumstance of being bound. 

The paradox of loving a prison is that first, it brings it into awareness and then second, it drives its dissolution. 

Held in the awareness of love, all limitations lose their power over you. Without resistance, they melt into the light of higher possibility.

This higher possibility is being in the throes of creation, like a child unbounded by the litany of ideas that stop them from running, screaming, and asking for what they want.

Asking is the thrust of desire from the void into the world.

When you ask for what you want, you are free.

When you are as happy to fail as you are to fly, you discover the wondrous reality that these are the same; all flying is falling. 

Everything is dancing, from the bottom to the top and across the entire expanse. 

Everything free, that is.

Can you hear the music? 

And are you afraid to dance?

At what age did dancing start being scary? Was it in middle school? Even younger?

We come into this life dancing and then, too soon thereafter, we let our dancing die. 

We let it get choked out on the ju-jitsu mat of an industrialized educational complex by a society sick on plastic productivity. Hiding out in the confines of authority and order–a world within the pale–we lose touch with our souls. 

Fuck that, I say.

We have one fucking shot at this thing called our life.

Let us stretch our arms out as far as they can reach and touch everything.

If you spend time with me regularly, every aspect of your life will be set ablaze. 

Ablaze for the better, with more passion, more pleasure, more profit, and more promise.

This is not something special about me. It is what Being Free does.

Freedom bleeds.

Just as fear spreads from one to another, freedom does too.

You can become not only the beacon of freedom for others, but the generating force of their liberation. 

You are being an influence and example to everyone you meet already anyway. Let that be an influence and example of freedom.

Through this Being Free ourselves, we can set the world free.

How much of a difference will this make, you wonder?

That question is one of the prison walls. 

Can you feel how it stops you?

Yes, you can.

And we’re only just getting started.

Loving us all, JPM

PS – Creator’s Journey is a year-long journey in radical liberation. For years following, you will look back on it as the most significant advance of your freedom. Tap here to learn more and join us today.

The post I Will Set You Free <span class="serif">(To Create What You Want)</span> appeared first on Creating.

I’d never really considered it before.

Having benefited greatly from his GMB Fitness trainings in physical autonomy I’d assumed I enjoyed them so much because I was a lover of freedom and autonomy was essentially the same thing.

Ryan explained that autonomy is about being able to make decisions and govern yourself based on your values, desires, and reasons. It’s about self-governance and personal authority over your actions.

In other words, autonomy is about you having skill, ability and strength of will.

Freedom, on the other hand, Ryan distinguished as the absence of constraints or external limitations on your actions. When you are free, you are able to act without restraint.

As I’ve contemplated this distinction that autonomy is about who is making the decision (you) and freedom is about whether you’re allowed to act without being hindered, I’ve begun to see why I couldn’t see it before.

It’s not that I was missing out on what might be a common distinction. It’s that I have worked tirelessly to dissolve that distinction for myself and everyone I meet. 

The reality is that there are external limitations and constraints on us and this does, in fact, limit our freedom. However, the perspective I take on those constraints and limitations – that they are all my past and ongoing creation – moves the locus of power from outside of me to inside of me. 

Did you know I was once arrested in a small town in New Hampshire? That’s a story for another time, but for now, just picture me in the sheriff’s jail cell at the police station where I can see the key to the jail door hanging on the wall over his desk. 

This isn’t how it went down exactly, but as a metaphor, my taking the perspective that external limitations are my creation and my creation alone, is akin to that key floating off of the wall through the bars of the jail and into my hand. 

It’s not that the bars of the jails in our life aren’t really there. They are. The circumstances are real and we are stuck inside of them. 

But there is always a way out.

While my circumstances are the limiting factor on my freedom, with the right attitude they can always be changed or transcended.

It is for this reason that I have not distinguished personal autonomy from personal freedom. In fact, my autonomy—my ability to make decisions and govern myself—includes my ability to choose perspectives that change and transcend limitations.

It’s been said that ‘freedom isn’t free’. 

In the same way that the physical autonomy Ryan is giving me through his slow and meditative movement practices takes months of challenging physical exertion, cultivating the psychospiritual autonomy to free myself from seemingly fixed external obstacles takes constant self-reflective effort that is often mentally exhausting and emotionally uncomfortable.

The reward though is a freedom that doesn’t know itself as distinct from autonomy. A freedom that lives at the center of your being and emanates out from you into the world, creating the possibility of liberation for everyone you meet. 

The more free we are—the less constrained we are—the more we can grow into the wild beings we are meant to be. The wild and more beautiful beings that make the most beautiful world.

What constrains you at the moment? Where don’t you feel free?

Hit me back here and let me know, as I’d love to hear from you.

Loving us all, JPM

The post Freedom Isn’t Free | <span class="serif">Freedom vs Autonomy</span> appeared first on Creating.

In his book ‘How to Read a Tree’, which I enjoyed reading more than any book in years, Tristan Gooley explains that these branches shoot out near the base of old trees to shade the ground so that no new saplings take root. They are called ‘defender branches’ because they are defending the older tree against an attack on resources by new younger trees.

His explanation struck me as odd because I wasn’t seeing trees as things that fight to survive. I saw them as aspects of a larger whole that cooperate in their coming into being. 

The way trees share light, for example, is expressed in how the leading buds stop the growth of their parent branches when they touch the leaves of another tree. This is why trees in a canopy can seem to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The trees share space and share light.

What if, I wondered, the branches that shoot from low on the trunk in early spring are not defenders, but the gentle guiding arms of a mother, teaching her children where to find their independence and strength? Indeed, her offspring will be more likely to grow tall where resources are not already being used. What if this is akin to the encouragement of a baby to leave the breast and consume the foods of the world?

The possibilities for new meanings are endless, but the gift of what I saw in my inquiry was not a more accurate way of defining these branches. The gift was waking up to the possibility that competition is merely a perspective. 

If we take the inquiry to the extreme, what difference is there between fucking and fighting?

One aims toward birth and the other toward death. 

But death is only an end when that which dies is not seen as part of the whole. When a part of something dies, that death is a transformation. Without the illusion of separateness, death is birth.

None of this suggests we don’t have a preference. We certainly prefer living over dying. 

But when there are no defenders, competitions transfigure into cooperations. 

Instead of people vying for their place, we see people dancing. Where before we saw a riot, we see a party. 

A riot is not the kind of party most of us would like to attend, but seeing it as a party does make a difference. When we see the party, our preference may remain but our resistance falls away.

At the start of the pandemic, my friend Mark Sequoia, a former teacher who homeschooled his children,  wrote a simple line of medicine for the many parents suddenly thrust into the role of educator. 

“Your children cannot get behind because life is not a race.”

Until now, I have found much solace in this by remembering I don’t need to worry about my children competing educationally or professionally.

Today, as his medicine comes to me while writing, I’m hearing the last five words deeper than ever.

“Life is not a race.”

What if we aren’t all vying for survival? What if that’s just a story we’ve been sold?

What if there are no defenders and, in truth, we are all always cooperating, whether we see it this way or not?

The beady eye of the rooster I shot in the head on Monday makes this hard to see. The threat of a bomb landing on my friend’s home in Ukraine makes this even harder to see. 

When I am very still though, when I am most deeply present with the unfolding of all things, here I can see that we are never competing. I can see that even in this messy, bloody world we are actually cooperating. I can see that we are creating, working together as parts of a whole to bring into being something we do not know. 

This is a more beautiful world. There is still heartbreak in it. There is still the struggle to get away from hurt, but without competition our resistance to this fact is removed. 

We resisted competition because deep down, we knew we didn’t have to compete. Not in the sense that there need not be struggle, but in that we knew we need not be alone. 

I like the look and feel of a world in which there are no defenders; a world in which we belong to one another and we are creating together.

When I see young branches shooting out from the base of a tall tree, I see the gentle guiding arms of our sisters and brothers, inviting us to share.

“What if there are no defenders?”

Then all competition is an illusion and we are always cooperating as parts of something greater than we know. 

Look at the world through this lens this week and share with me what you see. 

Loving us all, JPM

PS – My next Master’s Circle has a couple of spaces left. If you’re ready for an extraordinary challenge that will cut to the core of how you see yourself and your world – and put you on a new personal and professional trajectory – the reach out and let’s talk.

The post What if There Are <span class="serif">No Defenders?</span> appeared first on Creating.

Maybe that was what did it. The missing toothbrush really shook me out of my shock and frustration. I thought of the man who had walked by my van the day prior looking in the windows at me. I hadn’t considered him much before, but now he had a suspicious face. No, now he had an innocent face. He was a guy who needed a toothbrush so bad that he’d steal somebody else’s.

While I walked to the police station to file a report, which I would need if I was to get any insurance money, I felt as light as air. It was that sense that one has when they have given a birthday present to someone happy to receive it. There’s an ecstasy in emptying one’s heart into another, not unlike the afterglow of a man giving into a woman.

While sitting in the waiting room at the police station, behind people certainly there with more important concerns than me, I found myself with a near infinite patience. I’d somehow never been so unhurried in my life, so happy to sit in a plastic chair in a cold and spiritless room.

It turned into a kind of contemplative meditation on giving and receiving. What I saw at that moment was that it was impossible for whoever entered my campervan to take anything from me. It was impossible because I’d decided to give them everything that they had taken with them. The moment I decide that I’m giving, there is no taking.

This is a good example of how the higher absorbs the lower, how love squelches fear, and how light casts out darkness.

Years later, gathered in a small circle in a riad in Marrakech, I was leading a conversation on creating and one of the women wasn’t seeing the possibility in this story, so I picked up a piece of fruit off the table and held it in my hand.

“Try to take this from me.”

Slowly and suspiciously, she reached over and took it from my hand. In the moment she grasped it, I moved my hand gently in her direction.

“Did you take it?” I asked.

“No, I tried, but you gave it to me.”

“OK, try again.”

She gave the fruit back and I held it again, this time closer to my body. She reached over quickly and snatched it. In the moment of her snatching, I loosened my grip, let the tension in my arm go and smiled while looking her in the eyes.

“Did you take it, this time?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I tried, but you let me have it again.”

“Do you see what I’m saying now?”

Her eyes were glazed over. It was sinking in. I added a few words to make it memorable.

“Nothing given can be taken.”

This became a cornerstone principle in my life and remembering it has liberated me from much toil and agitation, for within me I hold the power to never have anything taken from me simply through the choice I can make to give.

To wield the power of the choice to give doesn’t require that it happen in advance of the action of taking. It can occur in the moment of the attempt when the person is snatching the fruit from your hand, or even afterwards, when you discover the toothbrush is missing.

In fact, the light of giving can cast out the darkness of taking even years later.

Some years ago, a small men’s group that I’m a part of recommended that I write a letter to my father thanking him for everything he had ever done for me. This was to be a practice that would help heal the subconscious judgments I held of him. In writing that letter, I found myself moving from the obvious things to be grateful for – the trips to Disneyworld, helping me make my pinewood derby racecar in cub scouts, and coming to all my sports games, to the less obvious like grounding me for being an asshole and finally even for divorcing my mother.

That last one snuck up on me.

I didn’t want to write it, because even then in my early thirties, I was still pissed at him for that. A part of me still felt the way I did when I was fifteen years old, sitting in our living room, having just been mysteriously called in from playing outside earlier than dinner time so that our parents could ‘talk to us about something important’. Serious talks weren’t exactly something that happened in our house. There was a lot of sarcasm and talking about things, but we never even had the ‘birds and the bees’ conversation.  Maybe that’s what this was going to be, I thought.

My Dad spoke.

“Your mother and I are getting a divorce.”

It was short and straight to the point. No beating around the bush. That’s the way my Dad shoots.

I remember looking immediately over at my mother and seeing her arms folded with a look of dissatisfaction on her face. It wasn’t the kind of sadness for letting us down, but the kind of being let down herself. That stuck with me and I carried it for years.

It wasn’t the whole story for me. At the same time, it was great for my Mom to find herself, I could see that. She’d gotten married so young. And eventually, she came to be happy it worked out the way it did.

We can become happy with anything I suppose.

I’ve got friends who can’t walk and who are happy. My 4th grade teacher was missing his middle finger, and he was happy as a pig in shit. Even back then, I doubted his story that it got cut off in a machine. The middle finger seems more likely to be one that’s chopped off by the wrong person you pointed it at to be caught in a machine, but maybe that’s just my wild imagination.

When I wrote that line though, when I thanked my father for leaving my mother, which came in on its own from the wellspring of love I had tapped by listing one thing after another that I was thankful for, suddenly all those years of being taken from just vanished. It was as if I’d just realized that my toothbrush was missing, saw how much that person needed it more than me, and moved my hand in their direction. The pain of having my childhood vision of our family taken from me was gone.

I can still remember the whole thing and all the years of hurt, but the hurt itself was gone. Nothing given can be taken.

This is what we mean when we talk about forgiving. In a literal and etymological sense, to for-give is simply ‘to give completely’. Nothing given completely can be taken, be it something happening now or anytime in the past or future.

If a long time ago, something was taken from you and bringing it to mind still hurts or bothers you in some way, then you can be free of this by simply choosing to give away that which was taken. Maybe it was money, pride, your virginity, or a loved one. It doesn’t matter what it was and it doesn’t matter how true or accurate it is to say that it was taken from you. If it feels like it was taken, then it was taken. And you can be free by choosing to give that thing away.

Forgiving doesn’t need to be about letting someone off the hook, not holding people accountable or even pretending that a wrong wasn’t tried against you. It can simply be about creating freedom through the choice to give completely.

By giving completely that which was taken from us we create real, pervasive freedom that changes the way we experience ourselves and the world.

When we become this free, it’s hard to remember what it was like before. The free-rolling wheel doesn’t remember being attached to the axle. It’s off on a new adventure looking only forward.

That’s why this idea became so central in my life and work. Freedom isn’t just about relief. It’s about liberating full-throttled creation. When a person lets go of something that was holding them back, they are free to look and move forward towards that which they desire.

I’ve used it to help so many people get what they want. Money, relationships, and all sorts of dream lives that didn’t seem possible before. This is because giving has even more power than I’ve shared so far. Giving is literally the antidote to fear.

Loving us all, JPM

The post The Ecstasy of <span class="serif">Emptying One’s Heart</span> appeared first on Creating.

That is until he, for some reason, got the idea to say ‘thirty-five’. 

It would come out so quickly and matter-of-fact when a stranger asked his age. I liked those moments because his answer was so unexpected. It reminded me of the story of Benjamin Button and I wondered if he was, in fact, an old soul in this new body leaking some of the story of a former life through his beautiful little mind.  

Once when we were driving with Asher, our older son, on a road trip across the south of England to see friends in Devonshire, he spoke up from the backseat in his sweet little two year old voice.

“Before I came here I could see you.”

I looked in the rearview mirror. He had a dreamy look in his eyes.

My wife looked at me and then asked him to explain what he was saying.

“What do you mean, Ashie?”

“Before I was born. I wanted you to be my parents.”

“You could see us before you were born?”

“Yeah.”

He was looking out the window now. It was a short conversation, but one my wife and I remember quite clearly for how out of nowhere it seemed, both in the classic sense that he wasn’t prompted and also in the sense that he seemed to be speaking about a memory from a time and place nowhere in the world we know. 

Moments like these I refer to as existential thunderclaps. It’s that feeling the first rumble of thunder gives you, especially when you’re indoors when you hear it. The deep base that comes from the sky and shakes the ground takes you out of whatever minutia you are consumed with and reminds you of the enormity of the world you are in. Your vulnerability becomes present, like when you come near the edge of a cliff, wonder how well the ground will hold and look for something to hang on to with your hand.

When I saw my friend swinging in the hammock chair that’s hung from the tree outside of our house, the giggling of the dozen or so small children, all of whom were born around the same time as this idea to move to Hawaii was, had the same kind of effect as the rumble of the existential thunderclap. 

That’s the same hammock I was sitting in when I’d realized the whole thing about having, except when I realized it then, it was hanging on the front porch of our little rental house in California. In fact, it’s the one I’d held Rumi in the day we brought him home from the hospital and many days after that. The one I’d been sitting in when I got the idea to go start my farm in Hawaii with some planters on the cement patio in Los Angeles.

Now we were here and that same hammock was holding a friend we didn’t know that we would have, but that we did have in spirit and mind long before they’d met us.

In some ways, we have no idea what the future holds. In a way, we never knew we’d have this friend, that we’d bring these hammock chairs with us and hang them from a tree on a hill that from 2000 feet overlooks Maui and the great Pacific Ocean. What a life that hammock has had and all it’s had to do is just hang around, allowing itself to be carried and hung in one place and then another. It’s been carried and it carries, it’s both held and it holds.

It’s the same idea I got when I dove deep into the word Providence, the capital city of the state I was born and raised. In exploring this idea that something divine intervenes, that when we are committed and faithful, the winds of circumstance carry us to our destination, I found myself with the idea that we provide as we are provided. The hens on my farm provide eggs as I provide them with food, water, safety and comfort. It’s been great getting to know the temperamentality of their ovulation. If they’re not relaxed, they don’t produce eggs, at least not as much. 

They don’t speak, but they teach me how to relate to the feminine. It started as a lighthearted joke that I would say “What’s up ladies?” as I’d come down the hill to feed them, but over time my speaking it presenced me to the fact that they were all girls and through that presence, I found myself relating to them more gently and with more attention to their emotional needs. 

This is something I find it is helpful to bring to my relationship with my wife as well. When I remember she’s a woman, and I am present with our differences, I find myself having more compassion for her experience and her needs. It is seeing the sameness in us, as a first view, that makes possible the projection of my own expectations on her.

Funny that, isn’t it, that seeing sameness in another person can open up so many things. When I see the sameness in another, I feel compassion for them, I understand them, I close the sense of distance between us and I find myself accessing the capacity within myself to be, do and have what they be, do and have. 

My father taught me this, not on purpose, but by accident, like most of the things he taught me. Without realizing it, I’d learned from him to look for what’s the same in people when they had or were doing something I wanted. By seeing myself as essentially the same as them, I’d just get on with being and doing whatever they were being and doing that got them what they wanted and soon enough I’d have it too.

Most people don’t do that though. They see someone with something they want and instead of looking for how they are the same as them, they look for how they are different. Whatever we look for we find and so when we find the evidence that we’re different than the people who have what we want, we cut ourselves from that path of possibility. It’s a door into a room we would love to be in, but we imagine it’s locked and don’t even touch the knob to try turning it.

We provide as provided, and what we are provided is a function of where we put our attention. I cannot be provided with a basket of lychee fruit from our friends on the island if I don’t open my hands to receive their gift. And without that receiving, I have not the same impulse in me to pile a bunch of avocados down the hill to our tenants or to collect macadamia nuts and bring them to our son’s preschool teacher for an adventurous snack time with the mac nut cracker.

It is by giving that we inseminate the world with new possibilities and it is by receiving that the conception of new life-force energy begins in our hearts. Just as the young mango tree outside our bedroom responds to the water we remember to give it in the evenings with the hose that we leave hung over the railing, we provide as we are provided. Good fruit comes from good care and good action comes from good opening. 

That’s why I stop and listen when I hear thunder. To pause in my hurriedness of ensuring the pool party runs smoothly and to look at my friend swinging in the hammock and hear the children giggling and marvel at how our life has gone from there to here, so radically different in such short time and yet, also so incredibly the same, is the opening. When I slow down and let the magic of life seep into me, be it that thunderclap, or the birds that sing us awake in the mornings, interspersed with the cry of roosters near and far, or a red cardinal eating the crumbs of cake off the table on the Lanai the next morning, these little moments bring not just gratitude but also a presencing of the pliability of reality. Seeing the arc stretching across the sky of time between now here and then there makes it feel like anything is possible. 

All it takes to make good fruit is to be put in good soil and given water and light. The tree is always open to being provided for. If we can be like that, to remain as open as a tree, as ready to receive, then we too will find ourselves giving good fruit, riding on waves of abundance.

It doesn’t start with giving. It starts with receiving.

Loving us all, JPM

The post The Winds of <span class="serif">Circumstance</span> appeared first on Creating.

I like dry philosophy in the same way one might like dry wine. The displeasure of it is part of its character. There’s something pleasurable about what you don’t like when that thing you don’t like is so consistent, clear, and dependable. Maybe like the annoying habit of a friend. It’s both bothersome and comforting.

Heidegger was posing the question “When is a chair touching the wall?” and using the varying answers to point out that a concept like ‘touching’ exists only in the mind and agreement of human beings.

This was an example, he points out, of how all concepts and ideas work.

Everything we mean is, in fact, an expression of a human being that the concept or idea is or is not. A hammer in a tool shed, Heidegger asserts, is only a hammer when a human being is present with the hammer. Otherwise, there may be something undefined there, but without a human being present, there certainly is no hammer.

Putting down the text and swinging in the hammock, I considered the application of this to a perennial, albeit mysterious wisdom I’d been reflecting on recently then too. It was a line from the New Testament of the Christian bible, in the book of Matthew, that goes something like, “To those who have more will be given and to those who have not, all will be taken away.” 

If I’m honest, what turned me on about the phrase at first was how honest it was about reality as we know it.

I like it when love hugs you and punches you in the gut at the same time.

The idea that ‘all will be taken away’ stings the victim to hear. Where is the compassion and care in that? Reality is a bitch, karma kicks your ass and entropy doesn’t give a shit what you want. Nobody is coming to save you and, the fact worth facing is that to those who have not, like the last bit of swirling water down the bathtub drain, all will be taken away.

Right there though, in the to and fro powered by my foot on the hammock, I thought about having as Heidegger did touching.

“When does a person ‘have’ something?” I whispered to myself. 

When my thinking gets serious, it tends to verbalize. Maybe everyone whispers to themselves when their thinking gets serious, I don’t know. But I like that I do it. It’s a dramatic moment in my little movie with me playing myself in my life.

If a chair touching the wall comes down to an agreement between people about how close it needs to be to be ‘touching’, then certainly having something must work in the same way.

When does a person have money? Is it when the new client says yes? Or when they paid the invoice? Or when the funds first reach their account? Or when the funds fully post and become available? Or do they need to be withdrawn and held as cash? Where does the cash need to be for you to have it? In your house, in your wallet, in your hand? Do you have to eat the cash to have it? Cut open your head or your chest and insert it inside of you? When do you have it? 

Everyone has an idea of when they have something and then they live that idea out. When their idea matches what they experience from the out there, then they have it, when it doesn’t, they don’t. 

This was seriously one of those holy shit moments. I even stopped pushing off the column and let the hammock come to a rest, because I needed to put all of my attention on the ramifications of realizing that everything I have, have ever had and will ever have actually comes down to whether or not I’m choosing the perspective that I have it.

This idea deepened for me when some weeks later, I was hugging my wife goodbye at the airport. 

“How crazy is it that I am missing you right now?!” I whispered to my wife while chuckling at the longing ache I was feeling for the woman I had wrapped in my arms. 

What I found so funny and what deepened my understanding of the plasticity of having was that I was missing my wife while she was still with me and I knew that while she was away there would be plenty of time, in fact most of the time, when she was nowhere nearby and I was not missing her at all.

While my wife was in my arms as I hugged her goodbye at the airport, I was NOT having her there, and hence my ache for her presence. Instead, I was having her absence and experiencing that. 

To those who have not, all will be taken away. In this way, my ‘not having’ made her gone before she was gone.

The inverse is equally true, that the more I have something, the more it is given to me. By having her with me, be it in my mind without her physical presence or in my mind in tandem with her presence, I got more of that. More fulfillment, more closeness, more love, more care, more companionship.

To those who have all will be given. 

It is this waking up to subjectivity and relativism of having that unlocked a freedom and power to create that I’d long known was there but had had difficulty really grasping.

This great power to create had remained, for a very long time, on the other side of what seemed like insanity. 

Long had I understood the power of using our mind to manifest new realities in form, but I had always met with conflict when my imaginings seemed not to match up with reality. 

Never had I considered this lack of matching was due not to something out there not matching with something in here, but instead simply the position I was taking on what having was. Or what touching was. Or what missing was. 

Right there, was the deepest power to create I’d ever discovered. It wasn’t in an insight about what to do or how to use my mind but at a far deeper level. A level in which I constructed reality and my world. How I made sense of the world. 

This was going to change things forever. But first, back to swinging.

Loving us all, JPM

PS – Go even deeper with this video that I made from my hammock sharing my insight about how dissolving the distinction between ‘having’ and ‘not having’ can paradoxically help you to have everything you want.

The post The Essence of <span class="serif">Having</span> appeared first on Creating.

We spoke about how conscious leadership is slowly making its way into realms where there is an absolute political and corporate power.

The light is getting in.

My mentor expressed doubt as to whether or not the rise in conscious leadership would make a meaningful difference and I reminded him of something that he shared recently.

He said “He is going to win. That’s not a prediction, it’s a declaration.”

This is super aligned my belief that we speak as a means of creating, not predicting, the future.

I shared with my mentor that the light that is getting in will reach a tipping point and everything will change. I said, “That’s not a prediction, that’s a declaration.”

As I was writing this morning I was considering how doubt is actually beautiful.

To be disappointed that a mentor has doubt is disempowering. 

Instead, I saw an opportunity for us to support each other. My mentor has been inspiring me for a long time and for me to breathe life back in that direction was very meaningful for me.

Doubt is a healthy response to the illusion of separation as it is an indicator that we have disconnected from others.

What if the desire for encouragement is the attractive force that holds us together with other people? 

If I didn’t need other people to keep me at my highest capacity of certainty then I would be a lone wolf, and as we know, lone wolves die in the wild.

The pack is needed and togetherness is functional.

Doubt is a sign that we’ve cut ourselves off. We live in a culture where doubt is weakness and we are supposed to independently maintain certainty and belief. This idea is powerfully championed in the world of personal development but this hyper-individualism is paradoxically toxic. 

Doubt is a beautiful call to togetherness. Being in togetherness with other human beings who are also inspired by you and admire you is a powerful tool for your growth. 

Today consider where the doubts you have are not in fact an indicator of your weakness after all, but a call for togetherness, support and encouragement.

Loving us all, JPM

The post Doubt is the Call of <span class="serif">Belonging</span> appeared first on Creating.

I loved sitting out there and swinging gently in the hammock, on our front porch, where I could see people pass by on the sidewalk and watch my yellow flag float up with each breeze, unraveling and showing the smiley face printed on it.

It was where I’d spend my free time, my relaxing time when there wasn’t anything to do.

Come to think of it, it’s been a while since there wasn’t anything to do. Ever since we bought the farm, there has been lots to do. More than one man, or even one whole family, can do. At least not in a timely manner or not in such a way that it doesn’t seem like the to-do list is growing faster than our ability to complete the tasks.

It stressed me the fuck out at first. I was trying to stay on top of everything and bring into being the vision I had for our land.

Still, with five separate structures on the property, bountiful cultivated flora including twenty different fruit trees, and nearly fifty chickens, something was always breaking, springing a leak, or needing some care and attention.

As soon as I fixed the leak in the roof, the chickens stopped producing eggs because they had gotten mites. By the time I learned how to clean that mess up so the little bugs stopped sucking their blood and they were relaxed enough to lay eggs again, the weeds had grown so high that I needed to cut them before I could get back to thinking about where I would put the new irrigation lines for the fruit forest we were envisioning.

It’s OK now though. I’ve let go of the ideas and ideals of urban and even suburban life, the ones that were still in me when I escaped the city and moved to the countryside on a mountain in Maui.

They were ideas like finishing things, getting to the end of something, and bringing order to things that would stay for a while.

Permanence is a fiction we unlearn either when we dive deep into Eastern wisdom or when we leave the protective garb of the city behind and expose ourselves to the ever-changing nature of nature.

Escaping the city is an idea that one of my early clients gave me.

He had a recruiting company in London that would help city workers leave jobs they were burnt out by and find more meaningful work. Like a banker turned charity fundraiser or helping an operations manager for an oil company find a similar role, but with more meaning and alignment of their values in a social enterprise.

When we joined forces, I helped him create what he called the Escape School. The central idea taught in this school was that the city is not just a place where you have a job.

It is a way of thinking and seeing the world. First, you quit your job and become an entrepreneur and then, over the months and years that follow, you realize you’ve taken so many of the assumptions and ways of working with you into self-employment.

You discover the only thing worse than having a boss, is being your own boss.

That fucker is always there, in the evenings, on weekends, too. You can’t get away from them until you walk away again, but this time on the inside instead of the outside.

The day you stop bossing yourself around is the day you truly and finally leave employment. 

It was the same here, this place we call Happy Farm.

Once I was carrying rocks up the hill on our land. They were rocks that had rolled down from a stone wall due to erosion. At the same time I was listening to an audiobook by the French author and philosopher Albert Camus and right there, while I was carrying rocks up the hill, I found myself learning for the first time about the myth of Sisyphus.

This was the Greek God, who for illegally attempting immortality, was punished with the task of carrying a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down when it got to the top.

It was uncanny that this story had come to me while carrying rocks up the hill.

It is synchronicities like these that remind me of Einstein’s remarks that God doesn’t play dice with the universe.

Randomness speaks into being a dead world, a world without beauty or depth to it. I choose a world in which a story about Sisyphus comes to me while carrying rocks for good reason. It is the synchrony of the police siren with the flashing lights. Together, especially when you are in the dark, they are sure to capture your attention.

What that siren call alerted me to is the perfection of my never-finishing what I’ve started here on Happy Farm.

Not only will I never fully realize my vision for our home and land, because the time between now and then lends too much space for creativity and expansion of vision, but also because things will break, decay, and die on the journey from here to there too, and I’ll be forever busy fixing things, removing things, replacing things, and keeping things alive, and collecting and harvesting things that return.

Even abundance is a bitch.

I dreamed of having fruit trees and now I’ve got fruit falling on the ground and rotting. Citrus, avocados, macadamia nuts, strawberries…all going to waste.

Or so I thought, being a suburbanite for most of my life.

For shit’s sake, I didn’t even know that fruit came in seasons until I was in my twenties. There were apples and strawberries all year round in the supermarket when I grew up.

They were just as consistently available as the pop-tarts and rice krispies.

Nothing distinguished their availability and I never thought about it much, until I did. And then it was obvious. But it wasn’t until it was, and that’s always the thing. Nothing is obvious to us until it is and there isn’t anything wrong with this.

It’s not our fault that we don’t know where the meat comes from that we eat. I don’t mean where in the world, I mean where on the animal or even sometimes which animal it is. We have different names for the animals and the food we eat that comes from them, not in the least to create some distance from the bloody fact. 

It wasn’t always like this, I hear. My parents tell me of their childhood how their grandparents grew their own food and how they would go grab a chicken from the backyard and ring its neck for dinner. It wasn’t a rare thing.

One hundred years ago, nearly everyone grew and raised at least a good portion of their own food.

But fucking hell, in a short time we have come a very long way from that. So far from it I had not a clue how to grow food. I mean, I knew the basic principle, but I’d never done it. Maybe it happened in school at some point, a kind of science experiment with a seed, but never had I attempted it with any genuine interest or attention. 

But as I was sitting there in the hammock, swinging myself with my foot bouncing off the column, and looking at my bare empty front yard tiled with square cement slabs that had crushed stones beneath and between them, I imagined what it would be like to start farming now, here, before I had my house on a hill in Hawaii, where we would grow our own food and live the new dream life we were creating with our imagination and action. 

“I’m going out!”, I shouted down the hall to my wife.

“OK, where are you going?” 

“To the shop to buy some pots and soil and seeds.”

There was silence, but I could tell she was trying to make sense of what I’d just said. The only pots she’d seen me with were the house plants I’d gotten for my office that had all died since I’d forgotten to water them. 

A couple of hours later, I was back in front of my porch, pouring bags of soil into large ‘growing bags’, which I was told would be better than pots for growing the tomatoes, cucumbers, and sugar snap peas I’d bought seeds of as well.

My first real attempt at farming didn’t go too well on the hot cement slabs of my front yard in Santa Monica. It probably had something to do with the heat, or my rolling the dice with planting seeds in huge pots of soil rather than starting with something smaller and gentler to get the seeds to sprout first.

Nevertheless, over the course of three months, I did get one cherry tomato. Much more than that though, and far more importantly, I was having Happy Farm before I had it.

Each time I watered my little fruitless garden, I was touching a future that would realize itself in form in shockingly short time. 

Loving us all, JPM

PS – Watch Kalpna and I share the story of how we created Happy Farm in the Creating community here.

The post From Stress <span class="serif">to Serenity</span> appeared first on Creating.

I said that I would.

But I didn’t. 

At least not yet. 

I’m telling you this to prepare me to share it with you, now and here. 

But first, why didn’t I share it more widely?

Because it’s edgy for me. The reason why will become clear shortly. 

It’s one of those insights that opens a whole new level of freedom.

Like that time during the pandemic when I read this quote by Bayo Akomolafe; 

“The fugitive cannot afford to speak truth to power. Marronage, the act of removing oneself from the control of the slave plantation, wasn’t preceded by honesty or truth-telling, but creative deception and a refusal of the epistemological imperatives of the master.”

At a time when I was facing a choice of either vaccinating or losing my freedom to move, this single insight provided me with a whole new set of options.

At the bottom of my hesitancy to share is the simple fact that the freedom we want is frightening. To live beyond the pale – as in beyond the rule of the crown – is to live in the wild. 

And the wild is filled with dangers.

To be free is to go first and alone. To be first and alone in the wild, uncharted, unruled land is even more dangerous. 

Alright, enough with the preparation and justification. I’m ready to tell you now.

My realization was that, ultimately, at the base of most of the fears, worries, and concerns that keep us from standing up, standing out, leading, speaking, and creating at our highest level is the thought that we might be a bad person. 

The fear that we are not ‘good’, by the standards of our society, our parents, or even our God, haunts us with a soft hum, like an old metal fan slowly turning in a hot and dry room. It’s not helping, but nonetheless, we are so accustomed to it being there, that we feel we need it.

This worry and concern about not being ‘good’ and its determiner being out beyond us presents us with an insurmountable task. Not only can we never measure up to this invisible and moving target, but even more so, we have no say in the matter of measuring overall.

Really, it’s not our being good enough that limits us. It’s that the determiner of that goodness is beyond us rather than within us.

What if we could decide for ourselves what is good and what is not?

What if we could snatch the sceptre from the hand of the almighty and judge for ourselves our own goodness, rightness, and worthiness?

This would be an awesome power, indeed.

For in one fell swoop we would go from questioning our goodness to deciding and knowing it with the certainty of a sovereign King or Queen.

Where though, would we anchor our faith in our capacity to decide?  How would we know that our judging ourselves is not a willy-nilly choice at the mercy of our appetites and selfish desires?

Such power is frowned upon for the assumption that if we were to choose our own rightness, we would become disentangled, and eat each other alive. 

There is a deep story that our shared fallibility keeps us safe. We lean on each other to make up for our faults.

But this is only one angle in the case of interconnectedness. 

Another angle would be that each of us, in our perfection, adds together to make something greater than us.

If we are to untether ourselves from the opinions of our family, society, or God – if we are to cast the line wrapped around the cleat at the center of our soul, then we must know how we will live without an anchor. 

How will we live, as Mark Twain encourages, ‘beyond safe harbor’?

My insight was this; 

I can anchor my goodness with my sails to the winds of love.

Love is not a fixed point. It is not a bouy whose position will be known tomorrow as it was yesterday, 

Love is in motion. At times it is calm and at times it is wild. 

When we anchor our goodness not to a fixed point opinion on the lands of people or gods, but instead to the ever-changing winds of love, we are holding the sceptre. It is the rudder we till and the lines that lower and cast our sail. 

We have agency and yet, at the same time, we are trusting something deeper and more real in that its nature is ever-changing. 

What comes when we decide that we are good, and we allow ourselves, moment by moment to be guided by love rather than the thoughts or ideals of the common, we come into an ecstatic certainty and power. 

We are struck with a new capacity to weather hurt, failure, messes, and disasters that come our way or even that result from our own doing.

Without the fear of making a mess, our capacity to create launches exponentially to new heights. 

It doesn’t matter anymore if we spill the fucking milk. 

We know that we are good. 

And we know that love will take us wherever we are meant to go. 

No matter what anyone, above or below, says or does. 

Loving us all, JPM

PS  – When I tell you that my advanced intensive in London will be the deepest conversation of our lives, I mean not only emotionally deep but more importantly philosophically deep. We will cut so far into the layers of how you see yourself and the world, that a new you will come out—the one in there already, who wants to be free. Grab your seat now here, before they are gone.

The post ANCHOR TO THE WIND: <span class="serif">How to Be a Good Person</span> appeared first on Creating.

This simple statement holds the prism of the Creating perspective up to the light.

By simply speaking it, and allowing your mind to wander with all the things it might mean and do, you can discover all the angles for Creating. 

It came through me while free-writing last week as an intuitive response to the ‘grass is always greener’ problem. 

To claim that our grass is the greenest is not a competitive advantage. It is an arrival at that place we are otherwise forever seeking. 

To have arrived is a good feeling and it is always within the power of your declaration. For experience follows thought and with the impetus of your will and speaking, you may direct that thought. 

You can arrive on any day that you’d like, by simply stating that you have.

All the counter-thoughts, the inner arguments with your statement, are good fodder to sort through for your freedom.

Fear not the instigation of conflict within by asserting that some grander life already is. Allow that conflict to be a means to a more liberated and luxurious way of being. 

By the way, this doesn’t mean that you need to fight. Within the confines of your mind, you can be like Gandhi standing before an army, allowing them to strike with sticks and not retaliating. The gentle surrender to violence within can invite that same acquiescence of will in the opponent. Your loving kindness towards your inner conflict can quell that conflict. Your simple observation and allowance can bring down the whole structure like a house of cards. 

In the soft breeze that follows, you can assert again that statement that brought the conflict in the first place.

“We have the greenest grass.”

With the prism now turned, you can see the truth of the statement that already is. You can see the seasons of the year when it’s true. You can see the miraculous and glorious green in a single blade of grass before you and be struck with gratitude for its beauty. You can see what before, blinded by conflict, you were missing. 

In this new light, with this new seeing, you feel filled with – and fueled by – love. This love moves you, too. It moves your spirit, your creativity, your body. You find yourself thinking, speaking, and acting in ways that bring more of what you have and love into being.

You find yourself with the greenest grass doing those things that bring even more of that green. 

The ships of your circumstances rise with the tide of your being. 

More and more, the grass you called yours, the grass that was already greenest, becomes greener and greener. 

Its increase never nullifies its already utmost. 

The paradox is simply this: Your already being there is the force that brings you towards it.  It carries you as a wave does; both still upon it and, at the same time, thrust forward by it. 

This is Creating.

Loving us all, JPM

PS – If you want to discover the miraculous power that Creating can give you, join me for the deepest conversation of our lives on 10th-14th July in central London.

The post The Greenest Grass: <span class="serif">This is Creating</span> appeared first on Creating.