iMindShift with Steve Chandler

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere someone set me free

My new book, Creator, has just been released and in the back Recommendations section it tells you to come here to this blog site if you want to listen to two of the songs mentioned in the book.

“The Middle of Nowhere” was written by Fred Knipe and myself back in our music business days when we did songwriting and music publishing for a living. “In Your Right Mind” was written by Fred a few years later after a long conversation we'd had about how natural creativity is for children and how it gets disconnected later in life when social anxieties take over a grown-up's life.

“The Middle of Nowhere”:

Middle of Nowhere

 

“In Your Right Mind”:

In Your Right Mind

 

I hope you enjoy this music.

 

And here's a little piece of Creator:

For many years my job was songwriter. I co-wrote songs with my brilliant collaborator Fred Knipe. One of my favorite songs we wrote was called “The Middle of Nowhere.” One line was, “Out there in the middle of nowhere, someone set me free.”

Normally the idea of being “in the middle of nowhere” is not so good. But something about that phrase was haunting. And it’s funny what happens when you take a second look at a phrase like that. Even funnier when you put music to it. It changes. What seems bleak and hopeless changes into something else.

Just like a person’s life when you add the awareness of eternal creativity to it. It’s like putting music to words that never would have been heard.

Writing that song got a small premonition of insight started in me back then. The insight that opens more every time I hear my recording of Fred singing it. What I now see is that there’s freedom in the middle of nowhere.

In my mind, the middle of nowhere is where creativity seems to live when we don’t know we have it. It’s as if we’re in the eye of the storm, in the middle of a hurricane of creative energy. It’s where I drop my preconceived thoughts and beliefs about who I am. Or even what I should do next.

From here, I can open to the source of spirit as taught by Dr. Ron Hulnick in his courses on spiritual psychology. He often invited his students to be willing to enter and stay awhile in “the divine unknowing,” a place the ego always wants to avoid, but a place where you will feel your true creative power.

One drink is too many for me but a hundred is not enough

(These are some notes I've been making for my Death Wish project
http://deathwish.stevechandler.com)

The problem in my life starts when I think I have to add something to this present moment to make it better.

Addition is seductive. It’s a lot like addiction. The words look a lot alike. Look too quickly and you'll mistake one for the other.

How much addiction comes from the lure of addition? The myth that tells you…whispers to you…that you have to add something to your life to make it a happier experience.

Let me add this strong drink to the chemistry in my brain and body. Now let me add more drinks. (One is too many, a hundred is not enough.)

It’s simple addition! And it leads to misery.

What if I were brave enough to turn my addicted life around? What if I were strong enough to experiment with subtraction? Subtraction! People fear it. What would be left? Just me?

Adding muddies the water. . .subtracting makes it crystal clear

 Some people have what they call food addiction. Carb addiction. Addiction to bread and sweets. Emotional eating, they call it. But what if I subtracted flour and sugar from my diet? (Versus the addition of a dangerous amphetamine diet pill that races my heart and speeds up the already-circular thinking in my brain...and soon turns into an addiction.)

What if I subtracted my drug, my alcohol? What if I were brave enough? Subtraction leads to freedom. It takes these chains from my heart and sets me free.

Addition: addiction.

For the word addition to become the word addiction, I just have to throw a “c” in there. You know “c.” It stands for cocaine, or cannabis, or cognac, or cookies, or catastrophe, or chronic alcoholism.

I’m not enough. I have to add something to me…something from the outside world.

Byron Katie talks about being addicted to love and approval. There are clinics for sex addiction and romantic love addiction.

Yes I have a happy marriage but I myself am not happy so maybe if I just added this one adventurous romantic love relationship to my life.

I read the tabloids to keep up with what addiction can do to people. Famous people in celebrity rehab. All of them. Adding like crazy. Look at Oprah’s five beautiful homes!

Ben Affleck has a good marriage to Jennifer Garner (I’m putting my groceries on the conveyor belt slowly now so I can read all of this) and he decides to add to that a romantic relationship with their nanny. In the following weeks and months I read all about custody, betrayal, heartbreak, financial penalties, bitterness…..in other words a major life hangover. So much for adding.

The famous beat generation author and drug addict William Burroughs killed his wife playing a William Tell game at a drugged-up, drunken party. He was the author of the books Naked Lunch and Junkie. He was actually a brilliant man, and never so brilliant as he was in his later years when he was clean and sober and said that there wasn't anything, any feeling, any high, that you could get on drugs and alcohol that you couldn’t get without drugs and alcohol.

And that’s because that treasure of good feelings is already in you. The drug (and I always include alcohol as a drug) just breaks down the barriers. It releases what’s already there. It took me awhile, some years clean and sober to find out that he was right. But you can go faster than that. Through meditation and working with others and an ongoing spiritual practice you can find out faster than I did that you can have an even happier life than you did at your best drunken moment.

I used to believe I had to add drugs and alcohol to my system to feel the things I wanted to feel. If I wanted to feel more relaxed or more courageous or more confident in a crowd of people, it was never going to happen unless I added something to my system. I did get (most of the time, at the beginning, until it turned really dark and desperate) the feelings I wanted. But they were all-too temporary.

But as Burroughs found out, the drug itself doesn’t directly produce the feeling. It just removes the barriers in the brain to the treasure that’s already there. And there are other ways to remove those barriers, thank God and the people who will help you.

 

How to access magic, mystery and mischief

Briggs Whiteford is an artist.

Although she has very devoted customers who own her work, her art has been largely hidden away from the world for awhile, but no longer.

You have a chance to come see it now. (More on that in a second.)

Briggs' work brings back a distant memory I have of my brother Dave wearing a tee-shirt (all the time) that said ART SAVES LIVES.

His point was that art saves us from the busy-busy, judgmental, critical, revved-up, worried left-brain thinking that vacuums up our soul and spirit..... but only all day long.

Art lifts us out of that cul-de-sac of overly personalized thought and gives us the gift of expansion and inner freedom and space.

Briggs is a woman who finds art in life and then brings that life into her art.

Listen to her:

"I come from the deep, Deep South, the low country, hot and moist, Spanish moss dripping off live oak trees, lazy dogs draped across dirt roads, catfish on strings caught at the demand shrimp boats leaving the dock before sunrise.  I come from ballroom classes, and finishing schools where I was taught how to cross my ankles coyly in a pretty ruffled dress, the perfect hair, yes, taught to be picked like a flower and worn on a man’s arm."

Wow. Now I am hoping she writes a novel one day because her words are so infused with the magic and mystery of an artist unafraid to observe (drink in!) life.

She continues, "I come from debutante balls and country clubs where dance cards are filled by a committee, bands play behind greenery so they can’t look upon society’s elite.  I come from Catholic pews, the kind of family togetherness that suffocates, shrimp and grits, South Carolina peaches, Frogmore stew, lightening bug magic on steamy summer frog-singing mating-call nights that give life to my art, make it possible to sit by a river painting the low country fisherman, creek talking, Lord praising, heart swelling, connecting souls with mud, ocean, sky and birds, joyous in our work together."

Now we can see her work.  In person.  Live. The name of the show is Magic Mystery Mischief.

Opening reception Saturday Feb 22 4:30-7:30.

Cosentinos Nursery, 25019 Pacific Coast Highway  Malibu, CALIFORNIA

Contact info:

www.Briggswhiteford.com     [email protected]  

 

Briggs Whiteford

When you come to Malibu (please be there) to see Briggs' inspiring work, you may recall the words of the great dancer/teacher Martha Graham:

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.  And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open...."

Coming to Malibu on February 22 will be another way of keeping your own channels open. Inspiration does that.

How to reinvent yourself

When I reinvent myself in the most exciting and beneficial way, I don't change from an inferior personality into a superior one. I change from a noun to a verb.

I reinvent from static fascination with my past and its patterns into joyful action. My world changes from trying to improve myself to learning to leave myself behind.

A really good reinvention in my own life (with the help of my own business/life coach) had me converting from being a money-fearing loser (noun) into making a difference, creating and joyfully serving others as the natural outpouring of God-given energy and self-expression. A series of verbs.

These ten ideas tell how I did it and how my clients are doing it in terms of the verbs they can be instead of the nouns they misunderstand themselves to be.

 

1. Stop winning friends and influencing people.

This entire orientation to life and society and community (winning people over) is a hangover from childhood when the grownups had all the power and all the money. They needed  to be charmed and manipulated for us to get what we wanted. We learned to do that. It became second nature.

But carrying that into adulthood leads to mediocrity and misery.

We want to switch from trying to make an impression to  trying to make a difference.

 

2. Change your relationship to life.

If you see life as something outside of you, pushing in on you, then you will reveal that by saying things like, "That's life!" when things go wrong, or, "Life is difficult" when you feel the need to sound disconsolate and wise.

But when you reconsider your relationship to life and change "life" from being outside pressing in to being inside as a source of energy, everything gets fun again (as it was when you were young and just knew intuitively that life bloomed and blossomed from the inside out.)

 

 3. Use the language of intention.

People whose repeated self-told stories cast themselves as victims continuously use the language of obligation. There are so many things they "should" do and "have to" do.

Reinvented people convert to the language of intention. They do things because they intend to...because they want to.... because they choose to. This is more powerful because it is closer to the truth. It is not a sugary affirmation. It is truth that will set you free. Once you see that you are choosing to go to work today, you'll never have to lie to yourself and your children again by saying, "Sorry but I have to go to work." Those kinds of lies take a toll. They drive self-esteem and love-of-life out of existence. When you reinvent yourself, you start by changing your relationship to the very truth that will set you free.

 

4. Give up your personality.

This false persona (the Greek word for mask) is something that went through its final edit in junior high school. It is not real. It is not you.

To truly reinvent from noun to verb, you need to replace personality with purpose. Then you can be whoever you need to be based on what you are creating right now.

 

 5. Learn to be the problem.

One way to get centered in the locus of true power is to say, when a problem arises, "If there's a problem, I'm the problem." Now you can do something about it! Because if you're the problem,  you're the solution. This is not about self-blame and guilt. It's about always becoming the solution.

 

 6. Convert the "How to" into the "Want to."

People think that they aren't doing things that would benefit their lives because they don't know how to. They are deceiving themselves. The real bottleneck is that they don't (yet) want to.

The "how to" is everywhere. You can look it up. If you know "how to" use Google, you can find out how to do anything. The "how to" is never what's really missing.

Yet we say it is. Then once we say it is, that story becomes "the truth" and we are stuck.

 

 7. Change your definition of optimism.

Optimism is courageous and tough-minded.  

Pessimism is a weak little tantrum.  

Optimism fearlessly opens the mind to possible solutions.  

Pessimism is the attitude that closes the mind.

Once you see the vital usefulness of optimism you will bring it to every party...to every so-called "problem."

 

 8. Convert reacting to creating.

You can use your marvelous bio-computer (your brain) two ways: one way is to react to things...the other (more powerful way) is to create things.

At any moment, in any situation, you can step back and breathe and notice. Just witness: are you using your brain for creating right now, or are you using it for reacting?

When you shift (up) from reacting to creating, you are now using more of your brain...higher levels of full capacity brain power...imagination, innovation and creativity are now yours to access....energy is improved.  

 

 9. Stop deciding---start choosing.

People who are not yet reinvented waste so much life and heart and nerve power trying to decide things. Most all of this time and frustrated effort comes to nothing. In this class we will eliminate all of that trying to decide time and replace it with the practice of simply CHOOSING.

 

 10. Learn to rise up.

The linear left brain life of trudging along the horizontal line from birth to death doing "one damn thing after another" is hardly fulfilling. Hardly joyful. Hardly even productive.

We want to rise up. Leave the past behind (for it is truly non existent)...rise up in this precious present opportune moment. We want to go vertical. You can fly like an eagle, ever upward, or you can be a worm (horizontal, linear, birth to death).

For this we use the metaphor and visual teaching tool known as The Ladder. Where are you on your ladder right now? High up there with spirit and humor and creativity? Or down low with fear and resentment? We shall learn to rise up.

* * * * * * *

 

IF YOU ARE A COACH:  

   The coaching school of the future...is a school of NO FEAR:

   The new coaching prosperity school (Advanced Client Systems) is 85% full.... if you want to sign up before it fills, email me ASAP.

Click here for the Advanced Client Systems website

 

 

Hey, where's the class on How to Live?

Brian Johnson (with Alexandra and little Emerson pictured above) is a philosopher and giver of joy to many thousands of his readers, viewers and subscribers.

Brian was featured in the fantastic and highly-recommended movie, Finding Joe, a documentary about Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey we all (consciously or unconsciously) take in this life.

He is the author of one of my favorite books, A Philosopher's Notes, and you can find out more about his colorful life and many offerings (some at no charge) at www.entheos.com.

As Brian says, "Isn't it a bit odd that we went from science to math to history but somehow missed the class on how to live?"

We could always just wring our hands and curse the educational system. But Brian has a better solution. Why not just provide that missing piece? Why not create email messages and cool YouTube dramatizations of the best philosophy and positive psychology in the world for everyone to learn and use? He has done that. His work is mind-blowingly thorough and easy to grasp.

In my wealth warrior inner circle members listen as I interview a new dynamic hot thinker each month on the subject of wealth and creativity... it costs a membership fee to be in that group, so I don't share the webinars. Or at least I usually don't.

But this once, I am going to. Because this one was so extraordinary and inspiring and game-changing and life-changing for people in the group that they are sending it all around the world and the internet ... so here it is for you:   Loving What You Do with Steve Chandler and Brian Johnson

....and here is a recent message from Brian and En*Theos:

ENJOY| by Brian Johnson

"This is the manner of noble souls: they do not want to have anything for nothing; least of all, life. Whoever is of the mob wants to live for nothing; we others, however, to whom life gave itself, we always think about what we might best give in return... One should not wish to enjoy where one does not give joy."  

                          ~ Friedrich Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

 I absolutely love that.

Imagine a life in which we seek to GIVE joy.

A life in which we enter relationships to GIVE joy. A life in which we work to GIVE joy.

Can you even imagine how much we would ENjoy that?!!? Stunning... To giving full expression to the highest within us!!

~ Brian Johnson
www.entheos.com

 

IF A THING IS WORTH DOING IT'S WORTH DOING BADLY

"We're not looking for the correct method, we're looking for the incorrect method."

                              ~ Keith Richards

    I found this Keith quote in Seth Godin's wonderful new book, The Icarus Deception.

    His quote is a great refresher for anyone attempting to create anything (a service, a product, a business, a life).  Creativity thrives when it is fearlessly unaware of whether I am doing it right or not.... creativity and quality-of-product thrive when they have a lot of heart and very little head.

     That was Nassim Taleb's point about being willing to make a mess of things in the name of making something that will be timeless and popular and sell like crazy... like the Bible (which is disorganized to say the least) or any of the great books that follow no formula or outline or ANYTHING bureacratic or thought-out-in-advance or planned carefully.

    Kathy and I once went to a talk given by Lee Child in a little bookstore in Scottsdale. He is the author of the wonderful, colorful,  bestselling Jack Reacher series of books. He said he never plots or outlines his stories. He never knows from one page to the next what's going to happen in the book. He just wakes up and pours his heart into it. A controlled explosion.

    Taleb compares the messy beauty of an emerald forest with the carefully organized-and-planned freeway system in L.A.  

     One is beautiful and timelessly alluring and the other is a repulsive hell on earth. Messy wins again. Because organic has heart.  Synthetic loses again.

    No one wants to read your book if it's organized like a textbook or business book. No one wants to feel that fear that was in you when you put it together, editing even before you wrote it. Trying to use the brake pedal to drive with.

     Most people I coach try to "create" that way. With one foot on the brake and the other foot amputated by a premature quest for acceptance.

    It's the classic HOW TO taking all the steam out of the WANT TO. I created an audio program that addresses that issue....why be modest...solves that issue. It's a mess of a program. No script. Clearly ad-libbed. You probably think I am going to now try to sell it to you.

   That would be the correct thing to do, because all the marketing gurus tell you how to sell and grow rich. I am just going to give it to you, it's called The How To versus the Want To. Email my business partner and audio publisher Maurice at [email protected] and he will send it to you.  

     By the way, the clients I coach do not use their brake pedal to drive with for very long.  I help them see how ineffective it is.  

     Try it with your car.

     Then sit in your car for an hour or two and ask yourself if you've been living your life this way. With this abundance of caution.

   I know I did that. But only for about five decades. Then it hit me as I slowly pulled my foot off the brake: I'm not getting anywhere this way.