Meditating on Success

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“Success isn’t about what you get. It’s about who you become.” – Steven Barnes

This quote floated across my feed this morning. Steven Barnes means it.

The thing that most struck me about this statement wasn’t just the truth of it, but the realization that though most of us will nod our heads in agreement, I also know how many of us don’t believe this, deep down.

We may not equate success with stuff, but still equate success with becoming a person who: has the right job, or is some amount of famous, or has this amount of credibility, or lives a life filled with exciting stories or a life that feels big, somehow. Life feels big if we shift ourselves to allow it to feel big. Life can also feel small, quiet, ordinary. Bigness or smallness doesn’t equal success or failure – success or failure can occur at any level of that spectrum. What equals success or failure for me, exists in answering yes to the following questions: am I learning? Are there at least one or two people I can share deeper thoughts and experiences with? Do my heart and soul feel nourished by my life? Do I have food and shelter? Do I wake up each day curious about the tasks at hand? Am I able to engage, and to be present? Am I of service?

I felt just as successful when working for room and board and $200 a month as I do now, with my current small amount of relative fame and the lovely home I am privileged to share. I also recall the times when everything felt like a struggle, and I didn’t feel successful at all, even though there were several things in my life that looked like success. I felt lonely. I wasn’t at ease within myself. I felt confusion – there was dissonance between the inside and outside of myself. My life, words, actions, and relationships weren’t reflecting the person my soul wanted to be.

What does your soul want to be? What activities in your life help you to answer this question? For me, the key was not even in the spiritual practices I was already doing, some of which still help support my life today. For me, the key to changing my life toward one that felt successful was finally sitting down on the meditation cushion. Once I sat down, I realized I’d been running from parts of myself for years. There were parts of my soul and personality that I’d been trying to control, suppress, deny, or just avoid. They all sat with me. I suffered with this. I hated it. These parts squirmed and shouted and complained. Then my relationship to myself began to change.

This practice steered me toward a life that built my being from the inside out, so that everything began to emanate from my core, and consistency became easy, rather than the struggle it had been. The practice of sitting with myself allowed me to become who I was meant to be. Slowly, success became a way of life. No matter what hardships, irritations, or challenges occur, there is now a sense of success, because I know who I am, and also know I am still in the process of becoming.

What is your relationship to success?

#meditation #StevenBarnes #Success

(In Praise Of) The Anti-War King

In a time of drone warfare, indefinite detention, Guantanamo Bay still not closed, with military suicides at an all time high…we need the words of Dr. King.

So, as I post every year, here is an excerpt from Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence:

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Please take 23 minutes and listen:

#antiwar #MLKjr #revolution

Opening to Life

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Where do you feel your life opening? When you drop into the silence of breath and contemplation, of the marriage of your body and your mind, what happens?

We accustom ourselves to looking at closed doors and blocks, at irritations and things gone wrong. In the midst of all of this, however, there is always a chance we are missing: the opportunity to soften, to open, and then to muster up our strength and will and GO!

Some of us like to leap ahead to that end part. The part that says muster up strength, will, and then go. That is how I have been for most of my life. I’m learning differently now, and have been doing so, step by step, for many years.

Others of us get mired in the softening, turning it to apathy and numbness. We never quite find a way through, choosing instead to keep moving – if we move at all – in the circular motion of a revolving door. Or we choose to sink into the cushions of our lives, not quite satisfied, but never quite believing there is more.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Clear direction comes from risking both decisive movement supported by strength, and by opening, relaxing our edges, and listening for what is present and what may come. Irritation may still be there, but it is not the only thing. The closed door has an opening as well. The details are important but they are not the whole story.  Something is waiting. Are we ready?

We can access our whole being, making our lives, and being made. 

I encourage us all to pause for a moment. Find the stillness at your core and breathe into that. Drop your attention. Listen. Sense. Taste. Soften.

Where is life leading you today? I look forward to reading your answers.

h/t to Umair Haque for saying: “being a leader is perhaps the toughest thing you can attempt. As you remake the world, it will remake you.”

#direction #life #listening