TO BE OR NOT TO BE 'FULLY ALIVE'

Excerpts taken from www.elle.com article written by Ben Dickinson.

I can’t help believing there’s some wise Yoda out there who knows a better way of tapping into one’s innate talent, and if I could just get my hands on the formula, I’d be the prolific writer I’ve always envisioned being. Jonathan Fields, the author of Uncertainty:  Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance, seems like a promising candidate:  This former SEC lawyer turned yoga studio owner turned writer, speaker, and avid blogger gave up a six-figure income 15 years ago to become a personal trainer earning $12.00 an hour and, despite having a wife and a three-month old to support, signed a lease to open a yoga center in Manhattan - on the day before 9/11, as it happened.  Clearly the guy knows a thing or two about what he calls “leaning into uncertainty” - being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Fields lumps entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, choreographers, musicians, filmmakers, bloggers, app developers, software programmers, and yes, writers into the same creator rubric.  We’re all “wired from birth to want answers and hard data,” he writes.  “As soon as we’re challenged to own (uncertainty), then act in and face it...we run from it.  We’re scared of the discomfort that comes with opening doors without knowing what’s behind them.  The problem is, of course, if you strive to create anything… uncertainty, risk of loss, and exposure to judgment are necessary parts of the quest.  If everything is known and certain, that means it’s all been done before.”

Fields is at his best when unpacking the anxieties that come with owning a creation, jolting us into a more mindful state about how self-doubt can paralyze us.  “The greater the risks you take to create something that didn’t exist before, the greater will be the potential for you to be judged and criticized” he writes. “Judgment is all wrapped around two big questions that all creators constantly wrestle with: Is this good enough? Am I good enough?”  These simple yet introspective moments (the ones that make me think, Oh yeah, I do do that) urge us to change how we see and experience fear in our creative process. 

In Beck’s seventh book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, she unfolds a road map back to the “true self” -- a wiser, calmer, evidently still-intact (though long undernourished) individual equipped with an innate sense of purpose and identity, irrespective of whatever she’s been socially conditioned to achieve. Beck’s route to enlightenment heads straight into mystical territory, which may present a roadblock for hard-line realists but will come as no surprise to her loyal fans.  She begins with techniques for achieving a meditative state called “wordlessness”  that dials down our running thought stream and accesses instead “the intelligence of the nonverbal mind.” From this isolation and quietude, we progress to “oneness,” mentally ”connecting” with metals, plants, animals, and eventually, other people.  In the third step, “imagination” we attempt to divine what “wants” to happen as opposed to what we manifest what previously existed only in thought.  Pursuing any of these states requires intensity, persistence, and a certain leap of faith.

And non-Western cultures have a better grasp of this?  We have this odd cultural belief that there’s the human world and the natural world.  It’s considered bizarre by other cultures.  To them, it’s extraordinarily obvious that what makes us happiest is to be responsive to our essential self--by that I mean your body but also your personality and your brain.  To know what that true self is without social pressure is to know your true nature.

What do wild animals have to do with wising us up? In the book, I try to take readers with me to Africa and into nature again and again, because as you start turning in to things that aren’t human, you find the same joy, the same freshness, the same energy as when you were two or three years old.  Can you boil down the mental state you call wordlessness? It’s moving attention out of the lolgical, verbal part of the brain to use all parts of it.  According to some neurologists, that analytical part is processing 40 bits of information a second, while the nonverbal brain is processing 11 million bits.  When your entire is active, that means you are taking everything in through all sense perception. Your entire memory bank and your instincts are in play, so you make much quicker and more intelligent choices.  You advocate “imagining” but you disparage the new age concept of willing one’s decisions into being.  Anything you’re trying to will is focused on the future; it’s always associated with some sort of anxiety that makes the present moment somewhat uncomfortable.  The type of imagination I’m talking about is a spontaneous response to being completely present.

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