To kick off this new stage for Living Authentically I will be offering consultations in exchange for a testimonial (ideally in the format of before and after. Or in more detail: I had this problem, what I did with Evan, the result for me was . . .). This offer is open until September 30th, 2010.  Please remember that I am in Sydney, on the east coast of Australia. You can use the World Clock to figure out how my time relates to yours.  If you think you would like to talk to me, please get in touch via this blog or email to arrange a mutually satisfactory time for us to talk.  Looking forward to hearing from you, Evan.

In preparation for this offer I asked some people who I have worked with who they would refer to me. One I liked particularly put it this way:

I would refer someone to you who needed help and support finding out and accepting who they really are and what they really need. One of your best skills, in my experience, is facilitating, encouraging and supporting this process.

In More Detail
Following is the copy that I will be using on the Work With Evan page, which is going up after September 30th. It should give you a good outline of what to expect and answer most questions. Any other questions, comments or enquiries you can leave in the comments or contact me via the Contact page on this blog.

If you would like to work with me one on one you can. I offer personal sessions via skype – speaking or text chat, whichever you prefer. (My current internet account is too limited to allow me to do video.)

The best way to get a sense of who I am is to read around on the blog (try typing in the topics you are interested in into the search box and see if you find what I have to say seems worthwhile to you) and read the about page.
A lasting satisfaction in our lives is possible. My understanding of the process of life and how to flow with it (which brings lasting satisfaction) is given in this series of posts. A good sample of my approach is in my free report. In a one on one session I will respond to what you want – I won’t put you through my process but respond to what you want.

Why you might want a one on one session

• If you are finding that you have read lots and tried lots of things,
• If you have got some places but not where you want to be yet,
• If you feel that something is eluding you and you don’t know what,
• it may be that talking to someone personally is the missing piece you need.

What you can expect from me

• To have your boundaries respected
• To be listened to
• That I will be able to handle what you have to say
• To hold the space
• To accompany you on your journey to authenticity
• To ask you what you want (this is normally the first thing I ask)

What you can’t expect from me

• Advice.

You know yourself and your situation far better than I do. Any advice I would offer would likely be a waste of time. I do sometimes offer observations – e.g. that you have missed something obvious, or that you haven’t tried an available option, or that you have persisted with doing the same thing in the same way (that hasn’t worked yet).

• Agreement

I see my job as helping you to find clarity so that you can live an authentic life. This may involve me approving of behaviour, or parts of yourself, that you judge negatively. I have found that usually the behaviour we dislike, or find problematic, is our best attempt to meet legitimate needs.

My approach

In a nutshell: if we stay open and stay with it, it works.

This means staying open to, and staying with, the disliked and disowned parts of ourselves too. As well as staying with the positive and brilliant parts of ourselves (which can sometimes be surprisingly difficult).
If we do this then it is possible to resolve our inner fights – and release the energy used up in the inner turmoil to engage with other aspects of life. This normally is experienced as an initial elation or release (which can sometimes be through sadness). The energy freed up is then used to make modifications to our life so that we can live with more authenticity and satisfaction.

To arrange a time you can contact me by filling in the form below or emailing me at livingauthentically [ a t ] gmail [ d o t ] com.

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When it comes to meaning I feel that I need to nail my colours to the mast. It is a big topic and sometimes a very controversial one. For me it implicates the core of who we are – which is what this blog is about. So I’ll give you a paragraph about what I think before I move on to how meaning can function in your own self-development.

The paragraph about me:
For me meaning is a meeting of me and [something or someone] – that is: meaning is not just made up. For me meaning (or some meanings) have the quality of discovery rather than creation. I feel that some things are true of me and my situation even if I don’t want them to be (for now). The meaning of my life is about meeting – getting to the core of something (whether it is an idea, or a person’s issue, or a heart-to-heart meeting with another).

Meaning Matters
Viktor Frankl in his classic Man’s Search for Meaning shows that a sense of meaning – a reason to live – can be the difference between life and death even in an extreme situation (being imprisoned in a death camp).

There is a little parable that goes something like this. Three men are laying bricks: one is hating it – it is just doing the same thing over and over to build yet another building, another is happy he likes to contribute to making something (a fine building), the third is delighted he is building a cathedral to the glory of the god to whom he feels personally related.

In more mundane matters the meaning makes a difference too. Imagine you have a friend who, when driving along a particular stretch of road, that you often travel with them, pulls out near to the centre of the road. They do this every time and they don’t do it on other roads. Then they explain that they do it on that piece of road because on that stretch of road there are so many side streets that it is safest to be near the centre of the road. Your feelings might change from puzzled and anxious to reassured.

Another mundane example: Imagine that your friend wants you to sort the laundry in a different way to the one you do. It will not make a difference to the result. Your way is perfectly fine. You don’t see why you should bother to do it differently. Then your friend explains that the reason they don’t want you to do it that way was because their abusive parent punished them for doing it that way. This will make a difference to how you feel about sorting the laundry.

Our lives are saturated by meaning and it affects us intimately – it is such a regular part of our lives that we often overlook it.

Two Exercises
To get a sense of how much a part of our lives meaning is, try this.

• Think of an important experience from your past. Then describe it – either to yourself, in a journal or somehow, or to someone else. As you do this try to only describe. Try to avoid interpretation completely. I think you will find this is extremely difficult to do. Our meanings are tied up very closely with our experiences.

That exercise may be a bit biased – I asked you to choose a meaningful experience and then to try and remove the meaning from it. So this next exercise is about normal experience.

• Take a moment just now to look around you. Notice that your eye is drawn to some things rather than others. Notice any feelings that you have about what you notice (they may be slight but you probably have some). Notice that after a while doing this you get tired of doing it. (You can do this with sounds or sensations as well as sights.) As I look around there are some books and papers on the table that don’t interest me much, then I see a magazine open at an article I was reading which I find more interesting. If I looked up and saw my beloved that would be a very different experience. What I want to point out is that the meaning comes with the experience. Mostly I don’t see something and then decide about what it means – this happens sometimes, with surprising or unfamiliar experiences. With the surprising and unfamiliar experiences there is a pause in the meaning process; which calls our attention to the process itself. These times can be striking and memorable – but they usually make up a small part of our life.

It may be possible to strip the meaning out of experience, though I’m not sure it would be desirable. It would certainly take a lot of work. There have been philosophical attempts to simply describe how something is – without any prejudice by the observer interfering. Unfortunately no two people committed to this idea have described the same thing in the same way.

Finding Meaning
Which you may feel is all very well and entirely beside the point, if you don’t have a sense of meaning. This lack of meaning may range from being something that doesn’t bother you to a gnawing ache that is experienced as black despair.

I do think that there are some things you can do to find a sense of meaning for you. However it may not be grand or impressive. A girl I knew made small glass figurines – for her life was about making beautiful things. Did she want to be another Da Vinci or Brancusi? – no, she was happy making small glass figurines. It may be that you want to be a parent or a friend – this is what (your) life means to you.

Your meaning may not be seen as important by others. This is another whole subject – that some people’s gifts are looked down upon is one symptom of a sick society in my view.

Hints
I think we can get some hints about our meaning from reflecting on our experience. These hints are things like: we feel nourished and better for having done something; we feel like we come alive when we are doing something, we are effortlessly attentive to something.

Another way is imagining a narrative. Imagine that you are an old person looking back on a full life. You are in your rocking chair on the verandah telling your grandchild or great grandchild about your life. What you loved, the hard times, the regrets, the lessons you want to pass on to them.

Steve Pavlina has a four step exercise. 1. Take out a sheet of paper or something to write on. 2. Write at the top “What is my purpose in life?” 3. Write your answers to this question. Keep writing. When you get bored, keep writing. When you feel there is stuff you think is silly, write it down. When there is stuff that is hard to face, write it down. 4. You have found it when you get to the one that makes you cry.

If you feel the lack of meaning as an awful thing then this kind of reflection may not work. In this situation, if you have good support, it may be possible to examine the despair. It may be linked to traumatic experiences or particular ways of thinking and feeling that you have developed. Paying attention to the despair can lead to finding your sense of meaning – however this is best done with solid support. And the support may well include drugs – anti-depressants have saved people’s lives and may be an extremely valuable support while examining difficult experiences that you have gone through. I am entirely in favour of people using drugs to support themselves on their healing journey.

A Possible Down Side
It is possible to exploit people’s willingness to bear with the how in the service of a why. I think at a societal level this happens in a lot of caring professions – the pay is poor, the workers are effectively exploited because their work is meaningful to them. (In Australia parking inspectors are paid more than childcare workers!)

Reminders
To have our lives infused with the meaning of (our) life I think it can be helpful to have reminders for ourselves. Pictures are often used this way – from religious paintings to the snapshots of friends and family on a desk. When I get stressed about a particular activity I like to stop and ask myself, “Do I want to do this?” It helps me assess whether the particular thing fits with what I want to do with my life. Rituals can also be useful – a particular time of day spent in quiet contemplation, giving thanks for meals, making a cup of coffee or breakfast for our partner, all can be rituals that connect us to our meaning.

Meaning can be a calling
The meaning of our lives is usually experienced as inexhaustible. There is abundance about it. And while it doesn’t lead to fretting it can be experienced as a calling to go beyond where we are. To improve our craft or experience more of some part of life. It can be experienced as a calling to be more truly and deeply who we are. It can be the core and the fuel as well as the reward of our self-development.

This has been a very personal post. I hope I have not ‘gotten in the way’ but managed to evoke some part of your experience too. I would like to hear from you about your experiences of meaning – great or small. Do you have a sense of meaning in your life? Please tell me about this in the comments. If you think I am completely mistaken about this or you have a very different perspective you are most welcome to leave comments about that too. Looking forward to hearing from you.

A beaut blog: LymanReed.com is a blog by, yes, Lyman Reed.  It is about self development in daily life and has lots of practical articles that are also well written.  Highly recommended, you can visit  it now by clicking here.

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Breakthroughs get our attention – they are gripping at the time and memorable in retrospect. But they aren’t a major part of our time – we spend most of the time walking the road, even if the decision to take it was both difficult and momentous. The walking part is often not nearly as gripping as the decision. And the walking takes us new places, that are unfamiliar, that we need to get used to. So, this post is about the more mundane aspects of change – walking the path, getting used to the new scenery and the new me, I hope you like it, Evan.

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My quest for the last couple of decades has been to make my living doing what I love. For me this quest is a spiritual one – it involves meaning and the meaning of my life; which is what I think spirituality is about. There have been many twists and turns on the journey – involving massage, acupuncture, psychotherapy and, finally, blogging.

Blogging suits me because (the way I do it anyway) it is about providing information in a way that is accessible and on a topic that is useful to people – that can potentially change their lives for the better. If I can earn my income by improving people’s lives – and in the area that I care about – this is a good recipe for happiness for me.

The latest twist in the path came over the weekend when I listened to a podcast by Suzanne Falter-Barns and Jeffrey van Dyk, part of their Spiritual Marketing Telesummit. To explain what this meant to me I need to give a little background.

Twenty-five years ago I discovered Perls, Hefferline and Goodman’s Gestalt Therapy. I read it and worked through the exercises and it changed my life. The basic framework has stayed with me since – though I have added and modified it, if anything it has become a bigger part of me over the years. One of the remarkable insights of gestalt therapy into psychotherapy is ‘to go with the resistance’: instead of fighting it, embrace the part of you that is resisting something. The resistance is where the energy is – tap into that energy and change is happening.

On the podcast Jeffrey van Dyk was talking about resistance and the role it plays in developing a business. He was talking about embracing the resistance. His way of putting it went straight to my heart, “Every part of you is wanting to serve you.” He also was talking about, which is also an insight from psychotherapy, that the resistance is a way of guarding ourselves. His way of putting it was, “What is the core wound?” For me it is around acceptance – my early life decision was, “I am unacceptable because I’m incompetent”.

So my resistance(s) serve to guard my acceptance of myself. I need to be authentic to be acceptable to myself. My resistances to various kinds of marketing are about being acceptable as an honest and non-manipulative person who wants to be considerate of others. (Having pop-ups that dominate the screen as soon as someone lands on my blog are NOT considerate of my readers in my opinion.)

All of which was, in one sense, no news. I knew gestalt theory, I knew about going with the resistance, I knew that marketing and dealing with the external world were part of my self-development, part of my spiritual journey. And yet it was news to me – it went straight to my heart. As a wise man once said,

D’Oh! – Homer Simpson.

This is the reason for me writing this post now. And it has lead me to thinking about what I am doing with this blog. I am very happy with the basic direction and ideas but a few things have clarified.

Pricing
My value is not for sale (and neither is yours). If people need to make a lot of money to improve their self-esteem then I hope they make lots – but money just doesn’t do that for me. My self-esteem is affected by other things.

I think charging what the market will bear is a way to bring about poverty, so I don’t want to do things that way. My pricing will be what I’m comfortable with rather than set by the market or ‘competitors’.

Health for wealth is immoral and I need to make an income. For those with little money I provide free stuff on this blog and in my newsletter. I want to have a number of worthwhile products covering different price points. I hope soon to have a very simple product that will be very low priced (perhaps under $5.00). This will be mostly a way for people to check me out and a marketing piece. I want to then produce stuff at various prices from there.

Form
I’m a word person. When I understand something, the understanding comes as a phrase. I think my products will mostly be reports and ebooks. I will provide audio’s of them, as I get used to the technology, for those who prefer that way of learning. I don’t like video much – it is harder to scan, more time consuming and chews through bandwidth at an extraordinary rate (in Australia, where I am our internet accounts usually have limited bandwidth). I don’t think I have ever seen a video that couldn’t have been put into text, and been more accessible. For now I am sticking with text.

I want to provide for each product a ‘sample’ where people can do one of the exercises or in some other way get a taste of the product they would be buying.

Topics Coming Up
I think I am nearly at the end of my Rough Guide to Self-Development (though I may get another idea or two). I have two ideas for future topics – the relationship of authenticity to various systems of self-development and authenticity in little things – the details of daily life.

If you have ideas on what topics you would like to see on this blog, or want to say anything else about this post, please let me know in the comments.

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When you do, please make sure your address works. Someone, you know who you are, recently signed up by their email address didn’t work. (If you are wondering why you haven’t received your newsletter this is the reason.)

Thanks, Evan

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This has lead to a reaction I think – an overemphasis on feelings. (At the social level this is the story of the western enlightenment and the romantic reaction to it.) For instance, Iona Marsaa Teeguarden, in her wonderful book The Joy of Feeling bodymind acupressure (which I recommend) says that we shouldn’t go with Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” but instead go with, “I feel therefore I am”.

I do think that our culture is still in this split – valuing thinking with some kind of hostility to feeling combined with an over compensation for feeling – leading to indulgence and consumerism.

I think we need to acknowledge that our feelings are a valuable part of who we are. That moments of elation and disappointment, anger and sadness, and much else, are part of what make us human. I think that we need to acknowledge that they can be problematic too (we may need to set aside the feeling of panic to survive an emergency, we may need to set aside meditating on the beauty of our beloved when chopping the vege’s or risk cutting ourselves).

If we acknowledge our feelings then we can listen to them and learn from them. Every feeling is a kind of judgement about our situation. Fear is a judgement that danger is present. Laughter is a judgement about incongruity or delight. Anger is a judgement that something precious to us has been threatened or violated.

These feeling judgements are no more infallible than our thinking judgements. The feeling may be triggered by the similarity of the current situation to an old one – instead of relevant to this one for instance. What feelings do provide is information. If we listen to our feelings as well as our thoughts then we have more information and are more likely to make fruitful decisions.

A Visit to Felton
Felton is, without a doubt, a nice place to be. Polite are considerate and respectful. And the relationships are good. And people are healthy with supple bodies – you don’t see many bodies that are rigid and inflexible – it can be a pleasure to just watch the people of Felton move around.

The children grow into adults who know how to care for others and have a sense of who they are. Conflict can often lead to productive innovations so that there is a bit of an experimental air to Felton – things are pretty stable but there is a sense that people are fresh and willing to try out new ways of doing things.

Felton is not paradise – people still get sick and have accidents. People still need to mourn the death of loved ones and be sad about the misfortunes of life. They do however have the support to feel their feelings and have had good models from others of how to express their feelings. While not paradise Felton is undeniably an improvement on our current lifestyle (and in my view a BIG improvement).

If there is a drawback to living in Felton is that things can get a bit ‘mushy and gushy’ on occasions. If there is one feeling that is sometimes devalued it is anger. Perhaps it would be right to say that a sign of maturity in Felton is expressing anger well.

For a good glimpse of how embracing our feelings could affect our lives there is a ‘parable’ by Claude Steiner called, A Warm Fuzzy Tale. I think it would be an excellent thing if our world was a lot more like Felton.

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In the comments on the post Barbara pointed out that the question can be heard in a minimising way as well as a reply to stop minimising. So I want to emphasise that my intention is to have a way of stopping the minimising. The post is called What Difference Does That Make: empathy, pain and understanding. I hope you like it, Evan.

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This need of protection is the topic of a guest post by me on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is called The Childhood Need for Protection Isn’t Just Part of Childhood. I hope you like it, Evan

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So life should be pretty much back to normal from here – though maybe not completely.

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Not sure how things are going to work out so I’m not sure how soon I’ll be back – hopefully in a few days. All loving thoughts/energy/prayers sent my family member’s way will be gratefully received, Evan.

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