Justine Musk

the bullsh*t of permission + the power principle

2013-05-25T19:03:23Z

I went to hear Sir Ken Robinson give a talk at UCLA.

One of the things he mentions in his talk and new book (FINDING YOUR ELEMENT) is that

“the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020 depression will be the second leading cause of death in the world, affecting thirty percent of all adults….By some estimates, ‘clinical depression is ten times more likely to torment us than it did a century ago.’”

The antidote to this, according to Sir Ken? Find that sweetspot where your passion and talent come together and create real value in the world.

We have so many different words for it. Your purpose. Your Element. Your dharma. Your raison d’etre. Your soulprint. Your north star. Your voice. Your onlyness. It is, I think, variations on the same thing: an organizing principle for your life that gives it shape, energy and direction. It draws from the multiple levels of your personality, expresses itself through your gifts and hooks you up to a much bigger picture.

Being in your Element brings you joy, which Peggy Tabor Millin points out

“….is not an emotion but a physical sensation of wholeness.”

Instead of looking for a person to complete us – a dubious proposition at best – we should be hunting high and low for our Element. click to tweet

Most of us, according to Sir Ken, give up too soon. We sell ourselves short. We settle for too little. We live in a consumer culture that trains us to look for happiness in all the wrong places: a perfect body, a big white wedding, a midnight-blue Porsche and a house in the hills.

But I also blame the Power Principle.

The Power Principle is what writer and Jungian analyst Marion Woodman renamed patriarchy after too many people assumed that patriarchy automatically means men. It does not. Patriarchy refers to a system – supported and perpetuated by people of both genders – based on a power hierarchy that privileges so-called masculine values and attitudes over feminine values and attitudes. In order for someone to be in the up position, someone else has to be in the down position.

This means we’re constantly comparing ourselves to others.

This means we’re relying on external sources of validation to guide us.

There’s a lot of talk in the personal development world about asking for permission. In order for a woman – the person is usually understood to be a woman – to fulfill her destiny and reach for her potential, she has to give herself permission. Or understand that the universe has already given her permission. Or just quit waiting for permission in the first place.

Maybe what she – or he – really has to do is to reject the whole idea that permission exists.

When I was a teenager I fell in love with the fantasy movie LABYRINTH, starring David Bowie (Jareth) and a young Jennifer Connelly (Sarah). I was disappointed when Sarah spurns Jareth, the Goblin King, at the end of the movie. This was partly because Bowie injected the character with a wistful, yearning quality that I found romantic and hot. I was also caught up in my own version of the fairy-tale fantasy that Sarah learns to call out as bullshit.

In the final confrontation between them, Jareth tries to seduce Sarah into staying with him as his Queen. “Look, Sarah,” he tells her, “look what I’m offering. Your dreams!”

He goes on:

“….I ask for so little. Just let me rule you, and you can have everything that you want. Just fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.”

But Sarah recognizes that, like any master narcissist, Jareth is working with smoke and mirrors. What he’s offering isn’t love. He’ll make her Queen (“you can have everything that you want”) for the price of her freedom (“do as I say”).

She would constantly have to ask for permission.

Instead, she realizes, You have no power over me, with a note of wonder in her voice. The reality that Jareth has created comes apart like a house of cards.

Watching this movie as an adult, I realized how the fairy-tale fantasy that still permeates this culture is not just about some rich dude on a white Mercedes galloping in to sweep you off your feet, whisk you away to a castle (in the hills, with a pool and a view) and love you happily ever after (once you’ve signed the prenup). It’s about the unspoken agreement that so many of us make with the Power Principle without even realizing we’re doing it. If we’re good, and perfect, and hot, and productive, and pleasing, if we fulfill the criteria set out for our gender (“do as you’re told”), then patriarchy will reward us with our dreams. We’ll get the relationship, the shiny career, the adorable kids who never misbehave in restaurants, the flat abs and fabulous shoes and lifelong security. Bad things will happen to other people – and we’ll feel sorry for them and tell them how strong they are – but not to us.

In return, all we have to do is keep checking in for permission, approval, validation; for all the signs that we’re playing the game exactly right.

Until, of course, something goes wrong, and the illusions are shown up for what they are. And we realize we no longer know who we are, or where our passions lie, or what we love. We traded our soul for an elaborate card trick.

But if we can say from the beginning, You have no power over me…..

Finding your Element requires you to tune out the worldly chorus and listen, instead, for the voice of your deep self, that nonverbal intelligence constantly communicating through dreams, images, physical symptoms and gut feelings.

It’s the voice of artists, rebels, lovers and visionaries.

Finding your Element is like falling in love, and love has a way of cutting across boundaries, ignoring taboos and challenging authority. Speak with that voice, and the world might suddenly be asking you for permission.

photo credit: orkomedix via photopin cc

on the art of mastery and soul-making

2013-05-23T20:25:27Z

“I play a Gibson Les Paul through a 65amp half-stack. Love that amp. It’s so huge-sounding. I’m all about big, nasty, sleazy dirty riffs, and that amp with the Les Paul make my sound. I also play around with some pedals. One of my favorites that I used on the record is a Death By Audio pedal called the Supersonic Fuzz Gun. It’s so messed up and dirty sounding. I love it.” — Siouxsie Medley

The other night I went to see a band in downtown LA.

My friend Marc and I developed a fascination with the guitarist.

The band played hard rock, thrashing and soulful, and she was this waif in a sweatshirt torn off one shoulder and long brown hair whipping around as if the music was punishing it (in a good way) and she stalked her end of the stage, body rocking and rocking it out, hands a blur in every photograph I took, and let me tell you boys and girls she owned that instrument. She was ruling it and working it, which let the music work magic through her.

She didn’t look like she was that many years out of high school. She must have found her way to guitar in her teens if not sooner. Holed in her room, the bite of steel in her fingers, as she leveled up from suck to nonsuck to halfway decent to decently average to hey, that’s not so bad to hey, that’s pretty good to damn, girl, play that shit again.

My guess was that she didn’t have many friends. To log all those hours of solitary practice, she must have been some kind of geek. One reason why geeks are the way they are is because of how obsession defines them. They’d rather spend time deepening their knowledge and acquiring mad skills instead of, say, social savvy. (Which isn’t to say that social skills don’t eventually come, at least to some of us.)

The world outside that obsession? Often bores them. It isn’t as rich or vivid or visceral, it doesn’t get them where they live in quite the same way. The obsession is always in the background, waiting, and some part of them waits to return to it.

It’s kind of a cliché now to evoke Malcolm Gladwell’s Ten Thousand Hour Rule (it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become excellent at whatever it is that you’re practicing) so I’m hesitant to do it (even though I just did). Also, Gladwell’s rule is only part of the picture. It’s not enough that those hours have to number ten thousand (at least, and more often fifteen or twenty) but they have to be a specific kind of practice.

It’s called deliberate practice, and it keeps you at your ragged edge, attempting a specific task that you keep failing at and failing at until finally you get it and your teacher moves you on to something new that you keep failing at and failing at and on and on it goes. Continue like this long enough – for years – and eventually you arrive at a point where, as Stephen Cope explains

“….The capacity to know a certain domain of the world in such depth appears to us ordinary mortals as a kind of supernormal power. It seems like magic. It is not magic at all, of course, but simply the inevitable result of sustained concentration on an object of intense interest.”

As Frans Johansson points out in his book THE CLICK MOMENT, racking up ten thousand hours of sustained concentration on a particular interest is necessary to excel in some fields – but not so much in others. Some areas are so new and/or volatile and/or rapidly changing that excellence relies not on skill so much as a deep game-changing creative insight. Meanwhile Tim Ferriss and Josh Kaufman have come out with books (THE 4-HOUR CHEF and THE FIRST 20 HOURS, respectively) that show how you can hack the process of mastery by approaching your study in specific, strategic ways.

But here’s the thing. Ferriss and Kaufman are assuming that the end point of this process is the product itself: the skill you’ve acquired, the cool thing you can now do for your own enjoyment or to impress your friends and lover(s).

Which is awesome.

But I think this is overlooking a central aspect of what mastery is – and it’s something that might not naturally occur to us Westerners, who want what we want when we want it because we’re very busy and it’s time to go home and watch MAD MEN.

Mastery is about learning something right down through the bones of it. click to tweet

Cope describes mastery as “heightened pattern recognition” and explains how

“The process.. continues to deepen throughout the career of a master, until the more obvious surface patterns dissolve to reveal even more subtle patterns underneath….The pleasures of mastery are not what we usually assume them to be. They do not center around the control of one’s particular domain…They center, rather, around knowing. It is the profound pleasure in knowing the world more deeply that creates authentic fulfillment.”

A true master, Cope says, isn’t motivated by extrinsic factors like money and fame but the pleasure of following her dharma, her path, her way of being in the world that serves the world through the expression of her deepest gifts. This enables

“…a much, much deeper pleasure: the pleasure in knowing the world.”

So perhaps the larger point of a practice has to do with the practice itself, and the result it throws off is almost a happy byproduct. You need all those hours not just for the learning but for how that learning transforms you. You take it first into your mind and then into your body, where it lives on such a cellular level that skills you once struggled to perform become second nature. You can perform them on autopilot. But more importantly, you can go beyond them to find what’s deeper, what’s greater, and where that can take you.

“Practice isn’t about making something perfect; it’s about making something possible.”

As writer and writing teacher Peggy Tabor Millin explains:

“Practice – of sport, writing, art-making, meditation, music – has no goal but revelation. Practice discovers, uncovers, reveals, surprises, astonishes, and awes. Practice provides the road through new terrain, tests our resolve, and develops our skill. We take the attitude of the adventurer, not rushing but moving slowly enough to notice details. The unexpected occurs.”

Not everything we do has to be in pursuit of mastery. There are things we can learn to do well, and leave it at that. That’s fine. That’s what hobbies are for: to relax, not to push and prod you to new heights of selfhood through some deep mystical knowing of the world.

Cope equates true mastery with dharma: the great work of your life that brings your soul alive.

When you’re in the presence of mastery, you know it. It’s a shock-and-awe kind of feeling. It resonates in your body as well as your mind. It inspires you to pursue some shock-and-awe of your own. The skill itself might fade – the athlete gets too old, the pianist injures a hand – but that way of knowing lives on, and the kind of person it made you can never be taken away from you. And if this sounds a bit woo, I can only suggest that they don’t call a spiritual practice a spiritual practice for nothing. So there might be some soul-making involved.

“A yoga practice,” my yoga teacher told me, after she’d been keeping me on my ragged edge for an hour and I was entertaining murderous thoughts toward her, “is the practice of showing up. No matter how you’re feeling or whatever else is on your plate, you show up on the mat, day after day after day.” You learn a lot about your moods, your thoughts, your body that way. You learn a lot about yourself – in that same deepening way through which you also learn the world, via coding or writing or photography or gymnastics or entrepreneurialism or carpentry or Balinese puppet-making or whatever.

When my yoga teacher told me that, something clicked. There are mornings now when I am tempted to cancel my session, and I realize that part of my practice is to practice showing up. I might be edgy from an argument or seriously sleep-deprived or suffering from too much wine the night before (or all of the above), I might be worrying about one of my kids, but somehow it’s enough to let her know, and then let go of it. “I’m showing up,” I tell her, and we take it from there.

you do hereby swear to engage in acts of creative rebellion

2013-05-17T23:19:51Z

“Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.” — Osho

I [state your name] hereby declare that I am a Creative Rebel, also known as a Creative Badass, and that I am either Female or a great friend of the Female or in touch with my inner Feminine, my Soul. As such, I believe the following:

My creative ambition, however it chooses to express itself, is my birthright. It is central to who I am. It involves the need to play, to experiment, to make a mess, to embrace the great beauty of imperfection, to understand that there are no mistakes. It requires that I wander and dream and expose myself to interesting things and follow up on what catches my fancy.

Thus, it might not always seem that I am quote-unquote “being productive”, but I shall trust that deep forces are at work, even when it appears said forces have gone to Tahiti.

Creativity moves through me and happens in the spaces between myself and others, myself and my materials. It is my job as a Creative Rebel to find those persons and materials that light me up, and to steadily extract myself from relationships and situations that are eating away at my soul. I have only one soul, and I do not wish to lose it, trade it in or misplace it.

Putting a dent in the universe is all very well, assuming the universe is some steely mechanism, but I am not into swinging a sledgehammer. I wish to track my deepest nature and be a point of light in the web that connects us all. I will help keep the darkness at bay.

I reserve the right to excellent footwear, and fine chocolate when necessary.

I recognize that I have both a Soulvoice and a Worldly Chorus. My Soulvoice would have me reveal my innate genius by becoming exactly who I am. It guides me to my unique and sacred purpose. The Worldly Chorus would have me slice off pieces of myself to fit someone else’s agenda. My challenge is to listen to the one and navigate the other, preferably with wit and savvy and the occasional shot of tequila.

I acknowledge that my creative life is the shifting accumulation of the choices I make about how I use my time and energy and engage, or fail to engage, in the radical acts of self-care. Each decision leads me away from or toward what I want, even if what I want is a better understanding of just what the hell I want.

I shall henceforth feed my head all sorts of wondrous and inspiring images on a daily or near-daily basis.

I understand that for all my attempts to plan, predict and control things, I live and work against a backdrop of mystery. Our actions ripple out along the invisible lines that connect us: our friends and our friends’ friends and our friends’ friends’ friends. By saving myself, I can also save others.

I understand that the universe keeps secrets much bigger than I am. I shall find my work, and do my work, and let go of the fruits of my labor. The universe knows what to do with them. I shall move on, turn the page, begin again.

I acknowledge that the influence a Creative Person sends into the world isn’t measured by how famous she is or the wealth she accumulates or the amount of wild sex she is having. People become icons when they embody some aspect of the zeitgeist; their very identity tells a story that the rest of us need to hear, that eases some anxiety inside us. Some people have a flair for this. It’s their gift. I might have different gifts. My story is also worth telling.

I acknowledge that failure is a part of all great stories. In order to overcome something, I have to have something to overcome. The meaning is in the struggle: how it forces me to change and deepen and grow in the ashes. The old self must die, so the new self can rise and turn pain to power, wounds to light, however much this may suck at the time.

And now, because it is time to end this thing and go have the Coffee, I [state your name] do hereby swear to Own It.

And also to Bring It.

Signed:

on being original + fierce

2013-05-17T13:14:12Z

I was exchanging emails with a writer of a novel I admired, when he asked me how my own work was going.

It goes in fits + starts, I wrote, partly I think because I didn’t have enough distance from the real-life things that inspired it. I lacked clarity. Also, afraid to write some of it, which I take as a good + promising sign.

He agreed that it was a good and promising sign, because that meant “the stakes are what they ought to be.”

I loved that response, and told him so, and he came back with an anecdote about a well-respected writer he knew who was judging a literary contest and reading through the novels that had been nominated and finding them well-written, yes, very much so, but…uninteresting…because there’s nothing in the way for the writer. There’s no obstacle. Nothing real is at stake.

All of which I think is another way of saying, The writer failed to go there.

Going there is about working along the nerve, slicing open your inner life. click to tweet Whether it’s tapping into confession, fantasy, or simply what you really think, this kind of writing isn’t safe. You’re stepping forward with a bold point of view, allowing yourself to move along the lines of your instincts instead of the wellworn grooves of what’s already out there.

When you go there, you know it. You’ve got real soulskin in the game.

Origin means the point at which something comes into existence: the source. To write in an original voice means to write from your source. Every story in the world has been told a million times…except when filtered through the prism of your perspective, your experiences and talent and worldview, grounded in the details of your private landscape. To write this way, original and fierce, means to show yourself, and not the glossy and practiced persona but the creature who lives behind that.

It means to throw down.

provoke the world

2013-05-12T14:35:11Z

“What makes the content you create awesome is that it’s a story told through your unique lens. It’s you, telling a story. It’s you not giving a fuck about anything but telling that story. ” – Paul Jarvis

I have a friend who likes to say he’s out to change the culture. (Oddly enough, I have a character in my novel-in-progress who likes to say the same thing.) I have friends and friends of friends who want to change the world. A few of them actually are.

This can put a lot of pressure on the rest of us.

We’re a generation that somewhere along the line developed insanely great expectations of what we’re supposed to accomplish with our lives, and what our work life is supposed to accomplish for us (higher meaning, deep soul satisfaction, startling revelations of identity, free coffee).

Dominate the world. Put a dent in the universe. Be a bestselling writer. Find true love. Get ripped abs. Save the children. Find good childcare. Lead the company to a huge IPO. Find my car keys. Follow your bliss. Save the whales. Leave your highly paying but highly stressful job to go open a cheese shop in Botswana just like you dreamed of when you were a child. Raise millions of dollars on Kickstarter for your documentary about opening a cheese shop in Botswana. End global warming. Make money blogging. Save me from putting my wallet on the roof of my car while I’m putting in gas and then driving off with the vague feeling that I forgot something but not remembering what it was until a truck drives alongside me with the guy in the passenger seat gesturing like a mime on crack about how he saw my wallet flying off the roof of my car. Find said wallet.

It’s good to think big, of course. Crazy big. We need a little crazy. But what if you flipped that around and, every so often, thought small? What if small could be the new big?

Instead of changing the world, what if you decided to provoke it a little? click to tweet

Provoke the world.

Maybe not even the whole world, just, you know, a part of it.

“Mom, Dad,” you can imagine a child saying (or maybe you can’t, but that’s kind of beside the point, so nevermind), “when I grow up, I’m going to provoke the world. Or at least poke at it a little.”

Hell, what if you decided to provoke yourself?

It’s that what-if in the back of your mind. What if you started that blog? What if you decided to do 100 words a day on that thing you’ve been wanting to write since the fateful winter of 1996? What if you drove through the streets of your town and randomly handed out pieces of cake? What if you went to Burning Man? What if you subtracted something from your life just to see what new solutions you’d be forced to create? What if you wrote a haiku everyday and used it as your Facebook status update or emailed it to friends?

What if you started saying no?

What if you started saying yes?

It’s about engaging the world in some new way, or some new-to-you way, not to get famous or make a million dollars or find someone willing to have the wild monkey sex, with or without the masks, or the wigs, but just to see what would happen. Just to shake things up. Just to get out of that rut. Just to reframe things, add a playful twist and some spirit of mischief and maybe an olive. Shaken, not stirred. Or straight up.

Just to have fun.

What if that small thing led to some other small thing led to some slightly bigger thing led to some bigger thing and so on and so forth? Maybe the culture would change. Maybe your life.

It’s a crazy world, and these are crazy times.

What if you tossed aside that five year plan and fully lived each moment in front of you, explored it, followed those whispers of intuition? What if you put your ear to the ground of the culture and spent some time listening, listening hard?

What if life was no longer a rat race or a treadmill locked in the ON position but an idea lab, a living art project, a social experiment, if even for an hour or half an hour or twenty minutes every day? What if you created a space for yourself where there are no mistakes, no failures, only lessons, and each lesson takes you closer to that place you don’t know you’re going but will recognize when you get there?

When you finally come home to yourself?

You came, you saw, you provoked.

Who knows? You might do it again.

what we talk about when we talk about purpose

2013-05-06T14:54:10Z

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it? — Steven Wright

So you want a purpose. It’s a shame you can’t just buy one off the Internet. But if you don’t have a purpose, and you’re looking for a purpose, maybe that is your purpose right now. To engage in that process of discovery.

Call it a vision, a mission statement, a personal creed, a tattoo: different strokes for different folks.

Purpose is a way of nailing ourselves to the world. click to tweet

It’s that point where our inner life connects to a shared and much larger picture, through the expression of what Nilofer Merchant calls our onlyness.

(When I grow up, I want to be as smart as Nilofer Merchant.)

She writes:

“Onlyness is that thing that only one particular person can bring to a situation…Each of us is standing in a spot that no one else occupies. That unique point of view is born of our accumulated experience, perspective and vision…”

She adds:

“Embracing onlyness means that…we must embrace our history, not deny it. This includes both our ‘dark’ and our ‘light’ sides. Because when we deny our history, vision, perspective, we are also denying a unique point of view, that which only we can bring to the situation. Each onlyness is essential for solving new problems, as well as for finding new solutions to old problems.”

If purpose involves embracing your onlyness, it’s also about listening for the call of the times – and how it calls you in particular (and what it calls forth from you). Purpose depends not just on who you are, but on where and when you live, the problems rising to meet you.

I can’t help wondering if the reason so many of us struggle with purpose is because we’re trying to lock down something meant to be fluid and dynamic: it grows as we grow, shifts as the world shifts. You think you’ve got a hold of it with both hands only to find it’s slipped your grasp and transformed into something else.

Maybe it doesn’t come as a neat and tidy verbal statement.

Maybe trying to cast it into language is a mistake: narrows the meaning, cuts off the oxygen.

Maybe, for some of us, purpose is felt deep in the body, like an arrow that keeps pointing us in certain directions, even (or especially) when we keep trying to go another way.

Maybe it lives in our minds as a recurring image, a waking dream, a secret self.

Maybe purpose isn’t a quest, but a multilevel process of surrendering to what you already know, in that bone-deep sense that goes beyond words.

It’s about paying attention to the kinds of things you notice – and the things you don’t notice – and what that says about what you truly care about. It’s about noticing where your mind goes when it doesn’t have to be thinking about anything in particular. It’s about what you see in your daydreams. It’s about what in the world gets under your skin and tugs at your soul and makes you want to cry or scream or stand there amazed at the beauty of it all. It’s about what pulls you forward. It’s about what draws other people to you. It’s about what you embody and how you embody it.

Most of all, though, I think it’s about the thing in you that’s bigger than the fear we all feel when we want to try or do or be something great. The only thing that can drive out fear is love, whether it’s for self or someone else or some ideal, for animals or the planet or humanity in general. Purpose taps into that love, leads with that love, and people can’t help but respond because who in their right mind doesn’t want to be around love?

Show me who you love, or so the saying goes, and I’ll show you who you are.

All we have to do is remember.

beyond virgin/whore: the art of creative womanhood

2013-05-05T14:55:54Z

The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy. ~Ellery Queen

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. — Rumi

I walked into a party at a film producer’s house. There were a lot of people in black (including me) and a lot of well-toned women in Herve Leger dresses showing miles and miles of leg, balanced, sometimes precariously, on very high heels.

“Look at the Hollywood skanks,” said one of my girlfriends.

This would be an example of slut-shaming.

Slut-shaming is, as this blogger describes:

“…. the idea of shaming and/or attacking a woman or a girl for being sexual, having one or more sexual partners, acknowledging sexual feelings, and/or acting on sexual feelings. Furthermore, it’s “about the implication that if a woman has sex that traditional society disapproves of, she should feel guilty and inferior” (Alon Levy, Slut Shaming). It is damaging not only to the girls and women targeted, but to women in general and society as a whole. It should be noted that slut-shaming can occur even if the term “slut” itself is not used.”

Said blogger goes on to say

“Put in the most simple terms, slut-shaming happens when a person “publicly or privately [insults] a woman because she expressed her sexuality in a way that does not conform with patriarchal expectations for women” (Kat, Slut-Shaming vs. Rape Jokes). It is enabled by the idea that a woman who carries the stigma of being a slut — ie. an “out-of-control, trampy female” — is “not worth knowing or caring about” (Tanenbaum, p. 240).”

It’s not exactly a secret that women can be vicious to each other. I can’t remember the last time I walked into a room with a man who immediately denounced, in one sweeping, offhand statement, members of his own gender whom he didn’t even know. But instead of slamming women for slamming each other, it’s worth shifting to something called “the pro-woman line”. This is a perspective that acknowledges how women do the best they can to survive and thrive within the context of a society that demands certain behaviors from them.

When my friend was calling those other women skanks, she was in effect declaring that she was not a skank. By calling you out as that, I am declaring myself to be not-that, so other people won’t accuse me of also being that.

The problem with this approach is that you’re still buying into a version of reality that devalues female sexuality as vile and shameful. Which, as a woman, is probably going to complicate your relationship to your own sexuality, or to your body in general.

Remove the issue of sexuality from your own female equation and what are you?

A girl.

Or a lady.

Author and psychoanalyst Harriet Lerner points out that even though

“it might seem like woman, lady and girl are interchangeable terms….only the term woman has sexual and aggressive implications and connotes reproductive functioning.”

To prove her point, she presents a fill-in-the-blanks kind of exercise:

“She feared that after her hysterectomy she might no longer feel like a real _____.

Jane is sweet, soft-spoken and modest. She is truly a ______.

When Sue began to menstruate, she knew she was on the road to becoming a ____.

Why are you always fighting and screaming? Can’t you behave like a _____?

She felt very passionate with him; he made her feel very much like a ______.”

She points out that men are not called or do not refer to each other as “gentlemen” with the same kind of frequency. This

“…reflects the very different cultural pressures and expectations for their sex. While women have been encouraged to inhibit their sexuality (as in the glorification of naivete or virginity) males are encouraged to make open displays of their sexual prowess (hence the difference between a loose or promiscuous woman and an experienced man.)”

You don’t risk being called a slut or a whore if you’re a girl or a lady. The word woman, though, carries that taint of sin and transgression, all those possible, undesirable female selves: messy and primal and slutty and aggressive and ambitious and loud and dirty and angry and selfish and obnoxious and the other things that a good girl, a lady, is not supposed to be, that get split off and assigned to those stereotypes, those shadow-stories about women that continue to haunt this culture: the slut, the golddigger, the bimbo, the femme fatale, the temptress, the homewrecker, the militant feminist, the rape victim who isn’t really a rape victim but just out for revenge, attention and/or money: all those identities that women feel, on some level, they have to defend themselves against, have to reassure the culture how they are not-that (which only reinforces the idea that other women are).

There’s something dangerous about being a woman: to others, to society in general, to yourself.

Womanhood raises the possibility of rebellion, of rocking the boat, of breaking taboos, of being ambitious and competitive, of taking your creative and intellectual work as seriously as any man’s (and prioritizing it accordingly), of being sexy and sensual and sexual not to please men in general or your partner in particular but because you enjoy it. Womanhood goes beyond wife and mother to be artist, CEO, wanderer, adventurer, trickster, road warrior, rebel, revolutionary, sage, scientist, visionary, spy, elite athlete, general badass…whether she’s in black leather or a Herve Leger dress.

Even a lady isn’t a lady all the time.

Even a good girl isn’t good all the time (witness Good Girl Reese Witherspoon’s recent DUI and subsequent “do you know who I am?” mouthing off to the cops).

To transcend the whole good girl/bad girl, virgin/whore thing means to accept ourselves as good and bad, to recognize that the ‘good’ can have a shadow side (self-righteous, narrow-minded, self-erasing, weak, deceptive, judgmental) and the ‘bad’ can show some good (assertive, self-protective, creative, authentic, trailblazing, fun). That way we can rise into a new realm of possibility, a way of being that doesn’t depend on amputating the self and scapegoating others.

Call it not just womanhood, but creative womanhood: creating new myths and stories and heroines to inject into the soul of this culture, a new sense of what it means to be feminine without feeling that feminine means frivolous and weak.

The divine feminine, if you will. The badass feminine.

I have to end this, now. It’s getting late, and I have to get ready to go out.

It’s time to put on the high heels and the tight sexy dress….

…or not.

6 things to know about writing epic sh*t

2013-05-02T17:48:25Z

Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. — Seth Godin

If you spend time online blogging and/or creating, sooner or later you’ll run across the advice to write epic shit, which is part of creating cool shit, which is part of being awesome.

All of which helps you stand out against the noise.

I love that advice, even if it seems incomplete. Not only does it appeal to the go-big-or-stay-home part of my soul (plastered with motivational posters), I think it’s true. When you look at the A-listers who set themselves apart from the rest, you see it wasn’t just perseverance that got them there. They have the charisma and curve appeal that comes from being epic. They embody what they do, because what they do is who they are and nobody else could be a Danielle Laporte or Gary V or Seth Godin or Marie Forleo in the same way.

Which doesn’t stop people from trying.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You figure out who you are partly by imitating those who attract you and noticing the places where your style falls away from theirs – and then exploring ( and exploiting) those points of difference.

Success leaves a trail. It’s human nature to study those who have gone before, figure out how they did what they did, codify, package and serve up to the masses. But anything that depends upon a logical analysis of existing evidence is not only evident to you – but also to everybody else.

Which means that everybody starts doing the same things.

Which overlooks the fact that when the A-listers were doing them, nobody else was –

– which is part of what made them epic in the first place.

Epic doesn’t rely upon a prefabricated blueprint (although it soaks up as much learning as it can from whatever blueprints are out there). Epic understands that it has to go someplace new, feeling its way through uncharted territory by the light of its own intuition.

Epic is an artist, bringing all of its values to work, pushing the extremes of personality, slapping a soulprint on the world.

I’ve blogged before about my belief in a sweetspot where you and your audience overlap each other, become one: writing for you is writing for them and vice-versa.

There’s a point where you represent something bigger than yourself.

You embody the values and aspirations of your tribe, be it a subset of the culture or an entire generation. People look at you and see something that they are – and something that they want to be. They see a doorway to an aspect of their own self-actualization.

Many of us decide to blog – and then try and figure out what to blog about. Ideally you reverse the order: you have a message so epic that it compels you to bring it as only you can.

Epic is about bringing it.

Epic is about showing unique awe-inspiring value.

Epic is about provoking and illuminating and being insanely useful and reaching people emotionally and shifting the paradigm.

Epic is scary. It moves you outside your comfort zone. Instead of following a leader, you are the leader, and the only thing to follow is the voice at your core, your actions and mistakes and triumphs and feedback.

What could you blog about that would change someone’s life? Their way of thinking or doing or being in the world?

Except I think there’s a better question to ask. In the end, we teach what we most need to learn (the best way to learn anything is to teach it to others). In the end, you are your audience.

What could you blog about – or write or paint or code or build out – that would change your life? That would be something you embody but also challenge you to learn, stretch and grow?

We need those stories, your stories, because they inspire us to go out and make our own.

After a lifetime of fitting in, we give ourselves permission to stand out. click to tweet

And that is awesome.

how to be lost

2013-04-19T00:33:48Z

Something entered your life and pulled it out of whack.

It might have been as subtle as longing or as shattering as death or divorce. It forced you into the unknown. You look up and realize you’re lost.

Disoriented, you have entered a new way of being, a new country of you. This is how a hero’s journey starts – stepping to your ragged edge, and beyond.

The journey makes you. Being lost is a creative process, a re/vision of self. click to tweet

Creativity happens in stages. There’s a period of defining the problem. What questions are you asking? What if you took the question and asked it ten different ways? Change the question, change the frame, change the angle on your life. Maybe you need a new angle.

There’s a period of gathering your materials, looking for inspiration, venturing into new territory.

This requires a leavetaking.

Every journey starts with the realization that here is a place you can no longer stay.

Something is sacrificed. It gets left behind.

You might have to leave a relationship, or a job, or a city, or a career. Not to mention the beliefs and self-image that you have outgrown, the defense mechanisms that no longer serve you (and are probably holding you back).

Then there’s a period of incubation. You have taken those raw materials inside yourself to fashion something new: an insight that will shift your life, illuminate direction.

This is a time of pulling inward, descending through the layers of self. You’re listening for the voice at core that speaks up through your bones. It will tell you what you need but first you have to block out the external noise, the other voices that would dictate what to do and who you are.

This can be the tricky part: standing firm, in your power, holding the tension as new shapes take form. Refusing to let the busyness, the distraction, consume you.

When we do things just to please someone else, when we go looking for approval and external forms of validation, we get divided inside ourselves. We cut off from our own vitality: that which feeds and nourishes us, gives us the strength to experiment and make our so-called mistakes.

Being lost is uncomfortable, and our culture has a real discomfort with discomfort. The culture wants you to snap out of it, bounce back, go to your happy place. But transitional periods move to deep, internal rhythms. They can’t be rushed. They demand their time of chaos. Eventually you will find your way home again, bringing back the elements you gathered on your journey. The unknown enters the known to create your new reality.

But first, you have to be lost.

That’s how worlds are discovered. click to tweet

11 quick + dirty things about writing

2013-04-14T01:13:03Z

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

― Sylvia Plath

If you have the calling to write, do yourself a favor and listen close. It won’t go away. It will chafe and grow inside you, a hard determined pearl.

If you wait too late to start, you will regret it.

Start now. What the hell. Buy a notebook and pen and go somewhere on your lunch hour and write something, anything, even if you’re just writing about not having anything to write. Enjoy the play of language. Get to know your mind in the way that only your writing can show you.

Give yourself permission to write badly, or you’ll never do it at all. First drafts are not about writing well. They’re about spinning out the raw material for you to work with in order to write well.

If you don’t write yourself into existence, someone else will have to invent you. click to tweet

Silence won’t save you. You think you’re hiding from criticism and judgment, but you’ll get criticized anyway (just not for writing). Silence makes it possible for them to write over you.

And then to erase you.

The way to deal with fear is to let yourself feel the fear: if you try to suppress it, it comes back stronger. Know that it’s in you but not of you, and you don’t have to let it stop you. Move with and through it like you’re driving through bad weather. When you start writing, the fear fades away.

Everybody needs her period of apprenticeship, and it will be longer and tougher and harder than you expect or want it. Embrace the struggle. Appreciate what it does for you.

The struggle transforms you into the writer that you need to be.

We are forged in creative fire. click to tweet

Your voice is like your avatar; it’s what readers wrap their sense of you around; it’s a set of ideas about who you are and what you represent; it’s what you say and how you say it.

This is the paradox: you must develop a strong and grounded sense of self, because you are whatever they say you are.

Your ultimate goal shouldn’t be to write for yourself or for an audience, or to find a compromise between the two. Compromise sucks. There’s a vanishing point, a sweetspot, where you and your audience become one and the same: writing for you is writing for them.

You want to find that spot.

You want to live there — and disappear there.

You develop your voice through reading all the time and writing all the time. (Reading is the inhale, writing is the exhale.) Let yourself gravitate to the writers who attract you, pull you in, because their work is showing you something of yourself. Let yourself imitate them, until you notice those spaces where you can’t help but do something different.

In those spaces, you start to make your own voice.

10.

People don’t own ideas. They own the execution of those ideas. (Give the same idea to twenty different writers, and I’ll show you twenty different stories.) Execution is the hard part.

11.

Writing lives in the body as well as the mind. It’s a lie, and a truth, and a lie that shows the truth.

12.

Writing makes you whole. It shows people who you are. And then, as you grow toward mastery, it shows them who they are.