Courage to Walk on Water

There comes a time when the solid ground we walk upon dissolves. Tried and true methods for navigating life as if we were dwelling on firm terrain no longer work. No matter how hard we try or how much we love, our reliable maps and compasses, insightful knowledge and beliefs, precise formulas and techniques fail. The lines connecting people, places and events vanish. Our actions don't produce predictable results. We can't get a grasp on things. Not only has the rug been ripped from under our feet, the floor is gone too. We find ourselves adrift with no land in sight. The solid earth has liquified. We are living in a watery world.


Our first response it is to flail about, desperately attempting to grab something that's not moving. We look for fixed reference points to tell us where we are. We search for clear signposts to guide our way. The watery world, however, has shimmering milestones and undulating pathways. Everything is swirling, rising, falling, rolling. Nothing is graspable or clearly defined. The separate billiard ball world we're used to has melted into an ocean that continuously heaves and breathes. It's bottomless. It stretches beyond all horizons.

It's time to sink or swim. So we start paddling. Maybe we embrace the challenge and have some fun splashing about in the waves. We carry with us the solid ground belief that we are separate from the watery currents, however, and our arms tire from the effort. Our bodies remember we are not dolphins; we were made to walk upright. But, we've be told that walking on water is reserved for saints. It only happens in the mystical realms of miracles.

We realize there's no alternative. The only way to find food, shelter and clothing is to step onto the shifting currents and find a trail across the roiling foam. Treading on water is counter intuitive, to say the least. It takes a powerful suspension of disbelief to stride through the rippling seascape. That's what life calls for these days. The analog world we have inhabited for thousands of years has been swept away by the digital tide. Everything is out at sea. The only way forward is to summon the courage to walk on water.

24 Patterns of Wisdom—Book Trailer

Imbalance: The Secret to Dynamic Balance

We seek balance in stillness. Another kind of balance makes the world go round. It's the dynamic balance that nature uses to renew itself. This animated balance enlivens your body through yoga and exercise. It sparks relationships, regenerates economies, and recreates the world in countless ways. This illustration of Growth, Decay and Renewal from my new book 24 Patterns of Wisdom depicts this dynamic balance. It diagrams how balance in action comes through what appears to be imbalance. Instead of seeking balance through freeze-framing it in unmoving suspension. We can sense the dynamic balance that is already and always moving us toward lively renewal.

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Applying Patterns of Wisdom to Daily Life

These days our attention turns to the lessons learned over the past year and how to apply them during our next orbit around the sun. Whatever wisdom we have gained, our minds organize it into patterns. We develop systems for action that we believe will produce certain results, "Early to bed, early to rise makes one healthy, wealthy and wise." We focus on tasks that will enhance our food, shelter, clothing and communities while they enrich our bodies, minds and souls. We begin the new year determined to work smarter, try harder and love more. As the months unfurl, our visions of a better life can get lost in the day to day challenges we encounter. So, what is a practical and sustainable way to apply patterns of wisdom to daily life?

For me the answer is depicted in a story I came across more than 40 years ago. I found it in a sidebar of the Whole Earth Catalog and carried it with me for years. I used this tale to open my first book, The Temple in the House. It goes like this: The Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyu built a teahouse on the side of a hill overlooking the sea. He invited three guests to the inaugural tea ceremony. The guests had heard about the beautiful site and expected to find a structure that took advantage of the wonderful view. After arriving at the garden gate, they were perplexed to discover a grove of trees had been planted that obstructed the panorama. Before entering the teahouse, the guests followed the custom of purifying their hands and mouths at the stone basin near the entry. Stooping to draw water with a bamboo ladle, they noticed a small opening had been clipped through the trees. This opening framed a view of the sparkling sea. In that humble position, they awakened to the relationship between the cool liquid in the ladle and the ocean in the distance, between their individuality and the ocean of life.

What I draw from this story is that patterns of wisdom are a means to connect with what is beyond patterns. They are forms that set up the experience of what is beyond form. Patterns of wisdom are physical vessels of life that allow us to drink in the energy and intelligence that animates and guides daily living. We may enact our wisdom by creating a vision board describing our ideal house, car, physique, wardrobe, partner, family, community and world. But, more than these objects, we want the experience of being alive that we believe this object will bring. Because, these forms are hollow if we are not ignited by the sparks of energy rushing through them.

Sitting on the meditation cushion or stretching out on the yoga mat are, therefore, vessels for feeling the life force flowing through our minds and bodies. Eating a healthy meal is a vessel for tasting the life force moving through the world that produced the food. Going shopping is a vessel for embracing the life force animating and connecting your community. Every physical form from a blade of grass to a galaxy is a vessel for accessing the miracle of life energy shimmering through it.

The application of wisdom is not how to get the things we want. It's how to feel the life energy surging through everything we already have. It's not how we can reshape the world into our preconceived patterns; it's how we can open to the vitality and intelligence animating the amazing patterns that are already and always forming and reforming our lives and the world.

As I focus on the year ahead, I think of expectations of the guests as they arrived at the tea ceremony all those years ago. I recall the small opening the tea master clipped through the trees and how that opening pointed to the ocean of life beyond the trees. I feel how the guests sensed the waters of life pouring through the ocean and through them. I'm inspired by the way this pattern of wisdom awakened them to the life force beyond the pattern. I sense how to apply the patterns of wisdom life has shown me, to honor each physical form I encounter as a vessel for the revitalizing life force surging pouring through it.

Blurring Your Belief Grid To Recharge Your Life

Our minds work incessantly to put things in order. We strive to get it right, know what's up and where it's at. Despite our best efforts, life messes with our agendas. No matter how precisely we draw the plans, make the calculations, place the arrangements, or map the stars, we can't fit life into conceptual boxes. Try as we might to harness the forces shaping the world, the primal powers of life refuse to be constrained by our designs. As the saying goes, it's what's happening while we're busy making other plans.

Faced with this reality, what do our minds do? They keep making plans. Our brains are Belief Grid-making machines. Give us a jumble of forces and forms and our minds instantly look for a pattern that will make sense of the situation. As soon as we have developed a solid explanation, however, life quakes, new information emerges and our Belief Grid is shaken. In response, our minds may cry like children who have lost their candy.

A deeper wisdom within us rejoices. It knows that the blurring of our Belief Grids is the way life keeps our plans and methods vibrant. It's not order or chaos that keeps life dynamic, creative and renewed. It's the mixture of order and chaos.

So, the next time your explanation of a situation or roadmap to success doesn't hold or doesn't go the way you expected, take heart. Instead of interpreting it as a failure, engage the disruption as the primal forces of life loosening the tightness of your grip. Open your hands to allow new ways of seeing and experiencing the situation to enter. Stay with the edges where chaos overlaps order and sense the vital energies and information that are being revealed to you. As your mind attempts to solidify it's explanations of what is happening, see through your attachment to having it your way. Receive the wisdom and support of playing it life's way. Let the Blurring of your Belief Grid turn from a barrier to a benefit beyond your imagination.

To learn more about the benefits of Blurring your Belief Grid take a look at my new book 24 PATTERNS OF WISDOM by clicking here.

BELIEF GRID: Tyranny and Freedom

Between you and the world hovers your Belief Grid. It's the veil of concepts through which you locate and define people, places and events. Your Belief Grid is the framework your mind uses to shape the elusive forces of life into the recognizable patterns of home, school, work and play. It maps your coordinates for getting from here to there and back again. It outlines your politics, economics, spirituality, diet, movies preferences and every other thing you like or dislike.

We also use Belief Grids to guard against the Primal Wound inflicted by the duality of living. We employ it to control the raw power surging from the wellsprings of creation. These attempts fail, but we try anyway.

Each of us has a Belief Grid. Our minds are Belief Grid-making machines. Encounters with each other are mostly encounters between our Belief Grids. My framework of concepts I hold to be true crosses paths with your framework of concepts you hold to be true. Instead of connecting human to human, one framework tries to press the other framework into agreeing with it. You can see this everywhere. The stalemates in congress are standoffs between Belief Grids. Clashes between people, organizations and countries are battles between Belief Grids.

In these conflicts, our Belief Grids become solid. They obscure the lives they are trying to serve and protect. When we make our Belief Grids more important than people and the earth, we tyrannize each other and the world. We attempt to suppress life's revitalizing energy and wisdom and make it rigidly conform to self-centered interests. The result is isolation, depression, struggle and worse. If, on the other hand, we see our Beliefs Grids for what they are—devices our minds create to navigate the world—we can use them as tools for exploring life and fostering communication and understanding.

As you go about your day, notice the Belief Grid hovering in the space between you and the world. See if you are making it solid and trying to control people and events. Or, spot the openings where your Belief Grid opens to deeper connection, freedom and delight.

Learn more about the Belief Grid and other shapes of knowledge in my new book 24 PATTERNS OF WISDOM, click here to take a look inside.

THE ARCHETYPE OF SELF & OTHER: Learning to Dance with Dispute

He said/she said... progressive/conservative... rich/poor... friend/foe...like/dislike... opposites make the world go round. At the core of all contraries is the perception that You are separate from Me. Personal squabbles, political battles, economic competitions, holy wars and every other conflict arise from dividing the world into Self and Other. In this separateness, we see both danger and delight—danger that Other will harm Self and delight in the possibility that Self will be enhanced by Other.

These differences, however, do not separate us. Self and Other are intimate partners in each step of living. Every detail is divided into opposites: light has its shadow, good its bad, beauty its ugliness. "You can't have one without the other." Despite the connections between Self and Other, the apparent divisions drive us crazy. The Other just won't cooperate with the Self's agenda for what it believes is right, healthy or loving. So Self enacts all sorts of strategies to pull Other under its control. But every rule, commandment, design and dominating tactic only clarifies the lines appearing to separate Self from Other.

What Self misses is that division is an archetypal pattern. It allows the oneness of consciousness to experience expressed possibilities. Without Self and Other, life would be an amorphous, soup-less soup. The overlapping circles of Self and Other is a primal structure that allows no-thing to breathe as everything. The trouble isn't the framework of Self and Other. Problems stem from seeing their relationship as a personal dispute rather than a cosmic dance. This doesn't mean to get falsely Kumbaya about the differences. It means to stop futile complaints against an essential structure of life and connect with the energy generated from the interaction. It means to discover the strengths the dynamic reveals and act from the field of possibilities broader than personal gains and losses.

So, the next time that irksome Other person, political party, or religion doesn't dance to your particular tune, try stepping through the dispute into the dance of consciousness cavorting with itself. Hear the music to which Self and Other are dancing. Enter the wider, subtler and more intricate symphony to which the archetypal twins are already swaying.

Learn more about the dynamic of Self & Other in my new book 24 PATTERNS OF WISDOM: Navigating the Challenges and Awakenings of the Human Journey by clicking here.

Surviving the Flood

If you're not overwhelmed these days, you're not paying attention. Sure, every moment is not a crisis, but tsunamis of information, innovation and interconnectivity are inundating every aspect of life. All things, from food, shelter and clothing to personal relationships, politics, economics, science, entertainment and art, are being dragged by tidal shifts into unknown forms and functions. The big waves are swamping the gridworks of concepts and beliefs that have defined us and our world for thousands of years. Our references points and coordinates for navigating the world are dissolving before our eyes. Even when we accept that this is a time of unprecedented change, the transformations keep coming so quickly and relentlessly that it's easy to feel we're drowning. The bad news is we are.

The good news is that drowning in the flood is an archetypal pattern of wisdom. Whether we like it or not, guard against it or not, our frameworks of dwelling on earth cannot withstand the forces of revitalization that sweep away the old to make way for the new. With all the talk of attuning ourselves to the earth, we ignore nature's essential pattern of renewal and sustainability—to continue, life devours the structures it creates. From starfish to stars, from homelands to homes, every form that is made is overwhelmed by forces that unmake it, opening the way to new life.

In the midst of the flood, we believe it's the end when it is actually somewhere in the unending middle. As we call for change and extol transformation, it's helpful to remember this. On the way to new doings, life will carrying us through our undoing. As natural as it is for the tides to rise and overwhelm us, it is just as natural for them to recede and reveal our new forms and patterns for living. So, let's face it, the floods of change will keep coming. The question is, as the Persian poet Hafez asked, will you go kicking and screaming or go dressed for dancing?

Learn more about The Flood and other structures of knowledge in my new book 24 PATTERNS OF WISDOM: Navigating the Challenges and Awakenings of the Human Journey, click here

Photograph: K.M. Chaudary/AP Illustration: Anthony Lawlor