SGM March 2015 Weekly Message Four: “3 Techniques to Discover Magic in Disruption”
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Welcome back to the March 2015 Edition of Spiritual Growth Monthly. I’m Kevin Schoeninger. Thank you for being with us here at SGM! In this week’s message, you’ll learn 3 techniques to discover magic in life’s annoyances, challenges, and disruptions.
When you wake up in the morning, do you expect that what happens this day is part of a Bigger Plan for your life? Do you see the sequence of tasks and feel the deeper meaning and significance in everything that is laid out before you? Do you feel the magic of how every event, every person, every circumstance and meeting is related and connected to everything else? Do you feel like you are moving forward toward your destiny and feel excitement for how it will all come together and unfold?
Or do you wake up tired from the day before and anxious about the day ahead? Are you hoping to get through it without too much hassle? Are you hoping that there won’t be anything too overwhelming or any big problems to deal with? Are you hoping for a quiet, smooth day that you can cruise through with little angst or worry? Do you simply look forward to a few moments to relax at day’s end?
What was your outlook as you started this day? What did you expect? What did you hope for? Did you have a plan?
Personally, maybe like many of you, I have been a person who likes to plan the day, the week, and the year. I like to be prepared and know what to expect, so I can do a good job. I am intentional about my decisions and take care to mind the meaning and purpose in my life, so that it makes good sense to me and I feel good about what I am doing to take care of my family, myself, and help others in my time here. I like to plan things well, because I’ve seen how this helps things run more smoothly. It feels good and it makes sense to me.
This past year, I’ve learned a lot about letting go of my plans and being open to a design beyond what I can immediately see and figure out. Events that seemed “out of order” have popped up repeatedly—and these have forced me to discover a deeper order, meaning, and purpose that actually seems “out of order” on the surface. These events included my Mom’s unexpected death way before her time, my Dad’s massive heart attack after he had had a complete thumbs-up physical including a full heart workup, and a tumor in my wife’s inner ear that will necessitate a delicate surgery and mean she will stop teaching singing. . .
None of these events were expected, given past health history, family history, and the best plans we had all made. Yet in each of these I’ve discovered deeper meaning, purpose, and a Bigger, if not always rationally understandable, design. Each has led to unexpected blessings.
Among these are resources from my Mom’s estate to cover costs for my Dad and my wife, an enforced need to work less and live a less stressed life for my Dad, a buyer for my wife’s business, and an easy “out” for her to be able to let go of teaching singing—which she has done for 20 years and was ready to move on from. It’s hard to tell people you are leaving without a “good explanation.” Both my Dad and my wife were given easy explanations for why they are letting go.
What if everything in life is so deeply interconnected and interwoven that it is impossible to imagine the complexity of interrelationships? What if there is an “implicate order” beyond our rational understanding, beyond our simple linear views of cause and effect? What if we could learn to tap into this deeper layer in a way that our lives would unfold with a profound sense of magic, of being cared for, and of being connected to each other in ways that defy reason and logic?
In his book, The Mind-Body Code (Sounds True, 2014) Dr. Mario Martinez describes three ways that we can learn to access what he calls “the drift” and discover magical synchronicities that give us a whole new feeling of sacredness and grace. As he says, “the drift is a time/space of interconnectedness that anyone can access if they use the right tools of observation.” (p.217, TMBC) In the drift you learn that “out of order” experiences are often portals that can usher in “something more” in your life. They can help you break out of ruts and enter profound new experiences. They can shift your state of consciousness in ways that you could never expect or plan.
Martinez says that “These out-of-order states are undulations (ripple effects) of deeper meaning that you can access to transform your life from a mundane one to a life filled with celebrations of exalting discoveries.” (p.217, TMBC) He tells a wonderful story from his own life to illustrate this point.
Several years ago, Martinez was flying to Rio de Janeiro for a vacation he had long looked forward to and was really ready for after a period of hard work. Five hours into the flight, the plane had electrical system malfunctions which forced a premature landing in Belo Horizonte. When they landed, they learned that the airline mechanics were on strike. The options were to wait for days in Belo Horizonte or take a bus to Rio.
After initially being highly annoyed, Martinez decided to rent a car and drive to Rio. Looking at the map, he saw a picturesque colonial town called Ouro Preto (Black Gold) that he remembered from a novel he had read in college. Why not make the most of this detour by enjoying this stop along the way?
He arrived in the town and found it immediately charming, so he decided to stay for a couple days. Arriving in Rio moved to second place on his list.
The first evening in Ouro Preto, he asked the innkeeper at the bed and breakfast where he was staying for dinner recommendations. The innkeeper recommended a cozy restaurant called Contos de Reis (Tales of Kings). He arrived at the restaurant just in time to get the last table. This was obviously the place to go in this small town.
A short time after he was seated, he noticed a fellow passenger from his interrupted flight who had just walked in the door. It was great to see a familiar face, even though he had never met her before. What a coincidence that they would both have chosen to drive to Rio, both had chosen to stay in this town, and both had chosen this restaurant.
He could see the woman was being told by the hostess that there were no tables available, so he invited her to dine with him. She accepted.
Before long, they were deep in conversation about their interrupted travels. They ordered wine and were soon toasting their “chance” meeting. Their eyes met during the toast and they both felt as if they connected with the person they would spend the rest of their lives with. By the end of the evening they had compared notes on a wide variety of uncanny similarities in interests and insights. It was magical. Before his vacation was over, Martinez had decided to move from the U.S. to Montevideo, Uruguay, to live with his new life partner.
Chance meeting? Happy coincidence?
What if there is an underlying design to life that defies your ability to explain it? If so, wouldn’t you want to know more about it? Wouldn’t you want to know how to tap into this Bigger Plan and welcome more magic into your everyday world? What if you are being watched over, guided, and cared for in ways beyond your understanding?
Martinez says that it is just these type of unplanned, out-of-order experiences that can magically change your life when you know how to notice them, observe them, and move with them. He offers three tools to help you do just that: feedforward, apophatic inquiry, and prolepsis.
1. Feedforward
When something unexpected, unplanned, and seemingly inconvenient and, even disruptive, happens to throw off your best-laid plans, what if instead of being annoyed, you instead paused to celebrate? What if you shifted your mindset to expect something good to come of the interruption? What if you went so far as to celebrate this in advance?
Martinez says, “You can feedforward to celebrate, in the present, a future event: an entangling, fortuitous, soon-to-unfold event. In other words, simply celebrate in the present without knowing the reason, and wait for the event to unfurl in the future.” (p.223, TMBC)
Now this may seem ridiculous, impractical, and a waste of time to your conscious mind. But notice how doing this would shift your mindset. Instead of being annoyed, you might now be curious to see what might happen. Instead of being pessimistic and feeling helpless, you might open up to notice a new wonderful opportunity and anticipate some magic happening in your life.
How could that simple practice, if you made it a habit, change your life for the better?
2. Apophatic Inquiry
“Apophatic inquiry reaches contextual meaning through negation.” (p.224, TMBC) Setting aside the dry scholarly name and description, the essence of this technique is to negate your present assumptions about what things mean, so you can access a deeper intuitive knowing. When life throws you a curve that defies all rational explanations in the moment, you consciously exhaust those rational explanations.
As a dramatic example, what might you do if your child died in war? Burying your own child is one of the most traumatic “out-of-order” experiences a parent could suffer. All kinds of rational explanations might be offered, but none of them can really soothe and heal. Using apophatic inquiry, you could negate each explanation until you arrive at a state of not-knowing in which a deeper awareness might emerge.
For example, you could say “A son does not die at war to defend his country, for the glory of God, because of bad luck, for heroism, by accident, from carelessness, and so on. When you exhaust the intellectual pursuit of meaning, you are left in a linguistic void of reasoning, logic, orderly sequence, and any other categorizing.” (p.224, TMBC) When you truly exhaust all possible reasons and explanations, you are left in an open space, beyond reason and also beyond uncertainty, beyond having to know.
Martinez says that patients he has who follow this process into that void are left with a sense of serenity that they describe as “We are not alone.”
What might happen if you negated all your possible reasons and explanations during “out-of-order” moments? What might happen if you let go of your need to know, so you came to rest in a deeper faith and serenity about the Way of Life?
3. Prolepsis
Prolepsis is a Greek term meaning “preconception” or the representation of something existing before its proper time. It’s a way to tap into the interconnected web of nonlinear space/time and draw forth something profound and new.
Da Vinci sketched a helicopter five hundred years before its invention. Einstein imagined his theories long before there was technology to confirm them. It’s similar to what Steve Jobs did at Apple when he brought his vision of a future product to his engineers who told him that it was not possible. He told them “Yes, it is possible, and you can do it.” They eventually went on to invent what he envisioned—the iPad, iPhone, and so on.
So how can you use prolepsis in the out-of-order, challenging moments of your life?
What might happen if you imagine yourself at some time in the future when you already know the solution to your problem? You don’t imagine that solution, you just imagine a time when you know the solution. You smile at the simplicity of the solution and you feel what it is like to have solved the issue. Perhaps you draw on the power of “feedforward” and actually celebrate the solution without yet knowing what it is. This creates fertile ground in your creative imagination.
You then allow your creativity to run wild, imagining solutions and answers without editing or judging feasibility. You really get into the feeling of having all of these solutions. The possibilities are limitless.
Then you drop all of those solutions and imagine that you have an even better one. You don’t try to imagine what that is, you just imagine that you know a better solution.
You imagine yourself fifteen years in the future. That future doesn’t have to relate to the solution you are seeking. You simply project yourself into the future and notice how what you were worried about now seems irrelevant, because you solved the issue long ago. . . How does that feel?
Then just notice what comes to you, at the present moment or in the days ahead. You may be surprised at what you discover.
I would love to hear about any of your insights and discoveries in our Discussion below.
In next week’s message, I’ll guide you in a meditation to access The Healing Field in which you can effortlessly release tension and welcome new levels of health, wealth, and happiness.
Until next time,
What if magic was available in life’s disruptions?
Kevin