• I don’t want to feel it.

    Whatever the fuck it is, I don’t want to get close to it – that feeling lurking inside. Because I know it changes everything.

    The feeling is me.

    The feeling is my actual experience of the universe, in this moment, as I let the tingles creep over the outsides of my hands, and my spine starts to uncoil of its own accord, and the buried grief from a lifetime ago yells to be acknowledged.

    The feeling is everything. The unfiltered phenomena of life in this skin on this earth, under these stars.

    And encoded within the feeling is everything I am. And everything I don’t want to face.

    You don’t want to feel it

    It is understandable. Life is a shockingly visceral affair. There’s a lot of it, and not very much of you. It plants itself inside your body, pulls on your nerves, weighs down on your shoulders, plucks at your heart strings, squeezes at your guts.

    It’s understandable you don’t want to feel it. Because if you choose feeling, the result is non-consensual. Once you peel off the hardness and shake out the stuckness, you are then plunged into feeling itself. All of it.

    You don’t get to choose what you feel, and what you don’t. You can’t let in the nice stuff and keep out the painful. It’s all or nothing.

    Easier to stay numb. Safer to veg out. Simpler to maintain that you are nothing more than the ideas in your mind, and the job that you perform, and the identity you’ve been given.

    Much better not to feel.

    There are two fundamental ways to do this.

    One. You can rise above it

    Rise above the feeling.

    You can do this through calming breaths, positive mantras, or simply arguing with the utility of feeling in the first place.

    You can seek out the holiest of holy spiritual ideals, and float above yourself on a cloud of love and unicorns.

    You can drink five espressos a day, and drown out the feeling with a heroically full schedule.

    You can craft a superior and grandiose throne for yourself from which you can condemn and banish this feeling.

    You can do many of these at once! You may even be able to do it for years, decades. Some do it right until the bitter end. But bitter then you will be, for you will have spent your entire life in evasion.

    Because the feeling is none other than experience itself, which is none other than God, who is none other than you.

    And so as you rise above yourself, you ascend to a plane unearned, and thus pull rank on God himself, and claim that you know better than he, what should be felt, and what should not.

    You will not find yourself this way.

    Two. You can sink into it

    There is another way to wriggle out of this inconvenient problem of feeling. The relief of the full bodied collapse.

    Fall. Fall so fully into the feeling that you become it. Let it consume you and pull you down into its dark and warm embrace.

    Let the feeling becomes so full that the line between you and it dissolves as you become One.

    When you emerge once more, you may feel grateful. You might call it catharsis. You might even have paid workshop leaders to take you into this experience so you can feel like you’re making good progress toward finally healing yourself.

    You can spend a very long time looking for yourself in the intensity of the feeling. But it will not provide what you seek.

    For while you may believe you have honoured the feeling by communing with it so fully, what you have actually done is to have merged with it.

    You have unplugged your consciousness from awareness, and relieved yourself of the responsibility of experiencing the feeling. You have collapsed the boundaries and returned to the infancy in which there is no difference.

    You cannot feel the feeing if you are the feeling.

    You will not find yourself this way either.

    The movement of the centre

    First, drawing in the fullness of breath, to fill your chest and dilute the dry nameless pain. Bringing to life what you don’t want to feel.

    Then, slowly releasing the fullness of breath, to empty yourself and return to the silence. Reminding yourself that you are more than what you can feel.

    First, expanding up and outward, giving you a higher perspective so you can lead the chaos of life as it happens.

    Then, hunkering down and inward, bringing you into contact, so you can surrender to life as it happens.

    Up and out. Down and in.

    And in this moment it all comes together.

    The heart, held in the centre, delicately moving back and forth, regulating the flow of life.

    It is in this feeling that you reside.

    This is where you live. All of you.

    This is where you’re closest to God.

    This is where you find yourself.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • We do something no other animal does. We speak and think in words.

    It is this ability that gives us such incredible power, for we can imagine something in words, that doesn’t exist in reality.

    Words are the magic through which we create the world.

    They are also the magic through which we obscure it.

    Words are names

    They’re the names that we gave to the things around us. Table. Me. Sad. Mountain. Eat. Tree. You. Sun. These things had no name before we learned to speak.

    Perhaps the names we gave things were arbitrary. Perhaps the fact that we called water, water and not fart is complete chance. Someone called it a random sound, and it caught on, and now we’re stuck with it.

    I suspect not. I suspect there is a subtle connection between the sounds of things and the nature of things. The name water does sound rather like the bubbling of a mountain stream. At least, it sounds more like that than fart.

    Regardless, now the names are old. Water is definitely water. Sad is definitely sad. Beauty is definitely beauty. The names are deeply embedded, and when we say them, we call forth the spirit of the thing.

    We now know this from science. The mind does not distinguish between the real thing and the imagined thing. To a thirsty person, both real water and imagined water increase their thirst.

    The line between the names and the things themselves is not so clear as we might believe.

    And so by our speaking a thing’s name, we call it into existence.

    Names call forth reality

    “I can’t do it.” I say to myself.

    I’m going back through my journals, trying to identify the key threads from my life over the last year. I have this inkling that if I can find them, it will help me untangle my present reality. Pages are spread out all over the floor. There are a lot of words to sort through.

    “It’s too hard, I can’t do it” I say to myself again.

    And as I name this world, it arrives, like a loyal dog to greet me, and give me what I asked for. And lo and beyond, I find that the task is indeed beyond me, that I in fact cannot do it. And the little loop in my mind links up. I said the words, and reality confirmed their truth.

    But this is where our magical ability to name the world gets confusing.

    Because we can say things that are in fact, not true, and yet the world of those names will spring forth as if they were.

    My statement “It’s too hard. I can’t do it” was not an accurate observation of reality. It was a prediction.

    I have predicted the future, and determined that no matter what I do, I cannot find what I am looking for in these journals of mine. The task is beyond me.

    But by naming it, I have made it true.

    True names create intimacy with reality

    I take a deep breath. I pause. I try again.

    “I’m afraid. I’m afraid I can’t find what I seek.”

    My body and mind relax, as if I’ve just said the magic password.

    What I just said was true for me. I accurately named the experience that was already happening. And now my whole body has softened, and I feel in tune once more.

    It is when the unnamed reality, and the named reality fit with one another, that our experience of the world feels good, and the doors of the moment open, allowing us to witness what comes next.

    Now the fear has been named, it goes back to sleep, nestled into me, and I return to the pages on the floor.

    And then I don’t know where the time has gone, and I wake up to find a whole map laid out, with timelines, and themes.

    Be mindful of what you name

    Because what you say will become your reality. It will become true.

    If you narrate the script of your own self-delusion, then deluded you will be.

    If you name the misery that you think you deserve, then misery you will be given, and you will feel deserving of it.

    If you name yourself as the same person you’ve always been, that that person will you remain.

    Or, you can attend to the actual feel of the moment, and watch as experience bubbles forth of its own accord. And as you watch, you can simply name what arrives.

    Tree. Birds flying. Smile. Loneliness. My heart opens. Ache. The feel of life itself. Ahhhhhhh.

    As I name things in this way, I am like Adam, naming what the divine mystery gives me in each and every moment.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • The first is the one between birth and death. This life. The one you’re living right now. The unfolding of what was, through what is, into what could be.

    The second is the other life. That between death and rebirth. It’s the elusive life, because in the midst of its living, there is no concept of itself. And so we can never speak of it.

    It is where you return to. But when you return to it, you are not there to experience it.

    We do remember it though. The feel of it is there in every moment. It’s there in every cell of existence, the source of every single atom and non-atom. That which gives everything and nothing.

    It is the insidious knowing that we are not originally of this plane. That we are fallen.

    And in the broken yearning for home, we search for what we came here to discover.

    Everything that plagues us has been exquisitely designed in our second life, to live in our first life.

    But to seek the second life as the goal is to miss the point. Because our return is the only inevitability.

    To live the first life as a pursuit of the second, is to clench in anticipation of the relief of tomorrow, because we cannot give ourselves over to today.

    And today is the game. This life is the beautiful gift we gave ourselves.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • I’m a sensitive man.

    By that I don’t mean one who is touchy, emotionally volatile, or easily hurt (though I have all these characteristics), I mean in the literal sense of one who has a high capacity for sensing.

    I’m pretty sure I was born sensitive. Though I was also born the son of a somatic therapist. As a child, my father would encourage me to cry, to express my desires and to feel the impact of things. He said feelings were good, and so under his tutelage, and the natural sensitivity of my mother, I learned to feel. A lot.

    It’s a double edged sword. One side powerful. One side compromising. And it’s a characteristic that I’ve struggled to integrate with the fact that I’m a man.

    Here’s how the established logic worked inside my mind.

    1. I’m a man.
    2. Men are supposed to be masculine.
    3. Sensitivity is a feminine trait.
    4. Therefore, I’m either not masculine, or I should stop being sensitive.

    It’s been a long road to untangle that one. And I don’t just mean conceptually, I mean somatically and archetypally. The cultural voices are loud. The biology is deeply wired. The new models are still sketchy.

    But untangle it all we must. Times are changing remarkably fast, and we’re rushing to create new stories about men and women, to fill the void left by the throwing out of orthodoxy.

    Should men be sensitive? How can deep feeling and masculinity co-exist? These are pressing questions for our culture, and for me personally. Here’s my take on the answer.

    Sensitivity is the opposite of numb

    We consider insensitive people to be those that don’t consider the feelings of others. They’re not aware of the impact of their behaviour. This stems from the fact that they can’t actually feel themselves, and thus cannot feel others.

    They don’t notice that the loud conversation they’re having on their phone is irritating every other person in the otherwise silent train carriage.

    They don’t hear their own loudness. They don’t notice their own blindness. They can’t feel their own delicate and ever changing emotional flavour.

    They’re numb.

    This is very helpful in certain situations, or for certain roles. And it’s a vital adaptation to the experience of pain, an adaptation that we all make in some way or another. A child who is abused must desensitize themselves. The pain will kill them otherwise. And we’re all abused to one degree or another.

    You could also say that sensitivity is the original state. The state we are born in, a permeable sponge of experience.

    Being sensitive doesn’t mean you’re ‘emotional’, it means you’re more highly attuned to all sensory data. It’s like a highly calibrated microphone, able to pick up the quietest of sounds – things no one else can hear. But when a siren goes off, the sensory input is too high, overwhelming the microphone and distorting what’s captured.

    It is this sense of overwhelm that I experienced as I child in school. When other kids said hurtful things to me, I experienced the hurt with great visceral detail. Break times were the hardest – the sensory overload of more children than I’d ever seen in my life, all playing at once. I would find quiet corners to hide in.

    Though it also meant that I could sense the mood of my teachers as soon as they walked in the room. He’s angry today – better stay quiet. She’s happy today – maybe she’ll take us to the music room again!

    As I got older I tried as hard as I could to hide my sensitivity. It was a weakness that was not respected by my peers. So I played it tough (as best I could), so I could be one of the boys.

    We don’t want our boys to be sensitive

    Traditionally, we don’t encourage boys to be sensitive. We tell them they need to toughen up.

    And for a culture that long required its men to physically protect its borders – whether the farmer protecting his family from criminals, or the soldier protecting his people from invaders – sensitivity was indeed not a useful capacity for them to have.

    The chief consequence of high sensitivity is the possibility of overwhelm. I feel so much that I get flooded by sensation and lose myself.

    In the midst of combat, when people you care about depend on your conscious vigilance, this is a serious handicap. Freezing up from overwhelm as the enemy storm toward you means death. And not just for you, but for your comrades who depend upon you, and your family, who will have no one left to protect them.

    This is why tough men call sensitive men ‘pussies’. This is not actually a denigration of female genitalia, but rather a comment on the disposition required for men in combat. That is, you need to be hard, not soft.

    Soft means dead. And dead men can’t protect anyone, which is what we’ve spent millennia doing. Thus history has bred us to be tough. It was an evolutionary necessity. We’re all the descendants of tough men who numbed themselves sufficiently to go to war, and protect us from invaders.

    But now the men are confused

    For an unbelievably long time, this is how it was. Men did men’s jobs and women did women’s jobs. This wasn’t a patriarchal conspiracy; it was the way things were. Women spent their lives creating our homes and bringing up our children, and men spent their lives working our fields, and protecting our borders.

    In a couple of generations, we’ve unravelled millennia of tradition. And we’re all reeling as a result.

    Men are confused. I’ve been confused. I was brought up at least as much like a girl as I was a boy. My father himself was trying to work out what it meant to be a man in this new age.

    My culture confused me. It told me guns and violence were wrong and were the ills of history. And yet at the same time, fed me exhilarating films and cartoons where men used guns and violence for good. I didn’t know what was true.

    And it’s because we are confused. All of us. We ripped up the rule book, and now we no longer know where we stand.

    Women have done a pretty damned good job at learning the masculine game. They’ve stepped into the public arena and learned how to be hard. Women who kick ass are celebrated. As they should be.

    Men who feel a lot are still struggling.

    The sensitive men of old

    It was a couple of years ago now, in the midst of a training course with my Tantra teachers that I asked them about this topic.

    “I’m worried. By sensitizing myself, am I not compromising my masculine ability to get shit done, to drive through difficulty? I’m worried I’m making myself less of a man.”

    They told me of the men of the past, the ones who felt deeply, and were celebrated for it.

    The most effective hunters were those who could feel the animals as they walked through the forest, and thus knew where to find them.

    They told me of the Polynesian Wayfinders. The veritable kings of the South Pacific tribes, who through their immense sensitivity could feel the layers of ocean currents beneath their wooden canoes, know where they were, and thus navigate across hundreds of miles of open ocean with no compass or sextant.

    These guys were so deeply sensitive to the world that they facilitated the spread of a people from the Indian sub-continent, all the way down to New Zealand, and all the way across to Hawaii.

    That takes balls man. And I mean that literally – the way they developed that sensitivity was by tying their testicles to the tiller.

    It takes a real man to be sensitive

    And by real man, I don’t mean the macho man of old, but the man that is equipped with the range and depth to face our new evolutionary challenges.

    This man need no longer be the specialist of old – the soldier, who had to numb himself in order to survive the horrors of war. For, many men are still playing that role in their droves, it’s just that the battlefield went indoors, and the weapons became products and stocks, and the killings monetary in nature. But they’re still numb.

    And becoming a deeply sensitive man so you can nurture children, empathise with the oppressed and cry in the woods with your brothers is not enough. I’ve met these men, I’ve been this man. It doesn’t work.

    The answer I believe, is that the sensitivity of the modern man must be used for the purposes of masculine ideals, just like the men of old. While our world has changed radically since those times, the principles are I believe, the same.

    A sensitive man is so much less capable of creating unnecessary hurt in another, because he feels the hurt in another. And as he deepens his ability to feel, he is released to embody that archetypal masculine action – penetration.

    It is this nature that is under cultural attack. But the problem is not that men penetrate, it’s that they do so without feeling the consequences. The more I as a man am able to feel what it is I am penetrating, the more I am able to take skilful and appropriate action.

    By feeling the texture of my client’s heart, I can slice through his avoidance, into the truth of what he does not want to face.

    By hearing the pain and suffering of those around me, I can hunt down the dangerous ideas that maintain their victimhood.

    By sensing the currents of my life and all those I am connected to, I can navigate through the unknown, to a better and more beautiful future.

    Men are designed to penetrate, to break through boundaries, to pierce the status quo, to open what was closed. This can be done with grace, or with brutality. And sensitivity is the difference that makes that difference.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to be conscious – to feel, to actually notice what’s going on around me

    And so when I’m not looking, it sneaks around behind me and steps into me, putting his hands inside my hands.

    When I can’t find a way to say what I want to say as I write, he takes over, gets up and smokes a cigarette.

    When I don’t know what to do with my discomfort and anxiety at the great work project in front of me, he rescues me, and I turn to Facebook and divulge myself of the responsibility of feeling myself.

    When I can’t find a way to be with the grief and longing in my heart, he steps in swiftly and feeds me cheesecake and pasta, and all the feelings melt away in culinary overwhelm.

    These are my time disruptors. They are the crutches of my attention. The habits that I can always lean on when the present moment becomes something I want no part of.

    The magnificence of the moment hides itself from me as I look for solace out in the future, that imagined reality where I will finally have resolved all my problems. Or in the memories of the past, where I look for the reasons I can’t find what I’m now looking for.

    All the while, the gift of this moment goes unclaimed.

    I’m sorry sweetheart, I neglect you don’t I?

    And then there it is, the utterly simple beauty of noticing now. The way the candle flame flickers and reminds me that time is moving. The miracle of a roof, and a glass of wine, and the fact I get to spend my time writing things like this.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • We want to change.

    It’s built into our nature, the very substance of life.

    We want to realize the vision that we see in our mind’s eye. We want to fulfil the potential we feel in our soul.

    We’re told it’s possible, just a decision away.

    We want it fast. As fast as a book downloaded to our kindle. Or a tweet sent out to the world. We want it fast, because the world is fast. Faster than ever before.

    We want to change, and we want it now.

    The imperceptibility of growth

    Between the day of my birth and the age of 17, I grew from around 1 foot 8 inches, to 6 feet 3 inches.

    I did not see this growth happening. I didn’t wake up each morning and notice the .009 of an inch I’d grown over the last 24 hours.

    But whenever I would see my family at Christmas, Grandmothers and Uncles would proclaim “my, haven’t you grown!” Because they saw it.

    Growth happens so slowly we don’t see it.

    It’s only in the retrospective measurement – the drawing of pencil marks on the door-frame, months or years in between – that the heightening becomes evident.

    This principle doesn’t just describe physical growth.

    Making sense of the multitude

    I’m bumbling about my day, trying to do my best with an odd hand of cards.

    Stuff happens. I do some writing. I have a coffee break. I coach a client. I listen to a podcast. I’m working habitually, on instinct. I’m following my agenda. I’m trying to notice when I check out of my experience and drift. I’m focussed on doing my work, building something.

    And then I try and make meaning out of it all.

    I journal. I talk with friends over lattes and cigarettes. I practice and meditate, allowing the feel of myself to express itself in movement and in stillness. I check in with my advisors, both human and divine.

    And I try to spin a narrative that makes sense. One that stretches to include what I didn’t before know. One that reaches out to embrace what is asked. One that makes me feel like a sane and good person.

    I try to keep in step with my ego.

    The story that holds it all together

    When I say ego, I don’t mean what we often mean: an over-inflated sense of self. I just mean a self, period.

    The origin of the word comes from the Latin for self. Freud made the word popular. Except he actually didn’t, because he never used it. He used the German pronoun das ich which just means the I.

    James Strachey, whose English translations of Freud popularized him, changed the I to the ego to make it sound more scientific.

    The self. That strange aspect of ourselves that’s hard to pin down, because like Alan Watts said, “trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth”. To see the self, you have to use the self to see it.

    Those voices in your head? That’s not schizophrenia, that’s the human condition. We are not one thing. We are a multitude. But to make sense of ourselves, we create a story of who we are.

    I’m Ewan. She’s Jenny. He’s a moron. I’m neurotic. They don’t get it. I’m someone who spends inordinate amounts of time trying to understand the un-understandable, because I feel purposeless unless I do.

    We’re like bails of straw, with a myriad of aspects, feelings, memories, dreams and karma.

    And the ego? A stretchy piece of string that holds the whole bundle together.

    Hopefully.

    The game of growth

    Sometimes the string becomes hard and inflexible through lack of exercise. We say “this is who I am”, and we constrict the changes that want to occur.

    Sometimes we stretch the string itself, without the bail of our multitude pushing the expansion. The story becomes bigger than the reality. And we say “he’s got a big ego”.

    Sometimes we don’t know how to make sense of the expansion of ourselves, and the string becomes tight around us, straw spilling from its grasp. We become overwhelmed and we say “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

    Sometimes we experience all of this in a single moment as we follow the movement, and spin the yarn, and tell a story that makes sense, and helps others make sense of this infinite mystery.

    And that’s the game of growth.

     

    Ewan Townhead

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  • “We’ve reached such an incredible level of freedom that for the first time in history we have to manage our own mutation. It’s up to us to decide what it means to be a successful human being. That’s the philosophical task of the age.” – Peter Koestenbaum

    I’ve ruminated on that quote for well over a year now. It comes back periodically to tempt me with its invitation. This morning it came back again.

    What does it mean to be a successful human being?

    I care about success. Genuinely care. I’ve been ambitious for a long time, I have things to do, changes to bring.

    And yet success is something I’ve never felt on gentle terms with. It’s often felt like a black figure hanging over me, berating me for not achieving the level I’m supposed to. The hare of success disappearing over the hill, while I plod along, not measuring up.

    I’ve wrestled with my ambition, baulked at the images of success I was fed. Rebelled, dropped out, found inspiration, dived in.

    So I want to talk about success with you. Because I think Koestenbaum is right. There are few more pressing issues. And in a world where we don’t have to follow the old rules of success, I think it imperative to deconstruct the inherited definitions, and build a new an image that draws forth our ambition as a creative expression, rather than pressurizes it, as a milestone to attain.

    The prescribed rules of success

    My first ‘proper’ job was at a small marketing agency in Liverpool. I’d recently graduated and got the job as a temp, and they’d liked me so offered the position to me permanently.

    I was the receptionist. A job that is not supposed to be filled by a heterosexual male. I’d answer the phones, welcome clients to the office, make coffee, open mail, complete little admin tasks. Mostly I watched video clips, played on internet forums and worked on ideas for my first business.

    They saw I was over qualified and twice offered me a position as a junior account manager. It’s rather a sought after path in the marketing and PR field. I said no. I said I wasn’t interested. They were confused.

    The thought of diving deeper into the world of clever adverts, schmoozing clients and pouring over spreadsheets made my heart go dark. But they couldn’t understand it.

    I’d turned down advancement, to stay on the lowest rung of the ladder.

    According to their world, I’d broken one of their rules of success.

    Rule #1. You must climb higher

    You work your way up the ladder. Your pay cheque gets bigger and bigger. You have more impressive sounding job titles. The really successful people run entire companies.

    But I never wanted that kind of success. I always felt like an outsider in that game, though it took me a long time to come to peace with that feeling.

    Many years later, I dropped out of the corporate game all together. I started playing the online entrepreneur game instead. It was a big relief. I had a lot more room to express myself.

    Success here is building a brand for yourself, generating a big mailing list, doing 6-figure launches, being called a ‘world expert’ on someone’s tele-summit. The milestones look a different, but I realized the rule was the same. Climb higher, at any cost. And it was in this game that I really came face to face with the second rule.

    Rule #2. More money = more success

    How much revenue did you do on your product launch, how many thousands? 50? Good job. 100? Wonderful! You’re on the way toward real success now son.

    Money is great. I like money. I like having it, I like creating it. I like being able to invest it in things I want, things that enrich me. Training courses. A month in Bali. A new leather jacket. A box of Lego for my partner’s son.

    I remember early on in the entrepreneur game we did an affiliate deal with a big website. They were the trend setter in our field, the mother ship. We crafted a really clever marketing campaign, and it worked. We brought in over $50k in revenue. It was the most revenue I’d ever done. I got my own biggest pay day. $6k, which felt like an extraordinary amount of money.

    According to the rule, we’d succeeded. But I couldn’t feel the accomplishment. I didn’t hear people telling us how much the program had helped them, how appreciative and inspired they were. Mostly I heard silence, or grumbling about big marketing promises that weren’t delivered on. I felt ashamed. Uncomfortable.

    I’ve done countless product launches since then, some brought in more money, some less. The one’s that felt like a success were those that helped a lot of people. Which sometimes correlated with big revenue, and sometimes didn’t.

    Rule #3. Success is appearing successful

    This is an insidious little bugger of a rule. One I’ve only been starting to catch myself playing by recently.

    I’ve worked very hard to present myself as being successful. I’ll drop in little lines in my writing that demonstrate how successful I am. How much I charge (because money = success remember). How far I’ve come (because successful people always climb higher).

    “Do not doubt it dear reader. Despite my obvious vulnerability, I am very successful. And you are not. Never forget that. And if you want to be successful like me, then pay me a bunch of money for coaching and maybe you’ll win too.”

    That’s not success. That’s insecurity. I’ve done that more than I like. I’m sorry, I was doing what I thought was right.

    As the air fast escapes from the balloon, I realize it’s just another rule that I never consciously agreed to play by.

    The original nature of success

    The root of the word comes from Latin. To succeed means literally to “come after”. It’s a sequential thing. There’s one thing, and then it’s succeeded by another thing.

    There was an open field there once. Now there’s woodland.

    The original meaning is value neutral. It doesn’t mean the succession is good. It doesn’t mean the woodland is better. It just came after the field.

    The definition of the word changed in the late 1500s. It came to mean the accomplishment of a desired end. The neutral mechanic of succession had desire and preference added in. Success came to be defined by whether the outcome matches the desire.

    You start with one kingdom, do some invading and end up with two…success!

    You start with no money, and after it you still have no money…failure!

    You start with no qualifications, and end with a PhD…success!

    You start with people being in connection with mother earth, then technology distracts us from nature and we despoil the environment…failure!

    Certain ends are successful. Others are not.

    It is not the addition of desire and preference that I take issue with. Not at all. The problem is that so often we do not question the preference that gives the defined end.

    We mistake the end for the success itself without questioning whether the movement of succession is what we actually want.

    Success is becoming a celebrity, therefore if I too become a celebrity, I will be successful.

    But the end is not the point. The celebrity is not the point. The point is this…

    From whence does the desire come? And is it yours?

    Toward a new definition of success

    To my great grandparents, success was working the farm effectively, so they and their family had enough food to eat. It was a noble goal for the world they lived in. But that is not my world, or yours.

    In its most pure sense, success is succession. It is one step after another. It is the movement down the path of life. If you’re moving, you’re succeeding.

    The deeper cut however, is to truly choose the substance of the path. To truly tune into the deepest desire you are conscious of, and walk that path, wherever it ends.

    Because if we do not stop to consider that substance, that desire, we end up succeeding at someone else’s quest.

    We climb the rungs of the professional ladder, because our culture tells us that is what successful people do. We look at the artists or entrepreneurs we consider successful, and we try to emulate them. We carefully construct a mask of success, because that’s what we think will fill the hunger of our ambition.

    And then maybe we realize that it is all without substance – an idea of success that floats like a balloon filled with hot air. The tether, so easily cut, revealing the true desire that is not based on an idea, but on the very yearning of the soul.

    The successful path

    As I walk, one step succeeding the last, I become more intimate with the dirt under my feet, and the stars over my head. They whisper to me…

    Be true. So true it scares the life out of you.

    Show yourself, the good and the ill.

    Let the lessons of the universe be taught through the folly of the personal.

    Never forget your heart.

    Go first. Ignore the rules, except the one’s you find in yourself that are true because they feel true in the deepest part of you.

    Let others follow if they want to. Don’t persuade them, their following must be freely chosen.

    Light the way. Hold the torch of your truth as high as you dare.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • I was reading Brené Brown again the other morning as I was eating scrambled eggs with avocado.

    Brené (I don’t actually know her so as to be on a first name basis, but like to pretend I do) was talking about barriers to vulnerability.

    She was talking about masks. The masks we wear.

    The things that we put on, so that we look like the personality we think we need to be. So people like us. So we don’t rock the boat. So we fit in. So we’re not alone.

    I’m an expert, and you should listen to me

    I was trying to write something on marketing. And it wasn’t really working. I noticed an unpleasant feeling. It was familiar.

    I’d always assumed it was the effect of not finding my flow. I can’t write, so I feel contracted,

    But I realized it wasn’t. I realized it was the cause. I wasn’t in flow, because I wasn’t writing. A mask was.

    So, I put the mask centre stage and let it write. This is what it said.

    “I’m an expert. And you’re not. Listen to me, because I know. Be quiet and you may actually learn something.”

    And it’s said in this slightly bored voiced, like really you should know better, but since you don’t, I’ll grace you with my superior wisdom. Though I’m making it clear it’s begrudging. But not clear enough that you could comment on it.

    I’ve christened him Bartholomew Snooty III.

    I remember being on a personal development course years ago. The leaders had offered me a free place because I’d started an audacious business that professed to be a hub for the kind of work they were teaching.

    I thought I was better than them.

    I’d silently critique their teaching from the back of the room.

    And I ended up pissing some people off. Because I wasn’t committed, and I dropped out, and broke some promises I made. And even though I felt ashamed underneath, I covered it by looking down my nose at them, and dismissing their quaint complaints.

    And that’s how he works. He covers my insecurity with indifferent arrogance.

    Meanwhile, I’m still lonely.

    Oh! Look how vulnerable I am!

    I have another one. It’s the “I’m vulnerable” mask.

    The one where I pretend to be vulnerable. Because it’s a deep value of mine (the vulnerability not the pretending). And I think I need to be like that all the time.

    “I did this thing. It was really vulnerable. But look at me, I’m so brave to be sharing it like this with you. How good am I?”

    I remember a couple of years ago. I was having a fight with my girlfriend, and my best friend Joel was there too. And I got really upset, and started crying uncontrollably.

    Joel didn’t buy it.

    He said he understood I was upset, but it seemed like I was making a show of it.

    I froze.

    “This is a matrix moment Ewan.” He said.

    And he was right.

    It felt so real. And I was hurt, but even more, I was trying to get seen.

    And maybe that’s why I do it more often.

    Don’t see me

    Don’t look at me. Because if I show you the real me, you’ll reject me. Like you did when I was innocent, and didn’t know about masks.

    I never fitted in at school. Maybe none of us do.

    I had the wrong shoes. And no Nintendo. And brown bread sandwiches with cucumber and vegetarian pate.

    I stood out, like a weird thumb. And the other kids, with their Nike trainers wouldn’t let me join in.

    So I started fashioning some masks. So I wasn’t so lonely.

    Maybe you did too.

    And none of us realized that we were all wearing masks, and participating in an invented stage play. All secretly wanting to fit in.

    And I’m still doing it.

    “Like me! I’m really good at writing! Can I play with you?”

    I wrote that on facebook the other day. That I still felt like I was 5-years old trying to get people to be my friend.

    And lots of people said they would be my friend.

    And it was lovely. But it didn’t really change anything.

    The naked truth

    Because it’s not about winning friends. It’s about saying what I have to say. The real one, who nakedly says the things that he can’t help but care about.

    And it would be really shitty if that meant no-one likes me anymore. But even that I’d endure. If that was what my art demanded.

    Walt Whitman was like that. Most people hated what he wrote. And he didn’t get huge thanks or success. And then he died. And then everyone realized how brilliant he was, and how beautiful his writing was. And how revolutionary.

    I hope that doesn’t happen to me. That would suck.

    But I’m realizing how it’s really not about getting friends. That little 5 year old has lost his chance.

    It’s about speaking the truth.

    I can feel the masks start to melt. And as more of the naked truth starts to reverberate around my world, I realize I’m no longer in control of the plot.

    So I cross my fingers, and hope it all has a happy ending.

    And I’m stacking all my chips on this. The belief that if I keep speaking what wants to be spoken, then something will happen. And that ending will be the happiest one.

     

    Ewan Townhead

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  • I remember years ago, being in a room with a spiritual teacher. A friend and I had organized a workshop with him. He was a very wise man.

    Towards the end of our evening, a guy put up his hand to ask a question.

    “Terry, I wake up every morning, and I don’t really want to be alive. There’s so much pain. I was an alcoholic for many years, and I’ve been sober for many now. But I’m just so unhappy. I don’t know why I’m here. What do I do?”

    It was one of those questions that makes the room go deathly silent, as everyone reels from the depth they’ve just been plunged into.

    Terry paused a long time. And then he said.

    “I don’t know. I don’t have any advice for you. I don’t know what the answer is. But I will offer you a prayer.”

    And he did. And something entered the room as he did. I can still feel the shivers now.

    The question was too big to answer. And so he honoured it by opening his heart, and blessing this man, and his suffering, and all of us who are suffering, and don’t know what to do about it.

    And I’m glad he did. And I’ll never forget that moment.

    We’re taught to know the answers

    Because intelligent people know the answer. Successful people know the answer. Popular people know the answer.

    And if you confess that you don’t know, then it must mean that no one likes you. Or you’re a failure. Or dumb.

    And who wants to be dumb and alone?

    So we fake it.

    I fake it.

    It might be a small fake. Just brushing over the cracks lightly, and hope no-one noticed.

    “You know, like in that amazing film, ‘The Cross and the Armadillo’, you know the one I’m talking about right?”

    “Uh. Yeah of course.”

    Except you don’t.

    Or maybe it’s a big fake. Pretending to be this whole other person. The one you think you need to be to get the things you think you want. And it’s been happening for years.

    And at the bottom of it all, it just hurts.

    It hurts to fake it, because it robs us of the natural nutrition that we get from being real.

    But to be real we have to be vulnerable.

    “I don’t know.”

    And the more there is on the line, the less our pride wants us to confess to it.

    You’re the coach, you should know

    You’re expected to know the answer Ewan.

    You’re supposed to guide them through this with surety and confidence. You’re the coach.

    You’re expected to get them results, no matter who they are or what they do.

    So what’s the answer Ewan? Your client is in front of you, and they’re scared and stuck. They need your help. What are you going to do?

    I don’t know.

    But you should know! Oh man, you’ve got yourself into a sticky spot here haven’t you? You told them you could help them, and now they really need your help, and what do you have to say?

    I don’t know.

    Oh dude. You’re fucked. This is so far from being ok. Better fake it. And fast. Otherwise this whole house of cards is going to come crashing down. What’s the answer?

    I don’t know.

    Sometimes I wish I said it more often

    During an interview earlier this year, a woman asked me how my coaching was different to other business coaches out there.

    I was about to deliver some kind of elevator pitch. Because I thought it was a good question. And I thought a good coach would have a good answer to it. And I wanted to be seen as a good coach.

    But for some reason I paused long enough to find something more true.

    “I don’t know.”

    Because I didn’t really know how other business coaches worked.

    And sometimes I wish I said that more often.

    Because when I realize I don’t know, and also realize that my unawareness is real, and not an error, it opens up this huge space for my curiosity to flow into.

    Authentic ignorance.

    Saying “I don’t know”, because I truly don’t, even though the rules in my head say I should.

    Saying “I don’t know” because it’s infinitely more true than pretending I do.

    Saying “I don’t know” because it gives me a blank page to paint a new consciousness onto.

    Smash the statue and the pedestal

    Don’t hide your ignorance.

    No need to pretend you’re more than you are.

    Every time you try and fit in, you negate the way you stand out.

    You just keep propping up the crumbling statue of some fake guy, which you glued together from ideas of how you’re supposed to be, and what you’re supposed to know.

    It’s not real.

    Smash the statue. And smash the pedestal you’ve been trying to pretend you’re standing on.

    You are so wonderfully ignorant of how fucking beautiful you really are.

    Though that’s not a mistake.

     

    Ewan Townhead

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  • Brene Brown said it best.

    “You can’t get to courage without walking through vulnerability.”

    If you go up to somebody who is in the midst of taking courageous action, and you ask “how do you feel?” they probably won’t say “I feel courageous”.

    They’ll probably say: “I feel vulnerable.”

    If you wilfully decide to ‘do courage’ you’re probably posturing, which is definitely not courageous, or vulnerable.

    But, if you feel where you’re afraid to look at yourself, you’ll probably find a beautiful vulnerability that requires genuine courage to reveal.

    The One in the Arena

    In January I met with my mentor in person for the first time in London.

    After a passionate and sprawling conversation over dinner, I took him to a classic English pub in Westminster. Over a pint over ale, he asked me if I knew the ‘The Man in the Arena’ quote by Theodore Roosevelt.

    It’s a quote that I now know intimately, one that he has sprawled over a wall in his offices. But at the time, I’d never heard it.

    I’ve read it numerous times since that evening, and each and every time I do it opens my heart and brings tears to my eyes.

    For I find myself on a path that consistently asks for a greater levels of courage than I knew I possessed.

    We are each called to show our Work to the world. It is the challenge of our time: to continually bare our truth in a world where promotion is free and criticism is bundled along with it.

    “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt

    The Lonely Leader of Truth

    Several years ago, two friends and I created a (now somewhat heralded) interview series called Waking Up the Workplace. We spoke with many of our heroes in the conscious business field.

    I still listen to those recordings sometimes, I learn new things every time I do.

    Last spring I was doing precisely this. It was a recording of a class taught by the man who I would later ask to mentor me.

    During that class he spoke about an author that had had a huge impact on him, a rather unknown giant of the philosophy of business called Peter Koestenbaum.

    I went out and got myself a copy of Koestenbaum’s book Leadership: The Inner Side of Greatness.

    I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the beginning of my journey into the nature of courage.

    This is what Koestenbaum says…

    “To be courageous is to be prepared for the isolation of leadership. Thus to be a self-starter is to be autonomous, to have given up the helplessness and dependency that are so often fostered by the presumptive security of larger organizations. Autonomy is the ability to live in isolation and be comfortable with the feeling of aloneness. For the person who cherishes intimacy, isolation is as painful as it is fundamental to integrity, because intimacy without the courage to stand up for one’s rights is empty servitude.”

    In other words, courage is the decision to step out alone, and follow your own truth. To walk the unknown path, the one that leads to something you deeply year for, and that your mind cannot yet comprehend.

    To be courageous is to step out into the arena and show people what you’ve created.

    Seth Godin says “Here, I made this”, is one of the bravest and most vulnerable actions there is.

    And that is exactly the quest that the courageous one is entrusted with.

    To turn away from the safety of servitude, and the dependence of employment. To step out, alone, on the only path that is authentically yours; your path.

    To relinquish the right to determine what is good, and what is appropriate, and reveal what is truly in your heart.

    The Courageous Path is paved with Anxiety

    Just as you can’t get to courage without walking through vulnerability, you cannot take the path of courage without feeling the substance of the road you walk.

    “Anxiety is the key to courage, for courage is the decision to tolerate maximum amounts of anxiety.” – Peter Koustenbaum

    The path of courage is paved with anxiety.

    Courage is not the absence of fear, courage is the decision to immerse yourself in the very things that threaten your sense of safety.

    Courage is not something that strong people feel, courage is what every person feels when they embrace their vulnerability and step out into the unknown.

    I’ve become fascinated by anxiety over the last year or two. Perhaps because I’ve experienced so much of it. Perhaps because I had an unshakable sense that the way we often think about anxiety missed something huge.

    I still remember the first time I read about anxiety from an existential perspective. It was again in a book by Koestenbaum, but his notion of existential anxiety goes back to the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard.

    I covered this topic extensively in a previous piece. But I return to it, because you can’t get to the heart of courage without understanding anxiety.

     “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” – Soren Kierkegaard

    Anxiety, it seems, is not so much an emotion, but the existential mood of life. Its literal Latin root means the pain of passing through a narrow passage.

    What single experience is more existentially vulnerable than passing from the soft safety of our conception to the hard reality of birth? That formative moment, when before we even know how to think, we feel the reality of living. And it is anxiety.

    Yet anxiety is not a dysfunction in need of medication, or a negative emotion in need of releasing. No, no, it is the very fabric of freedom, as felt by our powerfully permeable human beingness.

    Kierkegaard continues…

    “Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self… — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.”

    Anxiety is not simply the price we pay for being creative beings, it is the actual feeling of becoming who we are. It is the emotional mood of courageous self-authorship.

    It is the immense energy of our freedom that we have not yet found the courage to claim.

    Free to Choose Your Nakedness

    The root of the word courage is very old. It comes from an ancient language we know very little about.  At its core, courage means simply ‘heart’.

    Courage for me feels like nakedness – showing my inner heart to the outside world.

    It is opening my hand, and allowing my precious creations to be set free into a world who’s embracing or rejection of them, I cannot control.

    It is the opposite of comfort. It is the opposite of safe.

    And yet it is the path that leads to realization.

    You choose to come and live this life because you have a story to tell.

    It is your story.

    It is the story that no-one else can ever know.

    Except when you realize you are already free. Free to embrace your anxiety. Free to reveal your vulnerability. Free to show your naked heart to the world. Free to realize who you really are.

    This is the heart of courage.

    Ewan Townhead

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