• Despite what our calendars tell us, now is a wonderful time to engage your new year energy.

    I know we’re in March, and our “New Year” was supposed to be two months ago, but as I’m going to explain, this tradition is actually a relic of bureaucratic decisions made a long time ago. We’re running an old calendar that doesn’t align very well with the natural cycle of time.

    When we re-align with a “natural” calendar, something based on deep time, our actions and energy can work in tandem with the phase the world is actually in.

    This is particularly pertinent to the practice of goal setting and new year planning.

    For over a decade now, I’ve relished the new year tradition. I love the downtime over Christmas, and then the invitation to mark the passing of the year.

    I’ve developed my ritual over the years. It starts with a deep review of the year just passed, with particular attention placed on my wins, successes and appreciations (gratitude is important for me to counter the “never enough” voice).

    And then my favourite part—a deep enquiry into my vision for the year ahead. What do I want to create? What is it that wants to come through this year?

    In more recent years I’ve learned how to then take all this, and “call it in” spiritually.

    What I realised this year, is that January 1st is a really fucking weird time of year to do it.

    Time cycles and ancient bureaucracy

    There is a cycle of deep time. Something that is built upon natural and real events, rather than the more arbitrary models our human culture tends to run on.

    This natural cycle is based upon the actual events that create our global year. It’s the time it takes for the Earth to fully orbit the Sun. This creates our seasons, our solstices and equinoxes. There is nothing arbitrary about this cycle.

    We start our year on Jan 1st, which does not align with this cycle. It’s close to the Winter Solstice, but not really. Why do we place it here? The Romans. Whose ancient tinkering is still coded into the way we think about time.

    Originally, the Roman New Year began in March, which was their first month. The period between December (the final month) and the beginning of the year was left as undefined “winter” time. This is something many pagan cultures did.

    In roughly 700 BC, the Roman calendar was upgraded from a 10-month to a 12-month system. January and February were added, and a 355-day year standardised.

    This screwed up the order, and the numerically named months got out of sequence. September comes from ‘sept’—seven. But where does it fall in our calendar? That’s right, ninth. The same issue goes for October—December. Oops.

    Gradually, more changes were brought in, including the moving of the New Year from March, back to January. This was a key move that is of course still preserved in our calendar.

    Why did they do it? In short—ancient bureaucracy. It had administrative advantages, and allowed them to better prepare for that Spring’s planned military campaigns.

    Which all results in some funky karmic energy still running through our New Year’s magic. As Dr. John Churchill says, we’re still running on empire time.

    A natural quarterly cycle

    As our world heads ever more frantically down the technological rabbit-hole, I feel many of us are called to a re-integration with the natural timing of things. To align with the deep code in our bodies with the cycles of change, expansion and contraction.

    We’ve got most of the right practices, we’re just doing them at the wrong time.

    Rather than follow an old calendar designed by an empire looking for military expansion, I believe we are being asked to remember and realign with the natural calendar that Earth provides.

    This is a calendar that is based on deep time—the actual passage of our planet around her Sun. The solstices, and the equinoxes are natural delineations of time given by astronomical and astrological reality.

    We adhered to this natural calendar for so long we don’t even know when it started. Though the solar alignment of many ancient structures gives us a clue as to how deep this knowledge went.

    And according to the natural calendar, now is a wonderful time to activate your new year energy. As we approach the Spring Equinox (March 21), and new life is sprouting all around us, the natural world is literally inviting us to join the growth party.

    From the perspective of natural time, this makes much more sense as the “start of the year”, and something that many cultures practiced for millennia.

    Making it real

    If you already have a plan for your year—you know what your goals and intentions are—then this is a great time to call it in, commit to it, and feed your soul juju into its bubbly excitement.

    If you don’t have a plan and you’re unclear what you’re aiming at this year, then this is also a great time to do that work. You haven’t missed the boat. You’re just in time.

    What is the essence of this practice?

    • The purpose is to get clear about your goals and intentions. This is what sets your aim for the journey ahead.
    • Source them from as deep a place as you can find. Take your time, let the truth come through you.
    • Write them out in a short list—get specific with your language. Shorter is better, distilling down the essence into simple language.

    Don’t ask AI to generate all this for you. What makes the process powerful is the struggle and learning as you translate what’s inside you into words. The result is infused with your own creative effort and is what sets the tone for the year ahead.

    My favourite way to “sign off” on my yearly plan is to do so in ceremony.

    After I stir up the magical field, I say out loud what my goals and intentions are. I call in the spirits of change, asking for help and guidance as I commit to the path for the year ahead. This is an embodied practice too—feeling the desire in my body as I speak, including the doubts and fears, declaring the commitment in my heart.

    This brings it into the present moment—making it a real and embodied declaration.

    There are many ways to do this kind of ceremonial commitment. The form is less important than the authenticity—making it your ritual, following your intuition. What makes it powerful is the pouring of your sincere intention into the vision.

    New life is sprouting all around. What wants to be born through you and your work this year?

    What will you create?

    I will be taking the goals and planning I did on December 31st, refining them into my plan for the next year, and invoking the spirit of Spring to help me create it.

    Would you like to join in?

    Ewan Townhead

    , , ,

  • For as long as I can remember I’ve had dreams. My mind seems to naturally conjure future visions of how amazing things could be.

    This is a double-edged sword.

    On the one hand, it’s a powerful imaginal capacity. It underpins key parts of my mystical and shamanic work. It allows me to understand and see other people’s visions (great for coaching people). It gives possibility to life.

    On the other hand, it’s easy to conjure the picture of something, and way harder to actually create it here in the 3D. This can lead to a habit of living in my magical imagination, rather than doing the work in the physical world.

    Therefore, I’ve spent many years studying and experimenting with different approaches to “realizing your dreams” or “reaching your goals”.

    One of the most important conclusions I’ve drawn is that this endeavor is best seen as a journey — not just as a nice metaphor, but because it most closely resembles the actual territory.

    So, if like me, you can struggle to bridge the big picture vision, with the small practical steps, this is for you.

    How on earth do I do this?

    The voices start chattering. All the worries and challenges spiral into an imagined nightmare.

    “It’s too hard.”

    “I’m not good enough”.

    This kind of stuff normally comes up when I’m thinking about the thing I always think about. How to step deeper into the arena and dare to boldly show my hand. I’m holding an image of a glorious potential. As I conjure it my soul and heart hum to its tune.

    But today, like other days, the negative voices seem to be winning out.

    We all know that they’re not to be trusted as the authorities they profess to be. We all wish they’d pipe down and get in their place. They feed the doubt.

    “How on earth do I do this?”

    Which is just a stone’s throw from “I can’t do this.”

    So let’s map this out. For as I said, I’ve come to believe that these things are not simply metaphorical journeys. The structure of the journey is embedded in the way our body-mind works with this stuff. I think this is because they both have the same deeper root, the transformational cycle from which they’re both modelled.

    Here’s a way of looking at it.

    Corners you can’t see past

    I see a future vision, of how my life could be. It comes to me in a moment of calm perhaps, or a heightened state of consciousness.

    Insight. Seeing.

    I’m inspired—the vision lights something up and I feel a bubbling excitement.

    Then, perhaps the next day, I sit down to start working on it. And I realize how big or hard it feels. So I stop. From my limited perspective, it looks like it’s a long way off, in fact it’s so far off I can’t even see it. The vision euphoria starts to wane, and the quest seems more difficult and less appealing.

    If I were to zoom out and see like the eagle sees, I would be able to see a winding pathway that leads from my starting location all the way through the landscape to the location of my vision. In fact, I might see an entire root system of pathways, spreading out from here to there.

    Now when I zoom back in again, and view this through the eyes of my human self, I see a forest of trees before me. I remember the route I saw from above, and now I see a pathway running out in front of me. But I can still only see so far. At some point the pathway bends and I can’t see past it.

    I can’t see past the corner.

    Once again, this is a metaphorical truth embedded in the life journey. It’s the way our human mind makes sense of travelling through time and space.

    The corner is the future location that you can’t see past.

    For example, “I know I’ve got to get on a plane and go to this thing. But I truly have no idea what to do when I get there.”

    That’s the point that you can’t see past.

    The only way to navigate the journey is to take the steps along the pathway, until you reach the corner, at which point your view will open up once again and you can work out your new heading.

    The reason the vision you seek can feel so far away and so impossible, is that it lies around 11 corners.

    I can’t see past the 1st corner, let alone the 11th.

    I can’t see it, because the person who walks around that 11th corner is different to the one standing here. He’s the product of having walked around the preceding 10 corners. And been changed by each of them.

    So, the gameplan in its first instance, is to focus on the steps, and not the corners.

    Steps along the path

    Pick the direction (which implies the destination) and see the pathway. See the steps that follow on from one another, and end up at the corner you can’t see past.

    I go in a North-Easterly direction, get across that muddy river, up the bank on the other side to the tree line, then I can see how to tackle the big hill.

    Or, I’ve got to finish the copy drafts, find some new images, get some feedback, work it over again, upload everything to WordPress then I’ll be able to see how to announce this thing.

    I know enough about the direction and path that I can take. I know the steps that get me to the next corner. And then it’s a case of take those steps. The first. Then another. Then another. Taking consistent steps is much more important than the size of them.

    I learned a profound lesson from Jordan Peterson about this. The steps you commit to must be small enough that you can actually do them (over ambition raises the risk you in fact do nothing). The telltale sign of an appropriately small step is that you feel kind of stupid aiming for it.

    “Like really, that’s all I have in me?”

    Jordan describes a man who he worked with many years before whose life was a big mess. His first goal was to tidy his room (which was also a big mess – go figure). That was his corner – having a tidy room. And his first step? All he could manage for the first week, was to take out the vacuum cleaner, put it by his door, and look at it every day.

    That was the first step for him. The one he could take and did take.

    The work of the manifester

    The work is to keep seeing the next step, and taking it even when it seems stupid, and especially when you feel stupid for struggling with it.

    Even one step each day adds up to something bigger than you might think. As the seemingly meagre rhythm stabilizes, you find your groove and start to notice the sensation of momentum.

    This is when you feel like you’re being pulled along (not simply pushing yourself forward). Like a river current that adds its power to your movement.

    And before too long you’ve reached the first corner. And then you’re around the next few corners, and things look quite different.

    So, if the vision feels too big, or the challenge too great, and you don’t know how on earth you’ll ever get there…just head for the first corner. Take the steps, especially when you feel a bit stupid for lowering your targets.

    Trust that the one who keeps taking steps, is the one that makes it to the next corner. And trust that the one who has made it there, will be equipped get to the next.

    Until you realize you’ve reached your destination. And you can enjoy it for those glorious moments, until the next journey calls your attention once again.

    Ewan Townhead

    , , , ,

  • I must confess, I am slightly obsessed by the future.

    I think about it all the time. Both mine—how I’m going to achieve all the dreams I have, and what it would be like to live that future? And ours—how on earth are we going to make it through this very odd moment we’re in the midst of? And what will the world my own children live in look like?

    The obsession seems part of me. The driving force that counters my instinct to hunker down, go back to sleep and hope it’s all better when I wake up.

    But this is my nature. Indeed, it is our nature.

    We are beings who live in time—who can choose to forgo the impulses of the present, in service of a brighter future that exists only inside the dream.

    For any of us who seek to walk the soul path, and to manifest the potentials we hold, the dream of the future is what we travel toward. The work cannot be done without this. It’s a fundamental dimension that we exist within.

    The problem is that the journey toward the future we dream of, is one that is not well managed by the rational mind, and our conventional ways of making plans and goals.

    For me, the conventional goal-setting approach provides mountains of fodder for the hungry bear inside whose goal it is to ensure I stay anxious and painfully watchful:

    “Am I on track? Am I doing enough? Am I good enough? Is there a silver bullet that would make it all come true? What’s the strategy? Damn it Ewan—you need a strategy!”

    It doesn’t work.

    Rather, the practice of dreaming the future is one that must be approached in a different—indeed, mystical way.

    It is a practice of embodying the future self.

    The amazing transformation of the butterfly

    The butterfly has long been help as a symbol of the transformative process. With good reason. The journey the little caterpillar makes, from its innocent munching of leaves, through the magic of the cocoon, into its emergence as a beautiful new being, is an amazingly apt metaphor for the journey that you and I make as we transform our own consciousness.

    We move from the innocence of our younger self, through the magic of metamorphosis, into the majesty of one who can now soar higher than we were previously capable.

    However—as I discovered some years ago when I studied this biological process—there are even richer layers of symbology that reveal critical aspects of our own transformative process. I want to share those with you, for they set up the idea of the future self beautifully.

    Do you know what you would find, were you to slice open a chrysalis just a single day after the caterpillar had entered it?

    You may think, as I did when I was first asked, that you would find a caterpillar slowly growing wings and antennae.

    You would not.

    In fact, were you to look, you would find that the caterpillar is no longer there. What you will find instead, is goo.

    The little leaf muncher has decomposed into slime.

    Before the new can grow, the old must disintegrate. The potential of the future must be grown from the materials of the old. But for that old material to fertilise the new, it must decompose. It must turn into goo.

    For you and I to become a fuller and truer manifestation of our soul’s potential, we must allow the old self to disintegrate and die. For it is from this decomposed self, that the new is born.

    This is not a pleasant process. For it is experienced, literally, as death. It hurts. Who you considered yourself to be—the identity you held as “you”—ceases to be so.

    I have long railed against the fashionable glorification of the transformative process, as if it is something that can be enjoyably enacted during a weekend workshop. While in truth, it is a slow, destructive process which ushers us through pain, grief and disorientation—inevitable feelings when in the proximity of death.

    The caterpillar’s disintegration into goo is a powerful image for the death of the old.

    But the symbology of this amazing process of the butterfly does not end there.

    If you were to cut open the caterpillar itself, before it enters the cocoon, you would discover something else incredible.

    Already inside the caterpillar are proto-wings and proto-antennae

    In other words, the future butterfly is already present inside the caterpillar.

    And so it is with you and I.

    Your future self already resides inside you in potential form. It is not simply something that is created—manufactured from nothing according to your own will and determination. Your future self—in proto-form—is present in this very moment as you read these very words.

    And if the future self is already inside us, then it is one who can be contacted and indeed, felt.

    This practice—of feeling the future self in my own body-mind—has been one of my most important practices over the last couple of years. It’s worked me on deep, deep levels.

    Imprinting the Future Self

    One of the most ancient practices we have, reaching right back into the pre-religious shamanic traditions of the world, is that of merging with other beings. Or, if you need secular language for this—embodying archetypal forms.

    In the tantric lineage that I’ve studied in with one of my teachers Michaela Bohm, it is called deity yoga—inviting the archetypal form of a particular deity into your body, and sitting or moving as that deity.

    I have practiced this with Jesus, sitting as Jesus, allowing his nervous system to replace mine, so I can feel as him. Replacing his thoughts with mine, so I conceive of the world as he does.

    And where I have also practiced this deeply, is sitting as my future self.

    It’s quite a trip. I can do it now.

    Despite thirty-six-year-old Ewan sitting here in this seat in this coffee bar on the Beethovenstraat in Amsterdam, I can call in “future Ewan”. He enters my body-mind, and without conscious effort, things move.

    My spine straightens.

    My eyes soften and take in more of my visual field.

    My lips curl into a little Buddha smile.

    I involuntarily take a big juicy breath.

    And when I stop and look around, the world is a different one than that I saw but a minute ago.

    It’s so much more beautiful. The background music becomes something I playfully move to in my seat, rather than the distraction it was previously.

    The colours get richer.

    My work feels more like a gift—a container for my own curiosity and expression, rather than an onerous yoke that I must carry without whining (something I’m not generally predisposed to do).

    And from this place, I can examine questions, or decisions, that thirty-six-year-old Ewan is struggling to resolve.

    The angst over my own stuttering writing practice is easily solved from here.

    “Just write” future self says.

    “Sit down. Turn off your phone. And write.” He’s kind, wise and penetrating.

    “Stare into space when you get stuck. Don’t think about the quality of the completed piece.” He instructs.

    It’s more than his words that touch me and change my state. It’s the truth of them, the truth that is not arrived at through careful rational consideration. But one that just penetrates me instantly, because I know it to be true.

    “Thank you.” I say.

    And he goes back to his ephemeral home in the potential of things. And I come back to the present. Thirty-six again. Mildly angst ridden again.

    But the smile remains.

    And the back is a little straighter.

    And I know what I have to do. The words flow.

    The transformative power of the future self

    The caterpillar doesn’t have to worry about whether it will fulfil its potential and become its destiny. It instinctively enters its chrysalis. It becomes the butterfly without conscious effort. It simply follows the biological path laid down by its billion ancestors.

    But the path is rather more fraught for you and I.

    This is the great gift and curse of humankind. Our potential is not predetermined, nor biologically constrained. But neither is it inevitable.

    The process of becoming the fully manifest soul is the work of a lifetime, or indeed many.

    The future self inside—the potential you hold in proto form—is but a blueprint. It does not prescribe its ultimate form. But it does carry a unique archetypal imprint. That is, when I tune into my future self, he does have a particular quality. He’s recognisable. He’s like this, not that.

    And somewhere deep inside I know him. I recognise him. For I can see the innocent roots of his brilliance in my childhood. I can feel the seeds of his power in myself, here in this moment.

    Knowing him enables me, whenever I choose, to short-circuit my egoic programming, and align with a deeper truth. I can call him in, in those moments when confusion and self-doubt are blinding me, and look instead through his eyes.

    “Oh, this is what you want me to see?”

    “Yes” he replies. “Got it?”

    And that momentary peek through the veil gives me my compass reading, and I know how to proceed. And he’s here with me, gently, subtly.

    As I practice this over time, I find myself moving more directly toward his actual manifestation in my life. He sets the direction, pulling me toward his beauty and power. And the alternative navigation—the one that stems from my egoic desire to “be enough” or “get recognition” is gradually weakened. The path toward soul becomes clearer, the path of egoic justification led trodden.

    For as I wrote in The Game of Soul Goals, it is the setting of goals that set you down the path toward soul manifestation are what keep you playing the infinite game of life. But to do so requires a compass reading of the soul. Or, as I am suggesting here, an imprint of the feel of the future self.

    How to meet the future self

    Perhaps you already feel them inside you. Perhaps through your own practice and path you know the feel of the one, who lies in the future, as a glorious embodiment of all that you are.

    If so, then the practice is one of inviting them inside. Allowing their imprint to fill you from the within, like a ghostly form stepping into your body and filling you up. Do this as often as you remember. For doing so builds those proto-wings and turns them from potential into reality.

    If you cannot feel your future self—if you have no reference point for the proto-wings inside, then there are a host of practices that will help you do so.

    The methods I find most powerful are gnostic or shamanic practices which I will not describe here, since they require a deeper transmission and instruction than I can convey in a few words.

    However, there is a practice that is more easily performed, and which I have found very potent.

    In her interview with Tim Ferriss, Debbie Millman shares this wonderful practice. You can do it alone—it’s not technically challenging, though it can be psychically challenging. I’ve done it with a number of clients. If you engage with it deeply, it will give you a sketch of the future self.

    The practice goes like this…

    1. Carve out some quality solo-time. A calm and beautiful setting helps.
    2. In a notebook, write the date of today, 10 years in the future. For example, 29th January 2030. I find the simple contemplation of that number catalyses something potent.
    3. Then write—in the first person—an account of that day in the future, when you have soul-manifested everything you could have dreamed of in the preceding 10 years. This is not an exercise in envisioning what is appropriately attainable, or based on ego-goals. It is the realisation of your sacred dream.
    4. Give it lots of detail. Where do you wake up? What do the bedsheets feel like? What occupies your mind and heart upon waking? Who are you with? What does the world look like through the eyes of this self? What’s exciting you? What are you working on? Who do you pray to? What do now understand, that your self 10 years ago did not.
    5. You write something like a novel, where the protagonist is your dream self—the one you fantasise about becoming. And in this story, you get to paint a picture of that dream world. Remember, you must write in the first person.
    6. Don’t aim low. You write to get on the inside of this future self. Don’t play it safe. Write out a day in the life of your dream self. Don’t use your mind. Let it come through the heart.
    7. Write as much as you can/want. 10 pages is better than 1. Write 100 if you’re moved to. More depth and detail means more psychic impact.

    This exercise will give you a picture of the future self. When you allow the writing to come through your heart, you let your soul speak.

    For the one that comes through the dream is the one that is already inside, in proto-form.  And when you are able to put a pin in the map of the future, and know, in symbolic form, toward whom you are travelling, it changes the journey fundamentally.

    Happy travelling.

     

    Ewan Townhead

    , , ,

  • For the last three Christmases, my family and I have played a wonderful board game called Pandemic Legacy. The “standard” game pits the players—who constitute a collaborative team, rather than opponents—against a lethal virus which is threatening the world with extinction. The objective of the game is to keep the virus from spreading, and find a cure.

    The “legacy” editions of the game are some of the greatest board games ever made. Each time you play the game, a larger meta narrative develops. The entire game is played across 20 or so individual games, each evolving the story, and changing the game. New characters are discovered, rules change, viruses mutate, clues are discovered, conditions get harder. It’s amazing fun.

    It’s a wonderful metaphor for the game of work in this modern age of complexity and unprecedented change.

    And so as I sat on New Year’s Eve outside my house beside the fire, working on my goals for 2020, I realised that I had started to think of my goals, like Pandemic Legacy—as a game that changes as it is played.

    The objective of the game

    The objective of the game of work is to unfold your soul—unwind its potential— into actuality. To create a life forged from the blueprints held deep inside. To become who you were born to be, and contribute what you were designed to create.

    There is no obvious end point to this objective. It cannot be clearly achieved. It is not a measurable goal. It is what James Carse calls an “infinite game”.

    Most of the games we play in life are the opposite—finite games. The goal of these games is to win at the expense of others. Make more money than your neighbour. Get more twitter followers than Stormzy. Commune with more unicorns than other shamans. They are zero-sum. The game is over when you’ve accumulated enough of the limited elements to beat your opponents.

    The most important games are infinite games. The objective of an infinite game is to keep playing the game.

    This is the game of soul-unfolding. You keep playing. It has no ultimate destination. There’s always another layer, another lifetime.

    This is the context for goals. The game objective is soul-unfoldment and embodiment. The game goals are what keeps you moving along the soul path.

    Setting soul goals

    As I sat with my notebook beside the fire, I thought afresh about goals, and what this new year, indeed this new decade, held in store.

    Goals and I used to have a rather fractured relationship. I thought they were constraining prisons that blocked creative emergence. They thought I was a lazy schmuck who was too scared to put my balls on the line.

    We respect each other now. We work together. And as I sat writing beside the fire I once more enquired into their nature.

    A goal is a conceptual stake that you plant in the ground of the future, and aim your life at. It’s something that—as far as you can tell—moves you along the soul path.

    Some people like setting modest goals, targets they’re confident they can hit. The goal of the goal is to achieve it—they fail if they don’t.

    Some people like setting impossible goals, something that looks utterly unattainable. The goal of the goal is to blast apart their conceptions of what is possible. They fail if they attain it (and discover they aimed too low).

    My neurotic insecurity doesn’t do well with impossible goals. I’m still building the muscle of discipline and conscientious work. So I create goals which are attainable. But (and this is the key) in order to attain them I have to change.

    This is a soul-goal.

    The goals constellate into a whole which—if achieved—will be completed by a man more soul embodied than this man now, writing these words.

    Ewan(2019) isn’t capable of pulling them off. I have to become Ewan(2020) to do so.

    And I check—carefully—that Ewan(2020) is someone that is soul-embodied, not ego-inflated. Let me explain this. It’s also key.

    The place from which we source goals determines the path the goals will then lead us down.

    If I create goals that pump my self-esteem and help me feel superior, then the man at the end of that path will be narcissistic. If I set goals that protect my insecurity and maintain safety, then the man at the end of that path will be a coward.

    If I set goals that further the work I know I’m here to do, which put me face to face with that which scares me existentially, which force me to embody those capacities that call out to be integrated, then the man at the end of that path will be more soul-manifest.

    The rules change as you proceed

    The nature of a soul-goal is that it requires transformation. The current self is insufficient to accomplish it. The muscle of the future self must be exercised in order to attain it. The very act of setting the goal, and perusing it launches you along the path toward greater soul manifestation.

    And then? You dynamically steer as you move through the actual territory of life. Reality never measures up to our concept of it before the fact. This is very important. It allows for the possibility that you realise that the goal you set wasn’t in the right place.

    We can set goals with the best of intention—the deepest conscious presence—and then reality can change the game on us half way through.

    This is fact confused me for a long time. I can never know exactly how the reality of the future will play out. Indeed, the deeper the transformation—the more I walk the path of the soul—the less sure I can be of where I can end up.

    A cynic (and I flirted with this for many years) may therefore conclude that goals are both pointless (due to the unpredictable nature of emergent reality) and harmful (for they constrain the “pure” emergence through our mental conceptions of where we “should” be.)

    This issue took me a long time to untangle.

    I remember sitting in a car with a man I was staying with in Dallas some years ago. He was a very successful business man and was grilling me on my business goals.

    I mumbled my way through lofty aspirations that I hoped would satiate his challenge, while actually revealing the fact I didn’t have any clear goals.

    “Well that doesn’t work, you need to have goals.” He replied.

    “But I can’t know what the future holds, what if things change?” I argued back.

    “It’s very simple.” He said. “You plant a stake a ground and you go at it—hard. And if you discover it wasn’t in the right place, you move the stake, and then you go at it—hard.”

    While we indeed cannot expect our conceptions of emergent future to be accurate, the coin has a second face.

    It is the great human gift to be able to manipulate time—to conceive of the future, and sacrifice the present in service of creating that future. This is what separated our hunter-gather ancestor, who lived in the blissful ignorance of the present, to our famer ancestor, who planted his seeds, and suffered in the present for a better future when the crop would be harvested.

    Our predictions of the future may be insufficient, but it is our job to make them nonetheless, and in doing so, discover that we can indeed create the future. And while it may not be what we always expect, if we are able to stay in touch with the soul’s guidance inside—the voices that call out and activate our deep yearning—the path is one that transforms us into something greater.

    The goal is not the point. It is not the win-condition of the game.

    The win-condition is to keep playing, learning, and unfolding the soul.

    This is the infinite game.

    But the goal is what drives you along the path. The goal is how you continually play the infinite game.

    Ewan Townhead

    , ,

  • I learned a new skill last year.

    In fact, to call it a skill does perhaps not do it full justice. For it is in actuality, a capacity for a fundamental orientation toward life. One that much to my shame, I had hitherto forsaken.

    In common parlance this capacity would be called “goal setting”.

    I had ridiculed this skill for many years. It was “a function of the old way”, I said. The deeper path is of spontaneous emergence. The one where you “surrender to what happens”.

    I had tried many times to persuade myself, through the words of wise others, of the necessity and utility of “goals”. I read the right books. I bought the best software programs. I listened to the advocacy of the high performers. But none of it stuck.

    It all seemed so shallow.

    I didn’t want to capitulate my revolutionary liberty to the banalities of the mainstream world of achievement.

    And so I didn’t. My intellectual antibodies kept the necessity of goal setting at bay, and I was free to frolic about my life with ignorant abandon.

    The weight of expectation

    I have never lacked ambition. In fact, I would say I have more often suffered from the opposite problem—my aspirations are so large that I stumble under their weight. They press down on me impelling me to bend or, at worst, collapse.

    To combat this affliction, I had developed a functional alternative. I didn’t set goals. I set “intentions”.

    “I have an intention of making €50k this year from my work.”

    And then I would leave it alone, and “see what emerged”. I would abandon it as some implicit background notion—one that I hoped would magically attract the wealth that I so desired. This is where the “deep work” occurs, I told myself.

    If come the end of the year, I have earned this figure. Wow! It happened. The universe really does provide for those who trust in it!

    And if I don’t? No sweat. It wasn’t supposed to happen.

    The convenience of passivity

    My “intention” is not a goal. It is a passive hope. Which is not to say it is not valuable.

    By framing the “intention”—verbalising it—it becomes (somewhat) more likely that the possibility will become actuality. I subconsciously refer to its achievement, and I perhaps behave differently.

    The problem however, is one of responsibility.

    Because whether the “intention” is reached or not, I am not really responsible. The outcome is “the will of the universe” or whatever other pretty dress I want to put over the convenience of my passivity.

    For me, the truth lurking in the dark under this spiritual costume, is fear.

    I’m afraid.

    I’m afraid that I can’t arrive at the destination—the goal. The demoralising conclusions I know I must draw were I to fail in my quest seem too large a price for my fragile pride to bear.

    So I don’t take the risk. I use “intentions” and outsource my responsibility to some mystical other.

    What are you aiming at?

    You’re pointed toward something. Your life, if it continues in this vein, will arrive at a natural conclusion, the consequence of your orientation.

    We are spatial beings. We have a front and a back. It’s built into the very structure of our beings.

    And so, you are pointed at something. Your posture orients you toward something.

    It may or may not be something you have chosen.

    It may or may not be something you actually want.

    The conscious choosing of an aim, and the voluntary acceptance of responsibility for attaining it are cornerstones of the masculine orientation to the world.

    They are not the prevue of men. They are the necessity of any human being who seeks to manifest the dreams they hold.

    They are not optional.

    They cannot be replaced with “intentions”—with “seeing what emerges”.

    However, all of this says nothing of the actual result.

    You cannot control the result

    The larger the goal—the further it lies from the present moment, and your current capability—the more the mystery of life will bend and break your assumptions of what is possible, or indeed, whether the goal was correct in the first place.

    The largest aims are for lands well beyond the horizon of what we can see.

    They are far away across the territory of life, and can be gleaned only in imagination and the tricky articulation of the mysterious whispers that exist under the surface of the psyche.

    Your mission, is to envision that goal—that future life—with as much authentic detail as you are able. And then accept responsibility for its achievement.

    This is the great masculine secret—that the voluntary bearing of the cross, the acceptance of the burden of responsibility, creates the future.

    Its secret is simple in concept, and infinitely challenging in practice.

    It goes like this…

    1. Set your goal in life—a goal that moves your very core.
    2. Accept sacred responsibility for your journey toward it.
    3. Struggle toward it with as much courageous vulnerability as you can muster.

    And then see what emerges.

    Ewan Townhead

    ,