by Lisa Kentgen
p
By bringing awareness to the internal experience of being stuck, you are able to bring skills to the process that will help you move through it. Counter bad habits, like distraction and waiting for inspiration, with intentional practices in action. These include showing up, taking small steps, and channeling your energy for the task at hand. Taking meaningful action, especially when you feel stuck, gives you a powerful sense of volition and confidence in your ability to act on your behalf. Intentional action transforms the experience of struggle to that of empowerment.
Part V
Chapter 14
The Wisdom of Making Space
for What is Here
Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever
how we experience life and the world.
John Milton
The fifth foundation of an intentional life is allowing, which is the act of letting be; letting experience unfold without interfering. Experience is disallowed when we try to change it as it is happening. Allowing is a state loaded with possibility. It welcomes all that is happening within you—thoughts, feelings and physical sensations—as well as what is happening around you. When you allow experience to unfold you have tamed the habit of trying to control it. You let experience come to you, aligning with the external world in a more collaborative relationship. It is not that you don’t think or act, but thinking and acting do not dominate the experience. Allowing enables you to more creatively join yourself with the external world. You become part of the experience and let it impact you—just as you impact it.
Allowing is surprisingly difficult to do. For many of us it is a radical act. For years I could not step back from a habitual style that valued constant do-ing. I eventually recognized that I had an unarticulated belief that I constantly had to work hard, even when it wasn’t necessary, in order to feel purposeful or deserving of abundance. I had difficulty allowing good things to come my way unless I had, in my mind, earned it. To this day, when fortunate events happen, without my having had to try hard, I can still feel surprised. I still remind myself that this is how it can be. I now believe in the benevolent and helpful forces in the world that are waiting to be tapped.
An important intentional practice that lays the groundwork for allowing experience to unfold is noticing when you are disallowing. You may think that you are trying to understand experience while, in reality, you are disallowing it to be as it is. Watch your mind’s moment-to-moment interruptions of experience as they are occurring.
When you first try to practice allowing it can seem like it runs counter to the ability to be volitional. This is because allowing is unfamiliar and can be mistaken for passivity. But in reality, allowing is a vitally active stance. In fact, your capacity to reflect, make decisions, and take action is more flexible and creative when occurring in the open space of allowing—because you are in a synergistic relationship with the world around you.
While allowing does include noticing, it is more than that. It is an all-encompassing opening to experience. It is a state you naturally arrive at from practicing in the other four core areas of intention. When you arrive, notice where you have come to and volitionally join with the benefits that come with it. While allowing is not something you strive for, you can sow the seeds for the experience by an active receptivity to what is here for you right now.
The Anywhere-But-Here Nature of the Mind
Going on meditation retreats throws into sharp relief how difficult it is to allow. Meditation provides the opportunity to witness thoughts that rise up to meet every experience. I was on a week-long retreat with nothing to do other than to let experience unfold. The entire retreat was in silence. No eye contact was made between retreatants as a way of heightening awareness of our minds. The retreat was structured around forty-five minute periods of meditation—alternating between sitting and walking meditation. Other than meditating there were two meals, a snack, and one talk in the evening given by a teacher. That was it, from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. What there was “to do” was notice and allow experience.
Even as I set my intention to simply allow, and was having brief moments of doing just that, I’d quickly shift to wondering how I could extend this experience to my day-to-day life in New York City. In almost all of the meditations I spent time thinking about the future—calculating how many more meditations were left in the day, wondering about the lunch menu, thinking about where I would go for the next walking meditation. I did this rather than simply allowing the experiences of the meditation to unfold, experiencing lunch as I was eating it, and choosing where to have my walking meditation after the bell sounded the end of the previous meditation. The many ways my mind left the present experience could fill countless pages that nobody would want to read. Uninterrupted experience is far more interesting—and fleeting.
Allowing doesn’t mean that you don’t ask questions. Instead it means knowing what questions can be answered at any particular moment. It means recognizing which questions are helpful, and that those questions can often be answered best if you allow experience to unfold.
Allowing doesn’t mean that you don’t ever take action to try to change the course of what is happening. It does mean getting clear for yourself what, if anything, you want to do or can be done. It means that even when you try to change things, you remain receptive while doing so. A practice in allowing teaches you that you often don’t have to think so hard about taking action because, by patiently allowing experience, the best course of action gets revealed. The revelation comes from within you, from a place that is familiar but not often accessed.
Practices in allowing are not intended to eradicate the mind’s mark on experience. But allowing does slow down the automaticity of interrupting experience. As you develop your capacity to allow experience uninterrupted, it feels good and it feels spacious. With time, it feels transformative because you recognize how much is here for you that you didn’t know before. By allowing experiences to unfold, they are more impactful and meaningful.
The More You Let Go, the More That Awaits You
Letting be requires Letting go: Letting go of what you believe you need to be happy; Letting go of wanting to be other than you are; Letting go of wanting others to be different; Letting go of attachment to things; Letting go of beliefs about how things should be; Letting go of stories; Letting go of fear; Letting go of waiting for the conditions to be right for you to be happy.
It is not as if you, literally, excise the attachments you are holding onto. Instead, start with a sincere willingness to try, in your mind’s eye, letting these things go. What feelings and thoughts come up as you imagine letting go of an attachment? What, if anything, gets in the way of letting go—even in your imagination? Practice imagining letting go over and over again. Then, after imagining letting go, practice concretely letting go of some of the things that clutter your life and your mind.
Letting go might mean finding ways you can simplify your life from unnecessary material things. Our culture is one that is destructively consumptive. As a participant in the culture, you may unknowingly participate in a way of living that is unsustainable for the planet. Letting go of excess is a practice that enriches your life as well as the lives of all beings on the planet.
Bring the practice of letting go into your closest relationships. Bring it to the things that are the most important to you. Because what you hold most dear, especially these things, you can hold tightly. Try to loosen that hold with the practice of letting go. Holding what you most value lightly enriches those relationships. Letting go of attachment to what matters most is radical, seemingly paradoxical, and allows for greater depth of loving.
If you have a practice in letting go, you’ll witness how frequently your mind can hold a tight grip. Before having a practice, you may not have noticed what your mind clings to, but it affects you. For example, one of my practic
es in letting go is trying to notice when reflection turns into overthinking, and to let go of the habit of overthinking because it doesn’t add any clarity to the situation. Sometimes I’ll say to myself, out loud, “Is there any thought that would help me now? If not, can I lay down my thoughts around this?”. The act of trying to let go reinforces a deeper understanding of what serves your interests and what doesn’t.
Sometimes you will find that you are unable to let something go. Maybe someone has hurt you tremendously. Maybe you’ve acted in a way that caused regret. Maybe you have a deep belief that what you need to be happy lies outside of yourself. Maybe you define yourself by others’ perceptions of you.
This realization of your inability to let go is not cause for getting down on yourself. Instead, it is a reason for being compassionate toward yourself. Because holding onto pain, anger, and longing causes further suffering. Holding onto narrow definitions of your worth causes suffering. It may be that you cannot do anything about it at the moment. Yet still have letting go as an aspiration. Have a willingness to test out, over and over, your ability to let go.
It helps to ask yourself, sincerely, “Can I let this go right now?” And, if not, “What, if anything, can help me let this go?” “What would it look like if I let this go?”
The paradox of letting go of what your mind is grasping, like the paradox of allowing, is that the more you are able to let go, the more that becomes available to you.
Exercise: A Helpful Way to Let Go
This can be a powerful exercise to help you set your intention to let go. It is a visual reminder that you can practice choice as to whether to cling to something or let it go. What you choose to let go can be situations, beliefs, anger, judgments, stories – anything that you believe is getting in the way for you.
First, close your eyes and notice your breath for at least a full minute. Let go of asking yourself any questions. Simply watch the breath as it enters and leaves our body. After the minute has passed, ask yourself directly, “What do I want to let go of?” or “What would help me to let go of?”
Write down what comes to you on a small scrap of paper. If multiple things come to you, write them down on several scraps of paper.
Put these scraps into a metal bowl. Close your eyes and set an intention to let these things go in your mind, your heart and your life. Put a match to the scraps of paper and watch them burn. (If there are multiple scraps, open a window!)
Allowing Leads to the Experience of Flow
A powerful type of allowing occurs while in the state of flow. Flow is a unique state of absorption, of being completely immersed in an action or experience. Out of the state of flow comes clarity, creativity, and sometimes profound insight.
A common phrase go with the flow means accepting experience—not resisting it. The person going with the flow is often thought of as being easygoing. This definition of flow captures the quality of nonresistance in the state of flow. However, it misses the importance of persistent effort that is required for the heightened focus and preparedness that makes the state of flow so special.
People who experience flow states often have practices in concentration and awareness. In the state of flow, your sense of self is lost; there is complete absorption with the experience itself and you are not separate from it. Your sense of time changes with an awareness only of the present moment. Qualities of knowledge and clarity are heightened. When flow is experienced in conjunction with intentional practices, it deepens your capacity to direct your life in powerful ways.
p
Paul was under extraordinary pressure because his company had been subsumed by a larger company. He didn’t know if there was a place for him in the new company. The executives who believed in him were unable to protect him because they did not, themselves, know what would happen. In the midst of intense stress and uncertainty, Paul had an unexpected experience of flow during a work presentation.
He was asked to go on a retreat with executives from both the old and new company. He welcomed the opportunity, hoping it was a sign that there would be a place for him in the restructuring. He felt he had one chance to make an impression, which led to tremendous internal pressure. While preparing for the presentation Paul had high levels of anxiety and began to ruminate. Doubt creeped in regarding whether he could rise to the occasion—even though he knew his material inside and out and was a skillful speaker. Paul’s anxiety became so intense that the thought of making the presentation became aversive.
Fortunately, Paul was asked to present to the group early in the retreat. His discomfort had become so intense that he shifted to a place of “not caring anymore.” He just wanted it to be over. This was the best thing that could have happened because it enabled Paul to get out of his own way. He was able to focus and approach the material he knew so well with ease. He forgot the weight he had placed on his performance and experienced flow from beginning to end. The audience responded enthusiastically.
In telling me about this experience, Paul wondered how he could allow himself to have these experiences more readily. Could he get to a point of “not caring” what others thought, in a healthy way, without going through prolonged intense anxiety and self-doubt? Bringing this experience to his awareness, Paul utilized it as a springboard for focusing on the process of allowing things to unfold. He realized that learning to care less, not out of feeling exhausted from caring too much, was a path to greater authenticity and showing the best of himself. He now committed to creating these states more often, regardless of where he landed in the new company.
p
For thousands of years practitioners of Buddhism have practiced mindfulness to welcome flow-like states. Rituals in different religions have a common goal of cultivating these experiences of connection to something greater. These rituals, involving repetition, concentration, and sensory awareness, were intended to help a person move to a heightened state of awareness. This awareness may have been of greater connection to God or, in Buddhism, a breakdown in the experience of self and other. In the 1960s, the concept of flow became popularized in Western psychology. Like flow states in religious ritual, they described states where time stands still, we are less aware of ourselves, and aware of being part of something larger. Actions taken while in flow are intrinsically rewarding. What these understandings of flow states have in common is the importance of having practices that cultivate them. In other words, persistent effort and skill seed the conditions for flow.
Flow states have a positive impact on the quality of your life—don’t leave them to chance! They allow you a more direct relationship with your interior and so lead to the experience of authenticity. If flow states are directed toward your highest aspirations, they are transformative.
Some people seek out flow experiences for their own sake. This can foster a continual pursuit of experiences, followed by "Now what?" We can become flow zealots, perpetually seeking the next peak experience at the expense of moment-to-moment of life as it is, leading to discontent. We can lose sight of engaging meaningfully with all our internal states and external experiences.
It is ongoing practices in intentionality that seed both peak flow experiences and authenticity.
An intentional life does not preference flow experiences over other ways of experiencing. You may personally prefer effortless states of absorption, but they are not central to the practices of living intentionally. Instead, they are a rewarding byproduct.
What’s important is to try to bring a quality of awareness to all of your internal states: flow states, grappling states, fear states, contentment states, confused states, clarity states, and somewhere-in-between states. Heightened awareness to all states is what leads to ownership of your life.
Allow Others to Have Their Own, Unique Experience
Just as you practice allowing your own experience to unfold, practice it in relation to others. When you make room for others’ experience you are seeding the
conditions of greater connection and intimacy.
Parents understand how difficult it can be to allow children to learn from their own experiences. There can be a fine line between guiding children and interfering with their experience. It is so important that children have room to practice create their own experience—reflecting, making decisions and taking action—and learning from what unfolds. It’s understandable that parents don’t want their kids to suffer negative consequences from their choices or actions. Yet without the opportunity to practice, children can’t learn to shape their own lives. The most valuable guidance, within parameters and in age-appropriate ways, is allowing children to test out for themselves the contingencies of their reflections, choices, and actions.
p
Jane and her ten-year-old son, Stefan, regularly battled over his homework. Stefan sometimes watched TV before his homework was finished, which was against the rules. Jane would ask if Stefan had finished his homework and, if he hadn’t, he’d respond angrily. She would threaten to take away his electronics which escalated his anger. On one or two occasions, he told her he had finished when he hadn’t. When she found out, she became angrier. Beneath her anger was a fear that Stefan’s behavior would generalize into a larger pattern of lying.
When Jane came for help with parenting Stefan, one of the first things I asked was what happened in the past when Stefan got to school and his homework wasn’t done. Jane told me that this never happened, not once. He was an exceptional student and his occasional challenges at school were behavioral, not academic. I asked what her concerns were around Stefan having his own experience of taking responsibility for homework. What was her fear of his going to school one time without having it done? Could she allow him to experience those consequences? Since Stefan had a style of getting down on himself when he didn’t excel, it was my guess that he’d be pretty unhappy about not having his homework finished. Jane’s fear was that it would be a slippery slope, like Stefan’s lying. In her mind, if Stefan didn’t turn in his homework once, it was just a matter of time until he would stop caring about his school performance. Her fear-based response was fueling arguments between them.