Max Daniels

Woody Crumbo, Deer and Papoose, circa 1950. (Just so you can see what Woody Crumbo is about; this isn't the work referred to below.)

What is this Wayfinding? It's a series of experiments with Martha Beck's "technologies of magic," as described in her book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World." They are Wordlessness, Oneness, Imagination, and Forming. We do the experiment together!

Coincidences (possible signs of Forming)

Every day now on my morning walk I see the shaman-looking guy who is probably an economist working in the area of metals extraction or something. I'll just call him the shaman economist. He nodded at me the other day, which is more than my next-door neighbor does when he's out running and we pass within six inches of each other. Made me feel quite homey.

Then one morning on my walk this week I was listening to a recorded talk by my podcast partner Sarah Bamford Seidelmann. She was speaking on the topic of animal totems, and using animal sightings as a means of shamanic divination. I was following her instructions as she did a group divination, and the guidance I received was so comforting and left me feeling so supported - so held - that I just burst into tears of joy. (This is unlike me. And I was soaked through - the rain was bucketing down that morning.) Then recorded Sarah finished up her divination, and in closing, mentioned my business card, which you see above.

(Which, whoops! you do not see above, because of my short-term editing memory fail. Sorry. Here it is below:)

Sarah had recorded this before we really knew each other, so I was hardly expecting her to refer to me in a talk. But hearing her speak my name made me feel so connected. It was lovely. And these little moments of connection and feeling held are more and more common for me.

To say nothing of the message: Keep Calm and Ask for More. I'm not doing money coaching anymore, except as part of a shamanic consult, but I think that's a great slogan - for a coach, or anyone. And good advice, which I'm taking this week. (Me, I'm asking for more help.)

Finally, I had a follow-up conversation with someone I'd done a journey for the previous week. I'd done a power animal restoration for her, and she had told me she was surprised by the animal that had come, as she had no particular affinity for this animal. And then she added, suddenly, Oh! Except that six months ago I was weirdly compelled to spend a ton of money on a painting of this animal.

Oh! Except that.

She sent me a photo of the painting. It is a stunning Woody Crumbo work, called "Spirit [name of Animal]." Oh yes. And it turns out that the issue she'd come to me with is being addressed easily now.

That's some good coincidence right there, and why I'm going to do more shaman session follow-ups.

Oh! And one more: Everywhere I go, I'm hearing Bob Marley's Natural Mystic. Is it going through a phase of renewed popularity? Or something for me to pay attention to? It's a lovely song, but I can't say I resonate with the lyrics...

Imagining

Okay, this is insane. Here is what I am imagining: Time. Expanding. Instead of that law that I have spent so much time creating proofs for, Parkinson's, the law that says work expands to fill the time available. I want to change that. I want to seek proof of Daniels's Law: Time expands to accommodate available pleasure.

Do you guys like that? I think it's really good and we might consider embarking on a little cooperative proof project together.

Because here's why: between the Times and O Magazine and Entertainment Weekly, I have a queue of about 16 books, most of them the sort of lower-upper-middle-brow borderline trash I love best, and they are all comin' at me, straight from the Cambridge Public Library.

Updates on past experiments

I had lunch with my old boss on Friday. She's super high-powered and impressive and, in her field, probably one of the top women in the world. She's also very down to earth, so our conversation started like this:

She: So tell me what your days look like now.
Me: I go for a long walk every morning, and then I do some meditation, and some yoga, and then I do some work.
She: Gee that sucks. How's the coaching? What's that like?
Me: I'm pretty much working as a fortuneteller now.
She: Omigod you are such a bucket of crazy. I miss you!

Then she left the door open for me to say I wouldn't mind having a part-time job again. Someday. But - and I'm not sure if it was a perverse impulse, or a sane one - I slammed that door shut. I was thinking of Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard professor who teaches a very popular course on happiness. It's a practical course that comes with a ton of advice, and one of the things he taught us around goal-setting was to make it very hard to turn around. He puts it this way: you've got a big wall to scale, and a big backpack with everything you need inside. You can't get up the wall with the backpack on because it's too heavy, and you can't go on without it. Your only choice is to throw the backpack over the wall first, and then follow it.

Of course, if my kids were hungry, I would cheerfully accept a job as a French-fry wallah. But leaving the door open for part-time work right now feels like staying on this side of the wall, clutching my backpack. I hope I've made myself unemployable. I want to get over that wall. Even if it means living in a tent,* working as a fortuneteller, appearing for all the world like a bucket of crazy. I guess … that's success, or the beginnings of it.

* Or hey! Maybe a trailer in the desert…

That lunch was four months to the day after I left Harvard. I used the occasion to collect the last of my office belongings: two boxes of God knows what, and a fig tree bequeathed me by my uberboss, a man I loved and loved working for. Somehow, I had not been able to drag my ass in there to pick this stuff up in four months. (Thanks, Chris E., for keeping my fig alive.) No, nothing going on there - just too inconvenient! Snow. Rain. No time.

You know how when you go to lunch with an old boyfriend, and you tell yourself all your feelings should be quite mild by now, hardly a ripple, and then you go home and clean your whole kitchen like you've just had your first dozen espressos?

This was like that. I trundled home with my granny cart full of crap. Eleven years at Harvard, and every thing I thought I still wanted was in those boxes. I was so stirred up when I got home I sorted those boxes and threw out most of the stuff and then I went up to my office and cleared everything off my desk and scrubbed it down and threw out more shit and added the one thing from the boxes that I still love, my 1982 Kachina Classic commemorative Couroc trophy tray that my sister found at the Bargain Barn in Santa Cruz, and I lit some incense for good measure and cried.

Holy shit. Eleven years. I'm still climbing toward self-reliance. This wall's high.

Not at the top yet. But I can see it from here.

Your turn, darling

If you're doing a similar wayfinding experiment and want to report results, or reading Martha's book and want to talk about it, leave a comment below.

You might also enjoy

Taking stock
Ageless as a clown
Harbor office with osprey 

Might be time to work on the lower body now...

As you know, I've been out walking every day for at least an hour, and haven't missed a morning in a couple months. I'm not a dawdly walker, but neither is this strenuous exercise and it hasn't done much to transform my body.

I like to think of myself as muscular, but that's only true from the waist up. I've boasted shamelessly here that my arms are as good as Michelle Obama's, and the only upper-body exercise I do is floss. Heading south it's the opposite. I lost me a bunch of flabby fat, only to discover that underneath was a bunch of flabby muscle.

So I have a couple choices. I could hate on my wobbly thighs and curse my flabby muscle and attack it with plastic surgery ("It's amazing what they can do with lasers these days!" marvels a good friend) or hit my legs with Serious Exercise.

Or I could accept my wobbly thighs and love on their wiggly flabbiness because even if they're not beach-perfect they reach all the way to the ground and they sure get me around, and they keep me out there every day walking and lifting my mood. 

I'm going with acceptance, because I'm going with serious exercise, rather than plastic surgery. It's not going to be a sprint - it's going to be a marathon. And self-hatred is a serious impediment in a marathon, like shooting yourself in the foot. You can still run - I guess - but a wound is really gonna slow you down. And hurt like hell.

And leave a mark, which you'll have to work on later.

You might also enjoy

Fat acceptance ... and then some 
Exercise, and why we do it. (Hint: it's not to burn calories.)
Wayfinding Week 9.25: Taking stock 

Photo Credit: Bob.Fornal via Compfight cc

High Head, Truro, in the Land of Doing It Right Now.

What is this Wayfinding? It's a series of experiments with Martha Beck's "technologies of magic," as described in her book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World." They are Wordlessness, Oneness, Imagination, and Forming. We do the experiment together!

Coincidences (possible signs of Forming)

Oh, so many coincidences and convergences! It's been an overflowing week of them. I will just tell you about a couple:

I was thinking about Rosie the Riveter, and a woman who uses an image of herself as Rosie in her marketing. What could I do that was similar? I thought of the iconic image of Che, but of course Margaret Cho has already done that. (Not that Che's image would be easy for a weight-loss coach to adopt.) I haven't heard from Margaret in well over a year, but the next day, there she was in my inbox, with some vintage Notorious C.H.O. clips. (They did me good.)

The Karoo came up three times this weekend, and I had never heard of it before. And friends converged in some funny near-miss ways all week.

And there was bibliomancy! I had the big fun of appearing as a guest on the Secret Lives of Stuffed Animals, a weekly podcast hosted by my friend Mr Bear and his friend Stumpy. (Well, I hope I can count Stumpy as a friend now, too.) We talked about shamanism, and they were surprised to hear that divination is a staple of shamanic practice, because they do a divination every week on their show. Their specialty is bibliomancy, which is reading a passage at seeming random from any book you like, and using the passage as an oracle for anything you might need guidance on. Stumpy and Mr Bear use a deaccessioned library book called "Sweet Valley High #86 Jessica Against Bruce Can Anyone Win This Deadly Battle No We Don't Think So." We got some good divinations from that.

A couple days later I was moved to do some bibliomancy, Martha Beck style. To do it, you close your eyes and run your hand over a bookshelf, choosing the book that feels hot or buzzy or whatever - you know it when you feel it. I pulled out a book I could have sworn I'd never touched before, it felt so odd and wrong. (It had been lying on its side, in fact.)

The book I chose was a Jack Kornfield volume that Juannie had given me (more Juannie!), and the paragraph I was pointing to was about my old teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and his teachings about spiritual materialism, which is the dressing-up and play-acting part of spiritual practice - the putting on of costumes and ideas. The glittery part, not the hard work. This directly answered my question of the moment, which was about shamanic practice.

And then my coach buddy called, and we talked about bibliomancy, and she told me she had just done one herself, using a Jack Kornfield book called "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry." Which, if I had to a summation of the paragraph about spiritual materialism, I might do in just those words.

Updates on past experiments

Project Cash Basis has been very rewarding, at least as an awareness practice, if not as a way of hugely increasing my wealth (at this time). I noticed that I get very freaked out in line after the cashier gives me my change back. I need to count it and put it in my little envelope along with my receipt, and I've got this piece of social conditioning that screams Hurry up hurry up hurry up you're in the way! so loudly that I want to shove everything away and commingle it and say it doesn't matter. As if saving the person behind me two or three seconds is more important than the near-untangleable mess that results from hurrying and stuffing.

What is this about? All I know for sure is that it's the same Hurry up! You're taking too much time and being selfish! that I hear when I'm trying to figure out what to eat. If I give in to panic, which is what The Voice is so good at producing, I will make a shit choice for sure.

So I have been slowing the hell down, counting my money, putting it away carefully, and noticing how no one explodes from waiting three seconds. It's awesome. Sanity 1, The Voice 0.

Some other wonderful things

I got to meet up with another Martha Beck coach while in Wellfleet this weekend. She's a brand-new coach, really fun, really inspiring. Oh, and I got to be in Wellfleet, capitol of Doing it Right Now. With friends. Bliss! And when I got home, there was a beautiful gift from a client, in the form of something blue. How did she know?

Lots of connection, which is always the point for me. Luxuriating in that!

Imagining

Hawaii. 2015, after all the kids are launched. A long trip. Never been. I will take your advices any time you want to start giving them.

Trailer in the desert. Northern New Mexico. I mentioned this before. But that was when it seemed a little pie-in-the-sky. Now - a week or so later - it seems like Why on earth not?

The Golem and the Jinni. I got it from my oldest for Mother's Day. It's good, and I want more time with it.

Your turn, darling

If you're doing a similar wayfinding experiment and want to report results, or reading Martha's book and want to talk about it, or just want to tell me what not to miss in Hawaii or have a great source for vintage Airstreams, leave a comment below.

You might also enjoy

Wayfinder's Quest Post #70: Now with 25% less
Wayfinding Week 32: You're doing it right now

Bride, or spousal practitioner?

Since starting to study and work with shamanism, I've read very few books on the topic. I haven't wanted to prime the pump with other people's experiences. The books will be there when I've gathered more of my own experience.

But I've been glancing through one in which the author makes a distinction between shamans and what he calls "shamanic practitioners". Probably out of concern to avoid cultural appropriation, he regards a "shaman" as a shamanic practitioner who comes from a culture where the practice of shamanism has never died out. The "shamanic practitioner" is a shaman whose culture doesn't have an unbroken lineage of shamanism, but has had to study the shamanism of other cultures to revive it.

As you know, I've been doing shamanic practices and offering shamanic services, and thinking about what to call myself. I'm settling on "shaman-in-training" right now. But at some point I'll be switching over to "shaman." As Mr Jones and I were saying, "shamanic practitioner" sounds unwieldy and unnecessarily tentative and weak.

We were imagining this kind of conversation: "Yeah, when my pipes got clogged I really wanted to call a plumber, but hey, good luck getting one of them up here in Baconstrip, Manitoba! Yeah, I had to get the plumbing practitioner in. But my pipes are clear now. You know, basically."

Or "Yeah, I really wanted to get married, but who can afford a wife? So I got one of them spousal practitioners. And I think she knows her stuff. It's worked out pretty well. Basically..."

So what do you think? Shaman or shamanic practitioner?

You might also enjoy

Your practice is whatever you say your practice is
Late-date career change: Why the hell not?
I can haz Housekeeper? Yes, because we live in a cooperative society.

If this is your kind of thing, I bet you'll like my newsletter:

Photo Credit: zilverbat. via Compfight cc

As you know, I've been walking at least an hour every morning, no matter what. In fact, I have reached that almost-mythical crossover point they talk about, where you bound from your bed in the morning, more exhilarated about exercise than your cafe au lait - even when it's in your favorite latte bowl.

Anyway, as a side quest on all my walks, I do this little SARK exercise she calls the "Miracle Walk." You leave your house, headed any direction, with your palms up, reciting "Miracle, find me now!" until the miracle finds you.

(You can also do this the Havi way, and go on a "Clew* Walk," collecting up to maybe five clews, which you make a note of and then do some enquiry around what they have in common and what they're trying to communicate to you. This is also a very effective exercise, and clews will absolutely present themselves for you to find. I recommend trying both!)

I must have been extra-receptive to miracles and clews today, because I found this highly repellent and highly magnetic book (above) as I was passing a fancy wreck of a boathouse near home. Like many books about childhood, it seems to possess a kind of earnestness and sincerity that makes me barf only a little less than cynical calculation hiding under fake earnestness and sincerity.

However, because my inner child(ren?) is clearly pissed off, I think there's a message in it for me.

What about you? Would your inner child be interested in a rocking chair, or whatever else is in the book? Let me know in the comments, and I'll report back.

*This is how Havi spells "clue." I think of it as Austenian...

You might also enjoy

Wayfinding Week 40: Puttering and decluttering
Old Ladies of the Mushroom Hunting Cult
Wayfinding Week 33: Wired for the thrill of finding