Another story that I tell.

One Monday morning, I am reaching into a new position. It is a yoga position that I have done before but I have a new teacher, and he is encouraging me to do it in a slightly different way, to push myself further than I think I can go. I am trying to straighten my leg, and I am trying to get my hand to reach the ground. It is 7.30 or so, in a yoga studio in Notting Hill, just around the corner from work, and there are pools of morning sun collected under the sky lights. I am trying but I am not quite getting there.

Suddenly, something inside me snaps. I crumple to the floor and I feel tears, welling from deep. Ryan, the teacher, comes over to me.

‘Are you OK? What is it? Is it the yoga? You are doing very well’.
‘No, it’s not the yoga’, I say through my tears.
‘I’ll give you a few minutes’ he says, quietly, and he leaves me to be.

I sit there, and I just let myself be. I breathe. This is where I am.

A few minutes passes.

Ryan comes back and crouches down beside me.
‘Is there anything that you would like to share?’ he asks.
‘I’ve just had this moment of clarity. That I am playing a role, and it’s not really me. I dress up, and I go to work, but it is not who I am’. I am surprised by my own words, as if they are coming from so deep inside me that I haven’t thought them before I say them.
He considers me and what I’ve just said. Gently, he offers ‘It sounds to me like you’re up for a life change’.
‘Yes’, I acknowledge. I pause. ‘But change into what?’ I ask him; I ask myself.

I collect myself. I stand up. I remember the tai chi position ‘wu chi’. I stand with my legs hip distance apart, legs slightly bent, my arms in front of me, forming a circle. I begin to feel the energy flowing between my fingertips.

At moments of clarity, we are naked. We are not hiding anything from ourselves or from others. We are connected to ourselves, and to the world around us.

After the class, I see Ryan outside.
‘Are you OK?’ he says.
‘Yes, thanks for earlier. I just don’t know what I should do’.
‘What would you most like to go and do right now?’
‘Go skiing’. My instinctive reply.

Three months later, I am working as a chalet chef in Meribel, skiing and creating, and defining my feeling of freedom.

Being truly naked is at the intersection between vulnerable and full of power. When you allow no barriers between you and the world, anything is possible.

‘Je n’ai cherche pendant toute ma vie que l’essence du vol…le vol, quel bonheur’.

My translation of this – ‘All my life, I’ve only sought the spirit of flying…. Flying, what joy’.

Bonheur is a difficult word to translate. I don’t think that there is an English equivalent. The dictionary says ‘happiness’, ‘bliss’, ‘the joy of living’. I remember being out on the mountain skiing, and coming back to a warm café and writing to a friend, that ‘bonheur’ for me was about being completely in the moment, lungs full of fresh air, but at the same time being open to possibilities, open to the future, open to the unexpected. Present and alert. In flow. Flying.

In the same programme, there was another quote that stood out for me.
‘Il y a un but dans toute chose. Pour y arriver, il faut se degager de soi meme’.

I roughly translated this as ‘There is an end goal in everything. To get there, you must free yourself from yourself’.

The freedom that lies in freeing yourself from yourself. And then you can fly.

“So in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know ‘my’ myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks”.

(quoted in the Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell).

‘How do you see yourself? What defines you? What makes you happy? What do you want from life? These questions, naïve and unoriginal though they may sound are right up there with the current crisis of climate change as we contemplate how we are going to live out the next few decades and beyond’.

I agree with Susan Greenfield in the importance of asking questions. Although the questions she poses may sound naïve and unoriginal to her, how many people can actually answer them? Or perhaps, more importantly, are even thinking about how they would answer them? If we cannot begin to think about these questions then I believe that we won’t be able to solve questions such as how to tackle climate change.

As for my motivating question and quest, a few years ago, one morning when I was swimming lengths in a pool, I thought that my motivating question was ‘How do we create meaning?’ I have continued to turn this question over in my mind. I think now the answer is in the question. How do we create meaning? By creating.

As Jung said:

‘The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly’.

When we dream, the barriers between inside and outside dissolve, between our unconscious and the collective unconscious, Jung says.

Is it this dissolution we dream of?

‘It’s a process for me in having great faith in how these things will evolve, and after a few years experience of doing it, you learn that instead of trying to control the work, you just try and find the correct circumstances for the work to come into being’.

I think that this process of having faith and giving room for work to evolve, to come into being, applies to any creative process, including setting up a business.

So what is the link between this and listening to yourself with love? It seems to me that listening to yourself with love is about authentically listening to yourself. You can listen to yourself sometimes, and all you hear is chatter and noise. Listening to yourself with love is about being gentle with yourself, accepting your faults and imperfections, and listening for the truth that is beneath the chatter. And giving yourself the space, and having the faith, to do this.

Listening to yourself with love sounds like gentle waves on a sunny day, or the freshness of a forest glade. Listening to yourself with love is the sound of calm, of crickets chirruping in the fields.

Listening to yourself with love is heaven and earth. I visited the Richard Long exhibition at Tate Britain earlier this year, which was titled ‘Heaven and Earth’. The paintings in the first room were of the I Ching hexagrams for Heaven and for Earth. I was not familiar with I Ching, so I borrowed a book from the library: The Living I Ching: Using Ancient Chinese Wisdom to Shape Your Life by Deng Ming-Dao.

This is some of what Deng Ming Dao had to say about Earth and Heaven:

‘The greatest virtue earth exemplifies is patience.

‘Whether we are growing grain to sustain ourselves, or whether we must search for a new place to live, the earth shows us how to turn waiting to our advantage. Everything worth doing takes time to develop. The earth teaches us to think of what matters against the long perspective of its geologic time.

‘In that sense, we must become the heaven that sets situations in motion. We can go through gates instead of standing paralysed. We can become heaven – the heaven like a father who acts, who fights when necessary, who leads, who works. We must act, and benefit all that we touch as surely as the sky sends sun and rain.

Heaven creates time and circumstances. We must accept that. At the same time, we must find heaven in ourselves. We create with what heaven gives us, and in so doing, we become heaven itself’.

Patience and Action. Recently, I have become impatient, wanting action. But, at the same time, I need to give time for things to develop organically, to give space for the listening, to combine the willingness to create with the willingness to wait. I think that is perhaps one of the most important lessons that we can learn – but one that is certainly not taught in schools, or encouraged in business. But it is a lesson that artists learn, because it is that mix of Patience and Action, Heaven and Earth which provides the conditions for creativity.

Yet that is where the future lies.

‘The best way to predict the future is to design it’. (Buckminster Fuller)

And the only way to start designing is to be still, listen and then start putting marks on that piece of paper.

Is this what we need to say yes to – ‘the real Me I shall achieve’? And say no to that which is not?

Geoff Dyer also quotes Frieda Lawrence. “To me his (Lawrence’s) relationship, his bond with everything in creation was so amazing, no preconceived ideas – just a meeting between him and a creative, a tree, a cloud, anything. I called it love, but it was something else – Bejahung in German, “saying yes”.

For the last three years, I have had a theme for the year. 2007 was my year of saying yes. My year of saying yes was my call to action. 2008 was my year of radical change. 2009 is my year of dancing and flying.