Thank you @Margaret Barr @Eric Stromberger and @Erica Gibbons For showing up to the inaugural session of The Pleasure Break - our weekly live call. Every week we will have a lively discussion on a topic of choice. I invite you all to make suggestions for future topics… Otherwise you're stuck with what I wanna talk about… Lol Maybe this for next week. As an aside - I was invited to be a practitioner at these retreats. ❤️‍🔥🐒❤️‍🔥

We have decided to start a live call each week on Friday afternoons at 2:30pm PDT. (Subject to change in the future) It is called "Break for Pleasure" and we will explore a variety of topics. This week's talk is focused on how many people (including your's truly) have done a fuck ton of personal work, are often on the "high achiever", type A list, and still have a tendency to feel some level of chaos (internal) and discontent. You don't want (or need) another training or a new guruuuuuu....you know this.....and still, WTF do you do. Here is a paper that gives some indication of a possible path to relief and acceptance and actually moving forward wit more grace and intent. I attached the full paper which is a little dense to get through. And a brief, one-page, synopsis. I'll let you take a look and let them be fodder for Q&A>>> See you tomorrow my funky monkeys ❤️‍🔥🐒❤️‍🔥

Check out the new Substack article. The Genius of Deconstruction According to some visions or versions of life, I did mine slightly backward. Or maybe it’s that I did it just right and decided to regress and redo my 20’s in my 40’s. Either way I have had a hell of a lot of fun and undid at least some of the f*cked up programming I received in my younger years. I became a father at 18, joined the Marine Corps at about the same time. Didn’t get to college until I was about 29. Then became a grandfather by 43. Hell, that’s when the Norman Rockwell life plan would have had me getting close to retirement and settling into middle age. But... well, let’s just say that hasn’t been my experience. Now, into my early 60’s, I have been on a whole new upswing of creative activity, writing and teaching. I suppose that I am going to post a series of newsletters talking about my experiences until I get it out of my system. I hope you will bear with me in this systemic flush because there is no way to lay this journey out in one or two emails. The Renaissance Life “Life is hard but I KNOW there is a better way to live.” This has been my deep conviction, my mantra, and my rallying cry since I can remember. And that one thought has taken me to some very dark and weird places, as well as places of pure, unfettered joy and love. Mostly it has taken me on this long journey of conscious (usually) deconstruction. Explanatory interlude My use of the word “Deconstruction” only loosely aligns with Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction Theory in the sense that you can’t just tear something down for the sake of tearing it down. We need the old to help give meaning and form to the new, and the new to give reason to the old. Way too much to elucidate fully here. My personal deconstruction has been about making space for authenticity. It’s about looking at my life with eyes wide open and seeing it for what it is, or was, and learning how to work with that reality, and make sense of it.

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke. And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider lest the parade of our mutual life gets lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give— yes or no, or maybe — should be clear; the darkness around us is deep. —William Stafford Hello my friends, I came across this really amazing poem the other day and I thought I would share it with you. Let me know how it lands on you and how you interpret it. I will weigh in a little bit more once I hear from a few of you. I don't think that I have ever read any of his work. Let me know if you're familiar with it.