The Home of Steven Barnes
Author, Teacher, Screenwriter


Monday, July 03, 2006

Thoughts on the Path

Now that I’ve had a week to depressurize from the second Path workshop, I want to go back through everything we’ve done, with the thought to improve every aspect.  There are several ways to look at the core of the process, and the “flavor” of the workshop will depend on which of these “cores” we consider most paramount.

Here are some possible ways to look at it.  In fact, I suspect that it will NEVER be possible to refine it to a formula…if human transformation could be boiled down to words easily understood and applied, we’d all be enlightened.  Having met a few (just a very few) human beings I genuinely consider enlightened (and none of them lurk in my bathroom mirror) I just don’t think it’s that easy.  But it IS possible…
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The first “core aspect” has to do with Reconnecting with our childhood dreams, and aligning them with our adult goals.  Making our work our play, in other words.  To do this requires re-wiring our beliefs, diminishing the negative emotional anchors, and prioritizing our values.  This is part of what I call being a “room temperature superconductor”—not fighting ourselves, not resisting our own excellence.

We have to have permission to dream, to hope. To place both our successes and catastrophic failures in perspective.  We have to dream our futures as clearly as, when children, we saw ourselves as astronauts or models or dads or cowboys. We have to re-connect with the river of energy flowing within us.  This last is so important: as we run out of energy, we run out of hope.  Double your energy, and your optimism, sexuality, intellectual agility and resilience increase hugely.

So, then, connecting childhood dreams and adult goals is one way of looking at the Path…but not the only, and not necessarily the best.  But it works.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I belive that our childhood dreams originate from the reasons why we decided to come on earth, from what we want to test. This is why it is important to re-aline our present dreams to childhood dreams.