For the next several Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

In “A Dangerous Taboo,” (page 61) Rob Brezsny discusses the fact that our society’s conventional wisdom perceives pessimism as intelligence, and optimism as naivete. “If you cultivate an affinity for pronoia,” he writes, “people you respect may wonder if you’ve lost your way. You might appear to them as naive, eccentric, unrealistic, misguided, or even stupid.”

I can understand why so many people feel this way. For hundreds of thousands of years, humanity’s focus has been simply to stay alive, to survive what the day brings. We’re born, we struggle, and then we die. And after we die, we might be rewarded if we bore our burdens without complaint, or punished if we strayed too far from what’s expected of us. If we have a little fun or make a little progress along the way, that’s great, too, but we certainly shouldn’t expect it.

But, as our friend and coach Maia put it the other day, we’re at the cusp of something new now. We are beginning to see the truth in the Observer effect—our perceptions of things clearly change the thing we are perceiving, whether those things are waves of light or other people. And, grasping this, we begin to understand our own responsibility. If we want a creative, useful, and joyful world, we must learn to perceive in a creative, useful, and joyful way.

Brezsny is exploring this new frontier and asks us to do the same, though rewiring thousands of years of caution, worry, and fear is demanding work. But our task is not to put our heads in the sand and refuse to look at things we don’t like the look of. “Pronoia is fueld by a drive to cultivate happiness and a determination to practice an aggressive form of gratitude that systematically identifies the things that are working well. But it is not a soothing diversion meant for timid Pollyannas strung out on optimistic delusions. It’s not a feel-good New Age fantasy used to deny the harsh facts about existence. Those of us who perceive the world pronoiacally refuse to be polite shills for sentimental hopefulness. On the contrary, we build our optimism not through a repression of difficulty, but rather a vigorous engagement with it.”

Read more...

image by House of Sims

I was very nervous when I walked through the glass doors of the elementary school on my first day as a mentor, as I almost always am when I start a new project. When I signed up to be a KidsHope mentor I was gung-ho. It sounds like such a fabulous thing, setting aside an hour a week to help a child who needs it.

I love grand, abstract concepts. That’s why I love writing. I could sit here at my computer all day long and play armchair philosopher. It’s fun. Sometimes, though, when it gets down to the reality of actually doing something with all of my lovely ideas, I get a little panicky. Who am I to think I can accomplish anything, to make a difference? my brain says to me.

Once that thought takes hold a million others flood in after it. What if the kid doesn’t like me? You hear so much about how kids are jaded and hate to learn. Of course I don’t believe that when I’m alone with my pie-in-the-sky thoughts, but what if it’s true? What if this kid finds having a mentor embarrassing or thinks it’s a stupid waste of time? What if I don’t make a difference? Failure and I are mortal enemies, so much so that I have been known to avoid trying to avoid failing.

As I walked through the standard-issue locker-lined halls of the school I felt all of my old school aged insecurities flooding back to me. I suppressed them. I’m 30 years old, for the love of Pete. I don’t need to be intimidated by 10 year olds, but for a minute I was.

Read more...

This Thursday, our discussion will focus on “A Dangerous Taboo” (page 61), “Let’s Make Morality Fun” (page 72), and “Bigger, Better, More Interesting Problems” (page 77).

image by are you my rik?

Last week Victoria and I got our life coach, Maia Conty, on the phone to discuss her approach to coaching. We learned a great deal about what coaching is, how it differs from therapy, and how this coach sees her role in helping to create the future.

Maia first came to coaching about three and a half years ago, when she was invited as a guest to a training session. “I was painting with an all-female painting crew and I was up there on top of this really high ladder with a sander and a mask and it was hot as all heck and I’m up there with the sun and all this paint dust ... and I was going, what am I doing here? ... It wasn’t too long after that I was invited as a guest to one of these coaching sessions.”

Read more...

image by Serge Melki

I’ve written before about how much my experience of life has changed in the last year or so—I fell in love, changed many of my habits, and found a spiritual framework that makes sense to me both intellectually and instinctively. There’s been several components to this sea change, from taking on the practice of meditation, to joining together with friends to start this website, to seeing myself and all of humanity in a huge, evolutionary context. One tremendously important piece of this puzzle has been working with Maia Conty, a dear friend of almost 15 years, and, lucky for me, a gifted life coach.

Tomorrow we’ll feature highlights from an interview that Victoria and I conducted with Maia last week, but today both of us would like to share our experiences of working with Maia and how her coaching is helping us change so that we can create the future we want.

Read more...