The 16th Annual Golden Gate Bridge Walk season has launched!
The unfolding of this year’s campaign has been a lovely Zen teacher.
Almost immediately when we began to look, a beautiful idea dropped in. It paralleled many places we have traveled this year in practice and offered a number of fun metaphors. Great care and attention went in to building the structures around that campaign. However, when we began putting it all together, to the final piece, it stalled. We tried putting this piece here and that one there and … nothing. It did not click into place. But it must. We kept moving the parts around.
I noticed in myself a process of “making it work” set in. That served as a flag. Wait! This is a familiar conditioned process. It felt so different from when the idea first dropped in. The dropping in was easeful, fun, exciting. The “making it happen” felt effortful, hurried, a sense of needing to get it done.
This awareness, that the process had moved from a Life process to a conditioned process, opened the space to remember: It’s not what, it’s how! With that recalibration, the question dropped in, “What if this isn’t the campaign?” A voice in the head countered, “It has to be; it’s so good!” But our experience that the conditioned process will never lead to the Life outcome was so strong that there was a relaxed willingness to let it all go and ask, “What is it?”
And there it was, in the meeting where we were laying out the final pieces for the original campaign, as the whole team stepped into a place of inquiry, we watched as the original ideas washed away and truly within minutes, the campaign built itself out of the material of “what isn’t it.”
The realization that that original campaign was not wrong, not a “waste of time” has been a helpful teaching to apply everywhere! What “isn’t it” helps guide us to what is it, and in the end illustrates for us that it’s ALL it! Very relaxing—and fun!
Speaking of fun, we would love to have you join us in the fun of Team 150K for Africa! Find out more.
In Gassho
Jen