What an honor it is to be included in the ranks of the authors Colin Lewis picks to feature in his wonderful gift to humanity, Wisdom Notes. Choosing to Be is part of his newest series, and you can see for yourself the esteemed company we have joined. . .

Wow! The Feline Zen Master joins The Prophet, the Tao Te Ching, Eckhart Tolle, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and other masters, taking his place with his usual dignity and wise reserve. Me, I’m hopping up and down and doing a little happy dance.

See, I know you will find this hard to believe, but some people have a little trouble accepting wisdom from a talking cat. This has been a bit of an impediment in getting people to take Choosing to Be seriously, as you might imagine. I was delighted early in the year when Thom Hartmann said that Choosing to Be was one of the best books on meditation he had ever read. Thom is a long-time meditator and is very knowledgeable about all forms of meditation, so this praise coming from him really meant something.

Still, it remains an uphill climb – and since my goal is to reach millions of people with this simple yet profound story about learning to meditate, I obviously need to find people of considerable wisdom who will help me spread the word that Choosing to Be is not just a cat book. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that! — to quote Jerry Seinfeld. . .)

And then, Colin Lewis got it! And not only did he get it, he decided to tell the world in the best possible way – by putting Choosing to Be in his new Collection and writing a very thoughtful and serious Wisdom Note in which he pulls out the nuggets of wisdom for his readers. And, in a marvelous and brilliant moment of inspiration, he decides not to mention to his readers that my teacher is a cat. How cool is that!

Now maybe those people who cannot seem to get past the cat thing can learn the lessons in Choosing to Be, which are, in fact, very similar to lessons they might learn from Eckhart Tolle, Soygal Rinpoche, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sharon Salzberg, and others, including my own very well respected human meditation teacher, Jason Siff.

The wisdom in Choosing to Be has its roots in all these and many other teachings. I just decided to attempt to demystify meditation by writing a story about my own journey, and used my very wise cat Poohbear Degoonacoon and his kitten brother Catzenbear as my teachers. Think Star Wars and Yoda, or Alice in Wonderland and the Cheshire Cat, or Winnie the Pooh and his friends.

And Colin Lewis got it! Maybe because he hangs out with so many wise teachers, he recognized the wisdom of what Poohbear Degoonacoon was teaching, and managed to overlook the fact that he is, after all, only a cat. (I love saying this, because I can imagine all the cat lovers half rising from their seats and saying “Harrumph. Why, my cat knows more about meditation than most so-called masters!)

So now, without further ado, I would like to direct you to read Colin’s Wisdom Note, which he is so generously making available as a free sample from his Collection. As a fan of Choosing to Be, you will be delighted at the way Colin pulls nuggets of wisdom from the book, and enriches the lessons even more by bringing forth his own extensive knowledge of the works of other wise sages to clarify and elaborate some of the points.

I know you will enjoy Colin’s Wisdom Notes on Choosing to Be, and I sincerely hope you will consider subscribing to his wonderful Series. As you may recall, Poohbear Degoonacoon taught that “Wisdom only comes with knowledge and experience.” You will get a new Wisdom Note every week, so within a very short time you will gain an astonishing amount of wisdom. Wisdom Notes are a very clever way to gain much knowledge in a limited time – something we can all surely use in today’s fast paced world.

And if you have met with resistance from your family and friends regarding the wisdom to be learned from a cat, you can now pass along Colin’s Wisdom Notes for Choosing to Be so these humans might more easily respect the wisdom therein as Colin presents it, without pulling away the curtain and revealing the true teacher — Poohbear Degoonacoon, who was in fact named after another very wise philosopher, Winnie the Pooh.

To download the lovely gift from Colin Lewis – a free sample of the Wisdom Notes for Choosing to Be – just click this link:

Choosing to Be Wisdom Notes

The Buddha was an optimist.
Okay, so he did say life was filled with suffering.
But notice he didn’t say you personally have to suffer.
He only said life was filled with suffering.

Look around you.
Do you not see suffering?

The Buddha also said we can know the cause of suffering.
Fortunately, the cause is close at hand.

This is excellent news.
Because the Buddha said there is a way out.
And he provided a pretty cool path.

But first, the cause.
How can we know it?

The Buddha gave us a map.
It’s called meditation.

———————–
Kat Tansey 
from Choosing to Be, page 129

I chose two unpeeled hard boiled eggs from the basket and placed them in my favorite white ceramic bowl. These were very special eggs laid by free range hens who are not given steroids, hormones, or antibiotics, and are fed only organic or natural grains. While all of these features are important to me, what I like most is that each of the eggs in a carton of twelve is a slightly different color, in varying hues of pale green, light pink, tan and white. I love opening the cartons at the store and marveling at the colors, then choosing that one carton that contains the most interesting and visually appealing assortment of hues.

I went into my office and put my orange juice and the bowl with two eggs on my desk while I checked my email. One of the emails was from a spiritual group I belong to – the topic was how to go about your meditation practice when you are unable to find a cushion or time to sit. I noted the topic and went on to check the rest of my email.

Then, realizing I was quite hungry, I turned to my eggs. The first one, a very pale green, cracked perfectly, one long crack almost halfway around the egg. I started peeling the first half, making sure I picked up the thin skin with the peel, as this is the trick to peeling an egg with the greatest ease. The first piece came off smoothly, and I was able to peel the entire egg with only six pieces of shell. When I broke the egg in half, the yellow center was perfectly positioned in the middle of the egg. This meant there were no bites without some part of the center in them. The taste was magnificent and I was in a state of bliss as I slowly consumed this perfect egg.

I took a sip of my orange juice and gazed lovingly at the second egg. This one was a pale, slightly speckled tan color. I cracked it carefully on the edge of the bowl, but hardly made a dent. Again I cracked it, much harder this time. This resulted in more of a dent, with many small cracks radiating from it. If I had been paying attention during my prior egg peeling experiences, I would have known I was already in trouble.

Sure enough, just peeling the first small piece of shell was a challenge. I could not find a tear in the skin, and so had to take the first piece off by itself, leaving the skin behind. I picked at the skin with my fingernail, finally tearing it enough to pull the skin off with the next small piece of shell. However, I was only able to get some of the skin with that piece. It seemed as though the skin was bonded to the egg with epoxy.

The shell itself was quite thick and difficult to pull off in pieces of any substantial size. The skin continued to cling to the egg, and many times I was pulling off layers of the egg white itself, resulting in a very unappealing finished product, full of pockmarks and scars. It took what seemed like forever to finally remove all the shell and skin, and when I poked my thumb in the middle to open this now quite homely egg, the center was not in the center, so half of the egg had hardly any yoke.

I consoled myself that at least the work was done and I could now enjoy this egg as much as I had the other one, but this was not to be. My first bite revealed this egg white to have a chalky, flaky texture, not at all like the wholesome, substantial texture of my first egg. And the taste was almost non-existent. I consoled myself with the yoke, which was quite good, and set the bowl with the egg shells to the side.

Then I remembered the topic in the email I hadn’t read, the one about how to pursue my sitting practice when I don’t have time to sit on my cushion. I picked up the bowl of shells and looked at them again. This time instead of egg shells, what I saw were my own thoughts. So many thoughts just about this seemingly insignificant breakfast. My first realization was that some of my thoughts that come up in meditation are like the first egg, they slide off effortlessly, skin and all. And others are very much like the second egg, they cling relentlessly, they have to be picked away in small pieces, and they take much of me with them, leaving holes and scars behind.

Then I looked at how much attachment I had to the perfect egg. It must be easy to peel, beautiful, just the right amount of yoke in each bite, the texture and taste pleasing to my palette. Just the sort of egg I would like my life to be like, rather than the second one, which was thick skinned, difficult, clinging, pockmarked, chalky, hardly any taste at all.

Ah yes, but what is one without the other? If both had been perfect eggs, I would have had no lesson from this morning meditation. I thanked the hens for their gift and set the bowl aside, leaving it on my desk for the day to serve as a reminder of all I had been given on this beautiful morning.

I never pictured myself as a person who would be gleefully checking on the status of a pool full of tadpoles every day. Guess I’m making up for the fact that I never took Biology in college, opting for rocks instead.

This winter, we turned our solar heated pool over to the many frogs on our land as a sort of nursery for their tadpoles. We have hundreds of them swimming around our Olympic size pool, enjoying the bounty of such a large pond with great algae.

I’ve been watching them for months, and all I could see was that some of them were getting bigger, but they all still looked like tadpoles. And then yesterday I got down close to look at the bigger ones, and I spotted little tiny hind feet. You would think I had won the lottery!  Raced in the house yelling, “they’ve got feet!” Greg and Kevin smiled at me the way you would at a four-year old, but I didn’t care. Maybe I am a four-year old when it comes to tadpoles.

I was curious about what to expect next, and Google obliged my curiosity with this great chart on tadpole development.  Oh boy, two more weeks and they will get  forelimbs! (I now know that they don’t have back feet, they have hind limbs.)

Then sometime after they get their forelimbs, they will magically morph into little frogs. Guess when this stage gets close I will have to move outside by the pool to see if I can catch this metamorphosis as it happens.

At any rate, I am enjoying my four-year old self immensely, and promise to let you know the minute I spot those little forelimbs!

This is day fourteen in my quest to meet Connie Regan Green’s 30-day blogging challenge, and I’ve had a big breakthrough!

For the past three posts, I’ve been exploring my own resistance to change, a topic I became an expert in back in the late 80’s, when I wrote a book called Winning the Change Game to help organizations implement large-scale, company-wide changes.

One of the tools I used back then was called a Breakthrough Analysis, a 4-quadrant model to help managers analyze whether they had created a vision and plan for change that would be successful.

After I wrote my last post, in which I had a dialogue with myself, I’ve been thinking about the struggle within me between my “corporate mind” and what I consider “me” – my poetic, fiction writing creative mind. You see, I spent many years in the corporate environment and my perception is that my creative mind got smushed (technical term).

When I became ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 1990 and had to retire from my consulting and corporate life. I began to write and draw and take photographs, learned to meditate, researched alternative and natural healing methods, and eventually got well. Last year I finished my new book, Choosing to Be.

But somewhere along the line, I lost sight of how creative I had been in the corporate world, and developed the belief that I could only be creative if I stamped out that punishing corporate mind. (This was not a conscious process – in fact it has been quite hidden until now.)

So when my Corporate Mind decided to take on this 30-day blog posting challenge, that little Me wanted no part of it.

This is where my Breakthrough Analysis comes in. When I was writing my dialogue between my Corporate Mind and Me, it reminded me of my Model.

Here’s how the Breakthrough Model works. Any time we want to help someone change, whether it’s someone else or ourselves, we need to consider what the forces are for changing and what the forces are for staying the same. And each side has pluses and minuses.

I decided to create a Breakthrough Model about this dialogue I was playing with and look at the forces for Me to change.

This is the first version:

You will see that I created this as though there are two separate players, and indeed there are – Corporate Mind and Me!  In this version, the pluses to change (1) are all for the Corporate Mind. (In dealing with corporate change, this
would be management:)

The minuses against change are all for Me. (2)

The pluses to NOT change or remain the same are all for Me (3).

And the minuses for not changing are, you guessed it, from the Corporate Mind point of view (4).

See why this change is headed for failure? When I used to do this with top corporate management, they would sit there very quietly, really taking it in and thinking about past initiatives that had failed. 

So what has to happen? I must build up quadrants 1 and 4, and mitigate quadrants 2 and 3 if possible.

This is version 2:

As you can see, I needed to get in touch with what was really in this for Me, and what the minuses would be for Me if I wasn’t able to make this change. The items I’ve added are in blue print.

More work can be done with this model, but hopefully I’ve given you enough to understand the power of this approach.

I realize now that this is a long post that will probably work better as an article, so I will do that as part of my Insomnia Project. The Breakthrough exercise is needed as part of that project, as I need to create a Breakthough Model to help people get past the inclination to knock themselves out with a sleeping pill instead of using alternative methods that don’t reduce their ability to perform in the daytime and damage their health.

Aha, now I am getting somewhere! I’m excited about daily blog posting as I begin to understand how the synergy can work between blog posts, writing articles, and working on big projects. And I’m very pleased to have experienced what is a huge breakthrough for me about what has been going on in the deep recesses of my mind.

Plus, I am thrilled to bring back all that work I did in the late eighties before I got sick and see how perfectly applicable it still is.

Last but not least, I’m hopeful that my journey and insights will provide you with food for thought, and perhaps lead you to your next breakthrough!

Kat Tansey
Corporate Mind and Me, together at last

I think I’m on to something about why this becoming a daily blogger is so hard. My big corporate self is telling my little writer self to “get with the program” – after all, my corporate self has goals, big ideas, worlds to conquer. Meanwhile my little writer self, who has always had to take a back seat to my corporate self, is really pissed off. Once again, my creative abilities are not being respected. Feels just like all those years I had to spent writing corporate stuff instead of poetry or books about talking cats.

I’ve tried to find interesting things to write about, views with a twist, imaginative observations. But I’m not used to doing this on a daily basis, not used to keeping track of all my ideas, and then when it is time to write, sometimes my mind looks like a big stretch of Antarctica, completely white and devoid of any living forms.

So like all “little people,” I’m pushing back at the big corporate mind dictating this change, finding reasons not to do it, problems that get in the way, subtle passive resistance that makes the big corporate mind pull her hair out. After all, what has she ever done for me?

“Well,” she says, “I did give you this idea about a series on how to change, didn’t I? And, I’m showing you right here that you can do one of your favorite things — you can write dialogue even in a blog. So why not open up that creative mind of yours and have some fun?”

I suspect a trick, but I do have to admit that her idea of making a series out of little posts was pretty cool. And I do love writing dialogue.

“Okay,” I reply grudgingly, “I do admit I’ve been dragging my feet. Maybe you’re on to something. As long as you promise that I can exercise my creative freedom however I see fit, I’ll do it.”

“That’s lovely. I just know you are going to like what comes of this. Trust me, I know what’s best for you,” she says with that knowing smile I have learned to hate. But, what the heck, I know how to postdate these things, so I can still play the game my way.

I find it amusing that I am struggling so with this change to be come a daily blogger. After all, I wrote a book on change in the late 80’s, and developed a change model that still holds true today. My model was based on work by Roger Gould, who wrote Transformations,  and William Bridges, author of Transitions, on how to make successful changes in your life.

I applied these principles to organizational systems,  since at the time I was consulting with companies on how to implement widespread structural changes or new computer systems. What I learned about change during that time was that no matter how many people were impacted by corporate change, it was for each of them a quite personal matter. The problem, and the reason for the failure of many costly change implementations, was that often the people implementing the change didn’t think much about the people involved.

I smiled as I wrote that last sentence, because I suddenly had this image of me as a giant corporation deciding that I should become a daily blogger, without considering the personal implications for me, the person who had to make the change.  In part 3, I’ll explore the implications for the little person who has to actually do the work.

Before I begin, I want you to know that I am not whining – I am observing my own resistance to change. Yes, I know it may seem like I’m a little self obsessed these days, and that I veer wildly from writing about nature to writing about my own mind – but this all part of a scientific experiment. Ah, now that it is for science, self absorption is acceptable. That, and writing poetry, give me permission to gaze into my own navel, at least insofar as my personal code of acceptable behavior dictates.

I am absolutely committed to meeting Connie Regan Green’s 30-day powerblog challenge. I have kept up pretty well, twice needing to write 2 posts and backdate one, but now I have slid to 3 days. What I see is that I am still pushing myself to do this – there is no pull, no vision of who I will be when I pull this off (pun intended).

And, most importantly, I have not figured out yet how to change the way I think about this and set myself up for success. I don’t carry around a little notebook to jot down ideas as they come to me. I don’t set aside a time each day to do the daily post. Now that I know I can postdate my post, I have found a loophole – and I have enlarged it from 2 days to a 3 day window.

Since I now have 3 posts to do today, I will focus on this change issue in a cute little 3-part series. (Hmmm, think I’m getting the hang of this.) Next, part 2. . .

The light begins to stream through my bedroom windows. I slowly become aware of the sounds around me, the blanket over my shoulder, the light beyond my closed eyelids. A long, luxurious stretch helps me wake up and become aware of my body. I lie there for a few moments reviewing my night’s sleep, revisiting snatches of dreams, enjoying the warmth of my bed, the coming back from a refreshing journey.

I open my eyes. How amazing that everything is just as I left it, when I have travelled so far. Stretching myself around slowly to a sitting position, I smile at my slippers, waiting patiently beside the bed for my return. I wiggle my toes, roll my ankles and then slide my feet into those patient foot soldiers. I roll my shoulders to loosen them and rotate my torso to waken my spine, then I stretch my arms up to the ceiling, letting my head fall back, and sigh out loud. Another wonderful day awaits me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today we had a big wind, the kind that reminded me of the wolf huffing and puffing to blow the house down. Remember him in the story of The Three Pigs? Well, this was that kind of wind. It came swooping up the valley in huge gusts, making groaning noises as it swirled around the house, rattling the windows.

The small birds that usually come to my feeders were hiding out somewhere. The wind was too big for them to even sit on the tree branches outside my window. I wondered where they went, maybe down into the lower part of the valley, or maybe they flew out to a place where they could find shelter from the wind.

Then two mockingbirds blew in, literally, and landed on the tree on the side of the small hill outside my office balcony. I could see they were having trouble even staying on the branches, but one of them kept trying to fly into the wind. He would leap up, but before he could even flap his wings, the wind caught him and pushed him back and up higher. Then he would pull in his wings and dive back to his starting point.

The other mockingbird and I watched him try this again, and again, this heroic fight against a much stronger force, only to be blown back every time.  He stopped for a while, to catch his breath I imagined, and just then the wind stopped too, for a moment. He seized the opportunity and took off into the canyon, the other bird right behind him, following his flight plan.

I smiled as they flew off, thinking about the Wright brothers and how many times they had to try before they were able to take off. It amused me to think that even birds have their days when it might be easier to just give up.