Catching the Updraft! ~ The Blog

An Introduction to the Optimal Stance – Part 1

We’ve discussed the practice, which is a way to think about what to do next: what to think about, what to build, what actions to take. Then we discussed a model for what it is and how it works. But these two facets of updrafting are incomplete without understanding exactly how we figure into the picture. Now it is time to talk about how we, human beings, relate to the universe’s ongoing creative endeavor. As it turns out, the way we think about the world and what’s happening, and why we do things is just about as important as what we do. (I might argue that they are really more important.) It seems a bit strange at first, but your habitual ways of relating to your life are critical to the creative process. We call our habitual way of relating to the world our stance.

What is a stance?

A stance is a position, relationship, or posture we take relative to the world. Physically, spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally, it embodies:

1. How we understand what is happening, and
2. The position from which action arises.

It is a point of view and a perspective, but it is dynamic in that it guides and directs our actions. One could say that it mediates (or filters) the incoming information and entrains (or controls) the outgoing actions.

We often think of stance as a physical position and there are many examples of specific stances:

• Aikido, judo, and yoga all have particular ways of holding the body and the mind as we participate in the movement.
• A dancer has a very particular sense of balance, muscle awareness, and attention as he prepares to be ready to move in any direction.
• A surfer, a glider, or a horse and rider all have very specific physical and mental relationships to the environment in which they participate.

In our usage here, a stance is not purely physical, though it can include a physical component. It is our particular relationship to our work, the world, what is happening, and other people that represents a specific way of being in any activity. In its most refined form, the optimal stance (which we will explore further) is all you need. As we will grow to understand, if you are able to maintain the optimal stance, you don’t really need of a lot of the details of the practice or an understanding of the model, because the stance itself guides your choices. But most of us are working from some less-than-optimal stance, and the practice and the explanations of the arising world model help us make those moment to moment decisions when our stance isn’t perfection, but is off in the weeds somewhere. In fact, they are tools to help us refine our stance in addition to helping us figure out what to do next.

End of the Intro to the Arising World

So what are the key ideas that make understanding the arising world model useful and evolutionary?

The Arising World Model provides a new perspective on how the world actually works, and the more we get this the more effective we can be at everything. We will go into these more later, but here is a summary of those key ideas:

• The world we experience arises into being from a vast ocean of potentials. The model helps us to grasp and live the reality that the world emerges from the actions of all actors from all time and from the vast persistent potentials of our species and our planet. We are not in control but contribute potential to that emergence.
• The importance of our awareness to the power of our actions. The nature of action and the state of awareness of the actor are key to the relative value of any action for generating potential for the future and the model provides a basis for understanding these relativities.
• The advantage of finding coherence with the arising potential. The potential of the world contains our history and the preponderance of momentum for the future. Embodying coherence with this arising potential enhances the power of action and engagement to affect future possibilities.
• The need for improved congruence in our actions. We have poor habits with respect to congruence in our beliefs, intents, thoughts, words, and actions, which derives from erroneous beliefs about the potency of our engagement. Aligning our actions in a consistent way improves their effectiveness.
• A sense of the indirection of action in time and space. We can come to understand that what exists is only the emergent reflection of past action, and that we cannot affect what is directly. We must act in the moment to generate the new potential for the future. That is how we cause something different to come into being.
• A new internal model of causality. All of these elements contribute to a new understanding of causality, which can be embodied in a new state of awareness and therefore a new model of engagement.

But more on those details later. Next we are going to talk about “stance”—how are we going to “be” in the world”?

Intro to AWM Part 4: What are we?

We are not separate from this arising world? So what are we individually in this big picture? And, more importantly, how do we participate?

We embody two important things:

1. We are the expression of everything that has gone before, what you might call a result;
2. And we are (really “are” and not “have”) the potential for choice and action to generate the potential for what will come next.

Everything is perfect (as in an accurate result) as the expression of every creative (potential generating) act that has every happened; and in the same moment there is a wealth of new things to try, new structures, forms, and capacities to create. Nothing is “wrong” and everything is up for improvement.

Most of us live in our worlds as a result; that is, instead of knowing our bodies, our minds, and our lives as an ever changing potential, we think of ourselves as something that happened, something that is stuck and has a problem. It is possible to learn to focus on ourselves as the choosing and acting dynamism in the universe. As we do that, we understand that we can live at the level of causality knowing that we are part of the causal component of our world.

You are Your Arising Potential

The model tells us that you are a portion of the arising potential of the universe embodying the creation of something new. You are that. It is not your “reason”; it is your being. Reason implies to us that you can choose what or why. But in reality you can engage with your potential arising or you can resist what is coming into being through you. You can try to choose something else, only to fight against the current.

Imagine a musician who is brilliant, dedicated, a magical performer, and a generous performing partner. This musician has dedicated his entire life to becoming a creative expression. As such, he is a clear embodiment of a creative force, totally and completely engaged in the realization of creative power. He is a generative being in a volatile state bringing something wild and surprising into being in the world.

In the most practical way, he IS this musical expression arising. He is the music itself. You can sense it in the performance and in his entire life, which is one of exemplary engagement; he is fully engaged the arising potential that is exploding into expression through him. His experience is that he just “has” to make music and the more he engages with it the more it arisies. We can view musicians as the embodiment required for music to arise into the univers and our experience. And the music is the embodiment of a greater expression of the experience of being human and one particular expression of our possibilities.

We each have some engagement with life that is arising with us, a role to play, a gift to give. Not all of them as dramatic as being famous musician, but all critical to the unfolding of the universe. We are the confluence of possibilities arising as a creation, which can perceive, choose, and act. This is the unique capacity of a human being, and a powerful role in the expressive nature of our world. Optimally, we don’t dedicate ourselves to something outside of us; we choose to powerfully engage with who or what we are, whatever it may be.

Our musician is a more overt creative expression in which his consciousness is totally engaged with the arising potential, enhancing and reinforcing it with his creative choices, enabling the whole thing to arise like a blaze into being. Some of us are more visibly a creative expression, but all of us, with whatever expression arises, are in support of the arising whole.

This is what an engaged purpose is—a human fully expressing the arising potential that is moving through them.

Note: One of my inspirations is the musician Mark O’Connor. When you watch him perform and read about his work and life, you come to realize that here is someone who is maximizing his potential and creating something wondrous in the world. Here is the link to his My Space page and some of his wonderful music.

AWM: Two Key Concepts

The universe is really one continuity in the process of becoming, but we perceive things, people, organizations

The truth is that it is all continuous—that it is one universe arising into being as itself. But it appears in the Actuality as an infinite number of separate entities.

The understanding that we are separate is an illusion of the creative process. Individual expression and action function in the universe the same way multiple colors are used by an artist to create a single image. Each object that we identify as separate is just a focus of activity (locus of information), which is functioning as a seemingly separate as part of the dance. It has its own arising potential and persistence, and its own ability to act. But they are only seemingly separate from the whole.

So an entity, an object, a person or an organization is the expression of information about its current state of being, its potential (possible future states), and a localized ability to choose and to act. The potential of an entity is arising into being as the entity and its environment. It is a flow of becoming that has complex structures of change and persistence. That is what we mean by updraft. A group of entities (a family, a business, a bus full of travelers) comprise a confluence of their individual potentials creating more complexity and expanded abilities to choose and to act.

The Concept of Persistence
Some things have a great potential for persistence, that is, they stay around in fairly static states. Other entities (both objects and people) express wide variability in their patterns of persistence, sometimes chaotic. Water can be water for a very long time, but the form it takes on is a chaotic structure.

The world of objects embodies a vast range in the qualities of persistence, though we can see with careful observation that nothing is perfectly persistent. The Himalaya mountain range, while seemingly a fixture for time immemorial, is changing every day as tectonic plates shift and surfaces crumble. The planets shifts, the sun burns, the waters flow. Everything is changing and the variety of changeability is core to the fabric of the world. Humans also embody this variability in persistence and changeability.

So what is persistence? It is the preponderance of likelihood that something will stay the same. A rock is more persistently a rock than a flower is a flower. And the opposite truth is that something that is ephemeral, fleeting, amorphous has the likelihood and ability to change. It is easier to change your thought than to change the color of your eyes; the thought has a smaller preponderance of persisting. Something that is very persistent has a lot of potential to remain the same, and therefore it requires a lot of accurately generated potential to change it. Something with little potential to remain the same does not require the same effort.

What is most persistent about a person? Which parts of a human being express stability? Is it:

• Bones? Muscles? Teeth? Brain?
• Personality? Emotions? Knowledge?
• Ideas? Beliefs? Intents? Thoughts?

These attributes represent a great deal of variability in persistence, but none of these are the most persistent attribute of a person. The most persistent element of a person is the process that causes the person to come into being—the ongoing becoming that creates a focus of activity, which we call a person. Each of us is the arising result of a process of becoming. And everything about us has more or less persistence. Our bones are more persistence than our hair. Our beliefs are more persistent than our thoughts. My location on the planet is more persistent than my emotions. We are a complex mixture of elements that express a wide variety of stability. This particular complexity is what defines us a human. And freedom in the elements that are highly ephemeral—the ease of potentiating change—are where the possibility of evolution is most available.

Moderate persistence is required for creative expression and the ability to evolve. A tree needs to maintain its existence as a tree in the midst of growing. A person has to maintain his existence as a person to evolve his capacities. There must be enough stability to perceive, choose and act; but enough dynamism to evolve. If we are too rigid, we cannot learn. If humans were so chaotic that we had no persistent pattern, we could not express what we might have learned. Evolution is the process of changing our relationship to the world in a way as to express a moderately persistent way of being in the world that, over time, continually shifts into a greater capacity for engagement and understanding.

We live on an edge between chaos and static order—this is where creative choices have meaning and evolution can proceed.

An Illustration of the Model : AWM

(see my apologies for the post at mary.panttaja.com)

Let’s assume this orange cylinder represents the moment—that “now” when

everything is actually happening, when it is not the future nor the past, but actually going on. It’s impossible to “represent” the moment actually—it would take the universe! But let’s pretend that this silly orange cylinder represents the time/place/moment when the potential becomes the actual. It would have to go on infinitely in all directions, of course. (Notice that it is not really a “time”, a “place”, or a “moment” precisely.)

The yellow cloud represents the potential—the sum of possibilities and preponderances. The blue cloud the actual—that which came into being. Notice the ambiguous edge between what is actual and what is potential.

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The potentials arrive in/at/with the moment as they transform into the actual world.

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The actualities, the world as we know it, arise in the moment—the

same moment.

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Actions, which also always happen in the moment, generate new potentials.

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Everything is happening in the moment where we at once experience what is happening and act to create potential for the future. It is called the Arising World for it is ever arising from the potential. This movement of arising is what we call the updraft; it represents the potential that is arising into actual. That’s the movement and power we capture when we are updrafting.

Intro to AWM: How Stuff Happens – Part 2, The Model Itself

The Model Itself
This model describes a functional structure with a set of simple principles (axioms) and relationships between those principles. Some of the axioms represent things (the existential axioms: state, moment, entities); some of them represent movement (the operational axioms: becoming, action, choice). To make the basic axioms easier to apply to real life, we have developed derivative axioms from the synthesis of the existential and operational axioms, which helps us understand the ordinary world.

Things that Are: Actualities and Potentials
At the deepest level, the model shows us that there are two main elements of the creative universe.

1. There is the stuff of the world that is—that which we normally perceive. We call it the Actuality or Actualities. It includes what most of us would perceive as the actual stuff of the world. (Ambiguities about what is real stuff and what is potential stuff are interesting, but not really pertinent to the application of the model. Thank goodness, for the line is hard to draw.)
2. There is the Potential, the information about the future world into which the Actuality will transform. This information includes patterns of persistence, arrays of possibilities, likelihoods—all of the pending possibilities that have been previously generated. We understand a lot of the information that resides in the Potential, but not all of it. (We can predict the movement of a golf ball, but not the shifting of an earthquake, or the thought process of an Einstein.) Some of it is too vast or complex for us to be able to predict what is actually going to happen, though our capacity to understand is expanding all the time.

We call the combination of the Actuality and the Potential the State of the universe. State is an infinite informational state space—that is, everything in the world has, in each moment, some state or condition which is changing to some degree all the time. Its momentary actual state, its potential states, and the process of change itself determine how it changes—what it will become—what happens next.

In each moment, the potential becomes the actual—the world arising into being.

How the World Operates – Becoming
Becoming is the core of the universe’s existence. Everything is changing in every moment. The universe is a process of change and evolution even more than it is a set of things.

The rules for the process of becoming are in large part what we try to learn in life. These rules determine the creation of the actual world from the potential of what could be. We understand a lot of the rules of becoming. We can explain why a plane flies, or why balls fall, or how the surfboard catches the wave. We know why the baby is hungry. But there are many other underlying patterns and rules that we do not yet understand, though our evolution, exploration, and investigations are driven in large part by our desire to uncover them and to understand more accurately how the world works. Each individual has a different level of understanding and, in large part, that is what individual growth and development is—the expansion of our ability to understand all the ways of the world and to work creatively with them.

An Introduction to AWM: How Stuff Happens – Part 1

Why a new model of how the universe works?

Well, if we want to be more successful we may need a new way of looking at things, a way that corrects our misunderstandings and give us a stronger basis from which to choose—and choosing every moment is everything. The Arising World Model (AWM) also gives us a firm foundation for understanding our creative practices—what will work for us and what will never work.

The reality is that the world is just what it is regardless of whether we understand it or whether we have a good working model for our engagement. But if we can improve our understanding, we also change what we are doing which is the key step in evolving our own creative potential.

So, What Don’t We Know That We Need To Know?

There are several key reasons why a new way of thinking may be useful to correct misunderstandings that are pervasive in our current worldview.

More Than Action Matters

First, most of us barely have a clear model of how the physical world works. So we do not have a complete or practical model that includes how our thoughts, intentions, and beliefs affect the world and each other. And it turns out, whether you believe you thoughts do or do not affect the world, you will be more effective if you work within a model that guides your choices of what you do and what you think and believe. We will be more successful if we believe that our thoughts are effectively actions and that we can and need to choose them explicitly. It is not logical to separate the body and its ability to act from the mind and its ability to think, for they are both simply facets of you and your potential coming into being in every moment.

In fact, the universe is one whole and we are all, bodies and minds, arising together (no matter how convincingly it seems as if we are a lot of separate bodies and minds). So a model that helps us work within these seeming dichotomies in a practical way allows us to engage more effectively.

It turns out that when we consider the results, what happens next, we need to think of the world as a vast continuous whole. But when we consider our choices and our actions, we need to remember that we hold some individual responsibility for what happens next in that whole.

We Are Not In Control, But Are Critical to What Happens Next

Second, most of us need a new model because we think that the world is just happening to us, that we are victims of everything and everyone else. In thinking this, we also believe that what we do or think doesn’t matter much in the big scheme of things. What this model helps us to visualize is that nothing just happens to us and that we are responsible for everything we do, everything we think, and everything we believe. And that our actions make a difference in what we experience in our lives and what everyone else experiences in their life.

We need to get over the belief that we can be ambiguous, half-hearted, or incongruous about our actions, thoughts, and beliefs. We need to become whole-hearted about everything we do if we want to leverage the true power of our creative ability. And this power will come from two aspects of the human experience: the state of our awareness and the nature of our actions.

Skillful Means – With Awareness of the Implications, Do the Right Thing

This explanation of the world is focused on the nature of actions and, by expanding the definition of right action, the state of awareness of the actor. To develop skillful means is to evolve our ability to know what the right choice is and to execute the optimal action. AWM is ultimately practical in that it shows us how to make the best choices and to execute effective maneuvers. But optimally, it requires that we have a comprehensive worldview from which to make the choices, so that we understand the true implications.

the ambience of summer swallows

We rode early today to escape the rising heat of early summer. Riding over the river I was entranced by the spiraling dance of hundreds of summer swallows who nest under the bridge. They were out in the early morning air in a frenzy of chasing. The sensation of their swift sallies and swoops, a mass of movement, dominated the river and shifted my awareness to the world outside my head. How easy it would have been to be lost in my mental chatter and missed it altogether.

Three bay horses loiter, muzzles hanging over the fence, communing with the morning traffic, trying to be sociable.

It is so common for me to be lost in my head ruminating. Sometimes I am doing useful thinking and planning. But oftentimes I am just allowing my chatterbox brain to prattle on. The rest of the world, what’s happening, is lost to me. Whatever I am missing-in-action thinking about had better be darn important if it means that I am not aware of the world around me.

The breeze is coming from the east; that’s why it is such a warm morning, the wind bringing the heat of the valley instead of the chill of the ocean.

Sometimes, of course, I am doing useful things inside my head: analyzing, planning, composing, figuring out. Sometimes though, once those things are done, I find myself using mips to try to remember them. In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen proposes that it is key for us to keep lists, to write things down, just so we don’t use our precious awareness fussing about remembering things. Writing things down frees our mind for more valuable tasks and frees it to be aware of what’s going on around us. (Writing things down is particularly challenging on the bike—therefore the recording device in the future.)

Five stark dead sycamores stand, their white trunks alight against the deep green of the willows along the river.

We can also distract ourselves from what’s really happening in our organizations with the stories we constantly tell ourselves. Are we really noticing that the sales numbers are static from quarter to quarter? Are we really aware of what is happening? Or are we so busy each quarter telling ourselves the story of why, what went wrong this time, that we don’t pay attention to what is really happening. If we are not aware of what is actually going on, there is no way we can find a resolution. A effective new path cannot be found if you don’t know where you are, if instead you are inside a story you keep telling yourself.

An elderly farmer in his ancient, well-kept farm truck grins and waves as I swoosh by, his bright cheeks aglow with recognition. He must have previously noticed us plying the valley roads.

So I’ll keep trying to pay better attention. Be aware. Live in mindfulness. Do my work in the real world, not just in my head.

The deep rattling caw of an unseen crow roils over head causing a vibration in my belly.

An Illustrated Walkthrough of Updrafting

In the simplest case, we simply do something. We bake a cake. We answer a question. We write a chapter. Sometimes we are in touch with our process to such a degree that no outside structure is required. The full-blown creative act arises spontaneously and implicitly. Many of our basic creations come into being in this way.

We call the processes represented in the diagram ovals the modes of the creative activity. A mode is a way of relating to the creative process with specific things to do that generate specific results. Let’s decompose this mode to learn more about the practice.

As we understand more about our own creative process, we may see many of the creative modes come into play internally even if we are not engaged with them explicitly. We may use the modes invisibly as they best fit our current activity.

The first level of decomposition of the simple act of creating something is to:

1. Choose what you are going to create
2. Take the actions that are necessary

We call this Taking Aim and Taking Action. Taking Aim includes all the ways in which we determine what we are creating and the development of our path to the goal. We call the path the trajectory. Think of it as aiming an arrow on the optimal trajectory to hit the target. Taking Action is doing what it takes to move us closer to our goal along the trajectory.

As our tasks get more complex, or we want a greater degree of control, or we want to create with a team, we may want to further break down our modes of engagement with the creative process.
Taking Aim breaks down into two sub-modes: Discovery and Design.

1. Discovery is learning about the creative environment:
• Looking outward to see what exists that could participate in or influence your creative endeavor
• Looking inward to see what ideas, intuitions, and potentials you have to inspire the ideas that are evolving.
2. Design is combining your knowledge and your inspirations into a broad vision and building the mental and physical components you need to do the work at hand.

Discovery decomposes into two modes: Survey and Sense & Engage.

1. To Survey we study what exists in the world that affects our creative process and feed what we learn back into the definition of what can be created.
2. To Sense & Engage is to discover your creative intuitions, the future possibilities, and the potentials that can define and refine your goal, while helping to leverage it into reality.

Design has three sub-modes:

1. Envision – Create an illuminated vision of the goal and its meaning
2. Align – Create alignment, or congruence in beliefs, intents, and actions
3. Embody – Create the capacity to physically and organizationally do the work required

Taking Action decomposes into two modes:

1. Map – Make plans
2. Maneuver – Execute your plans

The updrafting key here is that you define very specific planning horizons for your maneuvers and know that you will re-plan often to meet the new requirements of the evolving environment in which you are creating.

Now we can see the whole practice—moving through the modes as they are needed to create whatever your want. Remember, sometimes these things will be explicit; other times they will just happen naturally. But these shifts in awareness and engagement are always part of the process. Of course, there is a lot more detail to come in later discussions.

How Do You Actually Get Started?

So now you have a brief introduction to all the modes of the creative lifecycle, but how does an innovation cycle, or the process of a new creation actually begin?

The story goes something like this.

1. You (or someone on a creative team) gets an intuition or an idea of what might be possible. Some idea intrigues you and your mind begins to fiddle with it.
2. You use your intuition, and possibly the intuition of others on the team, to explore the possibilities.
3. In your mind, or on a doodle, you describe what it might look like.
4. You then survey the world for more information about the creation, its possibilities, and anything else that might affect the creative process.
5. And then intuition plays with it again; the process will loop around in a idea form until it develops enough momentum to come into the world as a creative project.

Awareness Counts!

(This post is still part of the introduction to the Practice. It discusses how attention and awareness are a critical part of success. When we discuss the practice of updrafting and its modes, we will address issues of awareness as they pertain to each mode. Alternately we could, and many teachings do, focus on the state of consciousness and the development awareness, allowing that to lead into new patterns of action. There are many angles from which we can disect and approach the discussion, but Updrafting usually begins with the things we do as the entry point.)

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Our awareness or our state of consciousness is a very important part of the effectiveness of our actions. In updrafting we call an ongoing, working state of awareness a stance. There are two key reasons why the stance is critical:

1. Our awareness and understanding mediates our understanding of the world. That is, it is what stands between what is real and true, and what we can perceive and know.
2. Our awareness and understanding guides and colors our decision making process and therefore all of our actions.

Both what comes to us and what comes from us is affected by our stance, our state of awareness.

There are four key facets of awareness to consider in the updrafting stance. The first two have to do with freedom—-freedom from internal constraints. (Otherwise known as bad habits.) The second two concern our ability to successfully engage with our potential.

The Practice of Freedom

1) Non-Clinging : Not constraining yourself or the world

The definition of the verb to cling from Apple’s Dictionary is the antithesis of updrafting:

cling |kli ng | verb

1. l) hold on tightly to : she clung to Joe’s arm | they clung together | figurative she clung onto life.
2. ( cling to) adhere or stick firmly or closely to; be hard to part or remove from : the smell of smoke clung to their clothes | the fabric clung to her smooth skin.
3. ( cling to) remain very close to : the fish cling to the line of the weed.
4. remain persistently or stubbornly faithful to something : she clung resolutely to her convictions.
5. be overly dependent on someone emotionally : you are clinging to him for security

Non-clinging defines a preferred relationship to the existing world that is not trying to make some thing, person, or reality stay put permanently. While we can enjoy or not enjoy what is currently happening we must acknowledge that it is always changing. We cannot stop that process. Clinging is an internal resistance to the creative flow of the world that disables our creative power. We we cannot hold on to anything, we can only continually create the potential for its persistence. This non-clinging relationship is emotionally and energetically another way of being than clinging to a reality. It is participating in an act of creation, manifesting no resistance to the ongoing flow of the world.

Clinging affects our ability to create in many ways.

• It distorts our ability to see what actually is.
• It distorts our ability to choose appropriate action.
• It reflects an ongoing concept that you need something to be a certain way, which is different emotionally and energetically from wanting to create it.

Non-clinging also pertains to ideas of what is possible, for many of our limitations arise from our belief in them. Having no fixed ideas of what’s possible leaves room in the universe for new things to arise, which may be grander than you could imagine. Clinging to a fixed idea will almost always limit your possibilities to those things you think of as possible or probable.

A final but critical point: we must not have a strong attachment to our results, which is another form of clinging in which we require the world to end up a particular way. We have goals and targets that guide our actions, but the results must be surrendered to the intelligence of the world as it is arising altogether. That is part of our adventure—to see what happens next.

2) Surrender/Acceptance-Freely engaging with whatever is happening

To surrender is an ongoing process of suspending judgment and fixed ideas, and willingly and completely engaging with what happens. It can become the perfect stance for engaging creatively with the universe. We still choose. We still act. But we never resist. We see everything that flows into our space as part and parcel of our life and as part of the medium of creation that we are working in. It is all an expression of what the world has become and the working potential with which we create the future.

After Freedom, Updrafting

Coherence

Coherence is the practice of finding alignment with an arising possibility. Each of us exists along with potential events, objects, and people with whom to engage. Sometimes these possibilities are right in front of us—like a bus. But sometimes we find our engagement with them through synchronicities or intuitions, and in this practice we work to develop our skills in maintaining awareness of all the potentials arising around us. Sometimes we resist these potentials (it’s one of our ongoing bad habits) like a child resists going to bed. But sometimes we find perfect engagement with these opportunities—and that is what we call coherence. We become coherent with the arising possibility and therefore can use the existing momentum of that potential to our best advantage.

Congruence.

Being congruent implies being consistent in our actions relative to a goal that we have determined. It is part of the practice to be completely aware of our actions and thoughts to the extent that we learn to maintain congruence at all times. This is counter to many of our behaviors in which:

• We act to create a goal which we secretly believe is impossible; or
• We only work half heartedly at something because we don’t believe we are worth it; or
• We do a task all the while believing it is stupid or impossible; or
• One part of an organization (or an individual) is working at cross purposes with another.

Being congruent is how we maximize the potential of all our actions align with our goals. The practice of Updrafting will develop an enhanced awareness that will mediate an engagement with the world that is richer and more dynamic. We will be able to pick up on things that we would have previously missed and accomplish things we would not have imagined.

What does the stance end up looking like?

• Ever present awareness and interest in what is, which includes all the potentials and possibilities
• Non-clinging acceptance of (or surrender to) what has become
• Passionate interest in what might be created
• Joyful engagement with the task of creating the future

After Note:

In this model we include ideas, intentions, and thoughts in the category of actions—actions that generate real potential. We will see that these internal constructs can be harmful in that we are often resistant, negative, and limiting in our thoughts and beliefs. These thought structures, which are sometimes collectively called the ego, are often erroneously believed to be our actual selves and we use them to both limit who we think we can be, but also what we expect the world to be. We will come to view these thoughts as negative actions, or unskillful actions, and we will learn to reduce or eliminate them from our acting awareness—another step in expanding our awareness of what is possible in the world.