Send Me A Person Who Dreams During the Day

"Send me a person who dreams during the day, not during the night.  That's the person who's going to change the world."

- Lawrence of Arabia, T. E. Lawrence

"Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer."

- William S. Burroughs

From Steve Chandler:  

    Sometimes a coaching client of mine will claim to not know the answer to something or "not know how to" decide something.

     Often my clients have a lot of opportunity in life but their real problem is choosing.  They think they don't know how to decide what to do, and so they live a totally paralyzed life.

      So, I will tell them to take a long walk by the water, go to the beach and take a long, long walk, just by yourself and don't have any distractions, don't have your earphones on or anything like that. Just walk and listen to the water and live inside the inquiry of what would be the boldest, bravest thing for me to do?

    And they almost always, when they do the assignment, come back with some amazing insight they receive. A strong, new choice that they have made and it's really got a lot of heart in it!

      When you walk, you activate the right brain because you cannot move your left leg without the right brain kicking in and activating. So the left, right, left, right of your walking actually guarantees that you're now in whole brain thinking while you're walking. 

     That's why so many great philosophers from Plato to Emerson to Brenda Ueland, walked and walked and walked.  Colin Wilson, walking... walking along the cliffs of Cornwall with his dogs every day. 

     And because it activates whole brain thinking, it allows the right brain to serve you and help you.  If we're seated and balled up with the  body clenched in the seated position all day in front of a computer screen, the left brain is processing all day but the right brain will just check out.  (Ever seen those rubber band balls? Ever spend your day as a human version of that?) What happens in the the night after that is you have the wildest dreams in the world. Because the right brain is finally being allowed to express itself, but it's in dreams, not in waking hours. 

        Now that occurs when someone is willing to go for a long walk, all alone, by herself, to just see what comes up.  It's a very brave thing to do because there's huge resistance to it.  People don't want to do it.  They'd rather live inside the illusion of busy-ness - frantic false activity all day! - than be brave and go to solitude and silence and walk.  That's why I've always talked about the ultimate seminar being one in which no one speaks.

Live well and prosper,
Steve
  
All the best, 
Rick Wallace