from childhood to adolescence…you think it’s easy?

May 15th, 2012

If you’ve been hanging around PHC for a while, you will recognize the letter that follows as the difficult transition from the security of childhood to the adventure of adolescence.

You know how teenager are at one moment begging you to help them, love them, understand them and the next moment they are telling you to f-ck off? I’ve explained that as the part of them that still wants to be a dependent child battling with the part of them that wants to be an independent adult.

This letter from a teen who has just made the initial transition shows how strong that draw back to childhood can be, and how painful the loss of that time of life can be.

I am just blown away by how articulate this young person is about their feelings…

Im growing up and it makes me so mad and I can’t stop feeling sad and angry about how much I changed?

I will be turning 15 soon.  yes I know im still young but Im so much different then when I just turned 13.

I was this little immature geeky Anime,Manga,Video game, Starkid, Cosplay (costume play) obsessed kid who loved dressing up as characters were ever I went and also going to cons. My life revolved around those and my one best friend in the whole world Jeremy. We used to do everything together we had one week sleepovers and we really were immature making videos of us cosplaying going to fairs and being idiots playing light sabers in the middle of the woods at 3:00am We were never your adverage kids .

Now Im in 8th grade and Im so different! I still like Anime but im not as obbsesed with it like I used too and the other stuff I don’t even do even do anymore I never see my friend anymore because we live so far apart Im not even Immature anymore.I found my old computer in there and there were so many videos of me and jeremy on there from summer 2010 and I started to cry I really miss those days.

Now im so different I act different and everything I don’t even look the same! I remember the day I stepped into my 7th grade class room I remember that day exactly as it was. im gonna be a freshman I get angry about it so much I punch walls and everything. Also I never really had a childhood my childhood started in 2010 when I met jeremy if you knew my background story you would know why.

In 2 years my life completly changed and I will never be the same and it pisses me off so much. I want to play light sabers I want to talk about starkid I want to cosplay I want to get looks from people when I go to the mall or park or just town dressed up as Naruto Uzumaki I miss being called Kiba Kun want to be that person again.

I hate who I am now. I can’t stop crying and being angry with everyone.

Also should I delete the videos from my computer and how can I stop being like this? I cut myself and everything.

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My Teenager Hates Me 1 – easy to blame them, hard to look at ourself

May 15th, 2012

I’ve put together 4 videos that talk about what you do when you feel: my teenager hates me.

What a hard, hard place, but there is relief. It might take some work and some challenging self-reflection, but it’s possible.  Here are the videos. Enjoy.

My Teenager Hates Me – Part 1 – Easy steps & hard steps

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engaging your curiosity

May 1st, 2012

Do you know Amory Lovins?

Being interested in Environmental Science, he is a guy you should know.
He is not the most exciting or fun speaker (he’s a bit of a nerd) but his ideas are amazing. If you’re thinking about a future in environmental science (as something to study, as something to do for a job, as something you care deeply about) there are ideas here that are worth paying attention to.
I’d be interested in hearing which parts of his talk are interesting to you…what stands out? What makes you curious? What makes you think, “how could that work?”
Example: I was talking to a junior in HS recently.  He was watching TV and saw an add for a Dyson fan. http://www.dyson.com/fans/
He jumped out of his chair. He had to figure out how it worked…he just loved solving problems and figuring out how the world works.  Three hours later came out of his room and said to his parents, “I think I figured it out!”  He was awake to his curiosity and willing to explore…
What is the kind of thing that would make you disappear in curiosity for 3+hours?
Oh, and for those of you who care about the world, but are having trouble finding compelling people to hang out with (like many HS students who would rather get high than do something intellectually engaging) when they showed the people watching the presentation I thought, “I’ll bet that there are people here you’d love hanging out with.”
How can we find them?

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the search 4 wholeness…but blessing the halfness

April 26th, 2012

the path to wholeness...it's gotta be rocky

I like to talk about and create experiences of wholeness. I think that they are really, really important.

Summer camp was for me a place where I felt totally alive. Whether it was running through the woods playing capture the flag, or waterskiing, or going on canoe trips, I loved it. It was my element. An experience of wholeness.

Playing on a state championship caliber hockey team was an amazing combination of excitement, fun, and challenge. I was able to discover and use my talents and abilities. I was pushed to be better than I thought I was. I was challenged to places I didn’t even know were possible. I was learning through my experience. An experience of wholeness.

I feel lucky that I had these opportunities, because in the academic/school and the social world (with girls at least), I was amazingly lost. Not an experience of wholeness. In this place I felt broken and oblivious.

In the old times when someone had an experience of wholeness they put stuff on them – necklaces, scars, tattoos, other jewelry. They knew that it was so, so important to help the person who had the experience remember it.

It’s hard to remember those times when we feel whole. They don’t happen so often – especially these days.

Too often these days we experience half-ness and think that it’s wholeness.

Here is what I think is going on:

Too many adults aren’t connected to their wholeness. There are compromises all over their lives – a job they hate, relationships that seem wrong, inability to dig into vulnerability. Really, this is what I see most of all. There are a lot of people who aren’t good at being uncomfortable and confronting the hard things in their lives.

Here is what it looks like: lip service about getting healthy, unwillingness to stop bad habits (smoking, drinking, pot smoking, caffeine dependance, video games, etc), and lack of action in getting into the challenges of loving people and begin loved by them…and there are certainly more.

What happens when we think that our lives are whole, when they are actually half, we begin to bless the half-ness in other people. Partially because we don’t know what wholeness is and partially because if no one else becomes whole, it makes us seem less lame.

One reason teenagers are so angry and lost is because they don’t have access to enough inspired (read: Whole) adults. Here is what a young man has to say about what happened in high school:

 The main message I received over and over again is that it is not the system that is fucked up, it is you. Your unhappiness and resentment is your fault. We are not diseased, you are.

This was told to us every day, usually not directly. But you consistently feel undermined.

Your dreams are shot down by those who did not follow their own dreams now locked in jobs that they do not enjoy. They failed to follow their dreams and they only took what was handed to them.

Many grow embittered and they will tell that is all there is because that is all they know. That is the real world they say condescendingly each time you dare to speak of your own dreams. And how could they think it otherwise.

If you break out of their real world and you find more than what was handed to you that means that they have failed. Failed in their very lives. It forces them to confront their own unhappiness which is covered over and then forced on to students who step out of line and defy them.

That is why I left high school.   But I could not put it into words. My feelings and emotions were trampled upon and labeled invalid. But even if I could have spoken then, who would have listened? My parents to some extent but they too shared the fear because I wanted to stop something that was only an imitation of life.

Who would have listened?

This is from Michael Meade’s audio program Branches of Mentoring which you can find here.

It’s time to get courageous. And start to develop the muscles to be able to be uncomfortable, get into the hard vulnerable stuff and find wholeness.

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The presence of death

April 26th, 2012

close calls...what would your headstone say?

Does it ever occur to you how close death is every day?

I stand at the corner watching cars whizzing past and think, I am about 3 feet from dying. While I ride my bike around town, I think, one cell phone distraction and that car wipes me out. Driving down the highway at a high rate of speed, a tire blows, that same distracted driver.

Death is all over the place and close. We face it (usually unconsciously) many, many times a day.

It scares me. Thankfully it doesn’t paralyze me – and I am grateful for that.

But I do realize that it could happen. To me. To my wife. To my kids. To my family. To my friends. It has happened. And it is no fun.

I have to admit that the thought of losing my wife or kids scares the shit out of me. It’s hard, hard to imagine. I wipe it from my thoughts and feelings as rapidly as I can.

But, I also spend a moment wondering, what if it really happened? How would I possibly go on?

The thing that keeps me going is this: I have no idea what the future holds. But I do know that I have today. Today I have my wife and kids (and friends,etc) and I have the opportunity to share life with them. The thing that will crush me most if/when that moment of death arrives is looking back and thinking, I wasn’t there with them, I didn’t know them, I didn’t push through my own crap to spend time with them, I was too involved with my own crap to enjoy what I had, I got too wrapped up in all the difficult stuff about parenting and being a partner to embrace it as the choice I made.

I hope it is a long time until I have to put this theory to the test, but when those moment come up when I realize how close death is, I think that knowing I did the best I could to live as fully as possible with the life I had with them, would allow me to figure out how to take steps forward out of that place I don’t want to imagine.

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Painful blast back to middle school

April 23rd, 2012

this was NOT me on my way to Bar/Bat Mitzvahs

A family friend had her Bat Mitzvah this weekend. It was at a temple very much like the one I was invited to weekend after weekend during 7th and 8th grade.

As the service reached it’s 2nd hour, I looked over at the middle school girls (and boy, singular) in attendance. They had been invited to wittiness the coming of age ritual of their friend. But, they probably didn’t realize that they would have to sit through a 3 hours service, mostly in Hebrew, a language they didn’t understand. Ouch.

And I remember pleading with my mom, “Do I have to go to the service? Can I just go to the party? Please!”

Girls!? v. Utter Boredom…a painful choice

Truth be told, the party wasn’t any easier than sitting utterly bored and lost for 2-3 hours, as it meant having to interact with, gulp, girls. It also meant my having to watch the other boys interact with girls in a way that seemed impossible to me. And thus made me feel  like a loser.

So, it was quite an adventuresome event, this Bar Mitzvah.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I’m not religious. I consider myself spiritual. However, I did convert to Judaism when my wife and I got married and we are involved with a temple, so I have jewish connections. And  for the record, my wife says that I pulled a jedi-mind trick on the rabbi who converted me, as it was likely the easiest conversion in history.

Rituals are Boring

I haven’t changed much from when I was in 7th grade – 2 hours listening to a ceremony in Hebrew is torture. I really didn’t like it. I got antsy. I was bored. I thought a lot about who was there and why. And it was clear that I understood what was happening about 2 billion more times than I did in 7th grade (or even 5 years ago), but that has more to do with how little I knew then than how much I know now.

Sitting there, I spent a lot of time wondering why in the world would people come to a conservative temple. There was all kinds of “god is the best, HE’s given us blah, blah, blah.” “Oh, mighty king of the universe…” which offends me on at least 2 points. I didn’t know what was being said, I didn’t like how it was being said, it was taking forever, and even when I did understand I didn’t often agree with it.

And we’re thinking of having our kids Bar Mitzvah’d because???

Rituals are boring, but really meaningful…

I have changed a lot since 7th grade because in sitting there, it gave me time to remember that I think rituals are really important. I think that there should be more of them, because I think it would help us make meaning of life .

While my kind of ritual happens while hanging out in the woods with 100 men, cleaning the forest floor and making beautiful alters and chanting into the wee hours of the morning as man after man takes part in the active part of the ritual, I began to realize that sitting in that hall for all those hours was a different kind of that same experience.

What I’ve come to learn is that rituals are long and boring. There is a lot of waiting around. There are parts that are traditional and get done over and over again, and there are moments of pure courage and inspiration. Sitting there between my 2 kids, I began to appreciate both the boring and inspiring moments.

 

 

 

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lets talk hockey…

April 20th, 2012

I’m a big  hockey fan, specifically a Chicago Blackhawks fan. It’s playoff time. So the excitement is high.

If you don’t know a lot about hockey, it’s a fast, physical game. The players are just so, so good, which you might not be able to appreciate fully because they make it look so easy.

My team is in trouble. The other night this happened:

Not good. There is the level of being concerned about the players well being, and thankfully he is okay.

But, I want to go into the hockey side of it.

As a competitor, I want to beat the shit out of the guy who hurt our player. In the video you’ll notice that after the play a Blackhawks player goes and tries to fight the guy who made the hit – Torres. And Torres “turtles”, meaning that he curls up and protects himself.

Total act of cowardice. If you’re going to take a run at someone, then you’d better be ready to stand up for yourself. This completely gets my blood boiling. I’m pissed. I want to be playing. I’ll bring some choice words and a nice slash to the back of his knees or head.

Now, there are all kinds of debated in here about violence, and fighting, and what’s being a coward, but again, I headed a to a different place.

I can feel all the anger inside. It’s really big and I’m ready to go. Blood is boiling…while he was being put on the stretcher, someone on the other team was laughing!  What a fucker. Lets get it on.

But there is a small spark of rationality somehow inside. One of our guys is seriously hurt. We want revenge. But, if we go hurt someone, we’re going to get a penalty and end up costing our team a win.

The best revenge? Winning. Gotta play our asses off. But, that’s just a spark, and the rage is huge.

The game starts again and they get back out there, partially furious and partially worried about their teammate.

I just want to kick the other teams ass and win like, 50-0. So I work to channel all that anger, all that frustration, all the emotions into hoping the Blackhawks can bring intensity and play as well as they can.

This is REALLY, REALLY hard. For me, but really for them.

I don’t know if you can feel the intensity of the moment. But it is one of the things that I love about sports. Players are constantly challenged to raise above adversity. To be in the intensity of a challenge and have to fight your way out. I am massively impressed by their ability to stay calm, not my ability so much, but they are amazing.

And sports is unforgiving. Because they didn’t win.

The Blackhawks almost won. Right when I had accepted the loss and felt the disappointment and disbelief, they tied the game with 4 seconds left to send the game to Over Time (OT). It’s never over until it’s over – a lesson I learned in a painful way back in my playing days.

But a couple minutes into that recaptured hope and the excitement of OT, they lost on a really bad goal. Ouch.

Okay, it’s just a game. And it’s for enjoyment. But I’m still mad and hurting from the loss.

I reason, it’s just one game. I figured with a couple days to calm down, the team would come out with a determined effort, channel that anger and frustration, and win big. The only way to avenge the hit on one of their beloved teammates was to win.

They did come out strong. And played pretty well, but gave up 2 goals half way through the 3rd period.  Crap!  I gave up hope. Braced for the disappointment again (i couldn’t handle it and fast forwarded the recorded part of the game)…until they scored to pull within a goal. Hope back.

Then, miraculously they tied the game with 1:15 left  to send it to Over Time…an amazing feat. And again, I feel the resilience in the team I love rooting for, I feel we’re going to avenge the hit on one of our players.

But 2 minutes into OT the other team scores another bad goal. Really? Ouch.

Being an athlete is a lot about physical talent. But, just like in life, to use your talent to it’s fullest, you have to be really tough in the brain part and the heart part. So much of life is how you show up in the face of adversity. How you handle it when you care deeply, try really hard, show up in the way you want to show up, and fail.

I don’t know why I am so connected to the ups and downs of a team I’m not even a part of, but I do. I feel the pain. I feel the intensity.

I guess I really wish I could play. I want to be in those kinds of challenges. I want to test myself and see how I would respond. Because now, with the Blackhawks down 3-1 (the team that wins 4 advances to play more, the other team’s season is over), I’m bracing of the end of the season. I am not feeling hopeful. My anger has abated, and I’m feeling sort of numb.

I’m fascinated what the players are feeling and how they’re dealing with it.

Yeah, I guess I wish I was part of that game…a dream unfulfilled…

 

 

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Improv Everywhere in Portland?

April 20th, 2012

If you haven’t checked out Improv Everywhere, they do some really fun stuff.

My favorite part is the older guy holding the “a high five!” sign gently shaking his head, like, yeah, it’s coming, you’re not too cool for this…

I love the shake things up  and kick people out of their daily routine moments.

Some of the stuff they do lends itself well to NYC, where there are lots and lots of people. In Portland, it’s a bit more challenging, but we tried a little Clown Patrol on the trolly line, but there is more that we can be doing.

What ideas do you have?

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getting real

April 20th, 2012

I was reading the Single Dad Laughing blog this morning. I was listening to a TED talk by Brene Brown also.

And I was wondering, why is that people are drawn to these? What makes something compelling?

I started thinking about Dan, the single dad laughing, and going “how can I be more like him?” And it hit me.

I spend  ton of time trying to do things “right”. I talk all day about discovering ourselves and being confident, but then when it comes time to work my marketing, I try to figure out the formula for how I’m supposed to do it.  But,  what I know is that people are drawn to authenticity, vulnerability,  and honest expressions.

So I’m going for it. I’m challenging myself to be more me and see what happens.

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a small topic…the Big Bang…2 simple syllables

April 19th, 2012

One of my teachers, Michael Meade is a great story teller. He is brilliant, just brilliant at reading between the lines of ideas.

Most cultures have 5, 10, 20 intricate creation stories that try to explain how life began, where we came from, and how this whole thing started.

And we have all brilliant and well paid people all over the place trying to figure it out and what we’ve come up with is 2 one syllable words: Big Bang.

What I take from this is we massively over simplify things. We want easy and elegant solutions.

But life is complex.

More specifically in my world, parenting is complex. Our kids aren’t their test scores or grades. When we think that these kinds of things matter we are collapsing our creativity and losing our humanity.

Our kids are complex and interesting. They have a genius that lives inside them. They have all kinds of things to offer the world.

The way that I say it is this: they’re soul is here for a reason. We’ve got to discover that reason. Until they discover this genius, they will be unfulfilled and searching.

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