The Edge of Consciousness: Success, Stress and Meditation

Successful people know their limitations. 

We know that there is only so much we can do - especially as we get older. In our twenties there are no limits to the amount of energy we can spend. We are able to waste time figuring out what we are doing and still find success because we have the spare energy to make up for lost time.

For most of us it is somewhere around thirty that we realize this was an unsustainable model. We have limits and if we were going to continue to be successful we can no longer rely on brute strength and volume. We have to find way to produce the same amount with less effort. 

We have to become more efficient - this requires strategic thinking. 

As we grow older this trend continues. So does the quest for efficiency. With the technology and communication revolution exploding around us, we are expected to produce more than ever. Between our work and family there is more to do than hours in the day. We end up sacrificing down time, recreation and social outlets to meet our demanding schedule. 

This recipe for disaster leads to burn-out, anxiety and depression. When we reach this crisis point we desperately need rest. We seek out our family doctor. She starts us on depression and anxiety medications that mask our symptom and allow us to carry on in this unsustainable pace. 

Finally we crash all together.

At least thats what happened to me. I was able to maintain this pace until I turned forty. I had been running on fumes for a few years by this time. I was still producing as much as ever. In fact my late thirties were the most successful years of my life - professionally. My family life and health suffered. When some personal tragedies fell on our home I was out of energy and my health gave up on me. 

It's funny how life steps in and sets your priorities for you when you fail to do so. I have been forced to work on my efficiencies first and let go of my perfectionism and workaholic behaviours. The job for me now is to find balance in my life. I can complicate the process. 

But it can be as simple as doing more of what works and less of what doesn't.

Taking time for reflection and introspection is critical. I grew up around meditation, my mother has taught Transcendental Meditation (TM) since I was a baby. With TM you sit quietly and repeat a "mantra" twice a day for twenty minutes. I have long understood the value of meditation and the need to clear our minds and get a break from "compulsive thinking". 

When the Buddhists talk about "enlightenment" it is described as, "the absence of suffering". The word suffering can be replaced with compulsive thinking. So mediation, and relief from thinking, may be the single most important activity we can undertake to achieve happiness, peace and success.

Unfortunately for me, sitting quietly for twenty minutes is akin to water board torture.

Fortunately, over the years I have been able to find suitable replacements for "traditional" meditation practices. In Eckart Tolle's book "The Power of Now" he tells us taking a single breath can give us enough of a break from thought to make a difference. I have found repetitive exercise such as swimming, or running works well. As a martial arts practitioner, the moving meditation of forms, or Kata, and repetitive drills also provides the break i needed. Even a short break from compulsive thinking can increase our focus and efficiency. 

We all need a break from our thinking. The absolute inability to control thought ultimately leads to insanity. 

This is why so many people shoot themselves in the head when they commit suicide - the damn thing won't shut up. 

I have recently found a new type of meditation that has produced some truly astounding results in a short period of time. It's called binaural beats technology. I won't get into the science behind it. I have been doing it for at least twenty minutes a day for the last few days. I can say that not only does it work in quieting my mind, but I don't have any trouble sitting for the twenty minutes. 

I will be investigating this more. For now I will leave you with the sample below to try for your self. The only thing you need to know is it can be played at lower volumes, you have to use stereo headphones for it to work and you should not listen while driving. 

Find a quiet place and sit and enjoy a break. 

Please leave a comment and let me know what your experience was.

Best, Sam Edge
Check out the Edge On Strategy

The Edge on Father / Daughter Relationships

According to my family mythology surrounding parenting, boys teach mothers and girls teach fathers. I'm sure there are exceptions, however, it has enough credibility to survive a few generations, especially with my First Nations (Native Canadian) relatives. The fact that I have three daughters certainly supports this notion. I call it a Myth because it really has no grounding in scientific or measurable facts, yet it explains events that are beyond our control.

My girls are, by far, my greatest teachers. 

The most intense relationship, for lack of a better word, is with my twelve year old. She is the product of a previous relationship that fell apart shortly after she was born. Her mother was younger than me. The responsibility of motherhood was too much for her at the time. As a result, I took on most of the parenting responsibility for the first ten years. My first daughter my "Starter Child", teaching me to parent through trial and error. 

My parenting philosophy is to ensure the child grows up feeling safe and loved at all times and above all else (and not to let her be the stinky kid in school). 

By ensuring she felt safe and loved growing up we now have a strong and healthy relationship that can weather life's obstacles. 

If you have followed my blogs or read my books, you will know I use my life's experience as the foundation for my writing. I believe that lessons learned from trial and error have weight and depth. Further, the more work that a particular lesson requires the more valuable it is. I don't share my experience until I have reached some sort of internal resolution. My writing objective is not to use the world as a sounding board while I work out life's challenges. (Although the writing process can lead to amazing self discovery). My writing objective is to help others by sharing what I learned from life's challenges once I have worked through them.  

In 2012 I lost a bitter custody dispute. My oldest went to live with her mother, nine hours away. In the course of 24 hours my family was chopped by twenty-five percent. Working through this has been simultaneously the most difficult and most rewarding experiences of my near half-century on the planet. This reaffirms one of my core beliefs that:

Difficult times are opportunities to become better, stronger and faster than before. 

As a direct result of this dispute, we have a co-parenting agreement where my daughter is able to rebuild the relationship with her mother while maintaining her connection to me, my wife and her sisters. Although, the role I will play in her teenage years is not what I had expected, or wanted, things have turned out just fine, if not even better, for her (shhhhhh, don't tell my ex I said that). It is a crushing blow to my male pride and ego to have to take a back seat to her mom in the parenting for the next few years; however, it is her happiness, not mine, that I am concerned with. In the end she will have a balanced upbringing with the benefit of a close tie to both parents. 

In retrospect, it was the family mythology of daughters teaching fathers that I leaned on to make it through the dark times of dispute and separation anxiety. It gave me faith that everything would work out. I was able to actively seek out the hidden lessons and be grateful for them as they manifested. It is a perfect example of the Power of Myth that I have been writing about recently. 

In times of crisis we lean on our stories to overcome the fear of the unknown - we are even willing to suspend logic.

Currently, my Daughter is with me for three weeks over Christmas. It's been a tough eighteen months for the poor kid and she's a little shell-shocked from it all. I have years of practice working through the tough times, she doesn't. For the first few days of her visit she was stand-offish and tense. The conflict between her parents had taken an obvious toll. It was like she was waiting for something bad to happen. Waiting for me to drag her into the conflict she desperately wants no part of.

I sat her down and explained that we were both grieving since our relationship changed and getting used to idea that life is going to unfold differently than we'd expected. I told her "different" could be hard and scary but it was up to us how it turned out. 

I ensured her things could be better than ever if we worked together. 

I told her I was just figuring things out as I went along and if something I did made her feel uncomfortable or sad she should speak up. I told her it was okay for her to grieve in her own way too and if she had any questions she should ask. Most of all I told her we should take it easy on each other and remember deep down that we love each other and we're on the same side. I ended by sharing the family myth about her being my teacher and thanked her for all she'd done for me.

It was like turning on a light. You could see her changing from low to high frequency as the fear and anxiety melted away.  Gone was the fear of the unknown - she felt safe and loved. Since then the tension is gone and our connection is even stronger than before. These are the lessons that stick with us. They are even better when we can share them. 

In moments like this, being a parent is the best and most important thing I've ever done.

Kind Regards, Sam Edge

The Next RIght Thing ...

Happy Humpday,

On October 15, 2013 I got over 1,300 hits on my Poetry Blog. This is more than ten times my average traffic of roughly 100 hits per day(hpd). Now, before I launch into a speech about how hard work and perseverance pays off and the complex inner workings of critical mass and tipping point dynamics, I will disclose the following:

I have no friggin' clue what I did right.

If you follow my Poetry Blog and can offer any insight please let me know so I can do it again. I looked at all the obvious variables and I can find nothing unusual.  It closely followed a poem I wrote for the passing of my Grandma so ... um .... well... I'm not really sure what to say about that.

Ultimately, I have surrendered to the reality that even a broken clock is right twice a day and my explosion in hits was the result of the Chaos Theory in action. That is, all the moving parts lined up strictly as a result of repetition and inevitable coincidence and nothing to do with my highly contested brilliance.  

Doing the Next Right Thing

The older I get the more I realize that "less is more". As a young buck I adhered to a "run fast - hit hard" paradigm. This, combined with a tendency to over-think things, was inefficient and I did a lot of work with marginal results. The only reason I had any success at all was I had endless energy and I could afford to run down numerous dead ends before getting it right.  

This frantic pace proved to be unsustainable and by the time I hit forty I was burning blue smoke out of every orifice (and leaking from a few gaskets). Now, I've spent the better part of a decade learning how to do more with less. One of the keys is to put 100% into everything I do. This requires more than simple brute strength - it requires some strategic thinking. Such as:

1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Do what is in front of me first.
3. Don't do other peoples work.
4. Identify my strengths and weaknesses.
5. Do more of what I'm good at.
6. Delegate what I suck at.

These are some of the basic strategic elements in no particular order of living an efficient life. It can be summarized by: "Do the Next Right Thing". If I do what is in front of me to the best of my ability the next thing requires much less effort. Conversely, if I am preoccupied with past or future things, I expend more energy and produce less and lower quality. 

Hardly rocket science, however, it has worked well for me. If you find your self jammed up over a thing. Stop. Do the next right thing and nothing else.  Rinse and repeat. You will find nothing is insurmountable - at least this is my experience. In the case of my mysterious increase in hits, the next right thing is writing this Post.

Now it's time for a coffee break. 

Enjoy the rest of Hump Day, Sam

The Edge of Safety

Everything important in life I learned before I was six.

My Mom and I started off on our own. She was a single mom until I was six. My Dad was a little on the wild side, to put it mildly. She figured that the best place for him was away from us. At nineteen years old she bundled me up and ran away to safety.

I don't have many memories about those first six years - just vignettes and snapshots that are random and out of sequence.  When I think about those years I get the picture of Christopher Robin in a rain jacket skipping through mud puddles.

‘One, two, buckle my shoe’

We lived with my Grandparents for awhile. Then we got a place on Park Avenue. That's the Park Avenue in Kelowna, B.C., Canada not Park Avenue, New York, N.Y., USA. There are probably no two points on the Earth farther apart than the two Park Avenues.

Mom worked. I remember a pizza restaurant called the Colony. The memory of this place is the clearest of my first six years. I remember the name of the restaurant, how my mom looked, the smells and the tastes - especially the taste of pizza. Every payday Friday we would have a mushroom and olive pizza. We were vegetarians. I thought everyone was. In the 60's many were.

To this day I associate mushrooms and olives with being safe and happy.

This feeling of safety started to fade when I was six. My mom remarried and I had two half sisters in rapid succession. I was a sensitive kid and I didn't adapt very well. I didn't feel like I fit and I didn't have that feeling of safety any more.

And then this happened ------------------------------->

I spent a decade or so chasing my tail and trying to fit in. I all but erased the simple lessons of my first six years.

I was unhappy and unsafe.

I am happy to report my eventual return to happy and safe. The circle is complete. Today these feelings come from within and are supported by a loving wife and three daughters. There is no longer any question of where I fit. Not only am I safe but I now provide safety to others.

Last night my six-year-old wanted to sleep with me. She wanted to feel safe. Sprawled diagonally across my bed, her blanket had fallen off and she'd dropped her stuffy. I fixed her blanket and realised it was the wrong stuffy. I went to her room and got the right one.

In that moment, as she squeezed her stuffy and sunk a little deeper into the pillow, she knew what safe and happy felt like. She didn't know how or why and it didn't matter. It was part of her now. It would kick in when she needed it.

Before the complications and compound complications love was simple, not something that had to be worked on. My Mom taught me all I ever needed to know about love and life in my first six years. She taught me a lifetime of value before either of us ever found out about the things we didn't know.

"One, two, buckle my shoe ..."

The Edge of Reason

"It's beter to keep your mouth shut and have people think you a fool than speak and remove all doubt." Mark Twain et. al.

I attributed the quote above to Mark Twain et. al. as there is some debate as to its genesis. Regardless of origin, this little pearl of wisdom has served me well. When I am unsure of where I stand or, more frequently, when I am not fit for Human consumption, I try to listen more and speak less. 

I learned this lesson only after many years of conflict, trial and error.

For most of my thirties I worked in an office with twenty-five employees. I was the only man. I worked there for seven years. I was in a senior management postion. Any authority I had over my employees was an illusion that I was allowed to entertain from time to time. 

Any true managing that I was able to achieve was through the art of strategic submission. I leaned more about how to get along with the Humans during those years than all the combined years before and since. Overall I managed to play well with the other kids. I learned to brush off the passive aggressive jabs that I had become accustom to having for lunch - for the most part.  

There were a few conflicts which I chose to engaged in with way too much vigor.

The delicate art of assertively setting and maintaining boundaries came slowly.  Rather, I spent many nights plotting revenge on those who I was convinced were picking on me. Ultimately I resorted to guerilla tactics. 

I would spend an entire week crafting an e-mail to be concise,  hard-hitting and full of double meaning and deniability. I fuelled fires with with phrases such as: "I understand how difficult ... I am happy to assist with ...  complex issues for a person of your .... given your limited ..." 

My objective was to exact revenge while maintaining deniability. 

At exactly 4:25 on Friday afternoon. I would send the e-mail, turn off my computer and go home for the weekend. I would be the last this the recipient would see before their weekend. They were left unable to respond. Monday they would be apoplectic. 

A little, little man   

Ultimately that job crashed into a mountain and I was eaten in the ensuing weeks. I will always be grateful for that experience. I was in the most precarious social situation I could imagine. As a result I have never since found a personality conflict I am unable to rise above. 

From this experience, I developed the single best strategy to promote peaceful relations with the Humans. I sleep on it - that's it. I don't react in the moment I go home and let it sit for a night. Almost all the time the problem resolves itself as I sleep. When it doesn't I am able to find a way to resolve it with out bloodshed or viscous e-mail campaigns. 

I still write e-mails to resolve resentments but I have my wife proofread them first. 

Today I know that I need to play well with the other kids. It's just not worth the price I pay. Besides, I need all the energy I have to be the best husband and father I can be.  I don't have the luxury of nursing resentments. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

The reason I went on this rant today was because I have been on a YouTube safari this past week checking out slam poetry and spoken word recitals. I was looking for inspiration from my own poetry and trying to get a feel for what goes on out there in the world. I even thought I could see where my place might be...