It is strange, lacking both progeny and a wife, to have a strong feeling of wanting to leave a legacy, but here it is. I want to become and express the best version of myself in service of something larger than this life. 2012 I think will be key for that through synthesis, synthesizing being and doing, time and timelessness, and melding the experiences, influences, and talents of 43 years into something deeply personal enough to be universal, and vibrationally true enough to be timeless. With ease and grace.

Yes.. let me be known for following, with clear-eyed compassion, a heroic, even mythic life journey, with an ease and lightness that inspires others to do the same. People after can live it forward.If and when space/time pancakes in 2012 like some expect it to, I say let it collapse into something great. Let my life being a living puja that the world is meant to be free in and life was made to be enjoyed. If it is enjoyed in the 5th dimension beyond the grid of space and time, all the better.

I’ve never expected anything, especially relationships, to last, and often pretend I’m nearly dead, so its not so strange I consider legacies.

What is a little strange is how rarely our legacies relate to our personal goals. There are so many seen and unseen forces that can live through us and leave a breadcrumb trail behind us on our behalf even when we forget or choose not to. I’m proud and excited for my sister who recently, at 40, discovered the gift of silence and spaciousness and has learned to love the very same unstructured time that used to tyrannize her.

If  I have a choice/influence in the matter of a legacy at all it is in paying attention to the people and places that open me to new frontiers of experience and ways of being.

I think that is why I have lived most of my life in beautiful and inspiring places like Aspen, Esalen, Ojai, Santa Barbara and Carmel.

Why my pantheon of influences is multi-clultural, multi-dimensional, and both incarnated and not.

Why I don’t use an alarm clock or carry a watch. With people, slow is fast and fast is slow.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that Eckhart Tolle spent the two years on the park bench, Joseph Campbell 5 years in the cabin with his books, or Julia Butterfly-Hill 2 years in the branches of a redwood named Luna.

There’s something there.  In the commitment to the chrysalis. This post is to the people who inhabit and tend those sacred places and inner spaces and fires, who organize their lives around them and soak them into the marrow of their bones in a way other people can feel and recognize.

In 2012, here’s to renouncing entitlement and sacrifice and living true lives that burn hot and leave a glow for others to see by. See you around the campfire.

Apart from the hot springs and schmorgasbord of every kind of movement/artistic/creative/spiritual/deep change workshop you can imagine?

Apart from the fact that their 50th anniversary is coinciding with this whole 11/11/11 thing?

And the long smooth slippery and patented strokes of the Esalen Massage?

Well..there are quite a few other cool things, things I learned when I spent 5 weeks there as a work study participant in fall of 2005. If you haven’t dropped out of society yet, try it, you’ll like it!

• There is amazing wholesome and nourishing organic food, grown a few steps from the kitchen.
• There are the famous natural hotspring tubs and glass walled showers on cliffs overlooking the pacific.
• There are great conversations with fantastic people who have lived there on-proprerty or are visiting from all over the world.
• There is a fantastic meditation hut over a creek and a quiet and private beach and lots of room to just meander.
• There is an arts center, gallery and festival.
• There is a preschool that looks super fun.
• There is an intellectual/research brain trust called the Center for Theory and Research that was started by Michael Murphy in 1962 and is still going strong.

But to me and my Apollonian temperament, the best of the best is that the whole place (its values, buildings, people (past and present) and future vision is organized around supporting and accelerating our evolution and transformation.  Something in the air, the light, the place fosters that inner alchemy in just the right way for you, whether that takes the form of a gentle and private retreat and soak, histrionic and out of character role playing (ie, The Max), or some esoteric woo woo sister Moon practices to rock your whole personality structure to the core and shake your Etch-A-Sketch clean.

This about says it: “It is a place, as Thomas Wolfe said about America, “where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.”

All this and more and more is why, starting November 10th, I am excited to become the new Marketing Communications Manager at Esalen. You’re invited to celebrate that and yourself, by nourishing yourself as deeply as you care to.

Oh, and here is the link to the PDF of the new catalog that just came out.

And you can get a print version mailed to you too. How cool is that?

See you soon.

Doug E

Sometimes I’ll secrete  a thought that seems like a fantastic point of departure to a faraway land–an eccentric is a pioneer turned inward-- and I’ll wait on the dock with it and enjoy its company while it rattles around looking for a happy home in a photo, journal or blog.

Other times I’ll have a judgement disguised as an observation–people who wear leather vests are lost in a haze of Harley noise, bourbon, and cigarette smoke–so I’ll add another repentant  thought over the top to cancel it out: I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you.

Still other times I will think something prideful about how thoughtless I am–Wow, so quiet. Like a  cat or a zen master. Oops wait, they don’t think that.

Less frequent but more fun are the times when I consciously  take advantage of the mind’s infinite innocence and naivete and slip it a placebo–Sting is on his way over for breakfast.

I cleaned my apartment in just under an hour this morning with that one perched on my shoulder.

What is your relationship to thought? Can you say me what your next thought will be?

The last thing a fish would invent is water. In the same way the last thing I noticed I was addicted to was suffering.

It was everywhere, I was soaking in it. My body was wafting a feeling tone of bone-weary sadness and lethargy from every pore. The pain body took up occupancy then slimed every square inch before bolting all the windows and doors to make sure my identification with it, as it, was complete. Its jangled and spiky vibes were systemic, pernicious. As Adyashanti would say, I was “Velcro’d”.

Where I was was off. If I was there, even I wished I wasn’t. Kids would go find another room to play in. Dogs would growl. Even my body odor smelled like it belonged to someone else.

Have you ever tried to out-affirm, out-pray, deny or step over that kind of pain? To stuff a steamer trunk of %dc# like that into a space no one would recognize? There is nothing more pathetic and painful than watching someone do that to themselves. The heart knows the truth.

So, you might ask, how did feeling like Eeyore become my drug of choice? Who knows. All I know is it did feel familiar, in the sense of family, or ancestry or at least collective. Like the uh-oh you get in your gut when you step off the plane onto the tarmac of a war-ravaged country. Its not really personal until you make it so. Then the parasite of suffering sucks up to a new host.

Looking back, I can see how I was continually gathering evidence of not enough, animating it with my attention, fertilizing it with the foods I ate, the way I held my body, even the way I breathed. My first few breaths of each morning were puffed into this gloomy little ghost, the rest of the day spent idly stroking it with two fingers…one of encouragement, one of dread. And I was so proud of that angst, protective of it as mine, my special artistic and intuitive sensitivities and pessimistic proclivities.  As if brooding made me European and mysterious instead of just an annoyingly brooding American. Pride and shame together make a kind of emotional epoxy.

So how did I get unstuck from the addiction to suffering?

I’ll tell you: merging onto the highway today (which takes time in an old 4 cylinder Subaru) I realized that what I thought was “being in my heart” was actually a lie: I was leaking energy to my feelings and giving my power away to my feelings of separation. Compassion had turned to wallowing, self-care to neuroticism.

Today I chose to let go of wanting to be controlled by that feeling, and instead to  re-claim and re-direct my energy and love to someone else that can truly benefit. In choosing to cut that cord, I feel my energy rise, spine lengthen, and heart expand.

If I get caught by that feeling again, I can rest in knowing that feeling is arising in or on that which I Am, and not the other way around. And if I really look deep within, I can’t find anyone home to actually take posession of that little package of pain.

And that is a huge and blessed relief.

Here I Am. Here You Are.

If its some random chaotic accident, why not make it a happy one?  If it is an expression of Divine Intelligence or cosmic grand plan then might as well shoulder and savor the responsibility as best a mortal can.

There is not a dang thing we can do or undo to change it.

So, be here reverently or resistantly but pretending not to be here hurts and being non-reverent is kind of ugly.

Here belongs. You belong.

Its a miraculous sleight of hand that we could even think that “something is wrong,” or, “I’m not good enough” when you consider that:

• The odds of you being that lucky egg-getting sperm to make it to the egg are 1 in 12,000,000,000.
• The odds of the Earth supporting complex life the way it does are under 0.01 per cent over four billion years.

The odds of you finding and reading this post are probably similar.

Thank you for reading these words.

18% of the world, about 1.2 billion people can’t read at all much less own a computer.

Feeling lucky yet?

A few inspiring sources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_habitability
• http://members.shaw.ca/tfrisen/chances_of_you_existing.htm
• http://www.gratefulness.org/t/abc.htm

Hanuman Yoga Festival Boulder CO – Images by doug ellis

Amma Fundraising Kirtan Party Ojai CA – Images by doug ellis

or sharing a sandwich with a planet.

A humbling and ridiculous mashup.

Only grace can make you feel both so precious and tiny.

You don’t even need to make the first move.

Silence is already there. And here.

Dissolving aloneness into all oneness with infinite patience.

Might as well stay still.

When it takes you, you want to share it,

the hushed moment.

But moment is all there is,

a moment in a moment in a  moment.

Maybe you can feel it between these words.

Maybe you too are a friend of silence.

When we meet

we’ll greet each other with the space inside.

Maybe it will quietly smile.

As someone who has sampled most every self-improvement and human potential morsel these past twenty years, it is funny and ironic and more than a little paradoxical they have circled me back wide-eyed to the Baby I Always Was.

The only real reason to ask questions is to drop the questioner. Even the most complex system is at its best when it is transparent and invisible. It is true and makes no sense that we kick up so much dust for a whole lotta nuthin’.

So if you are evolving your mindset with NLP, affirmations, inquiry, visualizations, coaching, EFT, meditation, mastermind groups, morning pages, rampages of appreciation, vision boards, strict media diets, stringent friendship requirements, or any other myriad ways of thinking better , you are in the business of leveraging your isness by forgetting thought.

If you are evolving your environment with feng shui, professional organizers, stylists, home stagers, energy clearers, astrocartographers, or any other myriad of ways of improving your habitat and workspace, you are in the business of  leveraging your isness by removing external distraction and noise.

If you are evolving your skillset with trainers, teachers, online videos, mentors, workshops, seminars, books, and practice, you are in the business of leveraging your isness by becoming unconsciously competent in skill.

So it starts simple and it ends simple. As Sogyal Rinpoche says about meditation, good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

–TS Eliot

My friend and spiritual mentor Jeddah Mali made a rare U.S. appearance at the Stillheart Institute in Woodside California on April 15th-17th, 2011. Below is a slideshow and event photo gallery of the images from the event:

Spiritual Retreat at Stillheart Institute with Jeddah Mali – Images by doug ellis

If you would like to deepen your sense of being and feel inspired by our global interdependence and your role in it, by all means please join us! Howard Martin, Vice President of HeartMath, will also be making an appearance to discuss the Earth’s electromagnetic fields and what this is increasingly revealing to us about the interaction between human beings and the Earth.

The setting and venue are world-class.

The registration page and full details can be found here: http://jeddahmali.com/california-april.php

I will be there photographing the event and offering portrait sessions to the attendees.

Here is some of what you can expect in this two day experience of global harmony:

We will look at the universal laws that govern existence, and how a better understanding of these laws will enable us to transform our thinking and realign our intentions towards individual and collective health, happiness and harmony.

We will examine our predisposition for peace and contentment, and see that we are hardwired for harmony – both individually and collectively. We will be exploring the truth of that within our own experience and where we might be freer and clearer in our understanding and experience (and thus bestow freedom and clarity upon the world).

We will look at the options that are available to humanity at this time of increased challenge and examine the poignant questions:

• What does the future world we desire require of us now?
• And what are the most viable options for achieving this on an individual, societal and global level?

We will also share some of the ground-breaking science on the Earth’s electromagnetic fields and what this is increasingly revealing to us about the interaction between human beings and the Earth.

Please join me in spending two days with Jeddah at this incredible event, with special guest Howard Martin of  (Heartmath / Global Coherence Initiative).