As I write this post, I realize it's the last one that will drop easily into your inbox through the Ki Moments newsletter. The blog will continue on my Website under, yes, "Blog" :-) but it won't arrive as an email.

I've used an email marketing service over the years, which is how Ki Moments gets to you every month, and I'm discontinuing the service. Now you'll just remind yourself - if you want to - to go to my website.

If you forget, maybe something will prompt you. Conflict, of course, could be one of those things. And so could a happy moment, a ki moment, in which you experience the power of presence and want to explore that experience further.

Special Announcement

You will receive one more email from me, also in November, with a special announcement about a Thanksgiving give-away sale. I still have a number of books and CDs in my basement, and I'd prefer to see them in your hands. You'll be able to order any of the items mentioned in the announcement at no cost except for shipping them to you. So keep an eye out for that announcement!!

Happily Trapped

My last two posts in September and October gave some context on the next steps I'm taking into the unknown. It's weird. I don't know how not to be busy, how not to be engaged in an endeavor that gives back so much. I'm not sure what that's going to be like. 

You may ask, "Then why stop?" And I'm not totally sure of the answer. I love what I do - I still have some work as I write this - and I also have a sense that this is a good time to bring this part of my worklife to a close. It's an interesting, thought-provoking, exciting place to be.

I sometimes listen to the Calm app when I'm meditating. Recently Jeff Warren, one of their authors and a meditator, said: 

Life is a kind of dance between understanding and humility. So we're learning things based on our own experience and we develop confidence in that understanding. And yet if we hold onto that understanding too tightly we can close ourselves off. We can't receive the new learning that's happening all the time all around us.

Similarly, in The Magic of Conflict, my friend, mentor, and author of many wonderful books, Thomas Crum writes about an elderly philosopher friend who wisely advised him about "traps", saying that "in order for a method to be truly useful you must get trapped by it." He continues:

'But when that method begins to self-destruct, let it go. Don't try to defend it or be evangelical about it, because as those walls around you called your method begin to crumble, your tendency will be to try to hold up the walls to make the method work like you thought it would work. But behind those walls are even more magic and power and' - he paused - 'another trap.'

The wise elder encourages us to "go for the new method 100%" until we are trapped again, and then to find another "new" method, another "new you" to once again be trapped by. And on and on we go.

I have been trapped by the Aikido method for over 30 years - 100%. A willing entrapment. 

I won't say that the walls of this method are crumbling. I will always see the world through that lens. I've been happily trapped. And I get the picture. It's time to develop a new lens I can add to ones I already have.

I'm swimming in waters not yet explored, and I'll continue to write about that exploration. Maybe you'll join me, either on the blog or in your own deep water.

Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, is quoted as saying:

We train in hopes of being of some use, however small our role may be, in the task of bringing peace to mankind around the world.

A worthy goal for all of us, yes?

Catch you on the flip side!

Good ki!