Move #9
Creating Your Own Luck

Most of us navigate through life on the premise that there exists an “external” or “outer” world and an “inner” one, and they are divided somehow by our skin.

The separate “reality” of these two realms comes very early to our consciousness. It is helpful that we view the world this way. It is self-protective. Otherwise all manner of hostile visitors, people as well as microbes, might invade our space and do us harm. Although it is helpful, it is entertaining to realize this view is in large part a great fiction.

I came upon this discovery some years ago when designing the Graph program for the first edition of Piloting Through Chaos. I noticed that when I fell away from integrity, any “move” I made that helped me to reverse course would influence every other element in helping me to recover integrity, or as I defined it, my sense of connectedness and dynamic balance. But then, and here’s the point, I noticed wonderful things started to happen in my “external” life, when I regained a state of high integrity. They came to me, as it were, unbidden. With my new program I had a way to track the process. There is an axiom in biofeedback, a field I have studied deeply: what you can measure, you can influence. In biofeedback training the key to influencing is “passive volition,” the art of allowing or giving in control.

This simple exercise teaches an invaluable related life capability: “field independence.” In other words, by simply allowing things to happen and not attaching to them—whether good or bad—you begin to develop a sense of balance and equilibrium. You are no longer tossed around by other people, events, or circumstances over which you have no control, notwithstanding the illusion that you do.

This art is greatly refined when we add Laughing Heart consciousness to the mix.

Author’s commentary

Playing the Game

You can have fun exploring this new frontier by playing the Create Your Own Luck Game. Please review the two short videos (in the Footnotes) and print out the two included forms, and you will be ready to play. In the short form all you do need to do is to track three lines. The first bar is your external life. Above the line “Up” means “good” things are happening. “Down,” means the opposite. The second bar tracks your Laughing Heart state. “Up” means you are flowing, joyful, powerful, and happy. “Down” says you are overly busy, constantly in motion, and most importantly, stressed out. The third bar tracks paying forward. “Up” means you are taking some action to lighten someone else’s burdens or enhancing their quotient of joy. “Down” means you are unengaged, or worse. In the next few months we will be able to send you Version 1.0 of an app to trace and remember the “wave form” of your day, week, or month. It will enable you to discern the deeper currents in your life.

Some will argue that we/you are stacking the deck. In other words, the game is subjective—you are just “thinking” you see that this outer shift is “positive” or “negative”. Your personal view has no “scientific” significance. This challenge opens an opportunity to explore more deeply the question of “inner” and “outer” boundaries.

• Of course, your experience is subjective, because your perception and awareness are expanding. What previously you might have concluded was an “adverse” event, you may now see as potentiating good things; conversely, you may be more careful not to become inflated by success, because you understand that good things in life are often momentary, and can give way to troubles. The key point is when you are more able to surf the waves, you begin to see the potential for light in everything. And the data becomes more reliable, because your propensity to delude yourself diminishes. I call this the “principle of increasing fidelity.”
• Qi passes through boundaries. Some qi masters maintain that the qi moves faster than the speed of light. We are continuously bathed in qi. Laughing Heart is a state of high flow of clean, balanced, bright and powerful qi, infused with love. As you practice Laughing Heart you may discover that your integrity (or consciousness of boundaries) can be strongly maintained, even as the perimeter of the boundaries moves outward. This state is closely associated with a sense of powerful resilience.
• What I believe may be happening in the Creating Your Own Luck Game is that players are tapping into what modern physics is calling “quantum entanglement.” Here is a short video explaining this concept. The core premise is that we are all, at least at a quantum level, profoundly connected. Is it possible that this quantum entanglement at times “seeps” into our “ordinary” state of awareness?

This brings us to a further question. What does it mean to say “you” are “creating” your own “luck”? The Game at least invites the interpretation that “luck” (from Middle Dutch, a shortened form of gheluc) ‎“good fortune” may be creating you as the reverse. Laughing Heart is both a dance and a conversation.

If qi can really move through walls and across space and time, and if you can learn how to influence qi fields by Creating Your Own Luck, what might be the larger implications of these discoveries for enhancing community health and wellbeing? What if you and I and all our friends and colleagues were to combine what we have learned and discovered from practicing the 10 Essential Moves in a continuous stream of creative expression? One result might be a new kind of community narrative we are calling “Emergent Art” introduced in Move 10.

Creating My Own Luck – Examples

Creating My Own Luck – Simple Form

Creating My Own Luck – Long Form

Adversity’s Spiraling and Creative Wave Form

Life has many colors and wave forms. The Art of Laughing Heart is to work with what is. In this way every moment in the wave becomes an opening and a gate. Here is how Laughing Heart can be applied in especially challenging circumstances.

The above diagram “Adversity’s Spiraling and Creative Wave Form” traces the hero’s and heroine’s journey. At the upper left an event occurs. It may be a slight shift we interpret as a movement “downward.” This gives rise to a vague sense of unease, an amorphous fear. Then, something untoward happens, and we see a pattern developing. We call this “bad luck” or “adversity.” Often the spiral intensifies. As Shakespeare writes in Hamlet “Sorrows come not as single spies but in battalions.”

We descend. Our journey into the wood becomes thicker and darker. We try to find firm ground, but we falter. Pretty soon we are approaching a place of despair.  King Lear (Shakespeare again) warns: “The worst is not so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’” At this final place without a name all we have left is a choice: to surrender and give up; or to accept what the world appears to be giving us, with a generosity of heart and with compassion to ourselves and others. And then, in these difficult straights there comes a moment of grace; a tender mercy in the form of a subtle shift– a kind act, a gentle word, a slight glimmer of light, a quiet recognition. If we can listen to the signal and hove to this glimmer of light, it will uplift us.

All of a sudden there is an opening, a loosening in the fabric. We begin to sense our power, inexplicably. We find our power inside our pain. Now we are on a creative upswing. More discoveries ensue; they come in flocks like butterflies. Our creative energies coil and thrust. We emerge, gloriously from the darkness, and arrive at a new and higher peak of life force and power. We are ALIVE! There can be no doubt of it, and our vessel is sturdier. Like ancient mariners in a storm at sea, we have held the tiller firm and found an opening in the waves. We have “Created Our Own Luck.”

Emotive Reaction Range? Hints: mystery, surprise, awe, wonder, magic, powers, not knowing, play, gaming, flow, surfing, skipping, letting go, giving in control, allowing, transformative, mercurial