Preparing to Create Your Own Luck

How important is Heart in community affairs, science, technology, business, law, the arts, and even—no, wait! we urge especially today–in contemporary politics? The workshop on March 25 sponsored by the Santa Barbara Center on Lifelong Learning introduces a new field of scientific and other inquiry—Laughing Heart or Big Heart Intelligence. It will feature one of ten essential moves to experience, explore, and apply Laughing Heart. It is called “Creating Your Own Luck” (Move # 5).

The ½ day workshop will begin with a brief introduction to some of the modern tributaries to Laughing Heart in neuroscience, neuro-cardiology, positive psychology, Jungian psychology, and also its roots in East Asian and indigenous healing traditions and martial arts. Since prehistory around their supper fires our ancestors wondered about the extraordinary capabilities of the heart. Our goal here is to draw upon this ancient wisdom and experience in creating a framework for modern exploration and discovery that is easily understood and can be enjoyably practiced by anyone, anywhere in meeting the exigencies of daily life.

“Creating Your Own Luck” draws upon a fertile corpus of writing that explores Synchronicity, a subject that fascinates millions. Is Synchronicity “mere” chance, or is something more interesting going on? Are we mortals mere playthings of the gods, or do we have surprisingly greater dominion over our fortunes?

We have something new to add to this inquiry. It is a simple method to attract, follow, and measure, and thereby to influence this “a-causal” process. Creating Your Own Luck applies not only to good events but also to what appear negative ones; and, as we suggest, we can work creatively with the darker colors and wave forms in our lives and learn to harvest their potential. The secret—herein freely revealed—is not to hold on to the fruits of our labors and other good that comes our way. Rather hasten to pay this bounty forward, as Emerson wrote “line for line, cent for cent for cent, deed for deed.” In this way you create circles of virtuosity that enhance your own powers. There are striking parallels between frontier observations in quantum physics and Laughing Heart that we will explore in the program and in our next blog.

The Laughing Heart Initiative may be among the first of its kind to seek and apply these principles on the scale of an entire community. We call this “Celebrating Laughing Heart Advantage” (Move # 10), and we invite you by this simple workshop to begin a community wide narrative expressed in a new genre of “emergent art”. Santa Barbara is the first pilot city to light the flame of Laughing Heart for communities around the world.

References:

AlliancesforDiscovery.org 

Julian Gresser Piloting Through Chaos—The Explorers Mind (2013)

G. Jung, Synchroncity—An Acausal Connecting Principle

Ralph Waldo Emerson, On Compensation (1841)

Swami Vivekananda, Karma Yoga (1955)

How to Use the Explorers Wheel in a Nutshell

You can use the Explorers Wheel to connect Laughing Heart to any cause, idea, or concern of importance to you, your friends, colleagues, or society at large. Here’s an example focused on our central theme: Cultivating Exuberant Vitality.

The EnsoSeeding the Process/ Beginning Your Journey

  • You have a choice to begin either in discovery or invocative mode. In the former you simply write your question inside the enso—the Japanese brush stroke at the bulls eye of the Wheel; in the latter you invoke the help of the Explorers Wheel, something like the oracle or Sibyl of ancient Greece. For example, you might write, “Please guide me to sustainable exuberant vitality for the rest of my life.” Formulating and writing down your question is all you need do to start the Explorers Wheel spinning.

Laughing Heart as your Guide

  • Now simply let your Laughing Heart guide you to which “moon” seems most relevant. You may feel a slight “tug” or an inner voice inviting you to come to a particular moon. In preparing this explanatory note the Past moon immediately “called” to me. “Go back to a time when you are most vital,” it said. And immediately I was at the height of my youthful powers training at the main aikido dojo in Tokyo. You can easily capture the special resonance of each moon for you. Don’t try to think your way through. The key is to listen to your Laughing Heart and let the process guide you.

Finding New Connections

  • The next step is to draw lines connecting other moons to your questions and to each other. In this way you can discover the “intertidal” linkages among the moons. I naturally draw a line to Life Force and also to the Discovery/Invention/Innovation moons.

The Beauty moon also begins to speaks to me in an interesting way. The next evening I dream I am listening to the last movement of Mozart’s or Hayden’s Coronation Mass—I am not sure. I am submerged in its majesty, beauty, and power. But when I listen to the actual work the following morning, the original is very different. It seems the Explorers Wheel can constellate and even create new relationships on its own.

Drawing a line to the Future moon enables a form of time travel. I imagine myself in my late eighties, looking, feeling, and transacting little differently than I do today. Flowing with exuberant vitality, I can trace my pathway back from this future/present time space to the active Present. When I do this move I fancy the Explorers Wheel is spiraling inside my Laughing Heart, helping me to discover fresh and interesting connections in my life.

Collaborative Exploration and Discovery

  • The Explorers Wheel gains momentum, the more we play with family, friends, colleagues, and even perfect strangers! Actually we are all connected in many ways of which we are not generally aware. Discovering this shared consciousness can be a source of enormous vitalizing power. The Explorers Wheel and Laughing Heart offer an alternative to our ordinary consensus-based versions of reality.

Other Applications

  • You can point the Explorers Wheel to any other application that interests you. We have used the Explorers Wheel for large scale challenges such as developing innovative strategies to address the Fukushima nuclear disaster or new models of earthquake prediction. Always the best test for Laughing Heart and the Explorers Wheel is: are you having fun? What if our life itself is a great Explorers Wheel?

Explorer’s Wheel Printable Worksheet PDF