I am going to be traveling a lot in the next 6 weeks – to the Integral Theory Conference in Oakland, then a week with Mike Jay in Las Vegas (see below), and then Burning Man – and reporting on all these events – so I am leading off with a long piece on entrepreneurship, happiness and success, followed by an offer / invitation.  You can skip the narcissistic ramblings and head directly to the invitation below, if you want, which is a pretty good one. 

The ups and the downs of being an entrepreneur

I got a mixed response to the Entrepreneur test piece, with people asking me “is this really you”?  Well, in many respects, sadly, it has been.  I am actually not a natural entrepreneur, yet I have spent a large chunk of my life  looking for some way to support myself that would also feed my happiness and allow me to do the things that have been most important and vital to me (my adventures in relationship and community and “experiments in consciousness”).  I became an entrepreneur by default – I couldn’t think of any other career that would give me the freedom that I needed.  When I met Rebekah, after a lifetime of seeking in both the relational and business arenas, I became happy for perhaps the first time in my life, because I had found a path to sustained sexual intimacy with a person of the female persuasion (don’t laugh – it’s actually not an easy thing). 

With this triumph, and flush with excitement, I then created or participated in 4 different businesses over the next 6 years – all of which failed, and two of them spectacularly so (the first web business and Trellis).  My current business, WordPress Academy, is the first one that is successful.  Maybe because it’s more related to an area of desire (or intrinsic motivation), for me: WordPress Academy is a type of conversation for transformation, which is the thing for which I live. 

And yet I continue to struggle with this – either sacrificing happiness in the pursuit of success, or, as of lately, sacrificing success in the pursuit of happiness.  This, I have come to learn, is very common.

On this topic, I just recently re-read Gurdjieff’s Meetings with remarkable men, that relates extraordinary events in Gurdjieff’s life that happened 100 years ago but which are extremely relevant to my condition.  For the first half of his life, Gurdjieff conducted extensive travels and meetings throughout Asia with a group he called the “seekers of truth”.  He was also a very astute businessman and trader, and he supported himself throughout this period by a series of business ventures and schemes which included (in a moment of desperation) snaring live sparrows, clipping them and painting them, and selling them in the market as “American canaries”.  Laying aside the ethics of some of these activities, the story was extremely inspirational to me, first because it legitimized my own struggle to support myself financially as a “seeker of truth”, but also because it reminded me that it is possible to be a spiritual person and smart and resourceful too.  In other words, that the pursuit of enlightenment and the pursuit of business are not inherently contradictory.  Another great guru and teacher of mine, Swami Rudrananda, ran a very a successful art import business his whole life, and firmly believed that a spiritual teacher ought to have an independent means of support.  He would sit in his Manhattan storefront and teach his students in between visits from customers. 

Enter Mike Jay and Flawless Living Design System (FLDS)

The basic idea of FLDS is that happiness is natural – happiness comes from following our desires and intrinsic motivation, where we can exist in a state of flow while creating those things that we value – whereas success, for most people, is not.  I define “success” as the ability to provide what we need in life while following the path of our happiness.  Unlike happiness, success comes from executing the success requirements of our business or profession, which may or may not be inborn, and which may or may not be part of our intrinsic motivation.  This is why it’s so hard and why so many of us are under great tension around this.  The situation is actually made worse by all the self-help gurus (Tony Robbins, Steven Covey, etc.) because they teach systems that work well if you work them, but that only 1% to 5% of us will actually apply – thus funding a billion dollar training industry that does nothing, and leaving many of us struggling our whole lives trying to mold and adapt ourselves to some standard that just doesn’t fit with who we are, and then wonder what is wrong with us.

The fascinating thing (to me anyway) is that I have been discovering many of the ideas of FLDS on my own, through my own life and research; but Mike Jay has actually made an entire developmental system out of this, that he calls a “memetic operating system” (or values-based program), that is backed by a ton of psychological research and theory, along with his work with thousands of coaching clients over the last 20 years; and what’s more that there is a business community being created around this, a movement really, of people committed to exploring their happiness while expanding success – of people committed to living more inter-dependently and with greater passion and contribution.  Because the solution, of course, to our inability to do the things that are required for success, is first to accept our limitations, and then to ally with other people who can do those things naturally that we cannot. 

I invite you to come experience FLDS with me in Las Vegas on August 20-23

I invite you to experience the first (beta) Flawless Living seminar in Las Vegas from Friday August 20 at 6pm, to Monday August 23 at noon.  The first FLDS seminar – and probably all of them – is going to be free, except for an administrative fee for various assessments (that are key to the discovery process that happens during the seminar).  During the first two days, we will each create a blueprint for success, unique to us, using Mike’s inquiry methods.  On the third day, there will be an offer to buy-in to the business network, at guaranteed rates of return or money-back – it’s truly an unusual and extraordinary offer.

If you can’t come to Vegas in August, there is another in Philadelphia in late November.

Much love,

Marc

PS: here is the brochure I designed for this event – first-draft, but not bad IMHO, especially considering it’s my first brochure, what do you think?

I am in part reluctant to write today, as I have so much to share, as my life has taken a definite turning point, a crystallization and falling-into-place and making-whole of all the experiences, triumphs and tragedies, joys and sorrows of my 3 years with Trellis, 6 years with Rebekah, and indeed the entire stream of my life to this day.  I am half-reluctant to share because although there are some very exciting external events, which I will share momentarily, and upcoming adventures (I live for adventures), the essence of this transformation is still internal and in-process, and may therefore be difficult to convey in writing.

I am encouraged to write by a beautiful book I am reading, My years with the Qutb by Sharon Marcus, about her time with the great Sufi saint Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, who spent the last 16 years of his life in Philadelphia (!).  I must be a natural Sufi because every time I read anything on Sufism (previously Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s fascinating lectures Love is a fire and I am wood) something inside me responds with a powerful “Yes”; and Sharon Marcus’s book is no exception, I start to cry on every second page (tears of recognition and tears of relief).  Sufism is about the primacy of love, and the burning away of everything that is not-love, and the everyday ecstasy that can be had from the intimate meeting with God and all of God’s creatures, including oneself and one’s fellows.  This is the experience that was at the core of the design of Trellis (and the design of Morehouse as well, that is Trellis’s spiritual parent), it is the same as Jerry Jud’s Love is an intention and “more than anything else, we seek to love and be loved”, it is what happens most weekends (predictably) at Shalom Mountain Retreat Center. It is an experience that has always been with me and called me, that has expressed itself most potently for me in intimate relationships of all kinds, and sexual/romantic attractions; and it’s an experience that is growing deeper and stronger with me every year.

Aside from this brief (rambling?) digression, I do have some news.  I have found my dream job, which is social media director and affiliate manager for a new program called Flawless Living, that is being developed by visionary coach, entrepreneur and internet marketer Mike Jay, which I wrote about in my previous article.  Flawless Living cannot be described in a paragraph, as it’s the result of Mike’s 20 years of research into business coaching, Western psychology and human development (with a smattering of the world’s wisdom literature thrown in), but I can say that it’s a seminar series, a school of consciousness, a community/movement, an integrally-inspired business network, and a training program in internet marketing and business development all at once.  The program is still in development but there is a beta launch in Las Vegas in August and an official launch in Philadelphia in November.  What it’s about for me is the unification of the two fundamental strands, or major impulses of my life, which are the drive for happiness and the drive for “success” (recognition and contribution).  These two major impulses, which I also describe as the masculine and feminine polarities of life, have been at war with each other for 40-odd years. What is so meaningful to me about this assignment, and so magical, is that it’s a recognition and validation of what I have been doing already for a couple of decades, for free—networking for transformation—and so this recognition has been profoundly calming and settling for me.  The fundamental idea of Flawless Living is similar to—but much more complex and layered—than “do what you love and the money will follow”, because many of us have tried doing what we love and the money has not followed, and this is at it should, because the idea is good but a bit naive, and Mike has helped me to understand why. 

Flawless Living is for now just a very part-time job for me, which is just as well, because of my next major piece of news: I am selling an interest in WordPress Academy, for a little cash and some help, to facilitate a big product development effort that will culminate in November with a product I am creating, which is a book/DVD on WordPress web design and internet marketing for small business.  This is my major project for the next 4-5 months, that is going to force me into a kind of focus and self-discipline that I resist and yet I know I need in order to become the person that I want to be (i.e., happy and successful .  The reason I am seeking partners is that I have realized that I don’t want to do this alone, I am not motivated, it’s a fundamental part of my design that I can’t bring myself to do something unless it’s fun, and it’s a fundamental principle of Flawless Living that just because we can do something (like, exercise or meditate every morning) it doesn’t mean that we will, and therefore we need to find workarounds (such as, in my case, finding a partner, even at the cost of giving up some equity). 

Because of all this, I have a very ambitious travel schedule over the next 4 months: in addition to a week-long retreat that Rebekah and I are doing at Shalom Mountain called Sexuality and Spirituality, I have four trips out West scheduled: I am attending the Integral Theory in Action Conference in Pleasant Hill CA (near Oakland) end of July, the Flawless Living immersion in Vegas mid-August, I am going to Burning Man 2010 with a group from Shalom Mountain that I put together, and then back to Vegas again in October for Blogworld where I will be promoting WordPress Academy.  I haven’t travelled much for the last 6 years, so this also is a big change.  The Flawless Living launch is in Philadelphia, thank God—I love traveling for the excitement and all, but I also find it physically challenging. 

So stay tuned for more interesting reports over the course of the summer and fall, hopefully less rambling (although I don’t promise anything

Much love,

Marc

PS: If you like this, please comment

Rebekah and the kids are away for most of the weekend, and so I am enjoying “that blissful solitude, that was so painful in my youth” [Einstein].  Truthfully, the events of the last 6 weeks (starting with the book I am writing and on to extremely exciting events at WordPress Academy, that I haven’t shared yet) have been so intoxicating that I had resolved to spend the entire weekend in bed reading paperback novels and listening to inspirational audios.  But I need to share with y’all what happened yesterday.

Mike Jay is a business coach and developmentalist that I have been connected with loosely for a number of years.  I had actually started his coach training program 5-6 years ago, before deciding that being a business coach probably wasn’t for me.  He’s been pretty quiet for the last few years but has recently surfaced with a coaching / business development program that is so compelling I joined right away.  I will be doing this program over the course of the summer, culminating in an intensive in Las Vegas in late August.  It turns that he has been traveling a lot for the last few years, coaching billionaires and major third-world banks.  I think he is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met, and his ideas on development are both very practical and timely.  The intro call for this program occurred yesterday, and it blew my mind.  I will post the audio to this call when I get permission, but let me summarize some of the key ideas here, and their impact on me.

The relationship between happiness and success, and effective tools to achieve these two goals,  has been the dominant inquiry of my life.  It has always seemed to me that a person could be one or the other – entirely dedicated to work and achievement at the cost of one’s personal life and relationships, or else living a life dedicated to pleasure, connection and authenticity, but at the cost of success and/or financial stability.  I have had very happy times in my life, and quite successful times in my life, but they rarely coincided.  In one way or the other, I have been obsessed with this theme my whole life, which I see as being connected to the “right-relationship” of masculine and feminine forces within oneself [Shirley Luthman, Waking Down in Mutuality], and in the outside world as “sexual polarity” [Lafayette Morehouse, David Deida].  For the last 6 years I have been engaged in a deep exploration of  these teachings, all of which have a lot to say about happiness, and perhaps even about “awakening” – surely, “awakening” needs to include some deep acceptance of self and unconditional enjoyment of life, and so the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of awakening need be very closely related.  But I have not yet found a philosophy or developmental school in which there is a practical analysis and action plan for simultaneously achieving these two goals, happiness and success.

Mike Jay’s fundamental idea – and this of course is just the tip of the iceberg – is that happiness comes from being oneself, whereas success comes from meeting the success criteria of one’s chosen profession, that will vary (an athlete has different success criteria from an executive).  And the problem is this: that success comes from predictably (repeatedly) doing the actions that will cause one to meet the success criteria for one’s profession;  however, unless one has enjoyment (happiness) in these activities, it’s virtually impossible to do anything with any kind of consistency.  The majority of people struggle their whole lives trying to improve their character or motivation in order to do all the things that they know are necessary for their success, and they fail miserably, simply because human nature and our individuality (skills, likes and dislikes) cannot be easily changed, if at all.  Mike Jay talks about a trillion dollar industry built around training people to do this (change their motivation), which, of course, doesn’t work.  The real solution is to:

1. Understand oneself sufficiently to know one’s limitations, and not even attempt the things that one is not suited for.  It’s much better to not even begin than to spend one’s lifetime in a battle with oneself, in which the speed and efficacy of one’s entire system gets degraded.  This of course is no different than the prime Socratic directive to “know yourself”, brought into the 21st century and expanded to account for all the layers of complexity that must be handled within our modern lives.  (I am reminded here of something I heard the Dalai Lama say: “If you are not going to meditate, don’t even pretend to be a spiritual person.  You will have so much more freedom”).
2. The way to meet the success criteria for which one is not suited, is to partner with someone else.  This however is not an easy thing because in addition to “knowing oneself” it requires the ability to ask for what one needs, and distinguish in the answer whether it’s a good fit.   According to Mike Jay, introverts have a particular difficulty with this, both because going outside themselves is difficult, and because they don’t know how to ask the question (present clearly and enrollingly) and distinguish the answer.  But it’s hard for everyone – this of course is the fine art of leadership, or management.

So there you have it – in a nutshell – the cause of the overwhelm that I have been experiencing lately. I am an introvert which compounds the problem.

It’s difficult for me to fully convey the importance of this insight for me – along with the fact that I seem to have found at least the beginnings of an answer to the problem that has been tormenting me my entire life.  I have studied Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen (other major integral philosophers / developmentalists), and I am becoming increasingly connected to the “integral evolutionary” community which I see now as my “spiritual home” – but I haven’t yet found anything actionable in these teachings – anything that helps to either alleviate human suffering, inject more love in the world, or put money in my pocket and in the pockets of my clients / business associates.  Even before Mike Jay, I had already started to partner with people more in my business, and will also be getting into social media in a big way in the coming months, but it’s really wonderful to be a part of a coaching and inquiry group around these important issues.  It feels wonderful not to be alone any more, and I am ecstatic.

I will be writing more on this in the coming weeks on the Integral evolutionary blog – you may subscribe there if interested in hearing more.  This list (“Marc’s life and travels”) is a less-frequent personal snapshot of the turning moments in my life, such as this one, and so I won’t be posting a blow-by-blow account of my engagement with these teachings.

Much love,

Marc

I wanted to share these two resources that have really rocked my world this week.  Please note that in general, going forward I will only be publishing my developmental ideas and similar resources to my new Integral Evolutionary blog (http://integralevolutionary.com).  This newsletter will return to its original purpose as “Marc’s life and travels” and will come out every 2-8 weeks.  If you really like “Marc’s life”, and want even more, please subscribe to the Integral Evolutionary blog.

I learn from the best
I take what I learn and apply it in a way that resonates
I simplify the lessons that work most effectively
I teach the lessons to others
I focus on my strengths
I never apologize for the truth
I believe everyone deserves heaps of joy in this lifetime
I know the past has no power over me
I live a life knowing that everything I want is within me now
I realize that intelligence is not just in the mind
I believe it is possible to be spiritually aligned and wealthy
I strive for the impossible so I can call on a strength greater than myself
I believe I was put on the planet to coach, teach, and Be
I believe my happiness is the best gift I have to give my children
I know my husband is the best thing that ever happened to me as a human
I am intense and focused
I love my clients and feel it is a privilege to work with them-not the other way around
I am not better than you and I am not worse than you
Reading is as important to me as showering (sometimes more so)

– Brooke Castillo

Check out Brooke’s site above for her free audio and handouts.

All for now.  Stay tuned for my next post, entitled “Journey to the dark side – and how I came back”.

Much love,

Marc

The last chapter of Carl Jung’s autobiography Memories Dreams Reflections (which is one of my ten favorite books of all time) has always deeply affected me.  It is still, to my mind, the most powerful brief essay on the creative life that I have ever read.  It recently crossed my mind and so I am copying it below.  It’s long but well-worth reading – hope you enjoy.

On a personal note, big news and big events happening, however it’s too early to share.  I will let y’all know as soon as I possibly can…

Much love,

Marc

Extract from the last chapter of Carl Gustav Jung’s “Memories Dreams Reflections”

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. The loneliness began with the experiences of my early dreams, and reached its climax at the time I was working on the unconscious. If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely. But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to companionship, for no one is more sensitive to companionship than the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon. I could never stop at anything once attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead.

I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people—aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice. Of course I did not always obey it. How can anyone live without inconsistency?

For some people I was continually present and close to them so long as they were related to my inner world; but then it might happen that I was no longer with them, because there was nothing left which would link me to them. I had to learn painfully that people continued to exist even when they had nothing more to say to me. Many excited in me a feeling of living humanity, but only when they appeared within the magic circle of psychology; next moment, when the spotlight cast its beam elsewhere, there was nothing to be seen. I was able to become intensely interested in many people; but as soon as I had seen through them, the magic was gone. In this way I made many enemies. A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.

“Shamefully A power wrests away the heart from us,
For the Heavenly Ones each demand sacrifice;
But if it should be withheld
Never has that led to good,”

says Holderlin.

This lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me. Often I felt as if I were on a battlefield, saying, “Now you have fallen, my good comrade, but I must go on.” For “shamefully a power wrests away the heart from us.” I am fond of you, indeed I love you, but I cannot stay. There is something heart-rending about that. And I myself am the victim; I cannot stay. But the daimon manages things so that one comes through, and blessed inconsistency sees to it that in flagrant contrast to my “disloyalty” I can keep faith in unsuspected measure.

Perhaps I might say: I need people to a higher degree than others, and at the same time much less. When the daimon is at work, one is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one achieve moderation.

The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me. The ordinary undertakings I planned usually had the worst of it—though not always and not everywhere. By way of compensation, I think, I am conservative to the bone. I fill my pipe from my grandfather’s tobacco jar and still keep his alpenstock, topped with a chamois horn, which he brought back from Pontresina after having been one of the first guests at that newly opened Kurort.

I am satisfied with the course my life has taken. It has been bountiful, and has given me a great deal. How could I ever have expected so much? Nothing but unexpected things kept happening to me. Much might have been different if I myself had been different. But it was as it had to be; for all came about because I am as I am. Many things worked out as I planned them to, but that did not always prove of benefit to me. But almost everything developed naturally and by destiny. I regret many follies which sprang from my obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal. And so I am disappointed and not disappointed. I am disappointed with people and disappointed with myself. I have learned amazing things from people, and have accomplished more than I expected of myself. I cannot form any final judgment because the phenomenon of life and the phenomenon of man are too vast. The older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into or known about myself.

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.

The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step in our development. But that is —or seems to me—not the case. Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is — or has — meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.

When Lao-tzu says: “All are clear, I alone am clouded,” he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age. Lao-tzu is the example of a man with superior insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable meaning. The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is eternally true. At every level of intelligence this type appears, and its lineaments are always the same, whether it be an old peasant or a great philosopher like Lao-tzu. This is old age, and a limitation. Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.

I recently came across this fascinating introduction to a new book called Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future, by (among others) Peter M. Senge and C. Otto Scharmer. The book presents a radical new model for leadership based on a new understanding of how organizations function in relationship to individuals’ own "deep work".  Read the paper as it is very good.

One of the things that the authors did was to interview leading scientists, business people and social entrepreneurs, asking them the question: "What question lies at the heart of your work?".  When I read this, something immediately clicked and my answer came: "Then let us see what love can do" (William Penn).  What I love about this quote is that William Penn is not saying "love will solve all your problems".  He is saying, just try it and see what happens – decide for yourself.  You may have tried X, you may have tried Y, and it hasn’t worked – why not try love?  When I said this to myself, I immediately started to cry. That is "the question at the heart of my work", with Trellis, with Waking in Down in Mutuality, with Shalom Mountain and everything else that I do, even my marriage. 

One of the basic premises of the book is that reality (matter, the phenomenological world) is shaped by fields of intention, in the same way that a tiny seed can grow into a huge tree.  We tend to say that a tree comes from a seed, but think about this for a moment.  A seed clearly does not have the resources to create a tree.  However, it does contain an intention (blueprint, pattern, organizing principle) to become a tree.  From that intention, it pulls everything it needs from the environment (ie carbon dioxide, sunshine etc) to manifest its intention.  How cool is that? In the same way, the smallest force in the field of intention (as in, for example, a small loving act towards oneself or another) can generate dramatic results. 

There are some very dramatic things happening right now in my life and in the lives of many people that I am connected with. I have initiated several developmental groups in which, I believe, deep and important work is being done.  Trellis itself is, in a way, a developmental group.  As I am starting to really "get" some of the concepts in the "Presence" book and in Waking Down, and as I am actively seeking the support of peers and the mentoring of teachers such as Saniel Bonder, my world is irrevocably shifting, and my effectiveness as an agent for change is multiplying.  I will share more about this in a little while as right now it is still in its baby stage…

What question lies at the heart of your work?

Less than two weeks after I declared publicly, in this post, that I wanted essentially to become a "professional housemother" (owner/operator of a commune, purveyor of "a community of fun, love and transformation"), some amazing things have happened.  Specifically, 3 new people (yes, three) have approached us with the intention of doing a trial residence and eventually possibly living with us.  This raises the possibility that, without even trying, we would have a full house here by September – which would enable the Trellis business to pay for all of Rebekah’s and mine housing expenses, and in addition generate a profit that would help pay for ours and house-member’s personal and professional development (ie Morehouse courses, Shalom retreats, NVC etc). This would be amazing, and it has been a goal of mine ever since we bought the house, that Trellis would generate enough profit to pay for house-members personal development.  It would be the "deal clincher" on what is already, to my mind, an extremely compelling lifestyle proposition.  I will write more about this another time, because people don’t generally understand what we are doing here.

My own growth through this process has been equally interesting.  I remember very clearly, when I first moved into the Yonkers Morehouse, feeling that I could never be the housemother of a commune, as I lacked the necessary attention on other people, and possibly even a real deep interest in other people, in their lives and in their development.   But now this is beginning to change, and I give a large credit for this to my work with Saniel Bonder and Waking Down in Mutuality (ie, I am becoming less self-centered). 

Related to this and to what I said above "people don’t generally understand", the conclusion I am drawing is that my work now is two-fold: I need to find the right languaging for educating people about what we do here, and I need to improve the quality of our product (the product is "fun, love and transformation", which is directly related to the quality of my attention on other people and my willingness to see them / relate to them from where they are and from their needs rather than mine).  This is all intensely exciting.

Anyway, since I have now become a huge fan of publicly declaring your intention, and since Rebekah and I will still need to operate separate businesses even when the house gets full, I am declaring here my intention in solving the second half of our financial predicament:

I want to create, inside 4 months, a business that will enable me to work a maximum of 20 hours a week while billing out no less than 10 hours x $75/hr. (this would work financially, and, quite frankly, I don’t have time to run a commune and work more than 20 hours!)

Wish me luck and feel free to write to me your intention (or better, comment to the blog directly)! 

You are subscribed to "Marc’s Lifestyle Design Blog", an intimate report of my own development through the microscope of my own life and my investigation into the nature of consciousness. I hope that this will clarify, enlighten or entertain your own quest for a life filled with love, meaning, passion and contribution.  If not, please unsubscribe from the link below.  I welcome all comments, either by direct reply to this email or (preferably) via comments to the blog post, so that others may benefit from your insights!  With love, Marc

Well I have been off coffee for 48 hours – man what a difference.  Long-term coffee toxicity is deadly – I pretty well slept or rested the whole day yesterday.  But today, I am on fire!  I am drinking green tea now, which seems to be working very well (3 1/2 hours on the job and still going strong at 5:30am).

I have had some major personal shifts / insights in the last few days through the Waking Down work (I had a session with Saniel Bonder yesterday).  The book Waking Down is a profound, profound reflection and text / guidebook on the human condition and the nature and steps of the awakening process.  I feel a much greater clarity and focus around my work-life issues right now – while realizing at the same time that I exist in a fundamental state of confusion, fear, anxiety and alienation (my human condition).  This is the paradox of our "divinely human condition" – that we carry both a divine nature (unlimited freedom and power of consciousness to witness and create) and a limited human nature (stuck and contained within our messy-sticky needs, emotional reactions, relationships and finances).  So I can say now that I have "clarity" but only within certain bounds.  I have clarity that I want to move forward into the great unknown adventure, yet knowing full well that I really don’t fully know what I want, what is best for me or anybody else, and how it all will unfold.  And there are no guarantees of success.  A certain level of pretense (and maybe arrogance) has fallen away from me in the last few days.  Pretense that I know what is best for me and what I want.

I wrote the following note to a business networking group I belong to (TPNG – Technology Professionals Networking Group).  This is part of my emerging clarity around these issues.  I really don’t know if this is the best thing for me to do, but it is where my energy is drawing me now, so I feel it’s either going to be this business or something better that will emerge in the creation process.

I used to run a web design / development company for 3 years. It failed for several reasons:

1)Poor business model – insufficiently thought-out from the beginning
2)I started hating the job – too intense and no work-life balance – started feeling like everybody’s slave
3)Insufficient income in relation to time invested

However, market conditions being what they are, and since I can’t find contract work as a technical writer anyway (and, truth be told, I am extremely ambivalent about the 40 hour work model to begin) I am starting up again a different business, which will focus on internet marketing, blogging, and social networking for small / medium entrepreneurs.

Anyone else in this boat and able to provide feedback, form a support group, etc?

PROS OF BUSINESS OWNERSHIP
1) Control of one’s hours (particularly nice for me as I have taken on a polyphasic sleep pattern that works really well – see http://polphasic-sleep.info )
2) Potentially rising salary (increasing rates as interest in the service rises)
3) Building equity – possibility to sell the business or develop products providing passive income potential down the line

CONS OF BUSINESS OWNERSHIP
1) It’s pretty difficult to get the same level of income as a full-time hourly gig, especially initially, plus health-insurance costs etc
2) One needs to be a more "rounded person" – to have skills in different areas (especially marketing and the internet)
3) Work-life balance is more difficult.

I am looking for feedback from others who have made the transition and/or who are considering it.
Thanks!
Marc Beneteau
http://webtechnologyguru.info