Being Big

Fear, Joy and The Magical

Path

Dane E. Rose

Copyright 2016, all rights reserved.

ISBN-13:978-1500862695 

ISBN-10:150086269X 

~ Dane E. Rose ~

Praise for the author’s work:

“I'm just mesmerized by your book!” Christel Rene

“Dane has an enormous depth and breadth of perception.  He invites the reader to look deeply into themselves in a way that people often avoid.  Great tips, fun and sometimes confronting!” Anne Watts, facilitator: Human Awareness Institute and Financial Intimacy and Freedom coach

 “Dane offers practical and unusual perspectives to create exceptional conscious relationships.” John Hoyle, M.E.D., Co-creator of The Hoyle Method form of healing and Founder of the Institute of Conscious Studies, San Rafael

 "This book summarizes the author's highly unconventional but creative and daring strategies for creating the quality of relationships he desires.  It's hard to imagine anyone reading this book without encountering numerous ideas and possibilities they hadn't considered or thought of before.  Recommended for anyone feeling stuck or disillusioned about their intimate relationships.” N.O.

 "Dane can be brilliant at stepping outside of the box and supporting relationships with fresh ideas for breaking out of stuck places. His simple, powerful techniques can enable partners to easily find meaning and richness in their time together." Fred Burks, former US presidential interpreter.

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Other books by the Author

Co-Creating Conscious ChemistryUnderstanding the forces that pull us together and

break us apart.

Celebrating BeautyA collection of poems

101 Choices On My Path to Well-BeingA biographical review of life-choices

Finding Love in a Mixed up WorldStrategies for win/win relationships

Cresting the WavesA guide to sailing through life on relation-ship:

www.CrestingTheWaves.com

Maps to LoveA guide to exceptional relationships with uncommonly sensitive people

Amazing Questions:Doorways to Love, Joy, Abundance and Fun

Faces of LoveDistinguishing the many masks of one word.

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DedicationHappiness is an inner state.

When we find our path to happiness

we offer this inner state to others.

May you be happy, and bring

the gift of your happiness

to those you touch.

About Learning and Teaching

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Sometimes we teach what we need to learn, and sometimes we teach something we have already learned, and know very well. I love to write about things because it gives me a chance to learn what’s inside me. I notice that while I may publish a book that many read, I often take what I have learned while writing and reading the book more seriously than many of my readers. I am, after all, my first reader and I take what I read seriously enough to take immediate action.

I don’t know how useful this book will be for you. I hope it is but you will have to decide. What I do know is that it is very useful for me. I hope it helps you too.

Contents:7. Introduction8. What do I appreciate about myself?13. If I was being truly loving to myself right

now what would I do?

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15. What do I want to do before I die?20. What makes you feel totally and completely loved?22. Who would I be if I could be anyone?24. What causes you pain?26. What is the most amazing day I can imagine today?28. Who and where supports me in being the

person I want to be?32. How can we create a peak experience?1. Dollar for dollar, what brings me the most

happiness?40. What dreams do I want tonight?42. How can compulsion serve me?45. What one thing could I do today that would

contribute the most to my amazing future?

46. What do I want so much that I am willing to grow and become more in order to create?

48. What would I need to learn to predictably create amazing relationships?

50. What Container Can I Create to Support this Amazing Energy?

55. How can I sustain what I want in the world?

56. What is the most important question you can ask ?

Introduction

As I write this I am challenging myself to be big. And I’m not sure quite what that means at this

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time. Life feels a bit edgy, in part because I’ve already accomplished many of my goals on a material level and am not sure what to go for next. What I’m really interested in are the juicy states of being that I often stumble magically into on the way to a big, or important goal on the outside.

This book is about me finding out how to grow in new ways, and about sharing the things that have helped me reach my current position of seeming abundant success.

With love,

Dane

Writing Goals

One of my teachers said something when I was fifteen that stood out: “They have done studies of successful people and the only common denominator they could find is that each had clearly defined written goals.” Whether or not this

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is true, the statement stuck. I decided to have clearly defined written goals.

I now have a system of yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily goals. I also have other documents:

My Bucket List. What I would do with my life if I had zero

fear. Really Important Goals. Goals for Age 45. The most Fun I can Imagine.

This makes sense when you consider my observation: My goals get accomplished 300% faster and reliably when I write them down, review them daily, and take action. Because I don’t like to-do lists I often take immediate action when I think of something so I can get it done with. In fact sometimes when I am writing my goals for the next day at night I say “I can do that right now,” and cross it off my list even before I send it. My daily goals I send to myself as e-mails.

This goal process saw me having my own business at seventeen, has seen my income rise seventeen times since then, saw me designing and building my first house at age twenty two and literally doing hundreds of other things that our culture does not designate as milestones, but which are more important. It has seen me meditate, take workshops, write poetry, create free time, and so much more.

Writing goals has worked well for me on my path to becoming big. One reason is that I am uncomfortable taking up space, and achieving any

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goal requires us to take up more space. When I ask myself “what do I feel like doing?” it is often to breathe shallowly, stay in my house and do something under the radar that no one notices. When I write a goal, it almost always requires me to do the opposite: engage with others, learn a new skill, develop a muscle and take action. Then, on the other side of my goal, I have a bigger cocoon to retreat to. After building my first house, for example, I could retreat even more comfortably into my serene and beautiful house to write new goals that challenged me to grow even more.

Amazing QuestionsQuestions are doorways into thoughts and feelings we otherwise would not experience. The answers to great questions can take us places we would not otherwise go.

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I discovered the power of questions as an adjunct to goals. In the morning I have a page on my wall that asks me things that can open up my day to being more fun:

What is the most amazing thing I can imagine doing today that I had not imagined doing before?

What is the single most important thing I can do to enhance my well-being sustainably?

What thought brings a smile to my face?

I have three other questions in the morning and another six in the evening. And they are fun to answer. If they were not they would not be good questions for me. And that takes us back to the most powerful question of all: What are the questions that at this time can help me create the most magical life imaginable? These should be your questions!

I want to be clear that my answers and actions in response to these questions are not dissociated from commitments and responsibilities. I don’t blow off promises and pay bills late to run off to Bali for a month at short notice. Rather, with the help of my goals and good questions – and a lot of patient practice – I have created a reality where I don’t have to look at my bank account for months at a time, have at least 70% of my life to play in, and stay ahead of the few responsibilities that I selectively choose, setting goals that make running the mundane part of life easier and easier with time. It’s a bit counter-intuitive: Discipline, responsibility and skill are often what create the abundance for spontaneity, joy and moment-based fun. At least that’s what I’ve found. So each year I do some things with discipline and strategy which I can see will

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make it easier for me to play for the rest of my life. Writing this book is a little of both: A way to meet new playmates and a way to review and stretch my current strategies to having fun. Last year I put a lot into my landscape business so that I could double my income and have even more free time to do things like this, which I don’t do for money, but makes me smile.

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RoutinesSome of the most creative and imaginative and prolific writers follow set routines every day. Steve Jobs had many of the same type of jeans and black turtle necks. I find that I do the same: I might spend a few days creating a really great place to travel to, learn the best hotels in the area, where all the things I like are, and then go back there over and over. Yet while I’m there, I’ll write a new book every time.

I think it works something like this: We each need a certain amount of certainty and security to create the internal space to take big risks and go into the unknown. It’s just not fun to go to a new place, for a new reason, learn a new skill, for an unknown purpose, for an unknown period of time. At some point we are overwhelmed with uncertainty and what was “new and refreshing” becomes a burden. When to get out of bed today? Why? For what purpose? What to wear? What to eat? I’ve had the kind of freedom many times where there is so much to decide that decisions feel oppressive, rather than freeing. Perhaps you find that when you go into a gourmet store and are faced with thirty types of mustard?

Routines allow us to standardize certain aspects of our lives so that it is truly fun to create and explore new things in other areas. There is a saying that if you are an addict you only want to attempt giving up one substance at a time. It just works better. I think the same is true when it comes to going out to the bleeding edge of growth in some areas. For it to be fun, rather than overwhelming, try and standardize some areas of

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your life so you can show up with excellence in your one chosen area.

Some of the things that I standardize and delegate are:

All house chores to someone who comes an hour a day five days a week within a set time.

All bookkeeping and taxes in the same way.

SEO for my business website.

Writing and giving copies of my landscape book for new landscape clients let’s all of them know how I work in detail before they hire me, and builds trust.

My grocery shopping – though I do this for fun myself as well.

The things I pack/bring when I travel.

A wake-up and go to sleep routine including questions, meditation and writing.

My contracts with clients.

What I wear.

This takes an enormous weight off of my shoulders, making these things mindless. So what happens? Freed of tedium, I have more energy and enthusiasm for a new idea. I came up with this book idea an hour ago and it’s already well underway. As I type my house-cleaner is doing the household chores I would have otherwise felt I should do and would have made this book feel like a chore. By delegating repetitious things, I have energy for unique things I enjoy more.

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Physical HealthTaking great care of our body is key to being big for obvious reasons. I don’t have strong opinions about how anyone else should do this. Here are a few things I do that I think have helped me:

Therapy and energy work (up to four hours a week) help me clear out of my system things that I can’t fully let go until I feel they are heard/understood. So by telling someone all these things I empty out, and feel space for something new.

Organic food helps my body have less chemicals to process.

Vitamins in a vitamin box that I prepare every two weeks keeps me in better health than I feel otherwise.

Writing, drawing or some forms of meditation make me feel much more alive and I find I can sometimes cure a cold when I’m on the edge if I just start writing.

A full spectrum light helps with depression so I turn this on when I’m writing for hours in my otherwise dimly lit office.

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Travelling to Thailand and swimming in warm water a few times a year feels wonderful.

Have a set routine helps me relax and enjoy my day because I am relaxed physically.

I measure and make sure to drink two quarts of water every day.

What works best for your body?

MeditationIn the same way that a routine creates a solid foundation from which to take bigger leaps, grounding and centering helps me create a bigger world. As I write this I feel a bit close to my edge so I’m pausing now to ground and center again…

First I visualize a light coming from my tail bone and going all the way to the center of the earth. (As I did this just now I remembered to drink my electrolytes and felt much more relaxed after doing so.)

Second, I let everything I don’t need or want fall away down that chord. Next I imagine a circle out about eight feet from my body. I create this circle. Then I fill it with bright light that has my energy signature in it. Then I clear out anything from the circle that does not belong there – that is not me.

Next, I open up to explore high energy. Where does the brightest, most beautiful and magical energy I can imagine want to take me today? (Right after writing this it took me away from the book to a beautifully tearful

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platonic cuddle with my house-cleaner who I chose for her presence and capacity to be a good friend as well as her professional skills).

Positive energy is worth pivoting for! If your best friend dies tomorrow you will probably pivot around that: cancelling and rescheduling plans that will allow you to honor their death. This is understandable. But will you join me in pivoting for joy of an exceptionally high nature? Or will you proceed with a mundane day, telling joy that you are too busy to give her any of your attention. We can do either. It’s our life!

Sometimes I find the most needy, desperate, terrified part of myself and give him as much love as I possibly can, singing, holding and inviting beings much bigger than I am to love him as well. It is my belief that when we nurture the seed, our innocence and our need that the being and life that grows from that seed becomes more beautiful.

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Psychedelic Ritual and HealingI stayed away from drugs and alcohol of all kinds until age forty. In that time I wrote thousands of poems, thousands of pages of journal writing, engaged in thousands of hours of meditation and therapy of all kinds. When I came to the beautiful mystery of Mushrooms, LSD and MDMA it was with profound respect for the potent doorways they are into my own vast inner world.

I’m glad I opened this door after grounding myself in so many ways. There are ways that learning all about money has taught me a lot about honesty, trustworthiness and sustainability. After all, if we cannot save more money than we spend, how can we grow more trees than we cut, or cultivate more love than we damage?

I’ve used low doses (65mg of MDMA, half hits of LSD and between 1/20th of a mushroom and two mushrooms) because I’m not trying to create such a loud interruption of my normal state that I can’t connect the

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two. What I’m interested in is the middle ground: Where I am conscious enough in a rational sense to track the many beautiful places I am going, and can learn from my experience, rather than be disoriented by them.

What I love most about my psychedelic journeys is the ways I have used their insights to live bigger in ways I would have never done otherwise. As an example, I know own a piece of land and am working towards building – something I had no idea I was even interested in – until I felt a connection with the local San Francisco land. The land that I chose is/was also rather illogical on the surface. However, the more I dig into the details the more hidden value this piece of land is revealing, from extraordinarily nice neighbors to scheduled county improvements.

One of the things that has kept me away from psychedelics and drugs of all kinds is the stereotype of dis-oriented, unreliable people who talk more and do less than the average person and feel great about it because of their substance-based experience. It is admittedly my own stuff, and I’ve always judged the perception that “far out” was, in and of itself, something worth pursuing. I’ve always been much more interested in what someone does with the information, philosophy or idea than the thing itself. I had paid close attention to the way my father used conspiracy theories to justify not improving his life. It did not matter what the conspiracy theory was. Or even whether it was true or not. The common denominator was that he was not going to fix some problem or other in his life because…. xxx conspiracy theory made the problem irrelevant. “Why should I fix the car when Edger Cacey (here a long introduction to Edger’s record as a predictor)

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predicts the world will end by 2000?” 2000 comes and goes. No problem. There are plenty of other predictions that would make fixing the care irrelevant in the near future.

I share this as context for some of my own skepticism about substances as any kind of quick fix. It took a number of forces to soften my anti-drug bias:

Spending 200k on therapy and energy work only to find that some internal pains and fears were getting worse, not better.

Feeling exhausted by all the control I was doing to manage my PTSD.

A clarity that I did not want to live if things went on feeling the way they did, despite my outer reality being stunningly beautiful in so many ways.

A brainstorming session in which I explored all the experiences and resources I had never explored, highlighting psychedelics.

Reading Food for the Gods and Acid Test, two books that helped me reframe my paradigm for substance use.

Hearing in Acid test that Iraqi veterans were at times having huge leaps forward in well-being after a single facilitated therapy session on MDMA.

An acquaintance I felt safe with offering to facilitate my first MDMA journey.

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All of this came together in about sixty days. And this has led to one of the richer veins of growth in my life, albeit rocky at times. It has an important part to play in my journey of living big because of the impact. In less than twelve months and in the space of five MDMA sessions, I have experienced the following:

More intense emotions than at any time in my life, both expansive and contracting.

A tripling of my income.

The buying of a piece of land.

A wave of new insights.

Some of the most intimate relationships in my life.

Writing twice as many books as usual.

I probably would not be writing this book were it not for my work with MDMA. I also think that my results were largely determined by the way I went about it:

1) Low doses.

2) A private, beautiful and safe setting.

3) Using paid facilitators or trustworthy and safe friends as sitters.

4) Reading Acid Test first, and following many of the protocols used in an FDA approved study of PTSD in Iraqi veterans:

a. Soft blindfolds.

b. Clearly written intentions.

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c. Great soothing music and headphones.

d. Recording the session on both note-paper and on my phone using a dictation app that recorded everything that went on in the room.

e. Listening to the multi-hour sessions multiple times afterwards.

f. Actively scanning areas of my life and looking for new actions that I could see clearly as a result of my altered perception.

I’m pretty sure that I would not have received these kinds of results before I had done so much inner work. I also think that MDMA is a very good substance for me in particular as a very motivated, mentally driven person who uses a lot of control to manage emotion. It was great for me because it allowed me to see my heart clearly without the encumbrance of my ideas. This gave me a more balanced view of my reality than my mental biases normally allow. It was the direction towards balance that I believe was so helpful.

I also want to acknowledge the risks involved with substances. At the same time I was experiencing all of these positive results, I found myself traumatized by the relationship that developed with one of my paid facilitators. As a result of the fact that substances can override our normal emotional and personal boundaries, I found myself flooded with feelings that were five times more intense than was safe to share with this man. He handled the situation poorly and unkindly, which led to deep childhood issues resurfacing in a way that was too big and too unsafe to deal with. In the end I did about

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fifty hours of intense therapy on this issue and had several of the most scary months of my life. All of this highlights the respect with which it is important to honor both ourselves and the substances we take for growth, spirituality or pleasure.

Self Acceptance (Being Small)Many things about being big are paradoxical. One of them is that to really be big involves accepting and respecting our limitations, or the areas we are small.

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Several areas stand out on my path where this truth has expressed itself.

I had started about ten books before I came close to finishing any of them. I always started with an overview, an outline of all the chapters, and then tried to flush out my overview into the complex book I had imagined. Then I would start writing and it would not seem to fit with my overview. So I would freeze, going back to the overview to re-write it so that the new chapter would fit. It was tedious, overwhelming and I felt confused. And this sense that “I had to do it a certain way” distracted me from my writing.

I found the same thing when it came to editing. Trying to figure out what I had written in another area of the book and edit for the big picture meant a process that made writing tedious. So I didn’t do it. Finally, long chapters would start in one style and then I would get tired of writing after about thirty minutes to an hour. But when I came back I was in a different mood and had a different way I wanted to say the same thing. So then I would go back and start re-writing the chapter – which took even more time than writing it the first time. So I would do that. But then I would again put it down, only to start the whole process over again. Then the book would go stale as an energy long before I completed this tedious and circular project. Another book would be discarded with nothing to show for it.

So what was the solution? Self acceptance and respect for my limitations. In the case of writing this meant taking each of these friction points and re-designing the process to eliminate each one.

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1) No more book master plans. Instead, this afternoon when I identified that the tensions I was feeling inside related to the voices in me that wanted to be big and the voices that wanted to be small, I came up with the clear theme of “Being Big.” Next, knowing that writing helps me as much or more than it helps my readers, I decided to write a book with that title. As I sat down to write it made sense to me to start with a review of things I’ve done well over the years. Then when I exhausted the known strategies I could start writing chapters that were more of a stretch. As a result the preceding chapters flowed out very easily.

2) I reduced the size of my chapters to a point where I could finish them in about thirty minutes. This eliminated the need for re-writes. It also gave me a sense of accomplishment, which motivated me to write more.

3) In order to keep books fresh, I also decided to make them shorter. For example, when this book stops feeling rich, I’ll stop writing it and simply call it at book at that point. In order for this to work I make sure to avoid references to future chapters. I don’t say in chapter one “I’ll talk more about XXXX in chapter ten.” Each chapter stands alone.

4) I edit paragraph by paragraph, as I’m writing. And fortunately I’m a fairly lucid writer. This allows me to feel comfortable publishing my first draft. Basically I say: “It will take me 1/3rd of the projects time and energy to re-read and edit the book and I’ll only improve it about 8%. That’s not

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very efficient. So I’ll publish the first edition 8% below my standard.” Then I give 5-20 copies of the book away (the whole first edition in a print-on-demand run) and enjoy the feedback I get.

5) Then I want to re-read the book to find out what it’s like to be a reader and so I do. As I do, I notice typos and things that are not clear. I go and re-write those immediately so I don’t have to remember them. Then I print the second edition of 5-20 copies. This is even more fun to give away.

6) Finally, I re-read the book in 6-24 months when I feel like it and make a few more edits or add a chapter. All this time the book has been out and it’s fun to get positive feedback, and to give it away or sell it.

As a result of respecting and accepting my limitations as a writer, editor and creative person with a lot of ideas writing books has become fun and easy. And because I’ve made it fun and easy, I write 1-3 books a year. As a result I have more than twelve books already written. And it just gets easier with time. In other words, I start to get bigger. And one of the reasons I decided to express my creativity in books was that a book, once written, is permanent. I never have to do anything for it to have value twenty years later. It’s leveraging my time in a way that helps me be bigger for others, since I can give them a book at a time I don’t even want to say a few sentences in person. The book transmits and amplifies my voice when I am not there.

Another area that I practice this passionately is in the area of relationships. I want to be really big in my

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relationships. And I know that for this to feel great and be possible I need to intimately understand and honor my own and my partner’s inner child. I do this in many ways, but one of them is mapping out the trigger points in me and my partner, and coming up with strategies to avoid them. In other words, if I want to experience the greatest love of my life it’s not going to work if every day consists of being annoyed, triggered and over-stimulated in five to ten ways that brings up all my smallness. Rather, by bringing all the judgments, fears, desires and trigger points out into the open, we can design a relationship that gracefully steers around these points. And as a result, some of the most beautiful and intense love, intimacy and trust emerges easily because it is who we are when our wounds are not being brought constantly to the forefront.

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One Big ThingFocus is powerful! Focusing on radical transformation and growth in one specific area of our lives is a recipe for success in a big way.

The first thing that happens when we decide to do one thing at a time superbly, is we need to think about what that will be. I make all my money as a landscape designer and installer. All my creative projects are funded from that. And that’s the first area where I see the power of focus. I have learned that for a variety of reasons I can make money three to four times easier as a landscaper than doing any of the many other things I could do to make money. This helps me make a very clear distinction: Anything I’m doing for money needs to be as a landscaper. Everything else is for fun.

In the 2008 housing crisis 50% of landscape business dried up in a year nationwide. That meant that landscapers were losing 50% of their income because people were not spending money. And that’s when I really benefitted from applying the power of one.

I asked myself one question: “Is it possible that my business could actually grow while the entire industry is shrinking 50% by doing something no one else is

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doing?” I decided that it was possible. Then I asked a new question: “What could I do differently that would cost almost no money and bring in more work than anything I’m currently doing?” This led to one answer: Writing the only local landscape book, knowing that anyone who read it would be predisposed to hiring me. I did this in three months for the grand total of $150. and this book has been bringing in 100k in business every year ever since, allowing me to grow in the middle of the recession.

I did this same thing a few years later. “What is the single most important thing I could do to dramatically improve my income?” My answer: “Create one of the best websites in the country and see that it get’s to be number one on google.” This was my one task that stimulated a complex strategy:

1) I had my assistant send me links to the top 100 landscape websites in the country.

2) I went through and picked my favorite as our starting point.

3) I set my assistant to work building it.

4) I designed a Google, Bing and Yahoo reporting page that would show me in 30 seconds exactly how much progress we made each week in the goal of being number one on Google, Bing and Yahoo.

5) I set my assistant to making me a weekly report.

6) I then went out and took 600 local images, grouped by category (mailboxes, driveways, garage doors etc.) and posted all these images on

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the website, having learned from experiments that Google gives high points for videos and images titled with the things people search for.

7) I had my assistant read two books on SEO and implement strategies he found, testing them with our weekly SEO reports. In some weeks we would improve 30%. In other weeks we only improved 5%. We worked on it, week by week.

Within three months we had achieved our one goal. We were number one on Google, Bing and Yahoo, without paying any of them a dime in advertising costs and had one of the best and most helpful websites in the country. As a result, leads in a given month doubled to tripled. We are now able to sustain this position for around $200. a month, bringing the cost of generating 50k of work to a mere $200. This is HUGE for me, since in the past I have paid up to 5k to generate 30k and not as reliably. And this one really big thing is a big reason why I’m on a plane to Bali and the Philippines for a month as I write this rather than worrying about can I afford another month of vacation back home.

I mention this because it’s easy to think that to get bigger we should do more things all at once. The stereotype of the mad, frazzled do-it-all juggler of crisis is often identified with success. Yet I have not found it to be so. In fact, I have never in my life had so much free time (five months of complete vacation overseas in a year that I tripled my income and made more than I have in any year of my whole life and often worked five hour days in the months I did work). Or money. And there have been plenty of years in my life when I worked ten hour days to make less. All this points to the

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power of doing one really important thing really well at a time, and picking things that build on one another.

When I was seventeen the really big thing was picking landscaping as my career path and business to start. When I was a few years older it was choosing to teach landscape classes. Then it was building a house. Then it was learning to work with temp agencies so I could take holidays. And as each success has built on things that came before, slowly my world gets bigger. As it does, I reinvest that success back into the next really big thing. And when I want to be really productive, I do just one really important thing at a time.

What is the single most important thing in your life at this time that, if you did it really well, would dramatically improve your life now, and in the future? Think about it. Think about how to respect your limitations to make it happen. For example, I do not have the patience to build elaborate websites but I do have the patience to find an assistant who could do it for me. I don’t have the patience to write elaborate e-mails. So I had my assistant find me software that makes it easy for me to send audio files in e-mails that outline detailed instructions. That made the web page project fun and easy for me, rather than an irritating chore. The key is to be honest with yourself and not judge who you are. And to care enough to get into the trenches if you need to in order to survive.

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Let You Matter!I can’t tell you what a big deal this is!

You: your thoughts, feelings, preferences, beliefs and values matter. Your body and what it does and does not like matters. As I write this I’m sitting on the floor of the plane, having paid $130. to upgrade to a seat on this 14 hour leg that has no seats in front of me. So I’m sitting on a pillow on the floor, typing on my laptop on the seat. And that’s why this chapter is making it into the book. I also have two chemical heat pads on my feet and one on my back, keeping me warm since I’m at the tail end of a cold. And this laptop really works for me. Knowing that having a laptop that works for me, could replace my desktop and was fun to use was worth 3k

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when I bought it. My Bose noise cancelling headphones are making it bearable to write on a plane. I really let what I want and need to have fun and be successful matter.

I want to be clear that one of my favorite stores is the dollar store. There are plenty of things that others may care about that don’t matter to me at all. I’m not saying I or you should buy the best. I’m saying that what is important to you matters. And that, if you take the time to know and respect yourself, it will lead you towards success and growth. It will help you become big.

Here’s why this is a big deal. There will be so many times in your life when a quiet or loud voice inside wants to speak up for something you know will be better for all concerned. Maybe you are working in an office that you can’t concentrate in and the boss is really pleased with herself for having an open floor plan because they think it’s modern. You know she will not want to hear that you are only working at 60% capacity because of her “great idea.” And everyone else is congratulating her – even the people who probably think like you do. Yet if you don’t speak up, negotiate the ability to work from home or wear Bose headphones or… then you will be assessed as being worth 60% of your true value. And you may be passed over for projects you would otherwise get as a result. And you may accept the image projected on you and forget that the reason your performance is sub-par is the open floor plan, not your skill-level. And worst of all, you will have trained yourself to say nothing at the many other moments that present themselves to speak up or be silent. What will your life look like twenty years from now if your reality delivers itself to you based on a

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compounding interest of silence, rather than a compounding interest of speaking up – because you matter.

People are always telling me how lucky I am. My outer reality (I’m processing sadness and depression this evening so I distinguish the outer reality from the inner.) is pretty amazing and gets better, overall, each year. And there is a reason for that. My reality reflects so many times when I have allowed my own experience and needs to matter:

I left school at age fourteen because I hated it and believed I could learn faster and more important things on my own. I did!

I started my own business in my own way that really worked for me, rather than becoming an employee.

I’ve invented hundreds of recipes and love cooking for myself, rather than eating what’s on the menu.

I went to college by studying biographies of successful people – something I love to do and learn from – rather than putting myself in boring and uncomfortable group contexts.

My contract with clients is very unique and spells out a number of things that are not considered “professional” but that work great for me. I go to work starting between 11am-2pm so I can enjoy leisurely mornings and write. That’s in my contract because I put it there. My life is so much more relaxed as a result.

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There are thousands of these things, big and small, that I’ve done differently for one reason or another. When I wanted to date people that valued the inner world more than the outer world I dressed in thrift store clothes and paid attention to who noticed me vs. who noticed the clothes. It worked, and I saved money on clothes. Now I’m going through a phase of filtering for fun and grandeur rather than being ordinary. So I’m buying silk and playful outlets to see who lights up vs. is put off and judges me. I want to hang around the people who light up and see “permission to play and have fun with this guy” vs. “who does he think he is with these weird outfits.” It makes me a bit uncomfortable, and that’s also fun. I’m smiling more in the mix of it all, and that’s the most important thing of all to me at this moment in time (remember, I’m processing some sadness and depression on the inside, so being kind to inner me trumps anything else).

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What Would I do With No Fear?

What would I do with my life if I had no fear (and by extension, no pain, since fear is produced by the memory of pain projected into the future)? This is a very big question, since so much of our lives, consciously and unconsciously are shaped by our fears.

One of the most important shifts is that we would make a bee-line for our optimal selves. Without fear of failure, disappointment and humiliation it really does not matter if we spend our whole life and just get half way to who we want to be, or succeed many times over and create new ideal selves to become. Without fear of failure we stop curbing our path of action to accommodate thoughts that “I’ll never make it. No one makes money at that so I’d end up on the street.” None of those fears matter in a world without fear. All that matters is the joy, pleasure and sense of growth that comes from heading towards where we want to go in a headlong pursuit of passion.

When I think about how fast people have gotten to where they wanted to go by just going for it all out, it’s pretty amazing. Having read Bill Gate’s biography the really amazing thing was just how passionate he and Paul Allen were about creating computer software of all kinds. They wanted to be a part of that world and did all kinds of things to see that they were, simply by taking the straightest path in that direction. Sometimes stealing, lying and cheating, never taking the short view, and being driving more by the dream than the money, they studied, practiced, dreamed, worked

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harder than almost anyone, and created the world they wanted to be in.

We are entering the phase of the book where I have a lot to learn! I’m terrified and have fun at least half of my life based on fear. I have chronic fatigue because my adrenals are so spent processing all of my unresolved PTSD and the many anxieties that my body and PTSD blow out of proportion. Trying to imagine a reality that is driven, not by fear, but by joy, is a really big deal for me. And it’s one of my more important projects. I’ve started my “no fear vision of life” document. And then I go and distract myself with something fun. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that it’s sometimes easier for me to give advice to others than to myself. Yet the advice I give to others is generally helpful when I apply it to my own life. So I’ll keep talking to you, and hopefully get a few more insights and pointers along the way! Thanks for supporting me in this way.

I think one of the reasons this is so hard for me to imagine is that I have done many of the big outer things as if I had no fear. I have written the books, made the money, bought the items and done the things on my bucket list. In fact, since my PTSD results in an all or nothing urge around many things, it has been very effective at helping me achieve big goals in a hurry. When I get clear about something that is important and I decide to do it, I go all out until it is accomplished.

For me the biggest thing that would change in a reality without fear is my approach to connecting with others. Anxiety, pain, shame, discomfort and loneliness, along with my fear of feeling these feelings directly or making other people feel these feelings and judge/reject me is a

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crippling force that leads to many of my interactions feeling more like a stutter, than a graceful flow. It’s so painful to imagine all the pain that has and might result again that I feel I need to practice, discipline myself and go on the attack trajectory to “engage as planned.” However, parts of me dissociate to avoid the expected pain/shame and these are the very parts needed to regulate and create the magic of flow with the person I’m with. What’s more, I’m not relaxed and my tension empathically migrates over to most people, who are themselves predisposed to be tense. In that way, I’m not really interacting with the other person as much as I am with my fears, and the images that are creating them. Even if things go beautifully well (they often do) I am still more engaged with “what a relief” than I am with the other person. This basically means that I’m tracking and relating to fear more than the people in my life. I feel sad when I reflect on this. It’s where my work is. When I can connect with someone with the inner confidence that I can and will create joy for myself and most likely for the other, my inner world will take about a 200% leap forward. In fact, as I’m writing this, this could be my next really big thing. And since the Philippines and Bali are both less fearful places than the U.S. when it comes to social interactions, I’m on the right track to having an easy arena to play in (I’m still on the plane to Manila).

Where is your work? As you examine your life and imagine a life lived as if you had no fear, what is the biggest change arena for you?

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The Meta-ConversationThere is one super-common denominator in all of the things I know about being big: The more conscious we are as we go about realizing our intentions, the more successful we are and will be. In other words, find a great way to double or quadruple the amount of consciousness that is present in the people involved in any situation, and that situation will move closer to it’s stated ideal.

Enter the meta-conversation. It’s been said that what separates humans from animals is self-awareness: that is the self being aware of itself. Self-consciousness is similar to a mirror in which, rather than seeing what is outside of us, we see and become conscious of ourselves. Self-consciousness is a powerful force in personal evolution. A meta-conversation is similar to the mirror of self-consciousness. Only it is what happens when a conversation becomes aware of and reflects upon itself.

Here are some examples of meta-conversations:

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Would you like to have a conversation with me?

What would you like the conversation to be about?

I want to pause for a moment and share how my body is feeling and learn how yours if feeling as we talk about that topic. Can we do that?

I want to pause and tell you what’s going on in my mind and heart as we are discussing this topic. Are you up for that?

A meta-conversation is a conversation about the conversation. What happens is that the spell of the conversation is broken and mutual awareness is flooded into the space, usually bringing vitality or at least awareness of the block. If someone resists a meta-conversation then a block becomes more conscious to both people, which is helpful in supporting both people to respect and possibly even discuss the resistance.

Here is an example of what can happen when you initiate a meta-conversation.

“Sure, tell me about what your body has been feeling…”

“I have a tension in my neck that feels like some anger that came up five minutes ago.”

“Do you know what that anger is about?”

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“I’m not sure, but I think it’s because when you talk about yourself I feel like you are bragging and comparing yourself to me as if you are somehow better than me.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

“Do you feel better than me?”

“I think there is some truth to that. What I’m thinking when I’m telling you about my successes is “Why doesn’t he do the same thing? It’s so easy.””

“That’s it! That’s exactly the sense I get and it pisses me off?”

“Why does it piss you off?”

“Because you are so sure that your way is the best for me and you are not letting in that I don’t want what you want? You are just assuming that I should want a new car because you do and then you are judging me for not going about achieving your goal the way you do.”

“You don’t want a new car?”

“NO! I don’t. I resent anything new at this time in my life because it takes thought and attention. What I really want is to feel more joy when I write my poems. And I’m glad I don’t have a new car because I’d probably get sucked into thinking I was better than others or trying to look important, but none of that really makes me

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happy. What I’m proud of is the poetry I’ve been writing and I want to keep it that way.”

“But what’s so great about poetry?”

“There you go again. You have that condescending tone. Rather than be humble to the fact that you may not have a wide enough outlook to understand a reality in which poetry mattered, you have already decided that your new car is more intelligent than my poems.”

“You’re right. So tell me.”

“It’s not the poetry, you idiot. It’s how I feel. I feel free, happy, satisfied, connected with myself and complete when I write an authentic poem. And I know how precious that is and I know you don’t get all of that from your car. But I also know that most people would not agree with me, so the car is tempting. I don’t want to be tempted. I want to protect this feeling.”

“I see. You get all of that from a poem.”

“Yes.”

“I had no idea. I respect you for going for what you value on your own terms. I always just assumed that material things were the measure of success. I don’t always pay attention to my feelings.”

“That’s what consumer culture wants: First advertising defines success, then we buy into it without thinking,

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and businesses make a lot of money because we work hard to fulfill their scripts of success.”

“I never thought about that in that way. I must seem shallow to you.”

“A bit.”

“So who is judging now? Personally, I like fitting in and not standing out. It makes me uncomfortable.”

“I can understand that. I’m just not willing to pay the price of selling out the few times in life I feel truly happy.”

“That makes a lot of sense to me.”

It is the meta-conversation that delivers all of this awareness. And it is the awareness, and the chance to edit the unconscious judgments with that awareness, that lead to these two men growing closer together, rather than simmering in resentment or drifting apart. When it comes to big thoughts, big hearts and big relationships, the meta-conversation is king. It can turn the most boring conversations into the most stimulating and rick conversations. And that’s BIG!

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United CouncilYou’ve seen how weird and inefficient governments are. You hear the news stories of billions spent to do something inefficiently that probably would have been better not done at all. What you are witnessing is the bizarrely jagged line from an idea, watered down by

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absurd compromises, so it can pass with a majority vote.

The same thing goes on inside of each one of us. We decide to lose some weight. But the personas who need that weight to avoid feeling shame kick up a fuss and start sabotaging the program. We say “no more starches” and the emotional protectors say “fine, we’ll enjoy an ice cream pint in the evenings.” It seems like we are making progress but sometimes, after all the ripple effects of our grand plan tally up, we are moving backwards.

The problem is not government. It’s the idea of unilateral, dominant and fragmented power as a paradigm for decisions. Our mind gets an idea in its head and wants to execute the idea immediately, without being aware or including all of our inner stake-holders, conscious and unconscious, who are affected by the plan. The more we push for a straight and uncompromising line, the fewer votes we end up with from our internal personas. All kinds of decisions end up on the graveyard of abandoned projects and dreams.

This is as it should be. Ideas that do not serve all of us are straightforward and simple, but don’t do us any good. We need to start piloting our life from a holographic perspective. And to do that we must begin by listening, and continue to do more listening than preaching, until we reach as strong a majority vote as is possible.

I want to tell you a story about saving money. I could never do it. I went from making $10. per hour to making $400. per hour and could not save any money. It made me so uncomfortable to have money that I would

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hurriedly spend it, prepay bills or do anything to insure that I didn’t have money in the bank.

One day I went cold turkey. I just stopped spending money with a commitment that I would not spend a penny unnecessarily until I had $10,000. in the bank in long term savings. It was tough! I went through all kinds of emotions. I toughed it out. I lost a friend, who used to occasionally loan me money. I let him go. I felt physically sick and scared as income dried up, testing me. I toughed it out.

Then it was easy. After a few months it was easy. There was no more resistance. I have saved an increasing amount of money ever since, though at times it still makes me very anxious.

This is an example of crude power. It was not very graceful, but it did work with enough stubbornness and a willingness to hold onto it at all costs. However, as I’ve noticed over time, I paid a high price for this change. I was VERY good at juggling money. I would go out and sign jobs just in time to avoid bouncing checks. My life was an ADVENTURE! And every time I made another deposit I felt great! It was exciting! And I was an unconscious addict to all the adrenalin that came from living on the edge.

But I didn’t know all this. I didn’t understand how fun this was for parts of me that liked the weekly hit of “I did it again! I have enough money in the bank.” And there were other things it did for me as well, such as make me seem less arrogant to my friends and even be a bit more “normal.” I lost all of that benefit when I saved money. And for about a year my life was not as fun. I had to create a new self-image to find excitement

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in other ways: Kite surfing, hang gliding, going on last minute travel adventures. So I passed my “savings bill” and got it implemented through brute force. And I went through a year of less fun. It was OK. I did my best. But I know that if I could have learned more by listening I might have negotiated a much better deal with myself: “First we are going to start spending money on travel and kitesurfing. Then, when you have enough adventure in that way we will start saving money so we can do even more of it. How does that sound? And we can invite friends to join us and use more free time to socialize so that we are more connected…”

Win/win intelligent plans start on the inside, show up as great lives and then work their way up to a national level. When we have a population who can vote for great internal bills and create amazing lives, we will also throw out the inefficient bills put forth by government and ask for truly creative win/win bills. In this way our nation will become as good as our individual lives at spending time and money. We are the leaders – the pioneers.

The most important thing when creating great bills is not to judge our needs. We need to hear from all voices. Then, as majestic kings and queens, we can assess what decision truly would be the best for all of us. And we can preside over changes that stick and are celebrated with fun, rather than unbalanced plans that quickly fall prey to self-sabotage. We cannot grow big when half to a third of us is fighting the other half of us. To be big, we need a united council.

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I like this question because it forces us to dream big. It’s one of the questions I have taped by my bed and has led me to put many things in motion that are helping me create an amazing world. Often it leads me to invest in my business, since that is what funds all the other great experiences I mention in this book.

What is one choice you could make today that would dramatically enhance your probability of a great future? This is such a powerful question to keep asking and answering!

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Loving Loving is perhaps the single most powerful force of personal transformation. There are many kinds of love and it can be confusing to distinguish what we are talking about when we say the word (I wrote “Faces of Love” for that reason). The particular kind of love I’m referring to here is the love that is so big that we are willing to change – to become more, out of our love for another. It’s one of the paradoxes of self-love that at some point the most selfish things we can do is to love someone more than we love ourselves. Just think about the way we clean up for company. We do it for someone else, but we are the ones who enjoy a cleaner house. The company often hardly notices.

I’ve experienced this form of love in various subtle ways. I used to hate Thai food with a passion, so I didn’t eat it. But I love to cook for my lovers and sometimes, when I really love someone, I invent dishes that are inspired by the profound intimacy we share. I find myself asking myself “what dish out of all infinite possibility would most touch, delight and inspire this woman I love?” And when I make that dish it is with the sole desire of seeing her happy, nourished and feeling known.

I did this for a woman who loved Thai food. I found myself imagining flavors that would nourish and delight her – seeing her smile when she ate my unique flavors. And this set me to experimenting and fiddling – my favorite kind of cooking. Low and behold, I could not imagine the perfect flavors for her without falling in love with those same flavors myself. In short, I fell in

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love with Thai cooking because it was in those range of flavors that my lover was most delighted. As a result, Thai cooking is one of my favorite foods. My lover and I separated but I have gone forward in life with a love for a whole range of food I would have never eaten otherwise. In fact, Thailand is currently my favorite travel destination and 20% of that equation is the food, which I see cooked there with so much industry and love.

As I write this I’m carrying on a lively platonic conversation with a Thai woman who, when I met her, did not speak a word of English. She has one of the biggest hearts I know and she has decided to love me with passion and kindness. It’s not a sexual love. She sees me as a son and brother who fills her heart with love and joy to spend time with (Joy in the Presence, is the flavor of love, for those who have read “Faces of Love”). So she is changing in beautiful ways at incredible speed. Her English is improving at a rate of 50% per month. She is learning a whole new way of thinking. She went from feeling that flowers were a waste of space in her rooftop vegetable garden to planting many of them to make me smile (I love flowers). And she is deeply grateful for the whole experience.

This woman tried to teach me something along these lines with limited success. She told me “In any relationship you can be the bicycle or the rider. The bicycle never changes and you can complain and blame the bicycle when it falls down or you trip over it. But the rider is the one who learns to see, respect, master and learn to transport themselves to beautiful places with that bicycle. What do you want to be? The rider who

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takes responsibility for learning, or the bicycle who stays the same?” One of the reasons that loving is so powerful, is that it gives us the inner reserves and will to want to be the rider, rather than the bicycle in our lives and in our relationships. The bicycle has an easier job, but is also powerless. It has to wait for someone with the will and capacity to ride it well. The rider never waits. They will walk, get another bicycle if one is locked up, can repair the bicycle that breaks, and can learn to ride with more and more skill.

Loving someone so much that we are willing to change for the better is a gift we give ourselves.

In my house is a chalk drawing that I made with a lover. It’s beautiful, and I learned to draw in that way just to draw together with her. It is unique. There is a French press that I learned to make great coffee with for another lover. There is a book of poems I wrote mostly for another lover. My lovely natural latex king bed I purchased to help another lover’s back. My garden looks nicer than I bothered to make it because I wanted it to look nice for yet another lover. None of these things would be there were it not for the joy of loving another. And they are there even though each of these lovers has long past through my world and I may never see any of them again. Pi Oh, my thai friend, will have a new appreciation of flowers, a new way of thinking, the ability to speak English and so many other things because of her love of me.

There is a profound misunderstanding that when we change ourselves for another, we show weakness. American women in particular are always trying to look out for one another in the form of “Don’t you go selling yourself short or making any changes for some man.

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Look at what he is doing for you? Don’t do it girl!” This may be true when it comes to giving up what is beautiful in us and our world. However, a clear distinction must be made between the deeply self-loving and self-respecting path of becoming more in order to love someone and giving up our personal beauty to be liked by someone.

When I meet someone I take it as a given that loving them profoundly will change me profoundly. I don’t even want to bother with a relationship that does not have the potential to transform me profoundly. This is why I won’t tolerate lies, low-trust in return and various other beliefs and habits in a partner that make it unsafe to be as vulnerable as one needs to be to change profoundly for another. The thing I pay attention to is whether I like who I am becoming more or less when I am changing in order to love a particular person? This, for me, is the most important question in the relationship. I once had a lover who laughed more, wanted more sex and made more time for me when I put her down with sarcastic jokes. I never saw her so juicy and alive so I found myself becoming sarcastic just to please her. But I didn’t like the way I felt about myself. So I first brought up the issue, and then separated when she defended her right to enjoy being put down. That is something I have not kept around. I’ve gone back to being more sincere, sensitive and playful in my humor, and find people who like that.

It takes real bigness to love. It is powerful to consider re-writing our software and changing our hardware to become more for another. It is our nature to love big, and the more that we do, regardless of the levels at which it is reciprocated, the faster we grow. Don’t hold

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back because someone else is being small. Let yourself outgrow them and choose to love someone else who you can change even more for. The self-loving piece is to track that you love, admire and are more capable as a result of your choices to change for another.

The same is true in reverse. I ask a LOT from my lovers. Many have told me that relating to me was one of the most challenging, growth-filled and dynamic relationships in their life. That’s because I am both picky and sensitive in ways that require many to grow and because I admire, love and respect those who are willing to learn to ride bicycles rather than wait to be ridden perfectly. And the happiness I delight in seeing in these women’s faces comes from just this. We feel great about ourselves when we become more to please, love and support a great partner. When I teach someone to talk to me with more respect they feel proud and excited to know a skill at a new level. And I love them more for being willing to be big.

I encourage you to invite people in your life to be big and to celebrate them for each step along the way (this is a key distinction, or we are just nags and perfectionistic critics). Truly honor each thing someone does in your relationship to love themselves and you more. I’ll talk about this more in the next chapter.

Remember, that if you are ever in a relationship in which you have done all of the changing (for the better), when the relationship ends you will walk away more powerful. If you balance the check-book, plan the vacations, clean the house, cook the food and continue to improve in all these areas, when you outgrow the relationship the other person’s life will fall apart because they did not have the courage to become more

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for you (there is always the fear of feeling that “I made them the most important part of my life and they did not even care enough to make me a little important,” which is a lonely feeling). Yet your life will improve when you leave that relationship because you will have the routines, muscles and skills to live a great life. Loving does take courage. And we need to do it for ourselves, as well as another.

InvestingOne of the more important paths to bigness is investing in our future. I like to tell myself “Dane, you will be much smarter in ten years than you are today. So make sure that what you do today makes it easier for your future self, not harder.” This is why I don’t like debt. Debt says: “I will spend the money smarter than my future self so I’ll take out a loan that they can be burdened with later.”

Investing in the future can take so many forms. In my own life I try and invest in all areas:

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Goals invest in a more productive tomorrow.

Researching and buying tools before I need them allows me to seize opportunities and work efficiently when a job comes up.

Keeping my truck filled up with gas, my water-bottles filled, my truck stocked with my two local landscape books, and all the odds and ends in the tool box that I may need, allows me to be fully prepared to respond quickly to a fun adventure or a work need without stress.

Investing in an IRA saves me taxes now but also prepares for a time when I might need the money.

Putting 10k in a safety deposit box protects a possible future in which there might be an internet crash in which ATM’s don’t work for a few days or in which my accounts are frozen for some reason I can’t imagine. Physical cash can be useful in some situations.

Keeping my house stocked with food and vitamins means that I can host at a moment’s notice – my favorite kind of hosting – and am not distracted from key goals in the day by small errands.

Taking the time to set up online bill-pay saves me many hours a year buying stamps, mailing letters, and writing out checks.

Finding a virtual assistant that I LOVE was a lot of work. However, once done, he has helped me with literally thousands of small and big chores over the year that has dramatically freed up my time and made it more fun. By seeing that he does enough things that make me money I also have made money as a result of having all these improvements, which is part of designing a sustainable investment or idea.

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What I look for in an investment is some mix of the following:

A one-time action now will make it permanently easier for my future self. Setting up bill-pay took me several hours up front, but then saves me time indefinitely, as an example.

The amount of time/money invested now will be easily repaid.

By preparing, I will be able to have a wider range of opportunities available for me. For example, finding a really great house cleaner/assistant who comes one hour a day and does all my chores helps me open to a wider range of possibilities:

o I will have more energy to do a range of things from work to adventures, last minute.

o If I am sick, someone can take care of me – buy food, clean, massage me etc.

o By picking people I really like my future becomes happier.

o The fact that I make more per hour than I pay per hour and I often use the cleaning hour I would have spent to work means that I have more money at the end of the year because I’ve hired this person.

o I LOVE walking into a clean house every day.

o I pick people I can process feelings with and find that this clears my head, so I make better decisions.

o I have someone I can call to do errands and who can look after the house when I travel.

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Do-It-Now is a habit that supports investing in the future. Every night when I get home the first thing I do is fill the two truck water-bottles that insure I stay hydrated. Then I put all the receipts in the box for tax purposes. I prepare checks for deposit. I listen to and return calls and e-mails that relate to work or the future. And I review and respond to my assistant’s work for the day. Finally, I prepare the tools I will need for the next day, re-writing my job plan. And I put more books in the truck if I’m getting low. Then I do laundry, put any groceries away and buy anything I need online that came up during the day. Now I can play on the foundation of a well-prepared day. This daily habit naturally leads to thinking this way over the year. I will prepare, plan and buy things on sale and simply do things that come up, like this book, immediately. In fact I woke up after my first day in the Philippines and had three chapters I wanted to write and decided to do them immediately, to help clear my head from jetlag and also to be done with this book quickly so that I am ready for the next inspiration.

That also reminds me of last night and today being better as a result of investments in the future. I know that my experience travelling improves 300% with sensual female company. So about a week ago when I booked my ticket I also began a system of investment that was immediately fun and also has led me to a sense of abundance in that area right now:

First I sorted out my feelings with my assistant by talking about the tension I felt around wanting to have one or more female companions for my trip and wanting it to be a win/win. I decided that what felt best was to delete marriage from my dating profile (since that seemed unlikely and would avoid giving false hope), would spell out clearly that I was looking for a travelling companion, not a long-term girlfriend, and send this to many people, knowing that only about 10%

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would have the time and be open to the idea, and we might or might not be a good personality fit.

Next I created the form letter so that I could copy/paste it and add the woman’s name.

Next, I scanned 1,000 Filipina profiles, searched by not having young kids living at home, speaking English well and being online in the last month.

I showed interest in about 200 of these.

Then I sent the letter to anyone who showed interest back, or wrote to me.

In my letter I also invited women to read my books as a way to get to know me. This was both done as a sub-agenda of sharing my writing and positively affecting people’s lives and as a filter to find someone I would enjoy talking with and to see who was serious.

In the letter I asked for a phone number, skype account, and description of their schedule during my trip. This also allowed me to track communication skills and attention to detail, two things I like.

Then I e-mailed everyone who wanted a copy of one, two or three of my books, depending on what I thought they would like. Two of the books were very intimate, so a favorable response to the book would mean they were likely to like me.

This left me with about eight phone numbers I could call when I got to Manila. I called four. I spoke to the mother of one woman (parent’s take an interest in their daughters in the Philippines) who had read my books and liked me and said she would chaperone her daughter today on a two hour bus ride to meet me and if we all got on well she would leave the daughter to go travelling

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with me and take over the daughters responsibilities for her.

I then called other people and found someone who was delighted to join me for dinner, cuddling and sex on a five hour date. She showed up within an hour at my hotel and we had a lovely time. I am not as focused on sex as I am on win/win and flow and she was the one who initiated our kissing. She was going to spend the night but wanted to go to church earlier than I wanted to wake up so she left last night.

Creating an abundance of quality time with very nice people is much easier in some parts of the world than others. The same is true with just about anything: some places are conducive to business, such as the U.S. Others are more conducive to art (places in Europe). Yet others are more conducive to emotional connection.

Fertile SoilPart of being big is growing easily and rapidly. And that requires rich soil. Every soil is rich for something so the important thing is matching the soil with your main goal.

I feel fortunate to have learned at an early age that every country and culture is richer soil for certain things. When my family moved me to England at age ten it felt very stuffy in some ways. But in others it was three to ten times richer. Reading Sherlock Holmes, Hardy Boys and Enid Blyton mystery novels in a four hundred year old home with a cellar that might have secret passages was so much more exciting! Jumble Sales at the church were incredibly rich environments to gather my detective kits and metal-detecting was a real adventure. England was rich in mystery, but also in

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global perspective. When I returned to America after several years of British Comedy and BBC news I was struck by how provincial the U.S. awareness was. The BBC news would report the world. The U.S. would report America.

Perhaps the most striking thing I noticed, moving from New York to England, Scotland, Cyprus, Canada and back to the U.S. was the standardized assumptions that were accepted within each culture. In England they had giant keys that were fairly easy to pick and uncomfortable to carry around. These keys to bedroom doors and houses were still being manufactured, with huge locks. They were ugly, impractical, used four times more materials than U.S. locks and were never questioned. New locks and keys were being designed and built every day just because they had been done that way for hundreds of years.

By contrast, the Europeans had dual flush toilets that saved half the water of giant, slow U.S. toilets that were still being designed the way they always had been, and would continue to dominate U.S. markets for another thirty years after I saw the dual flush units in England, France and Scotland.

These types of things were easy to spot and compare. But the same was true of emotional biases. The U.S. is more transparent, immediate and direct when it comes to emotion by about 200% over England, while simultaneously being less self-deprecating. As a result, Americans come across as very self-centered and unsophisticated in that arena, as viewed by British eyes and traditions. The brits are viewed as being more stuffy by Americans.

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I tried to start a business in England exactly as I had in America and failed. The Brits were looking at different things. All of this is to say that the people, location, culture and environment we choose to become big in, will play a part in how easily we succeed. You can grow a tomato in rocky desert soil. But it will grow much easier in rich vegetable compost.

What does this mean for you becoming big? It may or may not be relevant for you at this moment in time. However, be aware of this variable. It can change your life. Here’s one example of how it changed mine:

I moved my business from Whidbey Island, Washington State to Marin County, CA. My income doubled. That’s not why I moved. I moved because the woman I had decided to enter relationship with lived in Marin and she could not move her business as easily as I could move mine. I did it to make it easier for her. I had just finished building my dream house and would have enjoyed living in it, but love is more important than houses in my world so the move made sense. But I also know that most relationships don’t last. So before I decided I asked myself an important question: “If we break up and I’m settled down there, will I regret the move and move back?” I answered “No. Marin will allow my artistic creativity twice as much freedom because the landscape work being done there is twice the quality per square foot as the landscaping being done on Whidbey Island. This has proved to be the case. As a result, my income doubled as a result of moving to Marin County. And my skills and artistry has grown, long after this woman and I separated on amicable terms.

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Yet that one choice may be why I’m writing this book. It may be why I’m in Manila for a one month vacation. And it may be why so many of certain of my creative projects have taken off. They are doable within the environment that I have chosen.

We don’t think as much as we could about environment. It’s normal to assume that the rest of the world is like our world. But it is not. In the Philippines I can spend ten times the quality time romantically and otherwise with warm people for ten times less effort. It is literally easier to fly half way around the world and set up my whole life to do so than it is to create enthusiastic, warm and sensual first dates in the Bay Area. I tried every approach I could for seven years before asking myself a very important question: “Is there anywhere in the world where people might want to relate the way you do, and thus be allies rather than having to drag people along?” This led me to Thailand and the Philippines. And over the course of fourteen months spent between these two countries I’ve learned what can happen beautifully here, what can’t and what parts of my soul, body and spirit I can celebrate and nurture in these soils. And I know that it’s not me. I’m not being singled out for resistance in the Bay Area and I’m not being singled out for love and acceptance in Thailand and Philippines. It is just the nature of the soil. My heart grows richly in these places because they provide rich soil for my heart.

Have you ever noticed that you laugh three times more with one person than another? Or that you get enthusiastic when you think of going on a road trip with one person and scared when you imagine the same road trip with someone else? In truth, some of these feelings

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may be the result of projections that have little to do with those people. Our projections about a place or person are part of the soil, so we make it easy on ourselves when we choose people and places that for us hold a positive projection. But some of it is the place and the person. Some of it is the memories of one person criticizing and glaring at us when we are enthusiastic where as someone else enjoys the energy of our enthusiasm and does not care if our ideas are good or bad – it’s the fun that counts!

As a business owner I know I can have a client that, for them, I am amazing. I can have another client for whom I am an idiot, even as I do the exact same things for both clients. I can be too expensive for one client and too cheap for another. And the same is true with lovers. I can be an amazing cook for one, and a bore who spends too much time in the kitchen for another. I can be an amazing entrepreneur in America or someone too big for their britches in England. Here’s the thing: It’s not you. It’s not me. It’s simply the way you and I land in a certain place with a certain person.

This has given me all kinds of freedom. Because I have been in plenty of situations where 90% of the people around me told me with absolute certainty “You should not do this! This is a horrible idea. You are a bad person for doing this. Get back IN LINE with the rest of us!”

Watching most people, they will automatically drop their own impulse and get back in line in these situations. I’m sure I would have also if I had not had a life in which I have seen different groups behave this same way about many things, in opposite ways. So what happens in my mind at these moments is: “I wonder what this group would do if they were confronted by

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this other group I know who feel just as vehemently about the opposite thing? Which group do I want to belong to?”

Much of my freedom to live life on my own terms comes from the willingness to change groups rather than change myself. I look at it on a case by case basis. Would I like myself more if I changed to fit into this group? Or would I like myself more if I changed the group or changed groups? Sometimes I will change groups. Sometimes I will go off on my own for a while, knowing that I don’t know any group who agrees with me but that there is one out there and it’s my job to find it. And sometimes I’ll act as a mediator between groups, telling American’s about the wonders of Thailand, where people are much happier and less stressed, and telling Thai’s about ways to think that unlock more of their personal freedom to be themselves – something that America does well.

The point is that the people you spend time with, the places you visit, the groups you participate in and the books you read are all part of your soil. They matter. Dropping a group or activity can be as important as adding one. I dropped Toastmasters because the group was valuing seconds over the amount of emotional depth and vulnerability of the speakers. I did not want to learn that time was more important than feelings – a lesson I had learned too well already in America. So I left, to pursue long winded emotional experiences with people who love to make their heart sing. It’s not that I discount Toastmasters value in other areas. I just noticed that I was changing and did not like who I was becoming as much as the Dane who did not go to

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Toastmasters. I’ve made hundreds of these choices very consciously. And my life is better because of them.

Since all soil is fertile for something, even if only for self-pity, the first step is to choose our goals and visions. Then we are in a position to start finding the people, work, culture, beliefs and daily routine that is rich soil for our success.

Celebration!What is celebration? I experience it as pausing to honor with joy where we are, what we have accomplished, and where we are going. It’s a pause in which we shift from the feeling and actions of trying to be and get more, to enjoying the present. And it is VITAL! Celebration can literally improve our quality of life 50%.

We can create amazing lives on the outer level driven largely by fear. I’ve done it. I imagine all that can happen wrong and work really hard to see that it doesn’t. Then I go on to the next thing and see that that does not go wrong. My reality gets better but I’m always afraid. Because there is always something to do to improve things. And there is always something that can go wrong.

That’s where Celebration comes in. And it’s really big. It’s a feminine energy (one reason it’s discounted in America) and it’s all about the feeling. It’s about going from feeling tight, nervous and driven to vast, happy, abundant and joyful. It’s about shifting from worry to gratitude. And it’s not about doing anything at all.

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An ideal dance with bigness involves doing things 50% of the time to improve our overall well-being and become who we want to be, then celebrating our success, beauty and abundance 50% of the time and replenishing our reserves with joy. Nothing beats this quality of daily experience. It’s the feeling we have when we meet a beautiful old couple with a partly dilapidated house that is singing with joy. They don’t have the coolest house in the neighborhood. What they have is so much more significant: the most beautiful experience of their lives.

What does it mean to celebrate?

To pause, and in that moment of pause feel our freedom to be. Our joy of presence. Our deep gratitude for the 99% of things in our life that go well, including all the cars that arrive safely at their destination, all the e-mails that show up where they were intended, the cells in our body that do their job against enormous odds, and the planet that keeps on turning day after day! And our sense of abundance. Just because we don’t have all the things mentioned in 20,000 TV ads, does not hide the fact that as a species we have never had as many choices, luxuries and resources in so many different forms, online and otherwise. There is so much abundance to be grateful for!

We can celebrate with song, with food, with joy, with meditation, with games and with laughter. The focus is on the presence and on the emotion. It’s a time when the infinite to-do list is put on hold and we can realize the bigger truth: that all of the many things our masculine self does for our future, survival and well being is all for this moment: the delight of our feminine

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self in all we have accomplished and in the presence of who we have become.

There are various rituals and moments throughout the day in which celebration can easily bring us the 50% greater joy that it will – if we let it. Here are a few:

Pausing to smile.

Making eye contact.

Lingering and listening before replying.

Telling someone: “Pause a moment. You just said something important and I want to enjoy it. Let it in.” If there is some good news I sometimes say “Hooray! Let’s all celebrate xxxxx success.” This brings a smile, a reduction in tension, and the only thing that made that accomplishment or success worthwhile: A feeling of joy.

Writing letters of appreciation to ourselves by e-mail or otherwise.

Writing in our diary.

A gratitude journal.

Hosting a party and toasting/honoring a specific mile-stone or accomplishment.

Honoring someone else. Sending a card, a gift or hosting an event.

Writing a poem.

Drawing a picture to celebrate something.

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Meditating on good things and abundance in our lives.

Making an offering or gift to a beautiful project to help others.

Preparation can also be a form of celebration. Preparing flowers, a dish or a card with honor for who someone is can have the energy, not so much of doing, but of honoring what is and anticipating the beauty of connecting.

This book is medicine in my life for the fact that my anxiety drives me to do more than to enjoy. Writing about the things I have done well is helping me pause and reflect on the joy of being here, rather than worry about what I need to do next. And this chapter is one of the surprise gold-mines for me. As I write it I can see so clearly that celebration, pause and presence is exactly the medicine for my body, adrenals, and my deeply sad and ignored feminine heart. I think it’s how all our hearts feel when we do do do and get the message that it’s never enough. May this chapter be as rich for you as it is for me. I just paused to text the mother and daughter who are just getting on their way to see me today. And this chapter helped me shift what might normally be my impatience at being interrupted at what I am doing to the wonder of celebration that this chapter is already this far along. And that two people, based solely on reading one of my books and a fifteen minute phone call are setting out on a two hour journey to have lunch and perhaps a whole trip together. And I’m celebrating the fact that in Philippines and Thailand the elder sisters and mothers coach the young women daily, who in turn honor them with intimacy and respect, on how to succeed, understand and bring joy

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into their relationships. In that sense it is really the mother who I will be in relationship with, and who will be guiding her twenty year old daughter to take good care of herself and enjoy visiting me. I’m also grateful that my date will have the incredible resource of kindness that an emotional family at her back provides. I love the way that some Asian cultures protect the feminine by giving it so much support to be it’s beautiful self. My feminine self is in the right place to learn from and take in this great luxury.

Now, it’s time to Celebrate!

About the Author

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Dane Rose lives in San Rafael, California. His interests include energy medicine, landscape design, sculpture, poetry and vegetarian cooking. So far he has lived in New York, England, Findhorn Scotland, Cypress, Canada and Whidbey Island Washington.

Do you have something valuable you would like to invite? What would make the interaction the most nourishing for you? I would enjoy receiving it. Feel free to write to me at:

daneeaster@comcast.net

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