Episode 24

Hello again. This is Episode 24 of the follow through Formula Podcast, and I'm Rick Lewis following through on a commitment to do 21 days of podcasting in a row. Now, you might be asking, If it's Episode 24, how can you say this is part of following through on 21 episodes in a row? 

This is something that really interests me. Maybe more than anything that's come so far. Each day during this challenge to myself, I was getting up with a desire to follow through on this goal, completing 21 podcasts in a row. I would get up with that motivation there, to be able to say I did it. On day 22 I even talked about the importance of having a goal and incrementally moving toward that goal and acknowledging for yourself that it has been successful, to celebrate it. Then there was episode 23, which I called the worst episode that could happen. I actually I think it is probably the best episode so far, because something even more real is starting to occur. It is showing up along with the feeling of not wanting to follow through anymore.

What could there possibly be of value in the feeling of running out of motivation? Why continue to do something you've been committed to without having the motivation to do it anymore? At first blush, it would be easy to assume it's over. It would be easy to stop because I don't feel like it anymore. But the reality is that not feeling like following through is actually the beginning of follow through. That's where follow through really begins.

Up to that point, you have been riding the chemistry of what is commonly called “the honeymoon.” It's like a new relationship. It takes no effort on your part to follow the chemical trail of love cocktail that gets created when you have a naturally occurring attraction for someone. You pursue it and you enjoy it and you revel in it. But it's not of your doing. It's something you stumble into and you can say yes to. But it never lasts forever, at least in the same form. People change, bodies change. The brain becomes inured to the signals that once produced excitement, and now it just feels like the same thing. Day after day, the novelty wears off, and the novelty is now wearing off on a daily podcast. I am curious about what is there when you don't want to do something anymore.

What happens then, when you continue to follow through, and who or what is following through if you don't want to?

This goes back to the conversation that I've been having about integrity. What part of us is motivated to take action on a goal? And if that part changes or goes away, then who follows through? Who's going to pick up the ball and make sure that there's still someone there to get up in the night when a child has a bad dream and the parent is exhausted? Who makes the coffee in the coffee shop when after 10 years of being in business that person doesn't feel like getting up at 4am and making that coffee in advance so you can go have it at whatever time you roll out of bed? Who does that? Who's the one who goes to sit at their computer to complete the novel that you're now reading when they didn't want to write, when nothing in them had any motivation to produce more of the story that you're in the middle of enjoying? Who completed the roads that you drive on and the entertainment that you consume? Who created the stand-up routine by the comedian that you love who spent thousands of hours coming up with the gags and then the five or 10 years testing those jokes on millions of people to hone it to the point where they could deliver 20 minutes of stand up material that you love and enjoy? Who kept doing that?

There's something inside of a human being that can go beyond the motivation to do it, and that's what interests me right now.

In that way, follow through is a kind of spiritual experience because it transcends the human frame. It transcends the capacity of what the human psyche and the human identity, the human ego alone, which is limited by its separate sense of what's in it for them, can produce. What if there's no more reward for the part of us that started something in the first place? Who picks up the ball and actually follows through on a project or vision, a cause, a calling? Now it gets interesting.

This is where a new kind of possibility really shows up. Because if we can carry on somehow without motivation to do it, then there is the real possibility of something extraordinary coming through. Maybe follow through is more of an empty space than one that is full of passion to do something. The passion is sort of like the first launch stage of a rocket when they send the rocket up into space. There's a huge storage of fuel that's in that first stage of the rocket, and it gets you into orbit, breaking through the earth's atmosphere and the initial large pull of gravity that must be escaped. And then all the fuel gets burned out of it, that piece of the rocket drops away, and then you've got a lighter load. There's less fuel, but there's also less resistance.

The first stage is all about reaching your goals and crushing it. That first stage is where you make a million dollars and where you get 100,000 followers on Twitter or a million views on YouTube. All of this whips up that sense of conquering and winning and being somebody into this juicy, wonderful, yummy frenzy. But what happens when you wake up and realize those millions of YouTube followers haven't essentially changed your experience of life or how much you love yourself, or you still feel a kind of emptiness inside that was trying to fill itself up with popularity or money or success, to no avail? Then who follows through?

We might say that a life that's worth living comes after we've reached our goals, because then we have to dig even deeper and ask ourselves some very important questions about what we're doing here. Now we've entered a realm where we're talking about a spiritual path. We're grappling with an existential question about the meaning of life, but the thing is, we can't do that in our heads. This can't be a conceptual conversation, a philosophical conversation, because follow through has to do with the nuts and bolts of action, of hands on engagement with the world of behavior, of taking actual steps towards something.

We have to pay attention and look for signs and clues and hints in the actual fabric of our activity about what direction we should go, and that's part of the beauty of the first phase of action. I've been coming here every day into my dark shower stall to have a conversation about follow through. When I woke up this morning and there was technically no need to continue, the motivation was gone. What I still had was the physical sensation of being inside of the dark shower, the memory and the feeling of walking downstairs early in the morning and walking into this dark shower stall and giving myself over to a waiting conversation about follow through.

We act into the emptiness of a habit we've established in that first phase, which is essential.

It's almost like, but not quite the same as, the original motivation to do something at the beginning. In that honeymoon phase a seed gets planted. There won't be any tree if the seed doesn't get planted, but the seed has to disappear. The seed gets destroyed when it germinates, when the plant actually starts to grow. You can't find the seed anymore. Instead you've got roots going down, a plant coming up. The seed that disappears is that sense of I want to—I'm so excited about this.

A good friend of mine who is a spiritual teacher in the tradition of Buddhism often talks to me about her commitment to renounce passion. I love her dearly, and we have amazing conversations together, but I’ve never known what she was talking about when she talks about renouncing passion. I have always thought, Why would you want to renounce passion? Passion is so much fun! Perhaps what I'm touching on and experiencing today has to do with the necessity of renouncing passion. Renouncing doesn't have to mean that you never allow it or that you try to crush it or get rid of it. Perhaps it just means you're no longer relying on it for your life to occur. Maybe when we are renouncing passion we are just saying that something else is in charge  besides my passionate desire to do something.

Something else causes me to act, or I let something else be the origin point of my activity, other than the desire to do it.

That is follow through. It is the beginning of a search for a force that's beyond ourselves, that acts in our absence when we've got no fuel in the tank and we're at the end of our rope or we are desperate or we don't know where to turn next. In this sense, follow through might be the origin point of true service, true creativity, true genius.

It makes me wonder if Einstein wanted to spend all his time thinking about the theory of relativity or the other things that he pondered, which eventually produced these revelations of scientific principle. He somehow produced that without a million followers on Instagram cheering him on to get him to keep contemplating the universe.

It strikes me that it's essentially important to have an example of follow through in your life, meaning a person that you can brush up alongside of who's an example of real follow through, who keeps showing up day after day beyond the usual frame of motivation. (The one that every commercial which has ever been produced is appealing to, the immediate gratification of human ego).

It's important to know one human being who has made it through the labyrinth to keep going and demonstrate what it looks like to keep going.

When that first stage of rocket burns out and drops off, what do the people who keep going have? What do they tap into that the rest of us aren't seeing? Whatever they're catching hold of, whatever subtle energy or spirit they are riding on that allows them to follow through while the rest of us stop and stay in bed. That's something that might interest us. And who are those people? For me, the first person who comes to mind is my spiritual teacher, a man named Lee Lozowick, who died 10 years ago.

I spent a fair bit of time with him when he was alive. There's not a single person I've ever met in my life who was more of an example of follow through than Lee was. I'd say that no human being I've ever met or seen has ever inspired me as much as Lee, but that really wouldn't be an accurate portrayal of my relationship to him because part of him was very inspiring, and part of him was just scary. And what I mean by that is because he was animated by a force that didn't have to do with his personality or his interactions with any other human being, he wasn't predictable or understandable. He was very inscrutable.

He had a presence and a depth of being, which was incredibly magnetic. I wanted what he was tapped into day after day. He'd show up to be present and available for his students, even when a student was displaying behavior that was stubborn, unconscious, petulant. I include myself in that category!

If you really look at what drives human beings, there are forces of resistance and refusal that air profound inside of us. We could say that the spiritual path is about coming to terms with those and really discovering them and finding a way to work with those parts of ourselves so that they don't stop us from pursuing the highest form of good in life. To voluntarily put yourself in the path of the obstacles that other human beings have to realizing their spiritual nature, that's not a pretty job to have. After the first honeymoon blush of saying you are a spiritual teacher, that's not a job that you wake up and and want to keep doing each day.

I watched him follow through day after day, demonstrating what follow through looks like. He was no one's idea of what a spiritual master should look like. He loved to sell books and bronze statues. He was a purveyor of sacred art. Toward the end of his life, he was a full on salesman. He loved sales. He loved business. He grew a set of 4 ft long dreadlocks that he wore for years and then shave them all off one day. He fronted as the lead singer in several rock and blues bands even though he was no kind of singer that you would ever imagine fronting a band. He sang from pure authenticity, but not through any accomplished vocal vehicle. The sound of his voice was not pretty or melodic. It wasn't even particularly adapted carrying a tune! And yet he sang night after night, song after song, all over the world. He toured with several bands as the lead singer because he was a lyricist, and he wrote thousands of songs. The number of performances he took part in is itself a clear demonstration that he was coming from a place that was beyond the desire of wanting to do this day after day.

 And yet he kept showing up to write down these lyrics, in addition to writing poems to his own spiritual master, an Indian saint named Yogi Ramsuratkumar. He wrote thousands of poems praising his spiritual teacher day after day. Did he want to write all those poems? Did the human part of him feel that emotional charge of undying devotion and praise for his master each day? Or did he just keep writing those poems even when the feeling wasn't driving this show?

One of the most visible examples of Lee’s follow through was three years before he died. He contracted a form of cancer that affected his vocal cords and began to shut down the whole apparatus in his throat which needed to produce the sounds that allowed him to sing as the lead singer off his band. Not a single human being would ever have said, “You should keep going even though you can barely get sound to come out of your voice box.” But Lee kept touring and fronting his band, barely having the vocal apparatus to produce sound. Not only that, he recorded his last album in this state. What was moving him? What was so important about these songs, in his lyrics and the communication that was being made, that he kept going in the face of the severe discomfort and pain that he was experiencing as a person trapped in that sick and ailing body?

This was one person in my life who showed me what follow through looks like. And to be honest, I'm not sure that I want it, because if follow through actually wins out and is running the show, then all the things I say I want as a separate, comfortable human being, they're suddenly in jeopardy because real follow through isn't tallying the votes of my small self. Follow through is much bigger than that.

If I were to connect up to a form of follow through that was that large and that powerful, what would happen to the me that wants to stay safe and secure and comfortable and invisible?

This project started as a 21 day commitment to follow through, which was exciting and fun. And I find myself here at the beginning of a different kind of territory with a question about what follow through actually is and where follow through really begins. Maybe the beginning point to follow through is after that honeymoon is over, and we begin to see what real follow through is going to require from us. 

Who is an example of follow through for you? Who have you seen follow through in a way that's beyond the ordinary example of human self-centeredness, who follows through even when follow through doesn't make you look good anymore or sound good. I don't know the answer to these questions, but they're questions that interest me now in a different way than I was even interested during the first 21 days of this project. If you're still here and still listening, then I appreciate your good company, and we'll see where this goes next. This is Rick Lewis with the Follow Through Formula Podcast, and I'll be back tomorrow. Game on!