What Will Come Next?

First published on November 28, 2017

This series of pieces began as a practice, to break through my Resistance and allow myself to grow. As a practice to help me share, freely, myself with the world. It came from a place of discomfort: the contraction and fear of sharing. And it came from a place of courage: a growing understanding that only by facing our greatest resistance and fear can we really grow into the people we have the potential to be. It came from a place of acceptance: if, as Steven Pressfield says, the more important an action is to our soul's evolution the greater the Resistance we will feel, then we can use it as a compass, to find our way to a better place, a deeper place, a more fulfilled place. A more full-souled place. But if that is true we need to accept that it is there, and get on with making art anyway.

Sometimes the pieces started with a thought, brewing on my walk to the train. Sometimes they started with an interaction - a shared smile with a stranger suddenly opening up an idea. What I didn't know when they started, in August last year, was that they were really a practice in creating from the Through Me place. From allowing what emerges to emerge through me and out into the world. Sometimes it didn't feel much like that: sometimes it was By Me creation, which is wonderful too - something I had thought about and formed on the walk to the train, or in the shower. Sometimes it was even To Me writing, to a certain extent: creating something from the place I was at that time, victim of the struggles and the thoughts rattling around in my head. But even in those To Me and By Me moments, it was and is a Through Me practice. Because I don't know where this piece is going to end today, and even if I did, I wouldn't know how it would get there. Because there's no time in 12 minutes, you just have to write and see what happens.

I wrote a longer piece from a Through Me space in August this year, as that became the end I sought rather than an accident of creation. I read it back the other day, and it is powerful. And it is strange. Because I don't really remember writing it. Some of it doesn't really sound like me. It sounds like someone or something else. I'm going to share it this week, and I hope you like it. Through Me is really what happens when you get Resistance - which is primarily a battle fought in the head - out of the way. When you get fear out of the way, at least a little. When you bypass your thoughts and release the inner wisdom in you. You do it, sometimes, in conversation. You do it, sometimes, with your art. I do it, sometimes, in my coaching. If you're a coach, you probably do, too.

Nature will take you there, out of your head and thoughts. Music will take you there, too. Or at least it will for many of you. Sometimes reading will, sometimes theatre will. I find those a little less good at it. Playing the guitar takes me out of my head. Standing in our spare room in our flat in London, when no one else is home, singing and playing, allowing the sound of some song learnt a decade or more ago to flow out. I don't have to think about the chords to Foxy's Folk Faced any more. The beauty and the poetry just comes out of me. It's mostly not mine. It's mostly Simon Fowler's. But there's a flavour of me. Especially now, after 15 years of playing it. And that, really, is what it is like to write these pieces, sometimes. It is what it was like to write the longer piece. Did it really come from me? Does art really emerge from "me" - the me that I think of? Or did it come from somewhere else?

I remember this feeling from acting, too. My best acting came from releasing what I was supposed to do. From knowing it, embodying it, doing almost all of it, and dancing and living in the moment, as the character. That's where the magic happened.

I notice it in my coaching, these days, more and more as I practice. I'm not thinking about what to do (most of the time), I'm just seeing what emerges. And that's where the magic happens.

There are wonderful places for tactics and strategies. I love the way the rational mind has created wonders the like of which our grandmothers and great uncles could never have imagined. But I'm curious about what comes next, now, as we release that. As we lean into our deeper wisdom. As we include our emotions and our body intelligence in the magic of what we can create. As we listen for something bigger and something deeper.

What will come next?