I woke up this morning knowing today I would be sending you another biography exercise. I opened my email first and found an awesome crazy video that is perfect as a metaphor of biography, the unfolding of our lives.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w 

 

Life doesn't just happen! It is a journey to an outcome, a goal. Everything that "happens" is a step, an essential step, moving you toward that goal.  This video shows you just how wacky and complex it all is to get from the starting point to the purpose point.  Enjoy it - the video and your life.

Here's another great video - a little more orderly, but the same idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYabfifhEPE

Biography exercises help us "see" our lives and ourselves more clearly, with more distinct outline, more saturated colors and more nuanced feelings. We see discrete moments, meetings and miracles. We find pressure points that push us in certain directions and openings we fall through, slight tilts creating lifelong inclinations and sudden surprising leaps that deliver us to strange new places in our souls. We search through chaos and find order. We see the recipes that combine, the architecture that shapes and the xray that reveals. Life is a Rube Goldberg contraption of complexities, convolutions and contradictions that leaves you amazed.  You design it. You live it. Do you ever understand it?

The Inner Life program guides you to understanding and helps you develop the skills of self-observation.

 

One of the participants in Inner Lent wrote me to ask for suggestions about celebrating her daughter's 21st birthday.  She wanted to acknowledge the incarnation of the Spirit, the I AM, that takes place at 21.

I remember my own daughter's 21st.  She gave herself a big party with 3 birthday cakes! I was standing next to her at one point in the evening and I got it! She was her own person, something had shifted - her Spirit had taken up residence in her consciousness.  Some little spark of moral freedom had lit up and it had nothing to do with the DNA she had inherited from her father and me. It was not a result of her home life, her education, her friends or me. Just pure, core, unique selfhood and it was there to stay and evolve.  There had been moments throughout her growing up when this "I AM" had twinkled and touched her, but now it was truly here.

I suggested the following gestures of celebration to the mother who wrote me.

Of course, the best poem on the I is Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
and you could also review her first 21 years and chose 3 or 4 or 7 moments when you experienced the quickening of her I - the suggestions of her individuality.  Then write a poem, or an essay about each moment and find symbolic images or gifts for each one.  Or a gemstone for each one.

Your biography exercise, should you want to explore your own coming of age/self moments, is to reflect on the 3.4, even seven moments in your first 21 years when you felt your individuality.  These might occurred through difficult times (your parents divorce or moving away from your home) or they might have been fun times (riding your bike without training wheels or driving the car for the first time), or a moment looking at the night sky. You might have felt it when someone older spoke to you in a way that was beyond a normal adult to child way as if this relative or teacher saw into your future and felt reverence for your destiny.