Use Your Best Stuff
Unexpected Advice from a Famous Hero of the Counterculture
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Greetings from New Orleans. This month we’re sharing a teaching that came down during our recent Guild season. Speaking of which, we made some changes to our opening frame:
Other wonderful suggestions from Guild members included:
Ecstatic cooking over diagnostic looking
Ouroborean circularity over big me causality
Living bread over walking dead
Improvised cadence over inflated presence
Art-and-dart over Napoleon Bonaparte
Brad came up with that last one, which may be my favorite. I find it conveys the sort of recondite truth that takes a minute to sink in. You might be wondering, “What is art and dart?” It’s a new core teaching that captures the heart of ecstatic living. It’s just been added it to our Guild page.
We’ve already begun dreaming into the next season, which starts in October. We’ve received a new visionary license plate and are headed for the spirit distilleries in the Oaxacan countryside, among other dreamed locales. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this month’s teaching.
Hillary & Brad
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Use Your Best Stuff
Brad dreamed we were performing diverse forms of our work for a committee. We weren’t sure what we were auditioning for, whether it was becoming students, teachers, healers, or performers. We showed the committee academic papers we had written, poems, recordings, illustrations, and how we work the spirit with sound and movement. We emphasized the cutting edge of our work, showing what was most unique about our approach. When the committee asked us some questions afterward, Brad spontaneously threw in the remark, “We also have worked with families.” This statement caught the interest of one committee member who interrupted to respond, “Now that is something of interest.” We recognized it was R. D. Laing, the former anti-psychiatrist hero of family therapy. He went on to add, “Working to change a family system is far more interesting than the boring talk concerning altered states of consciousness.”
We laughed because no one was a wilder adventurer of the mind than R. D. Laing who ran an experimental community that allowed almost anything to happen, from ingesting psychedelics and whiskey to never-ending discussions of all sorts of topics. Celebrities mingled with intellectuals, artists, and those taking a journey through so-called schizophrenia. It caught our attention that Laing was most interested in the phrase, “we have worked with families.” He and the committee, a group of experts from diverse fields, then indicated that we had passed their test. Dr. Laing spoke for them all when he finally advised, “Make sure you use your best stuff. Don’t try to show how clever, skilled, or creative you are. Emphasize whatever is your best gift—the one that opens the hearts of others.”
In that moment, we realized that this teaching is true for everyone in the Guild. Ask what forms of creative work best come through you. Accentuate your best stuff, though occasionally add some variation by extending what you do in novel directions—but not too much or too little. If you are a natural comic, make sure you serve up some humor. Consider throwing some deadpan in the frying pan if it helps feed a crowd. Can’t sing? Then hum. Don’t worry if you can’t play the drum because you might be able to clap, shout, moan a beautiful tone, hold someone’s hand, comfort the sick, carve a stick, build an altar, or pray in a touching way.
Finally, remember that your “best stuff” is not necessarily what you think will most impress others, that is, what makes you look especially arty, smarty, or talented. Don’t do your best to impress; use your best stuff to touch others’ lives. You’ll know what that is by how it makes you feel. You’ll feel your heart open when you open the hearts of others. This is the kind of stuff that goes past the fluffery and puffery of public adoration. Your best stuff is the right stuff for making the room bigger, warmer, and sparkling with life.
– The Keeneys, June 6, 2022
P.S.
If you missed our last post, “When He Saw Who I Was, He Saw Who He Was Called to Become: A Two-Part Essay on Becoming a Healer and How to Pray,” read it here.