Day 21: Lu Hanessian
“I think of inspiration as the breath of life, and I think about the alternative to living an inspired life and it’s a very dark journey. I think living an inspired journey is what we’re here for …”
.
.
Click here to download…
.
Toni Reece: Thank you so very much, Lu, for agreeing to be part of this interview. And before we jump into the questions, can you take a few minutes to introduce yourself?
Lu Hanessian: Sure, Toni. My name is Lu Hanessian, and I am the founder of WYSH — Wear Your Spirit for Humanity — and the author of parenting books and the grateful mom of two fabulous boys.
Toni: Fantastic, thank you for that.
Lu: And the giddy bride of one swell guy I’ve known half my life.
Toni: Oh, that’s great! Well Lu, with all of the work that you’re doing and the life that you lead, when you think about inspiration, who do you inspire and how might you do that?
Lu: Well, I love the word inspiration. I was actually surprised to realize that the root of the word somewhere in there is breath. And I think of inspiration as the breath of life, and I think about the alternative to living an inspired life and it’s a very dark journey. I think living an inspired journey is what we’re here for, so anybody that we can inspire, as far as I’m concerned, is a gift and I don’t think it’s a unilateral process. I think that inspiration is a reciprocal, ideally a reciprocal process, but I think it begins on another level than most of us live in our hustle and bustle. I think it’s a very right-brain process, a very intuitive … a very connected process.
So I guess I like to think I inspire people to enjoy the ride, to see the lesson in the conflict, to be able to create a paradigm shift out of things that they might normally just view as an obstacle. There are times when I know I’ve inspired a child — even though mostly it’s the other way around — but there are times when a child’s light is out and I notice it, and I guess I find a way to intuitively help that child find a way to turn his light back on. And I just typically, on a day-to-day level, inspire hopefully parents to reframe situations that they might think of as difficult or struggles or vicious circles, and I help inspire them to look at it differently, to see with new eyes.
Toni: Lu, how do you go about that? Are there techniques that you use? Is it conversation that you have? Particularly in the two situations that you mentioned — one which is helping a child to turn their light on when you notice that it’s out, as well as working with adults to reframe situations — how do you go about that?
Lu: Well I think doing it with kids is a little different than doing it with adults, so I’ll answer them separately. The way that I explore potential with adults — with parents, with teachers, with any adult who’s interested in exploring their potential — is first exploring their resistance, because I think that the way to help people explore their potential and reach it is to understand their fear in doing so, because we often want two opposing things. We often … I meet people all the time who dream big and keep themselves small. Parents who want the best family they can have, but they thwart that. Parents who want their children to be authentic, but then they suppress their identity. So there’s a lot of contradictory forces that we live with, and I think that the word potential has … I want the say the true meaning of it, I think, has been missed or overlooked in a lot of areas of our culture because the word potential, I think, has come to believe “fantasy” and I know a lot of people who live with an idea of a potential and they’re kind of okay resigning to the idea that they’ll never reach it, but they could if they wanted to, they just never will. And that’s not the same thing as exploring it.
So I’m very interested in our resistance. Why do why block ourselves? What is the block? What is the block we’re not aware of? How do we become aware of it? How do we block ourselves? In other words, you know that old myth of Sisyphus, the Greek character who was rolling that boulder up the hill as his penance … how many people create that boulder-pushing opportunity in their life thinking that it was done to them when in fact they chose the boulder themselves? And then I think of Sisyphus, and I think if he had kids, there is no way they’d be off rolling in the pastoral landscape; they would be rolling boulders, too.
So, the idea of potential is fascinating to me, Toni, because I think it’s all wrapped up in fear, and if we can use our fear as a compass, one of the ways I help adults do that is to help them befriend that fear and help them get inside their defenses, get underneath them. I do it with humor; I do it with story; I do it with video. I have a long television background so I use those skills in creating videos. And then, when people can see things instead of just hearing it, somehow something can get moved on the inside and their potential doesn’t seem as out of reach.
Toni: So when you talk about how you go about inspiring others, that leads into the second question which is how do you explore their potential – which, for you, seems to be very much the same in identifying for them that there is a fear that’s holding them back from their potential. And it’s interesting, because you said you will recognize when a child or someone’s light is out and then with shining a light on it … it’s almost as if you’re shining a light on them in order to help them turn their light on.
Lu: That’s beautiful. I know some people have said that’s the case and that’s very gratifying, and I guess I like to think of it as guiding people to finding their own light, and then how do we A) keep the light on in our kids and B) teach them how to do the same; and I think the way to do that is to keep our own light on. And to me, that light is the inspiration. So we talk about “get inspired.”
I feel like if people have been living decades uninspired … I love the sort of mission of the Get Inspired! Project which is “get inspired!” If you’re not, get inspired … okay, how? How? And so I think that’s the exploring of how do we A) find inspiration even in the mundane, like magic in the mundane? How is it that my 9-year-old last year could get so excited about the first tulips, ask me for my camera at 7 in the morning, and run out barefoot into the garden, come back 20 minutes later with 124 pictures of petals floating in a toboggan that he filled with water, and I thought, “I’ve never looked at tulips like that.” And then he did it with weeds, dandelions. I’ve never looked at weeds like that. He made weeds beautiful.
Okay, so how does an adult do that? It’s a metaphor; you know, we’re not going to run out and take 124 pictures of tulips, because we gotta get to work. But what if we saw the world through a child’s eyes? If we dared to allow them to own and to explore their exuberance; to not be frightened by it? And then if we feel that their light is out, it’s only because we noticed it because our light is on. In other words, if a child’s light is out and we don’t know, it’s because ours is out, too.
Toni: Right, and that goes back to you shining the light onto others so that they can recognize whether theirs is on or off. And that gets me to when you’re looking at your children and you’re working with people and in your own work, what do you need to be inspired? How do you seek inspiration?
Lu: You know, it’s interesting. I used to think I needed time; uninterrupted time. I used to think, well in order to come up with great ideas and follow through, you know, you need a passport and a month off!
Toni: Right, right…
Lu: And I’ve come to believe that that is a myth. It’s another myth that we tell ourselves to hold ourselves back from that potential. So I’ve come to realize that I can find that inspiration and those stepping stones to the potential in the middle of the chaos. I can find it right in the middle of the storm because the storm, the chaos — all these things that we think of as difficult struggles — are there kind of pushing from all angles, pushing us from the inside out to step up, to wake up, to be as clear and as present as possible, even if in that moment it’s uncomfortable.
And I guess another thing I realized was, you said what do I need? I need presence. If I can stay in the moment — and I don’t mean the fluffy, oh, live in the moment — I mean if I can really, really know that in this moment when my child is talking to me, talking with me, and he’s saying to me “Mom, I need to connect right now,” if I can be present in the moment when I’m not feeling good, when I’m not happy about something, when I’m feeling daunted by a project or when I feel like giving up on something … if I can be present in those feelings, then I’m already exploring my potential, because I realized after many years that, you know, culturally we’re taught that our potential is something in the distant future, and I’ve come to realize again that’s another myth. Our potential is right now; it’s every day. It isn’t something that we finally achieve, it’s something that we harness and cultivate as a process. So the word potential for me has really become process; and when I’m present to the process, I’m living my potential, and that’s what I try to inspire in others.
Toni: What other tools or techniques that you might reach out for in order to help you stay present, to work that process? Is there anything that you might search for?
Lu: Well, yeah, there are the palpable things, the tangible things, and then there are the internal processes. And one of the internal processes … I think that, you know, when we all kind of get this process and begin to harness, it’s that awareness piece. I like to kind of come up with ways of … little mantras for myself, ways of talking to myself. You know, we have so much negative self-talk in our heads, and I think the antidote to that is not to silence the self-talk. And I think a lot of people think, well, you need to silence those voices in your head. You need to silence all that. You can’t. I think we need to listen to it. I think we need to turn up the volume on the negative self-talk and hear it and transcribe it and try to … who are the voices? Who are all these people in my head? And once we can turn up the volume and we can start identifying and recognizing the sources of these voices, we can begin to let them go and release their grip on us so that … that aware process for me is aware … a-w-a-r-e … so for me it became an acronym: A Way to Access Real Empathy. And the empathy piece is the other tool, and that is, I need to feel for myself.
I think most people in our culture walk around with all this burden of shame, guilt, and fear, and then we pretend we have it all together, which further disconnects us from ourselves, our inspired journey, and our potential. So I think this mask of “got it all together” even though deep down I feel like I’m unworthy, is very toxic for us. So I try to really … when times are tough and I don’t know how I’m going to get something realized or done or sometimes that voice comes in and says “Well that’s just impossible, how are you gonna do that?” I have to recognize what that voice is, who it is, what it’s about, and then I have to empathize with myself and say “Yeah, you’re pretty freaked out right? You’re scared, you’re tired, you’re probably hungry, get some sleep.”
So it’s a way, like we kind of come to a place where we parent ourselves. We become our sort of internal guru. We end up becoming our own spiritual mentor, which doesn’t mean we don’t have faith in a higher power or in a larger process, but I think that one of the tools for me is I find a way to stay connected to myself. And when we’re disconnected from ourselves as so many of us are — circumstantially and intermittently and sometimes chronically — we can’t get anything not even just achieved, but anything understood, anything embraced, anything … it’s very hard to be inspired when we’re disconnected.
Toni: So staying connected for you is that self-awareness and the wonderful acronym that you mentioned as well … which I think that from what I’ve heard during this interview is that as long as you can stay connected, stay authentic, face the fear, listen to the voices in your head and let go of the ones … when you figure out the ones that are blocking the process which blocks your potential, then that is how you have the breath of life of others to shine their own lights.
Lu: Absolutely. And that’s how I teach my kids and hopefully inspire other parents to model for their kids a way of relating to their lives, to life itself, to themselves so that they have this language. They grow up with a language of self-awareness, of compassion for others, instead of a language of blame; instead of a language where they see life happening to them. I just think as long as we can keep that light on and stay inspired, even in times where we’re having painful passages that are tight and uncomfortable, you know, these hot narrow passages that we all experience. Staying inspired — as you well know, Toni, having created this Get Inspired! Project — being inspired doesn’t mean we run through the daffodils every day; it isn’t about that. And I love that you’re doing this because you are lifting the veil as I like to do, too, on the truth about what it means to live inspired, to be inspired. It isn’t being in a good mood; that’s not what inspiration is. As you know, it’s purpose. It’s purpose, it’s passion, it’s using your life for the greater good, and what else is there?
Toni: Absolutely, and your interview has been very inspiring, and I’m going to go back to just how we started out, which … inspiration is the breath of life, not a mechanical breath, and that’s the way that you have come forward in this interview. And the information and your approaches and your needs will help others, and they will learn and benefit by them; and I really appreciate how honest you’ve been and that you’ve given us this gift of time and this interview, and for that I thank you so very much .
Lu: Oh you are so welcome, Toni. I wish you the best with this and any time you want to collaborate or call on me again, I’m here for you.
Toni: Thank you so much. Take care.
___________________________________________________________
For more information about Lu Hanessian: www.wearyourspirit.com
.
Post Comment