One of my more embarrassing memories is the day in high school drama class when I was assigned to deliver the famous monologue in which Lady Macbeth loses her freaking mind. Bumbling my way through history’s worst rendition of that scene, I suddenly understood why actors are always asking, “What’s my motivation?” I had no idea how to portray Lady M because I couldn’t imagine what the heck made her tick.

At the time, I blamed my abysmal acting skills, but now that I’ve lived many additional decades and watched 800,000 episodes of Law & Order, I realize my horrible performance wasn’t entirely my fault. Lady Macbeth is incomprehensible because after years of secrets, lies, and manipulation, her mind is such a mess even she can’t find her way around it. She lives in a private hell, and as she puts it, “Hell is murky.” She’s constantly scrubbing at her hands, but that doesn’t help. Nothing is clear to her. Nothing is clean.

Though few of us are in Lady M’s league when it comes to foul deeds, most of us at least occasionally act on motivations that are less than pure. We tell little lies to get people’s approval, do things for acceptance that feel wrong-ish, soothe a friend’s feelings not out of unsullied love but because we’re hoping for a favor. To live a totally clean life is as rare in its own way as being a mad murderess. But even if we can’t be completely pure, it’s within our power to do what twisted sister Macbeth couldn’t: clean up our act. Which is another way of saying welcome to the Agenda Cleanse.

Why an Agenda Cleanse Is Good Life Hygiene:

The problem with hiding your real motives is that you’re essentially keeping a secret, and as neuroscientist David Eagleman has written,”The main thing that is known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.” When we begin to weave webs of deception, we need to expend enormous mental energy to prevent them from tangling. There’s less brain power left over for solving real problems, and we start to falter in other areas of our lives.

The problems may even show up in our bodies: Secrets and lies can weaken our immune systems. They’re also hell on rela­tionships, both personal and professional. People can feel the difference between a pure agenda (you kissing your baby) and a murky one (a politician kissing your baby). They find ulterior motives vaguely to intensely repulsive. As a result, impurely motivated actions tend to backfire. Lie for approval, and people disapprove. Try to control people, and you lose control. Pre­tend to be perfect, and you risk being caught by folks who’ll abhor your pretense of perfection more than your imperfections themselves.

If, in light of all this, you’re hesitant to do the Agenda Cleanse, I’ll assume it’s because you’re either Lady Macbeth or Mother Teresa. Everyone else, please meet me at the next paragraph.

Agenda Cleanse Step 1: Pick an interaction, any interaction.

Think of something you plan to do in the upcoming hours or days that involves other people. It could be going to a coworker’s birthday party, putting in a day at the office, attending square-dancing class, whatever. We’ll call this interaction activity X.

Step 2: Ask yourself the actor’s question.

Keeping activity X in mind, ask yourself, What’s my motivation for doing this? Don’t spit out the first facile answer that comes to mind (Um, I have to?). Give it real thought, and be brutally honest. Your clarity—maybe a little piece of your sanity—depends on it.
There might be several reasons you’re planning to undertake activity X. Feel for the one that’s deepest. Maybe you’ll be attending the coworker’s birthday party because you sort of want to be there but also to be polite, and mainly because you want cake. You may go to work to earn money, and to feel important, but primarily to prove your worth to your parents. Perhaps you square-dance partly for love of the music, partly to show off your new Frye boots, but mostly because your friends just keep hounding you until you go. Pick the motivation that feels most true, your real bedrock reason.

Step 3: See if your real agenda aligns with your apparent agenda.

Now that you’ve identified your actual motivation, check to see whether you’re making it clear or hiding it from others—and even yourself. Finish this statement, and don’t hold back. Tell it like it is.
I let myself and others think the real reason I’m doing activity X is _______________________________________________.

To the extent that this answer is the same as your answer in step 2, your agenda vis-á-vis activity X is transparent. If the two answers are different, you’re in hot water. Happily, I mean that in a good way.

Step 4: Clean your hidden agendas with an unbroken stream of truth.

Simply by stating your real agenda and admitting that it’s different from the one you present to the world, you’ve already started getting clean. To keep the process going, consistently tell yourself the truth about your motivations and any deceptions you perpetrate. You won’t change your behavior immediately, and that’s fine. Just keep getting clearer inside by acknowledging where you’re not being clear outside.

This means that as you wish your acquaintance a happy birthday, you remind yourself, I’m here for the cake. As you assure your boss you love your job, own the truth: This is pure b.s.—I need the paycheck. While do-si-do-ing, silently admit, I’m doing this only because I didn’t have the guts to say no. 

Sustained personal truth-telling will gradually cleanse your inner life. This, by the way, is what happens in good therapy: Each week a perceptive professional helps you admit to the real forces behind your actions. As you start to see your inner motivations more clearly, you begin relating differently to the world around you. This leads naturally to the next part of our cleanse.

Step 5: Allow your pure inner agenda to radiate outward.

Just as muddy motives leak, revealing impure agendas to the people we’re trying to fool, a sustained clear agenda becomes ever more luminous to others. Even if you don’t mean to change your behavior, your cleanse will begin shining truth on everything around you. This may disturb people whose motivations are still impure. Indeed, these people may become so alarmed that they try to pressure you back into insincerity.

In response, you can always go back to having crazy-making, murky agendas. Or you can keep cleaning up your act until folks around you either undertake their own cleanse or go away. One client told me, after an especially hidden-agenda-packed meeting, “I’m exhausted by my own hypocrisy.” Once you start articulating such feelings, you’ll stop doing things with impure agendas, slowly separating from people and events that are essentially environmental pollutants.

Of course, there are scenarios in which it isn’t wise to take your true feelings public. But these scenarios, like Lady Macbeth, are truly insane: political dictatorships, prisons, reality shows featuring various populations of “real” housewives. People who live within such systems sustain impure agendas just to survive. As you become more honest with yourself, you’ll know whether being more pure in your outward behavior is truly inadvisable or whether “I can’t say what I really mean” is just another fib.

Step 6: Fill your life with clean, clear things.

I’ve noticed that as my clients begin speaking the truth to themselves more often, they grow increasingly accurate at spotting false agendas in others. This makes them safer in every situation.

Run frequent agenda cleanses, and you’ll unconsciously steer yourself toward activities you truly love and people who truly love you. People will trust you, and you’ll know whom to trust. The brain space that was tied up in conniving manipulation will be free for problem solving and creativity. Your energy will rise; your stress level will fall. You’ll be happier and more at peace.

Macbeth tries to make this happen for his wife. He orders a doctor to “Cleanse….that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart.” The doctor, checking his records and noticing that psychiatry won’t be invented for centuries, says, “Therein the patient must minister to himself.” Agenda cleansing, you see, is an inside job. And I have nothing up my sleeve when I say I think you’re just the person to do it.

Task Seven: Notice that you are all for all, always.

We’ve arrived at the final task in our newsletter series based on my new book, Diana, Herself: An Allegory of Awakening. The Seventh Task in becoming your wild self is the ultimate act of spiritual surrender, in which you completely release your identification with what I call your “meat self”, that sense of individuality and “me-ness” that has defined you throughout your life.

So, why not do that now? Take a deep breath, and just let go of your ego forever. Take a few moments, if you need them. I’ll wait.

Obviously I’m kidding, though kudos to any of you who just achieved spontaneous enlightenment through the sheer power of suggestion. The Seventh Task represents the end of all suffering, which makes it the Big Banana, spiritually speaking. It’s what generations of mystics and yogis dedicated their lives to seeking, and very few were ever successful. So it’s fairly safe to say that you and I are unlikely to spontaneously achieve the Seventh Task in the checkout line at Whole Foods, no matter how raw and organic our groceries.

If you’re using the first six Tasks consistently, Task Seven will take place when you add in stillness, in the form of some kind of meditative practice. You might even find that your meta-self begins moving into stillness spontaneously. The magnetic tug you felt when you first let your body be moved in Task Three, the deep fascination of Task Six, might all steer you in the direction of some sort of meditation. Give in to the desire to be still, even if it hits you in that self-same Whole Foods checkout line. We all know the staff there have seen weirder things than a spiritual seeker clambering atop the avocado display to assume the lotus position.

Give in to stillness; more importantly, open into it.

If you can do this for long enough, I’m telling you, you’re going to experience something more miraculous and bewildering than anything you’ve encountered on this path so far. You keep opening and opening into the stillness, and at some point, something very… unusual happens. And by unusual, I mean by standards that would have even veteran Whole Foods employees shaking their head in disbelief. But bear with me. Do this for long enough and a moment will come in which you will experience the universe opening its eyes as you. If you continue to expand, the scope of the intelligence that’s looking out through your eyes grows incredibly, impossibly, magically vast.

And then one day you just might find yourself looking at the world with a new understanding: I made this. Not your individual identity, but the entirety, the consciousness that existed prior to energy and matter; the creator whose name is Stillness and out of which all things come. And you know for a fact that if a miracle were needed, you could perform one. There is no doubt, no self-aggrandizement, no ego—there’s no you. There’s no self left at all.

The spirit that wants to heal the earth for us—not for itself, but for us—is abroad in the human race right now. It’s in you and in me with the intention to show us that “you” and “me” are an illusion. There is only “all”—all for all, always. When we wake up to that, we will save the world.

And that, my darlings, is about as wild as it gets. Wouldn’t you agree?

You can find the links to all seven tasks below:

Task One: Calm All Fear

Task Two: Don’t Swallow Poison

Task Three: Let Yourself Be Moved

Task Four: Demolish Your Definition of Self

Task Five: Tell the Truth

Task Six: Let Your Meta-Self Flow Through You

Task Seven: Notice that You Are All for All, Always.

There is a creature swimming our oceans that is called Acanthonus armatus. But, perhaps because Acanthonus has the smallest brain-to-body weight ratio of any vertebrate, it prefers to go by its more familiar name, the bony-eared assfish. I did not make that up.

You can know that Acanthonus armatus is your animal totem if you’re swimming around subtropical waters and you hear yourself call out, “Whoa, Mabel! Get a load of the bony ears on that ass fish!” Listen: fish don’t have ears, and you don’t know anyone named Mabel. Now, I know that if the bony-eared assfish is your totem, you’re already having trouble following this, so just lie still and try not to think.

The Fourth Task to Bewilderment: Follow Love

This month we’ve reached the fourth of our Bewilderment Tasks! If you have no idea what this means, you’re already bewildered and may be excused—or read my last three newsletters,* which cover the first three Tasks. But if you’ve been following along, you know that Bewilderment is a re-awakening of the wild essential self, and that the Tasks are practices for encouraging this awakening.

My favorite deceased Indian dude, Nisargadatta Maharaj, once said, “When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I look around and see that I am everything, that is love.” Task Four is about connecting with the world so intimately that you experience everything as your true self. As you practice the first three Tasks, you’ll be living more fearlessly, honestly, and fluidly. Now your wild side will begin pushing you—sometimes subtly, sometimes overwhelmingly—to begin connecting with other beings and including them in your definition of self.

Task Four is simply to let yourself follow this impulse toward love whenever you feel it. This very moment, your heart is turning toward certain people, places, and experiences the way a flower turns toward the sun. It wants you to reach out and connect: write an email, offer help, give someone a moment of your attention. So do it.

Today, as on many days, Task Four took me outside to meditate under a tree with bird seed sprinkled across my lap. Every time a bird or chipmunk hopped onto my knees and gazed into my face, I fell in love. That’s the reward you get for practicing Task Four: the heart-opening connection with the parts of you that you haven’t yet recognized as parts of you. It will demolish your definition of self, because that’s wisdom, and replace it with the entire universe, because that’s love.

*You may read the first three Tasks described in my newsletters here:

• Task One: Calm All Fear
• Task Two: Don’t Swallow Poison
• Task Three: Let Yourself Be Moved

The lungfish is an African creature with awesome skills. In dry times it digs into the mud, encases itself in a hardened mucous shell, and lowers its metabolism to 

almost nothing. It can stay that way for up to four years, reviving and emerging when rain finally arrives. Occasionally people make bricks out of the mud, and on rainy nights newly-awakened lungfish start slithering out of their walls. Altogether charming!

Use Lungfish’s spiritual essence to help you spend most of your time totally lacking in ambition or motivation, thrashing around at rare intervals just barely enough to survive. Lungfish energy will help you encase yourself during your periods of lethargy, though instead of hardened mucous, your “shell” will be made of emotional numbness, or possibly aluminum foil. Call on Lungfish to help you pop out of nowhere into the lives of long-lost lovers and childhood friends, shouting, “Hi! I’m here to spawn!” Just like Lungfish, you’ll leave memories that never fade, even with the help of pharmaceuticals.

Check out our Lungfish friends here: