"There's that feeling you get when you see something that you don't understand..."

"There's that feeling you get when you see something that you don't understand the origin of ... wonderment."The Brooklyn artist Swoon was quoted as saying this in the New York Times and when I read it so many things came together for me.

• Why adults and adolescents love small children.
• Why it can be difficult for us as adults, to be curious in the face of the unknown.  The uncertain.
• And why poetry so often appeals to us, especially at the most difficult times in our lives.

I think most of us "smart and savvy" (and maybe a bit world weary) adults do just the opposite of wonderment in the face of what we don't understand.  We don't get curious, we don't allow ourselves to be drawn toward the unknown, instead we just shut down and/or armor up.  We assume something negative and turn away.  What poetry does (think Robin Williams in the Apple commercial) is usher us into a larger world where wonderment is more easily accessible.  It helps us make or see things whole, including our own difficulties and our own lives.Of course, I realize there is real danger in the world.  My goodness look at the front page of any newspaper around the world.  Death and disease are everywhere.  On a large scale the world is beautiful and terrifying.  All the more reason for us to seize moments of wonderment.  But to grab hold of them we most notice them first. Let's start by looking close to home, people we know or situations at work.  When a colleague or loved one says something that I don't understand the origin of what do I do?  Too often I tell a story, make meaning based on my past experience and the culture I am part of ... but what might happen if instead I go to "wonderment".  To wonder and awe as in ..."that makes no sense to me, I wonder what s/he is seeing or experiencing that I am not."  Can you sense, that in that moment we are drawn in, we are drawn closer, just like a child to the first doodle bug they see? We all have this capacity.  We were born with it.  But it gets covered over with our preference or our habits of predict and control.  For just today, instead of making meaning, good or bad, in the face of something or someone we don't understand, why not try wonderment, real open hearted interest and curiosity about what we don't know?  Let's enter our beginner's mind or "don't know mind" and see what happens.   

Are you in the "real" conversation?

This is truly the 64,000 question.  Most of us engage the conversation we know how to have but often that is not the "real" conversation.  The conversation that you don't know how to have, is typically a "real" conversation, it's  the conversation you MUST have to move forward.   Other questions that are related to this one are:

• Are you doing your top priority work first or do you tackle the things that you know how to do easily first?
• Are you majoring in minors?
• Who inside you determines the focus and the direction of your energy expenditure during a day?  Is it your protective and scarcity/anxiety/stressed based self or is it your aspirational self?

Since our organizational and our personal lives are  a series of conversations day in and day out, if we aren't having the conversations that are most important (even if  hard), we can expect the following:

1. Decreased passionate engagement and satisfaction in our work and life.
2. Decreased energy, efficiency and productivity.
3. Decreased positive personal and organizational results.

But when we do have the "real" conversations, the ones we MUST have, we can expect the following:

1. Increased engagement for ourselves and others.
2. Increased connection  to our colleagues and ourselves.
3. Increased sense of empowerment, for playing big and not small.
4. Increased efficiency, energy and productivity.
5. Increased positive personal and organizational results.

If you agree you want to have the "real" conversation, the one you MUST have, the first step is COURAGE.   And where do you find that courage?  For many of us it is found in reconnecting with our personal mission and purpose for our work and our lives.  We find it through our hearts and what matters to us.  Did you know that the root of the word Courage is Coeur for heart.  Ask yourself:

1. In my moments of "Flow" in my work and my personal life, what is it that excites and compels me?  What gives me energy?
2. Why  does my work matter to me?  To others?

The second step is COMMITMENT and action.  After you have brought to the forefront of your heart and mind the meaning and purpose of your life and your work, then make a list of the conversations you are avoiding, including any with yourself.  Rank order the list from easiest to most difficult. Then, make a commitment to go after them one at a time, until you have made it through the list.  Starting with the easiest allows you build on your successes and achieve positive momentum to continue to engage the "real" conversations that arise in all of our lives.The third step is to APPRECIATE and acknowledge yourself for shifting avoidance to positive forward moving action.   

"Suffering is pain that hasn't found it's meaning yet..."

This quote from  neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight.  Her 2008 TED talk, My Stroke of Insight   by the same name, and currently holds the number 2 spot for most popular TED talks.   Jill's left-side brain stroke sent her on a journey that included an 8 year recovery.  Along the way, she decided that even though having her left brain largely unavailable to her put her in a  very peaceful, harmonious place, it also restricted her ability to communicate and contribute to our world.  She challenged herself to bring her damaged left hemisphere back on line WITHOUT reengage its negative emotional baggage.  She refers to this part of her brain as her story teller.She did the miraculous thing of figuring out how to stop her story teller (left brain identity centers) from attaching to pain.  She discovered that our emotions only last about 90 seconds in our blood stream.  If she was feeling a negative feeling longer than that it meant her story teller was somehow keeping it alive or that she was somehow attaching to it emotionally.  Toward the end of the audiobook, she says "suffering is pain that hasn't found it's meaning yet".  I flashed back on Victor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning and how his drive to understand why in conditions of extreme pain and deprivation (Nazi Concentration Camps), some people psychologically connected to the best and most resilient in themselves and others did not.  Meaning and purpose played a significant role he concluded.  It allowed people to endure pain while somehow also seemingly transcending it.When the pain we are experiencing has a context, when we create a larger meaning and purpose for our trials and struggles, they can enlarge us.  We may well  experience pain, yet we do not have to experience suffering.  One of my teachers Richard Heckler Strozzi spoke of your "for the sake of".    Using this concept, when there is a challenge in our lives, especially one that is painful to us, what this challenge "for the sake of"?  Or what  "for the sake of " could you give your pain?  My sister, as she supported her husband through his long journey and eventual death from colon cancer appeared to create one of the most powerful contexts for his cancer and the pain they all endured.  Looking from the outside and observing her compassion for herself, for him and their daughters her "For the sake of" appeared to be living fully each moment that they had together.  They were both surprisingly present to the day to day joys available to them during so much of this journey.  Not necessarily "laugh out loud" joy, though she did plenty of that too, more like a deep abiding gratefulness for whatever particular moment she was experiencing.  And he seemed to be present without agenda and available to the moment and what was happening in a remarkable way.  The story teller (suffering generator) gets banished when that happens.  You know where this is going.  If you are "suffering", if you are experiencing negative thinking or emotional energy, look around for a large enough meaning for your pain and the suffering may well dissipate.   

Earth's crammed with heaven

"Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God;" This could have been written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning about my son Zachary Robert Dearing who is celebrating his 23rd birthday today.  Since his arrival he has grabbed for this earth as if it were indeed crammed with all things divine.  At age 2 in the grocery store checkout, he would stretch away from me to watch the cashier, mesmerized.  (He received a toy cash register for his next Christmas).  At age 5,  he pursued T-ball, basketball and any other sport with such focus and determination that he was typically the coach's example to the other five year olds.  At early as 3 years old when he was giving his new birthday roller blades a trial, he fell.  Then promptly picked himself up with "Good fall, Zac" and went back after it again.Zachary has treated this world as if it truly is sacred, as if it were indeed created by God, (whether in 7 days or via the big bang and evolution), matters not so much to him as loving planet earth well. Loving it though, not with a mother's or father's love, but as lover.  He devours this world and is the most present person to each of his experiences I have ever known.   He expects to fall in love with all aspects of earthly life and so he does and has; now for 23 years.  You know with all the focus on saving this planet I wonder if we are really present to  it?  Do we truly experience it?  Do we love it and more importantly our own precious lives as if they will never come again?  Because each moment will never come again.  Somehow Zachary, from the moment he arrived (he slept only 10 hours a day as an infant... until he was 14 years old) has intuitively known how to love this world and his life here as if he had only this one shot at it.I know something about loving one's life.  I was raised by a man who truly loved his life.  Zachary's grandfather, Robert Wonders loved all the days of his life.  But more quietly than Zachary.  Zachary's enthusiasm for the world can take one aback, especially in his younger days.  He takes up space.  He has big ideas and pursues them and most importantly he does not focus on outcome.  He focuses on the hunt.  He celebrates each achievement, mourns his losses but never for more than 24 hours, then on to the next pursuit.  It is clear that victory is not the point.  The point is life.  The point is being "all in" his life.  The point is being truly alive.What does this have to do with you and with me?Ask yourself,"Where am I concerned with outcome?"  or"Whether something makes sense enough to give it a shot?" or"How will I look doing it?" or"What so and so might think of me?"or some other form of doubt that is distracting you from channeling your inner Zachary Robert Dearing and simply loving this "earth crammed with Heaven?"  Happy Birthday, Tiger boy!

2012 is the year to learn how ...

2012 is the year to learn how...to put fear and anxiety behind you and keep possibility and the larger meaning and purpose of your life, in front of you...e.e. cummings said it is the privilege of a life time to become who you are.Or something pretty close to that.  There was a recent cover on Newsweek that said "Heaven is Real".  It went onto describe a Neuroscientist's experience while in a coma.  According to him his journey could not just be attributed to the strange firings of the brain (as he used to believe) because the part of his brain that could do that was out.  He journeyed to another dimension and was met by a feminine guide.  She had a message for him that he in turn is offering to us.Her Message:You are loved and cherished dearly and forever.You have nothing to fear.You can do nothing wrong.So, today is Halloween or Samhain as it was called in ancient times.  It is said to the be time in the calendar of the year where the veil between the manifest or visible world and the invisible, unseen world is the thinnest.  This is why there are Day of the Dead celebrations at grave sites in Mexico.  It is time to commune with your most dearly departed, because it is said to be the best time for this.The moment I read the message in Newsweek I knew I would blog about it.  I am asking myself, my clients and now you the reader ; "What would you do differently if you 100% believed the message given to this doctor?" In another such experience, an Indian woman was dying from a body riddled with cancer that was miraculously cured right at the end of her life.  she was in a coma for 36 hours and she had a near death experience during that time.  She wrote a book "Dying to Be Me".  (on Amazon) describing what she learned. You can hear her discuss it at length on you tube.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jFN9XQeEn4But the message is similar.  We are here to be ourselves.  Our whole authentic selves.  And these authors don't say this but I would add, and help others do the same or at least allow, make space for  others to do the same.  So on this ancient holy day, when the gods are able to best hear you, what do you want to tell them that you are ready to begin?  If you truly believe that in the eyes of the Eternal you cannot make a mistake, you have nothing to be afraid of and that you are loved beyond your wildest imagination...how would you lead your life?  What bold action would you take now?