“The power of love upsets the order of things.”*

“The power of love upsets the order of things.”*For years men and women have written about “fate” and “destiny.”  From my perspective, fate represents a kind of unconsciousness or reactivity.  A bit like getting up each day and telling an 8 year old to make his bed, yet no bed is made.  You repeat the action the next day expecting different results, but alas, you get an unmade bed.  Then one day you do something different and get different results.  The day that you do something different I think you step off the wheel of fate and onto the path of destiny.  There is a momentum of sorts to fate, the power of lethargy or the status quo.  It is hard to think of something new and different to do, the seductiveness of unconscious or reactive actions looms large in all of our lives and therefore in all of our organizations, families and governments.Yet, the quote says, “The power of love upsets the order of things.”  I interpret the order of things to be “fate.”  To be “the way we have always done it.”  The order of things is conventional wisdom.  Please note it wasn’t always so; what is now “how we have always done it” or conventional wisdom was once the new idea that upset the order of things!  So, we might think of fate and destiny as two forces in life: fate being a current we must swim against in order to get to shore and destiny is shore.  Except this happens each moment.  So destiny is not static or “there.”  It is earned again in each moment.The power of love is the other important aspect of the quote.  We might substitute, energy, passion, or the random and unexpected for the word love.  What upsets fate and shifts us into destiny is more familiar to the Western mind as energy or passion.  How many lovers have thought to themselves in the original throes of the bloom of love, “I am a better me with my beloved.”  Or maybe, “I am the best me” with that person.  For love we risk being out of our comfort zone, because we love and because we feel loved.  And all of a sudden, the siren song of safety is not alive and running our lives, but rather the song of adventure and possibility.  In my view, that is exactly what we are here for: to come alive. And, the power of love will help us leave the path of fate and jump over to the path of destiny.“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  Howard Thurman *Quote from Genesis Rabbah LV8 and embedded in the text at this link:http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Akeda,%20Zach.htm.**Acknowledgement to 8.4.12 conversation with Bridget Boland and to James Hollis and his book, What Matters Most:  Living a More Considered Life, for informing my thinking on fate and destiny. 

Down with Self-improvement

“God's admiration for us is infinitely greater than anything we can conjure up for Him.”  St. Francis of AssisiFor centuries St. Francis has been one of the Catholic Church’s most popular saints.  Do his words go straight to your heart?  They certainly did mine.  Maybe because this change and growth business I am in is a bit tricky.  It can leave us over-focusing on flaws or imperfections, which actually from a larger perspective are essential to our true beauty and can well be a distraction from the meaning and purpose or our lives.If your philosophy of life doesn’t include a monotheistic God, you might rewrite the words to say “love”.  For example:  “Love’s admiration for us is infinitely greater than anything we can conjure up for Love.”  But whatever word you use, I think this is a great and abiding truth.  There is something much larger than our strategic or left brained understanding and perspective. That something makes things whole.  It renders us whole.  And whole includes our flaws, so maybe our beauty actually needs our flaws?In the David Whyte poem, Faces at Braga, the poet tells us:If only our own faces would allow the invisible carver's hand
 to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.If only we knew
 as the carver knew, how the flaws
 in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,we would smile, too
 and not need faces immobilized
 by fear and the weight of things undone.When we fight with our failing
 we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself
 and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good.When we fight with our failing, when we focus on self-improvement — on how to make things or ourselves better — we miss the entrance to the shrine itself the poet says.  That means we miss the point of our lives.  We are sacred.  Our lives our sacred.  This world is sacred.What happens if we trust that our flaws are essential to our brilliance and our goodness?  I believe what happens is that we come alive, truly and wholeheartedly alive.  And, in the face of such aliveness, “...even the gods speak of God.”

Dare

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare, that things are difficult.” SenecaDo you believe that? I think this quote would be quite disturbing to the strategic and rational mind. It is the part of us that questions whether something “makes sense” or whether an idea of ours will turn out like we want. It gives us the list of reasons that things can go wrong. And it should because that is its job: to protect us. But often it becomes a tyrant king. It controls the conversation that is OUR life.The rational does not truly understand or speak the language of passion, energy, and engagement. It cannot and will not make us wholehearted. In fact, it doesn’t trust these things. Scares the bejeezus out of the rational; this whole passion thing. Yet a person or an organization that is directed by the rational has much less vitality and originality than one that is directed by our essential self — or our true and wise self. That part of us, though irrational (because it can’t tell us why, it can’t explain) only knows what it loves and what it wants. And according to neuroscientists we should be listening to it, because it knows with far more accuracy what will make us happy over a long period of time.In his book The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love Character and Achievement, David Brooks tells us that this unconscious, if given information and a few good nights’ sleep (i.e. time to mull it over and synthesize in its unique and mysterious way) will yield satisfying choices better than 75% of the time, while the rational mind will only succeed 50% of the time.So much of our unhappiness (which shows up as exhaustion, stress and a general sense of life being a burden) is directly because we take our marching orders from the wrong side of the brain; the side that will never dare. The link below is from a TED talk given by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who had a stroke and was able to observe her brain functioning during it. Please take the time to watch this clip.Now, think about a challenge you are facing. Get quiet, close your eyes and take a few deep, slow breaths. Then ask yourself, which side of your brain have you been listening to regarding this issue? If it is the left and rational side, ask your intuitive mind to give you its perspective. Finally ask yourself, is there some action that actually might originate from the right side but be informed by the left side? Because it turns out that is the optimum relationship. The unconscious and intuitive points the path out, and the rational side executes or helps you get to that path and move forward on it. We need both parts of our brain, but we need them in the right relationship.

Catch Your Breath

David Whyte: “If you treat the discipline of reading poetry as an act of contemplation, then you will have a moment in the day, as William Blake said, ‘that Satan cannot find.’  When William Blake spoke of Satan he actually meant the strategic mind, the part of you that feels it doesn’t deserve anything unless it is ’doing’ something.”It is my hope that you treat reading this blog as an act of contemplation.  A chance to catch your breath and reconnect with your personal “for the sake of”.  For the sake of what do you do the work you do?  For the sake of what are you here at this moment in history?We wonder why our workplaces are so stressful and yet, and assume it is the pace of things or something unique to our time.  But, is it?  Back in the 1800s poet and artist, William Blake noted this was happening.  There is really not much new in the human psyche.  The strategic mind that must always be “doing” or “controlling,” what neuroscientists are now calling the default network, is deeply uncomfortable with another much larger part of us.  This part, the soul or psyche (which means soul in Greek) -- the energy that makes you you -- or maybe you call it your true or essential self, terrifies the strategic mind.  It is a jealous lover who must have complete control.Another poet, William Carlos William wrote:My heart rouses thinking to bring you newsof something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the news.You will not find it there but in despised poems.It is difficult to get the news from poemsyet men die miserably every day for lackof what is found there.So, in this pause, see if your answers to the questions that follow, reconnect you and invigorate you for the work yet ahead of you.  For the sake of what did you enter the profession you chose?  For the sake of what did you join this firm or start this company?  What about this work’s mission touches your heart and soul?And if the answer is nothing, it just might be time to find out what does!

Accept - Then Act

 “Accept—then act.  Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it… This will miraculously transform your whole life.”  Eckhart TolleTolle is right.  If I choose something, then I trust that it is somehow a benefit for me, even if only in the long term.  If I choose something, I don’t waste time and energy wishing for a different reality.I am in a two-year IRS audit.  So let’s test-drive this idea: I chose this audit.  Hmmm, how might that be true?  Well, through this audit (now going on three months), I can say the following:I am learning to accept, embrace and actually be grateful for my imperfections and inadequacies.  Through this audit both my accountant and the IRS agent have criticized me.  I have been accused and shamed.  I have been talked to with an exasperated voice. Until this audit, I did not know I still held somewhere inside of me a sense of inferiority and even shame for being so right-brained and not linear or sequential, for how I am made.I have struggled with my strange and random way of being in the world my entire life.  I am not linear.  I have no sense of Chronos time, sequential time, or quantitative time.  I am very present.  I live in qualitative time.  I am deeply aware and connected to energy.  I have enjoyed the gifts of being primarily right-brained.  The right brain makes things whole.  It has a great capacity for wonder, awe and depth.  It is a holy way to experience the world.  But all my life, I have felt somehow defective because I have been so different from people I admire.  My favorite story has been The Ugly Duckling, the story of a swan chick raised by ducks and ostracized for his lack of swan-ness.  Until one day he sees who he truly is, and he is at home in the world.   Stories of exile, like this one, are my story.  These stories might be yours too, but for an entirely different reason.  Most of us, feel somehow “other” or different than most.This audit took me on the journey of exile, and today I am at home in the world as it is and as I am.  I accept both and believe I have chosen to be here and to be here as I am. I am at peace with my unusual self.Where do you need to accept yourself?  But not in spite of how you are made, because of how you are made?