Tag Archive: awareness

August 27, 2024

Release and Reclaim: Seven Steps in a Seven Year Cycle of Intra and Inter-Personal Regeneration

“I’ve come to understand that the pain of a wound or a loss is over as soon as it happens. What follows is the pain of getting well.”

– Richard Wagamese (from What Comes From Spirit)

Mount Pollux, South Amherst, MA

As the fall season is soon to begin, I am about to mark the beginning of my (to this point) seven year journey since re-entering the “workforce” after experiencing clinical burnout and proceeding with an intentional rhythm aimed at more balance. This has entailed gradual, focused, and caring support from a range of healers as layers upon layers have sloughed off, revealing deeper wounds and cries for attention.

I am fairly certain that we are never done with this so-called “healing” work, to the extent that our own wellbeing is inextricably intertwined with that of others. As Nora Bateson crucially asks,

“What does it mean to be healthy in an unhealthy system?”

And Toni Morrison writes,

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

All this said, as I feel that much “lighter” and learn-ed in my process, I am reflecting on seven steps that have been and will continue to be core to this journey, including the work that my colleagues and I do to help weave the more beautiful world we know is possible.


🌀 Re-cognize: bring awareness to the realities of dis-ease and dis-association

🌀 Re-lax: breathe into this awareness, let what bubbles up come up; keep breathing

🌀 Re-lease: let go of what may have served and no longer does and that which never did

🌀 Re-claim: start inviting back those parts/aspects that have been ostracized and ignored

🌀 Re-member: embrace more and more of our underlying, essential and limitless identity

🌀 Re-surge: allow what has been regathered to both guide and deepen trust in our core

🌀 Re-cycle: this process is not linear but more of a spiral that can encompass others

*******

*******

And as the poets often capture it better than anyone, I will end with this from Danna Faulds:

There is no controlling life.

Try corralling a lightning bolt,

containing a tornado. Dam a

stream and it will create a new

channel. Resist, and the tide

will sweep you off your feet.

Allow, and grace will carry

you to higher ground. The only

safety lies in letting it all in –

the wild and the weak; fear,

fantasies, failures and success.

When loss rips off the doors of

the heart, or sadness veils your

vision with despair, practice

becomes simply bearing the truth.

In the choice to let go of your

known way of being, the whole

world is revealed to your new eyes.

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December 27, 2018

2018, The Year of Love: A Retrospective

“I need love
Not some sentimental prison
I need god
Not the political church
I need fire
To melt the frozen sea inside me
I need love.”

– Sam Phillips

Image by Luke, Ma, “Love by Nature,” shared under provisions of Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0.

I started this year with a post focused on love, and this idea that 2018 would be the year of love. This thinking wasn’t offered through rose-colored glasses, but from a shared sense and conviction that love would be required to see the year through. And not just any kind of love. In that original post there were a few definitions and quotes that we have been playing with at IISC, including these:

“All awakening to love is spiritual awakening… All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic.” 

– bell hooks

“Justice is what love looks like in public.”

– Cornel West

“To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him [sic] an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.”

– William Sloane Coffin

“Love is seeing the other as a legitimate other.”

– Humberto Maturana

“The ultimate act of love is allowing ourselves and others to be complex.” 

– Nora Bateson Read More
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August 4, 2011

A New Toolkit

Happiness

|Photo by ernohannink|http://www.flickr.com/photos/ernohannink/3931122112|

Last week’s post on “Negativity and Self-Limiting Advocacy” ended up setting off quite a conversation. In light of that, I thought I might further flesh out some of what Barbara Fredrickson recommends via her book Positivity in a chapter entitled “A New Toolkit.”  Here she enumerates  ways to enhance overall positivity, and therefore broaden our individual and collective minds, build resourcefulness and resilience, and flourish in the direction of our highest aspirations.  Here is what she suggests, based on rigorous research: Read More

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February 7, 2011

Finding Neighbors

vintage_neighborsPhoto by: Fzyaso

The following is a repost of a Huffington Post blog by Alicia Anstead, including reference to the work of IISC’s own Melinda Weekes.

Tonye Patano, a black actor in New York City, was so consumed last year by reading a script about minstrelsy, she was late for an audition. The story had rattled and repulsed her. But she couldn’t put it down. The day when she finally headed to the audition, she heard a group of young black teens on the street riffing in racially charged language.

“It was their way of relating to each other,” said Patano. “My response in my spirit was: ‘Young man, do you hear what you’re saying?’ But they were owning who they were, not caring about anyone’s judgment. Even if I don’t agree with it, they had made the language their own.”

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December 7, 2010

Theory U – The 4th Proposition

u-theory

Click here to see The 1st Proposition

Click here to see The 2nd Proposition

Click here to see The 3rd Proposition

The 4th Proposition of Theory U is:

The most important tool in that leadership technology is the emerging Self – the leader’s highest future possibility. Theory U is based on the assumption that each human being and each human community is not one but two: one is the current self, the person that exists as the result of a past journey; the other is the Self, the self that we could become as the result of our future journey.  Presencing is the process of the (current) self and the (emerging) Self listening to each other.

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July 21, 2010

Power and Love

3027627141_fbd4ea7cdb

photo by partie traumatic

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.  Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This often quoted comment by Dr. King forms the foundation of Adam Kahane’s new book,  Love and Power: A theory and practice of social change. Melinda Weekes and I attended a recent book talk by Adam, attracted to the topic because, at IISC we’ve been thinking through and practicing the connections among power, love, networks and collaboration for years now.  Much of what Adam shared resonates with our thinking. The book builds on the thinking of theologian Paul Tillich.   His definitions are worth taking a closer look:

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February 16, 2010

V-Day 2010

VDaylogo1

I know I’m coming late to the party, but I saw the Vagina Monologues for the first time this weekend and I was blown away by it.  Rather than writing yet another raving review of what evidently is a deeply moving work of art, I want to make a comment on the movement that it has unleashed.

I saw the play as produced by MIT undergraduate students who did it in concert with thousands of others around the world – I think it most appropriate to let V-Day speak for itself: Read More

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August 20, 2009

Back to Thinking

“With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.”  – Robert Cialdini

As Alfred North Whitehead once suggested, one of the main conundrums of our evolution as a species seems to be that it has largely depended upon our ability to engage in more and more activities without thinking about them.  Hence a world built upon scientific discovery, full of ever declining numbers of people who are scientifically literate.  Hence a world of increasing complexity that we often meet with relatively primitive automaticity.

In her book, The Canon, Natalie Angier provides an entertaining primer on the hard sciences for adult non-scientists and along the way makes a strong case for the need for more of us to bring greater rigor and discipline of thought to the day-to-day.  She illustrates how we often operate with models of physical reality that are simply false.  In many cases, these models were ingrained at an early age and remain stubbornly embedded, owing to certain neurological tendencies.  Not understanding these tendencies, we remain convinced that we are more critical in our thinking than we actually are. Read More

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August 13, 2009

Keeping Our Eyes (Not Just) On the Prize

Thanks to Sean Stannard-Stockton for introducing me to this video.  He referenced it while writing about the risks of being outcomes-focused in philanthropy.  It’s a great reminder to keep ourselves open to what we aren’t looking for.  It may also provide some insight as to why networks bend our brains, at least those parts that are singularly focused on results of a linear cause-and-effect kind.  The social capital and new forms of self-organized action that are the result of network building activity are not always the first things that appear front and center on our screens.  Rather, they may appear in the background, on the periphery, or in the spaces where more concrete images meet.  And yet, there is little doubt about the potential of net-centric approaches for social impact.  Time to adjust our eyes from the isolated (old paradigm) prize.

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August 6, 2009

No Such Thing as Waste

Landfill

When we throw it away, it doesn’t go away.  This is an important lesson of both systems thinking and ecology.  Fritjof Capra, physicist and founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, writes that we need to relearn the fundamental facts of life, including the fact that matter continually cycles through the web of life and that one person’s (or species’) waste is another’s food.  If our awareness and actions shifted in accordance with these facts, how would we live and work differently?

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June 12, 2009

Race and Recession: How Inequity Rigged the Economy and How to Change the Rules

The American economy wasn’t created in a race-blind way and the current recession isn’t race-blind in its impacts. It stands to reason, then, that we won’t get out of the current recession fairly without paying attention to the impact of race as we create solutions.

Listen to this summary of an Applied Research Center report on the issues of race, recession, and recovery.

To read more, go to: http://www.arc.org/content/view/726/136/

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April 20, 2009

On American Privilege

As a black woman in America, I know a lot about racism and white privilege. I am aware of privileges I enjoy by way of other aspects of my identity—education (graduate level), language (‘standard English’ speaker), able-bodiedness (relatively, speaking), citizenship (American). I’ve always fashioned my sense of Americanness after DuBois’s notion of ‘two-ness.’ I am black in America. That makes me American, but it makes me a “other” American who is set apart from Americanness because so much of Americanness means whiteness. When the attacks of September 11th happened, I didn’t feel like part of the “us” that was under attack. This is my country, but not completely, down to the core of my being.

Even so, I recognize certain things that are very American about me. Take my general stance that most things can be changed; that with enough energy, resources, brainpower, commitment “it can be done.” I recognize that point of view as a privilege that not everyone can partake.

I recognize the privilege of holding that little blue passport in the context of international travel. And, I know I have the privilege of freedom from scrutiny and discrimination in civic and economic processes like registering to vote or applying for a job, loan, or college.

But, there’s an even more basic privilege that I rarely consider. I carry shame and grief at the realization that I have done precious little to leverage or neutralize it. My American lifestyle and the privileges I enjoy are a direct function of genocide. On one level I’ve always known this. There were people here before the European settlers arrived. The Mashpee Wampanoag’s even helped some of them survive and learn to live here. And their repayment? Near obliteration and more than 350 years before the U.S. government would deign to recognize them as an official tribe. The unmitigated gall!

I’m ashamed of my smug progressive stance. Of course Native peoples have been oppressed and I call Columbus Day a Day of Mourning. Yet, I know so little of the history and I’ve been so unengaged in the struggle for justice for Native peoples. I’m only getting outraged in a very visceral way as I ingest spoonfuls of history. (Thanks PBS for “We Shall Remain“!) And, just as I’ve been told white people sometimes feel when they first really confront the reality of their privilege, I’m unsure what to do with the outrage and how to live inside the reality that every day my life is made possible by what has been taken from other people. It’s one thing to understand it in the abstract—to know that we’d need four planets for the entire world population to live the way we do. It’s another to know I that literally grew up on land in Massachusetts that was taken by force from people who initially acted in compassion and good faith. And that was repeated “from sea to shining sea.” And, now we’re back to the two-ness. The people who did that were not my people. And, yet, what they did accrues to my benefit daily.

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