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We don’t know how to listen. Developing listening and speaking intelligence

Monday, November 14th, 2011


Part 1.

We don’t know how to listen. The old saying, ‘we only use 10% of our brain’ could well apply to our listening ability. Except I would say we probably only hear about 1% of what is available to us. We have way too much going on in the madness of our inner conversation for a start, and then there is how we listen, and where we listen from, and what we listen for. Complex. Very, very…a skill to be developed, absolutely.

And you only have to look back at your last week of conversations and interaction with self and others to realise that we have low skill in speaking to others. The amount of time we spend cleaning up after miscommunication, failed communication, no communication…or the number of times we find ourselves in the same place, doing the same old behaviours, the ones we really dislike…because of the circling conversation in our head…like…”I don’t know how to do this…or…I am not good enough…or…?? You get my drift..

Phew…just image if we got these two developmental intelligences right…we would all have more time, and less stress, to start with. The legal profession, and most of the health profession would become largely redundant. 40% of the inefficiencies at work would be gone. And that is just the beginning.

This article, in 2 parts, is an introduction to developing listening and speaking intelligence. For just as we have cognitive, emotional, physical and spiritual intelligence, we also have listening intelligence and speaking intelligence. These are learned skills. Like any skill, you have to want to learn to improve them. If you live in a cave and never deal with other people, then this article is not for you. Otherwise, consider improving your life by taking time to invest in developing these skills with consciousness.

The Situation
You are in a meeting and you say something to your boss in truth and innocence and they start interrogating you from left field. You leave the meeting, and later start to feel or experience deep discomfort in your body, or in your thinking. Something is really off. After further reflection you realise that something happened in that interchange that raises red flags for you about the level of trust you have with your boss.

Or…

You are working with someone who for some reason appears to hold the power dynamic in the relationship. They may be very clever with words, they may be adept at ‘casting spells’ over people putting them into a trance like state, they may be a master manipulator, or employ passive aggressive bullying techniques. You have some level of awareness of this, but you know that you often leave any conversation with them deflated, dis-empowered and generally in an unresourceful state.

We all have had these experiences. Usually many of them over time. Often we have these experiences with very specific people in our life. They have an archetypal makeup that plugs us in, and we allow ourselves, usually unconsciously, to become diminished around them. We may not become aware of this diminishment until months, or even years, down the track. One day we may hopefully wake up and realise that somewhere in the equation we gave up pieces of ourselves and responded repeatedly to them from a place that was small. Anyone who has woken up after divorce will often realise that during their marriage, they gave up whole chunks of themselves to do things like..keep the peace, avoid conflict, or because they didn’t trust their own voice and intuition.

The destination
The goal of mastery that we are seeking in this article is to be able to determine in the very moment the point that a violation happens, and to speak calmly and clearly to the violation. To name it without being reactionary. By violation I specifically mean when a person in the dialogue is manipulating, bullying, distrusting, intending harm, disrespect, or dis-empowerment, as in the two examples illustrated.

Realise that you are a participant in the violation by not speaking and allowing it to occur, be that consciously or unconsciously.

Violation = to treat irreverently or disrespectfully. Violation is derived from the same root as virility and virtue.  (uiro which means man, the vital forces of man.) Violation- to treat with force, or to rob one of their vital force.

The pathway
Few people have the ability to speak to a violation in the moment as it occurs and to do so while maintaining their own dignity, without reaction. To be able to do this indicates a level of mastery. Therefore, we need to start our journey to mastery by recognising that it is indeed a journey, and may take years of development to achieve.

*The beginning of the journey starts with simple awareness.

Recognise some form of violation is occurring, whether that be minutes, days, months or years after the violation. This is the first step.

People will generally have some of the following type of experiences after a violation.

They will feel body sensations that are unpleasant. Anywhere from overt pain, like neck pain, stomach pain, stomach knots, headache, dry mouth, sweaty palms, increased heart rate; to subtle body signals, like vague nausea, lethargy, depression, a bad taste in the mouth or just general twitchiness.

They might have difficulty sleeping, because something very low grade is worrying them and they can’t quite put their finger on what it is.

They may be in a circular thinking mode, where the same thoughts are going round and round.

They may be irritable. Other people notice before they do. “Why are you so snappy today?”

They may get sick, with cold or flu like symptoms.

It may be very very vague…just a feeling that something is not right.

Strongly intuitive people will register this quite quickly, although they may not be able to determine source.

If you have been absorbing a repeated violation for years, you may have depression, extremely low self esteem, consistent illness, lethargy, chronic pain.

*Once you have the awareness that something is not right, we then need to determine the source. This takes practice, especially if we have been ignoring the signals for years. In people who have disassociated their own feelings, they will have a deep sense of confusion or denial around the source. These people are often candidates for professional help. In many instances they have separated themselves from the source, objectifying it to allow it to not affect them so intensely. Objectification is a self defense mechanism.

Source is best determined if you go back to the first moment you became aware of the discomfort, or to the place where your thinking continues to circle. You may need an objective third party to help you with this.

*Once you have determined source, you need then to uncover the source code. What was the intention of the person at the very moment of the violation? Again, this may need an objective and skilled third party.

*The intention needs to be named. Clearly and specifically. When truth is named all of the charge (heat) diminishes. The noise in our heads stops, we have a deep sense of ‘yesness”. Because we are so often attached to these issues naming may be very hard, unless we bring clinical objectivity to the naming. Personally I ask my coach to help me, as these issues can be complex. We are dealing with power. (That’s power over another, not personal empowerment.)

From here, I would suggest you employ the ‘7 step process for radical truth with compassion’, as outlined in my FREE ebook, Speak the Truth.

This process will help you uncover your contribution to this situation, and to enable you to step into a conversation with the perpetrator while maintaining your centre. To enact this conversation requires great skill, also something that is developed over time.

In the advanced levels of the skill of listening and speaking intelligence, you would become aware of the violation in the moment, you would identify the intention behind it, and you would name it, right there and then, all the while maintaining your centre.

To accelerate the development of this intelligence is a practice, requiring consistency over time.

In Part 2 of this article we will look at practices to get your listening intelligence advanced, to identify source code, to name it without creating blame, and then to speak to the situation while maintaining your centre.

Would love to hear your experiences…

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..the dance between evolution and equilibrium..

Monday, November 7th, 2011

 

The Certainty of Globalisation and the Science of Dynamic Equilibrium
or…the dance between evolution and equilibrium.

 

The often over used word, equilibrium, is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “any condition in which all acting influences are cancelled by others resulting in a stable, balanced, or unchanging system.”

Equilibrium is not inactivity, but rather dynamic balance. The balance can be in the domains of physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. Life is filled with fluctuations towards and away from equilibrium.

Nature exhibits an intrinsic drive towards equilibrium. The front door of your home is opened in mid winter and cold air rushes into the warm interior. Very quickly though, the imbalance disappears and the air temperature throughout the room stabilises. It has never been observed that one side of the room gets colder while the other side gets hotter, for no apparent reason. Just as gas molecules in a small container disperse throughout a larger container in ways that give each gas molecule equal space. You will not find gas molecules gathering in one corner of a container.

Greater forces overpower smaller forces. A too heavy object sitting on a too weakly constructed shelf will eventually fall through, and may come to rest on the floor, if the floor is strong enough. At the atomic level, the constant move to equilibrium continues, even when the overt appearance is of an object at rest.

Nature seeks equilibrium spontaneously, as nature is always most efficient and economical.

So, what has all of this to do with globlisation?

For most of the history of humanity we have lived as nation states, pockets of humanity, similar to the gas molecules in a small glass jar. Within our own ‘jar’ we have found our dynamic equilibrium. However, we have also been pulled by evolutions arrow in a constant quest to evolve.

This is the dance between equilibrium and evolution, and it has gone on for all of life as we know it, and will continue, long after you are I are dust.

Over the last 50 plus years, as borders have become more fluid, and systems such as money, trade, and energy have become less border dependent, our ‘jar’ has become bigger.

As I wrote in the article, Eventually we all pay, when I lose my manufacturing job in a wealthy nation state to cheaper labor in a developing country, I may suffer loss while someone else gets pulled out of poverty.

The world is in the middle of a significant process of dynamic equilibrium. We have one part of the room(world) that is cold, and another that is hot. This is not a permanent situation. Indeed we have been through many of these movements to dynamic equilibrium already, and will continue, probably at an accelerated rate, as Universe evolves. The big difference now is that for the first time we are dealing with the whole world, and not just little communities.

Our ‘jar’ full of gasses is indeed the world. Pollution in China affects the fisherman in Tuvalu. Low wages over ‘there’, mean someone loses over ‘here’. It is how things go when  dynamic equilibrium is in process. At some point, in the near future, world wide wages will balance out. There will be no ‘cheap’ wages to be found, which will require a different model than the one we have.

Then there will be other areas/factors that will fall out of equilibrium. Because this is the way nature works, especially when man gets his hands on things without being mindful of the precessional effects. This constant dance.. evolution.. equilibrium.. evolution.. equilibrium….

We are losing species, but while species die, (and possibly humans too), other species flourish. The earth and nature will do just fine in the whole…equilibrium will find its space, in the end. Until another evolutionary event comes along…and then the dance will resume.

The point is that we have to start seeing the world as a whole. We can no longer afford the luxury or indulgence of living in our little glass ‘jar’. And in this whole view, we need to recognise that we are in the process of finding equilibrium within globalisation. Don’t get too comfortable though, because evolutions arrow will find a new target.

Globalisation is in process, whether we like it or not. The real questions lie in how wisely we can support the process of dynamic equilibrium at all levels, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually.

Let me know your thoughts….

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Eventually we all pay

Monday, October 31st, 2011

Here in Australia we just had Qantas shut down for nearly 2 days, stranding thousands of people around the world. If you scratch below the surface of this action and zero in on the source of why the executive team decided to do this, it reveals the cost of a world in the middle of a transition to globalisation.

Complexity can never be looked at through a simple lens. As Bucky Fuller said, we have to start with the whole (synergy). Sure, if I were a passenger stranded in some place, with a limited time to get to a very important event, or to start my holiday that I have saved for for years, I would be seriously pissed off. And if I were a worker, imminently facing the loss of my job to cheaper labour overseas, I would be frightened.

But we simply cannot point a finger of blame while at the same time enjoying the fruits of the cost of this. Globalisation means jobs are off-shored. I get to buy my electronic gizzmo’s for a much cheaper price. Lovely. I get cheaper travel with airlines that have cheaper labour. Lovely. But at what price? And when do I ask that question? As I am paying for my next exciting techno gadget? Or when my whole livelihood is threatened? For as surely as my job may be under threat, somewhere in the world other families are celebrating their success in getting the very job we have lost. Just as blue green algae is celebrating a world with more CO2.

I am actually a fan of globalisation. It is a tide coming in that has its own momentum. To try to fight it is futile. Same as trying to fight the advent of the car. Sucks if you made your livelihood from horse buggies. (I do think we could transition to globalisation in a much smarter way than we are doing it now, by the way.)

The incident with Qantas is just another little signal in a sea of signals that change is moving faster and faster. The ability to adapt to change is ever increasingly becoming a skill of high value. Do you have this skill? Or are you the one resisting, being dragged kicking and screaming?

We cannot rape the earth of its millions-of-years-to-develop oil and gas, and not expect to pay. We cannot reach 7 billion people on the planet and not expect to pay. We cannot live lifestyles of obscene waste and not expect to pay. We cannot buy our clothes and toys cheaply from China and India and not expect to pay.

The question is, when will we pay? Or who will pay, and when? Qantas is a signal that its current workers are being asked to pay now. Today, or, in a few months or short years…they will still pay. No matter when, they will pay and they will not like it. Our dislike of things like a carbon tax is just about our reluctance to pay now. For somewhere down the track, soon, someone will pay. Will it be us, or our kids? Or both?

The tab will be tallied. This is unavoidable. Who pays and when, this we are bickering about. But make no mistake, it is simply a delusional delay.

Until we start to incorporate a different accounting methodology (integral accounting) that takes into consideration the all-in-cost of what we do, we are living in the delusion that we can get away with our many years of blindness, or sheer willful ignorance.

Part of globalisation at the spiritual level (now manifesting at the physical level) is the ever dawning realisation that we are all one.  Truly I cannot do anything in my little isolated world and not deny the consequences. We no longer have that luxury. The people in the Maldives are paying for us now. As are the people in Tuvalu, and Bangladesh. The Amazon…the list is long….and painful. Animals…species, extinction…and yes, some of us privileged westerners are starting to pay. The confluence of the GFC and climate change, our health system, over population, all of these things are now showing up in a perfect storm that will effect all of us, even the 1%. In different ways, for sure. But there is no ‘there’ we can run away to. My air is your air. My sea is your sea. A virus is spread in the same air and water…

Getting fit and eating healthy food after years of indulgence hurts, in the short term. Few people enjoy that initial transition. But most people who stick with it, actually discover a vitality they had not even realised they had lost. To choose consciously to pay the all-in-price for everything we do will hurt, big time. Big changes in lifestyle will need to be made. We all know this, at some level, and are seeking to delay the arrival time for as long as we can. I propose that on the other side, when we are living with full consciousness of ‘we are all one’, then we will discover a vitality and humanity that we have long forgotten.

In the current movie, “In Time” there is a quote, repeated several times, that for a few to be immortal, many must die. Will, the character played by Justin Timberlake, has a response. “No one should be immortal if even one person has to die.” Idealistic, sure. But anything less reduces us to the lizards that we have evolved from.

Your thoughts?

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Vocational arousal, dancing bubbles of joy

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

When you love your work, you spend your days in a heightened state of arousal. Pretty cool. What’s not to love about that?

The world is filled with people who have brought the system…”do as you are told, go to school, get the required education, get a good job, work for the machine.” Today we are seeing the youth saying… “Hell no. I start my life saddled with massive debt from an education that I was told I needed and now I can’t get a job?”

What is a job? And who would want one long term? A job has no vitality. It is a way to fill your day while you are planning what you really want to do. And often in the planning you become numb, totally swallowed by the machine. And you forget who you are. And what role you have to play that makes your eyes sparkle and your heart sing. So we have cities filled with zombies. The most aroused they get is through very ordinary sex, too much social media, or crap TV, magazines, gossip…

Bucky Fuller did the computer sums and discerned that it is probably cheaper to pay people to stay at home, to not commute, to not produce stuff that adds no real value but consumes earth energy. They then might have a chance to discover where they are vocationally aroused. And we would honour people for doing what was spontaneously arousable within them that adds value to the whole. We would honour those who love to do the caring roles that our current society regards as worthless…like taking care of children, the elderly, the physically challenged. We would not say that they are less value than the guy who gets paid silly money for trading bits on a screen. We would honour men who wanted to be stay home dads, and women who wanted to be stay home mums. We would celebrate the artists and artisans, music makers, poets, the masters and the apprentices. We would measure value by the joy in the eyes of the creative spirit, and the contribution they make to the joy and wellbeing of all.

How to navigate your way back to vocational arousal? Most of us have lost the map. And we have no idea where to begin looking. It is actually an inner journey. More like an archeological dig. Much debris needs to be removed, many things need to be unlearned. Exquisite care needs to be taken. Support of a fabulous guide is helpful. Time needs to be surrendered. Radical truth needs to be confronted and lived in. Views need to be expanded, for most of us are seeing through the lens we have been taught is the only lens. Whole worlds become visible.

Vocational arousal is life. It is the twinkle. The dance and the music.

This, or nothing…

Ah joy

Delicious dancing bubbles of joy

There is no ending

and

no beginning….

Only an eternity

of

light

With deep homage to Barbara Marx Hubbard for coining the term, vocational arousal.

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Truth at the Speed of Light

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

“You can’t handle the truth” yelled Col.Jessup forcefully to Lt. Kaffee in the famous court room scene from the great movie, “A Few Good Men.”

Col. Jessup was right. Almost all of us cannot handle the truth. Not the real truth. The whole truth. And so we carefully craft our lives to avoid facing it.

We drug ourselves, over eat, stay extra busy, sleep too much or too little. Lurch from one addiction to another. Because underneath is a truth that we are desperately trying to ignore. Yet, paradoxically, in this truth is our ultimate emancipation. Our deepest integrity.

Truths like….my life is a lie. My relationship is hollow. Our leaders lie, and we say that is OK. Our governments are corrupt and I am doing nothing about it. My child is taking drugs, my partner is having an affair. I have spent my life working at a heartless job because I sold my soul a long time ago out of fear. I have a house full of stuff I don’t really want, or rarely use. I am so afraid to take the step I most want to take because I might fail. Or, even deeper. I am a liar. I am a cheat. I betray myself. I betray.

We are at the stage of human evolution where everything is speeding up. Like it or not. We have transited from the age of matter to the age of energy. The solar age. The age of light.

Our children have developed the capacity to tune into signals and frequencies that we are unable to access. Their receptors are hyper sensitive. They have all the AD’s and other autism’s that seem to be spreading like wildfire.  We have no historical way of supporting them in this. So we resort to drugging them into somnolence. We do not have the language or the tools to deal with the new wiring of the new human. We have no pathways to navigate. There are no leaders who know how to run businesses and governments in this solar age. And besides they are so buried in a system of lies and complicity that there is no distinction between the true and the beautiful. North is lost to them.

We are trying to apply the old pathways to new roads. And what a mess that creates.

If we really had the courage we would be in a constant dialogue with truth. Truth at the speed of light. Available to us 24/7. Tuning into the highest frequency of truth. Silent long enough to listen and hear. Brave enough to act. Wise enough to listen to the truths of others as ours emerges and so build a coherent whole.

There is no plan to this level of truth. It emerges. Whole and intact, in the moment.

But can we handle it? Take a deep breath…your life is calling. Life is calling all of us. Can you hear it?

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On Integrity

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Integrity…I would have thought that to live in integrity was not that hard a gig. Seems I am wrong. Seems that integrity is the toughest gig in town. Not only that, but that it is rare. It demands of you your best. And more. It demands of you that you say no to a lot of yummy things, and yes to some of the really hard stuff. It comes at a price. Most people don’t pay.

What is integrity? To me it means wholeness. Completeness. I first ‘got’ integrity when I was working with building Bucky Fuller’s models. Take a bunch of toothpicks, and some jelly babies, and build a square. Notice when you do that the square cannot stay upright on its own. It collapses. Yet we have built our maths and architecture around  squares. Now build a triangle. Something feels good about a triangle. But it has no dimensionality. So add one extra point and create a tetrahedron. Bingo…now you have a thing that holds its shape. It has complete integrity. It has an inside and an outside, which means that it is a system. Actually, it is the minimum system in Universe.

A complex system, like a human being, has integrity when it is holding its shape. When it is doing what it was designed to do. When it is complete. Given the changing state of the larger ecosystem in which we find ourselves, to do this requires extreme attention. It means that our intention matches our words, matches our actions, matches the effects our words and actions have. The signal is clear, from source to delivery to destination. There is no dissonance, no misalignment, no fracturing, no distortion. Yep, I did say this integrity thing was hard.

It has to start with source. The source of our signal. What is that? Most of the time we get distracted with the signal itself. Like an amazing light show, the brightness takes our attention away from the source. We have become signal responding creatures, rarely focusing on source. We take a pain killer for a headache, eat too much to hide our guilt or shame, react to things without taking the time to focus on what is really going on. Jump to conclusions, make assumptions. Accumulate yuk because we do not speak up sooner. Or get distracted by the bright shiny object before we really know about from where the bright shiny object came.

How many times have you had the experience of getting riled up, jumped to conclusions, only to find that you were missing a significant piece of the information, and that when you had that information, the view changed so significantly that your reaction was ill conceived? Hmm..let me name 30% of the waste in human productivity spent in this type of conversation. Let me name my own getting trapped in this way too many times. It is a nauseating place to be, and yet for some dark reason, us humans find it attractive. That smelly, icky gossipy place. It always does harm. Subtly or overtly. This is why the conversation for understanding is so important.

How does it feel to be on the receiving end of another person’s neglect of going to the source of your actions? Of jumping to conclusions, making assumptions, blaming or shaming without having the relevant whole? Or of being completely negated and discarded after weeks, months, or years of attention, focus and applied energy being put into something that deeply mattered to you because the other party did not take the time to go to source, to see the whole, to honour your history, your effort, your dedication?

Bucky said that the necessary ingredient of synergy is to start first with the whole. With the Universe. That until we have the complete picture, we have only a partial and therefore incomplete view. Our legal system is supposed to be built around this…innocent until proven guilty. But do we live by this?

Have you ever felt devalued? Discarded as a human of value? I have. Many times. It feels horrible. The question is…how many times have I done this to others? And this is a question I am sitting in now. As someone who has built my brand around integrity, I have known that the price of so doing would be high. That this conscious choice would open me to be held to account at a level most uncomfortable. That I would have to demand of myself the kind of personal reflection rigor that few stomach. That I would have to stand in the heat of others who see me in my shadow. And own it all. All. Yep…this stuff is hard.

So I circle back…..what is the source of your signal? What is the intent you project in the world? And what comes back at you that indicates the truth of the projection? Is it aligned? Where is the dissonance? For this is our feedback. Like it or not.

Do your words really match your intention? Do your actions? Or do you say one thing and do another? How do you cheat on yourself and your own integrity?

And are you really game enough to surround yourself with people who will hold you to your highest expression of integrity, your most magnificent wholeness? These are your true support team. The ones who will not step over anything ever, but will bravely and respectfully point out when you have strayed from your own wholeness. Ideally they will do this from a place of deep care for you. Sometimes they will not. Sometimes it will be the total stranger who will shock you from your own treachery. Hard medicine, but a gift none the less.

Integrity is a tough gig. The toughest. Which is why it is so important.

To declare my current focus in living in integrity, my commitment is to work at going to source before I get into reaction, make judgements or jump to conclusions. To have the whole view rather than work from the partial. I am up to being held to account around this….if you notice me stray.

What is yours? Want to play…?

 

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Posted in Change, Conscious Business, Conscious Communication, Current Affairs, Guinea Pig C-personal category, Leadership Development, Personal Development, Positive Deviants | 3 Comments »

On the question of personal power and surrogacy

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

In the award winning but chilling movie, No Country for Old Men, there is a scene between the psychopath Anton and a woman called Carla Jean, an innocent bystander. If you have not seen the movie, Anton Chigurh kills people with complete disassociation from humanity. It is his chilling absence of emotion that makes his character so compelling and repulsive. The results are not good for Carla Jean.

Carla Jean Moss: You don’t have to do this.
Anton Chigurh: [smiles] People always say the same thing. 
Carla Jean Moss: What do they say? 
Anton Chigurh: They say, “You don’t have to do this.” 
Carla Jean Moss: You don’t. 
Anton Chigurh: Okay.  [Chigurh flips a coin and covers it with his hand] 
Anton Chigurh: This is the best I can do. Call it. 
Carla Jean Moss: I knowed you was crazy when I saw you sitting there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me.
Anton Chigurh: Call it. 
Carla Jean Moss: No. I ain’t gonna call it. 
Anton Chigurh: Call it. 
Carla Jean Moss: The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.

What Carla Jean refused to do was to surrogate her power to a coin, or more specifically, to a coin toss. She handed the power right back to Anton, the place where it always rested. The risk she took of course was that it may cost her her life. Literally. But she knew, at some primal level, that to surrogate to the coin, she was in violation of the last remnant of dignity she had left. Her own power. I am not sure I would have had the courage, or the fortitude, to do as she did. Indeed, until recently, I may not have had the wisdom to see how specifically I was handing my power of life and  death to a coin, and not the man behind the toss, who by holding the gun, was the one choosing whether to kill or not.

How many times do we surrogate to a coin, or the government, or to a person we believe has more power than us? The tragedy is that we do with every single day, every single time we handle a coin, or a note, or participate in our system of government. Or when we say to ourselves that someone has more power, more authority, than I.

In my own life I have had to look with exquisite and painful detail at where I have handed my power away. I am quite sure I am not done with this inquiry, as it as deep an inquiry as is to accept full responsibility for my world without any blame.

Today while I was the recipient of an amazing energetic coaching session from the very gifted Emily Gendron, I saw in a beautiful inner visual montage, the light of me, of my source, and how I have diminished that light around some people. Similarly, how I, at times, think my light shines brighter than others. Righteousness. Such a nasty way of being. How good I have been at righteousness. It makes me shudder. I pray for forgiveness from all the people I have inflicted with my righteousness.

In this inner montage, I saw the lights of all beings, shining equally bright. Dancing and interacting with each other. We need the dance, because on our own, while our light shines with equal brightness, but we are incomplete. An orchestra is not made from a single note.

How many times have I given my authority away to another? How many times have I enslaved myself? I listen to people who have signed an agreement to be bullied every day at work. It’s called a paycheck. But they still have the power to choose. No matter how smart and charismatic the ‘authority’, no matter his or her personal power, no matter how big the paycheck. Being bullied, being verbally and emotionally abused, is a choice, that we, the recipient makes. We can choose to walk. The price may be high, rarely as high as Carla Jeans. But at what price is dignity? At what price is being our own source?

Even more scary is to consider, over the course of my life, how many times I may have been the ‘authority.’ The ‘great’ righteous one. Less and less, methinks, but worth really considering.

I have had a pattern of surrogating my power to highly charismatic, highly intelligent men. Of being blinded by the glamour. Spell cast by magicians. Seduced by the offer of something I feel is lacking in me…knowledge, skill, money, fame, success and the illusions of all of this. While I have allowed myself to fall under the spell, I then give away almost every part of myself. My money, my energy, my spirit…trading it all for the possibility of some bejeweled state. The prostitute in full flight. (To be clear, I have not traded my body. I am speaking of the prostitute as an archetype, selling your soul for money.) Oh me, oh my! How weak is my sense of self? How little do I think of my own light? It is time for this pattern to be done in my life.

Fortunately, I have always awoken from the spell in enough time to pull out of the death spiral. And in so doing, break the illusion. But not before considerable damage has been done.

We are all on paths to hold true to our own inner power. Not power over, but the source of our gifts, our spirit, our light. It does not mean that we are perfect, far from it. It means that we can show up in our perfect imperfections and be whole. We all have our seducers, people, and things to which we  surrogate our soul. Like the horcruxes in Harry Potter, we split our soul into parts, leaving it in places, or with people we think have more than we have. And so we walk around the world, fragments of our self, mistakenly thinking that in so doing we will be stronger.

And like Harry Potter, or Carla Jean, to fully heal requires the willingness to clearly choose self respect and dignity, and to stand empowered in the certainty of our own light even in the face of the death of all that is an illusion. I aspire to the courage of these two fictional characters.

Where do you surrogate your power?

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Financial literacy, new friends, abundance as a way of being

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

 

In the history of the world it is often the seemingly small events that have the power to make the most significant changes. Rosa Parks refusing to sit at the back of the bus. Mohamed Bouazizi, who’s personal sacrifice sparked an uprising across the Middle East.

In my world, the small but significant event took place July 22 to 24, 2011 in Berkeley California, where a group of about 20 magnificent people gathered to give birth to a project I have been working on for some 25 years. These great people found themselves in a deep exploration of financial literacy. Not the type of financial literacy you will find at business school. Or in the economics department. We stepped into the conversation, guided by the insight of David Martin, looking to bring truth to the very core animating impulse behind our current global financial system. What was the intent of design? How did the intent become manifest? What does this mean to humanity? What can we do to repurpose this system, allowing a different outcome to the one we are currently observing around the world. (Massive personal and sovereign debt, an ever increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor, global hunger and starvation, gut wrenching poverty for the majority of citizens on spaceship earth.)

Through this extraordinary process over three days, our Universe was tilted. Even without being able to fully get the language, as one participant said, “I am able to deeply get that this is truth.”

This journey began for me when I was 26 years old and, as an ambitious young entrepreneur, I wanted to understand how to make money. So off I went to a class called Money and You. Still running to this day, this program, designed by the great Werner Erhard, tipped me completely onto a path of self discovery and development. More than that, it also introduced me to the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, one of my life long beloved teachers.

As I am now approaching my 51st birthday, I have, as the richness of age gives you, the opportunity to look back at life and see the threads, that no matter what, have remained consistent, through every up and down and in and out of my life.

Those threads have been..

*Integrity
*A forensic quest for truth
*As part of this quest for truth, a deep desire to understand the very systems that form the foundations of our current life, and in particular, our economic/value exchange system.

As I have written before, life doesn’t turn out how you expect it. I neither expected to be a mother, and a single one at that, or to have spent the majority of my life single. I also never expected that I would have a personal struggle with finances and money.

But such is as it is. I have half written another article, “If I were God” where I posit that to reach this place in my life right now, where my commitment is to bringing light to the current system in a way that emancipates people worldwide, I needed to go through every single one of the days of my life, exactly as they have been, to this very point. All the fear, the pain, the confusion, the struggle, the effort. All of it.

Indeed, the perfection of the path is as exquisite as it has been painful.

For many years these seeds were growing in me. Then in 2006, during one week in October while traveling in the USA, I had the good fortune (or was it more auspicious than that?) to meet Bernard Lietaer and to hear a talk given by David Martin. Bernard, a world renowned economist, and an expert in complimentary currencies, demonstrated the power of a currency to change the world from short term to long term thinking in a heart beat. David Martin, with precision and an almost detached clarity, walked through the exact events that lead to what we now know as the Global Financial Crisis.

From this week I was seized with a deep truth. I knew nothing about the very system that underpins everything we do. I was deeply unconscious. And as someone who is committed to consciousness and forensic truth, this was no longer viable. So my quest went from vague to 80% committed. The reading began. Economics books. Articles. From mind numbingly boring to deeply riveting.

Two years ago, August 28th, I met David Martin in a skype call, specifically to propose to him that we co-create a financial literacy workshop. In his wisdom, David challenged me to consider the field effects of creating such a workshop. We also started working together as partners in The Constellation. Earlier this year my commitment shifted to 100% and I commenced a deep dialogue with two of David’s staff about the deep energetics of this workshop. This was a critical component. When you are working with such emotional material, material that people are so heavily invested in, the level of clarity around your purpose is crucial. I had to clear away any residue of my own dogma, my own stuckness, my own agenda.

In early July, with a few weeks notice, we decided to put a stake in the sand and invite family and friends to the very early first draft of this workshop.

Several people who showed up on day 1 did not come back. The truth might set you free, but first it can piss people off. Or, when people have so much invested in the current system, the very thought of having to face their collusion with it, and their desire to maintain the status quo, becomes too frightening to contemplate. Or whatever the reason.

While we did cover distinctions around money, debt, credit, public and private equity, the federal reserve banking system, bonds, insurance, productivity, utility, etc, what we really engaged with was the core animating impulse behind all of these. I have know intuitively for most of my life that our system is perverse. That at its core it is a corruption, specifically designed to enslave and dehumanize value for all but the minority.

I have also spent years berating myself on my ‘lack’ of intelligence to ‘work’ the system. In truth, there has been many times when I had opportunities to do just that. To turn left and take the money, when my gut and my own truth said no. I am beginning to see that my ‘lack’ of intelligence was indeed the opposite.

When we started on day one of the workshop with an honouring of all the people who have suffered through enslavement, poverty, death and loss of dignity as a direct manifestation of our current system, I felt their pain. Not as some isolated observer, but as my own pain. I know the feeling of being marginalised. I know the feeling of being made to feel less than. I know what being devalued means. I am that person.

And, the truth of all truths, I am currently enslaved. I am a slave. I have debt.

This statement takes a moment to digest. Most of us are enslaved. Many of us have been dehumanized over and over. And while we might live in extreme wealth compared to many people in the world, our wealth enslaves us. It is designed to do this.

From anchoring in deep truths, those kind of truths that turn a healthy set of brains into scrambled eggs, we did move into an inspired place as a launching pad to move back into full engagement with the world. We explored integral accounting, abundance, and the power of community. How, without changing the existing system, people can re-purpose the current structure to invite a different engagement. Now. Today.

I observed three of the most magnificent women commit their heart, soul, mind and body to this work. I sat in the experience of feeling an unbreakable vow from others. Such a rare phenomenon. Rare, rare, rare. I had people step up to support me totally. Wow. (Breathe Christine. Receiving support has not been easy for me.)

It was an incredible three days. It is only the beginning. During last night, it became clear to me that my immediate next step is to write articles about the key pieces. Money, debt, etc..to this endeavor I will be commencing immediately. Simultaneously, we have a team of magnificent people committed to bringing this work to the world. I know that there are people who are hungering for it.

Please let me know if you are one of them.

(A special and deep bow to every single person on this journey through my entire life. Particularly, David Martin, and the people in the room in Berkeley. And to Dori, Nirvana and Elizabeth, for demonstrating such generosity, grace and commitment.)

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Not Afraid Enough – naming ‘he who cannot be named’

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

“Instead of medicating ourselves on shopping, food, drugs, alcohol, eternal youth, gossip, reality TV, and intense narcissism as a way to avoid facing what we feel in our increasing fear, far better to step deep into the fear, to speak the truth, and name the devil. For ‘he who cannot be named’ does indeed have a name. Dare we speak it?”

It seems we are living in a world of fear. I certainly feel it. Fear of the breakdown of our climate, our economy, of families, of our way of life. At a personal level, fear of how I am going to make it, to survive, financially. And what type of world am I leaving my daughter?

I often think back to other ages in history. Like the great plague. Imagine how terrifying this time would have been? No one family spared. A terrible, gruesome death, no pattern to it for the people to make sense of. Who lived and who died was like a lottery. It seemed so unfair, so irrational.

Or to the recent world wars. Even in our relatively unscathed Australia, most of our young men were gone on ships to the other side of the world, where letters took more than 6 weeks to arrive one way. The enemy of the day was on our door step, invading Darwin, North Queensland, and Papua New Guinea. Food was rationed. The future was uncertain.

It seems that every period in history has had events that have had similar energetics in common.

*Terrifying uncertainty
*Loss on a significant to extreme scale – be it life, or home, or community, or country, or environment
*The need to bring in harsh austerity measures
*The seemingly random arrow of fate, choosing one person, or community, or nation, over another
*The influence of nature that renders man without power – be it a plague, or a tsunami, or fire, drought, flood, or the rage of the microbes
*An elite power structure that had as its bedrock rampant corruption, greed and arrogance

We in our cosy western lifestyles have had it good for quite a while now. At the same time, we have gotten very fat. Obese. Lazy, unbelievably unhealthy, and indulgent to the extreme. We feel incredibly entitled to the life we have become used to. We feel entitled to shop at will, to over spend, over feed, and over consume pretty much everything. We feel entitled to eternal youth.

I watch with great fascination at the unravelling of an empire of propaganda. Murdoch and his insatiable desire for world domination. How timely. What a beautiful example of how life can change in a heart beat. I love that the British people will not let this one pass to the keeper. There is nothing money or the illusion of power can do when people unite and rise up. History has demonstrated this, time and again. And in our very recent history, we watch as the power of people in community say No to greed, corruption and injustice and in so doing discover they were not victims after all. They had chosen their own victim hood.

So here we are, fat, lazy and entitled, with the slow creep of terror seeping through the cracks. Yet at the same time we do all we can to avoid the fear. Our ‘new ageism’ means that fear and anger are bad. We should be skipping down the yellow brick road throwing daffodils all day long, imbued in such positivity. And if we are not doing this, then something is wrong with us.

Yet maybe we are not afraid enough? Maybe in our indulgence, our narcissism and laziness, we have avoided really standing in the fear. Really looking into the dark places. Naming the devil. For surely if we did, then we would be in the streets, up in arms. We would insist on radically changing our ways. We would demand that what a Stanford University report has revealed, that the world can switch to 100% renewable energy in 20 to 40 years, using todays technology, is implemented. We would insist on changing our political system from one where elections are brought for obscene amounts of money, and the politicians are forever pawns of the power of their purchaser. (In another world, this is called prostitution.) We would demand that our economic system returns to a system based on genuine productivity and value. We would find it totally unacceptable that one child dies of starvation while we spend billions on the costs of an obesity epidemic. And we would rage against a machine that allows the wealth to continue to be in the hands of a small few, a result of the multiple asymmetries that we have condoned as acceptable

And maybe, just maybe, if we did these things, we would change the course of the next few years enough to prevent a large scale systems breakdown.

On the other hand, humans have usually required to push themselves to break point before getting off the couch. Collapse can be very motivating once people have moved through the paralysis of fear unaddressed.

And just as each period of history has similar energetics in common, how we respond to serious crisis has common elements.

*A resilience and resourcefulness re-emerges that has been in a stupor from too much shopping and eating
*People come out from behind their walls and engage in community
*Generosity rises, amidst the lack and austerity
*Thoughtfulness and compassion resurrect
*Happiness goes up as life’s true values once again find a seat at the table (family, community, love, health, simplicity)
*Respect for each other and nature is held as sacrosanct
*The greedy, arrogant and corrupt power structures are uprooted and rendered harmless, even if for but a moment
*Genuine human productivity and creativity are valued

History has shown that we resolve, at this point in the cycle, to learn from our lessons, and never do this again. But, like a very slow spreading cancer, drop by drop, nano milimetre by nano milimetre, we fall back under the spell. And the cycle repeats. And again.

When people talk about this current time in history as being the most critical time in human affairs, I am not so sure. We have had many critical times. We suffer deeply from short termism in so many ways.

Instead of medicating ourselves on shopping, food, drugs, alcohol, eternal youth, gossip, reality TV, and intense narcissism as a way to avoid facing what we feel in our increasing fear, far better to step deep into the fear, to speak the truth, and name the devils. For ‘he who cannot be named’ does indeed have a name. Dare we speak it?

The question is, do we have the guts, the tenacity, the passion, the compassion, the love, and the will, to get off the couch and do something?

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Who’s to Blame? Hmm–let’s start with the man in the mirror.

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

How did we get to this place? The place where the first response to anything we don’t like is to find someone or something to blame? Our complete abdication of any form of responsibility makes me sick to the stomach.

The co-valent pair of blame is victim hood. The moment I blame anyone or anything I immediately reduce myself to becoming a victim. One does not go without the other. (And yes, let me be clear there are very legitimate victims in the world. People who have suffered terrible transgressions because of other people’s greed and stupidity. I am not talking about those people in this article. Interestingly, many of these people do not behave like ‘victims’. They often don’t live in blame.) I am talking about the guy who gets his jaw broken in a drunken bar room brawl and wants to put all the blame on the guy who drunkenly hit him. I guess he could have been standing off to the side in complete innocence, minding his own business and some random guy came up and hit him. That might have happened. But it probably didn’t. I would guess that he was doing some form of provoking. Is he willing to take any measure of responsibility? Or is it all about blaming the other guy? And getting the pay-out? Will money ease his pain? Or is it vengeance he is after? When has vengeance ever healed someone of anything? Oh, I forgot, we have had thousands of years of observing how vengeance begets vengeance and still we think it is a strategy that works. Ahh.well….no…it might ‘feel’ sweet, for a moment of time, but the scorpions tail of vengeance has a vicious bite and the poison lasts a lifetime, or more.

Or the person who dives into a shallow canal and becomes paralysed. Blame goes to the land owner for not having a sign up saying “shallow water” Tragic accident, but really, do we have to have signs everywhere to protect ourselves from being sued? Apparently so. How about the fool who dived into the water in the first place taking responsibility for doing so? No, he had nothing to do with it it. So we now spend millions on protection and insurance. And the circle goes around. And around. The lawyers win, big time by being paid. But everyone loses when we add all the costs together. Our communities, our well-being, our bank accounts…all suffer.

Please don’t complain about rising insurance premiums if you also think it is OK for people to sue for tripping on a pavement and breaking a bone.

We are all in the blame game. Playing small or large. The moment I participate in any form of blame I reduce myself to a victim. In doing so I become disempowered. Sometimes this is a very subtle game. Let me share a personal example. The “I don’t know what to do?”  question. This is a form of the victim/blame game. I want to abdicate my responsibility to someone else so I don’t have to make a decision. (Or I want to abdicate my responsibility to no decision at all, which is equally as disempowering, and often I end up blaming me.) By doing this, I am off the hook, and if all goes pear shaped, I have someone else to blame. We all do this all the time. We abdicate our choices to ‘experts’, and people that we deem have more authority than we do. And then when our ‘experts’ fail to deliver, we go right into blame and complain. And we want vengeance? For what? For not having the backbone to make a choice? Or to be responsible for the choices we have made?

How did we get this way? How did we become so addicted to victim hood? Please show me a single victim of this nature who is also happy, and in their own power? It is not a happy, empowered place to be.

How did we get to a place where abdicating any form of responsibility is normal operations?

Part of the answer to this question is that it is designed into our operating system. We have limited liability companies as the backbone of our industry. Have we stopped to ask, why limit liability? A corporation has the rights of a human without any of the responsibilities. (Indeed I am asking if humans have many responsibilities these days? Our blame epidemic is so out of control.) If you are serious about standing to full account, about being sovereign of your own choices, then you are also willing to take responsibility. This means that by inviting the very energetics of limited liability into your work you are colluding with the very system you might be trying to transcend.

Part of the answer is that we don’t want to take responsibility. This is the realm of the healthy adult. We want to stay in our child and be ‘cared for’ by the government, or the system, or the…? We want to stay helpless and small. We fear our own power. And we like to throw tantrums and demand this and that because we ‘deserve’ it. I ask please that you remove the word deserve from your vocabulary right now. It marries with entitlement, which is an epidemic of our society. I am entitled to…I deserve it? And the other person doesn’t? A more subtle form of vengeance.

It is far easier to point the finger than to look in the mirror. Not much heavy lifting to be done to point the finger. There is a high price, apart from rising insurance premiums. The price is our own vitality, happiness, self-esteem, sovereignty. Looking in the mirror and owning our responsibility is hard. And brave. And it is the only place I know where true freedom lives.

I am responsible for my choices. And yes, I get to choose. Accidents do happen. People make real mistakes. Bad things happen to good and bad people. Always, always, I have a choice in how I respond. No one or no thing can take away that choice as long as I am breathing air on my own. I am sovereign to my choices, to my responses to what life deals me. This is true freedom.

And why do people get away with blame and victim hood in our lives? Because we let them. Because we say that is OK? Funny that, responsibility starts with the man in the mirror. Hmm…that would be me. And you.

Where does blame live in your life? What are you doing to unstick the tentacles of blame from your world? Please share…

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