Archive for the ‘Massive Action’ Category

Stepping up, letting go..

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012

 


In some areas of our life we are all being called to step up. I know I am. It required a complete break down and break apart to get this. The universal shake up. A BIG shake up.

In the last few months I have experienced the slow then rapid ‘death’ of the form of my work that has sustained me for the last 15 years. No amount of intention could breath life into a corpse. All that new age stuff about thinking it, willing it, intending it…zero zip, nada…and of course when the ‘magic’ wasn’t happening for me I took the position that either I was showing up ‘wrong’ or something was wrong with me. And the shame of that. The sense of failure. Ughh!!! Not pretty.

What was wrong/right was that I was not paying detailed attention to the themes and schemes of a greater Universal force. My attention was on the corpse, not on the larger patterns and the new things coming in. I was being shaken, to the core, by not paying attention to the fact that I needed to let go. To really let go. To jump completely, into the abyss. In truth the jump was always going to happen, it was a question of jumping or being pushed. I was pushed.

Next time, I will jump. The pain of clinging to the edge is too too much to bare. I had been clinging for over a year…way too long.

Finally it took a loss of my home of 15 years, then 3 weeks in no mans land, living with my wonderful mother, then moving into our new abode, to really let go and choose a new identity, a new career, a new life.

In the decision to say yes to the new home was also the decision to say yes to the new career. They came as a package. Interestingly, the old home and the old career started together. And so they ended together. The end of a cycle.

Now I am being asked to step up. Instead of being on the side lines as a coach, supporting the game on the field, I am jumping into the game, into the arena. Instead of advising how to build a team, I am building a team. I get to be the leader. I get to play the game.

What has been one of the most difficult periods of my life is now morphing into a very exciting stage.

When I think I have no idea what to do next, I remind myself that I don’t need to know everything, I only need to know the very next step. And, more than anything, I need to trust myself. Really really trust myself. I have been studying business and leadership for years. I actually do know what to do. And I know I can do it, brilliantly.

Its my time.

I am clear. I know what the game is, why I am playing it, what is our intention, and what are the desired outcomes. It is a combination of every aspect of my life’s learnings till now.

I am being asked to step up, really step up, Play bigger than ever. Bring my whole self to the arena. And I am up for it. Yes!

While it has been the hardest journey of my life, I am deeply blessed to have been on the path. The learnings have been that immense.

And because I have now let go to the greater impulse of the Universe, the Universe is rolling in ecstasy at my feet, showering me with yes’s, opening doors that had been closed, revealing allies and champions that had been hidden. It feels miraculous. Of course it isn’t.  Its just what happens when we get out of our own way.

What game are you being called to play?
Where do you know you need to step up?
Where are you playing too small?

You will know you need to explore these questions because the flow has stopped, you are blocked, nothing is moving….

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There is no There to throw away to

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

On the weekend I finally tackled the horror that was my garage. For the last few years it has been the holding place for stuff in between. In between usefulness, in between relevance, in between new/fresh and old/gone.

Then the horror. Which hurts me physically, even now as I write this. All the old video tapes, broken things..piles of these, to be thrown away. But where is away? Just me, one person, and all this rubbish. And the rubbish is stuff that I know is going into some ‘landfill’ somewhere along with a few million other peoples rubbish on a good day…to then spend more than my lifetime trying to return to something useful because it will take a gizzillion years to break down.

I felt physically sick that I am contributing to the breakdown of our beautiful world by my ‘throw away’ life.

And to the continued short termism of our thinking that we design and manufacture stuff with zero regard for the consequence.

Come on people…we are surely smarter than this? We have the ability to design art in our products where every single component is considered from birth to death to rebirth, where the cycle of the recycle is designed consciously into the equation.

Have we not learned from our most omnipotent teacher, Nature?…she is always most economical, only taking what she needs, always being sure that the cycle goes on and on and on in a beautiful dance.

There is no There to throw away to. My There is someone else’s Here. My There is my grandchildrens future.

My grandchildren will look back at is with the same perplexity that we have when we observed slavery (oh..I forgot, we still have slavery) and women not being allowed to vote.

“What were they thinking?” they will ask. Our children’s children.

If there is something to truly celebrate at this time when the spiritual and physical rivers of life are clogged with stuff brought through our carelessness and our systems are breaking down world wide..it is this….

That we are no longer able to ignore our small and ill considered actions. We have forced, through our own negligence, to wake up and change.

Starting with me.

Who’s in?

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Waking from Slumber. The question is, will we wake in time?

Monday, June 25th, 2012


Interesting that the myth of Snow White has been brought back to the big screen in various iterations in the past few months. The great beauty Snow White, kind and caring of all of life, succumbing to a poisoned sleep by the jealous wicked Queen, a women consumed with a rapacious hunger for beauty, youth, and the sweet life with little regard to anyone or anything standing in her way.

We are in slumber. We have succumbed to a greed, hunger, entitlement and laziness that consumes our soul. And it is shameful. The metaphorical Prince is not coming to kiss us awake. Or if he is, he will come wearing the cloak of a wrathful spirit.

Last week the local paper reported that a women, in her 30’s, was suing our local water park because she got stuck in a water slide. She was completely unharmed physically, but apparently traumatised, and believes she deserves $400,000. Exits were everywhere, had she had the nous to look.

How does a 30 year old women become so incapable of asking a series of questions to herself about how to get out of an enclosed tube in a water park?

How does a 30 year old women arrive at the place where she thinks its acceptable for her to sue the Park for $400,000? (Yep I know in the USA the sue society is worse…but really people, why do we tolerate it? Worse, why do we do this?)

Has she no clue that her little greedy tantrum will cost everyone. EVERYONE. Our insurance bills go up, the entry fee’s for the water park will go up. (Please read my article…Eventually we all pay….) And if she truly is traumatised, then she needs to toughen up and get over it. How have we raised several generations of people without any physical and emotional resilience or back bone?

How did we as a society get to this place? It sickens me.

We have kids who are so molly coddled they are incapable of taking care of themselves. They need to be driven to and fro, seemingly incapable of walking or riding a bike, parents terrified their precious little bundles will be one of the very few to be abducted. What is wrong with self defense classes? And yes, before you get righteous with indignation, I too am a parent. It would kill me if anything happened to my daughter. But over protection is simple not the answer. My job is to support her to be able to function resourcefully and well in society. The mother bird pushes the baby out of the nest, and the baby bird either flies or falls. There is no lack of love from the mother bird. Indeed, it is the opposite. Our job as parents is to prepare our children to live in a hostile environment, to be resourceful, resilient, to think for themselves, to survive and thrive. Wrapping them in cotton wool and showering them with gifts will not do that.

Kids of today expect the world to pay, just as their parents did pay for everything. The “give me more society”. They have little ability to fix a light, clean a toilet, sew a piece of cloth, hammer a nail, change a tyre, iron a shirt. They may be able to cook, but only because of reality TV cooking programs. And if the parent is not able to provide the latest and greatest, the parents are beset with guilt while the kids whine about missing out.

This is the world we have created. It is obese, indulgent, incompetent, blaming, lazy and demanding.

Oh…and unforgiving. A young man who makes an idiot mistake as every young man has done is not allowed to be forgiven..because he has a public face. He becomes the magnet for our finger pointing, a certain way to keep the finger from turning back upon its source.

Heaven forbid we look at ourselves, at all the times we have gotten angry and hit out at another, and got away with it. Those few who had the bad luck to do damage, or worse, get killed or kill, while they certainly need to be punished, cannot shoulder the blame of our own anger for eternity. We were just lucky to get away with our little tantrums. I am not talking about the serial offender here, but the regular person who does a few silly things, and hopefully learns from his mistakes. As we have all done.

A few nights ago I had a dream that took me to a place of rage. It was the rage that woke me. It was most curious to observe. The fire inside that I long to connect to. The fire that gets me from the couch, gets me to speak, act, do. Not in blind, ill considered reaction. But in thoughtful, purposeful activism. Fire in the belly. A potent and needed elixir.

I have to start with myself. I am the one who has written for years to wake up, speak up, take action, do something. But where is my voice in this? Sure I write about it. But most of my mutterings are under my breath, or worse, a part of the larger blame based conversation that society loves, because it gives us a place to feel like we are doing something, when in fact we are doing nothing. Talk is cheap, and easy.

Not only in my writing, but speaking up. Writing to my local paper, my local government, speaking out, jumping in. This is what has been calling to me. I can’t sit on the couch and spectate. The arena is calling me.

Back to the larger story of our society…how do we as a society wake up? This is the question I have been stewing in for the last few weeks. How do we become more resilient, more compassionate, more grateful, more supportive of our community, more humane?

My answer is bound to be controversial. But in all my years of working with people, as a healer of sorts, I have observed through my own experience that almost all humans do not do the hard yards if they can avoid it. They would frankly rather eat crap knowing it will kill them, literally and metaphorically.

Nature though, the brilliant and very capable teacher, has a way. And she will deliver. There will be no God that inflicts petulance and famine upon the human race. We will do it with great skill, all on our own. Indeed, we are almost at the precipice, if we have not already crossed it.

In what costume the disaster will appear, I know not. Natural disaster, pandemic, the effects of climate change (fire, flood, famine, raising tides), global economic collapse, or the normal human preference, war…. Even more possible and tragic, a confluence of all of these events, the perfect storm. She will breath her fire, burn, maim, destroy, reduce, break down, a Kali of impeccable wrath.

And while at the personal and human level, the effects in the short term will be tragic, long term, we may actually wake up from our indulgent slumber.

People will bow in gratitude for the warmth of the sun, the simple ability to eat good food grown by their hand or the hand of their neighbour. They will share, build, hold the hand of, care for. Nature will not be some utility for our exclusive and careless use. She will again be revered.

Only tragedy appears to restore humanity to humanity. I wished it were not so.

For a miracle to happen and to prevent the kind of breakdown that is being created at our own hand, not only do I need to get off the couch, you do too. Millions of us. I pray it is so. But I suspect that it will not be. That only through horror and suffering will we stop our whining, blaming indulgent behaviour.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this…

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SOPA, The Year of the Dragon, WWIII – Black Swans and no this is not what you think.

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

2012 will be the year of people. Regular people. Mothers, fathers, youth. Tax paying, hard working, making ends meet kind of people. People from wealthy countries, not so wealthy countries, black people, white people, gay and straight people. People will find their inner dragon.

It started loudly as the Arab Spring, and then it shifted to the USA and the Occupy movement. In Europe the fastest growing political group is the Pirate Party, started in Sweden, made up of mostly 18 to 30 year olds against online censorship. It will move at the speed of light, in totally unexpected ways. Because people are waking up to the power they always have held as a collective.

The politicians and power mongers are not reading the signs. Their hubris and arrogance is making them the blind. They forget that money does  NOT buy everything. Never has, never will. The illusion is that money will buy votes, that money makes blind, mute, deaf slaves. But they have forgotten history. In their hubris and arrogance they have forgotten that people, the masses, us, do have a voice. We can say no. And when the workers of the system refuse to show up for work, the system breaks down. I am not speaking of unionism. And I am not a socialist. I am speaking of the power of people collectively protesting to no longer being slaves to a system that is being kept alive for the few. Of the travesty of greed and pride run rampant. Of the acceptance of evil as a normal day to day thing. Evil – like it being perfectly acceptable for some people to have all the gizzmo’s in the world made by hands of enslaved children. Or, evil like the rape and pillage of earth, making the local people’s environment toxic, and inhabitable.

Everyone knows that the system is broken. Broken. What people forget is the power they hold in their voice and action to stand up and speak.

I watched the great TED produced 13 minute video clip by Clay Shirky telling the truth about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).  His final words where that even if SOPA was defeated, it would return.

The fight would not be over. Be prepared for the next round.

Now here is the truth.

If any version of SOPA clears the American legal system, we are looking at WWIII. Not the usual war with guns and military, but the turning of the rest of the Western world on the ‘mighty’ USA. And lets face it, the USA already has much of the non-Western world as enemies. I am not sure anything less than this type of global uprising of people will break the bubble of delusion that holds the USA in their own minds as this place that is an exception to the rest of the world. A place where they can get away with the very things they accuse other countries of. (Like electoral fraud, invading soverign nations covertly, rendition, war crimes…the list is long)

(To be clear, there are very wonderful, magnificent, brave people in the USA, people working their arses off to stop this kind of behaviour. I am speaking of the country as a whole… of the archetypal USA full blown in its shadow.)

When nations like Australia, New Zealand and countries in Europe, the usual allies of the USA, see their citizens arrested in their own country by the USA because of ‘their’ ‘copyright’ laws, then all the hell of Pandora’s box will be unleashed. When corporate USA thinks they can control the internet anywhere in the world, they better think again.

Like it or not, the internet belongs to no one country. And no one company, despite Googles efforts to change that. The internet is the defining invisible force of our next stage of humanities evolution. It is the boundless, freedom finding, liberating energetic network that transcends ownership. It has its shadow, as does all things. (Fraud, legitimate piracy, the ability to shred an innocent persons reputation in seconds, for example.)  But for any country or company to attempt to ‘own it’ will create such wrath from the rest of the world.

There has been so much talk about 2012, about the Mayan calendar ending, about this time being the most important time in humanities history. Frankly I find this just a lot of distraction and noise, a place for people to focus their energy and make a shit load of money, continuing to encourage the type of fear that keeps people from thinking and seeking clearly.

History demonstrates that every single time in history has had moments of extreme crisis, where humanity reached a critical threshold. This is not the big one, it is simply another one. Can we stop the spin and get on with what needs to be done. We have too much work to do to spend any energy at all thinking this is the BIG time in humanity. All this does is continue to affirm our need to be ‘special’. This is a hollow egotistical need. It distracts us from our real purpose.

I suspect that what will knee-cap us will be the Black Swan. It will not be the usual suspects. Sure, the economy might fail. It has failed before and we survived. And god knows the financial system is in need of collapse in its current form. The EU might collapse and…people will survive. The Middle East might turn into a seething sess pool stirred on by the USA via Israel. Yep, this has been going on for the history of humanity. I am not glossing over the tragedy of all of these things that seem pretty certain to unfold.

Mother Nature will rise up and say enough, in her usual fashion, reducing humans to acknowledging that she has the kind of power that humbles us all. She is angry at being raped, pillaged, and treated with such flagrant disrespect. Her gizzards have been sucked dry, her skin scared and polluted, her oxygen poisoned. If she were one of our children we would be screaming foul to all four corners of the Universe.

But will anyone expect the world to turn on the USA? All of the world? I don’t think anyone sees that in the future. SOPA could do that. In an instant.

We are no longer working in linear time. The splitting of the atom changed all of that. We are moving at the speed of light, and at this speed institutions we thought impossible to fall can and will.

Interesting times, yes. We need wisdom (which won’t be found from our elected leaders), and is not something we have much of. We threw wisdom away when we made our elders elderly, and stopped learning from them. When we stopped being students of history, where the follies of man have been documented in one form of other for all of human time, and to which we have way too much arrogance to pay attention to.

The signs are all there. The cards have been played. Now it is up to us…how will we play our hand?

The perfect metaphor for this time is the lone man standing against the tank in Tiananmen Square. Each of us holds this potential, to stand up to. On this day, January 23rd 2012, the dawning of the year of the Chinese Water Dragon, we the people are called on to find our inner dragon. Lets hear the ROAR.

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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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Reconciling the sacred mother archetype

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

 

I never had anything to do with children. I don’t believe I had even held a baby until I held my new born daughter. I have always preferred animals. But my destiny was to become a mother. It so happened that I was married when I fell pregnant while on oral contraceptives. I had been suffering from nausea for about a week when finally I went to the doctor and he said pee in the bottle. Which I did, not believing even then that the test could be positive. It turned blue before my eyes and I burst into tears. Not tears of joy, but of shock.

I never had a picture of me as a mother. It didn’t live in my worldview. Never. Not even for a nanosecond. So the shock was pretty deep.

Yet here I was pregnant. Because there was a possibility the pregnancy was ectopic, I was rushed off that same day for a scan. Nope. Normal pregnancy. Loud and clear. I am not anti abortion, but termination was not an option for me. We talked about it, but as an abstraction, not a seriously considered conversation.

My daughter from the outset taught me that she was in charge of her destiny. She remained in the breech position for the entire time. Her head in the upper right part of my stomach. I tried everything to get her to turn, from standing on my head, to acupuncture. I was attached to a natural birth. I even sacked my obstetrician because he was inclined at 12 weeks, to schedule me for a caesarian. Out of laziness and not for any medical reasons apparent at that time. I found a great obstetrician who was an older country doctor. Thank goodness, because he was happy to consider a trial of labor.

Two weeks before due, and on a very hot and humid Saturday in February, it all started. On her schedule of course. My waters broke, and early labor commenced. The doctor and I decided that the risk of a natural birth with my size and a breech baby was too high, so at 4 minutes to 10 on the 16th February 1991, my daughter was born by C section. She was tiny. Just 5 lbs. And delicate. And present. I am sure I am not the only parent that has looked into their new born child’s eyes and seen the wisdom of ages starting back at them. All knowing, all present, all peaceful. Truly a humbling experience.

We discovered that the reason she had remained breech and in the same position was because my uterus was heart shaped. Literally. It had a septum or panel dividing it into two lobes. My vessel for holding a child in utero was in the shape of a heart. There is a metaphor here worth holding close.

We spent 3 days naming her, because the names we had originally chosen were not who she was. I had all of these strong warrior woman names, and she was the essence of feminine beauty. The naming was very important. There was an alchemy to it that I know more about now than I did then. I did know that the name we chose for her was right. Natalie Newby. No middle name. I was even happy for her to have her fathers name, because it resonated with her spirit. This has proved deeply accurate, as Natalie shares the Maori blood of her father, and just about everything else of his as well, except his height. (He is 6’3, and I am 5’1).

Just as I did not expect to be a mother, I did not expect to spend all but the first two years as a single mum. I don’t recommend it. Its hard work, especially when you are also the main income earner. But it was worth it.

Here is the mystery. The real mystery. I knew, intuitively, how to be a mother. Not instinctively, but from a deep and profound well of knowing. I have observed since that many women do not have direct access to this knowing. But I did. It was effortless.

From the moment she was born I got that she was her own spirit. She had been teaching me from the day she made her presence known. She had her own song, her own expression. It was not mine. Nor was it right for me to try to mold her in my image. The opposite actually. I knew intuitively that my job was one of the most sacred roles in Universe. To be a steward for a child. To hold a space where a child is able to grow into everything that is already encoded within them. To purify the space, to keep my grubby little fingers off.

Family and friends watched me be a mother with incredulous amazement. I too was surprised to the core. I found the tuning in to her needs as easy as breathing. That is not to say I was perfect. Hmm..no…that would not be me. There was a day I remember where I was so close to loosing it, where I looked into the abyss of what is possible when a sleep deprived, angry mother is at her wits end. So close to doing something terrible. Only by the grace of something did I return to sanity and pull back from that very dark abyss.

Now, 20 years later, I have a beautiful young woman for a daughter. We are great friends. We have an amazing close and rich relationship. I knew as the years unfolded that my role  was to change. That finally it would be about me providing a space where she could come to me and speak about anything at all…without fear of shame or humiliation. Anything. At all.

I would be a lesser person without my daughter. In ways I cannot begin to articulate. She opened my heart, and kept it open. I would be an empty shell.

I still do not have any sort of attraction to babies in prams. Nope…none at all. Not interested. I am not interested in being a grandmother, although that is likely to happen. So I have, for a very long time, denied the side of me that is a mother. It has been as if it was an element of me that lived over there. Outside of me. Alien.

For the last 7 months, since January of 2011, I have been working with people to bring to life their deeply held impulse. You know, when you get a hit that cannot be ignored, that you need to do something? The impulse usually drops into us out of the blue. And it is pure.

Then we take it and make it something else. We start to mold it in our image, or in the image that the world says we are supposed to mold it. The form then takes over. It may even take over to reach a place where the impulse and the form do not even look alike. One day we wake up and go…how the hell did I get here? This is nothing like what I felt when I had that original impulse. Both the expression of the impulse and I are miserable.

My role has been to support people to get back to the integrity of the original impulse. To let go of form. I find this easy to do. The form emerges naturally if you let it. And there is a flow and ease to the process that is deeply organic.

Last week, while I was swimming laps, it suddenly occurred to me that this is the archetype of the mother. This is it. This is was I do naturally. This was a big aah moment.

I have the ability to tune into the source code of the impulse, or what is needing to be unique expressed and honoured, and to hold the integrity of that. To stop our ego’s from getting their grubby little fingers all over the purity of the impulse as most of us do.

This is the sacred mother archetype. Or one expression of her. I can do this in my sleep.

Oh my god, I am mother. I always have been. A sacred mother. The chalice, or crucible. The keeper of the integrity of the source code. This is part of me. Who would have thought? I hear Gods laughing. Finally she gets it. Took 20 years, but finally.

What a privilege. For we have some real work to do, those of us who embody the sacred mother. There are many precious babies (literally and metaphorically) that are being incubated and needing the stewarding of a sacred mother. Being keepers of the integrity of the source code impulse is a very significant role. I am deeply honoured to be gifted with this task, as I join with other sacred mothers (male and female) from around the world being called to steward the new. For indeed we have much to do. For too long have we been drinking the kool-aid of seduction, manipulation and surrogacy. It is time to honour integrity of source. And for that, we need the sacred mother to hold the crucible of the impulse with heart, allowing it to manifest uncontaminated.

 

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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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Massive Action Now

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

Why Massive Action Now? If you are like most people, you are feeling the earth shifting under your feet, unsure about your next step and whether it will land on solid ground. Having a sense of security is becoming an elusive memory. Uncertainty rules the day. Even if you are in a very secure situation, you cannot but help feel the whisper of the winds of big change. It will touch us all, in some way.

This present time is offering a new experience that makes most of us feel uncomfortable. What will tomorrow bring is a question that is on the lips of many. 

All of this, no matter what your circumstances. 

 

*For those who have a solid foundation of wealth, you will certainly have seen some diminishment in your asset base. Depending on your outlook, this is either mildly alarming, or very worrying. You worked hard for those assets.

 

*For those who hold employment, you watch as people around you are made redundant, and you wonder just how safe is your job? The fear in the corporate culture is very loud. Some of you are already on the sidelines, seeking new opportunity.

 

*For those small business owners and entrepreneurs, you are either in a business that is thriving, and you are feeling extremely grateful, or you are watching with morbid fascination as your business shrinks before your eyes. 

 

No matter where you are placed, now is the time for re-evaluation. To ignore re-evaluation is to put your head in the sand and pretend that it will all return to the previous place where you felt safe and certain. Massive Action Now is needed.

 

Life rarely goes back. While we may go back to the horse and buggy, it will only be temporary and the roads and infrastructure are very different from previous times. The sudden rise in the cost of fuel had one great aspect to it. It raised our awareness that the future of an oil based economy is going along the path of the dinosaurs. In our lifetime, probably.

 

The only thing we can count on right now, is the uncertainty. Imagine living with massive uncertainty as a familiar? Part of the everyday fabric of life? What adjustments would you need to make?

 

Life rarely goes back. The future does not look like the present. We have a confluence of events that guarantees massive change. The breakdown in the financial system is only one of the events. The extreme stress our thoughtless actions have placed on the environment is another event that cannot be ignored. No matter how far or near we are to peak oil, the way we travel from place to place has to change. How we live our lives has to change. Where we place our value has to change. The vast difference in rich and poor is creating fault lines that will not be placated by mere diplomacy and revised boundary lines. This has to change.

 

From the place of the symbolic, everything is perfect. The earth is screaming to be heard. No longer content with a whisper, her song is enraged. Humanity has for too long been raping and pillaging in a greedy frenzy. We have come far, and yet are now at the epi-centre of our rebellious teens– self-centred, narcissistic and ravenous for more stuff. It is time to grow up. To take the mantle of the adult, responsible, considerate, desiring to invest in the future.

 

No matter who you are, it is time for Massive Action Now. 

 

1. We must each of us start with a radical review of self. What is the truth about us now, in this moment?  What exactly is our current circumstance? 

Are we healthy? 

Are we vital?

Do we have any self regulation around consumption of everything-food, alcohol, shopping, TV?

How are our finances?

What is our reputation and brand?

Are our relationships in order?

What mess are we ignoring in our own lives?

How do we imprint on our environment?

How educated are we? Enough? Too much? 

Our career…have we adapted ourselves to the future?

Do we offer value that meets the future?

Have we branded ourselves so that people who need to know, know?

Do we have resilience built into our systems? Our selves?

Are we buried in patterns that keep up asleep at the wheel? Too much TV, trashy magazine’s, food and alcohol?

Do we lie to ourselves and others?

What are we not telling the truth about?

Have we seen a drop in business, not too serious but going down?

Or are we in serious trouble, be it financially, health wise, in our relationships, or at work?

 

2. Starting with the NOW, and looking ourselves clearly in the eye, we move to consider our assets.

What are our assets-both physical and non physical? Bricks and mortar, debts. Plus our knowledge, experience and abilities? Our energy, and health?

What is our value to the world, and how do we express that uniquely?

Does our value offering meet the needs of now and the future? Are we actually redundant? Extraneous- doing work that contributes either little value or is no longer valued, or rapidly loosing value? 

What assets do we have that we cannot see have value? Ask others. 

What are people constantly acknowledging you for?

What if you could offer your assets to 10 times the people you do so now? 100 times? 1000 times?

How would you do this? Would your systems cope with the increase? Do you have that level of adaptability and flexibility?

How are you leveraging technology?

What changes have you made in the last 5 years? Low to medium change probably means you are likely to be left behind sooner than later.

 

3. And looking to the future. There are incredible opportunities, whole new industries about to be birthed, new tools and technology to be created, implemented and supported. 

How engaged are you in the conversation of the future? Are you even looking? And if so, is your view clean and clear? Do you constantly look at the future and your current value offering and ask if one needs the other? How much time do you send with friends and colleagues discussing future scenario’s?

What opportunities are you not seeing?

Marrying your highest value offering with the needs of the future will ensure you have a vital future! That you will be sort out, and paid well.

Whether you are an employee, or self employed, you simply cannot afford to NOT look at these questions. If you do not take Massive Action Now and re-evaluate your own life, immediately, you will be lost in the turmoil of uncertainty. You will be left behind, you will be redundant.

 

Indeed, taking Massive Action Now is the only way to get things moving.

 

“Nothing happens until something moves- quoted Albert Einstein.” 

 

Taking Massive Action Now can look like;

*rebranding yourself in your career

*moving home to a more sustainable environment

*learning a new skill

*creating a new business product

*finding an employer who matched your values

*re-tooling your home to be more green

*selling your car for a more economical one

*getting out of debt quickly

*getting into health

*getting into community work

*using technology in a smarter way

*volunteering to causes that speak to you

*getting fully into the game

*learning what happens in the full circle of the products you buy and use, and taking responsibility for that

*researching the future trends and adapting yourself to meet the future head on

 

Ask yourself “Do you want to be left behind, or are you up for the future and all the opportunity it holds?” Can I afford not to take Massive Action Now?

Just imagine for a moment that what we have today, at the close of 2008, is going to get 4 to 5 times worse in the next 8 months. 

If you were certain about this, what would you do differently today? (And even if this bleak outlook didn’t happen, and you did take massive action now, you would be better off.)

This is the question behind taking Massive Action Now. Not to leave you paralyzed in fear, but to provoke you to look and respond. Today!

 

Christine McDougall is offering a very unique package around taking Massive Action Now. 

Email Christine Christine@syzergy.biz for more information or visit

www.positive-deviant.com/massive-action-now.html

 

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