On Living, Leading, (Re)designing, and Coaching

Waiting for truth to surface

"We often don't take the risk or time to stand before another long enough for their truth to surface. This is what I need, for you to wait till I can get there, all fresh from the deep. After all the trouble we go through to find each other, we must wait over and over for our loved ones to break through with their wisdom." - Mark Nepo

A tectonic shift in the landscape of trust

What is happening in the world today? I believe that, among many things, there is a tectonic shift in the landscape of trust.

Historically, we have placed our trust in authorities - politicians, business leaders, spiritual leaders and leaders in the scientific community. We have an unflagging trust in rationality. And we are living in challenging times amidst global recession, climate change, loss of jobs, pandemics, terrorism, war, etc. These are times of crisis. And in the midst of these crises our trust is being shaken. What can we trust? Whom can we trust?

When we feel our trust being shaken many of us are thrown into one of three different moods. We are either resigned that things aren't going well and they will turn out however they do. We are resigned to that and there is nothing we can do. Or we are resentful. We get angry with those in positions of authority in which we placed our trust. We are angry with them for their limitations (e.g., not being in control of things) and angry with them for their abuses of power and their violation of our trust. Or we deny that what is happening both locally and globally has any impact on our lives. We say to ourselves, "It doesn't matter, I'm going to live a fine life anyway." Those of us in denial are living in the misguided notion that it is  possible to live in a bubble detached from the impact of what's occurring around us.

Neither resignation, resentment, or denial are moods that compel us to invest in building a different future. Instead, they compel us to continue ceding power and trust to others.

We need to cultivate a different mood: hope. Obama brilliantly did this in his campaign. He stood for the possibility that the future can be better; that the abuses of trust and power can be overcome. He stood for the possibility that together we can design and build a lifestyle that works better for all.

Of course, there is a danger that we will again place our trust in Obama as the latest authority figure. And when he fails to deliver what we expect, then we will find ourselves being resentful, resigned, or in denial.

Each of us must take responsibility for cultivating hope and optimism in our own lives. Each of us must step forward ...  trust ourselves ... and be a leader in our own lives and the lives of our loved ones.

I think we are in the midst of a tectonic shift in the landscape of trust. From a historical perspective, this shift is more like an 8.0 earthquake. We are being called more and more deeply to find the part of ourselves that is not afraid and in which we can trust without question. We are being called to find our source of inner guidance, our source of true leadership and express that. In a significant way, this shift is a call for a kind of collective spiritual awakening.

I'm not saying that this earthquake will do away with political leaders, business leaders, spiritual leaders, or scientific leaders. They will still exist and we will still need to trust them for their expertise, their unique viewpoint, and their positions of empowerment to affect certain actions.  However, in the future we will not cede all of our trust to them so blindly and excuse ourselves from the table. Instead, we will take our place within the conversation, within the collaboration, within the decision-making and the action.

Already today we see patients taking their medical care more fully into their own hands. Patients are researching options for addressing their medical concerns on the web so that they can more fully participate in the conversation and decision-making with their physicians.

Given what has happened in the financial services sector, I imagine that more transparency (and regulation) is just around the corner. This transparency will be demanded of people like you and me who, trusting more fully in themselves, seek to enter the conversation with their banks and financial advisors in a more consciously empowered way.

Hope compels us to take responsibility for the way things are and step forward to build things anew in a spirit of collaboration and community. However, we can't wait for hope to arise before we take action. In fact, it is in taking action to build a future that works better that we evoke hope in ourselves and others. This is a great act of Self-leadership and if we quiet ourselves enough we all hear the call to take this step forward.

No action is too small. You can do more with what you have than you think. The end of these crises will not, in my opinion, leave us back where we were before they started. That life and lifestyle is gone. This earthquake will leave the landscape of trust permanently and fundamentally changed. We will need to find new paths, new approaches, new collaborations, new communities in order to survive and flourish both locally and globally. We will be living in a new world. And, in a very real way, we already are. Day by day more of us awaken to the realization that we are already in a new world.

In this new world new capabilities and skills will be needed to survive and flourish. Today I can see at least three broad capabilities that everyone will need.

1. Self-leadership - everyone will need to be a leader in their own life. Everyone will need to learn to trust themselves and to face into life's challenges as true leaders do - simultaneously in contact with their fears but also able to bring forth a constructive response from the depth of their capacity, their resourcefulness, and their creativity. In this new world, spectators won't last very long.
2. Entrepreneurship - everyone will need to see and respond to the world the way an entrepreneur does. They will need to see emerging unmet needs and re-vision and re-fashion themselves and their collaborators and communities in ways that offer to fulfill those needs.
3. Self-education - everyone must learn how to learn. Change is occurring at an ever increasing rate. Novelty is winning by leaps and bounds. Those that cling to "the way things have been" will stop being competitive. In fact, the ability to learn and develop yourself, your organization, and your community faster and more powerfully will become the primary competitive advantage.

The world that we are awakening into is the world of the "compassion worker." Many years ago noted management theorist Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" and heralded that knowledge work will be the primary unit of production in the coming age.  Well, the coming age came and went. Of course, I'm not saying that knowledge work will disappear just as Drucker wasn't saying that industrial labor would disappear.

What I'm saying is that knowledge work has to grow up and mature. And that will and is happening as more and more deeply care is being brought into the mission and structure of work. Riane Eisler has a new book that looks to speak to this (I haven't read it yet but it is on the stack :-) called The Real Wealth of Nations. According to the blurb she proposes a reinvention of economics in which caregiving is central. And, most curiously, she propses this as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism.

So the world as I see it will be filled with entrepreneurial leaders who see their primary business as caregiving of some kind and who are able to learn and adapt to emerging unmet needs and invent new possibilities to fulfill them. Pehaps this is just my dream, my hope. It may be, but this is the world that I am personally investing myself in building.

Love,

-Steve

The Body of Sustainability includes an I-thou

Yesterday I posed the question "What is the body of sustainability?" I proposed one notion, the body of sustainability has our minds and bodies be integrated not separated.  And I pointed to many of the problems that such a separation brings forth.

Today, I want to explore the separation between each other. Here I'm going to use Martin Buber's lingo.  Buber recognizes that we can have I-it relationships where I, as a self, relate to you, as an thing.

From this I-it relationships we get all kinds of social injustices, wars, and abuses. We treat each other on the basis of our differences - how different can a self be from a thing, after all - and not on the basis of our sameness. The enemy feels fear and wants to protect their children's future too.  I know I'm oversimplifying things here.  But I'm not trying to make subtle distinctions about war.

The alternative to I-it relationships is I-thou relationships wherein I as a self relate to you as a self - as another human being with the same legitimacy as I have.  This is the foundation of true contact, true relationship, and true love. I'm proposing that the body of sustainability is an I-thou body.

In a comment to my post yesterday, Lisa Christie brought forth Riane Eisler's distinction of dominator relationships and partnerships.  To me, the very basis of a dominator relationship is an I-it relationship. I-it is the foundation of slavery, abuse, and dictatorship.

As the unsustainability of our way of life becomes more acute, how will we respond to our fears that will naturally arise?  Will we defend ourselves through domination?  There are many who see this as the only viable alternative.  It certainly seems like the oil-grabs that are in progress throughout the world express this response. Surely we must find ways of being with each other in facing the crisis of sustainability instead of over each other. Can partnership be a more creative, more productive, and more effective protection of our children's future?  I say YES.

Buber's I-thou is the heart of true contact with one another and therefore at the heart of partnership.  However, we can't truly contact another if we are not first in contact with ourselves.  For me, this is where integration of self and body meet integration of I and thou. Being in contact with ourselves means that we don't have our bodies as objects that we posses and that we don't have ourselves as disembodied beings. Being in contact with ourselves is being an embodied self. And it is out very bodyhood, as Medard Boss pointed out (with echoes of Martin Heidegger in the background), that brings forth our coexistence in a shared world with others. In being in contact with ourselves true contact with each other becomes a reality.

So in healing the I-it wound with I-thou contact we again return to the body - the body of sustainability.

Thanks to those who have responded to my invitation to engage this question.

Take care,

-Steve

The Body of Sustainability

This past weekend I launched a new graduate level Integral Coaching course at New Ventures West called Deepening the Somatic Stream. In Integral Coaching, we recognize that people develop in different ways. We call these ways "streams of development" adopting Ken Wilber's lingo.  The streams of development we work with are somatic, emotional, cognitive, relational, spiritual, and integrating.  This course is on deepening development in the somatic stream.

I posed a question to the group as a project over the 5-month duration of the course.  The question is ...

What is the body of sustainability?

Here's my premise ... and I need to start waaay back at the beginning.

When we were born, each of us was born (dare I say thrown) into a cultural narrative not of our own design or choosing. As we grew up in our family, we began to learn and embody our culture.  We learned how to speak the language, how to attend to customs, how to behave, how to relate to others, what is forbidden, what is valuable, etc. We learned how to be a Jewish-American from New York or an Amish farmer from Pennsylvania or a Native American from New Mexico or whatever. And we learned this as simply who we are - as a way of being.

And our way of being is self-sealing. What I mean by this is that the ways we act bring forth the world we live in.  And the world we live in brings forth who we are.  Have you ever talked to a fundamentalist and realized how their worldview has lots of self-consistency.  And anything that doesn't fit, they reject in order to maintain the self-consistency of their worldview.  Well, that's the way we hold worldviews even if we aren't fundamentalist.

Here's the key part of this. In the beginning we didn't have a narrative. Then as we lived and interacted with first our parents and siblings, and then others in our extended family and neighbors and friends and teachers, we embodied a narrative. I say embodied a narrative because that's how it works.  Our culture lives in our bodies. And we express our culture through our speech and behavior and relationships. We express our culture through our actions. And if there are little tikes around, they pick up the culture from us and embody it themselves. This isn't something that we were conscious of, it simply occurs.  This is one of the wonderful inventions of "who knows what or whom" that has supported our evolution thus far.

But our future evolution isn't something that we can take for granted. Today we find ourselves in a "wicked mess" of crises. In this post, I'm going to focus on our sustainability crisis. 

The way we are currently living isn't sustainable.  I'm not going to ground this assessment here. Others have and can do a much better job of that than I can.  But let me say that this is an assessment that I accept.

So where did our unsustainable way of living come from?  Well, I hate to point fingers but it came from our parents and grandparents and the culture that they embodied and passed onto us. We (and by we here I am mainly talking about the Western world) have an unsustainable culture. And it lives in our bodies and is expressed, reinforced, and passed onto our little tikes through our actions.  In short, we have a body of unsustainability. As as the rest of the world (such as China and India and perhaps some day Africa) adopts our Western ways in order to become competitive and stake their own claims on prosperity we in the Western world are getting to see the unsustainability of our ways in stark relief.

So it seems to me a natural question to ask what is a body of sustainability? And how does one go about building one? And how to you "undo" the body of unsustainability?

These are big questions but maybe y'all would like to join me and my students over the next five months in being with these questions.

Disembodied Selves Leads to Over-consumption

Here's a starting place ... from my observation, the very heart of our unsustainable culture is the interpretation that we are separate from our bodies. And because we are separate from our bodies we abuse our bodies. We overeat, we work 80-hour workweeks, and we pop sleeping pills so we get enough rest to keep pushing ourselves. If we do pay attention to our bodies it is some sort of home improvement project like building a six pack or liposuction.  I saw a brochure for a spa the other day in my local organic grocery store that advertised "body management" services. It is as if our bodies are unruly and need to be disciplined.

In the West we have antipathy for our bodies thanks to Calvin and St. Augustine who had difficulties with their own bodies and their own sexuality. We blame our bodies for being sick, for being too weak, for not looking good enough, for falling in love with the wrong people, for being addicted, for being clumsy.  It is as if we didn't get the life we wanted because of the body we have.  We have our bodies like a cage we live in. It is no wonder that we seem to either deny our embodied life or try to take it on as a home improvement project.

This split between ourselves and our bodies creates a disembodied sense of self, lack of true contact with others, detachment from the world, disintegration of our life, meaninglessness, resignation, stagnation, and suffering. In short, our lives seem deficient and empty in some essential way.  It is as if there is a giant abyss in the middle of our lives that we must fill in order to bring significance and fulfillment to our lives. So what do we throw into the abyss to fill it up?  We throw in new cars, iPhones, fancy food, fast food, lots of sex, new shoes, alcohol and other state altering substances, etc. This abyss that's smack in the middle of our lives isn't really a secret. Marketers know all about this and use it as leverage to sell us the latest stuff. But in all these years of consumption, how many of us have managed to fill the abyss? No one.

So my first notion of the body of sustainability is a healing of this split between ourselves and our bodies. As human beings we are embodied beings. We are not disembodied selves in possession of a body. We are bodied selves. And perhaps in this recognition comes the true resolution of the deficiency we feel. Perhaps it is not new cars and phones and other consumables that we need to fill the abyss but it is ourselves, our conscious bodies, that will fill the abyss from the inside out instead of from the outside in.

In her book Getting Our Bodies Back, Christine Caldwell makes the point that addiction is dissociation from our body. This seems right to me. And as a culture we are addicted to eating, drinking, sugar, oil, and shopping malls.  What if our bodies really don't need all that? If we were integral with our bodies instead of dissociated from them, would our way of living be more sustainable?  I believe the answer is a definite YES. 

Earlier I pointed to how our worldviews are self-sealing. It often takes a big breakdown or crisis in order to break the seal. And when such a break happens, we can either choose to re-examine our cherished beliefs about ourselves, our relationships with others, and our world and develop a new worldview that resolves the breakdown ... or we can ignore the breakdown and pretend things are business as usual.  So here we are, on the precipice of a planet-wide breakdown. What will we do?

So this is my first notion of building a body of sustainability - heal the split between ourselves and our bodies. We haven't looked at the separation from each other and from the planet. For sure they have a big role to play here too. More on that later.

So ... please help me distinguish the body of unsustainability from the body of sustainability. What new interpretations are needed? What interpretations do we need to drop?  What new practices are needed? What old practices do we need to stop?

Take care,

-Steve

Living from the right hemisphere ...

This TED Talk has been making the rounds on the internet lately.  But it is so good - perhaps the best TED Talk ever - that I wanted to share it. Enjoy!

A year or so ago, I was working my way through Betty Edwards "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." If anyone is interested in how to make the switch between a left-brain observer and a right-brain observer, her work is one excellent place to start.

-Steve

A Couple of Rat Turds - more insights on The Witness and The Observer ...

This post is an addendum to The Witness and The Observer posted a few days ago. As with that post, those of you who don't have an interest in the boundaries between hermeneutic-phenomenology and spirituality might like to skip this.

Adding to what was already written ...

The Witness is the home of meaninglessness. The Observer is the home of meaningfulness.

The Observer exists in the domain of opposites, polarities, and paradoxes (e.g., good and bad, warm and cold, male and female, existing and not existing). The Witness never experiences opposites, polarities, and paradoxes.

The Witness has no structure or form and is outside of time in the eternal Now. The Observer has a narrative structure and is temporal, having a past, present, and future.

From the interpretation of The Observer we exist as an historical being - a self. From the experience of The Witness we are an ahistorical being - a Self.

As a self, we have concerns, emotional reactions, beliefs, intentions, goals and agendas, and conditioned tendencies (habits). As a Self, we have none of that. As a self we have choices. A quality of the Self is choicelessness.

The Self is the self's possibility for freedom and transformation.

It is within the dialectic between The Witness and The Observer that transformation of The Observer occurs.

This dialectic at once (partially) deconstructs The Observer through experiences of meaninglessness and  reconstructs The Observer as meaning is construed and constructed.

The Self is the "nothingness" out of which declarations are created. Declarations always refer to the world of The Observer.

Transformation of The Observer changes the form of our existence to ourselves in the present. The Witness is never transformed for that which is formless cannot be re-formed.

Transformation of The Observer allows us to take greater responsibility for the historical being we are. In taking greater responsibility for our historical being, we can live into new future possibilities through declaration of new self-narratives.

This distinction of The Witness and The Observer is dualistic. This brings to mind the notion from the Heart Sutra "Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form." Form characterizes The Observer whereas emptiness characterizes The Witness. But as Hakuin says in his commentary on the Heart Sutra, "A nice hot kettle of stew. He ruins it by dropping a couple of rat turds in."

A couple of rat turds - form and emptiness, The Observer and The Witness. Perhaps we shouldn't ruin the stew.

I recall an instance when I was volunteering in the kitchen at Green Gulch Zen Farm with a friend of mine who is also a student of spirituality and philosophy. We were "talking shop" as we cooked and in the middle of our conversation he asked "But what or who experiences non-duality?" And without a moment's hesitation to think I said, "Non-duality 'experiences' non-duality." And within the distinctions I'm exploring here that means no Witness and no Observer can experience non-duality.

Hope you enjoyed this ...

-Steve

The Buddha's Business Narrative

Lately, I've been working on building three different businesses. And at the center of all business-building is  articulation of the business narrative.

The dramatic structure of the narrative follows the "plot mountain" that we all (supposedly) learned in grade school - exposition of conflict, rising action, climax or turning point, falling action, and resolution or denouement. Is it coming back? Not too nightmarish I hope.

A business narrative frames the conflict that the business addresses, how the it addresses the conflict, and what you'll get from buying the resolution from the business.

For some reason I had the weird idea to look at the world's major religions through the lens of business narratives.

One of the very first teachings Buddha gave after becoming enlightened was on The Four Noble Truths.  They are:

1. Life is suffering.
2. The origin of suffering is attachment.
3. The cessation of suffering is possible.
4. The way leading to the cessation of suffering is The Noble Eightfold Path.

This is Buddha's business narrative.  The exposition of conflict is Noble Truth #1 - life is suffering.  The rising action is Noble Truth #2 - recognition of the origin of suffering. In a way the second truth doesn't really get us anywhere because we can understand where suffering comes from but still not be free from suffering. But the second truth does give the Buddha some credibility. Perhaps this is leading somewhere helpful we might be thinking.

The climax or turning point is the Buddha's declaration in the third Noble Truth that the cessation of suffering is possible. What a radical departure from how we experience life.  On the heals of the climax, he offers us the way - The Noble Eightfold Path. This is the falling action that leads to the implied denouement - no more suffering.

Wonder how much The Noble Eightfold Path costs? :-)

Unfortunately(?), it costs nothing less than giving up everything you take yourself to be, everything you take others to be, and everything you take the world to be. In spite of his crappy pricing strategy, he's doing pretty well with anywhere from 350 million to 1.7 billion customers worldwide, including me.

-Steve

 

The Witness and The Observer

If you aren't interested in the ontology of the observer you can skip this post. It is somewhat philosophical and will only be of interest to a few of you, I suspect.

Last week I was reflecting on the notion that you can only observe that which you have language for in light of experiences I frequently have that I don't have language for.

An insight ... there is a distinction between witnessing and observing even though we usually consider these as synonyms in our everyday usage of the words.

Indeed you can only observe what you have language (distinctions) for. As a result, observations can be shared with others. What you can observe determines what exists for you - not what is real - just what exists for you. What can be observed is determined by our structure of interpretation. The observer is an interpreter.

From observations we get narratives and, perhaps most importantly, self-narratives. That is our notion of ourselves - who we are to ourselves - comes from observations.

As an illustration of this refer to Helen Keller's account of learning her first word "water" and how that brought into existence for her the meaning of meaning, temporal narrative (past, present, and future) and her sense of being a self.  Yes, all of that requires the distinction of language itself.

The witness can experience experiences for which there is no language. That is, the witness can witness what can't be observed.

Of course, the obvious question is what is being witnessed? Is it reality? All I can say is that what is witnessed cannot be described by any distinction and, in particular, cannot be described as existing or not existing.

This calls to mind Lao Tzu's claim that "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao." And just to cut off a road commonly taken he goes on to say you can't say the Tao is Nothingness or Beingness for those are distinctions too.

Of course, all I'm doing here is merely observing the witness. What of witnessing the witness?

This points to the answer to so many Zen koans ... "What is your original face?" for example ...

-Steve

Given the choice ...

Today's inspiration ...

Given the choice between suffering and bliss we always choose bliss ... this is why we suffer.

Perhaps the "choice" is between choosing and not choosing.

What if not choosing is actually what leads to bliss?

-Steve

Searching for a Collective Ontology

Last week I took a 7 mile hike with my friend Ken Homer.  Among other things we discussed the observation our most powerful "technologies" for transformation focus on transformation of the individual because they are founded on individual ontologies - answers to the question "What is a human being?"

For example, one approach to answering the question "what is a human being?" that comes from hermeneutic phenomenology follows.

A human being is interpretive (and self-interpretive). That is our experience is shaped by our interpretations and, as individuals, the interpretations we make can and do differ. And this applies to our experience of ourselves as well as our experience of others and our environment.

A human being is product of the interaction of biology, biography, and culture (especially language). That is that how we interpret the everything is shaped our bodies, our personal histories, and the family and cultures we grow up in.

A human being has concerns and takes action to care for them. That is, as individuals, our experience is grounded in "care" and we have agency.

This leads to "transformational technologies" for individuals that amount to shifting how we interpret the world and how we act to take care of our concerns. This is the heart of coaching.

But the significant environmental, social, and spiritual crises of our present day also seem to call for transformation on a collective level. However, we don't seem to have good collective ontologies - answers to the question "What are human beings?" or, said more colloquially, "What are people?"  Of course, here we are asking about human beings as a collective phenomenon.  And, of course, we aren't proposing abandoning individual ontologies only augmenting them.

Ken has a neat idea - that we could look to indigenous peoples who seem to exist more as a "people" than as modern "individuals." I think this is a great idea.  To me it makes perfect sense.

Perhaps the best individual ontology we have is from the work of Heidegger. The above picture is of an Achuar man. The Achuar people are indigenous to the forests of Ecuador and Peru. What we need is the "Heidegger of the Achuar."  Any suggestions?

My best lead so far on this inquiry is to read "The Walking People" by Paula Underwood.

Take care,

-Steve