Happy Soul Food Monday!
After nearly a decade of Soul Food Fridays, I missed last Friday’s deadline (no excuses) so here it is on a Monday instead…
Are You Taking Yourself For Granted?
“Things are Way to Urgent to Rush”…
If we are intellectually honest with ourselves, reconciling the urgency of now, with a focus on long-term fundamental and systemic issues is both a challenge and an opportunity that is brutally tough to reconcile.
This piece from the Hopi Elders captures this inherent tension with timeless wisdom and a call for action:
The Dynamic Tension Between Your Fears and Your Dreams is Your Life!
Our fear and sorrow, left untreated pull us down toward entropy and negative energy, changing the set point for how we experience life.
Our dreams, on the other hand pull us up towards our highest potentiality and greatest gift, changing the frame and by extension shift our capacity to foster generative change.
We live on this pendulum, swinging between these two states and ways of being.
But what is moving the pendulum?
If you created a continuum of ones baseline state, do you find your default setting closer to the Fear-based side, or is top dead center more towards your Dreams/Aspirations/Vision?
Fear/Sorrow
______________________+______________________Dreams/Aspirations/Vision
If all we do is react to problems.
And if we react well to problems.
The best we have is no problems.
But is that the best you deserve out of life?
If emotional management Is a predictive variable (there are others) and your ability to recruit your emotional energy to shift from a fear-based model to a vision-inspired model is a key factor, are you able to harness those emotions to serve your greatest and highest need and that of those around you?
Orienting to what we want to create in life, rather than what problems we are trying to address or eliminate is a fundamental shift in attention, intention and attitude.
Hacking your own life success might well be as much about this internal condition -which we do control- and less about the external conditions over which we don’t have nearly as much control or influence.
Shift happens.
With this systems shift it might even be possible to transmute our deepest wound into our greatest gift?
Spending several days this week with Peter Senge, http://infed.org/mobi/peter-senge-and-the-learning-organization/ and his talented group including Mette and Roger, as part of a collective impact effort we are doing on the Oceanside Promise has been illuminating as we explored systems thinking models and archetypes, and challenged our implicit beliefs and biases about our world in general and education in particular.
Challenging orthodoxy after all is counter-conventional as Parker Palmer reminds us.
Going deep might be difficult and not the norm.
But perhaps that is where our deepest learning opportunities reside…
The Indo-European root of “to lead” leith, literally means to step across a threshold- and to let go of whatever might limit stepping forward.
Are you ready to take that step?
Here are two pieces to help us navigate this continuum, and yes by popular demand the second link is a repeat from last week, as so many reacted favorably to it and not everyone digests every Soul Food missive.
The first link is a powerful example of transmuting deepest wounds into meaningful gifts for ourselves and others:
The 10 commandments of grief are a powerful counter-cultural antidote to getting bogged down in a problem orientation
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/jul/26/san-diego-rabbi-explores-blessing-sorrow-new-book/
The second link reminds us of the power of our Dreams/Aspirations/Vision:
https://www.facemp4.com/video/1732996373400094
Both examples confront reality but elevate humanity!
Thanks this week go to Duane C, Nicole M, and the entire team at the Oceanside Promise as well as Peter S, Mette B and Roger B for their gifted shepherding of the process.
We ARE the ones we have been waiting for
Pay it forward with purpose!
Love,
Neville
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“If you want to change how a person thinks, give up. You cannot change how another thinks.
Give them a tool, the use of which will gradually cause them over time to think differently.” – Buckminster Fuller
Happy Soul Food Friday! 