Following a great talk from Gil Fronsdel on how self is constructed, I had a nice insight yesterday about personal identity.
Fronsdel says that when something happens, there are three things going on:
- There is the reality
- There is what we think about the reality
- There is the “I” that is thinking.
These are conditional, that is, they depend on and arise from each other. When I see something, I think something about it and my self in strengthened. For example:
- It’s raining today
- I hate rainy days.
- I’m not suited to living in a rainforest!
In Buddhism, we get locked into suffering when we think ABOUT something and then believe that thought. Who we are, our core identity, is in fact a set of stories we believe about our preferences about reality.
As a facilitator, this simple construction is a very important tool to use to reach clarity before working with a group. Imagine this construction:
- People are yelling at each other.
- They are in conflict and I hate conflict.
- I am a peacemaker.
So yes, but in the moment, you are going to suffer some when the meeting you are running counters your experience of yourself. You will think that you are failing if you are “a peacemaker” and yet your participants ar eyelling at each other. As a facilitator, when I get caught in that kind of thinking, I notice that I immediately become quite useless to the group. Why? Because I have left reality and I am spinning around in my thinking about reality, suffering and self-involved as my identity and ego get challenged.
People who have no thoughts about conflict are incredibly resourceful when yelling arises. They simply see yelling, they are able to listen and observe and notice what is happening. But those of us that are still working on our comfort with conflict might shy away from it, shrink away in fear, try to paper over differences or deny the reality of the moment in favour of a temporary comfort.
This is why it’s always good to work with people, especially with people who are afraid of different things than you are.
Working on this stuff is a key personal practice for me. I do it with meditation as well as working with Byron Katie’s method, called “The Work” to inquire into the thoughts and beliefs that are causing me suffering. My partner Caitlin Frost uses The Work as a cornerstone to her coaching practice, and it’s a real gift to have that available in our little firm. It lets me do much more than I ever could on my own. I’m curious wht your experiences are and what your practices are to challenge the constructions of mind that limit your own work in certain situations.
Tomorrow, a post on what this process looks like at the collective level.
Share:
Thinking today about the challenge of engaging community for real change, and I am playing around with two simple on the surface, but difficult to execute ideas. I think though that if these ideas are executed, it creates the best possible conditions for sustained action and transformative change.
The ideas, expressed as patterns, are: operate from a clear centre, and embody your future now.
I was riding the ferry with my friend Patti DeSante who is at the moment in deep Zen training with Roshi Joan Halifax and exploring many aspects of embodied practice in the world. We were discussing what it takes to act fearlessly and enter into transformative work in the world. She shared a story with me that was simple but important. She told me about her days as an energy broker and how the sole reason her company existed was to make money. It was a simple and powerful centre around which the company organized itself. It provided an easy way to evaluate what kind of action was worth pursuing. It allowed the company, and the people in the company, to be out in the world fearlessly, knowing clearly why they are there.
In other words, the company had a centre. To me the idea of centre is more than a mission statement or a vision statement. It is instead an assailable reason for being. Something you can feel, that is core to who you are, out of which you act. As Brian Arthur has said, in martial arts, if you think, you are dead. So to with any fearless action: if you need to think about why you are doing it, you are not operating from your centre. When you drink water you are acting out of an unstated need, a powerful and compelling centre that makes drinking a natural act. In martial arts we train in acting from that place as well. Developing a centre means developing clarity. If you haven’t got it, you move in the world from a position of confusion, and that kind of moving creates lots of problems: unnecessary effort, poor choices, emotional stress.
Developing a shared centre is not something one does overnight, or in a weekend retreat. In involves much work and diligent attention to being in relationship with each other, discovering what is true and powerful for us and exploring the way that centre can unfold into the world. Otto Scharmer provides an excellent map for the work that is required to do this, and most of the facilitation and dialogue processes I use are designed explicitly to, with enough time, connect to that source and act from it.
The second pattern is the pattern of embodiment. This is also about operating with clarity and it requires a deep discernment process. Embodiment simply means to bring into practice the principles of the world you are seeking to create. For example in the work we did on Vancouver Island with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team, we chose “Children at the Centre” as our primary centre from which we operated. In practice this meant all kinds of things, including meeting whenever possible with children present, or placing their pictures in the centre when we met. It meant making a practice of thinking first about how children would live with the decisions we were making. It meant taking inspiration from children for the work we were doing. When planning our engagement process, we asked ourselves “How do children inspire us to engage with them?”
Embodying these beliefs and centres in the world is a kind of deep practice. It makes daily work a spiritual practice, and results in tremendous emotional power and momentum. Taken to the broadest level. It finds it’s practical expression in Gandhi’s quest to transform Indian society by implementing his beliefs in peace, non-violence and equality at every turn, even being sure to clean toilets as a mark of solidarity with the lower castes..
Creating a centre, and finding its creative expression in the world. Sounds easy!