Pema Chodron, a well known Buddhist teacher, is one of my favourite teachers on facilitation practice. She has enhanced my understanding of dealing with tricky situations and scary places with practices, advice and stories which are beautifully rendered. In this article, “The Answer to Anger and Agression is Patience” she writes about her own struggle to cultivate a practice of patience as the antidote to anger and aggression: Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the …
From j a c k / z e n on the limits of seeing: A typical example of zen practice. Put a flower on a table. Write down every word you can use to describe the flower with full analysis of it, your reactions to it, the history of the flower and flowers in general, comparisons with all other flowers and living things and speculations backed by scientifical data about the flower. Put the flower to poetry, do a drawing and sculpture on it, write a play and feature length film on it, write a song about it. Take a …
Ten new bits and pieces for your surfing pleasure: Grupthink: “GrÅ«pthink is a new way to ask and explore open-ended questions with the rest of the world. Anyone can ask a question or post a topic at GrÅ«pthink, and everyone can respond. Here’s where it gets even more interesting: Anyone can respond with new answers, and those answers can be voted on by everyone else.” At the moment it seems to be fixated on rather superficial questions, but that could change. via The Big Here: “You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined …
Have a listen to Sir Ken Robinson, from the TED conference, on creativity and education. It’s a great talk filled with humour and deep insight about how the public education system does not serve creativity, children or our collective future. Some quotes: All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them. Creativity is as important as literacy and we should teach it with the same status. Kids will take a chance…if they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong…If you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never come up with anything original…We …
I’m preparing to teach at an Art of Hosting gathering in Nova Scotia in a few weeks and as part of the conversations on design, we have been talking a little about what is required in order to confidently step into chaotic and unknown spaces. This morning, my friend and other co-host Toke Paludan Moeller sent a short poem from an Aikido master that sums it up nicely: When you step up, claim the mat as your own. Everybody you encounter and everything that happens is there by your invitation and your invitation alone, even the unexpected ones. Your job …