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Category Archives "Being"

Tools for White Guys who are Working for Social Change (and other people socialized in a society based on domination)

December 15, 2010 By Chris Corrigan BC, Being, Collaboration, Community, Facilitation, Leadership, Practice 10 Comments

1. Practice noticing who’s in the room at meetings – how many men, how many women, how many white people, how many people of color, is it majority heterosexual, are there out queers, what are people’s class backgrounds. Don’t assume to know people, but also work at being more aware.

2a. Count how many times you speak and keep track of how long you speak.

2b. Count how many times other people speak and keep track of how long they speak.

3. Be conscious of how often you are actively listening to what other people are saying as opposed to just waiting your turn and/or thinking about what you’ll say next.

4. Practice going to meetings focused on listening and learning; go to some meetings and do not speak at all.

5a. Count how many times you put ideas out to the group.

5b. Count how many times you support other people’s ideas for the group.

6. Practice supporting people by asking them to expand on ideas and get more in-depth, before you decide to support the idea or not.

7a. Think about whose work and contribution to the group gets recognized.

7b. Practice recognizing more people for the work they do and try to do it more often.

8. Practice asking more people what they think about meetings, ideas, actions, strategy and vision. White guys tend to talk amongst themselves and develop strong bonds that manifest in organizing. This creates an internal organizing culture that is alienating for most people. Developing respect and solidarity across race, class, gender and sexuality is complex and difficult, but absolutely critical – and liberating.

9. Be aware of how often you ask people to do something as opposed to asking other people “what needs to be done”.

10. Think about and struggle with the saying, “you will be needed in the movement when you realize that you are not needed in the movement”.

11. Struggle with and work with the model of group leadership that says that the responsibility of leaders is to help develop more leaders, and think about what this means to you.

12. Remember that social change is a process, and that our individual transformation and individual liberation is intimately interconnected with social transformation and social liberation. Life is profoundly complex and there are many contradictions. Remember that the path we travel is guided by love, dignity and respect – even when it is bumpy and difficult to navigate.

13. This list is not limited to white guys, nor is it intended to reduce all white guys into one category. This list is intended to disrupt patterns of domination which hurt our movement and hurt each other. White guys have a lot of work to do, but it is the kind of work that makes life worth living.

14. Day-to-day patterns of domination are the glue that maintain systems of domination. The struggle against capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism and the state, is also the struggle towards collective liberation.

15. No one is free until all of us are free.

From the Colours of Resistance webpage

via RANT Collective  :  Tools for White Guys who are Working for Social Change (and other people socialized in a society based on domination).

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Speaking to the shadow

December 14, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Being, Facilitation, First Nations, Practice 9 Comments

Olelo i ke aka
Ka hele ho’okahi e
Mamina ka leo
He leo wale no e

Speaking to the shadow
Is what one does when travelling alone
Treasure the voice
For it gives sound to the thoughts otherwise dormant.

— from Lele Kawa: The rituals of Pele by Taupouri Tangaro

This is the beginning of my effort to bring some sense to what has happened to me since I stood on the rim of Kiluea in June shortly after the summer solstice in a week during which a large part of myself was opened up.  In the six months since then, the northern season’s long crawl to darkness, I have changed in my outlook, I have been transformed by working with women, I have become sensitive to the dynamics and faint echoes that lurk in many layers of context that hold us.  As we move in the next seven days towards the full moon of the winter solstice I want to explore a few of these changes and insights here in public.

This transformative journey for me reached its pinnacle in June but it was a couple of years in the making when I was introduced to Luana Busby-Neff, a friend and colleague from Hawai’i who is a beautiful singer and practitioner of hula and a stunning guardian of her lineage and world view.  Luana and I were brought together to work on the Beyond Sustainability gathering in Hawai’i in June and, joined by Tim Merry, we co-hosted a gathering of 50 powerful, pregressive and conscious people from around the United States.  We were seeking to answer the question, what would it take to create a community of leadership built on a platform of reverence?  What can the world learn from the pure and deep application of indigenous wisdom as a form and mode of profound systems thinking that can propose new views with respect to humanity’s relationship to the earth and which can underlie the search for what lies beyond the notion of “sustainability?”  Our gathering was founded on a few simple principles: that ceremony was the methodology, that without deep personal transformation, collective transformation was not possible, that such transformation was facilitated by fostering a powerful connection to the world itself and that cultivating  a state of reverence from which action – the building of community and the wise decisions that put power to use – can happen for the benefit of all was crucial to the future of our species.  These were audacious places from which to work, but we tackled the challenge, brought some very impressive thought leaders together and created some effect.  You can read more about the gathering at the Beyond Sustainability website.

What I want to share is my personal experience of that gathering.  It is a story I have told several times now but I have yet to write it down anywhere.  I think I’m finally able to put it in writing and see where it takes me.

For me, this gathering was the most challenging facilitation of my life.  The moment I agreed to take on the initiative every bone in my body screamed in protest.  I met deamons right away – issues of self-esteem, confusion, confidence in my own abilities to deliver, fragility in the face of massive expectations – you name it.  For two years I went in and out of a love/hate relationship with this project.  There were times when I felt that I wasn’t “indigenous” enough to host the gathering, and other times when I felt that I wasn’t plugged into the mainstream culture enough.  There were other times when I felt like I was the only one who knew what was possible and times when I felt that I was the only one who had lost the plot.  I chose early on to work closely with Luana and Tim, two people in whose hands I would trust my own beating heart.  But even with these two in a triangle, I could never cure myself of the weight of this project.

In retrospect I think I knew that there was no way I was going to carry off this work without a profound shift moving within me.  That was scary because everything I was was called upon to host this gathering and yet I knew that if a large part of me fell away during the gathering, I had no idea what would be left.

Basically I was scared.  My body, my spirit perhaps, knew that I was heading into waters that were going to change me, loosen up things and frighten me.

It was not my job to be frightened.  It was my job to assure the people who had put a lot of money into this gathering that it would be the best thing that ever happened to them.  And I was being called on to be all kinds of things that I was and was not…to be myself but also to be a projection for others, a person of mixed ancestry that was so comfortable in his skin that he could lead us through the process of negotiating the spaces between worldviews.  That somehow I would understand where everyone in the room was coming from, that I would have fluency with them all.  Most of the time I felt very lonely, and very incompetent, with momentary flashes of knowing what I was doing.

We were gathered at an old military camp on the rim of the  Kilauea  volcano on the big island of Hawai’i.  We were hosted there by first of all Pele herself, the goddess of pure unbounded creative spirit, and by her through the keepers of the hula lineage that honours her.  Pualani Kanaka’ole Kanahele, Luana Busby-Neff and a group of women called the Hi’iaka Wahine who were holding the physical and spiritual and ceremonial field for us.  A gathering of indigenous wisdom keepers happened in teh days before our gathering, during which time Elders spoke to one another about what they could share with the Americans gathering on top of the volcano.  Some of the Elders from that gathering attended ours, arriving at the end of the first day of our own time together.

Until the third day of four the gathering proceeded pleasantly.  We were engaged in good conversation about the challenge facing us, but much of it was in the realm of the mind and head and ran the risk of becoming redundant to many similar conversations going on all over the world.  We had some powerful teachings from Hawai’ian teachers like Auntie Pua and Ramsey Taum which introduced us cognatively to the Hawai’ian worldview that was in play – Malama Ola: taking care of life. The third day of the gathering featured time on the land, picking seeds and pulling invasive species invited to be in conscious collaboration with the land, the sky, the volcano, the plants, the birds and the sea far below us.  It was while I was picking seeds that I began to open.  Working on a lava bed far above my colleagues, I began to hum a tune, a seed picking chant that came to me from a single note.  It arose in my voice, and by speaking it I was able to help it come into being, a little wordless song that accompanied my work, expressed my gratitude for all that was around me, and focused my mind on the task of picking seeds and walking across sharp and treacherous ground.  I returned that afternoon calm and grounded and extremely sensitive.  I was able to notice little things in myself and in the group, was aware of the subtle energies in the room, of things people were enjoying or not liking, of the way the rain and fierce cold wind kept washing over us even as higher up on the mountain, the sun blazed hot.  All of the  elements  of life were presenting themselves to us and inviting us to be in deep and reverential relationship with them, to work with them, to work with the tools of life itself.

On the morning of the fourth day I rose early and went with my friends and colleagues to the lookout over the crater where we held a morning sunrise every day.  About 30 of us huddled in the sharp wind and rain and awaited the rising sun.  As the time approached, Luana began her chanting in her beautiful sonorous voice, wavering in the cold morning air, as if calling the sun to it’s place in the sky.  It strikes me that everyday, somewhere in the world, every sunrise is welcomed in ceremony by people.  Doing it in Hawai’i we were the last people on earth to welcome June 25.  A nearly full moon set, and the sun rose, and my world cracked open.

As Luana chanted, something came up in me.  It was a strong and powerful feeling that rose inside my body, from my belly to my throat, where it got stuck.  I started crying a little at first and then completely broke down in sobs.  I was shaking in whole body sobs, out of my mind with grief.  I had two powerful thoughts: one was of people in Aboriginal communities committing suicide and the other was the thought of shame.  The image was haunting: it was as if everything we had tried to do was a failure and we were out of options.  It was my biggest fear that this work, with good-hearted conscious people was not enough.  It was not enough for any of us and it was not doing anything to change the fate of Aboriginal communities.  We were none of playing at the level of real need, real fear, real darkness.  We were rich and  privileged  people pushing around the discretionary bits of our lives.  So from that place I felt tremendous shame.  Shame that I couldn’t do this, that I was an  impostor, that I was not who I or anyone else needed me to be.  Shame that my indulgence was costing something.

At the same time as I was feeling this, a young Samoan man, Tuvalu, who was with us uncovered his body in front of Pele in a powerful coming of age ceremony for himself that was witnessed by all who were there, except me who was blinded by tears and sobs that were so powerful, my core muscles were beginning to ache.  To this day I have the strong sense that my shame and his lack of it were connected.

I stood for a long time at the edge of the crater as the ceremony ended accompanied by two friends, Tim and Belvie Rooks, who just held me and witnessed.  I began to walk back with them, unable to talk with a huge lump in my throat and a deep pain in my heart.  I had a strong sense that fear had penetrated some wall I had erected over my heart and I felt as if it was going to burst.  We headed back to the camp for breakfast and our pre-gathering meeting with our team.

By the time we met it was 7:30am and I was still sobbing, an hour an a half after it began.  In our meeting there was some tension and one of the Hi’iaka Wahine exploded in anger over a small request I made of the group to help round up the people so we could begin in good time.  Our schedule for the day was to have breakfast on the land with some teaching from the hula practitioner Taupouri Tangaro and then have everyone stay out there in a solo retreat before coming back to the meeting space for an Open Space about where our will would carry us to next.  It was still raining and some of the non-Hawai’ians were grumbling a bit about the weather.  The Hawai’ians were getting frustrated with the lack of appreciation for what it meant to be working in the rain.  After three days of teaching about the powerful place of water in Hawai’ian culture, there was a sense that folks couldn’t get it, that we should abandon the ceremony and simply have a hula performance.

When I made my request my colleague snapped.  She said it was not her place to do my bidding and that her role had been completely misinterpreted from the beginning.  She asked me what happened to me in the morning ceremony and I started to tell her about the images that came to mind.  She stopped me.  “I don’t understand that” she snapped.  “Don’t give me all this bullshit.  What left you out there?”

I was so taken aback by the question that all I could say was “defense.”  I felt as if something I had been carrying around with me my whole life, some protection around my heart, had dropped away.  My friend scoffed at me and spat out some massively disapproving comment about being in my head.  She gave up on me and then the rest of us with a tirade against the greed that men, and white men in particular exhibited.  She railed against the hoarding of wealth of all kinds and she burst into tears as she pleaded with people to understand the place of giving.  She said that no one in the history of humankind has the opportunity to experience giving like rich white men and she sobbed as she described the missed opportunity that that vast concentration of wealth represented.

After ten minutes or so of this, I finally looked up at her and said “I don’t know what to do, and I am afraid.”  I meant it on every level.  She looked at me tenderly and said “Thank you.”

I had no idea how the day was going to go, I had no idea how to deal with the tremendous schism on our team, with the nervous response of our white male benefactor who had received the tirade with grace but not without a wounding.  I had no idea how anything was going to end, of what to do next, of whether we were doing anything important or just frittering around while the world died.  I felt the truth of “I don’t know” through my whole being and at every scale, all the way thorough to the biggest questions of my life.  I felt my expertise slipping away – what was being taken from me was my ground, my confidence and all of the false foundations for my  privileged  walk through life.

It seemed to take forver for anything to happen next.  Finally the Hawai’ians drove out to the site where breakfast was scheduled and back again – a full hour round trip to check the weather.  It was sunny up there so we all loaded into buses, well behind schedule and travelled to the forest.

When we got there Taupouri welcomed us with seven hula chants and dances and then an hour long teaching on accessing the feminine, authentic action, and the journey of a cultural practitioner.  At the end of his talk one of the men from our group said “I think that in theis group we have trouble accessing the feminine, and I wonder if you have practices we can use to do that.”  Taupouri was short with him: “Who is we?  Why don’t you talk about yourself?”  The man rephrased his question “I have trouble accessing the feminine.  What practices can I use?” He seemed surprised by this authentic and more truthful rephrasing.  Taupouri replied “Hum.  Build a fire.  Listen to a story.”

This response was as profound as it was simple.  What struck me most was the call to take personal responsibility, to speak for oneself, to not use the word “we” to hide from the “I.”  For the rest of the day when someone said “we” should do this or that, I asked them to rephrase it to claim it for themselves.

From this point on, my mind and heart returned to each other and we finished our gathering well, and with a number of commitments and actions to carry forward.  All those seeking ooutcomes were somewhat satisfied, and I was left with an ache.

These events seem unremarkable on their own.  What I can’t seem to capture in writing is the utter depth at which I felt them.  With an unguarded heart each of these events took on a deep significance.  I could feel a deep connection with context and a coherence between my actions and everything that was  going on around me.  For the first time in my life I had a felt sense of what it was going to take to recalibrate my relationship to the earth and to life itself.  And it was going to take several months of discovering shadow, confronting the feminine, repositioning myself in my home place and extending this learning conversation in order to set my new path to rights.

So more on that this week.  But at least now you know what hit me so deeply in June.

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What books teach us?

November 23, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Being, First Nations, Learning One Comment

Johnnie Moore had an interesting thought this morning:

Jeff Jarvis talks about the  Gutenberg Parenthesis. Those who bemoan the supposed short attention spans of the networked generation, typically measure this by the capacity or willingness to read a book cover-to-cover. This assumes that reading books is normal; but what about the vast span of human history before books? Perhaps we’re seeing a reversion to ways of knowing that were diminished by the printed word… to a more oral culture in which remixing is natural.

This reminds me of the book,  The Alphabet and the Goddess which also suggests that reading had a powerful and not always positive effect on how we think and behave.

I left him my own thoughts…and I say this as a guy that loves books.
I think the issue is not attention spans so much as it is a breadth of attention.  Before there was text humans needed to be incredibly aware of context, of everything that surrounded them of how things worked and what initial conditions led to certain kinds of results.  This is important in agrarian societies, hunting societies, transoceanic travelling cultures and other kinds of indigenous land based ways of being.

What we have lost during the Gutenberg parenthesis I think is the ability to think systemically.  Book reading has taught us to be linear and to expect a beginning a middle and an end.  That is not the way the world works and I think we ignore it at our peril.

This is a little bit I think of what we will taste in our module at the ALIA Summer Institute this year.

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Plane gripped by fear

November 18, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Being 5 Comments

Yesterday I was on a commuter flight from Toronto to Montreal. For those of you not in North America, these two cities are the biggest two in Canada and the flight is full of corporate looking people who are wearing ties, nice trench coats, shiny shoes, power rim glasses, and carrying leather portfolios. In short it was a flight of business travellers, mostly men, mostly white.

What struck me as I watched people coming on was how grim everyone looked. Everyone looked deadly serious. They were quiet, travelling alone for the most part and quickly avoided making eye contact with others. It seemed as if most people coming on were worried or fearful. It was as if people were moving with a kind of forced confidence but what was so clear from the outside was how afraid everyone seemed to be of appearing to make a mistake.

At one point a man sat down next to me after expertly throwing his rollaway into the overhead bin. He mumbled a forced “good morning” without looking at me and then cracked open his newspaper. A minute later a woman appeared and showed him her boarding pass which indicated that he was sitting in her seat. The man looked mortified, stuttered out an apology to me actually tried to defend himself and justify his mistake and very nervously and clumsily moved across the aisle.

I was filled with a wave of sadness in that moment. I wanted to say to him “Hey, I won’t be the one that yells at you today for that little mistake.” I looked around the plane. People were so scared of making an error that everyone sat clenched in their seats quiet and grim. I was shocked…it became clear to me that some part of our society – let’s say “Corporate Canada” in this case – was gripped by fear. People actually looked traumatized or abused. They looked like people I know who are residential school survivors or who had survived a bad and abusive foster parenting situation. I can imagine them being yelled at for little things that have happened. It looked like the most risk averse group of people I have ever seen in one place. Risk averse because somehow each of them had paid a dear price fro sticking their necks out, a personal price.

The temptation to generalize is great. But let me say that most airports on a weekday morning during the fall and winter are full of faces like this. Business travellers, corporate sales managers, directors of HR, regional market analysts, associate finance directors, senior planning officers…all these middle management corporate positions staffed by people so full of fear that they shake with nervousness at the smallest mistake in their day.

I don’t work much in the corporate world, but maybe I should more. Maybe a little honest conversation, a little tolerance for exploration and creative problem solving, a little space opening could go a long way to softening the lives of those who wear a hard visage.

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Stopping

November 9, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Being One Comment

Lovely quote from David Kundtz:

Stopping is doing nothing, as much as possible, for a definite period of time.

Many more great quotes at  Stopping: How to Be Still When You Have to Keep Going.

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