From my friend Ria, who advanced a little in her inquiry on holding space:
When I am holding space, I connect in my body with the unmanifest potential of this person, this group or this place. It asks for an emptiness and a deep stillness inside to be able to carry this potential. Maybe it is better to say to be a container for it, and I mean it in a very physical way. I open my body to be this container in service of something that wants or can become manifest.
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Hyperlinks –
follow these leads
a thread.
- Haiku resources
- My friend Thomas Arthur, who weaves with gravity, posts Wooshclang!
- Richard Sweeney weaves with paper.
- A beautiful and complete list of what the world is made of.
- Does your disaster plan include conversation to mobilize quickly? Or is it still expert driven?
- Nice summary of Senge’s core concepts on Learning Organizations
- You, and many other living creature, have a billion and a half heartbeats to change the world.
- Change management myths. (Not including the myth that change can be managed, but still…)
- Doug’s blog: Footprints in the Wind, which I read all the time, and so should you.
- From Nancy…the power of a line.
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From a conference call this morning with friends around some big work. We spoke about the fact that the work we are in – large scale systemic change – is plagued with doubt. There is no certainty that what we are doing is the right thing, or whether it will even work. But the project itself exists in a field of doubt, and as that doubt begins to pervade our core teams, the search for certainty becomes desperate. People begin to focus on little things that are going wrong and a depreciative world view takes hold.
Doubt hunts us on the trail. It picks up our scent and dogs our heels ntil we find ourselves running faster and faster away from it. We expend our energy avoiding it and become exhausted and depleted.
In these moments what is needed is a stand. We must stop running from it, turn around on the path and face it down. We need to muster up the courage and confront the energy of doubt unless we wishe to have it erode our efforts from within.
Large scale change is never certain. Our running from the doubts simply feeds the fear of that uncertainty. IN the worse case, we become consumed by it and look outside of ourselves for confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do. The truth of it is that the certainty we need is not outside of us. If it is not within us, we will never find it. We must generate it in the field of our work together or abandon our work to the poisonous cynicism that wants to consume it in the end. At some point we choose to confront the predator or become its prey.
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Just back from an amazing Art of Hosting in rural Pennsylvania. Found this in my email box upon my return, send to me by my friend Toke:
Not just any talk is conversation
Not any talk raises consciousness
good conversation has an edge
It opens your eyes to something
It quickens your earsAnd good conversation reverberates
It keeps on talking in your mind later in the day;
The next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said
The reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness
Your mind and heart have been moved
Your are at another level with your reflections.— James Hillman
This is what it is all about.
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This question of the responsibility of love continues to live in me. I wrote a comment at Dave Pollard’s blog that captures another facet of it:
Love IS a social issue and engaging in the world with love is a bit of a trick. It not only accelerates innovation and “better”, it is a double edged sword too. I think there is such a thing as “the responsibility of love” which refers to the way we wield the weapons of the heart in the world when we are working in the territory of open heartedness. When we choose to love, we choose to elevate and commit to certain things above other things – people, paths, choices, directions. There is pain associated with this choosing, made all the more stinging by the fact that we choose and exclude out of heart-felt action, which is action we are fully committed too. It results in pain, and so much of the world that is created by love is also full of grief.
Love and pain, bliss and grief are siblings in this world. If we choose to work with love, we enter this polarity. We may also choose to work with complete dispassion and equanimity, which is what the Buddha invited us to do. My path is not that refined yet. I still choose the path with heart, and that means the path of pain also.