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.
This is my son Finn, one of my teachers, facing huge waves at Ka’anapali on Maui last week. He plays in these waves with no fear at all. Waves that are two or three times taller than he is simply wash over him. He knows what to do, how to dive under the wave, how to swim in and out of currents, how to watch and read the sea, and his fear becomes play. He taught himself to bodysurf.
Fear does funny things to us. It makes us change sizes, for example. When we are confronted with a situation that creates fear, we puff ourselves up to seem bigger than we are, or we shrink away to hide and not be noticed. We do this by boasting, by telling stories that makes us seem more competent, more brave, more experienced than we are, or by engaging in self-deprecating behaviour that lessens our accomplishments, lowers expectations, diminshes our offerings.
It can seem like a challenge sometimes to just be the size that you really are, but I think when we are that size, comfortable in our skin and fearless in the moment, we become completely authentic.
Today in our planning for the 2009 Food and Society gathering, one of our young core team members made a bold declaration. She agreed to step up to be a target for any blame that might be generated during our work. When I later asked her out of which practice her commitment came, she said it was from the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong mind training, in which one of the slogans is “Drive all blames into one.”
Trungpa Rinpoche comments on that slogan:
The text says “drive all blames into one”. the reason you have to do that is because you have been cherishing yourself so much… Although sometimes you might say that you don’t like yourself, even then in your heart of hearts you know that you like yourself so much that you’re willing to throw everybody else down the drain, down the gutter. You are really willing to do that. You are really willing to let somebody else sacrifice his life, give himself away for you. And who are you, anyway?
It was remarkable to hear my young friend utter that line with such clarity and conviction in a room of power and experience which was tasked with designing this incredibly important gathering. Remarkable, but not at all out of character for the six young (20 somethings) people that are working with us on the core team. We are lucky to have them.
John Dumbrille on our recent efforts here on Bowen Island:
That self governance will be better enabled using web tools is probable. After all, there are economic drivers (‘more for less’) propelling it. But probable success factors are all about money and efficiency and intention, spirit and design. Thinking the litmus test is – does this BOWEGOV etc help people come home to themselves. How to measure this may be ‘happy’ indices, or, put another way – ‘spirit of giving/sharing’ indices.
I am dedicated to the face to face. Inasmuch as these tools bring us into generous relationship with each other, I say yay! And they do that in spades.
Tenneson Woolf from a harvest poem called How Are You Navigating in the Time of Dramatic Change?:
I sound like I don’t know what I am doing, but I do know.
I find my way in the immediately infront, the next simple elegant step.
The next simple elegant step describes my approach to action. Recently, in our little consulting firm we have adopted a project status process that involves writing down only the next step for each of our projects. When you take the to do list and write it as one thing to do only, one elegant next step, it invites consciousness and beauty and elegance and simplicity to the work. So I am becoming more conscious about filling in the little box that says “Next step” and taking a moment each time to find the clarity that is needed for that next step to invite more.
Navigating this drama with intention, consciousnes and invitation. Creating more of all three.