{"id":3542,"date":"2012-03-18T19:01:36","date_gmt":"2012-03-19T03:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/?p=3542"},"modified":"2012-03-18T19:01:36","modified_gmt":"2012-03-19T03:01:36","slug":"interior-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/interior-transformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Interior transformation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Transformation<\/a><\/p>\n

On the plane to Minneapolis for 12 days of teaching, learning and co-creating with the Art of Hosting. \u00a0While I’m there, I’ll be working with the Bush Foundation, the Blue Cross\/Blue Shield Foundation of Minnesota, and 100 people who will be coming to an Art of Hosting from all around the state. \u00a0I’ll be deep in practice with my close friends and colleagues Jerry Nagel, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller and Ginny Belden-Charles among others. \u00a0It’s a busy 12 days, with only 1 day off, and so I’m thinking a lot about what I’m doing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And as I was wandering around the airport this morning, I came across the above mask, which sits in an alcove in the US Departures terminal at YVR. This is a transformation mask from the artist Stan Wamiss. \u00a0If there was an active word to describe what is happening here it is “revealing.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is transformation that comes from outside, like a meteor strike or a tsunami. \u00a0And there is transformation that comes from inside, like a seed sprouting, an egg hatching, or a butterfly emerging. \u00a0The transformation comes from inside is revealed and in its revealing it has a powerful effect: it renders the transformed aware of the interior abundance of one’s self.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Transformation from outside can make us feel small and ineffective, unable to deal with what is coming or what has arrived. \u00a0Indeed, this is so evident around us that it is almost too obvious to see. \u00a0The products of colonization – whether in North America, Ireland, the middle east, Africa or elsewhere leave communities and people dispirited, dispossessed and disillusioned. \u00a0In contrast, transformation that arises from within can have the opposite effect, leaving us in awe of the new levels of spirit and energy, ownership and mastery and vision and story that emerge. \u00a0One of the reasons why “change management” fails is because a small group of people undergoes a transformative moment from their individual and collective interiors and they “roll it out” over everybody else with a – literally – missionary zeal. \u00a0For the leaders, the mission is to give everyone the incredible experience of awe and wonder and creative energy. \u00a0For the rest of us, we experience a meteor strike.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I once had a very good friend and teacher, Bob Wing, point this out to me. \u00a0We were together in a small Open Space, and we were in different conversations. \u00a0In my conversation a small group of us cracked a vexing problem by stumbling on a new map that seemed to make a great deal of sense in describing where we were. \u00a0It was exciting and we were fired up. \u00a0When we shared this map back with our colleagues, they listened politely to our exuberance and then Bob very calmly looked me in the eye and said “I like it. \u00a0I like it a lot. \u00a0But I don’t trust it, because I didn’t help create it.” \u00a0Where we thought we had produced a solution, Bob reminded us that at best we had merely produced and invitation, and that our exuberance for our own experience of transformation had made that a very bad and incomplete invitation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I think interior transformation is important, in fact I think it may be among the most important experiences that we can have as human beings. \u00a0This is why such experiences are revered with masks and dances on the west coast of North America. \u00a0It is what is fuelling the appetite for contemplative spiritual practices, for presence based leadership experiments, for all of the self-development and self-actualization process that goes on around us. \u00a0And I think that it is important that we do not limit this experience to a chosen few.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Citizenship for example, is crying out for this kind of transformation. \u00a0There is a tremendous poverty of beauty, intention, vision and soul in the public sphere right now. \u00a0John O Donohue calls this “the evacuation of interiority.” \u00a0There is a deficit of the kinds of qualities to public dialogue that are powered by listening, kindness, compassion and co-creation. \u00a0The result is that we come to believe that it is a mean world out there and that if we don’t do things to others preemptively, they will do it to us. \u00a0So we steel ourselves against vulnerability, wounding and hurt. \u00a0Declare emotional intelligence “soft skills” and deride relationship building as “time wasting” or unpractical. \u00a0So we end up in a cycle of terrible quality with a longing for something ineffable that seems further and further out of reach as we tie our actions to outcomes that can measured, funded and justified.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In Art of Hosting learning experiences I think we are trying to work against this cycle by, in a phrase, “serving wholeness.” \u00a0This means working with the interior transformations that birth new stories and visions of possibility, as well as being skillful in dealing with the exterior transformations that we have no control over. \u00a0We begin with provocative assumptions that somewhere within us, individually and collectively, is the resourcefulness we need to move from the stuck and unsatisfying places we are now in to places of possibility and resourcefulness. \u00a0We might be wrong (and we need to get WAY better as a species in being wrong most of the time), but we serve the inkling that leads to individual and collective resilience. \u00a0We are trying to teach and learn about a form of leadership and being together in organization and community that innovates with more diversity than we are comfortable with, to build relationships that can hold more confusion that we are comfortable with, so that we can develop solutions that will have effects that we can only imagine. \u00a0I don’t know any other way to develop the capacity, person by person, to survive the external transformations that are upon us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the plane to Minneapolis for 12 days of teaching, learning and co-creating with the Art of Hosting. \u00a0While I’m there, I’ll be working with the Bush Foundation, the Blue Cross\/Blue Shield Foundation of Minnesota, and 100 people who will be coming to an Art of Hosting from all around the state. \u00a0I’ll be deep in practice with my close friends and colleagues Jerry Nagel, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller and Ginny Belden-Charles among others. \u00a0It’s a busy 12 days, with only 1 day off, and so I’m thinking a lot about what I’m doing.   And as I was wandering …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[29,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-of-hosting","category-community"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piBp1-V8","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3542"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3543,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3542\/revisions\/3543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}