Category: Practice

The Longest Journey 

Last week we explored letting go.  Letting go of our sense of how things should be.  Letting go of our desire for a carefully ordered existence.  Letting go in order to take hold of the emergent new.  As Professor Bob Quinn reminds us: “Our ability to change is predicated on our ability to let go.”  But, letting go is just the first step.  With letting go comes the invitation to restore.

Restore | katartizo

My wound is my geography.  It is also my anchorage; my port of call.  

Pat Conroy

Our restoration as people and as a planet will not come without intention.  The polarization runs deep.  We remain divided.  As with letting go, restoration begins at the level of self with the healing of wounds.

Wounds.  Not simply the kind you see on the outside, rather the deep-inside kind.  The kind of wounds that Pat Conroy reflects on in the opening lines of his thinly disguised biography, The Prince of Tides: “My wound is my geography.  It is also my anchorage; my port of call.”  Growing up in an abusive household, the wounds ran deep.  Today, abuse on every level seems rampant.

Five Kinds of Trauma

A colleague of mine tells me that wounds are born of five kinds of trauma.  The wounds of:

• Withholding, that is, not getting what we need to be whole and healthy.  
• Aggression, receiving what we did not need in the form of physical abuse.  
• Loss, in the form death, illness and/or accident. 
• Betrayal, born of emotional abuse and manipulation.  
• Prolonged duress, as experienced in war, natural disaster, and situations of chronic stress.

Fault Lines

Our continuing political divide across the globe, the unremitting violence, the ever-deepening economic inequality, the increasing abuse against those who are different color and/or sexual orientation, the daily destruction of creation, and/or (you fill in the blank) reflects the heavy cost of trauma, post and present.   Daily there is relational fall-out, resulting from poor decisions made on every level.  Like aftershocks, social media increases fear and spreads distrust.  All the while, the fault lines are growing as we continue to respond with incremental “fixes” to circumstances that can only be addressed by restoring the soul of our integrity.

Hope

Yet, there is hope.  If geography is the study of the earth, then our wounds are the study of traumas that have shaped and formed us.  If we trace the geography of our wounds, they can become for us a source of healing and restoration; a foundation upon which to build.  It is then that we come to experience the paradoxical reality that wholeness can be born out of brokenness.  

There is danger, of course.  In our vulnerability, many prefer cut-off.  We ignore our wounds at great peril to self and community.  Rather than providing the means by which wholeness is sought, our wounds become an underground source of disruptive emotions and dysfunctional behaviors. In response, we over-focus on behaviors and emotions—sometimes our own, more often that of others—trying to manipulate, failing to address the root wound.   

Maps

Often, our need for healing is revealed in an unhealthy response to a life situation rooted in false beliefs.  We stay on the surface, never digging beneath the reactivity.  But, as poet and artist Jan Richardson reminds us: “Somewhere beneath our hungers are maps… there is a geography to our desires… our yearnings possess longitude and latitude… if we follow their lines, they can help us find our way.”

It is time to name the root wounds—our own, society’s and the planet—so that we can might begin to heal, at the level of self, family, community, nation and creation.  When we dare to name our wounds, we are released to experience truth and acceptance about ourselves and others.  With acceptance comes peace.  Just as Pat Conway’s wounds provided deep inspiration for his writing, so our wounds can and will provide inspiration for our leadership.  The koine Greek word for restore is katartizo.  It means to mend what is broken, to repair and restore.  It is also translated as equip, with the ethical intent of strengthening and making what one ought to be.  

With our restoration comes equipping for life.  When we dare to seek restoration, we find our choices emerge from a place of healing that neither reduces nor hides from the brokenness, but instead draws life from them.

Wholeness

In a time when many superficial voices speak, those who dare articulate the pain of the wounds intuit a way forward that offers healing and wholeness not just on an individual level, but also on a family, community and societal level.  If indeed, a large portion of our anxiety is tied to systemic challenges, then they must be addressed systemically, beginning at the level of self.  Our centralized structures were not built for our global world. 

Deep down, we know that we all have wounds in need of healing.  Put another way, we all got stuff.  I got stuff.  You got stuff.  How might our stuff serve as our port of call toward the flourishing of our communities?  How might we reclaim our agency?  Not in spite of the trauma, but through claiming the wholeness born of our brokenness.  Therein, lies the hidden gift.

Questions for Reflection

1. Are you able to name both ancestral and childhood wounds that have impacted who you are today?
2. What situations most easily trigger you?
3. Take some time to explore any possible connections between the two.

Practice: Tracing the Geography of Our Wounds

Wounds and roots, they go together.  One of my favorite desert wisdom sayings comes from Abba Poeman: The greater the hollow carved out in grief, the more room for joy to dwell therein.    The paradox of wounds is that out of our brokenness, can come healing when we claim the fullness of our stories.

This next week download and print out google maps of places where you have lived.  Create a collage and then grab some colored pens to annotate the journey.  As you trace the latitude and longitude of your life, what in you deserves the gift of restoration? 

Long ago, Dag Hammarskjöld noted that the longest journey is the journey inward.  Too often, we allow our outer life to distract us from the most important work we can do, the inner work that informs the whole of our lives.  It’s time to do that work for the soul of our leadership!  Will we repeat the past or commit to shaping a future out of the intersection of personal transformation,  innovation, and systemic change?  Join me for a seven-week journey of letting go to take hold.

Release | morphoo | Let Go!

You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the hour of the new clarity.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The image… the call to establish a community of Poets & Prophets… first came in 2012.  The early nudges expressed in a growing sense that I was no longer in the right seat on the bus.  By the time I wrote and presented a white paper on The Leader as Poet & Prophet in 2014, it was clear that I was entering into a season of disquiet.  A season in which I would have one foot in and one foot out of the institution.  It was time to nurture the poet and prophet within.

By their very calling, prophets are leaders who serve at the margins.  Shaped by the institution, prophets see the disconnect between the espoused mission and institutional survival.  But, the voice of the prophet alone is not enough.  It must be woven with the poet.  Many voices compete for our allegiance.  The poet helps us to remember who we are that we might reclaim the integrity of core identity, character and call.  Beyond the quick fix, beyond the individualization of our times, beyond the loss and pain born of deep change, nurturing the poet and prophet within releases a paradoxical hope for the future, in the face of deep loss.

The Future Must Enter You

Little did I know the prophetic truth of the poet’s words: “The future must enter you long before it happens.”  As with the stages of grief identified by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, I found myself first in denial that I would actually need to leave the institution.*  Couldn’t I do the work from within?  Hadn’t I earned the right?

Denial was followed by anger at the system for its failure to change.  Even as I understood that the system was set up to do exactly what it was created to do, I wanted the change without disruption to my own life.  Then came the negotiation.  I would (and did) design my own position description.  The problem, of course, is that tacit norms displaced core values every time.  Finally came the acceptance that I could not be faithful to the call to support leaders in growing up and waking up in spiritual maturity within the institution. 

Seen from the vantage point of today, I am bemused that I ever thought I could give birth to my images without first releasing my attachments.  Attachments to the very things I was challenging: power, privilege and position.  It was humbling to realize how much my identity was shaped by those three Ps.  I liked the power, I assumed the privilege, I was comfortable (even if unhappy) in the position.

A Series of Conversations

A series of conversations helped me to release into my present call:

• Anita Howard, soul friend, pressed me to name my call;
• Judi Neal, founder of Edgewalkers, helped me to locate my work at the margins;
• Janet Hagberg released me to focus my work with leaders and organizations “at the wall” (moving beyond the burden of ought self);
• Alicia Forde, introduced me to Movement Ecology (https://ayni.institute/movementecology/), helping me to understand how my work moves across three domains—personal transformation in my coaching; formation of alternative community with The Meetinghouse, home to Poets & Prophets; and deep systemic change through the Pivot Projects.

One by one, the wisdom of these women dismantled my defenses, challenged my unowned fear of failure, and blessed me into my present work.  There has been an unbundling and remixing that I could not have plotted or orchestrated.

Releasing Power, Privilege & Position

To fully engage the inward journey took releasing position, power and privilege.  It involved reconnecting soul with Source.  The gift is finding myself transformed, degree by degree.   There is a koiné Greek word that captures this soul movement.  The word is morphoo (mor-fo’-o) and it means the inward and real formation of the essential nature of a person.  

Our formation is akin to the growth of an embryo.  We are pregnant with more possibility than most of us can imagine.  A lifelong process, waking up and growing up involves not just learning about the spiritual life, but daring to connect soul with Source.   Like the hungry caterpillar in Eric Carle’s storybook, when we dare to surrender, amazing things begin to happen!

On a personal level, the journey has once again become my home.  I’m no longer destination bound.  Instead, I’m present to the invitation of each day.  With the letting go comes new an understanding of what it means to be, belong and become.  Do not fear the releasing which must precede the receiving.  

The hour of clarity will come… if you only dare let go!

Questions for Reflection

1. What invitation (or resistance) do you find in the poet’s words?
2. How are you being called to nurture the Poet & Prophet in yourself?
3. What might it mean for you to be transformed degree by degree?

Practice: Go for a Swing!

The problem is that to grow, to take the journeys on which our growth is predicated, we must confront our own immaturity, selfishness, and lack of courage.  In a sense, life is all about our forceful, often overpowering need to take journeys, yet our tendency is to grip the swings ever more tightly.  

Robert Quinn, Deep Change

As a child, I loved to swing as high as I could and then let go.  The sheer thrill of soaring through the air and then landing on the ground.   The release and the opportunity to begin again.  It led me to ponder when did I begin to grip the swings ever more tightly?  When did my own immaturity, selfishness, and lack of courage displace taking the journey?  

This next week find a swing set and reacquaint yourself with the experience of moving through the air. Perhaps your knees, like mine, can no longer handle the jump.  Simply, allow yourself to remember (or imagine for the first time) the exhilaration of letting go.  Name what your soul is inviting you to release that the future might to be born through you… and then let go!