A CONSCIOUS LIFE

WHAT IS A CONSCIOUS LIFE?
Since you are reading this it’s likely you are intentionally living a conscious life. But what does that mean and does it mean the same thing to each of us? I’ve been struck recently how, even among “like-minded people”, there are so many different ways of looking at things.

Diversity, uniqueness and individuality are what make a culture rich; finding points of connection, recognition and shared understanding give a feeling of belonging to something bigger than “me”; taking the time to acknowledge and embrace our differences is the compost which enables growth.

We may experience instant recognition when we meet someone new or have beautiful feelings of belonging when we join a new group, only to become disillusioned when we discover differences. Many of us have such a longing to find others who see like us, think like us, talk like us. Living a conscious life can feel quite lonely at times because it’s about being true to our inner being and that can involve breaking allegiances with any form of outer authority or restrictive rules and expectations. At times on the journey to authenticity we may need to separate from family, partners, friends and colleagues, simply to find out who we are as “myself alone”. To live a conscious life is to become a discoverer, an adventurer, an inventor, a pioneer. It means stepping out of the familiarity of consensus reality and into a present in which we’re guided only by the compass of our inner truth. It means becoming separated from the mainstream and finding ourselves in uncharted waters; exchanging certainty for navigation and invention.

Inquiry is a process of discovery
I’ve become more and more interested in the process of inquiry over the last few years. Inquiry is a wonderful tool for exploring. It allows and welcomes differences and starts from an attitude of curiosity. When I start from a place where I don’t know, there is room for expansion. I’m not trying to be right or prove a point but I’m wanting to discover something new. Asking questions requires openness and a willingness to listen and discover the answers. When we ask questions life becomes a process of revelation as the answers pop up everywhere and in anyone who crosses our path. We may start to feel there is an intelligence “out there” eager to answer and co-operate with us. Or is the intelligence “in here” and with intention we programme ourselves to notice and magnetise the information we need to take our next steps? Maybe both are true and revelation happens at the meeting place between inner and outer?

I’ve just finished reading “Broken Open” by Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute, and she says:
“ Everywhere we look we find accurate information and useful statistics about our most personal behavior. In fact there exists a brilliant feedback system that is working at all times, offering free information about how to – and how not to – function in our world. For every action we take reality leaves little messages about its wisdom or folly.

Chogyam Trungpa describes the message system like this: If you take steps to accomplish something that action will have a result – either failure or success... Trust is knowing that there will be a message. When you trust in those messages, the reflections of the phenomenal world, the world begins to seem like a bank, or reservoir , of richness. You feel that you are living in a rich world, one that never runs out of messages. Those messages are regarded neither as punishment nor as congratulations. You trust not in success, but in reality.”

Led by a bigger vision
To live a conscious life means to be led by a bigger vision for humanity; a healthier, whole, more compassionate and humane uniting vision for the way we can live together on Planet Earth. It means caring enough to be informed, being courageous enough to stay open to the complex mixed emotions which living at this time engenders, and being committed enough to take action for positive change.
When I was living in New Zealand I was fascinated by the early migrations, when people travelled great distances in their canoes, guided by the stars and carried by the tidal currents, until they came upon new lands. Perhaps that is what is happening now in this transitional time for humanity as we pioneers set out to invent a Whole New World?

For me, living a conscious life means being challenged by my human limitations as I fall short every day of my aspirations and fail to fully embody my values, then pick myself up, reset the intention and try again. It’s not about being perfect but learning to drop the judgements and turn on the loving kindness for self and others as we experiment and fumble and at times sparkle with magnificence.

It means giving priority to my state of conscious being, my state of presence, even when, particularly when, there is so much to do.

For me, it means knowing that whatever my circumstances I am one of the most privileged people in the world. I am free to choose. I am free to express myself. I am free to create the future.

Living consciously doesn’t make life easier; in some ways life becomes simpler, in others more complex. There are so many choices to be made, so many factors to consider - even in the simple act of choosing what to eat. To become more conscious is to become more responsible; to drop illusions is to see more clearly; to know is to move beyond the idea that there are individual solutions or places to escape, and to be obliged to act.

There are millions of us in the world awakening to this freedom and responsibility of becoming more conscious, and everywhere I go I meet people who are reaching out to connect with others who feel the same way. We are all looking for and creating our communities and joining our little lights into One Big Light that will circle the world and send out its healing empowering, visionary radiance.

The A CONSCIOUS LIFE PROGRAMME is starting NOW with an online community. For those who want to go deeper, Soul Cells will form in the UK at the end of January, in the US in February and in NZ in March. Based around the themes of the Consciousness Series e-books, we will explore:
Being Peace-in-Action
Living in Harmony with Nature
Exploring the New Consciousness and bringing it down to Earth
Creative Empowerment
A Soulful Life
Conscious Relationship as a Path to Wholeness

The series will:
Support you to connect with your own meaning, purpose, passion and inspired action as you face the challenges of living in our changing world.
Encourage you to commit to regular consciousness practices of your choice to maintain yourself in peaceful and creative states.
See www.awholenewworld.net/ebooksbuy.htm and www.awholenewworld.net/learning.htm

I am working with convenors in England to set up local groups and there are places available in a Women’s Soul Cell, to meet once a month on a teleconference call with me, Rose. If you are interested in convening a local group, joining the Women’s Soul Cell or receiving more information about UK, US or NZ programme please contact me NOW: rose@awholenewworld.net

TRANSFORMATION

polar bear on an ice floe
no tracks, no direction home
standing on the edge
certainty melting away

you can stand and wait
for reality to melt
or dive in
to the ocean of being
and swim
until you die

die to who you thought you were
die to limitation and separation
die to doubt and fear

swim into the One Being
melt into the One Love
surrender to the ocean
NOW
∞
I am the new born, without a shall

so soft and sensitive I can hardly bear to breathe.

I do not want to place a footprint on the virgin snow

nor flow into form to become fixed, held in, held down

I am the as yet to be, the coming solution

I am the next word you’ll hear, the next breath you’ll take

I am pointing to the future.

Yet I am soft, formless, so subtle, I am easily missed

you may mistake me for sadness, for loss, even for death

I seem like an absence

everything all emptied out, gone

I am a clear space for the breath of life

before words and thought

soft as a rose petal

formless as breath

Pure Love



I wrote this poem on New Year’s morning and it marks the end of three months in which I’ve been feeling the death of the old in me. The poem was inspired by a wonderful community brought together by Adela Rubio, 30 Days of Conscious Energy Shifts. http://selfcaremastery.com

THE CREATIVE PROCESS: CHAOS

How was your 2009? For most people I know it was a year in which there was a lot going on. For me it was a year of dedicated hard work, slow ox-like gains, opportunities disguised as sudden losses, and oases of soulful creative joy.

I started writing this a few days before the end of a six month visit to England, my birth country. Sometimes during those six months I lost touch with the human being I had become and regressed to human doingness. This was my own personal form of chaos and a reflection of the collective chaos and driven-ness I see all around me. As our planetary crisis becomes more evident I see several trends of behavior: some go deeper into denial and run themselves ragged trying to avoid their feelings, some work harder and harder trying to maintain the status quo and keep their lives functioning, and some work harder and harder in an attempt to avert disaster and create something new. I’m sure there are other options but whatever choice we make the result is stress. The Earth herself is stressed and we are all connected with the energy of the Earth, so to be anything other than stressed right now would be superhuman or out of touch. The best we can do is learn to manage stress and not take it too personally.

Back in the late ‘80’s and early 90’s when I was practicing as a Gestalt therapist and leading lots of workshops and trainings, I discovered Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms, a dance practice which explores the rhythms of the creative process or the rhythms of life: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. A 30 minute dance work-out moving through the rhythms gets the creative flow going and brings awareness into any resistances and stuck energy.

I used to love the point of abandonment and ecstasy when the rhythm of the dance raced ahead of the mind and the life force danced me. I became the dance rather than doing the dance. The root of ecstasy is ex-stasis, to be beside oneself, to get out of yourself, or over yourself. This is chaos. In chaos we let go of the fragments we’re holding together and trust that when they settle they will fall in an orderly way, maybe even in a higher order. Chaos destroys in order to remake and there is always an opportunity to remake consciously in a new way once the dust has settled.

As I was driving in my hired car from middle England to Northern England I listened to a cd by Caroline Myss, called Spiritual Madness (published by Sounds True). She talks of chaos as the bringer of change and how necessary it is to live with chaos and not resist it. Oftentimes when we find our spiritual path we hope our spiritual practice will help us to control life. Maybe, if I meditate every day I will become calmer, sweeter, more loving; that’s what happens to spiritual people isn’t it? Doesn’t spirituality make us nicer?

The way of the mystics is not to seek to control life but to allow oneself to be broken open by it. It is the way of surrender. We have to be prepared to let go and surrender to the bigger energy that is pulsing and dancing us: the energy of chaos.
The value of chaos is that it cannot be controlled; it is a bigger energy than us. When we try to resist or fight it, chaos bends and ultimately breaks us. It is the energy of Kali, of Shiva, destroying in order to rebuild. Chaos carries the opportunity within the crisis; the gift of transformation.

Nature is an energy bigger than us. Scientists, industrialists, capitalists and politicians have done their best to dominate and control nature. I hope they never succeed. I value wildness and being part of a world in which I know there are forces outside my control. I don’t want to live in a controlled and sanitized world in which every apple is the same size, every fish has been farmed by humans and even the trees are cloned.

I was listening to Caroline Myss speaking about spiritual madness as I was driving up to Cockermouth, the small town on the edge of the Lake District, which was recently badly flooded when rain fell in a deluge and the Rivers Cocker and Derwent burst their banks and poured through the streets, blasting through doors and windows, destroying homes and livelihoods, devastating farmland; altogether a catastrophe. Where’s the opportunity here?

There is an opportunity in loss. We humans are comfort loving creatures. We define ourselves by our comforts: our things and we use our comforts to separate ourselves from others and mark out our own little private space. We all need comfort at times; life can be tough and demanding. Yet comfort can be the compensation we take in exchange for giving up our freedom. We identify with our comforts and become bound by them.

When life rips away who and what we love and comfort ourselves with, there is an opening; what Eckhart Tolle calls a portal. Whether the door is ripped off its hinges or gently and silently swings open, we have the chance to walk through into a bigger space, a more expansive and inclusive identity. Whether we lose a loved one, a job, a fortune or a cherished belief or illusion, we are rendered vulnerable, and in our vulnerability we are more open for change. I saw this openness and vulnerability in my father after my mother’s death, in my best friend Woods when he was preparing for major heart surgery earlier this year, in my community in Nelson NZ when we received the news of 9:11. There is an opening, a portal, an opportunity for transformation but the door always closes again and, if we don’t choose the transformation, habit and comfort move back in, the old order is restored and life goes on “as normal.” We have to be ready and willing to walk through the door without any thoughts, plans or expectations but with a willingness to invent and discover in the now.

In David Attenborough’s stunningly beautiful “Life” series, (published on DVD by BBC Earth)there is a scene of thousands of crabs scuttling across the seabed, shedding their shells. Having outgrown their shell they have no choice but to risk for a while being soft and vulnerable to predators, until they grow a new one. We humans are the same aren’t we?. We build shells around us to protect ourselves from the chaos of life. Some of these shells are habits like smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, watching tv, playing computer games, shopping, over working, whatever keeps other people at bay. We try to make our homes havens of order; we make rules or live alone, whatever it takes to escape from the chaos of life. But if we are lucky the flood of life finds us in the end and the world spins, like the world of the dancing dervish, and we are left disoriented and pointed in a new direction.

This is chaos

The purpose of the spiritual path is not to avoid chaos but to allow ourselves to be moulded by the movement of this bigger-than-us river of life. The flood strips away outworn illusions, carries away chunks of ego, dissolves who we thought we were and where we thought we were going. It stops us in our tracks and suspends us, like the Hanged Man or Inanna hung on her peg, we are forced to question anew and more deeply: Who am I? What is the most important thing for me to do here and now? What are my priorities? What is trying to emerge here? How can I best serve this emergency?

And when the river of chaos flows through a community what happens to those who are dispossessed? Who is responsible for them? Who takes them in? Who turns a blind eye and clings more tightly to order? Where are the boundaries of our communities? Are those people and animals now starving in Africa and Bangladesh and Peru and Russia and Alaska as a result of climate change, part of our community? Are we responsible for them and if so, how?

Collectively we are in the chaos of global crisis now. It is a portal to a larger identity, to recognizing the essential interconnectedness of life and becoming One Global Family. Chaos is the Great Leveler. Life is bigger than us, it breaks us open, teaches us to surrender and how to serve and co-create.

After the chaos, comes the sweetness of the lyrical and the profound simplicity of stillness. I hope your Holy days are bringing you some of these fruits.

Finally, at the starting line

Finally, at the starting line

Finally, we’re ready to launch A Whole New World. It’s been a long journey and, after three and a half years focused work, here we are at the starting line. Anyone who’s been involved in developing a similar project, transitioning from the old values to the new, will know how long it takes to bring a vision into manifestation and how much it’s a process of experimentation and feeling ones way step by intuitive step into the unknown.

But here we are: we have our website ready, our first series of six conscious e-books, three full-length soulful books and an exciting pilot programme poised to be a catalyst for developing Soul Cells or small local learning communities, linked up nationally and globally.

I’ve become very interested in grass roots community empowerment and how people change the world from the inside out, with shifts of consciousness happening alongside inspired action and heaps of experiential learning. Through the process of writing, Living your Passion: How love-in-action is seeding a Whole New World, I realized the innovative people I was interviewing in New Zealand represent the new emerging global culture of peace and unity. I became convinced that providing inspiring role models and linking up all the little lights into one big light, is an important part of my mission and Woods Elliott and other soul friends, were right alongside me encouraging me on.

For those of you who are interested in how life themes and passions develop into soul work, or our life’s mission, on the About Us page of the website, Woods and I have identified some of the life threads that have woven into the fabric of A Whole New World: www.awholenewworld.net/aboutus.htm In the free sampler, 8=1, HOW THE PILLARS OF TRANSFORMATION CREATE UNITY IN A WHOLE NEW WORLD, I identify more than thirty conscious decisions and actions that contribute to living a life with passion, purpose and meaning.

Here are some of them:
Open new dimensions of being.
It’s always difficult to know where and when a story starts but one starting place for me was in 1983 when I left a full time job in adult education to give myself time to write. I had fallen in love with poetry and was working on a long poem which was coming from very deep inside me. I was experiencing tension between the educational work I loved and the intense excitement of discovering the inner life for the first time. A whole new dimension of my being had opened up and it was very compelling. Later I came to understand this as the emergence of the spiritual dimension within me but at the time I didn’t have this understanding and writing poetry was the only way I was able to access and express these new experiences and contain the intense energy of this spiritual opening.

Leap into the unknown
Although I left my job in order to write, it didn’t turn out as I’d expected. I soon realized I needed to eat and keep a roof over my head and poetry couldn’t support me in that way. So I started working freelance as a personal and professional development trainer and went on to create my own business, which included being paid to write training materials in group leadership. When I took the leap from the security of the monthly pay check, I had to learn how to steer my own course according to my own creative rhythms and support myself financially at the same time. I had a lot to learn! It’s been a challenging, evolving process ever since and I love the freedom of it.

Follow your creative process
In 1992, I took a second leap when I made the conscious decision to follow my creative process wherever it led me. Despite everything I had achieved I felt empty, so I left my business, my psychotherapy practice, and my home and set off first to the North West Highlands of Scotland, and then to New Zealand on a soul journey adventure which has lasted for fourteen years and is ongoing. I soon realized following my passion, or my creative process, means allowing my unique path to unfold and being willing to go with it, even when it seems totally irrational or doesn’t make any sense in terms of material security. This has led to much learning and strengthening of my spirit as I’ve had to face the challenges of living such an uncompromising life. Over the years as my purpose here on earth has become more and more clear to me, I have found I am unwilling and unable to compromise this purpose; life seems far too short and the urge to evolve is compelling.

Find a consciousness practice to support you
The inspirational phase of the creative process calls us to flow with it, either as an inner journey from the safety of home, or as a physical life adventure. This can feel risky at times, whether the risk is leaving physical comfort behind, or dropping a belief system and entering the unknown. I’ve had to learn how to support myself through the fear and resistances which are a normal part of creative unfolding. Adopting various forms of consciousness practice such as meditation and journal writing has been an essential support for this.

Fall in love with your destiny and embrace it wholeheartedly.
When I left Scotland I intended to stay in New Zealand for four months, then return to join a new business but I fell in love with the beauty of the South Island, with the people, and with the way of life, and stayed for twelve years. New Zealand is a natural soul sanctuary and during my time there my spiritual journey deepened. After some adventures, including a Peace Walk around the South Island, and an experience of living in intentional community, I settled in Nelson and took a job teaching counselling theory and practice. This was perfect for me at the time; it enabled me to consolidate my psychotherapeutic experience, extend my teaching skills and make a contribution to the community. It supported me to get residency in New Zealand as well. Later on a friend came along and helped me to buy a house, so I became quite settled for a few years.

To find out more,if you haven’t downloaded your free sampler yet go to: http://www.awholenewworld.net/books.htm and you will find a download box under Living your Passion.

Conscious Eating 2

It was all over the Times that we should “Give up eating meat to save the planet”. Who knows maybe in twenty years it will be as socially unacceptable to eat meat as it is now to smoke cigarettes.

A few years ago I followed a “blood type” diet for a while. (see www.dadamo.com). I’m an A: a natural vegetarian and prefer to graze on fruit and nuts; meat feels heavy and hard to digest to me. For others, I know it is different. A few years ago I was running a soul retreat in an out of the way beauty spot and we had neglected to tell people we would be having a very simple vegetarian diet. After two days one of the men was desperate and drove a 50 mile round trip on unmade roads to forage for meat, he felt starved without it. So I acknowledge there are some people whose bodies need meat more than others.

But before I go further into meat production and the real cost of eating meat I’m going to report a little of my shopping adventures following my awareness being raised about the parlous state of fish. Right now, I’m staying with my father, the nearest shops are a mile and a half away and neither of us has a car. This makes sourcing local food difficult and the easiest way to shop is a once a week visit to the supermarket via community transport. Recently I visited a couple of small towns in the north of England and I noticed how refreshing it was to find small local food shops in the main street. It’s so unusual these days. Shopping in most towns in the UK or North America you’d think people really do live on air or the occasional vitamin pill. There’s no food in sight. The supermarket is convenient if you have a car.

So I decided to look at the fish and see where and how they had been caught before purchasing. I fancied a kipper. If they had been caught on line I would have bought a couple of kippers because at least line fishing seems to give the fish a chance. But it said: line fishing, seine fishing and trawling. Did trawling mean deep sea trawling, the kind where they destroy the sea bed? I didn’t know so I gave up on the kipper and went to look at the meat for my carnivorous father. I can’t bring myself to cook beef or pork, these big animals seem so close to us it’s almost like cannibalism, so I chose some lamb shanks to make a nice warming lamb stew. After all, I reasoned, sheep don’t generate as much methane as cows do they? Wrong. Here’s some facts, hot and steamy from the Times:

With the highest carbon footprint of all UK foods, lamb creates 17kg of Co2 for every kilo of product as compared to potatoes which creates 450gms of CO2 per 1 kilo. Flatulent farm animals create 14% of global emissions of methane.
The biggest meat eaters in the world – you’re right, the Americans, consume on average 123 kg of meat a year, as compared to Indians who eat an average of 3kg, or Japanese who tend to use meat as a flavor enhancer treat and eat only, 40kg a year average.

67% of the world’s agricultural land is given over to raising livestock. Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gas. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.
Meat production is also responsible for the destruction of forest land for cattle raising and for animal feeds such as soy. It takes 7lbs of grain to produce 1kg of beef.

A typical UK diet including animal products providing 38%of calories requires 0.195 hectares of land and 535,000 litres of water. A vegan diet requires 0.065 hectares and 140,000 litres of water.

So what to do?

Becoming more conscious about the way we eat does require more effort. Fast foods and convenience foods are not called that for nothing. Barbara Kingsolver in a wonderful book called, “Animal, vegetable, miracle”, about how she and her family learned to eat consciously tells how big agri-business turns convenience foods into profit with obesity a by-product:
“...70% of all our Midwestern agricultural land shifted gradually into single crop or soybean farms, each one of them now, on average, the size of Manhattan. Owing to synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, genetic modification, and a conversion of farming from a naturally based to a highly mechanized production system, us farmers now produce 3900 calories per us citizen today. That is twice what we need and 700 calories a day more than we grew in 1980......Most of those calories enter our mouths in forms hardly recognizable as corn and soybeans... if every product containing corn or soybeans were removed from your grocery store, it would look more like a hardware store...”

The more I delve into the machinations of the food industry, the more it starts to make a lot of sense to:

Eat less meat and animal products.
Buy local and in season.
Cut down on air freighted food and packaging.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with conscious eating. Please leave a message on the blog.
Rose

Conscious Eating

I watched a film last night called “The End of the Line” about the so-called fishing industry. Industry is much too noble a term for the mass slaughter that is happening in our seas.

I actually watched half the movie and at the end of the first hour I turned it off and went to bed, partly because I was tired but also to escape from the unrelenting distress of watching wild creatures such as the magnificent bluefin tuna being brutally predated and massacred to the point of near extinction. Grieving as I am now I wish I had been brave enough to watch the whole movie. I’d rather know the horrible truth, at least then I can make conscious choices.

I awoke early this morning with a mixture of emotions. Grief is the over-riding feeling but I also feel shame. I am ashamed to be part of a species that can behave with such unlimited cruelty motivated only by greed, and I am ashamed at my own unconsciousness in relation to the food I take into my body and make part of me. When people ask me if I am a vegetarian I say, “more or less, I eat a little fish and chicken”, Now I realize that’s like saying I’m more or less conscious. It won’t do any more. I need to know where every item of food I buy and eat has come from and who and what has been exploited by bringing this food to my table. For of course it is not only the animals that suffer. The hi-tech fishing fleets in which the fish literally don’t have a chance and are scooped up by the ton and thrown dead overboard if they are not the “right” ones, also destroy the livelihoods of the traditional fishermen such as those in western Africa, whose communities depend on the fish for survival. This is another story of the multi-national corporations such as Mitsubishi destroying both the eco-system and indigenous culture for the sake of their own fat profits.

If the fishing continues in this way they say the seas will be dead within thirty years. After seeing what I saw last night I think that is a conservative estimate and it will be sooner.

What does it mean the seas will be dead?

I feel sick in my stomach as I contemplate this. The cod which once were abundant in Nova Scotia are now all but gone. Even though the fishing was stopped in the 1980’s the cod have not replenished. The movie spoke of this as being a “soul loss” for the fishermen whose livelihoods have gone. That’s’ how it feels to me too. The mass wiping out of bio-diversity; the destruction of sustainable eco-systems; the slaughter of wild life; the vanishing of all the beauty and mystery that other species bring, is sacrilege; an offence against the sacred; against life.

All I want to say is, I am so, so sorry. But this is not enough. It is not enough to break and destroy and rape and pillage and then to be sorry.

I know I must change my habits regarding food and I know this is going to take effort because I will have to do some research. There’s a certain sacrifice involved because now I’m aware I don’t think I can eat fish again and I’ve always loved to eat fish; it has been one of the great pleasures of life for me. And it means I’m going to have to stop being in denial and pretending that eating one battery hen here and there doesn’t really matter. And I will have to pay more for my food because organic, locally sourced, sustainably farmed, fair trade food is often more expensive, yet still doesn’t reflect anywhere near the real price of food which in so many cases, like the killing of the seas, doesn’t have a dollar value.

In short I will have to make more effort, take less for granted and sacrifice my own little wants and appetites.

But even this effort seems a pitifully small contribution in the face of the catastrophes we’re facing. This is one occasion where I am tempted to think, well what difference will it make if I eat haddock or wild salmon or tuna once a week? I am brought up against one of my key beliefs, that one individual making conscious choices can make a difference. I have never been a lobbyist; I have little faith in the political system and have not seen that as my work. My only hope as a writer is to touch your heart and to remind you to keep feeling. I know if you are reading this it is because your heart has already been touched by the plight of the natural world. But I want to remind us all not to forget, not to numb ourselves from the pain and turn away because it is too much and we would rather have fun and be positive. This is happening to our world, this is real, the seas are part of us as we are part of the seas. If the seas are being killed off, we are being killed off. If our brothers and sisters in Senegal are losing their livelihoods, then so too will we.

What can we do?

Go to: www.endoftheline.com for information about sustainable fishing, campaigning and the movie.
www.fairtrade.org.uk is a Uk based foundation for protecting fair trade. Is there an equivalent in your country outside the UK?
www.peopleandplanet.org is a UK based student action site for world poverty, human rights and the environment.

What will happen tomorrow?

June 6th 2009



I’m here in Yorkshire at the Oasis School of Human Relations for three months, where I’m going to be participating in an inquiry into the workplace of tomorrow.

This week I was at Oasis everyday; the first time for several years I have been in any workplace for a full week. I felt very welcomed and in many ways at home with the directors and staff as we worked together as a team to prepare everything needed for the first groups to begin the inquiry next week.

At the same time it was quite a jolt to go from my inner oriented life as a writer studying consciousness to this outward orientation; and from practicing presence to contemplating the future.

How do you feel when you think about the future? Do you think about it? And if so, do you think about it in any detail? Over the week as we talked about how the half day sessions are going to be structured, and practiced some of the processes, I was struck by how much our individual projections into the future are coloured by our subjective perceptions and how ill prepared most of us are for what may come.

A personal example of this unpreparedness is how aging has suddenly caught up with me. Until six months ago when I injured my knee I didn’t feel old and I never gave getting older a thought, now here it is creeping up on me and I am totally unprepared. When considering the life of an organization, although there was a lot of recognition that the implications of climate change and planetary responsibility should be top of the priorities list, in actual fact short term goals and survival occupied the majority of people’s efforts. When we multiply these two admissions of short sightedness by several billion, we start to get the picture of just how many heads are being buried in the sand in our world. And how few concessions are being made in the face of the collective problems we face.

I know if some of my more positive friends were here right now they would be telling me it’s all perfect and we just have to open our hearts and trust. Hm. That place of trust is a very beautiful place to be and I love to be there, yet trust without action isn’t enough. “Trust in Allah, but tether your camel” the old saying goes. But where is my camel and where should I tether it?

I don’t think I am the only one confused. In the workplace the bits of paper fly around and everyone keeps super busy and I bury my head in the next e-book about consciousness and wish that the future would go away….

One good piece of news though. I’ve been watching some nature programs on tv. (British tv still has two channels without advertising, so it’s actually bearable to watch.) And the rivers here, which were badly polluted, have been regenerated, so much so that wild otters and beavers have been re-introduced and are now swimming with grace and joy amidst all the other wildlife enjoying the spring. This is good news and it makes me happy.

As I reflect on this week I realize I have two wishes for my own future, one is to be able to sink my roots deep into community and lasting relationship, and the other is to know that I’ve made a difference. Making a difference doesn’t have to be a big thing or heroic, it can be noticing when someone does a good job, or doing any of those hundred little things that make another person feel valued. I think that’s where I’m going to set my sights this week. Have a good one!

Rose