Occupy Movement

I've been seeing people making statements around a "lack of direction","lack of focus", or "lack of a plan" of the occupiers and must state that this is not true.

Why are people coming together in this historic movement and moving us all forward?  Because there is an overwhelming consensus that we, the people, have been and are being and without intervention will continue to be exploited, imprisoned, abused, and abandoned by the dominant culture.

It's not true that they don't have a goal.  It's actually been clearly defined as starting the conversation.

Our world is full of problems,  like poverty, inequity, suicide, and environmental destruction.  It's vitally important to point out that government and big business have no idea how to solve these problems but you'll never hear that from them.  The occupiers may not know how to solve these problems,  but they do admit that,  and they want to have a conversation about it so that we can find solutions together.

As Peter Senge said in The Fifth Discipline:  "'Don't Know' is the heart of joining together to learn and co-create."

The Power of Disbelief

 “ Re-examine all you’ve been told, dismiss what insults your soul.”- Walt Whitman

It doesn’t cease to amaze me how beliefs hold people captive, and conversely, how people hold beliefs captive. There’s a flavor of fear of the unknown, or should I say the known. What would truly transpire if people suspended their endeared beliefs and risked knowing something different?

Beliefs are interestingly generated in families and society based on hearsay, dominant ideology, conditioning, and social control. Through classical and contemporary literature, film, and other cultural media in society we can see the construct of the hero and the villain. And so, in our families there’s a tendency towards a similar narrative. The question is, who holds the conch?

Who holds the dominant narrative, and who are the heroes and the villains in your family? And who has the power to say so? Who has permission to emote? What emotions are acceptable? Which aren’t? Who gets to decide? Who gets all the space in the family? Who gets none?

A desire for security plays a central role in shaping peoples perceptions as does a basic need for survival. One does not preclude the other. We depend on the people around us to ensure our survival as we grow from being babies. The beliefs of the people around us are beliefs we often assume for ourselves, out of necessity, survival. However, as we emerge into adulthood—a re-evaluation of what we’ve been told is relevant.

In my own understanding of how narrative works I see that people seem to prefer to believe something that isn’t true simply because it’s easier rather than to experience the discomfort of knowing they’ve been mistaken. To be mistaken can lead to change, and change leads to discomfort— threatening the status quo.

Functionally, our society is limited in its capacity, ability and willingness for wellness, wholeness, and inclusion—that is not to say that a drive for healing does not exist- it’s omnipresent—inherent in the fabric of our lives. Generational issues are manifest and people are lost in a sea of beliefs, buoyant on the status quo, rejecting growth and a progressive narrative driven by the principles of love, inclusion, acceptance; healing, balance, awakening, renewal and consciousness.

In experiencing my own family- I’ve seen the functional limitations of who gets to define the family and the role of the status quo in defining the narrative. Power dynamics inherent in who holds the conch and defines the narrative astounds me. How the status quo insists in maintaining itself, yet how this drive for healing and renewal persists in itself.

Our people are a sick organism living in a toxic habitat. And families, being the microcosm of this toxic habitat are susceptible to this chronic dysfunction of the macrocosm.  Where families should be a place of renewal, regeneration, community, acceptance, respite, and growth, we all too often have ongoing conflict, toxicity, gossip and hearsay.

Knowing, based on experience is where our power is, and truly where our hearts are. Examining all one’s been told. Defining one’s own narrative. There-in lies the capacity for growth, healing, renewal, and the story of one’s life. Regenerate, a new generation—let’s start now.

Evolution Resolution

A new year. There is something so powerful and momentous about this time. Fresh in its promise of new choices and opportunities to do the right thing. I'm not one to make resolutions; from my experience personally and socially, resolutions are often strict and judgemental, and I don't particularily respond very well to that type of system. Instead I'm relishing in the freshness and promise of a new year, in its simplicity, sacredness, and fullness of promise.

Being things I want to work on, I know what they are; with that I am gifting myself of grace, knowing that everything works out in its time. Granted, what I focus my intention on expands, so my responsibility is to stay focused on my potential.

I don't spend money on this enterprise, but am enriched by the resource of spirit. I think I can accurately reflect that New Year's resolutions can often require financial resources in dominant, mainstream society of the resolver, issuing bundles of bills to big business for the promise of a better self. Accumulatively, so much money spent on the application of a potential band-aid approach to something that oftentimes needs TLC; and it requires a judgemental, superfical asthetic to a longstanding, deeper wound. Something a stricter resolution (this time!) will not promise to fix, and can alternately serve to exacerbate. 

Recognizing the necessary flexibility to navigate this life course, choosing a much friendlier and economically sound approach in how I "deal with myself",  inspires empathy and nurturing in how I approach and reproach myself. In my experience, compassion relieves a host of "problems".

Our len's colored by the world we live in, I reflect on the words of the Talmud, "We see things not as they are, but as we are." Principally, this reflects my worldview in that practicing conscious awareness lends itself  to evolving in a way that humanistically supports my growth. Pivoting from various standpoints I can see that we are much more than we often limit ourselves to be, and/or are limited by the various sociological constructs in dominant mainstream society.

This new year, I want to say, "Yes!" to change, and growth at my own pace, with the right timing, whilst nurturing, compassion, acceptance, and love be my guiding pinciples. Resolving to focus on the potential that this attitude manifests, subsequently leaves me with abundance of spirit and monetary resources. Here's to doing the right thing. Cheers!

The Healing Path

Healing is mandatory if one wants to live a good, productive life in the vein of fulfilling one's potential; to be potent, after all, is to be filled with something effective, isn't it? The concept of healing, in our society, has been dominated by western science and those in positions of power. Personal experience and accumulated knowledge (through the process of discerning information) has led to me to a very basic, intuitive path. But one that requires discipline, rigorous honesty, and reflection in the face of more humanistic, holistic values.

I've come to accept that it's very natural and indeed an innate capacity to want to heal ourselves, to become whole, into our natural state. A natural capacity and automatic survival system also exists within us to deny our experience if it is deemed as being too overwhleming. Make no mistake about it, denial is very effective to the capacity that it serves as self preservation, however, it's not our natural state, to live in fear. Healing and denial are co-authors in this thing called life, each serving a purpose, but ultimately our natural state is to be whole, healthy, and happy.

It seems then, with this understanding, that our society structurally and foundationally lacks elements of a whole, healthy, and happy people. A sick organism at best, is what we currently have. The status quo has it that healing is for sick people, I would agree with this conception, but, I would include the organism in it's entirety. We really can't separate one from the other, can we? We are all people at the end of the day. Tiny, essential fragments in this entire existance of one. While healing has been mandatory, it certainly hasn't been guided by spirit in dominant, meanstream culture. In fact, traditional ways of knowing and healing have been relegated to the margins of society having been demonized by the church and imperial powers and thusly legally sanctioned.

Pathology is a big business in our society, being labelled as inferior in terms of emotional fitness to this society. To this society? I mean, can it really be the barometer of good health and emotional fitness? Our society is so... sick. People are being symptomatic of the systematic. Granted, there are some who can adjust better than others. People with humanistic principles and who value integrity have a particularly difficult time adjusting, and without proper supports and a holistic understanding and ideology in which to secure oneself, it is quite easy to slip through the cracks of a flawed, fractured system. Deeper into the confines of a society that doesn't care about you. It only cares about your market value. How sick is that? And how anxiety provoking?

Breaching adulthood with a less than enriching childhood (which is all to common a story) left with little to fend for myself and encouraged by the status quo to go out there, into the big, wide world, grab life by the horns and pay my taxes. Once I understood just how flawed our society was, I knew I couldn't endure the pretention, and from there, I knew I would have a difficult time adjusting. I just didn't want to play the game that I saw the majority of my peers and the dominant majority in society playing. I simply questioned things and challenged the existing status quo. Healing has been mandatory to accurately reflect this lived experience.

This healing journey hasn't come without its share of hard knocks and feelings of intense loneliness and brokenness, but, as I put the pieces of my life together and create meaning from my experience, a new story emerges, a story co-authored with the universe, moving in harmony and complete synchronicity, if I let it. In the words of Jane Rubietta, "Anger is natural. Grief is appropriate. Healing is mandatory. Restoration is possible." Here's to restoration and all the possibility that brings.

The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,.
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

Love in Action

As I begin my journey with yet another group of people in another aspect of my life, I am reminded of just how vulnerable we are as people in society in general, to wanting other people to think we are a somebody. This somebody influenced by the people around you. We want to be seen in a good light, approved of, as a part of. The alternative being death. As social animals we need eachother but not in the way we think we do, not in the way we largely should. The resulting persona stuffed with insecurities based on the faulty premise that we are not enough as we are, as we are inately made, inately born to abide in love.

I find it interesting that there are two aspects to how we refer to ourselves, have you ever noticed that? You know, those moments where we say something about ourselves? Who is that self? There are two selves that we are aware of, that we have distinct impressions of. These aspects of ourselves compete for eachother's attention, and for other peoples attention. Our authentic self hovers every so presently beneath our public persona. A persona we are forced to wear by the spoken and unspoken standards and values of this society. The implicit and explicit rules, essentially. And I know you know what I mean.

How many times have you met someone in your life and walked away with the distinct impression of a bad feeling, our direct experience based on a very intuitive reading that resonates on the principle of truth abiding. Abiding in truth brings with it the reward of having a good barometer and the added boon of being authentic. It is available at any moment, in any interaction where you are not feeling respected in your dialogue. The natural impulse to be ourselves is always there, always in spirit. The carving out of the niche of being ourselves begins with a very authentic first step, and this can disrupt our lives as we lose balance with who we have been for so long, who we think, and have been told we should be, and (we think) we are. Fear of rejection, setting the precendent of dominant group-think behaviours, over guided, responsible, independent, principled behaviour. And what we have is a dominant society of fearful people pleasers; where leadership is severely lacking.

We have a society fundamentally, foundationally, and functionally based on the make you/break you concepts of acceptance or rejection, looking to external influence more often than not, and finding ourselves acting in familiar, fearful behaviour. The behaviour we told ourselves we had put an end to; or conversly, behaviour we are trying to prove ourselves right in. Either way, we are left feeling insecure, afraid we are not enough as we are, essentially, we are afraid of love.

True leadership requires independent, principled behaviour based on the values of love with the option of an evolving, authentic, life changing existence. Conversely, being a people pleaser, one never gets to fulfill their actual potential, one only gets to fulfill the expectations of others. It validates them, not you. To be a true leader takes courage, the courage to change. To be courageous requires evolving and taking the initiative to teach people how to treat you (validating your authentic self) as opposed to the people pleasing behaviour of fulfilling others expectations (validating their persona). In the words of Shakespeare, "God has given you one face, and you make yourself another." I would have to agree with Shakespear's essential point, however I would add to this the very real context of our social conditioning, forsaking our true selves to be accepted.  Be a leader, be independent; god is love, love is god, be yourself. We need you.

The best Gift is Presence?

Being fearful seems to be a normal state of being in this society, whether people are generally conscious of this or not, I don't know. I'm inclined to say, I don't think so. Bodies contorted and minds congealed, nerve wracked people waiting for the potential next turn of phrase, vehicle horn, emergency siren, demands from a boss. These are just a few examples. Discussion on my periphery seems to consist largely of symptoms of being disgruntled, overworked, overstressed, and generally anywhere but in the moment. I like to say that people are being symptomatic of the systematic.

I walk along and think that people are missing the point of their lives. But I don't blame people purely out of ignorance or lack of awareness (which I have found many new age spiritual dogmas to teach), I think that hegemonic forces are largely responsible for the general malaise and expression of frustration I hear in the discussion being presented by people relegated mainly to the working classes, and the poor. Though the rich too have their qualms, of course. The topic of these classes I mention mainly centering around money, and what has been done by it, what needs to be done by it, and who gets what, where, when, and how. How monotonous, boring, exhausting, and in the last analysis, all important.

The majority seem to be planning for the future just to get past the present, well, you know, being in the present just seems to bring more of it. And for many, being in the present is a very painful, real, burdensome place. I have to wonder at the cost of not being in the present, in our bodies; and the actual consequences to our overall sense of wellness and experience of wholeness as beings with purpose in our lives. The latter being a privileged thought and possibility for the more free agents in the world.

My point being that I think the experience of being disembodied as a coping mechanism can bring with it temporary relief, inspired by automatic survival instincts, but the purpose likely is not intended to bring with it, long term satisfaction, nor the experience of being home in one's body. I wonder how the physical body, with all its ability (some more than others obviously) could create, unencumbered by poverty and social stratifications as a result of this hegemony. It's been said that, "Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present."(Alice Morse Earle) I think I'm going to go dance.