Authentic Leadership

"While you are proclaiming peace with your lips,
be careful to have it even more fully in your heart."

St. Francis of Assisi

 

"So if we are going to find lasting solutions to difficult conflicts or external wars we find ourselves in, 

we first need to find our way out of the internal wars that are poisoning our thoughts, feelings, and attitudes toward others. 

If we can't put an end to the violence within us,
there is no hope for putting an end to the violence without."

 
Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict

www.wisdomatwork.com

Dale Johnson   www.dpreview.com

Proper Role of the Ego

     “The ego is like a donkey.
      We want to ride the ego.
      We want to train the ego as our servant, rather than the petty tyrant within.” 

                         as told by a Sufi master to Cassandra Vieten                      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj-787otXnY

Public Gardens, Halifax, NS, Canada

 

What Are We Doing With Vital Energy?

     “He was an old man, wore old man’s clothes, a flannel shirt and old man’s trousers, slippers and a hat, and had an old man’s gait, yet there was nothing old man-ish about him, such as there was with my grandfather or my father’s uncle, Alf; on the contrary, when he suddenly opened up to us and wanted to show us things, it was in a kind of artless childlike way, infinitely friendly, but also infinitely vulnerable, the way a boy without friends might behave when someone showed some interest in him, one might imagine, unthinkable in the case of my grandfather or Alf, it must have been at least sixty years since they had opened up to anyone like that, if indeed they ever had. But no, Haugue hadn’t really opened himself to us, it was more as if it had been his natural self which his rejection had been protecting when we arrived. I saw something I didn’t want to see because the person showing us was unaware of how it looked. He was more than eighty years old, but nothing in him had died or calcified, which actually makes life far too painful to live, that’s what I think now. At the time it just made me feel uneasy.”
       Karl Ove Knausgaard. “A Death in the Family. My Struggle: Book 1.” Vintage Books, London, 2014.


     We bury so much difficult-to-understand, liminal energy in our bodies, causing us to harden, stiffen, & die well before we're buried. This feared & banished energy is the very stuff of life, growth, learning, evolution. What wasted opportunity!

 

Public Gardens, Halifax, NS, Canada

Authentic Leadership Required

     "A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to project on other people his or her shadow or his or her light. 
     A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being-conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. 
     A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside him or her self, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.

      The problem is that people rise to leadership in our society by a tendency towards extroversion, which means a tendency to ignore what is going on inside themselves. Leaders rise to power in our society by operating very competently and effectively in the external world, sometimes at the cost of internal awareness.
      I've looked at some training programs for leaders. I'm discouraged by how often they focus on the development of skills to manipulate the external world rather than the skills necessary to go inward and make the inner journey."                                 Parker J. Palmer

WisdomAtWork.com

Steve Grodin   www.dpreview.com

Gain & Loss?

     Appearing as babies, we are blessings, melting open hearts. We're at our authentic best, nurturing other beings to dwell in unconditional love.
     As we learn to make our individual way in this world, we tend to harden ourselves, forgetting for a time who we really are.
     As we age, life cracks and finally destroys this armoring. We invariably lose everything we've "gained" - even the people we've loved - leaving only our original authentic nature.

     "It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless."  L.R. Knost

For the Love of our Children and our Children's Children

     "Physics has provided the basis for the design of the fission and fusion bombs, biology -- germ warfare, chemistry -- nerve gas. And all of them have helped bring us to the brink of doom. But they still do not provide keys to ultimate power. If we do destroy ourselves, it will be the minds of human beings, the unhealthy emotions of individuals, the fear, the hate, the jealousy and the greed of individuals that will trigger these horrors. . . .     
     You can use Inner Science to educate each individual to understand himself or herself, to control his or her negative emotions and distorted notions, and to cultivate his or her highest potentials of love and wisdom. And you can keep improving your Outer Sciences to better understand, control and beautify the environment for the greater benefit of all beings. There is an enormous amount of work to be done. Let us begin it here and now."

       The Dalai Lama with Robert Thurman at Harvard                                                 www.wisdomatwork.com

Meditation may Alter Male & Female Brains Differently

     "Hippocampal dimensions were enlarged both in male and in female meditators when compared to sex- and age-matched controls. However, meditation effects differed between men and women in magnitude, laterality, and location on the hippocampal surface. Such sex-divergent findings may be due to genetic (innate) or acquired differences between male and female brains in the areas involved in meditation and/or suggest that male and female hippocampi are differently receptive to mindfulness practices.

     The observed group-by-sex interactions and sex-divergent effects are intriguing and perhaps reflective of differential (innate) conditions in male and female brains, as also implied by the large number of reports on sex differences within the hippocampus. At the same time, it is possible that male and female meditators may require (or employ) different amounts or elements of practice to experience desired effects. Both possibilities, independently or interacting with each other, might be accompanied by a sex-specific engagement of certain hippocampal subsections during meditation. Such a sex-specific hippocampal engagement might result in a sex-specific impact on hippocampal anatomy, where additional effects may manifest if male and female hippocampi are differently susceptive to the practice."

       Eileen Luders, Paul M. Thompson, Frorian Kurth. Larger hippocampal dimensions in meditation practitioners: differential effects in women and men. Front Psychol 06 March 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00186

       http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00186/full

from the web