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

"Practice" - What Does this Really Mean?

     We "practice" dentistry or law etc. and over a life-long career, we tend to gain valuable "practical" experience, which benefits our patients / clients. "Practice makes perfect."
     Besides obviously knowing more, what changes do we undergo as a direct result of practicing a profession, trade or craft over a long period of time?
     It's now well-known that progressive functional & structural changes ("neuroplasticity") occur in the brain (and rest of the body) of people who practice any skill eg musicians.  
     For thousands of years, "practices" such as sitting meditation, tai chi, qi gong, tea ceremony, ikebana (flower arranging), etc have been performed specifically to cultivate the practitioner's character or spirit. Sadly, present-day society - perhaps even in the East - is generally unaware of this highest form of "practice". The effects of these practices are meant to extend into, and transform, all of the practitioner's activities - her entire life. 
     Any activity, including one's work, can be - and ideally is - a "practice" in this deepest way.

       "From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty I had published an infinity of designs. But all I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three, I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at one hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am one hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I to see if I do not keep my word."
                            Written at the age of seventy-five by me,
                            once Hokusai, today Gwakyo Rojin,
                            The Old Man Mad about Drawing (1835)

       Quote from: Larry Rosenberg. Three Steps to Awakening. A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life. Shambhala, Boston, 2013. 

Near Eagle Lake, August 2014

Real Job Satisfaction

     "... your inner life need not be compartmentalized into your own time, but that it can be alive and active all the time, even in the workplace. ... whether you love your job or hate it, you can be awake and aware in your work. ... job satisfaction (can mean) not a job where everything goes well and we rise quickly to the top but a job where we can grow, develop, and mature as human beings, regardless of what happens."

       Lewis Richmond: Work as a Spiritual Practice. A Practical Buddhist Approach to Inner Growth and Satisfaction on the Job. Broadway Books, NY, 1999.

 

Tariq Sawyer, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

What's Meaningful, What Really Matters?

     It seems we have different priorities at different stages of life. Playing, fitting in, preparing for adult life, career- & nest-building, and then suddenly, retirement. 
     But when do we deeply investigate who we really are, what's really going on, what's really meaningful in this fleeting life? When & where do we learn the skills to investigate these questions?
     Should not the answers to these fundamental questions guide our life? Should we not deal with these as early & as thoroughly as possible?
     To be led gently, skillfully, towards deep insight would seem to be a vitally important opportunity. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an evidence-based, secular path to connect to our own core values - the rudder & ballast of our life. Embracing our own depth is the gateway to a rich, meaningful, congruent life - often an urgent calling by middle-age.
     8-week mindfulness courses are widely available near you. For one in Halifax, Nova Scotia see: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/03/8-week-mindfulness-ce-course-for-health.html
    

View from Pancole, Tuscany, Italy

Teaching for Wisdom - Urgently Needed Now

     "Teachers who teach for wisdom will explore with students the notion that conventional abilities and achievements are not enough for professional success as well as a meaningful life. Many people become trapped in their lives and, despite feeling conventionally successful, feel that their lives lack meaning, at least in the sense of contributing to a good that is larger than their own. Contributing to a common good is not an alternative to success, but rather, is an aspect of it that, for most people, goes beyond money, promotions, large houses, and so forth. The teacher will further demonstrate how wisdom is critical for a life that makes a positive difference to the world. In the long run, wise decisions benefit people in ways that foolish decisions never do. The teacher must teach students the usefulness of interdependence -- a rising tide raises all ships; a falling tide can sink them.  
     It is also important to role model wisdom, because what you do is more important than what you say. Wisdom is in what you do, not just in what you say. So students should read about wise judgments and decision making in the context of the actions that followed so that the students understand that such means of judging and decision making exist. Teachers need to help students to learn to recognize their own interests, those of other people, and those of institutions. They need further to help students learn to balance their own interests, those of other people, and those of institutions. They will teach students that the "means" by which the end is obtained matters, not just the end. Students need to be encouraged to form, critique, and integrate their own values in their thinking. They further need to learn to think dialectically, realizing that both questions and their answers evolve over time, and that the answer to an important life question can differ at different times in one’s life (such as whether to marry). Wisdom further requires them to learn to think dialogically, whereby they understand interests and ideas from multiple points of view. For example, what one group views as a “settler,” another may view as an “invader.” Most importantly, students need to learn to search for and then try to reach the common good -- a good where everyone wins and not only those with whom one identifies.
     Teaching for wisdom will succeed only if teachers encourage and reward wisdom. Teacher must make wisdom real for students’ lives. Teachers should teach students to monitor events in their lives and their own thought processes about these events. One way to learn to recognize others' interests is to begin to identify your own. They also should help students understand the importance of inoculating oneself against the pressures of unbalanced self-interest and small-group interest. 
     Students will develop wisdom by becoming engaged in class discussions, projects, and essays that encourage them to discuss the lessons they have learned from both classical and modern works and how these lessons can be applied to their own lives and the lives of others. They need to study not only “truth,” as we know it, but values. The idea is not to force-feed a set of values, but to encourage students reflectively to develop their own prosocial ones.  
     Students should be encouraged to think about how almost everything they study might be used for better or worse ends, and to realize that the ends to which knowledge put do matter. Teachers need to realize that the only way they can develop wisdom in their students is to serve as role models of wisdom themselves. A role model of wisdom will, I believe, take a much more Socratic approach to teaching than teachers customarily do. Students often want large quantities of information spoon-fed or even force-fed to them. They then attempt to memorize this material for exams, only to forget it soon thereafter. In a wisdom-based approach to teaching, students will need to take a more active role in constructing their learning.

     The important thing is to work together toward a common good — toward devising the best ways to select and educate students so as to maximize their positive future impact. We wish our students to show wisdom. We need to do the same."

       Robert J. Sternberg "Academic Intelligence is not Enough! WICS: An Expanded Model for Effective Practice in School and in Later Life."  https://commons.clarku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=mosakowskiinstitute

Risking for a Meaningful Life

     “If you have been brave enough to love, and sometimes you won and sometimes you lost; if you have cared enough to try, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't; if you have been bold enough to dream and found yourself with some dreams that came true and a lot of broken pieces of dreams that didn't, that fell to earth and shattered, then you can look back from the mountaintop you now find yourself standing on, like Moses contemplating the tablets that would guide human behavior for a millennium, resting in the Ark alongside the broken fragments of an earlier dream. And you, like Moses, can realize how full your life has been and how richly you are blessed.”                                        Harold S. Kushner


     See also: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/search?q=shipwreck

December's Child

How Do We Take Care of Ourselves?

     I think we all take care of ourselves, but HOW do we accomplish this?

     When we crave junk food, if instead we eat a healthy meal, we are actually denying ourselves - at one level.
     How often do we try to satiate our "hunger" with "junk food"? I suspect far more often than we realize. Shopping, eating, drinking, travel, work, all manner of entertainment - even real junk food. None of these, in themselves, in moderation, is necessarily unhealthy. However, insofar as these are regular substitute, fake gratifications for what we actually hunger for, they're all a waste of time, energy, our very life.

     So what do we really need? What has real meaning for us? How can we let go of junk food and live more authentically?

Steve McCurry   http://stevemccurry.com/

Towards a Qualitatively Better Quality of Life

     “The rapid growth of the coaching field over the past ten years reflects a hunger and yearning for new ways to address deep, perplexing issues inherent in human life. How can we respond with kindness and skill to the constant, rapidly changing flux of circumstances in our lives? How can we reduce rather than contribute to harm and suffering? How can we live in ways that are not just productive and efficient, but are also meaningful and fulfilling? 
     Our hunger can never be satisfied by better, faster, increasingly efficient ways of doing more of what we’ve been doing all along. It can only be fed by addressing its source: the deep human longing to be fully who we are.
     In order to develop ... we need to move beyond horizontal accommodation toward vertical transformation.”            Pamela Weiss   http://www.appropriateresponse.com/


     “Everyone has the ability to cultivate a certain kind of intimacy with what’s deepest and best in ourselves. And you can’t do that if you’re rushing through your moments to get to better moments.
     Mindfulness is a practice – as a concept, it’s only the doorway.”           Jon Kabat-Zinn

Anne Bastedo   http://www.serenityimages.ca

 

"Heart" ensures you Thrive, not merely Exist, despite Life's Inevitable Adversities

     "Heart (is) the characteristic that causes a person to be firm in his or her beliefs and to have determination to accomplish goals. Examples of heart can be found in many accounts of people who have overcome hardships and become successful. In studying the supermarathon Mexican Tarahumara kickball race and the Alaskan Iditarod 1049-mile dogsled race, researchers have explored the relationship between endurance and extreme motivation, which is believed to develop heart. In addition, of individuals who have been injured in accidents who have become disabled in some way, some become embittered and consumed with the tragic events that regrettably altered their lives, whereas others seem to find ways to compete in sports, secure meaningful work, and move ahead with their lives. What is the difference between those who thrive and those who simply exist? The difference is the indomitable warrior spirit or heart that brings forth courage, strength, and resilience."
     There's a great need to cultivate heart for all of us "as a primary prevention strategy to prepare (us) to face adversity. Heart can be developed by using sports (as well as mindfulness practice) as a vehicle."
       Bell CC, Suggs H. Using sports to strengthen resiliency in children. Training heart. Child Adolesc Psychiatr Clin N Am 1998; 7(4): 859-65.

     See also: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/04/capacity.html

matematto   www.dpreview.com

Common Conversation vs Meaningful Communication

     "If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible."

               James McNeil Whistler, American-born artist (1834-1903)
               Globe & Mail June 4, 2013


     Jokes aside, we've had serious communication problems for a long, long time. The loudest, brashest folks continue to be heard, despite the fact that they invariably have the least worthwhile things to say. 
     There's a serious need to cultivate listening skills individually and in groups - we may need to learn from our aboriginal brothers & sisters to sit in circles and pass the talking stick. 
     The productivity of our meetings would surely improve if EVERY person was given the chance to fully express herself without being cut off, shouted down, passed over, or otherwise ignored.

Steve Geer   www.dpreview.com

Living, Freezing, and Escaping Life

     We use different ways to prevent ourselves from succumbing to the adverse impact of real life events.
     Perhaps the most common is by keeping life more or less "unexamined", despite the fact that according to Socrates, it's then "not worth living." Avoidance of depth and meaning may be active, driven by the fear that there is no greater depth or meaning available than what one has already experienced. The search for depth and meaning can simply be neglected (passive) if continuously chasing after things, experiences or people to make us happy. The latter activity is very much like an alcoholic or other substance user who keeps trying to extract happiness out of substance(s), until they "hit rock bottom" - the end of a heroically enduring effort.
     A huge problem we have, as health-care professionals, is unrealistic confidence in our analytic thinking - and by extension - that our present self-concept & worldview is "as good as it gets." We are as attached to this as a substance user to his substance(s). "And how's that working for you?" Dr. Phil could ask either. Einstein said, "We cannot solve the problems of today at the level of thinking at which they were first created."
     Mindfulness practice is training to continuously elevate our level of thinking, awareness or consciousness, and thus, overall quality of life. Improvement is progressive over a lifetime.

See also: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/

Photo: Lynn Ellis   http://500px.com/lynnellis

Health, Harmony, Meaning - Navajo Wisdom

     Individuals EITHER promote the general welfare of the world & thus their personal well-being (as a healthy cell collaborates with & supports a healthy body) OR they create chaos out of a misguided, self-centered striving for their individual happiness (as a cancer cell does it's own thing, destroying the entire body).

     "Among the Navajo, all serious illness results from disharmony. To become sick, a person has somehow fallen out of harmony with himself, his family, his clan, and the network of relationships that constitute the Navajo Way. To be healed is to have that harmony restored."
     Navaho traditional healing ceremony "could 'heal' any seriously ill person, even a patient with terminal cancer, because prolonging life isn't necessarily the aim of Navajo medicine. Human beings, like plants and animals and the visible world itself, participate in a cycle of birth, development, maturity, and decline. This cycle constitutes the harmonious, natural way of the universe. Attempting to extend an elderly person's life beyond its natural span might well be seen as disharmonious or harmful, rather than healing; what the ceremony would do was to bring the dying person into a harmonious relationship with the important persons and values in his or her life."
     Their healing "address the more narrative dimensions of illness; i.e., to re-experience themselves as part of a meaningful story."

     Coulehan J. "Metaphor and medicine: narrative in clinical practice." Yale J Biol Med 2003; 76(2): 87-95.

See also: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/01/sense-of-workplace-community-belonging.html

Paul Hannon   http://paulhannon.com/

 

Critical Spirituality - towards a Deeper Therapeutic Alliance

     "Critical spirituality is a way of naming a desire to work with what is meaningful in the context of enabling a socially just, diverse and inclusive society. Critical spirituality means seeing people holistically, seeking to understand where they are coming from and what matters to them at a fundamental level; the level that is part of the everyday but also transcends it. What is important in critical spirituality is to combine a postmodern valuing of individual experience of spirituality with all its diversity with a critical perspective that asserts the importance of living harmoniously and respectfully at an individual, family and community level. 
     Human service professionals currently wrestle with the gradually increasing expectation to work with spirituality often without feeling capable of undertaking such practice. Some work with people experiencing major trauma or change such as palliative care or rehabilitation where people ask meaning of life questions to which they feel ill equipped to respond. Others work with individuals, families and communities experiencing conflict about spiritual issues. Increased migration and movement of refugees increases contact with people for whom spirituality is central. Such experiences raise a number of issues for existing professionals as well as students: What do we mean by spiritual? How does this relate to religion? How do we work with the spiritual in ways that recognise and value difference, without accepting abusive relationships? And what are the limits to spiritual tolerance, if any?"

       Gardner F. Critical Spirituality. A Holistic Approach to Contemporary Practice. Ashgate Publishing Co. Burlington VT, 2011. 

Photo: Larry Bauer   www.dpreview.com

Meaningful Conversations & Wait Time

     “Under a wide variety of instructional situations and levels ranging from first grade through university level, from classrooms to museum and business settings [and doctors' offices], the quality of discourse can be markedly improved by increasing to 3 seconds or longer the average wait times used by teachers after a question and after a response. These pauses are ordinarily so brief, 1 second or less on the average, that an adequate exchange of ideas and the nurturing of new ideas cannot take place. Wait time, however, is just another technique if one does not understand why fostering more productive exchanges among us all is so important. Gwen Frostic, a poet and artist, tells us in her book Beyond Time

We must create a great change
in human direction –
an understanding
of the interdependency
by which the universe evolves
Know
– that knowing –
is the underlying foundation
for the life we must develop. …
We cannot leave it to the scientists –
nor any form of government –
each individual
must fuse a philosophy
with a plan of action.

     Wait time provides a context in which teachers and students [doctors and patients] may dialogue together in the service of that purpose.”
       Rowe MB. Wait Time: Slowing Down May Be a Way of Speeding Up. Journal of Teacher Education 1986; 11(1): 38-43.

     See also: http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/04/insight-dialogue-guidelines-for-kinder.html

Portia has time

Feeling of Rightness

     “The transient vacuities of … success, peace, happiness, and distraction – pale before the question of whether or not one experiences this life as meaningful. Moreover, the test of meaning is not a cognitive decision, so one should not suddenly quit this present life for any quixotic mission. Meaning is found, over the long haul, through the feeling of rightness within.”
     Hollis J. “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.” Gotham Books, NY, 2005.
 
     “Wisdom traditions, the paths followed by our patients and our own experiences suggest that a sense of integrity comes through establishing healing connections. That’s not quite it. It wasn’t that the wave needed to establish connections. It was connected — part of a greater whole. Its challenge was to recognize the connectedness that was already there.”
     Mount BM. The existential moment. Palliat Support Care 2003; 1(1): 93-6.