Seeds for a happy planet

Via, via, via I came across a blogpost of Benjamin Aaron, participant in the Hub Berlin, and he shares an amasing list of questions!!! A few examples:

When you hear the term “sacred questions”, are there some coming to your mind that you would name sacred questions?

How would my experience of you be, if you are shining in your brightest light, radiating pure energy, being fully aligned with your passion?

You have 5sec on a stage where every human on earth will watch you – what would you do and say?

We are before the BigBang – you are god(ess) and you can choose which area(s) of the unborn world you take responsibility to create.

and many more!

Recently I attended three lectures, basically about different models of change and leadership for these times, and they all three ended with a similar kind of message.

The first one was Otto Scharmer who gave a workshop in a conference in Wurzburg. This conference was one in the series ‘Fields of Conflict, fields of Wisdom’ and this year’s theme was “I am. You are”. I value Otto’s book on Presencing and Theory U, because they gave words and a bigger framework to a lot of my intuitive knowing. I asked Otto afterwards the question of how to make sure that after going through the eye of the needle people don’t fall back into their ‘normal’ way of doing things. Basically his answer had two advices: be clear on your intention (don’t loose out of sight what you want to accomplish) and the second is to have a circle of friends to keep you in the creative spot.

The most inspiring lecture and workshop on the conference was given by Nicanor Perlas, a Philippine who has been integrating social activism and spirituality. He presented the Lemniscate Model, which uses the language of the hero’s journey of Joseph Campbell, and integrates more the ongoing iterations of the process than the U-process. One of the last points he named was that “a real living relationship and dialogue is a powerful entry point to a new sense of activism”. He named it the real ‘letting go’ and stressed the importance of a ‘a real relationship’ to be able to ‘return’ into the world after the moments or days of illumination. He named a real relationship ‘a spiritual path’, through which we can learn to hold our fluid state when we are encountered with boundaries in our self, in the other or in the organizations we live and work in.

Then a few days later I was totally amazed by a lecture by Julio Olalla, a man born in Chili, living in the US, but still showing his Spanish roots in jokes and even dance!
Fascinating enough he used the same language from Joseph Campbell! (The same book named in twice in three days time, I understand it as a sign to search for the book, somewhere on my shelves, and read it with the eyes I have now). The main point of this lecture was that emotional learning is possible and needed. He gave beautiful descriptions of the core qualities of different emotions: sadness, gratitude, passion, trust, tenderness… and stressed the importance of working with the body. He then pointed out that for ‘leap’ learning we need to gather in a ’sacred place’, which was named in former times “they sealed the temple”. In this space of care and trust the learning happens through speaking about your demons and emotions and when you are really listened to.

Real learning happens in real conversations, and conversations are as old as humanity.

Leadership in these complex times seems about providing a safe space where our humanness, in all its aspects, in its relational essence can thrive again. Whatever map we use, it seems to come down to “turn to one another”.

What happened on our second afternoon?
Somehow we started with a question about what we had learned in the morning; with the intention to harvest our wisdom,
suddenly almost all women were sitting and laying in one ’sister-heap’

a physical, in-the-moment acknowledging of how important physical touch and physical wellness is,
how important it is to have a connection with Nature..
how important it is to take the time to slow down. How so many times we forget to Be this Body!

I invited every woman to connect with their vagina, this place that holds potential, holds growth and unfoldment, until it, through birthing, manifests in the world. The feminine knowing – different with the mental knowing – goes through and happens in the body, and my sense is that the vagina is important in this regard. It seems to be a challenge for us Western educated women to trust in this inner knowing and speak and act from there before it is processed through our minds. Because that is how we have learned to speak; from our minds. But through our physical bodies, and this applies of course also for men, we connect not only with our heart qualities, but also with Source, this vast container of huge potential. And the question is how we can speak from that place inside, from the silence, before there are concepts in our heads?
I don’t remember how we arrived at talking about the anger inside, and the gift of power it holds. But suddenly everybody was off their chair or cushion, we followed our bodies, supported by music and each other, and expressed anger and power in many forms: with body, movement and voice. It surely was an intense, wild party! The sheer joy of being alive in this body!!!

We came back to our circle again,
the wave of energy had come down,
we were centered…
hardly any need for the talking piece to slow down the conversation; as we would take natural turns in the conversation.

Are we holding back our power out of fear? Which fear is it? To prevent what? Are we asking for permission? Or can we own our power and inform others how it is for us and how we will do it?

You can read more about this day on Helen’s blog.

Yesterday, there was a part in a conversation that really ‘got’ me. Rainer was talking about the scientific fact that there are many, many more dimensions than the 3,5 we now see as reality. We said 3,5, because of the three dimensions of space, and the half one is time going in one direction – which is only half of the truth.

Connecting this with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (as I understand it) – that on the level of particles there are no ‘things’ that exists, but what exists is a probability until it is observed in one way or another – it brought me to the power of thought and conversations.

If the world that we want exists as probability, then the mere act of thinking about it – and even better: having conversations about it – brings this probability closer to manifestation, because it is observed in this way!

In my understanding there are many levels (dimensions scientist would say) between our manifest world of space and time and the world of spirit. The simple act of thinking about ‘the world we want’ guides its probability into existence. The act of talking about it, which in my understanding is denser or closer to the manifest world, is an even stronger pull of this probability into the more manifest layers. And if more people talk about it, that’s even better!

This links with a new blog that has this topic as focus: Conversations as co-evolutionary force. It is set up by friends of me and it will become important reading, I guess.