This exchange is just so interesting I want to provide a link to it here. Gennefer Snowfield http://www.jellyflux.com/ and others discuss the essence of building a genuine community via the internet:
“It’s no secret that I spend a lot of time on Twitter. For me, it’s a valuable medium that facilitates quality sharing and knowledge exchange with smart, like-minded individuals who enhance my thinking and enrich my life.” (See the rest of this post: There’s Too Many ‘Me, Me, Me’s in ‘Follow Me’)
When we are mindful, we can change the way we experience other individuals in the business environment and function in organic and natural processes that bring creativity and heart into form, while preserving the essential features of business practices.
1. Consciously work to preserve relationships, reframe interpersonal challenges and develop a utility to achieve outcome.
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While sitting with a friend yesterday, I was reminded of how important it is to honor the threshold - the thing that symbolizes that which we are leaving and the beginning of where we are going.
Stop, next time you walk through the front door of you apartment, condo, home or office – just short of the threshold. Stop and gain a sense of the reality of what is happening in this moment of your life. There is no guarantee that from where you are leaving you will ever return. So pause a moment, turn around and “claim” the life you have lived in this context, the people who are saying “good-bye.” Just a moment – to recognize your life as it unfolds.
A threshold is a gift and an opportunity to awaken the mind.
Now imagine that our internal states are just as noticeable. You awaken in the morning, perhaps with the dream - a moment, a feeling, or an image – a moment away from this day that you are slowing becoming conscious of. Can you pause to mark the transition? Can you recognize that you are betwixt-and-between? What was – is ending. What will be – is emerging! Simply pause and claim these unfolding moments.
Image: Tdukes,Hawaii, 2008
There is some value to our innocence - it keeps us connected and empathically attuned to the people in our lives. As we navigate these difficult economic times, remember these people.
“Over the years, a practical and materialistic society can usurp the original mystery of childhood. We are sent to school early to “grow up,” to “be serious,” and if we don’t let go of our childhood innocence, all too often the world tries to knock it out of us. A hundred years ago the American painter James McNeill Whistler encountered this attitude in his engineering class at West Point Military Academy. The students were instructed to draw a careful study of a bridge, and Whistler submitted a beautifully detailed picturesque stone arch with children fishing from its top. The lieutenant in charge ordered, “This is a military exercise. Get those children off the bridge.” Whistler resubmitted the drawing with the two children now fishing from the side of the river. “I said get those children completely out of the picture,” said the angry lieutenant. So Whistler’s last version had the river, the bridge, and two small tombstones along its bank.”
(Kornfield, J. (2000). After the ecstasy, the laundry: How the heart grows wise on the spiritual path. New York: Bantam, p. 9. 10)
“There’s and old story about a farmer who went to the Buddha seeking help for his problems. Either droughts or monsoons make his work difficult, he complained. What’s more, he grumbled, even though he loved his wife, there were certain things about her he wanted to change. Likewise his children – yes, he loved them, but they weren’t turning out quite the way he wanted.
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“Mindfulness allows for a discrimination in psyche which is free of judgment . . . and which still allows for the influence of the unconscious to be entertained in consciousness. Mindfulness is not looking for a way “beyond,” rather it is a posture which seeks insight within and which allows an openness and availability to unexpected and uninvited unconscious content.
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Over the years I have come to realize that we may not have to work so hard to connect in our relationships. As a matter of fact, I think we are already connected and that the true nature of our relationships is a shared-phenomenal-world-in-common.
This is a pre-existing connection unencumbered by doubt, fear, judgment or the countless obstacles that cloud our perception. Recognition of this common basis becomes the context for resolving difficulties that hold us back in life.
By efficiently removing the veils that cloud this clear view, we begin to recognize how our relationships are integral to our success.
“Some things are just known in ways that I can’t explain. Some things have no verbal equivalents. Actually, lots of things have no verbal equivalents. We labor under the illusion that if we don’t have a name for it, it doesn’t exist.” (Bear, 2002, p. 92).
Language is developed in our organizations so that we can share a common reality. But does it help us to understand the unknown? So much of what we fear we simply do not have the language to describe, and therefore make sense of. Communication that is alive and which continually refreshes itself is absolutely vital to the well being and identity of an organization.
“What we have no words for, we cannot understand; it does not fit into our view of what is real. And if we stumble upon it . . . we may be taken by surprise, and frightened. On the unknown places on their maps, the ancient cartographers wrote, ‘Here there be dragons.” (Kornfield, 2000, p. 62)
“The challenges you face in your daily life, business, career or creative pursuit are a vital part of your accomplishments. If managed with compassion and insight, your trials will inform your process and ensure your success.”
- Timothy Dukes
One of the tools we work with is referred to as a Contemplative Collaboration. This approach to holding the collaborative process involves a significant increase of the participant’s consciousness to include the full range of human sensory awareness. Feelings, sensations, sounds, ideas, patterns – both positive and negative -emerge in a field of perception, sustained for long durations, revealing deep and often hidden potential that is here-to-fore cloaked in the comfort zone of “normal group functioning.”
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