Distinctions

With this new love came a realization that I was showing up in this relationship in a very different way than ever before. Taking a year-plus pause from my usual busy, over-committed life and living at a slower pace brought some real gifts. My capacity around connection and vulnerability grew deeper throughout the year as I met weekly with my pod: an incredible group of five people with whom I shared meals, clear agreements, and lots of love and support . As my social commitments otherwise ground to a halt, my nervous system reorganized around a life dedicated to slower pursuits. The green joy of Pothos, Marantas, and Calatheas filled my apartment as I learned to care for plants for the first time ever.

As my capacity to slow down and take joy in small moments grew, my narrative around staying hyper-involved and busy as a way to generate meaning and purpose lost hold. All together this created a profound change in my ability to be in deep relationality with others, stay present, and make commitments. Out of the breakdown of the pandemic came a breakthrough.

Alchemy

Breakdowns can lead to breakthroughs. This time of great pain and loss also created vast openings and opportunities for people, movements, and systems. Disability justice activists were stunned to watch as jobs or programs they had been told couldn’t be done online or provided virtually were suddenly available as the world went online. Mutual Aid Networks sprung up as people realized their neighbors were barely hanging on and needed help. Cities that had treated homelessness as a crime finally realized it is an issue of public health, and allocated resources to house people in hotels, potentially marking a significant shift in the way cities approach homelessness in the future. The movement for racial justice and against police brutality experienced a massive wave of support after a white police officer murdered George Floyd, with some speculating that with so many working from home, people had more energy and attention available to fight for racial justice.

Increased accessibility. Neighbors taking care of neighbors. Housing for the homeless. A worldwide wave of people demanding an end to police brutality. Amidst the pain, fear, loss, and death due to Covid-19, we’ve found ways to progress. Like medieval alchemists of legend, we took base metals and transmuted them into gold.

How do we keep what is good?

This is the question I hold for myself and for the world. When we move out of the breakdown, how do we keep the gifts of the breakthrough? In my personal story, I want to continue embodying this way of being that can fall in love in a full-hearted way. I also, like many of my friends, family and colleagues, deeply long for a world that continues to have compassion, resources, and attention for the vast social, political, and racial breakdowns that have existed for decades but have only gained visibility through their intersection with the pandemic. How can we do this?

Purposeful life design

Integral Coaches know that how we change and how we stay the same is the same process. We pay attention to certain things, which generates insight and brings about our understanding of the world. This understanding leads us to act in a certain way, which brings more of the same into our awareness. In the Professional Coaching Course, we learn that as coaches we can generate change for our clients by having them engage in new actions (leading to new insights) and by giving them new things to pay attention to. We might ask questions like: What kind of person do I want to be? How could I bring that person about? By choosing those things intentionally instead of just letting them happen, we are engaging in purposeful life design.

We can also do this on a broader level to build culture and shape society. In his book My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem writes:

“Culture is how our bodies retain and reenact history…Change culture and you change lives. You also change the course of history, Many well meaning social activists overlook this essential fact. They focus relentlessly on strategy, but strategy means nothing to our bodies and our lizard brain. When strategy competes with culture, culture wins – every time…We humans want to belong…But we can never belong to a strategy. We can never belong to a movement, either, though we can be a part of it. We can only belong to a culture.”

Menakem also writes about how unhealed trauma can start to look like culture when it transmits and compounds through multiple families and generations—but it is not culture, “it’s a traumatic retention that has lost its context over time.”

Healing trauma at the level of culture

Those vast social, political, and racial breakdowns that the pandemic helped reveal? Many people in the United States view those as evidence of an irredeemable, corrupt culture. Perhaps. But what happens if we consider the possibility that what we have mistaken for culture is actually an unhealed traumatic retention? Notice what changes for you in this shift. Can you begin to imagine a culture that could hold and ease this traumatic retention? Imagine what qualities and values this culture would embody and celebrate. Envision what things it would pay attention to, and how members of that culture would be treated and cared for.

How would it feel to belong to this culture? What is the smallest step you can take to live this culture into being?

Perhaps you, like me, have made some alchemical magic in the past year and wish to continue to cultivate it. This is an invitation to think deeply on how to bring attention and intention to the self and culture that you hope to see flourish. I hope the practices below can be supportive in this effort, especially as the Delta variant brings uncertainty and confusion. When I began writing this article, there was hope that we were emerging from quarantine in the US. As the article arrives in your inbox, rising cases suggest widespread restrictions may return.

For myself, I commit to saying “no” to patterns that would draw me back into my old, busy way of being and “yes” to relationships and commitments that enable spaciousness and depth. I say “yes” to building a culture of curiosity and “no” to a culture of jadedness. Whether my love affair proves to be a showy annual or a long-lasting perennial, I commit myself to caring for this new version of myself just as I did for my first plants: with lots of curiosity, tenderness, patience, and my whole heart.

Love,

p.s. Here’s a song to help you integrate these ideas.

Later, she writes:

“How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale. There is a structural echo that suggests two things; one, that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe, and two, that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.”

Journaling Exercise

In this quarter’s article you were introduced to Resmaa Menakem’s concept around how unhealed trauma can be mistaken for culture. Given this premise, journal on the questions below.

• What would a culture capable of holding space and easing this unhealed traumatic retention look like?
• What qualities and values would this culture embody and celebrate? Who or what would this culture pay attention to? What rites of passage or holidays would it celebrate?
• What would belonging to this culture feel like? How would members of this culture be treated and cared for?
• Imagine you are a member of this culture. What would feel possible for you to express or contribute to this culture? Please finish these sentences:
  • In this culture I feel free to express my ______.
  • In this culture I would feel able to contribute by _______. In the practice below these will be identified as “my expression” and “my contribution”.

Self-Reflection

The intention of this practice is to cultivate cultural change at the small scale. By paying attention to new things, you will generate insight and bring about your understanding of the world. This will lead you to act in certain ways, which will bring about more of the same.

As you create culture for yourself, remember that how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. How will your change reverberate to the largest scale?

Please take this up for two weeks or more as suits you.

Please stop twice per day to ask yourself the following questions. Write down your responses and make notes of your answers so you can notice patterns.

Over this last period of time:

• In what ways did I share my expression?
• In what ways did I offer my contribution?
• What happened? What possibilities opened, no matter how small?
• What will I take up, put down or adjust from what I learned in this exercise?

Becoming Human

Simon J. Ortiz

We are given permission
by the responsibility we accept
and carry out. Nothing more,
nothing less.
People are not born.
They are made when they become
human beings within ritual,
tradition, purpose, responsibility.

Therefore, as humans, this we do:
Sun Father begins red
in the east.
Stand and be humble.
Red through trees,
moments changing each instant
into the next change,
each change tied to the next.
To be human is to have
a sense of being within self.

Sun. Red. Trees.
Our hearts’ eyes seeing
inward and outward, accepting:
Stand and be humble.

The more names you have the more of a person you become. That’s what I’ve heard. I was telling Tom yesterday afternoon. Values, education, social change, cultural corruption, what is and what isn’t. I have to dispute him at moments. I tell him, The knowledge we derive from the education we get is our own. Knowledge is determined by our cultural, spiritual, linguistic, political environment. The knowledge from the community and context here cannot be anything but the people’s own. This is not Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, or Rapid City. This is Rosebud, the Lakota homeland.

Our names are both Indian and American. We have so many names now we don’t know them all. In a sense, we have become more of a people than ever before.

As much as we all hoped to be in a place of greater certainty by now, we must continue surrendering to what is beyond our control, expanding our curiosity and, most importantly, supporting one another. All of this for the sake of—as Jes reminds us in her lead article—cultivating what we know to be good and true in our work, our communities, our world.

It has been truly moving to watch our global community remain woven together—and even deepen in relationship—throughout the last year. To help foster this, we’ve striven to make as many offerings available across as many time zones as possible. This fall, the Enneagram and Integral Coaching sessions will take place at a time designed to accommodate our robust Asia Pacific community.

Facilitating Coaching Circles, our newest offering for grads, features a self-paced e-course that you can do from anywhere, and one of the scheduled workshops is designed to work for Asia as well. We’re particularly excited about this course, which is a collaboration with faculty emeritus Charles Brassard, who brings his years of expertise into designing and delivering this program. We hope that it adds a dimension to your work, and widens your possibilities for connection and career development.

Many courses that we are putting out and developing are in response to what you have so generously shared about hopes for your own development and work with clients. Please keep bringing your voice. The next Graduate Community Gathering —the last one for 2021—is happening on October 13. We hope to see you there.

Love,

Sahar and Adam

Congratulations and welcome to our newest graduates!