Distinctions

Featured Article • Becoming Home, A Remembering

Something kept working on me during and in the weeks after I returned from Mount Shasta. I had gathered there with Samantha Sweetwater and a circle of fellow devotees at Headwaters Outdoor School for DEVOTION – A Leadership Initiation at the Turning of Worlds, and of the many threads we wove together, one followed me home: homecoming itself.

Homecoming, in our common usage, is bound to place. If we are so privileged, we come home to the town where we grew up, the house with the familiar creak in the stairs, the landscape whose contours we know in our bones. There is something true and precious in this. Place holds us. The mountain at Headwaters held us; anyone who has stood in Shasta’s presence knows that land is a teacher, an elder.

But for many, return is not possible or they have a complicated relationship with and to place, e.g. the migrant, the refugee, the one whose childhood house has been sold or demolished or lies somewhere it is no longer safe to return to. But if we stop there, we make home into a noun – a location, a destination, a place of arrival. And throughout my life, and in particular during that retreat, I became reacquainted with home as a verb.

Home is not solely a place we return to but a relational practice. We become home.

In the first couple of hours of the retreat as I started to ‘make myself home’ in the teepee that I was to inhabit for the week, I was foreseeing that I would be happy to go ‘back to the comforts of home’. But over the week, something very different began to unfold. One night, I sat with the land at Headwaters through the night and into the morning, watching Mt Shasta emerge into view. I felt no separation. There was a deep sense of connection, interdependence, and interrelatedness as an experience, not a concept. Though a fresh experience, this was not a new realization, instead it felt like a profound remembering… of interbeing. And I wondered if my anticipation of being glad to return to a physical place just a few days prior as I had set up my teepee was a gesture towards a deeper notion of home that is remembered through relationship.

Sitting there, I thought of the opening poem of Rumi’s Masnavi. It begins with a lamentation, the cry of the reed flute (ney, in Farsi), telling the story of its separation. The reed was once part of a living reed bed, but was cut away, hollowed out, and turned into a flute. When breath passes through it, the sound is not ordinary music, but the cry of longing for the place from which it was torn, the grief of separation. And yet the ache of separation, fully felt, becomes the song that reconnects. The reed does not stop being a flute and crawl back to the marsh. Its homecoming happens in relationship: through breath moving through it, through the song it offers, through the hearts that hear it and recognize their own longing. The reed becomes home by recognizing itself as an instrument of connectedness.

The reed’s cry is an answer to what Charles Eisenstein names the Story of Separation, the foundational myth of modern civilization. In Integral Coaching, this could be framed as a metanarrative, a worldview: a collection of assumptions that tell us who we are, who others are and how the world works. The core of this story is that we are separate, discrete individuals, living in a world made of matter and objects that are resources, governed by no inherent purpose or intelligence that is fundamentally other than each of us. Given that premise, then life becomes interpreted as a competition among separate selves for scarce resources and the drive to secure our existence through exerting more control, acquisition, domination, extraction, and oppression over humans and the more than human world.

So much suffering flows from this way of making sense of the world, this notion of separateness. And yet, on the lands at Headwaters, I felt none of that separateness. Only an essential and undeniable felt sense of relationship to and embeddedness in the web of life. As we come into deeper relationship (with anything and everything – a person, a practice, a watershed, a bird, our own sensations), we become home. Home is co-created and continuously rewoven in a relational meeting place of seemingly separate beings.

For those of us in the work of coaching and human development, I wonder if our clients arrive homesick – for themselves, for meaning, for belonging? And the coaching relationship itself is a home-becoming, where both coach and client have an opportunity to experience themselves and each moment freshly, and discover that they were never as separate as the story told them.

With love and deep gratitude for this community,

Sahar Azarabadi (she/her)
Managing Partner & Senior Faculty, NVW

Practice • Experiencing Home

Experiencing Home

Let’s use the fall as a chance to reflect on our experience of ‘home’. This practice is an invitation to take some time and reflect on the circumstances when you feel most at home. Set aside 10-15 minutes twice daily. Have a journal or paper nearby.

The Practice: 

Stop 2x/day for the next month.

Reflecting on the previous period of time, note a moment or circumstance when you felt most at home. Let the experience become more vivid, then write freely in response to these questions:

• What was my experience of home (head, heart, body)?
• Who else was present? In what capacity?
• What were the circumstances?
• What essential quality(ies) was I able to more deeply connect to and express?

Exercise of the Quarter

Mapping Your Home Ecology

Home is rarely one thing. It’s an ecosystem of relationships that together help us feel we belong in the world. In the center of a page, write your name. Around it, write the people, ancestors, places, animals, practices, objects, communities, landscapes, elementals, the more than humans, and rituals with which you feel embedded in relationship. Continue to add to the map.

Step back, look at the web of relationships, and consider the following:
– How does this representation impact you?
– Who or what needs tending to?
– In what ways will you attend?

Let us know how the practice and exercise of the quarter work for you and feel free to share your own thoughts on the topic of home by tagging and engaging with us on LinkedIn.

Communications at NVW

There Is No Shortcut Through a Person

We all know you can generate a caption in seconds. But can you generate a changed mind?

Lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the option to download and work on so many apps and platforms and tools that promise the world. The speed of it all is dizzying.

Faster is treated as better by default, and there’s a shortcut for nearly everything, including, apparently, becoming a different person. Today, you can build a headline, a bio, even a whole personal brand before your green tea cools. I know how to do it, and I won’t learn nearly enough as I did when I had to iterate an “about page” 35x before I was happy with it. We don’t have to exaggerate of course, but still. There is labor in craft. There is labor in vocation.

The thing is, you can’t screenshot a moment of real insight and post it as proof that something in you shifted. Some part of all of us knows that, even when we’re tempted to believe otherwise. They’re trying to sell us all the pink-tinted glasses with the promise of bigger, better, richer, but in the end it’s the fundamentals that always come back.

This is for anyone who builds something with words, or with people, and feels the pull to skip the slow part.

Ease can start to feel like depth

I don’t think faster tools are the problem. Tools have always changed how we work (I’ve used Grammarly for over a decade), and with a small team it can be a make-or-break situation. Many of coaches are solopreneurs and need “extra hands.” We look for ways that support keeping the business afloat.

What worries me is a little more murky. Ease starts to feel like depth. A polished output gets mistaken for a real process. A brand can look coherent from the outside while the people behind it feel scattered and unsure. A leader can sound confident in a message someone else drafted and still not know, in their body, what they stand for.

None of that is new. There’s more of it now, it moves faster, and it’s easier to hide inside.

The words not being said are the work

My life revolves around and depends upon words, so I know how well words can be made. I also know they aren’t the whole story.

The part I care about most sits underneath the sentences. Under the iceberg.

What someone is afraid to say, the emotion they haven’t named, the question they’ve been carrying for a long time. No online prompt can reach that. It comes out when someone feels safe enough to say the true thing instead of the polished thing, and safety comes from being met by another person who stays.

This is true in coaching, in friendship, in leading, and in love. Every one of them asks for presence, patience, and a willingness to sit with what’s actually true rather than what would be convenient to believe. You can’t slop your way into that (or out of it!).

Integrity means letting substance set the pace

Speed itself is fine. Letting it stand in for substance, when substance is what’s required, is where it feels disjointed.

A brand has to know what it believes before it can say it well. A leader has to do their own inner work before they can credibly ask it of anyone else. And you can’t offer someone a place to rest if you’ve never found that place in yourself.

Service to others begins with ourselves.

That’s what I mean by integrity in a noisy world. Your words, your work, and your values have to point the same direction, and no tool can line them up for you.

People are looking for somewhere to set something down

The people who trust a brand, a writer, or a friend are usually looking for the same thing – somewhere to set something down. A question they’ve been carrying. A version of themselves they haven’t said out loud yet. What pains them. What brings them joy.

They don’t need you to be fast. They need you to be steady and real, and willing to stay in the room without looking for the “exit” AKA shortcut that would have let you leave.

I don’t know how to build trust, community, or love any faster than it has ever been built. It happens slowly, in the presence of another person, with enough honesty that something in both of you finally settles.

The relationship is the point.

Karen Kininsberg
Director of Communications, NVW