As a child, I recall my mother yelling at me in Yiddish, Hak mir nit keyn tshaynik!, whenever she felt pressed. To me, it simply meant “back off or you’ll get what’s coming to you”.
Years later, I learned its literal meaning, which like so much of the Yiddish language is expressive of the feeling state: “Don’t bang a tea kettle at me!” It’s a tactile reminder that we all have thresholds that trigger reactive modes, our fight-flight systems go on red alert and feeling states of fear, anger, and disappointment are not far behind.
The Natural Native, one of the six ways of knowing and leading in the new online series I am co-presenting, prompts us to remember the other half of the human equation. We are not only primed for reactivity, but also for peace, harmony, and creative responses to a world that is often banging the tea kettle at us.
The Natural Native Way explores what it means to be at home in and with oneself, no matter what is going on around us. It is a way of knowing deeply connected to nature and all of life. It is recognizing that we can depend on inner ways of knowing such as intuition and insight as well as being open to guidance from nature, wisdom traditions, and our own ancestral lineage.
Six Ways of Knowing and Leading
Way 1: The Servant Leader – Respond to your deepest calling to serve.
Way 2: The Circle Wizard – Understand the nature of this ancient human practice.
Way 3: The Natural Native – Be centered in yourself in connection with the Earth.
Way 4: The Space Steward – Attend to the aesthetics of spaces where the work will take place.
Way 5: The Crucible Guardian – Guide and protect the space as we remake ourselves.
Way 6: The Ritual Intercessor – Guide rituals that ignite healing, connection, and transformation.
Since 2016, David Sibbet, Gisela Wendling, Ph.D., Holger Scholz and I have been collaborating on the topics of leadership and the sacred.
A wonderful series of retreats and online learning journeys have emerged from our work called LEADING AS SACRED PRACTICE (LASP). In this time of pandemics and increasing concern for social justice, ethics, and wise action, we have released our first eBook about a different way of leading and knowing. Join the LASP email list & download the eBook!
Looking back on my earlier collaboration to articulate collective wisdom, I believe we all shared a faith in the centrality of spirit, the evolutionary potential of the human species, and the reality of our interconnectedness. We believed ourselves inextricably bound up with each other, enfolded within the larger forces of nature and subtle energies largely invisible to conscious awareness. Collective referred to a larger concept of wholeness and wisdom to its role in addressing existential issues of life, grounded in principles of collaboration, nonviolence, and adaptability.
Deeply embedded in our work, but in retrospect not explicit enough, was a respect for the individual’s relationship to larger fields. In our initial Declaration of Intent, published in 2004, we began by stating:
We believe a field of collective consciousness exists — often seen and expressed through metaphor — that is real and influential, yet invisible. When we come into alignment with this field, there is a deeper understanding of our connection with others, with life, and with a source of collective wisdom.
I’m now embarking on a six-session online program, Activating Collective Wisdom: Five Essential Practices, with Amy Lenzo, whose work with online environments and interactive group design makes her an excellent partner.
Early in our design process, she asked me about the relationship between the individual practices we are exploring in the course and activating collective wisdom in groups. In thinking about her inquiry, I am drawn back to the questions of fields. What different kinds of fields exist? What kinds of individual practices have the greatest impact on fields? How can we align, as individuals and as groups, with these deeper forces of connection? What is a path with wisdom?
I don’t have definitive answers to these questions, but they compel my attention and motivate me to inquire with fellow travelers. As the philosopher Jacob Needleman said with a mischievous smile, “I can’t tell you what wisdom is, but I know the wisest among us seek it.” Read More
When thinking something through it helps to think in images, as that can offer a unique approach to clarifying thoughts and seeing the relationship among ideas. It’s like translating between languages – conceptual ideas becoming representational, and images and symbols acting as a counterpart to abstract thought.
The reason for this lies in the very definition of image, literally an optical counterpart for an object. Similarly, imagination (from the Latin imaginari, meaning “to picture to oneself”) is an extension of this way of understanding. To the Romantic poets, for example, it was a way, through poetic expression , to picture something that was very real to them at the level of Soul, or Spirit. They weren’t making something up, as in our more common understanding of the word. They were making something visible that would otherwise be ephemeral but no less real. Images help us picture for ourselves ideas that can be elusive and difficult to capture in words alone.
We recently had a wonderful creative session with our colleague and visual maestro David Sibbet to create the above image (here’s a link to David’s description of our collaborative process). We wanted to represent practices of collective wisdom that we’ll be exploring in our upcoming six-session online course Activating Collective Wisdom: Five Essential Practices.
