Parts of me, Parts of her

See what happens if instead of 'I am afraid', you say 'Part of me is afraid'If instead of 'I am unsure', 'Part of me is unsure'Instead of 'I am angry', 'Part of me is angry'By allowing yourself the understanding that you are a being of many parts, rather than a single, monolithic self, you open up these possibilities:Firstly, coming to understand emotions as something you have rather than what defines you ...

... It really is quite different to know yourself this way - there is much more agency in having rather than being had by what you feel.

Secondly, remembering that there are always parts of you that are feeling something different to what's most apparent to you ...

... parts that are settled when you're experiencing anxiety, parts that love when you're feeling irritated, parts that are courageous and able to take action when other parts of you are paralysed with fear.

And thirdly, discovering that the same is true of others ...

... so that when you're bewildered by her rage you can remember that there is still a part of her that is kindness; when you're supporting him in his uncertainty you can call on the part of him that has clarity; and when you're struggling with his self-centredness you can remember the part of him that still, even in the midst of all the difficulty, cares deeply about all of it.

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On Relationship to Experience

You’re never just in life, this situation, this moment. You’re also in a particular relationship with it.So often this is transparent, like the air you’re breathing as you read this. But it's illuminating to understand that the world you're experiencing isn't ever simply 'the' world.Perhaps your relationship is to welcome whatever is happening. Perhaps you’re pushing it away, or denying it. Perhaps you’re treating what's happening as a huge opportunity. Or perhaps as a curse or problem. Maybe you’re relating to what’s happening with a longing that it be over. Or maybe you’re trying to cling on to it, already mourning the end of it, even before it’s gone.Another way of talking about this phenomenon is mood. Every mood - anger, joy, love, resentment, frustration, cynicism - opens up a particular kind of relationship to what’s taking place.Can you see how your relationship to it all shapes so much of your experience and what’s possible for you at any moment?That each brings forth a distinctive kind of world?That what’s possible from resentment is different from what’s possible from anger or love? That what’s possible from relating to it all as a curse is different to what’s possible from an orientation of welcome?Once you see all of this, you can first become an observer of your relationship to everything. Reflective practices can help here - a regular journalling practice and sitting meditation are two that are enormously helpful.Much more importantly, once you can observe you open up a second possibility of taking responsibility for your relationship to it all.Because while what’s happening might be just what’s happening, your relationship to it is something in which you're always a participant.Or in other words, the world you experience is never just happening but also, inescapably, something you are doing.

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Our stories about our feelings

When you feel emptiness, what do you do?

Reach for something to eat?Turn on the TV?Pick up the free paper on the train?Hide away in sorrow and resignation?Zone out?Lash out at your colleagues or your family?Find someone to blame?

What's the story you're telling about what this feeling means that has you act in this way?We're so quick to tell stories about what we're feeling. This feeling is something to be fixed, a sign I've done something wrong, proof my life is heading nowhere - or that it's heading somewhere. It's because of you, it's because of my parents, it's to be avoided at all costs, it's precisely the thing I need to feel in order to know myself and be ok.But our familiar, habitual stories about our feelings can imprison us in smaller worlds than we deserve.There's always another story you can tell.Maybe the emptiness is because you're tired. Or you're under attack from your inner critic. Maybe it's pointing you towards something essentially true about all of our existence - that everything is changing all the time and there's not so much for us to stand on.Or maybe you're feeling it because you've forgotten something important - your essential aliveness, the deep roots of your history and biology, all that supports you moment to moment.Each of these stories points to a different course of action. Same feeling, different response. Sleep perhaps, or an act of self remembering (creating art, meditation, poetry, music, prayer, beauty, touch).Or maybe what to do with what you're feeling is simply to allow it to be for a while, no correction or compensation required. And no story either. Let it do its thing and watch as it eventually, inevitably, and with no apparent help from you, changes you and turns itself into something else.

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Love

Love - genuine love for anything - is so often left out of the discourse of organisational life.Apparently it's not serious enough for business.Sometimes we'll allow ourselves passion - a word which is allowed, I think, because it sells us to others with its promise of energy and heat, commitment and making things happen. (We're so tied up with endlessly making things happen that we've forgotten everything else that conspires to make it possible).And we'll allow ourselves cynicism and skepticism, moods which distance us from one another and give us a feeling of superiority (a kind of pseudo-sophistication in which we believe we have greater insight than everyone else around us, who simply can't see what we can see).Frustration and resignation are also welcomed in many organisations, because serious work is apparently meant to be difficult all the time and both of these moods, reminding us of our difficulty, tell us that we must be doing it right.But love - genuine love? Deep, heartfelt love for something or someone that brings out our integrity, moves us, has us speak truth even when it's inconvenient, draws us out of ourselves, can touch people with something beyond manipulation or self-interest? How often do we allow that in ourselves or in others?We treat love with disdain.And we're much the poorer for it.

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Anxiety and fear aren't the same

Anxiety and fear aren't the same.It's important to see this, because they lead to different places. Anxiety - felt, allowed and responded to - can be an invitation into a new way of relating to the world. But fear so often leads us into actions that cut us off from ourselves, and from others, and from what's called for.It's David Steindl-Rast who makes this distinction in his wonderful interview with Krista Tippett at On Being.Anxiety, he says, is the feeling of being pressed-in by the world. It comes from the linguistic root anguere meaning 'choke' or 'squeeze'. The first experience of it in our lives, the primal experience of anxiety, is that of being born. We all enter the world through a very uncomfortable occurence in which we are squeezed and pushed and all there is to do is go along with it. In a very real sense going with the experience is what makes it possible to be born into life in the first place.And though we're born through an experience of anxiety, Steindl-Rast tells us, at that moment we do it fearlessly. Because fear is exactly what comes when we resist feeling anxiety, when we try to deny it or push it away. Anxiety can bring us into birth, while fear - our denial, our resistance to what we're experiencing - is a different move altogether: life-destroying, a totally different direction for our minds and bodies to take."And that is why", he says, "anxiety is not optional in life. It’s part of life. We come into life through anxiety. And we look at it, and remember it, and say to ourselves, we made it. We got through it. We made it. In fact, the worst anxieties and the worst tight spots in our life, often, years later, when you look back at them, reveal themselves as the beginning of something completely new, a completely new life."And what, he says, makes the biggest difference between anxiety and fear is learning to trust - trusting life, trusting the capacity of our own hearts, trusting others.We live in times that give many of us good cause for anxiety. But instead of collapsing and narrowing ourselves with fear we can choose to feel, and choose to practice trust. One step, and another step. And perhaps this way we can allow to be born in us a capacity to respond to our difficulties without turning away, and a greater ability to live without choking off our own lives or the lives of others.

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On Angst

Perhaps uniquely among living creatures, we have the capacity to sense beyond the particular details of the situation in which we're living. We can see its limits, and perhaps more importantly we can see our limits. We can understand that there's a ceiling to our power and capacity, that our time is finite, that the future is unknowable, that our understanding is small, and that much of what we depend upon is way more fragile than we'll ever admit.There's a special word for the feeling this evokes - angst.We mostly experience angst as a feeling of absence, because in coming up against the limits of our world, and the limits of our understanding, we quickly conclude that something is missing and that we must be responsible for it. We feel that we ought to change things, make them better, fix them up. We feel our inadequacy in doing so.And so we build cultures, organisations and lives in such a way as to shore us up against experiencing angst. We imagine that if we don't have to feel this way - perhaps if we don't feel too much at all - then we can assure ourselves that everything will be just fine.Of course, in the end this doesn't work out, because behind all our busy activity, our habitual routines, and our constant affirmations that we're doing ok, angst is still making itself felt. In a way our efforts make it more apparent, because living in such a way as to avoid angst means making our world small and tightly sealed. The feeling that we're deceiving ourselves and imprisoning ourselves and that there is some bigger way of living becomes even more present, even as we try to hide it.Running away from angst, it turns out, amplifies it and robs it of its biggest possibilities.The way through this?Firstly, giving up the idealised notion of an angst-free future. Angst is, it seems, built in to the human condition and comes as a consequence of our capacity to see beyond ourselves. And so there can be no world in which angst is fully absent.Secondly seeing angst not as a terrible something to be avoided, but as an invitation, a reminder of the truth of our situation, which is that the world is much bigger, more mysterious, and more possibility-filled than we can usually imagine. And that even though there's really nothing to stand on, there's much that we can trust.Angst is then not a signal to hide away, but a reminder of the uniqueness of our human situation. And a call to step more fully into life.

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Every sorrow can be a form of love

When we're feeling fear, sorrow, anger or emptiness at the world - or at any situation we find ourselves in the midst of - perhaps it would help us to remember:That when we speak our fear we draw on the courage and dedication it takes to speak;And when we express our sorrow it can arise from our love and care for what has been lost;That we can speak about our anger best by finding the commitment to justice from which it comes;And that our emptiness, our sense of what is still missing, is also the possibility from which something new can arise.Every anguish, every sorrow, has its truest ground in a kind of dedication, hope and love. And when we can remember that, rather than just the anguish and sorrow, our chances of being able to contribute with dignity are deepened and widened and made more real.

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A place from which to relate to the world

Moods.A distraction? An interruption to our dispassionate, rational, critical faculties? Out of place in work? At home? Best ignored? Even better suppressed?No.A mood is a place from which we relate to the world.Moods are disclosive: they actively show the world to us, bringing forward some aspects so that they can be seen, and having others recede into the background.And it’s important that we pay attention to them because there is no dispassionate, uninvolved place from which to relate to the world. There is no ‘mood-free’ way to be which would show us everything all in one go, at least in everyday life.

A mood of love: the object of your love (a person, an idea, a project) fills the world you experience. You find yourself turning towards it or them again and again in your thoughts and activities. For a while, the world revolves around this, and you get to see that which is inspiring, thrilling, life-giving about them.

A mood of frustration: when there’s something that matters to you that you can’t get to happen. Once again, that something figures centrally in the world for as long as you’re frustrated. Everything seems to point towards this something that matters, to contribute to your sense of being thwarted.

A mood of fear: brings forward that which is or seems threatening to us or to that which we care about, and has everything else fade away, so that we can take focussed action.

A mood of boredom: has everything fade into the background. Nothing seems important enough, stirring enough, exciting enough to move you.

A mood of resentment: has the person or situation you’re resentful about become central, and reveals to you the myriad ways you might take revenge, get your own back, or otherwise cause hurt.

A mood of gratitude: shines a light on the unlikeliness of your presence in the world, how little you had to do to end up surrounded by people, objects, possessions, possibilities. Illuminates the extraordinariness of the everyday.

Rather than being errors in perception, moods are always a way of attuning to aspects of the world that we might not otherwise pay attention to. Each mood functions to reveal the world in particular ways, showing us that which a different mood would conceal. And mostly this isn’t apparent, because for the most part moods are in the background, invisible. They’re like the air we breathe, omnipresent, necessary, and transparent.So being able to tell what mood you’re in is a huge opening. It will show you what possibilities you might be missing, or how it is that there seem no possibilities at all. It will tell you much about what you really care about, because moods always arise from our cares, values and commitments. It will show you how what seems central right now, and what incidental, is only one way to look at things.As you learn to cultivate different moods from the ones you’re most used to – for example gratitude where there was resentment – you’ll have revealed to you much that you never really saw before. You may discover that the world and other people are never simply this way or that, and perhaps even open up the possibility that they’re something else completely from how you’re used to relating to them. And this is a necessary step for any of us who want to bring ourselves fully to the world and to open up rich new avenues for relationship, possibility, and action.

Left Out

Conversations frequently left out of the discourse of professional life:

What you’re feeling – a potential source of enormous insight and connection to others

What you care about – especially if different from those around you

Your history – the story of everything and everyone that brought you to this moment, the discoveries and losses and experiences that have shaped you

Your weirdness – the unique artfulness and way of seeing that comes from you being you

Your imagination – your capacity to invent beyond the bounds of convention, the energy for life which stirs you to break out of the ways you’re held in

Your longing – the life and world you’re in the midst of bringing forth

We shut them out with excuses. They’re ‘soft’ subjects, while business is ‘hard’. They’ll open a pandora’s box or a can of worms. This is a work-place, not a therapy session.We lose so much when we continue to exclude the passions and possibility of the human heart from so many of our endeavours. And it damages us too, because before long we reduce ourselves and others to shadows of ourselves, inoculated by our cynicism against demonstrating care for much that is of genuinely enduring value to human life. Is this really the way you and your colleagues began your journey into the life of work? Can you even remember?That work should be this way was sold to us by the early industrialists who needed scores of people in their factories to button down, fit themselves in, and stay in line. They appropriated the language of rationalism and science to fashion people into tools, cogs, and components so they could build their great money making machines. And we bought it, continuing a pernicious myth that shallows our relationships and possibility.The world faces many difficulties right now, and addressing them is going to take all the generosity, wisdom and heartfelt commitment we can muster. Do we really intend to keep on working to shut that out from the world?

Feels just like me

That familiar feeling again. She said “You’ve let me down” and something dropped in your belly, your posture collapsed just a little, and the world seemed to lose its solidity. You know how this goes. You’ll deal with the deflation by apologising and the energy for all your projects and plans will slip away until long after you get home.Or you’re five minutes late for the meeting. Pulse racing. Tightness in your chest. You’re holding your breath, mind whirling, all the excuses and ways you’ll save face working out as you dash down the hall. You arrive hot, out of breath, mutter an excuse that blames the trains or the email system or someone else for holding you up, and then stay disengaged from the conversation, wrapped up in your shame and self-judgement.Or maybe he sent you an email telling you he wouldn’t be seeing you as you’d arranged. Fury and resentment knot your stomach. Your jaws clench, your shoulders tighten. “It’s always this way,” you tell yourself, “he’s so self-centred”. And already your fingers are tapping out a reply: cold, distancing, laced with judgements and sarcasm.Those feelings that are so familiar, that ‘feel like you’, are where your freedom can begin. Because every emotion conjours up a world, in which certain people loom close and others become far away, in which some actions become obvious – necessary even – and others seem impossible. And from the world that’s revealed to you by your moods you act: the combination of the familiar feeling and well-rehearsed action giving you a sense of who you are. In a way, over time, your way of responding indeed becomes who you take yourself to be.You can see that this is the case by observing yourself for a while. What kind of possibilities become available to you in love, hate, resentment, joy, boredom, anger, frustration, sincerity, cynicism, fear, panic, anxiety, gratitude? And what familiar actions do you tend to take? What results do they bring?The first steps towards your freedom are taken when you find out that there is no right ‘thing to do’ to respond to what you’re feeling. What seems so self-evident might just be the result of years of practice that’s conditioned you to react in a particular way. Don’t confuse its familiarity with appropriateness.Next time you find yourself propelled into action like this see what happens if you make a change – and just a small one – in your response.What happens if you do the opposite of that which your body seems to compel you to do? You may just find that new possibilities begin to open for you and those around you… that the world starts to open up in ways you’d never imagined.