Love made visible

Below, nine narratives, nine stories, about what work could be for.Whether we choose one of these, or one of the infinity of others that are possible for us, there's no doubt that our narratives have a powerful role in shaping our identity, what we notice, what we think is possible and important, and our relationship with others.Change the narrative and we change what work is for and much about how we experience it. Change the narrative and we change our relationship with our difficulties and possibilities, with the sense we make of the past and of the future.Do any of these offer a new way of seeing what you've been doing so far...... and what you might take on next?

--

Work as...

.. a way of setting the world straight - fixing what's wrong, making good, bringing integrity, standards, and justice into the world.. love made visible - an opportunity to dedicate ourselves to our deepest commitments with our minds, hearts and bodies, and in relationship with others.. a way to cultivate excellence - finding ways to do things better, with greater impact and with ever-increasing quality of attention and skill.. an expression of artistry - work for its own sake, for the depth and expression and creativity that is unique to human beings.. an opportunity to learn and discover - work as the pursuit of understanding, learning a field from end to end and using that learning to solve problems that would otherwise continue to challenge us.. a way to lay down secure foundations - work as what makes it possible to have somewhere safe, dry and warm to live in, a shelter for ourselves and those we love, and the resources that will help us respond to unknown future challenges and possibilities.. an exercise in freedom and hope - work as what enables us to break the confines of otherwise predictable lives - to play, to experiment, to meet people, to try out new things, to bring into our lives and into the world that which has not been so far.. a challenge to the status quo - work as a way of upending things that need upending, revolutionising what needs revolution, using our power to shift cultures, expectations and the way things are done... the practice of peace - work as a way of bringing people together, forging community and connection, relationship and shared purpose, a way of having our many differences serve us and each other rather than separate us

Photo Credit: torbakhopper via Compfight cc

The limits of happiness

This being human is a guesthouse, writes Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, the 13th century Persian poet. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.I think Rumi's right. To be human is to be visited by a stream of experiences, each arising and fading away after the other in a mysterious succession. We know only a little about how to influence the stream. Sometimes we find ourselves able to direct its course by being with certain people, or taking up certain activities, or by being in a place resonant with beauty or with memory. And we can sometimes influence the stream by trying to block it - holding on to sadness, or resentment, or anger through the stories we tell ourselves about life.But, mostly, to be human is to have a stream coursing through us that arises of its own accord, without our volition. And when we seek to constrain the movement of the stream so that it consistently feels a particular way we also end up having to constrain some portion of our aliveness and freedom. Our fullest humanity comes when, as Rumi recommends, we learn to meet all our experiences at the door laughing, and invite them in. Each year, as I experience ongoing rivers of sadness, joy, tenderness, rage, sorrow, fear, longing, love, satisfaction, frustration, deep confusion and hopefulness that flow through me, Rumi's advice seems more necessary, and more true. And it seems no more passing mood gets me in more trouble than the expectation of happiness. When happiness is the standard, almost anything else falls short. When I imagine that happy is the way I should most often feel, I can twist myself into all kinds of knots trying to bring it about, and invest myself in all kinds of comparisons, and standards, and unforgiving judgements about the life I'm already living. I can imagine that others have found the key to happiness - that they have it in a way that I don't. And I have found out how easily I can end up narrowing my life in its pursuit, pushing away or disapproving of many other kinds of experience that arise, quite naturally, in day to day living.Let me be clear - I think happiness is wonderful, and I love to feel it. And I'm also saying that I think there is a trap in making it life's primary purpose, and in thinking that it's even possible to cling onto it without in one way or another narrowing ourselves. Because happiness is just one of Rumi's visitors, destined to be followed by all kinds of other experiences in any life that is allowed to breathe. And also because we ourselves are changing all the time, so that many of our attempts to generate future happiness are deeply flawed. The person we'll be when the time comes for the happiness we've longed for to arrive will be different in so many ways, and may feel happy about different things, than the person who is making future happiness plans today.So if happiness is transient, and if chasing it can so easily diminish us, what is worth pursuing? I think the answer almost certainly lies not in trying to feel a certain way but in the purposeful cultivation of what the ancient Greeks called the virtues - those capacities and qualities that allow us human beings to live in meaningful, vibrant, engaged ways, whatever our circumstances. There's a wide freedom and much possibility in cultivating integrity, goodness, kindness, creativity, connectedness, flexibility, forgiveness, devotion, gratitude, resoluteness, intimacy, patience, truthfulness, warmth or wisdom, to name just a few.Each of these virtues can be nurtured in an ongoing way through our everyday practices of speaking, listening, working, making, resting and expressing. Each may bring us happiness, yes, some of the time. And each may sometimes bring disappointment or frustration, or any other of Rumi's guests. But it's also the case that each of the virtues, if we'll be disciplined enough to work on them and to attend to them, can also bring us deep opportunities for meaningful engagement with life, for belonging, and for contribution, whether we're feeling happy, or sad, or despairing, or whatever else comes our way.

Photograph by Justin Wise

Secret superpower

Many of the most courageous people I know are also the most afraid.Living with such an intense inner experience of fear - and surviving it - cultivates within them extraordinary capacities to keep going, to face things as they are, to take action when it's called for, and to be present with others who are afraid.I know how much I value having such a person by my side when there's something genuinely terrifying to face. Someone who knows fear intimately. Someone who has found ways to work with it. Someone who already knows what to do.Many of the most courageous people I know hardly see themselves as courageous at all.They relate to their fear as a defect, a failing, a reason to judge themselves, as fuel for the harshest inner criticism. That they are afraid obscures the view, so that they're blinded to the gifts they bring.They do not see that the part of themselves they most wish to banish is the very source of blessings, the source of their secret superpower.So it is in the best superhero origin stories, and so it is with all of us.

Photo Credit: merwing✿little dear via Compfight cc

Your family, your team

Here's a powerful method for working with, and talking about, the unconscious projection of family relationships onto other situations (your team, for example).1 Map your own familyStart by drawing your own family system - the one in which you grew up. Include everyone who seemed a significant presence to you during your childhood, for better or for worse - parents and siblings in particular, and perhaps aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents.Map it out on a piece of paper. Draw a circle for each person, with the distance from you showing the amount of contact, and the thickness of line showing the quality of relationship you had (thicker = stronger). For example:If you wish you can give more detail to your map by noting the mood of each relationship you're mapping (supportive, caring, threatening, confusing etc).2 Map your teamNow think about your current work team as if it were a family.Who do you think takes up what roles? Can you see parents, siblings, cousins, outsiders? What is the age order in this system (it may not be the same as your actual age order)? Who is close in, who is further out? Include yourself in this exploration – specifically, who are other people in the team to you (older brother, younger sister, cousin, parent etc)?Draw out your team 'family' in the same way you did when you mapped your own family.Do you notice any connections? Similarities? Resonances between the family map and the team map? Can you see any way in which the relationships you take up in your team echo the relationships in your family? Does any of this suggest new actions you wish to take, new possibilities you wish to pursue, or things you'd like to stop doing?3 Talk about itHere is where the magic begins. Host a conversation with your team in which you share your family map, your team map, and the insights that have arisen as you compared the two.If your colleagues are ready, invite them to do the same. Remember that what you're sharing is each person's experience - so be curious, gentle, generous, welcoming and as open as you can. This is an exercise in understanding one another, in knowing your shared humanity, not in convincing one another or proving a point.If you're willing to be kind enough, and interested enough, and truthful enough, you may just start to give yourself new language that you can all use to observe yourselves in action - and a way of catching the underground patterns that have you relating to one another as if you were people from there and then rather than the people you're working with here and now.

Photo Credit: md-images via Compfight cc

Seeing through it

Given how often our naturally associative minds fill in the gaps in our experience with the ghosts of memories, projections, and transference, what are we to do?Let's start with understanding that all these processes are entirely natural and - in many circumstances - entirely necessary. Faced with something new and unknown, it's quite reasonable and very helpful that we have the kind of minds that enable us to predict what might happen and take action on the basis of our predictions.But let's also understand that in many situations our associative understanding of the world causes enormous trouble: when I try to gain your approval as if you're a parent because of the way you have positional authority over me; when I treat you as I do my younger brother because you're a peer on my team; when I project onto you those aspects of myself I don't like or can't tolerate, and judge you or criticise you because of them.As I have written here in recent days, each of these can lead us into all kinds of difficulty because we are no longer relating to the people around us as they are. So how can we work with colleagues, lead an organisation, parent or be a friend in a more truthful way, a way which is responsive to what's happening now and here rather than what was happening then or over there?Perhaps a powerful and insightful place to start is to take up the discipline of regular self-reflection. Buy yourself a journal - something you'll be pleased to write in. And a pen that you'll enjoy writing with. And then write, daily. You can uncover wonders with just a few minutes of attention each day (some hints on how you could do this are here).Write about what you see in yourself - your thoughts, what you experience in different situations, and the actions you find yourself taking. In particular, write about what it feels like to be with others. Where do you feel small, diminished, like a child? Where do you feel grandiose, puffed up beyond your normal stature? With whom do you feel judgemental, angry, resentful? Whose company are you drawn to?And then, most importantly, write about what each of those feelings remind you of. It's here that there's the most uncovering to do - that the watchful, vigilant state you find yourself in with Paul reminds you of the feel of being with your father when you were small; that Dana irritates you the way you feel irritated with your sister; that you long for signs of Karen's appreciation for you like you did with your mother.Often it's just the seeing of our transferences, projections and memories that allows their grip on us to start to loosen - that allows them to move from having us so that instead we can have them. And such self-reflection is vital work for all of us to do, if we want to take responsibility for the systems, communities, organisations and families in which we live our lives.

Photo Credit: Bust it Away Photography via Compfight cc

Ghosts

We search for patterns, often without knowing that we are doing so, filling in what we can't be sure of with what we can already grasp. And so it is, as I have been writing in the last few days, that we so often relate to other people from our memories of them, or we project onto them aspects of ourselves to fill in the unknown we encounter in them.But that's not the end of it. We also easily and unconsciously relate to other people as if they were key figures from other systems and constellations of which we have been a part, in a phenomenon known as transference.So you join a new organisation, and find that there's some way in your new boss reminds you of your father. And even before you know it, you're filling in the blanks as if that's just who he is. When he doesn't reply to your email, it feels like all the times you were ignored in your own family. When he's short tempered or curt with you it reminds you of the times you were judged, and you imagine his reasons for judging you are the same as those you remember from home. You find yourself seeking his praise, repeating the ways you learned to get noticed as a child. And you feel warm and supported perhaps exactly when you get the kind of recognition you longed for when growing up, but feel unseen when he's recognising you in other ways. And all the while, you have no idea this is going on.And he, simultaneously, is responding to all the subtle cues that come from the transference you are experiencing. Perhaps you now remind him of his own child, and he finds himself treating you in this way. He looks to praise you the way he praised her. He is frustrated with you for what frustrated him about her. He is reassured when you respond in ways that feel familiar, and confused and exasperated when you don't fit the pattern that years of habit have taught him.Before you know it, you have planted the ghosts of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, teachers and enemies and lovers among your colleagues. And each one of them, in turn, has recruited you into a role you may know nothing about.And all of you are in a dance that everyone is dancing, even though nobody can see the steps the others are following. On and on, through and through, transferred memories of families and systems that are not of this place, the weave from which your conversations and relationships, your delights and your many troubles, are spun.

Photo Credit: george.bremer via Compfight cc

Missing

Aside from our projections (the aspects of ourselves we see in others when they are actually present in ourselves) we also miss the truth about other people when we hold on too tightly to our memories of them.We so readily fill in the gaps in our experience with that we think we already know. But our stories are necessarily incomplete, and our memories are in many ways unreliable. And, added to that, people keep on changing, so that our certainty about others quickly becomes a way to have them be familiar to us rather than a way of meeting them. Often even a well-worn difficulty feels more inviting than the uncertainty and openness of not knowing.And it may even be the case that the child, the friend, or the partner you said goodbye to this morning is not the same as the person who is walking back in through the door this evening.Responding to this is not at all easy. We'd rather hang on to our stories than take the risk of being surprised, with all that could bring. It takes courage to set all that aside. But learning to see people more accurately (and with more kindness) might be our best source of hope for healing our relationships and finding the goodness in ourselves and others that we so urgently need.

--

With thanks to Jason for our recent conversation that brought this into view.

Photo Credit: Jamie McCaffrey via Compfight cc

On undoing our projections

Our projections onto others cause us such difficulty because, in effect, we are asking other people to take care of what we can only take care of ourselves. And we can only take care of it ourselves if we're prepared to look, with some attention and persistence, at what it is that we are projecting - often a part of us that's out of view.My big work on this topic over many years has been with anger. For so long unable to see and feel how angry I felt about so much, I'd project anger onto others in at least two ways that I can determine.The first - being sure that other people were angry with me when it was me that was angry with the world and with myself. Perhaps you can imagine how confusing it is for other people when I'm reacting to them as if they're already furious with me - when I withdraw, or become sullen, or snap back in response to something inside me rather than in response to them. As is the way of such things I'd often quite successfully bring about what I most wanted to avoid, as other people became angry as a result of my way of orienting towards them.The second - trying to shut down anger in others when it did arise, because it put me so directly in contact with my own fury, the very thing I was most afraid of and most wanted to deny. The result, a stifling way of controlling and dampening others' responses towards me, of not letting them be whoever and however they needed to be.And, most fascinating about this, how invisible both of these processes were for me for a very long time. I knew I was afraid of other people's anger, and I suppose I had some sense of the ways I'd try to avoid it or reduce it, but I had no idea that I was seeing it everywhere because it was present, so very present, right here in me.Perhaps if you look you'll start to see similar processes at play in your own life. Maybe it won't be anger but fear. Or if not fear, perhaps it's shame that you're projecting onto others while trying strenuously to avoid it yourself. And once you start to look, perhaps you'll see how projection shapes relationships at home, with your colleagues, across your organisation and in many other situations in which people relate to one another (isn't that everywhere?)We've taken up our projections for good reason. They have doubtless, along the way, had a necessary protective effect. But learning to still ourselves enough that we can see them, and coming to observe ourselves accurately enough that we can drop them, liberates a new kind of truthfulness and a much needed-freedom into our relationships and interactions with everyone around us.

Photo Credit: PeterThoeny via Compfight cc

We see what we project

So much of our difficulty with relationships comes because we're projecting onto others what we won't see in ourselves.

So you get angry and frustrated with a colleague because she's tentative and hesitant, without seeing that it's a cause of anger (rather than compassion or curiosity) precisely because you're angry at all the ways that you are tentative and hesitant.

Or you get furious with your partner for leaving the kitchen table in a mess, not so much because of the mess but because your inner critic is eating into you for all the ways you struggle to keep things neat and in line.

Or you fall in love with another's creativity and spontaneity, all the while because he reflects back to you all your own creativity and spontaneity with which you've lost touch.

Or you feel afraid of an entire group of people because they remind you of what you're afraid about in yourself.

Our projections - if they illuminate anything about other people at all - leave so much of their true beauty and complexity shrouded in darkness, so that we're often relating to what we project rather than to who they are.None of this is so unusual. But it can be a huge source of difficulty and suffering for us. Because behind our projections is another human being, different from us, confounding, surprising, and worthy of both curiosity and wonder. Behind all our projections is another who we are sure we know, but perhaps barely know at all. And behind all our projections are aspects of ourselves - gifts and suffering - that we're sure are out there in the world, but are in fact right here if we'll only turn towards them and look.

Photo Credit: Indrik myneur via Compfight cc

Naming it

When you’re caught up in a something that’s pulling you away from life, distracting you, narrowing your horizons, or having you act in ways that don’t seem to match your intentions, you could try to give the something a name.Is it anger, shame, resentment? Frustration, boredom, cynicism? Fear? Resignation? Your inner critic?Names have power.Moods, and our own inner critic, are often transparent to us. They recede into the background of our lives – shaping the world without us knowing, but shaping the world nevertheless.But a phenomenon, once named accurately, starts to come forward from the background. It becomes possible to point at it and to have some kind of handle on it. The somethingyou’re in takes a step from having you to being had by you, just as in the naming of daemons in the old myths – once named the daemon’s mysterious power begins to dissolve.So, when you’re in some kind of difficulty, you could try to see what name fits best.Anger? Fear? Frustration? Shame?If you pay attention you’ll know when you’re on to something, particularly if you pay attention to the felt sense you’re experiencing in your body. An accurate name, something that’s true enough, will feel different, almost as if the phenomenon you’re naming turns towards you in recognition, becomes willing at last to make itself known.And once named, first to yourself, perhaps later to others, see what new purchase you have on your situation. You may find that the invisible grip of the invisible something that has enveloped you will start to soften so that something new – a possibility or course of action – comes into view.

Photo Credit: stimpsonjake via Compfight cc