Expanding Reality – Work, Study, Nature

Expanding Reality – Work

This is the first in a series of three articles sharing insights from my recent reality-expanding 7-week adventure in Europe and the UK. Instead of Eat, Pray, Love (although I did all these too) I’ll call the articles, Work, Study, Nature.

Travel, throughout my life, has been a source of inspiration, a way to free up my thinking and expand my consciousness. My recent seven-week adventure in Europe and UK encompassed study, work and nature experiences taking me on a life-enhancing journey through a variety of different realities.

As a lifelong traveller, I have explored the world outside and have also travelled the world inside, seeking out new territories of experience, within the abundant riches of my inner consciousness.

Regardless of my material circumstance, an abundant reality has always been available to me – within my mind and heart. It is a well that never runs dry.

And yet, plenty of people take their last breath without ever deeply drinking from this well. Regardless of material experiences which may range from poverty to extreme wealth, many fail to experience the abundance of consciousness that is free to all.

• Have you taken the time to dive into this well lately?
• Do you even know of the well to which I refer?

If you’d like to dive deeper email me.

Over the last months, several Academy participants have shared with me their desire to cultivate a more meaningful, soulful, and fulfilling life. It is a desire that when acted on and consistently chosen expands one’s choices and experiences, making life sweeter (even when it is sour or bitter).

It pains me to see the poverty of consciousness experienced by those who enslave their choices and consciousness to the prevailing systems (educational, social, economic, political). Systems that reward people for narrowing rather than expanding their frames of reference. It pains me to see the passing on of these values to our children.

In the work part of my adventure, I worked with some brilliant leaders and teams. It was a great joy to reconnect in person after working with many of them virtually over the last few years. Some I met face to face for the first time – after building deep relationships online. The time together was precious.

These brilliant people were leading organisations facing tough adaptive challenges, with organisational structures, mindsets, and histories, not set up to meet the challenges. During our time together I witnessed the desire to explore new territories and also open these territories up to those they worked with (team members, customers, and society).

They were ready to move beyond past limitations of thinking and yet the systems in which they operate reward a narrow path. It will take an ongoing commitment and focus to resist the status quo. In the face of such challenges, it takes a conscious choice to move beyond the limitations prescribed and rewarded by retrogressive systems. It takes a conscious choice to step into a vaster identity and worldview.

In consistently choosing to evolve beyond our limitations, we experience the game of life differently. We are no longer subject to the game that has been playing us, we can see the game as object, and become a player. As Robert Kegan describes, the more in our lives we take as object, the more clearly, we can see the world, ourselves and the people in it.

With one team I used the analogy of moving from being a pawn on the chessboard, played by limited mindsets and systems, to becoming a player of the game, by embracing the greater choices available. This requires a significant developmental shift, one which requires vigilance and self-awareness.

The desire for most was firmly to move from pawn to at least Knight, Queen and aspirationally to player. Let’s see how they progress.

As Victor Frankl stated in Man’s Search for Meaning, “A human being is a deciding being”.

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts, comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread….they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. A human being is a deciding being.”

And yet this understanding is best applied with the compassionate acknowledgement that our environment and circumstance shape us and can expand or narrow the choices we experience and perceive.

As Raoul Martinez states, in Creating Freedom:

“The knowledge we possess, the beliefs we hold, the tastes we develop, the traditions we adopt, the opportunities we enjoy, the work we do – the very lives we lead – depend entirely on our biological inheritance and the environment to which we are exposed. This is the lottery of birth.”

In my experience, balancing an understanding of how the environment shapes us with an understanding of the power of human choice, and with it – the ability to expand consciousness and transform our ways of making meaning, provides an appropriate doorway for encouraging oneself and others in unlocking potential.

In my work with leadership teams, I attempt to weave these threads in a way that can help us to expand our current reality tunnels (mental filters shaped by beliefs and worldviews) and experience new ways of seeing, imagining and being together.

It was a delight to observe individuals and teams re-energised in contemplating possibilities as reality tunnels expanded to see and perceive more options, which could then be acted upon.

This didn’t happen by accident but through deliberate thinking, frameworks and dialogue, the kind of dialogue that opened new thinking – not the “opinion tennis” which often passes for dialogue in groups. The observation of what was possible when individuals moved from defending their assumptions to opening to what else could be true was powerful for the teams to experience.

In the words of David Bohm:

“Dialogue is a space where we may see the assumptions which lay beneath the surface of our thoughts, assumptions which drive us, assumptions around which we build organizations, create economies, form nations and religions. These assumptions become habitual, mental habits that drive us, confuse us and prevent our responding intelligently to the challenges we face every day.”

The requirement to have an educative facilitator on hand to support this, for teams used to thinking and behaving in different ways was apparent. The need for human beings to develop these skills – listening, self-awareness, asking good questions, and questioning assumptions is clear. We all need these skills to create a better reality.

And beyond all the mind-expansion, it was the heart expansion, of being together, sharing beyond the operational and engaging in free-flowing communication that made the experiences together meaningful. I count myself as completely blessed to be able to work with such intelligent, caring people who can make a positive difference in their worlds.

While I returned from my journey with a virus – this is helping me to be still and assimilate my experiences.  Writing these articles is part of the assimilation.

I look forward to sharing the next articles “Study” (unveiling a little-known passion of mine) and “Nature” (think reality-expanding experiences being in nature) with you over the coming months (make sure you subscribe to the newsletter to read them).

Above all, I’m looking forward to allowing my inner expanded reality to ripple into my relationships, work, choices, and ways of perceiving and living.

As Sadie Delany, a human rights pioneer shared:

“Life is short, and it’s up to you to make it sweet.”