MISSION 2020
Now on hold until further notice - and the green light comes on...hopefully soon!
Partner with me as I travel the USA in 2020, March-June, to visit towns and cities, libraries, schools, wellness clinics - and set up storytelling events to catalyze awareness, participate in the synergy of and transform the way we see ourselves and each other.
"We are living in an important time of social and global change."
People often wonder why we wait for something "bad" to happen before we get serious with change. Why does it take a "negative" wake up call before we WAKE UP?
Some people feel fear and that changes them . Well, the fear factor never motivates change very long. We just kind of wait for the fear to go away, then we go back to sleep!
Fear is not a very good motivator for change anyway. I wish my dad would have know that. Fear causes unhelpful things too: more long term effects like suspicion and defensiveness. Making children fearful causes them to not feel good about themselves and causes things like depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide.
All in all we just don't know much about how to wake up.
But I have some ideas.
BE A GAME CHANGER - BE A HEALTHY PART OF THE CHANGE!
Why wait for something unwanted to happen? GET AHEAD OF THE CURVE!
Change, in this sense EQUALS = awareness, growth and higher consciousness. Storytelling helps us see "higher" and "deeper." Like we're looking into a well. Awareness will render us new choices. What does that mean? It means that we can choose to make things better, by being aware and conscious. We can choose to awaken, just like our medieval ancestors did.
They were the one's who became aware ...."enlightenment."
They woke from their sleep.
It's time for us to wake from ours.
In order to go forward with growthful change we need a place to experience it.
I think that growth in consciousness happens when we learn to listen!
LISTENING
DOESN'T MEAN AGREE! IT MEANS TO IMAGINE, TO SEE, TO BE INSPIRED!
Listen to stories. Listen to fairy tales and myths... Listen to what we are telling ourselves...our own story. Be inspired to THINK FOR YOURSELF IN THE NOW!
This is not a religion. This is not about judgement.
IT IS ABOUT LEARNING TO BE OPEN!
MY IDEAS COME THROUGH YEARS OF OBSERVATION!
IT'S ABOUT LEARNING TO HELP OURSELVES BE "not so reactive."
Deep listening counteracts reactivity. That is place where deep narratives touch.. Deep listening is about imagination, not agreement. This is my mission..to create spaces for deep listening so that we can all hear a deeper story...a new one.
"We are a fractured nation. Television, politics, entertainment, business, sports and family tables all show that we are so deeply divided we’re giving up on each other."
Tim Shriver, Chairman of the Special Olympics
2020 Mission Audio Blog
"one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." CG JUNG
"Become aware of the "hole" in your bucket. Stop making other people responsible for it. It's like making the darkness conscious." jBates
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (pictured to the right) were listening when they heard the old stories and fairy tales NOT being told anymore. Why were they dying out? It was the turn of the 18th century... the city and the industrial machine were growing. They fed each other. They saw their society changing. People were going to work in the big city industry. They were leaving their farms. The fairy tales, the enchanted medieval stories...the story tellers...were dying. They were being replaced by machines. How long would it take before the old fairy tales were forgotten?
Theses two guys are heroes and we don't realize it. Time has done its thing. Made us forget. Without them, there would not have been a Walt Disney - Disney made most of his money on embellishing the tales found (FOUND) by the Grimm's. Most people don't even know that Jacob and Wilhelm did not write these stories. They found them. They found the story tellers by traveling in and throughout western Germany and eastern France and wrote down, according to Maria Tatar, "word for word" the tales that they heard.
The Grimm brothers, besides preserving the stories themselves also did something else. At least for me. They preserved a memory...a memory of the kind of person who, at one point in time, had the inner capacity, the imagination, the love and care, to BE a story teller. These original stories, rich and imaginative, were not written down and READ stories. They were TOLD stories...the voice, the pauses, the inflections...the juxtapositions. The art. Yes, the art of it all. Was dying...
Storytelling is one thing. Story creating, back in those days, wow, I can only wonder. Think about the people, the women and men, whose experience of life rendered these tales, rich and deep...The dwarves, trolls, nixies, giants. What imaginative minds created such "beings" about which we are still enraptured! And we are enraptured for a reason...
The medieval story tellers weren't just telling stories to be "cute" and have "fun." They told stories, passed them down from generation to generation, in order to call up the personality, the character, the imagination...to help the gatherings who heard the stories have a common story around which to engage in fruitful and essential conversation. Stories create the feeling of connection experienced in community. I would call it togetherness. That's what stories do. Well, that's what they can do.
And that is what I see my mission being. And I am going now...I hope you take advantage of my offering to do this for you and your group for free...just put out a little tip jar.
THE FOUR F WORDS
...that F-UP our lives...
FIGHT
FLIGHT
FREEZE
FAWN
This is a reflection on how I think that PTSD (our leftover trauma that still controls us) short-circuits Critical Thinking. Many people may think - "Why would that be a problem?" Critical thinking is another name for "thinking for one's self." That's why it's a problem. Not be able to really think for one's self TODAY! is a problem! The Four F's that F-UP our lives is what I call it. We were traumatized as children - in essence talked out of, scared out of - thinking for ourselves: like we didn't dare challenge the terrorizing or absent adult in front of us - we caved in, went along with them: WE FROZE OR FAWNED in time and space. We got stuck, stunted, went to sleep...in one moment of time. We didn't know it. We were just trying to survive.
We adapted by NOT BEING PRESENT. We checked out. We went elsewhere. That little person is still in there. Waiting for us. We know something isn't right. It's called "COMPLEX" post traumatic stress disorder (Pete Walker). The only solution is to "wake up" from our sleep. Learning to think is not easy because it takes a courage that we have been scared to embrace. Learning to BE and to THINK for one's self (in that order) are todays biggest social, cultural, political and I dare say, religious hurdles. We are confined BY these peculiar and unique functions of our world, no longer liberated by them. We are their prisoners, not their benefactors.