Yesterday I spent an hour sitting on the banks of the Mississippi River near Albertville, Minnesota. We were deep in a design day, and I’m feeling a little run down and tired. I needed to go and sit, and rest and fill my lungs with air and my mouth with silence. One of the tried and true things I know about sitting in nature is that it takes about 20 minutes in stillness and quiet before the system you have entered has absorbed you. Humans are clumsy at being in the natural world and we stumble and make noise. All …
There were many leanings for me this week here in St. Paul, Minnesota. Foremost among these I think is a deep recommitment to the essential nature of the Art of Hosting: what we call the Four Fold Practice. I admit that I haven’t always given this particular model the attention it deserves, so if you have been in an Art of Hosting learning event with me at some point and you are scratching your head about it, let me explain. In brief the four fold practice is this: Be Present and cultivate a strong practice of hosting yourself. Participate in …
Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent …
Graphic from puramaryam.de Last night as part of a leadership retreat we are doing for the the Federation of Community Social Services of BC, we took a bus into Vancouver from Bowen Island to listen to Adam Kahane speak. He spoke last night on the ten laws of love and power (the essence of which you can see amongst these Google results). There are a couple of new insights from the talk he gave which I appreciate. Love and power as a complimentary system. Adam’s project is to recover useful definitions of love and power and to see them in …
This fall I have been really lucky to study and work alongside Alissa Schwartz in New York and Wendy Morris in Minneapolis. Both of these women are actors and performance artists, and in my working with them I have become cracked wide open to the reality of leadership and ACTION as performance, best trained through understanding the relationship of the inner body to the outer, the presence of the individual in relation to the collective and relational field. Since connecting with the Applied Improvisational Network and working with colleagues Viv McWaters, Johnnie Moore and Geoff Brown, I have been learning …