Ten pieces of interesting linkage for you collected over the last couple of weeks:

Great. I wrote a couple of days ago about how hard it is to facilitate in Canada during the hockey playoffs. Tomorrow I’m working with a group and tonight the Vancouver Canucks suffered a spectacular playoff-ending overtime defeat.

I was truly honoured yesterday to sit with 15,000 other people and listen to the Dalai Lame give a talk on Universal Responsibility yesterday in Vancouver. (You can view the video of the talk online) The Dalai Lama was introduced by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in a way that made it feel as if he was introducing a good friend to an audience of good friends. It was a wonderful afternoon.

There were many parts of the teaching that resonated, and it will take me a while to process the entire experience. Just being in the presence of these two great men, and 15,000 people who care enough about peace to have gathered to hear them, was an overwhelming experience in itself. At times, it simply made me hum being in the same physical space as the current manifestation of Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Compassion.

There were some things that did stand out for me, especially in light of the other teachings that are flowing into my life at the moment.

The Dalai Lama had some very interesting comments about opening and closing energies. In speaking about emotional energy he said that positive energy is opening while negative energy is closing (see his comments starting at about the 45 minute point in the video). “Hatred must find an independent target. Positive emotions are helpful to see a holistic perspective; negative emotions are the opposite,” he said. The lesson here is that in order to exhibit negative emotions, you must collapse your world onto a specific target. It is a closing energy that inhibits compassion, inhibits a holistic view of the world, and inhibits the ability to transcend personal issues and problems in order to express compassion.

Compassion is about understanding that our personal interests and the interests of others are essentially the same. If we are able to do this, then we see that, as the Dalai Lama says “war is out of date…the destruction of your neighbour is the destruction of yourself.” The Dalai Lama advocates genuine dialogue to explore interests in a way which holds open the truth of all perspectives and refuses to collapse one in favour of another. In today’s world, where we are more and more connected in the concrete world through economics, communications and environment, it follows that a more transcendent acknowledgement of this connection is required for our collective well-being. Narrowing one’s focus of the world increases the potential of negative emotional energy because it ignores the reality that we are increasingly and deeply connected. Simplifying things gives rise to the simple, one dimensional targets that hate requires. Keeping the world open and complex allows for less opportunities for negative emotions to arise, and therefore preserves our field of practice for compassion and dealing with the world in real terms.

Montreal, Quebec

Lucky me, blogging from downton Montreal, where I have been working with a joint working group of First Nations and Inuit organizations and government.

I love this city, which is not something you hear every native born Torontonian say. This place is a treasure, a unique incubator of culture and difference that adds heaps of energy to this otherwise homogenous continent. It allows North America to hang around with Europe and African and Asia at all the parties for the cool continents. Without Montreal (and Quebec), NA is the neighbourhood geek with too much money and too much time on its hands.

As I type I am listening to the afternoon CBC show, and someone is talking about a major art event and assuring people that all Montreal Canadiens goals will be announced so people don’t miss all the action of tonight’s important playoff game. When the Habs are in the playoffs, everything seems to revolve around them.

In fact it is a work hazard, being a facilitator in Canada during the hockey playoffs. One year, back home in BC, I was working with a group in deep conflict, and they decided to go for dinner together and watch the Vancouver Canucks playoff game. Luckily, the Canucks won, putting everyone in a good mood the next day. I shudder to think what would have happened if there had been a loss that night. It kind of puts one’s role in a humbling perspective – to think that a bunch of hard process work can be undone by an overtime goal!

And that’s the mood here right now as the Habs lost an important game in overtime on Tuesday night, in a most bizarre fashion. Tonight, they must win to stay alive in the playoffs.

Luckily my meeting is done, and my flight home leaves early in the morning.

Reading about Leon Fleischer in the New Yorker:

Open Space is like that. Facilitating in general is like that. With Open Space, there are so few rules, the ritual is so similar every time we open space, but the implications are infinite, the possibilities stretching back into the dimmest recesses of possibility. When we get it right, tapping every so gently on the field of process, the light explodes forth, invited into a warm space full of hope.

That becomes a memorable moment of transformation with a group. It doesn’t happen every time, but every gathering is pregnant at the outset with the potential. It’s marvelous when it happens – contrivance falls away, passion envelopes the people and something hard inside suddenly dissolves. Have you felt that flow? The billions of implications that unfold from a moment’s sounding of a simple invitation?