Connection, Collaboration, Consolidation
I'm in 12 days of seasonal joy and slowness. It's wisdom with action for meeting our times and embodying the power of our connections, feeling the collaborations, crystallising what's new: a birth!
There is an arc to our times and my year. It is likely you are noticing this too: connection, into collaboration then consolidation. It’s calling us to meet our times from joy.
Connection
To be in relationship with others for the sake of being in relationship
Alicia Forde
Did you feel it—post-covid, post social isolation—the legacy within us, multi-headed and complex, from our worldwide zoom embraces? Our physical sensations contracted so our perceptual senses enhanced themselves to compensate for the gap.1
Screen connections are deep yet obviously lacking taste, smell and touch. I so missed this: oxytocin and dopamine as we hug, the physical sensations of a gentle surrender of a body into mine, being fully embodied with others and not just on my own.
Taking myself into this time, it is like my body is reaching out to yours regardless of distance. I am feeling for connection, deeply attuned to emotional nuance and your subtle presence. It is like my multiple intelligences are becoming superpowers: hara and heart centres are expanding, penetrating through the screen, perspicaciously highly sapient.2
What do you feel in yourself, in your heart and your belly, as you take yourself into this time? This time when most of our connections were moderated through a screen? How would you describe feelings in your body, in that time on zoom:
A yearning, a reaching?
An openness, melting, merging?
What do do you feel and where do you feel it? Do the feelings have a colour, direction or movement to them?
In my social isolation (I doubled the population of the village I live in by arriving there in covid times) I was held in the liminal beauty of that land around me and my zoom conversation lifelines. My subtle senses enhanced wildly, involuntarily & insanely large into feeling the whole universe rushing through me.3
There are beautiful gifts from that time, unfolding into those perceptual sensations. Let’s collaborate with them more fully online.
Collaboration
the way that carried you into your future, that brought
you to this place, …
you had sought forever, like a broad field of freedom
that beckoned you beyond; like another life,
Santiago by David Whyte
We’re bringing the future into the now. Our covid-times sharpnesses of mind, body and spirit, with our connections for the sake of connection, are driving collaboration.
One way of understanding this is as a developmental shift. Feel yourself moving out of old ethical, mastery space tethers. Feel yourself being fully authentic with yourself, responsible. Collaborating in mutual responsibility.
When I do this my emotional and subtle intelligences are engaged, enhanced by the gifts from covid-social-isolation.
Try experiencing it explicitly, feeling mutual cooperation in your body:
Make yourself comfortable, as for meditation. Close your eyes if that is helpful for you.
Take yourself into a space of feeling fully supported. A place where you were especially relaxed and happy.
Take a moment to observe all you can about how you feel in this moment, as neutrally and objectively as possible. Then allow yourself to visualize a witness platform. This platform represents the neutral, objective state of consciousness you’re now using to observe what’s going on inside of you.
From that witness platform, think about the cooperative aspects of any collective you belong to, beginning with your body. Consider your head, heart, organs, limbs, blood, bones, nerves, muscles, skin, and cells—how they all work together to create each moment of your experience in physical reality. As you perceive any example of cooperation in action, tell yourself: “This is cooperation.”
Move on to partners, family, friends, coworkers, social organizations, spiritual groups, neighborhoods, regions, and nations. Constantly remind yourself: “This is cooperation.” When finished, see yourself one last time on your witness platform.4
If you are like me a witness platform is like viewing myself, and the engagements and interactions I am in with others, from a balcony. It’s a little like experiencing what I and others are feeling from the balcony (rather than being in the experience, on the dance floor).
From here, from your balcony, remind yourself “This is cooperation”. Try it on a walk when your eyes light on a tree or a bird. Notice flowers or bees, mushrooms or lichen and feel how all of this supports each other element. Every time you notice that say to yourself “This is cooperation”. Notice what that feels like, in your body, when you recognise “This is cooperation”.
Try it in a meeting. When you are facilitating, leading or participating what comes into greater focus for you and in that room?
The impact is all around: in our willingness and desire to be in collaboration, drawing from places not limited by an old linear view of society and creating experiential somatic embodiments to integrate what was stuck.5
Let’s consolidate that.
Consolidation
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become
Carl Jung
The end of our year. A time to be languorously wrapped in the quite sleepy spaces around us.
In the northern parts of our planet, time is very slow. We are just past the solstice and the days are infinitesimally lengthening again. Many parts of Europe honour this in the culture, don’t email me about work! And this is fundamentally in our cycles too. Solstice in the far north meant 12 days when the sun literally stood still in the sky. No time, infinite time, slow.
In the far south we are slow too. Summer solstice in Australia. Far too hot, the buildup times. We are waiting for the heat to break, for the seabreeze revival. Don’t email me about work!
And yet, this is simultaneously a time of birth. When all of the pieces we’ve been curating all year consolidate.
Crystallisation: From connection, collaboration and consolidation
You are invited to draw your blade and use it. It is not auspicious to hesitate, to waste time in idle talk, or to hide from the inevitable. Heaven and Earth are aligned to support you in claiming your power, so take decisive action. Overcome your fear of hurting others unsheathe the blade, and use it wisely!
Colette Baron-Ried
Wise use is asking us to keep our multiple intelligences online. Our times call for creating with collective mutual responsibility. They call for our connections, collaborations and consolidations to come together as a meta: meta-aware sheer skill.
Meta-aware sheer skill is well beyond balance and linear cause and effect thinking. From a place using our multiple intelligences, being aware of what collaboration feels like, a meta-aware sheer skill sees you with your action sourced from the collective:
I’m harvesting from the rich emotional landscape, sharing to feed every soul.
Teresa Zimmermann6
That’s the promise from our full-selves. You are in connection with others. You are creating clarity that is honouring the abundant intensity of life, aware of and holding the fullness of emotional landscape, not knowing but feeling in your body the collaborative wisdoms. As you are nourishing others you are experiencing that overflowing your cup, more than fully nourishing you.
I am wishing everyone a beautiful 12 days of Christmas, 12 days of Solstice. May you have much joy penetrating and being permeated through by this connecting, collaborating and consolidating time.
May you wisely and joyfully wield all this is birthing for you.
Photos: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.
Howard Gardner introduced Linguistic, Logical/Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Naturalist as our multiple intelligences. Ken Wilber expands this to at least 24.
My backstory, being taken/had by the universe will be a three act story. Act 1 has four Scenes:
Act 1, Scene 1 is The rascals immunity
Act 1, Scene 2 is Rascal visions
Act 1, Scene 3 is Rascal’s descent
Act 1, Scene 4 is Boom, crash, bounce?
Act 2 currently has three Scenes:
Act 2, Scene 1 is The Rascal and the Mongrel
Act 2, Scene 2 is Western logic
Act 2, Scene 3 is Unfolding realities
Act 2, Scene 4 is Taking the red pill. Coming soon.
There is one interlude, That rascal. Got me
From Kurt Leland. The Multidimensional Human. '“Witness platform” you may be familiar with from other meditation. Kurt’s practice is: “Sit comfortably in a supportive chair or on a meditation cushion in a place where you’re unlikely to be interrupted. If necessary, wrap yourself in a blanket for warmth. Close your eyes. Notice any sounds in the room, then let them go. Turn the focus of your attention inward. Reduce the tension in your body by taking a couple deep breaths and letting them out with an audible sigh.
When you’re ready, allow yourself to remember a time when you were especially relaxed and happy. … let go of your memory of how it was initially produced.
Take a moment to observe all you can about how you feel in this moment, as neutrally and objectively as possible. Then allow yourself to visualize a witness platform. This platform represents the neutral, objective state of consciousness you’re now using to observe what’s going on inside of you. Your witness platform should have a sense of support, such as a strong floor under you, and an expansive view. …”
Embodiments that Unfold us into bigger realities: This is the core of my work and brings in an aliveness like nothing else. I’d love to talk more about it, please reach out, Meet Simon.
Sheer Skill is one of the four masculine and feminine principles Teresa and I outlined across 3 depths (conventional, post-conventional, meta-aware) and 5 patterns as part of Frame & Flow. An example, a taste of people holding sheer skill, creating outcomes honouring abundance, is in this linkedin post here>