It’s no secret that I like labyrinths. I visit them often and am very happy that the beautiful Carol Shields labyrinth (in the photo above) is just across the river from where I live. It was at the centre of that labyrinth that I stood with my candle in a small circle of women, welcoming 2012.
It’s also no secret that I love metaphors. I’m a meaning-finder, and I love to wrap the complexity of life around the simplicity of a good metaphor.
The labyrinth is a great metaphor for life. Here’s why…
1. The journey to God is a path that leads along many deceptive twists and turns to the centre.
2. Though it often feels like we’re getting lost, if we keep following the path, we’ll eventually end up where we’re supposed to be.
3. When we’re weary and feeling lost, all that is required of us is that we put one foot in front of the other and carry on.
4. Sometimes we get really close to the centre, and think our journey is done, but suddenly we round the corner and there’s a whole new lesson we need to learn before we can rest.
5. Each time we pass a familiar place, we wonder “haven’t I been here before?” Those moments offer us the opportunity to lean even more deeply into the lessons we’re meant to learn and the beauty we’re meant to see at those places.
6. God is both the centre we seek and the path that gets us there. What we need is to trust the centre and to trust the path that leads us to it.
7. The path to God requires that we commit our body to it, not simply our minds. Get up and walk – God is in the movement.
8. To hear Spirit whisper, we have to be willing to be quiet.
9. Like all rites of passage and initiation ceremonies, walking the labyrinth is structured as a pilgrimage with three parts. First comes the journey inward, toward the sacred space where change happens. Next, time is spent at the centre, where the new life begins. Finally there is the journey outward, the return of the transformed person to the world, often with a new identity.
10. We don’t get straight paths in life – only winding roads that never show us the final destination and that keep taking us to places we don’t expect to go.
Some days she wants to spin you around the floor, and show you off to all the world.
Other days, she turns her nose up at you and points out how far you fall short of the popular girls in the room.
One day, you’re on top of the world. Your work is being noticed, you’re getting lots of teaching jobs, people tell you how meaningful your words are, you’ve written a book you’re pretty proud of, you get great feedback from students who take your courses, and someone wants to interview you on the radio.
You’re the hot dance ticket, and Ego whispers big, bold messages in your ear. “You’re awesome! Look how great people think you are! You’ve got special talent and it’s about time people noticed. You deserve all of this attention. Not like those wallflowers at the edge of the room – nobody wants to dance with them. But YOU… YOU are the talk of the town. It’s all about YOU!!”
And then, only a day or two later, everything changes. Nobody’s paying attention to you, hardly anyone’s reading your blog posts, the only people who hear you on the radio are your husband, brother, and friend, you get some negative feedback from students, and you realize your work is about to dry up and you don’t have much lined up after all these courses end.
You’re no longer the hot dance ticket. Ego sneers at you and whispers criticism in your ear. “You’re good for nothing. You put all this effort into your work, and nobody pays attention because you’re just not that important or interesting. You’re failing. You shouldn’t put your neck out like that and risk getting hurt. You really should give up and go get a postal delivery job instead.”
In the blink of an eye, everything changes.
And yet… nothing really changes.
You’re still doing the same things, you’re still following your calling, you’re still pouring your heart and soul into what feels like your right work, and you’re still being faithful to the God of your understanding. Nothing has changed.
The only thing that changes is the story you’re telling yourself – the story you’re letting Ego convince you is true.
Neither story is the whole truth.
You are neither the most awesome dance partner on the floor, nor are you the biggest failure.
Ego may think she has your best interests at heart, and part of her job is to protect you from harm, but she cannot be trusted. She’s fickle and unreliable.
You are not Ego’s stories about you.
You are doing your best, you are faithful, and you are showing up for what has been asked of you. You are good enough.
How do you stay grounded when Ego wants to either sweep you off the floor or bury you under the floorboards?
Here are some of the things that work for me.
1. Remind yourself that the outcome is not your responsibility. Do the work, be faithful, and then surrender. You are only responsible for what you’ve been called to do – you’re not responsible for how people receive it.
2. Grab your camera, go outside, and find a tree or flower to photograph. Remind yourself on a regular basis that each flower and tree grows and blooms exactly the way it is designed to grow. It makes no difference what anyone says or thinks of them – they just grow. Your job is to do the same. Grow and blossom. Do what God designed you to do.
3. Receive both your best press and your worst press lightly. Ask yourself “what am I meant to learn from this?” and then set it aside. Walk away and carry on, holding the best learnings from both, but letting go of the stuff that holds you back.
4. Get back into your body. When Ego whispers in your ear, go for a walk, start dancing, grab your yoga mat, or go for a swim. A healthy, engaged body is one of the best defences against Ego’s lies.
5. Write a letter to your ego. Tell her you’re glad she’s looking out for your best interests, but you just don’t want to dance with her anymore. Tell her you’d rather dance with Truth. And Humility. And Faithfulness.
6. Make a bowl mandala. Draw a large circle on a square piece of paper, and fill it in with colour. It doesn’t matter what it looks like – it only matters that you do it. Start adding words on top of the colour. Consider it like a bowl, meant to hold everything that’s taking up space in your mind – the lies that Ego wants to tell you, the truth that Real You is trying to remind you of, the prayers you want to whisper to the God of your understanding, the prayers God whispers back – whatever shows up. Consider it a mental cleanse and dump everything in the bowl. Welcome whatever new wisdom wants to show up to fill in the space the cleanse leaves behind. (For more on mandalas, check out my offerings. There are still a few spots left for Mandala Discovery which starts on Friday.)
Last week was full of teaching. LOTS of teaching. In four different subject areas.
I taught six hours of writing for public relations, six hours of effective facilitation, six hours of tools for social media visibility, and two and a half hours of creative discovery.
And in between all of that teaching, I had to create curriculum for all of those courses – from scratch. And I had to mark papers for two of the courses.
That, my friends, is some serious teaching exhaustion.
And then, on Friday evening, at the end of it all, I had to muster the energy to go on the radio to talk about some of the teaching I do (on mandalas, creativity, and community-building). By then, my head was spinning with all of the subject matter my head has been dabbling in. (To hear the interview, click here, enter March 16th at 8 pm, and then wait about 15 minutes before my interview starts.)
Needless to say, I had to spend much of the weekend recovering my energy. Fortunately, the weather was lovely, and I had a chance to wander in the woods, walk the labyrinth, do some mandala journaling outside, and have a wiener roast in celebration of my youngest daughter’s tenth birthday.
Yes, I was exhausted and needed to fill my tank, but underneath that exhaustion was an even stronger current, helping me to sustain the energy to carry on.
More than anything, I feel deeply privileged.
I am privileged:
– to be part of the learning journey of so many interesting students.
– to be able to “pay it forward” and share the wisdom that I’ve gained from many wise teachers who’ve inspired me on my own learning journey.
– to have students who come from all over the world (in one class, there are 8 countries represented) to study in Canada.
– to be able to dive deeply into topics that interest me, so that I can learn enough to inspire my students.
– to be on the receiving end of many, many stories.
– to have had so many vast and interesting experiences and learnings in my life that I can now be qualified enough to teach.
– to be able to help people find their unique paths in the world.
– to learn as much from my students as they learn from me.
– to have this much variety in my life to keep my inner “scanner” happy.
– to sit in circle with interesting people and find community in the classroom.
This is a good life.
It’s exhausting, and some days are very, very hard. But most days, it’s a privilege to teach.
This weekend, when I wasn’t wandering around outside, I finished making personalized mandala journals for the people who’ll be participating in Mandala Discovery. Happy that I soon get to connect with another circle of interesting people in yet another course, I poured a little love and goodness into each journal. It was a privilege to make special gifts for each person and know that they will soon be in my life, and I will get to sit in another circle (albeit a virtual one) and hear more stories. I only hope that receiving these journals is as special for them as making them was for me.
After finishing the journals, I edited the following video where some of the wise women who I got to learn from each week in my Creative Discovery class (that is sadly now over) share their experience. Watch it, and you will understand just how privileged I am.
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. – Oliver Wendell Holmes
I have watched the buzz around Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 campaign with interest. It was my teenage daughter who first alerted me to it. Like many teenagers all over the world, she was pumped up about it and wanted to wear the bracelet, hang the posters, and know that she was part of a movement that was stopping an evil man and fixing problems for the children he’d brutalized.
I validated her passion, and then I suggested that, if she really wanted to know how to help people in Uganda, she should speak to people who’ve grown up there – like my friend Nestar – and find out more about what the issues are and how a teenager in Canada can support them.
The last thing I want to do is pour cold water on my daughter’s passion… but… there are many complexities that KONY 2012 ignores. Complexities like… What are the root causes of war? What have people in Uganda already done to try to resolve the situation? How might a campaign like this feed into the dangerous colonialism that North Americans too frequently fall prone to when it comes to the way we want to “fix” problems in other countries? What if the world isn’t really as black and white as the film would have us believe and we can’t simply resolve problems by doing away with bad guys?
The problem is, complexity doesn’t trend on Twitter. You can’t fit it onto a bracelet and sell it to millions of teenagers.
Complexity involves time and effort and frustration and commitment and chaos and depth and… a whole lot of things that make it tough to fit into a marketing plan.
This is an issue I’ve struggled with for a long time, starting with my work as a communicator for a non-profit organization working with partners all over the world to respond to hunger. It’s not easy to explain the complexities around why people are hungry. There is no simple cause and effect that can be fixed by throwing a few dollars at it or sending a letter to the government or wearing a t-shirt. Hunger is about conflict and HIV/AIDS and gender and politics and corruption and… the list goes on and on. To make any long term difference so that people are able to access food on a regular basis instead of becoming reliant on aid agencies, you have to dive into the complexity and dare to get your hands dirty.
Try as I might, I just couldn’t boil those complex messages down to a simple catch phrase. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though – I made several videos when I was working there, and none of them went viral. They didn’t have cute, cherubic children in them, and I didn’t promise an African child I would stop the bad guys who killed his brother.
As anyone in n0n-profit will tell you, though, it’s the simple “give money and you can fix a problem” messages that get the donations and support. “Sponsor a child” or “buy a goat” or “stop a bad guy” paint simple problems with simple solutions and they bring in money. People want to know that their $30 donation will mean that a child can sit down to a meal every day, or that evil will be arrested. Send out a photo of that child whose life has been “fixed”, and it’s an easy sell.
But none of this is simple. You can’t fix all of the complex problems that children face – marginalization, conflict, lack of education, etc. – with your $30 donation (and I’m not suggesting that those organizations who use this type of marketing would ever make such a claim). I wish it were so, but it’s not.
It’s not much different in the work I now do in personal development, facilitation, and teaching. On a regular basis, students ask me for simple answers – templates to ensure they’ll get top grades, rules for writing, etc.. “It’s not that simple,” I say. “This is not a black and white world.”
If I could sell simple, my business probably would have taken off like wildfire. But I can’t sell simple any more than I could create simple videos about how hunger can be resolved. I live in a complex world, and I can’t authentically tell you that anything I offer will fix your life or your community or workplace. I live in a world where babies die, where loved ones attempt suicide, where people loose their jobs, where fathers get killed by tractors, where people who love each other sometimes hurt each other, and where dreams don’t always come true.
I don’t sell magic. I sell hard work and deep dives and surrender and journeys through chaos – nothing that fits into a 140 character tweet. My work is to invite you on the journey through complexity.
Fortunately, though, I believe, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says in the quote at the top of this article, that there is a deeper kind of simplicity on the other side of complexity.
That simplicity is the place where God resides.
It’s about Love – the simplest (and yet most complex) concept in the world.
It’s about the kind of love that “passes understanding”. It’s love that’s been through the battlefield of complexity and lived to tell the tale. It’s love that knows that there is no black or white, but just a lot of shades of grey. It’s love that recognizes that to really help people who are hurting we have to sit in the hurt with them and not try to fix it. It’s love that dares to get messy and dares to forgive.
It’s also about surrender. And trust. And forgiveness. And community. All of those are simple words, but none of them are simplistic. They don’t exist without the complexity.
I have had the honour of doing mandala sessions with several people who, after working their way through the mandala discovery process, have found a path through complexity to a new place of simplicity. I get to witness the a-ha moments as something new arrives that brings them closer to their centre, closer to Spirit, closer to truth, closer to simplicity. It might not make me millions, but I wouldn’t trade this kind of work for anything that fits cleanly on a marketing plan or is easy to sell in 140 characters or less.
This is the hero’s journey we’re talking about – Theseus’ path through the labyrinth, hanging onto a thread. It’s not simple. And yet it takes us to the deeper simplicity on the other side of complexity.
Several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Angelina Atyam, an amazing woman whose daughter was abducted, along with her schoolmates, several years ago by Joseph Kony’s army in Uganda. Atyam joined together with other mothers to form Concerned Parents Association and began lobbying for the return of their children. They challenged the government to reconsider its strategy against the LRA. At one point, she even had the opportunity to meet with the President of Uganda.
Clearly feeling threatened by the work of CPA, the LRA sent a message to Atyam that they would return her daughter if she would stop her public relations campaign against them. Atyam countered with an offer to do so if all the girls from St. Mary’s were freed, but the LRA refused it. Her family was appalled that she had turned down the offer, but as she wrote in Marie Claire, “getting my child back would be absolutely wonderful, but if I accepted the offer, I would be turning my back on all the other families. I’d destroy the new community spirit we had created–the hope of getting all the boys and girls back.”
Eventually, her daughter was found and returned to Atyam. By then, the daughter had given birth to two children fathered by the commander of the army. One son went missing in the raid that rescued Atyam’s daughter, but a few weeks later, after he’d wandered in the bush alone with no food for weeks, he was found. Atyam began raising her grandchildren so that her daughter could go to school.
The part of the story that sticks with me the most is what Atyam shared about forgiveness. At one point she realized that she was full of bitterness and that she could not work effectively for peace if she didn’t first experience forgiveness. Working hard to forgive her daughter’s captors, she went to the village where the mother of the commander of the army lived. She told the other women that she did not hold her personally responsible for what had happened to her daughter. She said she forgave the woman and her son for the horrible things that had been done to her family.
That, my friends, is complexity. It’s messy and uncomfortable and courageous.
That’s the kind of complexity that is missing from the KONY 2012 video. Uganda’s challenges will not be resolved by a lot of well-meaning white people wearing wristbands. Uganda’s challenges will be resolved by mothers standing up to evil and then digging deep into their hearts for forgiveness and love.
That love that Angelina Atyam extended to the mother of her daughter’s abductor and that helped her raise the grandchildren who’d been fathered by a murderer? That’s the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
Not long ago, I was on my way to a coordinating committee meeting for a feminist organization I’m part of, and one of my teenage daughters asked “Do we still need feminist organizations? I thought women already had all the rights they need.”
At first I was rather shocked by her response. How could a daughter of mine, who’s been raised in a home where human rights issues are discussed on a regular basis by a mother who doesn’t hesitate to share stories of the women she’s met in other parts of the world who’ve had their genitals mutilated or have been sold into slavery, not understand that there are still many women who are marginalized, ignored, tortured, raped, sold into slavery, etc., etc.?
After the initial shock, though, I realized that part of the reason she asked the question is precisely because she has been raised in an environment where these conversations are a normal part of her day – where women’s equality and ability to lead is never questioned by either her mom or her dad, where her dad respects her choices and takes responsibility for just as much of the child-rearing and household care as her mom, and where she knows she has as many options for her future as her male cousins and friends. Those are good things, and it gives me hope that young women in her generation will enter a work world where equality is assumed and no longer has to be fought for.
According to Gloria Steinem, though, we still have a long way to go. “The Feminist Revolution is the longest revolution in history. I’m not sure we’re halfway through this process. Maybe only a third. That’s why I say to take it in 100-year stretches. Movements have to last at least a century to be fully absorbed and normalized in culture.”
I am part of two organizations that are honouring International Women’s Day in different yet equally relevant ways.
UNPAC, the organization that I sit on the coordinating committee for, is releasing a gender budget report card on the steps of our provincial parliament building today (at 11:30 if you’re in Winnipeg). We’ve done analysis of how our provincial government has or has not indicated their support for women’s issues by committing funding to it and we’re advocating for change in that regard. We still need change. The government barely got a passing grade.
Gather the Women, another organization I’m connected with, has just today launched its website (that I created, by the way) for its annual gathering called Weaving Wisdom, Renewing Spirit, happening in August in Ontario, Canada in August. The women of this organization are supporting the work of women by gathering in circle and honouring feminine wisdom and what gives us unique strength as women – our spirituality, community, connection, stories, and compassion. (I sure would love to have you join us at the gathering!)
Sometimes I feel a little torn by these two approaches – is it better to spend my time and energy advocating for women’s rights, or sitting in circle and dreaming about and working toward a better world where women’s wisdom is valued?
My answer to that question is – it’s best to do both.
We need to continue to challenge the priorities of our government, stand up for those who are being marginalized and brutalized, point out the inequality in the way women are represented in our media, and empower women to make their own choices. We need to continue striving toward a world where women have access to power, and decisions are not made on our behalf. We need to ensure we live in a true democracy where women’s voices are heard as loudly as men’s.
AND we need to sit in circle; support community-building; honour our spirits, intuition, and feminine wisdom; and continue to strive for a world in which women’s wisdom is no longer considered secondary to men’s. We need to believe that collaboration is important as competition, that communities are as important as teams, that circles are as important as hierarchies, that intuition is as important as strategy, and that art and beauty really are transformative.
There are many ways to silence people. You can brutalize them, overpower them, threaten them, or marginalize them. You can imprison them, take away their rights, kill them, or ignore them.
One of the most insidious ways of silencing people, however, is to convince them that their voices are not important, that what they claim as wisdom is just frivolousness, and that their stories have no relevance. That’s what’s been happening for too long to women all over the world.
Yes, it’s horrible that women are being sold into slavery and that genital mutilation is still happening in parts of the world, but it is also horrible that, even in our “progressive” North American culture, the things that women value and the wisdom that we hold is not being valued in a world that desperately needs us.
As I’ve said before, it’s important that women have access to the halls of power (and that’s what the feminist movement has worked hard to ensure), but it’s ALSO important that we start CHANGING those halls of power. The old systems aren’t working as well as they could – they’re too slanted in one direction and they ignore half of the strength we have in humankind.
We need yin and yang – masculine AND feminine, strategy AND intuition, competition AND collaboration, industry AND community, progress AND simplicity, warriors AND lovers, fierceness AND softness, production AND environmental stewardship. We need to be involved with organizations that advocate AND those that sit in circle and honour spirit. We need to fight and we need to love.
“We’ve learned that women can do what men can do, but we haven’t convinced most of the country that men can do what women can do,” says Gloria Steinem. We can serve the world well if we not only stand in our power as women, but also invite men to experience and honour their own feminine wisdom. This is about moving away from dualism into a world where there is middle ground.
In honour of International Women’s Day, I encourage you to consider the rights of women all over the world AND I encourage you to honour your spirit and your wisdom and believe that it can change the world.
I leave you with this poem, written over a year ago when I first started imagining this work I would do with Sophia Leadership.
How to be a Woman
There may come a time, my friend,
when you have lived too many lives that are not your own,
followed too many rules that broke your spirit,
and mastered the art of imitation.
This will be a time when you’ve forgotten your own shape
and you find that you no longer remember just how to be a woman.
Believe this: you can remember again,
you can fit back into the shape that you were meant to be.
It hasn’t truly gone away.
Start by taking a deep breath, and sit quietly while you
listen to the wisdom written on your heart
by your God/Goddess.
Be kind to yourself
caress your skin, your hair, your breasts,
all the body bits that make you woman.
Gently touch the flabby bits, the too-skinny bits,
the old bits, the not-perfect bits
Stop to kiss Mother Earth, Gaia,
bend your knees, run your fingers through her soil
hug her trees, blow kisses into her wind.
Twirl your skirts, kick up your heels
and dance while you listen to the music nobody else hears.
Then, when you are ready, turn your head in the direction
your own journey calls you and don’t look back
even when you hear the cries
of those who feel betrayed by your leaving.
Stand tall, my friend,
you need to be courageous for this remembering
you need to be ready to break things
shift things, disturb the status quo.
You need to be powerful, and wise, and steadfast,
in this re-birth, because it is what is expected of you
by all of those waiting for you to lead them.
Make no mistake – they ARE waiting for you to lead them
because they are afraid, they are hurting,
and they have lost their way.
They need your strength, your courage,
your beauty, your art, to lead them into this new place.
But first,
be gentle, sit quietly,
for you need this time of rest
to prepare you for the journey.
