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.
“But… I don’t have coloured markers. Or pencil crayons.” Pause…
“In fact, I have nothing in my house that I can write with in any colour other than black or blue.”
That’s what I’ve heard from several of my mandala discovery clients after we’ve been through the coaching session at the beginning, we’ve identified some block or growth area they want to work on, and I’ve begun to explain a mandala process that will help them.
There’s always a note of something in their voices when they say it. Longing? Fear? Regret? Maybe even a little bit of shame?
“You can start with what you have,” I say, not wanting to push them too far outside of their comfort zone right from the start. “But at some point, I suggest you go out and buy some.”
A few days later, I get an email. “I bought coloured markers!” And sometimes (because buying coloured markers can take much more courage than one would imagine), “I had no idea what I was doing when I was standing in front of a wall full of art supplies, but I heard your voice in my head and I BOUGHT THEM!”
There is always a note of something in that simple email… Joy? Pride? Surprise? Permission?
You could say that I’m a coloured-marker-ambassador.
I believe that every home needs at least one set of coloured markers. Preferably two, or three… or more.
The more I do mandala discovery work, the more I believe in the power of coloured markers.
Coloured markers give us permission to play.
They strip away some of the seriousness that grown-up pens (in boring colours like black and blue) trap us in.
They remind us of the fun we had when we were kids, when a blank white page meant POSSIBILITY!
They help us get unstuck when we’ve been spending too much time in our left brains, trying to wrap logic and ration and order around everything.
They let us make mistakes and ignore linear paths and forget the rules and HAVE FUN!
They remind us that creativity means freedom. And freedom brings change, and from small changes, revolutions begin.
Just think of them as tiny colourful swords to be wielded in our battles against the fear gremlins.
There were many years when I didn’t have coloured markers in my house either. I thought I had to be a grown-up and put away childish things like markers and crayons and colouring books. I was a mom, a manager, a wife, an elder in my church, a board member… a serious, grown-up member of my community. Grown-ups didn’t play with coloured markers.
But then one day, after too many years of blue and black pens, I finally gave in to my silent longing and signed up for an art course. Throughout that first class, I choked back tears. Happy tears. I was in a happier place than I’d been in a long, long time. My love of colour and art and POSSIBILITIES had re-awakened.
I needed more art supplies.
I needed more swords.
And since then, I have filled my tiny office/studio with art supplies… paint, crayons, pastels, chalk, and especially markers. I have fat ones, thin ones, and medium-sized ones. I have every colour in the rainbow… and then some. I am well equipped for battle.
I do most of my journaling in colour – switching whenever the mood strikes me. I doodle, I play… and I make lots of mandalas.
And now I see it as my job to make sure other people rediscover their love of coloured markers too.
Because coloured markers – in a tiny revolutionary way – change things.
We need to stop silencing that part of us that wants to live in full colour. It’s time to stop being so darned grown up and responsible all the time!
When my friend Desiree – an amazing, bold, and creative woman, who’d forgotten just like so many of us – finally bought the markers I’d been cajoling her to get, she gave me the title of this blog post… “THIS,” she said, waving her coloured markers in front of my Skype screen, “is a revolutionary act! Buying these markers CHANGED me!”
If I do nothing more in my life than convince a few people to bring coloured markers back into their lives, then I have done well.
What are you waiting for? Go out there and buy some!
And once you’ve bought them, sign up for Mandala Discovery, and you’ll get to play with those coloured markers (and think revolutionary thoughts) every week!
My current time-waster/stress-reliever is a game called Mahjong, where tiles are stacked in various formations and the goal is to remove all of the tiles by finding matching pairs.
I’ve gotten to the point where I can win about half the games I play, but that meant a fair bit of trial and error had to take place before I could begin to understand the strategy. At first, I’d simply remove any matching pairs that appeared, hoping to get to the bottom. With that approach though, I never succeeded.
One day I had an a-ha moment while playing Mahjong.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
In other words, by removing the easy tiles at the beginning instead of saving them for later when one of them might match another tile that’s more important to remove, I ruin my chances of success in the long run.
The most valuable thing to do is to remove those tiles that reveal something deeper underneath.
The more I play Mahjong, the more I realize those lessons go much beyond a simple game.
Since I started my business last year, I have been doing a lot of things. Too many things. There are lots of things I CAN do, and I’m good at many of them, so when people ask me to do them, I think “I need to make money and I need to get my name out there, so I’d better do this thing.”
I have been writing a book, editing other people’s books, tutoring people, coaching people, mentoring leaders, serving on the board of a women’s empowerment organization, teaching effective written communication, teaching writing for public relations, teaching effective facilitation, teaching emotional intelligence, facilitating community-building workshops, facilitating leadership workshops, teaching creative writing, teaching creative discovery, teaching social media skills, writing and selling ebooks on writing, wandering, leadership, and social media, serving on the organizing committee for an international women’s gathering, building a couple of websites for clients, doing mandala sessions and creating a mandala discovery course, doing a Skype interview series for a leadership gathering, hosting retreats… and… there’s more.
Some days, at the end of the week, I feel like my brain has been riding a merry-go-round for days on end. These past weeks have been especially challenging, since I’m currently teaching courses in three very different subject areas (writing for PR, effective facilitation, and creative discovery), and building a website for the event I’m helping to host this summer, and planning 2 upcoming retreats, and doing some mandala sessions. TOO MUCH!
I need to make money, I need to build my platform, and I enjoy variety, so I have a hard time saying no to the work that shows up.
Just like in the early days of playing Mahjong, I’m removing all of the tiles that appear, without consideration for whether or not they’re helping get to the deeper purpose.
Just because I can, doesn’t mean I should.
It’s time to apply that mantra to my life as well as my Mahjong board. I need more strategy. I need to trust that hanging onto some of the easy tiles will mean I’ll have them in reserve for when they help me get to the deeper stuff.
Yesterday, I took a baby step. Because of my skill-set and experience, I’d been asked to sit on the board of a really interesting organization doing international development work, mostly in Africa. It was SO tempting to say yes, since it so closely matches my values and interests and I knew I would be an asset to them and and it would give me a new circle of interesting connections. BUT I knew it would take time away from some of the other valuable work I’m committed to that’s even more closely aligned with my values and interests and long term business goal. So I made the difficult decision to say no. OOoooo… that was tough.
And I’m going to start saying no to more things, like some of the teaching that requires too much of my time and energy in areas I’m neither effective nor interested (grading papers, for example).
None of it has been a waste of time though. Just like all those practice rounds of Mahjong, before I started winning games, this past year has been incredibly valuable for me. I’ve learned so much more about what I’m good at, what I want to spend my time and energy on, and what offerings of mine people benefit the most from.
I couldn’t get here without the practice.
I couldn’t start saying no until I’d said yes a lot of times. I couldn’t find the work that was most meant for me, without a little trial and error that helped me eliminate the work that wasn’t meant for me.
Here’s what I’ve learned about myself this past year:
I love public speaking. I am often in my most happy place when I am speaking, leading, facilitating, or teaching. But I don’t really enjoy speaking on topics that don’t energize me.
I love engaging people in meaningful conversation, and I love helping them get to deeper levels of meaning. I even get energy from facilitating challenging dialogues.
I love encouraging people, but I don’t really enjoy being in a position where I have to judge their work. I’d much rather offer words of encouragement to my students and help them find their unique gifts than correct their papers and give them grades.
I love creative writing, and I enjoy teaching other people to write more creatively, but I don’t really enjoy teaching business writing.
I am a meaning-finder, a metaphor-maker, a big picture thinker and a non-dualistic processor. I thrive on creativity. I am much more comfortable outside the box than inside. I feel easily trapped when I have to teach or work in environments that feel too restrictive or systems-driven.
I can’t think of anything I love more than doing creative work (like mandalas) and encouraging others to grow in their creativity and self-discovery.
I keep going back to the personal mission statement I wrote about 10 years ago when I first started imagining this work.
“It is my mission to inspire excellence in people, to facilitate personal growth and the discovery of gifts, and to serve as a catalyst for positive change.”
It’s time to start saying no to more things so that I can say a bigger YES to my mission.
This week I woke with a new abbreviated version of my mission statement on my mind.
I am a catalyst for creativity, community, and change.
Last week was full of teaching. LOTS of teaching. In four different subject areas.
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.
