Sanctuary. An Ongoing Training for Activists.

An activist is someone who takes action - in order to bring awareness to and to change situations of injustice.

An effective activist is someone who takes action while at the same time challenging their own limiting habits, expectations, judgments, and fears.

The ongoing commitment to transform the world and the ongoing commitment to transform ourselves is, in reality, the same thing. We can’t do either one effectively without the other.

We are called to be practical, adaptable, and open. A doctrinaire approach self limits. The time is over for rigid adherence to doctrines - Buddhism, Marxism etc. Such things are best used as filters, rather than articles of faith.

We are better off learning from multiple sources. To do so is not to dilute the truth of what we know. It is to go ever deeper into an understanding that works systemically. It is inclusive, and it is essentially creative. It includes those we may have thought we must oppose, it moves toward win-win solutions, it is rooted in basic human values of kindness and mutual co-operation. It is the essence of Anarchism in its original sense. Call it original anarchism. Eros out of Chaos . . .

Look for Kropotkin: Mutual Aid
and Alfred Wallace: The Malay Archipelago
Mix gently and simmer.
Season with Audre Lorde's essay on Uses of the Erotic.

Mmmmm delicious!

Shaking the Tree.

“What does not change is the will to change?” Who said that? Pindar perhaps.

The Buddha suggested that resistance to the natural process of change is a cause of unhappiness. Forcing change to happen can be equally problematic. Change is evolution. What I mean by change is a change in values and perspectives, rather than simply a change in outward circumstances.

Change means adaptation. It is the power to respond in new ways, to always re-evaluate. To be open - always. To listen, even when we are afraid.

As a teacher and a facilitator of change, if I am to help others change their lives, I must also know that some people will be impatient, while others will be left behind. Some will be disinterested, or even take the invitation to re-evaluate their assumptions and habits as a personal affront, others will embrace the challenge.

Leadership is very much about catalyzing appropriate change and then implementing it in an appropriate manner. You can’t make everyone happy all the time. To do so you would make you an enabler at best. It could make you complicit in preventing the best from emerging. The best emerges - in an individual, in a community, or in wherever context you work in - in its own time, catalyzed, in part, by what that person or community is willing to learn in the process.

I have noticed that the work towards personal change that I have facilitated for several years (Meditation and Mindfulness drawn from Buddhist traditions) has often been a way for people to feel better about things they have decided they can't change in themselves, rather than actually being a means of effecting genuine personal change.

I am aware that meditation practices that espouse change often do not really encourage people to change basic habits and perceptions. Is that sad or what? I have noticed that some practices actually anchor people into despair, dysfunction, and resistance to really questioning their ‘stuff’ and console them by encouraging them to believe that they are part of an elite community that understands things more deeply than other people.

It was that way with me too. There were times when I was stubbornly stuck. Am I a bad teacher and a bad student? Maybe. Though what I am describing is something I see in various chronic dysfunctional forms in Buddhist centers of different varieties (and in other 'spiritual' contexts too). It's a disease that infects religious thinking and institutions. Stasis. Denial. Dogmatism. Complacency. . .

But now I am excited about change. I am excited about person change that takes place outside of religious or political constructs (are they any different?) - dogmas, fixed systems, and rigid therapeutic modalities.

Therapy is ‘why’.

Buddhism is . . . . well, it's many things. Unfortunately it also can be,
'don't challenge authority'.
or 'practice more and harder and then you will understand'.
Although in essence it encourages us to 'keep asking questions, don’t take anything on faith.' In fact it's often 'don't question me'.

My own interest now is ‘how’ and ‘let’s do it!'

Now the combination of tools that I use to facilitate change, tools I have been given, over many years, adapted and honed, and which I continue to examine and refine and challenge are, if I say so myself, pretty exciting; and judging by the results I am getting from clients and students, pretty darn effective too!

Learn more at manzanitavillage.org and 5changescoaching.com

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From paper clip to $34,000 in less than an hour, or how I learned to ask for what I want.

Maui. Billionaire Boot Camp. The last of six seminars I attended with Christopher Howard and his folks. I am now officially a graduate of The Fast Track to Success. Over the past few months I have also drawn deeply from the teaching of several people I might not have been open to a very short time ago.

What I have learned is that we each choose our lives. I say ‘learn’ as though such a thing was not already obvious. I mean REALLY learned on some deeper-than-before level. . . . that we can be a 'cause' in our life, or we can be an 'effect.' In other words, we can remain stuck in existing conditions or we can ask, at ANY MOMENT, 'what can I learn here?' I say 'choose' because although some might say that things happen to us that we would never choose, we can always choose is how we respond. Some people are crushed by the same challenge that causes others to thrive and soar.

It’s as if the lessons that really matter can be learned over and over again, each time penetrating deeper, each time corresponding to our ability to challenge our own assumptions more and more. We CAN effect change in our lives, we CAN live with sustained awareness, we CAN be happy, we CAN feel essentially safe in the world. Joy is a natural state. Nothing new here! What is new is the idea that learning and living by these things does not have to be a struggle. Life is essentially fluid. “We live in constantly changing quantum sea of pure potentiality” is a phrase I've heard a lot recently.

Does that invalidate the hard realities of life in these times? Of course not. Does it dull us to contradiction and complexity? Quite the opposite! What it does do, for myself, is to help me recognize that I have a choice. I can feel oppressed (personally, emotionally) by what happens in my life, or I can simply ask, “What can I learn here?” Meaning, what can I learn here for my benefit and for the benefit of the work I do, which I believe to be valuable not only for myself but also for those who are my clients, students, colleagues, and friends.

THERE'S MORE. How can you turn a paperclip into $34,000 in less than an hour. I had heard of the man in Canada who traded up from a paperclip to house. The game we played was based on that.

I’ve won games before - relied on charm and cheek. This was different because it was real. Me, my team, and my phone. Amazing. I called a friend in San Francisco who offered me a couple of hours of his time as a financial consultant, worth $2200. Another friend traded these two hours of consulting for a lifetime membership of her network marketing consulting and leads site. She assumed I’d be around for the next seventy years and so the value worked out to around $34,000. Amazing, in less than an hour.

The next thing is to apply the same sort of attitudes and strategies on a daily basis. To just go for it!

Gatekeepers at World Pride and Power

Almost by accident I enter the World Pride and Power Conference in Los Angeles at the end of February, a world of queer identified folks, mostly of African descent. I came in my capacity both as a woman of transgendered experience as well as a teacher of Mindfulness and Personal Transformation. I shared a platform with Malidoma Some as well as numerous women and men of extraordinary personal and spiritual power. My friend and student Queen who first invited me to attend this conference really is a queen it turns out, a priestess trained in the ecstatic Yoruba tradition.

Malidoma describes himself as a gatekeeper, and invites those of us there who choose, to describe ourselves as gatekeepers too. As a straight man, he speaks of how queer/gay/twin-spirit same-sex loving people are and have been the gatekeepers between the spirit world, the world of the ancestors, the Earth, and the everyday world we know. He has suffered stigmatization and personal attacks both in the US and in his native Africa for doing so.

What is a gatekeeper? Someone who guides, guards, shows the way, keeps the way safe. Someone who knows the way, and who is comfortable moving into the unknown. A gatekeeper protects the integrity of the passage, defines it, explains it, hides it reveals it. Plays. Is a trickster, a healer. The gatekeeper is a map maker and a storyteller. Someone who knows that all maps are real for the one who travels by them, and that no map is fully accurate for one who seeks the truth.

Is the gatekeeper the counterpart of the modern coach, consultant, healer, therapist. Perhaps. That and something more, holding integrity with a higher level view, a higher perspective. a view that includes an awareness of deep time, the immanent presence of the ancestors and the future generations - in our bones, blood, though, and actions. I was surprised, honored, very much at home, to be included. Thanks goes also to another friend, Lawrence Ellis of Paths to Change, who did so much to organize and make the conference possible.

Teleseminar Secrets Again

I met Alex Mandossian in October of last year when I signed up for his Teleseminar course. I met him a couple of times after that and was struck by a quality that I have noticed with only a very few people.

I noticed it with the Dalai Lama on the several occasions I have spent time with him both in the US and in India at his home in Dharmsala. The word that comes to mind in ‘congruent’. But it is something more.

I understand congruence to mean that someone is living their values. They are doing what they love, they are making the best use of their time. There is generosity there, and joy too. Their values direct them towards growth rather than containment, exploration rather than conformity, questions rather than answers. They are doing what they love best and what they love best is to be of the greatest possible benefit to the greatest number of people.

Strange perhaps that two people of two such different backgrounds should have such a similar essence to them. I only count myself fortunate to have such mentors and teachers in my life.

Where do Social Activism, Entrepreneurship, and Buddhist Practice come together?

The answer is: at Manzanita Village.

If it seems strange to you that such things can coexist it may be because you hold certain limiting beliefs about what any of those three things really are.

After the retreat that finished today (we are calling it an 'Advance' rather than a Retreat) it seems clear that to effect change in the world we must collectively move beyond divisiveness, and learn all we can from each other.

What Doesn't Work
- activism that holds to a singular social analysis,
that fosters resentment,
or makes others ‘wrong’
- entrepreneurial values that are solely about gaining,
no matter the cost to others,
rather than building strategic alliances and helping others
- spiritual practice that sets up a dichotomy
by even calling itself ‘spiritual’

. . . all of these come from world-views and patterns of behavior we can no longer afford.

What Does Work

"Unless everyone wins, no one wins!"

The retreat at Manzanita Village that ended today has shown us that this unlikely combination of elements is not only possible, but that the various lessons these elements foster in each other are essential for us all to open to our full potential, individually and collectively.