Introduction
As the signs of spring unfold before us, I am reminded of an insight shared by Eduardo Bericat, a sociology professor at the University of Seville. As he wrote, “As human beings, we can only experience life emotionally.” This is a simple, but deeply profound insight.
And the challenge this spring is that so many of us are feeling terribly worn from living in such a fragmented, complex, and divided world. There are days in our highly balkanized society where the only thing that appears to unite people is how much they do not like someone else.
Yet, in the midst of this, some of us are seeking wholeness and meaning over fragmentation and division. We also seek joy and connection after three years of living within a global pandemic. The difficulty is how to get from where we are right now to joy, connection, and wholeness. What are the first steps we need to take? How can we move forward, individually and collectively, to this better place?
Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, a Russian-born American professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California and the author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want (Penguin Books, 2008) writes “… the three factors that seem to have the greatest influence on increasing our happiness are our ability to reframe our situation more positively, our ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous.” I think her three factors are important points and offer a window into how to proceed. But, I also believe there are two important first steps to take before one can “experience gratitude” and “be kind and generous.”
Be Friendly To Yourself
I believe the world we live in right now is highly triggering for many people. “Being triggered” often refers to the experience of having an emotional reaction to a disturbing topic such as violence or the mention of suicide in the media or in a social setting. Those who are triggered have a strong, uncomfortable reaction to a stimulus of some sort. Triggered people may panic, feel overwhelmed, cry, act out, withdraw, or react defensively. Their strong emotions are anger, fear, anxiety, sadness, numbness, and a feeling of life being out of control. When we look at what is taking place all around us, this pretty much summarizes most peoples’ daily feelings and daily experience. Wholeness, meaning, joy, and connection are often the rare exception to what they routinely see and feel.
Margaret Wheatley in her book, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity (Berrett-Koehler, 2017) writes, “First, be friendly to yourself.” This is the starting place. And yet, I believe we have lost the memory and the feeling of being friendly to ourselves. It happened so long ago, or not at all, that while we get this concept on a cognitive basis, we don’t know what it feels like in our hearts.
As we come to accept this perspective and this loss, I believe we need to consider an insight shared by James Autry in his book, The Servant Leader: How to Build a Creative Team, Develop Great Morale, and Improve Bottom-Line Performance (Prima Publishing, 2001). As he writes, “Burnout is not a crisis of time, it is a crisis of the spirit.” And for me, this is a turning point in our understanding of how to move forward.
When we seek to be friendly to ourselves, we have to remember that the words, health, healing, wholeness and holy, all come from the same word in old English. Each of these key words were and are interconnected with the others. Furthermore, to focus on one word without being mindful of the other words generates something different than focusing on the four words together. When we choose to be friendly to ourselves and understand the interrelatedness of the above four words, we have a road map for being friendly to ourselves.
The first step to being friendly to ourselves is to take ownership and responsibility for our own feelings. This is part of the healing process. However, Brene’ Brown in her book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (Random House, 2021) notes something very interesting about feelings. As she wrote: “Fifteen years ago, when we first introduced a curriculum based on my shame resilience research, we asked participants in the training workshops to list all of the emotions that they could recognize and name as they were experiencing them. Over the course of five years, we collected these surveys from more than seven thousand people. The average number of emotions named across the surveys was three. The emotions were happy, sad, and angry.”
When I first read about this research, I was stunned, embarrassed, and blown away by the implications. As she continued, “Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning and self-awareness…. Language show us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.” In essence, our language can give us the capacity to heal, to find wholeness, and to rediscover that which is holy. Without emotional literacy, we can only make so much progress. Therefore, we need to find better and more in-depth ways to define and to share what we are feeling.
The second step to being friendly to ourselves begins by making time and space to pause and take stock of where we are, what we are experiencing, and where we are headed in life. On one level this seems elementary, if not simplistic, but in reality, we rarely do this and rarely give ourselves permission to create and enter into this unique space.
Ron Heifetz, Founding Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, in an interview with William Taylor called “The Leader of the Future” from the June 1999 issue of Fast Company magazine, notes that people in leadership positions, and in my opinion all positions and walks of life, “need a sanctuary, a place where they can go to get back in touch with the worth of their life and worth of their work.” He calls these “practical sanctuaries - - daily moments that function as sanctuaries”, because when we have these, they root us “in a different reality, a different source of meaning.”
However, on a day to day basis, most of us are engaged in “shallow work,” referencing the work of Cal Newport in his book, Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World (Grand Central Publishing, 2016). He describes shallow work as “non cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted.” On the other hand, Newport defines deep work, the opposite of shallow work, as “activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.” I believe deep work is important and necessary. I also believe finding and routinely entering “practical sanctuaries,” as defined by Heifetz, gives us the ability to do deep work on a personal and professional level. Regular sanctuary time is the gateway to finding wholeness, health, healing, and that which is the holy in our daily lives.
And the outcome of doing this in-depth work is to discover something very important, namely belonging. As Brene’ Brown in her book, Braving The Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone (Random House, 2017) wrote: “True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.” The feeling and experience of belonging is profound and moving. It is transformational and critical in our life journey.
FYI: To be continued on Tuesday.
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