Carrying so much sadness today, so I am especially thankful for good news. An email from Maurice letting me know that he got into NYU put a great big smile on my face. Here he is at the Centre for Social Innovation. He looks right at home! Maurice, you wrote […]
I am so glad our paths have crossed and am so excited to see you begin this new chapter in your life. The man of the hour shows off his touchstones.
The Monster Celebration is perhaps the most famous guided meditation comes from Amanda Owen’s book, The Power of Receiving, and it comes to me via my cherished friend Steph Cowling. I really dig visualization exercises such as this because in addition to being powerful and effective, they are also fun and surprising. Yes, this is a really fun way to do shadow work. (Personally, I found talk therapy to be incredibly important foundational work, but fun? Not so much.)
Owen’s hypothesis is that standing between us and whatever goals we’re struggling to achieve is at least one “monster”—her word for inner demon. In spite of the name, this is not an “evil” or “bad” aspect of the self. To the contrary, she holds that our monsters are likely outworn beliefs and behaviors that no longer serve us (e.g., the Rebel or the Good Girl). Monsters are thus the rejected or misundertood parts of ourselves that continue to haunt us precisely because we refuse to know them more intimately and accept them with unconditional love.
If we want to live our lives in wholeness and integrity, it makes perfect sense that the task ahead is to know and integrate every aspect of the self, including those that we wish did not exist. The magical thing about healing—alchemical, really—is that observing any aspect of the self in loving attention transforms that aspect into gold.
With this in mind, Owen has come up with a playful solution to facing the most feared aspect of the self: throwing it a celebratory party! What better way to embrace someone we’ve ignored or rejected for so long? (more…)
Old readers will know that I’ve spent a great deal of time working with my Emerging Leaders on establishing self care practices in their lives. We adopted the habit of opening our meetings up with a guided meditation, which everyone really loved. But I wasn’t sure how easy it would be for my young people to take these practices home with them, so to speak, because let’s face it: it’s not easy for anyone to transform their lives. At the start of my own efforts toward mindfulness and wellness, I would begin doing something like yoga or meditation with a lot of enthusiasm, but if something urgent came up, such as a big work project, all that would go to the wayside. Eventually, I found my way into my own rhythm of integrating yoga, meditation, cardio, and strength training into my life, but it’s taken years to get here. For me, it wasn’t so much finding the time for it all, but accepting the fact that I am probably never going to be someone who will have an established routine for all this. I do what I have the energy for in whatever combination I find appealing on any given day.
Since I’ve been approaching my youth work with a very light touch this year, I haven’t pointedly been asking my young people if they’ve been practicing self care. I don’t want to hound them about anything, because at the end of the day, I trust that whatever is meant to stick with them from all the things that have come out our time together, will take root. We like to celebrate the big victories, of course: graduations, college scholarships, first jobs, etc. But I count the subtler shifts in my young people’s lives as triumphs that are just as significant as external milestones, because what goes on under the hood lays the foundation for everything else. How I love to see these sprouts break ground. Such a moment happened just this morning.
Where have I been all these months? Although I came thisclose to moving to Singapore this year, I’m still here in New York, dividing my time between the city and the Hudson Valley. One thing I realized about my two-week silent retreat and a month-long trip to Singapore and Korea is that if I didn’t make any substantial changes in my life, I would go right back into the habit of overworking no matter how intensive or long of a “rest period” I gave myself. Something had to happen at a deeper level. (more…)
Part of the reason it’s been so silent here is because this summer has been one long learning experience for me. If 2013 was the year I was reborn, the year when so many positive things and so many wonderful people flowed into my life, 2014 is the year that is testing me to see if I can really steer the ship of my life in this brand new direction. Can I get out of my own way and step fully into my power?
Emerging Leader Maurice came into office hours last week wearing his red power tie. Our initial plan was to unpack his “hustle” from the Work On Purpose workshop we did in our last Emerging Leaders meeting, but he announced that he wanted to share some “good news” and a “dilemma,” which were in fact related. It turned out that Maurice needed to choose between two very different housing options that each appealed to conflicting values, and the decision was overwhelming him. With his permission, I’m sharing some of the details of our meeting because it contains an exercise that might prove useful to the young people you work with (or to you yourself, if you’re in the market for a decision-making tool).
About a week and a half ago I facilitated Work On Purpose’s Heart + Head = Hustle activity with my Emerging Leaders. It’s an exercise that helps them (1) define their passions, (2) identify their strengths, and then (3) put those two together in order to begin sketching out their dream […]
[For Harry, who also believes] In the past year I’ve had the good fortune of meeting a lot of inspiring young people who have been in foster care and have creative ideas for businesses and programs that would improve the lives of our most vulnerable children and families. Three such individuals serve as youth advisors to Minds On Fire. To help them grow professionally, I started funneling resources to them individually, but it eventually hit me that I could easily scale my efforts. So I reached out to other young people I’d met and also asked some colleagues for referrals. The only requirements were that participants have direct experience with foster care and aspire to start a social enterprise or run a nonprofit organization.
We had our first meeting back in September (in AlleyNYC‘s War Room, bien sûr!) and the energy was electric. One person remarked that it was so energizing to meet other young people in foster care who were going to college and intending to give back to their communities. After a particularly joyous meet and greet we talked about my initial idea for the group, and also what everyone else wanted to get out of our meetings. They’re permitting me to do most of the steering in the beginning in order to lay a solid foundation on which we can build.
My primary objective is to expose these young people, who are currently between the ages of 19 and 26, to as many resources, professionals, and ideas related to social entrepreneurship as possible. These are the tools that will enable them to blaze trails into the business world and the child welfare system. What I also hope will happen is that the emerging leaders begin to see themselves as part of a cohort that will support each other’s dreams and perhaps even collaborate on some projects. The underlying belief is that they are the ones who will solve the biggest problems in child welfare because, having grown up in the system, they know its pain points. What’s more, they’re coming out of foster care resilient, observant, impassioned, streetwise, and compassionate. They are the ones who have the capacity to touch and transform our hardest to reach youth. (more…)
I think I can come clean about a couple of things now that this retreat has come and gone: First is that I’ve wanted to go on a retreat with this group since I first started talking to Amy Chou about working with them last summer, so this past weekend was quite literally a dream come true. Second is that when Amy asked me if helping youth organizations draft mission statements and constitutions was part of the work I did, I kinda’ fibbed when I said yes. The truth was more along the lines of yes, it’s work I would like to do, but no, it’s not work I’ve ever done before. When she engaged my services I remember hanging up the phone and wondering what I had just gotten myself into.
Here I am, about a year later, so very lucky to have spent two days in Jersey with this lovely bunch:
In the order that they appear in my photo stream, I’d like to say a few words about each of these fine folks. (more…)
