What is an underlying question that gives form
to your work or interest in this field?
In the never-ending cycles of endings and beginnings,
what is phasing out and what is emerging now?
What is your personal experience of collective
wisdom in groups?
I’m answering this at 9PM waiting for my plane
in the Medford, Oregon Airport. The agent announces cancellation of
our flight due to fog. Stranded strangers cluster around the desk booking
“distressed lodging”. In the muddle four of us catch each
other’s inventive energy. Amassing our experience of the mountain
passes, weather conditions, cell phone capacity and fiscal calculation
- we decide to fly to another city, rent a car together, and cross the
Cascades in a midnight drive between snowy volcanoes reflecting the
moonlight. Along the way wild animals crisscrossed our way, and we uncovered
specific reasons why we were together. This is how it goes these days.
This second attempt to answer these questions is in Ann
Arbor, Michigan as I prepare for year 5 of teaching Dialogue in a revolutionary
leadership experiment. Three hundred employees are involved. A system
of interlocking councils supplants all boss-subordinate relationships.
This is the most alive, effective organization with which I have the
privilege of working. Nothing is undiscussable. Everyone matters. People
own and love their work. Nothing is motivated by fear.
For 15 years I have been teaching teams and executive
groups to learn and reflect together as vital leadership functions.
I run international mentoring and coaching programs
for aspiring young women leaders and mid-career women, honing their
proclivity for collective wisdom. Each one’s individual calling,
as it wants to manifest in this life cycle, shows itself in the circles
of deep listening and inquiry.
I live with a community of friends who have moved to
Oregon together, committing ourselves to the ongoing discovery of the
potential of well tended friendship. Also, I sit in a dedicated circle
of women who have met for eight years, courageously listening and creating
together. And I sit with aging parents and my sister, who, at long last,
openly discuss money, the necessities of diminished capacities, grief,
and the gifts of our lives together through thick and thin.
What is it about the work in this field that excites
you and connects you to your own deepest self?
I have become well versed in the subtle shifts possible
in a group sensitized to finer levels of perception and thought. Creating
conditions for this perception fulfills, in part, my sense of purpose.
I find a direct sense of life’s present intent in this connection
into a larger field of intelligence, accessed most readily collectively.
In recent years another door has opened for direct relationship
with a larger energetic structure. I have found this through a practice
of personal attention and focus…a simple form of meditation that
works for me. I am learning to translate experience of different vibrational
states into actual expression. My experience of this field - which the
poet Rumi praises - has, until recently, come through shifts in collective
awareness. But now I move easily on my own into that field “Out
beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing”. I have longed for
this intimacy with life my whole life.
As reliably as collective opening locates us in a larger
flow of time and space, this personal portal seems to connect to an
ever-present essential field and my own essential nature. Could it be
that one accesses unfolding meaning and the other accesses the eternal
vibration we call love?
At this time in my own development I am going through
both doorways, experimenting with how they relate together as the quiet
background for all my work. I am awash with hope and excitement. Clues
and insight seep in to organize new meaning and new questions.
Please provide a brief storyline or snapshot of
what brought you to this work. Feel free to mention important work experience,
transformational experiences, theoretical frameworks, mentors, or schools
of thought, etc.
My destiny seems to have included endless permutations
of helping people fulfill personal and collective potential, including…
graduate school in Speech Communications and Human Relations; U.S./Soviet
work in the film industry unlocking barriers of stereotypes: 20 years
devotion in a spiritual community, the crash of that community and the
breaking opening of my heart; 15 years of focused development of the
discipline of Dialogue and Dialogic Consulting; initiation of the Fieldworks
Institute and then The Ashland
Institute; coaching senior executives and mentoring aspiring young
women; passionate commitment to an evolving meditation practice; a new
parallel career as an artist.
How would you like to be available to others in
this field? What would be a meaningful connection?
I want to connect via e-mail with others who understand
how I answered #3 ("What is it about the work in this field that
excites you?"), who are experimenting with the integration of personal
and collective apertures into new frequencies, in service to a more
coherent world.
I want to connect with women who long to clarify their
calling as it relates to the era we live in now, and to current phases
of their own lives. (See www.ashlandinstitute.org)
I am interested in biological research and collective
practice which integrates intelligence of the heart with the functions
of the brain.
If you are similarly gripped with newfound artistic fervor,
I am interested in how this relates to everything.
And if you have a partner and developed community that
support the kind of emergent wisdom I have alluded too, I want to say
how lucky you are. I offer my experience in building these dedicated
communities. Around here we call this a “permission field”.
