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| The start of my life map |
Nature and the Human Soul Conference
Day 1, Jan 19th 2012 Thursday
Bill Plotkin and Fr. Richard Rohr
Hyatt Tamaya, New Mexico
1,000 Attendees from around the world
My Notes and Musings
2pm Bill Plotkin
Questions for us to ask ourselves as we go through this conference and in life:
1) What's on the current trajectory? How would you describe in your own terms the life stage you are in? What are the greatest joys and challenges? Your deepest values? Tasks?
2) How would you describe your own path at this time in your current trajectory?
3)What's calling you? Desire, opportunity, symbol, place, relationship, soul, a way of being in service? (even if you're ignoring it)
4) What, if anything, is ending in your life right now? (job, suffering, relationship, etc.)
5) What, if anything is being born in your life right now?
6) What is your deepest longing? Are you willing to tell yourself the truth?
Now, take the next 10 minutes to journal on those questions and share your answers with someone near you who you do not know.
My answers in brief:
1) Like a time of transition and waiting, feeling something on the tip of my tongue that's about to unfold and the need to be patient and open so it can unfold. Listening. In its own time, not my own time. Torn between waiting and wanting to do more/give more/be more in my life. No regrets I have not forgiven and cannot live with in peace right now. I've really given myself the last decade to explore and learn and enjoy life. Challenges: routine, supporting myself while not getting caught up in the corporate rat race. To support myself enough, while still setting the time and priority for self-exploration, travel, whatever comes up so I can follow it without being impeded by lack of funds. Joys: People and community of Santa Fe, nature, family, even more than those - developing a relationship/conversation with the divine, expression through poetry, creativity, design, photography. Learning and daily surprises, learning to let go and not be in control and finding everything flowing. The unfamiliar gives me great joy. Tasks: Being light-hearted, remembering that I am guided and cultivating ways in my day to feel that guidance more and more (meditation, yoga, solo hikes, poetry, creativity, stillness, being around like-minded, positive thinking people, gratitude, books on the subject and conferences like this one, journaling and listening in my journal and then writing down what comes from the depths), following and trusting intuition, also a big task is developing of my ego enough so that it can be small enough to be guided by God/soul.
2) Life path changing shifting more and more to listening to voice inside. Finding equanimity, giving back to the community. Not traveling for traveling's sake, but if it serves my spiritual growth. Seeking things out that stretch me. Going outside my comfort zone. Willingness to do the opposite of what I want to do (remain silent when I want to speak; speak when I want to be silent; travel when I have a good place of settlement and am starting to feel like staying; settle when I am feeling restless)
3) Desire for connection. The word web/connect that came to me in a dream last summer and again during my conversation with a spider and its web. To love and be happy - to find love and be able to do that in my vocation. Desire to listen to voice inside and not be swayed by the external. Creativity and poetry.
4) Endings - No desire for romantic relationships unless they involve spiritual growth and deepening (well, I've kind of always had this desire and knowing, but its even stronger now. I'm officially committed to it now). An end of going along with anything inauthentic for me. An end of the desire to make it in a high profile design or otherwise career. An ending of feeling or trying to be in control (really came about over the summer during my solo trip to canyon de chelly)
5) Beginnings - more and more following voice/inner guidance, dreams, trust in unknown, strong sense that I want to give up ego/self agenda and give it over to the service of something bigger than myself. Opening my heart wider and wider.
6) Deepest longing: My deepest longing is to listen to the voice within as much as I possibly can and to be at its service not my own any longer. To be as much as I can be and give back to the world. To create beauty in this world through creativity, poetry, art/design and also through transforming and healing work. Something to do with connection and Web (as in connection).
3pm Bill Plotkin
Goal of first half of life: to become an initiated human. In western cultures, Bill guesses that only 10% of the population ever actually reaches authentic adulthood. Humans need a healthy, mature culture to deepen into adults. Healthy cultures need a representative sample of all the stages.
Initiation into adulthood. Healthy human adulthood starts with healthy human adult parents.
How do we help children and early adolescents reach adulthood? (not how do we help a child compete/get into Harvard/make a million)!
Definition of an adult: someone who has what is in essence a mystical relationship with the world. An authentic adult is a human that experiences him/herself as a member of the earth community, as the web of life, and... has had revelatory, mythical experiences of their mythical, poetic place in that community, and...is embodying that place in the earth community (doesn't just know it, but is embodying it)
All are born with the capacity to discover our true nature. Each has a mystical story to live into the world. We're a poem wanting to be read/lived into the world. We are born with the capacity to live as if we were that poem through a delivery system (profession, craft, career) for something mystical.
Life-actualization over time of the "Truth at the center we were born with" - David White
Vitality, life force, quickening, translated through you into action. You are unique and if you block your gift from coming through you, it will be lost to the world. It is your business to keep the channel open - to keep open to the urges that motivate you.
Humans can understand ourselves as metaphors. We have the capacity for conscious awareness.
Enter journey to soul. (in western society, often doesn't happen until mid-life, (often mid-life crisis), which is 42 years old! In indigenous societies the journey to soul happens in the teens!
Becoming an adult is not chronological! Going through any of the stages of life is not chronological!
Process of soul initiation (into adult) spans several months to several years. Requires a good deal of preparation for people to be developmentally ready and mature for soul initiation. It is a descent. You go down from the workaday world to soul, it involves dying to the self you were. Then there is an ascent back to the workaday life.
Soul initiation and adulthood is reached and earned from having made the descent into soul, out of the workaday world and back into it.
"To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others" - poet, David White
Definition of Soul: Soul - ultimate, deepest, truest place in the world, place meaning the niche, true purpose, gift you are born with to bring into the world. [so I'm having a conversation with my gift every time I'm having a conversation with that voice inside me!]
Imagine that each one of us was born to take a certain place in our ecosystem. Soul is the key to our destiny. (why we were born, larger story you might live, your particular way of belonging, the largest conversation you can have with the world0
Each human being has 3 identities (learning to integrate and operate in all 3 at the same time):
1) Upperworld identity: identity with the sacred, great mystery, the divine, the non-dual experience, the experience that we are the divine in human form.
2) Middle world - everyday human identity - profession, my parents daughter, traveler, etc. Who people see you as
3) Underworld - your true self in the soul sense, mythologically, your soul purpose identity, the unique gift you have to bring into the world and the way you do it
What good is it to you to be an authentic human adult? It sounds like a lot of work! and it is!
You will experience yourself belonging to something larger than yourself, a sense of purpose and meaning, involved in projects that matter to you.
Why are authentic adults of importance to culture? Your presence contributes to healthy communities, deeply serves the culture and helps it evolve, can't become a true elder without becoming a true adult.
How are authentic adults good for the more than human world? Without healthy human culture, then the world is in danger.
Healthy children and adolescents are just as important as authentic healthy adults and elders.
4:30pm Bill Plotkin
How do human beings best mature? Why are some ready for the descent to soul and others are not? What's the difference? Why do some come out of vision quests making the descent, while others come out with a sense of healing and wholing, but not ready to make the descent yet?
Ego-centric vs. eco-centric
Life is about maturing an ego which serves the world. A healthy ego is one that experiences itself as contributing to, serving, and participating in the world.
Difference between rights of passage and iniatory processes: Western culture has been rediscovering the importance of rights of passage. Rights of passage are secondary to what happens between them. They only work for someone who has been developmentally preparing for the initiation in the interim. Its very rare that a right of passage actually moves someone from one stage to the other, from adolescent to adult for example. Rather, a right of passage is a celebration of a life transition that has already recently taken place. It is also instruction of whats happening in your new stage of life.
A full human life has 9 major life passages, beginning with birth and ending in death. In the western world, 80% of humans experience only 4 of the 9 passages! Most americans don't go past the 4th stage life passage, which is called puberty.
Every stage brings absolutely essential gifts to the community. A healthy being at any stage is a blessing to the community. The stages are not less to most spiritually developed, but less mature to most mature. You have to love the stage you're in.
Draw your own life map at this point. Make a circle, divide up like the wheel of life. Draw or write in each of the stages anything that really stands out - what questions you have about the stage, any confusion/questions.
[Musings: Everyone is absorbed in flickering flames of the heaters and fires, working on their life maps, by mountings and plains and duskscape, outside the conference center]
There are always tasks left incomplete in each stage. You are always still working on these left over tasks, which are dealt with differently later on then when they were worked on in their original stage of origin. You cannot meaningfully work on the tasks of stages that are in the future, that you have not been through yet and are not currently in.
Exersize: Let yourself feel/imagine etc if this map is actually accurate. What does it mean for your life? How might it change what you do? Your relationships? Your children's lives? Your communities?
Parent's task: mirroring the child and helping the child develop its ego. Celebrating the child's qualities as they emerge.
Good journal exercise: Imagine yourself as the mature, nurturing parent of your 4 year old self. You would be telling the infant that you were about their loving, beautiful toddler qualities and celebrating those qualities that were notable in you very young. Hold that child spiritually and psychologically in your heart and mind. "This is how you were at a young age"Preserve the child's innocence. Practice present-centeredness to what your world holds with eyes open, being present to world, emotions, body, sensing.
6pm Fr. Richard Rohr
Adulthood is a sense of the whole. A person who is universally connected sees the connections and passes on the connections. When you're around those people, you feel allowed access too, encouraged to see your own potential and soul.
If spirit ascends, soul descends into the wound. Soul people can find meaning there. Too much in either direction is not good. If you can put the two together, you will fly high, while being grounded.
Who you thought you were is not who you really are. Constantly being open to this. Your "thinking" doesn't make it so. You start protecting/defending your thinking about you you think you are, which is not who you are. That is what marriage/relationship and any true friendship can do for you and open you up to learn.
If you can keep realizing with regularity "I'm not who I thought I was" you have a program for growth and soul work.
People who can't do this, can't admit they're wrong, can't admit they're not who they were thinking they were, those are the people that stay stuck where they are and who do not grow. You've gotta have the willingness for ambiguity and following the butterfly.
Often career/job is confused with soul. "Because you've got a job, you've found yourself." No. You will have to bear the criticisms of those who don't want you to stay in the other stages, even at the cost of a pay decrease or job status decrease.
Soul is a combination of grounding down and "falling upward"
When you discover the unloved and uncompleted tasks, feel the humility there, to be soundable, to go back where those wounds still are and to the state where they still hurt you, is usually the only way to heal the wounds. Wounds never go away - they become transformed, they become the doorway, the opening to your soul and resurrection itself.
Oct 28 - 29 2012 CAC conference in Santa Fe "Franciscan Mysticism - I am that which I am seeking" [I'll be there if I'm here still!!]
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