Holding Ourselves Back

If you like, you can lis­ten to me read this post.

Recent­ly, I’ve been great­ly inspired by the pas­sion­ate writ­ing of Eve­lyn Rodriguez at her Cross­roads Dis­patch­es blog. In a cou­ple of recent post­ings, “The Time Has Come to Be Fear­less” and espe­cial­ly her elo­quent and heart-felt fol­low-up, “Still Fear­less,” she explores what I would term the radi­ant ener­gy that con­nects us to Source and of which we are but one small expres­sion. She writes hon­est­ly, coura­geous­ly, and I was espe­cial­ly moved by her poignant obser­va­tion that:

I write because I see women par­tic­u­lar­ly hold back, peri­od. And hold back their gifts. And, I know, I am one of them. 

I make no pre­tense of under­stand­ing every­thing of which Eve­lyn writes. In a post­ing, “On the Capa­bil­i­ty to Lead,” I explored this ener­gy from my own van­tage point, but have not used the same lens, for sure — my post is real­ly still too intel­lec­tu­al — not explor­ing deeply enough, as Eve­lyn does, the way such ener­gy might man­i­fest in a per­son­’s life. And I agree with her many insights, that this is ener­gy that sur­pass­es the “you” and the “I,” that it orig­i­nates in Love, and that it rep­re­sents the unfold­ing of a per­son in a way that is not to be con­tained. It’s dev­as­tat­ing to me to think that such ener­gies also cre­ate risk, espe­cial­ly for women, with the impli­ca­tion that they also rep­re­sent threat to the frag­ile ego sys­tems and cul­tur­al norms and defens­es that keep our­selves, oth­ers, and soci­ety small. And my sense is we do keep try­ing to con­tain the radi­ance and chan­nel it for all kinds of pur­pos­es, not the least of which is economic.

It is easy to see how the ener­gy gets chan­neled and quashed under the weight of how care­ful we believe we need to be in our orga­ni­za­tion­al lives. Care­ful, for exam­ple, in writ­ing the email that mere­ly asks up the sys­tem the sen­si­tive ques­tion that is on every­one’s minds; care­ful in call­ing an exec­u­tive team to its agreed upon promis­es; care­ful in reflect­ing back to the vice-pres­i­dents their lev­els of com­pet­i­tive self-pro­tec­tion; care­ful not to men­tion the wrong thing to the wrong per­son lest it come across as polit­i­cal betray­al. Care­ful, care­ful, care­ful not to offend. Since any­thing too open will gen­er­ate some form of defen­sive­ness, we must all learn the art of not offend­ing — and in acquir­ing the very smooth­ness and pol­ish need­ed to sur­vive and progress, we also lose the capac­i­ty to deal with what’s Real. We learn to be care­ful not to bring too much too fast; learn to gar­ner sup­port before attempt­ing to make basic changes in the tone and fab­ric of the empire; learn to be care­ful with our­selves. All of which lim­its us to mak­ing most­ly cos­met­ic dif­fer­ences and then won­der­ing why we got so lit­tle done. It’s for fear of offend­ing with that bright, radi­ant ener­gy that could in an imper­son­al­ly joy­ful moment actu­al­ly spill out into the meet­ing room with the pure obser­va­tion that some new plan or pro­gram or desire to main­tain the sta­tus quo is just a real­ly bad idea — or spill out, heav­en knows, into actu­al and per­son­al feed­back for those in the room. Instead of becom­ing increas­ing­ly radi­ant, we teach our­selves — and are taught by oth­ers — to be “smart,” to influ­ence behind the scenes, to uncon­scious­ly adopt com­pen­sat­ing behav­iors of becom­ing obse­quious or of deflect­ing or of using care­ful manip­u­la­tions to get what we need. And then we won­der bit­ter­ly about the lead­ers of the orga­ni­za­tion and their shad­ows, while we yet become them.

And we cre­ate two orga­ni­za­tions — an “offi­cial” one and a “below-the-water­line” one, as I’ve not­ed else­where. And just so, the ener­gy can­not real­ly be reduced to some cul­tur­al­ly pre­ferred forms. It keeps escap­ing the ket­tle in which we try to boil it down. While we keep try­ing to reduce our mind-sets into man­aged pro­grams, bud­gets, bureau­cra­cies, pow­er struc­tures, par­tic­u­lar van­tage points, such as the val­ue of “win­ning” the con­test with com­peti­tors, we just can nev­er quite get there. The soul of the place keeps show­ing up — through the peo­ple, espe­cial­ly the peo­ple who don’t “fit,” espe­cial­ly the peo­ple that keep chal­leng­ing the val­ues of the place. The peo­ple are won­der­ful, and they are try­ing to exist in orga­ni­za­tions that frankly have become banal; orga­ni­za­tions like strip malls, all lit up as a col­lec­tion of lit­tle shops shar­ing a com­mon park­ing lot, but cer­tain­ly not yet a vil­lage. The vil­lage is hid­den, below the sur­face, har­bor­ing con­ver­sa­tions among and about peo­ple (espe­cial­ly the lead­ers) on the edge of the orga­ni­za­tion, not at its cen­ter. All this is our social and per­son­al conditioning.

Look at most office build­ings: they exist as effi­cient reduc­tions of an “envi­ron­ment” to its least com­mon denom­i­na­tors. A client of mine is try­ing to change this, cre­at­ing ele­gant work­spaces filled with art, com­fort­able places to sit and talk, with plants, books, sofas, with decent, not over­bear­ing light­ing, with views of a riv­er still flow­ing in a nat­ur­al way. And the goal of this? To cre­ate a space where peo­ple feel good about where they are, a place that gives a sense of whole­ness, so that when any­one enters this space, a client or some­one who works there or some­one deliv­er­ing a pack­age, what that per­son feels is a sense of relief, as in “My God, it can be this good.” And what’s the eco­nom­ic val­ue of this? Well, I think that’s the wrong ques­tion, and if you ask it you may quick­ly find your­self in a con­ver­sa­tion with the com­pa­ny’s founder about the nature of human healing.

Eve­lyn Rodriquez is right about reluc­tance to express the ener­gies wthin us. We hold our­selves back. We live with the con­di­tion­ing, based as it is on scarci­ty, with a sense of all per­vad­ing vic­tim­iza­tion, with deple­tion, with belief that it’s all unchange­able, when in fact the world in its utter beau­ty still exists right out­side our doors and win­dows, how­ev­er monot­o­nous­ly designed they might have become. We hold our­selves back from notic­ing the ener­gy itself, from rec­og­niz­ing our own sen­si­tiv­i­ty to it and how sen­si­tive it has become in oth­ers. In this state of group wound­ed­ness, to begin may mean feel­ing, if we give our­selves half a chance, the emo­tion of grief; grief that we’ve let our world become this way, this con­trolled, stale, and qui­et, this blank, this reduced.

But if we can stand to look into the Void, into Real­i­ty, just stand there and keep look­ing, I imag­ine we can begin to feel the absence its time to cor­rect — in our­selves. Mary Oliv­er, in her recent col­lec­tion of poems, Thirst, expe­ri­enc­ing and doc­u­ment­ing her own griefs, gives lan­guage to all of us who need to grieve the loss of the radi­ance nev­er found or act­ed upon in our lives. In one poem she writes:

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled–
ros­es in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply…

No reply, indeed. The loss isn’t to “orga­ni­za­tions,” those make-shift struc­tures. The loss is to the lives of peo­ple, you and me, who don’t know we have the radi­ance to alter the “real­i­ty,” (small r) we’ve assumed is all there is. 

Maybe one def­i­n­i­tion of lead­er­ship, a tough one, is acknowl­edg­ing how sim­ply dis­tant from the truth of this ener­gy we and our orga­ni­za­tions have become. Maybe we could break through to build new struc­tures — in the name of life and beau­ty and abun­dance. We’ve lost an aspect of life, become too dis­con­nect­ed from the elec­tric­i­ty of liv­ing. And, if that is so, then that too is tes­ti­ment to us, that we can know it and we can begin to change it, that we can still receive life. Then, per­haps, our lead­er­ship becomes an offer­ing, an expres­sion, not a “tak­ing,” and thrives because it isn’t “in us,” as some form of per­son­al charis­ma that we “own,” but is based on the charis­ma of Life itself that exists in every­one. Charis­ma is an inter­est­ing word — it comes orig­i­nal­ly from a Greek word, kharis, mean­ing “favor” or “grace.” And, just so, is not radi­ance often filled with these qualities?

We hold our­selves back until we start to deal with the loss of the part of our­selves that has been held back. Luck­i­ly, there are many ways to enter this part of us. Mary Oliv­er writes so sim­ply and so well about this, leav­ing a sharp les­son for us, and a con­do­lence, in only a few lines…

The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Some­one I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

It isn’t orga­ni­za­tions that are in trou­ble, you know. It isn’t these “con­struc­tions” of ours that have become mun­dane. It’s us. We have too thor­ough­ly lost our capac­i­ty to feel our own ener­gies, our own pas­sions, our alive­ness. We can alter that, if we can break just one of those win­dows and feel the rain come in.…it’s a win­dow on the out­side, and a win­dow on the inside, as well.

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