In this episode I interview author Cyndi Suarez, who has just released The Power Manual, a book on how to master complex power dynamics. Cyndi has written a comprehensive operations manual for living into the tension of these distinctions and quite literally enacting our way to freedom.

Last month I was blessed to facilitate the fourth annual Evolutionary Leadership Workshop, our flagship program. A workshop to make dreams real. I also facilitated the first ever Evolutionary Leadership Graduate Program, an opportunity for former workshop participants to come back and level up. 

I was moved to learn that my friend Kenzo An, runner, meditator and all-around passionate man, wrote a post on the practice of fulfillment for About Meditation.

In Yes, Fulfillment Is a Path but It’s Also the Goal he writes that:

There is a deeper source that doesn’t fluctuate based on external conditions. The sense of fulfillment is immediate and unconditional.

I'm testing the approach to group accountability that will hold together our Mastermind Group. A premium program that we are developing for successful professionals who want to level up. Want to build your morning routine?

Damali Vidot-Rosa is the kind of person you fall in love with the minute that you meet her. She exudes the sort of authenticity that is defined by love. She is President of the Chelsea City Council and part of the Evolutionary Leadership Cohort of 2017.

Four years ago David Brooks wrote a column that stuck with me. Startling Adult Friendships]. I saved it.

In it he fantasized about what he would do with $500 million dollars. He said that he would try to set up places that would cultivate friendships. He would take the sort of networking programs that seem to transform people’s lives and make them less career oriented and more profound.

That’s what I do.

(Minus the 500 million)

As I spend my days in progressive circles, privileged to spend time with people committed to a movement that can redeem our country and help save the world, it is crystal clear to me that this sign names the core platform that we are fighting for. Queer and trans liberation. The liberation of migrant people. The liberation of Black people. Governance grounded in reason. The liberation of women. The end of an extraction economy and right relationships with the planet. These are evidently true.

But what about kindness?

Sixty of us have been harnessing our collective energy to keep a daily meditation practice this month of March. I know I have benefitted from feeling into this connection as I meditate, and I as I remember that we are together when I go about my day.

Meet Kendra Rosalie-Hicks, Co-Director of Radical Philanthropy at Resist, and part of the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop cohort of 2017. I asked her to share where she is with her project, and she blew my mind.

If I’ve been taught to derive value, status and belonging from how much sex I can get and  how much dominance I can wield, then it will make sense to let my soul’s longing recede.

But if I’m taught to listen to my soul, if I can learn to take my masculine drive and place it at the service of something that is truly good, something much bigger than just me or you, then freedom becomes possible. It is from here that a conscious masculinity can be born, that the work of atonement can flow, that we will cease to be a danger and remember what is good.  

It’s my birthday! I’m already tearing up with all the love coming my way via text and social media. What a miracle it has been to be born into this Flow of Grace. I believe in seven year cycles, and I stepped into my 42nd year with great intention (and intensity!). It has been quite a year. A year of deep, inner, personal transformation. 

The impulse to develop the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop was the desire for creative freedom. I work for institutional clients, the client is the convener and I’m invited in to design and facilitate the experience. It is beautiful work and I am privileged to do it. But it is work that demands compromise. The client has their own goals, their sense of what is possible and their own set of constraints.

I set out to create a space that was free of such compromise. I decided to try being the convener. And I developed a workshop where I could apply the very best of what I have learned in service of what I see as our highest purpose.

Intention. Connection. Experimentation. These are the tenets of the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop.

We live in a suicide economy. We are caught in a system of extraction that is decimating the planet and has the species on the fast track to an evolutionary crash.

We have a crisis of the imagination. In the words of Fredric Jameson, “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of [globalized, unbridled] capitalism.”

But ours is not a dark story. Ours is the story of evolution. And everywhere around the world people are daring to imagine something new. Everywhere we find people who hold the wisdom we were taught had been lost. Everywhere there are folks who are practicing, inventing, remembering, experimenting with better ways of being human together. And isn’t that what an economy is for?

• Movements are not made by individuals.

• Movements are definitely not made by men.

• Our preference for simple stories seduces us into the myth of the charismatic leader.

• If we don’t pay attention we will miss out on what is emerging RIGHT NOW as a new movement emerges from decentralized groups of people coming together to live our way into a new day.

All of this is true.

AND we can still celebrate the grace of the prophetic voices. The resonant voice of women of color like Adrienne Maree Brown is for me an example of that.

When I launched the Better Men Project I chose to focus on cisgender (term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth) heterosexual men in committed relationships. The intention was not to exclude other men, but to humbly begin the process based on the experience that I know. You have to start somewhere. And it is good to start with yourself.
My dear friend Felix Endara was generous enough to sign up for an interview anyway. Felix is a trans man. I had no idea until the moment of our interview. I have been working with Felix for years. It turned out to be the most powerful interview that I’ve had during this process.
Who better to speak to the redeeming aspects of masculinity than people who have had both experiences, the experience of being assigned female at birth and the experience of transitioning to life as a man. I write with Felix’s permission and with his eyes on these words. 
 

We need to grow. To stop growing is to start dying. But the quest for achievement is not always about growth. It often is about wanting to become whole. It can be fueled by the idea that we are somehow not enough, and that happiness can only be found at some point in the future, when we become worthy of it. This is wrong.

This is a time of pain and self-reflection. Men in these interviews speak of the limits to our cultural idea of masculinity. They speak about having access to a limited range of emotion, of only being taught domination, or not always knowing how to speak to what we are feeling. These men are increasingly aware of the ways in which we have been crippled by patriarchy. Some make a direct connection between patriarchy, the climate crisis and our pillage of the earth.

We find anti-blackness in many migrant communities, Islamophobia and anti-migrant sentiments in Black communities, and our whole society is guilty of making Indigenous people invisible. It makes no sense for these communities to distrust each other even as we are all threatened by bans, walls and the criminalization of our very existence.

When I ask a group to talk about what it is like to be with someone who is really present, they say words like: comfortable, safe, being held, alive, joy, energizing, grounded.

WOW.

Consider being so present that others feel joyful around you, alive, energized, grounded. Wouldn’t this be an amazing way of being?

We can be this generous.

Here I’m re-posting what I wrote on facebook as I worked to contend with the pain of this powerful #metoo moment. It is important to be clear about this. I’m not writing from abstraction. I hold positions of leadership. I seek to call people to a higher standard. When I fail, when I make mistakes or miss my blind spots, the impact is greater, and messier. This is a commitment that comes out of real hurt and real learning.

Our first newsletter was supposed to go out on the New Moon of September. That’s when Hurricane María struck and the land of my birth experienced the first climate catastrophe caused by human made global warming. The island went dark. The diaspora went into despair. The waters and the winds struck with unfathomable fury.

The disaster is still unfolding.

The #metoo campaign is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen on social media. It is absolutely devastating. And it is also liberating. Silence, shame, hiding - these are the tools of oppression. I am disturbed by the masculine silence. Are you a man struggling with how to show up? Let's talk about it.

I can tell you that there are people who punctuate their lives with acts of devotion, who make sacred offerings with every meal and who sing prayers into every hearth. And I can tell you that they are beautifully perfect as much as they are also flawed. They have moods, preferences, blind spots and human stuff as much as any of us. But they show up. They say yes to the work. They try harder. They try again. They do it with devotion. They do it with love.

I've turned off my WhatsApp notifications. I'm part of too many active groups! But I can turn to it at any given point, much like I did this morning, and let my heart be moved by one group or another expressing love for each other.

Learning from Your Project X

Launching and piloting Your Project X was a phenomenal experience. I am so grateful for the Boston Founding Fellows, the first participants in our Boston Career Change pilot. It takes courage to be first.

I'm excited about the turns that YPX is taking. This project is right where it needs to be, the team is learning and iterating, it is practicing what we preach.

After a lot of personal reflection, I have decided to step out of the project. I have full confidence in this idea, I love the team that is bringing it together, and I know that it will iterate its way into something pretty amazing.

We are off to the third annual Evolutionary Leadership Workshop. Here is a note to the participants:

You have probably had a set of landmark experiences in your life. You have had moments that you refer back to over and over again, you have had realizations that continue to feed you. Our goal is to craft another one of those experiences. We want the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop to become a landmark moment in your life. Our intention is to support you as you reach deep alignment with yourself and with your own highest purpose.  We want you to return home with a new community of people and a concrete set of steps that will launch you into what is next for you.  We want you to actualize your dream, we want to enroll you in the evolutionary movement of our time.

Love What You Do or Do Something Else

I am thrilled to announce the launch of Your Project X! It is my latest effort to help people (re)discover their passions and build careers they’ll love.

You know I’ve devoted my life to helping people do the work that matters most. I cannot think of a more important moment to tap our creative impulse and do what our hearts are here to do.

I am excited by the ongoing success of the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop. But not everyone can get away to a magical island for an intensive seven days. So here is Your Project X.  We run 10 week part-time programs in New York City and Boston designed to help participants accelerate change in their careers -- by amplifying what they are already doing, breaking into a new industry or founding a company.

Tim Ferriss shared Daniel Ketchell’s Medium piece breaking down our current media environment. It is an excellent exposition of the way a relatively neutral or even positive story is funnelled towards negativity and outrage. It’s really worth checking out.

Here is a quote that stood out for me –

There is probably an evolutionary reason for the virality of outrage, but I’m not a scientist, so I’ll use a simple, light example. Have you ever seen anyone scream at a sports bar or stadium full of strangers about a logical and sound referee decision?

Outrage encourages interaction and engagement, the fuel of our social networks. So outrage, too often, becomes the narrative — or at least skews the narrative.

There is a narrative out there that 2016 was the worst year ever. Not only did we lose beloved icons ranging from Prince to Carrie Fisher, but the United States just handed the Nuclear Codes to the least qualified individual ever to hold the Presidency. And this is without talking about his white supremacist tendencies!

I am the last person to deny the very real implications that our political choices will have on very real people.

At the same time I find it important to agree with Charles Nevin’s recent opinion in the NY Times. We have done much, much worse.

I've been quiet during this ominous week. Even when we still thought Hilary was going to win I found myself walking the city streets and murmuring to myself - "this is not good, and I don't know what to do." Little did I know how much worse it was about to get. 

n the US it is common to make fun of the French and their unions, their strikes and their 35 hour work weeks. It is easy to forget that the unions are indeed “the folks who brought you the weekend.” I was excited to read Sweden is introducing the six hour work day.

Our relationship to work is all wrong. It is by now a cliché to say that too many of us live to work instead of work to live. But it is true. We have left our children to be taken care of by iPads, and we have limited our own lives to an idea of “productivity” that has simply come up short. Too many of us are not happy.

I watched Hercules last night. The terrible B movie starring “The Rock.” Don’t ask me how I ended up here. I sat through the annoyance of cliché after cliché. It wasn’t until the movie was done that I got some value from it. Samantha, my wife, who finds something to appreciate in everything, was the one to point it out.

As a person of color I have experienced direct and explicit aggression as well as significant forms of exclusion. I also experience plenty of microaggressions. As a man who has been culturally conditioned by patriarchy, I have also been the perpetrator of explicit and implicit aggressions. I have been hurt and I have hurt others.

It is unfortunate that we have structured a society in which the power embedded in relationships of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, exclusion and privilege define so much of our human experience.

We are social animals. We cannot be an isolated self. Affluence allows us to become more and more independent from each other. It allows us to isolate ourselves.

This is the big irony. We are “wealthier” than most people on earth yet we are lonelier than most people on earth. The “stuff” that we buy with our wealth, the “safety” that we buy with our wealth, the “independence” that we buy with our wealth, it all seems to diminish the very thing that gives life meaning - the generative power of human connection. Our wealth is making us scared. Depressed. And small.

David Brooks wrote an awesome column about The Great Affluence Fallacy:

Today is the 70th anniversary of India’s Independence. The event matters to all of us. Not just because it impacted one out of every five humans walking the planet at the time. But because two centuries of domination by the largest Empire that the world had ever known were finally undone by a revolution that was fundamentally spiritual and had nonviolence at its core.

We just watched the new take on “The Little Prince” that Netflix released on Friday. I found it beautiful. I loved the art. And I loved the “story within a story.” It is a great way to bring grown ups back to the magic of a fable that we learned to love as children.

I bring it up because the new version offers a sharp critique of a world defined by corporations, “productivity” and standardized education. It reminds us that the most precious things in life cannot be dominated or owned. It reminds us that we have lost too much.

I’ve been struggling with “movement space.” It feels like the people who are devoting our lives to social transformation are also burdened by an unconscious shadow. This shadow takes the form of judgement and self-righteousness.

The rush to indict and exile is not exclusively applied to “the other.” It’s not just the bad guys who are wrong. The whip of self-righteousness is increasingly applied to those who are in movement with us.

The traditional activist tends to come at you. It is a straightforward charge backed up by righteousness and facts. It is a worthy passionate stance. And it has its limitations.

The artist comes at you sideways. Good art sneaks up on you. You feel it before you think it.

I’m just getting back from two weeks at Sundance. I just facilitated two very different gatherings at the intersection of culture, art and justice. There is such a thing as a creative impulse. It is the driving force of evolution itself. It moves through us.

This creative impulse is your desire for purpose and significance. It is the eros that defines your subconscious. It is the thread of all good stories. It is why we thirst for meaning. It is what makes you want to grow, and what allows you to not know.

The creative impulse holds the magic of our aliveness.

“Humans are killing the planet.”

How many times have you heard that? How many times have you said it?

I know that I often have.

I was recently struck by a powerful challenge to that assertion. Who exactly is killing the planet and why are we all taking the blame for it?

I teared up this morning when I saw clips of Hillary’s nomination. We made herstory last night. And IT MATTERS. Every time a glass ceiling is broken it matters. Every time women or people of color can see themselves reflected in a position of influence and power it matters. Patriarchy is real. Racism is real. Breaking through is something that matters.

Here is my original Brexit Facebook post:

Make no mistake about it. There is a link between yesterday's devastating Supreme Court non-decision - the one that will tear apart immigrant families and destroy their livelihood, Britain's vote to leave the European Union, and the rise of Donald Trump. 

Nationalist voices are on the rise. They are winning BIG victories. The reactionaries have momentum and this is not good for the world.

Beautiful, glorious, radiant queer and trans Latinx siblings. You are my people. I love you. I welcome you. This cis-hetero-Latino man is here to hold you, to cry with you, to lay with you and spoon you. I am not complete without you. We are a people, we are us only with you.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry for every school yard joke, the stupidity of dorm rooms and locker rooms, every disparaging word, every expression of derision and fear that permeates this culture when it comes to the beauty that is you.

I'm sorry that you have been listening to this, feeling this, hiding from this, seeking haven from this for all of your precious and glorious life. I'm sorry for the times I played a role, I'm sorry for the times I played along, I'm sorry for the many times that I didn't ask them to stop.

Evolutionary Leaders reflect on challenges, the Self AND the Emerging Self. They reflect on their sense of frustration, their sources of energy and inner resistance. They name their own voices of judgment and fear. And they also reflect on this moment, their community and their future. Together we look at what we need to let go of, at the seeds that are present and at that which can be tested. We look at who is with us and what action needs to be taken.

The 2016 Evolutionary Leadership Workshop launches tonight at Hollyhock, Cortes Island, British Columbia. And we thought we’d give you a taste of what we will be doing together. Our leadership reflection will rely on a great tool for guided journaling that we borrowed from the Presencing Institute. We invite you to answer these for yourself!

Find the questions below.

I dropped offline for about 10 days and I’m just making my way back. I find myself in a flow of open hearted gratitude. This morning I woke up to a thread of e-mails of Evolutionary Leaders introducing themselves to each other. Participants in last year’s workshop and those who will be coming together in just about a week. Forgive the dramatic intensity but I literally fell to my knees with gratitude. I was bowled over by the abundance of generosity and mutual care. And I was overcome by a sense of being fully in service of the creative impulse, the evolutionary thrust that propels us forward towards a future that is ceaselessly beckoning, tugging at our hearts, desiring of our participation.

I think it’s important to measure things. I want to know how good I’m doing. I want to know if I’m moving the needle. I want to know if my experiments are working.

I have spent a lot of time in the nonprofit and policy worlds, affected by a philanthropic drive to measure that too often focuses on measuring the wrong thing.

I’m not shy about my politics. I definitely stand to the left of the average Democrat. I’m clear and passionate about what I believe it will take for humanity to make a just transition to an economy that is good for people and the planet. But even with all this passion and conviction I understand that the only way to make my vision a reality is to include those who don’t see the world as I do.

David Brooks just wrote a phenomenal column on “how to fix politics.” People on my side of the political argument often get appalled when I quote him. And that is precisely the problem.

Your attention is your currency. This is both a spiritual fact and a political fact. We live in a distraction economy. The biggest corporations of our day live and die based on how much of YOUR attention they can get. Advertisement is the backbone of capitalism. Advertisement’s purpose is to capture your attention. Once your attention is captured it seeks a hold on your imagination and once it has your imagination it seeks to shape who and how you choose to be. It promises meaning and purpose, but it leaves you empty instead.

Our experiment is almost over. Join us for ten more days of meditation!

Maybe you've been with us all along and you are now 30 days into your practice. Or maybe you signed up full of desire and commitment to get into meditation for the first time, or to finally come back to it - but maybe you couldn’t quite do it, you couldn’t quite get those five minutes in every day. Perhaps you didn't sign up for our experiment, but you really thought about it, maybe something struck your curiosity about this practice.

Vincent Van Gogh is a huge inspiration for my work - ever since I read “Lust for Life.” And Seth Godin is an important model for approaching it. I appreciated his post today, in “When will you get to Ramsgate?” Seth takes the arch of Van Gogh’s work to illustrate one of his core mantras “drip, drip, drip,” or, you get there step-by-step. He shows Van Gogh’s evocative yet somber painting of Ramsgate. It took skill to get there, it took step after step after step. And Van Gogh was still nowhere near the Van Gogh that we are so moved by today.

A “japa mala” is usually composed of 108 beads. It is a lot like a rosary and it is used to facilitate the repetition of the Divine name. It helps focus the mind during meditation and it helps return to center throughout the day. 108 is a sacred number in the yogic tradition. Today I celebrate 108 days without taking alcohol or pot, today is my sober mala.

March 20 is a special day. It marks the halfway point in our 40-day effort to meditate daily. It is also the Spring Equinox. It is one of two days of the year in which day and night are in perfect balance, they are equal in length. It is also the time of the year after which our days start to get longer. Our ancestors paid a lot of attention to these celestial events. Let’s honor them. Let’s observe the Spring Equinox together.

Join me and our community in meditation this Sunday, March 20 at 7PM East/4PM West. It will be a 30 minute call.

I spent "Super Tuesday" facilitating the third "Solidarity Summit," a series of convenings bringing together American - Arabs, Asians, South Asians, Latinos, Black folks and Muslims of a diversity of backgrounds. These leaders are organizers and activists, policy advocates and social media personalities, part of new and emergent movements as well as representatives from legacy organizations. To me they are already legendary. They are the people who give shape to history.

Be careful of the "grown ups." Seriously. They think they have figured it out. Be careful of anyone who claims to have figured it out.

Now think about it, when have you changed?

How have you changed?

What made you change?

It was either trauma or epiphany. It was either a broken heart or a flood of love and light. Our hearts change, then we change. We become more open or we become more afraid. And that's how we move ahead. We are either hopeful or hobbled by mistrust.

This is my life. And today I get to celebrate it. I get to celebrate the treasure that is my family and I get to celebrate the blessing of living a life of purpose. This will be my 41st journey around the sun. Turning 40 came with a significant transition, a different way of being in the world. I am enjoying every bit of this decade. I feel like my feet touch the ground. I feel like I have something to stand on and I have something to build. It is nothing short of excilarating.

I’ve been a meditator for about 12 years. I have experienced ebbs and flows in my practice and I have meditated every day of 2016. On February 29 I will be concluding a 60 day meditation “challenge.” A commitment to meditate at least 20 minutes per day every day for 60 days. I don’t want stop. And I want to invite you to join me.

I became a minority at the age of 12. It wasn’t a good experience. The Autobiography of Malcolm X became a formative text. Identity is how I came into politics. I often refer to the process as a first liberation. It gave language to my experience. Nothing was wrong with me or my people. We were all victims of a system of oppression - the problem was structural, not individual.

Feedback loops are at the very heart of our capacity to self-organize. They are what allow us to work together organically. We have to get them right. Feedback is what allows us to adjust behavior, to shift our approach, to adapt in ways that make self-organization possible. But feedback can get really hard for highly sensitive, emotional, social animals like ourselves.

One post on feedback led to another and now I find myself writing a third one. This piece by Tara Sophia Mohr showed up on my feed and it got me thinking about how hard it is to get feedback. It can be crippling. Few of us had perfect parents, and critical feedback can often send us back to our worst childhood wounds. One of Tara’s insights is that “the criticism that we most fear receiving and that we find the most wounding is criticism that matches up with what we believe about ourselves.”

On my recent post on “timely feedback” I made reference to “feedback loops.” I said that feedback loops are at the very heart of our capacity to self-organize. Self-organizing is the ecological antidote to our industrialized approach to planning. Of course it is important to plan! The problem is that we plan with an industrial mindset. The industrial mindset depends on high levels of predictability. But our increasingly complex world is highly unpredictable.

Last weekend I participated in a weekend workshop led by Patricia Albere of the Evolutionary Collective. It was powerful. And it was deeply resonant with my approach to facilitation. Patricia Albere is a leading teacher and practitioner in a socio-spiritual movement that has been taking shape and picking up steam over the last few decades.

Here is the BIG takeaway - there is indeed a collective awakening going on, but it's not so much about a bunch of individuals waking up. It is a mutuality, a being-with, that is awakening to itself.

More than 100 of us are now part of our three-week experiment in collective mindfulness. How is it going?

Present Together - Getting Ready

Thank you for joining our experiment in collective mindfulness. We are thrilled by the enthusiastic response. This is a quick note to help you prepare.

There are many ways to “become present,” you can choose mindfulness at any instant. You will be receiving three different kinds of prompts. A breath prompt. A centering prompt. A heart opening prompt.

You will get two of these prompts per day, they will come at random and unexpected times but none will come too early or too late.

Wow. 2015 was quite the year! My heart swells with gratitude for its blessings.

I turned 40. Big deal. Big party. It was so good to have so many friends from so many parts of my life brave the Boston Snowpocalypse in order to have a good time.

Mr. Tom Tan, my father-in-law, crossed over to the realm of the ancestors where we trust that he rests in peace and continues to watch over his beloved daughter and grandson.

Today marks my last day at the Interaction Institute for Social Change. This has been my professional home for the last 10 years. IISC is the community that has shaped me and my capacity to fulfill my life’s purpose. I am eternally indebted to this place. This is the platform that has allowed me to make my contribution to our quest for liberation. I leave with love, appreciation and commitment to our evolving relationship.

Last week I had the privilege of facilitating a unique gathering of movement actors. They are the protagonists of “When We Fight We Win!” a soon to be released book about the social movements that are shaping the 21st century. The book is more than a book. It is an art object. It is a cultural expression of our contemporary demand for liberation. You can pre-order this piece of art now.

I just facilitated the Rauschenberg Foundation's SEED Summit and I found it truly refreshing work. Artists bring a different energy to the work of collaboration. They have an intuitive understanding of our inherent capacity to create. Most of these artists are not explicitly movement artists, they are not explicitly committed to social justice. It might sound strange but this too is refreshing. I am appreciating time with people who share my values but live outside of my echo chamber.

We did it! The first-ever Evolutionary Leadership Workshop was a remarkable success. It was the landmark experience that we meant for it to be. Participants launched their projects, they committed to an experimental approach and they dared to take their dreams out of their heads and into the world.

We lost Grace Lee Boggs this week and our world feels a little bit smaller. But I try not to lose sight of the nurturing presence of our ancestors and I feel strong again when I know that she is among them.

I cannot say much that hasn’t been said about the life of this true American [R]evolutionary. I can say that her wisdom has shaped some of the most important aspects of my life and how I choose to live.

A group of visionaries came together this June in the first ever Evolutionary Leadership Workshop. The bond we formed was so strong that the group self-organized the reunion that took place this weekend. It was powerful, it was liberating, it was magical.

I was overcome by shame when I read this piece on the experience of women in our culture - It was easier to give in than keep running. My heart aches with the awareness of my role in perpetuating patriarchy. You don’t have to be a rapist to be part of the problem. We swim in a patriarchal ocean, patriarchy is found in every crevice, it threatens to define each of our micro-interactions. We practice patriarchy with our gaze, with the energy that we bring into a room, with the sexualization of a friendly smile.

I was specially moved by this post shared by Swarn Leung, one of the most empathic listeners I have ever met. I loved it because it resonates with my own experience of the power of deep listening. But I was also moved because it points towards the possibility of democratizing how we heal.

Join me this Saturday morning on a very special conference call. People from around the country will join for thirty minutes of prayer and meditation in loving support of the Movement for Black Lives.

I think this is some of the hardest work. It’s not about pack hunting an
external enemy, it’s about deep shifts in our own ways of being.

But if we want to create a world in which conflict and trauma aren’t the center of our collective existence, we have to practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species.

And so much more.

Our learning journey to Bolivia began on the Winter Solstice (Southern Hemisphere), the moon went from new to full during the time that we were here. The stars were aligned in our favor. Bolivia is a place like no other, the group dynamic was uniquely generative. This really has been one of the best learning journeys I have facilitated.

Bolivia is blowing our minds. We are visiting a place that is in the midst of a most significant revolution. No. It is not a place without contradictions. But what is?

A country that is 70% Indigenous has its first indigenous leader since the Spanish came with rape and colonization 500 years ago. This is a BIG deal. They have a new constitution, and it is among the most progressive on the planet.

The first ever Evolutionary Leadership Workshop, my first public workshop
after a decade of doing this work, was an incredible success. I am still
grasping for words to capture the potency of what we just experienced
together. But I have felt so loved and held by you, my community, that I
feel I owe it to you to share a first sense of what just happened here in
paradise.

This is a moment worth naming. I write from Hollyhock, Cortes Island,
British Columbia where in a few hours we will be launching the first ever
Evolutionary Leadership Workshop. After more than a decade facilitating
other people’s gatherings this is the very first time I offer my own public
workshop.

Came across this description of the class that Junot Díaz teaches at MIT and I couldn’t help but think about the work that Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown are doing with Octavia’s Brood and the way it all relates to the [r]evolutionary organizing and activism that so many of us are doing. Let’s Leap!