IS: Be the change
Upcoming public events:
- Friday February 14: IS Connection Call
- Tuesday February 18: Second Renaissance Connection Call
- Wednesday March 5: Limicon Opening Ceremonies
Community Hub calls for Season 17 members continue every Sunday through March 23.
Last week I wrote about Limicon 2025
Interesting insights (some would say wisdom) transmitted briefly come packaged as sazen. Simple aphorisms sound like clichés unless you already know the depth of what the few words point to. Nevertheless, today I will attempt to point to a truth I'm experiencing, using more words and examples.
The cliché form (or more charitably, the simplicity on the other side of complexity) goes like:
It's not what you say, it's how you say it.
or even better
Who you are trumps what you do.
or alternately
"...out of the abundance of the heart [one's] mouth speaks." Luke 6:45
and I'll end up at
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
In the last few days I've noticed three examples that illustrate the truth underneath this cluster of pointers.
I listened to someone speak audaciously in describing their experiences and their plans, in a way that "hubris" would easily fit if one were reading a text transcript. They even hit some of my vocabulary New Age flags, words like "vibrationary" and "transmission." And yet... I've experienced some similar experiences, and I have some similar plans. I could empathize with using those words, and I felt a trust that they were emanating from a heart of love. Who and how they are was radiating into whatever words they used, and so the vocabulary no longer mattered so much to my trust level with them.
I coached and was coached in a presence exercise, and the change for/in either of us was very easy for me to notice. Something about the "dropping in" or "grounding" process of attuning to one's higher/spacious/expanded awareness, it shifted the way we spoke, our posture, the way we carried ourselves. When people say "like a saint" in referencing someone's demeanor, they're pointing to the kind of tuned-in flow-state peaceful embodied confident way-of-being that we find remarkable when we get close to it. I see glimpses of this integrity when mental filters and buzzing self-doubts all drop away and a person is speaking from their heart, from their truth, from their desire.
A friend and collaborator called "antithetical" (to, I'll just say, goodness) a particular move I had made in a group setting. I respect this person quite a lot, and their story in/from their experience didn't match my story of why-and-how I made that move, and different interpretive lenses could create very different stories, and I have a valid and logical story, and yet... When I sit with it again... I think I recall that my "energy" in making that move had some cloudiness in that moment. To some degree, my flow carried a lack of internal coherence, or grounded integrity. I had some self-analysis (was I doing it right, what was the best way to convey and nuance the balance) active, and I believe that if I'd been more "from the heart" in that moment I would have been perceived differently by this friend.
Because, we are quite sensitive to the wholeness and coherence of people's expression: our body-mind systems are highly tuned vibe detectors! That isn't to say we're tuned in all the time, and something about depth-of-presence seems important too. (i.e. We're much less attuned watching a recorded speech versus real-time one-on-one communication.) But when we're really present with another person, we're reading them in a lot of dimensions, more than we're even aware of.
Thus, "be the change" took on another dimension for me today in trying to synthesize this. I previously held it as a thought close to "if you want something to change, do it yourself!" But now, transitioning from cliché to aha, the sense of "integrous way-of-being is the embodiment/enactment of change" (almost regardless of what kind of change!) is now alive and momentous to me.
Being in relationship with the world starts with the being, and then the relationship. Inhabiting the coherence and and integrity (as if "channeling from source/ground-of-being") brings the spaciousness, the anti-rigidity and anti-clinging, that unlocks anything unlockable.
Be the you that you've inhabited in moments of transcendence. Become that person in more contexts. How? Practice! Soak inside a culture that supports your transformation and integration. Live intentionally.
In acceptance and flow,
James