Evocateur

Category: Uncategorized

Practice 5 – Going Humble and Grateful    

Gratitude, Humility, Uncategorized

Gratitude is the wine of the soul. Go ahead and get drunk. Giving thanks for abundance is greater than the abundance itself.    Rumi     Summary: Humility and gratitude are fundamental. They are like blocking and tackling in football and throwing and catching in baseball– the basics. All psychological growth, loving relationships and spiritually tuning in depend on these two foundations: and they feed each other. They deserve our attention. Humility and gratitude sound like virtues in[…]

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If Gandhi did a podcast today

Neuroscience, Uncategorized

Loving activism has a neurological base. I was in the audience for a set of short lectures by notable personalities earlier this year, the ones that end up on YouTube: Krista Tippet, George W Bush, The Dalai Lama, and Mahatma Gandhi. They all gave good talks and I liked Gandhi’s the most. (Well, ok, this only happened in my mind. But I do think if Gandhi gave a mini-lecture today it would sound something like[…]

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Practice 3 – Extending Beyond Yourself

Practice, Uncategorized

Out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field. I will meet you there.    Rumi Summary: We extend beyond ourselves often, going under, over and past our normal thought pattern boundaries. Practice 3 is about going beyond regularly, on purpose, and staying there longer when we do. There are many avenues to the expanded space and time of the peace-engendering dimensions beyond our normal crowded thought streams. We will touch upon four of them—the arts,[…]

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Practice 2 – Witness over Will

Coaching and mentoring, Uncategorized

All the world’s a stage; And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts …Shakespeare’s As You Like It Summary: We are the chief actor in our life play. At some point we find that we can be the director of the play too. And we can keep going: we can more knowingly become the playwright as we mature, self-authoring[…]

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Ten Practices: helpful habits of mind and heart

Habits, Uncategorized

An introduction This is the intro to a series of short reads on practices we can develop to foster habits of mind and a useful mindset, one that can both exist alongside and amplify the ones that already serve us. My goal is to provide a means to grow and enhance our patterns of attention, and make the world a better place by doing so. Leaders of all kinds, from all human enterprise settings and[…]

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I will take the ring…

Uncategorized

“I will take the ring, though I do not know the way.”   Frodo Wisdom from Frodo, Michael Jackson and George Vaillant In No Ordinary Time, What is Our Job? We citizens of The Excited States of America have to keep up our pace, do we not? So even our holidays are busyness plus, and yet they provide rest and regeneration, for many of us. In spite of holiday reminders that many beautiful things happen all[…]

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Barista Benevolence: the Caring Connection  

Uncategorized

Customers hear it often…” What are you having today?” The order is placed… The brew begins…click, click, click, the expresso drops into the handled machine cup…pfsst, pfsst, the steam cuts through milk & its evolving substitutes…. sounds that could come from a steel stamping factory 50 years ago. But this is now as the baristas of the 2020’s serves up brew and lots more in the daily lives of the parade of seeker-customers, looking for[…]

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Apologies to Eckhart

Uncategorized

[Brief foreword: I have been mostly quiet since COVID hit and then the George Floyd tragedy. Too much change and gravitas to offer much (one exception here on my other blog as I hope we think big for the bigness of the times), and the channels are clogged with everyone having thoughts and opinions, many good ones, some not as much. So I resume with a little modest thought, not equal to the gravitas of[…]

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