Conversation is my lifeline.
For the last few months I’ve been on a mission to support my brother through a major transition, and I’ve replaced the freedom and expansiveness of my home in New Zealand with a somewhat contracted existence in an outer London suburb. The conversations I have on skype with people from many different countries – some in groups, some 1-1 – keep me sane and help me to maintain a more expanded consciousness.
The conversations I love most are those I call Deep Discovery in which two or more people hold space for each other to authentically explore our own experience, to connect with our wisdom and to see more clearly. It’s a process of revelation. As we peel back the layers of experience, creative sparks acrobat across the neural net, new insights flash and the hologram of life is vividly illuminated.
This may sound heady, and it certainly stimulates the creative mind, but it is actually a heart centred practice. It starts with my truth and your truth and – when we are speaking from authenticity – very quickly becomes our truth. We hold a common truth which we are shaping and refining together, and it’s the truth of what it means to be a human being emerging into higher consciousness at this time in our history on the planet. This consciousness is emerging through us as we speak and we become its portals.
These conversations only work when we show up 100% – truly present. We’re not “talking about” our experience, we’re feeling into it. When we do this we create an open space of awareness and hold an inner container in which we’re simultaneously experiencing and witnessing. We’re searching for words to describe intense and only half understood inner states and the dramas of being human that are currently playing out on our inner stage. I’m doing this right now, as I write, reaching to the edge of consciousness for the words to hold and express the meaning I so much want to communicate to you.
It is a creative process involving deep inner listening. When we engage this practice together, in conversation, we co-create a creative space which is both intimate and expansive, deep and resonant. At its best, I call this the soul field. Somehow, magically, by bringing all our attention, presence and love to the expression of our authentic truth, we tap into a vibrant, animated, alive and limitless field of intelligence and consciousness where there is no separation. There is still an “I” with a unique perspective and there is also the “we”, the one heart of humanity beating, connecting and moving us forward.
This is a deeply regenerative and refreshing practice. It’s very simple and yet it requires not only presence but also the willingness to be always in beginner’s mind – in that place where we don’t know but we want to know. It requires a willingness to suspend judgement, to be curious, open, humble. We have to set aside for a while any attachment to “being the one who knows”, being the expert, having the answers, wanting to fix problems. We simply stay as close as we can to the truth of our experience, listen deeply, feel sensitively and enter the unknown, one step at a time.
More tomorrow…..
October 9th 2015
