The people you find on this page are all leaders of Relating Arts practices. They are featured here because we trust them and their work. We find that working on-recommendation in this way is the best way of supporting you in finding high quality leadership.
We are all saying no to love. When we dont trust our embodied knowing of others and make ourselves more separate than we are. When we go too far that way we go into projection from resentment or from our own wounding. But it is possible to speak from our true knowing of others.
Awareness can bring the beautiful gift of seeing new possibilities for being in the world. It opens the blackbox of Me and allows me to see my doing as object. However, becoming aware of my own doing comes with its own traps.
In a Surrendered Leadership circle without an enlightened leader, I trust the practice itself to hold the context. The more I surrender to the practice as God, the more my leadership takes a formless shape to receive all forms in Love.
I am looking into love addiction as a possible rascal sabotaging my imagined intention to co-create a lasting loving relationship. At the heart of love addiction lies the tendency to make another person a higher power, says Pia Mellody (author of Facing love addiction). The road to lasting sobriety involves cultivating a relationship with an appropriate higher power, which can genuinely be a refuge through the hellfires and inertia that all people face.
I have created quite the exquisitely dynamic polarized yumzum rating the men I’ve loved as superior – not only to myself but to all the beings of the universe on all the planes. Giving these men more power than they actually have – their power plus my disowned projected power plus plus plus – is sexy, and it comes at a price. Once we’ve traversed the steep muddy mud piles I expect dragon supergod to pick me up and free me from myself. I expect him to love me so fiercely, so relentlessly that in the light of his undivided attention I will dissolve into a permanent state of union.
I’m in a hotel room in the paradisiac town of Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, shouting at my lover (it’s complicated) on the phone. My own voice startles me, and in some secret corner of my being I’m impressed. Watching myself act this way is strangely enlivening – a personality bound by conflict averse enneagram 9 sensibility. Bows to my mirror, I am now free to include ill-tempered hound dog in my bio. The furious Buddha has been revealed!
One night a few years ago I was sitting on a beach with a friend, feeling completely amazed by seeing her in her power. As we were sitting there it was as if I could see mythical world around us and her as a magical being. It felt very new for me. I felt humbled sitting there. And stupid in a good way. As all the deep and meaningful answers that I have worked hard to get to were completely obvious to her.
This summer at the International Circling Festival in the Netherlands, in a 100-person circle, I reached a new level of clarity about one transformational form of the practice called Surrendered Leadership.
The aim of this article is to delineate some Circling skills in the hope that it that can be supportive for the leadership development of the reader. I have used my Tai Chi practice and the 8 “energies” of Tai Chi as the structure for describing some fundamental skills or “moves” within the Circling practice.
I heard a piece of poetry at a Circling and Surrendered Leadership weekend I recently led. A participant described his experience as “endlessly waiting as life goes by” and that struck a deep resonance in me.