Cranking up your Conscious Evolution - Seeds for 2010

Because of the risk (for me) of ‘banging on’ till the cows come home, herewith a very few little ‘seeds’ for your ‘consciousness garden’ going forward.

The usual New Years resolution list has never really worked for me on its own. I operate much more effectively with intentions. Goals are time bound and measurable (and a fantastic way to take action) whereas for me clear intentions relate to a bigger picture and leave me more room for serendipity to help out! To stay focused on the ‘what‘ seeded from a clear ‘why‘ means the ‘how‘ can be supported from unlimited quarters.

Dare yourself to have an intention that is very clear at an emotional level - how do you want to feel in 12 months time for instance - about your life, your work, your contribution, your happiness....really imagine into what you’d love to be able to say about the past 12 months - as if it was already December 2010...build in the potential for great stories of miracles...ham it up...”You wouldn’t believe the amazing things that happened to me....” you don’t even need to know what that ‘thing’ was - it doesn’t matter because what you want to go for is the feeling. If you really want to go for it - write it down...”Reflections on 2010”...make it a backwards glance and summarise the quality of the past year. Werner Erhard once said “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”!

What happens next is truly miraculous....your Universe starts aligning with that feeling state. Stay conscious and notice the signals you get - like in that childhood game of hot and cold....notice your responses to the things you get to decide about. One choice takes you towards what you say you want and the other takes you away....what do you want? Choose it. It’s that simple. Then actively move towards it because it wont come to you, it will meet you on the road. So stay present to your own experience and notice what you notice.

Along the way there will be obstacles - challenges to respond to. Seeing these obstacles and challenges as part of the trip is vital if you are not going to fall into despondency. The obstacles can help us ‘compost’ any residual ‘handbrakes’ on our personal evolution.

If you really want to accelerate your growth, bring together some like minds and hearts - co-create a group of conscious co-creators. 4 - 6 people is good. The purpose is to meet regularly (about once a month - six weeks) and each have a ‘space’ to share over a meal or drinks/snacks. The point is to offer each other an opportunity to share your truth - express your feelings, and attempt to view your life and the goings on in the world with evolutionary eyes - the small number means you can consciously communicate and hear each other, empower each other, offer different perspectives with a view to increasing your awareness of your potential growth in your life and where you are being directed. You will grow as an individual - guaranteed. It can be helpful to the process for your first get together to be about your process - just to get clear on people’s needs and values, how they want to be treated etc. Over time you will learn to move beyond the judgements of what is happening to an open enquiry as to what creation itself is seeking to serve - and co-operating with that impulse.

I am in such two such groups and have been meeting for many years and the dynamic just keeps evolving as we all grow and our needs change and evolve. The main benefit for most of us seems to be the space - a neutral oasis that is also biased towards personal responsibility, growth and evolution - open hearts and minds in other words. We swap information about things of interest going on or that we are reading or seeing on the internet and we all have a chance to share where we are at - how we are traveling and seeking wisdom if required. It is not a therapy group and it’s not a social thing other than that we are together. It is a purposeful gathering to enhance conscious evolution on the planet...our contribution in the scheme of things may feel small - and - we trust it is nevertheless significant!!

Lastly, intend to become more conscious of your use of language. How we use language impacts actions and feelings...I frequently hear the words “I don’t care “ when the person really means “I don’t mind”....consider the difference in both statements. There are squillions of examples of this where we get sloppy with our language - so say what you mean and mean what you say. The quality of your communication will go through the roof!

Finally finally...continue (as I am sure you do now) to find more and more ways to add more love to the world rather than more fear.

SUMMARY - SEEDS

1. Create clear intentions that align with your deepest motivations for your ‘wild and glorious life’.
2. Notice what you notice - and take action that supports your intentions.
3. See obstacles with ‘evolutionary eyes’ - ie: is the feedback from your environment indicating you are on track (hot) or off track (cold)? Be vigilant with your own truth and integrity - they are your guides. Compost your crap (with expert help if necessary).
4. Get together with like-minded others as conscious evolutionaries and have conscious conversations that expand your current perceptions.
5. Stay conscious of your language.
6. Add more love rather than fear to the Whole.

Conscious Evolution is the best adventure in town. As we learn more and more about our own real story as an ever-evolving species, we humans are getting to write and live our own fairytale - consciously.

Let’s go for a happy ending for each and every Soul.

Leader as Facilitator, Coach, and Servant

Listening to conference speaker Matt Church, an Australian “Thought Leader” (see www.thoughtleaders.com.au) a few weeks ago, he made it very clear that Leadership and Innovation are currently the key topics organisations are convinced are the most valuable lever points for flourishing in our rapidly evolving environment. This is not a matter of legislating ‘thou shalt now step up and be more creative’. The unlocking of human potential requires an environment that promotes these things rather than stifling the flow. To truly allow the creative to manifest itself we need environments that foster the flow - where the environment is stifling, talented people move away. For organisations this is critical. Visionary leadership, solid teamwork and a nourishing personal and professional environment are all highly relevant and within every conscious individuals influence.

Conscious transformation is the most exciting game in town and the game is now to co-create with the many rather than rule via the few. That means we need to be great coaches for each other and we need to foster excellent facilitation skills so we can best serve our teams and organisations in the achievement of their purpose for existing.

So, a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Does the environment you work in have a vibrant creative feel to it?
2. Is there a system in place to generate creative ideas that everyone in the team/organisation understands and can contribute to?
3. Do you have a process in place to test out new ideas for robustness?
4. Does your organisation facilitate change well?
5. If you are a Leader in your organisation, do you find you need to ‘pull rank’ to get things done or are you able to truly coach your team to success?
6. Are you confident in your ability to facilitate team meetings and activities?
7. Are you a Leader as Coach? Or a leader as ‘Ruler/Dominator’?
8. Do you feel inhibited in expressing your creative ideas in the environment you work in?

To move in the direction that seems to be emerging more and more, here are a few ideas to help.

• Facilitate a team get together and discuss all the things you can think of that make a good team great – that cannot be bought with money
• Create the space for you and your team to have an open conversation about how everyone is doing.
• Be open to ideas from the team as to how you can be more effective in ensuring your team has the resources it needs to get the job done without compromising health and wellbeing.
• Check out whether team meetings have a clear purpose that everyone understands.
• Establish ‘vital signs’ that are relevant to your team that everyone can align with and use as a check in periodically to keep you on track.
• Ensure your team has a clearly understood purpose that aligns with and contributes to the organisational purpose, vision and values.

Truly understanding the facilitation of process and change requires personal work. The theory is not the application. To be successful we need to ‘Be’ safe and model the values and behaviour we are seeking – otherwise we will communicate incongruently and we won’t be ‘walking the talk’. If you are seeking to build your own confidence as a Facilitator, find an organisation near you that offers this education - you will find it useful for Life!

Whatever we do for the Whole, we do for ourselves.

Your contribution in every moment is to a world you are part of, so contribute to the world you truly want to see and experience. The mission is then to follow your own whistle and choose powerfully in the direction of your bliss. Choose any direction that calls to you – social justice, economics, science, health, education, environment, animals, the arts…. where are you called to play? Does what you are doing make your heart sing? The new age weight given to having to figure out some huge world-beater purpose for one’s life has stifled so many people’s progress. It can make us hang back as leaders and instead seek out who to follow. Where once we might have had such creative thinking and big ideas, believing we could do something special with our lives, it can be tempting to sink into a malaise of ‘what I do doesn’t make a difference’. This is depressing and debilitating.

None of us exist in a vacuum. We all have control of our responses. We all have brilliant emotional and intuitive guidance systems. Follow your heart - powerfully follow your heart and allow Creation to work through you for the Universal good. We are all making a difference every moment of our lives. What sort of difference is up to us.

My vision...

As I watched the Pope visiting the holy land as a pilgrim standing for peace recently, a fantasy was born in my imagination. I’ve had wishes and hints of this before but never as clear as when I saw the Pope praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

Clear as a bell I had a Vision of the leaders of all the world religions coming together to broadcast their unitedness in bringing peace to the world and calling to their followers to do the same. They modeled unity. It was all over the internet, television, radio and so on and it was all people were talking about all over the world. This gathering changed things overnight – the world was transformed!

In my vision I saw the Dali Lama laughing so delightfully as he does, together with the Pope and all the others we don’t see much in the western world as they acknowledged each other as Spiritual Directors standing for peace. I saw them profoundly forgiving each others religious history and genuinely seeking ways to work together for the good of the world from now on….this was a public reconciliation for the whole world to see…all of a sudden the rigid thinking was gone and the willingness to move forward profoundly and rapidly was born. It was like using a plunger on a blocked sink to clear the pipes so everything could flow again. Beliefs that have for years and years repressed, oppressed and suppressed women were flushed away and we came fully into full collaboration in the affairs of the world on all levels. True partnership between the genders became ‘normal’.

I saw these (men) open and genuinely interested in learning about each other’s faiths, the roots of those faiths, and seeking the common ground among them. I saw them taking responsibility for the behaviour of their predecessors, followers and any policies of their own religions that sought to dominate the spiritual scene on earth.

I watched fascinated in my Vision as these leaders of the worlds religions laid down their weapons of dogma and sought to embrace each others Humanity. In acknowledging the sun shines for everyone, they all acknowledged the common source energy of all of life was also freely given to all. Vitally, they all acknowledged how perilous our survival on this planet really is right now and how important it is to stop fighting and warring with each other and instead fight the very real challenges we face.

I saw them calling on world leaders to stop budgeting trillions to cause death and destruction and the squandering of precious resources. Instead they called for solutions to the most basic of
human needs - to feed and house everyone, and to empower all people to express their brilliance in the world.

I saw soldiers everywhere walking away from the weapons they dropped on the ground. That’s how easy it was to stop war. Everyone just put their guns down and went home. No more bullets were ever used to harm another human.

My vision went on and on….it was like a rush releasing of creativity that was the end of something and the beginning of something new. Yes we had to die to old thinking but the rewards were great!

From my view the problems we have to deal with are largely of our own creation and we are the source of the solutions….if we can just stop fighting each other long enough to experience something entirely different, to look to the systems that inhibit us, to continue to discover and use creative solutions that transform our experience….. My experience was powerful…”you may say I’m a dreamer…but I’m not the only one….”

…and that’s it from my view.

Have a great month

Cheers,

Amanda xx

Talking of sacred cows

….a recent example (albeit a little stale) of how easy it is to get stuck to a ‘position’ happened right here in New Zealand recently. Did you notice the “Edmonds Cookbook Hot Cross Bun broohah”? It’s certainly a wonderful example of the dynamics we live in. Here’s what happened. The Establishment (Edmonds) has a cookbook. It is iconic. Many Kiwi households have one and it has helped countless students and other households feed themselves. So all in all it’s a good thing…until it isn’t. If you haven’t seen the story, Edmonds has a hot cross bun recipe that doesn’t actually work – unless you somehow know that because fruit releases sugar when it is mixed into the rest of the ingredients you shouldn’t add it until the end otherwise the yeast won’t do its thing properly and you’ll end up with hot cross rock cakes.

Well known and much loved New Zealand celebrity cook Jo Seagar tested the recipe and found it wanting. Edmonds said they tested it three times and it’s fine. The public tested it and found it wanting. Edmonds isn’t going to change it and stands by the recipe. A former employee who was a test baker told the Edmonds marketing department several times while he worked there some years ago that the recipe needed to be changed. Edmonds says it’s fine. So, Edmonds has a recipe they say works. The environment says it doesn’t. Edmonds says it does and that people are just not following the instructions properly – they have taken a position.

The funny thing about all this is that it’s a great example and reflects the world we live in. So what can we learn from our teacher Edmonds? The Establishment has problems to solve (even if it doesn’t acknowledge them). The solutions are all around in the community already. Rather than adopt these solutions, the Establishment is closed to feedback and keeps doing what it does. The question is WHY? Why do we continue to do things that don’t work and make our problems bigger and harder to solve – especially when there are solutions already sitting there? Think alternative energy, child development, sustainability, the idea that one size does not fit all and so on… Why can’t the guy with the hugely long lasting car battery get any market share? Why is the research and development money so much less than defence spending? Why in this day and age are we still so influenced by rules made by a very few (sometimes just one individual) hundreds and hundreds of years ago for reasons that related to that time and place and no longer ‘fit’ our modern reality? Why is it when we have technologies that can improve people’s lives en mass, that we do not use them – have we not a responsibility to the planet and each other to move forward?

You thought this view was about a hot cross bun….well, I might not be a bun…but I can get hot (possibly menopause) and pretty cross when we shut our eyes and block our ears to feedback that could contribute to increased success – it seems plain silly! Come on Edmonds – set pride aside and just say thanks for the feedback, launch a nationwide competition for the next iteration of ‘the best little hot cross bun recipe in town’ and thrive on the renewed enthusiasm for New Zealand’s most iconic cookbook?’ You could call the new recipe ‘Humility’ after the guy whose death those buns are supposed to honour….

If the Establishment can’t change a hot cross bun recipe for the common good – how I wonder is Obama going to get on ridding the world of nuclear weapons that are so prolific that we could destroy ourselves thousands of times over? Humanity is revolting…(pun intended) in our own big and little ways. Make it a revolt that counts for the good of the whole – with no-one and nothing left out.

And that’s it from my view.

Cheers,
Amanda

The power and value of the Mother

One role in life I have never felt capable of attempting but one I remain in awe of is that of the MOTHER. Today I want to acknowledge the power and value of the Mother. All of us had one. Some are one. Some yearn to be one. Some like me have long known we are not cut out for it. I really do stand in awe of the women who create human life and then go about nurturing that life to independence and a full contributing life of its own, so often whilst juggling the challenges of adult relationship and work. Some mothers are ‘naturals' and they make it all look so easy, some struggle hugely and have to work at it, others are just not suited to it at all and suffer through it, but all are huge influences in a child's life. Further, I believe all mothers want to do a good job and to say someone is ‘a bad mother' is probably one of the worst things a mother could hear - she does her best even if she is under resourced herself. (Note: I know men also have a huge role to play in the raising of children and they are often under supported, misunderstood and under acknowledged but that topic deserves it's own attention in another issue!)

While we aim resources at more prisons, boot camps for troubled teens and so on, why are we not looking more closely at giving mothers what they need to create environments for their children in which they thrive and flourish? Instead we seem to pile on the pressure to be in the ‘workforce' so there is enough family income to survive - and pay for others to care for their children, (often in large groups). Sure, many women I know who are mothers feel they would go mad without the adult environments they work in but somewhere things have gone out of whack. Women need better quality support across the board, especially in the first few years of their child's life.

Parenting is arguably the most important role on the planet. We have enough research now that tells us what we intuitively know, that the very early stages of life set the foundations for the child going forward (a child learns more and faster in the first 18mths of life than the rest of the life put together according to the experts). Why are we not focusing more resource on this period? What’s more, why not give mothers the personal development education they need to work through their own ‘leftover issues’ from childhood so the models they offer their children are even more effective than the ones they had?

Remember the old saying “Educate a woman and you educate a generation”? We have come a long way in educating women for sure, but there is more education needed about the dynamics of child development – every mother is an early childhood educator but some educate from ignorance. Rather than blaming women for not knowing any better why don't we support them to learn and value themselves and their role more. Surely we can all help with that by the way we treat mothers?

Mothers raise boys, who grow into men. Mothers raise girls who grow into women. Mothers teach boys how to treat women and girls how to be women. Children either adapt to what was modeled to them, or rebel against it. To grow into healthy adults with a sense of esteem and worth, children ideally need someone to love them, like them and believe in them. All children love having someone to look up to, to aspire to be like, to ‘show them the way'. With these things intact in the family (whatever form that family takes - and there are many), the whole society can grow in diversity and tolerance, compassion and respect.

While we need to find solutions for our current troubled youth and adults, surely it is worth some forward thinking to consider the future societies we are creating every day that babies are born - every day a baby is born, so the future is born. We will not eliminate the problems on this one until we eliminate the kinds of role models and environments that create them.

“We tell children how to be and they keep mirroring what we are. Children learn by example. If we are to raise happy, intelligent children we must bring to wholeness the models they are following.”

- Joseph Chilton Pearce

Making resources available for parents to provide those environments that help children flourish could be a helpful (for the individual and the whole) focus of our attention, not from dogma or rigid applications of self righteousness but from principles that can be used as pointers on a path. Parents can be guides on a path rather than enforcers of rules.

One key in my view is to educate parents, help them ‘compost the crap' from their own histories and thereby interrupt the patterns that foster dysfunction and low self esteem, and to teach them what builds a robust and resilient fully expressed contributing human that uses the best of themselves to serve the wider community.

I dream of a day when all parents know who they really are and how the human development process works. Everyone does the best they can with the resources they have. If we want that ‘best’ to be even better we need to add more resources. My moot is that those resources would over time lead to us needing less and less prisons, less and less need for money to deal with social problems, child abuse would be an anomaly, a thing of a distant past…every child sacred, every one a gem, and the responsibility of parenting seen as the most valuable role on the planet (which it undoubtedly is!).

To all the mothers out there I honour you. To my own mother I say “Thank you (again) for having me!” Don't wait for Mothers Day to pause and consider all your mother did for you. Appreciate her for what she gave you - whatever her resources…she did her best in her circumstances and likely deserves a medal!

And that's it….from my view.

Make it a great month,
Amanda xx

PUT YOUR SEAT BELT ON!

What can happen in a month or so these days? We celebrated our national day with more harmony than for a long time. A new President in the US took office, there's a miracle on the Hudson River where everyone survived and a tragedy in Buffalo where no-one did. There's been the Aussie open tennis – thrilling to say the least (for the men's anyway), a war between Israel and Palestine and elections in Israel and Venezuela. Mugabe finally makes a show of sharing power with Morgan Tsvangirai, London has been snowed in, Wellington hosted the 7's and a new season of American Idol has begun and BIG things are having prangs – space stations out there and submarines down here! And that's just all off the top of my head as I write! All of this without even mentioning the devastating Australian bushfires and floods.

In times of crisis we have the opportunity to separate and go for ‘every man/woman/family/organisation/country for themselves' but we also can choose a truth that 'we are all in this together' as a whole planet, foster healthy connections with others and be of service wherever we can. Crisis can split us asunder as fear provokes survival based behaviour, or we can move towards each other to support each other through the tough times.

This is evident in Australia right now in the aftermath of such terrifying bush fires (and the danger still lurks as summer continues). Yes, there has been unimaginable tragedy…and…all over the world human beings are intentionally creating very similar results for so many people by actions motivated by dynamics of power and control, resource scarcity, religious dogma and rigid adherence to outmoded beliefs. Does that seem completely senseless to anyone else out there? There is an economic crisis and yet how much is spent on bombs and guns and soldiers soldiering and the consequent rebuilding of communities in the aftermath? We live on an amazingly abundant planet with the potential and wherewithal to ensure that we flourish for as long as the planets life cycle can sustain us (potentially thousands and thousands if not millions of years). We are behaving like children who see their parents as bottomless money machines – it is not realistic or sustainable. Are we not being challenged to ‘grow up'?

It seems certainly time for different behaviour and to foster that we need new thinking that focuses us on the whole rather than just the parts. When we eat we don't just feed the stomach – we feed the whole body. We need more wisdom based decision makers. I am reminded of an old Greek proverb “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in”.

I dream of a day when the ‘armed services' have transformed into simply ‘The Services', as Army, Navy and Airforce become the organisations with the resources to go anywhere on the planet and assist in times of inevitable natural catastrophe as weather systems become more extreme. It seems absurd that NGOs that do Humanitarian work seem to always be struggling for money and resources. New Zealand is a peace loving rather than aggressive country. We can't afford to be aggressive. Given our size, our small, smart little country has had to learn how to negotiate to get our way – to compromise, communicate, cooperate and collaborate. We simply don't have the military might to impose our will – and long may that be so!

What would it be like if all over the world, those who could were given the opportunity to serve in one of the ‘services' with the purpose of educating and giving people the skills to handle themselves and be of service to others in a crisis? Imagine how many different careers one could pursue and the work that could be done. Australians are now considering education about bushfires as a compulsory topic in schools now – isn't it obvious how valuable it is to know your environment and how to safely live in it and with it?

I believe it's time for some central government leadership on this one. We are all capable of learning how we can move beyond donating some money, food and clothing – and yes we still need to be generous in those ways but could you look after yourself and your family for a couple of weeks if you had to? We don't need to resist planning for disaster, we just need to be confident we will be resilient if the time came that we needed to really dig deep. Don't leave it to Civil Defence and other services to rescue and sort us out, let's make it ‘normal' to know what to do.

And that's it from my view.

My very best to yours,

Amanda xx “With beauty and goodness all around may you walk” (Old Navajo saying)

The gift of George W. Bush and the potential of the new world?

So it’s done. George W. Bush is gone and Barack Obama is the man of the moment. He and his family are already being mythologised as the world craves a new saviour.

With all the vitriol about Bush I found myself feeling (along with what feels like the whole world) much relieved in watching his departure after Obama’s inauguration…and, attempting to view the whole process with evolutionary eyes, I can’t help feeling that without Bush and his agenda there would be no Obama. George W’s legacy may be that he operated from a world view that is no longer (if it ever was) relevant to the shared planet we call home. His decisions though have inadvertently released boundless energy for change (I’m sure it wasn’t his conscious intention!). In pursuing his agenda of domination in the name of freedom, believing God and might were on his side, he created consequences that increased rather than decreased human suffering (wars, economic meltdown, denial of climate change and so on…). I believe history will say that Bush’s greatest achievement was to create a climate in which Obama could rise. The pain and suffering of so many along with our instant access to what’s happening in the moment due to the wonders of technology have been the accelerators for a quantum shift in thinking all over the planet.

If everything was rolling along well for the US when election time came in 2008, do you think the Senator from Illinois, with his youth and inexperience (let alone racial mix) would ever have had a chance against the Clinton machine? As it was, the people had to choose between the McCain/Palin fear based rhetoric or take the risk of going for hope. Obama’s timing was impeccable and his communication skills struck chords around his own country and the world. Many see his whole life story being divinely orchestrated so as to bring him to being ‘the man of the moment’ living in the White House. He is a man with very different views, values and beliefs than his predecessor and large numbers of people feel those values ‘fit’ with the momentum gathering all over the world. He feels like ‘a man of our times’ who actually has the power now to make fundamental changes to the way the US operates, to have a different sort of influence.

So before you write off George W. Bush completely, consider sending him a blessing, (this is not to excuse any of his choices) for paving the way for the people of the United States to choose a new style of leadership that embodies a very different consciousness that what came before it. Without George W. Bush, would American’s have heard Obama’s voice and elected him President? We will never know what might have been but I wonder….is this is a classic example of crisis driving human evolution?

And that’s it, from my view,
My very best to yours,
Amanda xx

An Introduction to Conscious Evolution

We all know what happens when you drop a pebble in a pond…there are ripples. Imagine what happens when a larger than life avalanche leaps into an ocean….seas rise and there are much bigger consequences.

What we see in the US right now is such an avalanche, for consciousness … and the ‘seas’ will rise, all over the world. This is a very exciting gear change and a dynamic evolutionary step for Humanity that I don’t believe we have even begun to see shake down yet although it is more and more evident in cyber space as people all over the world seek to connect with like minds and hearts. This rising of the collective consciousness will unleash enormous creativity, the emergence of new solutions to our problems and new and bold views of possible futures that are worthy of the becoming Humanity. No doubt as well, there will be the inevitable backlash of fear of letting go of what we know and have been used to (or ‘the devil we know’ as the saying goes). I am thrilled to see and experience this massive shift in my lifetime as are so many others who have been working to raise awareness in our own small ways for many years. Transformation is happening from the ground up and it feels like a highly significant moment indeed. I don’t believe we can even comprehend just how significant from where we sit right now.

Future generations will study these days and know they heralded a turning point for Humanity, not just in politics but in the sense of possibility such transformation can inspire, in any area of life. Individual stories of inspiration are beginning to emerge very fast now - watch for the books and movies! When change occurs there is always the potential for things to ‘change back’, like water can turn to ice and back to water again. With transformation there is no going back…it’s a long road for wine to turn back into grapes again, or for the butterfly to reappear as a caterpillar.

Anyone who watched the moment when Obama’s election was secure will have seen the rawness of feeling in the faces of people of all ages and races. There was something profoundly right about it. Something fell away and something new was fertilised. I believe it was the face of a new resonance and all over the world including right here in New Zealand we tuned in to that resonance. Humanity took a significant evolutionary step on November 5th, 2008 - a step I believe is towards a more universal species. If we ever had an opportunity to consciously evolve our identity out of ‘victim’ and into ‘co-creator’ that opportunity is here, now! And it’s not about one human ‘fixing’ everything, if we think that’s how it is we will be disappointed. The call is for us all to step up and take more responsibility for our own destiny - together. As Buckminster Fuller once said - “There are no passengers on spaceship earth – only crew”. Every one of us has a purpose.

Many many people are now at a point where they can more deeply embrace the idea we are all co-creators of our own realities. The challenge now is to choose to be conscious co-creators. In other words, to become the conscious creators of the future human history book - not from unconscious individual survival based motives, but from wisdom and an impulse to discover what really works for the whole planet - the conscious application of our intelligence and our compassion. Instead of fighting for our own separate interests and lives, we are now challenged to see a new world view of ourselves as a whole species living on a whole planet, and not at the expense of the individual either. The mindset of life being about either/or is being replaced rapidly as we seek to live with the mindset of both/and. The individual and the collective need to thrive in order for us to experience ourselves as whole.

When we are lifted by our own efforts and those of others to see new horizons of possibility and potential, we can also see a clearer view of what bought us to this point. For humans, our evolution is most often provoked by crisis. Crises drive evolution. To see crises this way is a new view for many and yet how many times have we all experienced the truth of this? It seems to be part of the human condition to stick with ‘what is’, to maintain the status quo until there really is no other option but to change, before we will change. And yet we are so good at it! Humans are incredibly resourceful and we can choose to do and be pretty much anything we decide, as long as it is sustainable and in alignment with our own potential (there’s not a lot of point using up the planet’s resources faster than she can replenish them or wanting to be an ‘Idol’ if you weren’t gifting with singing!)

To consciously engage in our own evolution we need to see ourselves as central to our own lives regarding our creative power. There is in every one of us, an intrinsic impulse towards the expression of our particular version of individuality. To learn to cooperate with this impulse consciously and contribute it to the whole is to become a conscious co-creator of our lives, or as Barbara Marx Hubbard says a ‘conscious evolutionary’. We all have incredible powers, gifts built into us that are our best resources…all free to use in abundance. We have free will, the choice to act or not in any circumstance. We have the extraordinary gift of intuition, a built in guidance system. Obvious too is our impulse to grow and unfold that we need only to tune into in order to cooperate and reap the benefits. We have imagination and an incredible capacity for learning…and, we have the ability to make meaning of our experiences, self reflective consciousness. This last gift is a real ripper – we can choose to make meaning that assists our evolution, or we can allow our minds to hold us back by rigidly holding onto unhelpful ideas of who and what we are - often based on early conditioning that is no longer useful going forward.

I choose to believe we are all local separate seeming (but not really) expressions of the divine creative impulse that powers the entire universe…we are this divinity, with a mind, with a heart and with a body – all of which we get to use to manifest the creation we are on this earthly plane. A pretty amazing creation are we not? Think of the path….billions of years of creation and here we are, homo sapiens sapiens, only 25,000 or so years old and the potential jewel in Creations crown. We are the ones with the ability to self reflect, to know our own powers and potential. What a difference we have made to each other and our world thus far and it's very obvious we have not seen the best of ourselves yet!

Where we go next is up to us. We have the power to shape our world, we have plenty of evidence of that! We are now getting very clear messages from our environment. We are being called from unconsciousness to consciousness, from autopilot to manual control, from “I don’t make a difference” to “Everyone makes a difference”. What difference we choose to make remains our choice and our responsibility. We have all the tools, we just need to keep learning to master them and use them in service to the whole rather than solely for our own individual gratification. I believe when we do that in numbers, we will reap the rewards in abundance and truly be conscious partners with Creation. As Alice Walker says “We are the ones we have been waiting for”.

We can all contribute starting at home base, our own individual life. By tuning in and examining our own personal evolution, how we have been shaped and molded, we can move beyond our conditioned limitations and become conscious co-creators of our future. Conscious evolution - a more exciting adventure I cannot imagine!