Experience True Freedom: Here's How!

Anne Stadler: South African, North American, European and now an India loving yoga instructor + leadership thought leader transforming student lives @ SOIL Here she discuses how leaders can leverage the power of meditation to improve themselves and the lives of people around them

Freedom exists when my Self connects to the Self of universal consciousness. Synapse happens when that connection is present. I feel/sense “I am that!” I experience delight, deep peace & flow. Whatever I manifest practically resonates with the Self-organizing at the heart of the living Universe.

Hypothesis: My aim/intention is crucial. It lands me in exactly the consciousness I aim for. My aim: Self to Self; my fire to THE fire at the core of life.So, I begin by dedicating each endeavor, relationship, and activity to serving life.I open my awareness to the unknown, the unnameable, so that my actions may be informed by the larger field of universal consciousness that is life…through meditation.In meditation, I try to divest myself of all stories, preconceptions, assumptions & expectations about the situation, person, or place that I’m attached to.

I follow delight, my sense of “Yes!”

I embrace what/who I attract.

I listen.

I pay attention (observe). I notice whether I am attached to something or irritated by it, and practice releasing that in the moment.

I do/make as love/attraction/guidance calls me.

I learn.

I reflect.

I complete what I am called to do.

I give thanks and celebrate.

I’m doing this practice daily as well as in the midst of collective activities I am called to do, with the same habitual regularity as brushing my teeth.

A Collective Practice:

“A mass of fire reaching upward from earth into the heavens is the robust, united, burning, radiant soul.”Emerson

What are essential co-creative patterns that foster a mass of fire—the united burning, radiant soul-- leading to evolution and wholeness?

Here are the minimal patterns and practices I, with others, have been noticing and experimenting with.

Treat everything as a learning opportunity.

Start by asking a question:

What are we called to do here together that we cannot do separately?

This opens me/us to the field of learning/action appropriate at this moment. It surfaces the manifestation possibility emerging from the universal intelligent field. Then invite a small group of people essential to the undertaking. In self-organizing system, a larger group or community forms from a small group, a fractal of itself.

We focus on these questions:

1. What is the calling we’re answering?

2. Who are we? What experience does each bring? What gifts?

3. Where are we?

4. What can we do together?

5. Who else needs to be here with us? Then WE invite and welcome a wider circle of others: extending and attracting a larger circle that reflects the “whole”.



Welcome: (the circle of the whole)

Hosting is essential. ALL work in co-creative relationship IS a gift exchange: I/We/Now! The purpose of welcome and hosting is assuring people that just as they are, they belong in that circle of relationship and are essential to the well-being of all.

At the beginning of any gathering, people need to know:

1. What is the purpose of the gathering, and the question we are addressing?

2. Who am I, and am I welcome just as I am?

3. Where are we? Walk around, look, and listen to the place we are in.

4. What is the abundance that has come together?

5. What are the gifts each one is bringing?

Exchange gifts: What are we here to do together?

Invite each person to take responsibility for what they love & care about in relation to the purpose and calling question; either through opening a marketplace as in Open Space Technology, or via another method of self-organizing, so that people can initiate a gift exchange of inquiry and potential action.

This affords the opportunity for my evolving Self to engage with others’ evolving Selves in service of the collective’s evolution. It is the gift exchange that IS the root of the word “community” (From the Latin: “com”, meaning “together”; “munus”, meaning “gift”.)

After a period of action/exchange, reassemble the whole circle:

1. Converge: What is the synthesis that this particular circle has to offer? Using all intelligences, working in small self-chosen groups, bring forth the synthesis of new knowledge that each group can offer in answering the question for which the whole circle assembled.

2. Reflect: What is the “aha”, the transformational learning gift we each want to offer so the group can learn as a whole? What wants to happen next?

3. Celebrate/Close: What is the appreciating and celebrating we want to do as we close this particular chapter in the life of this particular circle?

- Anne Stadler - www.soilindia.net