Author: Tenneson Woolf

Silence is a practice too. Particularly when the noise grows.

I find, again and again, that the noise comes from within me.

It’s true that the noise is out there.

But it’s my relationship with that noise that determines whether it lingers or leaves.

Gunilla Norris has offered some passages on silence that I’ve appreciated many times. I dug this one up from a previous post. She says,…

If we can simply learn to follow our breath 
in a steady way — attending to the inhalation
and the exhalation until we feel that we are no longer
breathing, but are being breathed
— we have grown in practice.

The point of practice is not to perform,
but to participate — not to achieve specific experiences, 
but to develop a new relationship with experience itself.

It’s big work to become breathed. For many of us. Yet, so fruitful.

I’m glad to be among many practitioners that share evolving insights. And that find their way to the simple and clear.

Mary Alice writes of a recent appreciative inquiry conversation among three young people.

“We need to get connected and then we get engaged.” 
The young man said: “I need to get engaged, then I get connected.”

There is a a very deep truth here about the multiple ways
it takes to build understanding, connection and mutual engagement for a purpose.

Mary Alice’s full post is here.

For inspiration.

It’s good to have themes. Overarching statements or patterns. About who we are, and about what we are up to. Or about what we are discovering. About how the world works.

One theme for me lately is “learn a thing by doing a thing.” It’s the commitment and the creativity to get started and then to let that thing inform us about what it really is. It can be true cooking a meal. Or running a program. I’m finding it true in creating Becoming & Belonging offerings.

In that spirit, a further theme of “inner leadership” is arriving for me. As another entry point into all the work. For teams. For individuals. For executives. For mid-level. For entrepreneurs. For artists. For poets.

Inner Leadership is

• practice
• listening deeply to one’s own truth
• aligning action with inner knowing
• presence
• purpose

Or more poetically, Inner Leadership is

• a quiet flame within
• that guides by stillness
• courage
• points towards what is most true and most alive

One more theme, discovered while doing. Not only to we live life, but life lives us.

This is significant. It changes the context for most everything — planning, accomplishing, worrying, fretting. It signals a more life-giving approach. It’s not that we need to create everything from start (and some of the fears that go with that). It’s that we need to surrender to what is already alive and moving. Give ourselves to life living us. In programs. In conversations. And yes, to simple things like making the soup.

Not trying to over assert the theme. I am trying to point to a neglected philosophy, a pre-industrial orientation. Or perhaps a post industrial era that reclaims life-giving creative spirit.

Thx for reading. Perhaps hearing a few sparks in your mind and heart. Best way to jump in to this with me is through my Becoming & Belonging series. I know I’m talking about it a lot. And posting.

Learning by doing. And then stay doing in ways that reanimate life.

I love this Mary Oliver piece shared recently with me (thx Saoirse).

Dangerous.
Noble.
Light.
Frolicsome.
Improbable.
Beautiful.
Afraid of nothing.
Wings.

Plenty to work with there, isn’t there.