Author: Tenneson Woolf

Yesterday my partner Teresa Posakony was featured in a webinar hosted by Transition US. Her main focus was “Self-Hosting” and how that connects to leadership.

1,400 stress hormones kind of freaks me out. It sounds like a bad address. Just hearing that from her, that this is what humans have, is kind of like test-driving a hundred or two of them. Teresa did a really nice job providing information, engaging participants in exercises and polls, and inviting awareness and practice.

The basic point is that we humans are quite conditioned to stress. Reactions to stress, some set of the 1,400, have protected us. In some cases kept us alive. Given us ability crucial in the moment. They are, or have been, our friends, which is worth celebrating!

But reactions to stress are often like friends that overstay their welcome. Teresa reminds the group that the emotion of stress lasts only 90 seconds if not attached to a web of thoughts and experiences. That’s it. A 90 second mini-experience in one’s day. It is our thoughts (fears, perceptions, worries) that move stress from temporary visitor to permanent resident.

For most of us, stress creates contraction. It activates the reptilian part of our brain to fight, flight, freeze, or appease. Those responses limit our ability to be creative, arguably right at the time when we most need to be expansive.

Teresa did a really good job sharing her key learnings of the last decade, including connections to Heartmath, Neurosciences, Self-Hosting, and some of the application in community change. A few of the resources she used are posted here, as well as a link to her 75-minute webinar recording.

 

 

I’ve been writing an article that focusses on the importance of friends gathering. The full article, available soon, points to four key anchors in the story of why friends gathering matters. One of these is the people yearn for community. Below is an excerpt.

People everywhere yearn for community. Yet community takes discipline, doesn’t it. It takes discipline to share ideas. It takes discipline to create a center, a shared purpose and imagination together, and return to it often. It takes discipline to work through difficulty without collapsing to embarrassingly conciliatory and discouraging consciousness. It takes discipline to find the simple and to stay with it. To not just please each other. To not just fight because it’s the easiest thing to do.

From a friend.

 

Sister Julia Walsh is one of the writers / bloggers that I enjoy a lot. I met her during work with the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration over the last few years. She is vibrant in her thoughtfulness, curiosity, and willingness to lean in to the complexity that is worship and vowed life.

In her recent post on “Technology Habits and Connections that Matter Most,” she references this term, “IT,” intentional technology. I appreciate how she reflects on the choice of how to best use social media, and more importantly, clarify relationship with social media.

It’s not as simple as “technology is bad” is it. That overlooks essential mediums that are helping people everywhere to organize everything from chats over coffee to revolutions. It overlooks a convenience of apps than enable mass amounts of portable information and practices to be available at fingertips.

I’ve been experimenting with my own relationship to social media. Really I’ve been doing this over the last 10 years in particular, just like most other humans. In the last year, I’ve created deliberate times of unplugging. Sometimes a morning. Sometimes three days. No email. No texts. No computer. No TV. In the best of those times, it is no clocks also (just an alarm set to mark the end of that period).

It is not reasonable, nor desirable for me to think of always being unplugged this way. Let’s face it, it’s pretty sweet to do more with a smart phone in five minutes standing in a grocery line than what would have taken, ten years ago, two hours at the office. The flight is booked. The banking transfer complete. I have the top news headlines. And I’ve touched in with five friends on Facebook. But I, like Sister Julia, also want those choices to be intentional. Deliberate. And I don’t want to miss the moment in front of me. Sometimes, its not my isolated todo list that matters in the grocery store, but rather, the person standing next to me. It’s also pretty sweet to to experience in those five minutes a “hello.” A “how are you?” A “that looks tasty, is it?” A laugh. A connection. A “have a good day.”

Therein lies the crux of it, in this human to human world. “Things” and technologies and distractions and, and, and. These will always be available. It is our intention and reclaiming of choice in relationship to any of those that matter.

That’s tasty don’t you think?