By marc on September 12th, 2010
I have just learned that a new free teleconference series, hosted by my friend Terry Patten, is beginning tomorrow. First guest will be Craig Hamilton, founder of Integral Enlightenment. Future guests include my mentor Saniel Bonder, and Marc Gafni. This looks it will be worthwhile to follow – see the email below or signup from here.
_______________
Thanks again for registering for our free teleseminar series, Beyond Awakening: The Future of Spiritual Practice. I’m excited to announce that the first call in the series is this Sunday, September 12th from 5:00-6:30 pm (PDT / GMT-7). All the access codes and important information to get on the call are right here in this email!
To begin, I’d like to tell you that the response to this teleseries has been tremendous — the topic has clearly spoken to a deep yearning we all share to embody our spiritual practice in ways that really matter. As a result, as of this writing, our collective practice community is already well over 15,000 strong–and growing!
In this kick-off call, "The Evolution of Awakening", I’ll be joined by my friend and colleague, Craig Hamilton, founder of Integral Enlightenment and a luminary in his own right in the field of Integral and Evolutionary spirituality. During the call I’ll describe some liberating and challenging insights that inspired me to create this teleseminar series. And in dialogue with Craig, I’ll dig into the fundamental spiritual questions that I’ll be exploring with our esteemed guests throughout the series. We can all expect to learn, to converse, to join together and to evolve together by participating in this unprecedented public discourse on the future of spiritual practice.
Our first event will take place this coming Sunday, September 12th, from 5:00-6:30 PM Pacific Time (GMT-7). You can listen live by phone or online, or download the complete recording anytime after the call.
To check the time in your local area CLICK HERE! Enter: September 12th at 5 PM and your location.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE:
The Evolution of Awakening on Sunday, September 12th @ 5 PM Pacific:
To listen live by phone dial: 216-258-0785 and enter Conference ID: 272072#
**You can also click HERE to find a local number to dial in with from the US. Enter the same conference code provided above!
To listen live online: http://AttendThisEvent.com/?eventid=14914209
To download the audio after the teleseminar is complete, go to: http://AttendThisEvent.com/?eventid=14914209
Join the Dialogue: At 6:00 p.m., we’ll open up the lines and you’ll have the opportunity to interact with us directly over the phone or via instant message. Here’s what to do:
1. To interact live by voice, dial into the conference line number and wait until we ask for a question from someone in your region, or
2. Send us your question via instant message in the teleseminar window on your computer, or
3. Send us your questions and comments before or during the live dialogue by posting them on our Beyond Awakening Community Facebook page.
*Please Note: There will be a limited number of lines available on the live conference call, so we encourage you to listen online if possible. To make sure you can get through by phone, we encourage you to dial in early.
If you have any questions or need any assistance please feel free to visit our online FAQ or email us at support.
I very much look forward to being with you on our first call!
Sincerely,
Terry Patten
& the Beyond Awakening Team
By marc on August 2nd, 2010
I just returned from the Integral Theory Conference in Pleasant Hill, CA. This is (arguably) the largest inter-disciplinary conference on the development and evolution of consciousness, from both an academic and a practical (business and social change) perspective.
People often ask me “what is integral philosophy”, and I have been at a loss for words (Ken Wilber wrote 10,000 pages on this topic). I feel a little clearer now in answering:
- “Integral” is a philosophy and a model of consciousness and cultural development that asserts that human development occurs by successive integration of higher-order (more complex and inclusive) perspectives, but without making the previous perspectives wrong. In short: “everyone is right” (even the Taliban – if you saw things from their eyes and from their developmental level, you would agree with them)
- “Integral” asserts that human development (as in, increases in happiness, love, contribution and maturity) occurs best by acting simultaneously on all challenges at once – including both our personal development (consciousness) and our work in the world (service or contribution)
- That spiritual development follows the same lines as above, and is no longer (if it ever was) only a solitary pursuit, but that it has become indistinguishable from our engagement with our communities and our network
Seen as this is my lifelong obsession (doing God’s work while having a good time ;), it’s not surprising the conference blew my mind. For perhaps the first time in my life, I found myself in a large gathering with a group of people who seemed to have the exact same interest as me. It was exhilarating. I had such a sense of having “found my tribe”. Apparently, many people have been thinking about this most troubling problem of mine for some time (success and happiness), they have ideas, even solutions.
So – I am “in”.
Aside from this, and great networking and other business opportunities, let me give another great takeaway.
I met a guy called Brian Whetten, very compelling guy, silicon-valley entrepreneur who has turned his mind to coaching integral business models (see http://sellingbygiving.net), and is doing well at it.
His idea is that one of the greatest challenges we are facing as a society is helping people create careers and organizations that integrate both money and meaning. The reason this is so difficult can be understood within integral theory: that money (or survival) is a lower-order need compared to meaning or fulfillment, but still must be (of course) included if we are to be highly-functioning in the world, offering our gift freely.
Many of us are searching for work and careers that provide meaning and fulfillment, while by-passing or suppressing the issues that come up as we confront survival. These issues come out as “shadow”, as all kinds of resistance and procrastination that many heart-centered (service-oriented) professionals experience. This can manifest, for example, in resistance around enrollment activities, charging too little for our services, and a thousand other ways.
The key is this: we have to heal our shadow aspects before we can reach the kind of fulfillment, self-expression and joy (along with income!) that we deeply desire. We have to take a more “integral” perspective on our resistances and other seemingly neurotic behavior – including them, paying attention to them, loving them as it were.
I don’t know about you, but nobody taught me this in business school (or entrepreneurial school).
Expect more to come on this. It’s a very exciting time for me, and I am thrilled to have you in my life, to be able to share this with you.
Blessings,
Marc
By marc on July 28th, 2010
I am going to be traveling a lot in the next 6 weeks – to the Integral Theory Conference in Oakland, then a week with Mike Jay in Las Vegas (see below), and then Burning Man – and reporting on all these events – so I am leading off with a long piece on entrepreneurship, happiness and success, followed by an offer / invitation. You can skip the narcissistic ramblings and head directly to the invitation below, if you want, which is a pretty good one.
The ups and the downs of being an entrepreneur
I got a mixed response to the Entrepreneur test piece, with people asking me “is this really you”? Well, in many respects, sadly, it has been. I am actually not a natural entrepreneur, yet I have spent a large chunk of my life looking for some way to support myself that would also feed my happiness and allow me to do the things that have been most important and vital to me (my adventures in relationship and community and “experiments in consciousness”). I became an entrepreneur by default – I couldn’t think of any other career that would give me the freedom that I needed. When I met Rebekah, after a lifetime of seeking in both the relational and business arenas, I became happy for perhaps the first time in my life, because I had found a path to sustained sexual intimacy with a person of the female persuasion (don’t laugh – it’s actually not an easy thing).
With this triumph, and flush with excitement, I then created or participated in 4 different businesses over the next 6 years – all of which failed, and two of them spectacularly so (the first web business and Trellis). My current business, WordPress Academy, is the first one that is successful. Maybe because it’s more related to an area of desire (or intrinsic motivation), for me: WordPress Academy is a type of conversation for transformation, which is the thing for which I live.
And yet I continue to struggle with this – either sacrificing happiness in the pursuit of success, or, as of lately, sacrificing success in the pursuit of happiness. This, I have come to learn, is very common.
Continue reading Entrepreneurship, success, and happiness: lessons learned, and an invitation
By marc on July 8th, 2010
- I am willing to lose everything.
- I embrace failure.
- I am always willing to do tedious work.
- I can handle watching my dreams fall apart.
- Even if I am puking my guts out with the flu and my mother passed away last week, there is nothing that will keep me from being ready to work.
- My relationship/marriage is so strong, nothing work related could ever damage it.
- My family doesn’t need an income.
- This is a connected world and I don’t need alone time. I want to be reachable 24/7 by my employees, customers, and business partners.
- I like instability and I live for uncertainty.
- I don’t need a vacation for years at a time.
- I accept that not everyone likes my ideas and that it’s quite likely that many of my ideas are garbage.
- If I go into business with friends or family, I am OK with losing that relationship forever if things end badly.
- I don’t have existing anxiety issues and I handle stress with ease.
- I am willing to fire or layoff anyone no matter what how good of a friend they are, if they are my own sibling, if they just had a baby, if they have worked with me for 20 years, if their spouse also just lost their job, if I know they might end up homeless, if they have cancer but no outside medical insurance, or any other horrible scenario millions of bosses and HR people have faced countless times.
- I am OK with being socially cut-off and walking away from my friends when work beckons.
- I love naysayers and I won’t explode or give-up when a family member, friend, customer, business associate, partner, or anyone for that matter tells me my idea, product, or service is a terrible idea, a waste of time, will never work, or that I must be a moron.
- I accept the fact that I can do everything right, can work 70 hours a week for years, can hire all the right people, can arrange amazing business deals, and still lose everything in a flash because of something out of my control.
- I accept that I may hire people that are much better at my job than I am and I will get out of their way.
- I realize and accept that I am wrong ten times more than I am right.
- I am willing to walk away if it doesn’t work out.
Courtesy of Seth Kravitz.
By marc on June 19th, 2010
I am in part reluctant to write today, as I have so much to share, as my life has taken a definite turning point, a crystallization and falling-into-place and making-whole of all the experiences, triumphs and tragedies, joys and sorrows of my 3 years with Trellis, 6 years with Rebekah, and indeed the entire stream of my life to this day. I am half-reluctant to share because although there are some very exciting external events, which I will share momentarily, and upcoming adventures (I live for adventures), the essence of this transformation is still internal and in-process, and may therefore be difficult to convey in writing.
I am encouraged to write by a beautiful book I am reading, My years with the Qutb by Sharon Marcus, about her time with the great Sufi saint Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, who spent the last 16 years of his life in Philadelphia (!). I must be a natural Sufi because every time I read anything on Sufism (previously Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s fascinating lectures Love is a fire and I am wood) something inside me responds with a powerful “Yes”; and Sharon Marcus’s book is no exception, I start to cry on every second page (tears of recognition and tears of relief). Sufism is about the primacy of love, and the burning away of everything that is not-love, and the everyday ecstasy that can be had from the intimate meeting with God and all of God’s creatures, including oneself and one’s fellows. This is the experience that was at the core of the design of Trellis (and the design of Morehouse as well, that is Trellis’s spiritual parent), it is the same as Jerry Jud’s Love is an intention and “more than anything else, we seek to love and be loved”, it is what happens most weekends (predictably) at Shalom Mountain Retreat Center. It is an experience that has always been with me and called me, that has expressed itself most potently for me in intimate relationships of all kinds, and sexual/romantic attractions; and it’s an experience that is growing deeper and stronger with me every year.
Aside from this brief (rambling?) digression, I do have some news. I have found my dream job, which is social media director and affiliate manager for a new program called Flawless Living, that is being developed by visionary coach, entrepreneur and internet marketer Mike Jay, which I wrote about in my previous article. Flawless Living cannot be described in a paragraph, as it’s the result of Mike’s 20 years of research into business coaching, Western psychology and human development (with a smattering of the world’s wisdom literature thrown in), but I can say that it’s a seminar series, a school of consciousness, a community/movement, an integrally-inspired business network, and a training program in internet marketing and business development all at once. The program is still in development but there is a beta launch in Las Vegas in August and an official launch in Philadelphia in November. What it’s about for me is the unification of the two fundamental strands, or major impulses of my life, which are the drive for happiness and the drive for “success” (recognition and contribution). These two major impulses, which I also describe as the masculine and feminine polarities of life, have been at war with each other for 40-odd years. What is so meaningful to me about this assignment, and so magical, is that it’s a recognition and validation of what I have been doing already for a couple of decades, for free—networking for transformation—and so this recognition has been profoundly calming and settling for me. The fundamental idea of Flawless Living is similar to—but much more complex and layered—than “do what you love and the money will follow”, because many of us have tried doing what we love and the money has not followed, and this is at it should, because the idea is good but a bit naive, and Mike has helped me to understand why.
Flawless Living is for now just a very part-time job for me, which is just as well, because of my next major piece of news: I am selling an interest in WordPress Academy, for a little cash and some help, to facilitate a big product development effort that will culminate in November with a product I am creating, which is a book/DVD on WordPress web design and internet marketing for small business. This is my major project for the next 4-5 months, that is going to force me into a kind of focus and self-discipline that I resist and yet I know I need in order to become the person that I want to be (i.e., happy and successful ;). The reason I am seeking partners is that I have realized that I don’t want to do this alone, I am not motivated, it’s a fundamental part of my design that I can’t bring myself to do something unless it’s fun, and it’s a fundamental principle of Flawless Living that just because we can do something (like, exercise or meditate every morning) it doesn’t mean that we will, and therefore we need to find workarounds (such as, in my case, finding a partner, even at the cost of giving up some equity).
Because of all this, I have a very ambitious travel schedule over the next 4 months: in addition to a week-long retreat that Rebekah and I are doing at Shalom Mountain called Sexuality and Spirituality, I have four trips out West scheduled: I am attending the Integral Theory in Action Conference in Pleasant Hill CA (near Oakland) end of July, the Flawless Living immersion in Vegas mid-August, I am going to Burning Man 2010 with a group from Shalom Mountain that I put together, and then back to Vegas again in October for Blogworld where I will be promoting WordPress Academy. I haven’t travelled much for the last 6 years, so this also is a big change. The Flawless Living launch is in Philadelphia, thank God—I love traveling for the excitement and all, but I also find it physically challenging.
So stay tuned for more interesting reports over the course of the summer and fall, hopefully less rambling (although I don’t promise anything ;)
Much love,
Marc
PS: If you like this, please comment
By marc on May 15th, 2010
Rebekah and the kids are away for most of the weekend, and so I am enjoying “that blissful solitude, that was so painful in my youth” [Einstein]. Truthfully, the events of the last 6 weeks (starting with the book I am writing and on to extremely exciting events at WordPress Academy, that I haven’t shared yet) have been so intoxicating that I had resolved to spend the entire weekend in bed reading paperback novels and listening to inspirational audios. But I need to share with y’all what happened yesterday.
Mike Jay is a business coach and developmentalist that I have been connected with loosely for a number of years. I had actually started his coach training program 5-6 years ago, before deciding that being a business coach probably wasn’t for me. He’s been pretty quiet for the last few years but has recently surfaced with a coaching / business development program that is so compelling I joined right away. I will be doing this program over the course of the summer, culminating in an intensive in Las Vegas in late August. It turns that he has been traveling a lot for the last few years, coaching billionaires and major third-world banks. I think he is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met, and his ideas on development are both very practical and timely. The intro call for this program occurred yesterday, and it blew my mind. I will post the audio to this call when I get permission, but let me summarize some of the key ideas here, and their impact on me.
Continue reading Mike Jay on performance management and personal effectiveness
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If not now, when?"
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the gifts you would buy,
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the enthusiasm you would have,
the attention you would give,
and anything else that appeals to you,
if you were able to give yourself the things you want someone else to give to you.
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I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as i live it, it is a privilege to do whatever i can. i rejoice in life for its own sake…
Life is no brief candle to me, but sort of a bright torch that i got hold of for a moment and i want to make it burn as brightly as possible, before handing it on to future generations"
-- George Bernard Shaw “Bright Torch”
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Throw away
Your begging bowls at God’s door For I have heard the Beloved
Prefers sweet threatening shouts, Something on the order of: Hey, Beloved,
My heart is a raging volcano
of love for you! You better start kissing me –
Or else!" -- Hafiz
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