Check out this inspiring TEDtalk by activist and performer Mallika Sarabhai on how the arts can bring change and awareness in the world. I truly believe that artistic practice, beautiful in its own right for making art, also provides a means for being active in the world.
[ted id=688]
The first step is to acknowledge what I have learned. Then to acknowledge that in order to learn I have to feel consciously incompetent and in need of learning. I move from what I learned into a conscious state of unlearning those qualities.
For me, much of my current experience has been unlearning technical knowledge in my business and policy school and moving into a space where I can constantly be learning from a number of different theories and take what I value from all of them into my own.
How do you unlearn in your life?
I’ve recently joined a Collective Presencing Circle, a holding space for deep, generative listening. What has amazed me is how this holding space is created through a process of storytelling and context sharing.
The shift in this circle is that we have power over the place versus the place having power over us. It is though our practices of intentional silence and generative dialogue that we actually transform our place into a holding space.
This quote from Theory U best describes the feeling when I leave circle practice:
“What happens is that you leave that conversation as a different being-a different person-from the one who entered the conversation a few hours earlier. You are no longer the same. You are (a tiny bit) more who you really are. Sometimes that tiny bit can be quite profound. I remember that in one instance I had a physical sensation of a wound when I left a particularly profound conversation. Why? Because that conversation created a generative social field that connected me with a deeper aspect of my journey and Self” (Theory U, Scharmer).
I’m currently reading the “War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle” where Steven Pressfield describes how I have two lives, the life I live and the unlived life, where resistance is in the way.
Resistance prevents me from doing my work, from being free, from being solo. It’s the different between the artist and fundamentalist.
So, ask yourself: what would I do in a life without resistance, without fear?
