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By Magdalen Bowyer
| Life's Journey: Not a solo, but a shared story |
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When I was training to become an Executive Coach, my mentor/teacher/friend Carollyne Conlinn told me the story that inspired her to create the program I was taking at Royal Roads University. As a woman working in the corporate world, she couldn’t reconcile with the fact that “people are dying at their desks” and knew she needed to do something about it.
In contrast, I’ve never been a part of the corporate world so I didn’t fully appreciate the impact of her statement. I didn’t have any direct experience with what she was referring to, but it sounded overly melodramatic.
Not anymore.
I see people every day who are on their way to dying at their desks. They come to me because anxiety is taking over their lives. They are depressed. Their bodies are shutting down in response to feeling overwhelmed. One of my patients told me last week that his body was not “following” him. And it’s true. The emotions arising in him are keeping him from doing his job.
Some people say, “Well, that’s life.”
My answer to that question is an emphatic NO!
Curiously, many people I work with end up quitting their jobs and creating their preferred work. Some stay in their jobs and develop new skills to survive. Others leave their work places in unexpected ways.
A new science, a new story
I write this as a Caucasian woman, living in Canada, but I know of societies that live differently. They have a different way of seeing and interacting with the universe. Their core belief is one of wholeness - that we are in relationship with all of life, including our planet. There’s a body of knowledge that is developing as I write this and it evolves the science that we currently base our world views on. This isn’t mine to write about here, but I can share a substantial reading list with you (i.e. check out Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There from Here by Bruce Lipton & Steve Bhaerman). My point is this: there are better ways to live, and in order to discover what those might be, we need to listen to the anxiety, depression and other emotions that overwhelm us.
So much of our society has people doing battle with their bodies and their minds. As though life is meant to be a struggle. We compete with one another on every level. Who has the best car? The most money? The biggest house? Most prestigious job? Higher status? We sense we are separate and must fight because it is a “dog-eat-dog” world based on “survival of the fittest” (thanks to a common misreading of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin). This paradigm has us fighting over limited resources and taking care of ourselves at the expense of others. We live our individual dramas in our isolated ways - a kind of zero sum game in which our gain has to mean someone’s loss. “A multitude of influences - religious, political, economic, scientific and philosophical - writes the story that we live by,” says McTaggart, and “we urgently need a new story to live by.”
The good news is that I hear a new story emerging in every therapeutic conversation I have with people. It’s being written in the stuff of our lives. And we’re tuning into it by becoming more aware of something important: the misalignment between the unsustainable ways we are living and the voice within us that tells us to live differently.
Remember who you are
Last week my husband lost a job.
Everything in my body wanted to panic, to get small and play victim as I witnessed my husband’s tendency to collapse in on himself. But instead, I coached him to write his story. I knew the process of writing would be therapeutic for him. Being his first editor, the text passed between us until it landed back on his desk with my urging to post it on his blog.
He was resistant. But I held the space to midwife his growing pains.
He posted it.
In three days, he had more than 12,000 hits and almost 100 comments. His email inbox is filling up as I write this. He’s received tons of support. His battered self-confidence has been restored. What struck me most were the number of people who related to his experience: a feeling that “nobody has my back” in a corrosive and inhumane workplace.
I’ve watched my beloved move from being wounded into being an agent of change. I’d sensed the greater story and my husband’s role in it. As a couple, our deepest commitment is to grow together so, I had to move away from wondering how we - he and I - were going to survive this and to move toward growing us through this in an evolutionary way. We had to stop worrying about the small details of our lives and to risk telling the big story in a big way. We aligned with our own integrity as storytellers to give voice to a larger truth playing out in our shared experience.
As I stretched myself from acting like a worried wife into acting like a wise woman warrior, I nurtured my husband’s potential to turn this life-changing event in the direction that best serves his soul. You see, being “fired” is a blow to one’s sense of belonging. Every day I witness the pain people endure when they feel that they don’t belong. It’s excruciating and debilitating. I also witness what some call the Evolutionary Impulse. It’s the impulse to grow through the pain, get excited about the impending change, and find a way to connect again to ourselves (soul integrity) and to each other. For me, this is a reminder that, if we’re not mindful, we can forget who we are. We forget that we are social beings and we don’t create anything alone. My husband’s experience of losing his job was not an isolated event, what they call in the theatre a “one-hander”. Our lives, in fact, are played out by a whole cast of characters on a shared stage reading from a larger text about what is happening, how it is happening and what it all means.
Every story is relational, contextual and historical. What happens to one of us, happens to all of us. As McTaggart writes: “The world essentially operates, not through the activity of individual things, but in the connection between them - in a sense, in the space between things.” (The Germans, in fact, have a wonderful word for this space: they call it zwischenraum.) We need to wake up to the fact that life is not happening to us, we are actually creating life in the spaces or “gaps” of our existence, and as such we have tremendous responsibility to see how we’ve invested in competition and individuality, what it costs us, and how we might consider moving into cooperation, collaboration and co-creation
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