Cultural Leadership : actions that midwives the future

“…. cultural leadership is distinct from political and administrative leadership. While political leaders primarily make rules and administrative leaders primarily enforce rules, cultural leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Mother Theresa find principled and imaginative ways to transgress those rules that inhibit the emergence of cultural sovereignty and creativity.

Continue reading

Is it time to step back, and, take a long view of life and reevaluate priorities ?

 

In high school, I had read a story by H. G. Wells about a child who wanders down an unfamiliar street and spots a door in a plain white masonry wall. He opens it and discovers a garden where everything is welcoming and full of peace – a place where he belongs. The next day he tries to go back, but the door has disappeared. Continue reading

The grace of surrender

What would it feel like to surrender to the rhythms and dynamics of life? What would it feel like to realize that we don’t really have a choice here—we can either participate with life, or resist it and drive ourselves to exhaustion and failure. Instead of working so hard to actively construct our lives, we could relax with the opportunities that life provides, both the good and the bad ones. People who have this type of relationship with life truly are more relaxed.
Continue reading

Not to tolerate the intolerant……

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

PopperLess well known is the paradox of toleranceContinue reading

“Fall down 53 times. Get up 54” – Zen slogan

Failure is unavoidable. There’s no way to avoid times of crushing defeat, great loss, terrible regret. We might like to think that “failure is not an option,” but it’s guaranteed to appear and reappear throughout our lives. This is just how life works. It helps to know this ahead of time. Or to learn it very quickly. What’s essential is how we work with failure, what we do once its ugly face appears.

 

failure

Continue reading

Ten Little Habits that steal your Happiness

You ultimately become what you repeatedly do.  If your habits aren’t helping you, they’re hurting you.  Here are a few examples of the latter that will steal your happiness if you let them:

1.  Focusing on everyone’s story except your own.

Don’t be so satisfied with the success stories of others and how things have gone for them that you forget to write your own.  Unfold your own tale and bring it to life.  You have everything you need to become what you are capable of becoming.  Incredible change happens when you decide to take control.  This means consuming less and creating more.  It means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and deciding for you.  It means learning to respect and use your own ideas and instincts to write your passage………

http://www.marcandangel.com/2013/03/08/10-little-habits-that-steal-your-happiness/

 

display grace under pressure, a quality that brings out the best in others…

Our over-intellectualized modern culture has tended to forget connections between mind and body. We are nevertheless more likely to believe what we feel as a physical experience than what we think. And when we are in danger, or under pressure, or anxious, we often experience what Daniel Goleman calls an “amygdala hi-jack” where suddenly our emotions tend to crowd out rational thought.

Fleetwood Quote Continue reading

Joy

Tagore said: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

This is the purpose of the religious life to awaken joy through service to and for one another.
Continue reading