Tag: wisdom

MAAS – Man As A Service

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MAAS – man as a service.

We know the term – SaaS referring to Software As A Service. This means as long as there is connection to the cloud, and subscription fee paid, we have access to tools and new information. The idea is that SaaS fosters flow.

Here we apply that principle to a man.

MAAS is a man in service to his qualities and what they represent – the collective man. As opposed to being in service to anyone in particular or their needs, your service is a reflection of what you want to become and how you are capable of achieving that. Your service is your legacy

BELIEFS

Your service is powered by your Big B Belief about men and small b beliefs about yourself as a man. It requires finesse to seek out the ways to connect your beliefs with your actions in daily life.

CASCADE

The task is to make a cascade of qualities from the collective man – to you the unique man – into others – as a service. This flow gives expression to your qualities like willingness, focus, creativity and reliability. When you can use your skills to communicate your qualities you generate satisfaction in yourself.

As you radiate belief, agility and resourceful other men will admire you whether they say it or not. That is the challenge – to have admiration of the unique man each of us is flowing between men.

RADIANCE

Part of that challenge for each of us is to CLEAN – BALANCE AND CHARGE our energy to liberate our radiance.

CLEAN - This process lightens the emotional load of our recent and accumulated history. Cleaning, whether it be your mind, your inbox or your home helps us be emotionally agile in our response to life. This entails forgiveness and communication of vision.

BALANCE is to take responsibility for one’s thoughts and actions and connect them to your intentions. This is the flip-side of forgiveness when we resist blame and guilt.

CHARGE is to power your day with the truth of the light of the moment. That power can be found in being of service to something greater than yourself.

Bark Code – Cedar

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Bark Code

Tree bark is a quiet, noble facade that is the skin of a whole world underneath.

Like bark, our skin, hair, eyes indicate something about our genes and culture but little about our desire, insight, talents and connection.

What tree do you identify with and why? What tree traits do you feel you could integrate into your perceptions?

Can you use the Bark Code as a form of appreciation for the complexity and harmony each life carries. Also as a way to understand the life long dance of ‘unique and universal’.

Cedar

A cup of cedar tea is as soft as it is true. It is a comforting vehicle of vitamin C that the tree shares in and among its other benefits. Known to be anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, and helpful to ease pneumonia or bronchitis.

Cedar is a kaleidoscope of expressions of strength and endurance and wellbeing. It exudes a clean, welcoming fragrance of assurance and vision. When used for smudging it adds a light sweetness to the air while eliminating negative energies. It was believed that the cedar gave off a certain power that allowed people to live eternally and manifest signs of wisdom and intelligence. The trees with a reddish hue often live from 100-300 years.

The bark is strips of thin hairy coating that allow the porous inner wood to breathe and absorb. Yet this bark is very versatile for weaving baskets or used in napkins, mats and even clothing.

The cedar can grow in loose moist earth and is not itself a heavy wood. Its fibrous, shallow root system – growing as deep as it does laterally – is approximately 25 feet for both.

Not damaged by severe changes in weather conditions it actually can remain intact even when under water for extended periods.

Bark Code – The Weeping Willow

The Bark Code is a way to use our connection with nature not only as a way to recharge for a new day but also to understand our nature as well.

Tree bark is a quiet, noble facade that is the skin of a whole world underneath.

Bark is the tree’s Art of War. The Art of War is a strategy to facilitate peace, whether personal, tribal, flora or fauna. The bark lead us to learn much about the tree inside when we slow down and take a peek into its world.

Like bark of a tree, our skin, hair, eyes indicate something about our genes and culture but little about our desire, insight, talents and connection. The Bark Code is a way to strengthen our appreciation for the many wonders of nature while opening up the avenues of perception about ourselves.

What tree do you identify with? What tree traits do you feel you could integrate into your perceptions?

Can you use The Bark Code as a form of appreciation for the complexity and harmony each life carries?

THE WEEPING WILLOW –

The weeping willow is a sweeping, weeping dramatic fountain of yellow branches and slender leaves. Like the Grand Canyon is to the Mojave and Sonoran deserts so are the ridges on the trunk of an old, graceful willow. This bark has been used for millennia to ease headache, back pain and inflammation.

A willow is willing. It is one of the first trees to sprout leaves in the spring that help it grow 4 feet a year as a young tree. 

While the branches are weak and the tree susceptible to insect plagues the roots are tough, tenacious and resourceful to secure minerals for life.

In full summer they provide a cool canopy that seems to rain shade where you can sit, dream and bathe within their umbrage.

As a material Willow is a light weight hardwood with a trait of shock resistance but at the same time not too strong. In symbology willows represent the capacity to handle deep and difficult emotions. Their roots aggressively search out water which makes sense because they thrive close to rivers. Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld and said to be the power behind the flow and floods of the Nile, was found/born in a clump of willows on the river bank.

Rebranding Your Climate Crisis

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Rebranding Your Climate Crisis 3 of 3.

It’s yours because the planet is not in crisis. The planet is changing based on its development trajectory. But that has little or nothing to do with the fact that we are very sloppy houseguests. Yes the planet has to adapt to our collective mess, but why is that a crisis?

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This is the third article in the miniseries addressing our mislabeling of the state of the relationship between pesky humans and resilient planet. The second article coming next (it’s like Star Wars with the sequel before the prequel) provides some ideas/inspiration about how we can be a drop in the waterfall of renewal. The third article refers more directly with the power pack of purpose that runs throughout all three.

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If you couldn’t call it a climate crisis, what would you call it? You can’t call it a climate emergency either because it’s not.

The degree of degradation of the planet has nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with our historical laziness. So let’s call it what it is: It is receiving the wisdom of the natural world and cherry picking lessons for profit. The pharmaceutical industry is brilliant at this. Big Pharma and the other usual suspects like universities and petroleum companies are in cahoots with known associates: you and me.

For example you take a flight that burns jet fuel to go on vacation so you can relax or simply ignore your reality for 7 nights and 8 days. This reason for your vacation does not have the leverage to reach up to the level of a purpose. Wisdom supports development at the level of purpose. Business could actually participate in this dynamic if we wanted it to.

Where can we find purpose and how will we recognize it when we do? And can I take a flight to search for it?

Sure take a flight. And pay attention to the planet as you fly, when you land and when you leave. And while you are there live with demonstrable appreciation for the planet. Not so much the kind of recycling your plastic caffe latte cup. That’s cheap justification.

Rather demonstrate to the planet via your belief in the known associates of your soul. How? When the crowd says yes, try saying no. When the crowd says one more ask about one less. When the crowd needs to be right try resisting argument back and forth and look to elevate the topics you want to think about. The crowd, by the way can be your partner or the internet, your workplace or your industry or your religion.

So there you are on the flight to your vacation and if you and the guy beside you did the homework to elevate your awareness about human purpose what would happen? Could it grow a momentum of decision makers whose value for the human instinct is more powerful than greed?

The Choreography of Your Danse Russe

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American poet William Carlos Williams penned the 1917 poem Danse Russe:

“If I when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-

white disc in silken mists

above shining trees,

“If I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt round my head

and singing softly to myself:

I am lonely, lonely.

I was born to be lonely,

I am best so!”

If I admire my arms, my face,

my shoulders, flanks, buttocks

against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not

the happy genius of my household?”

Like Williams’ Danse Russe your version of Danse Russe is the choreography of belief. Which changes in the moment based on the confluence of the energies of people and intentions, place and activity.

Belief can be your BIG BELIEF or small belief regarding a man. BIG Belief is what you think about the archetypical man, old school Aristotle and Greek wrestling man. Big belief is about the concept itself as it applies equally everywhere. Big belief man is what you aspire to and wish for your companions.

Small belief is how you believe in you as a man. How you feel when you look in the mirror at your body, posture, expression, skin and the look in your eyes. It is how you measure up to big belief. Your DR is a celebration of both what you want to become as a man and where you are now. Regardless of the gap between those two the dance is authentic and courageous, raw and beautiful.

Your DR is a sacred dance. It is a marionette show of you responding to a mid life morass of threads of responsibility. It breathes into the intense depth of how you feel about some of those roles. It is the illustration of how those feelings are beyond the reach of your vocabulary.

That is why your dance is so important. Because it offers you a compass where there is no map. The compass is always magnetized towards big belief and you orient the dial to determine the direction to point your small belief.

That dance is naked – like the poet. Or it is on the ice rink for Thursday night hockey. It is at the bbq for that family get together. It is thinking about starting your own business, and then closing that business after it not taking off.

It is of being the bridge for the energy between big belief and small belief. It is putting your best man forward, as powerful or pathetic as he may feel. The world loves a man who believes in himself.

10 Things Yoda Helped Me Understand About Teaching — Tough to Teach

‘A teacher Yoda is’ – Yoda While his unorthodox use of syntax would have landed him in deep water during the English skills test, Grand Master Yoda demonstrates over the course of eight Star Wars films that he is an outstanding teacher. It’s no surprise. Having spent 800 years training almost every Jedi Master in […]

10 Things Yoda Helped Me Understand About Teaching — Tough to Teach

2 Old Guys

Photo by boris misevic on Unsplash

2 old guys were playing tennis as I walked by the public tennis court. It was a beautiful fall day with the mid afternoon sun balancing out the autumn cool. In the park there were a few mothers and nannies caring for and playing with children. There was one empty court and the one in use by said men.

In their 70’s one fart was in very good shape and the belly of the other one had a nice round shape to it. I watched them for a few minutes from the park bench near the court. They played very well without physically challenging each other too much. I couldn’t hear everything they said but I did catch the guy with the belly say in a chipper voice as he approached the net to collect a ball ‘ Kids these days. They’re not careless’. It seemed he was defending the millenials for getting a bad reputation as being lazy and disrespectful. Perhaps he had some grandchildren that were really proactive at recycling and social responsibility.

Photo by Jim Carroll on Unsplash

‘They are carefree.‘ The belly guy completed his thought and turned to walk back to the baseline.

What is that supposed to mean – ‘carefree’? That young people being smart phone savvy soothes all their problems. That because the retired generation receive their monthly pension then all must be good in the world. Or because the younger generations can’t afford a house that means they don’t have to worry about a mortgage. Or because they use Uber they don’t have to be concerned about car insurance rates. Or because they work from home they don’t have to stress about the price of gas and the pollution it causes.

Stress and depression and the temperature of the planet are all on the rise. Young people are worried. Sick. They are worried about the degradation of the planet and how to grow food on their balcony, their parents failing health and the quality of care in a seniors home, the job market and the cost of daycare, the widening gap between rich and poor and the deepening feeling in their gut of connecting with some higher purpose that surely there is in life.

Like me and you, they need help. Sure they are super agile on social media and pay for everything in the moment on an app. Still they don’t know what they want in life, how to be a good spouse, how to respond to the urge of their soul life. They may sound very confident because they have lots of sound bites in the moment at their finger tips. Yet self knowledge is still elusive.

They need challenges that help them elevate their mind just as much as to learn how to stretch their money. They need guidance of how to cultivate their soul. Who is going to be that guide? To let them know what is a good idea to repeat of the the preceding generations and what mistakes to avoid. To model understand humility, listening and patience.

Below is the link to a previous post entitled Rise Of The Elder Class petitioning adults to get over their feelings about their stage in life and see past the confident face of the young generation to engage them in conversations about meaning: https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/wild-coach.com/834

Nothing wrong with being an old guy. In fact it is a badge of honour. But it comes with the responsibility to turn around and offer wisdom. To take responsibility for their role in the state of the planet and the lack of devotion life that connects young people with themselves and can be applied to daily life.

More or Higher …?

Doing a bit of research I typed in the word hotel into my browser. Within minutes there are ads on my screen for rooms all over the world.

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Photo by Orlova Maria on Unsplash

Data is the new oil – they say. Businesses can always use more data to refine their algorithm results. Corporations pay big money for your data = big data. Or they just syphon it off other websites. But do you need more data or information? Or rather more inspiration;  More passion?

Yes to inspiration. Yes to passion.
To resist the tyranny of big data we need references, resources, reasons and examples to educate ourselves about our sense of meaning. We all have a need for connection that runs 24/7 in each of us under the surface. Call it purpose, passion, meaning, calling, urge, mission – they are all asking you to connect what you encounter in daily life to what you are looking for on the inside. The inside is your devotional life – whether you think that is your thing or not. Since you have a soul your life is asking for some personal religion.

We need ways to elevate our source of references and reasons to get perception that make sense with daily life. We can read really old books or ask really old people a question and listen.

We need good reasons, enduring intentions and guiding sentiments to help in locating ourselves on our ongoing soul trajectory.

Crucial resources include maintaining a healthy foundation in the body, mind and emotions: find a moment of peace to couple with a moving meditation.  Regularly distinguish between habit, routine and ritual – and use them for your growth or phase them out.  Wonder about a higher purpose, be of service, teach, mentor and be mentored, tell stories, volunteer…

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Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Rise of the Elder Class

Because the younger have more knowledge in our wired world we are seeing an ancient template for wisdom resurge.

Photo by Neelam Sundaram on Unsplash

It can be seen when ‘young earth mama’ Greta Thunberg is begging adults to be elders. To have more than just harvested money and ridden the emotional roller coaster of society’s whims.

Thunberg is highlighting that adults have a distinct role in using wisdom from their life experience to be responsible. Some of us are responsible in our smaller communities like marriage, family, industry, and that internal community of inner lives (think of the soul and spirit). Other’s lack of respondability will reveal them to be a toxic disaster even at the personal level.

Nowadays we are seeing that what we want at the community level has wide and long lasting impact on a much larger scale. Adults need to be proactive in the larger community because it seems to the planet Earth and the current youth that we don’t care.

To some extent that is true. It might be explained by seeking the missing education. The education of a journey of development whether that be human or planetary. We are designed as humans to want a spiritualized life yet we end up with monetized lives as are inspiration of success.

The wisdom of a vision quest or way of the ancients is missing. And leaves us wanting.

Leaves our soul longing.

Perception is a residue of higher connection. It’s like a second education. In cultural terms this urge to keep learning in each different stage of life gets labeled and monetized as ‘Self Help’. With a plethora of far fetched ideas for personal development from instant gurus combined with easy to publish e-books the natural urge to grow has become a joke. Yet it is exactly Self Help that will attract the perception that Ms. Thunberg expects.

Help yourself to books that have bits of wisdom hidden in the stories, quotes, photos, poems. Help yourself to a retreat where you meet your pathway to eldership. Help yourself to the well-being and peace that nature effuses and where perception abounds.

It’s natural for children and adults to have elders in their lives. It’s not a given that you or I do the work to rise into elderness. I’m not about to tell Ms. Thunberg I’m not going to apply myself. Are you?

Rise up old man!

Be the elder you were born to be. Offer the next generation guidance and resilience. Hope and finesse.

re-Purpose

A former manager once dropped into my office and quickly put a gift bag between the wall and my computer terminal.  He timed it well so I was busy with someone so he just smiled, nodded and left.  It was mid December and so he was receiving lots of Christmas gifts from every direction.  I didn’t expect anything from him and I am pretty sure he had no intention of getting me anything.  For me the company wasn’t a place I belonged and for him I didn’t solve his problems with his bosses.  And then appeared a bottle of scotch in my office in a gift bag lacking the colourful tissue paper.  I can’t remember the last time I drank scotch.  Which means that I either binge drink it or never drink it.  I had never talked about scotch at work.  So obviously he was regifting the bottle.

Regifting is a useful practice. Re-gifting means more people get gifts which means more happy people and less consumerism and waste of wrapping paper.  It’s logical and heartwarming.  It works.  I drank the scotch.

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Regifting  and repurposing could both be seen as changing the direction of the same thing.  You can repurpose tires into jewelry, plastic into a fleece pullover, a boyfriend  into a husband, an old silver fork into a bracelet, a pop bottle into a flower pot, a stump into a stool and on and on.

Life stages thrust this reality of ‘the new you’ unto us.  Our curious child repurposes into a rebellious youth into the sceptical young adult into that focused adult who grows into an elderly sage.  In the beautifully painful transition known as death, the sage repurposes into spirit.

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Photo by Nourdine Diouane on Unsplash

There is some art to repurposing.  Simply said – don’t change too much.  Change as much as you have to while staying loyal to what you know is real.  What is true about you is the eternal you.  This is what anchors the local you through the bumpy transition from one stage to the next.   Your eternal you, your higher self, loves to elevate on the journey your soul is opening up for you.

10 Things a young man needs to to hear from a man.

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                            Photo by Tuce on Unsplash

10 things a young man needs to to hear from a man.  Always Be growing.  Be curious about how to combine these 10 things to make you a generator of confidence and humility.

  1. You are a vibrant power. This a seed of wisdom that should bother a young man.  To grasp how it applies to him and be able to spot it in others. The trajectory of a man is seen in his ability to grow due the compounding interest of belief and accomplishment. Many things will try to deviate a man from that trajectory. So what is stronger ? Deviation or belief?
  2. Do the work to be emotionally agile not fragile. This one is so important to teach by example. The work can be analogous to juggling. If you focus on one ball then all of them will fall.  To take it up a level you use your peripheral vision to manage the task at hand.  What is being asked is to be able to have long term vision while still managing the present.
  3. Define strength: mentally, physically, emotionally – as a man; find out what it is for a woman.  What is your formula for strength in each case:  Emotional Strength = _________ +  ____________ Use your strengths to highlight them in others.
  4. Decide what you want the residue of your decision making to be – belief, respect…
  5. Love yourself. This will sound cheesy to a young person because their identity branding takes importance over most things.  Still, this simple yet deep concept has many expressions into our lives.  All of them are springboards for growing.  Starting with your Ego. Elevate it to Your Best Ego; Accompanying your Soul we develop our participation in the Higher Soul. Then there can be talk of the universal spirit…
  6. Always be generating.  Generate your own reason for what you’re doing.  This makes you the author of your own story so you aren’t at the mercy of someone else’s laziness. Be clean.
  7. Connect with nature: breathe/5 senses, rejuvenate, exercise, ground, appreciate, marvel. Make nature your man cave.  Use the peace in the moment and the power of nature to visualize you: healthy, successful, happy, spontaneous, loved, loving, agile (see #2),  …
  8. Frame your journey to make sense of how to manage the competing interests for your attention. Have a way to process what happens to you in various stages of life.  This really helps when dealing with stress to understand what is impacting us so we can take responsibility for it.  This is a proactive measure to rise above violence against women.
  9. Understand how to understand women. If you don’t know how to access your abilities and insist on dwelling in the lower levels of energy you will end up ignoring what she asks you to do. At the maintenance level you can do what she asks you to do. At the perception level you can ask yourself what she would want and do it.
  10. Be of service.  Find people who don’t count the cost.  Read the books they read.
  11. goetz-heinen-1154874-unsplash Goetz Heinen on Unsplash