Rev. angel Kyodo williams

"love and justice are not two. without inner change, there can be no outer change; without collective change, no change matters."

movement-building

where’s your wall street?

By

 

riding the raging bull to freedom


INcite with angel Kyodo williams


At first it was just a whisper that spoke more to what wasn’t happening than to what was: mainstream media was shutting out coverage of the thousand or so people that had begun to gather starting September 17th at the unfortunately named Zuccoti park. Even when 2,000 mostly black folks ended their march at the reclaimed and renamed Liberty Plaza to protest the Great State of Georgia’s sanctioned execution of Troy Davis, the media eye remained mostly blind. But the whispers turned to grumbles and those closed same eyes were pried open when police arrested eighty people and maced a woman.

From there, Facebook posts and Twitter tweets multiplied and #OccupyWallStreet staked its flag firmly in the public sand.

I’m no reporter so it’s fortunate that in an era when hashtags (#) are the in-fashion symbol and symbolism, you can Google an education and Wiki the timeline. What you most need to know though, in case you didn’t, is that no matter where you are, #OccupyWallStreet is the movement made for you.

The only question is whether you’ll choose make it yours.

With decisions made by the General Assembly, “a horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought,” OWS seeks to stand for “the other 99 percent” of Americans that are on the stinky end of the economic shitstick that’s been beating the crap out of us all, while the 1% at the top of the food chain get fat eating off the plates we made for minimum wage.

No matter that it once looked like mostly disgruntled and disheveled white kids camping out because they could. Forget the fact that the initial call for this possible American Spring came out of Canada. Ignore the pundits that dis it for not having demands. By defying definition, flattening leadership and both utilizing and transcending organization as we’ve known it, shifting from spider to starfish, OWS creates within it’s morphing boundaries the one thing so many of our uber-defined efforts at movement-building have inadvertently managed to quash: opportunity. You only need to bring your voice, show up and choose to be who you are. By doing so, you cause this emerging movement to be yours. That choice, my friend, is freedom. Liberty Plaza, indeed.

Not enough women, you say? Call CodePink and now there are more. Want gays and blacks? Elders and immigrants? Grab your AfroCuban-born lesbian granny and go. Where are the gender queers? If you show up, they are there.

Having grown up in downtown Manhattan, I’m no stranger to the bizarre Wall Street world of high stakes gambling where the losers don’t even get to play the game. I’ve even ridden the back of the 7100 pound raging bronze bull that has come to epitomize the same financial aggression that has driven the economy into the ground. With each passing day, I am more certain that when I get back to my hometown next week, the protesters will still be there for me to join them. If it gets exceptionally cold or exceptionally rough, I’ll have the luxury of walking just a few blocks to return home.

But you need not have lived on the doorstep of the corrupt capital of Capitalism to smell something rotten in Denmark, not to mention DC, San Francisco, Chi-town and Everytown, USA. If not you yourself, you know someone who knows someone who lives on main street and was bummed out while wall street was bailed out:

  • someone who hasn’t been able to find a job for two years
  • someone pushed out of their home because they couldn’t pay a falsely inflated mortgage
  • someone who watches institutions of education fall while institutions of incarceration rise
  • someone whose grandparents or parents helped build this country but their family fears being torn apart and kicked out.
  • someone whose people picked cotton, built railroads or had their lands taken away, yet to this day have insufficient clothes, transportation or security of their own.

and all the while, politicians play footsies with all our futures.

Whatever you used to believe, what’s coming into plain sight—if you’re not the 1%, that is—is that this system has failed us all. And we each deserve to Thrive. On October 6th, DC’s K street gets occupied and a feverishly-growing number of inspired cities are determined to Occupy Together. So wherever you are, there’s a Wall Street near you and there’s never been a better moment to take it over and make this a movement for you.

Who knows? Perhaps one day, we will look back on September 17th as the beginning of the New American Revolution in which we finally captured not just votes but the imagination of the entire US as a People. But for now, it’s sufficient to seize the opportunity of this moment, by finding the raging bull of determination and riding it out to #OccupyYourWallStreet today.

—your in truth,aKw

Dedicated to the 99%. ‐aKw


—
copyright ©MMXI. angel Kyodo williams
changeangel: all things change. (sm)

angel Kyodo williams is a maverick teacher, author, social visionary and founder of Transformative Change.
she posts, tweets & blogs on all things change. permission granted to retweet, repost, repast & repeat with copyright and contact information intact.

Faceboook: Like angel on Facebook
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Blog: new Dharma: live, love & lead from the heart
Train: Train Your Mind with angel

the transformation code

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Over the past year, I’ve been making the sometimes painful transition from working harder to working smarter, often against the grain of long-established habits instilled by ideas about work ethics and the meaning we assign being at some work “place” doing work “things” in a work “way.” I’m all good with taking time off…what I need is not having a great divide between the two. At the moment, I take advantage of technology to build a bridge to something altogether different. I take more and more working vacations, or workations.

This workation, I read The Talent Code (Bantam Dell, 2009) in which author Daniel Coyle frames a “code” for talent. This code consists of three elements. Though he presents them in a slightly different order, I offer them chronologically:

  • “ignition,” instigating motivation fuel
  • “deep practice,” the act of installing natural broadband and,
  • “master coaching,” building the skills in others

We’re at a great place in many ways and yet, there’s something that hasn’t yet clicked—there are still energy leaks that allow momentum that we gain (think: the herculean effort of synergistic collaboration generated for Obama’s election) to peter out in such a way that it feels like we’re starting from scratch again and again.

Over the next few months, I’ll look at some of the barriers we experience—some known and acknowledged, others not so much—and by the end, we just might have something we can apply with precision to all aspects of the work we do for change to get better results, more predictably and more consistently, that build on each other and are sustained over longer periods of time. That like clockwork, in a phrase: we make more effective movements.

ITHS
The Talent Code’s catchphrase is “Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.”

Through myriad discussions that he revisits over and over again, probably the most important gift Coyle offers is to liberate the notion of talent from mysterious and amorphous ideas that leave us in a gray space of some kind of magic that only certain lucky people possess and therefore you either have it or you don’t and you go the way of the rest of the lemmings, pre-determined to live out an unsatisfactory life. He unpacks, reframes and then repackages talent and hands it back to us as what it should be rightfully understood as: skill. What’s great about that is we’re generally in agreement that skill isn’t pre-existing; it can be taught and, once taught, it can be grown. The proposition here is that we have what we need and who we need. Then what’s tripping us up? ITHS or…It’s The How, Stupid. Time to get to the how.

If this were a book, I’d make the catchphrase “Movements Aren’t Stumbled Upon. They’re Generated. Here’s How.”

The central concept The Talent Code asserts is to define skill in this way: “Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals.” It succinctly states that “…the story of skill and talent is story of myelin.”

Mye-what?
The short story of myelin is that for a long time we’ve focused on neurons and the firing of their circuits being key to making things happen. Which is still true, but that firing is like a light switch: it’s either on or off. If it’s off, nothing happens; if it’s on at the wrong time, it doesn’t matter. Turns out the neurons are held within an infrastructure that was long referred to as just “white matter”. Among other things, the white matter contains myelin. And because myelin is literally insulation that wraps around the neural circuits, it keeps the energy of those firing circuits from leaking. Up to 3000 times improved information processing for better results, more predictably and more consistently, that build on each other and are sustained over longer periods of time. In a word, more effective.

More than being able to do stuff, skill means stuff happens when it matters. Skill is the right stuff at the right time.

Three Keys to More Effective Movement
When I think about such a code in movement terms, I see three familiar things:

Motivation—what Coyle calls “ignition”—requires energy passion and commitment, which are most often put in play by having locked into a powerful vision of our ideal selves and future around which we organize and energize.

From master coaching, we gain the endurance we need to carry movements through temporal illusions so we can weather innumerable Tea Parties and understand the setbacks they cause as mere moments in political time. Movements may look like they suddenly “spring” out of nowhere, but it’s mentorship provided by our elders that keeps us on course. Being able to grow stables of “talent” in the form of inspiring leaders, strategic organizers and damn good people is sustainability that matters.

Vision, Practice & Endurance
In the end, there are no surprises as to what we need to make movements work. In some configuration our current movements have had all three things but haven’t had them altogether.

Much adieu has been made about the Arab Spring, but while its scale is impressive and initial impact admirable, upon reflection it has thus far been plagued with the same thing that stymies our movements here at home: (perceived) lack of coherence of the elements needed to transform an uprising into a truly sustained movement. Enough of the right stuff at the right time.

Next time we’ll look at what gets in the way of skill and what we can do about.

We need more than just a Spring, we need Summer, Fall and Winter too.

Let’s build our movement-making skill and break the code of transformation.

—your in truth,aKw

dedicated to all the people willing to listen for the resonance, take the time, and share practice as we find our way to real change.



—
copyright ©MMXI. angel Kyodo williams
changeangel: all things change. (sm)

angel Kyodo williams is a maverick teacher, author, social visionary and founder of Transformative Change.
she posts, tweets & blogs on all things change. permission granted to retweet, repost, repast & repeat with copyright and contact information intact.

Faceboook: Like angel on Facebook
Twitter: Follow angel on Twitter
Web: Find angel on the Web
Blog: new Dharma: live, love & lead from the heart
Train: Train Your Mind with angel

state of union

By

incite-jambo

resolution for revolution


Each January, whether formal or informal, uttered or silent, many of us resolve to do something different for the coming new year. We commit to starting some things and finishing others. We put plans into motion, we reassess, reevaluate and take stock of the life that we have and where we want it to be.

In two weeks, as President of the United States, Barack Obama will issue the State of the Union, as is constitutionally required “from time to time,” reporting on the condition of the country and setting forth his legislative agenda — resolutions for the nation — for 2011. Likewise, as a Movement of Peoples United in striving for a just and equitable world, we should require of ourselves a reflection upon the state of our union as we reconsider and reset our course for change in this new year.

To do this, we could overwhelm ourselves with a long list of far-reaching goals that get left to collect dust on our collective to-do lists while we wait for the perfect conditions that never seem to arrive: a perfect President, a balanced Court, a less sinister Senate, a reasonable Congress. But instead of pondering what we don’t have, I propose one single resolution that we can take on right now: A resolution for revolution. I propose that we put our efforts into forming a new state. A state of union. I propose that we become a single movement of movements. I propose that we become one.

One with what? Union with whom? Not just a new age platitude, being in union means seeing beyond the crippling illusion of separation and acting from the abiding awareness of our fundamental, indisputable interconnectedness. Separation breeds fear and perpetuates its own myth until we believe To be effective, our movements must be coherent. To be sustainable, our organizations must be aligned. To be whole, as individuals we must act from oneness.

Union within our Movements:
Let’s see where we can bridge the divides and emerge from the silos that even with our best intentions isolate the issues that we care about and create false illusions of disconnect: that somehow the oxygen created in rapidly disappearing old growth forests is not related to the oxygen disappearing in the lungs of black and brown children in inner-city jungles. Work for the environment IS work for justice but when it’s disconnected from the truth of our equal worth and inherent rights, pro-Green becomes anti-Black, Red, Brown, Indigenous and Impacted.

Union with Each Other:
As organizations trying to put asunder the corporate takeover of democracy that has recast citizens as mere consumers and cultures as mere commodities, most of our work exists in a hand-me-down paradigm designed by those same corporations. We imbibed their values when we drank the corporate Kool-aid. We’ve bought into the perpetual need to consume resources as the Holy Grail for all our woes. Now funding our fights beg us to jump through one foundation circus hoop after another and puts us squarely in competition with the very same folks we should be organizing, collaborating and conspiring with. We forget that the money we now scratch, bite and sell our integral souls for is mostly sourced from systems of oppression. Why be divided in reclaiming what was made on our collective backs? The American Economy is the Mother of all Ponzi schemes—putting Bernie Madoff to shame—and until we see the means and the ends as one, we fuel the hyper-capitalist engine of the systems that steamroll our imaginations. We are left bearing the false belief that we must depend on the path that suffocates us as the only route to freedom when really the only liberation worth attaining is that of the self: self-liberated, self-funded, self-actualized.

Union with Ourselves:
It’s no secret that if we want to get to the first two, we have to get with The One. The single individual that if we are out of relationship with, we have no hope for relationship with the rest of people, place and planet: we must find relationship with and within our selves. The good, bad, ugly and even hideous parts that we far too often cast aside. Because every day we head out to fight the good fight, we bring along the unaddressed and disconnected wounded parts of ourselves to the battle. If we don’t heal our wounds, they’ll consume our hearts, sap our strength and cripple our courage. And we all lose the war.

So how do we fulfill this resolution and make good on the necessary promise to get to know, show up for and love ourselves? To be in Union with who we are as we are? No magic pills here. It’s as simple as Practice: We set a date for meeting ourselves each and every day, 365, and we show up for it.

To usher forth a transformative movement, we resolve to work on ourselves & our organizations toward becoming the reflection of what we wish our world to become. We gift our movements, our work, our communities and our own lives with the single most significant effort we can make on behalf of all that we love and care for: we become leaders that transform hearts, minds and societies by becoming leaders—and lovers—of our very own selves.

—yours in truth, aKw

postscript: On Virtual Practice
Don’t have a favorite local practice dive? Don’t get isolated, get online. Here are three of my current favorite virtual practice opportunities, a few extras I ran across thrown in for good measure.

Daily
28 Days of Practice: Gibran Rivera of IISC and a cohort of buddies got together to support each other in committing to a daily meditation practice (centering prayer, silence, contemplation, stillness, quiet reflection…take your pick). Noting that consistency is far more important than quantity, 5 minutes per day is the bar along with taking 10 seconds to record your daily progress. Social witnessing helps keep us on track, and helps get us back on the horse when we fall off (which we will).

Yoga Today 365: Not feeling freezing your yogi toes off to trudge through cold snow for Hot Yoga? Not free, but for 25cents a day you get unlimited access to a hefty library of yoga classes on streaming video. If you’re working your way up to commitment, $3.99 gets you a “drop-in” virtual class of your choice. (Note: While an interesting resource, YT365 isn’t exactly oozing with social justice awareness. Not a brown/colored person easily found. Searching for online yoga that’s also justice-savvy? I’ll leave finding that balance to you.)

Weekly
MTX: Mind Training & Transformation: Yours truly has been chewing on this idea for five years now. Inspired by the profound Jewish tradition of Torah reading, each week MTX takes a look at one of 59 pithy non-religious “slogans,” or trainings that, with practice (and some commentary to help) are designed to transform—and unify—the mind.

Yoga Today Free Weekly Class: Mentioned above, this virtual yoga library offers a free video class each week to whet your appetite, so grab your mat, props, blanket and the front row in front of your laptop to get your body union on. (And don’t forget your eye pillow. Far from accomplishing acrobatic feats, it’s the integration at the end that gets you cool points. Don’t just do something…lie there.)

Seasonal
27 Days of Change: Winter, spring and fall, Center for Transformative Change hosts a seasonal “practice period” to help you get your alignment together. You make a formal agreement with yourself in areas such as improving relationship, taking care of the planet, giving more where and when you can. 6 intentions. 27 days. 360 degrees. (What about summer, you ask? CXC hosts an annual Inner Justice Intensive around June/July. While not for the faint of heart, if you want to “sit it down to kick it up a notch,” this may just be your mid-year game.)

BONUS:
While not virtual, if you are looking to become a resource for practice, these could be right for you: fearlessMEDITATION Instructor Training. Teaching about meditation from a social justice lens gives people permission to do the inner work that’s needed to sustain the outer work that’s called for. fMIT does just that. And if “yoga built built for justice” sounds like your fancy, the fearlessYOGA Teacher Training shares the unique legacy of being practice designed from the ground up for agents of social change. After a first year pilot, 2011 will see fYTT trainings on the east and west coasts. The time to sign up is now.

If your organization wants to become a resource, get info to get your people trained to hold practice space as a Social Justice Sitting Circle, coming to your neighborhood soon.

—your in truth,aKw


—
copyright ©MMXI. angel Kyodo williams
changeangel: all things change. (sm)

angel Kyodo williams is a maverick teacher, author, social visionary and founder of Transformative Change.
she posts, tweets & blogs on all things change. permission granted to retweet, repost, repast & repeat with copyright and contact information intact.

Faceboook: Like angel on Facebook
Twitter: Follow angel on Twitter
Web: Find angel on the Web
Blog: new Dharma: live, love & lead from the heart
Train: Train Your Mind with angel