art of becoming is a reflection of all I have gleaned from exploring meditation and spiritual enquiry, which has shown me the importance of the process of reflection and the value of pause and presence. I have found that when we become present in what we are doing, we are more fully our selves, more creative, more outward reaching, simply happier and more alive!
I have no religion and can’t even commit to one form of spiritual discipline. And yet over the years that I’ve been interested in what lies beyond, or within, or underneath our everyday understanding of the world in which we live, the value of pause and presence has been confirmed to be countless times.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say everyone should meditate. But I do believe that taking time out of every busy day to stop. Simply to stop. Is well worth the small push of discipline it takes to do it. It reaps enormous rewards for the time you invest. It gives you an awareness beyond time, beyond linear time, into timelessness. Life becomes simpler and more rewarding. When we stop being caught up in the everyday, in what we think is important, it gives us a chance to ask: what is really important?
In that moment of pause, you can become present to yourself, aware of the deeper reaches of your being. In what is. Not the projections forwards and backwards in time of the mind, but the everlasting present moment. The egoic mind will always try to pull you out of the present moment, out of the feeling of one-ness. The ego feeds on separation. But I have recently been pleased to discover ways of co-opting the ego to support the self in searching for a more spacious way of doing things.
In the present moment, in the reality of what-is, we have access to information that we simply cannot hear amidst the cacophony of our minds, the traffic of our thoughts. I think we have always had resource to this information, but modern life has bred the habit out of us. For me, one of the quickest ways to connect back in is through nature. I ride, I walk, I run through the woods, sometimes I just sit in my small garden and look up at the sky, birds nesting, buds bursting forth, fox cubs playing a few feet away. These things remind me of the life force that we all rely on. No matter how sophisticated our machines may be - and technological advances are truly inspiring and amazing - we cannot exist without this unseen force. We too are always budding, flowering, shedding - going through our own seasonal cycles; becoming. And the more conscious we can be of the life force that directs this becoming, the more access we have to it.
The same energetic resource that causes leaves to unfurl is greying my hair and directing my thoughts through words to this page. In our working lives, if we can still be sure to pause and be present, we have access to this force of creation, which is the same fertile dark of our own imagination. There is a danger that we try to live like machines in our working hours. We barely look up from the computer, pride ourselves on not taking a lunch break, tell anyone with time to listen how busy, busy, busy we are. But we don’t do our best work in this soulless environment.
I am learning that if I take a few moments to stop, and drop my focus down out of my head into my body I can reconnect with this force. And then if I direct this energy into the task I’m engaged in, I become fully present in what I’m doing. I do it better, I do it more completely and I enjoy it more. I put my heart and soul into it. And what’s more, when it’s done, it’s finished with. It’s a much less stressful way to work. It feels like harnessing the force of nature to help you get the job done.
This is how I like to approach business development, as a creative unfolding of our selves through our work. Our organisations, our businesses, can provide a bigger vehicle for our creative energies to flow out beyond our own lives and touch the lives of others. It’s marketing, Jim, but not as we know it. Welcome to the art of becoming!