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Joy Retro Disco presents What You Waiting For by Gwen Stefani

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! I’ve been cleaning out my iTunes over the last couple of weeks – desperately trying to squeeze another couple of gigs room on my hard-drive – and this song just jumped out at me while I was trawling through [...]

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How people change: Working with the stages and processes of change

While archiving a journal recently, I found an old photocopied article wedged in its pages. Upon re-reading it, I was struck by just how relevant (and now, mainstream) the ideas in this article were. The article, from the September 1992 edition of American Psychologist, was entitled “In Search of How People Change” and was written [...]

Asides

• My friend and colleague, Jeanette, just sent me this Andrew Cohen quote (below) with the query "Is this us?!!". I don't usually get into Andrew Cohen's writing. But, when I read through this quote I thought, "He's nailed it - this is what we're doing". We're not even at the "want to do" stage but this is actually happening now.  We are bringing together people from diverse backgrounds with diverse interests but with a common goal of making the changes we need to make to allow a socially just, environmentally sustainable and spiritually fulfilling world to emerge. To see this acknowledged on a global level is incredibly exciting. Not only because "We're on the right track. Yay." but all is in alignment... Engaging in Creative Friction Andrew Cohen "In an inspired spiritual context where the evolution of consciousness and culture is the goal, coming together with others is not just about sharing an experience of peace, bliss, and harmony. It is about what I call creative friction. "In fact, to me, the presence of ongoing creative friction is what indicates deep spiritual, psychological, and emotional health and vibrancy in this type of collective or intersubjective context. Creative friction is the very spiritual lifeblood of the new culture that we need to create, through consciously engaging with each other and the life-process itself, as we strive to deconstruct and transcend old structures and creatively construct new ones. "If we are all committed to the same higher goal, there is room for many opinions and points of view—they are all colliding in a living, dynamic, creative context, in which everybody benefits from the friction. To be true evolutionary partners and pioneers means being so completely in alignment at the level of our fundamental motive that we are free to disagree and debate in such a way that we are challenged, each and every one of us, at the deepest level, to evolve. "This takes guts and it takes heart; it means you always have to be willing to reach beyond the familiar, take risks, and continually let go. But if you have become deeply aligned with what I call the Evolutionary Impulse, you will not be afraid. You will experience creative friction as an ecstatic engagement with essence of Life, of Love, of God, and of your own Authentic Self." #
• I finally updated Wordpress and got all the bugs out of it. So we have new posts - with images! Yay. I must say, I do like the look of the new Wordpress admin panel. It's so ... so... intuitive. Anyway, back to it. Hope to be bringing you more posts in the coming weeks although I'm not sure if I can write anything beyond 140 characters now - what with my main form of communication being Twitter these last few months. Let's see what emerges... #
• Something wacky has happened to my Wordpress. I'm not sure what has happened but features are disabled and my password keeps resetting. So I'm not able to put pretty pictures with the posts at the moment. Perhaps it's time for a new theme.... #
• Apparently Henry David Thoreau said, "Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify, simplify! ... Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose." It's hard to believe that lives could be complicated in Thoreau's time (1870s I believe?). His statement, however, is ripe for our times and I have a hunch that the mantra of "Simplify. Simplify. Simplify." is going to be uttered by many over the next few years. It's quite a paradox that simplifying one's life isn't always a simple thing. First, we've got to get rid of the material junk - all those toys, gadgets, and THINGS that we once thought were so essential and going to make us happy happy happy. But they just made us broke. And stressed.  And then, once we ditch the physical crap we have to get rid of the beliefs, behaviours, relationships that really do not enhance our lives. As Mies Van De Rohe said, less is more. And Thoreau lets us in on a possible "more": Purpose. When we clear away the crap, why we are here and what we are here to do begins to shine through.  #
• Apparently Benjamin Disraeli said, "The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own."   I've been doing a lot of reading lately about Self-Determination Theory which is all about how we need to have choices and feel capable of acting on those choices for our well-being. And yet so often, we do not see our own potential, our riches or the opportunities around us. So, rather than giving money for a community well to be built by an outside contractor, let the community see they have the resources to build their own well - which they will stand back from when it's completed and say, "Look, we did it ourselves." I know words like "agency" and "empowering" have gone out of fashion, but I think they underlie all sustainable change. Oh, and yes, the other bit of the quote... Of course, imagine a world where everyone had agency AND we all shared our riches. Imagine what could be possible. #