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This book is our way of taking stock. It is an opportunity for us to share some of the things that we have learned so far on what is an ongoing quest.
our quest (#ulink_9355b7ff-17f1-5da8-9d9e-d3b2d186301c)
How am I playing a creative role in society…?
This question has been important to us as we have sought to find meaning and purpose in our lives and find our place in the world.
We are all happier and more nourished when we live life as a creative pursuit or adventure. We are motivated and energized when others inspire us or when they feel inspired by us. We are enthusiastic when we see each challenge that life throws at us as another opportunity to learn and to grow.
We also tend to feel most miserable and ‘at sea’ when we are disconnected from those aspects of ourselves that are inherently creative and purposeful, when life consumes us and when there is not enough time in the day or break in the routine to do something different. Then we find ourselves trapped in the way things are. We become victims of circumstance, judging life and the people around us in a way that keeps us stuck, burdened and adrift.
Interestingly, it is both what we think and the way in which we think that can get in the way of our natural creativity and growth. Our thoughts are incredibly powerful. They are the way that we co-create with one another and with the world. They co-arise with emotions that are felt throughout our bodies, and these emotions are translated into actions, behaviour and beliefs.
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Thoughts (and their accompanying emotions) are types of energy, and over time they make themselves manifest in form. The thoughts of our grandparents and parents have created our world. Our thoughts, and the way we think them and make meaning of them, are creating the world in which we live now as well as the world our children will inherit. So it may be wise for us to exercise some care and learn more about the power of our thoughts.
Over time our habitual modes of thinking become calcified within the neural networks of our brains. Like water flowing over rock for thousands of years, they carve ruts in our neural networks, ruts from which we find it difficult to escape. They become our paths of least resistance, our way of thinking, feeling, creating and learning. No wonder we find it hard to change!
This book has been designed to help individuals and organizations to overcome these ingrained patterns, to step onto new ground and find new ways of moving forward through life.
You will of course be aware that you can start this book from one of two directions. Whilst this half is based on releasing the creative potential of the individual, the individual and the organizational are two sides of the same coin. We cannot rise to the challenges that face us in our families, our organizations, our communities and our environment unless we unlock the creative potential within ourselves and between ourselves. Therefore each side of the book helps us to look into personal, inter-personal and organizational dilemmas… Here are some of them:
Working in the week and living for the weekends
We spend 60–70 per cent of our lives at work or preparing for work. It would be heartbreaking to look back from our deathbeds and feel that the majority of our time had been spent working on things that hadn't nourished us or enabled us to grow and realize our highest potential.
(#ulink_a632f8cf-4f69-508c-8cbb-18446da315a8)So how can we make our life's work more creative and meaningful…?
Arguing for our limitations
Our beliefs about who we are and what we can do are tied into our early experiences of childhood and family. Some of them are self-limiting – ‘I can't sing’, ‘I am not creative’ – and they tend to persist. What would happen if we could break free from our self-limiting beliefs…?
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Not accessing our highest potential
We access our highest potential when we use our creativity, our emotions, our intuition, our intellect and our physical capacity. Few of us use these innate capabilities to the full. No matter what the challenge, we tend to use the same ways of thinking and behaving to meet it. Most of us are one- or two-club golfers or one- or two-stroke swimmers. What could we achieve if we could access all of our capabilities…?
This is a book of practice. It maps out ways of helping individuals and organizations play a more creative role in society and simultaneously nurture their growth. It contains a collection of questions designed to help us all move into the unknown and transcend our limitations. It enables us to access our natural capabilities and release our unique gifts. And ultimately it reveals a systemic design that helps us to live in greater harmony with each other and with the planet.
It is about how each and every one of us can find our place – a place where we can connect with our own creative life force and weave it together with that of the people around us.
1 (#ulink_86150702-1e24-578e-9b97-bd57715626d7) Antonio Demasio, The Feeling of What Happens, Vintage, 2000
2 (#ulink_404151a9-f1eb-55fc-b1a8-1e04528913e1) As stated in a paper by Paul H. Ray, ‘The rise of integral culture’, Noetic Sciences Review 37, 4–15, 1996.
3 (#ulink_0c5f9f71-6979-564b-9637-73b0fa57596a) Inspired by Richard Bach's Illuminations, Pan, 1978.
a book of breakthrough questions (#ulink_4956939c-d8a2-5cc9-b9de-2f963e22c528)
This is a book of breakthrough questions.
Breakthrough questions are like keys to doors. Each door opens us up to a greater aspect of ourselves, making available a wider and deeper reservoir of internal and external resource. This expansion of resource, of heightened self-awareness and self-knowledge, is vital if we want to call forth our creative and collective potential.
Breakthrough questions lie at the heart of the Way ofnowhere. They are essential for unlocking our personal creativity. For creativity rarely begins with an answer. As soon as we discover an answer, learning tends to slow down and curiosity diminishes. By reframing an initial insight, intuition or notion as a breakthrough question, we are able to trigger our curiosity. Curiosity creates vitality, and together they generate enough energy to start and sustain the creative process.
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Breakthrough questions should therefore lead us into the unknown. They should create a sense of excitement, enthusiasm and momentum, yet at the same time generate a sense of trepidation and fear. They are designed to reveal their magic over time as we learn to ‘hold’ as opposed to answer them.
Like a Zen Kõan,
(#ulink_bd630bae-20d5-54c3-9d3d-0a08473de9fe) the challenge is to find a way of transcending our intellect,
allowing each breakthrough question to take us over, so we can learn to become the question. It is then, and only then, that we can break through the question. And it is in the moment of breakthrough that we see things we have never seen before, as if by magic … out of nowhere.
This book introduces eight breakthrough questions which are designed to reveal and unlock eight different doors to our creative potential. By working through these questions we can expand our consciousness, evoke our creativity and co-create our future.
Each chapter opens up a different question by offering pointers to insight. We have intentionally refrained from including our own answers to the questions. The insights we have gained and applied to date, on ourselves or with the organizations and communities with which we work, have been what we have needed to discover. You will need to find your own answers.
By holding these breakthrough questions, sometimes lightly and sometimes firmly, you will find they will begin to reveal their magic. Some will reveal themselves quickly, as you connect with those aspects of yourself that are already available to you as a resource. Some of the questions will be more difficult, as you discover aspects of yourself that are less accessible. The chapters that you find harder to engage with are likely to be the ones that will ultimately offer you the greatest movement forward in your quest to unlock your creative potential.
4 (#ulink_d76aa214-d70d-5cfe-b168-06b77d1edeb4) Inspired by a lecture by Moishe Rubenstein entitled ‘The role of intuition in the creative process’, presented at the Second Annual Global Intuition Network Conference at York University, Toronto, Canada, 20–22 August 1992.
5 (#ulink_5ec50c64-1ee7-5354-a329-7b91d85ef754) Kõans are riddles used by Zen masters as a means of awakening, for example John Daido Loori, Two Arrows Meeting in Mid Air, Tuttle, 1994.
inspiring-innovation: a personal practice (#ulink_798c5160-c225-5367-8c61-e3931eefa6fb)
We can learn to live and work at a higher order of consciousness. This higher order of thinking, learning and creating is necessary if we are to transcend our limitations, embrace our whole selves and contribute to the myriad of systems of which we are intimately woven.
For each of us to make our unique contribution to humanity and to our world, we must first discover our gifts and then find a means of skilfully returning them. Discovering and harnessing our uniqueness lies at the heart of playing a creative role in society. It is how we get to know ourselves and brings a deep sense of belonging, loyalty and pride.
As soon as we awaken to the possibility of our own uniqueness, we are faced with the question: How can I release my creative potential through the work that I do and the life that I lead…?
When I began to engage with this question, one of the first insights that I had was that it was not going to be either easy or fun if I tried to do it alone.
As in any partnership, Nick and I have many similarities and many differences. We are both committed to this question and to expressing our creativity through what we do. We have both dedicated our lives to experimenting with different practices, both ancient and modern, that may help us to achieve this more fully.
We are also very different. Nick is almost a generation younger and works much more quickly than I do. I tend to champion the purity of the practices and the wisdom traditions they come from; he wants to play irreverently with whatever works.
These differences manifest as creative and emotional tensions in our relationship. People are sometimes surprised at how we bicker, argue and disagree. They find it uncomfortable, as sometimes do we! But we always stay with it. There is always an unquestioning underlying trust and respect that enables us to eventually break through into new insights and innovations.
The book you now hold in your hands is one expression of this relationship. You can trace the breakthrough questions and the overall structure back to Zen influences – Nick's primary background. The medicine wheel, the allies and distortions come from Earth Wisdom, which has been a larger part of my own development and training.
This living practice has brought meaning and challenge into our lives. It heightens our awareness of those things that expand our creative potential while contracting those things that diminish it.
Please remember that if there are any bits in this book you really don't like, they probably came from the other Nick because he works more quickly!
co-creation
The Way ofnowhere is based upon the philosophy of co-creation.
Co-creation is the creative interplay or interconnectedness of all things. It is also the name we give to the process of releasing the creative potential that exists within and between all things.
One of the core teachings at the heart of the Way ofnowhere is what we call the Diamond of Consciousness. It was given to us by one of our most influential teachers at a critical point in the development of nowhere.
(#ulink_f7da9af4-9be2-57ac-98c8-a8115f228332) He said it had come to him in a dream and that he had a strong intuitive sense that we should integrate it into our work.
The North of the diamond represents our everyday consciousness. Whilst constituting a relatively small part of who and what we are, this aspect of ourselves takes up a hugely disproportionate amount of our awareness.
The South represents our subconscious, our emotional Self, which is also a very small but extremely influential part of who we are, as it drives our needs and desires.
The West represents the largest percentage of who and what we are. It reminds us that we are forever and always from the Field,
(#ulink_8a421b46-e406-5c19-9fdd-666b2e02821b) part of an interconnected whole.
the diamond of consciousness
And lastly, the East represents that very small and under-developed aspect of ourselves which we have called creative-consciousness. This is our ability to be present and at one with the Field, with our wholeness, and the interconnectedness of all things. Our teacher went on to outline how this capacity had diminished in modern society and how vital it was that we increased our ability to access it to face the challenges and opportunities ahead.
Our teacher also described how the developmental and personal growth work that many people are undertaking today, particularly in West, contributed greatly to cleaning the North and South axis of the diamond. He explained that the cleaning of this space was a prerequisite for tapping into the power and insights that flowed along the West–East axis of the diamond.
When our teacher passed this to us, we instantly recognized that the diamond gave us a new and useful way of looking at what we were doing and an insight into what we should focus on going forward. Thus a vital difference between the Way ofnowhere and other developmental approaches is that while we both recognize and work with processes to expand our conscious and subconscious, we do so in the interest of awakening our creative-consciousness – our co-creative Self.
Creative-consciousness is our innate ability to gain inspirational insights from the whole. Such insights often have an ‘Of course, why didn't I think of that before?’ quality about them, yet they have the potential to bring innovation to the world. They also enable us to move towards being the inspiration and innovation we want to see and be.
This book introduces what we call the art and practice of inspiring-innovation (i-i). The art is how to apply the virtuous circle of inspiration and innovation to families, communities, organizations and any other form of social system. The practice is how to apply this virtuous circle to the only social system which we can control: ourselves. We refer to it as a ‘practice’ because we literally have to practise it, like yoga or running. We have to internalize it and embody it. The more we do so, the more profound its effects will be, just as a professional marathon runner develops more blood vessels than a sedentary person or a highly experienced meditator's brain structure differs subtly from that of a non-meditator.
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This book has been designed to trigger this virtuous circle of inspiration and innovation within us, thus significantly increasing our ability to access breakthrough insights. It then supports us in finding ways to turn those insights into innovative form, one continually fuelling the other in constant motion and exchange.
6 (#ulink_13e1aeac-21d7-57f6-8214-21cfe502456f) A gift from RainbowHawk, one of Ehama's grandparents and keepers.
7 (#ulink_94c86680-fb93-531c-bedd-3f5bd1212429) For an excellent explanation of this vital concept, see Lynne McTaggart, The Field, HarperCollins, 2001.
8 (#ulink_330f12bf-56cb-591c-96e6-45598bb51fad) Inspired by a lecture by Andrew Newberg, Fred Travis and Antoine Lutz entitled ‘Neural correlates of meditative experience’, presented at ‘Towards a Science of Consciousness’ conference in Tucson, Arizona, 8–12 April 2002.
wheels (#ulink_a0f5a5a7-c3b3-5605-a6d6-d5d7b4e94631)
Our challenge has been to co-create a living practice that is fit for purpose in today's world. From the ancient wisdom traditions we have extracted those personal disciplines and practices that alter the way in which we see ourselves and the world around us. From the modern disciplines we have taken an understanding of the social systems that we co-create and perpetuate and how we can learn to find our place within them. From the world of design we have learned how to turn energy into form, turning these personal practices and social disciplines into innovative processes and liberating experiences.
One of the most influential components of our practice has been the use of ‘medicine wheels’. Medicine (or wisdom) wheels are systemic designs based on an ancient taxonomy of the universe, and over the last 12 years we have experimented with this 35,000-year-old technology and applied it rigorously to unlocking the creative potential of individuals, teams and organizations – with great success.
While we have deep respect and appreciation of the traditional forms of the medicine wheels, which we employ in other aspects of the Way ofnowhere, we have developed our own unique set of wheels by codifying our learning from thousands of interventions. Whilst our wheels are inspired by and consistent with the founding wheels, they vary in some important aspects.
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Wheels are the only tools that we have discovered that simultaneously map and unlock the invisible forces within the self, within a team and within the wider social systems of which we are a part, thereby creating a truly systemic approach to change, development and transformation.
Wheels are an ancient way of mapping life's different energy states. They use the eight points of a compass, each one representing a different energy intelligence. Just as these exist in the outer world, so they also exist within us, because we are a microcosm of the whole.
Each direction can either manifest within us in ways that release our creative potential and interconnectedness or diminish our creative potential and accentuate our separateness.
In this particular wisdom tradition, the liberating energy states are called ‘allies’ or ‘allied robes’ and the diminishing energies are called ‘distortions’ or ‘distorted robes’. They are called robes because they resemble the clothes we wear. These robes cloak us in energy states and patterns of behaviour which we may or may not be conscious of. They exert a powerful influence over us, moving us either towards or away from our co-creative capacity.
We can use these allied and distorted energy states to develop awareness and ultimately mastery of the ways in which we either help or hinder our creativity.
Thus, through awareness and skill, we can learn to accelerate the virtuous circle of inspiration and innovation.
In this book we introduce the art and practice wheels of inspiring-innovation. We use the art wheel as the basis for releasing our collective creative potential, in particular through the discipline of organizational transformation, and we use the practice wheel as the basis for releasing my personal and inter-personal creative potential. Together they map an inner and outer journey of transformation. They have been designed to help us to look at our consciousness rather than through it as we are normally conditioned to do.
Imagine for a moment that these wheels are maps of our inner world, maps of the energy states that lie behind our thoughts and behaviour. As we navigate through the uncertain waters of life, these wheels can help us understand where we are at any given time and give us keys to unlock our creative potential. We do this by deepening and strengthening our allied capabilities and controlling and minimizing our distorted patterns. We then begin to learn how one ally can magnify another and how one distortion can trigger another.
The wheel is therefore a truly systemic tool, as each direction, whilst being complete in itself, is also an integrated part of the whole. This is also reflected in the way any given direction relates to its opposite and neighbours.
i-i practice wheel with the allied and distorted energies
The design of the book mirrors the design of the wheel. Each chapter is based on a breakthrough question which is designed to release the energy of one of the eight directions. As we enquire into the breakthrough question, we begin to access and heighten the energy intelligence of that direction. Yet our creative capacity is unlikely to grow if we simply read the book in the usual way. Runners do not elongate their blood supply systems by reading books about running! So our invitation to you is to hold and meditate on each breakthrough question, a chapter at a time. Seek the insights that lie within each question, between each question and its ally and distortion, and between each word and each thought.
Then, as we move towards the centre of the book, we also move towards the centre of ourselves, until we stand in the middle of our circle and fully maximize who we are.
i-i practice wheel with the 8 breakthrough questions
9 (#ulink_6bc73170-74fa-5129-a39c-21e9087e4fcf) Based on the Native American Earth Wisdom tradition of the Ehama Institute.
how to use the wheel (#ulink_07fc9e4e-ff3a-53cc-a3e2-2a89d506677d)
Before we dive into the breakthrough questions themselves, let us suggest how best to use the wheel.
This book has two interconnected halves, one looking at ways of releasing my creative potential and the other looking at ways of releasing our creative potential. Within each half of the book there are eight chapters, one for each direction of the wheel. In line with tradition, we start in the East and move clockwise around the wheel. At the end of each half of the book is a chapter looking at what it means to stand in the centre of our circle. And in the middle of the book is the final chapter leading us to the Way ofnowhere.
Each of the main chapters is dedicated to a breakthrough question. The eight questions are:
ewhat is my unique purpose…?
se how am I releasing the magic of the moment…?
show am I venturing into uncertainty…?
sw how am I focusing the power of my intent…?
whow am I supporting growth…?
nw how am I learning to see the invisible…?
nhow am I returning my gift…?
