The Gathering for Change Agents
Year
Six:
Radical Relationship; Embracing the Gifts of Polarity
Welcome! On this page you will find the full collection of audio and resource archives from Year Six of our monthly Gathering calls. Speaker bios, audios and recommended resources for each month's call will be added to this page soon after the call. Our theme for this sixth year of Gathering together each month is "Radical Relationship; Embracing the Gifts of Polarity." In the midst of escalating tensions and divisiveness across the globe, How can we bridge the divide and co-create win-win relationships that How will you, as an agent of change, contribute in your own unique way to Along with our Year Six offerings, please take some time to explore the program archives:
Catchup up with any part of the program you missed, review a topic that particularly speaks to you, learn more about the guest experts and explore resources to take the topics deeper. To receive notices of future calls so that you can attend live, go to http://truepurpose.net/gathering A great planetary shift is happening, with challenges that are inviting us to move beyond individual will and divisive strategies to develop radical relationships that bridge divides and open the portal to co-creating a world that works for everyone. In service to purposeful transformation, Your hosts Beth Scanzani, David Evans, Carri Munn and Andy Swindler
Study Materials:
Browse the archives:
Next month: Our next call will be February 6, 2019 (no call in January)
12/5/18: The Gifts of Polarity with The Gathering Hosts On this call, our goal was to mine the treasures from this year's learning from both a personal perspective and as agents of purposeful change. Some of the areas we explored were:
We also shared some important news about the Gathering as we head into the new year. David Evans and Carri Munn will be releasing their role as Gathering co-hosts to create more space for the purposeful endeavors they have been manifesting. We'll miss them! Both David and Carri have added valuable perspectives and recourses for our community. Please join us in offering our deep appreciation for their contribution and wishing them fabulous success in their newest initiatives. Here are the resources that were shared on the call by the co-hosts: Andy Swindler - Nilima Bhat's Presence Practice is available on YouTube: Carri Munn - "Designing Regenerative Cultures" by Daniel Christian Wahl covering transformative innovation, biomimetic design, living systems thinking, and interbeing. David Evans - Somatic work, in any forms that resonate with you. For example:
Beth Scanzani - Inner work to increase awareness and conscious, purposeful access to both sides of a polarity continuum. "As within, so without." For example:
Keep your eyes out for emails between now and February as Andy and Beth gather to re-group and plan for a really engaging and purposeful topic and platform for 2019. We'll be reviewing all aspects of the Gathering calls and community to maximize the value and support that we offer for change agents. One aspect of that is likely to be a survey to get your ideas and desires, so please do participate if you see a survey come through in your email : ) Also, you can reach us through the Gathering Facebook group or by email; BethScanzani@gmail.com or Andy Swindler at andy@leadfromlove.io. We'd love, and truly value, your input.
11/7/18: The Polarity of Wounding; What's Driving YOUR Motivation? with Tim Kelley and Beth Scanzani This call looked at how the "wound-driven psyche" is architected from your reactions to an intolerable experience from your past, typically before the age of 7. As a result of this "wound", your psyche does its best to protect you from ever having this experience again. Safety is Job #1! Your "wounded child" part is whisked away into your unconscious, along with the negative emotions that you were experiencing during the event or pattern of events. Protective strategies are developed, parts are created to enact the strategies, and beliefs are created that affect the way you perceive, experience and behave in your life. What is the purpose of wounding? Wounding generates a brilliantly designed and capable outer persona, along with a purposeful set of skills and strategies for navigating life. Without a wound to generate this design and energize your motivation, you might never have developed the strengths and passions you have. And, at the same time, wounding is experienced as a set of inner polarities. We are at odds with ourselves, which results in the tension to create and evolve on one side and the tension to protect ourselves and keep things the same on the other. Our parts are working at cross-purposes and trying to do impossible tasks. This creates a donkey-and-carrot-on-a-stick form of motivation, which eventually becomes draining and inefficient. How do we heal our wounds? The beauty is that you don't need to "heal" or "fix" your wounds. Instead, you can find your way into a new relationship with your wound that honors the experience and the gifts that you developed as a result. When you transform your wound/fear-motivated system into a more efficient and purpose-powered one, you accelerate your ability to manifest your purpose and achieve other important goals in your work and life. During this call we explored:
Resources shared by Tim: Evolving Beyond Your Wounds program offered by the Shift Network The Hoffman Process Somatic Experiencing
He has worked with hundreds of CEOs, including top leaders and executive teams from such companies as Nabisco, ING, Oracle, Lexmark, and AOL. He formerly worked as a leader at Oracle, two levels below the CEO. He's the author of True Purpose and the bestselling co-author of three other books. Tim has commanded military organizations, including an amphibious assault craft unit, and is a retired Naval Reserve officer. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT.
Prior to her transition into teaching and coaching in support of evolving consciousness, Beth enjoyed a successful career as a human resources executive in the high tech and health care industries. See Beth's full bio here.
10/3/18: Leading Well Through Change: Exploring the Polarity of Change and Status Quo with Daniel Friedland, MD Many threads of polarity were woven on this call to help us better understand our directives as change agents to explore the question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of change or maintaining the status quo? Key Take-Aways: It turns out that when we review any polarity, we see that the positive aspects associated with the polarity relate to the creative mindset of high performance conscious leadership, and the negative aspects relate to low performance leadership. Dr. Danny shared his unique and powerful way of correlating the three primary areas of the brain with a simplified version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If each of us can better understand our basic shared biology, then we can consciously practice proven techniques to leverage stress, which is what happens when things we care about are at stake. This idea of consciously moving our energy from reactive to creative is a powerful way to manage our resources to meet the demands of the situation. Dr. Danny trusts that everyone has great capacity for belonging and significance, and offered a powerful coaching technique on the call to help someone move from a "threat" stress response to "challenge" (high performance) or "tend and befriend" (connect). This can completely change our frame of engagement around a tension to leverage it for higher team performance.
Dr. Danny is the founding chair of the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine and the president and CEO of SuperSmartHealth, where he provides keynote addresses, live workshops, online programs, and executive coaching to cultivate Conscious Leadership. Dr. Danny offered the following resources for those who want to explore this topic deeper:
9/5/18: From Polarity to Complementarity with Norman Wolfe
Author of The Living Organization and CEO of Quantum Leaders, Norman Wolfe is an expert in personal transformation, organizational effectiveness, and change management. As an executive and leader and then as a coach and consultant to many other leaders, one question dominated his thinking; "how do we improve our ability to get the results we want?" While traveling a path of business Norman simultaneously explored the fields of psychology, biology, physics, personal growth, human potential and relationships to gain a deeper understanding of our place in the cosmos and how life works. Key take aways:
Norman offered many resources to those who want to explore deeper:
8/8/18: Embodiment: The Practice of Being Human and Divine with Stephanie Red Feather Stephanie offered some great information as well as practical tips for achieving more balance between the up energy of spirit and the downward, grounding energy of being human. The art and practice of embodiment is about recognizing you are BOTH human and divine. This means both aspects are purposeful and absolutely necessary! Stephanie led us on an exploration of the nature of embodiment and how it invites us to be a bridge between heaven and earth. As humans, we are a magical conduit that weaves polarities together including body and spirit and masculine and feminine and holds space for the the gifts of both. On this call, you'll learn:
Below are some of the key behaviors and practices that affect how embodied a person is.
The practice of embodiment is an emerging field with powerful implications for you as an agent of purposeful change. If you are not fully inhabiting your body - not allowing your life force energy to move through your entire body with consciousness - then how can you be and do what is needed to effectively offer your gifts? Here are the Resources that Stephanie offered for those who want to go deeper:
The founder and director of Blue Star Temple. Stephanie is a prolific creator of programs and materials including Earth Embodiment School™, How to Thrive as an Empath, and How to Make Decisions With Your Heart: A Guided Meditation. Her first book, The Evolutionary Empath, is due out in 2019 through Inner Traditions. Find out more about Stephanie at www.bluestartemple.org. Stephanie holds both a master's and doctorate in shamanic studies from Venus Rising University, which was established by her mentor and teacher Linda Star Wolf. She is a Magdalene high priestess in the lineage of Nicole Christine, as well as a certified facilitator of the Priestess Process™. In addition she holds certifications in a variety of energy healing and psycho-spiritual modalities including Reiki master, certified shamanic breathwork™ facilitator, and voice dialogue coach. Stephanie is also a mesa carrier in the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition of Peru, having studied with Don Oscar Miro-Quesada and his lineage since 2005.
7/11/18: Five layers of the Subconscious Mind; How to Access and Integrate Multidimensional Shadow Aspects with Liat Doitcher
Liat believes that one of the key reasons that highly-aware people still experience stagnation in life, is because they try to figure it all out using logic and mental functions. What could be possible if you developed better understanding and access to additional aspects of your shadow including an emotional, a spiritual, a physical and instinctual/sexual subconscious. Here are some topics we explored on this call:
Most people have a default strategy for doing inner work, moving through challenges, and taking purposeful action that includes only one, two or maybe three of these 5 elements of the subconscious. Other elements are neglected, quite unconsciously. As a result, these subconscious aspects of the psyche make themselves visible in ways that are often reactive and dysfunctional. What would it be like to have more conscious access and alignment to all 5 elements? This call was also a perfect example of how polarities and shadow aspects can show up in life and in each of us. Exploring these energetic tensions can reveal previously unconscious shadow aspects that are rich and fertile material to use to expand awareness, integration and access to all aspects of the whole of who we are, individually and collectively! Below are some polarity continuums that we experienced or heard about. What came up for you? If you experienced any strong reactions, "positive" or "negative", try exploring them (and your relationship with them) through the lens of each of the 5 elements Liat described.
Liat offered a lot of information and suggestions to go deeper on the call and, here some additional resources and suggested actions that Liat offered:
6/6/18: Speaking of Polarity; What about Unity and Duality? with David Evans & Andy Swindler During our June Gathering, David Evans and Andy Swindler led participants in an active Big Mind process to explore the questions from the perspective of Unity and Duality! Starting with the simple definition – duality means two states, two poles, both of which arise from a division of unity – we invoked the voices in small groups of three to four people. What did these voices have to say? Unity expressed the "beautiful weaving together of mindfulness, stillness, and compassion" and spoke of "the ability to look for how we are like one another." Connecting with Unity is vital for change agents to move forward. While Unity was quite still, Duality expressed itself with a lot more energy and had a lot more to say! "Without Duality, there are no boundaries." Duality also expressed the importance of not pushing the messy uncertainty of Duality into the shadows. "There is nothing wrong with me. Just because you don't know how to work with me appropriately doesn't mean I'm bad." It is us who have "exiled" duality to the shadows. Duality "causes the tension and excitement" and instructed us to "feel the duality of it and see the different points of view." Duality also said "if you're not able to parse that out, then you get stuck in polarization of one side or the other." What about Non-Duality? We invited a special guest speaker, Non-Duality, to join us! Not one and not two, invoking Non-Duality dropped us into the "unanswerable, big profound, full of insight, no answer" of stopped mind space. With nothing to hang onto, Non-Duality said "it holds the full spectrum of energies between polarities – no answers." So Non-Duality seems to leave us in the space of polarity, where there are no absolute answers to our questions, only the act of living in the questions and the space between our projections.
Andy's Chicago-based practice, Lead From Love, connects people and organizations to purpose as a key component to realizing this vision. Andy is excited to join the hosting team for The Gathering, which is pioneering community dialogue for the 21st century.
David is a Certified True Purpose® Coach and Certified Integral Professional Coach™. He is also trained in Voice Dialogue facilitation, group facilitation, and is a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist®. David has practiced meditation since 1998 and has focused on practicing and training others in somatic meditation since 2006. He works to integrate his life and professional practice within the frame of somatic presencing. David is a graduate of Augusta University with a BS in Computer Science and minor in Mathematics. He lives in the Washington, DC area. He's an avid amateur photographer, plays guitar, does pen and ink drawings, and performs improv.
5/2/18: Leadership as a Path to Self-mastery & Selfless Service with Nilima Bhat
Nilima headed Corporate Communications for an ITC Hotel, Philips, and ESPN STAR Sports before co-founding Roots & Wings, a leadership consultancy in 2004. An expert in Indian wisdom and wellness traditions, she is a trained dancer, certified Sivananda teacher and practitioner of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother. Her first book is My Cancer Is Me, with her husband Vijay Bhat, outlining their integrative medicine program for healing through cancer. Nilima has delivered leadership training and facilitation for Microsoft, Whole Foods Market, Etsy, Genpact, Tata, Societe Generale Bank, Vodafone, and YPO, as well as academic institutions and developmental organizations such as Babson College, University of San Diego, and SKS Microfinance. She is an active supporter of Conscious Capitalism and Women's International Networking (WIN), and is on the board of Peace Through Commerce and MixR. She is currently focused on building The Shakti Fellowship: a global network of conscious leaders and entrepreneurs who collaborate to create peace, prosperity, and beauty through the exchange of multiple forms of capital. Using the model from her Indian tradition, Nilima introduced us to the Shakti and Shiva principles, where Shakti is the fundamental energy of life and Shiva is fundamental awareness or consciousness. We need both in healthy and balanced form to exercise power that is life-giving, creative, and sustainable. During this call we gained:
Resources shared by Nilima: The book Shakti Leadership is available through Amazon and other retailers. An audio book version is available via Audible.
Nilima's Presence Practice is available on YouTube. She is offering two programs, the Himalayan Shakti Tour on June 22-30 and the Shakti Fellowship Program beginning in the fall of 2018. Partial scholarship is available for the Fellowship Program if you apply before May 31st. To learn more, visit:
Visit http://shaktileadership.com to learn more about Nilima and her work!
4/4/18: Exploring the masculine and feminine through the lens of indigenous practices with Kelly Jennings andFrancois Demange
Today Francois is recognized as a leader and guide in the shamanic tradition of plant spirit medicine know as vegetalismo. HIs life commitment is to build awareness and community in western culture by inviting people to engage in self and cultural transformation and to promote the reawakening of our relationship to life and all of our relations. On this call, Kelly and Francois shared their experiences of participating in the Sundance and Moondance, of the Lakota and Mexica peoples. What we received:
This month's session focused on conversation and personal experience. We encourage you to listen to the archive, and connect with Dr. Jennings by email (drjennings@thesourceforhealing.com) or through her practice The Source for Healing.
3/7/18: Polarities for Change Agents: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with Tim Kelley Polarity is a natural and dynamic tension that exists within and around us. In contrast to a state of unity, opposite qualities, energies, emotions, opinions and states of being allow us to know and experience the other by contrast. There is a real and potent push toward separation and an equally strong pull toward unity as nature seeks equilibrium. Polarities create dynamic energy. Unity create stasis. Dynamic energy motivates, energizes and creates…which is very useful for change agents, right? But how do we make constructive use of the energy, tension and attraction provided by a polarity, without getting distracted, confused and stuck? As a change agent, you need to have a better understanding of polarities than most people, so you can transform them and use them as tools to construct Heaven on Earth. But how?" During this call we explored:
He has worked with hundreds of CEOs, including top leaders and executive teams from such companies as Nabisco, ING, Oracle, Lexmark, and AOL. He formerly worked as a leader at Oracle, two levels below the CEO. He's the author of True Purpose and the bestselling co-author of three other books. Tim has commanded military organizations, including an amphibious assault craft unit, and is a retired Naval Reserve officer. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT. For those who want to dive deeper on this essential topic, here are some resources that Tim recommended:
2/7/18: Converge for Impact: Making Collaboration Work with David Ehrlichman and David Sawyer On the February call, our guest speakers shared their wisdom on collaboration as the path for systems change in the face of unprecedented global challenges. During this call we gained:
Sawyer is a strategy guy for a better world, specializing in networks, design, and systems thinking. He is active across all sectors and has played key roles in a variety of fields: education reform, national service, social entrepreneurship, women & girls, venture philanthropy, and environmental preservation.
David Ehrlichman and David Sawyer are core members of Converge for Impact. Converge is a network of strategists and designers who partner with others to tackle complex social and environmental problems. Resources shared by Sawyer and Ehrlichman:
1/3/18: Humor and Human Connection with Adam Gordon On our January 3 Gathering, Adam and our hosts engaged in a dialogue about using humor to create human connection. What we received:
Resources for those who want to smile and connect:
Meet the Hosts
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Andy Swindler envisions a world that embraces healthy tensions to nurture dignity and agency for all people. As a True Purpose® coach, he takes the hands of leaders from the moment they open their eyes and hearts to show them how love can be applied to every relationship in their lives.
Nilima Bhat is a visionary, author, speaker, facilitator and coach for Conscious Leadership, Diversity & Inclusion and Integral Health. Her recent book, Shakti Leadership: Embracing Feminine & Masculine Power, with Raj Sisodia, offers a model for self-mastery and selfless service that can lead to a free and fulfilled world that works for all.
Ehrlichman specializes in designing and leading collaborations and networks that enable people and organizations to work together more effectively. He has helped build impact networks across the environmental, healthcare, education, economic, and civic systems.
Adam Gordon is an spiritual gangster comedian, actor, and storytelling coach for entrepreneurs. As an actor Adam has appeared on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Guiding Light and Days of Our Lives. He received an MFA in acting from the National Theater Conservatory at the Tony winning Denver Center Theater Company. He is a graduate of the Transformational Coaching and Leadership Training, and certified as a facilitator by The Circling Institute where he has been a course leader for three years. As a business owner he is the founder and CEO of Oxygen Massage Therapy--a clinical massage practice with three locations in San Francisco. 