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October 15, 2006

Being Still

My apologies for the absence here for such a long time. It is over a month since I posted. How can that be? How time flies.

I've been thinking about standing still.

Well perhaps not standing still in the pejorative sense, perhaps more being still. Being still long enough to know what is happening around me.

C Otto Scharmer calls it Co-sensing. If you are moved to look at his model, you will see this corrresponds to the left hand side of the 'U'. (It may not surprise you that I like to think of this as a spiral rather than a 'U'. On the spiral path you start where you are now and be still. Then you move both inwards and outwards on the spiral. But Ottto uses a 'U', so let's stick with that for the moment.)

Otto describes this process as

'Downloading' (images of the past)

'Suspending'

'Seeing' (with fresh eyes)

'Sensing' (from the field).

'letting-go'

To get into the left hand side of the 'U' we need to stop and be still.

It's not easy to find time to be still in our busy lives. But it is when we are busy we most need to find the time to be still.

If you follow Otto's 'U', you will see that it leads to 'Co-presencing' (connecting with 'Who is my Self?' and 'What is my Work?') at the bottom through to 'Performing' (achieving results) on the right. I like to expand this a bit with 'acheiving powerful results connected to our my true self and my true work.' But that is running ahead of ourselves for the moment.

Remember where we started today. Being still. Try it for 10 minutes to start with. Be still and be aware of what is around you. Don't rush ahead. I'll come back to the other parts of the process. For the moment, just be still and be aware, remembering that this is the beginning of powerful action.

Posted by chriscurnow at October 15, 2006 10:22 PM

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