Awakening Is The Ability To Accept Feedback Excerpts from Ken Cloke-The Art of Waking People Up and The Crossroads of Conflict In the end, waking up is simply awareness. Awareness is openness to feedback, and feedback is information we can interpret in infinite ways. We can increase our awareness by maximizing our ability to use internal and external feedback, which is information that we can use to improve our skills and performance. The goal of waking up is to become more authentic, centered, skillful and content with who we are as human beings. Every opening to real awakening can be painful because it is accompanied by fear, associated with the death of a false idea of who we are. But it can also be pleasurable, since it is accompanied by the birth of a true, more integrated, authentic sense of self and others. Often the very thing we are holding onto with all our might out of fear of loss ends up being the thing we most need to let go of if we want to live more fully and without fear. You can use what you have and what happens to you to wake up - or to become more resentful, bitter and sour. Whatever you are given can wake you up or put you to sleep. Waking up after feedback brings out honesty, authenticity and integrity, compassion. The question is how to help people and ourselves choose awakening to authenticity and what is. Carl Jung offers this: "The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown...This "outgrowing"...on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person's horizon, and through this widening of his view the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms. But faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency. It was not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so, did indeed become different. What on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, viewed from the higher level of personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a high mountain-top. This does not rob the thunderstorm of its reality, but instead of being in it, one is now above it." Is awakening then accepting the feedback that makes it possible to outgrow our old sense of ourself and others and to see our "problem" from a higher or wider perspective? This is what good mediation and collaborative practice seeks to accomplish. |
