gratitude is a muscle
sutranovum
sutranovum
Our retreats are primarily devoted to emotional intelligence. To embrace self-love is to outgrow deception at the ego level. You are the light of the world. You are the epicenter of meaning and the font of all healed perspectives.
We focus on coaching out the strengths in you. To be grateful and wise often can involve a retraining of the mind. We focus on going away into beauty spots in nature to access those quiet places within potent and aligned with our calmest most empowered selves. Be leaving the workaday world we embrace retreats that re-align ourselves with our most vibrant and joyous selves.
sutranovum runs various retreats over the course of a year.
To learn more about upcoming retreats sign up here:
To coordinate a retreat in your country or to a city near you contact us at retreats@sutranovum.com
An individual when healthy and wise is self-reliant. That doesn't mean isolated or separated. It means connected. And whole.
In-dividual Indivisble
We are connected. Walt Whitman wrote:
“I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.”
The study of mythology is the study of the possibilities of consciousness.
They are limitless. We are here at play in the garden. The ascent of man means the ascent of self and the ascent of self means that we must embrace our idiosyncrasies.
Thoreau wrote:
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
Joseph Campbell shared:
“You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.”
To be an individual means to be connected to the whole. Intimately. And yet to carve out your own path. To own that journey and the beauty of its flame.
In short: it takes guts to be yourself. Wholly so. Unadorned. Emotional wisdom comes from the gut, from the intuition. And from a flowering in man, that naturally awakens when we focus on seeing beyond fear.
When we marry we embark on a journey to learn balance in all things, starting, and ending with perception.
The Jewish peoples have an old saying that says when you marry you outgrow selfishness because life becomes bigger than “me and mine.” When a child is born an opening happens in the heart. An expansion. Not all marriages produce children but this sense that you are now different chambers within the same heart feeding one another is critical.
A fool will argue that you marry the wrong person, but can you be man or woman enough to embrace he whom life has gifted you? What we get in our marriage is a mirror to who we are. When we try to fix another we are a fool for self-love is all about taking responsibility for how we see. When we see flaws and lack in another it is a mirror of our own lack of self-appreciation. When we see beyond that, well, then life really becomes a dance. And a happy one.
Marriage really is the very crucible of the human journey. When we are wise to our needs we are not judging or blaming of another. We have come to self-love and a deep appreciation that goes beyond putting others down. That takes a lot of self-awareness...but when it flowers in an individual he or she comes to be aligned with their deepest needs and they confidently embrace their desires and live their dreams. They focus on hitting the target of their inspired goals and let go all deceptions that they are lacking in worth on any level.
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals...argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
Walt Whitman
To discern wisely the fruit of relationship one must be attentive to the core music within you. To be together wisely demands that one has plumbed the depths of solitude. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything. When we read "solitude" there, Rilke is not describing a solitary life, rather a happy one; an inner state that is not frightened nor perturbed, or, at least, can comfortably sit with that and, in sitting patiently enough, see through it. You can be in a crowd of millions, with endless agreeing and disagreeing, and not judge any of it, and still have that quality of stillness.
It is tempting to flick from flower to flower, to dig many shallow holes...but in relationship, true depth is born of confronting your fears and embracing the deep loving bonds that truly bind us. Marriage is the ultimate school for that. It's just how nature intends things and, when clearly recognized. and wisely honored, we can't help but bloom. We exist in relationship. To deny that is to deny our nature. To embrace it is to be in a state of union with ourselves.
Isaac Asimov wrote: Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in. Marriage IS a school. Like any school one can graduate or miss the mark. When we miss the mark our assumptions may be blinding us to the power hidden within the kernel of our experiences.
When you look upon yourself, or another, through the eyes of unconditional love, you are invited to take a journey into equity. Equity, today, is often associated with money, but the actual word just means 'fairness."
Marriage, it is not a love affair.
“Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married....The Puritans called marriage "the little church within the Church." In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament – love and forgiveness.... Like the yin/yang symbol....Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I'm not sacrificing to her, I'm sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life in in the relationship, that's where your life now is. That's what a marriage is – whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.” Joseph Campbell
Joy cannot be imitated. Shakespeare wrote "thou canst not be false to any man."He was right. One can be false but only at great cost.Especially to oneself.
He wrote this too:
"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep".
It is spoken by the magician Prospero. He has just made a large group of spirits vanish, He reminds reminds his daughter and her fiancé that mortal life also ends quickly. So one must capitalise on the school. When one does, a very deep satisfaction follows. Divorce is rarely a solution. More a bandaid. The soul must have complete its education; fulfillment being the only medicine that can be said to cure. The cure is graduation from the school of fulfilled relationships.
Children learn by example.
They learn by what their parents do more than by what they say. To become aware one has to awaken to what is talking in oneself. Is it insight? Is it insecurity? Fear? Fulfillment? What is it that speaks? Can you imagine differently....better?
"Yes!" comes the child’s happy whisper. The wise imaginative child in all of us speaks with such vision.
'The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.'
Abraham Lincoln
Several generations ago Emerson wrote:
“We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represent."
What will it take to embrace what is our essence without wasting time in expediency and evasion?
We owe it to ourselves. And to our children. And their children. And their children's children.
To educate wisely is to be attentive to emotional intelligence.
To be attentive to such wisdom then we have to have the right relationship with nature. With our own nature and the nature of the planet.
This is non-negotiable.
To catch big fish one must travel out far to the right fishing grounds.
To find the right grounds for hope, one must dig in the right places.
Modern history, prior to now, for the most part, has been grappling with the consequences of a self-destructing industrial society.
To celebrate the coming of age of our own maturity we can look to Vladimir Vernadsky who argued that:
“people were becoming a geological force, shaping the planet’s future just as rivers and earthquakes had shaped its past.”
He goes on:
“Global society, guided by science, would soften the human environmental impact; earth would become a noosphere, a planet of the mind.”
When reason and imagination meet wisely, there are ample grounds for hope.
Harvard professor Dr William Clark is one the most compelling voices involved in international efforts to use scientific technology to preserve the environment.
"Aided by satellites and supercomputers and mobilised by the evident environmental damage of the last century, he thinks humans have a real chance to begin balancing economic development with sustaining earth's ecological webs.
Managing Planet Earth, Forget Nature, even Eden is engineered. New York Times - August 20, 2002
Dr Clark is quoted as saying:
"We've come through a period of finally understanding the nature and magnitude of humanity's transformation of the earth. Having realized it, can we become clever enough at a big enough scale to be able to maintain the rate of progress?"
We may go still further together. We may see it not just preserved, but flourishing.
We attain sustainability, we realize it, see its implied form within the structure of things by loving nature, and the progeny of that: our own nature. We demonstrate liberation from fear to our children by being at one with our deepest core, and we find in that oneness, a hidden umbilical chord connecting ourselves with nature's genius. There are no problems in life. Self-love is the solution to all deceptions that proclaim we are mired in problems. To truly see what is before us we must embrace gratitude to the full.
The world is a beautiful playground when we see it through awakened eyes. There is no greater gift that might bequeath our children.
We serve that end. It is natural to gift this ourselves. To prioritise that for our children and in our schools is elemental.
Centuries hence they will see our time as the period wherein we made good on our commitment to our holistic nature, as individual, as a species, and as guardians of this sublimely beautiful earth.
Sexuality is the juicy fun of man’s being. It is to be honored fully. It is a rich part of the multi-layered tapestry of life.
When a fruit drops to the forest floor it nourishes. It gives the seed the nutrition to support the flowering of new life.
Sex is the nourishing sustenance that relieves tension, supports social cohesion and gives man a divine experience that brings the seeds of new life together.
The Taoist and the Tantric masters explored the divine beauty of sexuality.
And in the 12th century the French troubadours lifted by the troubadours exalted erotic love to another level - and amor or romantic love was born.
Prior to that society was structured around agape or brotherly love and the erotic impulse which was placed within the structure of what your father did.
A son of a blacksmith was likely to marry the daughter of another one. In many parts of the world today this is still the model. Astrology may play a part in the match making but marriage tends to be born of economic station. These are harmless details but not so when the imaginative heart is not recalled; not prized.
Unfortunately in history there has been a lot of guilt projected onto sexuality.
Be it the man’s prostrate. Or a woman’s sexual nature. We get the word embarrassed from the same root that gives us the Spanish word for pregnant. Where there is guilt there is fear. And fear is wisely summarised in the acronym: False Evidence Appearing Real.
It need not be recognized.
It surely is a thing of the past. Of its passed deceptions.
Yet another reason to be grateful ;)
Often, over the course of history, we have been segregated in schools. Boys in one school. Girls in another. We have been mixed too. But that does not mean, as a society, that we have mastered the emotional wisdom necessary for that blending to mix in absolute harmony. As is its destiny.
In Indian mythology three solutions were prescribed to the three problems man encountered over the course of his earthly life:
1. Yoga or psychology for the challenges of mind 2. Ayurveda or medicine for the challenges of the body 3. Precise language for the challenges of communication
When you look at the lack of emotional intelligence in parenting it comes down to miscommunication between two people. To bridge this divide demands that we look within to our own projections and disenthrall ourselves from what is not in harmony with deepest selves. It means to dislodge our belief in inequity. The Native Americans identified five sexes in man. The explorers who first came to the New World and its unspoilt Eden They had never seen a land so uncorrupted. The Europeans saw new geography, new plants, new animals, but the most perplexing curiosity to these people were the aboriginal peoples and their ways of life.
Of all of the foreign life ways Indians held, one of the first the Europeans targeted for elimination was the two spirit tradition among the Native American cultures. The same happened in Asia, Africa and Oceania when the colonialists arrived. At the point of initial contact, all Native American societies acknowledged three to five gender roles: Female, male, Two Spirit female, Two Spirit male and transgendered. And all were recognized for their unique value, their inherent contribution. We might have lost the wisdom of these aboriginal cultures. We tried our best. We raped and we murdered and we pillaged. And yet truth has a way of standing tall. Truth has a way of not being diminished. Truth has this tendency to rise above what is deceived.
Life gives us challenges as gifts. To the bodies eyes it is not apparent, but when we look with a deeper clarity, we find, we come to see that there is a structure, often hidden, but not obscured, that prepares us for greatness, that prescribes a secret harmony. What is blocked yearns to rise up.Something there is within man that teaches patience and forgiveness. Such things are no small lessons. What is impetuous, nervous, reactionary...cannot come to know what is unlimited. Only the calmest countenance can know this, this that cannot fail.
A family is the foundational unit of a culture.
Emotional intelligence or, the lack of it, is passed down generation to generation through the family unit. It happens unconsciously or consciously.
'Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.'
Joseph Campbell
Genetics is about the transfer of biological information across the generations. Culture is about the transfer of emotional intelligence (or lack of it) and knowhow across the generations.
To come to emotional maturity the individual must question where fear has been allowed a free discourse in the ways of his or her heart and mind. What influences are helpful and creative, what are buried and unconscious and destructive. We mimic what we are taught unconsciously. Emotional wisdom brings conscious attention to what is founded in fear and replaces it with a perspective that is grounded in the wisdom of self-love. This is what all families exist to bring out in one another. Including the family of man.
Work is not the purpose of life. But it is essential to human dignity. To contribute. to collaborate. to create.
WThis is what we do when our hearts and minds and hands are aligned.
The word for hand in Latin is “manus.”
From that word we get:
manifest destiny mandate manual manuscript manifest man
Our capacity to fashion things with our hands is critical to who we are.
The heart talks to the head and the head to the hand and so the head aligned with the heart yields all harmony.
When the heart is not attended to...then discord is certain.
When the heart is heeded harmony is guaranteed.
How we prioritize emotional intelligence in the workplace dictates whether our options are to flourish or merely to survive.
When a wise mother looks at her newborn child....her heart full of love...survival is not an option. All her heart wants is for her baby is to see it flourish.
If you look at yourself in the same way, you are looking with the eyes of love.
You begin to see why self-love is at the root of the tree we call wisdom.....
The heart informs the head and the head informs the hand. This is the way of emotional wisdom. When this is abstracted challenges arise. When honored, this is not the case. Technology must serve man.
This is not negotiable with any manner of clever arguments. Fear will create movies and pictured hysteria that sees technology attacking man. That is the narrative associated. We are bigger than this. We at sutranovum recognises this. It suffices.
Imagine a world where man is in harmony with himself, his colleagues, his children, and his neighbors.
What does it look like? To serve and coach growth seems integral to all human endeavors. Certainly when wisdom is involved.Every organization, be it a business, NGO or charity or a government body is peopled by individuals. And what we draw out of ourselves is born of what we see in ourselves.
It all starts and ends with the individual. We can create all kinds of technological advances but fear is what keeps man bound. Wisdom, therefore, prioritizes valuing the human spirit; listening to his or her nuanced sensitivity and innate intelligence. Not being lulled into deceptions about their apparent obstacles to growth. To embrace the inspiration that is aligned with our spirit - rather than a mindstate populated by the imposition of inhibition and emotional baggage requires being attentive to our intuition and sensitivity; practicing gratitude and forbearance. We can choose to look with fear or we can re-focus our intent and our attention and see in to form a deeper perception of ourselves. One that is more freeing and liberating. One that breaks the boundaries of the limits we have unconsciously imposed upon ourselves.
There are two forms of charity. One is ego based. It sees a world of victims. It seems to help those victims. It is founded on fearful empathy. Fearful empathy is: “ I see and feel your pain.” It is naive, for even though it comes from a place of 'meaning well' it tends to perpetuate the victim mentality. True charity is founded on wise empathy. This sees only the strengths in us, it sees what is innocent and when can and did transcend painful past experiences...what reaches for the stars, both literally and figuratively.
An NGO or charity can create many problems or help liberate the world of them.A business can do the same.Surely a business should do good and an NGO should enrich the economy. It Is not difficult to ponder a time when these two approaches merge. Take, for example, a shoe company that makes shoes that are very aware of the impact of the shoe on the curvature of your lower back. That is a form of preventative care. The lines between business and NGO seem quite arbitrary and not so intelligent.If our products and services are doing well in the marketplace they are serving people. If we are creating problems for ourselves/others or if we are perpetuating a victim mind state - in ourselves or others are we being emotionally intelligent?
We can be efficient at being ineffective. We can be inefficient at being effective. And efficient at being effective and inefficient at being effective. And: "The busier you are the lazier you are." Tara Singh True productivity has space to it. It focuses on what is important. Being efficient at being effective is working smart. But we must be emotionally smart as well as logically so. An NGO can "teach men to fish" or it can give out handouts that sustain victim stories. The first activity is effective and hopefully productive. The latter is ineffective. Aid has to be emotionally intelligent to be truly productive and see only the strengths before us and within us. Since the dawn of industrialized society and the digital age man has been through many changes. Things have sped up. Watch a movie from 50 years ago and how slow is the pace compared to one of today.
The shift from the natural rhythms of homesteads and farming communities with their rotating and varied crops and livestock - that creates and sustains rich soils - to the modern pressures on the human being can be considerable. Unemployment has come like a scourge on the landscape. But it need not be a part of our society. Every human being can contribute. We grow when we do. Among the great minds that have turned their attention to the impact of industrialized society, there was the visionary engineer Buckminster Fuller who saw the planet itself as a spaceship and wrote a book about it with that as its title. He said: “Dare to be naive.” We disagree. We believe that is folly. Dare to be innocent yes, but not naive. That is a fool’s wisdom.
Balanced ecosystems
There is a parallel between the story of the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park and the homeless situation in many cities today.
When the wolves are absent the ecosystem (natural economy) degenerated. When they were reintroduced their presence made sure the deer moved away from eating all the fresh growth. The wolves tend to eat the sick and the old and so the herd is kept healthy and streamlined.
With the reintroduction of the wolves, the deer couldn't just hang out at the watering holes and eat all the vegetation by the river. They had to move more and this meant the fertilizer of their droppings got spread out, enriching the land more uniformly. The saplings came back and with them, the songbirds returned and the river banks became stronger.
Recently, the shanty town has come to America - from Los Angeles to Pittsburg, the homeless have arrived because society, in part, has lost it's focus on self-worth. Affluence without wisdom is self-destructive. But affluence with wisdom is creative. With the homeless unemployed population comes hygiene problems, economic challenges, and social decay. All these things are the products of a lack of vision. And a lack of vision always comes down to a lack of self-love, emotional intelligence, and imagination.
These lines by Buckminster Fuller really has captured many an imagination:
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” "Bucky" is to be admired on many levels but this quote should be examined carefully for a number of important reasons. Earning a living is not "nonsense." It's an essential part of being an animal; of being in harmony with one's environment. Ants, monkeys, man...all of us work to live. When we do it wisely, there is ample space and no fear and we flourish, as individuals, as families, as nations and even as species.
Kahil Gibran, the poet, wrote:
"Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, It is better that you should leave your work and sit and the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger."
Work can be seen as a great blessing. To put ones hand's do good use. The word for hand in Latin is ‘manus." It gives us the words:
Manifest
Mandate
Manual
Manuscript
etc
And 'man'
Man is he ‘who uses his hands.’
He can do it wisely and that, essentially, means that the hand is connected to the head which, in turn, is guided by the heart.
Or he can feel overwhelmed and fearful by the pace of changes and a kind of apathy can set in when a lack of emotional intelligence smothers out the wisdom of the human heart and takes over the running of the mind.
There is no finger pointing or blaming in this way of perceiving things; the opposite is in fact true. To go to the root of things one must probe and see what is at the core of a situation, so to be emancipated from the problem which is, of course, essential to embracing the solution most fully. What makes man ‘man’ is his capacity to use his hands and to do meaningful work. Work is not the purpose of life but it gives man a structure and dignity. It helps hone his purpose. The land needs tending, there is so much we can do to improves our society through the wise application of our hands and management of resources. Creativity is deeply connected to happiness. And when wisdom is at work, there is the courage to go beyond fearful approaches. To foster real change, to be creative and share of our worth through our endeavors, our imagination and our spirits are brought to life by questioning the status quo and investing in the potentials we harbor. Regarding Bucky's second point about technology being a source of liberation, great, we should welcome that. Embracing technological advancements is natural and healthy. But “waiting by the river” and propping up dejected spirits in the name of the “spurious” second coming of Bucky Fuller is not.
It is inspired to contemplate using technology for more refined and liberated lives.
Yet an economic story where man has stepped away from his creative output is like the deer who are not kept in check by the presence of the wolves. The police are not wolves. They do not solve the homeless situation, They do not regenerate the river. They put the homeless on the greyhound bus. Or they clear out the tent cities and the disenfranchised move on to somewhere else. The problem is not cured. Not resolved. Just a band-aid on a broken leg. Seeing people as victims is not compassionate. Real compassion sees the strengths in people. Their “get up and go,” their innate talents, their wisdom, and innate power. No, what heals that situation is a different path inwardly regarding self-worth and passion for the creative experience. Is it 'compassionate'’ to keep people down living by the river waiting for the second coming of Bucky or is compassion seeing such people genuinely engaged in the thriving economic heart of the community? Surely, the latter is based on true vision.
Sometimes, the apparent story isn’t what it seems. Alan Savory in Africa is the perfect example. He was hired by the Zimbabwean government to figure out land management to reverse desertification and he discovered that the conventional wisdom was wrong. Conventional wisdom said that the land could only handle small amounts of grazing animals otherwise desert formed. The opposite is actually true. Given the natural predators were gone, large amounts of grazing animals destroyed the land - but when kept in check by putting them in makeshift pens at night they pooped all over their confined area and that fertilizer was vital to regenerative processes in the ecology of the land. This reversed desertification absolutely.
There is a direct connection between economic regeneration and how we engage with each other. Trust is key to man’s flowering. Trust in himself. Trust in each other and who we are. When people are given a fish, rather than taught to fish, we create dependence. We do not educate. Educate means to pull out what is inside us.
Villgro is an organization out of India that coordinates philanthropy with mentors and a deliberate focus on leveraging latent talent and maintaining sustainable economies. They are by far one of the most successful charities in their field, for the simple reason that they recognize how people need the right quality of relationships to truly feel appreciated and to appreciate - to really flower and flourish.
Image courtesy of Villgro.org
No money is given to an entrepreneurial project unless there are mentors in the story. providing that vital human connection. This fosters strong supportive communities and happy thriving businesses. There is great wisdom in these collective approaches. And profound emotional intelligence.
When we come to ourselves in such a spirit - we are choosing to sink or swim. We can swim and enjoy the journey or we can lose site of the emotional wisdom that matters. That is surely not a choice. It is a vital decision. Such intelligence can inform our economic stories. Indeed, it is absolutely vital that it does. A choice is one that is made between alternatives. It is arbitrary. In contrast, a decision is a decisive action. It is made because we have recognized the path of least resistance, of greatest meaning, of deepest value, of clearest harmony...because we have looked without distraction, we see to the core of things and we are not deceived. Such things give us reason to pause...and cause for celebration.
They are the weave of who we are.
Our retreats are primarily devoted to emotional intelligence. To embrace self-love is to outgrow deception at the ego level. You are the light of the world. You are the epicenter of meaning and the font of all healed perspectives.
We focus on coaching out the strengths in you. To be grateful and wise often can involve a retraining of the mind. We focus on going away into beauty spots in nature to access those quiet places within potent and aligned with our calmest most empowered selves. Be leaving the workaday world we embrace retreats that re-align ourselves with our most vibrant and joyous selves.
sutranovum runs various retreats over the course of a year.
To learn more about upcoming retreats sign up here:
To coordinate a retreat in your country or to a city near you contact us at retreats@sutranovum.com