Systems Thinking

"Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole." Wikipedia

"Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause new problems." Wendell Berry essay - The Body and the Earth

Challenged, O"

Give me that pill.....

Okay.....raise your hand if you have ever used performance enhancing drugs. Don't worry, no one will know you are reading this blog when you do.

Those of you who internally scoffed and said something like, "Of course not, I am not a professional athlete.", or, "I didn't even play sports in high school or college, why would I need to get a leg up on anyone else?", probably weren't thinking about the drug, Adderall, often prescribed for ADHD or Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

As I talk with college students about this, it is apparent that this popular drug is widely available on campuses around the country and cost a few dollars a per pill on the black market for students wanting a competitive advantage.

Say what! Yes, it is common knowledge among students that taking Adderall while studying for an exam, enables them to buckle down and lock in with a Zen like focus for extended periods of time.

The scenario seems to be wide spread. A student pops a pill, and then hunkers down in the library for hours of intense concentration. They are so focused and productive that it becomes hard to tear themselves away from the books, to get ready for an evening of socializing.

The Adderall is dictating one type of behavior and their hormones another. Tough choice.

If you know your classmates are taking a pill to enhance their ability to study and ultimately better prepare for exams, what's your strategy to keep up. Drink more coffee? For many, they see nothing wrong in mimicking what others are already doing to get ahead.

Sounds like the scandal in professional sports. Athletes recognize performance enhancing drugs are necessary if they are going to stay competitive with their peers.

Many parents with students (at all levels) get them diagnosed with ADHD so they have a legitimate prescription to keep them more focused 24/7/365. This might be especially advantageous for an easily distracted young boy, in a classroom full of more mature and capable girls. Most of us guys need all the help we can get to keep up with more sophisticated gals at all levels of life.

I'm not sure I would have traded my evenings and weekends of socializing in college for extended times in the library, even if hits of speed transformed me into a straight A test taker. But then again, maybe students today can have their cake and eat it too.

Alcohol has been around forever and is readily available for those wanting to kick start their social lives and lubricate the hormonal pull towards relating and connecting after the intensity of a day holed up in the library.

"Give me that pill...! I have to keep up with my friends."

"Give me that drink....! I have to connect with my friends.

"Give that other pill...! I have to get some sleep."

"Give me that smoke...! I need to relax."

"Give me that coffee...! I have to wake up."

"Give me that......."

Honesty and Truth-Telling in Families

Nobody said it would be easy, but most of us grew up assuming that our parents would never intentionally lie to us, or deliberately conceal information about important things.

As kids we expected straight answers. After all if we couldn't be told the truth by our mom and dad, how could we ever begin to trust the universe, including our own internal world of thoughts, feelings and perceptions.

Here is where the problems begin. Parents can be no more honest and direct with their children than they are with themselves. And as a parent, I recognize the natural drift to focus on what I perceive as being 'good for us' rather than what is true.

I am as guilty as anyone in routinely telling my children when they were young what I thought to be helpful rather than conveying my true regrets, struggles, doubts, and uncertainties. It was much easier to talk about "how it should have been" than "how it really is or was for them."

As Harriet Lerner describes it...."we rarely describe our reality to each other with candor, and this failure constitutes a tremendous loss, for it is through our stories, which create an authentic connection with significant others, that we begin to uncover our deepest truth."

Anxiety and a reactive emotional climate makes it difficult to push against silence and secrecy in a family system. "I just can't be real; I can't be myself", is often an unspoken symptom of underground anxiety reverberating through the life of children. They learn from a young age to recognize and tiptoe around invisible family mine fields.

From generation to generation reactivity accumulates over time. Intense and painful events that have never been processed remain embedded in the emotional landscape of families, only to be reenacted with each new generation.

And it is this level of underground anxiety (emotional reactivity) in a family that determines how much freedom the offspring have to discover, clarify and express their own realities (truth as they experience it), and how accurately they will see themselves and others.

Anxiety polarizes and herds family members often towards fusion or the opposite, cut-offs. Toward disclosing too much or too little. Toward completely avoiding a subject, or focusing on it incessantly.

By the time chronic anxiety (as opposed to acute situational anxiety) becomes the family norm, it tends to lock members into a rigid authoritarian rules bound system or the opposite fluid and chaotic family system that is out of control. Either way, kids suffer in both extremely anxious family polarities.

Someone eventually has to take the lead and openness and truth-telling can't begin until at least one person steps up, calms down, and really begins to think rather than to merely react. Any movement towards greater truth-telling in our families will requires us to:

1. define ourselves more clearly to one another

2. to see other family members more objectively

3. to talk straighter about family issues that matter

4. and to acknowledge in oneself and others the full, shifting range of competencies and vulnerabilities that make us human

Usually that someone in the family is a motivated adult who has the capacity to reshape the emotional climate of the family system by changing their behavior. (A child generally has limited capacity to problem solve and to take risks with the adults on whom their very survival often depends.)

Positive moves toward truth-telling require us to remain less anxious, and to arrive at a place where our wish to understand the other people in our family is as great as our desire to be better understood by them.

Honesty and simply "being ourselves" is not to be equated with uncensored raw expressions of thoughts and feelings that are merely dumped out into the family system. Instead, being strategic rather than spontaneous may include timing and tact on our part.

Truth-telling requires us to "be ourselves", but to also exercise restraint as it may take extended time and effort to clarify our positions on how we really think and feel, and where we stand on important family issues.

Asking questions and remaining calm (I call it sitting on your hands) helps promote a less anxious process, and each question and disclosure often times evokes more new questions, new feelings and new disclosures.

Laying the groundwork for becoming better truth-tellers is a life long challenge. It can begin at any age, and be done by each and every family member over time. Where lies, secrets and silence have prevailed in the past, families can begin to reverse the process with humble acknowledgment and declarations of forgiveness.

The good news is that it's never to late. We can begin today. The great news is that we have little to lose and lots to gain. Why bother going into emotion-laden issues with our families?

Why not bother? There is probably no better way to discovering our own truths than to unearth the stories and family events that have shaped our own stories. These stories are us, and it is in exchanging and refining our personal experiences that we can begin to know our own truths. Amen.

Enjoy the challenge!

Cheers,

O'

PS Peter, John, Nick and Annie - I'm all ears......OK, I need hearing aids sometimes, thanks for the journey! Love DAD

Adopted from the materials of Harriet G. Lerner, Honesty and Truth-Telling

Timing: Finding Mr. Right at the wrong time.

A young acquaintance of mine stated that she had met the 'right person' at the 'wrong time'. She went on to talk about the complexities of romantic relationships, and her pattern of meeting Mr. Right at the most inopportune times.

Mr. Right just happened to be married this time, and so it was extremely complicated she said. Without asking, I pondered how she happened to fall for a married man. She already knew what I was thinking and blurted out that they worked closely together in a stressful environment and quite naturally began to lean on one another emotionally which eventually erupted into a full blown sexual affair.

She reminded me that he was already unhappy in his marriage and that it was only a matter of time before he left his wife anyway. So I asked her why she was questioning the timing just now. Wasn't she going to get what she wanted? Mr. Right would soon be divorced and they could marry in time.

There's one big problem she said. "His wife is three months pregnant with their first child. This complicates everything! He will have to pay child support, work out visitations and of course remain in constant communication with her....... which will drive me crazy."

I asked if she had ever met his wife. "Yes, we know each other, she was a grade ahead of me in school. It will be very difficult for us both."

I sat on my hands and she continued to talk. She carried on for a bit and then began to cry. I let her.

Finding Mr. Right at the wrong time can be very stressful and I had no comforting words of wisdom. That was over six months ago and I have not heard from her since.

I have subsequently been in two more conversations recently with acquaintances (both married and single) who also found the right person at the wrong time. Getting the timing down seems to be a common problem among our species.

As my wise friend and colleague Rod would say, "We always want what we can't have." My wife Ann might put it this way, "She found Mr. Wrong at the wrong time. She could find Mr. Right at the right time, anytime."

I would say trust your gut, not your head or your heart and you will know if the timing is right. If not, well, you can always avoid personal responsibility and blame the other person.

Money..money..money..money.........MONEY !

MONEY - exploring the relationship between money and anxiety.

Join us Friday afternoon, March 26th from 4:30 - 7:00pm, for the beginning of an ongoing conversation with Bob Hunter. Curb your anxiety at the door of the Reynolds home - 3173 N. Delaware Street. Refreshments included of course!

• Money as a generator of anxiety
• Money as an attempt to bind anxiety
• Money as an expression of anxious reactivity
• Money and anxious families

Find Money..money..money..money..........MONEY! on YouTube the next day.

I lost my wife again !

Ann is in Hawaii this week with Janet and YWAM Kona......Peter is in NYC this weekend visiting John, Nick is headed to New Orleans and Annie ships out to Mexico with 12 ZTA's . That leaves me home alone in Indy - dog sitting for spring break.......!

Berserk Viking & Celtic Warriors

Berserk - the Viking and Celtic warriors who went "berserk" - (bear-shirted) - made a journey to the transcendent world, from which they eventually returned after warfare...and then men and women of the tribe cooled them down and reintroduced them with great care back to the human community again. Today we encourage our soldiers to go berserk and then simply discharge them out into the streets.

Robert Bly IRON JOHN

For Silent Reflection

I purpose to pursue what is in my heart and live with the anxiety and adventure this requires. My focus will be on what is the right question rather than the right answer.

The priority in life is aim over speed, and creating meaningful action and momentum right now despite uncertainty. I will put aside safety and instead view life as a wonderful experiment in God's unfolding Kingdom that is more about learning, development and maturing than merely achieving.

A primary goal is for establishing relationship rather than power, speed or efficiency; for making the choice of a worthy destination rather than the limitation of engaging simply in what I know works. The key is living a meaningful life in the pursuit of what matters.

What matters creates a deeper purpose highlighted by my capacity to dream, reclaim my freedom and once again be idealistic. (The current culture is focused on getting things done, pragmatic, totalitarian, asking wrong questions, predictably with a focus on 'how').

Living into what matters gives my life to things that are hard to measure, invisible, important to me (not them), providing motivation to do what I do. Living with a priority of what matters, I am on a path of risk and adventure, a life of service and engagement; a life transformed by creating something together.

My primary concern becomes the world that I co-create within community. I long to tap into my deepest true self as I connect in refreshing ways of being together with others.

We define our dialogue and discussion via the questions we address. Valid expressions of healthy community help us create more effective workplaces, leading to insight over control, with vision, purpose, common goals, empowerment and flexible structures.

We encourage leadership styles and learning organizations where we are free to fail, while living out our spiritual and human callings. Finally, our accountability to one another must be chosen to ensure that it is not mere compliance or coercion.

Adapted from The Answer to How is Yes by Peter Block Highlighted by O'Steven

The Sacrament of Sexual Union

Wendell Berry

Highlights from The Art of the Common Place (from the notes of O'Steven)

The most dangerous and most immediately painful consequence of the disintegration of the household is the isolation of sexuality...the division of sexual energy from the functions of household and community that it ought both to empower and to grace. This is analogous to that other modern division between hunger and the earth.

When sexuality is no longer allied by proximity and analogy to the nurturing disciplines that bound the household to the cycles of fertility and the seasons, life and death, then sexual love loses its symbolic or ritualistic force, its deepest solemnity and its highest joy. Sex loses its sense of consequence and responsibility as it becomes "autonomous" to be valued only for its own sake, therefore frivolous and destructive, even of itself.

Those who speak of sex as "recreation" only acknowledge its displacement from Creation. The isolation of sexuality makes it subject to two influences that dangerously over simply it: the lore of sexual romance (sentimentalization of sexual love) and capitalist economics....and by means of them, young people have been taught a series of extremely dangerous falsehoods.

1. that people in love ought to conform to the fashionable models of physical beauty, and that to be unbeautiful by these standards is to be unlovable

2. that people in love are, or ought to be, young - even though love is said to last "forever"

3. that marriage is a solution - whereas the most misleading thing a love story can do is end "happily" with a marriage, not because there is no such thing as a happy marriage, but because marriage cannot be happy except by being made happy

4. that love, alone, regardless of circumstances, can make harmony and resolve serious differences

5. that "love will find a way" and so finally triumph over any kind of practical difficulty

6. that the "right" partners are "made for each other", or that "marriages are made in heaven"

7. that lovers are "each other's all" or "all the world to each other"

8. that monogamous marriage is therefore logical and natural, and "forsaking all others' involves no difficulty

Believing in these things, a young couple could not be more cruelly exposed to the abrasions of experience - or better prepared to experience marriage as another of those grim and ironic modern competitions in which the victory of one is defeat of both.

The exclusiveness of the sentimental ideal gives way to the possessiveness of sexual capitalism, and failing as they cannot help but fail, to be each others all, the husband and wife become each other's only and the sacrament of sexual union, which in the time of the household was a communion of workmates, and afterwards tried to be a lover's paradise, has now become a kind of marketplace in which the husband and wife represent each other as sexual property.

In the isolation of the resulting sexual "privacy" the disintegration of the community begins. Sexual energy that is the most convivial and unifying loses it communal forms and becomes divisive. The disintegration of marriage which completes the disintegration of community, came about because the encapsulation of sexuality, meant to preserve marriage from competition, inevitably enclosed competition and the principle that fenced everyone out fenced the couple in; it became a sexual cul-de-sac, and the model of economic competition proved as false to marriage as to farming.

The narrowness of the selective principle proved destructive of what it excluded, and what it excluded was essential to the life of what it enclosed: the nature of sexuality itself...sexual romance can't bear to acknowledge the generality of instinct, whereas sexual capitalism can't acknowledge its particularity, but sexuality appears to be both general and particular. One can't love a particular woman, for instance, unless one loves womankind, if not all women, at least other women.

Sexual romance leaves out this generality, this generosity of instinct; it excludes Aphrodite and Dionysus, and it fails for that reason...though sexual love can endure between the same two people for a long time, it can't do so on the basis of this pretense of the exclusiveness of affection.

The sexual capitalist - that is the disillusioned sexual romantic, in reaction to disillusion makes the opposite oversimplification; one acknowledges one's spouse as one of a general, necessarily troublesome kind of category.

These attitudes look on sexual love as ownership and the sexual romantic - "you belong to me" and the sexual capitalist believes the same thing but has stopped the crooning....each holding that a person's sexual property shall be sufficient unto him or her, and that the morality of that sufficiency is to be forever on guard against expropriation. One tends to exploit one's property and to protect it....and the tragedy is that what is exploited becomes undesirable. The protective capsule becomes a prison, a household of the living dead.

Marriage shrinks to a dull vigil of duty and legality and husband and wife become competitors necessarily, for their only freedom is to exploit each other or to escape.

A more generous enclosure is a household welcoming to neighbors and friends, a garden open to the weather, between the woods and the road. It is possible to imagine a marriage bond that would bind a woman and a man not only to each other, but to the community of marriage, the amorous communion at which all couples sit; the sexual feast and celebration that joins them to all living things and to the fertility of the earth; and the sexual responsibility that joins them to the human past and the human future.

It is possible to imagine marriage as a grievous, joyous human bond, endlessly renewable and renewing again and again rejoining memory and passion and hope.

Generation to Generation

The Family Reunion

In an old house there is always listening,

and more is heard than is spoken.

And what is spoken remains in the room,

waiting for the future to hear it.

And whatever happens began in the past,

and presses hard on the future.

The agony in the curtained bedroom,

whether of birth or of dying,

Gathers in to itself all the voices of the past,

and projects them into the future.

T.S. Eliot

28 Years later - October 3, 1981 - October 3, 2009

Love you lots! The wife of my youth - Ann, and our offspring - Nick, John, Peter, O' and Annie! As usual, your assignment is to stay out of control and go out in life and have more fun than you should....enjoy the challenge -cheers, DAD

Focus on Strength H.E./R.O.

White Board adapted from Rabbi Edwin H. Friedman DD and his keynote presentation for the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy in 1992. (AAMFT)

"In a society oriented towards pathology rather than strength, it tends to measure the toxicity of any condition (physical illness, economic situation, race, gender, aging, boss, board of trustees, any statistical study emphasizing 'risk' factors) as equal to the strength x the number of pathogenic factors in the environment. With H.E. standing for the hostile environment we then get: H.E. = S.N. The hostility of an environment equals the strength x the number of toxic factors in the environment. But that is really not an accurate view of life, for the most part.

It is certainly accurate for radiation, falling out of an airplane or being held under water. Those situations are critically linear. But for most of the problems human beings face, a more accurate equation is a fraction which states that the potential hostility of any condition is proportional to the response of the organism, H.E./R.O., with R.O. embracing such factors as the organism's stamina, resiliency, self regulation, hope, etc. Now, as you all know from the simplest algebra, even a slight increase in a denominator (R.O.) has great power to reduce the value of any numerator (H.E.). More important, when the denominator (R.O.) heads toward zero (which occurs in a passive, victim stance or its opposite, a highly reactive non self-regulatory attitude), then no matter how small the numerator (H.E. i.e. the potentially toxic condition), it takes on infinite proportions.

In a society that is oriented towards pathology, the tendency is to focus only on the horizontal axis. The growth of human beings, however, the maturing of relationships, the evolution of our species, and perhaps all healing that endures, depends more on the qualities that can be measured by the vertical axis.

Obviously, if your major goal is social action and the direct modification of toxic factors in the environment, then the horizontal axis is, and should be, your focus. But I am speaking from a clinical point of view, and in that context, orientation towards the horizontal axis rather than the vertical is counter-evolutionary. Indeed, unless the strengths of family members are supported and promoted, then all efforts to improve the environment will be eroded from within. In other words, improvements in the external condition of families will not last where there is not a corresponding strengthening of our species' assets. Another way of saying this is all healing that endures is self-regenerative, meaning not only that the healing process must be located in the organism to be healed, rather than the healer, but also because then the very act of healing creates more self, i.e. movement up the vertical scale."

The Challenge of Change and the Spirit of Adventure by Rabbi Edwin H. Friedman DD

Rabbi Ed Friedman on Steward of the Vision

"The steward of the 'Vision' is also the steward of the self."

Rabbi Ed Friedman reminds us that a leader is one who can most fire the groups imaginative capacities while stimulating their resources.

In his thinking a leader:

1. functions with integrity
2. promotes responsibility in others
3. clearly defines themselves to others
4. regulates their own anxiety
5. stay's connected to others
6. stimulates the groups strengths and resources
7. stays the course

Leaders act on what they believe and try to live life to the max. Effective leaders:

a. are focused on self (integrity, responsibility) and not on others
b. focus on strength and empower people, stirring the groups resources, enlarging everyone's options
c. they help people grow by discerning between content and process, giving time to situations, and staying goal oriented
d. focus on challenge and not on comfort - without shaming or scolding, instead asking questions, pointing everyone to the imaginative capacities of the cortex, inviting more light

Comforters, appeasers, know it all advisors are not helpful in anxious relationship systems

e. focus on integrity and not unity - looking through the window of our soul, not on pleasing or being nice (not mechanical maneuvering of people, or our need for others love and approval)

Love is only possible when we speak through the window of our own soul and speak the truth as we experience it.

There is no true unity if integrity is compromised - being committed to the truth is far more powerful than any technique.

f. focus on the system and not the symptom - we sometimes see what is happening but not what led to it (preoccupied with a symptom and its cause or relief rather than on the system) We then miss what the system is about, the structure, patterns and proceses behind the symptoms.

Integrity = soundness, completeness, unity, purity (synonym - honesty)

Secrecy = anxious reactivity - it only produces more anxiety, secrets therefore are generators of triangles and the secrecy itself is harmful, not the contents of the secret.

Secret meetings (closed) neglect the counsel to speak the truth in love. We often protect and refuse to expose irresponsible whispers.

Adapted from Rabbi Ed Friedman books - Generation to Generation and Failure of Nerve

Rabbi Ed Friedman on Anxiety & Change

Adopted from Rabbi Ed Friedman - Failure of Nerve Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix

Another White Board designed by O'Steven

'Vision is basically an emotional rather than a cerebral phenomenon, depending more on a leader's capacity to deal with anxiety than his or her professional training or degree.'
Rabbi Ed Friedman

Don't take it personally

Shitz.......when was the last time you ruined someone's life. How many times have you heard "If it wasn't for you I'd be......bla, bla, bla freakin happy!" Chances are that somebody has broadcast a similar accusation your way, and the older you get the more opportunities you have to step into that shocking projection of a friend, spouse, parent, sibling, associate or adult child (heck today we even hear it from ten year old kids yelling at their mom's.)

Don't take it personally. I'm always reminded of Rod's typically nonanxious statement to distraught "victims" of such an outburst: "Relax, you are just not that powerful." Apparently, unless you are a King or Queen (or pathologically abusive to children who can't yet stand on their own two feet) it is almost impossible to wreck another person's life.

Rabbi Freidman's constant encouragement that the maturity of our response to such common pathogens (reactive outbursts) is much more important than the actual accusation itself, is the key to personal growth and stewardship of self.

It seems that the majority of blame throwers are just reacting out of their own pent up fears and anxieties. Heck, reactive sabotage may even be a sign that you are actually on the right track. So don't take it personally. Remember his five keys to effective leadership of self and others:

1.) generate the capacity to separate yourself from the surrounding emotional processes
2.) increase your capacity to obtain clarity about your guiding principles and life goals/vision
3.) be willing to be exposed and to be vulnerable - be "fierce with reality"
4.) manifest persistence in the face of inertial resistance, from friends, associates and family
5.) focus on self-regulation (taking personal responsibility) in the face of reactive sabotage.

Amen,
O'

Characteristics of Chronically Anxious Families

Here is a description of five interlocking characteristics of chronically anxious individual families and their regressive parallels in the greater American family of today. Each is regressive because it subverts a major principle of the way life on this planet has survived and evolved, as shown below:

CHARACTERISTICS - of anxious individual and families
1. Reactivity
2. Herding
3. Blame Displacement
4. A Quick-Fix Mentality
5. Failure of Nerve in Leadership

EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS SUBVERTED
1. Reactivity subverts our self-regulation of instinctual drives
2. Herding subverts our adaptation toward strength
3. Blame displacement subverts a growth-producing response to challenge
4. A quick-fix-mentality subverts allowing time form processes to mature
5. Failure of nerve in leadership subverts all of the above.

"All five characteristics contribute to one another, although the fifth, lack of leadership, may be the link among them all. For the first four all share two factors in common that always tend to compromise effective leadership: denial of emotional process and a devaluing of the individuality that is necessary for summoning 'nerve'."

A Failure of Nerve - Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix by Edwin H. Friedman

Fierce with reality - saying Yes to your true self

"This is not the self that wants to inflate us (or deflate us, another form of self-distortion), not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract code. It is the self planted in us by God who made us in God's own image - the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be.

True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one's peril.

The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes. One of them is that the humiliation that brings us down - down to ground on which it is safe to stand and fall - eventually takes us to a firmer and fuller sense of self. When people ask me how it felt to emerge from depression, I can give only one answer: I felt at home in my own skin, and at home on the face of the earth, for the first time.

Florida Scott Maxwell put it in terms more elegant than mine: "You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done...you are fierce with reality." I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

Some may say that this embrace is narcissistic, an obsession with self at the expense of others, but that is not how I experience it. When I ignored my own truth on behalf of a distorted ego and ethic, I led a false life that caused others pain - for which I can only ask forgiveness. When I stand attending to my own truth, more of that truth became available in my work and my relationships. I now know that anything one can do on behalf of true self is done ultimately in the service of others.

Others may say that "embracing one's wholeness" is just fancy talk for permission to sin, but again my experience is to the contrary. To embrace weakness, liability, and darkness as part of who I am gives that part less sway over me, because all it ever wanted was to be acknowledged as part of my whole self.

At the same time, embracing one's wholeness makes life more demanding - because once you do that, you must live your whole life. One of the most painful discoveries I made in the midst of the dark woods of depression was that part of me wanted to stay depressed.

I had missed the deep meaning of a biblical teaching that I had always regarded as a no-brainer: "I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Therefore, choose life" (Deut. 30:19). Why, I wondered, would God waste precious breath on saying something so obvious? I had failed to understand the perverse comfort we sometimes get from choosing death in life, exempting ourselves from the challenge of using our gifts, or living our lives in authentic relationship with others.

I was finally able to say yes to life, a choice for which I am grateful beyond measure, though how I found that yes remains a mystery to me."

Let Your Life SPEAK - Listening for the Voice of Vocation
by Parker J. Palmer

Three Universal Laws Regarding Children

Rabbi Ed Friedman reminds us that there are at least three universal laws regarding children of all families. These universal laws transcend all cultural and sociological characteristics:

1.) children who work through the natural problems of maturing with the least amount of emotional or physical residue are those whose parents have made them least important to their own salvation. (Maturity = defined as the willingness to take responsibility for one's own emotional well being and destiny.)

2.) children rarely succeed in rising above the maturity level of their parents and this principle applies to all mentoring, healing, or administrative relationships

3. a third universal, which also applies to all leaders, is that parents can't produce change in a troubling child, no matter how caring, savvy, or intelligent they may be, until they become completely and totally fed-up with their child's behavior

Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix
by Edwin Friedman

Beautiful Women

Steve - Hey Hey Scott, check out the highlights on the chemistry of attraction and love...shame! Enjoy the challenge,
O'

Scott - Beautiful women make men stupid!!!! What was the Creator thinking....

Steve - What a brilliant solution to embed an all powerful chemically driven gravitational force field in the biology of the sexes to insure multiplication. What puzzles me then is the condemnation that Jesus articulates for those of us who would naturally cooperate with this instinctual magnetism..
Shitz!!!!

Scott - Yea, I hate it when I have to use other parts of my brain...

Steve - There you have it Scott, you have just summarized the Law, the Gospel and Bowen Theory in a few short words!!! Love the Lord with....Seek first the Kingdom and...manage emotional (instinctual) behavior....Amen.
O'