Focalizing: Loss and a New World Vision
By Michael Picucci, PhD, MAC, SEP, Focalizing Topic Expert Contributor
(Originally posted on October 4, 2011 )
Last week, my eldest brother, Bob, died after years of health challenges. We were never really close; my brother and I had opposite worldviews. I dreaded his forwarded emails, which I politely asked him to stop sending. They came anyway; he was determined to save me.
At the time of Bob’s difficult passing, I was reading Lynne McTaggart’s new book The Bond, which was highly recommended to me by my friends at the Institute for Noetic Sciences. In this groundbreaking book we discover scientifically that “the essential impulse of all life is a will to connect rather than a drive to compete. In fact, we are inescapably connected, hardwired to each other at our most fundamental level—from cells to whole societies.”
The Bond provided me with a language to describe my own shifting personal perspective (of everything), casting a palpable energy beyond me. Bob’s death highlighted what the book refers to as “relativity awareness.” It grounded my own notion that competition as a fundamental human urge made no sense.
I have been writing about wholeness and what it means to us for decades. Yet, Lynne’s book catapulted me to a new threshold of envisioning it everywhere. I suddenly experienced my dying brother from his inside out, and all around. Our differences lost all significance and I felt a strong compassion, love and new connection with Bob that was real. What a lovely gift, and it went out beyond Bob to every person alive!
I found this exciting as it also relates so well to the potential of global transformation. Through the work of Otto Sharmer and the evolution of Theory U — an elegant process that offers both a new theoretical perspective and a practical social technology — we can see how they are naturally related. Otto works closely with Peter Senge, with whom he co-authored Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Both senior lecturers at MIT, Otto and Senge, along with many others, launched the Presencing Institute, toward creating a Global Awareness Based Action Research University, that addresses root causes of current economic, ecological, social, and spiritual crisis. They also ignited Transforming Capitalism through Presence, which uses Theory U, Presencing, Focalizing, or whatever one might call it, to bring us to the core of nature’s wisdom within—allowing for the future that wants to emerge through us.
It seems that merely looking back to confront today’s challenges simply no longer works. Tuning respectfully into nature (our own, and the planet’s) sends signals through the body and consciousness of beauty, love, compassion, sharing and expansion. As many of us have been saying along with Lynne in her book, “We sense that we have reached the end of something. The world as we knew it is going down.” The false view of us as separate is also going down, as we gradually emerge to the potential of a better future.
Just as my differences with Bob were dissolved and replaced with compassion and connection, our new world-story can be seeing and giving from wholeness, or the Bond that is alive between us. The Bond energy, wholeness, or the creative source energy found in Presence or stillness, is where to look for a new world. Check out my website resource page on Focalizing.com if you want to hop on the ride.
© Copyright 2011 by By Michael Picucci, PhD, MAC, SEP, therapist in New York City, New York. All Rights Reserved.