Lynn Twist on Taking A Stand

Lynne dropped in after our Open Space session to speak for 40 minutes. Wow! I never thought about taking a stand this way. Here is what comes out of her passion as she stands before us:

It is just so clear that the Symposium is what everyone is wanting. In many ways it gives people a sense of security within themselves. It gives people a sense of blessed unrest and a state of peace.

Lynne is working on a project for 7 women Nobel Peace Laureates. Six of them have come together (one of them cannot as she is under house arrest in Burma) to combine resources to help other peace activists. They were blown away by the mission of Symposium and they will be taking it. They are people like you and they are coming together with a bigger vision to help all of us. The most powerful thing that they could do is to get their communities exposed to the Symposium.

People around the whole world are feeling a state of fear and worry which is a form of negative prayer. The symposium helps people transcend their anger, fear, hatred. The Symposium takes people out of worry and gives us a recognition that we are not flawed, we are just not seeing it right. Mother Theresa says, “Fear is not the opposite of love, it is the absence of love.” When you fall in love with the human family, that fear gets displaced with love.

When you take a stand you stop having a point of view to a point of having vision. Taking a stand is a whole domain which is quite different than taking a position which always generates its opposite. When a position gets held strongly, it gets more and more entrenched. One gets more caught. Things polarize more and that creates an escalation of right vs. wrong, for or against.

When we find in ourselves taking a stand we are not coming from positioning. There is space for you, you are uplifted by it, and elevated the quality of the dialogue. Positioning creates the opposite. Mahatma Gandhi took a stand for humanity. Stand takers rarely have a position of authority. They derive their authority out of the stand that they have taken. There is room for everyone’s position within it.

You are stand takers. You are no longer only about me. Stand takers join a domain of distinction that allows them to have an uncommon wisdom. This stand is about vision which makes room for others. The Nobel women are no different than you. They were shocked when they got the Nobel prize because they thought they were just regular people.

I saw those facilitators standing in front of the room today. That thing you call Open Space is messy, disorganized and we are still doing our best. To the point of ridiculous, we often are crazy, doing as much as we can do. But we stand here in vision. Each of you has a vision which is way bigger than yourselves.

All the people in the world who have come before, that have done something for me, for you, for your grandchildren, they all had this vision. My granddaughter can vote because some women took a stand.

Of all the quotes in the Symposium, the one which gets me most is by David Ulansey, “We have the opportunity to live the most meaningful lives that humankind has ever had.”

I bow to you because you are the pioneers. It is messy. It is untidy. It takes time. It is inconvenient. It’s annoying, It’s expensive. But when you are enlisted it frees you up. It is a liberation, then you can find your integrity inside of it, because you have surrendered to the vision. If you fight it is difficult, if you surrender to it, you are carried. We are the ones with the willingness to carry humanity.

One of the greatest of Pachamama’s accomplishments is our body of facilitators. You are the cadres…the barefoot doctors. You are humanity’s imaginal cells waking up and waking everybody else up. You are the DNA of the butterfly. You are creating the clusters, as we say in the symposium, which will generate a new system for humanity.

The rest of the world, traditional institutions are no longer relevant and not really sustainable. They are beginning to dissolve into the nutritive soup out of which will grow an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presence on this planet.