Organizing reflection 28

This is a post in my series on organizing ”between and beyond.” Other posts are here. The purpose of this post is to reflect on subjects occupying my mind. I make no claim to fully believe what I write. Neither do I pretend that others have not already thought or written about the same subject. More often than not, I take up, combine, and add to already existing thoughts and ideas.

What is on my mind?
This reflection is inspired by Leo Zeff and Bill Plotkin.

I just finished reading The Secret Chief Revealed: Conversations with Leo Zeff, pioneer in the underground psychedelic therapy movement by Myron J. Stolaroff.

Leo Zeff describes, what he calls, the picture trip (my emphasis in bold):

One at a time I hand them the pictures [of themselves]. The pictures, they don’t react much to the two- to four-year-old pictures. Some time around the age of six is a very significant picture for them. That’s the point in life where we lose our naturalness and we start taking on the acts of the world and behaving the way people tell us to and start squelching our own naturalness. Frequently they get to that picture and they start to cry. And cry and cry and cry.¹

I’m taping everything that’s being said. They’ll do a lot of talking and a lot of crying. And a lot of ruminating, and remembering. This talking is very important to them later on when they go back and listen to it. It reconnects them with their whole experience,²

This reminds me of what Bill Plotkin says in this Earth Talk at Schumacher College (my emphasis in bold):

When we are young …
we make a promise that we forgot …
The promise we made was:
I agree not to sing in my true voice,
if I can get psychological and social safety
in exchange for that.
…
So, we make that promise, and …
at some point, we have to break it:
We have to agree that
we are going to speak in our true voice,
we are going to sing our true song.³

In generative organizing, we have to agree to speak in our true voice from our own naturaleness.

Notes:
¹ Myron J. Stolaroff, The Secret Chief Revealed: Conversations with Leo Zeff, pioneer in the underground psychedelic therapy movement (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic studies, 2004, first published 1997), p.74.
² Ibid..
³ Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed), DartingtonTV, Bill Plotkin – Soulcraft – YouTube (26:45–28:33), Published Oct 3, 2013 (accessed August 23, 2018).

Related posts:
Organizing in between and beyond posts