For the busy person who is overwhelmed by the amount to learn
It is not difficult to experience overwhelm when coming to grips with the amount of learning material presented to us on Regeneration. If you are feeling this way, pause for a moment, take a deep breath and enter the quantum with me for some shared reflection. This I believe will help you engage in ‘the live Game of Regeneration’.
Approach #1 - Drink it in slowly
There is nothing for you to do. There is no prescription. If you so choose, just sit back, relax and let it all wash over you. Something will eventually stick that your essence is curious about. That could be your way in. Your choice. Or it might be something you react to, get angry about, that really bothers you, that could be your way in. Your choice.
We need to take a long term perspective of working with this material, drink it in slowly, allow it to do its thing on you. Its underlying aim is to re-source evolution, yours and the systems in which you are nested.
Approach #2 - Play the game
There is everything for you to do. Remember a time when you were learning the most. Bring it to mind and compare it to the live tennis game analogy.
During my time with Discovery for Teens, Wayne, the study skills facilitator, would talk to the teens about learning by using a live game of tennis as an analogy. He would ask when scribbling on a whiteboard all the things going on in a live tennis match. There is the crowd, the camera’s, people sitting at home watching, the umpires, the ball boys and girls and the players. He would then ask ‘who is learning about tennis?’ The teens would always answer everyone and they were right. Then he would ask ‘who is learning the most about tennis?’ The teens would concede, probably the players. Wayne would offer them a conclusion that went something like this ‘you can learn from many different perspectives, and they are all valid ways of learning, but you are likely to learn the most about tennis by picking up a racket and taking part in an actual game’.
If we were to apply this to 'the live Game of Regeneration', where are you in this analogy? How does this inform your engagement with the learning material? Do you feel a need to shift? Where to?
This is my way of engaging, what is yours?
I created a learning material engagement tetrad that emerged out of reflecting on these four questions. Try them out for yourself.
- What thoughts am I having about the material?
- What is sourcing my thoughting?
- To successfully engage with the material, what do I need to be thinking?
- If I said to myself “You can engage with this material anyway you want”, what does that free me up to do?
When I am feeling overwhelmed it is an indication that I have gone past my current level of capacity to do something. For me sometimes it doesn’t take a lot to feel this way. Two questions arose when I reflected on being overwhelmed:
- How do I increase my capacity?
- How do I make some space within my current capacity?
It is important to answer these questions for yourself because you are different to me. My answer comes for me in stopping my energy drains and practising my energy able-ness. For example, stop being fearful and learn to face uncertainty.
As I am freed up from energy drains, my capacity to do more increases and I find myself wanting and even needing to further express myself. I move into a space of creative flow. I find this to be a fascinating and logical outcome of working on energy drains. Stopping them has given me a sense of my limitless nature, my awesome potential.
To develop I need to put effort in. Designing an engagement process to do this I have found really helpful.. The disciplined application of this process I feel is accelerating my development. An engagement process for me is just a step-by-step list I will apply myself to. As an example:
- attend learning webinar and be fully present (allow the learning material to wash over me)
- watch recording of webinar to refresh myself on the material and take notes
- use notes for further reflection and imaging
- apply what I am learning to a real situation i.e. 'the live Game of Regeneration'
So what are we really trying to develop. Is it our expertise on the subject of regeneration? or our ability and capacity to regenerate? If I am honest my approach has been the former. I have wanted to be that expert. The outcome of this approach has lead me to being only able to talk about regeneration, rather than do regeneration. After awhile just being able to talk about regeneration is not very satisfying. Playing 'the live Game of Regeneration' on the other hand is exciting, scary and deeply meaningful. It also happens to transform the entire world around you.
