Dharma Bum

The Postmodern Executive - Featured Blogger & New Column

I'm pretty excited to be the first featured blogger over at the OC Metro. Please click through this link to take a look. I wasn't sure how my approach and writing skills were going to be received, but it seems to be working out pretty great so far. Suz and the OC Metro have been very supportive. Many Thanks!!

I also have a new column up:

As someone who uses the narrative approach to conflict resolution, I try and follow a few basic principles when working with parties that are involved in a dispute....Read More Here

Success!

I played in my first tournament tonight since I last posted that I was going to re-start my poker career. Well guess what? I made the final table and cashed!

It was a lot of fun. I played OK, and it felt good to be back. The cash was just icing (and it wasn't much). I'm going to take this as a good omen for this new endeavour. I'm looking forward to Vegas in a couple of weeks where I will have a chance to play a lot tournaments and celebrate Stevie Gorgol's 40th.

Reminder - Postmodern Conversations - Featuring John Winslade, Ph.D.

Just a reminder that this Sunday is our next conversation. It looks like it's going to be our largest turn-out yet. It starts at 1pm at my place, contact me for details. Hope you can make it!

I'm happy to report that the Narrative Project's next conversation is set. Please join us on Sunday May 1st at my place as we host one of the early pioneers of narrative practice and theory, John Winslade, Ph.D. John will be facilitating a conversation on Mediation and Conflict Resolution From a Narrative Perspective. You will not want to miss this event. Contact me for details. Hope to see you there!

More about John:

John is an Associate Professor at California State University San Bernardino. He also teaches a mediation course at Cal State Dominguez Hills University and at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Until 2003, he was Director of Counselor Education at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. He still returns regularly to New Zealand to work part-time at Waikato University, including a Masters course on mediation in the School of Education. He is a member of the editorial board of the Conflict Resolution Quarterly journal. John has authored four important books in the narrative field. Two of his texts has been written with Gerald Monk, including Narrative mediation: A new approach in conflict resolution (2000, Jossey Bass). Along with Lorraine Hedtke, he is the Co-author of Re-membering Lives: Conversations with the dying and the bereaved (2004, Baywood). He has taught workshops in the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and Denmark.

To Do

This.

image: Vivian Maier

 

2 Months

I will be going back..

Le Flâneur (music by The XX) from Luke Shepard on Vimeo.

A Certificate of Embarrassment

With sardonic resignation, President Obama, an eminently rational man, stared directly into political irrationality on Wednesday and released his birth certificate to history. More than halfway through his term, the president felt obliged to prove that he was a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office. It was a profoundly low and debasing moment in American political life.

The disbelief fairly dripped from Mr. Obama as he stood at the West Wing lectern. People are out of work, American soldiers are dying overseas and here were cameras to record him stating that he was born in a Hawaii hospital. It was particularly galling to us that it was in answer to a baseless attack with heavy racial undertones....It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious “other” would have been conducted against a white president.....More Here

Post-Psychology Today

I'm continuing to do a little marketing and this week it's establishing my new profile in Psychology Today.

Please take a look around and tell a friend.

Thanks!

Experts?

Good Stuff. I really identify with Noreena Hertz's position on promoting dissent. It has been my experience that the business world has much more tolerance for dissent than what I have found in academia. I hope if I ever find my self in a supervisory role or better yet, as a professor, that I will always find a place for dissent in my sphere of influence and not only give it a voice but try and bridge the dissent to someplace preferred by those in the position of protest. I think power has become crafty to the point of "giving voice" but hoping it then goes away or worse, makes it go away through various tactics.

”We’ve become addicted to experts. We’ve become addicted to their certainty… We have ceded our responsibility.”

Notice

I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.
— Jeffrey Eugenides

Buddha Having a Bad Day..

A friend told me this morning that I remind him of "Buddha having a bad day."

I think that's the best compliment I've ever received..

18

4-26-93

This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected — in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life. - Thomas Mann

Or something like that..

Solitude?

Nowhere was Defoe's psychology more acute than in his imagination of Robinson's (Crusoe) response to the rupture of his solitude. He gave us the first realistic portrait of the radically isolated individual, and then, as if impelled by the novelistic truth, he showed us how sick and crazy radical individualism really is. No matter how carefully we defend ourselves, all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships. Evan Facebook, whose users collectively spend billions of hours renovating their self-regarding projections, contains an ontological exit door, the Relationship Status menu, among whose options is the phase "It's Complicated." This may be a euphemism for "on my way out," but it's also a description of all the other options. As long as we have such complications, how dare we be bored? - Jonathan Franzen

If you are able I recommend reading Jonathan Franzen's meditation in the New Yorker on the birth of individualism through Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, the suicide of David Foster Wallace, and the pitfalls of trying to survive on self. He covers a lot of territory I've been chewing on lately. It's one of the better things I've read in a while.

ILLUSTRATION: ZOHAR LAZAR

Happy Easter

From NYC.

Sent from my iPhone

When

"When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper."
— D.H. Lawrence

The Postmodern Executive - Re-storying Conflict in the Workplace

I have a new post up over at the OC Metro. More on narrative mediation. Please take a look.

Stories matter, people organize their lives in story form. We all have a long history of developing stories about ourselves and others. So when conflict arises in the workplace, it is most often relayed in story form...Read more HERE.

Narrative News

The Clifton Centre located in Melbourne, Australia is now hosting a narrative practice online learning and discussion site. New discussion forums on narrative therapy are available and topics include Re-membering conversations, 'Team of Life', and research and evaluation. Discussions are just beginning so go participate in the new learning community. Sign up HERE.

2 Days

It's up to me now, turn on the bright lights..

 

 

07 Colorblind

Counting Crows - Colorblind

 

Image - Austin Kleon

Inspired

I really have amazing people in my life.

This morning I had the chance to catch up with friend Mary Jo Frawley, who's not around much because she's always off to some hot spot in the world. Mary Jo is a RN with Doctors Without Borders and has been doing amazing work for them for quite a while. Name a dangerous or troubled spot in the world and Mary Jo has been there trying to alleviate suffering.

Mary Jo is one of those free spirits that make a difference in the world. Just being in her presence I get inspired. This morning we covered a lot of territory, from her recent experience in Darfur and Haiti, to what antibiotic I should bring with me when I decide to visit Nepal/India. She's really excited about my new journey and had a lot of questions about how she might help others that work in the humanitarian aid field, something she wants to move toward.

Last year my friend Justine White and I were having conversations around trying to establish a sort of Counselors Without Borders project in association with the Social Justice Collaborative. We both got busy and the project never got off the ground. Spending time with Mary Jo reminded me of that project and my desire to try and make something happen in that area in the future.

For more on Mary Jo and her work with Doctors Without Borders, check out the links HERE and HERE.