Michael Chender's Page

Spoke with my friend Amy, who has experience and read texts from Gampo Abbey, and so now my thoughts are -- rather than a trip to see van Gogh's in a museum, a trip to the Abbey might provide insight for local action on how to get 'ungripped'.

....not sure how to assist in any 'ungripping' of 'self' -- seeing the name van Gogh below, and seeing his large show in London last month The Real van Gogh reminds me of his comment, It is better to burn than bust. I sense there is something slightly helpful there. The sponsors had a tag line - Enduring Brilliance.

So sweet sharing that time with you - and all the way back -
thanks for the tip on the Van Gogh article -
wonderful !

Hi Michael ~ How are you? Thanks for connecting. Your question was... what is the State of Grace Document? At the time you saw my new page on ALIA I hadn't gotten the chance to fill it in. : ) So, there's more information there now.

The State of Grace Document is a tool my husband and business partner, Zelle Nelson, and I created 11 years ago to help people build better business and personal relationship foundations, and then it acts as a third party mediator if you need to find your way back to peace. It's essentially a way for individuals and groups to exchange "the blueprint of me" with one another to create more effortless and graceful daily interactions. It's now being used in 50+ countries around the world in many languages in places such as corporations, non-profits, intentional communities, schools, families, business partners, etc. You can read more at www.stateofgracedocument.com where we provide enough information at no cost for anyone to create their own Documents. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Maureen McCarthy
of Engaging the Soul @ Work

Hi Michael
Thanks for your welcome. Count me in and I'll be there with pencil poised to draw whatever's there. Or not there.

Susan

Michael,
I'm trying to figure out how to send you a private message--oh, well, guess this will have to do. Can you send me your email address? I'm not going to jump into the group conversation about containers (I don't want to damp others and seem too sure of myself in that "container"), but I would like to tell you how we think about them. They are anything that holds the agents of a system together long enough for them to interact and form system-wide patterns. They can be physical (room), temporal (meeting time), affiliative (race or religion). They can be like a fence, a magnet, or one-to-one connections. They can be permeable, semi-permeable, or impermeable. At any point in time and at any place, there are an uncountable number of containers active in any human system. The question is, which is privileged by the group? They are massively entangled--I am a member of a family, a gender, an organization, a race, a culture, a friend network, a . . . all at the same time. The context and my intentions determine which of those containers is relevant at any given time. Changes in one might change me, so I infect all my others with those same changes.

So, what you refer to as container in the space for a culture to change, I would see as only one example of the many relevant containers in the social space. This has real practical value because if I don't like the pattern in one container, but I don't have access to influence it, all I have to do is find a related container in which I do have influence and influence away. Eventually, the change will ripple over, and I won't have to play the victim pushing a change that I see and need but have no way to embody.