Resonant World #95
Earlier this year, I was rummaging in a box of clothes when I felt a tap on the back.
I started round, and saw a book had fallen from a shelf above me.
Its title was Vision Quest — and the chapters shared guidance for undertaking this revelation-seeking ritual, associated in my mind with Native American tradition, though doubtless practiced in other cultures as well.
I’ve yet to take the hint from the Universe and retire into the wilderness for three days to await my visitation from the Beyond, but I’m certainly fascinated with the concept of vision — and have felt my inquiry come alive in intriguing new ways through the course of the Resonant Man Initiative that Jacob Kishere and I launched last month. (For details of our next free online gatherings in July and August, please click here).
In my experience, vision can prove elusive.
I might feel an impulse to express something greater than my current life can support, but the details of what this “vision” will look like often feel hazy, even out of reach.
So what if I’ve been thinking about vision all wrong?
What if we don’t need to “have” a vision of what we want to do, achieve or become?
What if vision is a quality that we can invite into our moment-by-moment experience — a frequency to attune to, rather than an objective to attain?
After exploring this question in our first Resonant Man dialogue on June 23, and subsequently with Jacob and others, I felt an impulse to share some further reflections in the above eight-minute audio. (A lightly edited transcript below). I recorded it on the banks of the river Thames — I’m not sure if the water sounds soothing, or like white noise. In any case, I hope it may inspire you to explore the texture of how vision expresses itself through you.
As ever, I would love to hear any resonance in the comments.
Reserve Your Spot for the Resonant Man Dialogues This Summer:
Sunday, July 14: Speaking from our Deepest Listening (Men)
Sunday, July 21: The Gifts and Wounds of Ancestry (Men)
Sunday, August 4: Finding Integrity in Relationship (Men & Women)
It was great to join Kosha Joubert and Maria Leister for an introductory call to the Pocket Project’s Applied-Trauma Informed Leadership course last week. This is precisely the kind of training that’s needed to build the healing architecture we’re going to need to chart a path through what’s to come; more details here.1
How To Infuse Life With Vision
Podcast Transcript:
“Hello everybody, I felt an impulse to offer some reflections on the theme of vision.
Inviting vision was the theme of our first Resonant Man dialogue that we held just over a week ago, and in that discussion and since then a lot has been coming up for me around my own relationship to vision, and how I might approach, or invite, vision into my life differently than perhaps I would have done in the past.
I think I’ve perhaps had a tendency to approach vision as some kind of blueprint, or literal picture, of what I might want to experience or achieve or bring into the world, something far out in front of me.
And in that model, there has often been a tension, a feeling that the vision must be somehow beyond me, or out of reach, otherwise it wouldn't qualify as a vision.
And if I look back over my life, though there’ve certainly been moments where I’ve had a sense of the direction I wanted to go, or who I wanted to become in some way, I wouldn't necessarily say that I had a clear vision as such, more of a compass point to follow.
And much of my life has just happened, rather than unfolded according to some preordained script, or bullet-pointed list.
So vision began to assume a very different quality in both the dialogues that Jacob and I were having before we facilitated the session during that convening, and since then.
And it feels very much to me like vision is a quality that we can inhabit, or a way of being, a way of moving through the world that we can connect to, almost like another sense.
We can ask ourselves, ‘am I in vision right now?’ ‘Am I open to the signals around me, the impulses perhaps arising within me?’
‘Am I in connection with some essential part of myself that actually is prompting me, and does know the way?’
So there’s something new for me here around experimenting with the idea of vision as a moment-by-moment practice, as a quality to invite, to embody, and almost flip that previous script into reverse, so vision is no longer something out there in front, something that my mind has constructed, or a projection into my future which inevitably will be coloured by my present, and to a large extent my past.
Rather, vision is the conductor that allows us to connect with what is already within us but wants to unfold, emerge, express, but we’re often so busy in our habitual patterns or fixations or routines — our daily routines, yes, but also our routinized ways of interacting, of thinking, of keeping ourselves safe even — that that quality of vision doesn’t have quite the room, the space it needs to sink roots and blossom in our lives in the way that it might.
And I find that way of approaching vision much more appealing and accessible.
It takes away the pressure, or the idea that I have to come up with something or have the ‘right’ idea, rather that I can be in vision.
And Jacob has very much informed this exploration for me.
Some of what I’ve offered here is really developing or reflecting the thinking that he’s done around this topic, and it also occurs to me that the Resonant Man project itself is a manifestation of this approach to vision, in the way that it has arisen between us.
We both feel a real spark and crackle of energy, almost an electric current flowing, when we drop into the zone and begin to call forth what this project wants to be, find words for the energy that we feel, seek to solidify enough structure for it to become available to other men, and to the women who will also be invited to our session in August.
So in some respects, the entire exercise so far has been a practice ground for me to inhabit vision in this updated, or more embodied, more grounded, and more fluid way.
So I offer those reflections because I know so many of us are looking for purpose, looking to connect with the greater sense that we're landing our work in the world, that we’re bringing our creativity, our gifts, our wisdom to new audiences.
Sometimes that that process can be, or can rather feel, a little fraught, a little blocked — that there’s a pressure to get it ‘right’ in some way. And I feel that there’s some real medicine for those blocks in this way of being in vision, rather than ‘having’ a vision, and I hope that there’s some resonance here from the Resonant Man that will reach anyone who wants to connect with this process.
Thank you and see you soon.”
Note from the Editor: A labour of love, Resonant World is written in the gaps between work I get paid to do, notably editing investigations at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. It’s a huge boost when people become paid subscribers, and support of any amount affirms that my mission to support the global community of practitioners engaged in supporting people to integrate individual, inter-generational and collective trauma has value. Thank you!
The course link is an “affiliate” link which means I get a small percentage is somebody buys the course using that link.
How to Infuse Life with Vision