A Rage to Contribute

True leaders heed the call to live out loud through events in their lives that demand participation from a deeply emotional place.

One obvious example is Michael J. Fox. After contracting Parkinson's, advocacy for patients with the disease became his life work. However, most emotional story lines are much more subtle.

Many of us were born into adverse circumstances or suffered hardships in the course of life. At the same time, each of us entered the world with an inherent genius for creative problem solving. Those who are able to survive and thrive often become passionate about lending a hand to others who still suffer.

Decades of experience in transcending your greatest challenge has given you an evolving mastery. Your unique expertise may not yet have a name, but it is a potency within that cries out for full-throated voice.

Some of you are on the path of expressing your gift with the precise passion that attracts the people for whom you can make a difference. For you sense that only then can you gain the freedom that comes with fully "singing your song," and until then you may suffer a sense of impaired vitality. What may be missing is that you are not contributing anywhere close to capacity.

I have come to realize that I have a rage to contribute. My primary emotional story line (discussed in last month's post--see below) is that as a child I was neither seen nor heard. My natural expression was squelched and remained underground for 45 years. Then I found a way out that allowed me to become a transformational agent for others whose self-consciousness and performance anxiety were stifling their voice and compromising their gift.

Thus my rage to contribute alchemically transmuted into Speaking Circles, Relational Presence, and now Life Contribution Coaching(SM). The fire rages on.

What is your emotional story line that is inexorably transforming into your unique gift in the world? I believe that exploring and expressing yourself into great listening provides peace and attracts prosperity.

More on emotional story line and contribution

The primal emotion that fueled my path was rage at my family for thoroughly clobbering my self-expression. My ongoing outrage as an adult is about the stifling of children’s natural expression, the lousy listening so many of them get and so many adults give each other, and the habitual self-consciousness that so many wonderful people continue to constrict themselves with at the expense of aliveness and expansion.

The expansion process need never end. At age 65, I have come into a new clarity around my contribution and how to deliver it at a more potent, lucid level, through Life Contribution Coaching. My 20 years of developing and perfecting Speaking Circles through the alchemy of Relational Presence was ostensibly about dissolving public speaking anxiety, but I now see that on a deeper level it was all about creating the rich listening field in which participants can access, express, and further their contribution.

My emotional story line in a nutshell

Like all of us I came into this world as a fully expressive bundle of divine energy, and like most of us my capacity to flow my energy freely in the world was severely compromised by the limitations of the adults around me to support my expression, or even tolerate it.

My wide open, luminous, curious eyes were met (or avoided) by older eyes signaling “no no no!” or “danger!” or “who do you think you are?” or “nobody home.” By age 5 the spontaneous child had gone underground and replaced by a timid, chubby schoolboy with worried eyes.

With my divine perfection hardly mirrored back to me at home, I came to read contempt and indifference in the eyes of the world I met outside the home. Until age 25, I managed to cope and keep up appearances while living the Nowhere Man’s non-life of quiet desperation.

Then circumstances led to a crack in the veneer which landed me in therapy, and over the next 20 years the light slowly began returning to my eyes as I explored the psycho-spiritual realm.

At age 45, I turned a corner, emerging in baby steps as a teacher of what I had been learning toward accessing my full expression. Over the course of the next 20 years I perfected a holistic cure for public speaking anxiety--a method of receiving and delivering massive doses of the divine mirroring so many of us sorely missed in childhood.

Taking my own medicine, I transformed my severe stage fright into luminous ease in front of groups of all sizes, became a masterful group facilitator, trained hundreds of facilitators around the world in my method, wrote the book, and touched many lives.

Now at age 65 the bigger picture has come into view. I see my drive all along was to make my contribution to humankind; to give my gift fully before leaving this plane of existence. And I see that every person I have touched, from classes and private sessions to writings and recordings, has been driven to access their contribution, express their gift in full measure, to not die with their song unsung and dance undanced due as a consequence of the mistake of self-consciousness.

Comments

[Sahara]

Lee ~~~
Your life story mirrors my life story so well! Thank you for shedding such divine light on my drive to contribute and give my gifts away. And for a clearer compassionate understanding of why I have obscured my essential self most of my life.

Now that I have found my true voice from immersing myself in the safety and practice of Relational Presence, I continue to discover what my full expression means to me and for others.

Your significant contribution has been so instrumental in me discovering mine!

Showers of gratitude,
Sahara

[Nancy]

Lee,

It seems that every very successful (fulfilled and successfully engaged in the marketplace) teacher/leader that I've encountered has that rage to contribute. And the rest (including me) are still looking for that rage. You have a key to the transition- the gift of being seen and heard in Relational Presence.

Reading your post I am reminded of two masters I have learned from who speak a similar truth. David Whyte says in “Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity” , “You know that the antidote to exhaustion in not necessarily rest?…. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness... You are so tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life. You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while. You need something to which you can give your full powers..Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly … to rot on the vine”

The second master is Arnold Siegel. I studied autonomy under him for 10 years. He wrote an amazing poem called "A Voice Turned in on Itself" to describe the suffering that you address as well - that of not being seen. The last I knew, he's up in your area, Lee. His website is http://www.etheconversation.com. It's an astonishing program of self-mastery.

Thank you for finding and following your rage all these years.

Nancy

[trine]

rage, what it conjures?
Hot baths, red planets,mars-supials, superior capablity.... there so much to discover in the pouches of our unknowns.
what a tuely insiring expression luminous ease!
no need to squeeze with luminous ease.