Spark.
We all have it, that defining moment that changed everything for us that we seek to share with others.
In early 2020 I wrote the following as part of my contribution to an EU book project for Transformational Learning Professionals. It ended up not being included in the final edit, but it was a tremendously helpful exercise for me to write and I’ll offer it here as a window into my personal story.
As transformation professionals, our challenge is facilitating access to a larger reality with the concurrent structural changes internally and externally that is at most only a concept for our students. Transformation can be slippery to define, but when we experience it in truth, we know it from the bottom of our souls.
No question.
The most important resource here is the transformation itself as a living energy and catalyst for life. It’s something we as professionals need to experience and embody ourselves in order to share with, or even facilitate for others. This direct and very personal experience is our greatest asset and the required foundation that all pedagogy and theory rest on. Fortified with personal experiences of transformation as so many of us are, how then do we share this gift and nurture it in others?
One of the best ways we can do this is through story. As with anything transformational, we can only effectively share what we’ve personally experienced. The telling of a story for teaching purposes is entertaining and can lend insight, but the sharing of a story from our own direct experience is a transmission of embodied truth and can profoundly catalyze change in another.
Here’s one from me.
My work and passion for my entire adult professional life, over 35 years as of this writing, is facilitating transformation. I haven’t always been consciously aware of this, but it’s always been true. And I have always been doing it despite this lack of conscious awareness, every step of the way.
How can this be true? Unwavering pursuit of a goal with no specific, conscious intention to do so and no awareness of it?
When I was a teenager, I had an experience that changed me. My parents took me to see a theater production of A Christmas Carol. The most tired, trite holiday experience available in suburban USA in late December. I wasn’t exactly dragged kicking and screaming, but I was probably cranky and moderately unwilling.
Something happened in that theater though, something that took me many years to recognize and has shaped my entire life since. I had a moment, something happened in no time at all, beyond time, that was inexplicable. A switch flipped and so did the world.
Something turned on, scrooge pointed to it, quite literally, I can still see his finger pointing and that scowling face, I was utterly transfixed. Time and thought and identity ceased. I fully and deeply experienced what Joyce might call true art, the siddah yogis would call Shaktipat. A spontaneous awakening.
It fundamentally shifted my perceptions and understanding of the world, all of reality, and my place in it. Everything. Everything is a hard word to define in a meaningful way so I’ll just repeat it. Everything everything everything. All of it. Even that.
Was Scrooges first monologue really that engaging? Was it a divine transmission? Perhaps on a much larger level, a higher aspect of “I” was the willing participant in a much larger piece of cosmic theater simply disguised as …theater.
Something in me recognized something there, in that moment, and woke up.
Everything changed.
Looking back, I can see a distinct shift after that moment. I developed an insatiable interest in theater and art in general. I pursued it like food, found my way into scene shops and rehearsal rooms, was spontaneously offered paying gigs and quickly rose through the ranks of an extremely competitive industry.
Bypassed them might be a better term. Opportunities just came to me. I didn’t go through the traditional channels of study, apprenticeship, competition and hustle everyone else did. I just showed up and loved it all and amazing opportunities became available.
It certainly didn’t feel like it at the time, but in retrospect, It was a charmed ride I was on. Working worldwide with peers twice my age while having a fraction of their experience and education. I was steadily finding my way to the origin point of theater, the creation of it. Both in the architecture and the producing.
As a theater design consultant, producer or director, I directly influenced the effectiveness of the experience for the audience. 10 years in to this wild ride, I was hoofing it up the never ending circular staircase to the grid of the Aladdin Theater for Performing Arts in Las Vegas and had another moment.
It occurred to me that I should learn to breathe. In that moment I remembered the Christmas Carol experience and I knew it was a sacred thing and all I had been doing since then was my best to create something that can help others have their own version of what I experienced. Everything else was secondary to that purpose.
It was about people, and sharing what I had experienced personally in service to their own awakening. If only one person got what I got because I helped set the stage for it, then my work was a success. It all started to make sense.
After that moment, my life took another turn, I studied the breath. I revived my longtime yoga practice, immersed myself in meditation, devoured book after book on spontaneous awakening and spiritual practice.
I found my way into energy healing, BAM! That opened another door and I studied and apprenticed and explored shamanic work and practiced practiced practiced and it happened again.
People showed up, professional therapists, healers, coaches, teachers, all asking for my help and insights into a growth process that was so far outside their reality system it challenged their capacity to function and support others.
Deeply embodied people with a wealth of education and practice asked me to help them transform themselves and their work.
I developed a body of work and coaching practice in embodied transformation for leadership and kept diving deeper, alternating between architecture and the meditation cushion until one day (another 10 years later) it became apparent the two paths of Art and Healing were not separate, they were distinct.
I was doing the same thing in both worlds, only in different ways. The schizophrenic feeling I got alternating between the two careers could end.
If my work was directly facilitating transformation in others and both paths were equally true, then I could take the kinder path of therapeutics, coaching and education rather than building buildings or producing festivals to achieve this deeply held purpose.
I walked away from the offer of a project that any architecture or theater professional would consider the pinnacle of a career to return to the meditation cushion and the yoga mat, to bring the understanding of decades of not only facilitating transformation in large and small ways, internally and externally, but more specifically, the presence of MY OWN transformation as an offering for those who follow.
Another turning of the wheel and I have founded Nova Earth Institute, together with my wife and partner Alysia, to continue this sharing of the spark in the context of Creative Endeavors. NEI’s mission is to transform lives through creativity in service to a beautiful new world. In addition to being co-founder, I’m also a teacher and coach for many of the NEI programs. It’s a rewarding way to scratch the larger itch of sharing the Spark of transformation with others as well as the deep body of work we both have in the creative industries.
My personal work here on this site continues to focus directly on transformation itself and the creative industry experiences serves to inform that work. In the last 15 or so years the world of therapeutics, embodied somatics and education have been much more the focus of my explorations. These elements form a potent mix of embodied leadership skills and I now serve clients in entrepreneurial, consulting and changemaker roles as well. It all comes from the spark.
Transformation is a wild, fleeting, uncontrollable thing unique to everyone, but it can be invited and a process and container can be created to substantially increase the possibility of it happening. We as professionals aren’t exactly in control of the transformational process, but we can be stewards and champions of it. Continuing to study and cultivate this work is a great gift to humanity and pursuing our own transformation is the spark that lights the fire for others.
If I may be of service to you in your quest for embodied wholeness, or if this simply resonates strongly with you, please reach out and say hello. I’d love to hear from you.