In the afterglow of the election, I started thinking about unity building. How do you bring together people of many different beliefs and attitudes? Heck, sometimes my wife and I take awhile to sort it out, and we’ve been together for 15 years and agree on almost everything.
Those of you who are fans of M. Scott Peck (I am you, er, we. Anyhoo, I’m a fan.) may know about his book The Different Drum. I was astounded when I read it. It’s a profound discussion of what community is, and how it’s created, and has very little to do with strategy and structure. The secret is TA-DA! how to bring true presence and vulnerability into a group. Not as easy as it sounds, especially when people are so upset they are snapping at each other’s jugulars.
The book was revolutionary, and an entire foundation was started up to support those teachings. Unfortunately, it shut down later because the organizers confessed they felt the process was working in spite of their efforts, and not because they were particularly successful supporting community to happen.
All things grow and evolve, even when it doesn’t seem possible, and so did these teachings. A dear friend and colleague, Paul Werder (doesn’t he look like a nice guy? In fact, he is.) from LionHeart Consulting has written a book that evolves Peck’s teachings to the next stage.
To explain how this can be, I have to let you in on a secret. Don’t tell his clients, because he works with big corporations, doing spiritual healing stuff similar to what I do, but not as obviously because, you know, he’s in the big corporate world. They would flip if they knew.
Paul is a Sufi teacher. In fact, he’s a teacher of mine, and he’s the one I learned business healing from when I was at the University of Spiritual Healing and Sufism.
This is a long, drawn-out way to explain why you should read his book, Building Unity. It’s really a fantastic book. It explains the four stages of community building, pseudo-community, chaos, emptying, and true community.
The problem is most groups get stuck bouncing back and forth between pseudo-community (playing nice-nice, fake air kisses and all) and chaos (the blame game, backstabbing, and a variety of other fun group dysfunctions.) To get to true community, with your clients, with your workgroup, or as a nation, we need to move past chaos to emptying.
This book explains how it unfolds, and helps you to access it.
The Woo-Woo Bonus.
No, there’s not a gazillion bonuses worth ten million dollars but all yours for free. Nope. In fact, this isn’t even a book launch. The book was released awhile ago, and it’s just sitting there, waiting to be digested and put into use.
The Woo-Woo bonus is that Paul is a Sufi teacher, as I’ve already explained. What this means is that I experience a real transmission of peace and love just reading it. The book is smart, it’s dead-on perceptive, but there is an additional experience of it that helps the teachings and insights go deep.
We keep a pile of them on hand to give out as gifts to people we like, that’s how much we like this book. Actually, it’s time to order another pile, because we just ran out a week or two ago.
And, for crying out loud, it’s a book.
It’s not a $500 information product, or a $10,000 retreat (which might not be a bad idea, but maybe a little less expensive.) It’s a $16 book. Go get it, and let’s deepen how we’re building unity in this world of ours.
The problems we’re facing are deep, the solutions not obvious. But, at the core of it all, we need to connect and trust one another. We need to create true community. We need unity. You can’t really go wrong with this book.
If (IF! Get it already) you get the book, let come here and post your own review of it.
4 Responses
I read this book when it first came out. What a great idea to give them out as gifts – thank you! Talk about one stop shopping – you just made my life so much easier once again, Mark. Thank you.
@Char- glad to help. 🙂
mark,
thanks for giving rodney king his props…i still give him philosopher of the millennium for asking the most profound question of all time…simply because it can never be definitively answered “no”, and because in order to get to a “yes” we have to solve all the other big problems just to prove it!
@Charles – Definitely- the profound in the every day. I was thinking of him, too, when I wrote that. I supposed it’s unavoidable for anyone who witnessed that whole thing…