Songs of wisdom

I’ve been thinking a lot about wisdom recently. It is something we don’t really understand in today’s world of scientific facts and tangibles. There is nothing tangible or controllable about wisdom.  It's like a wild bird we can't put in a cage.

On a zoom call last Monday Paolo asked me what had kept me glued to the #earthWISDOMDIALOGUE day (https://lnkd.in/eqR5PFcT) he and his @atmanway team organized recently. I couldn’t find the words to explain it. It wasn’t the words being said, or the people speaking, or a specific set of things taking place. It was the song being sung in that space.  

It was the song being sung in that space.  

We seek wisdom all the time. More than ever, in the mumbo jumbo of social networks, media and journals, we are all looking for that song that we instinctively recognize when we hear it. I could hear subtle melodies when the indigenous elders spoke in turns at the event. I couldn’t tear myself away from the intonation, the rhythm, the images each elder brought to the space with his or her stories and thoughts.  

Even when I hear myself intervene in meetings at the companies I work with. Or when I am guiding groups in teambuilding exercises. Suddenly I feel I must speak up. And there is this distinctive feeling I’ve grown to trust and flow with. The words just flow out of me in a kind of song. I can hear the song resonating beneath my words.

All I can do is bear witness to my own songs of wisdom

Often I don’t know where those words are coming from. I see the effect they have on the people around me and I am amazed at what is happening despite myself. The images, the stories, the connections between events, things people said before … they just weave themselves together somewhere inside me to produce a new song.  

And I think this is what was most remarkable about the space Paolo and team created and held that day. It was a space where songs of wisdom could be sung. It was like a huge soundbox that amplified the tones, intensified the emotions and made every wave of energy larger, more intense, more able to reach more people. Each person’s song touched us all, making our own internal wisdom vibrate in turn, helping us each find the inner tune that can guide us through uncertainty and hardship in life and in business.  

It's harder than it ever was to find wisdom.

It's harder than it ever was to find wisdom. There is so much purposeless noise in our world today. Adolescents walk the streets with boom boxes hanging off their hips, reggaeton blaring around them. Cars race up with their own music. People walk around with earplugs repeating their own music or podcasts. Finding silence is more difficult than ever. But wisdom can’t really appear without silence. No way to hear its song through all those sexy, repetitive lyrics.  

As if silence wasn’t a tall order, then we encounter the next barrier: our denial of God. Spirituality is tabu in our current society. It’s like a well-kept secret you only share with your closest friends and colleagues. You don’t want to be labeled as weird, simple-minded or superstitious.  

Never has it been so challenging to accept the power that the world holds over each one of us. We all want to be masters of our destinies. We are raised to make a difference to the world, leave our mark, build something to be remembered by. Nobody teaches us to accept our innate helplessness as a part of a bigger game. We are not brought up to give in to movements bigger than ourselves.

 We are not brought up to give in to movements bigger than ourselves.

God forbid we honor the Great Mother Earth, or publicly confess that we feel like the birds are watching us, or random events around us actually feel like a huge movement of connected dots.  This fear of not being taken seriously if we share this spiritual part of ourselves that feels connected to intangible, spiritual, otherworldly things is castrating us as human beings. How can we write music in our souls if we erase, cancel or forbid half of the musical notes produced?

It takes a long path of hardship, challenge and overcoming one’s own achievements to build the kind of courage needed to share our wisdom publicly. You need to learn to trust your gut and your heart more than you believe what external authorities like scientific experts, virally acclaimed gurus and CEOs are telling you to believe. Maybe this is something you only learn to do in places of solitude where none of these talking heads ever want to waste their valuable time.

A story about two tiny swift birds

Last Saturday I found a swift bird trapped between a fence and a wall in my garden. I know nothing about birds. I actually thought it was a swallow! I watch the spectacle of tens of swift birds above my head every morning while I do yoga on the terrace in summer. I tried to pick it up to see if it was injured or something. It escaped my grasp, and barely made it past my dog’s eagerness too. Finally I just wet the whole garden and went inside with the dogs to let it find its own way. It hid on a wall behind plants just beside the stairs, and it was gone when I came back out.

But then yesterday I found another swift bird perched on a wall stone just above the floor on the street. I stopped beside it and wondered how I could help. It looked at me in a way I can’t describe. I crossed over to ask the man in charge of the fruit shop if he could help. Fortunately he did know it was not a swallow, and he knew that swift birds’ wings are so large that they can’t fly out again if they land on the floor. He picked it up and launched it into the air.

Hmm ... what does this mean?

Hmm. Two swift birds asking me to help them fly again. A message is presenting itself to me. What could it be? I looked up the symbolism of swift birds on internet. Asked my mystic friends. Let several ideas and interpretations swim around in my mind without a clear aim. I could feel an inner excitement fueling their movement, a feeling that this was very relevant to my personal growth.  

This morning I read and article about how swift birds do almost everything in the air. They rise up to 3 or 4 thousand meters to sleep at night! The article called them the “flight of the spirit”. It talked about how we learn to fly like swift birds in our spiritual development. At first we only dare to fly close to the ground, as if we were trapped in a cage. And as we overcome Earthly obstacles and tests we eventually learn to fly higher and higher, faster and faster like a swift bird. We can no longer spend much time down there, close to the ground.  

And just now I finally got some time to meditate. I closed myself to the outer world and turned inside. I connected myself to the Great Mother Earth and my superior soul as I have been taught to do by my spiritual guides. I asked for help to shed the old memories and reaction patterns I no longer needed, and to open up to the higher energies of love, freedom, trust and faith. A ritual I once used to follow in skeptical silence, but which grew in me over months to feel more real and important each day.

 Overcoming my own skepticism

The swift birds’ eyes appeared before me. I could see nothing else, all my thoughts revolved around that look. I felt like they were telling me to break free from all the old, earthly emotional stuff that retained my flight. Old pain flowed out of me. Memories of guilt, regret, grief and anger softly pumped out of my soul for a while.  

Suddenly my last three years appeared to tell a radically different story from the one I had believed up until now. For three summers, since I moved to this house, hundreds of swift birds have adorned my morning yoga and my last evening moments on the terrace, before turning in to the TV and sleep. Each summer I paid more attention to them. I began to miss them when they left in August and rejoice when they arrived in May. I started to look forward to morning and dusk in my daily routines. I looked for them when I opened my eyes and turned on my ears in the morning. Until two tiny birds asked me to help them fly again this week.

Now I see things very differently

Now I understand this message has been growing around me all this time. The world doesn’t speak to us in the in-your-face way we talk to each other. It’s all a lot subtler and discreet. A friendly reminder you can listen to or ignore over and over until one day you get it. Two tiny birds risked their wellbeing to fall down to the floor near me. Suddently I saw it: It was they who were picking me up and launching me into the sky.   (All this cycle of awakening concluded on the eve of July's full super-moon, I learned after publishing this story)

I experienced a lot of stories like these when I was riding horses for some time. Every time I thought I was helping out a horse I learned to later see how that horse was teaching me something about myself. So much so that I developed my executive coaching practice to include horse-enabled-programs in my portfolio.  

But wow! This experience with swift birds is a whole new level of feedback and mirroring for me.

I don't care! 

You might find me simple, crazy or “away with the fairies”, as they would say in Ireland, my motherland. I don’t care. It makes me laugh how little I care! I know what I know. I know without knowing. I've learned to recognize wisdom when it sings in my ear, and I totally get that other people don’t hear the song that the Great Mother Earth and its creatures has played exclusively for me.

Take my story as a small example of what wisdom is like. It’s not in books, or in science or in facts. It’s in the spaces between our words. In the music nobody else can hear but you. Your wisdom lies in the unique way in which you connect the dots of your existence to weave the story of who you are, why you are here, and who you want to become.

Learn to discard other peoples’ skepticism. Seek out spaces like Paolo’s #earthWisdomDialogue and spend time with people who trust their own stories, images, funny coincidences. Cultivate the song playing in your heart, in your guts, in your soul.

 Cultivate the song playing in your heart, in your guts, in your soul.

When all else fails, your song of wisdom will guide you through peril like a shaman holds his followers through a bad psychedelic trip with his voice. Like your mother’s voice held you with safety, with love, with faith in the unknown for nine long months in her belly.

More than ever, we need our CEOs to act more on wisdom than on scary facts and pessimistic projections. #EmbraceTheWild within you, embrace the wilderness around you, and open up to that inner space of knowing. Messengers patiently await all around you, as our Great Mother Earth holds you safe despite yourself, despite it all.