I love to lose myself in Chinatown – chandeliers, mushrooms of every variety, cherry bark, tobacco, jasmine pearl tea, rambutans, so many fish. I hear sounds that I don’t understand. It’s another world, and if you know me, you know I love feeling immersed in sensory stimulation and other worlds.
I also love Chinatown because my great-grandfather Morris, who died in 1975, walked these streets and the streets of the Lower East Side with the dust of Lithuania on his shoulders. I can feel his energy and his presence through time. I imagine us walking under the same sky.
Spatially close but sometimes worlds away, some people eat squid in Chinatown while a few blocks away other people eat celery root pot pie on the Lower East Side while decades ago my great-grandfather ate a pickle.
Our lives are full of so many possible permutations. Metaphorically speaking, you are so close to the other worlds of possibilities that you have in your mind. If you have begun the energetic work of imagining and beginning, it is already taking shape.
Morris’s world took shape exactly as it was laid out for him by his father - and I know this because my family has decades of letters between worlds - the old world; the new world. His vision - honor God, find a woman, have children, and trust that your livelihood will be taken care of. All of this came into being. It was the life imagined, and then lived.
We live inside our worldview. It is usually unconscious; we simply live inside our world as we see it. Our worldview is shaped by time, cultural conditioning, our personal stories, and our inner emotional landscape.
Our worldview shapes our vision of what could be. It is the roots of our actions and the way we go about things. Our worldview shapes the possibilities and outcomes of our lives.
Consciously working with our worldview can reshape the outcomes of our lives and work if we want. We can explore what our worldview is rooted in and then make a conscious choice to expand or shift our worldview if we wish.
Just as we step onto planes in one place and step out of them in another place, we can shift our worldview, and become more conscious of our habitual choices. We can time travel by shifting our worldview.
What is your worldview?
Sacred Worldview + Economic Worldview
Your vision of the future world reflects your worldview.
What do you believe?
What world are you living inside?
As I crave more space for slow time, connection, collaboration, pleasure, expansion, love, I have become interested in the kind of world these experiences can thrive within - along with the emotional roots that create different worlds.
The Economic Worldview
The Economic Worldview says that anything that can sell and have economic gain is meaningful and valuable, and anything that can’t sell is without value.
This worldview establishes relative value between people and things. We turn what is evolving and pulsating - life, learning, rest, desire - into a commodity.
The push is to maximize economic gain, to measure worth in numbers, and to seek validation relative to how others view us rather than through our relationship with ourselves. That frames how we pursue opportunities and make choices in our lives.
Reward and punishment, low risk, and low self-expression abound. We care about what will sell. This is a transactional worldview; a world of promotion. In my observation, it is rooted in fear.
At best, an economic worldview can spur continuous improvement, innovation, and growth. At worst, the Economic Worldview creates disconnection.
The Sacred Worldview
The Sacred Worldview values all life, and this inspires feelings of love, compassion, and responsibility. Appreciation for life turns your learning, your activities, your self-expression into a relational creation, rather than transaction. The Sacred Worldview sees the world as symbiotic and interdependent, naturally right. We are all integral parts of a larger unified whole. We all have intrinsic worth, regardless of what we sell.
Wholeness, becoming, consciousness, bliss, awe, mystery, reverence, joy, dignity, rapture, amazement, abundance, collaboration, and connection are supported in the sacred worldview. We tap into the natural abundance of the world- our rich and sacred flow of creativity, service, experiences, conversation, feeling, learning, relationships, spiritual transformation, and visibility.
In this Sacred Worldview, enrichment, wealth, and money are all part of natural flow and abundance. Rather than possessing, we allow money to be part of our energetic flow, like blood flowing through our veins.
Service, wealth, and love are intertwined.
As Kahlil Gibran said, “Work is love made visible.” Work, he said, is “turning the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by your own loving.”
Let your love permeate your offerings.
The Sacred Worldview nurtures collaboration and connection - but without the tools to work with our emotions, it’s really hard to live with this worldview.
Emotions and Worldview
We all want to survive.
Most of us want to thrive.
We want to feel worthy.
We all want to love and feel loved.
We want to self-actualize.
But fear is rooted deep inside our DNA. Our primitive minds have a survival brain that has a negativity bias. To survive on supposedly scarce resources, we scan our environment for danger. We think we need to be on guard, and seek destroy invaders who are different from us.
As we have evolved, we have developed a frontal cortex that can get the messages (of danger, threat, fear) from our survival brain and then know how to work with that.
But if we’ve been deeply hurt through trauma, as most people have, it is very normal to engage the limbic system, and fight, flee, or freeze for our survival. And when we are emotionally hijacked, sometimes we do things that hurt others - through devaluing them, harming them, lacking compassion, promoting shame and hatred, “othering” people, competing, and creating false hierarchies of worth.
Sometimes exploring your worldview means stepping on a plane…or a boat. Often it means exploring your inner landscape of emotions, and becoming more aware of your thoughts, feelings, and needs - as they are now. Time travel can happen without physically going anywhere else.
Befriend All of You
If you are feeling the drive for survival drive in your business or career, sometimes that gets you to improve your performance. Go deeper. Is your drive to survive rooted in fear or love? Become aware of what’s happening in your thoughts.
Befriend fear. Notice and accept the presence of fear without pushing it away. Allow yourself to notice it so you can come to understand it more.
Feel into your heart. Allow your heart to soften, and explore your feelings underneath the fear. How are you feeling vulnerable? What parts of yourself are you seeing that you don’t like or don’t want to accept - guilt, shame, feeling not enough, feeling wrong or bad?
Ask your most vulnerable self how you need to nurture and love yourself. Perhaps you need to offer yourself forgiveness, release some tears, hold yourself tight in a blanket, dance, breath deeply, or tell yourself that you are loveable exactly as you are.
As you heal yourself, you can heal the world.
It takes conscious commitment to know and nurture yourself to move into compassion, collaboration, and natural abundance. It also takes repetition, as life is fluid and dynamic, and new circumstances arise that help us continue to cultivate our self-love.
Imagine who are and what you will create in your vision for your future when you are consistently bringing love - rather than fear - into your soft heart.
Practices
1. I invite you to look at the world of emotions, ideas, and beliefs that have created the world you inhabit. What is the worldview inside of you? What emotions is your world rooted in? What emotions would you like to consciously cultivate?
2. Who are you inside the Sacred World - a world of collaboration, natural abundance, safety, and love? What do you create?
3. What helps you move between worlds? For me, it’s walking in a new neighborhood, stepping onto airplanes, meditating, swimming, floating, drinking tea, drinking cacao, sex, talking to strangers (not in that order), breathing deeply, seeing the stars, forgiveness practice, singing, reading, talking to kids or old people, sharing an emotion with a person I trust, writing letters, or being in deep appreciation and gratitude. How do you travel between worlds? How would you like to travel between worlds today?
Offerings
Explore worlds inside you in this 40 minute guided vision meditation that starts with resting in your body and then seeing your vision.
If you’ll be in New York, join other luminous visionaries tuning into truth at the next Multi-Vision Lab on September 5th, 5:30-7:30PM at the gorgeous Assemblage Park Ave. South. Check out photos from the first Multi-Vision Lab.
I’m forming new masterminds for the fall, beginning mid-September. There is magical power in a group of supportive big vision people holding space for each other’s dreams in a worldview that welcomes collaboration, self-expression, and love. Book time with me by September 13th to explore masterminding this fall, getting ready to expand into 2020 with a community of support and accountability.