On the Road Again

As readers of this newsletter may know, I’ve been on the road lately, traveling to various Courage & Renewal sites, as we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Center for Courage & Renewal and the tenth anniversary edition of The Courage to Teach. My pace is not quite as fast as Willie Nelson’s or Hilary Clinton’s. But my recent gigs in Seattle and Boston have been intense and uplifting experiences, leaving me with some strong impressions about where we are with Courage work these days.

First, many of the folks we’ve worked with over the past decade clearly feel themselves to be part of a movement, a community, even a family. The time they’ve spent in circles of trust has given them a sense of “home” to which they want to return. That’s why they come out in droves for these events, sometimes traveling considerable distances to attend and always investing themselves energetically once they get there.

Of course, the whole point of our work is to find that “home” inside yourself, a solid place to stand in a shifting and shifty world. You don’t need planes, trains and automobiles to get there! But we also know that being with other people who can help you find (and re-find) safe passage home is a crucial part of the journey. Many people are coming to these events to celebrate what it has meant to them to be in the company of such fellow-travelers, to rejoin them for a while, and maybe to be inspired to make the journey again.

Second, I’ve been happily surprised by the number of folks who come to these events without any prior experience of Courage work. Of the five hundred and fifty people who spent three hours in the ballroom of the Seattle Sheraton on a fine Sunday afternoon in September, half were newcomers to our work. I exchanged a few words with everyone in a long line of folks who asked to have a book signed, and learned that this group came from many walks of life: I not only met educators, clergy and health care professionals, but folks who work with Microsoft, Boeing, city and state government, organizational development, grass-roots social change, etc., etc..

I came away from both Seattle and Boston with a strong sense that not only is Courage work becoming known in diverse sectors of our society, but there is a driving hunger in every walk of life for “rejoining soul and role,” reconnecting our identity and integrity with the work we do in the world.

Which brings me to my third and most subjective impression. I have a strong sense that Courage work is approaching some sort of “critical mass.” Just before this road trip started, we crunched some numbers and learned that over the past ten years our retreats and programs have directly touched the lives of some 25,000 people, and the eight books we published during that time have sold over 750,000 copies.

Those numbers clearly contribute to my sense that we are no longer invisible! But numbers don’t tell the whole story. People who know me will tell you that I am not a big fan of woo-woo: talk to me about planetary alignments, and my eyes either start rolling or glaze over. But even a clod like me can sense an energy field, once it becomes electric enough. I think that our work is now being done in a very high energy field, brought about by a convergence of global crisis, the uprising of the human heart, and the fact that people who have experienced our work respect our way of responding to all that.

Which brings me to the last thing I want to say in these notes from the road: the way we respond to this moment of crisis-and-opportunity is crucial. So we need to go back to basics. We must remember the principles and practices that have brought us to this point, and primary among them is this: our calling is to create safe space for the soul, circles of trust, large or small, where the inner teacher, our own identity and integrity, the “being” in human being can make its claim on us, on the way we do our work, on the way we live our lives.

From the beginning of Courage work, our standards regarding what it takes to honor the soul have been very high—and the last thing we want to do in the face of urgent need is to get frenzied, try to “ramp it up,” and let our standards slip. As the punch-line to one of my favorite real-life teaching stories goes, “At this point in open-heart surgery, you have exactly sixty seconds to tie off that artery before the patient dies—so you had better take your time.”

In the “stump speech” I’ve been giving on this tour, I explore three problems that will be solved only if more and more people learn to value and do honest-to-God “soul work:” our cultural addiction to violence as a mode of “problem-solving”; the fact that institutions are often the worst enemies of their own missions; and the problem of the “empty self” that bows to authority from without, no matter how bogus, because it can’t find authority within.

In the next edition of this newsletter, I’d like to write more about these problems. For the moment I want to say that that simply naming them reminds me why Courage work is so important—and why it is so important that we continue to do it exceedingly well.