3.2 Three disciplines of deep-nurturance
How do you go about developing personal power? Especially if you want to base it in deep-nurturance.
There’s lots you can do, but I’m going to focus on three key disciplines.
Now there’s a complicated word: discipline. It’s got two very different meanings.
On the one hand, it means using punishment to control people.
But then it means something happier, too. The Latin root of “discipline” is teaching and learning. It’s from this root we also get the word “disciple,” which means you care about something so much that you put your whole heart into learning it and mastering it.
Maybe you want to object…
I’m already maxxed out, and you want me to take on three big. hulking, labor-intensive disciplines on top of everything else? Thanks a lot.
And that objection would be valid, except that…
Self-development generates time and energy and aliveness.
How’s that for good news? Most activists desperately wish there was more time in the day, and along comes self-development and makes more of it.
Not at first, though. At first, it’s going to cost you time. You’re going to have to elbow a place for it into your schedule.
But then as you progress and your self-development work begins to make you more effective, it starts saving you time. A little bit at first, then more, then a lot, really a lot.
For example, because you’ve been making progress, you’re now able to solve a problem with a staff person in three focused conversations of thirty minutes each—instead of letting the problem fester for sixth months, sucking up your emotional energy, poisoning your mood, dragging down your work, and making you feel helpless.
So please know that…
The deep-nurturance disciplines pay for themselves.
Still, I wish there were some shortcut. I wish I could give every activist a genie lamp preloaded with these disciplines, so all you’d have to do is give the lamp a quick rub and you’d have instant mastery of all three.
Of course that’s not how humans work. And that’s not how moral mastery works. You have to commit to the daily practice of decision-making and action-taking. And you have to keep learning from everything you do all day every day.
The activism of you
Sacrificial-savior activism starts with an external focus and keeps an external focus. It’s about service units and meeting objectives in order to fulfill your contracts and hopefully in the process make the world a better place. What you need personally doesn’t count.
Deep-nurturance activism starts with an internal focus. It starts with you. You do your inner work. You wrestle with your moral decision-making. You do your moral-moxie workouts. You deepen your character.
Which is….
Inner activism.
It’s the activism of your own person. And it matters because…
You are the instrument of your work.
That’s how it is with deep-nurturance activism. The heart of it is person-to-person. We’re not just trying to manage people at arms length, like getting them to vote the way we want them to, or getting them to contribute lots of dollars to our cause.
We want people to transform. We want them to step into activism themselves, the best kind, the most nurturing kind, and make it their way of life.
Sound bites
Here’s a quick look at what’s ahead in terms of the three key disciplines.
Develop
If we want to do the deep work of radical, fundamental social change, we need to do a deeper kind of self-development to prepare ourselves for the challenges of this work. The SSOS diminishes us, but the DNOS grows us.
Differentiate
If we choose to do the most challenging kind of activist work, we need deeper relationships to sustain us. The SSOS hurts relationships. The DNOS gives us a counterintuitive way to magnify the nurturing power of our relationships.
Dilemma
If we are engaged in activist work that addresses the depths of the human psyche, we will have to face the fact that we are dilemmic beings who have to wrestle with dilemmic decisions. The SSOS doesn’t deal with dilemma at all. The DNOS gives us our best chance to bring our moral moxie to dilemmic decisions in order to resolve them. Or if they can’t be resolved, then to live with the dilemmic impasse in a constructive and healthy way.
Want more?
My book, Asking More of Love, has much more about the mission of upgrading love, a mission which…
Deepens our self-development.
Asks us to differentiate ourselves away from our society and our species, while grounding ourselves in our own personal moral core.
And takes us into the deepest human dilemmas where we can find a deeper compassion for ourselves.
