A Word on Goals
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a pretty resistant relationship to goals due to a number of reasons (including the garden variety fear of failure.) One of the more interesting ones was that as a child of the 80s and 90s - the age of the insatiable, unchecked greed of the yuppie-corporatist - my young, contrarian free spirit associated goals as a portal into a dystopian pulverizing of humanity.
The way I saw it, growth for the sake of growth was meaningless at best, dangerous at worst.
Years later, I came across these words by another contrarian, the controversial writer Edward Abbey that confirmed my suspicions,
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
(And cancer, as we all know, is the disease of modernity. As within, so without as the Hermeticists would say.)
For better or worse, I associated goals with this guzzling pac-man of more, more, more; a world where the beautiful + complex system of a human being is reduced to dead-eyed consumer.
I wonder how many of us unknowingly shun the idea of goals because of this truthful intuition?
For me, the reasons underlying this association came down to an odd felt-sense that having goals was dangerous if they were feeding this larger Earth-human degrading agenda. I couldn’t fully understand and articulate this so I just quietly, unconsciously decided to have nothing to do with goals and goal-setting.
As I entered my thirties, I was able to put a name to this odd felt-sense, a passion as it turned out: whole systems (or holistic) thinking, living and being (including the paradox that the health of the whole depends on the healthy, authentic expression of its individual parts - not through conformity but through (bio)diversity.)
This has many meanings and implications which I won’t be going into today (but which filter through into everything I do, including these newsletters, so you probably get a sense of my approach to this.)
But in the context of goals, I began to understand why I was resistant to setting and working with them, namely:
If I set goals (and achieved them) what larger system would they be a part of? What would they be contributing to?
This is a question that I don’t ever recall being asked to consider when it came to setting and achieving goals - certainly not in the education system beyond the implied “get good grades, go to university, get a job, start a family if you want…and above all, shut up and be an obedient consumer, and feed the corporatist monolith.”
(Turns out more and more of us are less and less interested in being reduced down to the lowest common denominator of human experience: mindless consumerism. Our aspirations want us to blaze trails down weird + wonderful uncharted terrains which don’t include squeezing into any socially mandated boxes or categories, so how do we go about setting goals around these anyway?!)
Fast forward to the end of last year, when I began a deep-dive (and ongoing) journey of learning a process of eliciting values. In turn, I’ve been adapting this into a process of eliciting soul-based values, and weaving it into my larger body of work + methodologies.
And slowly, something new has been unfolding in my relationship to goals: they can be an expression of and in service to my soul-based values, which in turn feed a vision of the sort of world I want to be creating and participating in.
Knowing and being aligned with our larger (evolving) values are amazing. But what then? They can end up feeling larger than life and daunting. How do we authentically initiate and enact them into the world?
This is where our goals come in. Working with goals in this way also keeps them (and us) accountable. We’re able to check in and see if they’re coming from and feeding the ecosystem of our soul, which in turn is always connected to the sentience and life force of the World Soul, the Anima Mundi.
Systema Mundi Totius by C G Jung, 1916
In the process of doing this, we also get to meet the parts of us that we’ve rejected, the parts that (allegedly) procrastinate or self-sabotage. We get to understand that they’re not ‘out to get us'; we stop warring with ourselves, and integrate them back into the diverse, regenerative forest-garden that we are.
Our goals become a sort of navigational tool towards the rich, multidimensional experience of what we truly are - which we get to experience in a real and grounded way.
The side effect of this is that we often achieve the goal(s) but without that clenching, life-force draining quality. Without that fear of failure/grasping for success attitude, because everything is feedback.
Our goals adapt and evolve holistically because they’re part of a larger, living system.
One of the many surprising things I’ve been experiencing through this way of playing with goals is that I “get stuff done” but have more time + energy - I guess because I’m in more conscious alignment with my larger values, and spending less time on things that drain my energy/are out of alignment. And I’m not fighting with myself which is one of the biggest, most pointless energy-sucks.
I didn't think I’d ever say this but I’m slowly coming to love #goals! And I didn't think I’d start consciously weaving them in as an offering in my work…
Last season in Root + Rise we dipped our toes into the waters of getting to know our authentic code/soul-based values. This is now going to be grounded into the container and incorporated into our Foundational Practices, where members can go through the process of connecting with their values regularly/seasonally to see if anything has changed. This is also an insightful way to find out what our proverbial seasons are - when are we naturally inclined to do more, and when are we naturally inclined to rest, retreat, vision and gestate.
For this coming season, we’ll be diving into setting actual goals within the context of our larger values and taking action from being rooted in the authenticity of our soul’s ecosystem.
The architecture of doing from a place of being.
As it’s spring, we’re supported by the season to start playing, doing, discovering and creating.
I guess you could call this manifestation work. But - dare I say- not in that oppressive, surface-level Law of Attraction only think positive thoughts and bludgeon myself with positive affirmations, drowning out all the “negative” thoughts that are wrong and bad - which has only ever worked for me (and many I know) in a sort of hit and miss kind of way.
Don’t get me wrong. We absolutely need positive thoughts and affirmations. They’re healthy. They enable our bodies to secrete nutritious chemicals, supporting all our systems. They create new, nourishing neural pathways. But this doesn’t happen if we’re not also meeting, composting and transmuting the denser aspects of Self. The positive thoughts and affirmations are less bioavailable without the willingness to meet all parts of ourselves with Love.
We can’t just “vibrate at a higher frequency” while our neglected parts are starving in the basement.
Because the fact is, we don’t manifest from our conscious minds. We manifest from our unconscious - the place where the creative Mystery resides within us. And if we have a lot of rejected, abandoned aspects of Self left for dead in our unconscious, it matters not a jot how many positive thoughts we consciously think, because we’re not integrated. We’re not in integrity.
As we do this work of eliciting our values, and working with aligned goals, we organically - without any controlling agenda of “fixing” ourselves - come into contact with those parts of us that we’ve rejected and relegated to the shadow realms in our unconscious. We get to love and integrate them back into our Self, letting them share their gifts and become our beloved allies in working together towards our goals.
Less Law of Attraction, more Law of Alignment.
Done in supportive, nourishing community, within the resolving and contextualizing space of a myth, this stops being about perfectionism and struggle, and more about experimentation, play and Self discovery.
Which is the most delightfully creative + non-complainy way of flipping the bird to the colonialist-corporatist human-as-consumer agenda, imho.
Root + Rise is open for spring enrollment until midnight PST 31 March.
Join us in flipping the bird to the man and dancing off into the sunset with our values-infused goals.