My life is a perfect example of
• how extra-ordinary things happen to ordinary people
• what’s available to all of us right here at this amazing point in human history
Consider this
I was born into the Old Dream. My parents were teachers in the UK, we were middle class, not wealthy or advantaged in any way I could see as a child. I was urged down the get-a-great-education route and willing complied, ending up graduating from the prestigious Imperial College in London. All I needed to do then was join a great company and my career would be assured, varied and interesting work all the way to a comfortable pension and a happy retirement. I joined ICI, there weren’t any better companies in the UK back then, though I quickly learned to see it as the ‘velvet rut’, so snug that many of us would forget our wider ambitions just to stay in the comfort.
I made the Old Dream work for me. By the time I was 40 I was able to provide my wife, son and daughter with a 5 bedroom house in a posh part of town, a new Mercedes estate on the drive and holidays on different continents. My sense of making a difference was easily sublimated to the busy demands of running my own consulting and speaking business.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I was aware of a few of the problems that were becoming more visible in the 1990s, particularly the growing environmental crisis and the shameful state of democracy in the UK, which had always moved me. I wasn’t often short of an opinion about what could be done, but didn’t make the link to doing it myself. I had very little sense of the degree to which my choices were mirrored in the world and I was completely blind to the amount of privilege I carried, how much my opportunities were founded in my birth as a white, educated, owning class heterosexual male. And I certainly didn’t realize the urgency of our situation.
Then I woke up. I’d love the story to have a dramatic turning point, a near-death experience or similar; it doesn’t. It just got so I couldn’t carry on any longer, my work was merely oiling the wheels of the corporate demolition machine and I was raising two beautiful kids into an old dream that I knew was bust. So I stopped, I closed my company down and spent two years in reflection, meditation and research; two painful years of unknowing, of unraveling in which my marriage ended and I was separated from my kids.
I got to ask, and answer, some tough questions. In the space of my own enquiry I needed to know how the world worked [or rather how it was not working] and the point of greatest leverage where I could put my energies. I held no office, had no appreciable influence, no access to the corridors of power; what could I do to make a difference?
I got an answer and followed it. I came to see how the world is a mirror of all of us. We are completely reflected in the world we have created and I came to see the world can be changed as we change our thoughts and actions. I also got that my own talents were in communication, creativity and visioning and in these realizations my purpose became clear to me, to contribute to the awakening here on Earth. So if enough of us change how we think and act . . . . ummmm. Without any other means to express this purpose my book, Your Planet Needs You, came to me and was written in early 2006.
I began to follow the flow and more miracles happened. The most gorgeous woman I can imagine came into my life that same year [we’re now married and blissfully happy]. Sand and I found the work of the Pachamama Alliance and trained to offer their Awakening the Dreamer symposium, we began to see we could live our lives delivering workshops and wake-up calls and selling my book. The moment we stepped out of the old dream completely and committed to the new, with all its attendant risks, the Universe opened another door. I was approached to join the Pachamama team in San Francisco and in 2007 Sand and I moved there to begin a new life in California.
Extra-ordinary things happen to ordinary people, and my vision of contributing to the awakening of the human family now happens from the platform of a respected, global organization with people and resources committed to shift the world.
And this is what’s available to all of us right here right now, if we wake up out of the trance of the old dream and look at how we can find mission and meaning in our lives. Come and join the party, an extra-ordinary future beckons.
