Finding the Flow of Synergy that Works Best for You
Seeking more education and life-enriching experiences of any kind — whether by traditional routes or less conventional ones — opens up opportunities to gain power and demonstrate to yourself and others that you can handle power responsibly in the context of meaningful relationships — both those of intimate or private nature and those of more public nature in roles within your community at large. Throughout cultures around the world and across history, young people have tackled challenging opportunities beyond their family homes in order to develop richly rewarding futures, often for the benefits of others as well as for themselves. This can be true for you whether you now live at home or elsewhere. Expanded opportunities for public achievements as well as private intimacy await you to explore with others.
Once life beckons you beyond the boundaries of your home territory, as you likely know already, one of your greatest responsibilities will be to decide how to handle your freedom and your opportunities to try new things. When you feel more “on your own,” the challenges of making your own decisions as a member of an options-rich society arise. I can help you enjoy mastering your freedom as a responsible, empowered and contributing member of society who knows how to make well-reasoned, wise decisions. Your mastery will not happen overnight, but it will happen if you invest yourself in the most promising opportunities that match up with your preferences and your most heartfelt desires. Investing wisely will show you that wisdom is already available to you. Our conversations will help you discover it within yourself as well as around you and help you grow increasingly more confident in relying upon it as a resource. You already have what it takes to make good decisions.
One of life’s most important decisions is to select carefully those you trust to serve as your consultants and collaborators — as you are doing now. Consultation and collaboration with experienced explorers of life can help you to clarify your own aspirations and select among paths available to you. I invite you to experience the power of synergy on whatever path you choose. It is the power that sustains our lives when we share life in mutual appreciation and cooperation rather than engage in relentless competition, which often leads to conflict between “winners” and “losers” and drains everyone of their energy reserves. Within the synergy’s life-sustaining dynamics there need be no losers, only winners who enjoy helping each other win by enhancing everyone’s energy. Everyone within a win-win-win sphere of synergy benefits.
Some call “synergy” by other names like “chi” and “love.” No matter what label we may use, it’s the essential truth of synergy’s nature that matters. One truth about synergy is that it manifests in greater degree when shared between two or more people who join together to maximize its benefits not only for themselves but also for all about whom each cares. (That’s what Jesus had in mind when he told his disciples that he would be with them any time they gathered in his name and nature. It is what Buddha had in mind when he said, “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path” as he used “us” and “we,” not singular but rather plural pronouns.) As the circle of care extends to embrace more people, the synergy grows just as Jesus’ and Buddha’s power grew the more they extended their teachings to wider audiences. I invite you to sample that reality within the time you spend with me and prove to yourself that you can trust it to be true — as expansively for you as it has been for anyone else.
When we talk heart to heart, we experience an increased flow of synergy. That’s one reason that our conversations make each of us feel good. It’s natural to feel good when synergy flows freely, as it will with increasing reliability the more we open our hearts and become honest and vulnerable because we trust each other. Trust is key! The essence of every empowering, healthy relationship is to trust, feel and share one’s emotions honestly and talk about everything that matters most to our hearts.
Because our modern, high-tech, conformist culture resists this ancient wisdom, we are gradually discovering and applying it only in limited ways. If at all, most people are slowly picking up on the truth that sets us free to be the most amazing people we can be. Through our conversations I invite you to discover how to accelerate the rate at which you acquire, adapt and apply wisdom’s principles and practices to your benefit and master the art of sustainable progress throughout your life in your own less limited way. If you accept my invitation, you will be ahead of the curve and become a leader even in young adult years. Plus you will benefit your loved ones and others your heart yearns to serve as you soar to explore levels of personal development rarely attained in modern times. In short, you’ll become an advanced student of holistic, synergistic living as you honor all of who you are now and may yet desire and have the potential to become.
Synergy is like unpolluted water in which fish prefer to swim or clean air you and I prefer to breathe. It is healthy for us. It is the natural, organic and sustainable habitat in which we thrive rather than merely struggle to survive. Nonhuman forms of life remain connected within the flow of synergy by their natural instincts. Being the only form of life with free will and a highly evolved capacity for self-consciousness, humans have experimented with ways to disconnect from synergy’s natural flow and strive to survive outside of it. In fact, we’ve established an invasively and evasively pervasive culture outside of it and suffer from the consequences of experimentation that is running out of control and threatens our existence. Many of the rules, roles and rituals of modern society disconnect us from one another and from our native relationship with synergy. We are now taught to deny the value of our hearts, fear our natural desires and not talk about what’s missing from our lives. Deep inside, we know that something important is missing — that something is terribly wrong, sick or insane about our culture. Together we can act upon our inner knowing to remedy the wrongs, replace sickness with health and restore our sanity.
To restore our connection with synergy’s flow — and remain within the flow — requires that we let go of habits of denial and face our fears directly. Our habits of denial are rooted in fears that others taught us. We have been faithful students of fear’s lessons. Now we can choose instead to be faithful students of love’s lessons and emerge beyond denial to reconnect with life-sustaining, life-enhancing synergy. It is likely to feel like a bold adventure to reconnect as we adopt alternative principles and practices to be happier and healthier than our survival habits would ever allow us to be. Just as salmon swim upstream to spawn, we must swim upstream within synergy’s current to allow love’s light to dawn within us and grow stronger. Our conversations unite us in the adventure of exploring alternatives we’d not realized earlier are available to us. The process of transforming into a master of the art of synergy is creative and invokes the use of our curiosity and imagination. It’s both fun and rewarding!
The essence of the process is to trust each other, feel, express and share our emotions openly and honestly and talk about anything that matters to either or both of us. The more our conversations touch upon topics about which you are curious or imagine you may be interested, the more valuable and productive they will be. The more you overcome your hesitation to address a topic, the more you’ll grow freer to be the whole, caring, happy and deeply satisfied person your destiny promises you can be. It is all about spreading your wings of trust to discover your hidden value and find out that you’re readier to fly than you yet realize. In our conversations, the sky is no limit as you explore your natural desires to be creative, compassionate and cooperative with courage, curiosity and commitment to your own best interests as well as the best interests of other and to your highest ideals.
This is your opportunity to find your own balance among competing values like keeping commitments to others and keeping commitments to yourself or meeting other people’s expectations and meeting your own. Modern culture throws us off balance and swirls us around in confusing ways. Our conversations will allow you to see through the confusion and cease to swirl around as if permanently disoriented. You’ll learn to see the spin others put on their hidden agendas and no longer have to play along to get along when you’d prefer to stand up for yourself and chart your own path as your own navigator. We are happier and healthier when we balance our lives and remain focused and clear-sighted. Balance allows us to flow with life’s synergy as it invites us forward to enjoy ourselves fully throughout our lives.
Modern culture trains us to abandon our health and happiness as necessary sacrifices to achieve goals set for us by the culture’s unhappy, unhealthy norms. We need not choose between conforming to this training or failure. There is a third option, the one our conversations will explore that cannot be seen as clearly without the aid of additional perspectives we will share. Your perspective counts but is wise to consider the perspective of others whose experiences and insights you value too. We can choose to restore and retain the natural benefits of synergy by exercise of our free will just as we have been choosing, oftentimes unknowingly, to forgo those benefits. When you call on Art, you call upon synergy to respond to you and reveal to you what your heart yearns to know. In this way, you honor your own heart’s desires and validate your own value in your own eyes. Conversations rooted in synergy are like having the benefit of two eyes. With one eye, you see only a limited perspective and fail to have the depth perception and peripheral vision that you have with two eyes. With our synergistically combined hearts and minds, we see with wider, clearer, more discerning vision.
There’s a lot to talk about. I extend my invitation to talk based on an array of motivations. By presenting the motivations I outline below, I intend to help you begin to identify the nature of your own quest for truth that sets you free and love that empowers your progress. No matter which path you choose, I will make myself available to you to talk as much as you feel the need and desire to talk.
Investigating your options for education and experiences of any kind is exciting. It can also be stressful and anxiety-producing. It is more likely to be an adventure you enjoy if you undertake it with adequate assistance rather than stumble along alone and unnecessarily risk taking unproductive detours that wind up in dead ends. In some cultures, your adventure would be identified as a “vision quest.” I can help you gain greater clarity about your vision for your life, know that you’re not alone and feel more reassured along your journey and be more confident and satisfied with the outcome of your quest. Let me know if that option interests you enough to talk about it more.
PLEASE CLICK ON ANY AND ALL OF THE DESCRIPTIONS BELOW THAT MAY APPLY TO YOU. If one or more match you, let’s talk about how I can help you to make the most of your education and your personal life so that you can be free to truly enjoy your life while following Gandhi’s advice to “be the change in the world you want to see.” As you go forward, please keep in mind another saying, this time by Aldous Huxley, “I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.” If you devote yourself to promoting your own growth and best interests as a human being, you are in fact already devoting yourself to advancing the best interests of all humanity as well as of the planet we share with all forms of life.
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© Art Nicol 2021
Call on Art to Lighten Your Heart as You Explore Being You 