Mac Macartney: Living A Life Of Fierce Questions To Create Fierce Change - 015

04/18/18 • 61 min

Just how important is it to ask fierce questions of yourself in life, even if you don't yet know the answers?

In many ways, a life can be shaped just as much by asking the question as by having it answered.

Moving ourselves to that internal conversational frontier where we call out into the unknown, places us in a position of vulnerability and receptivity to whatever beautiful calling may come back.

To go to the deepest depths of ourselves, we can think of at least three questions for our lives:

What is it that you most deeply and profoundly love?

What are your deepest and most profound gifts?

What are your deepest and most profound responsibilities?

These are the questions that Mac Macartney poses to himself and to all those he coaches in reaching their greatest potential and deepest connection with themselves and the world around them.

Having sailed into tricky seas earlier in life, Mac had a wake up call to return to nature, retrain as a gardener and then later take on the mantle of executive coaching where he co-founded two development consultancies.

He subsequently heard the call to go deep into what it means to be human and went in search of the First Nations people of the United States where he spent two years embedded in their culture, challenging every assumption and belief he had about himself.

After a series of remarkable experiences with these indigenous people, he left to found Embercombe, a social enterprise that teaches people to become responsible leaders and change-makers in the world.

Since then he has a well known and sought after speaker on all topics from sustainable leadership to climate change advocacy and works with clients as diverse and Danone to Harvard Business School, helping them to move towards sustainable and ethical business behaviour.

Listening to him speak is a thunderous and inspiring invitation to wake up to your potential to take action in the world.

I caught up with Mac to talk about the importance of fierce questions to effect incredible and life-affirming change.

Just how important is it to ask fierce questions of yourself in life, even if you don't yet know the answers?

In many ways, a life can be shaped just as much by asking the question as by having it answered.

Moving ourselves to that internal conversational frontier where we call out into the unknown, places us in a position of vulnerability and receptivity to whatever beautiful calling may come back.

To go to the deepest depths of ourselves, we can think of at least three questions for our lives:

What is it that you most deeply and profoundly love?

What are your deepest and most profound gifts?

What are your deepest and most profound responsibilities?

These are the questions that Mac Macartney poses to himself and to all those he coaches in reaching their greatest potential and deepest connection with themselves and the world around them.

Listening to him speak is a thunderous and inspiring invitation to wake up to your potential to take action in the world.

I caught up with Mac to talk about the importance of fierce questions to effect incredible and life-affirming change.

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Hank Wesselman Ph.D: The Art Of Seeing - 014

"It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing." - Carl Jung

Do you ever think that there is more to life than meet's the eye?

That there is a world of things hidden amongst the world of things seen?

The shamanic discipline of life centers around exactly this, with practices that cultivate a way of seeing the hidden dynamics in life amongst the ordinary goings on, to turn the mirrors of form into windows of enlightenment.

For the most part though it is perhaps fair to say that we live anchored largely to the physical. The scientist, shamanist and doctor Hank Wesselman believes though that our ongoing bias towards objective knowledge has come at the cost of a deeper, intuitive rapport with nature and our spiritual selves. This he says has led to a disenchantment with the way things are and that our re-enchantment with the physical and spiritual world can come from cultivating this visionary 'shamanic sight'.

Through his own experience walking the path of an evolutionary scientist to a Hawaiian shaman, he has danced in both worlds and drawn deep inspiration from his visionary experiences which he has faithfully documented in his popular book SpiritWalker.

Hank argues that Shamanism provides the perfect vehicle for approaching a goal of deepened intelligence and experiencing ourselves as an interface between the worlds of things seen and the worlds of things hidden.

In his words: “There is new spiritual complex coming into being in our world. This mystical mosaic draws from many traditions and many cultures, and has the potential to refresh and perhaps replace our current mainstream religions with new perceptions and new insights.”

As we learn to see the world with renewed reverence again we can see the mystery of life with greater clarity and with it bring for the highest version of ourselves.

"Our practice is not to clear up the mystery. It is to make the mystery clear." - Robert Aitkin Roshi

Next Episode

Therese Jornlin: Womb Intelligence - Reclaiming The Wisdom Of Female Biology - 016

Life, death, rebirth. Expansion and contraction. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter.

These are the fundamentals and cycles of life as we know them.

Just as we look to the seasons and the stars for wisdom in their patterns, can we also see them within our own bodies?

This is the question that has slowly unravelled within Therese Jornlin over the past 30 years as she has gone deeply into the wisdom of female biology and explored the innate intelligence of the womb cycle.

Central to Therese's work is becoming deeply conscious of the womb cycle, fully aware of this most fundamental of biological cycles, and use it as an intimate re-grounding and re-connection process both with the earth and within.

In her course Women Awake, she deconstructs the cultural taboos around menstruation and our relationship to blood and instead teaches women to appreciate and elevate their cycle, to fully comprehend the mirror of their biological cycle to the ecology of the earth.