Claiming Ambition 🚀 / Embracing Shadows with Non-Attachment 🖤 / Micro-transformation: What Are You Rejecting? 🙅‍♂️

I’ve been wrestling with claiming my ambition more. I plan for The Relateful Company (CircleAnywhere) to transform our society positively, on a large scale. Orders of magnitude more than we currently are. I intend to help our civilization be far more loving, far more honest. To make sure our grandchildren and whatever species evolve after us will be better off for having had us in charge for a little while.

So there, I’m (more) out. 

Why “wrestle” with this goal? I’m not attached to when, or how, we make this positive change. Still, I wonder if it's missing the point (of life) — the wisest in history prioritized inner transformation because focusing on the outer is almost certainly a projection. How much desire for outer change is secretly about wanting to change ourselves? Attempting to control the uncontrollable? Thinking I know what’s best in an unknowably vast world? A classic existential bid for personal value and importance as a way to avoid feeling insignificant and avoid intimacy with death? Plus I’m cautious: Sometimes ambition inspires ethical compromises (SBF/FTX), greed, pride, or losing sight of the good that the success is trying to accomplish. Sometimes ambition is driven by pure Red selfishness.

🖤 Yet everything we repress tends to come out sideways, in shadowy addictions and allergies. And everything we admit to ourselves we can alchemize for good, boundary, or let go. My favorite tack is to embrace the previously shadowed without attachment. My ambitions for The Relateful Company are part of the flow of experience that comes and goes. It’s all beautiful, it’s all me (and not me). Life will continue. Life will give me feedback, and clean me up. I’m here for it. I’m listening.

🙅‍♂️ Perhaps you can relate with something you’ve rejected inside of you. Here's an invitation to risk claiming it, feel into the protective layers of shame and be seen in it. I can’t make any guarantees that you’ll be accepted, or that you’ll automatically find the beauty of whatever trait you’ve repressed. It could be a strange or long path to peace. But I can almost guarantee that you won’t find acceptance without willingness to take the risk. And sometimes the acceptance you find for yourself, despite others, is the most rewarding.

As closing claim to my ambition: Please let us know if you host (or personally know) any podcasters, email lists, conferences, etc, that would be interested in exploring Relatefulness. I—or one of the other facilitators—would love to give a talk, be interviewed, share the practices, and/or turn people’s attention to the kind of love and truth that’s possible in relating.

WIth love, Jordan