In this episode, Katie Churchman is in conversation with Faith, co-founder of CRR Global, about some of the systems that have inspired the work that she does, with CRR Global and beyond. The conversation covers:
Faith Fuller is co-founder and President of CRR Global. She is a psychologist and experienced trainer and coach, with over 20 years of experience in working with organizations, couples and communities. Faith takes a systems approach to coaching, namely that all aspects of the system need to be addressed in order for effective change to occur. Her particular skill is empowering powerful, productive and joyous relationships in couples, partnerships and teams . She also has a background in consultation, team building, conflict resolution and community crisis intervention.
For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time
We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.
In this episode, Katie Churchman is in conversation with Faith, co-founder of CRR Global, about some of the systems that have inspired the work that she does, with CRR Global and beyond. The conversation covers:
Faith Fuller is co-founder and President of CRR Global. She is a psychologist and experienced trainer and coach, with over 20 years of experience in working with organizations, couples and communities. Faith takes a systems approach to coaching, namely that all aspects of the system need to be addressed in order for effective change to occur. Her particular skill is empowering powerful, productive and joyous relationships in couples, partnerships and teams . She also has a background in consultation, team building, conflict resolution and community crisis intervention.
For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time
We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.
Key
KC – Katie Churchman
FF – Faith Fuller
[Intro 00:00 – 00:09]
KC – Hello and a warm welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity, to nature, to the larger whole. I’m your host, Katie Churchman, and in this episode I’m talking with co-founder of CRR Global Faith Fuller about some of the systems that have inspired the work that she does. Across the conversation we cover a range of topics to do with Faith’s life, including the meaning of influence, the impact of her childhood, working as a psychologist, the impact of a brain injury, Buddhism, may have had and her spiritual background and being diagnosed with cancer. As well as being co-founder and president of CRR Global, Faith is a psychologist and experienced trainer and coach with over 20 years of experience working with organizations, couples and communities. Faith takes a systems approach to coaching, mainly that all aspects of the system need to be addressed in order for affective change to occur. Her particular skill is empowering powerful productive and joyous relationships in couples, partnerships and teams. She also has a background in consultation, team building, conflict resolution and community crisis intervention. So without further ado I bring you Faith Fuller.
KC – Hi Faith, welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast.
FF – Thank you Katie, good to be here.
KC – So I know you’re a little reluctant around this topic, the systems that inspired you, so talk to me first about that reluctance to talk about some of the things that have inspired the work that you do in the world?
FF – Well, that’s a really good question, I’ve just noticed a tremendous resistance to it and I think it’s something to do with the fact that I don’t like being the center of attention and, I don’t know, it just sort of, I don’t like anything that’s sort of too much about me. But then Marita pointed out something really useful which has helped me a lot, she said it’s not about you, it’s about the people that influenced you or the things that influenced you! If it’s about you then you’re off the mark, so, I thought that was really helpful like yeah, it’s not. But the other thing I do wanna talk about briefly is it’s sent me off on a whole chase around what the hell has influenced me, what does it meant to influence somebody or be an influencer with somebody. You know, it’s interesting in psychology they have this whole theory called diathesis stress, and what that model meant is that any illness that came up was a combination of sort of the stressful event in your life, or good things in your life, and your phytotomy, you know your body tendency. And I think that’s true for influence as well, I think there are, that we are a seed when we are young and we want to grow into a particular tree based on our DNA and there are influences that shape that tree. So maybe I’m a chestnut tree, let’s say, but that chestnut tree is in my DNA and I want to become that, but all kinds of things influence how that tree develops. Something falls on it, lightning strikes it, these things will have huge impact on the actual formation of that tree. And so I think it’s kind of like that, we’re all, you know, I’m wildly mixing metaphors here but when I think about the influencers in my life, the people, they’re everybody from the students I meet in courses to you know big childhood influences or whatever, but I feel like we’re all in this big rock tumbler, you know, our rumbling along, rubbing up against people and they are affecting the shape of what I am becoming and I am affecting the shape of what they are becoming. We’re constantly influencing and being influenced in that rock tumbler as we rattle along together through life.
KC – Oh I love that metaphor, it really talks to the fact that we’re not operating in a vacuum and it’s almost impossible to say that was the moment that inspired ORSC because who knows, actually, there’s probably so many big, small and in-between things that got you to where you are today. And it’s not a one way direction, it’s an interdependency of direction, yeah.
FF – Absolutely, you know, when I think about ORSC, ORSC was something that just got expressed through Marita and me, so it wanted to come out in the world and it picked Marita and me. But how it’s been expressed, the way it shows up has been hugely influenced by every student in the course that asks a brilliant question or struggles with something, it’s a co, it’s a collaborative process, a course, influenced by everything that rubs up against that course and affects it.
KC – In a constant state of emergence as we say.
FF – Yes! And voices of the system that affect it!
KC – So, I wonder if we could start by talking about your parents. You’ve spoken fondly offline, there are some stories with your dad that you’ve mentioned and I wonder if you could start by talking about some of those memories?
FF – Yeah, both of my parents, of course, you know, everybody’s parents influenced them for better or for worse, and actually I’m gonna start with my mother because she’s edgier and I think she’s a good setting, also for my father. And my mother had a lot of demons, let’s just say. She struggled, she had a very difficult childhood herself, she struggled with depression, alcoholism, addictions of all kinds, so she was a difficult mother. But I have to say, I’ve been through stages of working through that difficulty of my mother, you know, it’s this loaded thing about your childhood, but I have to say my mother’s had probably a profound influence on me, and it wasn’t of the good things about her, although the good things obviously gave me enough that I could become who I needed to be, but it was my mother’s suffering, her depression, my longing to be able to fix her, you know, I think all a child wants is a mother to be well, you know it’s very threatening when she’s not. And I remember one time when I was six and my mother was getting ready to go out and my sister was actually putting her makeup on for her and I didn’t understand why was my sister helping my mother with her makeup, you know, my mother was an adult, why was this happening? But it turned out my mother was slurred in her speech, probably from a combination of alcohol and maybe Seconal, the bottom line is that she wasn’t, you know, she was altered pretty significantly and my sister was helping her and I just couldn’t understand why my mother wasn’t being my mother and when my sister finally explained it to me that my mother was quote unquote “sick”, well my world just shattered. And I cried for a long time but there was a huge shift from that into wanting to fix my mother and, as awful as that sounds, that drive to be useful in the world has shaped who I have become. I went into psychology, was it all about fixing my mother? No, of course not, I already had that tendency, but my mother and that desire to assist others, to find tools for others, to end suffering began with my mother, and it was a major shape that I think was already there, I was born with it, but my mother activated it in a very intense way. And I’ve gone from sort of done my therapy about my mother, you know, as a bad person, she’s somebody that I actually feel profound gratitude towards, that my mother, when I’ve recovered, shaped the gifts that I have and that’s true healing, when you can recognize that this difficult path you walked actually played a huge part in the strength of who you become. And I think that’s a final part of healing, when you realize that the thing that hurt you helped you become the best of your tools as well. So that was my mother – difficult and hugely informative to who I am. And my father was the other way around, he was optimistic, funny, warm, loved animals, he would take us… the story that I think you said that you loved was my father would go out driving on the roads in the springtime in Connecticut with us and he was driving around in the woods of Connecticut because he was looking for turtles that would cross the road at that time of year. There were box turtles, painted turtles and they were all coming out of hibernation. Of course they would get squashed on the road –
KC – Aw.
FF – Yeah, I know! So my father would drive around and find a turtle on the road, and we would get out and I would stand in the road to stop anybody that was coming, or he would stand in the road and stop any car that might be coming and I was always instructed to make sure I took the turtle across the road in the direction in which it was heading so that it wouldn't turn around. So, and sometimes if it was not a safe road we would load up the trunk of the car with turtles and move them down to a different location in the woods where they were safer –
KC – That’s so cute.
FF – It was! And my sister remembers doing this with him, in fact she wote a poem about the experience of the turtle being picked up and put in the boot of a car and then what it must have been like to have been released some place. So that was my father, very nature orientated, he was a professor, he had two PHDs and he never went to college.
KC – Wow!
FF – Yeah, two honorary PHDs.
KC – How did that happen? How does one get two honorary PHDs and not go to college?
FF – Well he was a book reviewer, he was a writer, he wrote around 12 books and he was a teacher and because he was a book reviewer, first for the New York Times for a while but also for the Wall Street Journal, their non-business books, and so he became known from that and his work was appreciated so he got two honorary PHDs, one from Sewanee University in the south and I can’t remember who the other one was because they revered his work, his views, his essays about literary criticism and so on, so he got two honorary PHDs and he never went to college, he was a self-made man.
KC – And so do you think his outlook on life helped to shape your intellectual curiosity?
FF – Definitely.
KC – Because I get that from you, you’re so curious.
FF – Definitely, that combined with the fact that I’m the youngest of four with a 14-year range in my family, I was the runt of the litter, you know, seriously! So you can imagine what dinners were like at my house in terms of intellectual conversation, you know. Arguments about this, that or the other, and I was this little kid, you know, with a big age range behind everybody so I grew up in a highly, somewhat gently combative intellectual arena and definitely that shaped my already innate interest in learning things, you know. So definitely, that’s the case. And I always laugh because you know in my family, you know, I have a PHD but that’s all BS in my family, in my family I will always be little Faith.
KC – It’s funny how these roles never leave us.
FF – These roles never leave you, yeah! So I think that’s contributed to my humbleness, I’m never gonna be anything more than little Faith for my family. Still at 71.
KC – So was it a natural progression then to apply for a psychology PHD? Or did that come separately after college?
FF – No, I think that fits right in, you know, I’ve always been fascinated by people. I was also keen to want to understand them and be possibly useful, you know, how could I be useful? But mostly I was fascinated so psychology was natural for me. And I also felt like I was fated to become a psychologist. I didn’t get in the first time I applied because there were 258 applications for five positions at the University of Marilyn and every other place I applied was very competitive, and my test scores weren’t that great. But I wrote an essay on impact on maternal employment as a child because I had a …
KC – Wow!
FF – I know, I know. And it just so happened that Clara Hill was, had stepped in at the University of Marilyn because the main director was on sabbatical and she happened to be 7 months pregnant when I applied. So she read the article and she was very interested and she called me up, and she basically said yes, I’m going to let you in, so I got in and I sort of feel like the whole universe, the world shifted for me, my life sort of then had a path through psychology and ultimately the coaching.
KC – So, you must be quite a forerunner in terms of, so you were a working mum and you applied for a PHD when you had a young child, I’m guessing that wasn’t the done thing back then given the topic of your essay?
FF – It wasn’t. Yeah. And so I was writing about, I was worried about it! But all the research, you know, I’m so glad that I did it, said at the time that if the mother was happy, the child would be happy. So if the mother was happiest at home, you know, being forced to work would not support her or the child and if the mother wanted to work and she was happy working then the child would be happy so it very much had to do with the mother’s needs, and I always heard that expression if the child cries, feed the mother, you know, so there’s more available for her to give.
KC – So where did your, because I know psychology is a massive field, and so where did it initially take you?
FF – Well, at the time I was really interested in the dramatics of pretty intense symptoms. So I was, I’ve often wondered about this, I don’t know whether it’s because I was a small woman and I was sort of counterphobia but I got very interested in sort of explosive people when I was at the university. And then I did my internship at the VA Hospital for two years, two half years at the VA Hospital and I was very interested in highly violent people, and I think there was a, you know, an aspect in that of could I communicate and was it manageable? Was there a manageable connection that could be made? So I got fascinated with that and I think I was trying to find out how you connect, how you make empathetic connection with somebody deeply different. And yeah, I was, I found the way in and I think one of the ways in that I learned is that nobody is one thing, nobody is, you know, an explosive disorder, that they are all these other things plus being an explosive disorder, or a violent or an abuser or a murderer, or all the things I worked with. That doesn’t define all of them. So I think a lot of the business about how we have many selves inside, we are a system, and I worked a lot with addiction and one of the things I found is that helping an addict to know that they’re not summed up by their addiction, there’s other aspects, there’s the father, there’s the person who wants to work, there’s the church person, there’s the whatever. And helping them to understand they were not fully defined by their addiction or by their mental illness is, I think, hugely supportive to the system of somebody who’s ill.
KC – It must have been really powerful work.
FF – Yeah, and you can see that run through the ORSC work in term of secret self, deep democracy and lions roar, that there are, there are many, that whatever is happening has, can usually, potentially has a positive aspect that we can find with enough work.
KC – Was that sort of the initial starting point, do you think, of understanding that system of me and seeing yourself as a system?
FF – Yes. Definitely. Plus years and years of therapy of course! That I highly recommended! Therapy’s different at different stages of your life, so you know, many years of therapy, studying my own system, studying different people’s systems, and I think I have my father’s sense of wonder at human beings. So every person always seems to me like this fabulous, you are unlocking a beautiful puzzle and it’s so funny if you’re working with somebody who has a very negative sense of self, it’s unlocking that to find the gold underneath, but if you’re working with somebody who has no sense of who they are beyond the sort of surface it’s helping them to unlock the depth and complexity underneath. So, I think you have to love people and have a sense of wonder so that reflects back at them rather than judgment or, for me I never really liked the pathology oriented stuff which is why I think I move toward coaching rather than psychology which tends to put people in the diagnostic category. It’s very limiting if that’s all you see.
KC – And so during this time would you call yourself a Buddhist?
FF – Definitely. Yeah. A huge influence in my life. It goes way back to, again, this particular, the shape of the tree of Faith has a lot of natural, I think, innate drive towards spirituality. And that’s just part of my makeup, my genetic makeup, there’s a tendency in that direction. And so I was, I did communion and I was a presbyterian, high church and all that stuff when I was a kid because that’s what my family was. But I didn’t like my, my understanding which has changed for me personally is that I felt like you were good or you were bad, for something you did you were good or you were bad, and I think I was drifting even in my late teens and the direction of wait a minute, I know I’m good and bad, I know this person is good and bad or that behavior may have been quote unquote a “bad” action but it actually had a positive outcome. So you know, it was too apt to write people off, you know, and I was certainly not an advocate of heaven and hell, and I could not imagine, you know, I couldn’t imagine a God that would be less compassionate than I was. I couldn’t imaging damning everybody for an entire, you know, eternity because of something they did, no matter how heinous. People change and grow, so at any rate I sort of felt like I didn’t fit in Christianity, although I still have the most profound reverence for it. But Buddhism came along, I had a partner I was with who was Buddhist and my sister was the same kind of Buddhism so I kinda got dragged into it, and boy, you know, it fit. And that sense of system, again, that you are not a single consciousness and that what flows through you is personal but not personal, and in the sense that, you know, I remember a teacher said to my sister at one point when she complained about how angry she was in her meditation, and he just said to her what makes it think it’s your anger?
KC – Oh wow.
FF – And that’s like, I got that story second hand and it was like wow, alright. So, you know that’s… and Arnie Mandell comes in there because Daoism with its sense of time spirit, we are, a sense of flow through the world of different motions and feelings and aspects of self, all that came in and wildly influenced ORSC which is vary Daoist, you know, since it’s so Arnie based, and very Buddhist also, although we don’t talk about that because it’s, you know, religion is still taboo to talk about in a professional course, but anybody who has any sense knows that it’s loaded with what I would call the neutral aspects of Buddhism, and the idea that people are basically good, it’s a Shambolic concept, a Buddhist concept, rather than original sin you’re basically good and you need to find your way back to the gem within you that is your nature.
KC – I love that link back to ORSC, do you seen Buddhism both as a way of life and a religion? Because I know sometimes it gets held in different ways.
FF – Yeah, I would say that’s true of any religion.
KC – Ok.
FF – If you’re a true practitioner, a true Christian tends to live their Christianity, you know, as much as they can and a true Buddhist truly tries to live with the concept of compassion and my tree and, you know, and all those things. So yes, I’d say it’s a way of life and it’s a religion, you know, and it’s a philosophy of life and hopefully whatever you believe influences you on a daily basis. Practice it the best you can, if it’s applied in a significant way. So I still apply it as much as I can and it’s a gift that keeps on giving, you never come to the end of doorways that are available in Buddhism, or for that matter, in Christianity, as you evolve the next door of insight about yourself or awareness of other people or of what’s needed in a moment where somebody is suffering, I think all religions, all the great religions know how to tap into that. The thing that I appreciate about Buddhism is it’s very practical in my book, because the path of course has to do with meditation and different and different dogmas and teachings, so I thought they give me a path that was natural for me to develop awareness, so it was for me a very practical applied approach to evolving as a human being.
KC – So did you get a lot of those insights and that awareness from sitting on the cushion and meditating for many hours?
FF – Yes. And I think there’s an arc to that. Where if you sit on a cushion, and I think the arc that we go through, you don’t have to be a Buddhist to do this, you know, a lot of people never sit on a cushion but the first awareness is you’re just aware of how very busy your mind is. You know. And then you notice that there are times where your mind isn’t that busy, that you’re just present with something in the room, aware of what’s happening and not thinking, thinking, thinking, or judging, judging, or whatever you’re doing. And then there comes a period where, in Buddhism it’s called the death gives rise to the service.
KC – What a term!
FF – It’s basically when you sit staring into the abyss of your nature which is what you do when you’re sitting for hours and hours and hours, there’s nothing to look at but yourself, and you begin to see all these things about yourself, that malevolence that’s there, the anger or the self pity, the themes go by like box cars, you know they’re linked to one another and they’re repetitive or even boring, the same things go by every time. And it’s like Jesus, my mind’s so dull, it’s the same themes, so there’s a period you often go through where you don’t have compassion for yourself or you feel like oh, God, I’m such a shitty person, look at this. And that’s followed by when you breath with it for long enough to begin to realize wait a minute, everybody is going through this, everybody is angry, everybody is bitter, everybody is… whatever they are, it’s not personal as much. It’s not all about you as a person, it’s about the human condition. And then I would say there’s the Tonglen practice which is once I realize my anger isn’t just mine, like that guru said to my sister, it’s not, what made me think of it is my anger. Yes, it’s my anger, that’s my doorway in, but Tonglen then allows you to connect with I’m willing to hold, I’m large enough inside, I’ve a big enough space inside me of goodness that I can accommodate my own anger first. You know, I can breath with that anger and I can be gentle with it and breath it out to that anger, gentleness and kindness and understanding, and when I breath it in I breath in that anger and I create a big enough space to hold it without grounding it out. You know? That’s where spiritual warriorship, the concept, comes in. You are large enough inside from the Buddhist perspective of decent goodness to hold that anger and give it the space to live in so it’s a storm not playing out inside a one square mile but playing out over the ocean, all this space, and when you’re the ocean of space you have to breath in not just your own anger but open to breathing in the anger of others because you can, because you’re big enough, because it’s not gonna break you. In fact the more you breath in the pain of others, the bigger you get, and you breath in the pain of others specifically, whether it’s anger or pain or grief or sickness or whatever it is, and you breath out gentleness, spaciousness, understanding. You wish them well. So that process makes you gigantic, you know, and you discover your edges, you discover I can be very compassionate with people, maybe, who are frustrated but I have no compassion for somebody who, you know, has got malice. I can’t open up to that. So then you get curious, why, why can’t I open up to malice? I can open up to this, why not that? So that takes you back to the next layer of your own development, your own curiosity about yourself, and so it’s a circular process of I evolve myself and then I’m open to help, to hold and evolve others understanding of themselves if that’s possible. So that was a long answer, I hope it made sense!
KC – Yeah and I’m wondering, does a lot of your meditative or reflective practice now happen off the cushion and in your life? Because it sounds like you’re doing that sort of away from the cushion and the formal meditation.
FF – Yeah, you know, that’s true. You know I think in the beginning you need the structure, I did, most of us do, of I’m going to sit down now, I’m sitting on my cushion, I’ve gotta shrine or whatever, and the rituals that help hold the discipline of the practice, but you know, as I’ve gotten older what meditation is is simply awareness. Awareness of what’s going on in your self, awareness of what’s going on in the space and the room, with others. And so you’re less caught up, again, in your own mind, you’re simply present for what is. And so that’s basically meditation off the cushion, you know, post meditation practice is being present with what’s happening without a lot of thinking and generating drama. And I do that a lot more now, so I do less, I just like to wander outside for 10 minutes and sit in a chair in the garden or in the front room, just be and just be and notice what’s around me and notice my own mind, and so I do that a lot, you know. Of course I’ve got my days of obsessing over something that’s tweaking me out, just like everybody else, but when I’m not triggered in some way then I’ll spend more time just being.
KC – Mm. It makes me think of signals, particularly sort of quantum flirts but also those signals showing up in the client, how that’s sort of meditative in the way it raises ours and our clients awareness.
FF – Hugely. In fact that’s where flirts comes from. If you sit still for an hour, you know, and you’re not totally obsessed in your mind, you notice things! That’s as simple as you notice that there is a fly on the windowsill crawling around. And then the next jump from that is to make a story up about it, what’s it got to say to me, why is it here right now? So you can develop a narrative of its needing you, it’s a relationship needing you, that fly has something to say. Dream into it, what does that fly say? But then you know, after you’ve felt that you go back just to being aware and then, you know, you do that a much, pretty soon there’s a firehose of flirts coming at you, the whole world wants to flirt with you. You’re there, you’re present! So definitely flirts come from there, you know, it’s just, all it is is awareness. That’s all a meditation is, is awareness.
KC – So I’m wondering, this container that you’ve created for yourself, how it’s helped you with some of the challenges in your life. I know, so you’ve had the cancer diagnosis which we’ve talked about quite a bit on Conversations on Cancer, but you also had a big car accident you’ve mentioned a few times.
FF – Oh yeah. Oh boy. You know I’ve gotta say, I’ve gotta bitch here for a moment, I’ve had a rough time till 2016! Which is when the … well maybe it was 2015, I can’t remember now, but at any rate, I had a really serious car accident which many people know about out there and I had a bad concussion and yeah, that taught me a lot of things. First of all it taught me that I had to almost grow back up through infancy over a course of several, you know, a number of weeks, and so I think, I notice for example that there was a period of time where I did not have any sense of time, there wasn’t a past and there wasn’t a future, there was only now. And as a Buddhist you could think wow, what more could you want, you’re in the now all the time! But what I came to realize is that if you don’t have a sense of self about what you’ve said an hour ago, or how you felt an hour ago, or last week, and you don’t have a sense of where you’re heading towards in the future, in some ways I didn’t have a sense of self because self is a sense of a continuity of experience and I remember the day where I realized that my self awareness was coming back. This nurse kept asking me the same question, where was I, what was my name, I got that I was in the hospital but it was only after she, I then asked, I don’t know how many times I realized if I don’t come up with the right answer for this, this woman is gonna keep showing up the whole time today and asking me the same damn question! And so something locked in, it was like yeah I know, which hospital? And after that I was feeling very aware of I needed to understand what was happening to me. And then time came back, I remembered oh, she’s asked me this before and she’s gonna ask me in the future and I could pay attention to no, I’m not just in the hospital, I’m in this particular hospital and I’d had an accident and this happened to me, and very rapidly then that sense of who I was came back. That I had a past, I had a future, and yet in some ways there was an innocence and an openness to why I didn’t have that, what I missed. Also it forces you to come to terms with disability. I had a disability around, I still have a disability around time, I’m terrible at tracking time…
KC – What, because of the accident?
FF – Well it’s hard to know. At this point between accident, cancer, being 71, I mean what comes from what! Am I brain damaged, am I the cancer drug – take your pick! I got lots of excuses! You know? Actually I could go on about that but I do wanna do a quick nod and a shout out to cancer which has been a huge influence. And, again, I don’t know whether it’s, I just, I’m less interested in, first with the accident and then with the cancer, I sort of felt like it pushed me off the road of so much doing in order to run CRR Global as Marita and I have, it involves a lot of hard work, many, many hours and I loved it, I felt like a cheetah who was galloping down the road and handling all these things, and after the accident it was like not so much, you know, and now, you know with the cancer I sort of feel like CRR Global is this wonderful, vivid, beautiful, New Orleans band, colorful and full of wonderful things, but I can let that wild, intense band move on down the road and appreciate it from a little bit more of a distance. I want less doing. I wanna be able to sit in the backyard and listen to the birds more. And I realize that at this stage in my life as I’m moving more towards completing my life, you know, I used to think what’s wrong with these older people, they’re so simple, they just sort of sit there, they don’t have much to say. Well from my viewpoint, I’ve lived my life in horizontal movement, that cheetah moving, making things happen fast. And now I’m in what I would call vertical development, the cancer, the accident has forced me to deepen. So I’m still evolving but it’s vertical development, not so much about travelling all over the world, it’s just as creative, I have thoughts and stories and ideas and I’m finishing a book called Relationship Matters, just as creative, but I wanna do less and experience more.
KC – What are you learning from that being space that you’re holding more and more these days?
FF – That’s a great question. I’m learning, how to say this, first of all, a lot about beauty. What does that even mean, it means that by slowing down and being more you are opening up portals to the beauty of the world. Whether it’s a person or an animal or a plant or a bug, there are infinite doorways in which to encounter the world and the profundity of the world, but when you’re travelling fast, moving fast, you will get a great deal done and that is a beautiful thing. It needs to be done in that time of our life. But there are enormous doorways that don’t open up until you slow down. So, I would say in this time of my life the worst thing about my temperament is my impatience and my speed, because when I slow down there’s a doorway opening with everything I encounter and beauty and miraculous-ness of a caterpillar, instead of thinking I gotta spray that son of a bitch, it’s gonna eat my leaves on my tree, you know, I just notice the legs and the colors and the miracle of it. Or a drop of rain on a leaf. It’s a doorway. And you don’t see them, the doorway, until you really slow down, get out of your mind of thinking and just be present with what is around you with all those flirts. And then doorways will open, inside beauty, compassion, deeper levels of yourself, you begin to blur the boundaries between self and others, between self and nature, between self and the moment. So when you slow down let yourself open up to those doorways, see what’s there for you.
KC – Mm. That makes me think of Pico Iyer’s quote: ‘in a world of constant acceleration what would be more exhilarating than slowing down’.
FF – Yes! Yes. Although our minds hate it. Our minds hate slowing down, they get bored, you have to sit through a lot of shit before you get to being. I still do to!
KC – Thank you so much Faith, thi shas been such a gorgeous conversation, yeah I feel like it’s never gonna be one that we can close fully because we’re in a constant state of emergence and I’m curious what’s gonna inspire you next!
FF – Me too! Thank you Katie, it’s been a huge pleasure, thanks so much.
KC – Take care.
[Music outro begins 38:44]
KC – I wanna say a big thanks to Faith for sharing some of the systems that have inspired and continue to inspire the work that she does. My key takeaway comes from the begin of this episode where Faith was pondering on the meaning of influence. When you think about the things that influence you, think of yourself like a rock in a big rock tumbler, rumbling along. All of us are beating up against other people, projects and events, and they are affecting the shape of what we’re becoming. And simultaneously, we are affecting the shape of what they become to. We are both influencing and influenced at the same time. They are interdependent. Thank you for listening to the Relationship Matters podcast. If you enjoyed this episode please share it with your colleagues and friends so that we can continue to spread these ideas across the globe, and if you haven’t already, do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. And for more information on the ORSC courses please visit CRRGlobal.com. For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time. We believe Relationship Matters from humanity to nature to the larger whole.
[Music outro 40:28 – end]