Monday Morning Mojo

Cultivate Your Chi

Chi (pronounced chee) is a Chinese term for universal energy, the energy that permeates everything and surrounds us, the active principle of every living thing, or life force.

When a person prospers, a plant grows, a company thrives, each is drawing on forces greater than those the body itself generates. In its natural state and flourishing, each is part of a larger system supplying the necessary nutrients and challenges in a series of events that brings out the best. This larger system of fields and conditions enters into the body, becomes part of it, and grows into greater and more complex forms.

A human becomes conscious. At first consciousness is a tool, a way of modeling the surroundings and using the various representations to secure new and better positions. With further development states of awareness go beyond enhancing one's ability to manipulate the environment, they make it possible to generate new ideas, to innovate, to think creatively and see possibilities where others see only constraints.

All of this comes about because you nurture your ability to think and feel. You bring together the best of awareness and unite them in a quest for improvement, advancing not only your circumstances, but also your inner experience.

This kind of cultivation is about seeking outside experience and exposure to new and better ways of doing things, as well as the inner work of learning to invoke and occupy states of mind. These new states of consciousness take you beyond being a subject acted upon by events - a vicitim- and help you to become an agent, an active participant influencing the mix and the results that arise from it.

There are powerful forces beyond our ken that reside in nature. They make it possible for individuals to achieve extraordinary feats as they discover and ply these powers. The same is true in the marketplace. What causes a particular product to lift off and become a bestseller while another languishes hardly noticed? What moves people in droves to adopt a new idea, a new way of working, while ignoring another option perhaps more efficient, more capable? This is the study of innovation, which extends beyond the great idea and out into the world to include the environment and timing of the innovation.

Our inner environment, just as our outer world, is not as random as it sometimes feels. Instead it is a thriving ecosystem of players, fields, and forces. By entering into it with an open eye, a desire to bring out the best, respect for what is, and a vision for healthy progress, we place ourselves in position to develop our nature, which is the life force itself as it uniquely expresses itself through us. This is what is meant by cultivating our chi, developing the life force as it is expressed through our life so that we not only get the results we are looking for, but we become that which we seek and contribute to the larger play in ways that inform, influence, and invoke the world we envision.

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