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Since our launch last November, we’ve been committed to bringing our readers insights into leadership and collaboration informed by jazz music as a model of thought and practice. Over the last three weeks our focus has intensified: the global crisis initiated by Covid-19 led us to do a hard pivot to current events.

That’s why we’ve been pointing to individuals and organizations responding to the crisis in creative ways while urging policy action and public support of the arts—especially jazz—in these troubled times. In this, our 51st post, we point to another organization providing crucial perspectives for our times: Rebel Wisdom.

Rebel Wisdom

Rebel Wisdom is a UK-based knowledge platform that presents live events and produces videos on a Youtube channel featuring conversations with vanguard thinkers. Yesterday, April 5, 2020, they held a free online event via Zoom that Jewel and I attended, “Resilience and Sensemaking.” The title points to two key areas of focus: making sense of today’s complex world and sharing tools to strengthen personal and collective capacity to not only understand and cope, but to withstand challenge and to even thrive.

After Rebel Wisdom’s founder and co-founder (David Fuller and Alexander Biener) opened the event for the approximately 400 attendees from around the globe, they explained the order of the program: intro presentations for context by Jamie Wheal and Diane Musho Hamilton, followed by practices for resilience such as movement and meditation, music and breathwork as well as insight practices for the nervous system, creating internal coherence for a poised balance between individual sovereignty and autonomy and better relationships, interpersonal to communal.

Jamie Wheal

David and Alex introduced the first speaker, Jamie Wheal, Executive Director of the Flow Genome Project, whose work we’ve mentioned in several of our Tune In To Leadership posts. With a brilliance of mind that reminds me of Stan Getz holding his own with John Coltrane on a Monk tune, Jamie weaves a range of disciplines with precision and depth, integrating material reality and cultural possibility, synthesizing personal and social dimensions in a uniquely powerful way.

He’s an essential voice for our moment.

Cognitive Map of the Moment

Jamie broke his brief presentation on the current global predicament into three parts:

Biology
What else is happening?
What does the world look like after?

The biological impact of the pandemic is the first-order effect of the moment, followed by second-order effects amounting to a perfect crap storm of economic damage. The first-wave of Covid-19, in the United States for instance, may turn out to cause deaths of .5 -1.0% of those infected, which is less than the most dire predictions. Yet this number is still close to 100,000 people. (In the jazz world alone, however, the recent losses of Ellis Marsalis, Wallace Roney, Mike Longo, and Manu Dibango are devastating enough.)

Besides the loss of life and breakdown of economic structures, what the pandemic makes crystal clear is the fragility of our “meta-systemic complexity.” The pandemic also prompts these questions:

Will there be a bailout for the mortgage market so the mortgage and credit markets avoid collapse?
Might a “debt jubilee” (universal debt forgiveness) be necessary to re-tool credit, debt, and ownership?
Will our economic recovery be V, U, or L-shaped, with V (sharp rise after a sharp fall) being most optimistic and L (sharp fall and stagnation) the most pessimistic?
What will happen in Africa and India, home to 2 billion humans, with food shortages and civil unrest a likely result of locust infestation and crops rotting? This problem is especially acute in light of NGOs that provide humanitarian aid being low on funds and resources.

The Emerging World

As if the above weren’t frightening enough, there is the possibility of a global economic depression. Yet what is also clear is that leaders of nations, corporations, states and cities are all working to avoid that result. Jamie emphasized the fracturing of the neo-liberal order, where a multiplier effect of democracy and laissez-faire capitalism (“free markets”) ruled the day in the West since the end of the Cold War. Another danger of this precarious moment of fracturing is the rise of surveillance, along the lines of movies such as Blade Runner and Minority Report.

Yet a bleak apocalypse wasn’t Jamie’s sole message. The human soul and human resilience may hold the worst effects of the pandemic blues at bay.

He mentioned an emergency online meeting a few days ago with a gentleman associated with the United Nations who said that what we need right now is 1,000 high-trust truth-tellers to rally humanity to rise to the challenge, and for leaders at localities everywhere to step up. Jamie highlighted the need for vigilance, for self-sufficiency, for joy—anyway. He emphasized the urgency of transcending the corrupting of the Alexander Hamilton-Thomas Jefferson dialectic (Universal globalism vs. the Virtues of the small independent farmer) while honoring the best of the local and gifts of the global. He pointed to the need for a new story, a mytho-poetic vision of shared humanity with a shared community. He proposed that we admit that we can’t solve the culture wars, and to focus, rather, on what we can indeed agree upon about living “a good life” at the local, state, national and global levels. We must “affirm shared overlapping spheres of concern,” Jamie said, based on common decency and dignity.

He closed with a quote from a founding father of the United States:

We must hang together, or we will surely hang separately.
—Benjamin Franklin

Diane Musho Hamilton

Author Diane Musho Hamilton’s decades of experience as a mediator and meditator has morphed into a transformative practice for emotional intelligence and communication excellence. She too is a crucial voice for our moment. In her introductory presentation she asked if we could find a way to embrace multiple perspectives at the same time? For example, can we allow ourselves to feel fear about the current moment yet also become fearless? Can we develop the capacity to feel, take in the energy and intelligence of the feeling, but then let it go? Can you listen deeply and then assert yourself without engaging in immature rivalry?

These questions are crucial because our emotional health and maturity affects those around us, and radiates from within to overlapping spheres of influence. In the same vein, she asked “What calms your nervous system?” How are you dealing with the limbic system of the emotional brain rather than the reptilian brain of “freeze, flight or fight”?

Before outlining a practice to enhance emotional awareness and skill, she offered a few framing polarities:

Being and Becoming

When we meditate, one goal is to tap into Awareness itself, Being, which is timeless. But evolution occurs in time, and humans are in a perpetual state of Becoming, where preservation and change, conservation and innovation, are in relationship. (This is a variation of a point I made in “The Blues and a Post-Pandemic Cultural Vision” about the necessity to include both “conservative” and “progressive” dynamics within our political structures.)

When Diane made this point I thought of the “Wheel of Change” graphic that master executive leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith uses as a heuristic device:

Sameness and Difference

Diane also riffs on the reality of Sameness and Difference. This distinction isn’t just a mental construct, it’s somatic, it’s felt in our very bodies. Sameness brings a feeling of oneness and peace. That’s why singing in unison and being in agreement feels so good. But difference brings a charge in the body, energy, excitement. We need differences, tensions, in order to grow, as we need the tension between preservation and innovation to evolve. (Music lives in the space of tension and release, which is one reason it’s universal among humans.)

These distinctions led to a practice by Diane, a nuance in the subjective realm of feelings we all experience but don’t analyze nearly enough.

First, notice a sensation in your body.

Second, give the sensation a name. This is the feeling.

Third, our thoughts, our cognition about the feeling and the sensation is fed back to us as story, which we call an emotion.

Fourth, when are emotions are sustained they become a mood.

Fifth, moods sustained over much time becomes a personality trait.

Knowing this process and progression allows us to flip the script through inquiry.

Flipping the Emotional Script

Meditation and mindfulness are far more than chanting mantras and saying OM, as important as are those practices in certain lineages of perennial wisdom. Mindfulness is also becoming aware of habitual patterns of thought and behavior and taking action to level up to higher octaves of engagement.

Diane’s pivotal move is in step 3 above.

Here’s how it goes: Think of something that upset you last week, something that really pissed you off or made you feel sad. Feel into the sensations and feelings that arose . . . but set aside the story. Just feel into the sensations and ask:

What is right about this feeling?

Don’t judge the feeling, just lean into to it for a moment. The beautiful insight that we experience is:

If you allow for the feeling, we leave room for the part of us that isn’t the feeling, the part of us that is pure Being.
—Diane Musho Hamilton

Takeaways and Next Steps

In jazz, you practice your instrument and play with others to grow and develop the capacity to improvise, to handle the syncopation and the chord and mood changes that life presents. You develop your self as instrument. We as individuals can’t control a complex external world, with biological and technological threats, but we can manage our responses to them. We can be smart about following the best practices of healthy living, not only short-term social distancing and heightened hygiene, but the good nutrition, exercise, rest, meditation and dancing we should have been doing—and the sunshine we should have been basking in—anyway.

Hard times call for furious dancing.
—Alice Walker
Live in your sunshine and not in your shadow. Because many of the shadows in life come from standing in the way of sunshine.
—Dr. Norman Thomas

Jewel and I were brought into the conversation during a Q&A between Jamie and Diane. One of the attendees, a musician, asked a question about how music and the arts can play a role in dealing with the crisis and in our future. Jamie paraphrased Paul Simon, saying that the arts are the story of how we begin to re-member, put back together the broken, while pointing the way forward. Music provides our “embodied texts,” and are our redemption songs, our scriptures of how to be and become, our “secret super power,” Jamie declared.

Riding on the wave of those insights, Diane passed the mic to us. Jewel spoke on the arts and creative responses to life generally and to our current crisis specifically; I riffed on the secular-sacred dynamic of black American music, the blues and gospel music, and how both are variations on the theme of confrontation and improvisation to celebrate life through and in spite of the pain and suffering.

Rebel Wisdom announced that they’ll have a similar event as detailed above on May 3rd, so mark your calendar. And at the end of that month (May 30 and 31), Jewel and I will be featured speakers at the Rebel Wisdom Online Festival. We hope that you’ll join us, from the comfort of your home.

Staying Resilient, Making Sense: A Rebel Wisdom Experience