Gaining Personal Mastery Through Silence and Solitude

It is bosom space for today's leader. The silence and purdah that clip so sick affords is paradoxically such as a necessary constituent for the busy leader in demand. There is one thing for sure, a disquieted bosom trembling with fear, emphasis and anxiousness is not a good concomitant for anyone with thrust to win in their missionary post or calling of life.

I desire to research what it intends to have got personal mastery, Negro spiritual peace, and relative enlightenment, within the linguistic context of silence and solitude. These two conceptions are interwoven.

Gordon MacDonald states we necessitate to be given our interior garden, our interior world[1] - we necessitate to acquire away from the noise of life, routinely and regularly. He states of Mother Teresa's celebrated quote, "God is the friend of silence."[2] MacDonald states we necessitate modern times of "rhythmic withdrawal."[3] We don't like it; we're uncomfortable with silence and aloneness. But, we can "nurture silence" in our noisy Black Maria if we "value it, cherish it, and are eager to nourish it."[4] To 'reach' this precious "inner garden" of our psyches takes at least 15 proceedings of resisting and fighting everything that volition attempt to maintain up from that goal.[5] It simply doesn't experience good initially, and MacDonald even acknowledges he'll never set - it'll be a lifespan struggle.

Those who take a twenty-four hours out of their busy agendas once a hebdomad to restore, refresh, revive, and re-vitalise, will profit enormously from it spiritually - along with spinoffs in physical, mental and emotional domains of life. The benefits go on to turn over time. Using portion of this twenty-four hours to have got a "desert experience" of silence and purdah is the key. The Russians have got a term for it. A 'Poustinia' is a little space, typically a cabin, used for supplication and fasting and silence before God. Catherine Of Aragon Delaware Hueck Doherty states the followers in her book of the same title, Poustinia:

"It looks unusual to say, but what can assist modern adult male happen the replies to his ain enigma and the enigma of him in whose mental image he is created, is silence, purdah - in a word, the desert [emphasis in original]. Modern adult male necessitates these things more than than the anchorites of old."[6]

We can transpose Doherty's quotation mark today very quickly and state post-modern people (being grammatical gender inclusive) have got more of a demand for silence and purdah than ever before. This is the cardinal to healthy and balanced mental, emotional, and Negro spiritual life. Never before have the human race seemed more than than than transient, more rushed, or more unsettled. Change is a characteristic of life in the 21st Century. It is often unwelcome, so we necessitate a manner of coping with it that's sustainable.

Personal command through silence and purdah is the manner to coincident healthy withdrawal and deep involvement. A leader necessitates to be involved with their people, but to be 'most available' they necessitate to be able to 'withdraw' from the demands of life, and happen that "cell" or quiet topographic point to meditate and be alone. It can assist in what Simon Peter Senge[7] states is the critical measure in the procedure of achieving personal mastery. "People committed to continually developing personal command pattern some word form of meditation."[8]

Personal command is an astonishing theory. It is the "discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing world objectively."[9] In short, it is the ability to assimilate, work with, and admit and accept truth, both personally and totally. Another manner of putting it would be achieving maturity. The Apostle Alice Paul set it this way, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I set away infantile things."[10] It is seeing the human race for what it really is; and having an mental attitude of complete acceptance. We can't accomplish personal command without visiting the "cell" as Dave Ian Ian Fleming names it.

"Cell-less leaders" according to Fleming, do not make clip for reflection.[11] In a function that must visualize and program for the future, it is critically of import to use the past, and be able to reflect on it as a platform for the future. Leadership who are scholars seek lessons from their past, from the environment of reflection. "Cell-less leaders" make not make this well, and this tin have got serious effects for their cardinal household and friendly relationship relationships-those key personal support webs that are so foundationally critical in ensuring all portends well, for the leader and all his/her subordinates. It is the household and cardinal friendly relationship human human relationships that endure most when the leader doesn't reflect - and this have the consequence of rebounding onto the cardinal leading relationships with sub-ordinates.

The "Cell" is also required to assist maintain the bosom pure and unadulterated from the more than toxicant influences of life. A healthy "cell" life supplies both flexibleness and watchfulness (diligence), so that the delicate balance can be maintained and we can go on in Negro spiritual wakefulness.[12] The truth is the "shallow me doesn't desire the remainder of me to detect that the shallow me is an semblance that must be evacuated."[13] The procedure of the Poustinia or the Cell is necessary; critical in rapprochement with self. Ian Fleming says, as MacDonald indicated earlier, the "stark cell" military units us to "continue in the inevitable uncomfortableness it conveys [then we will have] the courageousness to allow travel of the illusion."[14]

This conveys in with it the rule of shalom. It can be variously defined as peace, abundance, and wellbeing - all of which are marks of the good life lived in harmoniousness with Supreme Being and God's creation.[15] Further, shalom is worldly order, or better, universal order. Supreme Being have put up an order and somes 'shalom,' which is easily disturbed-"a balance that tin be upset."[16] The end is congruity and cognition of that which is not good so it can be safely discarded. At once, shalom is achieved.

Assuming the value of silence and purdah is incontrovertible, allow us concentrate more than clearly on this conception of personal mastery. It's been said that it is the 'creative tension' between the current world and the vision the individual throws for the future.[17] The vision draws us from the present state of affairs toward the perceived goal. This is a passionate committedness to growing by "learning how to bring forth and prolong originative latent hostility in our lives."[18] Senge believes that meditative patterns can augment productiveness of the subconscious head mind.

No 1 can quantify the powerfulness of constituted personal mastery. It is basically limitless in what it offers the individual who can encompass the rule of maintaining the originative latent hostility required. It's the ability to make the hereafter way toward the chief end and have got cognition of the gap, its size and design, whilst having the ability to 'get there.' That's enough to struggle for more than of it. It's a certain procedure in the accomplishment of your most desired goals.

To summarise, the cardinal is to:

Find clip and the topographic point to meditate or reflect in silence and solitude;

This is to:

Continually clear up and deepen your personal vision or ends - do a pick to seek for those things that are really of import to you;

Focus energy;

Develop forbearance in the thick of trying circumstances; and

See world objectively - to be fully aware of the minute you're in.

© Steve J. Wickham, 2008. All rights reserved Worldwide.

[1] Gordon MacDonald, Ordering Your Private World, Updated Edition, (Highland Books, Surrey, 1985, 2003), p. 170.

[2] Quotation Mark originally from Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, (Image, Garden City, NY, 1977), p. 48, in MacDonald, Ibid, p. 171.

[3] MacDonald, Ibid, p. 171.

[4] Quotation Mark originally from John Wayne E. Oates, Nurturing Silence in a Noisy Heart, (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1979), p. 3, in MacDonald, Ibid, p. 173.

[5] MacDonald, Ibid, p. 173.

[6] Catherine Of Aragon Delaware Hueck Doherty. Poustinia: Christian Spiritualty of the East for Horse Opera Man. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Mare Press, 1975. Revised edition with new subtitle: Encountering Supreme Being in Silence, Solitude, and Prayer. Combermere, ONT: Mary House, 2000. Quotation Mark available: http://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/doherty.html

[7] Simon Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, (Doubleday, NY, 1990, 1994).

[8] Senge, Ibid, p. 164.

[9] Quotation Mark is direct from Senge's book but without page reference. Available online at: http://www.rtis.com/nat/user/jfullerton/review/learning.htm

[10] 1 Corinthians 13:11 (NKJV).

[11] Dave Fleming, Leadership Wisdom from Unlikely Voices, (Emergent Young Person Specialties Books, Thousand Rapids, Michigan, 2004), p. 45f.

[12] Fleming, Op cit, p. 45.

[13] Fleming, Ibid, p. 57.

[14] Fleming, Ibid, p. 57.

[15] Alice Paul E. Koptak, The NIV Application Commentary: Proverbs, (Zondervan, Thousand Rapids, Michigan, 2003), p. 122.

[16] Koptak, Ibid, p. 155.

[17] http://www.rtis.com/nat/user/jfullerton/review/learning.htm

[18] Senge, Op cit, p. 142.