How I Transformed Crisis into Collective Flourishing
Here’s what I know. Every burden has within it a gift consummate to its intensity scale and duration. I have what most people would call preverbal trauma which would have been a crippling oversimplification if I had let it stay. As diagnoses do, they flatten out the real lived and unexplored dimensions of our experience that suspiciously result in reliance rather than independence, prescription rather than self authorship. Fear over Agency. Now this isnt me just bypassing the crucial and tactical role of professionals, medications, or anything like that. I had a spiritual crisis due to spiritual…solutions that came with their own price and traditional help dint’t save me but it was an essential species in my ecology of care. And so were the gems of my spirituality, first community then capacity and then calling and finally suspiciously as that was about to take off, SOLUTIONS. I call it an ecology of care because that’s what it is. Cross disciplinary cross meaning making paradigms, cross-what you’d rather be doing at the time, it took everything. But at the end I had a body of work so solid I literally couldn’t believe it. As in I still am training myself to acknowledge that I accomplished that much big. As in…that was a burden to carry but it’’s already helped out thousands and it helps me too. So yeah! Ecology, you know? You have to have an ecosystem. And you don’t have to have EVERYTHING you need at once, lined up, or even available to you at the time. I’ve found that care comes not “at the right time” but the right person on the right day in the right way routinely changes everything for me.
What I did was unique to me and I should be clear about that. But in the particular lies the universal so here goes: creating an ecology of care.
What I didn’t have were external resources. Not by many peoples standards. What I did was leverage the potential of every opportunity and beyond that apply what I had in quality and abundance strategically in a way that didn’t render the very real lack irrelevant so to speak but it got the job done and left me better off than I could have ever imagined my life going. What I used was a gift of mastering Adjacent subjects until I could gain expertise in entire fields. The results were staggering, because when you have learned that many individual subjects, you can connect dots that few people know, and a few more and you’ll uncover things that no one has figured out yet. The thing is, these areas contained the difference between difficult and impossible for me. And they revealed more than that.
Sometimes you can’t relieve the burden until you’ve retrieved the gold. Sometimes in life, conventional wisdom fails us. And unless we’ve been exposed to one or more alternative frameworks, or life experiences, there seems to be nowhere else to go. When I was working on Luminous Prosperity, I was in a special kind of stress. My normal capacity to focus and think went dark. I was grieving and the world seemed dark too. However the work didn’t just give me something to do, in fact there’s so much of it that doing it created more energy than it took. From coaching, to writing, to software creation, it always left me ready to go. I couldn’t understand why everyone kept inferring that I was exhausted. I realized that they never saw someone ship a book and an app by themselves the same day. I realize, through it all, this was routine for me, yet alien to most. I had almost lost everything but it seems some inner adaptation resulted in a non-scarce generatively for me that, with patience would eventually shine, help others, and uplift me as well.
Looking from the rearview: In retrospect it all falls into place. Just like Steve Jobs said, these things only make sense from the rearview so you have to believe or hope in SOMETHING. Truer words (or at least sentiment I got right - ha!) what I could only see as darkness of some sort inside and outside and in the very texture of my life, and most of this is coming to me right now as well, Luminous Prosperity was a tree that transmuted grief, intense and personal, into well, a holistic prosperity for, so far, thousands. The way I did it was by refusing to reduce myself, my resources, or untying else into 2 dimensions, because abundance is on the Z axis. What I mean is that by learning multiple perspectives I could see things that quit frankly no ne else had, by looking at my ecology of care as something I could create AND receive, I retained agency and generated wellbeing for many. And what started out as crisis the very roots of it blossomed into flourishing.
Luminous Prosperity was born from my survival from the generative practice of self-love, wisdom ranging from spiritual traditions to game theory, I learned to uncover the gold in any situation. And it’s not so much of a cost and a reward, it’s more the journey is the reward and the gold is the reward too. I decided long ago that I was only going to participate in win - win situations, even with myself.
