The Heart Tree - Venus Upadhayaya

VISION AND LEARNING: Have you ever observed that anger exists before the reason for that anger exists? Just like awareness or knowledge exists before the language in which we express it. Poets would understand emotion exists before the expression.

There's a great choice and an opportunity available in expression. A language's destiny depends upon how refined emotions does that society/community/civilization cultivates and how refined are its skills of language to express it. Language is very important for the synthesis of learning and skills of language are very important for creating a learning community.

Language is not just identification of sounds and skills of decoding. Language is a refined process of awareness of oneself and the world around. The world you create inside is the world you experience outside and language is a part of that experience.

While in auto to office today I was thinking of a word 'Suryakamal'. A sanskrit word, this word is a combination of two words 'Surya' that means Sun and 'Kamal' that means 'Lotus'. I was wondering how powerful this word is! When you chose this word in your expression you make a powerful choice, you undergo a powerful cognition process that's because of a powerful synthesis of two experiences of sun and lotus and their legacy. There's beautiful poetry in their combination.

The beauty of Sanskrit as a language lies in the way the language combines distant words to create new words that heighten emotion, comprehension, cognition, expression, poetry and exchange. Knowledge is the fundamental on which is built human consciousness and language is the medium that carries that. Imagine your experience of ganga without the word ganga.

Imagine the experience of your beloved without his/her name. Imagine the experience of your country without its name. Imagine the experience of truth without the word truth; it would become so difficult to contain and express our experience of truth without the word 'truth'.

Now imagine how long it would have taken the human civilisation to come to this point where each word denotes a process of refinement and each word carries a legacy of human experience and knowledge.

There lies the vision of my research and center of learning. Dear friends, let me introduce you to the Heart Tree. #thehearttree

(Heart Tree is based on my research into learning, teaching and learning/knowledge communities. This endeavour is supported by few individuals who are my friends. Heart Tree is not a legal, commercial entity currently. Welcome to the spirit of Heart Tree.)

Leadership and its paradoxes

I was never a leader because I understood leadership to be titles and reputation and thus I was one of the masses that believed it’s their right to blame leadership for everything happening in their community and professional lives.

In a journalism class, my writing teacher would sit talking everything under the earth, without writing even a single word on the board.  Students were agitated – they wanted notes, dictations, books and he instead in our class was challenging all of that. He was silently questioning deep-rooted attitudes, somewhere trying to liberate those latent faculties that make a human being a writer. But not many are seekers of themselves, of true knowledge! Not everyone wants to be challenged! We all live in self-made bubbles, our kingdoms in which our notions are kings ruling over all subjects of our psyche.

I was always keen to listen to him but maybe was too inexperienced to understand him and his intentions then. I was only twenty-one years old in his class, fresh out of a small town.

Years later when journalism as an industry had disillusioned me and that happened in the first job itself, it was my teacher’s attitude of non-conformity that helped me believe in myself, pitch my voice and have the courage to stand out, take decisions that would normally not be taken in a career. Not that today I have made renown of myself, that was never my goal – but I do see that my wisdom permeates my knowledge, and my quest keeps getting liberated and wider.

Understanding leadership and its fundamentals began when as a volunteer I started gathering a team for an activism driven media. It was a cause I was extremely passionate and selfless about, involved putting up a team of twenty people from around the country. These people came from different professions, were highly skilled and were all there to contribute selflessly to the cause. However, by the time I could implement something I was left with only one collaborator.

If it was a 9-5 job and I was in it just for the heck of it, I wouldn’t have probably bothered. But what I was doing was driven by my heart and spirit and with so much of energy invested in it, as the endeavour progressed I had many questions. I wanted to understand how and why do people blame me for something they haven’t been able to adhere to. I started questioning my skills, abilities, attitude and behaviour. I wanted to for the first time, impelled by a real life situation understand - how leaders lead the team, how organisations work and how synergy is built. For the first time, I understood success isn’t easy, leadership isn’t glamourous – leadership is about relationships, it goes far beyond one’s ideas and perceptions held dear at any point, it involves letting go at every moment. It involves empowering other people; it involves acting foolish to let others take the limelight, and it involves a whole lot of moment-to-moment positive investment in people. In a way it’s like consciously parenting, educating, and mentoring, supervising lots of people together – it’s a tough job, and maybe that’s why leaders are built by tough life situations. They aren’t built by comforts and can’t be built by selfish motivations. They are far and few!

Accept challenges, look within rather than blaming the system and other people or for that matter fate, believe in yourself and your cause and be bluntly honest in looking within for the cause of misery, problem or challenge that manifest outside. Adhere to a value system and make it your prime intention and practice and in due course, as you lose track of identifying yourself special, the world will start to recognise you a leader. Leaders are born and not created! Thus the best mentor will give you an environment that challenges your fears. Whether you jump to flight from the cliff is a choice only you will make.

Venus Upadhayaya is a journalist and a passionate media professional, she works for school staff leadership development and empowerment of young people, her email is venusupadhayaya@gmail.com .

Insecurity has a strange construct

Insecurity has a strange construct - an insecure person wants to live convinced of his insecurity. Status-quo is the most comfortable state. Change is difficult because it has to do with inside of ourselves. Change starts with belief in truth and that is tough.

The easiest thing to do when one feels insecure, threatened from something or someone is to go into denial, become protective of one’s sentiments and resist change. Easiest thing, so it comes first to us.

Thus, the question we face is – How to become supporters of change?

Becoming supporters of change would primarily mean focusing on ourselves for change to happen. Our sentiments are irrational; they often lack logic and direction. Our sentiments are selfish and want to be gratified. We want everyone to listen to us and we don’t want to listen to anyone.

A mother recently shared with me that when her son was young, he ate more sweets than allowed. This angered her so much that she forced him to eat all the sweets in the box. She said, “Now (almost after a decade) I feel bad and wonder what temper made me do so!”

The first step for change is a true aspiration for change. Relationships build the basic construct of everything in human society and every relationship starts with oneself.

Don’t get bogged down by how difficult or impossible ‘change’ appears. Don’t leave it because no one believes in you; don’t leave it because it’ll not earn you fame or following. Don’t leave it because it makes you an odd one out in your peer group.

Change is a process and is a powerful choice that you make for yourself. A belief becomes powerful when you start to live it with compassion, adhering to truthful practices in spite of challenges and lack of support. You chose to follow best, truthful approaches to solving/facing life situations.

Change happens by the cultivation of a compassionate heart. Change always starts from within. It’s not a business plan well-written on a piece of paper that you start to execute; it’s a decision to practice compassion, no matter how severe the tide of irrationality, distrust, anger, selfish sentimentality may be – you stick your head above all and keep practising change – never the easy, comfortable route!

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Venus Upadhayaya, is a columnist for Brewing Knowledge