We are rarely called to live into the higher virtues. Grace. Forgiveness. Compassion. Love and Letting Go.

The opposite tends to be true. Our culture encourages punishment, vengeance. Tearing down. Making things right by dehumanizing the other. There is little room for error. And so there is little room for growth.

Our moral stance tends to be static. We are rewarded for knowing right from wrong. For declaring it and enforcing it. But not so much for bringing others into the fold.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this.  It is a rigidity that has been with us for a while. But the last presidential election brought it sharply into view. Faced with hate come into power, we gave ourselves license to hate.

Interviews for the Better Men Project confirm that many of us want to do better. It is also clear that we do not always know how to. We know how to be better than Weinstein or Cosby. Some of us have learned tough lessons about the impact of our own behavior.

But being a good man has to mean more than "don't be bad."

Almost everyone I speak to says that Burning Man is transformational. This was true before the burn, it was true during the burn, and it was even true among people who have never been to the burn. Something is happening here that has the potential to change people's lives. It is something that wakes up commitment and effort to be part of this community.

But what do we mean when we say "transformation." I think of it as change that cannot be undone. Developmental change. Leveling up from one stage to the next.

The transformational experience is my life's central concern. It is what I seek for myself. And it is what I facilitate for others. It is key to evolution itself.

But we live in hyper-advanced capitalism. This late stage capitalism is more immersive than Burning Man. It is the ocean we swim in, it is where we live, love and work in every day of our lives. It is the default world. And the default world seeks to comodify the human experience. It does not matter what you are into. It can be virtual reality or the great outdoors. It can be meditation or sex positivity. It can be the workshop circuit or sacred medicine work. It can be Burning Man.

All of it can be commodified.

All of it can be reduced to an experience that you pocket.

You get to speak of it.

You get to remember that you had it.

But it will not be something that changes you.

Change demands integration.

There will be moments when good people who care for justice and the planet will be able to pass national policies that may have an impact on our collective destiny. But any and all hope for long-term survival is to be found locally, in relationship to each other, learning and experimenting together. Depending on one another.

In this episode I interview author Cyndi Suarez, who has just released The Power Manual, a book on how to master complex power dynamics. Cyndi has written a comprehensive operations manual for living into the tension of these distinctions and quite literally enacting our way to freedom.

Last month I was blessed to facilitate the fourth annual Evolutionary Leadership Workshop, our flagship program. A workshop to make dreams real. I also facilitated the first ever Evolutionary Leadership Graduate Program, an opportunity for former workshop participants to come back and level up. 

When I ask a group to talk about what it is like to be with someone who is really present, they say words like: comfortable, safe, being held, alive, joy, energizing, grounded.

WOW.

Consider being so present that others feel joyful around you, alive, energized, grounded. Wouldn’t this be an amazing way of being?

We can be this generous.

I can tell you that there are people who punctuate their lives with acts of devotion, who make sacred offerings with every meal and who sing prayers into every hearth. And I can tell you that they are beautifully perfect as much as they are also flawed. They have moods, preferences, blind spots and human stuff as much as any of us. But they show up. They say yes to the work. They try harder. They try again. They do it with devotion. They do it with love.