March 03, 2014
The Price of Visibility
Looking at success and the part that is ego driven verses the part that is a reflection of a job well done... Spiritual Leaders are often confronted with choices on how visible they want to be and what they are willing to "pay" for that visibility... Entertainment celebrities are faced with this dilemma daily. It is a slippery slope...
To be effective at what we do, whoever we are, we must be seen and heard by the members of our community who will value our services... if we are not, we have not really done our job well... but if we need to be seen and heard by many to feel good about ourselves, either directly, or from the material gains of that popularity, we have lost sight of the plot.
We often see desperate claims at moments of visibility by our peers... moments of public acknowledgement or recognition... we see a soup of spiritual people clamoring on top of each other to get in the last word, to be "right" and to receive their stamps of approval from another... It somehow feels like an oxymoron though... that the struggle for survival overrides all our wisdom... that the effort to come out ahead undermines our messages of surrender and alignment...
Can you say yes to visibility without giving in to the ego's drive for success? Lao Tzu says soften your ambition and toughen your resolve... If we are competing with each other to win the largest audience then have we lost our way....It seems to me that if the cost to play the game is the loss of our authenticity... then the game is lost before it has ever been played.