Time for Radical Aims!

I just started working with a movement whose aims  the Financial Times, says “are radical: it wants to bring about a comprehensive overhaul of our current economic system.”

Well, I for one believe it is time for radical steps toward creating an economy that doesn’t wreck the planet and crush people in its wake.  There is no more time to screw around with this. 

And that’s why I am thrilled to be supporting the Economy for the Common Good (ECG). 

The Economy for the Common Good has become an international movement that has grown rapidly in Europe, Latin America and Africa since its founding in 2011.  This summer we will be introducing the Economy for the Common Good to the Unites States and Canada.   

At the heart of the ECG is a simple but powerful idea: that our economy should be directed towards increasing the wellbeing of the entire population rather than simply towards maximizing narrowly-defined economic profits.

The Economy for the Common Good has active supporters in 30 countries and more than 1800 companies have joined as members and approximately 500 of those have developed the revolutionary Common Good Balance Sheets.

The balance sheet consists of a set of metrics that give an account of the degree to which the company fulfills the five most important constitutional values of democratic states: human dignity, cooperation, sustainability, justice and democracy.

  

Here's a TEDx talk that will give you a sense of what Economy for the Common Good is about.

We will be looking for innovative businesses and new economy organizations to partner with during the introductory tour this summer.  A crowd funding campaign to support the tour will begin in early June.  Please let me know if you have any interest in being involved. 

Ask yourself, is this economy working for you?  Is this the best we can do?  I say no, and no.  We can do better.  Let me know if you’re interested in helping be part of an economy that contributes to our Greater Good!  cylvia@3estrategies.org.  

Cylvia Hayes

Breaking Free from Fossil Fuel by Cylvia Hayes

On my way to Anacortes Washington to camp with and cover the activities of thousands of activists protesting the planned expansion of the Shell and Tesoro oil refineries.  All week long similar protests at highly polluting fossil fuel facilities have been taking place all around the globe.


I will be reporting as things go along this weekend and will be covering the full story in the June issue of Issue Magazine.


This event likely won't get the mainstream media coverage it merits so please spread the word. This is the largest global demonstration of support for going being fossil fuels in the history of the world.

Cylvia Hayes
http://breakfreepnw.org

The Extraordinary Gift of Forgiveness but Cylvia Hayes

Just the other day I gave myself an extraordinary gift. I forgave someone who had hurt me. I had considered this person a genuine friend. We had shared some powerful experiences and had worked together, with shared values to do what we could to protect and restore nature and our environment. She had been one of the very few I reached out to when the media shaming and accusations seized my life.

Then, she abandoned me, turned and fled. There were only a few of those close betrayals that hurt beyond belief and she was one. I felt used and discarded.

I had not heard from her in over a year when she left a voice message asking if I would meet with her. My first response was to reject her because I wanted to hirt her back.  It took me several days to remembered that was not how or who I wanted to be.

The morning we were to meet I allowed myself to feel the hurt and the desire to make her hurt in return. But as I sat with it, I realized that she had been in a difficult position. The media was going after everyone closely associated with me, especially those who were working on environmental, clean energy or climate change issues. The primary media attackers were pro-fossil fuel climate deniers and it had been an agenda-driven assault. I could see the humanness of her fear-based abandonment. But that didn’t mean it hurt any less.

She was a few minutes late getting to the restaurant and I had a fleeting, insecure thought that perhaps she had stood me up just to rub salt in the wound. Then I caught myself — I knew she wouldn’t do that. Next I thought, “Perhaps I should stand her up to show how angry and hurt I am?!” Then I remembered who I was.

Our meeting was awkward – pain, guilt and embarrassment bubbling under the surface. I was surprisingly nervous. We spoke of safe, peripheral things and allowed no dangerous silences between sentences, exclaiming about the tastiness of the food.

Then I centered myself.  I leaned back a little and looked across the table, seeing not an enemy who had hurt me, but a sister, someone I’d cared about, who in a tough spot had made a very human decision that she was now ashamed of.

I started to speak, trying, unsuccessfully,  to blink back painfully vulnerable tears. I said:

You know there were a few abandonments that hurt the most and you were one of them. But I’ve been thinking and though I’m not saying it was OK, I do understand it given the professional issues we were working on, the toxic media environment and all the fear-based political maneuvering advice you were likely being given. I am not sure that at that time if our roles had been reversed I wouldn’t have done the same thing. But I am sure that this version of me sitting across from you wouldn’t.

With that her tears flowed. She said, “Thank you for saying that,” and explained she had acted out of fear, felt terrible about it and certainly wasn’t proud of how she’d handled it.

We hugged as we parted and she thanked me for “taking a risk.”

I am thanking her for taking the risk to reach out, to make an opening to allow me to express my hurt and to face the chance that I might have acted on my desire to cause her pain return. That took real courage.

I was moved, a little unsettled, for the entire rest of the day. I felt a release, a strength and warmness of heart. It is one of the most pure, real-time examples of the power of forgiveness I’ve ever experienced.  I don’t know how it felt to her, though I hope it was good; amazingly, the gift in my forgiveness was for me!

Cylvia Hayes

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Largest Ever Direct Action Protest to Move Beyond Fossil Fuels by Cylvia Hayes

“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

As many of you know I have been working on and writing about the oil trains issue and protests for some time.  Next week I will be covering what is likely to be the largest ever direct protest against dangerous fossil fuel projects – a mass action called Break Free – taking place across the globe. 

The Pacific Northwest Break Free action is taking place in Anacortes, Washington.  There is still room for additional activists, volunteers and journalists.  Let me know if you plan to attend!  And, please spread word about this because mainstream corporate media likely won’t cover it much. 

The Shell Oil and Tesoro refineries near Anacortes are the largest source of carbon pollution in the Northwest and refine 47% of all the gas and diesel consumed in the region.  As a result of fracking, mile-long trains carrying highly volatile crude oil from the Bakken shale fields has increased some 400 percent.  This is the stuff that has blown up numerous times killing dozens of people.

I look forward to standing with and giving voice to this important citizen action. 

http://www.3estrategies.org/blog/

The Seductive Thief by Cylvia Hayes

Ego is such a seductive thief. I’m not talking about the obvious aspects of ego such as arrogance, pride and insecurity. I am talking about ego with a big “E”. This is the Ego that constructs the appearances, rigid beliefs and false identities we wrap ourselves in trying to overcome the deep core feeling of not being good enough.

Realizing how ego-driven I have been is one of the most embarrassing but also beautiful, life-transforming insights of this past challenging year and a half.

I am someone who has based a huge amount of my self-esteem on my performance, what I was able to accomplish, “out there” in the competitive world. And the somewhat humiliating truth is that I have wanted to be recognized for it. I needed validation from others to feel valuable. Even now it feels unsettling and vulnerable to openly express this.

For someone like me there likely was no hotter crucible than public shaming, being smeared, lied about, devalued over and over again. The powerlessness of not even having a way to come to my own defense clawed and chewed me like a wild beast eating me from the inside out.

But now, distance, reflection and healing allows me to understand that required this type of trauma for me to get to a place where I can decipher Ego from Truth. I can see so clearly now that all the constructs of my “enoughness strategies” – the busyness, the striving to feel important, the high-profile work and position – were just a house made of glass.

When the stones flew and the shell shattered, Ego was exposed and for a time paralyzed, and there I met Self, the real me behind and beyond all the constructs and illusions. I was stunned to the point of tears the first time I realized that that Self was beautiful, good and enough! Ego had been robbing me of this knowing.

Through meditation, counseling, reflection and study I have been very intentionally developing my relationship with my Self. And here’s the most mind-blowing part. When my accomplishments were trashed, my work and position were torn away, I raged, Ego fighting desperately to keep those constructs and appearances in place, to protect my familiar identity – to no avail. Then, amazingly, standing in the shards and fragments of who I thought I was I realized I hadn’t become less but in fact, could see that I was far more than I ever dreamed. Clinging so tightly to a constructed identity had been limiting my Self. There is a whole new world, a deeper, richer reality that I had been blindly skipping right past.

I sometimes feel like Truman Burbank from the Truman Show movie when he realizes his whole comfortable life had so far been lived in a small, constructed bubble isolated from reality. That is exactly what the Ego does to us when we are blind to it. It robs us of the adventure and splendor of our deeper selves, of the I Am.

I Am and I am so excited to move forward into the rest of my life, the next part of the adventure, with this new and growing awareness.

I truly, truly hope that sharing some of this will be helpful to those of you who are on your own journeys beyond Ego to Self. Imagine what our world could be like if we met one another from such a place?

Here’s to reclaiming our Selves from the Seductive Thief.

Cylvia Hayes

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