Life is sacred…

…and so living it needs care.

The history of business has been the history of division. We have long emphasised the head-based skills of separation: logic, analysis, control and measurement. It was these very same skills that gave us the industrial and technological revolutions and with them the power to manipulate our physical environment. We have transmuted that desire to manipulate into our relationships with others, characterised as they are by our struggles for power and dominion. And, seemingly encouraged by our success in bringing ourselves material comfort, we have taken this urge to separate inside ourselves, placing our faith in the rational and scientific and ignoring or belittling the energy of our own emotions, bodies and spirit.

The drive towards separation has brought environmental crises to our outer world and psychological and spiritual crises in our inner worlds. There are strong signs now that we are waking up to these outcomes and beginning to understand that it was we who caused them through the choices we made. We have forgotten our place in the undifferentiated web of life which connects us to nature, each other and ourselves. It is time to put ourselves back together again - to re-member.

The central idea of Sacred Business is that uniting in a whole that incorporates the wonderful diversity in our organisations will help us learn, grow and do better business, without the stresses, tension and imbalance that living in detachment brings.

“People draw together by their very nature, but habit and custom keep them apart…” Confucious

What are your experiences of wholeness in organisations, as compared with fragmentation and silo-thinking?