Sunday, December 27, 2009

New Heliotrope Website Launch

Since the last blog post, Heliotrope has gone through an incredible growth period. As a result, we're about to launch a new, more interactive website on January 6. It will feature a Heliotrope blog as well. This will report on activities related to Prelude and the enterprise more generally. This also allowed us to re-imagine this blog's role in relationship. New Heliograph posts will therefore be more personal explorations of ideas, trends, and discoveries that relate to Heliotrope and Prelude but go beyond them as well.

Hopefully this new approach will also encourage more dialogue with visitors. Martin Buber wrote: “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” This brings to mind the late greatly esteemed Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Khan. I can well imagine him saying this ‘divine electricity’ helps ‘fray new neural pathways for human connectivity and creativity'. Buber also wrote that “play is an exaltation of the possible”. All the research I’ve seen suggests that play is an ideal way to foster integral relationships and innovation. These ideas also reflect Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence and the power of the limbic lock: -

"In a neurological sense, laughing represents the shortest distance between two people because it instantly interlocks limbic systems. This immediate, involuntary reaction, as one researcher puts it, involves the most direct communication possible between people – brain to brain – with our intellect just going for the ride, in what might be called a 'limbic lock” [Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence; Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee; Harvard Business School Press].