Author Archives: ben@odysseyinstitute.com

In stillness and joy…

This is my son, Sacha. This morning he added a delicious twist to my meditation practice. After 27 minutes of quiet reflection, conscious breath and observation of thought, I found myself attracted to an unusual sound. The door was creaking open behind me and I heard the pitter patter of small feet across the wooden floor.

I chose not to be irritated by this disturbance and to, instead, welcome in this little being. I knew immediately which family member was coming to greet me in the dawn light. No doubt he was looking for his dad for a morning cuddle!

father and son meditating at dawn

I meditate outside on a covered deck. Humming birds are regular passers-by in the early morning, searching out nectar from our hanging baskets. But this was no humming bird; just a fellow sentient being who happens to be particularly good at making my heart sing.

Outside at dawn in Canada means chilly air, even in summer. I meditate wrapped in a huge fleece blanket, parked atop my meditation pillow. Its a luxurious feeling – warm and grounded, breathing super fresh early morning air.

This morning I simply glanced up, acknowledged my special visitor and opened my fleecy shawl. Without a single word, he curled up across my folded legs and nestled in beneath the fleece. I closed my arms around him and for the next 3 minutes (until my timer went off) I sat there, finishing my meditation with my son held warmly in the folds. Yum!

A new practice

I love the fact that my son gets to see me meditate. It makes me feel like I’m doing a decent job of role modeling what a great dad looks like! For the last 7 months I have woken every day and meditated. It hasn’t been easy, but its slowly becoming what feels like one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. That is to say, sitting still, resting at the fulcrum of consciousness, breathing in the stillness of the present moment at dawn – wow – what a joy that is. And oh how excruciatingly difficult. In fact, I never thought I could do it. As a long-term sufferer of ADHD, I have the quintessential restless mind: constantly darting, fleeting and impulsive and often wildly energized and emotionally charged. Its a tumultuous place to live and, in recent years, occasionally quite dark. But if there’s anything about myself I’ve come to trust its the fact that in times of crisis, when I really need to, I will evolve and find a way.

Hard times call for Yogi times

The challenges of parenthood, entrepreneurship and life in the developing world (in addition to the ADHD) have created enormous pressures that I haven’t always dealt with very effectively. In fact,  over the last year this visionary entrepreneurial multi-tasking father-of-two has burnt out and become seriously depressed. But amidst the darkness there is light. Somehow I have managed to maintain my yoga practice (despite occasionally overwhelming fatigue) and now, as the veil of depression begins to lift, I find myself experiencing new depths of energy and clarity. A chapter is ending and a new one beginning – and in to it will flow all that I have learnt about myself and all that I have managed to cultivate in my practice.

As cliched as it might sound, I am experiencing a spiritual spring – a deepening of God consciousness – and my prayer and meditation practice is at the center of all that I have done to foster this.

 

Traveler’s rite of passage

I finally flooded it!

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After 20 years living, traveling and working in developing Asia you’d  think I would have flooded a motorbike in a tropical rainstorm by now. Well, truth is I’ve tried but never succeeded. Until now!

This little alleyway is behind my office. When it rains it floods and today was the day that I finally found enough water to flood my bike!

The guy that followed me through was obviously a bit more skilled than me. I’m usually pretty adept  at maintaining enough momentum, but today the water got in and my bike promptly stalled!

Finally, I thought. Weird, but I kinda felt proud of myself.

 

Living in Bali

Outside the box…

There’s not much to say about this really. Its just a delightful memory.

Shortly after we moved into our new house in Ubud, Bali, in 2010 I got to take part in this craziness with my kids. Our furniture hadn’t arrived yet – in fact, come to think of it I don’t know that we had even bought any! So there we were, upstairs in this huge open room, surrounded by paddy fields and excited to be settling in.

A little water goes a long way on a tile floor! I think the kids discovered this game first. You toss a little water on the floor and then slide around in it. I just helped them get organized and maximize the experience!

Within about ten minutes we had covered the floor from end to end and graduated to a level where we were using the walls to kick off and glide in unison. I love my kids and such out-of-the-box activities always leave me feeling like I’ve done a really good job as a dad. I love their spirit if adventure and the crazy games we get to play together. In hindsight helmets would have been a good idea. But we survived.

Infinite love…

A simple meditation

I was pressed for time, but felt an overwhelming need to sit. I just wanted to be still. Just for a second. I needed to recalibrate before I went out into my day. I’d been busy and was “carrying something” – like a sadness or something. I didn’t really know. I just felt like I needed to sit and look inwards. I needed to make a quick journey somewhere else.

I have come to trust such sensations these days and so I honored it. I sat down. I set my timer for 5 minutes and plugged in to my music for assistance. My go-to meditation music right now is this mix from a yoga class taught at the Robot Heart camp at Burning Man.

I plugged in and breathed (my new headphones really help!), feeling instantly like I was in an elevator, descending floor by floor with every breath. Within seconds I saw my wife, Jamie, kneeling before our wood stove in our living room in Canada. I’m currently in Bali. I continued to focus on my breath and the vision and settled beside her.

I felt an incredible uprising of love. Tears filled my eyes and I just sat there, breathing, and being on another continent beside her. My vision was so powerful. I had the biggest smile and tears streaming down my face – just a brief moment in time, but one in which I was absolutely transported through time and space to the fireside of a small house in British Columbia. I was completely enveloped in love – looking straight into Jamie’s eyes and just smiling serenely. I had found my soul mate and I realized I was carrying loneliness and missing her.

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Infinity

I chose the weird photo above because when I came out of my meditation and opened my eyes I looked straight at this handle on the chest of drawers. Somehow it was as if everything else in the room was slightly out of focus apart from this one object. It leapt out at me and the message was clear: everything is infinite – including love. I guess I thought that because I interpreted the design on the handle as a symbol of infinity. I wonder, then, whether enlightenment is simply the experience of infinite love?

Who’d have thunk it?

I have known some dark places in my life. I have occupied states of mind profoundly different to  this moment described. So I know that when they come we must celebrate them. These moments of clarity and love that arrive so suddenly and with such intensity are often fleeting. But in this moment I know they are real and tangible and here to be cultivated. This is love in action and I am inspired by the practice I have developed and the relationships that I have discovered that have allowed such experiences to be part of my story.

 

BC beach meditation

This couldn’t be simpler. I just wanted to take a minute to appreciate the details. The beaches of British Columbia can seem desolate inhospitable places in January. But amidst the cold and grey  and bitter cold I found incredible stillness and glimpses of striking beauty.

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I was so taken with these colors, patterns and textures. Hidden gems.

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I saw the living and the dead interwoven. I saw life cycles and the incredible intelligence of nature. I saw multiple generations and symbiotic relationships and marine and terrestrial species communicating so subtly to one another.

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Form upon form. Species upon species. Story upon story. Time the only constant.

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I love this space between land and ocean. The intertidal zone. The edge. The space where all living creatures are inspired to adapt frequently!

 

 

 

 

Maya Skye Tamblyn

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Introducing Maya…

This photo was taken at about 6.30 am. Maya had just gotten up for school and in true fashion was already well in to an impromptu creative design experiment before she’d even finished getting dressed. I don’t really remember exactly how this started, but what I do remember is looking over at the kid who is constantly off on tangents and thinking, “wow. her creative energy is just flowing this morning. If she’s late for school its worth it. I’m just gonna let her roll with this one and take the pressure off to get her morning jobs done.” And so there she was, engrossed in a self portrait of sorts, an exploration of the contours of her face and – in a way – of the mind within.  

I found this shot to be so haunting and what she’d created to be so effortlessly powerful. Such is life with Maya: a constant exercise in open-mindedness! This kid epitomizes what it means to be “outside the box” and so what better image to use for her first appearance on this blog?

private vs public self

know thyself tattoo - in honor of all that has gone before and served as school

know thyself tattoo – in honor of all that has gone before that served as school

private vs public

A friend of mine just posted a quote by the Dalai Lama: “I don’t think a person should have two sides – a public and a private side. There should be no gap; that is not honest. ” Dalai Lama. Interesting, don’t you think?

It seems to me that the antidote to this dishonesty is to cultivate an awareness of our authentic self and to allow that to govern our decisions and behavior and therefore what people see of us. Should it matter where we are or who we’re with? The truer we are to ourselves the more likely we are to succeed in life. Maybe its not even possible without it.

Is there a correlation between when we are most effective and when we “show up” most genuinely? Ken Robinson is pretty emphatic about this point in his book, the Element.

Ken Robinson discussing “the Element

Ultimately, then, the process of figuring out what we love (our passions) and what we’re good at (our skills) and bringing them into a state of synchronicity is essential for authentic self development. I guess you could call that the antidote defined.

photo credit: Rolf Gibbs

 

iPad is a life-jacker

iPads and NERF guns: a hate-love thing…

I’m a lefty when it comes to politics and parenting. I want my kids to have mud between their toes and to be comfortable outside. I want them to understand their passions and skills and use them – daily – for their own betterment and that of the Planet. And with this in mind I make most of my decisions about what best to buy to inspire, empower and entertain my children.

About a year ago my wife and I decided to buy a “family iPad”. We were inspired by the marketing, which was delivered in perfect unison by Apple and a cohort of our respected friends. We were told what we wanted to believe, which is that iPads will “revolutionize the way our children learn” (in a good way), that they have a “highly engaging interface” with incredible potential to introduce concepts, knowledge, skills, etc. It was all too much to resist and we went with the flow, convinced that we were purchasing a tool that would soon see our children working for NASA.

I remain incredulous as to how fast our children, aged 6 and 9, have mastered the main interface. My 6-year old son is able to navigate this fairly sophisticated piece of technology long before he can even read. It is truly intuitive and something they seem to understand quite effortlessly. We’re a Mac family; long gone is the Windows / PC world.  And so it seemed like a logical extension of what we had already come to love and trust for work and entertainment. The reality has proven somewhat different.

Zombies and plump, flightless sparrows

Having mastered the main interface and the art of app navigation our kids have quickly slid off the rails into a world of superficiality; a world populated by zombies and plump, flightless sparrows that – although potentially revealing some of the wonderful concepts of physics – mostly just provides our kids with concentrated periods of meaninglessness.

Am I a terrible parent? Possibly. What is obvious is that my kids need supported, structured conditions in which to explore this technology. They cannot be left to their own devices to navigate the myriad of choices before them. That’s a disappointing realization, but I guess you could say we were naive.

Ultimately the potential of the iPad remains just that: a theoretical potential that in reality is far from manifest.

Back to basics…

Running along parallel tracks to our early endorsement of the iPad has been a persistent refusal to allow our kids to play with guns. Although constantly in their list of top five most desired 5 toys of all time, we have always considered toy guns taboo. If they make them themselves, artfully crafted from sticks and trash, they are permitted to use them for however long they last (usually just a few days). But never have we entertained the purchase of toy guns. It just didn’t seem to fit with our values. Instead we followed the crowd into iPad land and “embraced the future of education”.

iPlay

Its probably pretty obvious where this is going. In short we reigned in the previously unfettered iPad and put it in its place as a very expensive gadget that was being used like a TV. For us, the iPad occupied the vacuous middle ground between a phone and a lap top (both of which are very useful); full of potential, but perpetually disappointing and requiring constant interventions.

On the other hand we decided to relax our principles around the use of toy guns. This Christmas Santa brought a our son some NERF guns, which have quickly established themselves as the most coveted and exciting toy in the house.

Rather than demonize the little yellow plastic pistols that fire styrofoam bullets, we decided to relax and play with them. My kids and i have been stalking each other around the house and garden ever since. We walk in stealth mode, listening to the sound of our own breath and the subtle rustle of leaves. We think creatively about the space we occupy as we hide in cupboards and under bushes in the garden. We work together, discussing rules and boundaries and – most important of all – embrace the collectively created fun.

Life-jackers

Embracing this previously taboo activity has clarified the limited value of the iPad, especially as an entertainment device. Our recent NERF gun battles are the complete opposite of the iPad experience: they are live, spontaneously unfolding multi-sensory role play. So don’t believe the hype!

Here’s a few additional conclusions about iPads:

  1. corporations hijack values when marketing
  2. products representing hijacked values will hijack your life: the iPad is a life-jacker
  3. our values need to be reviewed occasionally because we’re all constantly changing.
  4. sometimes our values are actually someone else’s.
  5. technology is a means to an end, life is the process in between

 

Gaming = Future Ed

The list below was created by Brian Jackson, whose workshop I attended at the IB Dunia Teachers Conference in Jakarta. I was amazed at the extent of research that’s been done. Singapore University seems to have been very busy on this topic and the conclusion generally seems to be that appropriate use of gaming in the classroom is extremely effective in engaging youth with issues and concepts and can also be a catalyst for action – propelling students out of the classroom and into real world situations that require research and problem solving.

I’ve was formerly fairly cynical about gaming – especially as a tool in the classroom. This workshop opened my eyes to the almost infinite potential of gaming platforms to stimulate learning.

As an experiential educator I agree wholeheartedly with Brian’s comment when he said he considered himself a facilitator, rather than a teacher. The difference is profound. As these kinds of resources continue to evolve and find their way into our tool kits, so our understanding of what it means to be a “teacher” must also continue to evolve.

Game on!

Here’s a list of the best game-based learning links…

2012 New Horizon Report

Games

Statecraft  humanities, english, economics, psychology

Urgent Evoke humanities, science, english, art

The Hexagon humanities, science, english, art

Finding Identity humanities, english, art, history

World Without Oil humanities, economics, history, english, art, science, pe

Legends of Alkhemia science, humanities, psychology

Catalysts for Change humanities, psychology, english

Chemblaster chemistry, science

Trust Me psychology, humanities, english, economics

Nobel Prize list of games science, humanities, english, literature

Quest Atlantis humanities, art, history, english, science

Resources for making games

Big World Learning

Earthworks

HP Catalyst Project

Spongelab

Research on Gamification

Early report

Crossing the Chasm

I feel like I read this book without breathing. Some things just come along at the right time.

Geoffrey Moore’s iconic book, Crossing the Chasm, focuses exclusively on marketing strategies in the high-tech start up world, but I couldn’t help but to see numerous parallels. I’m the founder of a [still-newly-born] experiential education company called the Odyssey Institute, which in many respects couldn’t be more different. But our need to develop an effective marketing strategy is as real and essential as it is any high-tech start up. Here’s what I’ve learned from this book so far…

crossing-the-chasm

The Chasm

The chasm is the fathomless void that exists between where you start and where you need to end up if you want your company to become sustainably profitable. Don’t get me wrong, its actually possible to still be in business in year 10 without crossing the chasm – you just won’t be enjoying it much!

A chasm crossing is a profound experience for a company as it involves an evolutionary leap in corporate identity, with all that is implied for your company’s products/services, systems and people.

The Early Market 

One thing you can guarantee about a new product is that its far from perfect, but somehow these things still get sold. So who would buy a far-from-perfect product? Well, we probably all have at some point, but generally the answer is enthusiasts and visionaries – or what Geoffrey Moore refers to as “techies”. 

We have a handful of enthusiastic and visionary clients that make up our current early market share. We wouldn’t exist without them. In our case these folks are not techies in the IT sense, rather our techies are passionate educators who are looking for innovative educational products and solutions to the issues their students (and schools) are facing. Our techies are even willing to help create those solutions; they’re willing to get involved, buy a far-from-perfect product and go out on a professional limb. That’s an exact parallel to Silicon Valley.

Some of our techies are our friends and colleagues from previous jobs; they are our network of kindred spirits and share our passion for experiential education, holism and – most importantly  CHANGE. Working with them has allowed us to develop an initial product and get it into the market place. We’ve successfully done that and thus officially launched!

Our initial service was a series of field trips in Bali, Indonesia. I designed educational experiences to be facilitated in very unconventional classrooms (i.e. amidst rainforests and ancient temples) and used my network to both refine and sell these services. Although continually growing, my network is relatively small and the amount of sales we’re acquiring and retaining is far from the vision of greatness and profitability that I set out with. Suffice to say, we’re still entrenched in the early market sector, where we’re dependent on our slowly growing cohort of enthusiasts and visionaries.

The early market sector isn’t necessarily a bad place for us to be right now and we’re not in a hurry to leave it behind (despite the roller coaster of financial insecurity on this side of the chasm). We’re just starting our third year of operations and are still very focused on market research and product development. I guess that never stops, but you’d better be pretty sure you’ve got a solid foundation before you attempt a crossing. I don’t think Odyssey is quite there yet.

Beyond the Early Market

As we solidify our position in the early market our trajectory across the chasm is slowly revealing itself. Over the last two years we’ve been tip-toeing up to the edge of the chasm and staring across at the other side. Our early successes and loyal techies have lead us to the edge and we’re now beginning to engage with the pragmatists and conservatives of the mainstream market beyond. These pragmatists and conservatives are the faculty and administrative staff of the most established educational institutions in South East Asia. By definition they have a low tolerance for risk and a general disdain for anything “cutting edge” (despite often appearing to champion such values). The want “whole products” that have been tried and tested. They’re willing to pay more for them, but they’re also willing to wait almost indefinitely (or even just take their business elsewhere) if the service provider isn’t quite up to par. Needless to say this is a far less personal and substantially more bureaucratic kind of relationship. 

Geoffrey Moore encourages start ups to cross the chasm by finding a “beach head”. Its a 2nd World War D-Day analogy, but it works. You cross the chasm by penetrating a niche-market with your [by-now-hopefully-pretty-well-developed] product/service. You identify a specific point of entry (beach head) and aggressively go after that market segment with everything you’ve got. Once you go for it, its do or die time!

Choose your weapon

A key decision to make before a chasm crossing is which product/service to really get behind. We have a small, increasingly focused range of services that we’re offering and aren’t quite ready to choose. Our middle school field trips are doing really well, but our Odyssey Film School is also looking really promising. So for now we’ll keep looking to build our early market position and further establish our programs and reputation. I figure when the time is right we’ll know and at some point in the next 6-12 months we’ll have the clarity and momentum we need to leap across.