Autonomy
and Life

A life of your own design

None of us wish to reckon with a life not fully lived—a life of missed opportunities. None of us wish to endure a life not personally rewarding. And none of us wish to be unprepared to face adversity. Yet that may be where we find ourselves.

Not inborn with the right model to evaluate life’s priorities, we did one thing, then another and then another. And now that’s the life we have, much of it the unintended consequence of a previous action or inaction.

Did we choose it? Well, it depends on what you mean by choose. Life keeps us very busy. Sometimes its challenges seem daunting. We may feel buried under it—worn down by its weight. When and how do we come up with a life of our own choosing?

First, consider the facts . . .

Life is not fair

Involuntarily, we are inserted into a world already in full swing. Inserted, too, with specific characteristics. We’ve no say about our parents, color, shape, genes.

Life is not certain

Our futures are not guaranteed secure. Novelty, competition, inertia and intimidation may undo what has been accomplished or show up unexpectedly as obstacles to achievement.

Life is complex

Fickle feelings, compelling impulses and innate drives shape our fears and desires. They may play havoc with our strategies for success or even with our ability to create such strategies.

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Life requires great heart

Putting together a meaningful life is a multi-dimensional quest — of body, mind and heart. “Intangibles” such as attitude, resilience and nerve matter in a significant way.

Life offers few easy answers

Change, progress, accomplishment are rarely, if ever, the instant result of a transformational moment. Except when riding the bubble, most accomplishment requires an impressive self-discipline.

We are forced to adapt

The facts are the facts. We’ll win some and we’ll lose some. We must be skilled at leveraging the wins and know how to recover quickly from the losses. Even in the best of times under the best circumstances, we’re forced, time and again, to adapt, to transform, to change.

Adaptation requires effort

Adaptation requires far more than a simple insight. Our ways of being are deeply etched into our nervous systems. Our “past” or habituated patterns live on in the present. They will continue to live on in the future, unless we work an incrementally progressive change into our accustomed way of being.

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Change is something we win

This reworking is not so easy. Change is something we win — through effort and practice. It requires context, perspective, strategy, motivation and discipline. In other words, all of us find it challenging to change our habituated ways.

We can author our way of being

However, with reflection and practice, what was once elusive or seemingly too difficult can become possible. We may author our way of being in the world. Of course, the world is still just as it is but we can be in charge of our way of being in it.

An autonomously directed life

A life of substance

We need to develop a coherent worldview that includes the substance of Autonomy—the deep intellectual resources, the reserves of heart and humanity—that will get us through life’s challenges.

A life of quality

We need to cultivate a life of quality—with a respect for decency, responsibility and hard work; an esteem for intelligence, thoughtfulness and perseverance; and a regard for honesty and fair play. This kind of quality is attractive in and of itself and in the trust it inspires.

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A life of confidence

We need to learn how to acquire a greater sense of power and self-control and to experience confidence in our ability to carve out the life and lifestyle we desire, despite the very challenging circumstances in which we find ourselves. And as we learn how to strategically and creatively manage the quality of our lives and experiences, we will feel an exciting and earned sense of personal freedom and peace of mind.

What is Autonomy and Life?

A new discipline

Autonomy and Life is a new discipline we have developed and teach, fated to take its place among other human studies. Core to this discipline is the self looking to itself for the purpose of perfecting the manner in which it authorizes going about being human day-to-day. The discipline imaginatively captures history’s evolving design of the self—and the promised personally rewarding life it posits—to be realized at once culturally or locally and universally.

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A new perspective

Autonomy and Life is a new perspective we have developed and teach. With respect to identity and authority, Autonomy recognizes the turn that the self took toward its sovereignty over its humanity, a turn that parallels those made in disciplines such as science, technology, philosophy and other human studies.

A new vocabulary

Autonomy and Life is a new vocabulary, an artful vocabulary that identifies, explains, motivates and sustains. Making the familiar strange, distinguishing that which was undifferentiated and rediscovering that which has lost meaning, the vocabulary reenchants the world we live in, reestablishes our affinity with those we are connected to by family or commitment, and reawakens our hopes for tomorrow.

A new freedom

Autonomy and Life is a new freedom. We find ourselves with resourceful independent minds when we learn the discipline of Autonomy and Life. This enables us to distance ourselves from the machinations of our own unrefined and uneducated immediacy and to interrogate the typically unexamined and unevaluated cultural impress to which we are born.

An extraordinary personal achievement

While it would seem to be a birthright and its value inarguable, autonomy is an extraordinary personal achievement. It requires considerable intellect, integrity, sincerity, nerve and heartfulness. It takes authenticity, courage and a deep generosity of feeling to carve out a personally rewarding life as well as a decent and contributory life against much that is antagonistic, corrupt or seemingly fixed.

A mandate for heartfulness

To be autonomous is to be independent, competitively and cooperatively mature, knowledgeable about the rules that constrain us and the mandate for heartfulness that encourages us to be generous and bold.

A distinction between ego protection and self authorship

Autonomy and Life makes the powerful distinction of the difference between an identity centered on the integrity of personal autonomy or self-authorship and an identity dependent upon the “ego-protection” of self-deception, selective forgetting, self-aggrandizement and fantasy. When our sense of self is based on our actual resources and candor rather than on the protective manipulation that can riddle the ego, the possibilities for confidence, authenticity and playfulness are extraordinary. Said another way, when the pretense and the mendacity are gone, the possibilities for a fair degree of health, wealth and self-fulfillment are extraordinary.

A personally rewarding life

To know of Autonomy as just another word for self-government or self-management is to miss the poignan-
cy of that which is central to it. It is to miss the point of the freedom that leads to a personally rewarding life.

An understanding of our choices

In other words, how we go about living our lives must be addressed directly. We want to live with our eyes wide open and morally responsible for the decisions we make. Then we can better understand and appreciate the choices that lie before us and operate with the accumulation of resources gained from our choices, our initiative and our acquisitive efforts.

A life of substance

A life of substance emerges in its fullest sense only from our intellectual, conceptual and cultural resources, from our economic resources and from our social resources — from the manner in which we pursue and engage our relationships and in the manner in which we integrate with the social fabric.

How does this all work?

Heartful skills

Autonomy and Life rests upon a strong foundation of critical intelligence and critical skills. Also of particular interest is the acquisition of skills Arnold Siegel terms “heartful.” Why? Because those committed to this kind of study generally are not looking merely to be productive. They want to be mindfully and heartfully accomplished as well as competitively and materially accomplished.

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Valued resources

This means they value resources such as mercy, forgiveness, understanding, tolerance and acceptance as well as the ability to bring forth love, delight, connection, to give comfort and kindle the spirits of others, to be sensitive to the suffering of those less able than themselves.

Personal authority or substance

Participants in the Retreat Workshop and the Advanced Classes and Coursework who learn these critical skills can expect to gain the personal authority or substance needed to manage a personally rewarding life successfully and to develop a creative and strategic control over the quality of their lives and experience. The coursework offers a unique discipline in the way that it addresses autonomy, subjectivity (including our inner experience) and personhood, thereby altering our relationship to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

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