The Pains That Transcend Culture

“The education of our time has left aside our inner world; it has abandoned it.”

I have spent the last 30 years working with people from different countries. I’ve worked in 14 countries spanning 3 continents. One of the things that I have learned from teaching and educating people from so many walks of life is that there are phenomena, problems, and pains that transcend culture.

Everywhere I have been, consistent themes reappear. There is the pain that arises in complex relationships, the absence of affection, and difficult situations between parents and children. There is the feeling that life doesn’t make sense anymore, the lack of gratitude and the accompanying emptiness, and the deep desire to be more effective in our world. There is the feeling that there is no ‘magic’ in life and everything is about ‘doing,’ but doing is not a way of being, as it has no end and can never lead to satisfaction.

The central part of my discovery, as I traveled the world, is that none of these themes are included in our education. In other words, I go to school and none of that is part of what I learn. The education of our time has left aside our inner world; it has abandoned it.

In the best of cases, we have relegated our inner world to the field of therapy. But we have created the ‘common sense’ that it doesn’t correspond to the realm of education. I ask the reader, “Why is that?”

We haven’t always thought this way. In the past, the unity of the inner and outer worlds was not even questioned. It is only in the last century that we have changed our thinking and have shifted completely towards material goals that we think define success. For example, making money. It is not bad to have money and material comforts, but they are absolutely insufficient.

It is this insufficiency that our programs seek to remediate. How do we do this? We incorporate the elements that are missing from our learning. We generate spaces in which there is absolute trust, in which there is unconditional respect. It is in these welcoming spaces where we all deeply listen to each other that the magic happens, and we learn the tools that have been denied to us in our education.

Our goal is to generate these spaces so that every single human being can know that there is a place where they will be treated with unconditional respect and affection because this is the way that they can come to embrace their inner world and the wisdom that it holds.

This approach is not about fixing a person that is “broken,” but about embracing a human being who wants to learn. It is about a human being who wants to grow together with others as we all make the transition into a new field of learning.

The marvelous result of this approach is something I have seen day-to-day for the last 30 years. It is a constant gift to witness the surprise, the gratitude, and the joy people feel when they realize that it is possible to learn to move beyond what before they considered to be a personal defect. They move from thinking, “this is my problem, this is my defect,” to realizing that in reality, it is just uncharted territory and it is possible to learn how to explore it.

All human beings, no matter what stage of life they are in, no matter what profession they practice, or what economic situation they are in, are welcome in these spaces where they can discover a path of learning that, before, they thought did not even exist.

Over three decades, the Newfield Network has trained 65,000 masterful coaches, leaders, and individuals to be powerful agents of change. Learn more about our programs here.