Hey VC community,

As many of you know so intimately, profound insights often emerge from delving deep within. These novel insights can rearrange the very fabric of our self-understanding and our true nature. Moreover, true breakthroughs often bring with them profound vitality, a creative mojo that sets the tempo for the time to come.

All of this leads to practices of harnessing, stabilizing, and integrating—an oft-overused word. By virtue of this, I want to share some pearls of insight on a critical dimension of this craft: the power of recognition.

I invite you to read the following passages as you might read a poem. Consider this an invitation for the words to coalesce into a remembrance of your direct experience and innate capacities—all the ways you already do this and to see once more how we support each other to remember, again and again.

…Walking each other home

By the very nature of transformation, we arrive in unfamiliar spaces.

New terrains that reflect our deeper values but lack the familiar trappings of our previous habit patterns.

Genuine change—the kind where we don’t backslide into old shapes— involves the art of recognition.

We must recognize the change—correctly identifying its qualities and characteristics.

We must be in an intimate moment.

And with this, we must pay homage to the vision that has drawn us forward into this moment. To feed the gods of our imagination with acknowledgment, appreciation, awe, and reverence.

We must be humble before the mysterious powers that deliver us into genuine benevolence and honor them with gratitude.

It is by paying this attention, with care, that we solidify the pathway—stabilize the change—and begin anew, looking from solid ground, backwards and forwards in time, to take in anew what was, is, and now can be…

Because of this transformational effort… Because of what called us from slumbers into awakening.

The beauty is such because of our noticing.

Recognition crystallizes.

To your best journeys yet,

~DHR