Radical Hope #15: You Have Already Done the Hard Part.
From Generative Practice to Radical Hope #15
We are bodies that think.
We are nature.
We are the field of awareness in which everything happens.
We are pilgrims coming home.
And we have something to offer.
This is the fifteenth newsletter in a series called From Generative Practice to Radical Hope. I am exploring why deep personal development — somatic, psychological, contemplative — is not a retreat from the polycrisis but the very ground from which genuine engagement becomes possible.
In the last newsletter, If Not Us, Who?, we widened the lens to the scale of the world — the climate crisis, the tragedy in Israel and Palestine, the movements that succeed without anyone being in charge of them.
We asked what it means to flock, at that scale, towards justice.
This newsletter turns the lens back around. It asks who you have become during this journey.
My Own Journey
Seen in a straight line, my own journey starts with my ancestors — though in this lifetime I have worked with my own personal story first, and only more recently have I turned to look at what my ancestors passed down to me.
My ancestors are a motley crew. British Empire ruling class, involved in both running the empire and the slave trade — there is more of this in the book. German Jewish ancestors, who were fortunate enough to leave Germany before the Holocaust. On my mother’s side English soldiers and village vicars (priests in country parishes). And an Irish line I know very little about.
My concern for the world comes, I think, very much from the Jewish lineage, and from the German folk and Russell ruling-class lineage. My hurt and wounding comes largely from the fact that I never bonded closely with my mother, who had PTSD from the Second World War and was distant. My father was also distant — bad at business, a failure at it, and not interested at all in the practical things other men would teach their sons.
I grew up feeling lonely and isolated. But from quite an early stage, I had little glimmers of spiritual awakening — a feeling that there was something more to life than just getting up in the morning, going to school, and coming home again. The difficulty of my life both brought me pain, hurt and anger, and also opened me to the joy of existence and the great mystery of the universe, at an early age. I wasn’t happy in my life, but I found moments of happiness, marvelling at the glory of existence.
If I hadn’t had the wounding, I probably wouldn’t have had so many amazing teachers.
My woundedness took me on a long journey — we could call it a pilgrimage — through life, with both healing and an opening to the great mystery. It led me to many amazing teachers, both psychological and spiritual. I feel incredibly fortunate for the great men and women I have met over a long period of time.
Over time, my woundedness has transformed into a gift: a gift of sensitivity to the suffering of others, an ability to intuit other people’s experience, to empathise with people — and always to be able to go back to the feeling of resourcefulness offered by the ground and the sky. I love the simple Chinese way of speaking of the whole of existence as 天地 (tiān dì), heaven-and-earth, sky and ground together.
A birthday without him
My twin brother Stephen died on 12th March 1998. Later that year was the first time I would have a birthday without him. I was in the Dordogne, in France, at the temple established by Dudjom Rinpoche after he left Tibet during the Cultural Revolution, and now led by his son, Shenphen Dawa Rinpoche. By some synchronicity, he chose the date of our birthday to offer the community the Bodhisattva vow — the commitment not just to one’s own enlightenment, but that all beings should reach enlightenment together. It was a powerful day: I sobbed uncontrollably with the grief of everything unfinished between us, and also felt the bliss of being and compassion for the suffering of the world, all held in a single day.
That very day, I asked my teacher what I could do for my brother. He told me I could give a thangka — a Tibetan painting — to the temple. A thangka of Vajrasattva, the Buddha who brings the purification of light. Some of the merit of those praying before it would also go to Stephen, in the Tibetan Buddhist way of seeing things.
My teacher expected such a thangka would need to be ordered from Nepal or Bhutan, and that it would take months. But the senior student who ran the temple, Jacques Marichez, happened to be holding exactly such a thangka — someone had ordered it and never collected it. That week this beautiful image was hung in the temple.
That the offering for my brother should hang in this small temple — built by a great master who had himself been born under circumstances his tradition regarded as auspicious, recognised as a reincarnate teacher while still young in Tibet, before he ever came to the West to teach — touches me deeply, even now, so many years later. When I think of that thangka hanging near the shrine, I still feel a kind of thread: through my teacher, Shenphen Dawa Rinpoche, to his father, Dudjom Rinpoche, and back into the lineages that once practised bliss-emptiness in the high, hidden valleys of Tibet.
My pilgrimage home to myself has been a long one, and it continues.
Increasingly, I relax deeper into the nature of being. I am also learning how to move from that ground into action — action that comes from being, rather than from a feeling that I am not quite good enough and have to achieve more.
I am amazed by how far I have come, and I am also humbled by how much further I seem to be going.
And yet this is the human condition.
We never become perfect. We always have flaws. In the words of Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” (1) My own brokenness is allowing the light in. Increasingly, I feel I can participate in the world as one of numerous small islands of coherence, making a small difference in the great web of being.
The Pilgrim’s Journey
“To arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” (2)
We began fifteen newsletters ago with the weight of a world in crisis, and we have arrived somewhere unexpected: not with a solution, but as people who no longer experience ourselves as separate from what we are trying to heal.
As I think of the lives of my colleagues, friends, students and clients, I think of their journeys as pilgrimages – in the older European sense of the word rather than the American settler one. That American association is a real one, and worth naming rather than stepping around: for many American readers, “pilgrim” first calls up 1620, when the Mayflower arrived from England, starting a long process of displacement, disease, and violence against the Indigenous peoples.
I am reaching past that, deliberately, to the older, plainer sense — the one that predates the ship, predates the myth, and means something closer to its opposite: not a founder, but a stranger; not someone who arrives to claim a place, but a traveller passing through a land that was never theirs. (3)
When I think of my own fellow pilgrims, I am quite amused by Chaucer’s description, written around 1400, of his own motley crew, in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales — “sondry folk, by aventure yfalle / In felaweshipe” — “various sorts of people, by chance fallen into fellowship.” (4) Twenty-nine strangers, thrown together at an inn on the road to Canterbury: a knight and a miller who steals grain, a parson and a pardoner selling fake relics, quarrelling, drinking, telling each other filthy stories the whole way there. Chaucer calls the entire uneven, unholy lot of them pilgrims, without distinction. I rather like that. I hope this description brings a smile to the face of everyone who has journeyed with me!
The people who walked to Rome, to Jerusalem, to Santiago went on journeys that could take months and sometimes killed them. Their journeys were long, and often hard, and they came back from them having seen something they could not have experienced by staying at home.
There is a psychological way of understanding what happens on a journey like that I find useful: the anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner found that inner journeys have a shape: a leaving, a difficult threshold time, and a return in which we are received back into the life we left, changed. (5) They called these separation, liminality, and incorporation.
Separation is the leaving — the old life, or the old way of seeing, falling away. The threshold time, or liminality, is being on the boundary between two states: neither who we were, nor yet who we are becoming. This period is often difficult. It is also where people who are strangers to each other sometimes find an intense, levelling fellowship with one another that ordinary life rarely allows.
And incorporation, or the return, when we bring what we learnt back to everyday life, changed.
It is the return that finishes the journey. Without it, we can remain suspended indefinitely: present but not quite arrived anywhere.
A thangka hung in a temple, offered on behalf of my brother, is a good example of incorporation — something already present, revealed at the exact moment it was needed, given as a gift.
Dear reader, I think of you as a fellow pilgrim
If you have walked this journey with me — into the body, into nature, into awareness, into disorder met without flinching, into the flock, into what is yours to do, into justice, into the places where you have stood up for something and the places where you got it wrong — then you are probably someone who has been on this life-long journey and has passed through the separation and the threshold.
If I have done my job, these fifteen newsletters reflect your journey back to you to some extent and possibly help shed light on it.
Sacred Uselessness
There is a kind of rest that has nothing to do with recovering so that we can work again. It is the deep rest of meditation, where past and future dissolve and all that is left is presence in the now. No future, so no goals and nothing to improve. No past, so no wounds to heal and no karma to purify. This is freedom, and bliss-emptiness.
I notice how easily I get pulled into too much activity and too little inner peace. There is the book, the retreat business, my coaching clients, finding a new pension provider, a house to buy. But when I do stop and drop into that space for a decent stretch of time, (6) I breathe again and get a taste of that freedom.
For me it is still a focused period rather than a way of living — that belongs to the great masters. Resting there, with nothing required of me, I luxuriate in the sheer beauty of this world. And out of that, quite unbidden, comes curiosity about its life, and grief for its suffering, and then the simple wish to bring kindness. Even a taste of this is freedom, and it changes the place our action comes from.
And it is not only found sitting still. Once we know the way in, the same freedom can arrive while making art, walking in the woods, or fully absorbed in the company of a child or someone we love. The focused practice is what builds the capacity to find this.
We are not being asked to do more but to relax in being more. Yet to keep our eyes open to the world around us.
And then from this place, as our self-obsession decreases, and our compassion and love for the world and its inhabitants increases, a call to action naturally and spontaneously arises.
As the old joke goes: Socrates said “To be is to do.” Sartre said “To do is to be.” Sinatra said “Do be do be do.”
There is a cost to this journey I do not want to hide. Anyone who has done real inner work discovers that they cannot walk back into the culture they grew up in and fit exactly as they once did. Part of us is no longer quite at home there. That is not a failure of the journey. It is what the journey was for.
Because what we carry back is something to offer. Centred in being and in giving our gift, we also become role models for those around us.
Not the loud, charismatic kind of leadership our culture still tends to reward. Something quieter and more joyful.
The Servant Leader
There is a servant in Hermann Hesse’s short novel The Journey to the East named Leo. He travels with a party of pilgrims on a journey to the East in search of some ultimate truth, doing the humble, unglamorous work — carrying, fetching, fixing — and he does it, Hesse tells us, in a simple and natural manner, cheerfully, without strain. (7) He is the one the whole party quietly depends on, and the one nobody quite notices, until he disappears — and the group, without him, falls apart. Only then does it become clear that Leo was never merely the servant. He was the League’s president all along. The joy was not a mask over the authority. The joy was the authority.
Inspired by Hesse’s strange little novel, the management theorist Robert Greenleaf gave this quality of leadership a name in 1970: the servant-leader — one for whom the wish to serve comes first, and the wish to lead follows only from that, if it comes at all. (8)
Greenleaf also left us a way of testing whether any of this is real, rather than performance. He called it the best test, and it asks what happens to the people around us, not what happens to our reputation — whether those we serve grow, and whether the least privileged among them are any better for it. (9)
There is one more turn to this story. Near the end of Hesse’s novel, the narrator — who may well be Hesse himself — stands before a small sculpture: two figures joined together, one of them Leo, the other himself. He watches something move within it, his own image flowing into Leo’s, until it seems that only one will remain. “He must grow, I must disappear.” (10)
The Summons
Everything I have told you about myself — my own wound, my teachers, that afternoon in the Dordogne — has been leading here.
And I suspect that everything you have lived alongside me, reading these fifteen newsletters, has been leading you to the same place. Or perhaps you came by a different route, and this series has simply provided a signpost or encouragement.
We did not do all of this so that we could feel better. We did it so that something could move through us, out into the world, the way it moved through Leo in The Journey to the East, in a simple and natural manner, spontaneous, without strain.
So here is the only question this newsletter really asks: what is ours to do?
Not everyone’s. Not everything. Just ours — the particular thing that our own particular wound, our own particular teachers, our own particular walk through the body and the world, has quietly fitted us to offer. Somewhere between the ground and the sky, 天地, there is already a shape only you can make, because only you have lived this life.
This is not a call to do more. We have had enough calls to do more.
It is a call to notice what we have already become, and to trust that this is enough to act from — not from anxiety, not from the old feeling of never being quite good enough, but from the quiet, ordinary joy of a servant who shows others how to serve.
We began this series with the weight of a world in crisis. We end this newsletter — not the series, not yet — as one filament among countless others, threaded through the same ground.
What allows trees to become a forest is the fungal “wood wide web” — the living network threaded through the soil beneath them. A single filament of that network does not carry the whole woodland; it simply passes nourishment, signal, and coherence into the ground around it.
When enough of these threads do their modest work, the forest remembers how to stand, how to share, how to grow.
What is yours to do — or what is the distant glimmer of light announcing that something is coming that is yours to do?
A Practice
Ground and Sky
Find a moment today when you can stand, or sit, without needing to be anywhere else for a few minutes.
Feel your feet, or whatever part of you is in contact with the earth. Let your weight settle there. Don’t try to feel anything in particular — just notice what is already true: something beneath you is holding you up, and has been the whole time.
Now let your attention rise upward, slowly. Notice the space above you — the ceiling, the sky, whatever is actually there. Not reaching for it. Just letting your awareness go up as easily as it went down. Perhaps a nearby window will help you sense the sky.
Stay a moment in both at once: the ground beneath, the sky above, and the space between them.
Being enveloped between two things so much larger than yourself, and of being, for a moment, the meeting point of the two.
If inspired, make a prayer or set an intention. What is your deepest longing for the earth? Or for your life? Or for both?
Next Newsletter
The last one is brief, and it asks rather than tells.
What has this series stirred in you — and how might you offer it back into the communities that are already yours?
Where do you already do this — quietly, without calling it anything?
And what is one place you have been holding back from?
If something has resonated, or troubled you, do write to me: julian.russell@lifetalent.com. Also write to me if you want to join our WhatsApp and participate in the discussion.
Are you on the mailing list for the next newsletter and updates? If not, click the link above.
In hope and love
Julian
Julian Russell is a psychotherapist, executive coach, writer, and committed fellow traveller through the territories of inner work and public life. Drawing on decades of somatic and contemplative practice, he helps people access the capacities they already carry. He is a co-founder of the Generative Citizen community — a gathering of people who understand that how we are matters as much as what we do. His forthcoming book, Standing at the Edge of Hope, explores why personal and spiritual development is not a retreat from the world’s crises, but the very ground from which transformative engagement becomes possible.
Notes
1. Leonard Cohen, "Anthem," on The Future (Columbia Records, 1992). "There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in."
2. T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," V, in Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1943).
3. The word carries this meaning in its root. "Pilgrim" comes to English from the Latin peregrinus — a foreigner, a stranger, a non-citizen — built from per ("through, beyond") and ager ("field, land"): one who is beyond their own fields, away from home. In Roman law peregrinus was a legal category for those who lived under Rome without being of it. The religious sense came later, when the Church borrowed the word for outsiders travelling to holy places. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "pilgrim, n."
4. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, "General Prologue," lines 25–26: "Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle / In felaweshipe" (translation: "of various sorts of people, by chance fallen into fellowship"). The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
5. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960; orig. Les rites de passage, Paris: Émile Nourry, 1909); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). Turner’s term for the fellowship that arises in the threshold state is communitas.
6. I won’t say how long. Twenty minutes is plenty for some, an hour for others, two hours for a few. The question is what is right for you now. See note 3 in Newsletter 4 on building habits.
7. Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East, trans. Hilda Rosner (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956; orig. Die Morgenlandfahrt, 1932).
8. Robert K. Greenleaf, "The Servant as Leader" (Indianapolis: Robert K. Greenleaf Center, 1970).
9. Greenleaf put the test as a set of questions: do those served grow as persons? Do they become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous — more likely themselves to become servants? And what is the effect on the least privileged? Will they benefit, or at least not be further deprived? Greenleaf, "The Servant as Leader," as note 8.
10. Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East, as note 7.