Can A 5-year Old Understand ‘Being’?

Gaurav: You do a lot of work in deep transformation. You do a lot of work with leaders and coaches, and facilitate a journey for them where they can actually tap into their being. You’re an author of a book called A Shift in Being as well, thought and practices of deep transformation. If you were to define this term called Being to a five year old child, how would you define them? Because I struggle to define and explain the simple term called Being.

Leon: I read once that I won’t take credit for it, someone said, to explain to a five year old, you simply say it’s who you are, when no one’s watching. And the five year old can get a sense. When no one’s watching, when mom and dad are around grandparents and around, who am I in that moment, it’s just a sense of guilt that, but that’s not just for a five year old. That’s a wonderful way to explain a sense of being to people at any age, even adults with Who are you in that moment, the sense of self when no one and I mean, no one appears to be watching in any form.

Okay, because this is a quality of selfhood that is very difficult to put words to, I was actually working with a translator recently for the book into Portuguese. And the primary challenge he said that they have at the very beginning of the translation is that in Portuguese, there is no term for beingness and way of being.

And I thought, that’s fascinating, because in English, we just take it for granted, way of being might not be common, but when we sort of talk about presence and ways of being people readily after struggling, yeah, you know, I grasp what this is pointing to. 

But that there’s a whole language that doesn’t have a term for it is interesting to me, because language is descriptive in many ways, kind of a cultural understanding of things and the way people view life in the world. So we see that not everyone grasps beingness. But it is important for us to begin to understand it. Because it feels for me that it’s part of the forefront of what we’re really starting to understand about the evolution of humanity, if you will. We’ve learned so much about ourselves through psychology, through psychiatry, through coaching through all kinds of modalities. We’ve learned so much about who we are, as a race. 

But beingness is still this, this kind of unknown frontier, it’s right there with consciousness, right to understand this mysterious phenomenon that gives rise to my sense of self is a part of my energy systems, my aura, part of my consciousness and how that works. Do you know how I experience life? Because of it, how it interacts and engages with others, and how we expand it? Evolve it? 

These are questions that there are no yet ready answers for but like you said. This has always been for me, that was the passion point. Not that I have all the answers I’m not even going to pretend to but the passion point of sitting with people in exploration of this, both verbally or verbally, but beyond the verbal into those moments of silence, or beingness arises in the spaces in the silence and something extraordinary unfolds. But no one can necessarily say what it was. But something is happening in the interplay within the consciousness within the matrix of our connectedness.

The Art of Deep Transformation in Shift 

Gaurav: You’ve written this book called A Shift in Being:The Art and The Practices of Deep Transformation. Just curious. What does it mean? When you say Shift and Being?

Leon: It’s akin to a shift in consciousness, if you will. For some people, that might be an  easier word to grasp this idea that consciousness can expand into alternate levels. And in that case, as I write in my book, each level of consciousness has its own built in reality.

I love the work of Dr. David Hawkins, this was some seminal work for me in terms of understanding consciousness evolution, where he maps out human consciousness from very low levels of power to very high levels of power. He puts words to it and labels to it so we can get a sense of what these levels of consciousness are, from the more disempower varying levels, fear, hate, desire, that kind of thing to more expansive levels of will, love, even reason as a higher level of enlightenment and beyond. Yeah, joy. So when I began to understand that each level of consciousness has its own built in reality, it dawned on me that as we shift our state of consciousness or way of being in this world into these more expansive levels, automatically, our perceptions shift, to mirror to reflect, if you will, the consciousness reality is sort of embedded within that consciousness.

But what a lot of what happens in coaching is that we’re not really focused on helping people shift their state of being or consciousness, we’re having them think differently or think through things. But the assumption going in is that my state of consciousness coming into this session is not the focus, I don’t need to shift it necessarily, that I can achieve what I want in this session, with the state of being or consciousness that I currently inhabit. And I need some support thinking differently. But the way of being is not the focus. But in the work, we’re doing it saying, “No, the way of being is everything. That once that shifts often the solutions that are desired, just naturally fall in.” It’s kind of like the image of the Rubik’s Cube. Remember the Rubik’s cube with all the sides and colors? 

It’s kind of like you suddenly get this? Yes, I know what it is, I need to perceive everything differently, because I’ve completely altered my inner state of reality, not just thinking differently, not just perceiving differently. So the gist of the work becomes, how do we support people in a coaching session or transformative space, to truly shift their inner state their inner beingness, to elevate and expand their consciousness, because when we do that, that which needs to be known, just arises, these new ways of perceiving reality just literally arise almost by magic.

And they simply then live into that reality. And we start to see and experience the world that we have never in the past, glimpsed it, or we glimpsed it like we’ve had moments of it, but the sustainability piece becomes a question: how do we sustain these altered states of experience? Right? 

Because that’s often what happens, we move in and fall back. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, absolutely. with you on that. So we moved there, and we come back. And I really loved it when you said an altered state of being, the way we show up, the way we look at the world. You know, while I’m listening to you, the work of Richard Barrett, the work of spiral dynamics, the work of Robert Keegan, when he talks about the vertical development that’s coming to my mind.

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