Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion

Passion is a concept that’s talked about a lot these days, in a lot of different arenas:

• Business and leadership experts talk about employee engagement.
• Coaching and career development folks talk about finding a calling. 
• Educators talks about passion-based learning.
• Couples and relationship counselors talk about keeping the spark alive.

But passion is much bigger and deeper than what happens M-F 9-5, or what happens between partners. Ultimately, passion is a life skill---a stance---that helps bring vitality to all our engagements: from work, family and school life, to creative, social and spiritual life. And it’s a survival mechanism---critical to health and well-being---because your attachment to life depends on your interest in it. 

This presentation (part lecture, part hands-on workshop) is about what inspires passion and what defeats it, how you lose it and how you get it back. Through self-reflective writing, discussion, small group work, and brainstorming, we'll explore the endless, yet endlessly fruitful, tug-of-war between passion and security in our lives, the wild in us and the tame.

And we’ll do some courageous inquiry into our dis-passion---where we’re numb, depressed, stuck or bored in our lives---so that we can rework these tendencies in ourselves, claim our rightful inheritance of vitality, and get our spark back. 

What you'll learn:

• Passion can be cultivated. Turned on as well as turned off. And this happens most readily at the level of the gesture and the moment, not the five-year plan.
• Passion is in the risk. In the willingness to step from the sidelines onto the playing field.
• Passion breeds passion and disinterest breeds disinterest. If we lack passion in our own lives, our other relationships---our partnerships, friendships, communities, classrooms, corporations and congregations---will be denied that energy.  
• Passion is more than exuberance; it's endurance. It's sometimes shoulder-to-the-wheel stamina and patience on the order of years. 
• Passion is intimately related to health. To the degree that passion is vitality, honouring our passions enhances our vitality.