I am currently in Denver for a leadership conference for school...and while originally I wanted to write about all the things that I have learned and that have come up for me here...and perhaps that will come later but what's alive for me right now is the notion of commanding.

I'd been looking forward to meeting this scholar who studies mindfulness, attention, Buddhism, and leadership for the past month. I walk into her session and she is not there. Not physically, but she's on a phone which is hooked into a speaker. Not hardly the same. Next we proceed to meditate to which people are coughing (my pet peeve, self admittedly) moving, shifting, coming in and out, etc. I just wasn't into it, so I left. I thought to myself, "I can (and do) do this on my own and have a much more pleasant experience. That's the point though.

See...my "work" in this life is to connect to others. I knew that, Jan Spiller reiterated it. And as I literally sit above a mile high mountain top as I did many lifetimes before, I have never hated "connecting" more than I did 20 minutes ago.

When faced with the abrasive reality against my polished expectations it felt so raw and displeasing I left. As I set meditating, whenever someone made a noise it felt as though a noose tightened around my neck. Literally choking the throat; the sound chakra, truth blocked by lies. So what's the lies? Maybe that I used the noise as an excuse for my disturbed concentration. Maybe that I was connected at all. Maybe both. Or maybe I was annoyed at this demand being made by the noise makers for attention. How dare they ask to be heard, to be acknowledged, to be given attention?

Brene' Brown said a lot of interesting things this morning but perhaps the most personally provocative was when she said we need to make a bid for connection. I tell my students all the time to say what they mean to say. Think of the answer you want, ask the question that beckons that truth. Its a difficult thing...to be intentional which requires asking yourself what do I want? What do I want in this moment?

What do I want? When I had to think of a word to describe myself yesterday I knee-jerk came to the word:POWERFUL. To be entirely honest I am not sure where that came from. What space or what place produced that? Am I powerful?

I had a conversation with a woman yesterday and she inquired how she might have been "playing small" in various areas in her life. Then today Brene' iterated how she had previously purposefully engineered her career to stay small. Her viral popularity was much to her chagrin and she was not prepared for neither the negativity nor the positivity that came as a result of her vulnerability. She aptly professed, When [I] stepped into [my] power, [I] became a lightening rod."

The thing I find interesting about that particular metaphor is that the rod is not the source, it is the conductor, but it attracts the energy of source power and likely outlets alike. Yesterday I was made an example of when describing how to "command presence." Then last night, Nicole told me that I have a way of commanding attention. Rather than shrug off the attention, I found myself engaging in dialogue around it. I told her that I am learning to hear it, but I will not allow my ego to make this about me. Its really about the source, I am just a conductor. And really, I am not sure that I've fully stepped into my power, but I have more incentive than I did yesterday to do so.

And while my mind continues to wrap itself around this entire experience; what it means for my work, my Self, and my way of being I doubt it strays far from this thought. Make a bid for connection. Stop playing small, a beautiful lightening rod once said it does nothing to serve the world. And I am beginning to really think she had a point.