Interview with Jane MacAllister Dukes

By Colin Whitby

Jane and I first met over the internet when we were both taking part in one of Soleira Green's courses some four years ago. Since then we have been keeping touch over email, but it was when Jane sent me a link to her new web site that the idea of an interview came to mind.

I was delighted when she agreed, and we quickly arranged a telephone interview which flowed really well, I hope you can feel the energy that was generated; by the end of the session is was very tangible, like electrical energy in the air. This is 'The Magic of Being' in action, co-creating with like-minded souls.

We had some initial discussions about doing our energy or spiritual work whilst being in a ‘normal’ job, and the various impacts that normal working life had on us.

Jane MacAllister Dukes – I used to believe that it didn’t matter quite what was going on around me. I could do the (energy) work as it was that work that was important. I would do the work behind the scenes and being seen was not important. Now it’s like I need to stand up and put my head above the parapet.

Colin Whitby – Yes, that is what is happening with me, and that is what this web site is all about: standing up and being seen.

JMcAD – In a way I have always stood up and to some extent have felt until very recently that I was a lone voice. I have always had the conviction that the work I was doing was what I was here to do and that I would just carry on doing it anyway. There is a feeling now though that this is a time to stand up and share and be seen.

CW – And to help things along the whole point for me is that it is magical. That’s the emphasis of the web site, that it should be magical to share, and so far this has proved to be the case as everyone I have asked to contribute has come back positively. It should be easy, this process.

So to start our interview – how would you describe what you do in business?

JMcAD – Well it’s not about what I do, it’s about who I am being. So what I do is ‘I live who I am’. It’s about living my life in a particular way. In the process of living my life in a particular way I might paint, I might collaborate on the production of a book (which might involve my paintings being used as illustrations) or I might add some words to that book or I might take my kids to school, wash their hair, make dinner......I might design Christmas cards, I might design them on commission or freelance and sell them from local shops or from my web site and so on.....I’m a creator and a maker and I bring that creational beingness to everything I do.

I’m also a teacher, I’ve taught art at Foundation Course level at an Art College and many years ago I taught Silversmithing and Jewellery at Night Classes. I am much more of an inspirational teacher than a practical one, although I did teach practical techniques as well. Inspiration was always more important to me. It was about giving people confidence first and then the techniques would follow. Once they had the confidence and understood their own creational ability, then the techniques would come naturally.

I am a qualified Coach, I co-founded the Evolutionary Institute with four others. We created a new curriculum and we decided that we were going to alter coaching and make it into a much more evolutionary state or condition. We wanted people to be really empowered. We wanted to go a step beyond the belief system that says ‘the client knows everything’, because although on some level the client probably does know everything, whether they can access it or not is another matter.

So my main focus has always been the creational aspect of life and ‘being’, so it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, whether it’s coaching or writing a curriculum or painting or drawing or making dinner or cleaning.......whatever it is I always bring the same focus to it, which is that I honour it fully in the moment and am aligned to the energetic nature of it. So my passion, if you like and what I therefore do, is, I embody and live an ever-evolving understanding of energetics and consciousness. Does that make sense?

CW – Yes – and I think that the challenge for us all is to describe what we do or what we are so that it is understandable to ourselves and then to others. Until now I have been cautious about describing the energy work I have been doing as it did not seem to be the right time to share.

JMcAD – I do believe the reason you may have been hesitating is that there has been a separation between what you do and be, and there is no doubt that the coaching industry in my view has risen out of the desperate need or a calling for this to be addressed. Time and time again coaches will deal with highly paid executives that are brilliant at their jobs but have a terrible personal life. So they somehow work the system that they have created or that they are a part of, but when it comes to who they really are, there is a breakdown of understanding and they can’t deal with that.

A lot of people have focused on becoming successful and the word successful has meant someone who earns a lot of money and can buy cars and houses and things like that, but it’s only now that people are beginning to realise that houses and cars and stuff like that don’t make you happy. If you are really materialistic, which one or two people are, then you may be happy for a short while, but it is amazing how many really rich movie stars and pop stars, for example, are now saying in the press or magazines about how miserable they are, or unhappy they are, or how normal they are, or how they want to get married and have kids too.

So there is a general awareness which is beginning to weave itself through society, that money doesn’t buy you happiness. Now that’s something that had been said for a very long time, but it has not been truly understood. There is a sort of superficial nature to a lot of what we produce in society that is very destructive, and we can easily be seduced by it, and go down the route that says we need to have these symbols, that we have not made it until we have a big portfolio of assets, or can go out on a Friday night in London to night clubs and be seen in the right places, that we know the right people, wear the right clothes, say the right things. Depending on what you choose, then that is the set of beliefs that you buy into.

If you choose to be a fashion icon, for example, they you would need a certain handbag, or a certain set of shoes and so on. Recently there have been adverts on the TV about inserts that you can wear on the balls of your feet to put on when you go out to party in your high heeled party shoes, so that you don’t get burning feet. I used to think I can’t wear these shoes, what’s wrong with me, because I could not wear those kind of shoes without my feet hurting, but in fact everyone’s feet were hurting, it’s just they did not talk about it. So what is happening is people are beginning to speak about things more openly, and so it’s ok to admit your feet are burning. It’s ultimately a sign of awareness when it’s coming into the open like that.

I see signs everywhere of a kind of awakening if you like, and so what I do it is to encourage that awakening.

CW – You mentioned the Evolutionary Network earlier, how did that come about and how does it work?

JMcAD – 5 of us came together to create something called the Evolutionary Institute, and the idea of that was to create what we called at the time, Advanced Coach Training courses, which would teach people about energy and consciousness.

Everyone has an instinctive and innate understanding of it, and when we are kids we know it very well. We run about and naturally use our knowing (our intuitive knowledge) to inform us. We are also more than likely telepathic as children. That word telepathy has a strange connotation for people, they think it is kind of weird and that you can read people’s minds, but the truth is what you are really reading is energy.

We all had the desire to remind people of what they already knew, and so we came together to create this new institute. Now in the process of creating it we created a wonderful curriculum, we ran wonderful courses and we really did evolve the knowledge in relation to energetics and consciousness in the coaching world. It was such fun to do, huge fun, a wonderful dance of co-creation, just delightful.

In a sense you could say we used the coaching world as a portal to bring the information in, mainly because coaches tend to be more open. They have often been many other things before becoming coaches, so it was in a sense the most obvious route to take.

We decided that we did not want normal CVs, we wanted to break away and model a new way of being by doing it. We came up with names for ourselves, for example I was called Adventure Director, we had a Chief Energising Officer, a Chief Consciousness Officer and an Evolutionary Creation Director was another. The intention was that we grow this institute into a big global community of trainers and coaches who could run these courses all around the world.

In the process of creating the courses and running them and teaching them we evolved. We evolved ourselves into a different set up. One left as she was incredibly inspired to go off and do something else, which was perfectly right, but at the same time was in the background giving support. Then we split into two and two, and very naturally we came to the point where we wanted to teach differently and concentrate on slightly different things.

That was gorgeous because it meant we were not really ending. It was as if we were evolving into two different versions of what we co-created together, which was a natural evolution of being. The arm that I am part of then became the Evolutionary Network and I work with Soleira Green (and others) on that. The other two are continuing in the training that we co-created together in their own particular way, putting their stamp on it I’m sure and my understanding is that they too are evolving new work.

CW – Are you finding a growing interest in your new venture?

JMcAD – Yes and I remember in the beginning when the five of us were talking about how to create the courses, we would be cautious about using words like energy or consciousness and would have long discussions about their usage, whereas now these words are in common parlance. I see them popping up all over the place. So although we wouldn’t claim it was just us that did that, I do know that we were a contributing factor.

I stand for the work that has to be done when it is calling me. So when I co-create it with others and then see it in coaching magazines, in their adverts and their articles, then I know that my work is effective.

CW – Yes, in fact I find it possible to talk about these things at work more. There are people who I now share words like energy with, who I would not normally have even mentioned these things to.

JMcAD – A lot of the people I work with are nurses, telephone operators, receptionists, secretaries, school admin people, in fact people who are on the face of it not very important in the scheme of things. If you look at what success means in our society in the West particularly, we seem to have got things upside down and backside foremost.

A lot of these people are not considered to be particularly important in the bigger scheme of things according to the success definitions we use. However, in my book they are. All these people can touch so many others, so by doing the work they are doing and by being who they are being, they are altering the very fabric of everything, of creation.

So sometimes it is right to speak up when we are guided or prompted so that people are able to come out more, and people now have the courage to speak out, to say what is right in the right moment. There are a number of reasons we might not have done this kind of thing in the past. We might have felt that we would get shot down in flames or considered rather strange, or possibly even attacked, so we have had to be aware and not blunder about like a bull in a china shop. This is where conscious knowledge of energetics is really helpful, because you can read their energetics and actually work with it in a way which is honourable, has integrity and is sensible too. We have to have common sense in the whole of this as well.

You don’t have to be the Prime Minister or famous to be effective. You don’t necessarily have to be a world figure to be an effective evolutionary changer. In fact sometimes its infinitely more effective if you’re not, because in a way you go about your work, in a sense like a secret agent, undercover.

A lot of people come on the courses and do not want to be a coach. They just want to take the knowledge into their working lives, whatever their working lives are. Sometimes people who are really in alignment with things are much more in tune with the universe and what is going on than those who are successful in the Western sense.

CW – One of the things we have been finding with the creation of this website is that there seems to be a new way of finding out what to say and what not to say, feeling from the heart rather than from the head. Taking the traditional stance about target audience and what they would like seems to be restricting the flow.

JMcAD – Well it’s interesting because when it comes to what should be in something like my new web site, my wee website as I call it, as it is the first ‘on my own’ web site I have created, at first I sat there and thought, what exactly do I put in there? Well it’s my web site, so I’ll put in there what feels right. So in the process of co-creating this with a designer I did exactly what felt right, and if it didn’t feel right I didn’t do it.

So when you talk about putting certain words in or out I would suggest that if you are feeling those words energetically and they don’t feel right then trust that feeling. If you are thinking about it intellectually then I would suggest that perhaps that’s not the right decision. The way to decide what is right is to feel it, and if it doesn’t feel right, figure out why not, or just follow that feeling and just don’t put it in.

What astonishes me is that my website was just for me really, just a bit of fun, and what staggers me is that I’ve had so many remarkable responses to it. There were one or two comments that were based upon how a website should look, or how a marketing tool should look, but for me the website wasn’t a marketing tool. So I don’t have a target audience, I don’t look at it that way round. I need to consider what it is I want to say, what it is I want to present according to what I am and what I feel in the moment, then that’s it, I create it. Then I will attract whoever I attract, which is the opposite way round to normal marketing and that’s fine because I find I just can’t do it any other way.

So you are going to have to stand in your own integrity and do that which feels right for you. When everybody does that in decency, with great honour, respecting everyone around, then the world will change overnight. That’s all it requires. That’s what coaching, in my view, is all about. We encourage and empower others to become who they truly are. That’s what a good coach does.

CW – How do you see 2007, what are your plans?

JMcAD – Just more, more of everything...It’s a very exciting time to be alive. I’m excited by what is unfolding, what I’m unfolding, what I am co-creating, what I am becoming. I can’t be more specific than that because I can see a plethora of unbelievably gorgeous things unfolding in front of me. How they manifest in a sense doesn’t really matter – there will be painting, dancing, workshops, talking, fun. There will be whatever it takes, whatever is called for. In every possible way, there will be creational movement. It will be part of, without a doubt, the greater movement for all.

http://www.janemd.com/
jane@janemd.com