Principles for a Conscious Law Practice

Returning from a talk I gave on Conscious Business Leadership for Start-ups: Legal Issues From the Perspective of a “Conscious Lawyer,” I went way back and found the mission and guiding principles for my practice around its opening.

The year was 2001, and my logo was fashioned from a vision I had following a near-death experience in 1997:

 

 

 

The mission, as I had written it, was:

• To invoke and guide the evolution of legal authority toward an integrated health care system, one that is focused on the best interest of the patient, directed toward the alleviation of human suffering, and calculated to manifest the highest form of joy, love, and respect for all beings.
• To support the integration of traditional and folk medicine, manual and spiritual healing, herbal and nutritional treatment, and other forms of complementary and alternative medicine into modern health care, thereby facilitating the emergence of a unified, global medicine, combining technology with compassion.
• To facilitate the global healing of consciousness: a synthesis of insight in which vision, revelation and personal healing are venerated in equipoise to scientific method, principle, and truth, supporting individual, communal, professional, and global quests for wholeness.

And these were the principles:

Guiding Principles
The following ten principles guide and inspire my practice of law:

1. My work is based on and grounded in love and respect for all beings and contribution to the deep evolution of humanity.

2. I view law as a vehicle for the evolution of consciousness. Legal rules help human beings structure their relationships so as to minimize conflict and maximize the awareness of shared goals and visions.

3. I hold a healing space foremost and view all those involved or touched thereby as members of a community, interconnected physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

4. My actions and intentions in this community thus uphold the highest integrity. I regard my projects and the creative aspirations and realizations of my clients and colleagues as sacred.

5. Together with this commitment to bringing out the best in every person and project, I honor all ethical regulations pertinent to my profession and practice and beyond.

6. I choose health care and medicine as the main focus of my practice because of my commitment to the alleviation of suffering, to the regeneration of spirit, and to the endless unfolding of the human heart. I thus understand medicine in its broadest sense, to encompass all global healing traditions – whether ancient or modern, tribal or technological, herbal or pharmaceutical; whether based on the biochemistry of the body of the anatomy of the spirit.

7. I greet everyone with respect and love, whether plaintiff or defendant, ally or adversary, witness or litigant, shaman or bureaucrat. While taking an appropriate legal posture, I continually nourish the golden vision of upliftment and reconciliation.

8. I help my clients to find their own solutions so as to develop the most effective and creative outcomes based on inner resources as well as external advice.

9. My mission encompasses not only conflict resolution and business structuring, but also more fundamental objectives such as personal and global peace, prosperity and abundance, and the light-hearted happiness which I believe is every human being’s birthright.

10. Mindful of the debt to my ancestors and descendants, and of the repercussions of every legal decision or action, by right conduct of my practice I leave a legacy for future generations.

As I review these now through the “wayback machine,” nothing has fundamentally changed. The mission and guiding principles remain the same.