I remember the moment, at a Women Moving the Edge gathering in 2008, where the truth percolated through to me (for the first time in my adult life) that magic is real. It felt as if every cell in my body suddenly became fairy dust. Fizzing and tingling and luminous. Obviously, this was not a ‘discovery’ but a ‘re-membering’. Not a remembering of something I have known, but a re-membering into what I had forgotten I belonged to. That first time, the experience was fleeting. It didn’t long survive re-entry under the stifling blanket of social consensus, where the very word ‘magic’ is seen askance. I squirreled the knowledge away in my safe inner sanctum, like a sacred virus contained in a slow-release capsule.

So what is it that I belong to, that I had forgotten? The short answer is ‘Life’. The longer answer discerns some strands or dimensions – specifically ‘space’ and ‘time’ – that we tend to look at as physical properties of the universe, but which I am now discovering as entities with their own presence, intelligence and willingness to engage with me as I allow myself intentionally to be woven into the fabric of the kosmos.

Spot the robin

In recent years, I have been discovering kinship with different ‘segments’ of nature’s population. From one day to the next, for example, I started to notice birds. Each time I look out the window or step out of doors, my eyes are instantly drawn to birds. I have an all-at-once knowing of where the birds are in my immediate vicinity, and it is as if my boundaries snap out to embrace everything that is between those birds and the surface of my skin.

The greatest impact to date, though, has come from the trees. I’ve always loved trees, but I know the exact moment that ‘trees’ became psychoactive beings in my world. I happened to be at a wedding at Chaudfontaine, and a huge and ancient plane tree literally summoned me to come beneath its shade and stand against its trunk. You see me, so I call you to me. It is time for you to learn from the trees. The gates of my heart flew open and the membrane of my skin dissolved into music. A few hours later, a massive cyclone blew through Belgium.

tree-dimensional space

Its path took it right through Ransberg, where it uprooted one of the two walnut trees on the land I am stewarding. I learned of the devastation the next morning, seeing photos Ria posted on the Dorpsstraat blog. Just seeing that tree in a photo was enough to bring a flood of sensation and information washing into me. Since that time, I have come to know trees as knowledge bearers. It is as if ‘tree’ is a globe-embracing dimension of being and knowing that fills the space above and below the ground. Since the other grand old walnut tree on our land fell, silently and gracefully in the night of 21 December 2012, I have known the truth that every tree that ever stood on earth yet stands and shares its being and its knowing through the ether. This ‘tree dimensional space’ is permeable, intensely alive and aware, intimately interwoven with every aspect of the natural ecosystem both physically and in the subtle realms. It is full of story, sensation and light – and seamlessly compatible with the human sphere, provided the human psyche intentionally invokes contact.

I have given the trees blanket permission to permeate me, permanently, and now I am tree sister.  When I walk outside I feel how their fabulous coherence heals and cleanses my own aura, unknotting all the pockets of dense attachment and stress, bringing me to wholeness and rest. When my father died suddenly last new year’s eve, within 15 minutes of learning of his death, with the shock of it coursing through my body, my feet took me out into the street. Instantly, all the trees in the neighbourhood were leaning in to me, sweeping through me, swiftly, surely, firmly, settling my trembling nerves, restoring my coherence, connecting me to the place that knew the truth of my father’s soul-vacated body.

Leopard in the long grass

Just as the dimension of space is alive and aware, so, apparently, is the dimension of time. I have been struck a lot lately by the way timing is showing up as an active protagonist these days. Right Timing appears like an angelic force, omnipresent as I learn the rules of this delightful new game. Where in the past I might have been tempted to force things, now I just accept them: aah OK, it’s not the right time. This creates a different stance in life – I’m no longer succumbing to the ingrained human habit of thinking about what I want to do or achieve in life (or even just ‘today’). Instead I feel much more like wild nature – like a leopard in the long grass. All I have to do is be a leopard in the long grass and dinner will show up. What I need to thrive is given to me – it’s not that I have to go and kill something: dinner simply shows up and is absorbed – the meaning is different: the lower life form is somehow absorbed into the more complex one.

Just having Timing showing up as a protagonist in the cosmic unfolding brings everything into a completely different place… Instead of thinking, I am listening. Not only with my ears, but with my whole being. All my judgements and expectations become like the buzzing things that inhabit the sun-drenched heat of the plain, as the leopard sits in the long grass, perfectly still, alert and alive. Even the prosaic and down-to-earth context of the work place becomes just another stretch of long grass for me to leopard in…

Learning this new game feels a little like stepping out of the map and into the territory. Through the back of the wardrobe into the world where space and time, nature and past-present-future are living presences that interact with me. Instead of an unconsciously held map created by my mind, I am empty mind and presence in the landscape, alert and listening to see what shows up, suspending judgement and waiting to see what wild nature, as helen, responds to. What leopards do when dinner shows up. What’s the natural thing that happens? What is my natural mode of expression in the territory, when I step away from my conditioning?

My parents have been visiting, and a fascinating story leaked out from my dad while we were cooking the porridge. My mum couldn’t see what all the fuss was about – but she didn’t realise I had never heard this story before.

My dad used to be an officer in the British Royal Navy, and in 1962-3 he was posted on HMS Jaguar as the weapons engineering officer (WEO). It just so happened that he also had an experienced, mature assistant for training, so he wasn’t as occupied as he might have been with the guns, cannons, torpedoes and whatnot, especially in peace time.

The ship was on its tour of duty for a year, with a crew of 200. They visited Gibraltar, Malta, Jordan (Aqabah), Kenya (Mombassa), South Africa, Mauritius, the Falkland Islands, Uruguay (Punta del Este) and Tristan da Cunha.  A floating community with not a woman on board (except for a minor incident off Punta del Este, involving a storm in the middle of a cocktail party, where half the crew was ashore and half the shore was on board and the ship had to move back out to sea before it had time to ditch all of the Uruguayan beauties).

Of course, there are plenty of jobs to do in a community where nobody gets to go home after office hours. My jaw dropped as my dad explained to me that he was also responsible for the wardroom food and finance (but not the wine – that involved all sorts of tedious auditing…). Rather typically (for my dad) he also made it his business to write his name and the date in the dust on the walls, as a message to the steward, who was somebody else’s responsibility.

He was also Education Officer, teaching maths and science (the Supply Officer taught English) to the sailors who were studying for their ‘O’ levels. And Sports Officer, organising and playing cricket, tennis, rugby, football and hockey. Wherever the ship put into port, he refereed rugby matches between the local clubs at weekends.

When he left the UK, he took with him a pre-production model of the very first Moulton bicycle, famous for its small wheels and rubber suspension. The ostensible purpose was “climate trials”, but of course the real reason for taking a revolutionary prototype bicycle on such a journey was to see whether it was sailor-proof… Dad (a 17 stone rugby player) must have looked like an elephant on a tricycle. But he rode that bike out every time he went ashore, and the postman used it in the dockyard to collect the mail.

Talking of the absurd, as the cherry on the cake, my dad played the portable organ (“the collapsible pandemonium”) at church services on Sundays. Not to mention having to play the role of counselor to the men in his charge… The only thing I bet he didn’t do in this amazingly integral life, was meditate… “I did too!!” he replied, grinning: “I examined the backs of my eyelids, horizontally on my bunk after lunch every day!”

The more my dad talked the further my jaw dropped. I guess all the officers on that ship had a similar variety of roles. I find it hard to imagine any employer these days being able to rely on such versatility in their staff: the unions would never allow it. But then, perhaps that’s life in the forces for you. I would certainly like to think that the challenges facing humanity as we head into our common future on spaceship Earth will force us to expand our personal repertoires and look around to see what all else needs doing.

In the evening of a beautiful, sunny day in Brussels, we were eleven women – ranging in age from 24 to 50+ – who answered the call to gather in circle, an almost monthly occurrence these days. The question or theme of our shared inquiry becomes more emergent with every gathering. In the beginning, Nina and I would sit together in our shared office a few days before and sense into what was ‘in the field’. This time, we just trusted that the theme calling for our collective attention would present itself at the right moment. And so it did. In the morning of our gathering, during my morning session of online presencing, I stumbled on a piece written by Filiz Telek, one of our dear sisters from Turkey, and instantly knew this was what was asking to be seeded in our field. This is the extract I read into the circle:

“I noticed something powerful during my recent journey along the Aegean: women are in creation! There is a very powerful creation energy infusing our world right now. I am not suggesting this based on any 2012 prophecies or astrological forecasts; I am claiming this based on what I see with my own eyes and the stories I hear. Most women in my life who have been in deep sensing and listening over the past few years are suddenly manifesting their dreams and visions – by stepping into their new callings, building partnerships, creating new initiatives. Everything that might have seem a little crazy, even impossible in the past is now manifesting full on at a very quick pace.

And this isn’t just any creation. This is the Feminine in creation! and it goes like this:

”I know the structure of the ceremony. I know that but when I go in to do the ceremony I have no idea what direction it’s going to go; I know nothing. Even to the songs that will come, even to all of that. Everything is just allowing something to come in. You prepare this place and you allow. It’s a very very new experience every time. You go inside and you allow those things to open out, like a flower. And you don’t know what direction this petal’s going to go or where that petal’s going to go.That’s the mystery, that’s the beauty, and it’s from within. Just like today – everyday is a new experience. That is Feminine power.”
Pansy Hawk Wing, Pipe Carrier

When I read these words, I get it.

This is a different kind of creation than we have witnessed in the past. This is a creation welling up from within women, from our wombs – the divine empty space that holds life -, from our longing hearts, from our intuition, from our hips, our finger tips and singing mouths and dancing limbs…This creation comes not through strategies made in sleek boardrooms, sterile labs, not for the insane growth of production for the sake of profit, not to control or exert power over a certain group of people. This creation comes from love of life and love of children (of all beings), from the instinctual urgency of a fierce mother to protect life, from the longing to be in harmony and flow with the natural world. This is a creative force far beyond our imagination and comprehension, sprouting and blossoming deep and wide in every direction.

This is Great Mother, Sacred Feminine manifesting through women (and men) in the world, creating and regenerating, mending the web of life. She is showing up in dreams and images, in songs and stories, and urging us to remember what we are in service of.

I remember. So do You.

It’s time to dream a new dream,
it’s time to create a brave new world.”

I announced my intention to Filiz (on Facebook) to share her words with our circle. She responded “I’d love to hear what you weave from the collective womb tonight, please share! I’ve been feeling the call of the womb wisdom ♥”.

And we truly did weave from the collective womb.

In the centre of Nina’s circle, there is always a bowl of Angel Cards ready to unveil the synchronicities present in the space. Just as we began our sharing, I picked the card ‘Synthesis’. By the time of our check-out, I really had something to synthesise: the fabric of wisdom collectively woven in our invisible womb space that evening.

It starts with some key words and phrases, born from sentences uttered by the different women during our check-in around what brought us to this circle, and afterwards, around the feminine in creation and what that evoked in us:

The account I weave here arises as a synthesis through my own filters of the conversation that unfolded among us. Gossamer threads were spun out into the centre, upwellings of intuition offered in from the rim, amplified and interwoven as the talking pieces were taken up and returned to the middle.

Shape and sound

Sound was present, frequency, harmony, resonance and vibration – the bell rang often, for silence to allow things to land and settle in every heart. We evoked the quivering thrum of our souls’ stirrings as they resonate in sympathy with calls coming to us from the world. We illuminated the process of learning to be played by the kosmos, so that our unique harmonic can join in the universal symphony of life and evolution, recognising that nobody else can bring what is uniquely ours to offer and be.

Memory was present – or more exactly, forgetting. The way our hold on the details of past learnings and experiences can desert us, leaving us as an empty vessel, a content-free zone, a womb available to bring forth the mystery into manifestation. Such forgetting can feel scary – content and facts are so prized in our society – but it can also be liberating: an irresistible demand to be present to what resonates in the NOW.

These are the moments when we know that life is living us on behalf of the whole. That we are pregnant with something that is growing in our depths, without our having any clue as to what it will be, until it is ready and ripe to emerge. This is the feminine way – it’s the same with our babies. We have no idea what they will look like, or who they will be, until they leave our bodies after nine months inside. And even then, during the years of their childhood, we patiently witness their ever complexifying unfolding, not yet knowing what they will become (always assuming we are sufficiently awake to refrain from corralling them into replicas of our own worldview).

And letting go was present, together with its shadow twin letting come. We let go of our preconceived expectations of how life should be, our fear of others’ judgement, our archetypal social and familial conditioning. We let come our deepest, most authentic yearnings and desires, our spontaneous impulses and the primal promptings of our souls, of our places, of our peoples.

Weaving these threads into fabric, I see that we have been evoking and exploring the conditions for living our uniquely creative lives. When I see what we have brought forth together from our centre, I know that this must travel and take its place in the expanding conversation that is co-creating Filiz’s Brave New World.

This article gives a brief overview of what needs to happen if we— individually and collectively—are to wisely and effectively engage in shaping the future of our planet and our species. The community of evolutionary entrepreneurs has a rich toolkit of models, maps and approaches to work with, but they can be effective only if we deeply understand the habits of the living systems in which we use them. The guidelines set out below come from the distilled wisdom of the global community of ‘hosts of conversations that matter,’ as I understand them through the filters of my own experience as an evolutionary entrepreneur working inside the European Commission in Brussels.

As humanity awakens to an unprecedented collective awareness of the challenges and opportunities facing our species and our planet, the term ‘entrepreneur’ begs to be redefined. Entrepreneurship is typically associated with starting and running businesses. Most definitions of the term on the web refer to innovation, risk and business. But I think it goes deeper than that.

A living system participates in its neighbour’s development

While some entrepreneurs are motivated by the prospect of personal gain, others are driven by a desire to make the world a better place. An evolutionary[1] entrepreneur is someone who is willing to dedicate his or her life to fulfilling a collective need. But something essential that underlies the whole enterprise remains unspoken in all these definitions.

The word ‘entrepreneur’ comes from the French verb meaning ‘to undertake.’ A commitment to action is involved—a determination to manifest a vision and to bring something new to society in the broadest sense. When we think about entrepreneurship in this way, the concept can expand to embrace a much wider population—potentially every man, woman and child on the planet. This kind of entrepreneurship doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with business at all.

If we want to be evolutionary entrepreneurs who survive the acid test of natural selection—if we want our undertakings to take root in the world and thrive, to truly make the world a better place—then we need to understand what game we are playing, and the environment we are playing it in.

Entrepreneurship is about will. ‘Will’ is a word that doesn’t exist in science. Science sees our actions, but not what fuels them. Will is a phenomenon that we typically associate with the invisible interior of individuals and collectives. We cannot see it—only the outcomes of the actions driven by it. We could even see entrepreneurship as a driving force of evolution now that humanity is awakening into fuller consciousness of its own evolution.

At first sight, entrepreneurship is all about individuals. It is the individual will with a vision of change that starts the ball rolling. But the change can only happen if the will of the collective is engaged. How can we maximise our chance of making that happen?

Properties of Living Systems 

Collective sense-making

We start by understanding that as members of the human race living on planet earth, we are embedded in multiple living systems. Any aspect of society or the economy that we care to engage with counts as a living system. As entrepreneurs, that’s what we have to deal with. Understanding the properties of living systems[2] can inform us about what we must learn and what we must become if we are to succeed.

• A living system pays attention only to that which is meaningful to it, here and now.Just because we have a vision of new possibilities doesn’t mean the rest of the world ‘gets it’ or cares. As part of the living system, our first step is to become aware of what has meaning to that system. To achieve this, we learn to live with an open mind, an open heart and an open will.
  

  A living system accepts only its own solutions

• A living system accepts only its own solutions. If we wish to provide a solution to any of the world’s problems, then the parts of the system that are part of the problem (as sufferers or perpetrators) must be drawn into designing a solution that they will all be happy with. To achieve this, we must learn the art of participatory leadership—how to lead others into participating actively in their own future.
• In nature, a living system participates in its neighbour’s development. An isolated system is doomed. The bigger the context we can get our arms around, the greater our chances of creating sustainable improvements together. To achieve this, we must learn to collaborate.
• All of nature, including ourselves, is in constant change. Sometimes when we are trying to ‘change the system,’ we despair at how unchanging things seem to be. Perhaps we are looking through the wrong lens. Isn’t it just as valid to see the world in constant flux? When we do this, our work becomes lighter. To achieve this, we learn to let go of our habitual ways of seeing. We look at the way things are changing; instead of at the way they are not.
• Nature seeks diversity—new relations open up new possibilities. How easy it is to succumb to the temptation of working only with ‘like-minded’ people. This leads us into ‘us-and-them’ thinking and compounds our difficulties. Rather than closing down when confronted by those who oppose our ideas or who hold critical attitudes that trigger our defense mechanisms, we can instead think of them as our precious teachers and open up to what we have to learn from them. They help us see flaws in our ideas and help us to bring to conscious awareness our shadows—detrimental patterns that are hidden in the unconscious.
• Nature is not intent on finding perfect solutions.Even the best battle plan lasts
  

  Who we are together...

  only until the first shot is fired. Then ‘life happens.’ We are learning to be available, moment-by-moment, to dance with what is arising now.

• Who we are together is always different and more than who we are alone. The next Buddha will be a collective. Evolution is marching on. Human consciousness is awakening to itself, to its own evolution, to its being an organic part of a larger whole, and finally to an embodied experience of this larger whole. As we enter this new stage of individual/collective awakening, we are being called to practice a new life-form composed of groups of mature and well-balanced individuals merging their collective intelligence as a circle being. Our practice as individuals is to deepen our self-knowledge, accept ourselves, accept the contribution we have to offer, and to fully and completely live who we are. The whole cannot be complete until the parts are fully individuated. We build ‘circle beings’ by sitting together in circle and sensing into the middle, by engaging in continuous collective inquiry about our shared purpose.
• Living systems cannot be steered or controlled – they can only be teased, nudged, titillated. I work inside a very large living system and every day I watch ‘management’ try to steer and control it. But the system just doesn’t want to play. Instead, everybody ends up feeling frustrated and disempowered. We can influence a system in a wise direction only if we are an acknowledged part of the system. If we try to work on the system from outside and don’t see ourselves as part of the system, then although we can provide environmental stimuli, we cannot determine how the system will respond. As entrepreneurs on the lookout for evolutionary opportunities in the system we learn how to tread the fine line between chaos and order—the space where living systems self-organise.

We first understand that we cannot work alone. When we identify a need that is sensed in the system, we seek out others who sense it too. Even when we come together with others to find a solution, until we find a clear sense of collective purpose, nothing will move. But regular meetings to explore the situation in search of solutions will deepen the relationships in the group and help us clarify the principles that will govern how we pursue our purpose. A cohesive group with strong trust and a clear sense of collective purpose can move mountains. This is where the collective will becomes engaged.

We first understand that we cannot work alone

Once the purpose and principles are clear, new people will tend to be drawn into the group. The process experienced so far then needs another iteration. Each time new people come in, they need to go through the process of gaining clarity of purpose and buying into the principles (or adapting them). This helps understanding and engagement. We are building a living system that is creating its own solutions—concepts, organizational structures, products and even practices come later, almost as a by-product of the functioning living system. Living systems self-organise.

The stereotypical image of the entrepreneur as a rugged individualist, going it alone against all the odds, seems partial when seen from this perspective. Rather, in this densely enmeshed living system that is the planetary ecosystem, I see the Cosmic Will moving through the collective to the individual and then back to the collective [3]. As evolutionary entrepreneurs, we are coming not from a place of unconscious ego activation but from a place of deeply open will. We are not implementing our own individual vision, as much as sensing into the whole. We are rooted in our individual perspective within the living system, that is also conscious of the larger system and sensing into how it can fulfil it’s highest potential, for the good of the yet greater whole of which it is itself a part. The life path of each of us, embedded in our own unique place in the collective and endowed with our own unique gifts, equips us to play a unique role. Being an evolutionary entrepreneur means stepping up and undertaking to play that role with our full commitment. It means being who we were born to be.

Mastery Comes through Practice

How do we learn the skills and ways of being in the world that will lead us to mastery of evolutionary entrepreneurship? Through practice. A wise teacher of mine recently said that the highest a human being can attain is to become a ‘practitioner’ of something. The purpose is to cultivate an attitude of mind and a way of being. Four helpful intentions for daily use on an individual or collective basis are: (1) Stillness, (2) Inspiration, (3) Service, (4) Devotion/Gratitude. In martial arts, the place of practice is called the ‘dojo’. As evolutionary entrepreneurs, I invite you to start up a dojo in your neighbourhood today.

Informed by these understandings of the properties of living systems in an evolving universe, we can increase our impact by joining with others to create communities of practice. As cohesive communities of practice, we can reach out to other communities of practitioners in other neighbouring fields. We can then form systems of influence in which evolutionary entrepreneurs become nodal points of integral consciousness that can join with other civil societies, public and private actors to hold the field for global transformation.

[1] I do not use the term ‘evolutionary’ here to mean development in any pre-determined direction. Rather, I use it as an epithet to describe ‘entrepreneurship’ in its broadest context as something that engages—directly, consciously and with intent—with the living system, for the good of the whole.

[2] I first came across this articulation of the properties of living systems in the writing of Margaret Wheatley.

[3] When I speak of Cosmic Will, I am not necessarily suggesting that there is such a thing ‘out there’ with an independent existence. Rather, it can just as easily be seen as something that we co-create together as we consciously engage in this participatory, collaborative dance, creating intricate and beautifully functioning feedback systems that then become a trait of the Grand Living Field that embraces all things.

If land and stones hold a memory and radiate it out through the ages,

dare we open as a portal to re-member and co-create with Earth,

to sound a new vibration – a new song – for the future to come?

Avebury stone circle

The theme of this gathering is strongly related to Place. We will be gathering at beautiful Hazelwood House, itself a place with presence, and we plan to visit Avebury and environs to bring our collective inquiry alive in a place of real power.

For more information, please see the save-the-date invitation (pdf).

For an insight into our collective inquiry that has brought us to this question and these places, feel free to look at the notes of our hosting calls on the Women Moving the Edge Ning site.

Autumn harvest

This post is dedicated to men and women everywhere who hunger for the new while feeling entombed in the old. It is was inspired by a recent 2-day inquiry among 30-odd practitioners of participatory leadership at the European Commission on how to effectively harvest the fruits of the collective conversations we host in our very structured, hierarchical and non-participatory context.

As I was writing this piece, I found I couldn’t let it go out into the world without  placing it in a context that just keeps gets broader each time I revisit it. This document has been open on my laptop for a few weeks, sharing the screen with a stream of news about worsening chaos and fear in Europe. My view from inside the EU institutions shows me a very large collection of gifted, well-educated and well-intentioned men and women at a complete loss to know what to do to make things better.

The EU’s deepest calling at this time in history is to lay the foundations for a global society that works for all humans and all life. As Simon Anholt put it in a recent keynote address at the European Parliament, simply ‘reforming’ our multilateral institutions would be tinkering at the edges. If we were to design them now, from scratch, they would be so radically different that the idea of reform seems ludicrous. To start with, they wouldn’t be institutions. “It wouldn’t be large rooms full of fat bald old men in suits arguing about national sovereign interests.” It wouldn’t be just governments – it would be all stakeholders, including religions, including corporations. It would be a network, peer-to-peer (not top-down)… But how on earth could such a phenomenon emerge from the belly of the bureaucratic, hierarchical dinosaur that the European institutions have always been?

And yet, it seems to me that I am witnessing exactly the embryonic beginnings of the kind of thinking and doing that might spawn the new world order. They are sprouting out of the practices of participatory leadership grounded in the hosting of meaningful conversations among stakeholders. These practices are starting to spread like an algal bloom into different policy areas, DGs and even institutions. But the movement is still fragile, and it is struggling for breath in the fundamentally hostile environment that is a command-and-control hierarchical political structure that has lost its way.

Harvesting together

To return to our collective inquiry about how to build on these hope-giving conversations, one of the outcomes I most wanted (having hungered for this focused inquiry for quite a few years already) was an articulation of some of the underlying principles from which intelligent and effective follow-on would arise as a natural consequence. The question I was holding was:

What are the principles which, if practiced, will naturally lead from meaningful conversation to wise action?

We ended up working on this question in different ways over the two days (Appreciative Inquiry in triads, group clustering in plenary, collective meaning-making in a smaller group, then conversation in an Open Space session, and finally allowing even more to emerge through illuminating that harvest during a convergence café). The inquiry continues, and here is where we are so far.

Inescapably, this offering bears my stamp. That is because I was the one who felt called to champion the question, at our gathering and beyond. And because I am the one who feels called to voice these principles on behalf of the whole. I am also aware that my illumination of these principles is voiced for people who are called to function inside a hierarchical context, where the unconscious ‘parent-child’ dynamic is so strongly prevalent.

Open Space Agenda

One thing that surprises me is that none of these principles is overtly about ‘harvesting’ – at least, not about the surface-level activity of capturing the fruits of our conversations. To me, they read more like a sort of manifesto for freeing up our minds to serve our hearts… I notice, too, that all these principles are interconnected – facets of the same story. And so I trust that they resonate with a deeper truth that is serving us in our longing to bring healing to our organisation and enable it to move into true leadership on behalf of the whole at this time rich with challenge and opportunity for true renewal.

We act on real need, we invite real meaning, we acknowledge (only) real constraints, we serve deep intention

In the traditional, hierarchical way of doing things, it is very easy to be lured into going through the motions, staying with the forms and procedures, playing office. Even when calling in participatory processes, there is a tendency to skim the surface and shy away from probing into the deeper malaise that lies beneath our frantic busyness and pretences at professionalism and ‘realism’. Failure to connect with deeper meaning and invite people to get real with each other leaves us frustrated, dissatisfied and disheartened, wondering whether we are wasting our time.

This principle invites us to dig in our heels and do the real work. To sit together with the callers in the organisation, whoever they may be, and open up to what is real, and what is underneath. To identify what it is we need to help us stay grounded in the face of what scares us, and to go for what brings us the deepest YES! And, if there is no will in the calling field to go to that place, we need the courage to say No to a hosting request that will do nothing but cheapen our work and undermine our credibility as hosts of healthy transformation.

We practice right timing: if it’s not easy, it’s not now – or it’s not ours to do.

Harvesting hand

We instinctively know when the time is not right. When our work will flop like a failed soufflé if we go for it now. And yet the culture of our organisation (and most big organisations) is blind to anything but its own all-consuming agenda.

Often we are called to rustle up a process in too short a time, with no thought for follow-up and no space to dig for the real purpose. Worse still, the hierarchical caller wishes only to delegate preparation to the hosting team and is not prepared to make him/herself available for preparation meetings. In this context, it takes courage to say ‘No’, but the same applies as for the previous point. This work needs spaciousness. It needs time to get to the core of things.

Meanwhile, there is always preparatory work to do for when the right time comes – and all our work can and should be seen in this context: as preparation for GO! Building trust, clarifying purpose, taking those small, invisible actions that transform culture and bring us one step closer to liberating the (inner and outer) structures that are holding us back.

We support each other’s authenticity, trust our instincts and go where there’s joy

Working as core teams brings trust and courage

Whenever we are working in mainstream society, we are working within a system of indoctrination and acculturation that supports ‘the way things are done around here’. That makes a pretty powerful – albeit unconscious – field. To make any headway in such a field, we need to be creating pockets of coherence that are held in a strong enough container that we don’t implode under the pressure of systemic inertia that we are operating in.

That means working as core teams, building the intimacy, trust and safety that enables us to tap into our individual and collective power and inspiration in the face of incomprehension, fear and resistance.

We dare to be as curious as the cat

What do we really have to lose? … actually, we stand to lose everything if we don’t dare do things differently!

What’s the worst thing that could happen if we follow our hearts and act on our deepest YES? Can we just try it and see? Where can we harvest the courage to experiment without asking for permission? Perhaps we should stop taking ourselves so seriously? What happens when we think the unthinkable? When we challenge all our assumptions about what is possible?

We work on behalf of the whole

Raw materials for this post

Sometimes it’s not participatory leadership that’s needed, but something else. What happens when we expand our vision to embrace a larger context? Paradoxically (in relation to the previous principle), what would happen if we started to take ourselves more seriously, daring to speak for the broadest perspective? How do we put our arms around the whole system, not just the parts that agree with us? How can we open up to ever greater vistas of wholeness.

We make the implicit explicit

Just as there are always deeper layers of purpose to unearth, so our disappointments and frustrations can reveal unexamined assumptions, help us to clarify roles, accountabilities and boundaries. This requires us to be willing to sit with our tensions for long enough to articulate what they are pointing to. It also requires us to step up and speak what we have learned in contexts that might not be expecting it. Sometimes it means calling out that the Emperor is naked.

We work with the power of “us” – we don’t focus on “them”.

Principles of Open Space

This principle is connected with the wonderful principles of Open Space Technology: whoever shows up are the right people and whatever happens is the only thing that could have – given also the timing and the context we are working with.

So much energy is wasted on the “it’s not us that’s the problem, it’s them” and “somebody should…” conversations. When you make a snowman, you don’t start with the snow on the other side of the field. You start with what’s at your feet. When we start change – even systemic change – we start with whoever is in the room. If the next step needs a decision from someone who is not in the room, then let’s invite that person in. What will it take for that person to become one of ‘us’? And if we tell ourselves it’s not us who have to change, but some ‘other’, then we might as well all go home.

In a hierarchical organisation, this can feel very tricky, because the disempowering ‘parent/child’ mechanism creeps in so easily. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with hierarchy – it’s everywhere to be found in nature. But healthy hierarchy is about different levels of scope and reach, not dominance. The higher up you are, the further ahead and around you can see and think (in theory) and the more resources you have to allocate; the lower you are, the closer you are to the power to actually change things, make things happen on the ground. Bring the two perspectives into a circle together and we have both.

We work to liberate structures: there is no BOX!!

No box

We are so often encouraged to “think outside of the box”, to be creative and think thoughts that have not been thought before, to come up with world-saving insights that will get us out of our collective stuckness. But in reality, the liberating realisation is that there is no box.

Part of our work in hosting meaningful conversations is to create a space where everything can be questioned. Where the assumptions held by the Mind can be tested and validated – or discarded – by the Heart. Where deeper truths can be unearthed, examined, espoused by the Will that then guides our steps to do work that makes sense, unhindered by the strictures of rules and procedures.

We have reached a place in our collective human history where we need to wake up. It’s time to change the game we’ve been playing for centuries – or, quite literally, die.

Waking up to the damage we’ve done, to the beauty that is already lost forever, isn’t going to be comfortable. I am curious as to whether the principles enunciated here can be helpful in keeping us on track when the going gets rough. Right now, for those of us privileged enough to recognise how privileged we are, there is still time to strengthen our community muscles before things start to get ugly. Will we use it wisely?

Photos by Dirk Stockmans

This preference resonates very strongly with me, too, and it got me to thinking about the power of friendship and intimacy, and what it can achieve that simple ‘collegiality’ cannot.

What I and my close colleagues are finding is that in the great complexities of today’s organisational life (which – at least in the case of the European Commission – is supposed to be dealing with the complexities of the real world), the normal standard of professional relationship just can’t hack it.

In order to navigate complexity with any kind of success, collective wisdom is needed (deep and accurate sensing from multiple perspectives). That means accessing aspects of being and knowing well beyond the cognitive capacities that are accepted and valued in traditional hard-nosed organisational contexts. And for that to be possible, TRUST is indispensable. So it is safe to say (and I see it every day, wherever I travel in this very large organisation full of highly educated, intelligent individuals of all European cultures) that without the capacity to nurture deep friendship with whoever you happen to have to work with, individuals will not be able to turn any part of their organisation into something that is truly effective in the world.

Holacracy gets around that problem in a number of connected ways – that’s not my focus for this post, but briefly, through having its governance/steering done through integrative decision-making, by double-linking its hierarchical circles, and by insisting that each circle, and each role within each circle, be self-governing – by some mysterious alchemy, the output of this cocktail is TRUST.

However, another interesting phenomenon arises when you step into deep friendship with colleagues. It soon becomes impossible to happily strive together to do things that don’t make any sense. Most of our organisations today are in the business of monetising aspects of life that people once used to be able to do for themselves – cooking, sewing, singing, making music, reading, writing, growing food, having relationships, rearing children, caring for aged parents, walking – thereby reducing the towering potential of humanity into ‘consumers’ on the one hand and ‘experts’ on the other, with no real need for community and ever less ability to relate to each other without the intercession of money and contracts.

There are times when my small team of close colleagues and I are reduced to stunned silence because, no matter how hard we try, we cannot find any satisfying sense or meaning in the work we are doing. At least, not the work we are paid to do. All of it is basically aiming at reducing humanity to conditioned slavery and mindless consumption, while turning our natural, spiritual, cultural and social capital into money, inevitably destined to flow into the hands of the richest – these days that means the banks and the heads of big corporations. It’s not what we thought we were signing up to when we joined the European institutions to serve the European ideal.

So where does that leave us? A nice paradox. It leaves me realising that my true work is exactly to learn how to restore authentic friendship in these impoverished professional environments, so that we can start to question whether we want to be engaged in these shatteringly meaningless passtimes, or whether we want to cultivate our collective wisdom and gradually steer ourselves away from the precipice, taking as many others as possible with us. Perhaps this is another germ of the revolution that is happening, now, among citizens in many different countries – Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Greece, Spain, Israel, India – just not wanting, any more, to blindly feed the mindlessly destructive mechanisms powering our civilisation.

Presence of Spirit and Earth

May magic return to the world

At no time was any explicit mention made of spirituality, and yet both Earth and Spirit were very present at all levels throughout our time together. A lot of subtle energies were at play – we worked with systemic constellations around a number of topics (family and money, in particular), and many people could sense shifts in the energy of the place in response to what was happening with the people.

The riveting stories that Jeanne Hoogenboom shared with us of how she came to Kasteel Nieuwenhoven and the subtle work she has had to do with archetypal energies, forgiveness, the lifting of curses and the unblocking of ley lines, illustrate just how much of what shapes our ‘reality’ lies under the surface, in the invisible realms where our science cannot follow.

May we learn to love the magic in the world.

In our diversity we are whole

The last two days were dedicated to ‘harvesting’ what we had learned from this collective experiment, and preparing some initiatives that had been born during our time together to take their first next steps out into the world beyond.

We walked together through Wilber’s 4 quadrants, placing our various experiences in these different perspectives and understanding also how ‘transition’ can mean moving from one preferred quadrant into another that is less familiar. There, too, we saw that while the individuals might have a partial coverage of the quadrants, every quadrant and every possible permutation of transition among them was present in the group as a whole. We saw that our diversity is our wealth, as without it we are less whole.

May we learn to honour our diversity as our wholeness.

Be yourself!

Be yourself, everyone else is taken!

The individuals, too, saw that their own beliefs and sense-making patterns were simply their own, not more right or wrong than anyone else’s. It was spoken again and again, into the circle, that all that is needed in order to create heaven on earth is simply for each of us to learn to be fully ourselves, and to live our lives as an expression of who we deeply are. Throughout our time together, we witnessed each member of the community – people of all ages and developmental stages – stepping more fully into their own skins, encouraged, mirrored, accommodated and appreciated by the community as a whole.

My own 15-year-old daughter was also present throughout, and I was constantly in awe of how beautifully this sensitive and authentic young woman blossomed in the light of the community’s appreciation and what an impact she in turn had on what took place.

May we all be so blessed.

Living the future we choose, together

As I witnessed all of this unfolding, in all of its complexity, at all those different levels, I felt as if we were living a future in which society is able to heal itself and stitch itself back together into a nourishing, self-transcending whole, embedded in a relationship with nature, where we observe and honour her natural patterns, that allow us to live in abundance.

Making seitan together

This is by no means the first time such an experiment has been conducted. Each time something of this kind happens, it is easier than last time, and it makes it easier for the next time – even if none of the same people are involved and the experiments don’t know about each other. Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields spring to mind.

Many new connections are made, and small projects shoot off in all directions, as people begin to work together in new ways. The social fabric is slowly but surely restored as new interconnections are made and people understand what is possible when we work and play together.

As our civilisation as a whole hurtles inexorably towards the extreme of pathological separation and enclosure of even our intangible commonwealth, there is no point waiting to see what the future will bring. Beneath the surface, instinctively, what we were doing during this week was reclaiming parts of our lives from folly of rational self-interest that is homo economicus…

May this movement continue.

Staying local

Part of what made this such a powerful and hopeful happening was simply that we were grounded in a place, in a natural bio-region, and the focus of attention was on how we live together in our families and our local communities – where the rubber hits the road. Because this was a regional event, the resources didn’t fly in from all over the world, and didn’t then all fly out so far and wide into the world again afterwards – it is possible to go on working together, supporting each other and nurturing the seeds that have been sown.

May it be so.

Intentionally spreading seeds of possibility

Taco expounding on permaculture...

As it happens, this place is where I learned the basics of permaculture myself (from Taco), and fate brought me to purchase a homestead only 20km away from Nieuwenhoven where Ria, Chrisje and I are taking our learning and practice of permaculture and natural building to its next level. Ria and I took a group of people over there one afternoon to show them the place – I was able to tell them the story of Nina, my colleague in Brussels who has been so inspired by my stories of our adventures in permaculture that she has started creatively growing fruit and vegetables in her small city garden. This is the way ‘transition’ travels, spreading through viral inspiration at whatever scale is possible, moment by moment.

At the root, the future can be born from the potential that we hold in our conscious intention, but we can never know how it will manifest: you can count the seeds in an apple, but you can’t count the apples in a seed.

May many seeds bear fruit.

Healing the relationship between the masculine and the feminine

As spontaneous offerings from the community, one evening there was a men’s circle around the camp fire, while the women took care of the children. The next night, the women did a full-moon ceremony and women’s circle while the men did the babysitting. I was quite struck by the way the men stood much more strongly in both power and service after their circle.

Every evening at the close of the ‘programme’, we danced the Elm Dance (as propagated by Joanna Macy) – it was one of the highlights of every day, and gave  towards the end we experimented also with different permutations that could shed light on how the masculine and the feminine could interact and play different functions in society. Particularly ‘hair-raising’ for me was the experience that the women could stand on the perimeter, shielding the men from disturbance as they met in circle to bond as brothers.

Elm dance

Things happened in the circle that felt healing for a lot of old trauma for both the masculine and the feminine.

New community patterns and permutations of relating and interacting are emerging for men and women as we move into the future.

May the healing continue.

Witnessing and reflection as practices that birth collective wisdom

Sometimes a child...

All of the above emerged from the complexity of the interactions in the community. In many cases, meanings and insights were picked up and illuminated by one or other of the ‘elders’ of the community (sometimes a child!) so that the whole group could relate to the issue in a more conscious way.

It was this practice of witnessing – never once explicitly spoken of in the full circle of our community – that allowed our diversity to be present without exploding the container.

Witnessing will be a core capability in the future we were seeking to prototype together during this week. Here is what the Cosmic Family has to say about it:

“There is no end to that which can be witnessed, but it is necessary to start small. Witnessing is what makes it possible for an individual, when invited, to step seamlessly into a functioning collective, and what allows a collective to seamlessly embrace a new member and be transformed by the embracing. With each embrace, the old collective dies and the new is born. The witnessing is of everything – the inner and outer, the individual and the collective. Part of the practice is to speak that which is witnessed, and to witness that which is spoken. Part of the practice is to speak what is witnessed as it is experienced – in joy or in rage, in sorrow or fear or indifference. The emotional charge is part of the meal, to be metabolised by the collective body. The more the collective body can metabolise, the broader the range of its responses to that which transpires in the greater whole.”

May we witness the miracle unfolding.

Core teams

The event was conceived and designed by a small group of friends with different skills and predilections. Their intention was to invite a collective, co-created, experiential inquiry into ‘transition’ (deliberately left rather vaguely defined, but basically inspired by the transition towns response to peak oil and climate change).

This group then began working with another group – people living and/or working together at Kasteel Nieuwenhoven, an old abbey/stately home set in 20 hectares of land with natural water features (ponds and streams), woodland, meadow (with alpaca and horses) and a permaculture garden which is hosting a community supported agriculture (CSA) scheme for the surrounding district. The place offered itself as the location of the gathering and a core team formed to explore what might happen at such an event.

The pattern of the ‘core team’ is appearing in many different places. A small group of people follow their passion and take responsibility for starting an inquiry around a question that calls to them deeply from some invisible realm of potential outside space and time. Their role is not necessarily to make things happen, but could simply be to hold the perimeter of the ‘field of inquiry’, to allow new potential to manifest around their question.

May we never have to work alone

Containers for self-organising and diversity

The whole gathering was held within a very light structure, using Open Space Technology, World Café and similar processes, which are intentionally designed to allow for maximum emergence and self-organisation.

The children officially opened the closing ceremony

Some 60 people showed up over all, in a number of waves, each new wave being integrated into the community without any need for intervention by the organisers. There were many generations present: grandparents, parents, children – elders, young adults, toddlers and babies. There were people from all backgrounds and educational levels, from urban and rural contexts. And yet, the culture was rather cohesive, because all those present spoke Dutch – so folk from the Netherlands and Flanders, mostly. The children brought in as much depth and learning as the elders, and were treated with equal respect.

At the same time, there was a great deal of diversity, partly because of the inter-generational nature of the gathering, and partly because the whole spiral of human development was present. Although the theme of development was not explicitly introduced in the proceedings, the hosts were very aware of the dynamics and challenges of all the developmental differences at play, and chose to allow all of this to be held in the container of the processes and simple principles that set the stage for Open Space self-organisation:

• Nothing needs to be fixed or solved – opinions and tensions are aired, witnessed and allowed to be present in the space and transform in their own way, in their own time.
• Individuals are invited to take responsibility for their own expectations and experiences, and to take what action they deem appropriate, without waiting to be told what to do by the ‘organisers’.
• The law of two feet – all those present were invited to follow this principle: if at any time you find yourself in a situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, let your two feet take you somewhere else where you can.

May we learn to trust our ability to self-organise

Coming next: Alternative currencies and learning to live from the land…