Howling in Place
Lately I’m hearing a lot more howls – and more robust, realistic ones – so either my neighbors (and their dogs) are seriously getting into it now, or real coyotes are responding in kind.
Developing a Mindful Approach to Earth Justice Work
The story one tells oneself about climate change shapes individual feelings and actions. For example, are we on the verge of breakdown or breakthrough? There is ample evidence for both.
Liminal Leadership
Our liminal leadership will be as people together in a struggling biosphere—just you and me and the other 7 billion mothers and daughters and fathers and sons. We will not lead on behalf of a company or a nation, not on behalf of a religion or a belief system. We will hold each other through the storms of economic volatility, ecological turmoil, and political insanity. There will be trauma, pain, and loss through which our solace during this transformation will be nothing less than the creative expression of tenderness.
| Awakening New Energy in Group Work
A person living today in a modern city or a suburb can be surrounded by others yet feel deeply, dangerously alone. According to neuroscientists, the effects of social isolation are as real as thirst, hunger, or pain. We are, in…
Open Group Practice: Eight Social Selves
Through co-operative inquiry, observation, and collective reflection, we began to track patterns of social behavior that seemed to follow a typology. This eventually led to the naming of eight ‘indigenous social selves’ that masquerade around as human beings in conventionally structured environments. The eight social selves are derived from alternative coping mechanisms at three levels of being: an inner core primary psychological schema, an outer social processing temperament, and an interpretive ideology.
A Glimpse into the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible: The Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter
The quality of our conversations makes our world what it is. How we talk to each other determines whether we walk away from each other and prepare to fight for our separate interests, or hold fire, stay together, and open…
Collective Presencing Part Four | The Circle of Creation: Building Capacity for Generative Collective Action in Service of Life
This is Part Four of our Collective Presencing series. The earlier three articles in this series describe the new human capacity we are calling Collective Presencing. This article describes the journey to becoming a Circle of Creation--at least as far as the authors have travelled thus far, knowing that the horizon moves ever ahead as we take the next step.
Collective Presencing: Embracing a New Paradigm
In the first two articles in this series, we introduced collective presencing as a new human capacity emerging at this time. The first article described a journey of individual and collective deepening and widening through a set of practices that can, over time, allow us first to achieve collective wisdom and later to become generative of more life. The second article took a more detailed look at the first phase in the process: what it takes to become a Circle of Presence. We promised that the next article would treat the next phase, the Circle of Creation. On deeper reflection we came to see that the transition to the Circle of Creation represents such a paradigm shift that some wider context is needed before we broach that subject. This article offers that.
Collective Presencing: A New Human Capacity
This is the first in a series of articles introducing the phenomenon and practice of Collective Presencing, a new capacity evolving in humanity at this time. Great thinkers have foreseen its coming—we recognise it in Aurobindo’s descent of the supramental and Teil-hard de Chardin’s noosphere. But what exactly do those terms mean? Where these gifted individuals intuited and envisioned the birth of this new collective capacity at the dawn of the last century, we are now starting to be able to describe it from experience. While many might recognise the phenomenon from transpersonal group work and other such practices, so far as we are aware, this is the first attempt to articulate it as a path and a set of capacities that can be intentionally developed.