Our approach to change
"What if the way we respond to crisis is part of the crisis?"
Bayo Akomolafe, emergence Network
At Starter Culture we value the 'how' of change as much as the 'what'. For us, the 'how' is what inner-led change is all about. Our approach to change focuses on prioritising the co-creation of healthier, more transformative, just and relational cultures in reciprocal relationship with our whole earth community.
We believe the depth and breadth of change needed right now requires approaches that support us to get better at relating (with ourselves, each other and other-than-humans) and which support the radical shifts in consciousness needed for deep cultural transformation.
Key ingredients of inner-led change
At this particular point in our evolution as a species it feels particularly important to pay attention to the following ingredients of inner-led change. We perceive these to be what will perhaps support us to most transformatively ride life's evolutionary intent for us as a species.
- Eco-centric: Shifting away from our human-centric lens of the world to nature-connected ways-of-being that support us to source solutions from beyond the consciousness that created our current crises: listening to the Earth's dreaming.
- Trauma aware: Recognising collective trauma as the underbelly of our social and ecological collapse and that transforming trauma holds the keys to the shifts in consciousness demanded by these times: becoming trauma-informed within our social and ecological change work.
- Decolonising at depth: Tracking colonialism's imprints within our own psyche, identity, behaviours and beliefs: healing and transforming the collective trauma resulting from historic and on-going coloniality.
- Emergent strategising: Letting go of our need to predict and control and learning instead how to embrace the discomfort of life's inherent uncertainty by taking one step at a time towards our North Star's gravitational pull.
Design principles
The design principles below are a taste of what informs the weft and weave of our approach to inner-led change. We are sharing these to enable feedback and evolution of our assumptions, perspectives and processes so would love your feedback.
Click on any of the tabs below to read more about how this informs our approach to change. You can toggle easily between tabs and the description will appear below the grid.
- Whole-systems approach
- Soulcraft
- Radical inclusivity
- Healthy boundaries
- Windows of knowing
- Paradox
- Wholing and healing
- Emergent strategy
- Walking our talk
- Cultivating resilience
- Eco-awakening
- Collaborating across difference
- Evolutionary intent
- Holding space
- Hosting multiple perspectives
- Interbeing
Whole-systems approach
"Relational systems thinking is an eco-centric way
of both sensing and intervening in systems
that privileges relationship and centers mutual benefit."
MELANIE GOODCHILD
WOLF WILLOW INSTITUTE
Our whole-systems approach to change is grounded in a relational systems-thinking perspective.This means exploring how all the seemingly different elements of any system connect at a deeper level and together hold the keys to transformation. For us this specifically means working with complexity at both depth and scale - and, of course, including the inner dimension of life to ensure this systems-thinking approach is relational and in service of mutual benefit.
Many of those committed to social and ecological change also believe in a whole-systems approach. However these inner and relational dimensions are mostly neglected. This tends to result in a zero-sum approach at the expense of serving mutual benefit. We believe it is this neglect of the inner and relational dimensions that is fundamentally hindering our vast efforts around social and ecological change and preventing the deep cultural transformation these times are increasingly demanding.
Our whole-systems approach seeks ways of re-integrating inner-led change:
* at depth e.g. shadow work, cultural somatics, transforming trauma and connecting with spiritual and other-than-human realms, and;
* at scale e.g. supporting collaboration across difference and identifying leverage points to enable widespread integration of inner-led change.
We intend to do this across the full spectrum of approaches around inner-led change. By presencing this myriad of gateways we hope to unleash the transformative potential of groups, organisations and institutions working so passionately for social and ecological change and deep cultural transformation.
This relational systems-thinking approach requires openness, inclusion, feedback and balance between the different dimensions of both inner-led change and progressive socio-ecological change work. It also requires us to include the full range of our ways of knowing: our thinking, feeling, sensing, imagining and intuiting, at individual and cultural levels.
"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."
- GARY SNYDER
Soulcraft
“Perhaps the most potent expressions of diversity
are far deeper than skin
and emerge when an individual
has sunk roots into their unique niche
in the unfolding dream of the Earth.”
GENEEN MARIE HAUGEN
ANIMAS VALLEY INSTITUTE
Our approach to change is deeply informed by the practices and approach of soulcraft.
Soul and soul purpose
When we talk about soul we are referring to the unique place and purpose that each and every one of us inhabits in the world. Our soul purpose then can be seen as our very own particular ecological nichewithin the entangled golden web of life.
Soul purpose refers to what we were born into this lifetime to be and do, so as to be most in service to all beings - in sacred and reciprocal relationship with the whole earth community.
Soulcraft
If our soul purpose refers to the unique gifts we were born to cultivate, craft and share, Soulcraft is the myriad ways (practices, approaches, ways of being) that support us to craft ourselves so as to become most able to live as our unique soul purpose, and thereby be most in service to all beings.
Soulcraft is an ongoing conversation, a dance no less, with Mystery/God/the Creator/Creatirix. Having received Mystery’s beckoning call, soulcraft practices support us to dive deep down into the underworld to harvest and alchemise the rich treasures that mysterious domain of the unknown has to offer us, and the middle world we continually return to.
Soulcraft practices
The term soulcraft was coined by Bill Plotkin, whose first book is of this name. Bill's sense is that soulcraft practices fall into three main categories, all of which are what we would call approaches to inner-led change:
- Practices for leaving home /becoming an emotionally healthy adult
For example, - Pathways to soul encounter
- Cultivating a soulful relationship with life
Take a deeper dive into this in the book Soulcraft: crossing into the mysteries of nature and psyche by Bill Plotkin.
Check out our resources section for examples and to connect with practitioners and organisations offering this support, such as the Animas Valley Institute (which we will refer to as Animas from now on).
Healing and wholing
Soulcraft both begins with and is grounded in what we are calling inner-led change - and which Bill calls healing and 'wholing'. Animas' soulcraft work places an important emphasis on the fact that us humans were each born with inherent wholeness - a 360 degree kaleidoscopic relationship with the world. And that within this we were each endowed with a cacophony of innate inner resources that support psychological wellness. Contrary to the emphasis so much of the world puts on our wounding, a 'wholing' approach places the emphasis on cultivating what Bill calls our four facets of Self or of human wholeness. Soulcraft prioritises practices and approaches our reclaiming of these inherent human strengths, capalities and sensibilities.
Four facets of human wholeness
North - the nurturing generative adult
This is something like our inner-parent, the one in us that is emotionally grounded enough to take care of our young wounded parts - the exiled and frightened ones who experience themselves as victims. It is also the one in us who is a collaborative leader - who has developed the relational skills to work well with others and who has honed a diversity of 'ways of knowing' so that our leadership is sourced from our thinking, feeling, sensing, deep imagining and intuiting, in reciprocal relationship with the whole earth community. It is the one in us that feels a deep commitment towards compassion, forgiveness and living more and more towards unconditional love.
The nurturing generative adult is the gateway to our rescuer and our people pleaser (the one that wants to rescue and please people in our fear of otherwise feeling the pain of being rejected). It is also the gateway to our inner tyrannt/persecutor/oppressor (the one who is conditioned into acting out our power-over model of relating - both in relation to others and ourselves (known as the inner critic). It is also home to our army of loyal soldiers. These are the parts of us who are intent on keeping us safe through a range of 'survival strategies' they developed when we were young - and which as adults are often at the heart of behaviors that keep us small, prevent intimacy and more generally inhibit our inherent transformative power.
As we cultivate more of these four facets of wholeness these loyal soldiers start to become willing to reflect on whether their strategies are actually still needed and helpful now that we are emotionally healthy adults.
East - the Innocent /Sage
This is the one in us that has cultivated enough embodied safety in their system to exeperience a quiet mind and be deeply present to what is happening in each moment by sourcing from both the 'beginners eyes' of an innocent new born baby, and the sage-like wisdom and breadth of horizon that comes from having lived a full, embodied and examined life.
This aspect of us is most connected with the divine and spirit realm and is most concerned with leading us up into the upper non-dual realms of pure consciousness, beyond distinctions and strivings. It is the part of us that can connect with life's inherent emptiness - from where the messy, embodied everythingness is sourced.
Our innocent/sage is the gateway to our inner escapists - those addictive and escapist parts of us that find any number of ingenius ways to avoid feeling the pain of the world. The underbelly of our inner escapist is the dissociative state that comes from trauma, which then latches on to anything from food, alcohol or other substance addiction through to spiritual bypassing, consumerism or simply getting lost in our thoughts, stories or screens.
South - the wild indigenous one
This is the one in us that is deeply immersed and in connection with our embodied self and all the emotions, feelings and sensations that accompany that. This one 'lets the soft animal of their body love what it loves' in wild and ecstacic pleasure and play and ever deepening reciprocal relationship with and as the indigeneity of wherever it is they currently call home. It is this one that holds the key to our sense of belonging in sensuous and polymorphous erotic communion with the whole earth community.
Our wild indigenous one is also the gateway to revealing and lovingly relating with our young wounded, exiled and orphaned ones. Our inner victims - the ones who are in so much pain, grief, sorrow and sadness.
West - the muse beloved
This part of us that longs for the depths of myth and the underworld. The enchantress in us who knows how to court and romance everything and eveyone. It is our inner poet and storyteller whose words are whispered from the depths of the rich textures emanating from the underworld mysteries.
The dark muse beloved is also the gateway to our shadow selves and to the transformation and alchemy that unravels when we reveal and relate with both our golden and sinister shadow energies, parts and selves.
Soulcraft practices continue and deepen this wholing process, introducing and integrating new and multiple dimensions to what it is to be alive and human in these times.
For an in depth dive into cultivating these four facets of wholeness have a read of Wild Mind: a field guide to the human psyche, by Bill Plotkin.
What is the world longing for through us?
Soulcraft refers to the practices needed for for the deep cultural transformation our world is longing for through us. It blows open our perception of experience and ways of knowing and being, it renders the impossible possible, through the process of strengthening our muscles to welcome and dance in and with the unknown, with and as emergence.
Soulcraft deepens our trust in life, whilst blowing apart and bringing us to our knees in the face of any notions of, and blindspots around, entitlement that we may be unknowingly inserting into our notion of what it is we trust life to manifest and look like. Soulcraft more and more liberates us from the stranglehold not just of our ego but of the superego and the superego’s ego!
Soulcraft practices open our taste buds to the inherent sweetness of life - and not without a commensurate opening to it’s sourness, its darkness. Soulcraft is no more interested in letting the light get in than it is in blocking it out and allowing death to declare itself in life’s inherent emptiness. Soulcraft prepares the ground for us to be able to birth the exquisite beauty inherent within life’s every-thing-ness by crafting our being to tolerate the death and darkness of no-thing-ness. And through this divined marriage of dark and light some-thing else is continually birthed rendering reality as the perennial life-death life cycle.
Soulcraft blows apart our middle world limitations as part of the time-space continuum. In opening our whole-beings to soulcrafting we surrender to that which Mind is incapable of fathoming. Soulcraft serves both that which the world is longing for through us, and that which is unfathomable to Mind, leaving us pregnant with possibilty and forever gently poised to receive the unexpected gifts generously presented by the unknown.
Re-sourcing in our turbulent times
Soulcraft equips us to open to our grief of what it is to be alive in these times when species extinction is well and truly upon us and the continuation of our own species now appears to lie in the balance. And it so too equips us to hold and live as the creative tension that arises in opening to and holding the possibility of near-term societal collapse and extinction of the human-species, alongside an active and radical hope that as more and more to us learn to open to and dance with Mystery and learn the infinite, non-linear, unpredictable, wild and fancy-free steps of soulcrafting, the future of our species may just be as bright and radiant as the Love that each and every one of us shines as in each moment. And it is from this place of undeniable Love that soulcraft more and more supports us to creatively and transformatively respond to this epic creative tension of our times.
The journey of soul initiation
Once we have done what is needed to cultivate enough of these four facets of wholeness, its seems to be that we become 'whole enough' to be ready for the journey of soul initiation. This is a process whereby our soul reveals its unique purpose to us through the realm of the imaginal in deep imagery, visions, messages and stories. This journey of soul initiation seems to take anything from several months to several years.
To find out more about how to embark on the journey of soul intiation check out:
- Bill Plotkin's book The Journey of Soul Initiation: a field guide for visionaries, evolutionaries and revolutionaries.
- Animas Valley's Institute's website to find a program to participate in
Radical inclusivity
"If you have come to help me you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation is tied up in mine then let us work together".
LILA WATSON, AN ABORIGINAL EDUCATIONALIST AND ACTIVIST
For us radical inclusivity is all about learning to love more of life’s everythingness and its exquisite diversity. We believe that this radically inclusive whole-systems approach holds the keys to the deep and radical cultural transformation that these increasingly testing times demand.
For a long time ‘justice’, ‘equality’, ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ (JEDI) have been buzzwords which for many have been implicitly understood as desirable - rather than as an essential lynchpin at the very heart of any process of transformation.
What we resist persists - often with a vengeance!
Contemporary Western culture conditions us to push away feelings, experiences, ways of being, people, identities and dimensions of life that we find uncomfortable and have been conditioned to believe are somehow a threat us, our identity, power and privilege.
This cultural conditioning gives rise to our polarized, and polarizing, states of consciousness, culture and politics. It also simultaneously deprives us of the key to understanding the origins of this polarized state of consciousness - and why it persists.
Radical inclusivity draws on a whole-systems approach to change, recognising the inherency and necessity of diversity and difference. This perspective centres the transformative potential of those approaches seeking to find the seeds of solutions within the problems themselves. That is, those approaches that see any and all tensions, problems and difficulties as a creative opportunity to manifest necessary change and transformation.
Radical inclusivity requires us to do the liberatory work of revealing what and who we have been conditioned to make wrong, fear, reject, marginalise and oppress at all levels - from the personal to the cultural. This deeply loving perspective wakes up in us the need to learn how to welcome those and that which we marginalise and make wrong, so that we can start to work together, rather than sabotaging our collective transformative potential.
This is in fact a process of developing radical self-love for each and every part of us - and especially those parts we have learned to fear, shame, reject, repress and hide. Needless to say these are the very things we tend to make wrong and marginalise in others. It is by learning to embrace and love more and more of ourselves that enables us to cultivate compassion and love for others.
Radical self-love is what partiarchy and capitalism are most threatened by. It is an ongoing process that requires us to strengthen our muscles to tolerate the discomfort of the shame, fear, grief, sadness and rage that tend to accompany this process of learning to love all of ourselves - and one another. It requires developing curiosity about how and where these feelings and beliefs around what and who are to be welcomed or rejected, are held within our bodies and within our culture. Support around this liberatory work is increasingly becoming available within the the field of cultural somatics, or somatic abolitionism, as Resmee Menakam calls it - as well as within various approaches to shadow work and embodied awakening.
Radical inclusivity is also what lies at the heart of Brazilian popular educationalist, Paulo Freire’s, seminal ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.
this is where the future happens
here at the margins
at the strange crossroads
of crisis and imagination
here you die
the small death of art
decorate the darkness
make beauty with your wounds
change is not a stage
but a necessary revolution
without the edge
there is no center worth saving
mark my words
mark my body
mark my life
risk the rage
but only if beauty is the place
it burns through to
sing when someone
looks at you askance
fire is the only thing
that can fix
the eternally broken
heart
fire like this
doesn’t disappear
it burns
STEVE HYDE
Healthy boundaries
Boundaries are the distance at which
I can love you and me simultaneously.
PRENTIS HEMPHILL
A healthy boundary is one that supports us to create the conditions we or our group need, to be able to learn to love more of what we currently resist, reject and marginalise.
Radical inclusivity can be misunderstood to mean saying yes! to everything and not holding boundaries around behaviours that may undermine the health of an individual or group.
Holding healthy boundaries is essential for health and effectiveness in the world, at the personal and collective level. Many social and ecological change groups struggle or fall apart due to unexamined beliefs that holding boundaries around certain behaviours or ways of being is bad and wrong - when in fact they are an essential ingredient for health and transformation.
On the other hand, many large institutions tend to impose discriminatory rules and regulations that exclude people and ways of being. What's more this is often carried out in unconscious ways that are destructive for both the individuals involved - and ultimately the collective who bears the understandable wrath of those marginalised by our mainstream culture and the rules and regulations imposed to uphold it.
Imposing boundaries, or rules and regulations, unconsciously to avoid feeling the discomfort that difference can evoke, is not at all the same thing as holding healthy boundaries. To be healthy, boundaries need to be introduced with an awareness that they are needed due to our own limitations to welcome difference, rather than any behaviour being wrong per se.
Unless of course the behavior is clearly an abuse of structural or physical power inequalities.
Healthy boundaries require us to be aware of and work through our reactions and biases around difference to enable more informed choices about how to proceed in ways that are in service of the whole, whilst not going over our limits in ways that undermine our, or our group’s, ability to be healthy and contribute in the world.
Flexible boundaries
Finally, it is important to remember that healthy boundaries are flexible and responsive to change as it emerges - rather than fixed and rigid rules and regulations. Flexible boundaries require us to pay attention to and seek feedback from everyone that our actions are impacting so that we can stay attuned to what will most serve the whole, and our wider commitment to deep cultural transformation in service of the whole earth community.
Myriad inner practices can help us develop what is needed to embrace those behaviours, ways of being - or even types of people, that cause us discomfort and/or nervous system dysregulation, and to hold space for others to do the same. What's more, the more we learn to understand, welcome and love those aspects of ourselves that we've been culturally conditioned to reject, the more we learn to love and have compassion for any difference showing up in relation to others, even and most vitally those behaviours and people we've been conditioned to fear, reject and oppress.
White fragility
White fragility refers to the tendency for those racialised as white to resist acknowledging racism because it generates feelings we don’t want to feel in relation to the role white supremacy has played in the systemic oppression and abuse of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC).
The term ‘fragility’ can be extended to all the other identities that our mainstream culture systematically marginalises and oppresses.
For example; male fragility, able-bodied fragility; hetero-normative fragility; gender-normative fragility; neuro-normative fragility.
For those of us committed to co-creating inner-led change and the relational cultures that support this, we need to be inquiring into where we may unconsciously be imposing boundaries in relation to identies and ways of being as a result of our cultural conditioning.
Windows of knowing
Thinking, feeling, sensing and imagining
Whilst thinking and cognition tend to be the most valued ways of knowing in Western culture, inner practices draw on the interrelationship between all our ways of knowing and intuiting - thinking, feeling, sensing and imagining. This requires developing our awareness of how we know what we know, and the influence that our different ways of knowing have on our actions, narratives and beliefs.
How do we recognise or experience our emotions, and how do they influence our thoughts and actions? Which senses do we mostly rely on, and how can we widen our sensory feedback loops? How can we develop our imaginative capacities, what constrains them, and what happens when we are given the creative opportunities to imagine?
Using all our senses enhances our capacity to challenge dominant narratives that have foreclosed and colonised our past, present and future - enabling us to imagine the potential for transformative change.
The only war is the war against the imagination.
All other wars are subsumed in it.
The ultimate famine
is the starvation of the imagination
it is death to be sure
DIANE DI PRIMA
For example the thought-based belief that ‘there is no alternative’ to neo-liberal capitalism shuts down our capacity to imagine regenerative and more life-affirming cultures.
What’s more, it is only when we are in relation with all our ways of knowing and intuiting - thinking, feeling, sensing and imagining, that we can begin to access the deep imagination - that which emanates from beyond the individual self/ego, and which connects us with an intelligence and wisdom commensurate with the scale of crises we now face.
“... emotions have been a ‘sticking point’ for philosophers, cultural theorists, psychologists, sociologists… this is not surprising: what is relegated to the margins is often, as we know from deconstruction, right at the centre of thought itself"
SARA AHMED
Paradox
"I once heard that to become a sovereign of Ireland you had to attach a chariot to two wild horses. One would lurch one way, one the other. You revealed your spiritual maturity and general readiness for the task by so harnessing the tension of both, that a third way forward revealed itself. The holy strain of both impulses created the royal road to Tara. A road that a culture could process down."
MARTIN SHAW
Greek “para” = beyond, “doxa” = belief
Perhaps the greatest hoodwink of our times is the conditioned belief that something can only be either ‘this’ or ‘that’. The epitome of which being: if I am right, you must be wrong.
This form of logic lies at the heart of our sense of separateness and disconnection - and the epic and widespread suffering this causes.
When we embrace life as paradox we surrender to our inherent state of inseparability with everything and everyone - and we get to celebrate the richness of it's radical inclusivity, it's kaleodoscopic everythingness and its effortlessly regenerative state of wholeness.
What’s more, embracing the truth of paradox liberates us from the zero-sum game currently fuelling the demise of our species and beyond.
A zero-sum game is essentially when we perceive that one person’s gain is another person’s loss, and implies a scarcity mindset which favours competition rather than collaboration and polarization and separation rather than unity.
It is this zero-sum game mentality that drives our individualistic culture that limits our love to those we perceive to be able and willing to meet our needs, rather than a vast love grounded in radical inclusivity and a commitment to expanding more and more into living as unconditional love of and as all.
When we start to experience life as paradox rather than as a black and white zero-sum game, we begin to taste the delicious freedom of life’s everythingness. The stuff that poets, storytellers and mythologists live and breathe. Living life as paradox unleashes life’s inherent magik and beauty. It liberates us from our insatiable need to know everything and always be right and from our debilitating fear of not getting our needs met - both of which limit our capacity to love and transform, and lie at the heart of our current crises.
How will we harness the immense cultural tension we are currently facing between ways of being fuelled by love, and those fuelled by fear? What will be the new third way this pandemic portal reveals to us in the throes of our love-fear polarity
Wholing and healing
Embracing practices that support our wholing and healing is an integral part of our approach to change - and sits at the heart of inner-led change.
Somewhat miraculously us humans were each born with an imprint of inherent wholeness - a 360 degree kaleidoscopic relationship with the world. And within this we are each endowed with access to a cacophony of innate inner resources that support psychological wellness.
Contrary to our culture's obsession with wounding, a 'wholing' approach places the emphasis on cultivating what Bill Plotkin, founder of Animas Valley Institute, calls our four facets of self or of human wholeness.
For inner-led change to be supportive of deep cultural transformation it needs to prioritise practices and aproaches that support us to reclaim these inherent strengths, capabilities and sensibilities.
Four facets of human wholeness
North - the nurturing generative adult
This is something like our inner-parent, the one in us that is emotionally grounded enough to take care of our young wounded parts - the exiled and frightened ones who experience themselves as victims. It is also the one in us who is a collaborative leader - who has developed the relational skills to work well with others and who has honed a diversity of 'ways of knowing' so that our leadership is sourced from our thinking, feeling, sensing, deep imagining and intuiting, in reciprocal relationship with the whole earth community. It is the one in us that feels a deep commitment towards compassion, forgiveness and living more and more towards unconditional love.
The nurturing generative adult is the gateway to our rescuer and our people pleaser (the one that wants to rescue and please people in our fear of otherwise feeling the pain of being rejected). It is also the gateway to our inner tyrannt/persecutor/oppressor (the one who is conditioned into acting out our power-over model of relating - both in relation to others and ourselves (known as the inner critic). It is also home to our army of loyal soldiers. These are the parts of us who are intent on keeping us safe through a range of 'survival strategies' they developed when we were young - and which as adults are often at the heart of behaviors that keep us small, prevent intimacy and more generally inhibit our inherent transformative power.
As we cultivate more of these four facets of wholeness these loyal soldiers start to become willing to reflect on whether their strategies are actually still needed and helpful now that we are emotionally healthy adults.
East - the Innocent /Sage
This is the one in us that has cultivated enough embodied safety in their system to exeperience a quiet mind and be deeply present to what is happening in each moment by sourcing from both the 'beginners eyes' of an innocent new born baby, and the sage-like wisdom and breadth of horizon that comes from having lived a full, embodied and examined life.
This aspect of us is most connected with the divine and spirit realm and is most concerned with leading us up into the upper non-dual realms of pure consciousness, beyond distinctions and strivings. It is the part of us that can connect with life's inherent emptiness - from where the messy, embodied everythingness is sourced.
Our innocent/sage is the gateway to our inner escapists - those addictive and escapist parts of us that find any number of ingenius ways to avoid feeling the pain of the world. The underbelly of our inner escapist is the dissociative state that comes from trauma, which then latches on to anything from food, alcohol or other substance addiction through to spiritual bypassing, consumerism or simply getting lost in our thoughts, stories or screens.
South - the wild indigenous one
This is the one in us that is deeply immersed and in connection with our embodied self and all the emotions, feelings and sensations that accompany that. This one 'lets the soft animal of their body love what it loves' in wild and ecstacic pleasure and play and ever deepening reciprocal relationship with and as the indigeneity of wherever it is they currently call home. It is this one that holds the key to our sense of belonging in sensuous and polymorphous erotic communion with the whole earth community.
Our wild indigenous one is also the gateway to revealing and lovingly relating with our young wounded, exiled and orphaned ones. Our inner victims - the ones who are in so much pain, grief, sorrow and sadness.
West - the muse beloved
This part of us that longs for the depths of myth and the underworld. The enchantress in us who knows how to court and romance everything and eveyone. It is our inner poet and storyteller whose words are whispered from the depths of the rich textures emanating from the underworld mysteries.
The dark muse beloved is also the gateway to our shadow selves and to the transformation and alchemy that unravels when we reveal and relate with both our golden and sinister shadow energies, parts and selves.
For an in depth dive into cultivating these four facets of wholeness have a read of Wild Mind: a field guide to the human psyche, by Bill Plotkin.
Our sub-personalities as gateways
You may have noticed that within each of these four facets of wholeness we mentioned a gateway to less favourable aspects of our-self: our inner rescuers, tyrants, persectors, oppressors, addicts and escapists; our wounded, orphaned and exiled victims; and our shadow selves.
We all developed 'sub-personalities' like these, and plenty more, as 'protective strategies' when we were young - and beyond. This is because as children very few of us had parents, caretakers or teachers who were able to support us to relate with our emotions in healthy ways that felt safe and generative. We therefore developed an impressive array of protective strategies to avoid having to experience those feelings that felt too overwhelming and/or that made us feel like our very survival was at stake.
Coming into relationship with these subpersonalities and the protective strategies that underpin them is a vital aspect of the process of wholing and healing.
Cultivating compassion
Cultivating compassion for these parts and respecting their inherent wisdom in terms of keeping us safe when we were very young and vulnerable - is an essential part of the wholing and healing process. As we start to come into relationship with these parts we begin the vital process of radical inclusivity and love. It is only through growing the emotional and spiritual resilience needed to feel able to welcome and embrace our vulnerabilty and the other emotions we avoid, that our protective strategies will start to fall away. And it is inner-led change that supports us to grow this emotional and spiritual ground.
Reclaiming our wholeness
The process of reclaiming our wholeness involves engaging in practices that support the cultivation of, and relationships between, these facets of wholeness - within ourselves, others and the relationships between us. As we develop more of each of these dimensions of our-self, we become more and more able to relate with the 'sub-personalities'.
Healing and transforming trauma
As we cultivate more wholeness there becomes more emotional and spirutual ground to heal and transform the collective trauma that underpins our current social and ecological crises. What this means is that as we cultivate more wholeness collective trauma is more likely to reveal itself through us. You can find more information on transforming trauma here.
Soulcraft
Wholing and healing is an integral part of the process of Soulcraft, and are terms coined by Bill Plotkin, founder of Animas Valley Insititute (Animas).
We highly recommend checking out Animas' Wild Mind and soulcraft programmes here.
Emergent strategy
Another key ingredient within our approach to change and deep cultural transformation is learning how to work with emergence, in reverance to the complex relational system we are part of.
Despite uncertainty and change being the only constant, contemporary Western culture attempts to defend against the discomfort of uncertainty through ‘predict and control’, projecting culturally conditioned ideas of how things will or should be. Working with emergence invites us to learn how to tolerate and transform this discomfort so that we can meet the constantly-changing truth of any given moment or situation.
Working with emergence involves letting go of trying to ‘predict and control’ how things should be. Instead we meet life as it actually is.
We receive and respond to the feedback life gives us in each moment, adapting our next steps accordingly - much like a skipper ‘tacking’ the way to their destination in response to whatever weather arises in each moment.
To work with emergence we need to re-member how to receive and respond to the constant feedback life offers in the form of thoughts, feelings, sensations, intuitions and deep imagery.
Emergent strategy brings together working with emergence with a more long-term strategic approach. We begin by dreaming into our vision - what do we long to bring about? What will life look and feel like then? Next we sense and map the changes needed to manifest this vision and identify immediate next steps to help move towards this change - all the while finding ways to keep our north star bright and alive at the centre of our being.
Hierarchical and rigid structures favour those who have most structural power and rank within our current culture, at the expense of the collective intelligence and creative genius of the many. However, those who are marginalised by our current culture have needed to work with emergence for their very survival because ‘predict and control’ has never been a strategy they have the privilege of drawing on. Our current global pandemic and resulting lockdowns have highlighted the necessity and importance of working with emergence.
For more on this check out Emergent Strategy: Shaping change, Changing worlds by Adrienne Maree Brown.
Walking our talk
There’s a thread you follow.
It goes amongst things that change.
But it doesn’t change.
People wonder what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it, you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
Or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you can do can stop time’s unfolding.
Don’t ever let go of the thread.
WILLIAM STAFFORD
Holding an intention to ‘be the change you wish to see’ is an invitation to embody the changes we long to see in the world through our relationships with ourselves, with others and with the other-than-human world. It sounds so simple and yet it is perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.
Walking our talk requires us to commit to taking responsibility for co-creating the world we long for. And this in turn requires us to cultivate the self-love and compassion needed to forgive ourselves and others when ‘being the change we wish to see’ is simply beyond our limits. Simply put, radical self-responsibility is about taking responsibility for where and when we are unable to act in deeply loving ways, to others and to our-self.
We will live in a very different world when we are all able to take responsibility for our own limitations around love, rather than unconsciously feeling guilty about not being able to fully 'walk our talk' and then needing to make other people wrong so as to avoid feeling the pain of our guilt.
As we learn to feel compassion for our limits to love everyone and everything - and the cultural conditions that led to this, we tend to find ourselves less in need of ‘othering’ those and that which we find hard to love, and more able to take responsibility for our inability to love everyone and everything.
Walking our talk and being the change we want to see in the world is also sometimes referred to as ‘prefigurative politics’.
This refers to the practice of enacting our desired approaches and relationships, rather than blaming, or waiting for, others to implement change on our behalf.
This is what is being pointed to within black feminist's rallying call: 'The personal is the political'.
Being the change we want to see in the world and prefigurative politics can often require us to act in counter-cultural ways that risk us being projected onto and potentially marginalised.
This is why it is so essential that access to support around inner-led change is made widely available to all - so that we all become increasingly empowered to walk our talk and be the change we want to see in the world.
Cultivating resilience
Cultivating resilience means the ability to ‘bounce back’ from adversity, experienced as one-off and/or complex trauma over time and across generations. When we are able to access support and tools that enable us to begin to experience an embodied awareness of what this adversity and trauma feels like in our bodies, we start to develop resilience around it.
In recent years trauma is revealing itself more and more within our groups and community spaces. This often occurs in the absence of the understanding, skill and experience needed to hold and meet this in healthy ways that enable its transformative power to unfold.
This is happening at a great cost to both individual and collective wellbeing. What’s more, it is significantly undermining the effectiveness of our social and ecological change groups and movements, as well as our education, health and judiciary systems. As a result our ability to cultivate the regenerative cultures our collective future rests on is being seriously compromised.
Healthy cultures are trauma-informed in that they provide us with, and signpost us to support that enables this embodied awareness of what adversity and trauma feel like in our bodies, and how to develop ways of being and relating that enable this to be gently met and transformed. The culture of our groups, and society at large, therefore plays a big role in the degree to which we are able to cultivate this resilience in the face of adversity and trauma - be that within our families, schools, places of worship, work or play, or our legal and health care systems.
Trauma-informed approaches can enable the recognition and acknowledgement of cycles of trauma and interrupt them at individual and collective levels. The beauty of this is that many people then have the capacity to use their experiences of cultivating resilience in the face of trauma to work towards transforming the systems that created the initial adversity.
"Our bodies are the place where the most ancient,
forgotten stories of our cultures play out;
stories which often involve inherited trauma and unprocessed grief.
As a result, although we may yearn for connective ways of living and interacting with others, many of us unconsciously embody disconnective patterns in our moment-by-moment ways of being.
Body-informed leadership supports us to change these patterns by teaching new ways to understand and relate to our body’s signals."
MADELANNE RUST D'EYE,
CULTURAL SOMATICS PRACTITIONER
Cultural somatics and transforming trauma
"The most damaging patterns of our society are the hardest ones to name. This is because we have absorbed them into our bones, into our tissues, into our very neurophysiology. They shape the way we sense and feel the world at such a fundamental level, we’ve accepted them as “normal.” And yet, I believe that the profound disconnection many of us experience – the unnameable, pervasive pain of our times – and the social structures and systems we build from this place are far from normal.
I passionately believe in the transformational power of our body’s intelligence. We each have the potential to develop a way of relating to our body’s signals that generates interconnection in our personal and group cultures.
I define somatic safety as having the inner conditions required to integrate our full range of brain/body experience, to practice self-awareness and choice, and to stay in relationship with others at the same time. It has nothing to do with “protecting” ourselves from unpleasant experiences; in fact, having somatic safety improves our ability to relate with unpleasant —as well as pleasant —experiences.
This practice helps us to find our way back to somatic safety whenever we notice we’ve disconnected from ourselves or from others. Most commonly this occurs because our autonomic nervous system has become activated, or because we have been seduced by a judgment, evaluation or interpretation.”
Madelanne Rust D'Eye, a dear friend and collaborator, is a trauma therapist, cultural somatics practitioner, group facilitator and founder of Body-Informed Leadership an organisation providing a range of programmes that support us to come back into healthy relationship with the inherent wisdom and power of our body’s intelligence.
We highly recommend checking out Madelanne's work if you are interested in getting support for yourself and your group around body-informed leadership, cultural somatics and transforming trauma.
“Trauma in a person, decontextualized over time,
can look like personality.
Trauma in a family, decontextualized over time,
can look like family traits.
Trauma in a people, decontextualized over time,
can look like culture.”
RESMA MENAKEM
Trauma as life's evolutionary intent
Increasing evidence demonstrates the epigenetic nature of trauma such that it is passed on across generations and held in our bodies at both the individual and collective level. In light of this we believe trauma exists in everyone - and that it makes itself visible when someone is ready to heal it.
This is why it is less common for those generations directly experiencing significant trauma, like war or genocide, to be the ones to heal their own trauma. It tends to be subsequent generations who are ready to do the healing work needed to transform trauma.
At the core of our approach to change lies a belief that this collective trauma underpins our current crises - as well as holding the keys to the deep cultural transformation this demands. In other words - we believe collective trauma represents life's evolutionary intent for us humans as a species.
By life's evolutionary intent we mean the process by which life provides precisely the ingredients that are needed for this particular stage of our evolution as a species.
Perhaps one of the juiciest and most existential questions of our time is, 'How and when did this collective trauma begin?'
Whilst this is not the place to go into that vast question, suffice to say that arguably the process of birth itself seems to represent our species’ original trauma which has given rise to our ubiquitous core wounding that seems to reside at the heart of our individual and collective trauma.
And historically it is useful, albeit partial, to recognise the role that power-over ‘Coloniser' culture has played in creating our current collective trauma.
Eco-awakening
Eco-awakening, a term coined by Bill Plotkin, is the awakening to the visceral and emotional knowing of your deep belonging to Earth. It is the sweet relief marking the end of the illusion-of-separation from “nature” and a re-membering yourself as part of the Earth community, no moreor less than every other creature. In fact, it could be said, it is the experience of knowing that each of us, yourself included, are Earth in human form.
Eco-awakening is a way of understanding and experiencing ourselves as intimately participatory in an ecosystem - and a call to act in ways of reciprocal relationship. It is not something that happens once and is finished. Nor is it a certificate or badge of having arrived anywhere. Within power-over culture, with its continuous demand of making something commodifiable and sellable, eco-awakening is absolutely of no value - in fact it is counter-cultural. At its essence it is a fundamental shift in world view and consciousness. It is in fact such a complete shift that it is often not possible to continue participating in what Joanna Macy calls ‘business-as-usual’. Rather than making us happier and better consumers or more successful entrepreneurs, eco-awakening has as its goal, the humbling force of true belonging.
It is a way of becoming regular sized, as Martin Shaw says. This way of finding our place as a human within the ecosystems of Earth, is a huge step towards shifting our way of participating in, or even stepping out of, the modern paradigm with all of its attendant horrors, extractive practices and mass scale suffering produced by those consuming, without giving back to either Earth or those working to make the products that are consumed.
In an ecosystem, no creature, plant, insect or being is out of place. Each fills an ecological niche receiving part or all of the physical bodies of others as food and, through its own body, giving itself, in part or whole, to another in the web as food. How might we, as a species, remember our place within the ecosystem of Earth and create cultures that are nourished by and nourishing to the ecosystem within which we live? Imagine that at scale. This is the potential and necessity of eco-awakening. It is a recognition of our place as a species within the web of life and a reciprocal relational way of being with the Wild Others that participates in the cycles of birth, death, decay, transformation, gestation and rebirth. This inner transformation of inter-belonging can only happen one person at a time, meaning it is simultaneously both deeply personal and essentially non-personal.
Eco-awakened adults are able to shift consciousness, hearing the dreams of trees, animals and stone. This might be what we mean when we say, remembering our original instructions as humans, meaning the way that humans are essentially and originally a part of the ecosystem within which we have lived and the ways of being and choices that are made arising out of that chthonic knowing - the deep knowing arising from being of a place. If our species survives the current socio-ecological collapse, in the future, eco-awakening holds the keys to us being renewed by, and as a culture, guided by, Earth’s dreaming.
At Starter Culture our approach to change sees eco-awakening as a vital component to consciously navigating this collapse and the deep cultural transformation inner-led change seeks to support. Without including embodied eco-awakening practices within our action plans and theories of change, we will continue to source our ways forward from the power-over consciousness that created our current crises.
Our deep longing is that humans will someday live into a time where eco-awakening is no longer necessary because our children will grow up knowing themselves as part of Earth. Imagine with us what that would mean? Human cultures would be reciprocally renewed in relationship to the ecosystem within which they are a vital part. Eco-awakening is the threshold to such a future, will you join us at the threshold?
Collaborating across difference
So many of the approaches, tools and practices needed to transform our current crises already exist, yet may not be visible or accessible. Collaboration can help reveal, amplify and co-create common cause with others aligned with inner-led approaches to social and ecological change. It can increase our confidence to centre and amplify these approaches to enable greater visibility, leverage and traction within the wider process of cultural transformation.
Genuine collaboration relies on building relationships, trust and skills, negotiating difference and having the tools and safety to transform arising conflicts into potentially transformative breakthroughs. Without this, the shadow sides of collaboration can flourish, which includes power-dynamics going underground, cultural and political appropriation and diluting the radical potential of approaches to suit a neo-liberal agenda.
Collaborating across difference offers an opportunity to strengthen our muscle around learning how to sit with and transform the discomfort that different perspectives, approaches and ways of being can activate within us. Collaboration that does not actively seek to welcome, include and navigate difference tends to exacerbate the status quo, that is, the very culture that created our current crises.
Knowing our limits and holding healthy boundaries around those behaviours that make it impossible for our group to function healthily, is also vital - as long as these boundaries are being held within a wider context of working towards becoming more able to collaborate across difference, whilst also taking responsibility these boundaries being due to our own limits to embrace difference, rather than because certain behaviours are wrong.
Many of the behaviours that groups and institutions dedicated to social and ecological change find challenging (e.g. being emotionally sensitive) or undermining of safety (e.g. displays of anger or aggression) are the result of nervous-system dysregulation resulting from trauma - which tends to be most present in those with the most experience of marginalization and oppression. This is why it is essential not to make these behaviours wrong, but rather acknowledge our own, or our group’s limitation in being able to include them just now.
"Council is an ancient way and modern practice whose roots are within the natural world, spanning diverse cultures and religions. This practice elicits an experience of true community, recognizing that each voice needs to be heard, that every person has a gift, a story to share, a piece of the whole. How do we remember all our relations, embrace differences, and find our own voices, while opening to others? It seems more than ever an essential time in our nation and around the world, to awaken this deep relational heart-mind."
GIGI COYLE AND JACK ZIMMERMAN
Evolutionary intent
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Holding space
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Hosting multiple perspectives
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Interbeing
Our current state of consciousness makes it hard to really experience our inherent state of entangled interbeing. Whilst the language of the inner might imply that the inner happens exclusively through the individual self, the reality is we are a collective self made up of an entangled web of individuals - human and otherwise.
Our inner experience is what enables us to actually embody our visceral state of interbeing - and it is our cultural conditioning, and current state of consciousness, that leads to almost all of us being over-focused on the individual self.
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