Our Design Principles

for Composting Power-over
into Relational Cultures

These Design Principles are part of a new earth-centric inner-led approach to change that we are experimenting with at depth and scale. It is an approach to change that gestures towards the composting of our power-over paradigm into the relational regenerative cultures needed to transform the Civilisation Trauma at the root of our current crises and collapse.

Without these earth-centric and inner dimensions of social and ecological change our groups, organisations and movements are simply replicating the very power-over paradigm that is fuelling the crises and collapse we are all seeking to go beyond.

Which Design Principles are you bringing to life?

We invite you to dive in and see where your work fits within this approach to earth-centric inner-led change we are experimenting with. Over the next five years we will be tracking and reflecting on the impacts of this particular approach to change and finding ways to tune it up so that it is more and more able to support what the world is longing for through us humans-born-of-modernity. We really hope you will join us.

To navigate the interactive map below...

Open this page on your laptop, iPad or desk top (it won't work on your phone)
Press the play button
Click the button in the bottom right hand corner to make it full screen
Click on the 'bubble' that you'd like to know more about
Scroll up and down to zoom in and out of the map

If for any reason you can't use this map, you only have your phone to hand, or you simply prefer linearity, you can read all the Design Principles in the list below.

Don't forget to make the presentation full screen for more pleasurable viewing!

Join us if you will ...

We would love you to join us in experimenting with this new inner-led and deeply relational approach to change - that is, to be alongside us in our shared grapplings around embodying these dynamic design principles so as to be able to birth relational regenerative cultures amidst the ongoing collapse of our power-over paradigm and all its crumbling infrastructure that is undeniably at death's door.

To this end we have set up a nomadic home at the threshold between inner and outer change, the crossroads of not-knowing and dreamtime, the personal and the collective, abundant with healing teas, deliciously alluring cakes and dangerously courageous conversation to all of which we invite you.

Imagine with us that woven into the fabric of the walls of this nomadic home are Vital ingredients and design principles for composting power-over culture (see below). Filled with evolutionary intent and healing, made not of one story, but many perspectives, together with our growing community we are composting modernity’s musty basement into earth-centric relational regenerative culture. Sourced from the subterranean dreaming of ancestors and place, mycelium and the roots of old growth trees, we are fermenting precisely the elixir-of-love needed to heal our consumerist extractivist power-over cultures that are being fuelled by burnout, destructive conflict, unhealthy group dynamics and decision-making that deepens our sense of disenfranchisement.

There is no penthouse within our nomadic home but the open sky. The earthen floor of this home beckons each and every one of us feeling the call to tend this threshold between inner and outer change. Those with bad knees get a chair and those who are ill, a place to lie down. Old ways of being die here surrounded by love, and new ways of imagining and creating life are born into the hearts of each of us. There is space for the elder knowings and the future ones, shared stories that are maps through these times and songs that might be prayers for a time long after our own.

We are here, at the ever evolving, ever transforming threshold, together dreaming the inner-led cultural change that is the composting of power-over culture. Our night dreams tell us that the inner work we are doing together at this threshold, relationally with the human and other than human worlds, is co-creating ways of being that are getting beneath and going beyond power-over to become power-with. We are helping transform civilisation trauma through the process of Sacred Wound Alchemy; our inner modernity through Shadow Work; and our perception of the world into one that centers; the ecological rather than only the human; the collective rather than only the individual; and the deep knowing of our hearts, bodies and souls alongside our beloved strategic minds.

This is to be sure dangerous to the status quo both inside ourselves and outside in our wider relational systems and requires massive amounts of love for ourselves, each other and for the way it is. As well, it requires a commitment to being brave, resilient, curious, open-hearted, tender and vulnerable, self-responsible and radically honest. We do not know what will evolve through us and do not presume to know “the way forward” or even “the solution to the problem”. Our longing is for many a gathering at this threshold alongside the unknown, with you and the other than human voices, to listen with the ears of our hearts to the questions:

“What is Earth up to?”

“How am I to respond now in the midst of collapse? ”

“How can we co-create a world with Earth that follows the natural cycles of Life-Death-Life?”

Our Design Principles are the sensing, feeling, thinking and imagining tools and embodied elements of how to compost power-over culture from the inside-out, as well as being an expression in and of themselves of expansion beyond power-over culture. They are the praxis of the crossroads consciousness we are inviting you into. They are not yet another way to beat ourselves with the stick of our internalised oppressor whose loving intent is to keep us small. They are markings on an ever evolving map inspiring us to re-member our healthy human blueprint.

Please grab a cuppa and sit with us as you read through the cultural elements of the inner-led approach to change we are experimenting with - an offering which is both particular and unique whilst perhaps not so different from your own vision and imaginal capacity. We invite you into the nomadic home of Starter Culture to sit at the fire, where power-over culture is being transformed into relational regenerative culture, from the inside-out.

Design Principles

for Composting Power -Over Culture

Here's the links to the Design Principles should you find yourself unable to access the map above or if you simply prefer the simplicity of a linear list. If you do want to access the map and are not able to, please email hello@starterculture.net to let us know.