For RELATIONAL WHOLE SYSTEMS

Relational Systems-Sensing

Hosting Multiple Perspectives

Dancing with Paradox & Complexity

Interbeing

Design Principle:

Relational Systems-Sensing

Many of us committed to social and ecological change believe in a whole-systems approach. Yet we mainly neglect the inner, relational and more-than-human dimensions of change, or they remain conceptual rather than embedded within our visioning, planning, prioritising and action. We believe this significant omission of the more invisible realms of change is fundamentally hindering our groups and movements, at least in part through burnout, conflict, unhealthy group and power dynamics and poor decision-making, and preventing the deep cultural transformation these times are increasingly demanding.

Beyond Space and Time

A Relational Systems-Sensing approach requires exploring how all the seemingly separate elements of any system connect at a deeper level; how they inform and transform one another and how together they give rise to shared multi-spatial and multi-temporal paths. This approach also embraces that there is more than one story, one way forward, one solution (or even one problem). Rather, it braids together a path of different perspectives in the present moment that affects both the past and the future.

By expanding our approach to change to centre the relationship between humans and Earth community, we tune up the typical human-centric whole-systems approach to change. By adding the inner dimension of life - and the complexity of the relationship between life’s inner and outer dimensions, we humbly apprentice to working with complexity at both depth (within ourselves and our relationships) and scale.

Relational Systems-Sensing is an expanded version of what most know as Systems Thinking. Rather than limiting ourselves to the strategic thinking mind, Relational Systems-Sensing involves opening up our ways of knowing to include all the senses: thinking, feeling, imagining and intuiting.

At Depth and Scale

By ‘at depth’ we mean through the practices of, for example, wholing and healing, shadow work, cultural somatics, transforming trauma and connecting with the invisible more-than-human realms.
By ‘at scale’ we mean through the practices of, for example, identifying leverage points to enable widespread integration of inner-led change, collaboration across difference and unleashing the transformative power of kairos: non-linear change that comes through supporting emergence and Life’s evolutionary intent.

This centering of inner-led relationality, and our inherent entanglement within the wider web of Life, renders us and our work available for the mutual benefit, both inter-personally and collectively, of Life’s evolutionary intent

This Relational Systems-Sensing approach requires us to learn how to embody and encourage openness, inclusion, feedback and balance between the different dimensions of change - inner and outer, human and otherwise, intra-personal, inter-personal and collective. 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. Relational Systems-Sensing has cross species reciprocal relating as its core organising principle, evolving and changing moment-by-moment, through time.

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Design Principle:

Hosting Multiple Perspectives

When we embrace our inherent state of interbeing we become able to hold within our own heart-minds, the truth and complexity of multiple perspectives. We are able to ask questions that serve the whole, rather than our own personal agendas. We are able to rest in not-knowing and listen to many views and stories of experience. We are able to sit alongside different versions of the same event or suggested way forward, and not feel threatened by this difference. Instead, we have room within ourselves for compassionate spaciousness and awe at Life’s inherent diversity, within which we can resonate with the deeper truth of this present moment and its possible impact on the future as well as diverse streams informing us from the past.

Even if our initial response to seemingly opposing perspectives is one of activation and defence, when we recognise the transformative truth of Life's inherent paradox and complexity, we commit to re-building the atrophied muscles that allow us to drop beneath and go beyond these triggers so we can unleash the transformative potential of welcoming multiple perspectives.  

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Design Principle:

Dancing with Paradox and Complexity

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, ‘us’ or ‘them’’. Our illusory sense of separateness and disconnection lies at the heart of this form of logic, and the epic and widespread suffering it causes. This way of thinking tends to make us small, tension-filled, aggressive, protective, possessive and driven by fear. It creates an illusory binary throughout all aspects of our culture - gender, religion, politics, race, relationships, bodies and so on.

When we embrace the complexity of life as paradox, not either or, rather both and more, we understand that more than one perspective or “truth” can and does coexist without infringing on the lived deep knowing of each. One of the most damaging versions of this belief of disconnection is: if I am right, you must be wrong, or worse, I can only be right when you are wrong. Another related and equally damaging belief is that someone must always be to blame - either someone else or me. This zero-sum game is currently fuelling the demise of our species and beyond.

Beyond Zero-Sum

A zero-sum game is essentially when we perceive that one person’s gain is necessarily 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 scarcity mentality that drives our individualistic culture and limits our identification with, and love for only those who we perceive to share our opinions and perspectives and/or be able and willing to meet our needs. When we start to dance with life as paradox rather than as binary, we begin to taste the delicious freedom of life’s everythingness.

Living with life’s complexity takes curiosity and practice as well as ripening through experience. It also draws heavily on Primal Trust. If we are willing to open our hearts and listen to another’s experience as totally valid and true for them, we might discover that we ourselves hold a multiplicity of perspectives, needs and desires, wishes and visions for the future that can also often seem to be in contrast and opposition to each other - all co-existing within our psyche despite their difference.

The Diversity of our Inner Village

Relating with the difference, contrast and opposition that exists within our own inner village/ psyche is the perfect preamble to learning how to expand and wizen up so that we can hold space for these rich and diverse perspectives in others. Holding space for difference is part of our practice of expanding into the complexity of a relational whole-systems approach, of which Paradox is one version. We hold space for the many voices of our own hearts and for the many voices of the human and other than humans in our web of relationship.

Seeking support to dance with paradox and complexity?

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Design Principle:

Interbeing

Our current power-over culture trains us to perceive ourselves as inherently separate individuals in competition with one another and to strive for individual freedom (the possibility to do anything we want, anywhere, anytime without reflecting on how this impacts others). This has created a blinkered belief in life as zero-sum: either you win or I do/ it’s either your needs or mine/ it's either someone else's fault or mine - someone has to be to blame.

Beyond Hyper-Individuality

This hyper-individuality creates a state of consciousness that makes it next to impossible to experience our inherent state of entangled interbeing. One could say that while we each have particularity and uniqueness, the individual, as it is manufactured by consumerist culture does not in fact exist. Rather we are collections of ancestral dna, bacteria, food, air and the water we drink, each further nestled within layers of community and woven into webs of relationality both human and other than human.

When we experience this truth of interbeing within our hearts and our lived experience, often with the help of, for example, music, dance, art, somatic practices, trauma healing, eco-awakening, wholing and self-healing , ritual and ceremony and many other ways of tending the dance between the inner and outer, it changes the way we see and understand the world.

Inner Roots to Interbeing

When we speak of the inner, we are not therefore centring or celebrating the hyper-individualistic, rather we are pointing to the unique ways that each of us is in reciprocal relationship with the world - which can only be known to us through turning towards our inner worlds.

Through inner-led change, our personal inner experience becomes what enables us to actually embody our visceral and inherently transformative state of interbeing, whilst holding healthy boundaries when necessary, because we understand ourselves to be interwoven with all of Life at all times. We then act from the perspective of what is best for the past, present and future ones - which includes but goes well beyond our individual selves.

It is our cultural conditioning, and current state of power-over consciousness, that leads to almost all of us being over-focused on the individual self, within a consumer capitalist world obsessed with unending growth and expansion and our own personal survival. And lest us not forget that the notion of ‘personal growth’ still hails from the same consumerist growth mind-set.

Seeking support around interbeing?

Check out our in-person and online programs, our Earth-centric inner-led mentoring offer and our Offerings section more generally - and/or sign up to our newsletter here to be the first to hear about our latest offerings you can.

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