How to live and work differently?
Another conversation? Another dialogue? Bleeeuhhh. Let’s do something! For me, it’s fascinating to see the call for action bubbling up in so many places; although totally understandable when you are aware of the state of the world and of the planet. There is a collective longing for direction. Still, many times it feels like pulling up the grass to see how quickly it is growing. Part of the whole practice – beyond the dialogue part – is to learn to take into account the right timing – the natural moment – and the right conditions if we want to create from a deep collective alignment, both inside the team and to the outside environment. The Western mindset is so prone to fall into the trap of premature action, to only later realize all the bad consequences we didn’t think about beforehand. (just look around in the world!)
But maybe it is still winter, and the leaves of last autumn need more time to compost to nurture the flowers of spring to come up in their own time?!? We, humans, don’t like to be folded into nature’s rhythms. Our minds can just jump to the other side of the planet; but if you would take a bike and travel in the physical world you would really get how much energy is needed to go there. Our minds forget that we are, after all, physical beings in a physical world.
It’s the physical world that gives us the experiences of a beautiful sunrise above the trees, the experience of a grandchild painting and writing a new year’s card, the cozy feeling of new curtains on the wall.
Beauty. Enchantment. Wholeness. Truth. Care. Isn’t that what we are looking for?
Rushing and stressing – leading to burnout – is not going to create any of that for us. Seems to me our whole world is in burnout – or even on fire! – having lost the connection with the planet as a whole. Fractals of many of my clients who have lived in a dreamlike illusion of work, success, money and job titles and lost connection with the seasons and their own bodies, emotions and heart.
How to live and work differently though? This call for action – while being in alignment with all of life – brings us into seriously unknown territory. How to stay in the same inquiry space, as in our best dialogues, while we are jointly holding a project with a certain end date? Now the practice of generative dialogue comes to a test – as you could read about the first gathering we had in our community – because in working on something real – this specific project – there is more at stake for the people involved.
How much of our habitual patterns show up again? Which protector parts – in the language of Internal Family Systems (IFS) language – are coming up? Uncertainty? Shame? Perfectionism? Critique of self and others? Taking too much space? Starting too quickly? How shall we make decisions together? Don’t we need more governance in place? Are we stuck in polarities?
Back to presence. Embodiment of grounding, and inner and outer alignment. Working as if we are dancing while nobody is watching. That’s the quality of action we are looking for.
The Collective Presencing practice is an answer to how to create different meaning – between us – that will lead to different actions in the world. That’s a huge potential to tap into; and it means that we also need to be able to hold all the pain, all the spaces and places where separateness took over the intimacy of relation and interbeing. That is not just another direction, but it is asking us to play different notes all together. To be in presence with wisdom does something to a community.
When we stay present together – to the rawness of life now – we can enter the fullness of a shared silence. Then we become a we that is available to life and living.