Seeds for a happy planet

It is difficult to remember what were all the things that happened on our third day together. It was again so rich, inspiring and beautiful.

Some of us decided to greet and honor the sunrise, and they ended up doing it in the hot tub. This was a luxury I enjoyed the evening before, with a splendid view lit by the almost full moon; when all the others were already gone to bed or to their rooms.

“It was a beautiful morning, the sun coming up over the distant ridge of mountains, and the moon behind, up the hill through the trees.” (Judy)

Later in the day Wendy would recall that it was not possible to see them both at once, but if you turn inwards then it is possible to have a sense or an experience of both. Did you ever think of that?

I can’t remember what exactly is the chronology of that day, but I do know that we decided to do an Appreciative Inquiry Walk after lunch, around a situation of ‘moving the edge’. The question was: What did you do that made it happen? The harvest of these conversations in pairs was again something that brought us deeper into our joint inquiry. Moving the edge happens when:

- there is a compulsion; when your integrity doesn’t allow to act in another way. In this way it holds the paradox of being conscious of ‘some’ consequences of your choice and the feeling of not having any choice.
- there is no point of reference that you can rely on

- it ‘had’ to be expressed
- we leave our separateness and join others, without questions or judgments
- there is an energy of “Let’s do it!” (in alignment with Source) instead of “Do it!”
- the outcome could not be anticipated beforehand
- there is a letting go, a giving up of control
- a not holding back: it asks for courage and honesty
- you have a sense of something ‘from somewhere else’ coming through you
- you live the energy of the Fool (tarot cards): it looks like stepping forward will lead to death, but not doing it will lead to another form of death

It wasn’t the first time we talked about it but the experience of giving birth was exactly this! Women’s way of being alive, every month ‘forced’ by nature to go along with Life, with no control over it, seems to make us more connected with Life, earth and matter; and the inherent ‘push’ of Life energy. Being on the edge in this way seems quite familiar… I think this experience makes women – on average – more open to a kind of subtle energies which are different than the mental knowing, but are needed to a get full ‘understanding’.

Judy’s reflections: “In recalling my own story, I remembered the ‘letting go’ that had to happen in my moving the edge experience. I remembered how hard that was, but when I did, then there was an openeing, and the ‘letting come’ flowed so naturally, so effortlessly. I also recalled on one occassion the buildup of tension that preceded the ‘lettting go’. Like something going to explode inside me, about to erupt, not going to wait any longer. Really like Life coming through me, there was no holding back. I also recall related and less explosive times where discernement, and the subtle knowing that is required, came into play. The knowing when to speak and when to remain silent, discerning when to lead or step forward, and when to just be with another.”

Like in the first Women Moving the Edge by lunchtime it was time for us, facilitators, to lean back and give the leadership to the whole group. Meantime it was pouring rain outside, so much so that we couldn’t even see the trees on the other side of the grass field.

And what did we do? If I would give a bullet list of all the different activities you could never understand the depth of what happened. We had some silence, there was conversation, we did a presencing-movement exercise; we danced ‘the Temple dance’; we sat in circle again. There was the sound of the big crystal bowl, we made sound and music together…

But I can’t hardly describe what happened in us and in between us. First it was named as a not-knowing, and later also as a not-talking… but then, what is it?
We seem to listen, to tune into, to sense…
into what?
the delicate, the subtle, the fine, the intangible…

It seems to be possible to access – in our bodies – the unformed, the unmanifest…
the sound of silence…

silence…

collective silence…

suddenly it was there:

a connected silence;

a tangible in-between space;

a sacred space;

a space full of possibilities;

a generative space…

Grace had arrived! The We is pregnant!
And you know what? Rain stopped, the mist was gone, we could see again the trees and the whole environment!

Judy and I arrived today at noon at Angels Rest; a beautiful place with a beautiful name. You can feel, sense and see the care that has been used to create this place. We have our gathering in a huge space, which was probably a barn in former years. There is a very big window facing south-east with a splendid view.

I was amased by the richness and the depth of what was said in our first circle. The introduction was really minimal: half hour of movement and dance to become present in our bodies; followed by a welcome word and a little introduction into the gathering and about circle practice.

In this first afternoon we also shared the questions we all brought to the circle. Here they are as an example of the richness of the field that was gathered:

How can we deepen our sense of collectivity and honor difference?

How do we hang out in messiness and let it be OK?

What is the omnicentric leadership? How can we do that?

How can we be with wholeness, let go of control?

How can we be consciously in the world with the future emerging through us?

How can we let life happen and not be in the way?

What are the deep assumptions that we hold about ownership?

What is feminine warriorship?

How can we integrate the life enriching energies that lie in both ownership/entrepreneurial ventures and community initiatives?
Such a richness, competence and passion is gathered here!

Do we really see that? Are we conscious about what this could create? I truly doubt it… but I trust life and I fully trust the process. I think some magic will happen.

Part of the magic are three crystal bowls, brought by different participants, which make the most amazing, resonant sounds… I wish you could hear them…

All photos here.

It has been a long time since I did some blogging… but here I am again. I’m sitting here in the Boston area, in a newly painted home, some boxes still unpacked… sunrays falling through the autumn leaves outside… It is good living here, being hosted by my friend Judy, with whom I will facilitate the workshop or gathering ‘Women Moving the Edge’ from tomorrow on.

We took our time over the last two days to settle in into this emergent work. There aren’t a lot of exercices or theories to be prepared, it is more a way of getting into the right ’space’, sensing what is the deeper purpose and intention; getting aligned between the two of us; sensing into this particular group of participants.

I love to do this kind of work; although it is hardly ‘work’ for me. It is more like a way of living, of being in the world: living a life ‘on the edge’. You might be wondering what that is… There are many entry points to start some explanation about it, and I am sure it will never be linear.

One element is living with an open mind, an intention to be constantly in learning, to enjoy the moments that I become aware that my thinking was limited, was stuck ‘in a box’, to constantly live with and in questions that really matter.

Another element is living with an open heart. Many might say that they do that also – I don’t doubt that – but for me it means that I try to overcome my sense of seperatedness. I am not a defined person that can live on its own. I exist – or: I come into being – in the ’space in-between’, between you and me; between the trees and me; between the house and me… our language feels too small here, too limited as it uses ‘nouns’ who then can ‘do’ something, but it doesn’t give us a language for expressing the mutuality, the becoming that is happening all moments… Wouldn’t it be great to have this language where threes are named by the sound they make as the wind moves its leaves?

Living on the edge means also to be open to ‘the greater will’, to live your unique gift, to speak the right words on the right time and otherwise to be silent; to live as if always ready to die – no actions or words left for later.

This is more or less what we will try to accomplish in three days with 9 women who don’t know each other beforehand. Wondering how it will be different than the same kind of gathering we had earlier this year in Belgium. My hunch is that the listening, the openess to the subtle realities will be a little more difficult; but maybe that is my prejudice…

Why women? Not from a feminist perspective, but to add some deeper awarenesss to our feminine gifts that are so needed in our world. I want to go to the heart, the essence of being feminine. The better we understand, we ‘get it’, the easier to bring it into the outside world. I think that is my gift to bring to the world…

“Dear Friends,

This is the time for the emergence of a new feminine archetype. I call it the “feminine cocreator.” As we have fewer children and live longer lives, as the world heads into its “crisis of birth” of a new humanity, this feminine cocreator is arising. We are giving birth to the authentic feminine self and our work in the world because it is necessary for the survival and thriving of our very species.”

This is the first paragraph of an email send out by Barbara Max Hubbard (visionary, futurist, author) to announce the Women’s Wisdom Conference: Touching Greatness, Igniting Purpose and Passion, and also the book The Power of Yin.

Just now – today – when I want to announce the second Women Moving the Edge gathering, which I host and organise with Judy Wallace from the US. This is the first paragraph from our invitation:

“A purposeful gathering of conscious women who will:
• explore and move the edge of what it means to know, sense, and be our emergent collective future potential
• hold, embrace, and birth the unfolding wholeness together
• and in this process of discovery co-create new grooves in consciousness beyond our individual and collective edge

In this gathering we will not only explore the edge, we will be it, we will do it. Our world requires of us the courage to open, to engage, to inquire, to suspend, and to explore beyond what we think we know. Together we will co-create and be the vessel to awaken the inter-subjective “We”, the Being who comes alive through all of us together, who awaits our invitation to bring collective leadership into the world.”Although they are both about The Power of Yin, the difference is that the first format is about ‘Presenters’ and the second one is about ‘Participants’…

Regular users know that I am involved with The Art of Hosting, be it the art in itself or its community. It is the art of designing and facilitating meaningful conversations in whatever community – school – organisation they ask for it or are willing to engage with each other in ‘a road less travelled’.

Recently Ravi Tangri posted an interesting conversation on YouTube (in three parts) in which Phil Cass and Toke Møller tell the story of how these meaningful conversations came into being in the health care system in Columbus Ohio. It is really an amazing story and a very good example for other places and other areas of life.

In Columbus, Ohio, the question started around how to build an affordable and sustainable health care system in their region. Some time later they were asking themselves: What is a health care system for? and recently they had conversations about What is Health? I am in awe for Phill and all the others who are breaking new ground with something as simple as deep conversations…

Please take a look here. As I mentioned before, the whole story is in three episodes.

And Ravi did more! He looked around all over YouTube and gathered all video’s related to meaningful conversations. If you are interested, here is more!

It is so fascinating when you see patterns, same themes arrising in different places at – almost – the same time!

One of these days I found myself sitting on a terrace in Paris, with Anne Stadler and George Por. Anne started talking about being called to some places to heal old wounds. The conversation went on with how we can see the whole web of relations. Is Europe able to see it’s whole history of what it has done in the colonies? Who knows that the North-West of the US was connected with the rest of the world through trade in the pré-history?

It seems that a huge re-uniting, a linking up is going on in so many places. Just a few days ago Juanita Brown, founder of the World Café, wrote about the recent European gathering in Dresden to some friends. Part of her email was:

“Most exciting was the simultaneous hosting of eight local World Cafés throughout the greater Dresden area (on sustainable business, the arts, media, youth and education, etc.), which led key leaders in Dresden to begin envisioning Dresden as a “learning city” using conversational modalities like the World Café and others to engage citizens at all levels in conversations about the questions that matter most to them— the “world as café” came alive in Germany!

This is so consistent, Toke and Phil, with the wonderful work you all are doing in Columbus. Maybe at some point down the line Colombus and Dresden might become “sister learning cities”–depending on how it all unfolds in terms of the follow up and next steps with the folks in Dresden.”

And look what Phil – doing the Health Care Project in Columbus – wrote in response:

“What is so wonderfully strange about this is that Dresden is Columbus’ European “sister city”.  We have certain municipal and cultural exchange relationships with Dresden and have adopted each other as sister cities.  I’m going to be in contact with our former Mayor who sits on our Foundation Board and has strongly supported our “hosting work” to learn more about this, because he was Mayor when this “adoption” took place.”

This is so consistent with one of the last things that happened in this Dresden gathering itself.  One of the last blog post I made while being there was about a Chinese man (sorry I forgot his name) who brought a gift from his country: a cloth with a view on his city: Hangzhou. And he told about his dream to connect cities, and inviting each other. He talked about appreciating the history of the people you will get to know and much more that could lead to a ‘wisdom civilisation’. He got a big applause!

And on the last afternoon in Dresden I participated in a conversation around the question: What is the highest potential of The World Café as a contributor to the development of large-group dialogue and collective leadership in Europe? One of us said that what is missing in Europe is a vision for Europe that is coming from the people, from ‘the inside’; instead of the politicians and other leaders. I noted down one practical idea raised by somebody else: setting up conversations between twin-towns!

Time seems to be ripe for this…

Lots of enthused people for the first Art of Hosting Learning Day, but finally we gathered with six – and a baby. And a learning day it was!

My body held still some sadness as I arrived, triggered by some last minute cancellations. I felt my face was closed.

We were welcomed by Rik in nature – his favorite working space – and by the sound of his flute. We stood in circle under a very old tree, hearing the sounds of working machines and closeby stood some building materials. It felt right to include them in our circle… including the ones who choose to do some ‘work’ and not to be here with us; and including the world ‘out there’…

I felt that nature, the silence and slow pace of our conversation and the music opened me up again… what a relief! My face opened up, my breathing became deeper and the smile returned on my face!

We were then invited to have a creative presentation as an answer to the question: In your wildest dreams, who – what – where do you want to host? Of we went for 20 min to let the ideas come up…

When we gathered again Sander was the first to invite us to join him in putting our nose to the window glass of the big room where he sees himself hosting leaders of the world. What did we see or hear while looking inside? This picture is what Helen saw: looking through the window, through the room, through the window on the other side, throught the garden, and through the gate and still seeing Sander’s reflection! Amasing lessons were shared from these small observations and Sander had the impression these answers were why he came all the way from the Netherlands to join us in this day.

Next was Hannelore to tell her wildest dream of having a farm and a garden connected with the Heerlijckyt, so that ‘a whole life’ experience can be offered to all visitors. She invited us in the field with the three donkeys…

Now it was Rik’s turn, and to keep his – and our – fire burning, he invited to build together a structure with some wood we could find around the place. This was an amasing experience! Nobody took the lead, the men were more collecting the sticks, women tended to build the foudation of the structure… and we managed to build something that was nice and exceptional! Again different lessons about working together, how things can emerge with no plan beforehand and lots more!

All this strenghtened my idea of how important it is to include the wholeness of knowing – all the different ways of accessing knowing.

Time for lunch!

This time we gathered around the fire-place inside, and I started harvesting on a big sheet of paper what we already got out of our conversations. If you ever were part of this kind of flowing, inspiring conversations you know it is almost impossible to capture. So rich, so many links, deep silence, building on each other, deepening our understanding together…

Some of the sentences:
We host the new world, as it emerges. Hosting means: holding the field outside the content; hosting the container for questions; hosting the process between people; hosting the trust.

We are creating the new, conscious groove.

What spoke to me the most was: We come together as hosts – without content – as the field, and this is an evolutionary, collective act and practice.

It was clear to us, after some time, that we were not here to organise something or to find a next step for some kind of action. This coming together, our search for deeper meaning, this inspiring conversation was our purpose!

Since earlier in the conversation we were talking about the history of the venue, De Heerlijckhyt van Elsmeren, where we were gathered and that we all have a strong relationship with. It was here that the first Art of Hosting happened last October. Julian remembered his first visit, when I showed him the barn that is used these days for storing wood and all the working materials. Somebody proposed to visit it right now, and of we went…

It is truly a remarkable place… a deep silence is almost tangible… an emptyness…

Rik started playing his flute, two others joined in with sound… Who is singing? Who is singing me?

The last words on the flipchart:

simplicity of love

power of silence

the mystery

as a gift

Thanks to Helen, who made so many beautiful pictures, go and visit them here! I’m pleased that I could use some of them to beautify my blogposting. The harvest team is building!

Yesterday something new happened for me and I think it is important for the leadership of the future. Years ago, in the autumn of 2000, I initiated a women’s group, which was called the FiveStar. Later the name changed to FourStar as one of us left our circle. This women’s circle was very important for me and to all of us. We all used it as our safety net and as our mirror and deep profound feed-back opportunity. Being all trained as therapists, you can be sure that we inquired into all bits and pieces of our emotional life. At a certain point silence ‘came in’. We didn’t decide to have more silence, but as we trained ourselves in following the energy that was present, silence happened. We learned to meditate together and used this collective state of presence to ask for information regarding questions or issues that were important to us. It was in itself a learning cycle – over the years – of co-sensing, until the point of ‘the eye of the needle’ as Scharmer names it in his U-process. I, or we, didn’t know this theory, only later I could see how our journey was a kind of U-process, at least the left side of the U: the process of coming to an Open Mind, an Open Heart and an Open Will. It was so fascinating for me that I wrote an article about it.

In this article I’m talking about the CircleBeing, this collective identity, that can arise when the members of a circle can all be fully present in themselves and with one another. The final question of this article is my hunch that CircleBeings become present because they have a CircleTask. You can see it as how individuals have all their individual life-task.

In one of our collective meditations, many months ago, we saw what this CircleTask is for us. But I got frustrated over time when I didn’t see any energy to make it manifest. Part of this frustration became constructive energy in the creation of Women Moving the Edge, about which I blogged recently. So I entered yesterday’s meeting with the question: Is our circle dying or is there energy for the emergence of something new? We had a deep dialogue about it and finally got again into a collective meditation around the focus question if we were to end our circle, and if not – why not, and if yes, why so? In the information we got it was crystal clear that ‘the form’ of our gatherings had come to an end and that there is a seperate path to go for each of us before we can realise our true potential, or our CircleTask.

So we left with no new appointment in our agenda and in total peace with our new insight. No blame, no conflict, no attachment to what was before… I knew right away that this was something important: not to be attached to the form or previous content of our meetings. Being able ‘to flow’, to be present to what is needed, not only related to content but also to form!

This seems to me an ability that is needed for the right part of the U-process. Because the trap of falling back into ‘known’ procedures, meetings and organising is very tempting when related to make things manifest.

I’m curious for the future to come…

It is Saturday already, and I still want to share the last part of our fascinating gathering. Our harvest on Tuesday morning still had the same quality of a collective sensing field that started on Monday morning. There was an overall opening to a collective and deeper knowing, in the form of questions ànd answers.

We were wondering about: What is the transformative dynamic? What made us come to this point, this state of collective wisdom, this Circle Being? Many elements were named…
start from silence…
deep listening…
walk the talk…
contain the pain and destructive forces…
holding chaos…
emptying for the whole word…
start from diversity…
trust the system…
listening to Life itself…

But the real answer was to me:
A community that has the willingness and the practice to tune into the notes of grace.

(more…)