Seeds for a happy planet

(This is the text of my recent Newsletter – with an addition by Ashley Cooper).
Last week I took a day off to go to the Belgian coast with a friend. Actually, we were lovers once upon a time. Probably you know the feeling of getting into ‘the old track of conflict’…

We had good conversations over lunch in Bruges, one of the most famous and picturesque cities in Belgium. We had walked on the boardwalk in the port of Ostend; I had taken a long walk on the beach while he took a nap. Now we found ourselves in a restaurant at the beach, eating fish.

He said something,
and I replied. No – I reacted.
Then he reacted.
And then I stopped.

I could feel it immediately! There was an emotional charge in my tone; I was out of my center and in a position of making sure my point came across. I stopped and asked if I had been harsh/hard on him. But I didn’t need to ask, I knew it already. My body had told me.

This to me is an example of embodiment of consciousness; a sensing so fine that it can distinguish the subtle differences between actions coming from ego or from our center. I see a rise in the importance of embodiment. Both in new, innovative ways like The 16 Ways of Dylan Newcomb, the fascinating world of Take Tina, and in my own co-hosted program of Women Moving the Edge. Also in the mastery of lineages that are applied to our current times, like the Conscious Embodiment of Wendy Palmer and the Warrior of the Heart; both sprouted from the old roots of Aikido.

You may wonder why this is important…
It is about being present,
Fully aware of what you radiate out to others,
Open to subtle sensing of yourself, the other and what is in between.
It is about knowing your inner ground,
And being able to return to it easily when you lose it.
It is about the capacity to act form your center,
When the world gets complex and chaotic.

It’s about being ready for the times ahead. Please don’t suspend till later.
These times are approaching rapidly.

Ashley responded: “on your embodiment poem, I played with it a little bit to reflect my own experience.” Here is her version:

Fully aware of what you radiate through your inner ground
and out to others
Open to subtle sensing of yourself, the other and what is in between.

And being able to return to your inner ground easily when you lose it.
It is about the capacity to act form your center,
When the world gets complex and chaotic.

Thanks Ashley!

Another of these amazing days with amazing women in an amazing program! The point of Women Moving the Edge is that we don’t have a design for the process. What we do have is a long process of preparation of holding the space for the potential to manifest and an intense co-sensing of what would be the right guiding question. These two, the holding space and the guiding question form the container in which the gathering can unfold. This question is in nice colors on the wall and besides the practice of the circle nothing is set beforehand.

For me it feels very natural to trust that something really meaningful will come out of this – even that we will move the edge of where we were before -; but I realized that it is not for many people. This trust makes that there is no pressure whatsoever of getting somewhere and it welcomes every contribution in the circle. So besides the conversations we had a song, a walk to the beach, belly dancing; we had tears and lots of laughter, and a hot tub to end the day.

It is impossible to remember or describe all the conversations… maybe I can put it together in The Glory of the Feminine.

What if following our bliss, our passion, our joy, our pleasure would be the way to go, and creating the new world would be a byproduct of that?!?

Coming from the idea that the masculine and the feminine needs to melt before new birth can occur, we had different lines of conversation on this dance between the genders, between these two energies. Who has to move first? Or do we all dance to the cosmic music and there is no one moving first but only listening to the resonance?
Is there value in seducing? Isn’t seducing the very act of being the pleasure and embodying the future?

The first part of our question is: “If we collectively hold space for the Future that is being birthed, …” That might be a very big idea, but it is important to see lots of our work – paid or not – in that light. We can’t move faster than how it goes, and it is important that projects and ideas can unfold in resonance with the pace of the Earth. But very important in this process is that we need each other to support one another in this holding space. It is a conscious act, although not very visible, but so needed!

Being pregnant… together…

I have been reading Dave Pollard’s blog for a long, long time. This time I want to share something – because after all he is a good writer! He goes on naming what is required from us in these times:

“Instead of seeing conceptually I have to learn to see perceptually.

Instead of using the tools of propagandized modern language, I have to learn to use the natural tools of intuition and attention and appreciation and sensation and presence.

Instead of learning based on planning and presupposition (based on what I’ve ‘learned’ before) my learning must be based on openness to all possibility, on appreciation of emergence, and most of all on humility.

Instead of applying complicated, analytical learning methods I must apply the ways of complexity: experimentation, discovery, observation, imagination, and practice.

Instead of learning by the traditional means of separating myself from the object of my study (”the environment”, “the culture”), I must learn integrally, as a connected part of all-life-on-Earth.

I have to relearn to learn how a child learns: authentically (=Gk. being oneself).

………..
To move forward now I have to become un-civilized, wild. Agile. Authentic. Finally, fully, nobody-but-myself.

………..

To do that I must let go of everything I believe, everything I think I ‘know’, everything I fear, everything I think is appropriate (or not), expected, accepted (and acceptable, or not), everything I have unintentionally become and everything I have ‘taken on’. All that baggage. All that stuff that holds me, holds all of us, back, and holds us in place.

I have to become light.”

Beautiful.

Raw.

True.

I love it!

Some weeks ago I told a good friend that I want to live in the energy or space or field where I can always ‘act in an instant’. This ‘acting in an instant’ is used by Otto Scharmer in his Theory U. It describes how you can be totally aligned in your self with your thinking, your emotions, and your actions and at the same time also be in harmony with your environment and third in resonance with the future that is emerging through you.

So, it is not following some instincts, or giving in to your longings. To me it is an alignment of your personality and your soul. In my experience it is a way of being totally alive. I guess it is like a bud of a flower, opening itself up more and more, step-by-step – a better word here is unfolding.
The difference between myself and the flower bud is that I get excited, and the flower is ‘just growing’? Or maybe the flower is always excited?

Why do I feel excited? Most likely because I wasn’t fully alive before. I was holding back a lot, I was silent, I didn’t take myself serious and many more ways of being ‘normal’ and ‘obedient’ instead of being fully alive.

Acting in an instant, it feels so good! The days and moments that it happens follow each other quicker and quicker. As if time collapses! There isn’t much scheduled in my calendar, which makes it possible to act in the now: to finish tasks right away; to take steps ‘one conference call at a time’, no big projects are figured out into detail, which then need to be accomplished, but a sensing of ‘right time, right space, right people’.

If time collapses, then space should collapse too. I can see glimpses of it in the ease of conference and Skype calls connecting people easily across the globe, in sending text messages from Belgium to Israel, but I am wondering,
if the time-space continuum really collapses can I disappear from here and appear right next to you???

Speaking from Source… what exactly does it mean?

At different times in our gathering I sensed that something wanted to be said – through one of us – and then I would hand over a talking stone to her. On this fourth day of Women Moving the Edge it happened again, and I supported Lisette in doing so. She could masterly describe how her thoughts would try to get her attention, instead of letting the words coming ‘through her’.

In our preparation before the gathering I named it in this way: “We have learned a lot in the world of Spirit, of concepts, of reflection, of meditation, of meaning making; but the world of the experiences, the subtle knowing, the subtle sensing… the phenomena, the experience of a phenomenon has had much, much less attention in our culture. … Goethe said: “Every phenomena, well contemplated upon, opens a new sensing organ in us.” That is the new what I am looking for. … There is a way of speaking, that is directly linked with your body, or the phenomenon of that moment.

What we did so far was: we have an experience and then we can reflect back ‘on it’, or we can make meaning ‘out of it’, or we can speak ‘about it’. And what we are doing now is: we can speak in that moment. There is a possibility – like when we are at the bottom of the U – that it happens in the same instant, that we are both at the same time: we are in the experience and we talk about it.”

This is what Lisette said:
I’m not somewhere else.
I’m in your body.
Live me, Be me as I am.
I am this glow.
Feel me I am always there.
Allow me to be there.
Allow me to show you the way.
Allow me to teach you there’s always a next step and live me by taking that next step.
I am right here. I guard you, I support you, I live in you.
It’s not big deal. I’m just life. Don’t make it too holy! It happens
anyway. I’ll find my way. I’ll have my way with you! I always do.

It is now two weeks ago, that third day of Women Moving the Edge. Of course I don’t remember everything, the memory isn’t that fresh anymore, but still I want to complete my harvest of this fascinating time together. With the help of my own and Maria’s notes and Helen’s and Judy’s blog I come a long way.

I remember that on the evening of the second day I was very surprised to hear so many stories from these women, which revealed lots of un-freedom, lots of pain held in the area of embodiment, the area of sexuality. I had forgotten that my own journey through years of emotional bodywork, 5 Rhythms dance, family constellations and trauma-work had freed me from a huge pile of inhibitions. And it isn’t a path that is taken by all the women! It made me think of integrating more of this experience maybe in the next gathering of Women Moving the Edge.

Now it was Sunday morning. Anne-Marie shared her story that she entrusted her little baby into the arms of her husband. Feeling the power she had as a woman to keep it with her, to hold on to it, to keep him out. Still she did it, she handed over the baby so that he could make his own relation with the little child, could learn how to handle it. This conscious act of ‘handing over the baby’ and ’stay with it’, as she named it, seems so essential for us women, in the world of today. We must not assume that men know what we know; we must not blame them if they don’t know how to hold the baby; we must not turn our backs when they do it ‘wrong’. Can we ’stay with it’??? Can we show by example? Can we walk our talk? Can we give attention to them, instead of the other way round?

Maria and Sarah arrived, having been on a grandma’s funeral. Effortlessly, they took their space in the circle and fitted in. We had invited them to join the circle, even if they couldn’t be on time. Death is part of life, and our gathering should be able to hold it all. It did. No problem at all.

It is Saturday now, after our morning break, and the room is silent. Everybody is just doing what they are doing: resting, in various positions, or drawing in silence. Nobody told us to do so, we are true to ourselves, in this moment. This morning we, as the hosting team, gave all leadership back to the group as a whole. We are still holding space, but we are not providing the others with techniques or tools or…

Words appear on flipcharts: Radical Authenticity. Swiftness, Preciseness, Love. On another flipchart: Be this Body!

This morning we struggled our way away from talking and concepts to this space of collective presence: present to ourselves in this moment, in this body, now, together.

Yesterday, we decorated the room with our questions on flipcharts, the letters wrapped up in colors and drawings. I used yesterday evening these colors too when harvesting our collective wisdom. We started our gathering with a circle sharing our answers about: What is my individual edge now? Flowing into a World Caf� around the question: What do we hear through the individual stories about our collective edge here? This is my harvest from this conversation.

What happened, and the speed with which we got at this point of collective presence supported my sense that every gathering is contributing to a new groove in consciousness. And the more we go there, the easier it gets for the next ones to step into that path. This is exactly the purpose of doing this: to lay these tracks in a secure and precise way, sensing our way into it.

Sense and act, sense and act, sense and act…

This question just appeared on the wall: Is humanity ready for Crone’s wisdom? It is related to a sentence spoken before by someone else: Humanity is just growing up. It puts our experiences in the bigger picture of evolution.

During the break someone laid out a roll of paper on the ground, somehow representing a timeline from our ancestors, through us, to the future generations. It shows some words and sentences, some colors, some curly lines. Open to others to fill in, to add their colors, their words, their part.

Writing and sensing all this, the sentence comes to me:
We are doing/being the future now.
or even better,
We are living the future, now.

This is not a group of women ‘just doing their own thing’. The intention with which we are here – to move the edge of collective presence – makes all the difference in the world. We live in this paradox of ‘moving the edge’ and ‘being present in this moment’. To me we are learning to be present, and slowly move into presencing.