Seeds for a happy planet

One of my friends of Women Moving the Edge, Cari, send a link to a TED video that she is enthused about. (many, many good video’s there! ) And I fully agree! It is a famous writer (which I didn’t know before…), Elisabth Gilbert, talking about the creative process and the role of the ‘daimon’ or ‘genius’.

This is the announcement on the TED page:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

Cari wrote in her note to us: “… can’t help feeling just listening to it again after a while that she is talking about source. … I think what we (Women Moving the Edge) are working with a is a reliable, replicable practice to call on and be with and come from source such that the capriciousness that she speaks of (the maddening part of creativity historically) is diminished. Like a channel we are receiving stronger or evolving into hearing better, louder, clearer over time….

Over the last months and even years I have been writing down the learnings, insights and patterns that have come out of the 9 iterations of the Women Moving the Edge gatherings; and much is about source, sourcing and collective sourcing. I just started the process to let the manuscript be read by a few of my dear friends and co-creators in this experiment. Helen just recently, took one part of it, and turned it into a beautiful blogpost! Just read along!

We had a most wonderful day – the third – in our learning gathering Art of Humans Being. It was juicy, it had song, it had a lot of embodied stuff… I think you can say it had a wholeness and fullness to it and I saw a lot of twinkling eyes and many, many conversations going on.

I want to share the nuggets we shared at the end of the day in the ceremony firecircle, here on the land. There was no fire, but there was the music of the flute that welcomed us; as it had done in the morning. And we all wrote down one specific learning of the day about repatterning and the new story. Here we go: (again read out slowly to let it all sink in!)

Trust source operating through ourselves – we already have it.
Body and Nature; Simple and Elegant.
Going with the flow, relaxed about outcome.
What are the questions that lead us to feel most alive?
It is not the new story being better than the old on; it is the next story building on the previous one.
The system works. Relax. Let go. Trust.
With trust, love deeply in the old and new story.
Form a new relationship with souls purpose and step into our fullness, naked and courageous.
Separate acting, community acting; it is all the same act.
Living in a new way, a new story.
Let our collective music arise from source.
Strengthening and listening to body wisdom.
Build a nest, let it rest. The rest will build the rest.
Lovingly held and gently hosted spaces; heartfelt wisdom flowing freely.
Magic of the flute.
Deep, deep, deep listening to higher self and purpose.
Experience. Wait. Ask. Listen.
My highest self is participatory.
Dear universe, What do I want to tell you that you don’t already know? You tell me. I’ll try to listen. Hey, thanks.
A little can be a lot.
The new stories are infinite and alluring, filling up with awe, curiosity and exitement. Gratitude for friendship.
I am here now.

Since the last day of our Women Moving the Edge gathering, which is more than three weeks ago, finishing my harvest has been at the back of my mind all the time. But working life is always rather full after a week away, and these last four days I had a low level energy – not really sick, but not able to work in a ‘normal’ way. It was the time and energy needed to tend to my subtle energy levels.

So I went back to my notes and started at the beginning – the preparation day – the day before the start of the gathering, when the hosting team came together. We were hosted by Lisette in her house in Amsterdam. I’m always delighted how these old city houses have so many windows and light is pouring in all over! So different than the rural Flemish houses of that age with small windows.

The day started with some synchronicities. Judy had lived in Amsterdam (she now lives near Boston), somewhere in the nineties, and it turned out that the place where she had lived had been only a few houses away from Lisette’s! So she strolled around the neighborhood in the morning, trying to find back a spot that she had loved and she succeeded. The spot was the ‘Begijnhof’ of Amsterdam. The begijnen, are a local and feminine story; very Flemish. These ladies lived together in the 13th and 14th centuries, under no religious order, making their own rules and having a certain influence on society. Aren’t we like them? The beguines of the new life?

The guiding question for our gathering was: If the need of the world/Earth is an invitation to become fully ourselves, then what is our role as the evolving collective feminine? This is a high level question with no easy or immediate answers. We have noticed over our different gatherings that these questions keep working in us, and pieces of the answers show up later also.

In our check in, the first major theme was: How domesticated are we? How deep is society ingrained in us? And where is the wild feminine, the natural under these layers of socialisation? This linked in with books we were reading – like Women who Run with the Wolves and Rewilding the World. Are we prepared to let the natural come back into our lives? Who knows what will happen then? The Wild is the archetypal, the instinctual, the natural. It is not new; but it seems to us that more and more women are hearing its call. And through internet we can find each other and relate with one another.

Another line in the conversation was about the movement, the transition from the Piscean age – where all sorts of parent-child relationships can be found in society – to the Aquarian age, where relationships are made out of true partnerships. We can understand true partnerships between humans, but how does this translate with the Earth, and with this archetypal level we talked about before? We were bringing in information from others’ books (Co-Creative Science from Machaelle Small Wright and Return of the Feminine and the World Soul by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee) and from our own experience to allow a new picture to form in our minds, hearts and bodies. We know that woman – or, rather, the feminine in every human being – has a natural tendency or capacity to be in direct communication with nature and the Earth. From that inner experience we have a deep sense of what is in balance with both inner and outer environment. True partnership with Earth, or with nature, then seems to be that we can use our human free will to choose for this overall balance, instead of the current ruling paradigm of separation and fragmentation. We have the free will to choose ever more balance, on all levels of our existence. We seem to get to a lived experience of the oneness of humanity and the Earth.

I have to tell you that this clarity wasn’t present our conversation then. It is now, by re-reading my notes and those of Helen, that I am able to give some coherence to what we were speaking on that day.

So, a deeper partnership with Earth seems somehow feasible and understandable, but how to understand a true partnership with this wild, natural, archetypal level of the feminine? And as we put it in our guiding question: a true partnership with the collective feminine?

From the Spirit-Source model that I developed to understand how emergence can happen, we know there are many layers between the existing potential and the manifest. The archetypal level is one of these deep layers, way below the manifest form of our daily life. Because it is an energetic level – it can be translated into the multitude of forms that we know exist on our planet (and maybe beyond?) – I understand the archetypal as a blueprint level and most likely such a blueprint exists for the feminine and for the collective feminine. Now, because our consciousness evolves, and we can make different choices than our ancestors, the forms that can become manifest out of this archetype evolve too. And because everything is reciprocal you could say that we influence the archetypal blueprint too.

This was a shocking realization for me! If this is true – and I can’t see why it wouldn’t be – then it leaves me, and us, with a huge responsibility! What we choose now has a huge influence on what will come after us, because we will, in one way or the other, change the blueprint out of which the multitude of forms will be generated over time. Do we really dare to move this edge of consciousness? There is a lot of power – at least influence – in this. Are we sure our intentions are clear and without ego? Moving the edge of consciousness is not a small thing!

Looking back at it now, I realise even more deeply that this mutual influence is going on all the time, and has been going on for ages – whether we are conscious of it or not. So my and our power or influence doesn’t grow, it is just that our understanding of the consequences of our choices is growing. My power is not greater than before, but now I can choose to apply it in a more conscious way.

On the other hand, there is also so comfort in all this. If we understand the nature of these archetypal and other energetic levels that exist before something becomes ‘real’ on the manifest level of time and space, then we don’t have to worry about how things will emerge. All these energy levels – some call them deva’s and nature spirits – will do their job! We just need to set our clear intention and co-create with these subtle levels along the way! For me that is a big relief. I/we don’t have to do it alone! Of course – for a good understanding – we never did have to do it alone, but most of us didn’t realise that. We were so trapped in our power position as the ‘highest evolved being’ that we blanked out all these other layers. Probably what we need to do more is to listen more deeply to the information that these layers are sending us.

Being in conversation about this, listening ever more deeply to what was arising in the middle of our circle, I suddenly reached a level of these subtle layers that I hadn’t reached before. I saw in my mind’s eye a huge web, a kind of irregular woven fabric that was in many, many places completely torn and broken. It looked like a woolen fabric eaten by the moths, no pattern to discover, but broken in many places. I recognized this as the archetypal energy level of connectedness and of collectives. These holes where made by fragmented thoughts, over and over again. Thoughts about ‘me, me, me’ – about separation – all influence this energetic level, which then starts to die off, to decompose.

I realized why we need to come together in circles, over and over again: because it is only these kinds of collectives that can heal again this fabric of being a collective, of being in connection with all of humanity, all of earth and all of nature – probably all of existence. At that moment I understood the deep meaning of the web of life, I understood the many stories, myths and fairy tales about weaving, knitting, mending, stitching… all images about restoring the connective tissue in the greater web of life.

Coming together, as a collective, for the sake of darning the energetic fabric of the collective and keeping it strong; that is probably what women’s circles have done through the ages, consciously or not. This is what we need to do now too. Even as fully individuated individuals, we need to do that now. So these circles, these collectives are no longer about conformity. Rather, we are looking at a collective of fully conscious beings bringing their intention and attention together for the sake of the whole of life. We have a role to play in bringing forward that collective potential.

This is the last bit of my harvest of Women Moving the Edge 6!
We didn’t talk much about sourcing this time, but it was happening a lot. One of the participants named I as: What comes up when I sit in my void (and I am not going to read books or scholars)? What comes up when we go there, with the collective?

Over time of these six Women Moving the Edge gatherings we see that we hold both large concepts as well as how to make things happen. They are a modern translation of the Red Tent, gatherings of women, coming together in a sacred and safe container, each bringing their own gift, and then – consistently – taking it into the world.

To sit in the void together, that’s what we name collective Sourcing. And it is a practice for a community to evolve itself.

Already during the gathering had come up the wisdom that somewhere, deep in history, the feminine had agreed ‘to stay inside’ and let the masculine do the job ‘out there’. Now the gathering was over, everything packed again and we were back in Judy’s house with our little hosting team of three.

If we were to come out more into the world I needed to know what this old deal had been about. What did the feminine get in return for ‘staying inside’? Soon enough we understood we got safety in return. And now we are caught up in this big illusion of safety provided by money, by organizations, by the system! As if we still have to deal with wild animals and have to fight over food to survive. This doesn’t mean that I forget that there are a lot of people in the world with hardly or no food, but we don’t live anymore in the Stone Age and the food problem could be easily solved like … has shown.

So breaking the deal is giving up this safety and the illusions and coming back on Earth, instead of living in ‘the world’ full of concepts and ideas that so many times don’t have any link anymore with Life itself. We need to do this to get our human essence back…

Our third day in Women Moving the Edge was so inspiring and so full of aliveness! Already at the breakfast table were we talking about the question: What is the question that would inspire a new economic order? As it turned out later this would be one of the threads that would later lead to a systemic constellation.

The other thread was more about us, women, being earthy and sensual beings. Speaking about it, it would also trigger deeply held pain that was hidden in our bodies, all these long years! So again, there were tears and also shaking of the body, taking care of each other and then – relief! – and how much laughter was available next!

A few sentences I wrote down during this process…

Earthy and sensual topics make us alive!

Allow and breath!

It is so damn easy as to follow your passion!

Deep sadness in the belly to live from that place. Moving sadness into aliveness through the expression.

Living the Sacred, instead of the pure pleasure.

We ALL need to be alive!

Life is happening anyway, if we participate or not.

As we moved through these conversations it got more tangible what sourcing really is; how it is to speak from a place where no thoughts or concepts are formed yet; straight from the experience – as when we hurt ourselves and scream, but now having deep wisdom to share. Once again it showed me how our minimal structure of circle practice, holding space for the potential to manifest and having a guiding question is a profound container for letting life happen through us. Sooner or later it will bring the wisdom as answer to the question and the clarity of a next, minimal, elegant step. This one next step is the only thing that is possible after all in a complex and chaotic environment – very much where we live in these days.

The sourcing got us into a deeper insight of what ‘the shadow’ really means. We speak of holding the shadow and loving the dragons, but it became clear that to understand what this really is about we have to sink deeper into ‘the koan of the shadow’. The shadow is not what we think it is, the koan will help us see what it really is; because it is not dark and it is not a thing. It is like clouds casting a shadow, but the cloud isn’t something to touch or to hold, you can just walk through it! Instead of the shadow there is an Intense Beauty! Can we live in the Direct Light, not putting anything between our selves and the Light???

The souring, the sharing of the pain, playing the music without asking for permission, reading a poem for the first time, it all lead us to realize:

TO BE ALIVE IS TO BE ON THE EDGE, TOGETHER!

It has been a while since I wrote my last blog post in English. In the meantime there was the Art of Hosting happening here in Dutch, with lots of related activities and I just returned a few days ago from Greece. I was at Axladitsa, the Learning Center, initiated by Maria Scordialou and Sarah Whiteley. The first few days I was part of their landweek, helping out on the land and in the garden. We fenced the newly planted vines and cleared some more space around the house and what will become the next extension of the vegetable garden.

After this work outside we gathered with the hosting team – the three of us and Judy Wallace – to prepare for the collective inquiry: The Edge of Collective Sourcing. Below you find the document we put together on this day, right before the participants were arriving. You will see, it is a work in progress, not all points have flesh to the bones (yet).

LIVING WHOLENESS – Through the Practice of Collective Sourcing

This is wisdom generated by two ‘partnerships’, which have been inquiring into Collective Sourcing for some years. We have attentively been watching what happens when our will is opened intentionally – besides our mind and heart – and is held and practiced collectively. It evokes real emergence, whereby something totally new arises.
Partners are Maria Scordialou and Sarah Whiteley, who founded Axladitsa, a learning center in Greece that is researching Living Wholeness in action. Other partners are Ria Baeck and Judy Wallace who initiated the training Women Moving the Edge, which will soon have its sixth iteration.

ASSUMPTIONS
The whole is getting bigger
In order to live fully in a world with more complexity and ever more uncertainty, we know that we have to go beyond what we already know. Whatever context we find ourselves in – the corporate world, public sector, non-profits or engaging in our communities – we need to learn to hold many levels of paradox, conflict and disturbance. It is our basic assumption that the whole that we need to live into and embrace is getting bigger and bigger. We have to include all the wholes that we already know of and transcend them.

New Human Capacity
To live this wholeness we need new practices, new organizational patterns, new ways of planning etc. In general we need to activate a new human capacity. A capacity that sees the world more in terms of organisms and ecosystems instead of organizations.
In the gathering, the Edge of Collective Sourcing we are building or activating this new human capacity: the capacity to collectively hold both the highest question and the deepest sourcing. It is innovating a new collective practice, a secular practice. It is removed from new age kinds of spirituality and removed from ‘normal’ religious practices.
This new capacity is also a shift from being an individual to being of service to and through the collective – whatever that is.  Our point of gravity will shift from being ‘me in relation to the collective’ – the old way of communal – to a new expression of ‘being the collective’ or ‘being part of an ecosystem’.

The field of potential in need of us
We came to see that there is a collective field, a collective presence, or a collective potential that exists in itself before we gather(ed). It is not us individuals coming together and then creating ‘this field’ between us. The field with its huge potential to manifest newness was probably guiding us to come together in the first place. The field is in need of us, human beings, to make it visible and to make its potential manifest. It is only through us that it can be embodied and can result in wise actions.

We can see each individual in the circle as holding a pole of awareness, being in inner alignment. In between the poles – and in the awareness of it – the field becomes tangible. The program Edge of Collective Sourcing invites participants to practice this double awareness while doing it collectively, for collective purposes.

Restoring Balance
One of the aspects of the whole that is getting bigger in our consciousness is moving beyond our ‘global village’ to ‘being a part in the ecosystem of the Earth’. In other words, we aim to restore the balance between ‘being Citizens of the World’ and ‘being Inhabitants of the Earth’, because as both we constantly interact and mutually influence at the same time.

MENTAL MODELS WE BUILD ON

We build on three mental models that have given us deeper insights and a framework to make sense of our many deep experiences. We assume you are familiar with these models, as we only speak about a specific piece of each of them.

Spiral Dynamics
Spiral Dynamics is a developmental model to see how societies, organizations, tribes – all collectives – evolve over time, depending on the environment they are in.
Our practice of Collective Sourcing is a second tier practice, and has distinctions from the Green level – also collective – and the Yellow level. We are developing and prototyping a Turquoise practice in which this new way of being in the collective is in service – or in alignment – with the Earth, all this from a perspective of the bigger whole, which is the universe.

Presencing
Collective Sourcing is, in the language of Scharmer, a field 4 practice. The difference is maybe that we are very explicit that this is a collective practice. Although it is quite implicit in Scharmer’s theory that this generative space is where ‘I exist, because you are’. It is the consciousness where you live in a constant mutual exchange with other human beings. We add to that the constant mutual exchange with place and non-human beings.
It is also where we live in the space of Open Will, besides of course, the Open Mind and Open Heart. Collective Sourcing is living in this Open Will collectively.

Art of Hosting
From the Art of Hosting community we take the pattern that we saw emerging and which we named The Fifth Paradigm. This pattern takes the known organizational forms of Circle, Triangle, Hierarchy/Bureaucracy and Network to a next level where all core elements are integrated into a new organism, fitting our new wholeness.

UNDERSTANDING EMERGENCE: SPIRIT – SOUL MODEL
(I have been writing different pieces of this model over the last months/years. Soon more will follow, you can find an article about it on EvolutionaryNexus).
Creating from Source
Living the Turquoise level seems to us also about ‘seeing and acknowledging what is’ and creating from and with the potential. Giving form to Spirit, or creating Spirit on Earth, is to create from Source. A partnership with Source allows us to create beauty.

Wholeness of Knowing
“What if words aren’t the medium?”

“I remember speaking vividly about the difference of feminine knowing and masculine knowing. It was more a showing than a speaking actually! Masculine knowing is taking a step back (see me stepping away from the experience, it its talking about something, it is building a concept after the facts… Feminine knowing (not to be confused with women’s knowing! Men know this too!) is knowing IN the experience (see me stepping into the center again). It is about ‘getting something’ while drawing you never understood before; or ‘getting’ what you need to do next while walking in nature. The knowing is in the totality of your being, not just in your head; it is as if your cells understood something.

“I see a spiral staircase, a double helix, one band thin and one band thick. The thicker one is the downloading and the rational, the thinner the more insightful and intuitive. These are the threads and our intention is to create the weave of wholeness. The pole in the center – the evolutionary thread – is what connects us to what has gone before and what is emerging. This is Collective Sourcing. The challenge is to not disconnect from the thread. The staircase can connect us to the next level.”

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PRESENCING, ART OF HOSTING AND SOURCING
In the bigger framework the practices of Art of Hosting can be understood as aiming at opening the minds and hearts of the participants who engage in it. It can be seen as helping people travel down the left side of the U as we have come to know it through Otto Scharmer.
When people have practiced the opening of the mind and of the heart – and personal practice is being a part of it – they become ready to be at the bottom of the U. This is the point where we have access to Source, to the unmanifest potential; either of ourselves or of the project or the group we are in.
Seeing it in this way, the process of Presencing – going through the stages – differs from Sourcing, which is a direct connecting to the deep levels of unmanifest potential. Sourcing is being able to plunge directly to the bottom of the well and still being connected with the manifest level of daily life.
When this capacity is shared by more people, and we go directly to the bottom of Sourcing, our guess is that the right leg of the U-curve will become different than described right now by Otto Scharmer.

NEW HUMAN CAPACITY

Ongoing Spiral between Holding the Potential and Staying in Inquiry creates New Wisdom
There is an ongoing dynamic  – like a spiral going back and forth – between the level or depth of Sourcing and the level or depth/height of Awareness or Spirit.
The depth of the potential can only become accessible for manifestation and action when we are equally able to become aware of the intention or the clear purpose. This explains to us the importance of finding the good guiding question(s). If our question comes from a higher level of awareness it will invite in a deeper possibility of sourcing. In this widened field of wisdom, through many cycles, new wisdom can be generated.
The ship with the highest mast needs the deepest keel.

Embracing more Complexity
Related with this – and drawing it in the model – we realize that this dance between both poles in the spiral also relates to widening our reach in the manifest. The depth of sourcing and the height of the intention make sure that we can embrace more of the whole, which is so needed in dealing with the challenges of our time.

CONDITIONS – PRACTICES FOR LIVING WHOLENESS
Staying in not-knowing
The underlying condition to get to the point of Collective Sourcing is the ability to keep the space of possibility open until the collective clarity of intention arises. This means that we need to be able to stay long enough in the not-knowing. It isn’t only a mental not-knowing, but we see it as a total letting-go; the ability to sit in the void with no clue of direction or possibility. The not-knowing is a place you haven’t been before, it is a place of newness and innovation.
The ability to stay in the not-knowing is enhanced by the training we receive through our individual practices.

Function of Disturbances
We realized why we say that disturbances have priority. Disturbances make us become aware of some borders or blocking energy in the play of the widening field. Integrating the disturbance means we have to widen our perception, widen our perspectives, widen our holding space, rewording our guiding question. It always is an invitation to open wider; either the mind or the heart or the will.

Capacity of holding multiple relationships at the same time
- Be participant in the process
- Be an observer/witness of what is going on in your self
- Be an observer of the field, the group, the context you are in
- Be a leader, step forward with whatever you see or need or want to bring in
Awareness on all these levels is needed when practicing Living Wholeness.

Living as part of an ecosystem
Shifting our center of gravity from the individual to the collective. By collective we mean here all that is around us, not just the individuals or humans. At some point we used the metaphor of tango, where the man and the woman become ‘a being with four legs’. In a gathering, a workshop – or in life in general – this means one needs to know what the whole is about so that we can keep an eye on it, while at the same time also being aware of our own individual energy.

New Practice of Planning
If we tend to an organism instead of an organization, then what would be the practice of planning? It seems to us that the organic form of this is invitation. The point is to know/sense when and who to invite.

Being a new kind of leader
What does ‘being a leader’ mean in an eco-system?
There is no separation between being and doing;
It is living-as-the-system,
Living-as-the-field.
It is living-what-emerges,
No separation between leader and what is led.
There is no border,
No precipice,
It IS.

Intergenerational

Collective Harvest and Meaning Making

Harvest into the Wider Field

FEATURES OF COLLECTIVE SOURCING AS EMBODIED EXPERIENCE
What leads us to Collective Sourcing is:
•    We are asking questions that lead us deeper into not-knowing and bring us to an edge of clarity
•    We are in a rhythm and pace of speaking and listening that is both waiting and yet searching
•    We are accessing information that is below the aquifer, coming from intuition, story, images, previous experience
•    We are in a field of listening for pop-out points, for clarity and for newness.
The moment collective sourcing arises we can notice some elements of it.
•    we use our subtle sensing
•    there is a slowing down, we speak and act in a different pace
•    silence comes in naturally and spontaneous
•    our small self is gone
•    I am a vessel through which the collective presence speaks and acts
This means that Collective Sourcing is an embodied experience, and not (only) a state of mind.

OUR GUIDING QUESTION
What if Collective Sourcing is
becoming a human ecosystem
that teaches us
to be one, as the Earth?

Or:
What if Collective Sourcing is
second tier partnership?

Or:
Is Collective Sourcing the
next structure of community?

PARTNERSHIP OR BEING IN RELATIONSHIP
Partnership or Being in (Mutual)Relationship seems to be crucial in Living Wholeness. This Being in Relationship we have to understand on many levels, not just on the human level alone. These are the levels that we see right now and that we keep being aware of:
-    with other human beings, the ones present
-    with place: Axladitsa is very much a place where consciousness about ‘us and the land’ is lived day to day. For our gathering now, we keep the question in mind: How can the different physical places inform – show – amplify our different mental models?
-    with history and future: How can we balance local tradition and lineage on one side and innovation on the other?
-    with local and trans-local
-    with the weather, the buildings, etc.: the human and non-human environment
-    with all other non-human beings present here on the land

More inspirations:
Without love for the whole, collective sourcing is not possible.

Creating for beauty is feeding the wholeness.

Just before lunch, on Saturday, the second day in our gathering Women Moving the Edge, my impulse was to speak about emptiness, speak about naming the feminine as ‘just being’. To me these are not the right words for what we are actually doing. It can be named more precise and explicit. And this has been my journey since a long time.
The so-called ‘emptiness’ is the holding space of the potential; indeed like a womb. It is an open space with no-thing in it, but it is a space that is ready to be of service to let new life unfold.
The ‘just being’ is like being pregnant. There isn’t much you can ‘do’ while being pregnant, but still a lot is happening! But the act of giving attention and care has value and importance.
Holding space – beyond being pregnant – is to be understood as holding space for your children to grow up. You want to support them so that they become their true self; you are holding space for that potential, although you don’t know what kind of person they are going to become.

This all let me to explaining more of my model and what holding space has to do with finding the right question and embracing a bigger complexity. Here is what I wrote on it earlier:
“At some point in our inquiry, it occurred to me to wonder why we (women) were always speaking about Source, and not about Spirit. It seemed obvious to us women that holding space had to do with Source, not with Spirit. But why? It got me thinking.

Following some impactful physical/energetic experiences, I realised that – for me – holding space is something that happens in my body. I don’t ‘do’ it, rather, it happens through me. It is as if my body is a vessel, through which I am able to hold space for potential to unfold. We are familiar with this idea of ‘potential unfolding’ when we think about raising our children. But now we were applying it to groups and organisations. Is it always future oriented? Again: why Source and not Spirit?

The more I contemplated it, the clearer it got. To my sensing, Spirit comes – somehow – from above, from somewhere away from here, while Source seems to be accessible from somewhere deep within. Source is like a seed, it holds potential, which can unfold into manifestation. But the full picture needed to include Spirit. So what was that about? What did it have to do with manifestation?

In my daily life, I understand Spirit as asking for distance, reflection, talking about, concepts… very different from potential! Spirit has focus and clarity. It seemed to me that the translation of Spirit into ‘the future that wants to emerge through us’ was to stay in the inquiry, to keep the questions open. It is the intention that some innovation will become possible.

Wasn’t that a beautiful couple: Holding Space for Potential to Manifest and Staying in Inquiry to discover new patterns? Isn’t the synergy of these two what we desperately need in our complex world with it’s huge challenges?”

Since I wrote this piece there is more to this model. In a conversation with Maria Scordialou, Sarah Whiteley and Judy Wallace, as preparation for our upcoming program The Edge of Collective Sourcing, we saw a new aspect in this model. This is what we saw:
“Ongoing spiral between Holding Space and Staying in Inquiry creates New Wisdom
We realized the ongoing dynamic  – like a spiral going back and forth – between the level or depth of Sourcing and the level or depth/height of Awareness or Spirit.
The depth of the potential can only become accessible for manifestation and action when we are equally able to become aware of the intention or the clear purpose. This explains us the importance of finding the good guiding question(s). If our question comes from a higher level of awareness it will invite in a deeper possibility of sourcing. In this widened field of wisdom, through many cycles, new wisdom can be generated.

Embracing more Complexity
Related with this – and drawing it in the model – we realize that this dance between both poles in the spiral also relates to widening our reach in the manifest. The depth of sourcing and the height of the intention make sure that we can embrace more of the whole, which is so needed in dealing with the challenges of our time. “

Many of the participants were very happy to get this framework and to see their own role in holding the new paradigm. One participant said: “There is wholeness in the model. It is like an egg.”

It is Sunday morning now. I am up pretty early, the benefit of the jetlag. I started my day in the hot tub here, watching how the light took over from the night. You don’t see it changing and yet it changes. Like the flowers who are in the center of our circle. We noticed that they were opening and yet you can’t pin it down and say: Now I saw it!

This has a lot to do with what was in our focus yesterday: emergence.

We started with noticing that at the breakfast table the centered and loving space from the meditation had changed in some heady conversation which left some of us closed down, stressy and agitated. Ego is so eager to take over! To do what it thinks will deserve� him/her a place in the circle… but in doing so we loose the essential, that what gives real meaning. Once again we realised the importance of our ability to notice in the moment, to be able to check if we are really present or not.

Someone shared a story of a boy giving a taped box to his dad. The dad didn’t understand what was in it. �It is me!� said the boy. If we open our soulboxes, share our love and our thinking, and if we are aware of the links between, the web that it creates, then a New Being has emerged. This is the potential of Collective Presencing. The Circle Being that is in itself a higher level of complexity, a next step in evolution, with the capacity to sense deep into deep and complex situations.

Suddenly the right moment was there to share the story of how Women Moving the Edge came into being and what we learned along the way. Next our energies went into the body: someone sleeping, the rest working with sound in the body, which fluently resulted in expression with colors on paper.

�I don’t belong at my desk anymore, although I created myself.� Resonance in the circle around this theme… �What I desire is not created yet.� A lot of talk about the precipice, the gap between what is and what we desire, the difficulty of going there… but is this real? Is it really hard? Or is it fun? is there excitement when we live on this edge? Do you know the aliveness when jumping of the cliff?

The sentence changed during the conversation to: What we desire is being created now! Life is here; it doesn’t need to be done! Leaping to lightspeed is not-knowing the form that is being created. But there is intention, there is a guiding question, there is� asking what we want.

We realised the limits of language, the limits of concepts, the limits of the already known. It is a ‘language +’ that we need. In the emerging we need all channels and there is the possibility to speak right from Source, without words being processed through the mind first. When spoken, these words carry with them the field where they are coming from; you feel the difference. It is this quality that we are seeking also in our acting. Are we able to notice and discern the difference?

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.

As the photo shows, I was ‘out’ on that Sunday evening.

Maria and Sarah offered to do a Tarot reading on our common question: What is the next level of women’s leadership, connected to Source?

Now, I would maybe call it ‘feminine leadership’…

Many elements that came out of this reading supported my own ideas of how and what is next; so I could safely lay down…

At the centre is the realisation that it is about change, huge change; about breaking out of a paradigm; and we don’t have a choice! Many people feel that these days, and our trap is that we want to have the bigger picture first, and then act. No, it is as we said before: sense and act, sense and act, sense and act…

This ’sense and act’ is our new practice. We do it over and over again, like a good apprentice who wants to become a master, until we slip through the mystery! It is coming into our awareness that we do need a new form, not one we planned ahead, but a form that is coming from Source – the form is ‘coming through’ us.

There will be many forms, many layers, many versions; with a danger that creativity can be scattered. We will need to be very un-traditional, and to let a form emerge that makes the feminine visible. But the near future brings ‘the wheel of fortune’: we will awake to the alignment…