Sharing our best selves in an age of disruption
Practicing a Mindful Embodied Relationship to Climate Change a GAIA prototype
Background
While writing an article about a mindful and embodied relationship to climate change, I had a very exciting conversation with a Social Presencing Theatre practitioner and trainer about our societies’ pathological and cultural disconnect to the climate crisis. Around the same time I also heard from another colleague and friend, that university lecturers who are struggling to process their own personal climate related distress, find it overwhelming to also respond, to the upset and anxiousness of their students. Many of whom’s well being is suffering from fear of an unknown, most likely dystopian future.
To illustrate this further, late last year I participated in an impromptu Social Presencing Theatre 4D modelling exercise with a very savvy and intuitive group of multistakeholder facilitators. These highly professional people are experts in Deep Democracy, Process Work, Multi Stakeholder Collaboration, U Theory, Restorative Circles, Open Space etc etc. Yet about fifty per cent of the group struggled to appropriately or mindfully engage, in the process exploring the topic of Climate Change. This indicated to me the level of distress, dissociation, guilt and anxiousness were so off the scale, it was too challenging for half the group to explore the climate crisis through mindful embodiment.
This strange experience signalled to me how challenging it is to feel anything else than the syndrome of fight freeze or flight when considering our species planetary survival. These hardwired reactions are anything other than mindful, in fact they trigger a sort of mindlessness. I explore my thoughts more on this phenomena, as mentioned above, here. When pondering these issues, I experienced a moment of integrational insight and developed an idea for a relevant prototype, partly inspired by the Presencing Institutes GAIA journey. The idea was to build a learning community dedicated to exploring and practicing a mindful and embodied relationship to climate change.
When I presented the idea to Mariëlle Slierendrecht the SPT practitioner and trainer mentioned above, she was very interested in experimenting with my concept. So she offered to use, one of her SPT practice group sessions as a space to prototype this idea. Together we crafted the session as an exploration, a form of collective collaborative experiential research, gathering Warm Data through embodied investigation. We hoped to discover the cumulative effects of the climate crisis, upon the physical emotional and spiritual bodies of participants.
The prototype
Thus on the 26th of June 2020 we dived deep, using a series of physical SPT processes and forms, including the 20 minute dance, as well as journaling about our relationship to climate change. One of the forms included modelling our stuck in relationship to the crisis as well as rounds of structured group reflections on the topic. Before entering the sequence of stages we designed for the prototype, I invited participants to engage in the explorations, with a kind of tenderness upon entering the physical enquiry, not to be too harsh or unnecessarily forceful or violent towards themselves, given the powerful inner storms evoked by this subject matter. For those unfamiliar with the stuck it involves forming a sculpture, a physical representation of the current reality in relationship to the issue being explored. Then being guided by the wisdom of the body to move silently into a shape that represents the emerging future.
Personally Modelling the ‘Stuck’
This is what occurred for me when modelling and sensing my physical responses to the climate crisis. While experiencing and deepening my climate change ‘stuck,’ I felt crushed by the impossibility and impotency of acting, disabled by hopelessness and sense of impending collapse. When I followed the promptings of my body to move towards health, it unfolded into a more sustainable life giving position. I felt grounded and stable, fully accepting of what might come. I first sensed the movement towards health, as my arms ached for release and freedom from the compression of my stuck. As I let go of this unsustainable position, I gained a sense of fuller acceptance and presence of inhabiting a more fully human attitude that I needed to play at this moment in time.
Collective Witnessing
Aside from the processes and experience described above, and the content of what was shared during our physical explorations. Some poignant moments really stood out, during our collective witnessing of each other’s experience. Feeding back using the sentence structures I sense, I feel, I did. Participants shared their sensing unvarnished by personal commentary, reactions or feedback just solo reflections on the raw data of their modelling. Later, some spoke about resolving long held climate related, oppositional tensions. Which had plagued their psyches, for example feeling fearful, and the fear of fear itself. The act of making this strain visible did not necessarily produce an obvious solution. More that, the dynamic tension between these oppositional forces became transparent and therefore, the participant was able to experience a fuller spectrum of their relationship to climate change. Another explorer spoke about being held in stasis between overwhelming grief and tragedy, whilst simultaneously being pulled toward hopefulness. On completing the practice this person arrived at a centred place, feeling more stable and pragmatic and perceived that this oversight of the tensions they experienced, had left them a lot freer and more empowered to act and respond to the crisis.
Collective Resonance
For me the highpoint of the event was the tangible emergence of a shared social field in our group. This was instigated when some very poignant breakthrough moments of deeply felt, immediate, insight were shared. The expression of these profoundly moving perceptions and heartfelt sentiments, during our navigation of the perplexities of climate change, reverberated strongly amongst those assembled, giving some ‘goose bumps’. These sharings plunged us into moments of collective resonance, where the separation between us as subjects and objects collapsed. This ‘Ego to Eco’ shift enabled the whole group to more fully experience our shared social space. We inhabited in those moments, the intersubjective, the awakening of our normally dormant inter being. We shared a sense that the latent potential of our shared humanity had infused our collective, co-creating a tangible appreciation of our own and thus our species, as a living system. In fact sharing our best selves in age of disruption.
The success of the prototype really exceeded my expectations and I was moved by what had just occurred, because we shared our best selves in the face of possibly the greatest crisis ever to face humanity. This act alone should inspire us to create more higher future possibilities together. A further online session is being run in the afternoon of August 20th 16–18.00 CEST which you can book here; Do come and join some pioneering exploration!
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About the author: Dave Pendle is synthesising almost 30 years experience in non profit enterprises with over 40 years of deep personal development experience. He is a teacher and transformational agent, keen to help shape education that is fit for a new paradigm. He aims to develop ecosystem leaders who embrace that they were born for this moment. He helps evolve their capacities to inspire and uplift themselves, stakeholders and systems to create a world that works for everyone.
Follow Dave Pendle’s Facebook page to learn more how you can engage with him and his leadership development business Generative You.