The Warm Embrace of Our Future Ancestors
For the last two years I have been sharing, contributing and exploring how to shape and form nature or life centred organisations. Largely within a newly emergent network titled OD for Life. Essentially this group is a purpose driven affiliation of professionals, who seek to work with, steer, support and encourage all types of organisations to function in harmony with nature’s intrinsic design principles.
OD for Life Mission
‘We are organizational development practitioners.
We are learning and leadership development consultants.
We are coaches and facilitators.
And we are people of all backgrounds and abilities
who share a sense that something profoundly different
is needed wherever people gather in shared purpose and collective action’.
I wrote in great detail about this movement’s early crystallization in May 2022. About what one might term one of its foundational moments in my article ‘‘Exploring the Deeper Dynamics of Systems Change’. Also in the last two years, I have been co-exploring life aligned governance as a board member for OD for Life and participating in an action learning enquiry about how to steward flows of resources and energy in our network. After the 2022 gathering, we also created a living document, that is a concise summation of how members intend to engage in the world. A living evolving document we term a Maniflexo, expressed in first instance in prose and again as a poem.
The wheel turned another full circle in May 2024 when we held our third annual European OD for Life Gathering. Meeting for the first time in the wonderful regenerative eco retreat centre, Yugen Forest in Drenthe, an hour or so north of Amsterdam. I was part of the hosting team for the retreat/gathering and in keeping with our shared principle of non-neutrality (See Maniflexo). We began the design by rigorously inquiring ourselves into ‘What may happen with life in organisations, if we connect with wounds and gifts and create spaces for healing, love and potential?’ These enquiries then became the key framing for the whole gathering. As we progressed and crafted the underlying principles for the event, we fostered a compelling intention together to create an integrated and coherent learning design, that would powerfully and experientially impact, the whole group without exception.
For me one of the most poignant and telling phases in the entire May 2024 event was the Seventh Generation experiential exercise based on this Deep Time/Future Ancestors ritual devised by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown. [Explained in Chapter 9 of Coming Back to Life second edition, published 2014 (Available on The Work that Reconnects website)]. This future oriented exercise occasioned a revelatory peak of shared exploration, with an extraordinary mix of insight and sincere truth telling
Before this specific OD4Life session I had experienced versions of this ritual twice, firstly under the guidance of Phoebe Tickell at the Emerge event in Berlin in October 2021 just at the end of Covid. Plus more recently at the launch of the IDG hub with Erica Harpe and colleagues in Den Haag in the Netherlands. In both those events I had taken up the same role (speaking) and soon this occasion wished to swap to the second option available. But to explain exactly what I mean, it is best to offer an outline of how this powerful exploration is structured. First participants are asked to accept to agree to two foundational assumptions as follows (ibid);
The first assumption is that there will be humans living on Earth two hundred years from now. Even if you have come to believe otherwise, please grant that assumption for the purpose of this ritual.
The second assumption is that the future ones have a cultural memory of what is happening in our time of the early 21st century — whether carried by educational institutions or storytellers. This is an important assumption. It means humans are not all scattered in caves but living in life-sustaining communities — because, you know, the Industrial Growth Society clearly can’t last another 200 years.
There were/are three rounds to the ritual, participants are placed in two rows or circles opposite a partner in the ceremony. One circle or row is silent for almost the whole duration of the exploration, the other speaks and responds to questions proposed by the main facilitator of the ritual. The silent partner represents the Future Ancestor, their only task being to listen attentively but not to respond verbally. The speaker is responding to cues provided by the ceremony leader. After the allotted time expires each speaking partner shifts one stool or chair to the left to begin the next phase anew. Instructions for the first exploration were provided as follows;
You present-day people choose to see the person before you as a human of the seventh generation. And you future ones know that the person before you lives back in the year 2024. You [future ones] have something to say to them [present ones] and to ask; this will be spoken in my voice [the voice of the person guiding the exercise] and taken as coming directly through your own heart-mind. You present-day ones will then answer out loud, while the future one listens in silence.
And by the way, the word “ancestor” refers to all people of preceding generations and is not limited to one’s own genetic line.(ibid)
In what follows I reproduce the three prompts that the aforementioned guide read, out loud. However, as I chose the silent role on this occasion, as the role of the Future Ancestor because I was super curious to hear, what responses each of my three partners would give to each of the prompts. After the exercise was fully completed. I journaled my own summary of what I had heard as a stream of consciousness exercise. This necessarily involved using a lot of my descriptive powers, to elaborate each of the three partners’ contributions.
These texts are in no way fully representative of what was shared verbally by each respondent. More that I sensed into the core sentiments, shared by each voice and expanded and dramatised these according to my own artistic inclinations. I follow up afterwards with some reflections on the whole ritual and some foundational insights that occurred to me as a result of listening as a Future Ancestor:
Question 1:
Ancestor, I greet you. It’s so amazing to see your face, because all my life I have heard stories from teachers and grandparents about the time you are living. Some of the things I’ve heard I find hard to believe, so I’d like to check them out with you.
They say that in your time there are a few people richer than the richest ancient kings, while billions of people are without enough food or shelter or clean water. They tell us that in your time bombs are being made that can blow up whole cities. We know about that, but they say you know about it too, right when the bombs are being made. They tell us that whole species of animals and plants are going extinct. We know about that, too, because gone is gone.
But they tell us you know about that while it’s happening. Is that true?… And if it is true, what’s that like for you? (ibid)
Respondent 1
‘I was immersed in clouds of fear, crumpled by crushing overwhelm, disabled by hyper anxiety, immobilized by the inertia of long term resignation and felt prematurely doomed, by the suffocating burden of my own insignificance. My intentional efforts felt marginal and unimportant. I did my best, I did all that I could, to not give into despair. Yet the mighty forces of degradation and exploitation almost flattened my resistance. I worked away, I gave to the good, I worked sincerely and diligently without clear hope, never knowing how it would turn out. So I am totally shocked and surprised, to hear that our race survived and see your blessed face backcast from the future mists of time.
Question 2:
Ancestor, I greet you. When we in our generation find water we can drink and soil that’s safe to grow food, it is thanks to the work you and your friends are doing on our behalf. It must be hard for you, especially at the beginning, standing up for beings you haven’t met and will never meet. So I want to ask you this question: What inspired you to start on this path? And what were the first steps you took?
Respondent 2
‘I looked around, I observed, I saw wisps of the elusive future appear. Like diaphanous clouds against the glowing azure sky. They were here, they were real, they signalled the possibility of renewal. Others of my friends, of my peers and my colleagues, also keenly gazed around us, we saw, we sensed the presence of a whole range of barely perceptible emergent choices to be made. Our super attuned antenna took in messages from microbial prototypes, tuberous filaments, mycelial resonances from this vast underground of ecosystemic, wordless, evolutionary information all of which led us into new directions.
This earthy togetherness induced a mind heart shift, releasing waves of emergent energy. We enjoined in a passionate soul based higher order collaboration, as we peered joyously into the darkness together. We were engrossed in indivisible unity, engulfed by joy and experiential goodwill. Simultaneously we yearned for the unpredictable, the unprecedented, for a totally unexpected shift into ubiquitous life alignment, expressed in a pluriversal outpouring of nascent communion. Again, we unabashedly peered into the pitch black unknown, we were totally immersed, surfing waves of unprecedented nature affirmative action. We nurtured our yearning for the emergence for the unimaginable, ecological transformation, where even every ounce of our frail faith and existential trust, barely portended what was to come’.
Question 3:
Ancestor, I greet you. We know you did not stop with those first steps. There are stories and songs about what you and your friends are doing to leave us a livable world. What they don’t tell us, and what I would really like to know, is where you find the strength to do this. Where do you find the power to keep on going for the sake of life, despite all the obstacles and discouragements? Can you tell me?
Respondent 3
‘We owned, we metabolised our grief, our ingrained patterns of guilt, suspicions and shame. We breathed it in deeply, felt it fully and became blessed by, allowing these experiences to course through us. It was the freeing crucible of our interbecoming. Our collective maturation, ripened through extended fields of being together, even while being besieged by enormous angst and immense uncertainty, whilst also consciously letting go of unnecessary suffering.
Our communal ear bent towards the pulse of the earth, the heartbeat of Gaia. Thrumming through her hardened yet vulnerable crusts, her tectonic plates. We incrementally edged away from the consciousness of a collection of objects, towards becoming a communion of subjects. We tapped into the latent but much obscured, potentials of mutual interdependence. Simultaneously we reawakened the wisdom of the ancients, of the spirits and of animate earth. In so doing we gloried, in the elation of restoring ecosystems of redemption and recovery. Delighting in their freedom to flourish, of myriad creatures, of multicellular beings, of the revitalization and re-emergence of nearly extinct organisms revelling in newly reawakened lives.
We tuned and attuned to the primogenetic beat, the pulse of life in time, reverberating within the core of existence. This beat our beat, its resonances became our guiding light, our north star. From the shared seas of potentialities, the unseen, the unimaginable, the unforeseeable and the unprecedented, anchored in deep faith alerted us to the possible. The future seemed alluring and mysterious and beckoned us forth, towards undreamt of paradigms. Our shared communion became the superconductor, whereby we ushered in the irrational, illogical unexpected, great transition towards the good for myself, for each other and for the planet’.
Compassionate Futures and Self Evaluation
The process as described was unexpectedly confrontational but in a good way. Many of those present if not all, day by day, fight the good fight, do the best work we can in the world, to offset, combat, or build the new in response, to the ecological polycrises. Yet the WHY of this work, often gets submerged in the pressing realities of daily, weekly, monthly, yearly life. These motives and reasons become submerged, subliminal and possibly anxiety infused over the passage of time. The format of the ceremony or ritual and the questions posed, invited these somewhat dormant thoughts, feelings and emotions to come more fully to the surface, to be in some cases experienced anew. When we were earlier in the gathering, exploring the dynamics between wounds and gifts, one recurring theme referred to shame, both the pain and pride contained therein. The already noted presence of shame in relation to the first question, became even more magnified in respondents when pondering their responses.
Furthermore for me in the role of a Future Ancestor, a future recipient and beneficiary of the work of the past generations. I felt a curious sense of entanglement with the feelings, ideas and emotions, presented by each of my three speaking partners. I experienced this as if each person was reading my present day psyche, my text, my thought forms, my prose, whatever the colour, shade or hue. Each of their individual sharing’s shone a light upon my lived experience within, whenever I try to explore these emergent territories. At source, in essence, I felt a sense of non-difference from each speaker, despite each of them being very different characters and also having obviously, very distinct perspectives and personalities in their own right.
One overwhelming gift consequent to the ritual, was that almost everybody apprehended to greater or larger degree. The enormous compassion that the Future Ancestors radiated and transmitted to us, present day humans. This emanation was immensely healing, forgiving and quite pleasantly shocking. While contrasting starkly with the newly brought to the surface lingering, sufferings of shame and impotence. As many respondents expressed heartbreaking feelings of inadequacy and insufficiency, to meet the challenges of our time. The encounter with all embracing compassion from our Future Ancestors was both deeply healing and encouraging.
Almost for all present, there was a strong sense of being unable to measure or match up to the sheer immensity of the current human predicament in the polycrisis. Including the difficulty of even minimally achieving the simplest sense that one was doing enough. This evaluative measure almost universally applied, seemed to me to be to me a kind of self-torture or self-chastisement. As if our protestant forefathers superegos, were peeking over our shoulders, measuring up the exact quantity, quality and adequacy of each person’s moral response to the crisis.
Nevertheless of course, there are degrees of gradation in response to ecological and civilizational collapse. Many are avoidant, detached or inactive or unmoved. Yet this self-selecting group exploring the transformation of organisations to a life aligned way of operating. I would surmise, are all sincerely working actively and energetically with commitment to change themselves and organisations to the benefit of the planet.
So to me this subliminally reactive form of measurement or self-evaluation criteria seems to be particularly self-defeating and draining. Having been dedicated to the transformation of consciousness and culture for over twenty years. I have witnessed many of my own tendencies, habits and patterns that align with this way of perceiving. One does have to clearly embrace the scale of the poly-meta-perma crisis to be truly engaged in the joyous struggle. Yet over time I found the habitual use of exterior measurement, of external reference points like ‘Am I doing enough’ did not energise me. But to me in many ways, identifying with this recurring thoughtform diminishes, or might be a turning me away from, simply facing emotionally, the hyper scale of ever present overwhelm. Which is is in some ways at every human level, the very nature of the crisis itself, on a minute by minute, or hour by hour, or day by day, year by year basis.
Conclusion
Thus sometime ago I concluded that this self evaluative comparative question was not at all personally useful. I now pursue, contemplate and attempt to exemplify life and being alive in all its wonderful dimensions. My yardstick now tends to be ‘How fully am I expressing, sharing and exploring my one wild and precious life? Rather than measuring myself solely, through my actions and doings or assumed impact. I now rely on my inner compass, conscience and intuition, to feedback to me how full my engagement is, in this slow unfolding potential catastrophe of our age.
Thus I contemplate; ‘Am I living fully in the moment? Am I doing my utmost best to appreciate, to enjoy every dimension of my life in as many ways as possible?’ Rather than reactive comparison, I choose my lived experience of life to be my measuring gauge. To be fully alive, to express, enjoy and share, in these dark moments. Seems to be a radical act of life alignment, especially in many of those moments, where all seems or feels to be lost.
Additionally this seems to me to be, a radically compassionate act towards myself. Corresponding with and reciprocating to, that powerful unexpected compassion radiating from the Future Ancestors, that occurred throughout the whole ceremony. Quite likely our potential Future Ancestors have more in common with a Bodhisattva than our austere forbidding Protestant forefathers!
Postscript
A core steward from OD4Life Michelle Holliday also published a poem sharing her perspective on the key sentiments expressed during the Future Ancestor exercise on the OD4Life website.
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About the author Dave Pendle; I am synthesising almost 30 years experience in non profit enterprises with over 40 years of deep personal development experience. Passionate about enabling others’ sense of fulfillment, impact and trust, to engage wholeheartedly with inspiration and commitment to 21st century work and life.
My website Generative You, explains my interests in more in depth, so do sign up for my newsletter or express an interest in my services, or share there how you best like to connect with me. I also run a monthly conversation series Phenomenal Conversations co-exploring life defining topics, with pioneering changemakers who embody systemic and regenerative change in their whole life.