MindStream

Our economic and ecological systems are at war. Unless we overhaul the entire economic system and its associated mindsets of nature as resource, the myth of infinite growth, and humans as endless consumers, we are going to topple over  the edge into a vortex of existential crises. We are already facing irreversible climate change. And there’s no time to dither. The time to transform is now. 

What will a regenerative future look like unshackled from the dominance and duality of isms and dogmas?

What are the exiled capacities that we need to re-activate within ourselves as individuals and collectives to co-create a future different from the past?

This has been a truly remarkable decade for movement-building, social change, and deep, profound shifts in ideas, perspective, and frameworks for broad parts of the population (and, of course, backlashes against all those things). ~Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

The grassroots movements dotting the planet today from #FridaysforFuture to #FarmersProtest in India, from #DemocracyforMyanmar to #BlackLivesMatter, and many more herald the rising of a different force. Led by people from all walks of life, these ‘movement of movements’ are not led by an individual or an ‘ism’, there is no one in charge, and these are localized, but also profoundly interconnected and global. They are not only spanning but also collapsing borders and boundaries, demonstrating the indelible interconnection we all share. 

May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells—for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.

#Regeneration has become something of a catchphrase, a buzzword in the past few years. We are in the midst of simultaneous systems collapse--economic, ecological, political, social, and spiritual. According to Frijof Capra, if we follow these crises upstream, we encounter a crises of consciousness, perception, and values. I also think we are in a crises of narratives. 

#Narratives are compasses that help us to make sense of apparent chaos. But more than that, they tell us how to be, what to do, and who to become in the cultural contexts of our existence. However, our current narratives have run their course. They are stretched to their limits and increasingly incapable of holding the civilization on course. It is time to hospice the old narratives, and co-create new ones.

The co-creation of new narratives will require people from all walks of life to come together. And this is already happening in the form of, what Paul Hawken calls, "the movement of movements." These are evident in uprisings taking place across the globe from #Farmers Protest in India to #BlackLivesMatter in the USA, from the #WeNeedDemocracy protests in Myanmar to #FridaysForFuture by young people across the world fighting for the planet. 

These are seemingly disparate yet deeply interconnected uprisings. They have certain foundational beliefs and values that override the surface differences--values of justice and fairness, of respect for all sentient beings--human and more-than-human, of making life-affirming choices and acting as the voice of #Gaia. Most importantly, these movements are grassroot, spontaneous, and aim to rise above the hegemony of power, politics, and privileges.

We all have our own unique gifts to bring to the co-creation of a #regenerativefuture. I believe my work lies at the intersection of my gift, my deep rage, and what I can hold with radical tenderness. This brings me to working with organizations on the cusp of transformation. I believe organizations have the power to bring about transformative change, to become regenerative businesses that help the Planet to thrive. This is way beyond shareholder profit and quarterly growth, and calls for leaders who can become #stewards, #facilitators, and #wayfinders for an essentially map-less terrain. 

Such leaders not only hold space for the new to emerge but also embody the future in the present. This ability to straddle multiple contexts at the  same time is true wisdom.

MATURITY is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past, the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what is happening now and what is about to occur. ~Anais Nin

Wordle to inspire ideas for a Regenerative Future

Michelle Holliday, the author of The Age of Thrivability, describes it thus:

Thrivability is a worldview, a global movement, and an active practice. Guided by what we know about living systems, it is a continual and purposeful drive to create the fertile conditions for life to thrive at the levels of the individual, the organization, the community and the biosphere. Profoundly practical, it is distinguished by a deep understanding of how life works – and by intentional participation in that pattern. The thrivability movement recognizes that only by aligning with life in the spirit of learning, compassion, contribution and play can we find the motivation and the means to collaborate and innovate at the levels required.

Kate Raworth, in her stellar Ted Talk titled A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow, asks us to reimagine the shape of progress.

Humanity’s 21st Century challenge is clear – to meet the needs of all people within the means of this extraordinarily unique living planet so that we, and the rest of nature can thrive.

I believe organizations that embrace thriving over growth have the power to become healing forces. They will be built on wiser assumptions about human possibility and planetary boundaries. They will be free to make life-affirming choices. 

Given this context, what qualities would a healing organization founded on the principles of Thrivability look like? But first, why am I focusing on organizations? Because, I believe:

Organizations are uniquely placed to have a massive impact toward building “a more beautiful world.” Because they are platforms of convergence where individuals come together, the Narratives, Metaphors, and Purpose that drive organizations can have tremendous influence on how people connect, collaborate, and co-create.

These unseen and intangible influences create the field which drives organizational behavior. Thus, to reinvent organizations, we need to re-imagine these underlying constructs — new narratives, new metaphors, and a shared Evolutionary Purpose.…

To become a conscious organization is a deliberate choice, which then leads to many small, thoughtfully undertaken actions and decisions over a period of time. These have a cumulative and a gradually percolating effect that can shift the trajectory of an organization.

The fact that we humans have such a notoriously hard time changing our minds undoubtedly has to do with the notion that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” which belies the great robbery of the human experience — by calling ourselves beings, we deny our ever-unfolding becomings.

Only in childhood are we afforded the luxury of inhabiting our becoming, but once forced to figure out who we want to be in life, most of us are so anxious about planting that stake of being that we bury the alive, active process of our becoming. In our rush to arrive at who we want to be, we flee from the ceaseless mystery of our becoming. ~Maria Popova

As the world literally burns around us, we have to admit that we have brought ourselves to the brink of everything. The narratives, structures, and perceptual framings that we had assumed and accepted as the 'way things are' have fallen apart. We don’t yet have a credible, alternative, collective narrative that can help us to reimagine a new world – a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. 

We are now residing in a place between stories – a liminal space filled with possibilities, potentials, and promise. We don’t yet know the exact outline of the New Story. But we can sense and feel the seeds; we know that the soil is being prepared; we recognize that we all have a part to play. It is up to each one of us to be heralds and emissaries of the new story – a story founded on us reclaiming our humanity, recognizing our interconnectedness, regaining our agency, authenticity, and wholeness.

The new story calls for a collective awakening, of making choices that will emanate from a shift in consciousness and impact every aspect of our existence – social, political, economics, ecological, and spiritual. It is no longer about individual preferences or even the choices of a handful of organizations. 

For this collective shift to happen, we must move from a Story of Separation to a Story of Interbeing.

Charles Eisenstein puts is beautifully when he says:

Befriending Uncertainty

To fully step into this liminal space of uncertainty-- embodying potential, possibilities, power-- and to become stewards of a new way of being on this planet, we must befriend and welcome the uncertain, the unknown, the ambiguous. Only by learning to dwell in this liminal space with gentle curiosity can we actualize the future that wants to emerge through us.

None of us have a map to this unknown world. I have tried to distill some core qualities we need to embark on this voyage as compass…

Every choice we make is a vote for the kind of world we wish to manifest!

Individual and collective choices intersect and intertwine to create the sociopolitical, economic and ecological realm we inhabit. Many of our choices are coming back to haunt us now—inadvertent and thoughtless choices that directly affect our ecosystem; biased choices that are now showing up as fault lines and cracks in our societies—from vanishing worker rights to crumbling healthcare, from disintegrating supply chains to starving millions—causing untold misery and deprivation for many; selfish choices that are now mockingly emphasizing our ineradicable and intricate interconnectedness and interbeing. 

Covid19 has effectively underscored all the fault lines of our current civilization—from appalling inequality to alarming political apathy to absolute disconnect from the reality of life. All the fissures and fractures of this fragmented world has converged under one umbrella triggered by an invisible virus. And the world has come to a juddering halt. Our choices have shrunk to maneuvering the mundane.

“We are our choices,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. We cannot abdicate the role our choices have played in bringing us to this moment of global reckoning in the form of a zoonotic virus. The signs of catastrophe have been all around us for the past few decades, with an exponential acceleration in calamities over the last few years from the Australian bushfires to the Amazon rainforest fires to the floods in Asia and other significant world events of 2019—all of which portend some sort of disaster—social, political, economic, and ecological. 

We’ve known for a long time that our civilizational trajectory was heading toward catastrophe. Yet, most of us have chosen to carry on with “business as usual” in spite of dire warnings from scientists about the untold suffering we are heaping upon our planet. Apparently, even the coronavirus pandemic had been predicted. 

Do we dare to befriend this uncertainty? Do we dare to dream of a different destiny? Will we use the pandemic as a portal to magnify all that is magnanimous within us? Is this our collective tryst with destiny moment? 

What behaviors do we need to demonstrate and embody to lead us into a regenerative future?  What narratives can we energize and envision to act as compasses in an unknown territory?  What old stories, patterns, and structures must we hospice to move toward a regenerative future?  What are the new stories, patterns, and structures we must midwife to step into a regenerative future?  How can we hold space for meaning-making, sensing, and emergence?  Above all, how do we “need to be” to stay with uncertainty, to welcome uncertainty?  What messages will this liminal space yield up, whisper to us if we have the nerve to step back, slow down, let go of our resistance, and care to listen deeply?

None of us have the answers. But if we live into the questions, I trust that the answers will emerge from our collective intentions and actions. We need to acknowledge uncertainty, dwell in the unknown, and hold space for ourselves and others as rapid and irrevocable change tears down every known bulwark and buttress.

Human beings are psychologically addicted to predictability. We prefer to be cushioned by the mundane ordinariness of life rather than dwell in the discomfort of the unknown. We will grab at any distraction to escape the awful, hollow, and helpless void of the unknown. 

With the onset of the pandemic, our routes of distraction have been snatched away without any promise of return. What we have been offered instead are revelations into the fault lines and inequalities in our societies we would rather not see; exposures to the absurd and ludicrous ineptness of governance that leave us stupefied; and experiences of the creaking and collapsing public infrastructures that are woefully inadequate in meeting the demands of the moment. And the exposure to the brutal and unimaginable divide between the top 1% and the bottom 50% of the world’s population. 

The virus has laid bare the pervasive brokenness we had papered over for far too long in their shameful, pitiful, and burning details. Our privilege is no longer our refuge. Our privilege now bestows on us a grave responsibility. A grave responsibility to reclaim our humanity and all it entails—compassion, care, empathy, connection, justice, equality, and dignity for all. A responsibility to remove the viciousness of social pathologies where we have lost touch with our own humanity in the pursuit of power, profit, privilege, pleasure, and political perversions. It is our opportunity to heal ourselves and our only home.    

What would a world where all sentient beings and the Planet flourished feel like?

How would it feel if our inextricable interdependencies and interconnectedness were deeply honored in all our decisions—social, economic, political, and spiritual?

How would we behave if we could touch the profound core of our entanglement with each other and the Planet?

How would we reimagine a world where the unheard, the unseen, the disavowed are no longer invisibilized and delegitimized? Where humanity is not divided into hierarchies…

The concept of the pluriverse upends the self-proclaimed superiority and universalization of Western universality, embracing instead a world of multitudes and their myriad cosmologies and ontologies. It is in direct contradiction to the sterilized and homogenous narrative that seeks to iron out irregularities and inconsistencies to maintain a façade of universalism. 

A regenerative, thrivable future can only be constructed by holding sacred the vision of an abundantly diverse, interwoven, and interdependent universe. By remembering, reclaiming, and retrieving the lost stories from the fringes, by bringing back the “primitive” and the “folklore” because that is where the roots of integration lie. 

A regenerative future must needs be one where many worlds fit. Many worlds with their many ontologies. A pluriverse is constructed of embodied, partial, and situated knowledge, where playing the “god trick” has no place.