The power of the whole

Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there”, rather than “in here”. It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.

Donella Meadows

On a grey September morning in a damp woodland in rural Somerset, I invited a group of leaders on one of our New Constellations journeys to attune to their whole. 

What constitutes that whole? I asked. Where does it begin and end? Bringing hands to our bodies, I invited the group to connect to the whole body and its different ways of knowing; from the head: seat of intellect, discernment, analysis, strategy, deduction, memory – to the heart: beating, life-giving organ and space of relationality, love, connection, openness, empathy and compassion – and gut: site of our sustenance and seat of our intuition, our passion and will – the fire in the belly – our core strength and inner knowing.

And where do we draw our boundaries? I asked. At the skin membrane? How about the 39 trillion microorganisms living on and in each of us – from microscopic mites on our eyelashes to the bacteria throughout our gut? How about the life-sustaining oxygen-rich air in our lungs – the gift of plant life, via the miracle of photosynthesis converting the energy of a star 93 million miles away… Are the air, that plant life, the star all parts of the whole?

And what of the many many other beings, human and non-human, whose matter, labour and care sustain us? From those that feed us, to our families, friends and ancestors, given and chosen, living and long gone, known and unknown, who have made it possible for us to be here at all. What of the ever-present earth beneath us, sustaining and resourcing it all, with the help of that star 93 million miles away? And beyond that, the ever-expanding universe, the great unknowable beyond of the cosmic whole in which we are all forever nestled and entangled…

What does it mean to consider this whole? And what does it have to do with the urgent, transformational change we need to address the many crises we are facing?

A lot, I think.

BABY HAIR WHORL, SPIRALLING GALAXY, AMMONITE. Credit/gratitude to PATTERNITY & @ANNA_SPIRALS

The root of it all

I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.

James Gustave (Gus) Speth

I was in my early teens when I became fascinated by how real change happens, and eager to play my part. 

An early adopter of climate panic in the early 00s, I spent my secondary school years volunteering and campaigning and eschewed university to get my first NGO job aged 19. I had been orphaned within weeks of my 18th birthday and thrown myself headlong into activism, with more than one therapist later suggesting I’d been “trying to save the world since I couldn’t save my parents”. Reductive I think, but no doubt there is something in it; my tsunami of grief felt somehow smaller in a context of planetary suffering and existential threat, and the distraction of becoming a total workaholic helped too.

So for 15 years I worked, very hard, as a campaigner, cultural strategist and activist. I felt a massive, self-imposed responsibility on my shoulders, was desperate to see big change happen and found community, camaraderie and purpose in the growing climate movement. I learned much about power, theories of change and mobilising people – becoming adept at honing strategies and telling stories to bring audiences round, lobbying parliaments, politicians, business people and international conferences, creating slick films, social media campaigns and countless emails and petitions. I marched, occupied, blockaded, chained myself to things, signed up celebrities, collaborated with some of the world’s biggest artists, worked extremely hard and felt terribly righteous and important. Petitions got millions of signatures, films racked up multi-millions of views, some good policies were adopted (many weren’t), bosses celebrated me (some didn’t). But over time I became less and less able to convince myself it was ‘working’ – we were rolling out the same tactics in what felt like ever more complex conditions, everything appeared to be getting essentially worse and I felt increasingly burned out and cynical.

I was beginning to intuit what I later came to understand very clearly: that so many of the crises we face – from climate collapse to racial and economic inequity, addiction, polarisation, threats to democratic institutions and so much more – are deeply, inextricably entwined, and rooted in stories of separation¹ from our greater whole: our whole selves, each other, our natural world and the beyond (however we choose to characterise that).

In that context, I felt increasingly uneasy about the change-making in which I was so immersed. Our technocratic, siloed policy campaigning and polarising, oppositional approach felt like it was creating more separation, not less. Climate campaigning at that time so often positioned the challenge as simply one of transition to a different energy system to keep running extractive, exploitative capitalism, and set up so many ‘us vs them’ dynamics in a context if ever there was one of needing to bring everyone with us. (Working 50-60 hour weeks for a climate org that expected me to sign away my right to rest and take long haul flights on a ~monthly basis didn’t help.)

Meanwhile, I had been trying to find my way back to myself and around the grief, abandonment, anxiety and you-name-it that was making me very unwell. I began a long road of psychotherapy and healing, and found solace and grounding through a deepening yoga practice and time immersed in non-human nature, getting out of my head and into my body. I took time off to travel alone, and completed three powerful yoga teacher trainings. I began facilitating nature connection programmes and yoga retreats alongside my ‘day job’. I lay in the woods. I cried a lot. I prayed (to nothing in particular, it felt good nonetheless).

Slowly, slowly I felt better. But I also realised how much I had bifurcated these sides of me: the outer-directed activist campaigner trying to fix the world with vigour, force and blame and the inner-directed, tender human trying to fix myself with spirit, care and connection – trying to return to wholeness.

Something clicked as I understood the need to weave these threads, to integrate and invite my whole into my work. I knew it was what I needed, and sensed this was something the world needed too – that transforming our systems will begin with transforming ourselves, and that reconnecting to all we are, each other, our natural world and the unknowable beyond is at the heart of that transformation.

THE MOTHER TREE, LANSDOWN

Not just an inside job

When the deepest and most grounded spiritual vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic, and social institutions, a holy force – the power of wisdom and love in action – is born.

Andrew Harvey

I was not however convinced – as some have argued – that this is simply a matter of ‘heal yourself to heal the world’. 

In fact I saw a huge amount of narcissism and spiritual bypassing² in the wellness and personal development spheres I encountered in that side of my life. I remember having an almost stand-up row with an esteemed yoga teacher who, in one of my trainings, was arguing that suffering was the result of people’s karma and our goal as yogis was to cultivate “neutral mind” rather than get “worked up” in the face of injustice. 

I don’t believe any of us can be truly well in a sick society, and that toxic cultures make us ill³, so pursuits of ‘wellness’ must extend to creating wellbeing in our communities and for our Earth. I don’t believe we can simply meditate our way to world peace. I strongly believe we all have a beautiful, moral duty to move our world in the direction of justice, to help each other reach toward the possibility of thriving for all life and future generations, and to dismantle and reimagine the systems and structures that obstruct those paths. And I want to be very clear that I am not saying we don’t need the committed, brilliant people getting policies passed and running campaigns in this spirit. We desperately do. And we need an all-the-above, bidirectional strategy.

I know transforming our systems in the ways a polycrisis demands will need the outer-directed and head-y stuff, the big ticket, truly transformational policies and huge structural changes. I also know it will take courage, heart, spirit, grace, reconnection, reconciliation, and looking deeply at ourselves and the ways we each maintain and perpetuate separation and suffering at the levels of self, group and system. 

I am excited by the possibility that as we shift the systems and cultures that maintain and deepen separation and suffering, we and future generations will have greater and greater opportunities to heal, individually and collectively.

And I know this transformation will require leaders who aren’t going to sell separation based on their own wounding, who instead are ready to lead toward justice, connection and thriving and to do so in ways that have integrity – another word for which is wholeness.

But what could that look like? Change that cycles, reciprocally, from inner to outer, self to group to system and back again, that comes from a place of wholeness and integrity?

I didn’t know. But by 2018 I’d quit my last ‘proper’ climate job to try and figure out what I might try. A lot of thinking and half-baked Google docs later I hadn’t had much luck, but when Gemma and I started talking (as she outlines in Beginnings) it was soon clear this would become integral to what we might create.

Journeys toward wholeness 

I was thinking: what made this different? How would you explain? In the normal world you bifurcate activities that you may do at a spiritual or wellness retreat where you think about your deep presence on Earth and you separately work with the family construct, and separately with a work retreat about climate or purposeful connection. What this did which felt unique was it combined these three processes. It called on all of us to work on those three levels. This is not how we live.

Participant, New Constellations Wayfinding Journey

And so, we have tried to welcome the whole into the heart of New Constellations.

From the outset we were determined to create something in which we could grapple with the whole, messy enormity of what we are facing – now far more commonly referred to as the poly/metacrisis⁴ – rather than picking off or prioritising issues or taking a siloed approach. We knew we wanted to welcome our own and other people’s whole selves: professional, personal and spiritual, head, heart, body and beyond into the work, and to operate at those levels of self, group and system.

We explored how we might blend and alchemise our various skills and experiences in systems theory, campaign strategy, coalition building, creative facilitation and idea generation, leadership and personal development, nature connection, collaborative enquiry⁵, embodied and somatic practice and more to create what in many ways was what we felt we needed in times of such upheaval (they say “teach what you need to learn”).

We tested early prototypes with trusted others and then more widely, following our intuition and allowing for emergence, and learning and tweaking a lot. We got braver and went deeper over time as we came to develop our journeys as spaces in which very diverse groups could be invited to bring their whole to the hard work of transformative change. (For more on what the journeys are and how they work please see Gemma’s brilliant blog The journey – a methodology for transition and transformation).

We create open, non-hierarchical spaces that invite people to participate as their whole selves, bringing all the many roles they inhabit. From the titles, institutional affiliations and LinkedIn stuff to the friends, parents, pet owners, makers, dancers, gardeners, and hurting, happy, bewildered, complex, dynamic humans we can all be, we welcome the parts people are proud of and the ones in the shadows.

We gently insist upon using our many ways of knowing. We are rigorous when it comes to the strategic and empirical underpinnings of what we do (as Gemma elucidates so powerfully in the blog above), and ambitious about the level of analysis and discourse we hold. But lived experience is as important as learned in those conversations, and insights from people’s many roles are as welcome as each other. We invite people to connect with and deeply trust their inner knowing and InnSæi⁶, and to be guided by their heart’s longing and body’s wisdom as they feel into and begin practising the futures they want to build. We call in the creativity we know resides in everyone, inviting people to dream, visualise, write, draw and tell stories even if they never think of themselves as being skilled in those areas.

We know the importance of a sense of safety and deep trust to be able to do this, and do all we can to cultivate it in our groups. We set expansive, co-created group agreements⁷ and hold everyone, including ourselves, accountable to them. We use sound, ritual, embodied practice, breath work, and time in and learning from nature, to help people regulate, connect with themselves and others, and access their most expansive creative capacities.⁸

As facilitators we bring our whole selves and our own vulnerabilities into the spaces we hold, welcoming powerful emotions and difficult conversations as part of the process of change, naming the elephants in the room, owning our (many) mistakes, and always learning. And even if it feels overwhelming at times, we try to be genuinely holistic and intersectional about the challenges we are facing and what it will take to meet them, holding the messy enormity over quick fixes, “staying with the trouble” as Donna Haraway beautifully puts it.

We invite people to connect to and articulate their values and what really matters to them, in ways they may not have before. People’s faith and spirituality has had a strong and welcome presence in many journeys, and many have remarked at how important it feels to bring this to the work of change. Several young people in particular have described the journey as a spiritual experience, and nothing has made me prouder. For those of us without faith in increasingly secular societies, it’s rare and precious to have spaces to collectively explore our values and moral codes, and so many of us are longing for transcendent experiences, ritual and community to make sense of the world.⁹

Our audio practice – integrated in the journeys and published in over 50 beautiful encounters – creates space for personal reflection and sense-making for those recording. For listeners, the pieces Jo so skilfully edits (excerpts from which we play out in the journeys) are not only meditative and often deeply moving but a unique way of uncovering the patterns and rich connections across voices that might otherwise seem disconnected – helping participants feel seen and heard as part of a larger whole (more on this in Jo’s moving blog on the subject).

And we have tried to practise ways of working and being as a team and organisation that honour the whole – as Lily explains in her excellent blog (which is also a treasure trove of practical tips and resources). This has meant showing up as our whole selves internally, making space for each other to work, care, rest and play in the ways we need to, being guided by the bigger cycles of which we are a part including our bodies’, nature's and the wheel of the year¹⁰, treating time in nature as ‘work’ in the same way we would a Zoom meeting, and doing all we can to reach toward ways of working and being that embody the values we espouse.

Over time it has become clearer that what we have been trying to give people – ourselves included – is encouragement and space in which to test and practise new ways of being: ones we sense we will need to be able to create futures of human and planetary flourishing.

Many participants have later told us that getting in touch with their other ways of knowing, different parts of themselves, each other and nature are things that remain with them long, long after the process. In this more connected state, as Gemma shared, they are better able to relate to and act in service of the whole.

New stories of possibility

Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

I, too, have been forever changed. I am more deeply connected to myself and my values, so much clearer about who I am, how I want to live, the work I want to do and ways I hope to be of service, and the future I want to help create for my children, all children and future generations.

I will not pretend it has been easy or that we’ve cracked it – we learned so much as we went, could go so much further, and it’s a constant challenge and practice to recommit to. A lot of our work has been extremely demanding strategically, emotionally and in terms of time, and I have often found myself stressed and disconnected, especially in the juggle with my very young family. But we have really tried, and created many glimpses and glimmers of new ways of being, and I’m very proud of that.

We have said before that we believe real change starts with new stories of possibility, and of course this doesn’t happen overnight. But I believe that over these five years New Constellations has become a story of stories of new possibilities: those crafted by each of our beautiful crews and collaborators in their individual and collective journeys, and our own. I believe these stories are taking root in all of us, that there is always further to go to deepen, grow and embody them (something we will explore in our chrysalis) but that we are well on our way.

To welcome the whole and hold space for the enormity of all we are facing, especially in times of such unimaginable horror and suffering, feels big because it is big. But I think the sooner we embrace that, the better our chances of breakthrough. And the conditions for breakthroughs are shaped by us: by our campaigns, by our cultures and stories, and by the human conditions that pull us either further away from or closer toward each other.

My wish is that we can put the transformation and healing I believe we all need at the service of collective, systemic transformation, via an all-the-above, inside-out and outside-in strategy, and that that in turn can serve each of us and those that follow. I hope we can all fall in love with the whole: our whole selves, each other, our natural world and the great cosmic whole. Because, as a very wise young person on our last journey said, “If you love something, you’ll look after it and you’ll protect it. And you wouldn’t want to hurt or destroy it.”

Here’s to that.

A PORTION OF OUR MILKY WAY GALAXY’S CORE. CREDIT NASA’S JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE

1. Stories for Life have done some great work on the narrative of separation: https://stories.life/chapter/the-narrative-of-separation/

2. A phrase coined by John Welwood to describe the use of spiritual ideas and practices to avoid engaging with more challenging aspects of the human experience – many have written about how this can maintain oppression, racism, victim-blame in the context of abuse and so forth.

3. Part IV of Dr Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal is a clear precis (among others) of the relationships between toxic cultures, structures and politics and individual physical and emotional health.

4. For an exploration of these different terms (and more) see Jonathan Rowson & Perspectiva’s essay Prefixing the World. Jonathan’s report Spiritualise (2014/2017) was another early influence on my thinking in this wider territory.

5. The Nature Enquiries I had been curating with Jessie Teggin, Leo Kay, Fiona MacDonald and James Turner at The Quadrangle Trust were hugely influential in myriad ways, and I owe a debt of gratitude to those co-creators and all our participants.

6. Icelandic for intuition, this word introduced to us by the wonderful Hrund Gunnsteinsdóttir means the sea within (the flow of our unconscious mind) to see within (how we introspect) and to see from the inside out (how we navigate the world) and has become a key reference for the ‘At Sea’ part of our journeys. See Hrund’s book InnSaei for a deep exploration of this term.

7. A set of norms or ground rules by which a group chooses to abide – see Seeds for Change for a good summary. Group agreements at NC journeys have included everything from being kind and respectful to ourselves and others, being present and device-free to having the freedom to change your mind, using the voices of the head, heart and gut and using ‘oops’ and ‘ouch’ to acknowledge harm (and much, much more).

8. These tools draw on polyvagal theory and the work of the Nature Connectedness Research Group as well as our own experience. 

9. The Sacred Design Lab are among many researchers who explore this in depth, and brands and marketers are starting to as well (the risk of co-option is great as Daniel Kim outlines here) 

10. An annual cycle of seasonal festivals marking the solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter points between them, and honouring the seasonal changes and energies each bring. Those of you who have received our newsletters will know we’ve used these as guideposts for our communications and wider work.