Falling out of the sky and surviving 40 days in the Colombian Amazon

July 24, 2023 No Comments

Falling out of the sky and surviving 40 days in the Colombian Amazon

You may have heard the story of the four children who survived a plane crash in the Amazonian jungle in Columbia and were found after 40 days. 

When the story first filtered through the news it was hailed as a triumph of the Columbian armed forces and the indigenous people working together. If you read more closely you can hear it as a story about the differences between an indigenous and western way of solving an almost impossible problem. 

There were seven people onboard the plane and when it had engine failure and went down in the jungle. The adults — the children’s mother and two pilots were found perished in the wreckage and there were signs that the four children from the indigenous Huitoto tribe, aged 13, nine, five, and one, had survived. But they were in such a deep part of the jungle it was nearly impossible for search crews to find them. The Columbian government deployed more than 100 soldiers but it was so dense and the conditions so difficult that many of them dropped out of the search. 

Meanwhile the eldest girl was taking care of her two younger sisters and younger brother. At 13 years old she had already been given the knowledge of how to live in the jungle. She had taken the baby and built a hammock in the trees for her where she was safe and happy. They knew which fruits could be eaten and they were eating cassava flour saved from the plane. 

After many days of searching one of the indigenous elders did a ceremony to dialogue with the spirit of the jungle about their predicament. They were in such a deep place where “no human was ever meant to go,” that the elder offered to the jungle his own life in exchange for the children. After a deal was made, he gave the Indigenous guard on the search team specific instructions on what to do when the children would be found the very next day, as they were. 

In his account of the search, Columbian activist Manual Rozental emphasizes that it was not technology or the armed forces that found them, but the indigenous knowledge and in particular women’s knowledge. 

Designing for More Aliveness

June 13, 2023 No Comments

Designing for More Aliveness

Christopher Alexander and the quest for balance in architecture, systemic constellations and human-centered design

We all know what it’s like to step into a space that on first impression feels good, uplifting, harmonious in some way. As we look around at our spaces we can take a moment of pause, feel a sense of ease from the beauty in a landscape, the view from a window, the layout of a room, the posture of a building.

Christopher Alexander was an architect and visionary theorist who wondered about the beauty of a village, a building, a built environment, and asked, What makes it so? And how might this quality of “rightness” be repeated? How might it scale? He thought there was a timeless way of building and that places of beauty were made by people who are close to this way. Alexander set out to find the common patterns that generate the most aliveness in a structure, with the goal of helping more people to be able to create beautiful environments and ultimately a more beautiful world.

He analyzed which buildings and spaces people had resonance with and derived 253 unique patterns described in his book “A Pattern Language.” With this book he wanted to provide a practical glossary that people could reference and reverse engineer for beauty. In the beginning of his quest he called the quality he was searching for “the quality without a name.” Later he named it “wholeness” in Nature of Order which relates to human relationships the feelings of belonging to the place and structure.

In Alexander’s inquiry there are many parallels with Systemic Constellations. In the language of Constellations we would say that Alexander was looking to define the place of balance, where systems come into equilibrium. Systemic Constellation shares in Christopher Alexander’s goal of propagating for beauty, balance, and looks at the relationship between diverse parts of an environment in order to architect for harmony.

The constellations approach is different in that instead of giving people a glossary of patterns to reference, we help people to develop their own capacities for perception. Once they get a felt sense for this senses of balance and harmony they can apply it, not only to building, and environments, but to anything humans “make,” including social systems. We include how things are today and often include a representative for the full vision of what the work could be.

The design process that Christopher Alexander used in building his first client home in Albany, California began with Alexander asking the owner Andre Sala to close his eyes and describe “the most beautiful and comfortable room you can remember.” What he envisioned was a memory of the farmhouse he had visited as a boy in the south of France. This became the center of the home.

Previous
Next

While the overall form of the house was planned in advance, it was not driven from behind a desk. Many design decisions were made as building progressed. For example, the placement of windows and the height of ceilings was determined on site by first creating mockups in cardboard. Christopher Alexander said the mockups were considered not by a standard of “Do I like it?” but by considering “In all the variations I can think of, which is the one that makes me feel most wholesome, most whole in myself?”

The act of design and construction is recast into an inquiry about wholeness and balance. This was a departure from the typical process at the time, where an edifice was conceived on a drafting table, with building plans and requirements ruling the process, and then imposed onto a site.  Instead for Alexander the guiding questions were about balance, comfort and harmony. Every detail was finalized on site and in relationship to what was already there. There was a strong awareness of pre-existing patterns, conditions, and history. 

As a human centered designer, I recognize the transition to an iterative process that I have seen over the course of my career in the technology. In the packaged software era, we would create a monolith of code, test it based on our best in-house knowledge, and then release it to the marketplace. If there were errors or lapses in functionality, these would be fixed when the next monolith of code was released. In the late 90s it was apparent to all that the approach needed to be more dynamic for the web environment. I became interested in the human interaction with the system, and found a home in user research where we started testing early prototypes with different audiences. Bringing end users into the design process brought more aliveness and balance into these systems, not to mention making the products functional and wildly successful. 

Before the boom of user-centered design, technology was being driven by “What does the business want?” and “What do the technologists know how to build?” Today we now regularly include “What do our audiences want” as part of the process, but there is mounting un-ease that we are still out of balance. We are now being asked to look for who or what has been excluded from our process. For example, is a vast number of human populations who have been left out, and we are rarely asking how to include nature or the earth in the design process. Systemic constellations gives us a way to grow in our capacities to diagnose these imbalances and exclusions. We can learn to design for wholeness, balance, and aliveness. 

Alexander cautioned us to not lose sight of the fact that systems are embedded and in relationship with other systems. 

“This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole, and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.” -Christopher Alexander

There was recently a conversation about Christopher Alexander in the Pop-Up School with Bonnitta Roy. and the metaphysical tones that were present in his first book: 

Roy: “calling the book a ‘first step in the society-wide process by which people will gradually become conscious of their own pattern languages and work to improve them.’ Alexander thought that the languages which govern people today are brutal and fragmented, and that most people have lost any true language to speak with at all. It was his goal to penetrate deep into the nature of things, to the core of all possible pattern languages, which can make people feel alive and human.

Christopher Alexander describes the balance he is looking for: 

“I first feel existence shimmering in reality, and I then feel it deep enough in the thing I am looking at and trying to make, to know it is worth capturing in concrete and wood and tile and paint. … This thing, this something, is not God, it is not nature, it is not feeling. It is some ultimate, beyond experience. When I reach for it, I try to find— I can partly feel— the illumination of existence, a glimpse of that ultimate. It is always the same thing at root. Yet, of course, it takes an infinite variety of different forms.”

Roy goes on to say that Alexander noticed that, when in the presence buildings or structures that have the quality of aliveness, whether natural or man-made, something was released in him— his true voice — or he was released into something — his natural state. At first he experienced this as getting closer and closer to his true self, but then he realized he was touching “something vast, existing outside of myself and inside myself, as if it were a contact with the eternal, something everlasting existing before me, in me, and around me.”

Alexander describes how he knows what he’s looking for in an embodied way:

“This is what I have felt on the beach on the north shore of Point Reyes, near San Francisco, when the sea comes crashing in with enormous force, when the water and wind are too loud for me to hear my voice, the waves too strong for me to think of swimming, the force of the water and the wind, the white foam of the waves, the blackish green moving water, the huge, loud grinding swells, the beach sand that goes on forever, the seaweeds strewn on the beach that have been hurled by a force greater than they are— as I am, also, when I walk among them.”

“Yet, even though I am next to nothing in the presence of all this forces, I am free there. In such a place, at such a moment, I am crushed to understand my own smallness, and then understand the immensity of what exists. But this immensity of what exists— and my connection to it— is not only something in my heart. It is a vastness which is outside me and beyond me and inside of me.”

This speaks to how we develop our ability to design for balance in a system. In systemic constellations if there is a stakeholder from they system we are designing for, we can architect a living map of the system and use our embodied felt sense to see how the creative impulse moves of its own accord. This can be done for all acts of creation — setting up a room, drawing, painting, programming.

Too Coarse an Instrument

May 25, 2023 No Comments

Too Coarse an Instrument

The mind is too coarse an instrument to gather deeper signals from the world This is the role of the body as the sensorium. — Bonnita Roy

There was a lot of resonance when I came across Bonnie’s work. Not only for mind-expanding perspectives on consciousness and ways of knowing — but because she stewards a 10-acre farm in New England and connects many of her findings to what she knows about training horses. 🐎

Translating worldviews

March 17, 2023 No Comments

Translating worldviews

Mashpee Indian Meeting House
Mashpee Indian Meeting House

I have been curious to find stories from the early days of encounters between Natives and settlers from the early days around Cape Cod, from the moment when two worldviews met, to see what was in the air in the moment before one assumed dominance over the other. I have been following the story of Richard Bourne who lived in my hometown of Sandwich and was an early minister and missionary to the Wampanoag people. He helped to establish the neighboring town of Mashpee and was frequently called upon as the arbitrator when it came to land deeds and to drawing the first borders around Sandwich and Barnstable. The intention of the settlers was to recreate as closely as possible the English-style towns they left and to gather Natives willing to convert to Christianity into “Praying Towns” led by Native converts under colonial jurisdiction. Bourne spoke some Wampanoag language and is credited with translating the Lord’s Prayer into Wampanoag.

This detail piqued my interest, as learning a language requires relationship and a strong desire to communicate and to be understood. Who was teaching Bourne the Wampanoag language? And what were those first communications like with the ones he was learning from? I can hardly imagine the many hours spent of mistakes, misunderstanding, and then understanding.

After the Lord’s Prayer, the English Bible was translated into Algonquin and printed at the press at the Harvard Indian College in 1663. It is known by the name of the missionary who oversaw the project, John Eliot.

In a discussion with historians Barry O’Connell and Lisa Brooks, they talk about how as Europeans moved westward across Turtle Island, there was a series bibles translated into local languages. Each edition attributes the translation to an English or European minister. However it was most certainly Native people who did the work of translation. In most cases, the ministers named did not have the fluency to be able to translate. North America at the time was multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and trans-national. In the Northeast region there were many languages before the English arrived that were very different from each other, for example Abanaki and Mohawk languages. There were always some people identified in the tribes who were particularly adept at learning languages.
 
Historical marker at Hassanamesit

Lisa Brooks points out that the Eliot Bible project gained momentum when James the Printer, the Nipmuc man who ran the printing press at the Harvard Indian College, and 4 or 5 of his Native companions became involved in the translation.

The other sign that makes it clear it was Natives who translated is the way they brought to the text their own way of seeing the world. Translation is never direct letter for letter. The indigenous worldview is infused throughout the translated version, and the Algonquin spiritual cosmology speaks through it. It contains points of view that Puritan ministers at the time would have found blasphemous to their cultural worldview.

One example Lisa Brooks gives is that in the Psalter, “My God” is translated as “Num-Manittoom,” where “Manittoom” is the animating spirit that flows through all things. It is the life force itself. There is no concept in Algonquin of good and evil, heaven or hell, and so this life force is one that has the potential for both creation and destruction. And Manittoom has the pronoun “Num,” “my dearly beloved,” where “my” is relational and not possessive. There is no way to talk about a divine power that was only externalized. In these two words we can understand that there is a personal relationship to the life force that runs through everything.

This is the worldview that has long been woven in to the landscape of the Northeast, still multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and trans-national. These worldviews are well supported to be reincorporated into our society and the way we live in this place today.

Waking Up a Sleeping Language

March 7, 2023 No Comments

Waking Up a Sleeping Language

The Wampanoag language of Cape Cod and the Northeast US had been known as a “sleeping language,” with no native speakers for the last 100 years.

Through the Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project, linguists and teachers are building connections to reconstitute the grammar and pronunciation through closely related languages like Blackfeet, Cree, Ojibwe, Passamaquoddy, and Sauk that are still spoken.

There is now at least one very young native speaker, with many more to come. This means we can most definitely re-thread a fabric of memory that has been frayed and re-enlived what looked to be sleeping.

The math on where we’re headed

February 23, 2023 No Comments

The math on where we’re headed

Nauset Light, Eastham

The universe is said to have a direction where it is heading. Roger Penrose, Nobel laureate in physics, has done the math on where that is.

Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss:

SHELDRAKE:
Roger Penrose in his latest theory about cosmology, is that the entire universe goes on expanding faster and faster, until all the matter evaporates into light. And that the universe ends when everything is dissolved into light.

It’s the opposite of the contracting universe cosmology which was fashionable until about the year 2000. People thought that because of all of the dark matter, and mass in the universe, the expansion of the universe would slow down. It would stop expanding and begin to contract faster and faster, until it all imploded into a terminal black hole. So in that vision, everything ended in darkness.

In Penrose’s vision, everything ends in light. Fortunately we are poised somewhere in between the two at the moment.

It is interesting that in his cosmological vision everything dissolves in light. Which then, he says, gives rise to a new universe. By a kind of mathematical slight of hand he suddenly says, Well if its all light and it has no dimensions, then you might as well contract it by thousands of orders of magnitude until it just becomes a Big Bang and starts another universe. That is, I think, slightly fanciful, but it’s interesting that his cosmology is the entire cosmos transformed into light.

VERNON:
The way I read his explanation of a transition from a massively expanded cosmos where all is light to the beginning of something new is that:

When everything becomes light, not only does time disappear, because light exists in eternity, in timelessness — but also space disappears for the same reasons. Traveling at the speed of light, light does not know dimensions. And so you move towards a cosmos where there is no space, no time, and that is like the aboriginal seed bed, the source, the origin, for a new cosmos. Out of nothing, literally; a reality where there is no space or time, outside of eternity.

Words we’ll need in ecotopia

February 5, 2023 No Comments

Words we’ll need in ecotopia

One way to start creolizing the new world of our dreams.

“If another world is possible, as activists and scholars frequently assert, what might it look, taste, and feel like? An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be.” via Atmos magazine.

What social issue constellations show about how to “change the system”

March 2, 2022 No Comments

What social issue constellations show about how to “change the system”

The process of systemic constellations was originally developed for looking at an individual’s questions about their wellbeing and the world around them. To do this we look at the systems a person belongs to — families, geographies, organizations, societies, nations. This wider context shows new ways to bring healing and transformation for individuals. So as practitioners we couldn’t help but wonder: can systemic constellations bring healing and transformation for society too?

This is my summary of learnings about social issue constellations inspired by the Awakening the Field conference held on February 19, 2022.

Previous slide
Next slide

Contents:

Organized by Jan Jacob Stam, Dees van de Hoef, and team, the Awakening the Field conference included fifteen systemic constellation processes on social issues:

  • Migration
  • Authoritarianism
  • Racism and slavery
  • Nature and environment
  • Climate change
  • Gender in a changing society
  • Corruption
  • Structural violence
  • Civic leadership
  • Female leadership
  • Healing after disasters like Fukoshima
  • Repressive social systems
  • The future of education
  • Indigenous wisdom
  • Fractal communities

The importance of acknowledging our place

One of the complexities when doing a systemic process about social issues is that we ourselves are not outside of the system we are attempting to see. This is true for facilitators, case bringers, and for participants.

What this means for facilitators

For facilitators it is harder to assume a space of objectivity that they may have when facilitating a topic for businesses, organizations, or family systems. It means that they are also subjected to the social currents they are looking at. This can show itself in the choices they make about how to set up a constellation, what the group focuses on, and the interventions suggested. It can also effect whether the facilitator has a bias to move the constellation to a “good” outcome.

What this means for case bringers

The case bringer is a person who is stepping forward as someone directly affected by the social issue. In the constellation we try to understand how the larger social current effects them; how the systemic principles are playing out; and what are the hidden dynamics. In a constellation we can see more clearly how this person is oppressed or empowered in the face of systemic dynamics. And we can see how they might be able to shift to have more strength, vitality, and effectiveness.  

What this means for participants

As we listen to a question brought by a case bringer and observe a constellation, Jan Jacob Stam suggests that all participants consider “from what place” we are listening.

Ways of listening

These are the three main ways of listening. Each corresponds to a different consciousness within a system.

1. Listening from a place of problem solving, looking for solutions, answers, and new ideas.

This is the default place that we likely all know well.

2. Listening from a place of finding “the good reasons” why things are the way they are.

If there is something happening currently that we do not like, chances are that something has been bound in the system for a long time. We look for the story behind the story, following the thread to trace why this current binding “makes perfect sense.”

Jan Jacob often says:
“Change starts with accepting things exactly as they are.”

He has since evolved this axiom to:
“Change starts with loving the world exactly as it is.”

Where love makes it an active form of acceptance, rather than a passive one. This doesn’t mean we love the hellishness that we see in the world; it means that we try to find the equanimity to trace the life force back upstream for where the hellishness began.

3. Listening from a place of not knowing.

In the practice of Social Presencing Theater, Arawana Hayahi calls this place of stillness “the Ma,” the gap where it looks and feels like nothing is happening. This stillness is the place from which a “True Move” can come.

When listening from this place we may perceive that something is coming to an end or something new is starting to emerge. This is the place from which a system starts to reorganize itself spontaneously.

Previous slide
Next slide

How systemic constellations for a social issue are set up

There are three main ways to begin a process:

1. One case bringer puts forward their concern or question about a social issue; representatives are determined by a dialogue between the facilitator and case bringer.

2. One case bringer introduces their concern or question, but it is on behalf of a wider collective. They are invited to enlarge their own system and consider on behalf of how many they are bringing the question. After they introduce the topic, participants in the group are invited to add to the question of the case bringer.

The representatives are determined by a dialogue with the facilitator, the case bringer, and those in the group who have added to the question. 

3. All participants in the group are asked “which topics are in the air,” where each participant is a representative of society in the moment. The full group in this way develops a set of questions, which are then narrowed down.

Some of these methods have been developed to mitigate the fact that we all are part of the system we are exploring. 

Example of constellating an individual’s relationship to a social issue: Gender

As part of the conference, Elena Vesalago facilitated a constellation on the changing meaning of gender in society. She pointed out that there have been major changes in the last decades with regard to how gender is held — what it means to be a woman; what it means to be a man. It varies greatly by country and region and for example in the United States language is also adapting. In businesses, schools, and government, it is becoming more widely accepted to self-select your preferred gender pronouns. In other regions these changes show up differently and are constrained by comparison; there may be more or less tolerance for homosexuality for example. The goal of a systemic process is not to change these social norms per se, but to illuminate how they operate. 

Elena guided the group through a process where each person  explored how the changing field of Maleness and Femaleness affected them.

Previous slide
Next slide

Step 1: Acknowledgement

This was done as a full group exercise, where she placed two objects: one representing the Field of Men and one representing the Field of Women.

Participants we were asked to look at the object representing the Field of Men. As we looked, we were asked to connect in a reflective way and feel into the ways we have been influenced by the Field of Men. This is not the chromosomal definition of sex, but everything that it means in society to be a man; the cultural story of maleness.

Similarly we were then guided to look at the object representing the Field of Women and sense in to the ways we have been influenced by the Field of Women. As part of the looking, we connected with all of the ways these influences may have been difficult or limiting.

In my own experience, as I looked at the Women representative, I had a kind of affection and familiarity with this representative. And was aware that I know very well how to behave in a womanly way. I had used this knowledge in life and it serves me in many ways. As I looked towards the object representing the field of Men, I could see how this field also influences me as a women. It lit up a network of internally held things “you just know” about this field, spoken and unspoken. I know how to be seen as though I am behaving, dressing, or acting like a man, and connected with how I unconsciously calibrate accordingly. 

I also saw how belonging to the field of Women can in some ways be a source of tension – the expectations, the experiences of ridicule when you do not conform. It was a chance to feel into how “what it means to be a woman” can in some ways be contrary to my being; to how life wants to live through me.

Elena pointed out that in some cases belonging to the field of Womanhood or Manhood might be so difficult that a person wants to deny what the influences are saying or deny the body in some way. In systems, we know that denying does not allow for movement and so as a next step, suggested a form of acknowledgement to see if that would allow for movement.

Step 2: Allowing what is

It was suggested to simply look at these representatives for Maleness and Femaleness and find an inner stance of:

“I agree with how Femaleness influences me.”

And:

“I agree with how Maleness influences me.”

The acknowledgement and the “agreeing to what is” is seen is an important step and is itself a systemic intervention. We hold back on the impulse to reconcile or find a better solution. By staying with acknowledgement and seeing, we can more fully process the parts of ourselves that were denying the influences or fighting against them.

Step 3: Allowing what is emerging

A few moments later, as the process continued we ventured to a place beyond accepting or denying, where a new movement is possible.

As a next step, Elena suggests that we look at the representatives for Femaleness and Maleness to see if it’s possible to “free up some space to be a woman or a man in a new way.”

For myself, I imagined a sphere around me, a new zone of possibility. This is the place where some part of me could unfurl to be a woman “in a new way — and in a way that no one else has ever been done before.”

As we did, Elena pointed out that there is often a feeling of guilt because we feel that we are leaving something important behind. These are the tendrils of connection with the people and the social norms that were formative for us. They literally created our sense of who we are.

She points out that there is almost always loneliness in doing so too, because to do something new always means we are alone for a short or long period of time.

The process concluded with embodying new futures, where we stand in the new place and hold that sooner or later, others will join us there, who may have also gone on a similar journey. They may have also found a new internal stance of “I am done fighting” with the tensions of not fitting into old paradigms so that they can be and love with fullness and ease.

An architecture for reconciliation and embodying new futures

This process that Elena facilitated showed an architecture of acknowledgement and reconciliation that can be used for leaving old worlds behind and stepping into new worlds. Importantly, it showed the restraint needed in not rushing to conclusions or solutions. When we do, we miss the opportunity for the system to reorganize, and for a more complete and thorough reconsolidation.

Even though I am relatively at ease with the gender norms of my society, I was surprised to find myself living in a slightly new world after the process. I got in touch with my own places of tension in relating to Femaleness and Maleness, for example the elaborate unwritten expectations on how to express my feminity. The night following the process my dreams were actively processing the material, replaying peak experiences of femaleness throughout my life. In the days that followed I felt a lightness and confidence that was physical and emotional, familar after effects of systemic “a-ha” moments.

In psychology this is called memory reconsolidation. In systems thinking this is the system reorganizing itself. In activism this is “the more beautiful world we know is possible.”

Example of constellating a social issue itself: Corruption

In the gender process, the goal was to look at an individual‘s relationship to a larger social phenomena. It is also possible to do a constellation to explore the nature of the social issue itself.

What is different about this is that there is not a single case bringer. In a sense the full group is bringing the case and the object of our inquiry is to see the “flow” of systemic principles are playing out on a macro level.

Bashar Al Safadi and Iman Mandour
Bashar Al Safadi and Iman Mandour presenting at Awakening the Field

Bashar Al Safadi and Iman Mandour presented on how corruption can be seen from a systems thinking perspective. 

They pointed out that if we look from the standpoint that corruption operates like any living systems, it is also a self-regulating mechanism. It is operating in response to other parts of societal systems that may no longer be working. 

Bashar and Iman guided the group through a series of questions to start unpacking “what is corruption trying to do?” 

The first question was:

“In your country, what do you call corruption?” 

Corruption may typically live in the shadows, but by naming it, we start to locate it in society. These were some of the common names for corruption named by the group. 

naming corruption
Harvest from how corruption is named in different countries

Within any social system, the members know what they need to do in order to belong. They know both the implicit and explicit rules. Corruption exists in the space where some members go outside of the established laws and societal agreements, taking the risk of no longer belonging to the system. Rebelling and breaking laws is one way that systems evolve into something new.  

Some questions they suggested on the systemic nature of corruption:

  • What is corruption a solution for?
  • What new or parallel systems are created by corruption?
  • Who or what wants to be seen?
  • Who or what has been forgotten?
  • Who pays the price for going outside the established laws and societal agreements? Who pays the price for staying?
  • Who is taking and who is giving something away?
  • Who are the victims protected by corruption? The perpetrators protected by corruption?
  • What is positive about corruption?

These questions alone were very provocative and brought a wider consciousness to a topic that can be hard to look at, as the common response is to blindly try to push it out or exclude it.

Does this mean we have we found a way to change systems?

This is a fair question. After all, we see how family and organizational systems are able to significantly shift, so why not transform oppressive social constructs? Why not reprogram the codes on the central server of society to be more just, compassionate, and equitable?

I do believe systemic constellations demonstrate a way to change systems for the better, but not in the way you might be hoping for.

We may think we are skillfull enough to reprogram the code on the central servers, but that is our hubris. We may know one programming language, but the fact is there are many more programming languages out there that we do not know yet.

Nature is the best teacher about systemic principles

Connecticut River valley, you call this area The “Place of long water,”

This is where we again need to come back to acknowledging our place in a system and our own human size and limited perspective. It can be hard to wrap our heads around this, but looking at the living system of nature can help. For example, step into a worldview where there is an important river you live near that connects all of the main travel and trade routes. If you are indigenous to the Connecticut River valley, you call this area the “Place of long water,” and because you identify yourself and your own life with the river, you use the same name for your own people as the river. The people belong to the river. This is a form of naming that acknowledges humans’ more accurate place in the system. In the western worldview, we have it systemically upside down, where rivers and geographical regions are named after humans.    

When considering “what can we do” to change systems, there is enormous opportunity in the way that systems are self-organizing and self-regulating. Does the social field of “Maleness” and “Femaleness” shift and evolve as we do? Does the field “Corruption” ease up because a group of people shined a light of awareness on it? We cannot really know. It is a better use of our own human-scale life force to put our efforts towards looking for the way patterns operate in ourselves and in social fields. Once we find the pattern and align with “why it makes perfect sense,” the re-organization is spontaneous and much larger than any one person or group could do alone.

So we are back to the best way to “change the system” is to reprogram the way the system is running within us. Each person can reliably and readily shift the injustice, the perpetrators, the victims who have not been acknowledged, the exploiters within us. When we do, we find ourselves in a new position with less oppression, more justice, compassion, and equity in our actions, and our society starts to look very differently than it does today.

The Life Force, Ashé, Megin

August 23, 2021 No Comments

The Life Force, Ashé, Megin

Classical systems thinking looks at flow thru a system — the flow of material things; information; data; people; resources.

Life Force

In family systems constellations, the “thing” we are tracking is the flow of life itself. We trace how life passes through the generations from parents to children. We pay attention when a life in the family system, for whatever reason, fell off the map; ended too soon; or could not be acknowledged. We track the outcasts; the secreted children; the ones who died prematurely. We look at all that supported the flow of life — including particularly supportive people, earnings, the lands where a family called home. All that enabled life to flow from one generation to the next seems to be remembered and imprinted on the family system, consciously or unconsciously.

The flow of life has a force. It persists, even in the face of very dire and tragic circumstances. Unique to family systems, the life force has a clear and certain direction, always downhill, always from parents to children. It keeps going no matter what.

The Life Force is known by other names in a number of cultural traditions and is not reserved for humans alone.

Ashé

In the Yoruba tradition West Africa, Ashé is the power to make things happen or produce change.

We do not exactly have the right words to describe Ashé in English, so to get the meaning it may work better to sense into it, as if listening to a riddle:

Ashé is an “immanence.” It is the creative potentiality that exists within a thing itself. Because things have Ashé, they are not inert, lifeless objects. They are a process in motion. They are a doing; they have agency. They are acting in the world.

Megin

Nordic traditions have a similar concept of Ashé known as Megin. Megin is the acting force within a person, a thing. The word Megin is derived from Mega — one’s “being able to;” one’s capacity for action.

Human beings are not the only ones with agency. Things also act. In their beingness, they are also doing. The Megin of a thing is its active “doing beingness.”

The potentiality in a thing is activated by exchanging with humans. We can make a thing come alive through relation-making, for example by naming a thing, and more traditionally, through singing and recitations. In Nordic tradition the Gods were said to be able to activate the Megin in us — to empower us for the victory we seek.

“The Megin is in there, it just needs to be called back by us reclaiming kinship with the land, through real, actual engagement with the material world.”

— Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen

Religious studies scholar and founder of Nordic Animism, Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, shares about these connections with mega Megin.

Relational systems change

August 17, 2021 No Comments

Relational systems change

More than one way of knowing

Two-Row Wampum Belt trentmagazine.ca

Since the Age of Reason, European schools of thought have privileged rationalistic ways of knowing, relying on overdeveloped skills in reasoning. In the process it has marginalized relational, process-oriented ways of knowing common to Indigenous societies.

Melanie Goodchild, Moose Clan, Anishinaabe (Ojibway or Chippewa) from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Keteganseebee, and co-founder of the Turtle Island Insitute suggests that these two ways of knowing need to be taken side by side, like the two rows of the Wampum belt. The Wampum belt was the way the agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch was documented in the 1600s about how they were to treat each other and live together. Each of their ways was shown in a purple row of wampum beads.

We are both sailing down the river of life together. Our responsibility is to help one another, but more specifically, the river of life is in danger now, so it behooves us to utilize our knowledge together to work to sustain, perpetuate, to strengthen the river of life. At the end of the day any social innovation should be about the continuation of life — not just human life, but all of it, for this generation, right to the end of time.

Awareness based systems change is a process into the deeper structures of the social systems in order to see, sense, presence, and shift them.

There is a knowing Center in all human beings that reflects the knowing Center of the Earth and other living things. Elders have always known that “coming into contact with one’s inner Center is not always a pleasant or easily attainable experience, (Cajete, pl. 1130). This led Indigenous people to develop a variety of ceremonies, rituals, songs, dances, works of arts, stories, and traditions to assist individual access and utilize the potential healing and whole-making power in each person.” (p. 1130)


A transformational element of coming to know is “learning through self-reflection and sharing of experience in community” (p. 1131). This allows us, concludes Cajete, to understand our learning in the context of the great whole. Cross-culture dialogues help us to see that there are as many ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, and understanding as there are members in a group. We come to understand that “we can learn from another’s perspective and experience,” and we also “become aware of our own and other’s bias and lack of understanding through the process of the group” (p. 1131).

References:

Cape Cod, MA

hello@alissafleet.com

About

Design Strategy

Systemic Constellations

Blog

Contact

© Copyright 2023 Alissa Fleet | Made in USA