Left? Right? Whole? — a whole lotta ways toward wholeness
Why are we still stuck in these circular closed loop patterns? What will it take to navigate well through uncertainty? It’s hard to do justice to the wide range of factors that create and perpetuate the patterns we observe and, often unwittingly, feed.
Let’s face it. We are in deep SHfT, and faced with multiple challenges as we navigate.
🔮 What does that mean?
🔮 What shifts are underway?
🔮 What shifts can we consciously choose?
🔮 In what ways can we intentionally move?
We are living through an extended liminal, in-between time. What was…is no longer. What will be…hasn’t yet arrived. In some ways, that describes life as it has always been, doesn’t it?
Yet the complexity of overlapping meta-poly-perma crises that we’re all experiencing to varying degrees is unprecedented. The mechanistic, competitive Industrial Age of consumption, extraction and unlimited growth, with AI voraciously nipping at our heels, is still with us. And yet…it is also (necessarily…and with great difficulty) facing shift and shifting. On an nonviable trajectory, many of us hope this shift will become more life-affirming — for people and planet. We have quite a ways to go and at this stage none if us are early adopters.
This is unsettling and destabilizing across all domains of society. Work and the places where we work, live, visit, interconnect, do stuff and show up, are part of a larger tectonic shift.
We all deal with this stuff differently. Human defences or coping mechanisms kick in with basic fight, flight, freeze or fawn patterns, depending on personal and interpersonal tendencies and life and work contexts and circumstances, at any given point in time.
Some of us are more inclined to welcome the kind of changes we’ve been waiting for or working towards — having observed many things that weren’t working well for a long time.
To varying degrees, more people are recognizing that a viable future on our finite planet is dependent on adopting new patterns of collaboration, coherent collective agency and co-intelligence that embrace our inherent interdependence.
Recognizing it conceptually — in our heads — is one thing. It’s a start… Learning how to navigate collaboratively through various messy stages is something else.
This isn’t machine learning with the flip of a switch.
The Industrial Age emphasized and valued linear left-brain reductionist ways of functioning and relating. So, we are witnessing and often feeding binary, divisive and highly polarized ways of making sense of our world. This kind of limited thinking and debating no longer works well (enough) or makes sense, given the complexity we are facing and the very problems humanity has produced over decades and longer. We are seriously out of balance, as human beings and as a society.
Einstein is often quoted:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
We sure do need some different thinking along with the wisdom that comes from diversity of perspectives, knowledge and lived experience, if we are to effectively address those wicked problems that are bigger than any one of us.
The good news — humans are endowed with the potential to develop consciousness and capacities, beyond left brain leaning, to bring more of our right brain capacity into balance.
Our right brain is more geared to collaboration, creativity, feelings, intuitive sensibilities and…yes…what are attributed to the feminine elements — balanced with the masculine — that all genders possess (to varying degrees.)
Is it any surprise that women and girls are still so undervalued — blatantly and/or insidiously — in a society that fails to value wholeness?
This has enormous implications.
In addition to gross injustice, inequity, and marginalization — the healthy right brain balance that human civilization so desperately needs, to navigate wisely and well — is constricted. This imbalance manifests in so many ways that have become normalized, compounding problems and creating double binds. Stereotyping, dysfunctional competition, males discouraged from developing and expressing their softer sides, females encouraged to be tough and strong and more…Damned-if-we-do-damned-if-we-don’t contextual dilemmas continue to set people up to behave in ways that are a disservice all around — perpetuating divisiveness, politicizing of issues and imbalance.
What the world needs to address the challenges we face is a much wider spectrum from which to draw…diversity of all kinds. We need our whole brains and selves valued, fully engaged and on-the-job — which includes all kinds of work and ways of being that contribute to family, community, organizational, societal and planetary wellbeing.
Check out the brilliant work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things. He takes our understanding of brain function — the impacts and implications — to a much deeper and profound level. Nate Hagens interviewed him as part of his excellent ongoing The Great Simplification series. Here’s the video.
McGilchrist’s well-researched work is about widening our learning portals, navigating more wisely, engaging our full cognitive and emotional intelligences, sense-making, creativity, intuitive sensibilities and soul-nourishing spirituality.
As we reflect on what is the matter with things…and there is much talk about all that is wrong…there are living system regenerative patterns pointing the way, that can help us in the context of our daily lives, work and place.
Building on McGilchrist’s research, John Ehrenfeld, in his book The Right Way to Flourish, considers our failure to adopt a sustainable path, and how more balanced brain function can potentially lead to innovations toward regenerative practices and the flourishing of all life and nature.
He articulates how “society must replace the current foundational left-brain-based beliefs — a mechanistic world and a human driven by self interest — with new ones based on complexity and care.” Paradoxically, the ability to recognize the limits of our own knowledge, whereby we can say “I don’t know,” and engage truly co-creatively, resides in our right brain capacity.
In a discussion with us, Erhenfeld surmised:
“The right brain, individually and culturally (metaphorically), understands that we only capture a part of the complex world. Consequently, it knows that when we act the outcomes are possibilities, not probabilities. We will always be faced with unintended consequences, but (a very big but) when we act out of care for the human and non-human world (right-hemisphere) we should do much less damage, and be able to repair some of the damage we have wrought.”
🔮 What does this have to do with systemic issues like the climate crises, social justice, economic disparity, the mental health crisis, a crisis of leadership, the epidemic of loneliness and more?
🔮 What does this have to do with our relationships with one another and the living planet that is our home, and how we meet the little and big challenges we are facing?
Everything!
We can ground all this in real life decisions, choices and initiatives. People are increasingly underway working toward needed shifts…or trying to…and often feeling stuck or blocked.
The shifts that will get us unstuck involve fluid zooming in — personal awareness and development — AND zooming out [trans]contextually, through working together — interpersonal, group, team, organization, and cross-sector, cross-cultural and intergenerational community, bioregional and global development.
All of this aligns whole-heartedly with decades of work that is taking many forms in many places and spaces around the world.
Dovetails with the warm data of real life that Nora Bateson so beautifully conveys as transcontextual wholeness.
Riane Eisler’s life work, entailing a wide angled retrospective view of human civilization history, also points us to natural partnership ways of being — life-affirming choices we can make at every stage. Societies that value, are influenced by and shaped with women — reflect a healthy partnering balance.
In this excellent Entangled Wisdom episode, Darcia Narvaez’ uncovers our natural neurobiology and the roots of human morality. She peels back deeper layers, from our earliest imprinted experiences that shape(d) and continue to influence us…how mechanized western industrial society patterns have contributed to detachment, domination tendencies, dysregulation and trauma.
We need multimodal ways of sharing knowledge and nurturing generative dialogue and learning.
The powerfully illustrative, engaged work and writings of Vanessa Andreotti, Hospicing Modernity, and colleagues, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, also deepen our understanding of dysfunctional patterns, the deep letting go work needed and the choices we might make to shift toward a decolonized future. Vanessa explores ways of knowing and being, stretching beyond western industrial left brain packaged ways. Rich, layered, compassionate bridge building…embracing an embodied learning journey...holding more spaces open…widening and deepening our capacity to hold complexity…reflects more right brain balance.
The Wildfires Raging in our Souls article, inspired by the beautiful Reimagining Humanity film directed by Darcia, attempts to cut through and reach us on a deeper level. Now, that’s a film that oughta go viral!
So important to develop ways of seeing — pattern recognition — and to open and widen integrative and collaborative pathways that build bridges and strengthen overlapping synergies.
Not easy to do in a noisy world that reinforces individual heroic (thought) leaders and compartmentalized disciplines. The story of separation clings insidiously. Media algorithms keep systems stuck in dysfunctional grooves. Life-affirming shifts are often relegated to the fringes and the intellectual elites…
When we consciously connect the (differentiated) work of Darcia Narvaez, Riane Eisler, Nora Bateson, Vanessa Andreotti and many others — seeing the common natural overarching patterns and themes that each conceptualize and explore in different ways, using special terminology and examples — we have powerful, compelling stories to carry forward…to shift the trajectory.
As we combine all these ways of reconstructing, shaping and living interconnected stories — perhaps collectively we can amplify (un)learning and build momentum, honouring and recovering our (lost) Indigeneity.
That can help us collectively gain more traction, widen reach and (maybe) step up mainstream adoption of healthy patterns that oughta (hopefully) become normative, common sense — sooner than later.
In the midst of escalating turbulence and widespread wrongness there’s a growing, less visible convergence.
New pathways are being forged and formed, informed by nonlinear strategy and systems-thinking, while honouring knowledge, ways of knowing and wisdom traditions that have withstood the test of time. Facing the biggest challenges of our time, our best hope is to advance this kind of diverse work, accessing our collective humanness spirit and joyfulness as an act of resilience.
Collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions are grounded living lab opportunities where we learn how to collectively create the conditions needed to innovate, experiment, mindfully activate and adapt pathways as we live into a (potentially viable) unknowable future.
When we value and integrate our right and left brain capacities, put the relational social glue to work and find the common ground toward real mission critical initiatives we can make meaningful progress.
This is invariably experienced as awkward and bumpy until we become, individually and collectively, more practiced holding and reasonably balancing the inherent tension. We are, all of us, messy humans, always works-in-progress, enrolled in the school of life and not perfect.
Life is offering us a joyful crash course, to step up and do a better job of stewarding our lives, our institutions and our planet. In doing so, we can become more whole.
We can break free of binary, either-or ways of thinking that keep us and our systems stuck. Not suggesting perfect symmetry, which doesn’t exist in natural living beings or systems. However, when left and right work synergistically within and between us — we can navigate more wisely in the roughly right ways…adapting and dancing with complexity, uncertainty and the inherent paradoxes we face.
Another paradoxical dance with some conscious choreography that can unleash more of our latent creative human capability and potential.
In some ways we’ve been asleep — passive citizens — products of our upbringing and society, relinquishing our personal agency to government and business institutions, expecting them to take care of stuff. Many have been disappointed, victimized, excluded, pushed down…
Democracy has been mostly aspirational — upheld as an ideal. Our current civilization hasn’t established the societal scaffolding, norms and safeguards whereby flourishing democracies are a widespread living reality.
People in their institutional roles have conformed to the pervasive systemic patterns that became the way things are done. Insidious and blatant colonizing domination-oppression patterns have been on mechanistic repeat-rewind.
Blaming doesn’t change the trajectory. No one of us has the perfect all-encompassing model or answers.
We need to [re]balance the ways we approach and shape the economy. In this Regeneration Rising Podcast: How to build a regenerative economy, Graham Boyd builds bridges across the multiple concepts of regeneration, capitalism, business and economics and the enabling adaptive scaffolding required for transformative societal shifts in an uncertain non-ergodic world. Graham unpacks the myths about companies (the legal aspects) and connects these to apartheid, freedoms and democracy. He focuses on regeneration, connecting consciousness and the meaning of a conscious company as it relates to intelligence and regenerative (eco)systemic conditions conducive for life.
“Conscious capitalism is more about consciousness and less about capitalism”
Cookie cutter machine age scaling up won’t cut it. We need to [re]balance the ways we approach scale.
“Endless growth is not sustainable and our urgency to try to fix the problem and seek solutions may be part of the crisis we are in. One unintended consequence of this has been that another type of scale has been devalued and as a result, under-resourced. It’s a scale that values the slow steady work of deepening relationships. It recognizes the significance of context, building connections that bridge diverse communities and it prioritizes inner work and healing as integral components of the scaling process. We call this type of scale ‘Scaling Deep’ and we believe that adequately supporting it, and funding it, holds the greatest potential for long lasting systemic change.” ~ The Art of Scaling Deep, by Tatiana Fraser
Mindful emphasis on right scaling — scaling deep and scaling wide to achieve more holistic meaningful and sustainable progress aligns with regenerative living principles.
“Right scaling is about disrupting our conventional ideas about scale and impact. It is about bringing together what is conventionally understood as big and little scale; it is about being able to work with the particular and the general at the same time. Right scaling refers to ways of working that help us to connect lived realities with decision-making that occurs about, but often away from those realities. It is about understanding scale at human and systems infrastructure level as equally important AND different. Right scaling means working within systems in ways that let us move more fluidly between big and small, wide and deep, recognise the connections between them and appreciate the different lenses they provide to our understanding of wellbeing.” ~ Everyday Patterns for Shifting Systems: Right Scaling, Griffiths Centre for Social Innovation
We gotta figure stuff out together, collaboratively. The stakes are high and getting higher — so we need to build bridges and deepen the roots and routes to the unimpossible.
More good news. A vast reservoir of knowledge, methodologies, tools and Indigenous wisdom traditions across disciplines and cultures can be applied and shared. We’re not starting from scratch. Excellent work underway around the world can be supported and interconnected — informally and formally through emergent and intentional mycelium formation. We can unlearn and cross learn.
Also currently on a slippery slope fraught with danger…technology developed and deployed as a crucial enabler and a force for good (not a runaway driver) can potentially play a key role — enabling and inviting access for all.
“Collaboration is the readiness to show up and do what needs to be done, in improvisation and mutual learning.” ~ Nora Bateson
Whether we are working in business, government or civil society, we are also all citizens on planet earth. When we break out of the silos and boxes and tap into our full(er) humanness capacities, we can innovate from the space between, and bring fresh thinking back into those places where we live, work and play.
🔮 What if the most meaningful, life-affirming breakthrough capacity to SHfT already exists?
🔮 What if we learn how to put our collective brains — our whole capacities together — for real?
There are real limits to growth on a finite planet. However, our creative potential and development may be limitless!
Imagine a world where anyone anywhere can become an engaged creative force and social entrepreneur, fuelled by a [reframed] sense of purpose and belonging, passion, agency and the enabling flow of multicapitals or capacities?
Imagine a world where we can individually and collectively exercise our creative potential to shape better lives for ourselves, our families and our communities — while caring for our shared life support system — our planet.
Unstitution, a collaborative commons, is among many collaborators around the world, working over many years to bring and restore this kind of wholeness. Together we can co-discover and recover enabling conditions that support wellbeing economies, healthy value exchange, flows and funds, opening pathways for more of us to engage meaningfully in overlapping and differentiated context-based and place-sourced initiatives, within and across (community) ecosystems.
A dance of emergence and strategy, engaging left and right brain capacities, embracing the “I and we don’t knowness” of inherently complex challenges, collaborating and re-contextualizing — we can learn how to make grounded progress on the possibles and the unimpossible. We can learn how to navigate paradox — dancing with metaphorical, mythical and real monsters.
Any of us can work from the space between, configuring and shaping better workable patterns as we navigate forward. There are growing numbers of us holding inclusive spaces for new and longstanding spiritfull co-creative work. Sometimes described as the 4th sector, we are finding and forging ways to reconstitute collaborative commonsing.
We are challenged to widen our contextual lenses — to access, tap and combine all our senses and sense-making capacities. In essence there is a compelling need to reframe what we mean by intelligence beyond atomized component parts — to embody our co-intelligence, as Tom Atlee explores and implores in his superb new book Co-intelligence: The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity.
Herein we might co-discover wide and far-reaching co-resonance that can enrich our ongoing learning journey toward interbecoming wiser and a whole lot more humble — living into an unknowable future as we endeavour to shape life-affirming patterns. Co-intelligence widens our eyes, illuminating patterns and pathways available that far exceed the narrow band that artificial intelligence represents. Tom’s book synthesizes decades of research and work building from his wise democracy pattern language.
In ongoing conversations with Tom, we’ve been exploring how to nurture wiser co-intelligence patterns — expanding our whole humanness capacity and extending the horizons of possibilities that can make this work more widely accessible. Retrospective and forward-facing, we can enrich our learning and expand our relational and sense making capacity as careholders — co-activating co-intelligence as engaged participants, leaders and citizens, in our wiser human evolution — within the (nested) contexts of ongoing every day work, life and societal shifts.
From the cracks and chasms, from the blurred edges, often hard to see — tender, fragile shoots are springing up. Some of these are creeping gradually into a wider social consciousness, as people increasingly recognize that the current trajectory is nonviable for a future civilization and living planet.
Emperors and elephants …the old story of separation…bit-by-bit and gaining momentum — are being revealed. The new story will be a proliferation — a multitude of stories. Story making, storytelling and story dwelling taking shape and described in different ways and words, reflect more wholeness and coherence.
“What if we conveyed our own perspectives as partial, unfinished invitations for creative interplay? Imagine if we offered, received and accepted views as input, fractals of a larger whole. Imagine a world where the exchange of ideas and stories was generally experienced as gifts, unpolished, imperfect gems that contributed to something made better as a result of humility, grace and reciprocity. Imagine if we worked at it. Would that begin to look and feel like real collaboration, with better outcomes as we increasingly befriend our mutual vulnerability?” ~Unstitution
*This article was updated again May 2024, reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen and adapt — indeed a humbling learning journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life, work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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