From Aware to Awake
I called this publication Activate the Future because my business is called We Activate The Future and because my book is called Activation. No grand strategy there but just an eventual ‘landing’ on a word which summarised my own sense of journey over the last few years! Activation is like a felt sense of what brought me from Aware to Awake and into action.
It expresses for me what it is like to travel from a sense of frozen incapacity in the face of the challenges we face in the future, my own personal calamities, and the enormity of finding a place for myself in which I could be valuable, useful and satisfied that my contribution was worthwhile. It marks my return to connection with the pulses of life on earth that was lost as I left childhood. It is the recognition that human life is not separate from the rest of life on planet earth but intimately interconnected, dependent and in partnership not dominance. It marked a period of intense questioning of my values, understanding, world view, beliefs — that is still ongoing but less turbulent than when I began.
It’s also the ‘state’ we need more people to get to, in order to galvanize more and greater change from the current business system to a better business system. Or any other system for that matter! (see A for Activism).
What is the journey through Aware to Awake like? Do we all get there? Do some of us never get there? Do we get there and then find we are pulled backwards again, like a Dalek through a time vortex back into the void of inaction and denial? Do we shapeshift through our firm commitment to conscious, regenerative living back to the demands and compromise of corporate life? Is it something that can only come with age as we pass through the levels of self-actualisation or can it be activated earlier? What activates it at all? These are a few of the reflections I put into the book.
Something similar to a ‘peak’ experience?
Over the course of a couple of hundred interviews with CEOs and Founders of businesses I would describe as being ‘purpose-led’ — from Patagonia to Pencils of Promise, whether global multinational, charity or startup — something emerged that was unexpected and intriguing. It wasn’t a question I was asking, it just came up in conversation. Almost all of these people had at some time in their life experienced one of the following:-
Near brush with death — whether an unexpected life-threatening illness, a near-fatal accident or injury
Unexpected loss of a loved one — when I say ‘unexpected’, I mean someone close who passed before their time. A child, a brother or sister, a partner, a close friend, a parent still in the prime of life.
A psychic experience — yes, there were many leaders who had seen or deeply felt a vision or calling, experienced something they could not explain in rational terms.
Grown up with purpose-led parents or other influencer— experiencing at a young age what it meant to be vocational, committed to a cause greater than yourself, or with a strong intense vision of where they wanted to have an impact in the world. Not always as an activist, but always as an agent of change from doctors to data analysts with a sense of mission and service to others.
Unexpected experiences such as the first three, can have a similar effect on the brain to those which psychologists call ‘peak’ experiences. Peak experiences are often described as transcendent moments of pure joy and elation. These are moments that stand out from everyday events. The memory of such events is lasting and people often liken them to a spiritual experience and can change the plasticity of the brain. A bit like mindfulness meditation but faster! Although the above experiences can’t be described as joyous, they can lead to an increased personal awareness or understanding which can lead to a transformative moment or turning point in any individual’s journey to self-actualisation.
A sense of needing to Seek
My own coming to awareness was similar to the founder of Original Beans, Philip Kaufmann. Philip’s was one of many interviews I carried out while researching my book. Philip had a very successful career in IT when he realised that ‘he was uninspired in his heart’, and felt compelled to go on a seeking journey for something different. On his travels he met with great examplars of deep ecology such as Joanna Macy, Jane Goodall and Paul Hawken which prompted him to reconnect him to his own ancestry.
Philip’s family history spans more than 200 years — 7 generations — in which one of his forefathers Georg Hartig wrote one of the first books on sustainability. He was German, and head of Prussian forestry services. At the end of 18th century several of the regional crown princes started to manage forests in a modern way.
“In forests that’s something multigenerational. Today’s generation needs to manage in a way that future generations have the benefit of it, as my forefather did before me. Both that heritage and the great resilience, inner core and strength to walk that double distance shown to me by those teachers convinced me,” he explained to me.
“From that moment of truth, in line with my forefathers, I chose to walk in their footsteps, and go into nature conservation. I went to the WWF and the UN and worked mainly on tropical and conservation issues. Ultimately I decided that I wanted to implement change through the reality of business and bring the market to have a positive impact or goal for conservation. That’s when I founded Original Beans.”
Like Philip, who spent the summers on a traditional farm in the mountains of Austria, I grew up with a strong connection to nature. Which, once I embarked on a career in communications, got lost in the hustle and bustle of city life, and within its many walls. After a brush with cancer and a deep period of depression, I went seeking along similar paths to Philip — to Schumacher College in Devon to learn about indigenous wisdom and new economics, to the Institute of Biomimicry to learn about designing with nature’s principles and to the Presencing Institute at Harvard to learn how to reconnect to emotional soul. I spent time with leaders like Joanna, Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge, and delved deeply into any knowledge I could find that would help build a bridge between ‘business as usual’ and the natural world, and find ways to move the equation forward.
I mention these two of many stories, because there is something important in the seeking, in the quest that helps bridge the moment of Awareness until you arrive at Awake. So in my own mind and sense, there is a step between Aware and Awake which I call Seek. Aware has a ‘moment’ within it which can feel like a call, an ache, a concern, sometimes like a slight sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that you worry about quite a bit before you choose to respond to it. But it does inevitably propell you on a quest of gathering. Sometimes that’s gathering knowledge, sometimes experiences, sometimes regathering emotions that have been lost or suppressed. Often about reconnecting to your Self.
Seeking without sense of security
Seek is the process of gathering, of becoming a bit smarter than you were when the bell went off in your soul! It can be marked by lots of resistance. It can be marked by a lot of inner and outer struggle. I found that I completely lost my sense of surety during this seeking period. I no longer felt at all sure of myself, of my own judgement, of where I was going. I found I didn’t secure work as easily because ‘old’ me was a fixer and problem-solver and what was required of me was to be right. I no longer felt I could promise solutions. It was an intensely difficult period for me where I was often propelled backwards towards the ‘known’ security of business as usual or command/control so that I didn’t feel quite all at sea, and yet found myself unsuccessful in doing so because clearly ‘new me’, ‘unsure me’ was leaking out.
The good thing I can say is that it doesn’t last forever, you do come out the other side and regain your sense of equilibrium. And it really does help if you succeed in finding conscious mentors and guides who can help you through this period because they will understand the fog that might surround you.
What does psychology say?
Eminent developmental experts like Richard Barrett have developed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs further than the original model to incorporate our increased understanding of how we ‘grow’ psychologically. Awareness kicks in as a person approaches Individuation. And whilst there is a general linear progression which comes with age, in an interview I carried out with Richard more than 2 years ago now he explained to me that the ‘whole’ person operates well on all levels at once — and that there are very few of them about!
Richard says it better: “ Under normal circumstances, the level of consciousness we operate from is the same as the stage of psychological development we have reached. However, no matter what stage of psychological development we are at, when we are faced with what we consider to be a potentially negative change in our circumstances or a situation that we believe could threaten our internal stability or external equilibrium — anything that brings up fear — we may temporarily shift to one of the three lower levels of consciousness.
Alternatively, if we have a “peak” experience — an experience of euphoria, harmony or connectedness of a mystical or spiritual nature — we may temporarily “jump” to a higher level of consciousness.
When the threat or peak experience has passed, we will normally return to the level of consciousness that corresponds to the stage of psychological development we were at before the experience occurred. In rare situations, a peak experience may have a lasting impact, causing us to shift to a higher stage of psychological development and operate from a higher level of consciousness.”
How can we ‘prompt’ a shift to Awareness?
I wouldn’t want everyone to have to experience sudden loss or illness to prompt them into the journey of development, so I tried to explore ways in which we can help give ourselves and others more opportunity for those doors to open. Is there anything we can do or culture we can try to design in our businesses to help things move forwards? And some of them are simple…..
Mindfulness meditation: helps create a shift in the plasticity of the brain. Coming out of depression one of the first things I did was sign up to Headspace. A quirk of fate, and I didn’t realise how much I was helping myself at the time, but it did contribute to giving my tired mind space to breathe. What’s possibly more important about meditation is that it is one of the few things that can help you manage the uncertainties of the pathway from aware to awake. There will be uncertainties. There will be fear. There will be resistance. There will be a great desire to go back to the security of the known. Meditation helps you continually direct your aware attention forwards to the path before you. What we consciously put our attention towards does become the story we create.
Beauty: might come as a surprise, but the perception and presence of beauty can move the soul considerably. Whether it is standing on the top of the Jungfrau looking at all of creation, admiring a glorious piece of art, immersion in a pristine forest, or even spending time in a space that has been beautifully and carefully designed (think feng shui), can have an impact on your wellbeing and soul. There is a reason that retreat centres and spas are so particularly designed and that is the impact they have on wellbeing. It is not superficial to create surroundings that are beautiful to you.
Nature: spending time in nature almost every day — even if it’s just a walk in the park — to look at and appreciate the beauty, complexity, sheer genius of what is ‘naturally’ there. Forest bathing has become something of an art in Japan because the energy of a still forest which has been there for millennia has a soothing impact on our busy brains. Design nature into your office experience — and I don’t mean just plonk rubber plants everywhere!
The ‘Wow’ Factor — Seek & Learn: choose to become a seeker. Choose to be curious. Write a ‘wow’ list of all the things which inspire you or have inspired you. Activate your sense of wonder by remembering once a day to stop and add another item to the list. Stop as you pass a tree and intimately gaze on this majestic piece of living art; look at the veins of a leaf, the complex patterns of bark, the intricacy of a flower’s design.
Activate Creativity — creativity can be crushed out of us once we enter a work environment. Systems, rules, regulated environments all conspire to suppress innovation and creative thinking. Sometimes even education systems with endless performance assessments can begin the process. Buckminster Fuller once famously said:
Vision Quests & Fasts: one of the most powerful transformative experiences is a vision quest or fast. A vision fast usually involves several days of preparation, several days and nights fasting alone in a remote nature location, and several days incorporation. Traditionally such fasts were conscious practices used to mark a rite of passage, such as from youth to adulthood, or a time of shift in life such as the onset of menopause. In today’s crowded lifestyles, such rites of passage have been reduced to birthday parties, stag do’s, marriages and funerals. But there is a growing trend to bring them back into regular experience. We see a similar need expressed in our desire to create small shrines at the sites of accidents, and build cairns or rock piles — and not always for a selfie!
Such fasts should be supporting by qualified guides trained in both psychotherapy, nutrition and be very familiar with the terrain you are placed in. Quests or Fasts are a great way to mark that feeling of awareness growing inside, and to offer a challenge that will allow you to clarify and claim whatever is your growing truth.
Led-Experiences: Many self-development ‘gurus’ create peak-inducing environments in their courses to assist attendees in achieving a shift in consciousness. Tony Robbins’ 3 day Unleash The Power Within extravaganzas are a prime example. Whilst these experiences are powerful, often the challenge for participants is to be able to sustain a similar mindset, or cope with what the experience unleashes within them — without support once the experience ends, especially given there are usually upwards of 7000+ people in an auditorium. Far too many for support staff to support.
A distance learning course on creative meditation had a very similar effect on me at the beginning of my Awareness shift. Based on the principles of psychosynthesis, the course was a monthly study kit delivered by email with a series of actions to be undertaken during the month. At the end of the month I would submit a written report and get written feedback. The course was powerful. I could feel shifts happening. But as I was at such a low ebb in terms of my mental stability and transformational ‘toolkit’, I had no containers or boundaries around which to hold the emotions, thoughts and experiences which arose as a result of the course. I had barely begun mindfulness meditation so a more powerful tool was beyond me to handle. It plunged me into more chaos — which may have been its purpose — but at the time my life circumstances did not support such a transformation. Nor did distance learning work for me. I craved ‘in person’ support. The remoteness of psychosynthesis from human connection was too hard for me at the time. Perhaps with hindsight, I resisted. Perhaps I was not ready.
What’s the learning here?
Having rambled on a bit, if you’ve got this far, let me see if I can summarise:
Awareness is the first prompt or recognition that we as humans, are not separate from the rest of life on planet Earth, but intimately connected to it and dependent on it, the first call back to connection.
Awareness comes when its least expected but you can choose to seek it out
Awareness needs to be nurtured, especially when the 3 enemies of Fear, Cynicism and Judgement raise their heads because it is easy to succumb to the prompts of daily life as we know it and not fight forwards
Awareness prompts a journey of seeking, of renewal, of knowledge gathering which can feel like a frustrating pause before the leap into awakened action can take place, but seems to be necessary
There is no exact path or pattern, it’s unique to each human being but it does need a support container of people, practices and places to be sustained successfully.
A final intriguing observation which I will come back to. The journey from Aware, through Seeking to Awake and Action — with all the hiccups, reversals and joyous leaps forward along the way — is not at all unlike the journey from simply sustainable, through circular to net-positive (for those of you who like business models). More to come on this one…..
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Jenny Andersson runs the We Activate The Future network and supporting organisations who want to activate social and environmental purpose. She designs and facilitates creative exploration workshops which help companies with breakthrough thinking and innovation with stubborn problems they can’t solve by gathering the collaborative and colletive intelligence of their rightsholders.
