Reflections: Reconnecting with the Sacred & Belonging

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Deep gratitude to Alnoor Ladha, Sandra Kim, and Martin Winiecki for sharing their wisdom and experience in last week’s discussion on “reconnecting with the sacred.” The video is available on our YouTube channel for those who missed it:

I’d love to hear what our discussants found noteworthy, and what others who tracked the conversation online enjoyed. I’ll capture here a few of my takeaways:

• The importance of belonging (we returned repeatedly to the concept of “home”) for people who are trying to experiment outside the mainstream. Alnoor described his people as “conscientious objectors to late-stage capitalism.” Martin spoke of the experiment at Tamera, and the value of intentional community.
• All three spoke to the importance of rejecting false binaries and constantly seeking the whole: Sandra spoke of “reclaiming the divine feminine” from patriarchy, particularly in faith traditions.
• All three spoke to the inherently relational aspects of transformation: that community is the container where we learn to become who we always were (before oppressive systems separated us from ourselves).
• A lot of wisdom around the importance of embodiment, and of the sacred as a portal to alternative ways of knowing beyond cognitive processing. (And here the notion of the body as a fractal of the whole: reconnecting with ourselves and reconnecting with community as necessary and inseparable).
• We had a rich discussion on the question of whether humans are yet ready to be “self-governable”: have we built up the necessary muscles/skills to live autonomously together (I would add that these skills are the various components of the arc of transformation we are exploring in this conversation series).
• And as a nice tie-in to our next salon (on Aspirational Identity, also featuring Sandra, together with Trabian Shorters, Doug Hattaway, and possibly Ben McBride), a great discussion of the importance of having a positive affirmative (aspirational!) identity to pursue as we learn to dis-identify with dominant culture. Sandra sees this as “coming home to myself”; Alnoor talked about “we are all in the redemption business of our ancestral lineages”; Martin spoke to how we can “nourish together constantly the vision of the kind of culture we want to live in.”

With now four of these Conversations on Transformation thus far, some of the common strands are starting to emerge in fascinating ways: areas of inquiry for our emergent collaborative to take up together. I’ll name a few here:

• I’ve been surprised by how salient and recurrent the theme is around the “fractal”: the notion that the small scale is the large scale, that it is the patterns that are determinative rather than the specific forms. This has been a learning edge for me, and it’s fascinating to see it re-emerge in very different domains.
• I’m loving the inquiry around sequencing and relationship between individual (internal), interpersonal (societal) and systems transformation. So far everyone agrees that all three are necessary and interdependent; it’s fascinating to note where people diverge on sequencing (Alnoor reminded us that sometimes external change can prompt inner reflection… as we’re seeing in this current uprising for Black Lives Matter).
• Everywhere a call to re-integrate and seek the whole, to transcend binaries without rejecting them (in the livestream chat someone called out Barry Johnson’s work on polarities).
• The power of embodiment: where ten years ago it felt like a fringe conversation to talk about centering and returning to your body (meditation, mindfulness, somatics) it now feels like it’s almost become accepted truth. Increasingly in movement spaces it feels not just necessary but expected to incorporate some sort of grounding exercise, and even in multisector spaces to offer some way to center ourselves (the prevalence of land acknowledgements as one example of this).

Anyway, those are a few thoughts as I take stock of where we’ve come from and look ahead to what’s next.

In community,

Brian