Innovating and leading a new world from a new place: the deep work

Written by Louise Marra, Co-founder of Emerge Institute

We must inspect our roots, our source from which all else arises and ensure this reflects the future we wish to see. (Credit: Jeremy Bishop / Unsplash)

Introduction

This piece is an exploration of how we innovate a new world. It represents my current musings after many years working in strategy, innovation, systems work and personal and interpersonal depth work.

Many different pieces and traditions of literature and thinking have been drawn on and influence my thinking on this topic.

This topic of innovating a new world is deeply connected to my purpose in this life and as such I am articulating my thoughts and experiences. This is a creative process rather than a purely rational process; I am not making an argument. As with all creative processes, I am seeking to convey what feels true to me and seeking relationship and evolution with others who can add their truth to create a bigger truth and picture.

I will write it as my truth to bring into relationship with yours. I will not bother writing “I believe” into each sentence or thought I bring, but If you the reader can take this as the continuous state for all written below. It is what I believe to be true at this time of my life and development.

I have had the privilege of working with masters in this life who have taught me to navigate complexity, higher levels of consciousness, the magic realms of the body and the earth and the stillness and space in which we all arise from. The experiences of these have deeply affected my thinking and being in this world — my experience of life itself.

This journey I am painting is one that releases the natural joy and love of life, helps us align to our gifts and purpose and work with the very intelligence of life that created us. While it requires dedication, the fruits of it are immense. It is also a journey of intimacy, connectedness, vulnerability and truth — it is a life fully lived.

The opportunity and problem

There is a real opportunity to recognise that we are facing death . Our death, but also the death of ecosystems, species, systems, and our very planet. This gives rise to what truly wants to live — what does living fully mean, how do we activate our full purpose and life in this life, and what does it mean for the whole planet to also live fully, as a full expression of itself?

We are also trying to create a new world and to refresh the ways in which we approach this — It is clear to me we are not there yet, we are here.

Here is full of some major leaps in technology, global connectedness, some social outcomes on the improvement but also destruction, war, countries building greater protective barriers, trauma embedded in bodies and land from generations before, scarcity and lives of separation.

We are in a time where the boils of the past are bursting, where the suppression of shadows are coming to the surface for all to see. What was hidden is now coming into the light. Now we can see these shadows, how do we work with them?

We need to embrace that we are in a time of healing. Innovating a new world has to include healing the wounds that led to the world we now live in. There is energy locked there that we need to learn how to unlock and build our higher capacities to bring a new way. We would long for the wounds to be gone, and higher consciousness to prevail, but we know that higher consciousness needs to embrace lower previous consciousness for it to let go its grip — we need to love our wounds and trauma and our adaptations to them, to death! In affect we love our fear to its death.

The future we need to grow goes beyond the dominant belief that everything is separate — even though it appears that way in our traumatised and fragmented world. We have grown a blindness to the wholeness of life no matter how much science and enlightened beings have told us this is not so.

We are in a time where the core wounds of humanity are now transparently here for us to heal:

1. Separation — from our own deep soul and nature, from each other, and from being nature itself, deeply connected to the living planet. We have indeep become wholeness-blind, we can’t see it or feel it, so we assume it away. Separation is the core lie — we are sacred earth, we each are a sacred site, we are walking planet, we are deeply connected to life in all forms.
2. Scarcity — the “not enoughness” begins way back and early on in our lives, centuries of judgement and blocking of the natural abundance of light and acceptance of each other’s way they arrive into this world. This has led to many wars within and without, needing to win, needing our view to prevail, our skin to be the best, our way of being.
3. Security outside ourselves — when we are finding our soul outside the very vehicle it resides within, we then create mayhem of unmet needs, the hungry ghost of consumption, the need for more and more and the need to look after me and not you.

All these wounds have led us individually, as groups, organisations and countries to adapt our true nature to build inner and outer fortresses and walls to manage the hurts, pains, abandonments and othering that the three wounds cause.

Beautifully, the path of healing, requires that both the very wounds and the adaptations we made to bare them and survive the world anyway, are our very resources for reconnecting with our unity.

There are many heroes and superpowers within this journey of adaptation, they were all intelligent at the time and built capacity in us — however, they are not the place to create a new world from.

They are our process back to wholeness and our purpose and need to be included, honoured and nurtured, but bought back home into the coherence of wholeness .

We are in a time of heightened protection and ego due to these wounds and adaptations not being addressed for many generations and we know that trauma increases if not healed in one generation, to the next. We are all carriers of past trauma and many from current life trauma.

We will not create the new, by the unintegrated past that has shaped our lives — where our wounds and adaptations are unconsciously running the show — we create the new from an inclusion of the past, but a connection to the whole where the future can land afresh.

So what?

My work spans both depth work and social and environmental innovation.

We can, in our work of taking responsibility for our lives and the life of this living planet and all its systems, as in all relationships, come from one of two places — the regressive ego or the essential.

Too much social and environmental innovation is still trying to fix the problem from an egoic paradigm, one of separation. Much of the environmental and social work, worthy though it is, misses to include the individuals in charge or in the organisations, still solving the problem outside.

There is no outside. Many project their own lack of relationship with their own essential wholeness and interconnectedness onto the planet or community and try to sort it there, leaving the very vehicle (their body and soul) where solutions can be found.

We will never create a new world from the ego or the hurt. We need to get clear on that and work actively with our own healing journey and those of our organisations and countries, so as we clear as much of the wounding as we can that holds us back from being a vital piece of walking planet that heals the part we were given to care-take and heal — our bodies.

It is rare to find the depth work and the innovation work together. We must change this.

We cannot bypass ourselves — our piece of earth to make yours better. If you do your work and I do mine, and they do theirs — what a mighty waka or vessel we become for channelling a higher vibration and future possibility where there has only been past wounds leading the charge.

Let’s replace the leader from ego to essence in ourselves. Essence grows love at the edges, births love, where it was excluded. It is in the integration of shadow that it transforms, it is in our love of it that we integrate it.

It takes one person to bring essence or wisdom into the room or into a relationship and it is in the room. Will it be you?

We cannot separate our awakening journey from the solutions of the future. They are inextricably linked. How is this for you? This is a big question to ask. The new creators of movements need to do this.

Our time in the healer archetype

We are in a time where healing is vital. We are healing ourselves, our past, our actions, the generations of warfare, colonisation, rape of the planet and species. We are healing together.

The modalities of healing have exploded over the past 20 years, giving us the means and tools, groups all over the world are working on their own consciousness and healing, collective and intergenerational trauma is becoming a more common topic.

We need leaders and innovators who are on their own awakening journey, deeply connected to their own development, ensuring they bring as much wisdom and consciousness as they can muster into the room with them. We need leaders and innovators who know when they are in their essential self or regressive self and know where they are creating from. We need leaders and innovators who help all create the competencies needed to do this so collectively we awaken and create from this essential place.

We need leaders who are healers — who do not shame further the regressive state but learn from it, allowing individuals, cultures and workplaces and processes and movements and communities to heal together by sending love back to trauma, love back to that regressive state — love can heal and if we do it together the work quickens and deepens.

Currently we don’t create from that state. We need to change that now! When we come from the essential state we are connected to the mauri, we have access to the magic that created the world and can recreate it.

Why would we not demand anything else from ourselves?

I see very few organisations, movements willing to do this, working consciously with the regressive state, learning and integrating the learning and then creating from the essential. Why?

It does require a tenacity, dedication and a willingness. There are some conditions that are needed as natural guides and there are competencies to build. We need to be up for this journey.

Conditions include elements such as: safety, natural hierarchy — where someone has these competencies we respect and learn from them, we honor the past wisdom — especially from indigeneity, everyone has a rightful place in the wholeness — their gifts to bring and draw out, reciprocity — aroha atu, aroha mai — I can give and receive love and my truth.

Competencies see us intentionally realise our current limited abilities to perceive the wholeness and unity that exists and work diligently towards increasing our capacity. As we increase our capacity for seeing and experiencing wholeness we also harvest the fruits of that seeing — love, insight, system thinking, creativity, pattern seeing, responsibility and responsibility sharing and many more superpowers.

Deep performing teams

With these competencies what might deep performing teams, rather than high performing teams, look like? A few characteristics would include being curious, taking growth and development seriously, being process orientated, interested in Te Waa, the Va, the space between people, they are slower, alow for silence and presence, engage in the subtle, they work with the creative impulse and tension as life trying to include something old to grow something new.

To do all this we need to integrate core practices and build capacities such as:

• An interest in the subtle world, in consciousness
• Presencing one’s inner state — body, emotions, mind
• Shadow work — healing and integrating our past to free energy and birth new capacities
• Meditation and connection to inner space, source and the mauri to link to the emergence, what life wants to arise.
• Resonance and full body listening to others and to the space
• Digesting and harvesting learning
• Knowing how to open and close the heart and energy
• Working with energy and consciousness as intelligence to download the future
• Ability to feel into the field and work with systemic intelligence
• Ability to ground in the body and the earth
• Ability to create a collective field or group that is coherent not fragmented
• A commitment to the vulnerability of our relative truth, to congruence.
• Practices of non-separation
• Emotional literacy
• The cultivation of compassion and love

In essence it is building our relationship with our very soul and being and working with nature and the eternal stillness as the wananga — the real school of life to update ourselves and the whole system.

It can all seem like a lot I know, but why not have an intent of growing into an updated version of yourself, lifting your own ceiling and contributing truly to a better world in you, in your whanau and in your organisation. Whilst challenging to allow shadows and associate feelings, the experience comes with such relief and spontaneous joy there is no looking back. Why stay attached to a lesser version of ourselves? Why not have the humility to be where we are and update ourselves into a future version. One thing we know is that growth is the serum of life, this is not the growth of bigger but rather wiser. Life is always moving wanting us to evolve, all systems to evolve.

Let us all become true evolutionaries. This is the heroine and hero journey of our time.

Conclusion

There is no conclusion to this journey, our ongoing integration and wholeness is ever-expansive.

While the above can all seem overwhelming — how do we grow all these competencies and heal — the important thing is that we do not do it on our own. We grow ourselves and fields of competence that in turn keep growing the competencies deeper and more thoroughly in ourselves. It does however require the dedication to start.

In my work I have created pathways, labs, programs in organisations, leadership development journeys, all sorts of ways to ground this kaupapa. Each person, organisation and country needs its own bespoke way of entering this terrain, building on its strengths, integrating its shadows and working with the future. However the competencies remain pivotal to this bespoke journey.

This an invitation into this way of being in your activism, purpose, creativity and healing and to join the movement of people committed to this path. I am keen to prototype with people and organisations dedicated to this path.