Know your why: Centring knowledge in community
Mama D Ujuaje, Co-Founder and Lead Facilitator at Community Centred Knowledge, talks about her “Know your why”.
It is useful for you to know that I am first and foremost a cultivator. As such I share nourishment through cultivating self-knowledge.
This is my ‘Know your Why’. It is a message to each person to know that every ‘why’ that you have every asked yourself can be responded to from that which is deep within you. Your purpose is as rooted in you as you are in your own context, whether you understand that context as your own body, your family, your organisation or your community. Everything around you that nourishes you becomes you. Why you are who you are; why you do what you do and why you lead like you lead it is all in response to your relationship with all these scales of yourself: body, family, organisation and community.
It is to help each one of us to be mindful of the bigger picture of ourselves that the ancients exhorted us to, ‘Know Thyself’.
We are what we take in
The saying that has been my all-time favourite is: ‘We see things not as they are but as we are’ and I link it to the popular saying of, ‘We are what we eat’ or as I prefer, ‘We are what we take in’. All of these are brought together in the Zulu expression of Ubuntu, which translates into: ‘We are because I am and I am because we are’, or that a person is only truly a person through other people: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.
How do all these things relate, within you?
They come together in meaning because, within my experience, we are relational beings — we are the hub of our own and co-constructed realities. Our sense making emerges out of our relationships with everything that surrounds us and that we come into sensory contact with - all that enters within and passes through us. Each and every of these experiences become us and we, in turn, become them.
Rather than this being understood as an imprisoned destiny, I embrace it as a series of unending possibilities and opportunities to re-generate based upon a deep engagement with all that I encounter and have the potential to represent in the world.
Deepak Chopra speaks of the imaginal cells of the butterfly. For the butterfly creativity means drawing upon a recipe of ancestral lineage of flying insect, encoded within its genetic material, blended with the energy of all that it has chomped its way through as a caterpillar. Its beautiful manifestation as a butterfly is within the context of an open and enabling environment where it leaves no footprint; it blends completely into the wider ecology of which it is also a part. This is an idea which we can apply to ourselves as human beings. We are forever becoming more of ourselves, drawing upon elements of our purpose within us and the environment we relate to.
To be inspired by natural processes has been core to the way in which I work with others. I understand each of us as being a part of the many ecologies of human, and more than human expression within the planet. We have given identities, yes. But more than that, deep within us we know that we all hold capacities to project and reflect those parts of ourselves which can bring about desirable co-creativity and co-production. Whether we choose to use this potential or not depends upon how much we can free ourselves of the limitations of a hegemonic vision of what the world is, and can become, and our place within it. What right, for example, have we to leave so large a footprint across the Earth?
Drawing from our own experiences
At Community Centred Knowledge, we encourage a deep listening to each other, to help us to discern underlying patterns, structures and systems.
We dance with each others’ ideas, embracing the complex interplay that arises from interwoven bodies of experience.
We try out proposals within shared protocols and test them through our bodies: how do they taste, smell, feel and sound to us over time and across the spaces we live, work and play in? We draw upon a range of bodies of experience to bring in intercultural and intergenerational elements. We respect the plural truths of being that make up our planet: including the perspectives of trees, of clouds, of frogs and dogs:
‘Even the scent of roses is not as man supposes… and goodness only knowses, the noselessess of man’ (The Song of Quoodle by G.K. Chesterton).
It is because of the knowledge of our personal limitations that we can expand our capacities by pursuing the ‘Nine Laws of God’, as tech guru, Kevin Kelly names them. Knowing and living these principles might enable us to access much more from the chaos that is the ever-changing ‘many worlds in a world’, or the pluriverse, that we traverse over our lifetimes.
The diversity of these many worlds, which we unfortunately mask with globalised and universalised solutions, is what enables us to navigate complexity. It is blind sighted to be culture-blind: we need to experience more, not less, to access our purpose! Duality invites in the dialogic but binaries banish the beauty of the spectrum of light with all the possibilities of seeing inherent within it.
Know our wise
We inhabit multiple layers of being: We can centre our ancestral lineages because we understand that narratives of lineage form family, which is the primary form of organisation. We centre our families and organisations because we understand that we have a place in them and they are the basis for community, we shape them and they shape us. We hold our purposes, our whys, therefore, as arising from being nourished by lineage, organisation and village.
We hold a power, then, to hold aloft its rights through performing its cultural rites. These are responsibilities, as threads we use, to interweave meanings at all levels of life organisation.
More than knowing our whys, our core purpose connects us to all we see and intuit. We reach inwards to come ever closer to knowing our true selves. Self-knowledge, as knowledge of purpose, reaches into the alchemy of ever present change. We have these assurances: that we who are rooted in lineage and community, leading on response- ability, embracing complexity and diversity, we don’t only know our whys, but collectively and organised, we can also know our wise.
Mama D Ujuaje, Co-Founder, Lead Facilitator, Community Centred Knowledge
Mama D works as a community centred researcher and learning facilitator in regenerative, whole person nourishment and healing. Having developed interactive processes of learning and exploration. Her work strives to bring deeper embodied awareness of different forms, scales and directions of human and more than human expression.
She works at a range of levels in support of a network of community organisations: Just Space and with its newest co-working initiative Just Collaborate, to help evolve a decolonising approach to relations between the academy and community organisations.
With an emerging collective of artists, ritualists, designers and social and food justice activists, Community Centred Knowledge is the body that Mama D has both co-founded and within which continues to co-curate the multi-sensory Food Journey© and other interactive and immersive workshops to contribute to our shared understanding and practice of healing.
